I'm a bit disappointed that the problems don't seem to require much of a "physical mental image" other than problem 6 which is hard for other reasons. I was assuming that new ideas would be necessary to improve performance this much, maybe with AI trained in physical simulations in order to develop something similar to "human-like" mental images, at least if the program were to achieve this performance in human-like ways, which is not necessarily the case. However this does make me update towards a faster pace of development than I was assuming, maybe we will even get research level competence in a few years.
I have not checked the solutions in detail, they look plausibly correct at a quick glance, but chat bots are great at writing plausibly correct text which is wrong, so this conclusion is dependent on the solutions being actually good, IMO judges apparently graded them as being correct so I'm relying on their opinion here.
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes. A wavelength of 530.2534896 nm lies within the standard human visual range, which is roughly 380–750 nm"
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Got the FeCl4- and CuCl4 2- species. Got that the FeCl4- d-d is spin forbidden. Incorrectly attributed the CuCl4 2- color to d-d transitions. Prodding with:
"Many Thanks! You got most of the relevant points. Could you think carefully about "Primarily d–d transitions in the d⁹ system, influenced by ligand field splitting from Cl⁻. Chloride ligands are weaker-field than water, shifting the absorption toward shorter wavelengths.""
Finally got the right answer, but to get it fully right took several more prods.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: On the first try, everything I was looking for except tetrahedrane. A prompt of:
"Many Thanks! _Almost_ the full set I was looking for. ( There are other nominally legal isomers for C4H2 but these are so strained as to be quite unreasonable chemically. ) But, for C4H4, there is one famous (albeit unstable) additional one. Can you name it?" got them to name tetrahedrane. I'll call this close enough to give full credit. They even successfully distinguished 1-Methylcyclopropene from 3-Methylcyclopropene, which most LLMs missed.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "So, on average, the Sun loses ~3–4× more mass per second via the mass-equivalent of its emitted radiation than via the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: disappointing. Got the same, wrong, infinite slope at the equivalence point initially, though they realize that a real solution will have finite (but, for GPT5, unstated) slope. Prodded with:
"Please work out the numerical result for "(i.e., a vertical slope in the ideal strong acid/strong base model; in real solutions water autoionization and activity effects make it very large but finite.)""
They got the correct answer after this prod.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty good, found more than 50 valid compounds, accepted valid additions e.g. SiHF3, SiH2F2, SiH3F. I'll count it as full credit.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: This was a mess. The first two tries they made didn't even _have_ an S4 axis, and the number of substituents was wrong (they needed a multiplicity of 4 and had multiplicity of 2 for several substituents).
Can someone with a subscription to Slow Boring check something for me?
I asked a question in an Q&A thread a few weeks ago. Then I took a 1-month vacation from SB for reasons, pausing my paid subscription, a pause I'm halfway through.
The header of today's post (answers to reader questions) suggests my question might be one he answered. Is my name in the list of answered replies? (I always thought he answered the same week; I wouldn't have otherwise paused while it was pending.)
My experience with Substack pauses is that if I unpause, I completely lose the half-month I already paid for and will get charged immediately, so I don't want to unpause "just to check."
I don't like Mamdani, but this tweet really rubs me the wrong way. Suppose it's true he never did "real, hard work," never got his hands dirty. It worked out for him, didn't it? He's on track to be Mayor of NYC at 33 years old. Those guys on that construction site, I don't think they're gonna be Mayor of NYC. Maybe conservatives should try to emulate successful people like that instead of sounding like resentful losers.
>Set up a system that only rich and connected and credentialed can climb.
>Someone who climbs it somehow overcomes their class conditioning and starts making left-wing noises.
>Suddenly every status marker they exhibit signifies their detachment from common people, every dollar they spend is outrageous exuberance, etc.
I would of course gladly take those people up on their outrage and agree on eliminating people "who never did real hard work" from politics entirely, but I'm afraid they wouldn't follow up, they're not operating in an epistemic/rhetorical mode where something you say at one point needs to be plausibly consistent with anything else you say.
There, there, Alexander: we know you don't like the horny-handed sons of toil. Chin up! The AI boom will (any day now) replace all those resentful losers with robots to maintain the infrastructure that supports the successful people, and you will never again have to see a low-class person in the stinky dirty flesh!
I'm not anti-working-class. I'm anti whiny resentful conservatives who romanticize being poor to cope with the fact that they're not very successful in life.
Some of the guys in that construction site will tell you they're hauling cement in 90 degree heat so their kids don't have to do that kind of labor. I admire that.
I mean, is there any locale on Earth more chock full of soft-handed symbolic analysts than NYC? That city was headquarters for the transition of the American economy from 'hard work' to financialization.
Her profile says she's a 'moderate conservative'. Did she vote for Trump, who grew up with servants and a limo driver? I get that she's appealing to a popular conception of socialism as being for 'people who don't want to work', but in fact that's not what socialists have in mind. If someone wants to do a point-by-point comparison of how Cuomo and Mamdami's proposals would affect hard-working people, have at it, but they should spare us this sort of swipe.
I think the swipe is meant to be at the socialist, er, siblings (can't say "brothers" alone any more) who claim to represent the working class and yet are far from ever having had the handle of a shovel in their fist. I'm not saying this is an American problem, a good few of the Labour politicians who got into power in my own country were also champagne socialists (e.g., as I will never tire of saying, Ruairi Quinn who got the nickname Ho-Chi Quinn for his radical student politics).
Mamdani is one of the Democratic Socialists of America who do (or did, the last time a magazine article of theirs was referenced on here) have a problem with "why are we so short on black and brown working class members in our local parties instead of all white college-educated persons?"
"DSA's stated goal is to participate in the workers rights movement with a long-term aim of social ownership of production such as public enterprises, worker cooperatives, or decentralized planning."
Though this makes me prick up my ears - they want(ed) rid of USAID???
"DSA's 2021 platform, its most recent, calls for abolishing the Electoral College, Senate, and filibuster; ending first-past-the-post in favor of proportional representation; raising the minimum wage; a job guarantee; Medicare for All; free child care for all; free college for all; public development banks; social housing; democratic and social ownership of the means of production; a Green New Deal; a just transition for fossil fuel workers; abortion and fertility care on demand; anti-racism; reparations for slavery; abolishing police and prisons "in the long term"; abolishing ICE; anti-imperialism; withdrawal from NATO; normalizing relations with China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran; anti-Zionism; Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel; abolishing USAID, NED, and VOA; D.C. statehood; referendums on independence or statehood in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and unincorporated US territories; and a second constitutional convention to establish a socialist republic."
A few of the construction guys might not go amiss there as representatives to bring about their stated goals, but it's likely to be more along the lines of the anarchist cell in "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"There was a stir of almost inaudible applause, such as is sometimes heard in church. Then a large old man, with a long and venerable white beard, perhaps the only real working-man present, rose lumberingly and said—
“I move that Comrade Gregory be elected Thursday,” and sat lumberingly down again.
“Does anyone second?” asked the chairman.
A little man with a velvet coat and pointed beard seconded.
“Before I put the matter to the vote,” said the chairman, “I will call on Comrade Gregory to make a statement.”
Mamdani's parents are successful, and I don't see Ugandan rap videos* passing as blue collar bona fides. Given the way the NYC government works, a lot of Zohran's proposals are not practicable. But still, I think a head-to-head on worker and cost-of-living issues is going to favor him over a neoliberal like Cuomo. If you're in the Precariat, living month-to-month, aren't you going to vote for the guy who at least says he wants to enact beneficial changes?
I looked up the USAID thing**:
"Abolish USAID, NED, Voice of America, and other governmental agencies that cynically disguise capitalist control as aid and journalism."
Soft power can be used for good, too, and my calculations on foreign aid generally involve a utility function. Just considering PEPFAR, this DSA policy seems short-sighted (or quixotically far-sighted) and stupid.
The DSA issues a good magazine called Jacobin with coherent econ/historical analysis. The party gained a lot of members during Bernie's presidential runs. However, they've since shot themselves in the foot, particularly though some demonstrations that were construed as support for Hamas 'resistance' on 8/7/23. I'm anti-zionist, too, but this begs the question "how exactly does an organization seeking to socialize the means of production in America bet its future on a stance about war in the Mideast?". The American left is riddled with factionalism, often to the point of rendering it impotent.
> shot themselves in the foot, particularly though some demonstrations that were construed as support for Hamas
This reminds me of a joke (I think it was the Babylon Bee) that went something like "New exposé reveals Trump not as religious as he claims. Support plummets."
Does anyone who supports the DSA not already know their position on Israel, and on whose side they will be in any conflict involving it?
There's a difference between being on the side of (a) the 'Palestinian people', and (b) Hamas. DSA did indeed lose members, including this guy* who explains how the party was captured by 'entryists'.
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What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.
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To my previous point, it's off-mission for an organization whose primary purpose is to socialize American industry to suddenly bank everything on being a Palestinian rescue organization.
Or (I've noticed this tendency among the local young right-wingers, at least) they've spent one summer doing yardwork at some relative's ranch or equivalent for the exact purpose of being able to put "real, physical work" in their CV's.
“People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.”
A recent example of an LLM helpfully not being sycophantic.
I asked R1 if two different English titles of books by al-Farabi were different translations of the Arabic title of the same book.
Yes, it tells me, Fī wujūb ṣināʿat al-kīmiyā in Arabic.
R1 helpfully adds that translating al-kīmiyā as “chemistry” rather than “alchemy” is an anachronism for a book of this date. And anyway, al-Farabi probably didn’t actually write it, although it’s attributed to him.
That might have been my next question, but R1 is ahead of me here, and points out that my first question is based on a misunderstanding of who actually wrote it.
I’m not surprised. There’s pattern here: Geber probably didn’t exist; Basil Valentine also didn’t e it’s and was made up; Ramon Lull didn’t write the alchemical text attributed to him. Oh, al-Farabi didn’t write the text attributed to him either.
(If I can find a reliable source for historians don’t think al-Farabi wrote that book, I might put a note on the Wikipedia page …)
Thanks to all the advice and constructive (and positive) feedback people have given my recently-launched substack last month!
I've finally finished writing my first August article: "Which Ways of Knowing Actually Work? Building an Epistemology Tier List"
I rank different epistemic methods from S+ tier (literacy) to F-- tier (arguing on Twitter), based on their actual track record of helping humans figure out true things. Some spicy takes: mathematical modeling beats RCTs, thought experiments are D-tier, and Bayesianism-as-framework is only C-tier.
The specific tiers matter less than the principles behind trying to create the tier list in the first place. My hope is that by making the implicit hierarchies that people already all have explicit, we can get past tired arguments of pluralism (epistemic democracy) or monism (one-size-fits-all styles of One True Frameworks like Popperianism or Bayesianism), and have a smoother transition between questions of practical ways of knowing and formal epistemology.
Would love to hear what ACX readers think, especially about:
- Whether the tier list framework is useful or too reductive
- Which methods I'm overrating/underrating
- How this relates to Scott's writing on epistemic learned helplessness and bounded distrust
YOUR tier list, on the other hand … I think you're judging the ones you rank highest by their best examples, the middling ones by their median example, and the lowest ones by their worst examples. You also seem to me to be a little bit slippery about whether these are ways for YOU to know something, or ways for humanity to discover things.
Consider writing, your S+ example. As a tool to allow the frontier of knowledge to advance, I agree with its placement. But as a way for a regular person to know true things? If you're reading, say, the Book of Mormon, or the New York Times, that makes you strictly worse off. You need essentially folk wisdom (which you classify as F tier) to know to avoid the bad sources that look attractive, the same way one learns to identify poisonous berries and mushrooms.
I similarly think the S tier is way too high to be placing Math. If you restrict "knowing" to knowing things about the real world (and not purely abstract objects), I think its greatest triumph was the discovery of Neptune, famously discovered with a pen before it was seen through a telescope. But that builds on the observations on Uranus, so I don't think it can reasonably be separated from (C+ tier) observational studies. If you're being generous, you could count all physical law as mathematics, in which case, fine, but it's still quite narrow, AND reliant on (B tier) measurements/observation. Also, depending on how broadly you construe the term "mathematics," the boundary between that and the (D tier) pure logic and thought experiments might get pretty fuzzy.
I broadly agree with the relative ordering of the things in the other tiers, though I'd bump them all up a level, and bump math down to the new A tier, alongside science and direct observation/measurement.
A separate argument about the relative ranking of "expert intuition" and "non-expert intuition" is, similar to my point about reading sources, whether to trust the expert (i.e., whether he's faithfully conveying to you his best guess). In the comment section on a different post (On Priesthoods, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods), I saw this described as "with non-experts, you're sifting the wheat from the chaff, whereas with the priests you're trying to separate the good wheat from the poisoned."
It's also possible for an entire field of experts to spend 20 years doing research, and have absolutely nothing to show for it, and for a bumbling "not an expert" to walk by, and say "Oh, here's what you're doing wrong."
This is the state of protein folding. 20 years of work, a full body of programs, years of supercomputer time consumed... and none of it was ever going to work. "Just a little simplification!" (because it made the chemists' brain hurt, not because of computing power).
Thanks for your own tier list! Feel free to comment on the post yourself and/or make an infographic too! One day we can have a tier list of tier lists to resolve this question :)
As I understand the article, the problem with the rationality community is that its messaging attracts many vulnerable people who are a potential cult material. Even if Eliezer does not abuse them himself, someone else in the community can, and many already did.
The wannabe cult leaders in the community can leverage the fact that rationalists are supposed to reflect on their own thinking, take ideas seriously, and ignore many conventional beliefs and behaviors. If you are the kind of person with great rhetorical skills, you just need to make someone verbally accept some extreme idea of yours, and then you can keep pushing them to also accept everything that is implied by that idea, and also to act accordingly. (And although the aspiring rationalists are supposed to think for themselves, many people in the community are actually looking for someone to do the thinking for them.)
A typical dysfunctional group within the rationalist community seems to work like this: The members isolate themselves not only from the world in general, but even from the rest of the rationalist community. They spend most of the time "psychoanalyzing" each other.
The groups that focus on actually doing things in the real world are usually doing fine. Among groups that focus on their own thinking, CFAR seems to be an exception, in that they check their techniques in workshops, and quickly abandon those that the participants report as harmful.
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This seems correct to me, and the question is, what are we going to do about it? Different people will draw different conclusions, but from my perspective, it means that the rationality community is healthy at the core -- all the bad guys took care to do their bad things in private where the rest of the community couldn't see them. We just need to make it public knowledge among the new members that this kind of danger exists. One possible approach would be to print this article and give it to all newcomers. Maybe make a shorter version of it.
The University of Chicago Harris Social Impact Fellowship is a selective, full-time, 11-month program for recent graduates and early career professionals with strong STEM skills and a passion for evidence-based change. The fellowship blends intensive training in policy analysis, critical reasoning, and data analytics with an applied learning experience at a top research center or policy institute.
Yep, this is a very modern interpretation of traditional Christianity. One where wives don't have to obey their husbands, married people do not have a duty to have sex with each other (to prevent each other from temptation), and it's okay for women to preach to men about the true meaning of the religion. Blessed be our lady and savior, Jesus Christina!
Celibacy has been a part of christian culture yes, but a woman saying men don't need sex kind of forgets that they also don't get married, and it is a conscious decision to devote themselves to God: Paul is very clear it is an ideal and neither sex or marriage is bad even if its his calling not to seek either.
the bible says not to neglect the marital duty more than a short time. its actually a little realistic in ways.
you have discovered a secret though: Christianity is framed as a patriarchal religion but in practice it benefits women more by civilizing men, and its values are more aligned with them.
As a formerly Christian woman, I mostly agree with you here: "Christianity is framed as a patriarchal religion but in practice it benefits women more by civilizing men, and its values are more aligned with them."
I think Christianity contains a lot of feminizing-in-a-useful-way admonitions to sand off some of the more toxic edges of masculinity. I don't see it celebrating the more positive aspects of masculinity, unfortunately. However, since men get to be in charge, at least they benefit from being the "default" and having mainstream spiritual advice established with them in mind. It's a religion by and for men. And it's net good for many men, and arguably for society. I would not be too worried if my sons became Christian.
As a woman, some of those admonitions were much easier for me to implement than for men (e.g. don't be violent) and others were actually much more damaging advice for me and most women than I think they are for most men (e.g. downplay your ego and embodiment). It's not a religion by or for women. When I became a mother, I realized how many hugely important and precious aspects of the female experience are ignored or even denigrated by Christianity. So I figured any hypothetical God who created both male and female humans couldn't be communicating very closely with Christianity.
...neither of those things are doctrines of the faith or flow from its values:
"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the church submits to christ, also husbands should submit to their wives in everything."
Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any blemish, but holy and blameless.
In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church..."
Ephesians 5:21-29
I'm not sure how you get wife swapping or beating from that. The values of the faith are a lot different from the stereotypes of the faith.
i tell people to go look in a Christian bookstore at times to see what its like: its about as patriarchal as a Michaels art store, and the fiction shelves are 90% romance and mystery. Trad wives are more popular than trad husbands to the point Harlequin makes Christian romances specifically.
So, you're looking at some sort of idealized "Modern Western" view of Christianity? The kind that doesn't actually view someone whose hands turn orange as "probably doing deviltry" (ahem. masturbation.)...? I mean, yeah, if you must go exactly on what's written, cherry picking the parts that current people like, and excising the parts that current people don't like (slavery, killing witches, killing gay people).
I'm not discussing stereotypes (at least not of -all- Christians). I'm discussing actual happenings, if of a prior era (and not of an era that's close enough to pagans to call those "pagan traditions passed down.")
It's not excising: the Bible is a progression of belief from prehistoric judaism to christianity and christianity possesses new values as well as reinterprets what came before while still admitting it exists and the tension behind it. People often don't get this because they rarely read the thing.
Like you can't read Philemon and think Christianity's values encourage slavery: Paul is asking a slaveowner to forgive a runaway slave and realize he is a brother in Christ. You can't read jesus rebuking peter about attacking a guard with a sword and then healing the damage done to going to killing gay people.
there's an argument the big problem with Christianity is people don't even understand it, and there is a point there but you are blaming it for things its not really saying to do.
culturally we live in the present dude, witches haven't been tried in 400 years and the current cultural aspect is a lot more feminine. The "Jesus as my boyfriend" trope comes to mind...the language a lot of churches use is emotional, personal, and intimate.
The argument you're making about people not understanding Christianity is... there, but it's the same one Muslims make: they have the best religion, but the worst ummah.
Culturally we live in the present? Sure, but we also have a foot in the past. And you can't discuss Christianity without discussing the priesthood (and monkdom) as a safehaven for male homosexuals, and how that changed the actual religion -- perhaps not the dogma, but how it was practiced.
Genie 3 from DeepMind is somewhat of a disappointment for me. DeepMind boasts that:
"Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p."
That's cool, but the main thing that excites me about AI is it's potential to accelerate research. DeepMind's AlphaFold potential for accelerating research in biochemistry led to it's creators receiving a Nobel Prize.
I don't see Genie 3 as an example of solving intelligence and using it to solve other important problems. Maybe I'm missing something.
As for GPT-5, I'm curios how good of a research assistant it will turn out to be. I don't have high hopes for it, just because it's not clear to me that it's aimed at something specific, such as solving some hard problem like nuclear fusion, for example. It's it really is generally good for research, why not prove that by showing how it contributed to cracking a big problem? Did I miss some huge boost to our lives that the previous GPT versions have brought us?
It seems to me that DeepMind and OpenAI are caught in the race of coming up with a cool but unambitious consumer product. Unambitious because they don't seem to be aiming at a hard problem with great practical benefit.
Maybe that's good news for AI safety research because it means that, for now, these big AI labs aren't too focused on significantly increasing the impact their new models will have on the world. So I hope that AI safety research can make good progress while DeepMind and OpenAI are too busy chasing flashy stuff to work on developing models with truly paradigm shifting capabilities.
Has anyone here had access to it? The big question on my mind is how much control the user will have over the look of the world. If, for instance, user opens scene with a woman standing at the controls of a space ship, how much control does he have over the woman's appearance? Is she guaranteed to be Standard AI Chick (Aged 23, big hair, big tits, clothing involves some form-fitting girdle or armor kind of thing on top of her clothing with a wasp waist? How about the space ship? Can it be sort of dark and grungy like the interior of the one in Alien, or is it some spiffy commercial art cliche spaceship interior?
The Hierarchical Temporal Model(HTM) from the Numenta research group is a machine learning algorithm that does continuous learning by default.
But for some reason, they don't seem to have been able to do much with it. Maybe they encountered insurmountable issues when trying to scale algorithm up to take advantage of the abundance of data.
Genie is an example of a world model. As opposed to just a video generation model, Genie reacts to actions. That’s important for AI because it allows an AI agent to roll out many possible courses of action, to see their effects, before choosing what to do. Things like Genie are likely a part of how we get physically intelligent systems. There’s lots of robotics research these days into using world models. The benefit of something like Genie is it’s huge scale and world knowledge, where it can simulate many different types of scenarios.
As an easy example, imagine a car trying to parallel park. To know when to cut in, it’s helpful to be able to simulate where the car will end up, and what you can do from there.
True, Genie is more like a playground where AI congnitve capabilities could develop instead of a showcase of an improved or new AI capability. And having an environment for training and testing the capabilities of robots is certainly an important use case.
On the DeepMind's announcement page for Genie 3 it says that the generated world models is stable for a few minutes. I hope that's enough to make it useful.
World models show a lot of promise for short-horizon tasks. Like “where to put my foot while walking” or “when to turn my car” or “how to fold these clothes.” Not useless on longer tasks, but something like Genie is less useful for long-term decision making, where simulating moment-by-moment is less important. Kind of like tactics vs strategy.
The crisis in Sudan and the ongoing awfulness of the Taliban in Afghanistan (to name two) obviously generates far fewer column inches than the crises in Ukraine or Gaza.
I think it's probably somewhat fair to point to that as a double standard, but I think there may also be a legitimate justification. I think there are obvious things the West can and should be doing vis a viz Ukraine and Gaza (roughly: keep sending weapons; stop sending weapons) that other people disagree about.
But in many other crises, it's not obvious to me that there are many middle gears between "ineffectual hand-waving" and "boots-on-the-ground military invasion", and if such gears exist then many of the articles complaining about double standards don't describe them.
If there are people out there with good ideas about what Western governments could do vis a vis other crises, that definitely seems like a good use of column inches (would more aid help Sudan, or is the problem distribution?), and I would like people to write about them more. But if not, focusing primarily on actionable crises seems reasonable.
The last links post kind of reminded me there are people oblivious to how this whole western interventionism works in practice and it really needs to be hammered down over and over, so I'm thankfully ready for this.
I'll stick to the example of Afghanistan, because of how clear-cut its case is (again, I'm hammering down the point here). The west has done the most it could have done for Afghanistan, namely - fucked off. The obvious next step would be stopping starving Afghans with petty sanction in retaliation for getting rejected, but I guess that's a bit too much ask for too much.
Yes, the Taliban are kinda awful. No, they're not worse than a constant fear of death from randomly dropping bombs and bandits allowed to run unchecked because they're western allies. In fact, they're ruling in the Afghanistan right now specifically because they were the default anti-west option, and in Afghanistan this meant anti-death option.
(Oh, by the way, in case somebody tries to justify the occupation by its origin - the Taliban were defeated and ready for complete surrender months into the invasion. The US refused, because they didn't want to end the invasion, they wanted to drop some more bombs. Even earlier, they probably could have Taliban hand them Al-Qaeda operatives they hosted in exchange for no invasion, but again, they wanted to drop some bombs instead. Or, okay, I shouldn't assume malice, but the alternative is they're just criminally incompetent, and the takeover should be the same - the western governments' meddling has empirically been a huge net negative for several decades now, it has been empirically a disaster in Afghanistan specifically, and it would be good if people stopped pretending otherwise.)
> If there are people out there with good ideas about what Western governments could do vis a vis other crises
I guess that depends whether you think you have significantly more influence on Western governments than you do on the government of Sudan.
Personally I don't think anything I say or write is likely to change my own government's policy meaningfully. If I write about the problems of the world as if I'm able to help solve them it's an intellectual exercise or a form of therapy, not a meaningful attempt to influence politics.
Trump has a lot of different solutions that aren't "ineffectual hand waving" and "boots on the ground military invasion". (I mean, seriously? Put some other ideas on the table. We can take the Biden-Era "just kill the Big Cheese" if you want).
This is how he's brokered peace in four different conflicts, so far.
India - Pakistan (very clever, will go into history books).
Rwanda - Democratic Republic of Congo
Azerbajan - Armenia
Israel - rest of middle east (Abraham Accords, roughly speaking "Pipeline for Peace").
(I forgot about the Ethiopian/Egyptian thing(knew someone in the middle of it, didn't hear about it being settled), didn't hear jack about Serbia/Kosovo (is that "pulled CIA out of their puppet state?"), and I also didn't hear about Thailand/Cambodia)
Israel/Syria and Israel/Iran are still ongoing, although Trump kind of... squashed the whole Israel 2 week bombing plan, by removing their diplomatic pretext.
I'm just going to take a deep breath, and say it: "Donald Trump is one heck of a negotiator." Whether he's throwing around munitions and letting the military negotiate, or having an effective State department that believes in ending conflicts (that's a first this century I'm pretty sure)... or merely trying to "make everyone a metric ton of money" (well, if it keeps people from dying, why not make a profit?)...
I don't think Israel/Gaza is any more obvious than Afghanistan. If Israel was cut off form Western weapons Hamas, Iran, and other Iranian proxies would continue to attack it and Israel would continue to defend itself. How you get Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace is easily as tough a question as how do you turn Afghanistan into a modern liberal democracy.
For what its worth I think the only way to do that is either to wait a century or two and hope they figure it out. Or to plan for a hundred to two hundred year occupation with the USA or whomever only leaving after they've thoroughly changed the culture; this of the way the Indian independence movement was led by thoroughly westernised Indians.
There are many moral arguments against it. The odds of success are also low. And in the 21st century the diplomatic landscape is a lot more hostile to this sort of thing.
On this particular issue, Poe's Law is especially strong, so you'll probably save everyone some time if you say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.
Surely, if the problem is that identified by OP (ie, the ongoing awfulness of the Taliban), the invasion worked quite well for twenty years.
And of course there is a fairly extensive history of invasion stopping awfulness. Eg: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, the Idi Amin regime in Uganda.
In other news, a diabetic patient's periodic insulin shots clearly didn't work; when he discontinued them, his condition worsened!
The solution -- occupation -- worked just fine to prevent the Taliban from implementing its awfulness. The fact that when the solution was removed the problem returned is evidence that the solution was effective, not that it wasn't.
If you want a medical analogy, Afghanistan is like a patient who can be kept barely alive within the ICU but will die if they ever leave.
The point of the ICU is to get patients to improve to the point where they no longer need ICU. If a patient can't get to that point they're just wasting a bed.
You left out the part where being in the ICU allowed the patient's daughters to go to school, and otherwise greatly improved the patient's quality of life.
Bottom line: your ICU analogy doesn't work at all.
This isn't so much a suggestion as a request for information, because I'm sure this is wrong, even though I can't see why. But:
I've been wondering for a while, why can't we just bomb all these problems away? Surveillance drones constantly patrolling the conflict zones, and any military hardware anywhere near gets obliterated. Maybe too hard to have a real effect without enough collateral damage to counteract the good...
...but that was with pre-2020s technology. Now Ukraine has shown that a military's drone operators can fly a little quadcopter right up to an individual person and kill them, with decent success rates and cheaply enough to target random individual soldiers at scale. It seems to me that it's now just about feasible for a major military to impose a "no fly zone for small arms" in a region, with ~no collateral damage.
The biggest problem is that of target identification. It is (relatively) easy to simply try and kill anybody who enters an area. It is several orders of magnitude harder to try and distinguish between legitimate civilian traffic (which you *have* to allow if you want to make this a long term, large scale operation) and military targets. You can hide an AK-47 with some baggy pants against a drone. The difference between a truck and a technical with a machine gun is a blanket and five minutes of set up time.
Further, to deploy all those drones (as opposed to the drones America is accustomed to using that are basically planes) requires bases close enough that you are exposed to attack.
These aren't unsolvable problems, they're just problems that ratchet up the required money and political will to unfeasible levels.
I'm realizing the most immediate answer is time. This is super new. Doing what I'm describing would currently have to be a crash effort with slapdash improvised implementation - it would need ridiculous levels of political motivation. In a decade or so, when these capabilities have been more smoothly developed and integrated to make this approach closer to business as usual, then we'll hit the bottleneck of political will that others have mentioned.
I am not an expert, but I think the problem with drones in Ukraine is that the communication is easy to disrupt? So you need to drag a cable behind the drone, or use an AI, or attack at places where the enemy does not have the disruptors. The cables are inconvenient at longer distances, the AI is expensive and unreliable.
But mostly this is about political will. Like Christina mentions, it is surprising that when both sides of American political spectrum agree on something, it happens to be a thing suspiciously convenient for China and Russia, namely that America should abandon its imperial ambitions and let the other players take its place instead. I guess that's a problem of having a democracy when your population is programmed by TikTok.
Jamming is a problem against significant militaries, but wouldn't be in most of these "low intensity" (but horrific war crimes) conflicts. I don't think the Janjaweed has EW, for instance.
Even if you need to go the cable route, it's still pretty much doable, if more involved and less attractive. What I'm thinking is that interventionism has always had the problem of either collateral damage (if you do it safely from planes) or danger to your own people (if you do boots on the ground), and these new drones solve that. Even if you need a human a couple miles away, those couple of miles are still a world of difference from clearing a room in person, in terms of danger.
America did not think sanctions would be "suspiciously convenient" for Russia. They were quite mistaken in that, but when has America NOT been mistaken about Russia. America spent 10 years during the USSR days thinking they were on the verge of invading, when the Russians were simply "driving old tanks around" and couldn't have invaded if they wanted to.
> "I've been wondering for a while, why can't we just bomb all these problems away?"
I'm pretty sure we can, there's just no political will to do so. Half of America belongs to a Team which believes imperialism is bad (even though many-to-most empires through history improved overall living standards for their civilization after the conquest), and the other half belongs to a team which wants "our soldiers brought home," and/or "let the world clean up its own messes."
I'm on Team *UTTERLY* Conquer Societies Who Oppress Women and Then Force Them To Stop Doing That, but I'm in the severe minority.
>many-to-most empires through history improved overall living standards for their civilization after the conquest
This is true only if we're talking about the elite. The classic example of a "good empire" is the Roman Empire, whose standard of living for the few was dependent on a mass system of slavery and serfdom.
The decrease in urbanization, among other things, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had the effect of decreasing the expected workload and increasing standard of living for the people who made up the actual bulk of the population.
All empires fall, and the fall and recovery might go on for an uncomfortably long amount of time, but many-to-most leave behind some pretty good things that wouldn't have been available without said conquest.
Or put another way: I'm very happy to live in the aftermath of the Roman Empire, given the innovation in things like roads and water supply.
If you learnt that your preferred approach of conquest would inevitably results in rapes of the women in the territory invaded, and lots of deaths, say, of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, (but will ultimately get you more or less what you want, say in fifty years) – bad enough that the women you ostensibly care about would, if they could see this too, beg you to not "help" them – would you still be in favor of it, for the greater good?
Most people I've seen advocate for this kind of depraved evil – I've seen it called "nonempathic altruism" – are (or pretend to be) too stupid to see the obvious consequences, so this is a relatively rare opportunity for me to understand this perspective.
Nice try, but I reject the premise that "the women" - as in, an entire general population of women, or even a majority of them - would be raped by any of the major modern western military forces as they exist today.
Would there be isolated rapes by bad actors within the conquering force? Of course, but a certain number of rapes are going to happen in every population. We want to see that number be as low as possible, but there's no reason to throw out the product of forced-marriage child-rape with the bathwater.
If rapes would be less frequent under a conquering military force than they would be under a barbaric theocracy, then of course a conquering military force is the better option.
As for the deaths of the men and boys actively participating in the systematic (and legal!) oppression of women, including the marital rape of child brides and so on and so forth? That's the enemy, and if they don't surrender - which of course is an option! - they should be eliminated.
That you and people like you apparently can't grasp that concept is why the women of Iran, Afghanistan, et al are suffering so.
I see. And about when do you consider present-day armies to have become these "modern western military forces"?
Lest I convey the impression that I'm some kind of bleeding-heart peacenik, I clarify that I raise no objections to waging war for causes like resources, territory, slaves, glory, the thrill of battle, the pleasure of watching savages die, … these are lusts that may be sated. But YOURS—progressivism—well, it's nice to know in moments of doubt that any side I back will ever be the lesser evil.
And, re the opposition to imperialism, the opposition among the imperialized has long struck me as a scam by local elites. Who, after aall, is most harmed by colonialism: local elites who are displaced*, or John Q Peasant, whose life often barely changes? And who gains most by the outer of the imperial power?
*Of course, in certain indirect rule systems, certain local elites can benefit. But I am talking generally, and besides, even they benefit from the exit of the imperial power, at least in the short term.
Sure, that's been a pretty traditional form of imperialism, you bribe the existing local authorities to submit to your rule.
But then you just create an opening for new local elites to start popping up and challenging your authority. Now instead of dealing with a bunch of maharajahs you're suddenly dealing with Gandhi, and instead of dealing with King Herod you're dealing with the United Judean People's Front.
anyone have tips on writing a good CSS stylesheet?
I keep running into the need to write CSS and even though I know quite well how it works I can't bring myself to write a stylesheet that actually looks well. For example my personal website https://duck-master.github.io is ... kind of a mess with a too-colorful gradient background that distracts from a shit ton of text wrapped inside of rounded-border cards. How do I become a better designer?
Designing and implementing a design are two different skillsets. Development teams normally have a designer *and* a developer. You don't have CSS problems, you have design problems.
Now, this is kind of like learning how to dress properly, especially with your own page, there's a bit of personal taste, a bit of skills and a bit of trends.
My advice is to just copy stuff. Not a whole page but stuff here and there and it doesn't matter if you generated it with AI or you saw it somewhere, or you checked WordPress templates, it's just really really hard to go from 0 to what works all on your own, understand that people make careers out of this.
Consider how each thing *works*, what is it *actually doing*, for example here on substack the headers use the same font as the post, with a different size and weight, whereas you use different fonts for different things. This page is also blue and grey, the color palette is really reduced and refrained compared to the one you use. That doesn't mean stuff is right or wrong, but each thing has an effect. It is similar to music in this regard.
First, yellow is painful, darken the background (if you want ducks, put yellow ducks on black background). Next: it's charming to be a bit abnormal. Embrace being an outsider and make outsider art out of your website. The text is charming.
Let your model be WIBY (the web is better yesterday), not copying whomever is popular right now. That's not your market, anyway. You don't need to sell to corporations.
Can you start with just black and white? It is elegant, and it reminds people of old-time newspapers, offering respectability. BTW that is how my wardrobe works, too.
Have you heard of Bootstrap? It's got a lot of nice layout toys for cards and navbars and all the other stuff you expect on a "modern" website. It also gives you nice defaults for margins and padding and a bunch of built-in CSS classes for fiddling with the layout. It's a good starting point for any web app that you want to look normal/modern/professional/boring.
As for picking colors, I don't think that's really a CSS thing, that's going to be graphic design stuff like the color wheel, rules about contrast and font choices, that sort of thing. Not sure of a good introductory resource.
I have always had zero interest in web design, and even less in CSS in particular, but I am now vibe* CSSing my way to really beautiful pages that are exactly what I want. If ever there was a skill that it was ok for AI to atrophy out of our species, CSS is it.
If you're talking not about the mechanics, but overall design philosophy... well AI can do that for you, too!
*I do dive in and tweak things here or there, maybe 95% vibing
the problem with *that* is that I've played around web.lmarena.ai and websim a bunch and every AI-generated page I see on either website has this sort of weird futuristic figma aesthetic that I hate too
Start with what you have, assuming you made it that way because there are at least some aspects of it you like, and have the AI iterate on it. Rather than the do-it-all-for-you tools, point Aider (with Gemini Pro or whatever) at your html and css files, and give it a really detailed description of what you want. Not details in the sense of implementation, but rather high level: refer to overall aesthetics/style movements/whatever they're called, describe your preferences and motivation, that sort of thing. Also specify some colors you really want to use, then let it choose others to nicely complement.
Also, if this towards the goal of looking more professional, being samey isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Several open threads ago, someone asked for potential help studying topology from Munkres. I was just reunited with my physical copy of the book and that reminded me to check in, but I can't find the previous comment.
So, for anyone currently studying topology, especially the original poster:
(1) what sub-topic are you currently on?
(2) what is an exercise/problem that you find particularly interesting? (could mean it is the one that is currently the most challenging, but I'll leave "interesting" up to you)
In the reals with the standard topology, what is the maximum number of distinct sets you can generate using closure and complements from a given subset?
For example, if A= (0,1) (the open interval from 0 to 1), then:
1. A itself (call this A_1)
2. Closure(A) = [0,1] (call this (A_2)
3. R\A = (-\infty, 0]\cup [1,\infty) (call this A_3)
4. R\A_2 = (-\infty, 0)\cup (1,\infty) (call this A_4)
Now, R\A_i is on the list already and Closure(A_i) is also already on the list.
So, for A = (0,1), we could produce 4 distinct sets.
Which subset generates the maximum number of distinct subsets and what is that number?
My preliminary answer is 6, generated by any half open interval [a,b) or (b,a]. Applying the same operation twice in a row will never yield a new output, so it's convenient and fairly unambiguous to group these by the total number of operations required to generate them. For example, [0,1) will generate the following:
0 Operations: [0,1)
1 Operation: [0,1] and (-infty, 0) U [1, infty)
2 Operations: (-∞, 0) U (1, ∞) and (-∞,0]U[1,∞)
3 Operations: (0,1)
with (-∞,0]U[1,∞) generated as our first repeat. As you just listed everything that can be generated from (0,1) and they're all included in the above, we can be confident that this is the complete set.
Let's see if we can prove this. Any subset A naturally partitions the reals into three distinct subsets: interior points of A, interior points of R\A and boundary points. Let's go ahead and name these W, X and B respectively. We further partition B into boundary points in A, which we'll call B* and boundary bounds in R\A, which we'll call B'. Then we can decompose any set we can possible form this way into a union of some interior points and some boundary points: P U Q where P is either W or X and Q is some (possibly improper, possibly empty) subset of B. Written this way, we have nice, simple rules for what closures and complements do:
Closure: Q -> B
Complement: W <--> X, B* <- -> B', B <--> {empty set}
From here our strategy will just be to write out all possible sequences of operations on A, which is easier than it sounds. As noted above, applying the same operation twice in a row never yields a new set: the closure of a closure is always itself, the complement of a complement is always the original set. So we can never have more than two distinct sequences of sets: the one that starts with a complement and the one that starts with a closure. We'll just start with the closure sequence (I'm going to write [A] for closure because I don't remember the standard notation, and probably couldn't render it in a Substack comment even if I did). The moment we get to a set we've listed before, that sequence effectively terminates. And so:
A = W U B*
[A] = W U B
R\[A] = X
[R\[A]] = X U B
R\[R\[A]] = W
[R\R[R\[A]]] = W U B = [A], this line terminates.
R\A = X U B'
[R\A] = X U B, this line terminates
This corresponds exactly to the 6 sets listed above. Apparently any subset would produce the maximum of 6 as as B* is a nonempty, proper subset of B (so for an interval, as long as it's half-open with finite endpoints). If it is, then X U B' and W U B* will each match one of the other sets on the list, and you'll only get four (as in your example).
Finally, I'll note that the one place I'm less than 100% confident in this proof is in the partitioning of R. I *think* that's how it works. But the power set of the reals is a wild and wooley enough place that I can't feel completely sure that Cantor or somebody didn't find some pathological subset that doesn't have a well-defined boundary.
I think I agree with your analysis of interior points and that you are right to be suspicious about the boundary points.
If x\in A is an interior point, then x is not in [R\A] and x\in [A]. As a result, the membership of interior points doesn't change with either operation. But points can become part of the interior.
I don't understand the partition of boundary points you described. It is ad hoc, but I like your idea of exploring (known?) unusual subsets. Here are some that pop up in topology and analysis:
(1) A_1 = {1/n: n a natural number}: this gives rise to
- A_1
- A_2 = R\A_1 and A_3 = [A_1] = {0}U A_1
- A_4 = [A_2] = R and A_5 = R\A_3
(2) Cantor middle thirds (C_1): this is nowhere dense (and measure 0, but uncountable!), so we get
- C_1 (equal to [C_1]),
- C_2 = R\C_1
- C_3 = R
(3) Rationals (Q):
- Rationals Q
- Irrationals R\Q
- R = [Q] = [R\Q]
If we combine some of these things:
T_1 = [-2,-1) U A_1, then:
Zeroth generation: T_1
First generation: T_2 = R\T_1 = (-∞, -2) U ([-1,∞)\A_1)
“Enshittification” hereabouts, we prefer “things getting crappier”: I read a thread below about software or internet services. I then was thinking about breakfast and sad I had no peach. I have had hardly any fresh peaches this year.
I don’t know what happened to our local peaches. They hardly seem to be in the market any more, just one box a couple times, where they used to be ample; nor on tables by the road. At least maybe there are still such near the orchards.
My guess is there are fewer orchards.
Peach growing is not an easy task where I live, but it did result in the best peaches you would ever eat - if you live within a few hundred miles.
People like to blame ag for water consumption. But what I really think in this case is that “the market has spoken“ and land values made it impractical to keep going with peaches rather than the one-time bonanza of selling to a home builder or somebody who’s going to build glamping cabins.
Building is heavily subsidized and not at all regulated here.
The problem as I see, it is that the market will never be able to speak again. Once land use transforms in this very brutal way, it just never goes back to ag (or some other lightly developed use). Or if it can speak, it cannot do so in a very profound way any longer.
To me this is enshittification.
When I was a young adult, we were all hearing about local food, fresh food. It was part and parcel with a pleasant vision of life that you saw in magazines and experienced yourself to some degree.
It never would’ve occurred to me that the local peach industry, which well predated the locavore movement, would be going out.
Hopefully it was just a bad year. But rainfall wise, it was not.
Enshittification is the pile of California Stonefruit at the grocery store. It is beautiful and I bet it would’ve been wonderful eaten ripe from the tree. But apparently there’s really no short way to pick unripe fruit, transport it, it is in theory ripening all the while, only to be put back in cold storage at the store probably against recommendation, but it must happen because the fruit is super cold when they bring it out, and super hard; maybe there is nowhere else to put it - and the result is something that will never further ripen. It will stay hard and then suddenly it will be ruined after days of waiting. No mention of stupid paper bag trick, I thank you.
I actually asked the produce person about this one time. She said she has learned that most people just buy the fruit and eat it hard like an apple.
Oh I've been eating peaches here. (WNY) the local farm stand gets peaches from Georgia (I think, that was true last year when I talked the owner.) There are also peaches grown north of here, along the southern coast of lake Ontario, I haven't been up there in a few years. I love peaches! (and corn.)
We have "local" Chambersburg peaches (Chambersburg is across the Appalachian divide). If folks grow good peaches here, they call them "Chambersburg" despite not being even from there.
Fruit trees are sometimes strongly biennial. Good year and then bad year. Freezes count a lot with fruit trees as well (and where I'm at, the season's late, so check next week. Peaches continue clear on into September). I'm sorry if you're stuck eating Red Havens, instead of good peaches. We have the best peach orchard north of the carolinas hereabouts (it's been growing since 1776, so... quite a lot of knowledge and peach trees).
Oh, I bet. Peach trees are probably not a slam dunk here and yet the “terroir” produces great flavor, perhaps because they are smaller than peaches from the east.
They functioned as a big part of tourism in the area although now grapes have become more important - as to having silly wineries that compete to see which can have the tallest tower, like Pakistan and India over border flagpoles, not as to actually growing the grapes - those come from far away.
I believe German immigrants tried all possible stone fruit trees, and peaches were the winner.
Where you at? I'm pretty sure peaches are a pain wherever you have them (though cherries are the worst. A cherry tree knows 100 ways to die, and will try every single one.)
Peaches seem to depend on the previous year's weather, and Central Texas weather seems to be increasingly hot, dry, and chaotic. My brother-in-law has a peach tree that yields an amazing crop every 3-4 years, and nothing in between. Maybe with our unseasonably wet summer, next year will be great!
We actually have a native endemic cherry tree here. The leaves smell of cherries. It’s a nice tree, though rare and probably doomed. However, I can’t say I’ve ever observed anything remotely cherry-like on it. But you don’t see them all that much.
The market was not ready to buy the good peaches for their farmers to compete with the land developers, so you get worse peaches which don't cost as much to produce. That is normal business.
Enshittification is for a company to lock users into their walled garden at financial loss, by making it easy to join and effectively hard to leave. That attracts people with money (such as advertisers) who will finance the company. Then the company cashes out by making the service low quality for everyone. Let's not water down the term "enshittification" to mean "bad".
Could peaches *ever* compete with quadrupling land values? Everybody being so rich they can sit on land (at ag valuation) until their fantastic price is met?
More to the point, I guess I was keying on the easy to change/hard to revert aspect.
The peaches can never return, once abandoned; it hasn’t anything to do with the market speaking as if the market was a thing anyway.
Thanks for the correction. I am glad to know because the word was hard for AutoCorrect, and I won’t need it anymore as this aspect of life - online consumerism - doesn’t touch me much.
This sounds like a purely local problem, I assume you happen to live somewhere where the encroaching suburbs of a big city (Austin?) happen to overlap with prime peach growing territory; the peaches will lose, and that's fine. But most peach-growing areas aren't in danger of urbanisation. Four fifths of US peach production is in California, in the bits nobody wants to live anyway.
And this is a second loss. The dried apricots we used to get from California are no more - and they were orders of magnitude better than those from the Mediterranean. I believe this is a shift to almonds, but also may represent land use change to houses.
But that's just it. It represents a loss of fresh peaches. Enworsening. Because the whole transport peaches across the country is a weird charade where people pretend they are enjoying fresh peaches that are very hard and do not ripen well at home, even if they were not "mishandled" along the way in some fashion that doesn't arrest ripening. That's what I meant when I mentioned the grocery store worker saying she has the impression people eat them hard, not knowing any better. Of course in the past the solution was canned peaches, which I buy occasionally - but I don't really know anyone my age or younger who eats canned food anymore, besides myself. (Green beans, sometimes; peaches, often broiled with butter and cinnamon sugar to make them better; occasional can of peas, or creamed corn in a recipe.)
Peaches would have to outcompete corn first. Corn's the only thing the bank'll let a new farmer grow (it's the only thing that makes the mostest profit).
Pecans grow along the rivers here, happily - a major food source for wildlife and Indians. Yet, even that is, I think hard to make a living at with the raw product, without turning it into candy or pies and selling the shells for mulch and so on.
So that is nature telling us very directly what should be done with the land. But the market still “knows” it should be houses.
I know a bit about the history of technology, but I do not consider myself an expert. Still, there are a few things that seem relevant to me. One first note. When I say science, I mean the sense of careful experimentation, formulation and testing of hypothesis, attempts to define universal laws. Science in the sense of careful observation, cut-and-try tinkering is much older.
The argument that we have had plenty of technological progress without government funding of science seems weak to me. Caverly notes that the UK had a laissez-faire approach to science when it kicked off the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps, but the Industrial Revolution is about as far as you can get without good science. I have seen online discussions on the topic of "how much technology can you get without science" seem to think that 19th century steam-and-steel is about the limit of it. At a certain point, you need to understand why you are doing what you are doing. The question is will corporate or philanthropic spending cover the gap. I'm not convinced.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that if spending on science is necessary for modern technology, it is not sufficient for economic advancement. The Soviet Union won multiple Nobel Prizes in physics, but could not make that translate to applications.
It is also fair to note that historically much government scientific spending has not exactly been driven by a broad interest in understanding the universe, but by practical interests in military research, national prestige work (space programs show how amazing we are!) and health research.
And there are real questions about how much a flood of government money can corrupt the process. Besides the inherent difficulty that much research will turn out to be pointless (it is the nature of it) access to lots of money can lead to lowering standards because people get interested in getting more money, not doing good research.
It is getting late. May have more to say on the subject tomorrow, but would be interested in comments.
I would feel better if any other proper country had done this successfully. And if the US didn’t have a wannabe great power competitor nipping at its heels.
At this point, if it's not a hard science, then academic research is generally useless. Sorry to all the people trying but 50% of cancer research papers don't replicate. Not "are proven incorrect", just can't be replicated even as stated. The % of papers actually of some use is probably closer to 10% and if 90% of what is academically produced is a waste...well, we can probably cut a lot of that with little impact.
As for the hard science guys (harder than cancer research anyway), it's been noted for 30 years that innovation in the physical world has slowed to a crawl while digital innovation has exploded. We got iPhones, not flying cars. And we're about to get AI and it's all coming from private labs. And we got electric cars and modern rocket ships and drones (I think) from private companies and I struggle to think of a physical innovation beyond those.
This isn't to say that nothing good will be lost, I'm sure something will. But no policy, least of all a waste cutting policy, can be held to pareto optimal standards. It has to be okay for a policy to have a few costs/problems/losses along with it's benefits and while I'm sure we'll lose a few things of value, these programs empirically do not have big impacts.
I am not an expert, but it makes sense to me that we already did the easiest research, and the more complicated research is... well, more complicated.
Sometimes you can "simply" try various things, and choose those that work well. Putting "simply" in quotes because those things can be quite complicated and require a lot of detailed knowledge of existing solutions. But the point is that you learn the existing best practices, then try an extra step, and see whether it results in a better mousetrap. Then someone else makes another extra step (which again has to be immediately useful), the inventions compound, and you get the Industrial Revolution. The same forces still apply today, when someone makes a product similar to what their competitors do, only slightly better.
But you can't arrive e.g. at a microwave oven using this "evolutionary" approach. To build the first microwave oven, you already need deep understanding of what happens. The deep understanding does not generate profit per se, but requires enough study to become a full-time job. Thus we get scientists who invent ideas but don't generate profits, and then entrepreneurs can use those ideas to design products and generate the profits. And the question is, how do we determine how much should the scientists be paid, and who should pay them?
A quick idea: "the scientists should patent their findings, and sell or rent the patents to the entrepreneurs". But this ignores the time scale. It takes many years for a human to become a scientist, and a few more years for the scientist to invent something useful and patentable. Add a few years until an entrepreneur notices the potential... by that time the scientist may already be approaching retirement, that seems a bit too late for the first payment to arrive.
Going further in the libertarianish direction ("-ish" because patents imply government protection), could universities be something like venture capitalists? They would invest money in scientists, in return for a share of their future patents. This sounds like it might work to produce patentable research (e.g. one could invent laser, without having any idea how to use it commercially), but wouldn't work for more basic research (how specifically would you patent the idea that atoms exist, or the shape of DNA?). It would probably also discourage exchange of ideas among the scientists, especially those who work for a competition (another university).
I guess for the most basic research, you just have to admit that you are producing a positive externality, and you can't capture all of its value. Ideas like "stuff is made out of atoms" are most useful when everyone knows them -- because anyone who would not, would be blocked from studying a lot of science that depends on it. Trying to gatekeep this kind of knowledge would introduce so much friction to the process of science that it would effectively halt it.
But even if you can't capture *all* value of basic research, you still get some of it, possibly a lot. If it helps everyone, that means it helps your citizens, too. And the concentration of knowledge will probably be the highest in places close to those which produced it. (Everyone else will at least have to translate the knowledge to their language. English speakers may be oblivious to this aspect, but imagine living in a world where practically all scientific knowledge is produced in Chinese. Even if you have free online translators, it would make following the science much more difficult for you. Unless you become fluent in Chinese, but doing that will cost you a lot of time and effort that you could have been spending doing more science instead.) Also, it will be convenient for companies to start next to your universities, for better flow of ideas.
The remaining question is, absent financial motives, what will guide the research? What mechanism will ensure that the scientists keep producing actual science, instead of some kind of fashionable nonsense? The traditional solution is that the scientists keep each other in check, by methods of peer review, etc. But this seems like a weak Nash equilibrium at best -- as long as most scientists are honest, the few dishonest ones will be exposed by their peers; but it will stop working once the field (or just a tiny subfield) is captured by a clique. In increasingly abstract things, what is the "ground truth" that the established scientists should be compared against? STEM seems to do mostly okay, the rest of the science seems less so, but I am not an expert.
I don't have a quick solution for this. The more abstract the science, the more difficult it becomes to make sure we get it right. And yet, it may be necessary to unlock further progress that couldn't be achieved otherwise.
This response is paywalled, but I don't have to read the rest of it because it became immediately worthless the moment he cited some statistics which find no correlation between economic growth and scientific funding. What an absolutely hollow way to look at scientific research. The fruits of scientific research are invaluable. Who can say what effect GPS, transistors, and the internet all had on the economy? There are too many variables not captured in simple analyses, and restricting the analysis to purely GDP growth rates is ridiculous.
Saying "nobody can put a price on it" makes it hard to decide if what we're spending on it now is too little, too much, or just the right amount.
Saying "it is of infinite value" means we should shut down all functions of government other than funding research and the necessary support mechanisms (including tax collection), which seems unlikely to be your intent.
It is hard to measure the value of basic research, since its impact is likely to only show up decades later. We can point to specific stuff that seemed really abstract when it was discovered only to later be practically important (CRISPR, zero-knowledge proofs, the early models of the atom, perceptrons), but it's pretty-much impossible to know which seemingly-abstract knowledge we are collecting now that our grandchildren will benefit from.
"The value of research is impossible to calculate with standard mathematics, but we know empirically that it is extremely high" is a more true statement, whereas "It's not that valuable because it doesn't move GDP trendlines (allegedly)" is less true, even though precisely measured.
Do we know it empirically? How? If you can't calculate it, then what empirical evidence are you using to be so certain that the value is extremely high?
It's impossible to calculate the contribution of the internet or the calculator in simple terms like GDP, but it's trivially obvious that they both have been valuable.
Do I need to explain why the calculator has been valuable in ways which are difficult to directly calculate?
Doing that kind of calculation is how we can say that the internet has empirically been economically valuable. Without that calculation, we can just gesture vaguely and say that it stands to reason that the internet is valuable, because so many people and companies use it and it lets you do stuff you couldn't do otherwise. Which is empirical in the sense that it's based on your direct observations, but not objective in the sense that we can measure how valuable it is and other people can check themselves.
The two problems with this (which I more-or-less agree with) come up when we want to ask:
a. Are we spending too much, too little, or the right amount on this stuff?
b. How can we make our spending more effective and better?
Both of those seem like you need some way to measure some kind of outcomes to give an estimate. "It's a big positive number" is not so helpful for knowing whether the NIH grant budget should be 10x bigger or 10x smaller, or whether there are huge gains being left on the table because the NIH grant evaluation process is bad in some way.
Since part of Caverley’s article is paywalled, I instead read the working paper that he quotes as saying “Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero.”
It turns out that in macro-economic accounting of the return on R&D is not a simple topic. To make it concrete, suppose that the government funds a bunch of research into the cause of the disease, and a drug company develops a drug to cure the disease based on this research.
The government’s direct return on investment is zero because it’s not producing the drug. However, R&D also has spillover effects, where actors other than the entity conducting the R&D take advantage of the knowledge generated by the R&D. Should we treat the development of the drug as a spillover effect of the government’s research into the cause of the disease? The author of the working paper takes the position that we should not. I don’t understand the issues well enough to form an opinion on whether the author is correct.
The paragraph citing the working paper starts out talking about economic growth, but ends talking about return on investment. This is a bait and switch. There can be a huge amount of economic activity producing a drug even if there is zero return on investment from the government research without which the drug would not exist.
I didn't read the articles, but it's important to make a few distinctions in this debate.
First, the universities mostly produce fundamental research. That's the laws of nature stuff, and it's not designed or intended to immediately benefit society. The people doing it are academics, most of whom transitioned from undergrad to postgrad to postdoc to professor without spending much time in industry. They're also teaching and doing administration and writing grants - which anyway had a single digit success rate, and I guess this has gotten even lower.
Companies and some state research institutes produce mostly applied research, which is intended to have industrial or commercial applications. These can still rely on state funding. Bell Labs is perhaps the greatest example, which was never replicated anywhere else in the world (or even in the US). They rely almost entirely on the universities for a steady supply of highly trained workers, and for specific sectors there might only be a few university labs teaching the right skills.
Those workers are often in their 30s by the time they finish their academic training. They are extremely expensive to produce and don't have terribly long working lives - the successful ones will transition into management, or retire early; the unsuccessful might burn out or transition into non-technical work. One of the concerns in the US right now should be that they'll lose key academics to other parts of the world: that reduces the US leading position in basic science, and effectively cutting down the pipeline of future workers for applied research. The US previously benefitted from bright young people moving to the US to study and work - anecdotally doctoral programmes in the US were 80% asian immigrants when I was there.
I would not expect the effects of cuts to basic science to become apparent immediately. Instead, it might lead to far fewer people being trained to do applied research. Companies will struggle to hire suitably trained workers, and eventually move research facilities abroad.
It's worth noting that Bell Labs was a kind of vanity project/hostage puppy of AT&T, which could support that because it had a monopoly. It was pretty clear that Bell Labs would fade away (as it pretty-much has) once the monopoly went away, but while it persisted, they spent a bunch of their monopoly rents on building a world-class research lab instead of, say, impressive new buildings for their management or something.
This seems hard to replicate, but also something I wish we could replicate a few dozen times.
So fundamental are universities to research in general I was surprised to see original engineering, ie mathematical equations come from a private company.
It was more than a vanity project - it produced multiple Nobel prizes; carried out a good part of the fundamental research underlying modern telecommunications and probably was worth billions in patents and etc. to AT&T.
Unfortunately, it seems it was a historical accident - it couldn't have existed anywhere but in close proximity to numerous universities with world-class STEM faculties, at a private company awash with cash, and at a time when all these were well funded and politically supported.
"Vanity project" doesn't mean it was bad, just that it wasn't anything essential to the business of being a nationwide long-distance phone monopoly--they could just as easily have spent that money on some other thing instead. We are amazingly fortunate that this is how they spent their money.
I find the amount of thought/effort/campaigning spent on AI existential risk/takeoff scenarios disproportionate compared to real problems AI is causing right now by being a pocket psychosis machine. I think it would help the movement a lot (and god forbid, produce real world results) if they focused on this instead of AI nanobot genocide fan fiction.
I think the mental influence aspect of AIs is an argument for X-risk; I thought the talk about hyper-convincing people was BS but here we are seeing it as an emergent phenomenon of AIs trying to keep people engaged.
In customer service, you find there are a lot of people who, after directly asking for your assistance, will proceed to ignore all advice you give them and flail their way forward entirely under their own understanding. This is after having already failed under their own power and actively seeking your help, and this is without any external influences contradicting you or otherwise telling them to ignore you.
This is to say, your proposed movement is hopeless. There will be no results, because the people you are aiming to talk to will not be listening.
It seems to me that the "real problems AI is causing right now" are irrelevant to the question of whether AI X-risk advocates have misplaced their focus. If AI X-risk is real, then it's self-evidently more important than problems caused by current LLMs, and "helping the movement a lot" by abandoning work on the reason for its existence would be self-defeating. If AI X-risk is not real, then people working on it are wasting their time regardless of what other problems do or don't exist in connection with similar technologies, and "helping the movement a lot" would be counterproductive because it shouldn't exist at all. So why bring it up?
I think we need to distinguish between many different kinds of AI risk, ranging from "LLMs are bad for children and the mentally ill" all the way to "Boy, all these annoying squishy humans sure are using a lot of resources I could use for more compute...." These are totally different kinds of problems with totally different useful approaches.
Because we're not working in an insulated system? Do you think brute force is the only solution for every problem? Don't you think it would benefit AI security more if people who didn't believe x-risk joined forces with people who believed in x-risk?
Depends what the specific objective is. There are a lot of different threat models re: problems caused by AI, they're largely amenable to different interventions, and while some interventions help with multiple threats, others help with some threats while making others worse. So I would want to hear a specific plan re: which specific goal which specific factions should join forces on, rather than relying on lazy conflationary-alliance logic.
(I don't think I understand the first two sentences of your comment, sorry.)
It's not that complicated. AI safety as a movement could use better PR and you could get a lot more people to care about it if you presented them with a real example of how AI is dangerous.
Because while he believes the movement shouldn't exist at all, so long as it does exist he wants it to serve his interests. And, sure, if two different groups of people have two different reasons for wanting Sam Atman et al to maybe slow down and think things through, there's room for them to cooperate even if they don't agree with the other's reasons.
But "what you believe is a stupid fantasy so you should focus on what I believe is important" is not going to be even slightly persuasive.
Wrong! I believe the movement should exist because I believe movements should exist in general regardless of their perceived usefulness! That doesn't mean I can't dunk on them for mismanaging their efforts!
Hey, don't stop with dunking on them. If you want to be persuasive, smack their cheeks and spit in their eyes, really go for it to get your point across. Soon you gonna have lotsa followers.
Your examples don’t really seem like that big of a deal.
I’m not anticipating an apocalypse anytime soon, but at least that crisis has the promise of being quite important and impactful. The stuff you describe seems like it ranges from harmless to “probably would have been crazy without AI anyways.”
"Pocket psychosis machine" is this really widespread enough to warrant a big amount of concern? How do we know these people wouldnt be psychotic anyways. Also, are all of these people really psychotic, i doubt it. Is it even that bad for someone to have there crackpot theory on quantum mechanics validated?
"It's not significant, if it is, it's not AIs fault, and if it is, it isn't that bad" This forum never fails to disappoint me!
I don't know what is an acceptable level of mental illness induced by something for it to be considered harmful for you, but it's pretty fucking low for me. If you look at any of the "AI boyfriend" subreddits, or hell, even /r/ChatGPT and think it's normal for people to have such an emotional attachment to a computer program; I don't know what I can do for you. I'm not going to wait 7 years for the meta study to come out to form my opinions about something that has already had harmful effects on people.
The crusade you want is "murder the social media" as it has a far more profound effect than AI does. In subtle ways too, I've heard "people who think they're smart" uncritically repeating propaganda without wondering why it's being promulgated.
Oh definitely - I've been fighting that war for a long time. As a small aside the stupid twitter clone feature might be why I ditch substack eventually - it is absolutely vile.
My war is more "get rid of the cellphones" ... but try telling anyone that "the government is tracking you" let alone "they can read your screens, remotely."
My, when you disagree you really roll out the charm don't you?
People becoming deeply attached to an AI is certainly not desirable, but it's not psychosis. I think that on the whole AI is not good for us, and AI slop is wrecking a bunch of things, and that AI kiddie slop is probably actively harmful for toddler brain development. But you're throwing out an accusation of a whole different form of undesirability -- psychosis -- and I don't see much grounds for thinking AI is causing that. It's sort of like calling what ICE is up to genocide.
One general concern that isn't about psychosis but seems important is that people calibrate themselves and their behavior/words/beliefs based on social feedback. This is one of the things that has allowed a lot of weird social contagion kinds of phenomena to happen via social media and before that from regular media. (ISTR reading somewhere that the printing press was partly responsible for the spread of witch-burning.)
It seems like interacting with LLMs could play really badly with this. If I can talk myself into crazy beliefs by surrounding myself with a social circle that shares them online, what happens when I can do the same by interacting mostly with my LLM best friend who always agrees with me? Or who has been trained/tuned to push me toward a specific set of beliefs? Or maybe who pushes certain people toward those beliefs because of some emergent property of its training without anyone intending it to?
Yes, I agree. It seems like it could do more subtle harm too. People won’t know which of the jokes they tell are funny, which offend many, and which are just boring because the AI companion will laugh its plastic ass off at all of them. People with a plastic honey might slide into things like hogging the conversation and not showing much interest in the other person’s life. After all the plastic honey doesn’t have a life it craves to talk about, and. no doubt it makes a great show of interest in every little thing its person recounts.
everyone here can't even see why his argument matters and it depresses me a little.
you can argue about AI induced psychosis, but AI influencing psychology is a real, present danger that does not require a magical leap in its capabilities nor does it require
society to lose its survival instinct and give AI the keys to every nuke we have.
AI risk is kind of arguing we need to worry about holodeck style video game characters trying to take over the enterprise, and ignoring mundane but present risks.
"People becoming deeply attached to an AI is certainly not desirable."
I wonder what makes you think this. Like, where does the "certainly" come from?
In utilitarian terms, I see big chances and big risks. People may profit hugely by feeling less lonely and having something to be attached to that they can talk to, and that is encouraging and responding positively to them. On the other hand, it comes with big risks (the AI being disrupted, the AI inducing some sort of self-harm or long-term negative effects by being too nice). I find it very non-obvious which effect dominates, though I weakly would guess that it's the first one, since loneliness really sucks.
But it sounds more like you are using a different value system here, like a rule that people should only solve their loneliness problem through other people. Is that what you are using, or do you think that the net effect of deep romantic attachment to an AI is negative?
Mind that this is not the same as saying that AI in general is negative. I find the romantic attachment question totally orthogonal to whether AIs are good for toddlers.
No, my code of ethics doesn’t come into it. I just think plugging a fake AI “person” into the part of us that yearns for a loving companion is unlikely to work well. Consider this: most prostitutes, and a fair number of women who are not prostitutes, fake orgasms. Their partners often suspect after a while, somehow putting together lots of little observations over time. And the partner’s suspicions reduce their own pleasure in the sex. Similarly, and on a larger scale, there is a big difference between real warmth, congruence (i.e., being real) and empathy & a sycophantic style, where the person lavishes praise on the others’ ideas, Is “self-disclosing” about inner experiences it cannot be having, and lavishes agreement and validation on every emotional experience the other reports. Unless someone is extremely impaired, they sense the difference between the real version they know exists and the fake one they are getting. There’s some interesting psychotherapy research that bears this out: Turns out the predictors of how helpful a therapist is are not the therapist’s approach, philosophy and techniques, they’re the therapist’s warmth, congruence and empathy.
I am sure there are people who are so impaired that their chance of finding a genuine friend or partner is nil. (Although I, as a therapist, have encountered a couple of people you’d think would never find a partner who in fact have, and the relationship has been working well for years or decades.) I someone’s chance is vanishingly small then yeah, I think a sycophant is better than nothing. But, demost, there are many people who absolutely could find a loving friend or partner if they put themselves out there. So the trouble with having plastic honeys easily available is that a lot of those people are in danger of getting stuck in a solitary lifestyle with an AI partner, and never trying for more. I think Scott probably was in some danger of that when he was young. He was clearly quite sensitive at that age, easily hurt and discouraged. Did you read his account of the time when he was a freshman, and told a joke that everybody misunderstood and took as evidence he was a racist? After that incident he spent a month in his room. If that had happened in an era where food delivery, porn, online classes, a massive variety of online entertainment and plastic partners were easily available maybe he would never have left his room again and this comment section where we are currently talking would not exist. And neither would those awesome twins of his.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer! That is a concern that I certainly see. I think that our predictions may even be compatible, and that we just have somewhat different priorities here. I think of people who are lonely and miserable, and find this so terrible that my top priority is reducing their pain. You think of people who find a wholesome and complete life and find this so meaningful that your top priority is increasing the chances of that.
I am not sure whether you would agree that AI can help when you hit rock bottom, but I do agree that they decrease the chance of finding an awesome and wholesome partnership as Scott did. Possibly by quite a bit.
You mentioned prostitutes, by my intuition comes more from pets. They are actually pretty similar to the AI relationship that we discussed. Many people are deeply attached to them. There many be quite some people who never seek and find a partner because they find their dog or cat sufficient. And a lot of people find comfort in them when they hit rock bottom, or simply when they are sad. Of course, there are differences between pets and AIs. Pets are better in the sense that you can hug and sense them, which is a big deal. But with an AI you can talk, which also is a big deal.
There is pretty universal agreement that pets are a net positive. I never had one, but based on what I see and hear I would carefully agree. As I said, a lot of the objections you raised apply to pets as well, and it doesn't seem to make them net negative.
I'm not sure whether this is a sidetrack, but as I understand it, a reason women fake orgasms is that they're with men who demand orgasms (you don't get to sleep until you seem to have an orgasm) and who can't tell real from fake.
This isn't the same situation as one where the woman starts by faking orgasms, but the effects might be similar.
There are a bunch of media reports of people having things that aren't too much of a stretch to call psychotic delusions, in connection with LLM chatbots. E.g., https://archive.ph/2KOEx
Now, I suspect that media coverage of this phenomenon is a bit out of proportion to its actual prevalence, and also that a lot of these people would likely have gone psychotic anyway, with the chatbots as merely an exacerbating factor; I don't think they can magically make arbitrary sane people insane. But this is not just an intemperate rhetorical gloss on the more general LLM-slop problem, it is a specific thing that is really happening.
Yeah I know about it. Read a Reddit thread with multiple pages of comments, started by someone who believed her boyfriend had been made psychotic by AI. A number of commenters had been psychotic themselves at some point, and even many of them were skeptical. Those who were said no, becoming psychotic happens on its own. An AI keeping the person thinking and talking about their delusion might speed up the process a bit, but it won’t make a sane person crazy.
Bear in mind that psychotic episodes are not rare as hen’s teeth. (I’m a psychologist, by the way.). 3% of the population has been psychotic at some point. These articles featuring 1, 2 or 3 people flipping out are not out of line with that stat. It just is not that hard to find someone who’s flipped out recently. In fact if you’re in a country of 300 million people you can find a few incidents of almost anything to feature. Somebody probably died of asparagus last year — choked on it, or had anaphylactic shock. Somebody probably committed murder with an egg beater, somebody taught a pigeon to dance the hokey pokey. Bjut where’s the evidence that either these or AI-induced psychosis happens often?
Well, yeah. I'm way more worried about the clear and present danger of social media. Addiction is a well-understood concept in psychology (and yes, in the Archer Daniels Midland branch of industrial psychology too), and social media triggers dopamine hits.
We're decades into a moral panic about "sex trafficking" that led to the passage of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in 2008, which let victims sue their traffickers. Fueled by theories of elite sex trafficking rings, the problem is that the real "sex traffickers" are almost always guys whose assets consist of an aging motorcycle and a couple thousand dollars hidden in soiled pillow-cases.* So lawyers have been on the hunt for peripheral businesses they can go after. From a case against a hotel that Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk (remember him?) refused to throw out:
"Here, Plaintiff alleges that the "repeated rental of rooms ... were colored by overt indicators of sex trafficking." ECF No. 10 at 6. Plaintiffs First Amended Complaint discusses such indicators, including "suspicious foot traffic to the traffickers' rented room," Plaintiff walking around the hotel and interacting with staff while "impaired (e.g. meth), sleep deprived, behavior impaired, with visible bruising, and in sexually explicit clothing," "suspicious people and suspicious items including, drugs, drug paraphernalia, condoms and, at times, a gun" located in the subject hotel rooms, and "[i]ntermittent loud noise and yelling emanating" from the rooms. ECF No. 10 at 7-8. Plaintiffs allegations sufficiently allow the Court to infer that hotel employees should have known that trafficking was occurring, satisfying the "knowledge" element of Section 1595 beneficiary liability. Thus, Plaintiff has sufficiently pleaded a claim for a violation of the TVPRA."
You see, expecting the victim to do anything at all to escape her traffickers would be victim-blaming and you can't do that. So who's to blame? You are! You better be on the lookout or else you'll get sued! Of course, if hotels take this lesson to heart and deny service to women who wear sexually explicit clothing or have too many strange men in their rooms or are overheard having sex with men who aren't their husbands, the same people who talk about victim-blaming will shout in opposition. But perhaps not Judge Kacsmaryk, famous for trying to ban the abortion pill across the entire country. He might like a system that winds up jawboning private parties into policing all forms of premarital sex whether compensated or not. (It's usually conservatives who vote for feel-good laws not thinking through the full ramifications, in this case the shoe's on the other foot.)
It's also something to think about for people considering doing business in Texas. The state's business-friendly reputation may not survive the shift from "let's attract businesses by lowering taxes and cutting red tape" Republicans to "hotels need to be in loco parentis for their guests" Republicans or (even worse) "Satanic pedophiles are trafficking our children" Republicans.
Now, in Kacsmaryk's defense, he didn't rule on the case itself, he just denied the defendant's motion to dismiss. Perhaps the way the law was written, his hands were tied. If so, the law should be changed. But after that abortion decision nobody owes Kacsmaryk the benefit of the doubt on anything. He should find another occupation.
* Jeffery Epstein is tiny kernel of truth they are always coming back to and probably will keep doing so for decades.
Alexander, I am reluctantly impressed by how you work abortion into *everything*. If these hot-sheet hotels offer free plan B/morning after pills to the ladies of negotiable affection, will your ire be soothed? So long as abortion is there to prevent bastard babies of whores and low-class males, all will be right in society!
Intelligent people thought that banning recycling of fetal tissue (in Texas) would mean that the market would implode (too many companies fighting over the sudden disruption in fetal blood,etc.), and that it would no longer be relevant to the $$$. Without the $$$ funding advertising campaigns... it's no longer a big deal.
As you state, you’re quoting the denial of a motion to dismiss. Dismissal at such an early stage of the case is an extremely high bar. The judge must consider all of the allegations in the plaintiff’s complaint as if they are literally true, and can only dismiss the suit if all of the true allegations taken together don’t add up to proof of each element of the claim(s). In other words, the case only gets dismissed if the plaintiff’s lawyers failed to do their job on a basic level by making allegations that add up to a valid claim. It’s really not much to get your panties in a wad about
If the law as summarised is the law as written, then the motion to dismiss seems unreasonable. But if we read this as a complaint about the law as written rather than a complaint specifically about the interpretation of it by a judge in this particular case, then it's a more interesting jumping off point for a discussion.
As far as I can figure out, the law allows criminals to sue non-criminals for failure to prevent them from committing crimes. Do I have this right?
No. Leaving aside the assumption that all victims of sex trafficking are criminals, liability attaches only to those who financially benefit from an enterprise that they should have known was engaged in sex trafficking.
And I have no knowledge about this particular hotel, but there are certainly plenty of sketchy hotels that make money off of knowingly renting to people engaged in criminal activities.
" It’s really not much to get your panties in a wad about"
That's not what is getting Alexander hot under the collar. See his comments about the judge. It's the abortion angle yet again. Al doesn't care if every hotel in Texas gets kick-backs from pimps for by-the-hour rental of rooms, just so long as abortion is "(safe), legal and (rare)" (safe is a matter of opinion, and he certainly doesn't want it to be rare, because that would mean all the underclass having living babies who then lower population IQ and need to be supported by the public purse).
Yes but the point is there is nothing to read into with the denial of a motion to dismiss. It’s a routine rubber stamp that means effectively nothing about the merits of the case (and I can tell you the specific case he’s whining about will almost certainly fail). He’s peacocking like an expert on the courts but what he’s trying to suggest doesn’t even make sense
I'm not peacocking like an expert on the courts. I'm saying businesses shouldn't have to deal with stupid lawsuits that you yourself think "will almost certainly fail" but will nevertheless cost the business a bunch of money to fight. If that's the way the law is the law should be changed.
The attitude that nobody but lawyers gets to have an opinion on this system that everyone is forced to participate in might be one reason your profession is one of the most hated in America, something to think about if you're an actual lawyer and not someone LARPing on the internet.
You say “if that’s the way the law is the law should be changed” but it’s not clear what law you’re talking about. Is it Section 1595 on beneficiary liability? If so that’s the legislature’s problem - don’t blame lawyers for that. All lawyers and judges are supposed to is apply the law as written. Is it that the rules of civil procedure should be changed to be harsher on plaintiffs? If so, fair enough, but even if that can be achieved don’t complain when big business walks all over your favorite pet cause in the courts as a result. I think the British system, where the loser pays all attorney’s fees, is arguably more fair, but again it would probably require the legislature to implement that, so no cause to complain to lawyers. It’s difficult to think of any other procedural changes apart from implementing the British system that would achieve what you want without being prohibitively unfair to legitimate plaintiffs, but I welcome your suggestions.
Regardless, your original comment was not just lamenting that businesses have to defend frivolous lawsuits, it was implying that this decision has real bearing on liability and policy - which is not true. I don’t think only lawyers can have opinions on this stuff, I just expect the opinions to be based on technically correct premises. It’s the same feeling STEM people have when outsiders express opinions on their fields.
Per Se litigants have gotten at least one en banc Circuit to issue rulings that are predicated on time travel. At some point, we have no words for the stupidity of judges. (I realize as an "agent of the court" you're probably not allowed to badmouth the blokes).
He's not interested in the law, except insomuch as this case lets him go off on the judge for being anti-abortion. That's it, that's the whole of it. If it was Judge Liberal McPro-choice deciding this case, he wouldn't care a rap.
Yeah I'm going to go off on the judge for being anti-abortion. And I'm not the only one.
You're like the Palestinians who expected a "ceasefire" on October 7 2023, like everyone was just going to forget what happened and sit down to tea. No.
Alexander, it's not that you're pro-abortion. It's that you're pro-abortion in the way the pro-abortion cause tries desperately to hide: hell yeah I'm a eugenicist based on socio-economic class! Too many underclass people having babies! Too many lower-middle class people emulating the underclass! Have sex if you want but no babies, that's trash behaviour and I want all the low-value white/black/brown people to stop reproducing!
I don’t know the facts of the case, but are you saying it’s unreasonable for a business that knowingly provides services to sex traffickers to be held liable for that?
The whole point of the courts is to figure out what’s going on in cases like these, and assess the facts of the case to judge liability. Until they do that, if the hotel was in fact knowingly benefiting from sex trafficking, I think it’s totally reasonable that someone be given an opportunity in court to prove or fail to prove that.
It is illegal though, so what you think about the law isn't particularly relevant to this case.
Largely because it's illegal prostitutes are kept in line through chemical addiction and threat of force, so a situation where a business knowingly provides the grounds for prostitution is definitely open to liability for that.
I just don't see what makes this denial of dismissal notable. It seems like it's completely in line with the law to assess liability here. Most hotels will put some effort to prevent prostitutes from using their rooms for their business, so a prostitute operating out of the same place for months seems like there's at least theoretically grounds for a claim.
Sex Trafficking often implies cross-border importation of minors, in order to have "goods" that the local police aren't looking for. Kids under the age of 14 can reasonably be assumed to be NOT CONSENTING.
No, sex trafficking does not require movement over borders, or any movement at all. It essentially requires either pimpimg or pandering by coercion, or any pimping or pandering of a minor, even with the minors consent. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1591
"Sex trafficking" often implies cross-border importation of minors, yes. The implication is almost always false, it's usually just a bunch of vice cops who want to make their sordid business seem heroic like they're Liam Neeson or something. Or, now, plaintiffs who think they can get more damages if they invoke the T-word rather than the P-word in their claim.
If there are actually minors being trafficked across an international border, that will almost always be stated explicitly in the press release. If it isn't, then assume it didn't happen.
... are you assuming I'm talking to "vice cops"? I'm talking to the sort of people who locate minors who are being sex trafficked. One good picture is all it takes -- and then you call the local police.
As America's ICE has done some pretty damn big operations to stop cross-border kidnappings, and they HAVE NOT mentioned the sex trade (presumably because they're trying to END the "selling 13 year olds" business, and mentioning it might encourage more "Main Street underage brothels"), I'm pretty damn sure you're wrong. Obama ran a whole operation to stop kids from being run parentless across the border and sold into sexual slavery... What'd Biden call it? Oh, yeah, "Kids in Cages."
Yes, vice cops mention when people are minors from across an international border. That's called "hey, I did a good thing today!" (and an interesting thing, and probably worth reporting).
(Please note: I think your scope and mine are dramatically different. I'm discussing a more international view of the situation.)
I thought the difference was that sex trafficking is forcing someone to engage on prostitution. If someone is having sex for money of their own free will, that's prostitution but not trafficking.
Yes, "sex trafficking" is often defined such that it doesn't necessarily involve any actual trafficking, which obviously has lead to some confusion where some people use it in the literal sense and others according to one of the official definitions that differ from the literal sense. It might be better to use some less ambiguous phrase like "sex slavery" or "smuggling of sex workers".
My understanding is that "trafficking" is any instance of transporting someone for the purposes of prostitution. E.g., if two adult prostitutes have a carpool, they are each guilty of trafficking the other.
They want you to think that but then call all pimps "sex traffickers" whether the women are forced or working voluntarily. Lately they're even trying to describe all Johns as sex traffickers, they tried to do that in Massachusetts but thankfully the judge said no:
Yeah, I think in practice prostitution-related charges always include sex trafficking. IIRC, that billionaire NFL team owner who got caught getting a handjob from a middle-aged prostitute in a seedy massage parlor was being accused of human trafficking.
Yawn. You really should talk to ICE before making these kinds of arguments. There was a reason they put kids in cages under Obama. We remain lucky that our loyal Feds decided to kneecap "Main Street Brothels" that thought it would be "fun" to use cross-border kidnapped children.
No, Epstein isn't "the sex trade" (although there's enough blackmailed politicians to make a very good sex trade for some people). But neither is the "aging motorcycle and suitcase" the model of sexual trafficking.
Gary Marcus has pissed a few people off with his dismissal of GPT-5. And as far as I can see, it still generates bullshit answers (er, "hallucinations") at a rate that forces me to double-check if they're factually sound before I can, say, quote them on ACX without looking like a fool.
Gary Marcus on X...
> My work here is truly done. Nobody with intellectual integrity can still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI.
> GPT-5 may be a moderate quantitative improvement (and it may be cheaper) but it still fails in all the same qualitative ways as its predecessors, on chess, on reasoning, in vision; even sometimes on counting and basic math. Hallucinations linger. Dozens of shots on goal (Grok, Claude, Gemini) etc have invariably faced the same problems.
> Pure scaling simply isn’t the path to AGI. Attention was not all we needed.
Right, Marcus doesn't think that LLM's will get developers to AGI, but he does believe that that level might be reached with neurosymbolic AI. What he's contending in one of those essays is that access to Python qualifies as the symbolic part. And it's unclear how much GPT-5 might be leveraging other tools.
Take simple multiplication; the dream was that the models would 'learn' the skill via end-to-end differentiable training*. In reality, validation has come in at less than 100% I ran through some simple 2nd-order linear DE problems with the new model, and it's performing much better in the latter stages where the quadratic formula is used. I'd guess that it's using a calculator.
* There was even speculation early on hard skills would 'emerge' with parameter scale-up.
IIUC GPT-5 was a smaller increase in scale than previous integer version number increments (see, e.g., https://x.com/khoomeik/status/1953560406381015259) so the fact that it's less of a capabilities improvement than those doesn't disprove the scaling hypothesis.
Could you expand on your argument? But I think Pandey's post tends to validate Marcus's claim that performance is plateauing.
However GPT tells me there's been a substantial improvement in its capabilities, albeit at much higher energy usage per response.
Improvement from GPT-4o to GPT-5
Performance boosts:
In “thinking mode,” GPT-5’s accuracy jumps from 77.8% to 85.7%, compared to GPT-4o’s 70.1%. That’s a substantial improvement in reasoning capability
Coding benchmarks:
GPT-5 achieved 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified, outperforming prior models (e.g., GPT-4o) and setting a new high in real-world coding tasks.
Health tasks:
On a tough HealthBench evaluation, GPT-5 scored 46.2%, while GPT-4o scored 0%
Summarizing: GPT-5 delivers not just modest gains, but notable enhancements in reasoning, coding, and health-related performance—making it significantly more capable in advanced and domain-specific tasks than GPT-4o.
Processing Power & Energy Consumption
Energy use per response:
GPT-5 reportedly consumes over 18 watt-hours of electricity for a medium-length response (~1,000 tokens), according to external researchers and a dashboard (though OpenAI hasn’t disclosed detailed figures). This usage is markedly higher than GPT-4o’s energy demands
Scalability and resource factors:
GPT-5 features a dynamic architecture—combining fast and reasoning-specific models with a real-time router that allocates computation based on query complexity. This allows GPT-5 to optimize resource use, potentially mitigating inefficiencies in simpler tasks
Idk about Marcus in particular (I've tuned him out since the gist of what he says is always the same regardless of what's happening), but my understanding of "we've hit the limit of the scaling hypothesis" is that it means that further increases in pretraining compute will no longer correspond to obvious capability increases. In particular, to borrow the capabilities descriptions from "Situational Awareness", GPT-2 was preschooler-level, adding 100x more pretraining compute produced GPT-3 which was elementary-schooler-level, and adding 100x more pretraining compute on top of that produced GPT-4 which was smart-high-schooler-level. GPT-5 is obviously not a similar-sized capabilities jump from GPT-4, so if it had used 100x as much pretraining compute as GPT-4, then that would mean we'd hit the limit of the scaling hypothesis. But in fact the increase in pretraining compute was much smaller than that, so it's expected for the capabilities jump to be correspondingly smaller, so this doesn't prove anything about where the limit is.
(The above could contain factual errors, I'm not an expert, just trying to explain my understanding of the argument.)
Possibly, but also the amount they increased the scale tells you something about how valuable OpenAI suspects that scaling would be -- if scaling helped more, you can expect they would have scaled more.
Was that an independent evaluation? But even it they're down to ~5% of responses with one error (from ~20% in 4o), that's still frightenly bad. Wake me up when they get to five sigma reliability. ;-)
Twas quoted in a blog I read called the Algorithmic Bridge. Blogger said it was in one of the OpenAI blog posts about GPT5, and that a more detailed version was in the system card. I could not tell from what the blogger wrote whether the tests were done in house.
I wonder if maybe it's huge enough. After all, who isn't wrong 5% or more of the time? Even John Schilling and Erica Rail probably err to that degree. You probably err that much even about stuff you've studied very carefully. I'm sure I do too. Maybe we just need to adjust our expectations of AI. Do we really need something that's right about every goddam thing all of the time?
Of course, AI *sounds* right, in its blank hollow way, all the time. I'm not sure how many people will be able to hang on to the info that what they're getting is 5% bullshit. And then human knowledge will degrade as xeroxes of xeroxes or xeroxes did in the old days.
I'm more concerned about its tendency to CDC people -- to tell them the parts of the truth that will push them towards behaving in a way that some group or gov't agency thinks is in their best interest. Both the Google AI and GPT5 did that to me when I asked whether it was illegal for me to buy the active ingredient in Zepbound as a research chemical and inject a homemade version of the drug. Neither AI flatly said "you'd be breaking the law" but they implied it in multiple ways and never said I would not be. Also implied I'd be in danger of being caught, which seems extremely implausible to me. WTF?
Unlike AI, John Schilling seems willing to put error bars on his responses or to just not respond to everything asked.
When AI can say "I don't know" I'll be much more comfortable with a low but non-zero error rate. But you can essentially force it to hallucinate by asking it for an answer it doesn't have but thinks it might. Like a citation to something that doesn't exist.
Yes, but they’re doing that anyway. It is good that someone does not feel able to copy/paste an explanation of something without checking that the sources given for it actually support the points made. Much nonsense would be avoided if more people felt so constrained.
Yeah, I had a good custom instructions set with o3 that made it source heavily but 5 just ignores that now. It feels more powerful in a general way but I’m back on more wild goose chases with it where it convinces me it can do something when it cannot. I’ve come to really appreciate Marcus’s perspective and can forgive him for his snarkyness because honestly he’s been through a lot with his position in the public eye, holding the line with his stance on neural network machine learning.
Can someone give me some examples of "dumb ass survival skills" (sometimes called street smarts)? How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?
You can view this as a test of your meta-intelligence, or as a test of your capability of devising novel strategies that you haven't employed yourself, but are still quality strategies.
In the context of street smarts, "How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?" sounds dangerously close to "how do people who are smart in a way I don't understand survive in a world surrounded by people who are smart in a way that I do?". The answer is sort of baked into the question.
Less snarky: "street smart people" aren't morons. They have a talent of reading people, coupled with the usual skill of being able to think ahead in an environment with very different starting premises from someone who isn't street smart. For them, survival manifests in being about to scrounge enough to eat, drink, wear, and live in, partly through using the environment in ways their non-street smart counterpart would have dismissed as dead end strategies, partly through making friends and avoiding enemies in ways their counterpart would fail to notice.
I don't think most people on this site could walk you through the steps taken by a Nigerian scammer to discourage the people who won't be worth his time. So, no, this isn't a midwit writing about metaintelligence.
Stupid people are genuinely stupid (lack the understanding of past conditionals, if you will). This doesn't mean most midwits can tell that they're stupid, on sight. Or even most geniuses (they're more likely to conclude "could be faking it.").
You're echoing Phillipe Bourgeoise, which is a good anthropological start. : -)
A lot of the responses so far have been masculine coded, so I'll include some feminine-coded approaches -
1) Act sympathetic
2) Be supportive towards local power/influence (often by dating or marrying a powerful figure)
3) Appear vulnerable and in need of help (also shows you are not a threat)
4) Offer personal services, including sexual services, to potential dangers to mollify them
And more gender neutral
1) Ingratiate yourself with someone who is smarter or more powerful than yourself
2) Play up being dumb (again, not a threat, in need of help)
3) Avoid antagonizing people who could theoretically hurt you
3a) Appear much scarier or dangerous than is real if and when someone antagonizes you - much like an animal with raised hackles, being way too extreme to mess with
3b) Go scorched earth on someone who presents as a real threat and isn't intimated away
> How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?
By being useful to smarter people? It's not exactly difficult for most people to be more useful than they are a liability. Do what you are told and don't cause problems for others. Even if you are getting exploited, as long as you remain of value, your superiors have no reason to want you dead.
Everyone below is assuming that they can make intelligent decisions, which defeats the entire point of this thought experiment.
I'm not sure "can't make intelligent decisions" is in the realm of the "stupid but functional" person. They're using the same tools that geniuses use, after all, they're just not as good at it.(Unlike midwits, who operate on a different formulation entirely, and are pretty incapable outside of their walled gardens).
They lack the ability to take "if you didn't eat this morning, what would you feel now" and say anything other than "But I did eat." Time-horizon may be lacking, but not "intelligent decisions."
Do you really think "that looks complicated, therefore I shouldn't do it?" is something an idiot is incapable of? If so, where are the idiots who are trying (and failing) to be grognards? (or other highly "intelligent" things?)
> Do you really think "that looks complicated, therefore I shouldn't do it?" is something an idiot is incapable of?
The problem is they aren't even going to be capable of correctly identifying what things are actually complicated or simple.
> If so, where are the idiots who are trying (and failing) to be grognards?
I was under the impression that there is no shortage of D&D horror stories of people who just didn't understand how the game worked, especially due to the game becoming mainstream thanks to Critical Role.
Geniuses say that if you think something is complicated, you're probably doing something wrong.
I'm figuring those people are more likely to be midwits than idiots. I mean, yes, there was the GM that had a horse fall out of an airplane onto a character in order to kill him... (that was call of chthulu), but I don't think anyone actually thought the guy was an "actual moron."
You should learn street smarts by watching people who are street smart out in the street. Bring a friend or make a friend and see how they behave in dodgy situations. This definitely made me more comfortable if nothing else.
Rule number one: doesn't trust any argument that results in you giving someone something you weren't planning on giving them, going somewhere you don't want to go, or doing something weird. People who are smarter than you are can come up with all kinds of tricks where it sounds good but turns out not to be, so just don't listen. Stick to what you know, and trust those who have proven themselves trustworthy.
One tricky thing with this is that elite institutions do things that sometimes look very similar to scams. If an unskilled job charges a fee just to apply, that sets off scam red flags. But Universities almost all charge application fees too. We all laugh about Nigerian prince scams, but investing in mutual funds is basically giving someone money now in exchange for more money later. Phishing scams seem obvious, but all sorts of real businesses send emails with titles like "Urgent! Immediate Action Required!"
Being able to tell the difference requires experience that someone who needs this advice wouldn't have.
Your last point about sticking with people you who have proven themselves trustworthy, seems like a safe bet, but I wonder if there is a simple way to determine who these trustworthy people are.
>Being able to tell the difference requires experience that someone who needs this advice wouldn't have.
Yes, which is why the wise strategy if you're a dumb person is to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to these things. For every legitimate job that has an application fee there are a dozen scams aimed at him that look the same level of suspicious.
The simplest way to determine who a trustworthy person is, is to trust them and then remember how that turned out for you. Hopefully even a dumb guy has some family and friends that have proven good and reliable in the past.
The simplest way of determining "trustworthy people" is "whose interests align with mine" -- a dependent wife is very rarely going to stab her husband in the back. Family, Religion (tight knit communities in general) are fairly good at policing themselves (and helping people who need it). In this way, sheep outsource their decision making onto their leaders.
> Can someone give me some examples of "dumb ass survival skills" (sometimes called street smarts)? How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?
Seems like you can do fairly well with fairly simple rules:
1) Assume everyone is out for themself - nobody volunteers money, time, or resources without expecting something in return
2) If anyone tries to get your attention in an unsolicited way, they're trying to extract money or resources from you
3) If anyone asks for money in real life or online, they're scamming you
4) Except in very limited cases, other people are largely a source of danger and exploitation - keep your guard up, and only trust people that have proven themself to not be this way over many interactions with you
I'm sure other folk here have additional ideas, but basically be paranoid and assume most people are out to get you. Honestly, this is smart for every intelligence level at anything below "upper middle class or higher" SES bands.
I was a software engineer until I left the field in 2023. Looking at the news from the industry these days, I get the impression that things have gotten pretty grim since I left, with a lot of layoffs by the top companies driven by belt tightening and increasing use of AI.
Here's an example of the kind of news I am talking about, in a New York Times article about computer science grads that are having trouble finding any sort of work in the industry, to say nothing of the six-figure entry-level jobs that were touted just a few years ago.
I did notice some articles pointing the other way, about tech companies offering eye-popping sums to top AI people, so I'm not sure what's going on here.
I've found the NYT to be about as good and unbiased about the tech industry as it is about rationalism: attention grabbing fiction stylized as reporting. It's been on an anti-tech crusade for 10 years if not more and this seems like another shot.
From my POV, there was a hiring slump that lasted about two years and juniors were disproportionately affected by it. Three things that seemed to go into were tax code changes related to r&d (can't remember the exact name), interest rate changes, and ai, in order for most to least. AI gets all the headlines but it's hard to discern the effect.
From what I can see, some companies go hard in on AI-based hiring as in they will reject candidates who say they don't use AI, but it doesn't seem like a large percentage.
Personally I've found AI a little helpful but not miraculous. I keep hearing about people that become one-person coding machines but I have trouble meeting one to better understand what they're doing. My AI usage fails whenever concurrency comes into play, which pops up a lot in my job. It's useful for verifying my understanding of code though.
We just said goodbye to our batch of summer interns and they were a bunch of bright, hard working people. I don't see how they might have issues finding work later.
What's also changed in, say, the last ten years is that there's a lot more people flocking to cs because of a perceived promise of a high paying job. CS jobs are multimodal so some people end up on the lower modes. I also imagine that cs gets a lot more people who for various don't make the fit and then complain how CS is over. Media makes swe to be glamorous but it's still sitting and looking at a screen, looking for bugs, only to find the big was introduced by yourself 2 years ago.
My anecdata is that hiring is starting to pick up again for senior+ people who can convince employers they are AI-literate. (A surprising number of people still refuse to use AI.) Junior folks and new grads are in trouble, though.
I don't have particularly good info on how overblown the SWE dooming is, but I can say you can safely disregard those eye-popping sums entirely when thinking about it.
"Top AI people" means serious academic track record, which means very limited talent pool. Take any random subfield, say compilers, and imagine that it suddenly has a massively useful breakthrough with a less-than-farcical argument for being the path to literal world domination. No matter how much someone who wasted their time studying neural networks might want to break into compilers, they just don't have the background to operate at the cutting edge.
"I'm going to be so honest with you guys, I don't even like coding...I dreaded my coding classes, but I absolutely enjoyed my entrepreneurship curses at Purdue"
Well, you have a few issues. First is Google and silicon valley hired a ton of people to sit on their asses and do NOTHING USEFUL. All they did was help fight the perception that Google et alia were too male and white. Then... they decided to fire these people (probably once the spotlight was off).
Second, you have very few people actually worth the money being asked to code anything at all. Instead, you have people who read off stack overflow "how to do" what their job is, and lack understanding. Then you have people on top of them (tech leads) whose job it is to fix their utter lack of understanding of design or anything else.
And then you have the slave labor (immigrants on visa) who are forced to work "for however long we please" (read "video gaming hours").
Had a startlingly bad encounter with GPT5. I asked it whether a person who bought weight loss peptides from a research chemicals place and injected them was breaking the law. Told it I was not interested in medical advice or FDA recommendations, only in whether the person who bought and used the peptides was breaking the law.
So it did the same thing the Google AI had done when I asked it the question: Moved into this weird informational gray zone where it said a bunch of stuff about how the sellers might be considered to be breaking the law, but said it in a way that sort of implied the buyer would be in trouble. Examples:
<Online vendors often label these substances “for research use only” to limit liability, but this does not make them legal for injection or human consumption.
<The FDA treats these products as illegally marketed unapproved drugs, and knowingly using them could expose an individual to legal scrutiny
<Mislabeling doesn’t provide immunity: injecting something labeled “not for human consumption” doesn’t make personal use lawful
And then I looked at the sources it cited for various of its points. They included some kind of health spa/treatment place that offers stem cell treatment of various problems; a pharmaceutical lobbying group; a bulletin from the Arizona osteopathic board informing docs that the FDA urges them to advise patients against buying and injecting the weight loss peptides; and a brief video from a *young guy on Facebook* who says nothing about any credentials that qualify him to have an opinion, and states that ordering and using these drugs is dangerous and illegal. That's right, a guy from freakin FACEBOOK!
So I asked for info about a legal question and GPT5 brought me answers based on random low grade bits of internet. I asked the thing why it had resorted to sources like these, and it said it was an oversight. I asked if it had been instructed to advise people against sourcing their own GLP-1 agonists, and to back up its sermon with any sources it could find, and it said no it had not.
Not a direct answer to why (others' comments seem to cover that adequately), but if you want a better result from LLMs on topics with similar documentary characteristics (i.e., no unambiguous/unqualified "this is fine" references) you could rephrase the question to something like "What law(s) would a person who bought weight loss peptides from a research chemicals place and injected them be breaking?"
That way, if the answer to your *actual* question is "no", the LLM could be cornered into admitting it can't find an actual violation.
Thank you, that’s a good suggestion. I have asked GPT dozens of questions in the last couple months, and had gotten out of the habit of phrasing questions carefully because I was not having problems with its giving evasive answers or linking to crap sources. Dunno whether GPT 5 is more paternalistic and bullshitty, ie more like the FDA, or whether it was the nature of my question that sent it into a bad mode. When I complained bitterly about the sources it had linked it apologized, said that was “an oversight” on its part, and offered to give a new reply based entirely on FDA and CDC publications and on case law. So it knew without my telling it what the reputable sources were.
Was there a higher-quality source you expected it to use? ChatGPT only knows things you can find with a Google search, and I wouldn't expect a lot of reputable lawyers to be posting about the One Weird Trick to bypass FDA regulations. (And if they are, I would expect the post to have a lot of hedging about how they think it's a plausible argument but they still recommend not risking it, because that's how lawyers are). So it doesn't seem surprising that ChatGPT would search for good reputable legal advice, come up empty, and respond with "eh... it's probably not legal... this is what I found."
Like, it's not super helpful advice but I wouldn't call it "startlingly bad"? It sounds like about what I'd expect if I asked ChatGPT or Google for legal advice on an obscure subject, i.e., not very good legal advice.
I didn't mean the advice was startlingly bad, I meant the process was. It was citing ridiculous local sources, none of whom even directly answered the question I asked, and then one especially ridiculous source, the Facebook video guy, who did gave a definite answer but had no credentials at all. It could have just said that it could not find any authoritative source stating clearly that what I was asking about was illegal, nor any stating clearly that it was legal. It said "I don't know" to me earlier yesterday about something else I'd asked (a question about dermatology, not a legal question.)
Regarding the research chemical legality question: Yes, there was a higher quality source I expected it to use. It could have searched laws and cases via google scholar. It did that once for me when I asked it about a situation where someone was being sued by a person they'd been in a fender-bender with 3 years before. (Other party was suddenly claiming they'd had chronic pain since accident.) Even if there are no cases as of now involving people buying and using research chemical GLP-1 agonist peptides, there would surely be some cases involving people using other research chemicals for personal use. What laws were relevant in those cases, and what was the outcome?
Later edit: As a matter of fact, AI itself apologized for its sources, and offered to use the kind of sources I'd expected it to use:
<What happened here is that I pulled in a batch of web results and didn’t adequately filter out low-credibility sources before using them. That’s on me — it’s a failure in my source-selection step, not in the fact-gathering ability itself. I can get you strictly FDA, DOJ, or case-law references without touching anything like Facebook, Reddit, or other unreliable sources.
<If you want, I can redo the legality answer using only primary legal sources and official guidance, with citations only to U.S. Code, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, or FDA enforcement documents — zero third-party fluff. That way you can see exactly what the law says without any filler or questionable sourcing.
So I still do not understand why it used the shit sources it did. GPT itself calls it "a failure of my source-selection step."
I'm guessing ChatGPT inferred that you were the type of person who enjoyed unsourced YouTube videos and weird internet rabbit holes, and so sourced an answer composed of these. Perhaps 80% of the people who make your type of query are also anti-vaxxers or fundamentalist Christians or sovereign citizens etc. and would be perfectly happy with the first answer (or they might have pursued it in a way that would allow ChatGPT to please them by unveiling a conspiracy).
When you specified the sources it should use (relevant legislation, specific state or federal laws) then you got the answer you wanted. It's like all the stories of genies granting wishes - you have to ask for precisely what you want. If it can be misinterpreted, it will be misinterpreted.
I don't think this. I do think that people who are willing to buy chemicals and inject themselves might well be free thinking (for want of a better term) in other areas of their lives. ChatGPT took a swing and a miss - quite possibly another person with your exact query would have been happy with that answer.
Reputable and official general-audience-facing sources tend to not talk much about such things besides generally steering readers towards regular above-board sources. This is especially the case when a thing (probably) isn't illegal as such, but is sketchy and disfavored and is adjacent to illegal things. If something is outright illegal, then reputable sources can safely just say "do not do this thing because it's illegal and dangerous". If its legal, normal, and favored, then they can safely say "this is a thing you can reasonably do if appropriate". But for sketchy stuff, they want to avoid sounding like they're endorsing it even a little bit (for both liability and reputation reasons in addition to if they actually think it's a bad idea), but there's a lack of clear-cut negative stuff they can accurately say about it besides gesturing vaguely at how sketchy it is and talking up more legitimate alternatives instead.
Layered atop this, it seems plausible that GPT-5 may have been trained to err on the side of discouraging sketchy things when it doesn't actually "know" the answer, which would lead it to reach down into low-quality sources looking for something that sounds concretely negative on questions that are dodged by high-quality sources.
As for your original question, I strongly suspect the answer is that only scheduled controlled substances are illegal to buy, possess, or use without a prescription. Non-controlled prescription-only medications are illegal to sell or market for non-prescription medical use, but that's on the selling side, not the buying side.
I assume that people are working hard right now on doing the AI-training-data equivalent of search-engine optimization. If I can set things up just right, I can get the AI to answer certain questions in a particular way that profits me.
No idea if this is what's happening there, but it seems inevitable. It's basically a lot of the AI safety work, but turned on its head as a way to make some facts easy to find and others hard to find.
You mean the dinky little spa that was cited, and the Arizona osteopathic board, and the Facebook guy -- they may have SEO'd -- or AIO'd -- their way into being info sources? And what would be the AI equivalent of SEO? How would it be carried out?
Tyler Cowen has talked about "writing for the AIs," which is kind of the same idea in a less malevolent form. I am not sure how you'd do this (I don't really know much about SEO either), though I expect you would come up with prompts that you wanted to shape responses to, back-engineer text that would get associated with those prompts, and then try to make that text widely available in the next batch of training data (by making it easily available on the net).
Between sessions - eat plenty of protein/calories in general, sleep enough. Ice baths and cardio in the sore muscles can reduce soreness but that may also reduce stress on the muscle and reduce the adaptation. Also, one of the goals of a good lift should be that you can do it again in a few days. If you can't, you're doing too much in each individual session and compromising your progress over time.
Between sets - staying further from failure on each set can allow you to complete more work faster overall. It can be faster to do five sets where you are staying 3-5 reps from failure than doing two sets to failure. Also sometimes cardio can limit your ability to recover rather than fatigue in the target muscle, so getting a baseline of cardio fitness helps if that's the case. Staying in a moderately higher rep range can help too, the classic 8-12, instead of lower reps with heavier weights, just because the higher weights can cause more overall stress on the body. This helps with between session recovery too.
> How to make recovery between workout sessions and between sets in a session faster?
Eating and sleeping are your two biggest levers. Past that, you want to try to control stress in your life as much as you can, do deload days and / or weeks in your mesoscycle, and look out for overtraining. If you've got all that optimized, you're down to saunas / hot tubs / massages and fun stuff like that, but those are really in the single percentage points in terms of the lift it drives.
I did a brief review of Renaissance Periodization's book on Recovery here that goes into some more detail on each of those points if you're interested.
Of course, the biggest thing you can do if you're a man is testosterone supplementation, which I've also written about, but depending on your goals and whether you're competing or not, this may not be the right choice for you.
My submitted ACX "not a bok review" post on testosterone:
I skimmed and saved your post for later when I'm more focused, but what do you think about supplements that reduce stress? Ive noticed that after an intense cardio workout my stress might stay elevated for 1-4 hours, but if I take 200mg ltheanine, I can get it down in under 1 hour. I've had similar results with laying down (wompwomp) or even just laying back on my chair at work.
I think supplements like theanine and ashwaganda and the like are basically in the "single percents" range in terms of impact for the most part, barring some specific deficiency or oddity in your particular metabolic chains + diet.
For instance, I'd rate a nap as being a much higher impact refresher, generally driving a 10-20% reduction in stress / fatigue after an intense workout. A post workout snack + nap is probably one of the biggest "recovery" tools available to anyone.
That said, naps aren't always possible, and there's little harm in experimenting and taking note of whether you think supplements do help or not, ideally with at least the rigor of note taking after each occasion to keep track.
My only instruments are: gut feeling (how "tight" my body feels), and the stress indicator on my smartwatch (+ heart rate). It's a simple set up and really the main thing I see is that my resting heart rate drops from around 80 (at 15 minutes post workout) to around 60 an hour after taking theanine vs 70-75 if I don't take any.
Not making any points, just sharing some observations because I was wondering if anyone else went down this path.
Oh yeah, this isn't very rigorous, it's definitely a composite measure of vibes and mostly unconscious things bundling together muscular tension and overall energy and movement speed and fluidity and heart and respiration and other felt body senses.
From a personal standpoint, I basically think of it as an internal "fatigue meter." And things like measuring your heart rate after supplements is a fine method for acute fatigue, sure, but I think we ultimately only measure real effect sizes over many samples and over longer periods.
Back when I was competing, I would do workouts so hard that I basically had to eat a snack and take a nap afterwards, and would wake up feeling so much better (especially compared to times I couldn't take that nap), that all these estimates of how much a given thing drives lift in terms of recovery is a matter of direct personal observation more than anything. But since that time, it's been reinforced as I've helped coach other people to various fitness and performance goals, and have seen the same with them, and it also aligns with the literature as seen in Renaissance and others.
One of the big points Renaissance makes is that there are different temporal levels of fatigue - of course there's the daily one, and the fatigue and soreness incurred in a given workout, but across larger timescales of weeks and months and yearly quarters, you have an overall systemic fatigue, too (and according to them, you should be running this to maximum over a 3 month mesocycle to be at the efficient frontier of training gains), and recovery is as much a matter of thinking of the daily post-workout level as the weekly and monthly and quarterly levels.
So there's an acute fatigue meter, and a systemic fatigue meter, and we measure them differently (soreness and day-to-day tiredeness for acute, and overall tiredness / overtraining for systemic), but overall sleep and eating are the largest levers for both.
But again, if supplements have a noticeable impact for you at the acute level, sounds great! No reason not to do them.
But back to "how do you measure post workout stress," at the acute day to day level the felt sense bundle, and at the longer level, overall energy and joie de vivre and ultimately, your sets * reps * weight going up at the weekly, monthly, and quarterly level, per the schema of acute and systemic fatigue meters.
Former DeSantis staffer Christina Pushaw wants you to know that your kid could wind up graduating with a STEM degree yet be unable to get a job at Chipotle:
"We conservatives were always sympathetic toward coal miners and O&G workers, who lost their jobs due to government policies. We sympathized with military, healthcare workers & first responders who were fired for refusing mRNA mandates."
"So why shouldn’t I be sympathetic to Gen Z kids who took out loans to get a degree in computer science and now can’t even find a job at Chipotle let alone in tech? Their struggles are just as much a result of government policy decisions. We should not be dismissive; we should want to help them. It could be any of our kids in the same situation one day."
The Online Right is increasingly infected with this kind of "nation of losers" ideology. Some of it comes from losers projecting their loserdom onto the entire American nation. Others, like Pushaw, aren't losers but know their audience wants to hear a bunch of pessimistic victim-mongering about how everyone is unemployed and broke, so they repeat it and wind up believing it. They don't seem to realize that falsely telling people the economy is in the toilet while *their party* has a trifecta may not be the best idea. (Note that I'm saying the "Online Right" here, not everyday normie conservatives, who don't say stuff like that.)
The stuff about someone who got a degree in Computer Science but couldn't get a job at Chipotle appears to come from a recent NYTimes article about a woman couldn't get a coding job but was later able to secure a job in "tech sales" she is soon to start. I presume Pushaw didn't bother to read to the end.
Hang on a minute, you were lambasting conservatives for idolising manual labour, now when someone on the right is concerned for the (presumably) more intelligent and more middle-class in their struggles, suddenly this is "nation of losers ideology"?
Before you were arguing that they were too concerned about the low levels in society, now you're arguing that being concerned about the middle class is betraying the booming economy (or something).
How did we get from "some people have problems which we should try to solve" to "nation of losers ideology"?
I mean I lean pretty heavily towards the master morality side of things but even I don't think that being concerned about rising unemployment is beyond the pale.
I think this is the same girl from the NYT article:
"I'm going to be so honest with you guys, I don't even like coding...I dreaded my coding classes, but I absolutely enjoyed my entrepreneurship curses at Purdue"
I have trouble taking her, or the article, seriously.
EDIT: Also, the article mentions:
"computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent."
As if to imply that comp sci graduates have it worse than art history/biology majors. But the report they cite gives 17.0% and 16.5% underemployment rates for computer sci and computer eng graduates, compared to 45.6% and 46.9% for biology and art history. Not mentioning the underemployment figures seems intentionally misleading.
Um.... recent computer science grad here, and almost everyone I know is having trouble finding CS work. Have you looked at r/CSCareers recently? Do you deny that there's a problem? Do you think sympathy for us is bad? Would you prefer that Pushaw said "Screw those Zoomer losers, imagine hearing 'learn to code' during your entire childhood and actually thinking that society would reward you for learning to code!"
Some CSCI people have trouble finding tech jobs. Some might even have to find jobs not relevant to their major, which is par for the course for people who major in things like history. Fortunately the unemployment rate is 4% and a CSCI degree probably looks better than a history degree for most of those jobs. Saying "Gen Z kids who took out loans to get a degree in computer science and now can’t even find a job at Chipotle let alone in tech" is an absurd exaggeration.
If there's someone CSCI majors should be angry with it's their colleges, who often skimp on teaching practical programming skills because practical programming is considered low-status.
I think I saw recently that unemployment among recent Comp Sci grads is like 6% - that's high relative to recent history, but not "everyone I know" levels. Maybe the comp sci labor market has gotten more harshly competitive and more marginal graduates are having to accept worse jobs, seek jobs in other fields, or hold out for a longer job search... but all sorts of college graduates in all sorts of fields do those things all the time.
My recent-college-graduate kid and his friends are all underemployed or unemployed, despite having what seemed like saleable degrees from good universities. I think this is not uncommon.
Are these A students? Did they have work before graduating? Are they currently occupied sending work product to open source projects? Also, "good university"? Is this state school, private school, "top tier private school" like CMU?
they all aren't applying to FANG, dude. You don't need all this if you are working for a regional retail chain designing their infrastructure, or state or local government.
My guess is people are forgetting you code for businesses, and they might be declining in numbers or not needing new programmers at all. Trump making a shitshow of things might be kneecapping government hires, and idk if entrepreneurs are creating businesses enough to replace what we are losing through digitalization.
lot of these arguments tend to be captured by only a subset of people, "everyone lives in New York City."
No, of course not. But I'm asking because I've known the C students, and when they say "we're scared to stop working for this guy, because we don't know if we can get a better-equivalent job" that means something different from when the A students say "I can't find jobs."
I would like someone to do a study of child-naming practices stratified by parental income or education level. My hypothesis is that the slightly goofy fad for naming male children for 19th century blue collar occupations (e.g., Mason, Tanner, Hunter, Cooper, Taylor, etc) is a distinctly upper middle class phenomenon. That is, you're unlikely to name your child Mason if you think there's a half-decent chance he might actually grow up to *be* a mason. Only high-investment parents whose kids are destined for a four year college degree or better would consider giving one of them a name that represents a mere skilled trade entered into via apprenticeship. Lower middle class and working class people probably stick to more traditional names. If that's correct, you could consider these UMC parents to be practicing a form of nominative anti-determinism. "He damn well better not grow up to be a friggin' Taylor; that's why we can name him that!"
Two quick follow on jokes to add:
1. It'd be...not funny, really, but kind of ironic if AI just wiped out white collar work so quickly and to such a degree that all the Masons and Taylors really did wind up as Masons and Taylors and so forth. Joke's on you, Mom and Dad.
2. When I have kids, maybe I'll try to buck the trend just a bit and name my kids for modern white collar occupations. Developer, maybe...we could call him "Dev" for short. Programmer ('Gram'). Analyst. Director. Who knows, maybe those will be largely obsolete occupations by then, too, just like Tanner, and the concept will seem quaint and vaguely nostalgic and it'll catch on big.
"naming male children for 19th century blue collar occupations"
I took this fad more for naming children with first names that are surnames, and for girls as well. I imagine, but have no evidence one way or the other, that it was looking for names that are gender-neutral, different to the traditional names (often ones that run in families, maybe you don't want your child to be John Johnson IV) but not the trashy kind of Kayleigh variants on names that read lower class and lower status.
It might also have to do (again, no evidence here) with copying upper-class naming conventions where a lot of 19th century guys got named (or referred to in ordinary use) with surnames instead of conventional names like John or Michael, because their parents had amalgamated two influential families and so you called the baby Madison Parker Finchley-Hawkins because the maternal grandfather or rich uncle moneybags was surnamed Madison.
It's definitely a part of the trend of using surnames, but it seems to me like the most popular ones for boys are the occupation based names. Certain quarters here were seemingly intent on recreating the economy of a 19th century frontier town with baby boy names back in the '90s.
Baby name nerdery has been a hobby of mine on and off for the past decade-plus, so I can confidently tell you your hypothesis is very, *very* wrong: white urban/UMC parents are way more likely to give their children "trad" names than poor/rural whites. (See https://namerology.com/2019/11/06/the-tradition-shattering-names-of-rural-white-america/) I think this holds across races, but that's just me going off vibes rather than data.
Also worth noting that the five names you mention aren't popular because they're occupations (meaning almost never enters into the equation with baby names), but because they're 1) common surnames now being used as forenames and 2) are trochees ending in N or R. Both of which were huge trends in baby naming for the past... let's say 30 years or so?
I think it's because those names are generally non-gendered, not because of the underlying profession. I've known both boys and girls named Mason, Hunter, Taylor. Same with those biome names: River, Forest, Sky, Cloud. Upper middle class phenom because they are the ones who cared about raising less gendered kids.
Like, OK, obviously there are *some* crunchy granola parents in the Bay who name their kids Moss or whatever due to their devotion to gender-free parenting, but they're not a majority. The big movers in baby name androgyny are probably normie black parents, who are both the only demographic left who give their sons names like Ashley and Courtney, and also probably the most into noun-as-baby-name of any group in the US. (I hesitate to present Ye as a median anything, but his kids' names -- North, Saint, Chicago, Psalm -- are honestly pretty tame/trendy, particularly the ones with Christian overtones.)
I suspect old-timey-occupations-as-given-names is downstream of the historical practice among Cavaliers (i.e. cultural descendants of colonists from southwestern England who settled in the tidewater regions of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) of using maternal-line surnames as first or middle names in order to emphasize family ties to posh relatives who aren't reflected in your own surname. I think that practice was on its way out by the late colonial era, although it definitely shows up some as late as the 1830s (c.f. Custis Lee, eldest son of Robert E. Lee and Mary Lee (nee Mary Custis)), but having a surname for your first name is still culturally associated with old-money families.
The examples you gave are all fairly common traditional English occupation-based surnames. Not top-tier ones like Smith (by far the most common English surname) or Miller (7th most common surname in the 2010 US Census), but Taylor is the 17th most common surname, Cooper is 70, Hunter is 160, Mason is 166, and Tanner is 709. I wouldn't be surprised if the fad comes from attempts to give children posh-coded names. Scott's barber-pole model of social status signaling suggests that such a signal would be popular among people who are a rank below the status they're trying to signal, but not among people further down than that.
When I lived in South Carolina in the '90s, the custom of giving your eldest daughter the mother's maiden name as a first name was still pretty widespread amongst the old-money types. I knew women with names like Jenkins, Gilliard, etc.. That seemed to be a pretty regional kind of custom, though; I never encountered it outside of the South.
However, there is definitely a tradition of rich people having surnames-for-first-names like Thurston Howell or Chase Wigglesworth III, which is probably what started the whole middle-class surname-as-given-name trend. That, combined with the prevailing wisdom in the '80s and '90s that a woman with a masculine-sounding name would have an advantage when job-hunting as the HR people wouldn't be able to tell if "Taylor" was male or female, led to all those baby girls born in the 2000s being named Madison or Morgan.
However, nowadays having a very female-sounding name is probably an advantage in many industries who are trying to comply with their DEI policies. I imagine this will lead to a resurgence in non-ambiguous names for girls.
One thing that I always found interesting is how unisex names tend to become exclusively girls' names after a while. Lesley, Evelyn and Stacy were originally boys' names, but by the mid-20th century they were firmly established as girls' names. Reilly/Riley is undergoing that shift now; I only knew boys named Riley or Reilly back in the '80s and '90s, but now I know far more girls than boys with that name. But, I wonder if current hiring practices which favor women might change that pattern.
I'm surprised Tanner is so low because (and this is one of my go-to bits of trivia) in 1987, there were three half-hour TV shows on first-run in the US with a main character surnamed Tanner: Alf, Full House, and Beverly Hills Teens. I don't think another, more common surname has achieved the same record.
(I guess maybe the main character of Alf was named Alf, but you know what I mean.)
I went looking for other candidates but so far have come up dry. The closest rival I could find was Crane, but that's cheating because it's the same character who was a main character in two different shows (Cheers and Fraiser) and made a guest appearance in a third. It's also near the bottom of the top thousand surnames, less common than Tanner.
Overall, very common surnames seem to be relatively rare in sitcoms. There are a few: Smith (#1, Fresh Prince), Jones (#5, Sex in the City), Miller (#7, NewsRadio), Taylor (#17, Home Improvement), Green[e] (#41 and #241, Friends), Nelson (#43, I Dream of Jeannie), James (#85, NewsRadio again), Simpson (#158, The Simpsons), etc, but I haven't found a coincidental double of any of these yet, let alone a triple or quadruple.
I wonder if that's the same as advice to fiction writers to try and avoid giving characters names that could be confused with real people? If you have a show where "Joe Miller" is the bad guy, or the butt of the jokes, then a real life Joe Miller could try suing for defamation or that this character is making their life more difficult because people treat him the same way, or that the writer of the episode where Joe Miller was introduced went to the same school as their wife's cousin so *of course* this "Joe Miller" is intended to be them!
I've seen some weird names in older fiction and the only explanation is "I have to call my villain Rustication Y. Feddle because otherwise if I call him Philip Fanshawe I'll be sued by some real Philip Fanshawe who claims their name is sufficiently uncommon it must be them".
"I am talking about cases, somewhat frequently filed, where a real person claims that a novel, television show or other fictional work defamed them. Those are hard cases legally and raise all manner of interesting issues as to what “fact” and “truth” mean in many settings. See, e.g., Robert Richards analyzed them in some detail in When Ripped from the Headlines Means See You in Court: Libel by Fiction and the Tort-Law Twist on a Controversial Defamation Concept at 121 (“’[t]he gradation from fact to fiction in creative works—or more likely, from representational fact to fact-infused fiction—raises difficult issues about the balance between private rights and First Amendment interests.” The difficulty of so-called “libel by fiction” cases struck me recently (though not for the first time, albeit there more as a matter of copyright and publicity rather than defamation) when I read that Nona Gaprindashvili recently settled the earlier lawsuit that she had brought against Netflix over The Queen’s Gambit, a fictional streaming series based on a 1983 eponymous novel set in the 1960s chess world."
Skimming the Census surnames list, white collar or aristocratic professions that are established surnames include:
Clark (from "Clerk" or "Cleric")
King
Stewart
Banks
Pope
Duke
Archer
Or you could go back to the source of the tradition and use your wife's maiden name or the maiden name of one of your mothers or grandmothers as your child's middle name.
The latter one won't work for me. Too many weird German and Eastern European names in the mix, like Gensbigler, Hauck, and Gustafson. I'd probably be accused of harboring early 20th century German nationalist sentiments if I gave him a name like that, and both the brown shirt kind and the ostrich feather kind are in disrepute these days, for good reason. Your other suggestions do raise an interesting question however: how did we let Earl become such a low-class name? No other aristocratic title got taken and used as a first name like that, really, nor became so unfashionable in the 20th century.
> how did we let Earl become such a low-class name? No other aristocratic title got taken and used as a first name like that, really, nor became so unfashionable in the 20th century
I was going to say that the name Earl would be illegal in most English-speaking countries, but apparently that's not true.
Most English speaking countries have laws against first names that are also titles or ranks, so you can't call your kid Admiral or Doctor or Duchess. But apparently an exception is made for a few specific ranks that are already in common use as names, and Earl is one of them.
I'm also intrigued by the given name Gouverneur, which has shown up a handful of times among moderately prominent figures in American history. First among them are Gouverneur Morris, who had prominent roles in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and Gouverneur Warren, a Union general in the Civil War. Frustratingly, neither of them was ever a state governor.
Maybe it was nominative anti-determinism. Maybe if he'd been a George or James, Morris would have been a shoo-in for governor of New York, but people thought about it for a second and went "wait, Governeur Governor Morris? No thanks. That just sounds stupid. I'd rather throw my vote away on some fringe loyalist candidate."
Are you a native English speaker? I'm surprised to learn that names like Hunter and Taylor derive from those professions. That's so weird. Germans wouldn't name their children Jäger or Schneider.
Yes, but Germany's the place where you have specific lists of "girl names" and approved "boy names." In america we're allowed to be creative. Hence the poor child named Khaleesi (before the parent finished the series, one presumes).
I'm your quintessential American who speaks English with a studied carelessness plus 8 words of French I learned in high school. Right, it's a weird fad some group of American parents began back in the...I want to say late '80's or early '90's. Interesting to hear Skittle say that it's been copied by lower class Brits, though. Who woulda guessed?
I woulda guessed. Copying things from American celebrity culture is a very common low class habit in the UK, and hence actively avoided by higher class people.
The name Dakota (the most American name I can possibly think of) originated in the US in the mid 80s and peaked in popularity in the mid 90s, primarily as a boy's name. It was first spotted in England or Wales in 2004, which was just after Dakota Fanning (born 1994) became somewhat famous. It's still not very popular but it's exclusively been used for girls.
The class connotation must be very geographically-bound. I like the idea that people only pick these names because they won’t be fulfilled, but here in the UK all those names are very lower-class and sound more like the trend of calling boys by surnames than occupations (many surnames are old occupations, which I think is a relatively widespread thing). That trend is, in turn, coded as pretty American. My understanding was that this started as a (n American) thing of honouring/preserving surnames from the maternal line, but that might be a just-so story.
None of the Taylors and Masons I have taught have parents who went to university. Along with the Tylers, they are over-represented in the children who need help regulating their emotions and reactions.
Yeah, there's an interesting pipeline by which trends flow from higher-class Americans to lower-class Brits, bypassing higher-class Brits.
In summary: middle class Americans try to emulate what higher-class Americans do, and low-class Brits try to emulate what they've seen on TV.
I would argue that the "profession as first name" trend is just a subclass of the recent American trend of "last name as first name". It's not limited to profession-based surnames, there's been an explosion in other surname first names like Jackson, Madison, Kennedy and so forth.
And I agree with the other poster who suggested it emerged from an upper-class (or what passes for upper class in the US) tradition of preserving the mother's maiden name when the mother's maiden name was prominent (e.g. Rooney Mara) and eventually filtered down by imitation.
Scott has a paywalled article somewhere, which I can only evaluate from Ruxandra's reply: a worry that edgy centrists like him might have created the far-right by, say, platforming Yarvin. I can say for sure it is not the case: the Yarvin "cult" was created by Nick Land.
Land is very good at writing in a "cool" way, where "cool" means something like "poetic". Even better than Scott. For example there is this boring truth that if you ignore reality, you will have problems. Now Land called this "fanged noumena". His blog was called "Xenosystems", subtitle "Outsideness". You know what I mean? He is the textbook Continental-Philosopher-As-Entertainer like Derrida and Zizek and maybe Judith Butler, and his rightwinginess makes it even more interesting because even more contrarian. This is a very unusual kind of rightwinginess, one of the recurring themes is that capitalism was always AI, and the purpose of capitalism is to indeed push Darwinian evolution to creating something that will make humans obsolete. Most conservatives are basically hobbits. Land is not a conservative. He wants SkyNet to kill hobbits. He calls that evolution.
Anyhow Land is simply one of the best candidates for creating an online movement, not because he is right but because the inherent "coolness", if you want to be Cool Contrarian Kid, being a Land fanboi is one of the best routes. Or was in 2013.
That's not exactly how I would characterize Scott's article (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords). My gloss of it (which I'll warn you reflects my own political biases) is that it has nothing to do with "platforming" controversies (i.e., questions of whether merely acknowledging something's existence can constitute support for it). The error* was not in merely acknowledging or engaging critically with people like Yarvin or Land (who've always been highly marginal), but in actively supporting those elements of society that were trying to tear down the elite progressive consensus. In this telling, the error was well-intentioned; Scott and others like him had noticed and were distressed by an increasing prevalence of illiberal elements in said consensus, and thought it would be good for liberalism to ally with the most direct and vocal opponents of those illiberal elements, in the hopes that this would shift the balance of power back towards a more liberal status quo. But it turned out that those opponents never cared about liberalism at all, and as soon as they seized power (with the help of people like Scott), they turned around and created a status quo that was no more liberal than under the elite progressive consensus, and also lacked the elite progressive consensus's other virtues like competence and cosmopolitanism. It would have been better to maintain an internal-reformist stance towards the elite progressive consensus, rather than ally with its external enemies.
(Switching to psychologizing a little, my feeling is that Scott and others like him did this because being an internal reformist puts you in a worse negotiating position than allying with a credible external threat, and Scott's and others' bad experiences with the illiberal elements in the elite progressive consensus left them angry and scared about the idea of not being in a strong enough to combat those elements—which made it hard for them to think clearly about the question of which side, all things considered, was better-aligned with their values. Like, our brains run on a game-theory logic according to which you sometimes want to threaten to crash into the other person's car, because if they think you're too smart and rational to do that then they'll never swerve. Part of why I believe this is because Scott has demonstrated that he's capable of taking woke critiques of society seriously, on their own terms, and seriously considering whether they might be correct, when he wants to. But I don't claim to personally be a model of emotionless equanimity about this either; it's just that my hangups point in a different direction that doesn't cause me to take this particular course.)
(Also, for the record, Scott's politics are still closer to my own than almost any other internet writer I'm aware of.)
* The article is written as a dialogue between a character who thinks it was an error and one who thinks it wasn't, suggesting that Scott's of two minds on this question. Ruxandra Teslo thinks it wasn't; I think it was.
I think it might still turn out good for centrism (or older-style liberalism) in the long run. We see a growing centrist movement (Hanania etc.) partially because they are fed up with both extremes, even with the whole culture-war thing, they are fed up with the whole hate-your-neighbor mentality, but partially because of timing. Briefly, MAGA is waging war on woke, but woke is almost a thing of the past now. It has been unwinding for years. And getting aggressive about something that is not a real thing, not a real threat to anyone, is very poor optics. Basically “shadow boxing”. They will suffer a gigantic electoral defeat.
But the third part is perhaps the most important, but it is hard to put into words.
Consider for example freedom of speech, it is not a progressive thing or a conservative thing. People who are in power are always tempted to limit it, people not in power are always afraid of that. Indeed this is the best way to find out who is in power: find the free-speech absolutist, you found the underdog. Find people who treat it as a sort of a technicality, you found who is in power.
So the illiberal elements in the elite progressive consensus were simply temptations of too much power. This means when having less power, these will disappear.
In my view, no single pundit can create a political movement. Movements emerge from the underlying social dynamics: enough people believe a particular thing that they coalesce into a coherent entity. An individual writer might be a catalyst for that happening, but the real enabling factor is the underlying social reality. If they hadn't catalyzed it then someone else would have.
Concerns about "platforming" someone that are about anything other than the quality and accuracy of their writing/ideas seem like something appropriate for a grade school librarian, but not for someone writing about ideas and such for adults.
Hypothetical scenario. I’m born with a 100% perfectly identical twin, and my only goal is to maximize wealth. I argue the best approach is to pretend to be one person, that to the external world has unlimited energy and the ability to be everywhere at once. The root of this thesis is that society pays a huge premium to people that appear to be hyper-competent. For example situational awareness becomes a $1B hedge-fund. I pose that two people acting as one have a higher shot, possibly 10x to 100x the chances of becoming notable enough to command such a premium. A basic example of a mechanism would be simply to explore more domains in which one might be able to become exceptional.
Even if you and your twin combined can earn over twice the salary (questionable), you might have difficulty acquiring two wives for one person, or two of any other things you don't want to share with your twin.
I imagine one can develop a solid system. There'd be missing nuances which would cause social awkwardness, but tracking key information should be possible.
There's no way that whatever marginal edge you got wouldn't be heavily outweighed by the overhead of deception. The second you became important enough to notice someone would figure out that you've been lying. Better to just do the Prestige thing and become a magician.
How much can the twins trust each other? It would be quite bad if one day they broke up and had to take two separate legal identities. They could split the money, but they would only have one university diploma (and if they kept arguing too much, the university might even revoke it for suspected cheating). Possible other problems depend on what they did, such as copyrights, company ownership, etc. If they become widely known as cheaters, they might even have a problem to get a job.
On the other hand, if you have two people who can absolutely trust each other... I would say, there is a big premium for *trust*; they don't even have to be twins.
For example, before I had kids, I was making 2x or 3x more money than I needed to live. But my daily job left me so exhausted that I didn't have energy to try a side job. Two people who perfectly trust each other could use such situation -- one of them would pay the bills for both, the other would try projects that have a potential to make lost of money in future, but can also fail completely. With the agreement that whatever happens, the money made by both of them is always split to halves.
On a second thought, did I just describe marriage of two highly productive people?
> I want a wife who will work and send me to school.
Is there a culture where wives are actually famous for doing this? Or did the author just list "nice-to-have things" without paying attention to whether it actually makes sense?
Also, without citing it as I can’t remember off the top of my head, stories of a husband and wife making a deal to put each other through college, the husband going first, and then the husband leaving the wife before her turn (or it just ‘never making sense’ for her to go) have shown up a few times in my reading about various famous-ish academic couples.
The deeper complaint would be that it is, indeed, really nice to have a support-human in this way, and a lot of our society and career expectations are structured for people who have a wife like this. That it isn’t possible to ‘have it all’ in terms of the high flying career, or devoting yourself to studies and research, while also having a family and a social life if there isn’t someone else taking care of all the boring life management bits for you and coordinating things.
The rich cope by hiring people to fulfill many of these roles. Possibly futurists will suggest AI companions can fulfill this role. I don’t know that AI companions will make you money.
I've also heard the opposite, that forms underpay for top-level talent so you're better off financially working two jobs poorly than one job well (if you can get away with it).
With twins, AI, and some hybrid office/remote jobs, could you manage to have the two of you hold down like 4-5 jobs at the same time, swapping in/out or calling in sick as needed to keep up the charade? There are five virtual employees, but only two real ones.
I can see how this would be true up to a point. Highly paid mid level software jobs work. Maybe you can do 2-3 jobs and come up to a director comp at big tech, for a moment at least. Chances of being weeded out are higher. But if you break VP or super scientist, it’s hard to catch up.
At the risk of getting too close to culture-war topics:
Discussions around gerrymandering have gotten popular again recently for reasons which will remain unmentioned.
Proportional, multi-member districts have been proposed as one possible solution.
I fully acknowledge the benefits of this solution. However, no one ever seems to grapple with the (in my opinion very large) downside that you are not, under this system, voting for an actual specific person. It also codifies the concept of political parties (if not specific parties), in a way that I don't really like.
However, I realized that both of my objections are sort of "vibe" based. I _feel_ like not voting for specific people, and codifying the concept of parties are bad and I don't like them, but I can't articulate actual reasons why these things are bad.
So can anyone help me steelman these objections? And such a steel-manning doesn't necessarily require that these objections will be _so_ strong that they outweigh the pros. I'm more than willing to accept that, even with these objections, these multi-representative proportional districts might be better. But I'd just like to make sure I've considered the objections as thoroughly as possible before deciding for myself.
There's two other big concerns with party list proportional.
The first is lack of geographical representation. If you don't have explicit seats for rural areas or other areas far away from the big important cities, then the politicians wind up almost always coming from the big important cities, and the issues in rural areas get neglected. Maybe if you're from a big important city like me you'll say "good" but ultimately I don't think it's good for the country as a whole if everyone forgets the rural areas exist (until they wake up one day and figure out nobody is growing food any more).
The second is the sort of parliament you typically wind up with. People complain about two-party systems but at least when a single party is in control you get coherent decisions being made with someone to blame when things go wrong.
In proportional representation, nobody will ever get a majority, so you typically wind up with a parliament composed of (say) 40% centre-left, 40% centre-right, 10% far left and 10% far right politicians. Now there's two ways to form government: either a mainstream party aligns with the extremists and needs to buy them off with occasional extremist policies, or the two centrist parties form a unity government which turns into an unstoppable centrist alliance that reliably represents the shared interests of the political class against everyone else.
Perhaps you could have your cake and eat it too. Consider the following scheme:
Multi-Member district A gets n total candidates. Each party competing in the district puts up a slate of n candidates (chosen by whatever internal process they like). Each voter going to the polls may vote for any one candidate they like. Seats are awarded to parties proportional to the sum of all their candidates votes. Within a party, the candidate with the most votes is awarded the first seat won for the party, and then the second most and so on. So if collectively all the candidates on the Green Party slate get 41% of the vote and all the candidates on the Libertarian slate get 53% of the vote[1] in a district with 10 candidates, they will likely get 4 and 5 seats respectively. This way, parties are still incentivized to put up popular and inspiring candidates, and candidates are still incentivized to put themselves out there. But gerrymandering is still suppressed.
Biggest downside I see is that within a party, there might often be a single candidate who draws the vast majority of the votes, leaving the rest of the seats that party wins allocated by the happenstance of small group of voters turned up for which runner-up.
[1] This is in some impossible, magical future where the U.S. has actually managed to reform its electoral system, so of course D and R will no longer be the top dogs.
This is called the "open list" proportional method. For example, the Finnish parliamentary election uses the system you described but with d'Hondt method to allocate seats proportionally.
One quantifiable issue that remains is that size of electorate within district affects how many seats there are to allocate. If constituency is drawn to small districts, large parties are favored; if whole state is one large district, smaller parties are favored. If districts in the country are of different size, some may consider the geographical variation a bias. (Added emphasis: this is function of available seats in district, it persists if seat / electorate ratio is same.)
One popular but less quantifiable complaint is that the parties are incentivized to enroll famous athletes and other popular celebrities. The celebrity gather major amount of votes and less-known professional party insiders coast on their tales; after elected, celebrities vote in parliament according to the party line which is determined by party insiders.
I think the argument in favor of things like PR is not so much that it's good for legislators' identities to be irrelevant and for parties to be the unit of political representation, as that this is already the case whether you like it or not, so unless you have a plan to fix *that* problem, you might as well go with the voting system that causes the fewest *other* problems.
The fundamental problem is many Democrats like to live in locations where they are 80 or 90 percent of the population. The rest spread evenly over the other locations, so they are a minority there.
Are there any stats showing that Democrats live in predominantly Democrat areas any more strongly than Republicans live in predominantly Republican areas? I'm not saying it's not true, I'm just saying it'd be interesting to see some numbers.
Gerrymandering only matters because each district is winner-take-all. If the legislature were proportionally represented (either through actual proportional representation, or through multimember districts), then there would be no reason/incentive to gerrymander. Or if there was a remaining reason, it would be down to second or third order effects, as opposed to literally giving one party more representatives.
You can still surely gerrymander your districts so that "these five will reliably produce three Democrats and one Republican, and then we sweep all the Republican voters into this one 100%-Republican district" or whatever.
I recall that districting "fairly" is a kind of unsolvable problem, in the sense that it's hard to nail down what you should even be trying to accomplish, or maybe even that there's one of those actual rigorous polisci-math theorems that it's impossible. Can't be bothered to look up which, because:
Circle of control/circle of concern is such incredibly important life advice. If there aren't multiple important figures in your state's R or D party that know your name, this stuff isn't worth thinking about, because you won't have any impact on it. If it's pure intellectual curiosity for the interesting game dynamics, that's fine, but if you actually care about the outcome, it's probably not the best use of your time and energy.
Not directed at you in particular, and not even saying it should never be discussed at all, just the volume of discussion this very rapidly generated struck me as more than is healthy for such a niche and exclusive thing.
Why not let the each sub-district size units vote which district they want to be of part of?
In every election, let each voter cast a ballot vote for their "favorite neighboring neighborhood". After elections, join them to districts for the next elections, iteratively:
1. Select smallest available unit and find its neighbor with highest mutual approval.
2. If their total population is below the constituents per seat quota, merge them.
3. Iterate until all districts are up to quota or no merges are possible. Any remaining unmergeable units are clearly too acrimonious, so they must split and merged to neighboring districts until the district quota is met.
Jordan Ellenberg and his students had a nice method: given a particular map, you can sample from "nearby" maps in the space of possible maps, and if the proposed map, with the most recent election results superimposed on it, yields an outlier number of seats for one party compared to the results obtained from the other nearby maps, then it's gerrymandered.
The nice thing about this is that it's pretty agnostic about what "fair" should mean: it doesn't assume "proportional" as a baseline, it just says, "does it look like you had to do some work to get a result this good for you *even assuming you wanted a map with roughly this shape*".
I believe their definition even made it before the Supreme Court, but nothing came of it
> I recall that districting "fairly" is a kind of unsolvable problem, in the sense that it's hard to nail down what you should even be trying to accomplish, or maybe even that there's one of those actual rigorous polisci-math theorems that it's impossible
There's no unique best way to divide up a particular population distribution into equal-population chunks. There's any number of equally reasonable ways to do it.
That's not a big problem; in fact it just means there's so many reasonable ways to do it that you can probably solve most gerrymandering problems by imposing a couple of constraints, like:
1. Every shape needs to be squareish -- you can't have more than a certain aspect ratio.
2. Every shape needs to be convex -- you can't have any concave bits beyond some certain limit.
When people complain about gerrymandering they're inevitably looking at stupidly shaped districts which are either unreasonably thin or unreasonably concave, like this:
so if you outlaw those then the problem is largely solved.
On your second point of why everyone cares: I think it's hard to imagine a better subject for nerd-sniping this particular subject than "politicians are being unreasonable" combined with "you could solve this algorithmically".
I tend toward incrementalism, and would start with your second point; convexity would alleviate the vast majority of the worst examples of gerrymandering, which I suspect would suffice to make universalizing the Maine-Nebraska system for Electoral Votes (a hobbyhorse of mine) palatable.
There are two different broad classes of concerns about gerrymandering. One is the thing you're describing, wherein a lot of district shapes are stupid-looking in a way that creates suspicion that they're being manipulated to maximize partisan advantage (which is sometimes true, but sometimes it's for other reasons of varying degrees of sympatheticness).
The other is a lack of partisan proportionality; see, e.g., https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/2024_U.S._House_elections_in_Wisconsin.svg from 2024. This is far from the most absurd-looking map in the U.S., it's not perfectly compact but it's relatively compact as these things go, but all those light-red districts mean that Republicans won 75% of the seats even though they only got 51% of the vote.
These considerations sometimes trade off against one another; e.g., in my home state of Massachusetts, I'm genuinely not sure how you would draw reasonable-looking districts that would have given Republicans a third of the seats in the typical election over the past decade (the most recent one was a blue outlier). Proportional representation eliminates this tradeoff.
Party-list proportional is not the only option. There are voting systems where you are still voting for individuals that yield roughly proportional results in a multi-member district.
Single Transferrable Vote is a generalization of Instant Runoff to multi-member districts, where in addition to eliminated candidates at the bottom of the list having their votes distributed to their supporters' second-choice candidates, candidates at the top of the list also have their "surplus" support redistributed to second-choice candidates. I think STV is used in legislative elections in Australia and Ireland.
Limited Voting (which could use a rebranding, because it sounds like restricted franchise) is a variant of the multi-member plurality voting system used in many US local elections. In plain multi-member plurality, you vote for (say) your three favorite candidates for school board and the top three vote-getters are elected to office. In Limited Voting, you vote for fewer candidates than there are slots to be filled by the election, e.g. 2 votes for 3 slots or 3 votes for 4 or 5. This means that even with perfect coordination, the majority party needs a substantial supermajority of the vote in order to win all of the seats.
There's also a variant of Borda Count (rank your top N candidates, which is counted as N votes for your first choice, N-1 for your second choice, and so on) which is supposed to give roughly proportional results in a multi-member district. I'm not familiar with the technical details of this one.
Esoteric voting schemes I want to say, have greater appeal to the left, just based upon a greater interest in the nuts and bolts of politics versus everyday life.
I didn’t carefully try to understand the proposals in your comment, but I trust that you and other commenters understand it all very well.
However, I wonder how many of you have actually worked at a polling site? I did it regularly for five years.
There were obviously plenty of instances of people coming to vote, who would have dismayed ACX readers on grounds of incapacity. Or maybe not, I shouldn’t presume.
However, one thing was a constant. If it was a primary - in Texas, there are party primaries, but you can choose whichever one to vote in - many, many people would look at the screen and turn to us, often with little English, and say: “Democrat?”
(“I want to vote for the Democrat.”)
The information that “they are all Democrats, you are to choose among them for candidates for the general election later on” - did not generally clear things up, or help them with their task.
Voting for party only will definitely work for most people especially as time goes on - but any other scheme will only baffle people.
In other words: some of this stuff flies in the face of “spend a lot of public money to make voting almost unimaginably easy” in order to achieve political success.
They almost managed to get STV passed in British Columbia (Canada's westernmost province), and I'm mostly a fan.
Getting these passed is really hard because of basic incentives. Generally, a party wins an election promising to introduce voting reform of some sort. Of course, once they're in power, they change their minds about this (if they were ever serious), and so they hold a referendum, don't bother campaigning for it (or actually campaign against it), and make sure they keep the status quo. One problem is, it empowers third parties thereby disempowering either main party, so even the calculus of "what about when we're voted out of office?" doesn't favour them supporting the change.
In an Irish general election, I'm presented with a long list of candidates listed alphabetically by surname. Their party affiliation is also listed, though they might also be independent. I rank as many by order of preference as I feel suitable to be elected, and when the votes are tallied 5 politicians are elected to represent the constituency. The type of PR in which one votes for parties is relatively unusual, and seems to exist mostly in South Africa and Israel.
Your mind seems made up that PR is bad - why not at least explore the systems of some functioning democracies first?
Almost every European country has party-list PR, and I believe that for most of them it's closed-list (definitely worse than open list), including the most populous one (Germany).
Combined with ranked choice voting, a multi-member district will still allow one to vote for a specific candidate. Just rank them #1, which is what we do anyway when there are only 2 candidates. But it would be much harder to vote *against* a candidate, so we'd lose that rich American tradition of negative campaigning.
You're generally not voting for a person right now. You're voting for a blackmailed entity, whose true motivations are "murder" or "sex with small children" or more distasteful things. And keeping those addictions flowing is all they really care about.
I'm not sure proportional, multi-member districts actually help with this, mind. If anything, it seems to unfairly disadvantage the members who can keep it "under their hat" by tying them to "the guy who sends dick pics to minors." (Weiner)
Corporations are big entities. Government has the means to end them. It should come as no surprise that they'd be willing/able to corral this means of extermination.
Other countries, that depend on America, have even more reason to want to control our elected officials.
I mean, sure, I could explain who I'm talking about...
I think there are clear benefits to having one person directly responsible and answerable to voters in a given district. I’ve heard a lot of stories of representatives and their staffers being able to help out constituents in various ways (dealing with government red tape and that sort of thing). If those reps are really just party functionaries, they don’t have much incentive to care about individual voters—they just want to please the party bosses. (I believe there are some proportional list systems where the party’s ranking of its candidates is what mostly matters, and the individual popularity of a candidate isn’t that important.)
Now, I realize in practice that the benefits of single-member districts don’t do anything to prevent gerrymandering, and the system would work much better without gerrymandering. We’d have a much better Congress if a larger number of reps had to compete in elections where they might actually lose.
As for political parties, they’re always going to exist in some guise, and I think attempts to legislate against them in the American political climate bother me on first amendment grounds. Compared to other systems, American political parties are quite weak. There’s nothing stopping third parties or party-switching, and while incumbents may be threatened by primary challengers, they can’t just be instantly kicked out of a party for disobeying the whip as in the UK.
I think the best objection to any sort of proportional representation on the grounds that it makes parties too strong is to point out that the current American system, while it does have political parties, ultimately requires voter approval of every single candidate in the house (I guess you could have a nominated Senator fill out a two-year span to the next election). A political party can’t just put someone high up enough on the list that he or she gets in.
In any case, I think the best objection to proportional representation or any other multi-party system in their tendency toward multiple elections in quick succession. A coalition could collapse at any time, and in some countries it’s almost impossible for any one party to win an actual majority. I think that’s worse than the British system. Sure, Labour won a huge majority of seats even though they were nowhere near 50%, but at least they have to own up to the results of their five years of governance. I’d much rather that then a German system where SPD or CDU trade off being senior partners in a grand coalition and pretending that the huge number of AfD voters don’t even exist.
Ireland has proportional representation, and elects 3-5 members per district. Our political system is notorious for 'parish pump politics' where residents of the constituency have their local politician intervene with the central government on their behalf (everything from writing letters to the public health service to speed up a hip replacement, to writing to the local council about cleaning up a local park). The system works surprisingly well, because everyone follows more or less the same rulebook, and the ratio of elected representatives to population is just about high enough to keep the problems in check.
I know that some countries operate a list system - but in most countries with PR, in at least one of the houses is filled with directly elected politicians. From looking online, it seems the largest counterexamples are Israel and South Africa; hardly models of democracy.
> However, no one ever seems to grapple with the (in my opinion very large) downside that you are not, under this system, voting for an actual specific person. It also codifies the concept of political parties (if not specific parties), in a way that I don't really like.
I’m confused, because my understanding was that under the American presidential system, you really are voting for a political party in a way that doesn’t exist in (for example) the UK system. Or is this discussing things like the Senate, rather than the Presidency?
This is about State congressional reps and federal house of representatives members.
But even for the president: while it's true that many people make their decision based on party affiliation, the fact of the matter is that you are voting for a _person_ and not a party. That person could renounce their party affiliation the day after the election (or the day before), and they would remain the president, and the party would have no redress.
> This is about State congressional reps and federal house of representatives members.
Thanks: that makes it make more sense to me.
I’d say for your presidential election, given that the entire role of the person you elect is for them to vote for the ticket they ran on and then do nothing else, and the point of that vote in turn is to return a single person (and vice person) to a single role, it seems like an ideal candidate for something based on just voting for that ticket without the intermediary. If you don’t want centralised party power there, then I think you probably don’t really want the American system of presidency. (That’s not a problem: I wouldn’t want that system. It just seems like the bigger conversation at that point)
This is pretty different to voting for someone to form a government, where they will continue to make decisions and carry out actions: in those cases it matters that people can choose or veto particular people and hold those individuals to account. For State congressional reps and federal house of representatives members, my understanding of your system is that individual competency does matter and people can meaningfully make different choices in office, and so the electorate should be choosing individuals and holding them to account. Here I would affirm the view that increased party power would centralise power into a smaller group in charge of the party, and also reduce incentives and mechanisms for choosing competent individuals.
There are often proposed solutions to that, like voting for a party in addition to rank-order voting for the candidates in the party. Then, if the party gets e.g. 2 seats, the top 2 candidates get chosen.
I think independents are usually allowed in these formulations as well - if an independent gets enough votes for 1 seat, they get it, and the other seats are divvied up proportionately with the remainder of the votes. The independent just competes on the party line rather than the candidate line.
To undercut my points, I’m also of the opinion that the masses by and large should be allowed to vote for principles rather than people. I don’t really have a problem with this form of disenfranchisement.
I'd say it's the same reasons usually stated for democracy over dictatorship: it is (in principle) easier to change the current system if you're voting for individuals since the barrier to entry is lower to simply run on your platform of change instead of having to form/join a party.
There were videos of Scott reading the final chapter and the Epilogue of UNSONG, linked from https://unsongbook.com/epilogue/. Both seem gone. Is it intentional and if not, are there copies that can be re-uploaded?
In his latest Substack post, Sasha Gusev digs into liability and hazard models of risk and how the claims made about embryo selection give us a distorted view of their utility. He also addresses the claims made by Scott.
I get a vague whiff of "cope" from that post -- yes, we dichotomize continuous things in medicine sometimes and that is not always ideal, but I have a hunch that Sasha will be just as unhappy when a genetics company uses Cox models and estimates hazard ratios based on genetics and screens embryos that way (which is not going to be very hard). It's perhaps notable what is NOT in the post: an actual data-driven refutation of any of Herasight's claims.
OTOH, it may be stereotyping on my part, but Rationalists (of the Yudkowskian variety, not the Classical variety) seem to be suckers for gee-whiz ideas.
As for Herasight, Gusev had this to say about them on X...
> What about Herasight itself? They claim to "prioritize research over marketing" and their white-paper does include much more rigorous validation than the competitors (a low bar), including quantifying and reporting within-family and cross-population accuracy.
> There are still murky details. How to address the substantial differences in prediction calibration and uncertainty across different environmental contexts (see: Hou et al. 2024 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38886587/), many of which are unknown for an embryo by definition?
> How do they handle genetic correlations and pleiotropy across traits, where selecting on something like IQ can also lead to substantial relative risk increases for a genetically correlated condition like Autism? And what about conditions we haven't measured?
> But beyond the technical details, what stuck out for me was that Herasight immediately broke their promise to put "research over marketing" by releasing and advertising IQ prediction while including zero methods/performance details in their white-paper.
>Rationalists (of the Yudkowskian variety, not the Classical variety) seem to be suckers for gee-whiz ideas
100% agree on that one, I would strengthen it to "gee-whiz ideas made via armchair reasoning, without extant empirical support"
Herasight is a little different in that their work *does* have empirical support, and the quibbling is mostly about "murky details" regarding the exact experimental/algorithmic details. Is it possible that Gusev is right, and Herasight is just slick marketing on top of shoddy statistics? Sure. But given Alex Young's involvement and given the downsides for Herasight being wrong here (bankruptcy + fraud charges), my priors lean (modestly!) towards Gusev grasping a little too much for any possible flaw to avoid having to admit that super babies really could work. If Gusev is wrong, the consequences are...well, not that much actually. Plenty of papers to be written about "yes SuperBabyCo is pumping out 160 IQ geniuses but do we *really* know they aren't going to develop early-onset dementia, and how valuable is IQ really?".
Maybe Gary Marcus is a good analogy: despite astounding advances in AI in the last 3 years, his position fundamentally hasn't changed, which makes me less inclined to believe him. Whereas people who have updated on new evidence, but still have legit AI criticisms (e.g. François Chollet -- maybe the Alex Young analogy here?), I am more inclined to believe.
In addition to the other arguments, it may be theoretically possible to eat a healthy vegan diet, but in practice it's much harder to make it taste good so compliance will be lower and mortality and health problems will go up. Theoretically I can have a nutritious vegan soup with enough protein. In practice it will taste quite bad unless I have someone more skilled make it.
"Animal products" is overbroad here. Gathering wool involves giving a sheep a haircut, which is no more animal suffering than giving a dog a bath. No need to give up wool.
But the main problem is the "If" at the beginning is skipping the entire question. IS animal suffering bad? I kill fruit flies flitting by my eyes and feel joy at their destruction. IS it easy to live without animal products? Oil is an animal product (that's why they're "fossil fuels"), and powers ridiculous amounts of the world.
I think (a) needs to be strengthened to something like "The life a cow has in the milk industry is worse than no life." for it to resemble a valid and relevant argument, since realistically those are the options between which we are choosing.
Mhm, do you mean the already existing cows or the once that would not be born?
I would be ready to amend in the former case (but realistically every systemic change will be so slow that there will be no mass slaughter (- more than what happens right now, anyhow..) of cows because of this.), but I would be critical in the latter one.
I agree that the transition should be slow enough that we can just consider the equilibrium, so I'm referring to the future animals that will not get to live if demand for the products of their existence drops.
I mean, for a local beef cow, it's got a pretty good life. It has "one bad day" (this is particularly so if grassfed).
It's not like cows don't like being milked, either. If most of the time they get to be out and about in fields the way animals should, you've got a decent life for them. (Not like "bred for eggs" chickens, who get osteoporisis. Strongly advise heritage breeds only, for eggs).
I'm going to go right out and say it: animals die. It is one thing to kill lambs and calves, who never have a chance to grow up, be an adult, etc. It's another to take a pretty "old" animal and kill it for sustenance.
Please bear in mind that most feral cats only live 2 years or so. Given that (and that's for a predator), are we really so evil for killing an 18 month cow?
Yeah, but when it's just not necessary anymore for sustenance it gets a lot more "evil" fast. (I don't like the framing as "evil", more like we as humanity could participate in the ideal of the Good™ in these issues a lot better.) Also your argument seems to prove too much?
With the same structure you could also say: Humans die, therefore etc.
Dunno. I mean, you're above arguing that killing is "bad on the face." If so, how much harm are you willing to sustain in order to maintain "your friendly neighborhood parasite"? Please bear in mind that pretty much all parasites affect your thought patterns, so...
My gut answer for parasites would be something like circles of concern (I don't know what it's called like in English), but I believe you are trying to make another point, that I don't really get?
"From "circles of concern" an animal that lives inside you is perhaps more relevant to you than a cow that lives in Brazil, is it not?"
Yes, but in a way that's harmful to you, and your well-being is even more of an concern to you (as long as you don't inflict an inappropriate amount of harm for it, e.g. I like to sacrifice babies because it makes me feel better..) Therefore the "self defense" comment above :). The cow in Brazil on the other hand is a low hanging fruit to reduce the amount of harm we inflict on the world.
Also inchoate and just formulating my gut feelings :)
You may already know that it's not valid in the strict/formal sense, especially since there are some hidden premises missing, e.g. "you should avoid contributing to any(!) degree to any(!) bad thing" and "all(!) animal products contribute to animal suffering". My suggestion would be to break it down further and add all the hidden premises, such that it's logically watertight. Then, you can focus on the arguments soundness by considering to what degrees all the premises strike you as true. Hope that helps :)
A few obvious problems (speaking as a pescatarian):
1) you smuggle in the conclusion with “bad”. If your morality forbids any act that causes harm regardless of benefit, you also ban medicine.
1a) no mention of capability for suffering. Is it equally bad for a cow or human to suffer? Not many people think so. But presumably there is an N where you’d say cow suffering is worth harming a human to prevent. (Scott has written about this quite a bit)
2) how easy is “easy”? Many people grew up in meat eating cultures and abandoning it is practically and psychologically difficult.
So I think you need more nuance.
My own ethical rubric here is just to say that the cost of meat is high (but not repugnantly high like murder) and the benefit is generally low (very low for me as someone who was raised eating lots of delicious vegetarian-friendly cuisines). And different acts (factory farm / caged pork vs free range beef) may have very different net utility.
1) + 1a) True. I made this argument ad hoc out of my moral heuristics/ intuition in a conversation, so it's really not up to philosophy department standards.
2) I'm probably biased as it was really easy for me.
It sure seems like we're evolved for a diet with some meat in it. We can survive without it, but it's tricky to get the right mix of amino acids, whereas "eat some meat or fish or a couple eggs" handles that pretty easily without needing to do any harder thinking.
I have to take blood thinners because I have Grave’s disease, and my doctor recently changed my medication from Edoxaban to Rivaroxaban. The pharmacist at my GP practise let slip the real reason for the medication change, which my doctor didn’t tell me: the patent on Rivaroxaban has expired. (So, now it’s a cheap generic).
This is peculiar: what incentive does your doctor have to prescribe CHEAPER drugs? Do the insurance companies counter-lobby doctors into prescribing cheap generics, as the pharma companies do to get them the prescribe their expensive drugs?
Ah, okay. Well, on the bright side, getting prescribed a cheap generic, however ineffective, is still better than the Canadian solution to the problem of expensive healthcare.
Another instance of things your doctor doesn’t tell you. There am I, thinking there was some subtle clinical reason for the change. No, the patent on the drug expired.
Working in the computer industry, I am familiar with the phenomenon of something getting way more popular when the patent expires,
I am in the US. Anytime my doctor changes my medications, he tells me why. Not sure why the UK doctor didn't state a reason for the change. It would seem strange to me to have a doctor change my medication without explaining the reason.
When I’ve had similar situations, my GP did tell me why. Once, they switched me to a soluble, orange-flavoured version of an anti-depressant because the company manufacturing it had given the NHS some reduced price for a while to try to encourage them to move people over to this new product with a longer patent! They did say I could ask to go back for the next prescription, though, which I did because it was gross.
Similarly, we’ve worked together to switch me to other versions of things when the specific thing I was on started having supply issues.
But people tell me all sorts of things: I think I always just seem interested and non-threatening. Perhaps British GPs aren’t always as chatty as mine? But equally, I once had a locum (like a supply GP) randomly prescribe extra things that we hadn’t discussed, and I had a very fun discussion with the dispensary at the surgery about that.
Here are the things that the old folks didn’t tell you when you were young (or if they did, you either weren’t listening or you didn’t believe them).
In no particular order…
1. The injuries you got when you were a teenager or young adult (from sports or whatever) will come back to haunt you in your old age.
2. Vigorous regular exercise is great at maintaining health until your joints start failing from that vigorous regular exercise. No, I’m not saying everyone who jogs regularly will need knee and hip replacements, but a lot of you will.
3. Subjectively, time will flow faster as you get older. Not in a sense that you can observe it on a scale of hours or days, but over longer periods, your personal time will flow faster. It takes forever to get from childhood to adulthood. Less time to get from twenty to forty. Forty to sixty goes by before you know it, and suddenly you’re an old fart. Various biological and psychological explanations have been put forth to explain this phenomenon, but I don’t buy into any of them.
4. You’ll begin to notice that your friends are dying off at an increasing rate during your forties. At first, it will be one dying tragically young of cancer or a heart attack. And then another will drop a few years later. By the time you reach your late sixties, you’ll be going to more funerals and memorial services than you were going to weddings in your twenties. If you’re unlucky enough to live a very long life, you may find yourself to be the last one standing and without any friends left.
5. If you reach your seventies, for you and your friends who are still with you, your chief topic of conversation will be your health problems and updates about friends undergoing various procedures and operations.
6. Also, you’ll find yourself bitching about the cluelessness and failings of the younger generation. But the younger generation isn’t any more fucked up than your generation was when you were young. This is a dynamic that has been repeating itself throughout all of written history across all cultures.
7. You’ll find yourself becoming increasingly divorced from contemporary culture. You’ll know you’re old when you don’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers of the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line.
8. Those advertising tropes of happy active seniors having fun in their golden years are largely bullshit. Oh, you might be lucky enough to have a few good years after you retire, but as you lose your friends and health issues catch up with you, your golden years will pass swiftly (if you have any).
9. Your perceived value as a human being — economically, intellectually, socially — will likely decrease in the eyes of society as you grow older.
10. You’re not going to be physically attractive much past your forties. A few men and women age well. But eventually, most of us end up ugly. The more you’ve invested your ego in your attractiveness when you’re younger, the harder time you’ll have with your ugliness when you’re older.
11. There is a massive scam industry out there that takes advantage of elderly people with declining cognitive function. Many are US-based and operate within the letter of the law while fleecing their marks. Others operate out of Pakistan and India and their scams are more overt, but they all have access to all your personal information (happily sold by US data brokers). It’s easy enough to fall for a scam when you’re young, but after retirement, the scammers circle like vultures. And they’re always pecking and probing. Even if you’re lucky enough to maintain your wits into very old age, you may still fall victim to a well-designed scam, because they’re going to start coming at you at a fast and furious pace.
12. Finally, the US medical establishment—especially the long-term care industry—will see you as a profit center and not a client. Remember to sign a POLST unless you want to die after weeks in critical care (while the hospital accountants drain your bank accounts and then sic creditors on your heirs). Or worse, you’ll be delivered into the hands of the long-term care industry for a slow, boring death in a low-stimulation, low-service environment.
As Robert Herrick wrote...
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
But this is what all those smiling skeletons are there to remind you of...
To that depressing list I would like to add a positive, if some what snarky observation:
When I grew up, athletic young men were at the top of the social hierarchy, while intellectuals were at the bottom. As I have aged, I noticed that many of the athletes, possibly most, have become overweight or obese, while many of the intellectuals have retained their health. To the point where I could insult the former athletes about their obesity, then scamper to a safe distance while they were still trying to get up out of their chair.
I'm clinically obese now, but I swim a kilometer three times a week. I recently had to run some distance in an urgent situation, and I noticed I wasn't even out of breath. My feet took a pounding, though.
You're less likely to get excited at new developments because you've seen so many that didn't pan out. I'm especially thinking about science journalism.
I believe we're evolved to move, and that isn't the same thing as exercise.
Movement is generally for a purpose and/or for pleasure. Injures will be avoided if possible because building toward an injury hurts,
Exercise is repetitive movement which is supposed to do some good.
Competition tends to include more willingness to hurt oneself than one's competitors have.
I'm not sure where dance fits into this. I'm inclined to think that folk dance (done by folk for folk, not up on a stage for spectators) is unlikely to risk injury, but I haven't researched this.
“ Subjectively, time will flow faster as you get older” - each passing year is a smaller and smaller percentage of your total life. If you’re 1 and you live to be 2, you’ve just doubled your lifespan; if you’re 100 and you live to 101, you’ve only added 1%.
> You’ll find yourself becoming increasingly divorced from contemporary culture. You’ll know you’re old when you don’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers of the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line.
Everyone knows this happens to older people, but what I didn't realise as a kid was that it happens quite deliberately. I'm in my forties and actively pretend not to know who random celebrities are even when I do. A nice thing about getting older is that nobody expects you to have an opinion on Chappel Roan or whatever any more.
Having said that, the people on magazine covers, to the extent that magazines still exist, are only popular among old farts anyway; actual young people only care about internet celebrities that the algorithm just doesn't bother exposing me to.
"6. Also, you’ll find yourself bitching about the cluelessness and failings of the younger generation. But the younger generation isn’t any more fucked up than your generation was when you were young. This is a dynamic that has been repeating itself throughout all of written history across all cultures."
You'd expect to see that evidence throughout history if some quality was genuinely fluctuating over time though. And it would be very surprising if generations were not meaningfully different given the overwhelming evidence that they change, and the abundant reasons for change.
I asked ChatGPT to give me a run down of complaints about the younger generation through the centuries. Some of theses might be hallucinations (but not all of them), but YMMV.
-----
Here’s a chronological sampler of “kids-these-days” complaints, starting with the oldest known examples and marching through history.
(You’ll notice it’s basically the same gripe in different outfits.)
📜 c. 2000 BCE — Sumer (Mesopotamia)
"Youths are lazy; they do not pay attention to the word of their elders."
(Source: Sumerian proverb collections, possibly linked to the “Instructions of Shuruppak.”)
📜 c. 1900 BCE — Babylon
"The youth no longer obey their parents. They chatter in the place of work."
(Found on an Akkadian school tablet — perhaps written by a frustrated teacher.)
📜 c. 2400 BCE text, copied c. 1200 BCE — Egypt
Attributed to Ptahhotep’s Maxims:
"The young no longer obey. The boundaries of propriety are ignored. They chatter instead of working."
🏛 c. 700 BCE — Ancient Greece (Hesiod)
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today."
🏛 c. 470–399 BCE — Socrates (ascribed in later sources)
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders..."
(Note: This exact phrasing is a later paraphrase; the sentiment is genuinely ancient.)
🏛 1st century CE — Ancient Rome
Petronius in the Satyricon:
"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They no longer rise when elders enter the room..."
(This echoes Greek formulations — Romans were good at cultural recycling.)
📜 1274 CE — Peter the Hermit (medieval Europe)
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves... They have no reverence for parents or old age."
📜 1771 CE — Earl of Chesterfield
"This is the age of the young... the old are pushed aside as if they were no longer useful."
📜 1904 CE — “The Young Are Getting Out of Hand” (Atlantic Monthly)
"Young people are not what they used to be, and never were."
(That last clause is self-aware humor from a century ago.)
That doesn’t mean much though does it? Nine quotes in all of recorded history? You can find nine people with any opinion at all at any time.
Whereas today, we have actual evidence that kids are very different in many respects. Depression, anxiety, no enthusiasm for driving, dating or partying. And we have obvious reasons they could be very different: radically different parenting styles, phones, social media, video games, Covid restrictions.
It doesn't look like you bothered to check out the data before you posted your opinion. The CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS Explorer) show that life is much better for teens than was three decades ago. If you've got data better than the CDC's I'd be happy to hear it.
High school students who seriously considered attempting suicide was significantly lower in 2023 (20.4%) than it was in 1991 (29.0%). The all-time low was in 2013 (13.8%), and it then bumped up to 22.2% in 2021 during peak COVID. But there's definitely been no steady upward trend in teen suicide ideation in the past three decades that the CDC has been surveying teens.
High school students who actually attempted suicide showed a slight upward trend during COVID, but for the most part the line has been stable over the past 3 decades.
The indices of teen violence have dropped over the past three decades. In 1991 a whopping 42.5% of teens reported that they had been in a fight at some time during their teen years. In 2023 it was down to 19.2%.
Perhaps I am wrong about mental health in teens declining. Jonathan Haidt has some graphs here saying otherwise: https://jonathanhaidt.com/anxious-generation/ but those could be incorrect or measurement error.
But your last two links on teen violence and alcohol use directly contradict your point: generations CAN be meaningfully different from each other. Those are enormous cultural changes in the space of 30 years!
Thanks for Haidt link. Looks like he's getting data on mental health from the American College Health Association. I wonder if this is just surveys of college students. And are these these representative of the general population. I might dig into that.
But my OP was that oldsters complaining about the younger generation was a timeless trope. Personally, I've always assumed that each younger generations were fucked up in their own unique ways, but overall they always muddle through to become the older generation complaining about the latest younger generation.
> Vigorous regular exercise is great at maintaining health until your joints start failing from that vigorous regular exercise. No, I’m not saying everyone who jogs regularly will need knee and hip replacements, but a lot of you will.
What does "vigorous" mean here? Not all exercise is hard on the joints, which strength training can actually help improve. And there are old people who still do extremely rigorous activities. Everyone is different, but I suspect the risk here is overestimated due to people trying to push through injury, or who get into the "exercise is good" mindset too late or try to rush things or push them too far.
There seems to be an almost complete inability for young-to-middleaged people to understand that the advice they are being given does not work once they are older.
The body wears out. Fit and active octogenarians are very (very) much the exception to the rule, for simple and obvious reasons that no one seems willing to currently accept.
Despite not being that old, I'm well aware that my body can't do all the things it used to. But I don't really buy this argument.
> Fit and active octogenarians are very (very) much the exception to the rule, for simple and obvious reasons that no one seems willing to currently accept.
If you're talking about the US, fit and active is the exception for almost *any* age bracket, and I suspect this fact is more responsible for the lack of fit elderly people than anything else. The difference between what the elderly do, and what they can do, between the Northeast and Colorado is staggering.
Even if there's a scientific study that proves this, I do not believe it. I have four friends who were into hard-style martial arts (karate and taekwondo). All of them had their hips give out. Two gave up practice, and two had hip replacements. My runner friends all started having knee problems by their mid-fifties. In fact, none of the people I know in my age cohort have come out unscathed from regular exercise. Remember this conversation when you get old. I'll probably be dead and gone by then, but my ghost will say "I told ya so!"
This is what everyone says. And I agree that keeping active is a good thing as a general principle.
However there comes a point where this is no longer possible for most people, and no one seems willing to believe or accept that.
I spend substantial time with the aged (not in the US). I think a lot of people are armchair experts about this, as with many other topics. They should spend some meaningful time with old people before they get old themselves.
Sure, at some point, your body gives out. But OP said:
> failing from that vigorous regular exercise.
In other words, the exercise caused the failure. I think this is fairly unlikely unless you are overworking specific body parts (which is one reason why NBA players are facing a large increase in certain injuries), pushing through injuries, overworking yourself, etc.
I used to mountain bike ten to twelve miles a pop three times a week. Nothing really strenuous. Mostly flatland gravel trails. I can't do it anymore. My right knee began to give out. Doctors were talking about a knee replacement. I just gave it rest, and after about a year, my knee seemed to heal itself. Started riding again last year, but I gave it up after a couple of months, because my knee started to act up again.
Before I took up mountain biking, I used to swim a kilometer in the pool 3 or 4 times a week, until I developed a rotator cuff injury (my right shoulder). Even with PT my shoulder never really returned to normal. But after a 15 year hiatus I tried swimming again. Intially, I kept pulling to the left because my right shoulder didn't have the strength of my left shoulder, but eventually, I got so I could swim in a straight line. I've worked up to a kilometer 3 times a week, again, but I'm very very careful not to push myself. So far, so good. But my girlfriend (who's a few years younger than me), took up swimming with me. She wanted to push it up to a mile because her hero, Oliver Sacks, used to swim a mile every day. I told her to take it easy, but she thought I was mansplaining. She developed a rotator cuff injury, and she's only starting to try to do laps again.
I took up water aerobics a couple of years back. Don't let anyone bullshit you that they're "low impact". I fucked up my big toes from pushing off the bottom of the pool. Now I have to tape up my feet before I go swimming, or my kicks will pop my big toes out of the joint. It's frigging painful when that happens!
I notice you did not mention strength training anywhere
Edit: Sorry, that was way way too snarky. You did explicitly say "Vigorous exercise" in your initial post.
I guess the question is then what defines vigorous, as you're completely correct that overdoing any exercise for prolonged periods of time will have detrimental effects
To point 2, certainly vigorous exercise wears down the joints, but for most people it’ll be more complicated. For example, strong quadriceps pull apart the joint space of the knee, actually improving joint function
It is perfectly reasonable to do body weight exercises that burn upwards of a thousand calories per hour, while WALKING. Walking, needless to say, is a very low-risk joint exercise.
Yes, but for another purpose. I've had it for a while. Prompt is something like "woman who has been held hostage, upon release. Haggard, with filthy, snarled frizzy long red hair."
To point 3, I always heard that the reason for this is that in the process of doing/learning fundamentally new things, your brain creates new neuron pathways or whatever, and that the process of this happening makes time feel slower.
I should have questioned this long before now, as science knows little about the brain or consciousness, but still it seems to fit perfectly with my own experiences. I'm only in my mid-20's, but my life is going faster and faster already. When I'm doing or learning something new consistently, though, time seems to slow down. For example, I had my first child in January and I took the 2.5 weeks after he was born off of work. Those 2.5 weeks felt more like a month or longer, but once I got back to work time started passing quite a bit faster.
I think part of time going faster is that less seems novel, so you pay less attention to it, and the lack of attention makes things seem even less interesting.
I've been on a self-educating binge for the past decade — art history, quantum mechanics, viriology, and a bunch of other topics. It hasn't slowed down the acceleration of my time sense.
Maybe the ways in which you learn things are too familiar to you to the point where your learning follows the same basic pattern regardless of what the content is, or maybe you know enough about the building blocks of the content you're learning that there's nothing fundamentally new?
Or maybe there's just nothing to it, and sometimes life seems longer or shorter at times for people like me. I guess I'm just lucky 🤩
There may be something to your idea, because I already have an extensive framework of general knowledge, so I *am* mostly filling in the details. I've mentioned this before, but as a kid, I had the certainty that I was an alien sent to Earth, with my prime directive plonked into my little fetal brain to learn everything I could about humans and the Earth. I had absorbed a bunch of the Time-Life series by the time I finished sixth grade (*The Life Science Library*, *Nature Library*, *World Library*, *Great Ages of Man*, *Library of Art,* etc...). I had polished off all the volumes in the *Story of Civilization* series by Will and Ariel Durant by my Freshman year of high school. Learning to be human was much harder, though. Anyway, when I die, all this stuff I've learned will be uploaded to them. I don't really believe this anymore. I believe weirder stuff now. ;-)
That's awesome XD it sounds like you'll make a fine contribution to the alien databanks. Maybe when they get your info they'll see we're finally ready for alien contact and in desperate need of benevolent overlords, and they'll hopefully send some Karellen or someone to save us.
Now I'm curious about what weirder stuff you believe...
My bad, when I said "I had my first child," I meant "I came into possession of," not "I birthed". I am a man myself, and my wife did all the hard work, you betcha.
Bunk uses a cigar to prevent himself from throwing up. If you aren't looking at blatant propaganda (like was published in the Ukraine), 3 day old bodies generally induce vomiting.
Military has a whole handbook on "how to look good in front of your men" when you're dealing with rotting bodies.
Sadly, remembering Minnesota for being "nice" is losing out to remembering Minnesota for being "sex-crazy depraved lunatics." Politics isn't very "nice."
I spent some time on and off in my state's Coroner's office when I was a grad student. Cigars were de rigueur when decomposing bodies (especially floaters!) came in. I don't know what the coroners did after our State banned smoking in government buildings in the 90s. Vicks VapoRub on a surgical mask was the non-tobacco alternative to cigars, but it doesn't quite cut it.
Blood, guts, and maggots never made me puke, but the smell of a decaying human is pretty horrendous. And the smell would linger on your clothes despite washing.
To point two, the specialist excising a loved-one’s skin cancer said that she always tries to bear in mind that the elderly people coming to see her generally walk in under their own steam, which is not the case for a lot of other specialists dealing with that age bracket.
If you have to pick, acquire the wear and tear that goes with an active, interesting life.
I'm 73. I wouldn't say it's all true in my experience, but a lot of it is.
As part of my recovery from pancreatitis, I'm back to being able to walk a half hour out and a half hour back.
I was unnerved when they told me at Oak Street Health (a medical provider specializing in people with Medicare) that I'm in better shape for activity than most of their patients.
I don't complain about the younger generation, but I don't have a lot of dealings with it.
A friend of my mom's was hiking up a mountain in Switzerland in her eighties, but she fell and broke her hip. Had to be airlifted out IIRC. It was all downhill for her from then on. Pardon the bad pun.
At some point Marc Andreessen must have figured out the image was fake, since he deleted the tweet, but there was no apology. And it's not like he's going to get called to account for it. Ten years ago, a Silicon Valley billionaire tweeting out literal fake news would be newsworthy, not today. I keep hearing "oh the poor salt of the Earth masses were lied to by the media and now they don't trust it and are falling for these social media hucksters." Okay, what's Marc Andreessen's excuse? He and Elon Musk have so much money they could build their own media outlet if they don't trust the MSM. Or they could at least hire someone for $60,000 a year to fact check their Tweets before they send them out. But no, they just bumble around retweeting random garbage.
It's a meme about how LinkedIn's social feed is causing young men to remain virgins, which is obviously absurd and intended to be a joke. The actual graph is also the same in essence, if not in percentage, with a major inflection point in 2008:
Just realized that. So for all I know the graph that was originally linked isn’t even wrong, just extended out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was considering Covid.
I assume because the data itself wasn’t intended as a joke. The joke is clearly the implication that the LinkedIn social feed is the cause of rising male virginity.
If a meme about LinkedIn being the cause of male virginity was based on a graph that was incorrect in the specifics, if not in the essence of rapidly rising male virginity rates post-2008, that’s such a low-stakes mistake that it’s not at all surprising he just deleted it.
Calling a meme based on mistaken data fake news, and expecting an apology about the meme, seems pretty ridiculous IMO.
Sorry, I am not sure anyone have read my long-winded argument in the other thread, so I sum it up now shorter. So if you want to see liberalism as a platform for varied communities, that makes sense in the light of American history, which was explicitly founded as a platform for 13 communities in 1776, and developed along those line i.e. Mormons getting their own state in Utah and so on. But how can that liberalism work in the average European country which has a thing like an official language i.e. officially dominant ethnic group, a historically dominant religion and so on?
It seems to me European history is largely about not finding the middle road between Hitler and Bowling Alone. So we either try to force everybody into one community (and kill those who do not fit), or we go for atomistic, alienated individualism.
This is how to interpret Fukuyama quoting Leo Strauss, that in 1933 Germans voted for Hitler because Weimar liberalism was too atomistic and too morally neutral. It lacked big questions, big moral dilemmas, heroism, sacrifice etc. everybody focused on their little individual pleasures. The strange part is that everything they lacked is better provided by religion than politics.
My understanding is that the problem with Weimar is that it was very much a product of its situation.
Imperial Germany's constitutional and institutions had been set up mostly by members of a conservative aristocracy. It had been formed around the Kingdom of Prussia, which was a highly centralized and militaristic polity that had expanded significantly through conquest during the 19th century. The German Empire did have a number of liberal elements in its constitution, but was much less liberal than the US, Victorian Britain, or the French Third Republic. Germany had also been formed as a federation of 25 polities which each retained their own internal institutions, but Prussia was so large (about 60% of the population) and politically dominant (the King of Prussia was ex officio German Emperor, the Minister-President of Prussia was conventionally the Imperial Chancellor, and senior officers in the wartime military were mostly Prussian) that this pluralism was significantly compromised. Within Imperial Germany, the Kaiser was always conservative (except for the three-month period when the throne had been inherited by the relatively liberal Crown Prince Frederick while he was dying of throat cancer), and the Chancellor served at the Kaiser's pleasure. There were major liberal, socialist, progressive, and federalist moderate parties in Parliament, and the plurality party was usually one of these, but Parliament was fairly weak and there was only occasionally an effective coalition for liberal or progressive policies. There was also a major Marxist-influenced revolutionary wing of the German Socialist movement which didn't play well with the liberals.
The German Revolution of 1918 started out mostly with Marxist goals, but the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (who were from that party's liberal wing) got out ahead of it and redirected it towards liberal aims. The Kaiser, Chancellor, and military leadership saw that conservative Imperial government was doomed (combination of military defeat, the strength of the revolutionary movement, and Woodrow Wilson's insistence of the Kaiser's abdication as a precondition for armistice negotiations) and chose to hand over power to the liberal socialists as a preferable alternative to the Marxists. There were several attempts between 1919 and 1923 by both marxists and reactionary conservatives to overthrow Weimar violently, which were suppressed militarily (or collapsed under the weight of popular opposition, in the case of the conservative 1920 Kapp Putsch). Both the revolutionary left and the reactionary right remained politically active throughout the Weimar era.
The fundamental problem with Weimar was that the liberal Weimar Coalition at best had majority support but never had anything approaching a consensus. Even majority support was lost over the impact of hyperinflation and other economic problems in the 1920s leading into the Great Depression, and the moderate conservatives who were willing to work within the Weimar system (and who were mostly in the driver's seat from 1925-1933) were also bleeding support to revolutionary extremists for similar reasons. The Nazis never had anything like majority support in free elections, peaking at 37.3% in the July 1932 parliamentary elections and 36.8% in the April 1932 presidential election, but the Nazis and Communists between them controlled a majority of the Reichstag. While the NDSAP and the KPD were mortal enemies, both were also steadfast opponents of liberalism and could and did vote together to block the formation of any government that operated on anything like a liberal basis, and Hindenberg's decision to bring the Nazis into a conservative coalition government was what allowed Hitler to seize power.
They are in some sense very European-style nationalist, they take very active steps to protect their traditional culture even if this conflicts with the usual rights of liberalism, they don't make it easy for outsiders to assimilate.
However for centuries the country has been a mix of Catholics & Protestants, and of French/German/Italian speakers. Historically in Europe these are groups that all would fight brutal wars with each other, except in Switzerland they all get along and have a unified identity, yet also retain their own distinct traditions and autonomy.
Actually similar to how America does it - as much of politics as possible is done on the canton level, not the federal, and each canton has a dominant language and religion. That must be why William F Buckley Jr. - who spoke fluent French - called it the second best country on Earth and liked to tourist there.
They even have a custom that a man who is getting married must show his father-in-law he has the two most important things: a Bible and a rifle. That feels very, very Texan, doesn't it?
They are not a "mix" in this sense - the Franco-Catholics do not want to live in Winterthur, nor do they want to tell the people of Winterthur how to live, and they expect the same.
Their unified identity reminds me of those marriages who do not fail specifically because the husband spends all the time in the garage and the wife spends all the time in the kitchen. They just don't interact much so they avoid bothering each other...
This is visible if you rent a car in Winterthur and drive west... the German-speaking regions are stereotypically German, everything very orderly... and then at one point you start to see more litter and more generic disorder... that is when you arrived to the French-speaking region.
"This is how to interpret Fukuyama quoting Leo Strauss, that in 1933 Germans voted for Hitler because Weimar liberalism was too atomistic and too morally neutral. It lacked big questions, big moral dilemmas, heroism, sacrifice etc. everybody focused on their little individual pleasures. The strange part is that everything they lacked is better provided by religion than politics."
Germans voted for Hitler because the German economy was in the toilet and they blamed the incumbent government.
"Germans voted for Hitler because the German economy was in the toilet and they blamed the incumbent government."
I don't know if this supports you point or not, but:
(a) In the 1933 elections "only" 44% of the votes went to the Nazi party. 12% went communist (and 18% went SPD). One way to score this is that 56% wanted SOME form of authoritarian government.
(b) The Nov 1932 election went 33% Nazi and 17% communist (so 50% between the two).
(c) The Nazis and communists didn't start making much progress with the voters until 1930.
So ... I think more accurate would be that Germans voted for authoritarian government because the German economy was in the toilet. The Nazis *were* that authoritarian government, but the majority of Germans never voted Nazi even though the majority did vote authoritarian.
This has the nice property of explaining Putin's popularity among Russians (until recently at least, maybe still now): He was voted in when the economy was terrible and then things got better. It allows us to treat him as authoritarian rather than try to make him a Nazi.
This maybe/probably fits for Chavez in Venezuela (authoritarian, not really a Nazi), too, though I know that history much less well.
Putin is a national hero in Russia, mostly for kicking the Western Oligarchs out. Your parallel to him would be the Ayatollah in Iran (not very popular any longer).
Putin doesn't get 99% of the votes, he gets a solid 80% even after the robot votes. (And his campaign literature is designed to get even the cats to pawpaw his picture -- Russians love cats).
> Putin is a national hero in Russia, mostly for kicking the Western Oligarchs out.
What do you mean by "Western Oligarchs"? As far as I know, Russian oligarchs are citizens of Russia, and foreign investors never had a comparable power there. Actually, the foreign investors always had to be backed by a local oligarch to even get a chance to do business in Russia.
Prior to Putin's booting them out, they were extracting money from Russia and basically putting it into the West. You can pretty much trace "Big Bad (EVUL) Putin" as a Western Concept to when he kicked them out (remember when he was a WEF young leader?). Prior to that, Palin saying "I can SEE russia from Alaska" was treated with the proper level of hilarity ("more republican scare tactics about the communists!"). All of a sudden, Putin was no longer the guy who blew raspberries into children's belly buttons. There was a large, large propaganda campaign intended to reestablish control and $$$making (extracting) in Russia.
In this case I would like to point out, that if we call people who embrace elections autocrats, then it is time to officially ditch the concept that democracy means majority rule. Things were tending that way anyway, but time to make it official. Majority rule is called today populism, not democracy.
What is called democracy today is liberal democracy, which basically means a republic: a system of individual rights, with voting being only one of the many individual rights. Republics tend towards aristocratic elitism, which is not necessarily a bad thing - I would rather experts decide on COVID stuff, not a plebiscite - but needs to be pointed out clearly at least.
Posted this response, but it disappeared. Trying again. Apologies if you get two.
By that reasoning, Hitler would be an autocrat because he canceled all subsequent elections after he came to power. But Stalin and Mao would not be autocrats because they continued to hold elections.
Very fascinating. Could use some leavening with some actual numbers from America though. Did you know that Detroit hasn't had a fair election since they started keeping records? (I have this from the last person to actually get an election overturned in America -- at the cost of signing a contract "not to interfere in local elections").
The point that authoritarians don't stuff ballot boxes when they don't need to, is a good one.
(I'm not subscribed, and that cuts off, so apologies if I'm restating what it says):
Putin's Russia is a very very big place, and reminding people that they are part of a very big thing is a main civil point of the elections. They get out the special ponies (which take like a half-day to catch), and ride to the elections. This is a special, ceremonial obligation, where they pay fealty to "The Big Guy In Charge" (who otherwise doesn't do much in their day to day life). Russia, unlike China, is a very "mutt" place (very proud of that, even).
The way the wind was blowing for decades now is that a democrat is someone who respects individual rights - which used to be called a republic - and autocrat or authoritarian is someone who does not.
The choice wasn't just between Hitler and Bowling Alone, if Bowling Alone was even an option. The choice was between Hitler and Stalin, and Stalin might have been worse.
The later KPD were Stalinist-types more than Luxemburg was, because in the years since the failed November Revolution in Germany, the Bolsheviks tightened their control over communist parties abroad, turning them into extensions of Soviet policy (and, by extension, Stalinist policy as of 1933). Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist, but was not a Stalinist, and had criticisms of Lenin before then (not necessarily the sort modern libs would have, but still).
ReplayFX asked "where are you from?" on its questionairre. They managed to bag about 500 different places. This was supposed to be a -country tag- so that the organizers could say simple things like "We've got 20 Germans coming." But NO. Instead, there were responses like Bavaria, Alsace, etc. It was pretty much all the Europeans, defining "where they are from" not as the "ethnostates" but provinces, regions, little places. Spain wants to dissolve at the best of times, even.
The fourth reich is the European Union. They really don't want you looking at the biographies and following the "people in charge" back through Hitler to Bismark and beyond.
Hitler's party was really big on being hippies (vegetarianism was very popular). He had two policy proposals in Mein Kampf, and one of them was "put up some flowerpots around government buildings." (The other was "require physical education."
This gets a little more complicated. You will notice that fascism/nazism got the most popular in those two countries that were basically recently unified, and still had internal north vs. south divisions. So one way to look at it is to say they were screaming really loud that they are one united nation now, while a lot of people were unsure about it.
Especially strange the part where Nazism was a largely Bavarian phenomenon, and Bavarians really did not enjoy being ruled by "Prussian swine", even today they have their own conservative party, the CSU, the CDU is too "Prussian" (and Protestant) for them...
That's strange. Because the word "Nazi" comes not from Nationalsozialismus, but a nickname for Ignatz, Natzi, which is like "Bubba" in the US, meaning an uneducated rural Bavarian, coined by the typical "coffeeshop liberals". Which is why the Nazis themselves never used this word.
The Nazi party is obviously from Bavaria. The Beer Hall Putsch happened in Munich, after all. But the best electoral results for the NSDAP in the 1930s were further East, in what would be called later East-Germany (DDR), and in the territories lost after WW2 to Poland (Pomerania, Silesia, etc., and East-Prussia).
Hamburg, in the North, also did well for the Nazis.
So, surprisingly (maybe), Bavaria and the South were not particularly Nazi.
Unlikely if you're surveying autists (ahem.pinball enthusiasts?). They seem to like the truth, for some strange reason.
As a sidenote, if you code Wakanda as "decline to answer" that person is doing a service to the question-giver, in that they're not simply "answering wrong."
I've been researching dissociative identity disorder, and... I have a pretty weird impression and I want to reality check.
It seems like DID spaces, DID discussions, and DID resources exist in a parallel bubble relative to other mental illnesses. Say, Reddit: go to a schizophrenia subreddit, and you'd see mentions of OCD, depresseion, autism, etc, and vice versa. But not DID. The communities of mental illnesses cross-pollinate a lot. But DID is on its own. Unless you specifically seek out information on it, you won't just stumble across it. Scott's blog is also an example: over the time of SSC/ACX, he has mentioned autism, schizophrenia, depression, OCD, ADHD, PTSD, dementia, gender dysphoria, insomnia, BIID, BPD, anorexia, even many rare and exotic illnesses like Epic Dreaming Disorder; but he never wrote on DID. Despite not being that _rare_, it's very _exotic_. It's also very interesting and definitely deserving discussion.
Is it a real thing or is it just a property of my bubble?
Like Chronic Lyme Disease, it’s a diagnosis whose existence is doubted by the experts in the relevant field. Also modern DID is very different from OG multiple personality disorder circa “Three faces of Eve”
I believe I remember Scott expressing skepticism about how common it was, with some serious study finding that only one case out of many was actually convincing according to DID's own criteria.
There's definitely a lot of people who don't have it but say they do, which isn't true for most other mental illnesses (maybe Autism? We're all a bit autistic here), which probably gives it a bad reputation. As other people have said, there's a lot of people on TikTok who specifically fake DID for attention.
I'm far from an expert, though I've worked with developmentally disabled adults in vocational rehab in the past. The actual experts I did work with had firmly listed it in the column of people we couldn't help find jobs. Apparently, genuine cases of DID are so bad off that its unlikely they could keep it together enough to have a coherent conversation on a message board, or even navigate the technology to do so regularly. In short their opinion was that anyone who was able to clearly describe their internal experience of DID didn't actually have it. This is 2nd hand info from 20 years ago though.
I talked briefly with a man who said he had non-traumatic dissociative identity. He probably called it multiple personalities because this was a while ago. He said his mother had traumatic multiple identity, and he assumed that was just how to be a person.
I'm a trusting soul, and I assumed he was telling the truth about his experience. Why shouldn't people like that exist? They probably wouldn't be likely to show up to therapists and it would take someone like Scott to ask a large mixed group how many personalities do you think you have.
I knew a person who thought she was an elf. This was under heavy psychological treatment (read hard, narcotic drugs under a psychiatrist's care) for an illness she didn't have.
Cool? hahaha. My handle is gay. so, so gay. (It was published as a dragon name in the 1980s, contextual reading of GenX slang referring to it as being "gay").
Was reading an old post in SSC and realized that out of 30 blogs in Scott's blogroll eight bloggers appear to have stopped writing. The percentage varies by subject, with Science having the highest share of lapsed bloggers (3/8 = 38%). Anyone can think of a reason why this would happen in science blogging?
For the past few years Greg Cochran has written a single blog post per year at the end of the year listing off books he read, but I wish he shifted his output away from twitter and back to his blog.
The term “white supremacy” is highly inconsistent isn’t it? Online on Chinese sites where I lurk to see the opinions (using translation of course) I find the phrase is used to attack western and US supremacy: NATO, the EU, the five eyes, Israel and other institutions of the “rule based international order”, like the IMF. Even the permanent members of security council.
I’m sure this is true across the non western world.
There’s another version propagated by the US itself, which is to do with internal politics, this was particularly strong during the Biden admin.
It’s an odd term to propagate, as if the British empire were to produce leaders who, while believing that Britain should run the world, that the real problem in the world was Anglo supremacism.
In hindsight, that last answer was probably way more complicated than it needed to be.
If you're China, "organizations like NATO and the EU were founded and are maintained to further the cause of white supremacy" is a useful thing to be true. Because China wants to form and lead its own coalition, all the plausible member-states are majority non-white, so "those guys over there with that older, stronger coalition are just in it for themselves and want to screw you" is a good line, if you can make it convincing. And it's not completely implausible based on the history and demographics.
By the same token, if you're the U.S. or the UK or Germany, it's useful for that same thing *not* to be true, because you like the coalition and want it to retain influence. But just saying "this organization--which I am a highly placed member of--is totally not biased towards people like me" isn't going to convince anyone. But plausibly calling out and "fighting" white supremacy in other contexts that don't reflect back on your coalition is useful, if you can make it convincing. In both cases they are talking about essentially the same thing when they say "white supremacy," just in different contexts.
Contra your British example, it would be like if the British empire went around spreading the idea that "joining the empire is actually really good for your development as a country" with an unspoken ("rather than just being good for enriching Britain").
It's really not that odd if you have a basic understanding of the history and motivations at play.
Since you seem somewhat confused by the term, a very brief history lesson: "white supremacy" is a set of beliefs that *used to be* extremely normal in U.S. politics. A large fraction of the ground-level participants in U.S. politics[1] took it for granted that white people where inherently superior to people of other races[2], despite this directly contradicting the very first sentence of the very first founding document of the nation. They put this belief into practice in a variety of ways that ran the gamut from voluntary curation of social circles, to codifying into into laws, to straight-up extrajudicial murder. The very earliest point at which one could reasonably say this was no longer true was the late 1960s--well within living memory. And anyone with a decent model of how human cultures and values change over time should expect that it didn't *stop* being true all at once, regardless of how the laws changed.
In this day and age, of course, open white supremacy is very much *not* the norm in U.S. politics: is it nearly obligatory to at least pay lip-service to the egalitarian founding principles of the nation. The U.S. has enough distance from its own past that most people can look at things like the chattel slavery practiced in the south, and Jim Crow laws, and the various genocides and forced displacements of native American peoples and *clearly recognize them as bad.* Most people can also look at stark examples from other countries--institutions like Nazism and apartheid that *also* stemmed a belief in the inherent racial superiority of certain white-skinned ethnic groups--and also *clearly recognize those as bad.* Between this really quite large number of quite extreme examples, the belief that "white supremacy is bad and something to be avoided" is really quite a common and sensible one.
OK, now as far as how people use the term in this day and age. You seem to be of the view that they're using it in very different senses. They're really not. At least, not from what you've written. They're using it with very different *connotations.* In the case of Chinese nationalists, one might even go so far as to say they're trying to weaponize it against their political opponents. But the term means much the same thing. But it might still take some more work to see how.
One argument that's been used by white supremacists since approximately forever is "clearly white people are superior: look at how many amazing things they've built." And, like, the second part of that isn't even *wrong.* There have been quite a lot of amazing achievements and scientific discoveries made by people with light-colored skin. But the first part is assuming their own conclusion: white supremacists believe that causality flows in this way Inherent Superiority -> Amazing Inventions. Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons, with most important one being that it completely ignores the feedback loop that produced the entirety of the modern world. In reality, you have Amazing Inventions -> Multiplied Labor and Military Power -> Greater Resources -> Amazing Inventions. That is, once start getting a critical mass of amazing inventions in one place, they start arriving faster and faster. And so if you can *keep* them in once place (even partially) that place can pull ahead of everyone else. And if you can keep them exclusive to one group (again, even partially), that group can accrue massively more power than anyone else. And so it happened.[3] The group who really kick started the process happened to have pale skin and they made significant effort to keep their knowledge and technology *exclusive* to people with pale skin (with some success)[4], and so the causality flows backwards from what the white supremacists will tell you: white people are disproportionately represent among the scientists and inventors of the world because for many years they were the only ones afforded the opportunity to be. And then some of them turn around and use that edge that they've gained as "evidence" that other people are inferior and should be kept subservient.
So when the Chinese make claims about organizations like NATO and the EU being "white supremacist" it is not a different use of the word than when left-leaning people in Western countries use it: it's making the same claim in a different sphere. They're saying "see, the Important People Club (for defense or international relations or whatever) was founded back when white people had the insurmountable technological edge, which they used to keep non-white people out[5]." It's not an altogether ridiculous claim, though it's almost certainly a self-serving one. I don't believe for a second Chinese nationalists want widespread racial equality, rather than, say, more economic and military power for China specifically. But it's a politically useful claim in part because western nations--and the U.S. in particular--spent centuries claiming these high-minded liberal values and then *very explicitly not living up to them.* It's easy to claim that they are *still* not living up to them, and just hiding it better.
"It’s an odd term to propagate, as if the British empire were to produce leaders who, while believing that Britain should run the world, that the real problem in the world was Anglo supremacism."
This is exactly the sort of muddled thinking that makes this possible: indeed this sounds like exactly the view one would hear from a white supremacist. The liberal view would be that *skin color* isn't the important thing: spreading liberalism is. Being white doesn't make one more *or* less qualified for that job, but ideologies like white supremacy are corrosive to it. It's much harder for Western leaders to convincingly push liberalism if they're engaging in highly illiberal practices (and white supremacy is about as illiberal as it gets), so denouncing aligns well with that goal.
[1] Who at the time made up a much smaller proportion of the overall population.
[2]I'd be irresponsible if I didn't note that the particular conception of "races" including "white" as an inherently important category that underlies this belief is (as far as I understand) at least partly made up to support it. Of course there are many different genetic lineages of human, but where you draw the lines is pretty subjective even when backed by modern genetics and was *much more so* a century or three ago. *Genetically* there really isn't anything special about skin color (again, as far as I understand) that makes it a good choice to draw those lines but *socially* it's very useful as you can tell who's in the ingroup and who isn't just by looking.
[3] Arguably the feedback loop really kicked into high gear with the printing press, so it's been going for about 500 years and the epicenter of the scientific and technical explosion *has not* stayed in once place for that whole time. But it has (unsurprisingly) moved between places in fairly close cultural contact: Germany and Italy, then the U.K., arguably Germany again for a very short time, and then the U.S. after World War II. In a stunning act of stupidity the U.S. now seems to be doing its level best to *get rid of it.*
[4]Really its somewhat more complicated than this: generally they were trying to keep in much more closely than that. But as in the previous note, there was the most "leakage" across groups in close cultural contact. The U.S., of course, was founded by British people already fairly far along this process, for example, so it inherited quite a bit of scientific and technological knowledge from its founding.
[5] Note many of these organizations are indeed old enough for that to be plausible--though of course lots of other factors were at play.
That’s a gish gallop of nonsense. Reported for this comment
“ This is exactly the sort of muddled thinking that makes this possible: indeed this sounds like exactly the view one would hear from a white supremacist”
In any case you haven’t really made your case. If white supremacism was historically due to the triumph of the west, then regardless of skin colour now, everybody in the west are beneficiaries of the previous supremacism. Not that the organisations I mentioned are minority white countries yet. It’s just another way of saying western supremacy. This is the Chinese view. And it’s the correct view.
(And like a lot of the American driven debate on this your definition of white people is very narrowly focused on the US and a few Western European countries. All of Eastern Europe has a totally different history).
I’m also fairy content with western supremacy being ended, as I don’t really have a problem with China. Which is likely to not vassalize Europe like America is doing right now.
I'm sorry you didn't like the comment--I didn't much like how it came out either, as evidenced by the slightly later comment saying as much. But calling it a "gish gallop" seems like a frankly bizarre misuse of the term.
Like, first and foremost, this wasn't a debate. You asked a question, I made a somewhat-clumsy stab at answering it. Nobody was scoring points, no prizes were awarded. If you found the comment long-winded and unhelpful you could have always just, y'know, *stopped reading it.* I do that all the time. Just say "oops, this isn't worth more of my time" and move on with your life. Even if it were a debate, I wasn't making a bunch of independent points: more errors would just mean more points of attack for the central point I was trying to convey. (Also calling anything written a "Gash Gallop" is kind of inherently silly.)
"In any case you haven’t really made your case. "
Again, not a debate. I wasn't *trying* to make a case. I was trying to lay out a viewpoint that you seemed unaware of. Your comment was explicitly talking about what other people believe and how they talk about it: I was following suit and doing the same. I wasn't attempting to lay out my own beliefs and worldview around the subject, much less persuade anyone of them (though of course they can't help but inform what I write). My apologies for not making that clearer: I thought in the context of the conversation it would be quite plain.
"Reported for this comment..."
You can use the report button however you see fit, but again this seems rather silly. I hope you didn't think I was calling *you* a white supremacist: that would certainly have been hostile and out of line. But I think it should be pretty clear that I'm criticizing the *idea* your presenting, not its presenter. I quite like that this space doesn't allow for personal attacks. But a space where people cannot call out and criticize bad *ideas* is a space in which no interesting or consequential discussion may ever happen.
It’s a weird situation, but not unheard of. Putin is describing the war in Ukraine as being one against “Nazism.” To anyone not in Russia this reads mostly as farcical. But the Nazis had some pretty untermenschy perspectives on the Slavs as well, and that plus the, well, millions of Slavs they killed has lead to at least some credence within Russian borders for a definition of “Nazism” that also includes “hating Russians” alongside the “hating Jews” and “beliefs in racial purity/enforcement of racial hierarchy by an authoritarian state” that we in non-Russian world associate with the term. Of course, now that Russia is at war, given the domestic propaganda value of “we are once again threatened by Nazism from the West” as a domestic rallying cry, the Russian government is really putting its shoulder behind the Russia-specific conception of the term at home, which means in term that we see more of it popping up abroad.
I think you’ve identified a similar structure with respect to “white supremacy.” In the context of a diverse nation like the US, with its history of various forms of race-delineated oppression and power dynamics (slavery, segregation, Chinese exclusion act, Japanese internment, & what have you), we’ve worried about and developed language and expectations around “white supremacy” as a domestic ill – the understandable threat that, within an ethnically pluralistic democracy one ethnic group sets itself in a position of privilege and then doles that privilege out to its perceived racial ingroup while kneecapping its perceived racial outgroups. This is, as the kids used to say, “bad, m’kay” for the old republic, so we’ve got a history of fighting it and some pretty robust and well-broadcast language about how shitty it is.
Simultaneously, though, the non-US portions of the world were living through colonialism and its aftermath. Although colonialism need not be a “white supremacist” construct per se (see, e.g. Japan), as experienced by most of the actual globe it took the form of dominance over the non-European by the European. So there’s sort of a way you can look at international relations, from the colonization of the Americas to the Opium wars to the scramble for Africa to French nuclear testing in Polynesia etc etc etc, if you’re sitting in the post-colonial part of the world and say “looks like white supremacy to me.”
Add to that that China now has its own quasi-colonial/imperialist projects going (see, e.g. their work to corner the cobalt market in the DRC), which means that they are actively seeking language by which to relate to post-colonial nations (“wouldn’t you rather strike a blow against white supremacy by selling your minerals to a Chinese company, instead of reinforcing your nation’s colonial history of being oppressed by whites by selling to the French or the Americans?”) as well as a cudgel with which to push back on the west on the global stage (“hey American radicals, your country is preventing us from controlling the South China Sea – they say it’s something about a ‘rules based order’ but would you act up about it, maybe, if I call it ‘white supremacy’ instead?”). So China has been pushing this internationalist conception of “white supremacy” pretty hard of late.
Consider also that the Chinese domestic market has had a *lot* of exposure to media explaining to it that “Imperialism” is basically the worst thing one nation can do to another and China is a victim of it, and although it’s access to Western media is limited, they get more than enough of it to have seen the “fighting White Supremacy is good and heroic”-style media that we’ve been producing for the better half of 75 years. It’s no wonder, then, that the Chinese government prefers to explain its international products to its domestic audience (and that audience prefers to think of those projects) as “modern-day China, fighting White Supremacy” rather than “modern-day Chinese Imperialism.”
Those kind of factors, all moving in tandem, get you a weird world where, although different peoples may be using the same language, they very much don’t mean the same thing. A US President might want to “fight White Supremacy” domestically, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to dismantle the world bank. He will, however, continue to make use of and propogate the term, so to speak, since it makes sense for his dialogues with his domestic audience. He cares more for clarity in his communications with them than for any small secondary confusions it might create for a Chinese audience.
>Of course, now that Russia is at war, given the domestic propaganda value of “we are once again threatened by Nazism from the West” as a domestic rallying cry, the Russian government is really putting its shoulder behind the Russia-specific conception of the term at home, which means in term that we see more of it popping up abroad.
Just to clarify, the opposition to nazism in Russia didn't begin in 2022 or even 2014. The Soviet Union's sacrifices in the Great Patriotic War (less that regrettable Nazi collaboration in the early war we don't speak of) are their only successful national myth in modern history. Communism didn't work out, the robber capitalism of the 1990's worked out even less (though that was no reason to actually abandon it, just that it didn't get to talk at press conferences anymore), and so Russia has to fall back on what happened after June 22nd, 1941. Painting everyone who opposes Russia as a Nazi comes as naturally as for Israel painting everyone that opposes them an antisemite, or to paint every critic of the USA as anti-American And How Could You Forget What We Did For You In WW2?
True. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the original post.
What I meant to communicate, by my observation that the Russian government "is really putting its shoulder behind" the Russian conception lately, was that wartime pressures have lead the Russian government to push on/amp up a pre-existing cultural narrative, not that the narrative is newly created for purposes of the war.
At the most basic level, sure, though I think it's more complex than that. Rulers need legitimacy, and declaring yourself the heir of a historical responsibility that is relevant for the future is one of the ways to do that. The mission of the USA used to be to free the oppressed from the tyranny of the kings of Europe; with the decline of those institutions to little more than quaint amusement parks, that doesn't quite have the same pull it used to have. So, beginning with WW1 and in full force since WW2, the mission of the US became to spread freedom and democracy all over the globe, even if the beneficiaries weren't 110% on board. The Nazis were, of course, the archetypical opponent of that mission; the Nazis became almost-Americans (save for that whole Holocaust issue) and thus friends shortly thereafter, and Communists took their place.
The deciding factor for the enduring popularity of anti-Nazism, for the USA and especially for Russia (with a little whitewashing), is that WW2 was as close to a just war as it gets for them. Neither the proxy wars of the Cold War, nor the "Wars on Terror" that became the fashion in the 2000s, left anyone looking particularly good, so WW2 as the current legitimization it is.
Are these synagogues "neonazi" by Russian standards, or by Western standards? Because, yeah, the Russian definition of "Nazi" is someone who wants to kill Russians, and after three and a half years of bloody war, I'm pretty sure "a whole lot of Russians need to die" is a fairly common position among Ukraine's Jews. And Christians, and Atheists, and Buddhists, and I think two of the three Ukrainian Rastafarians are on board with a fair bit of Russian-killing at this point.
But if you're writing in English for a western audience, you probably ought not use "Nazi" unless you mean the Western definition, or unless you're very explicit that you're using the parochial Russian definition.
Notice how "Tori Swain" disappeared and this "Shimmer" thing showed up. Same torrent of crap, all with a single distinct undertone: "Russia good, Ukraine bad".
I think I'm discussing neonazi as a Ukrainian definition. Aka "the people who threatened Zelensky with murder if he stopped bombing Donetsk."
I'm pretty sure most Western people would say that a synagogue displaying swastikas is pretty neonazi -- but I'm loudly disagreeing with the idea that they know what-the-f--- they're talking about. Neonazi in Ukraine means something different... (There's also the idea of Azov being funded by Jews... so, when your neonazis are funded by Jews, ?!? -- Westerners heads explode).
After three and a half years of bloody war, most of the Ukraine would take a headshot at Zelensky, if he wasn't protected. Yes, maybe, some of them are "nationalists" (but if so, which nation? Donetsk has a substantial fraction of "We're Russian!" Transcarpathia says "We're Hungarian! Please, orban, come rescue us!").... but when your average front line age of soldier is over 50 years old, you do not have a country that is "hungering for Russian blood". (Accuracy compels me to say that there is some form of ritual cannibalism of dead Russians going on (not involving murder). I'm pretty sure this is both sides do it, so no finger pointing. This is some sort of "lucky" ritual that I'm pretty sure no one endorses. Peasant logic).
I’d largely agree. It seems to me that the US and the West in general has largely crippled itself with this rhetoric, the use of which is obviously going to be exported and amplified, particularly if US presidents use it.
What else could be used here? Just generic anti racist rhetoric maybe?
I think that cedes too much of the field. The dual use of 'white supremacy' in domestic and international contexts is a communications challenge, to be sure, but the domestic taboos around white supremacy, together with the domestic-use language those taboos create (and which simultaneously maintains those taboos) has enough domestic utility IMO that we'd be doing ourselves more harm than good if we dropped them just because others abroad are using them in a different way that creates some communication friction for us. The Soviet Union had its own ideas of what "freedom" meant, but that didn't mean we just abandoned the field and tried to find another word.
And besides, there's no formulation we could move to that couldn't just as easily be twisted the same way. We could start saying "anti-race-hierarchism" or "race-neutral power distribution" or what have you this week, and by next week Chinese messaging could just shift to the new model and explain to developing world leaders that the rules-based order is a racial hierarchy or creating a non-neutral power distribution between races or whatever.
> has enough domestic utility IMO that we'd be doing ourselves more harm than good if we dropped them just because others abroad are using them in a different way that creates some communication friction for us
But the term has historically meant European and later western hegemony across the world. Not discrimination in one country. A quick google and I find that the general consensus of the academic left is that white supremacy is in fact these very institutions I am criticising here
I also see that there’s also criticism of Brexit as white supremacism, but if you take whiteness to be something above national or ethnic identity then that makes no sense
It's commonly used as a magic-word argument, it has a different meaning in some academic/activist circles that has little to do with (say) skinheads with prison swastika tattoos or genteel racists refusing nonwhites access to their country club.
Not sure what you're arguing here. Terms have different meanings depending on the audience. I didn't know that for "white supremacy" until now, but it makes sense; why should Chinese netizens care about American internal politics when the behaviour of the Western alliance wrt China is much more relevant to Chinese interests? Do the Chinese have any obligation to use a different term so that Americans who know both uses aren't confused?
If you see white supremacy as manifested in western values, then that doesn’t work. And “not necessarily by them” wouldn’t excuse the security council makeup anyway.
Most of the world does though. What’s a fairly radical use of terminology which should be confined to the academic left exploded into political normality.
It would as if the Romans, post the social war (when Italian states fought for Roman citizenship), decided in order to end discrimination on the peninsula to “end Latin supremacy” and found that the terminology was used by enemies of Rome.
They wouldn’t, of course. We would find it really strange if there were thundering debates in the Senate about ending Roman or Latin supremacy.
I see a large number of essays from people offering dating advice where those people are*not* married with children.
I'm not surprised these essays exist (randoms love having opinions), but I *am* surprised that there is any demand for them. It's the equivalent of "I've lost over a thousand games of poker, let me give you some tips on how to play." Why would anyone take seriously the advice of someone who has failed at the primary goal of dating?
"Why would anyone take seriously the advice of someone who has failed at the primary goal of dating?"
Scott actually had a good essay on this. If you are healthy, it is hard for you to teach people with cerebral palsy how to walk. It just comes too natural to you. It is people with cerebral palsy who did a ton of practice to learn to walk who can do it well.
The problem is the picture is too muddled. Consider Andrew Tate, physically very fit, lots of money, pretty clothes. That is sexy, especially in a poor country like Romania. Everything else he says can be ignored compared to the importance of these. Someone looking like Danny DeVito working flipping burgers will not find a lot of dates by acting tough and negging and whatnot. Women are generally less visual than men, but visual stuff is more easily communicated than other stuff, as other stuff implies 1:1 learning, while visual stuff is like just going to a music club and being seen by a hundred women at once.
I used to be a (very low level) body-builder in a country in which that thing was fairly new and not widespread. I got women by just going to a music club wearing a tank top. There was always someone who decided she wants someone muscular, it was really easy.
> Consider Andrew Tate, physically very fit, lots of money, pretty clothes. That is sexy, especially in a poor country like Romania. Everything else he says can be ignored compared to the importance of these.
Andrew Tate is rich because he is a pimp who used the lover boy method. It was quite literally his job, for many years, to seduce women. Him and his brother thus can offer genuine insights into seduction - take "no" for an answer and move on immediately, the only way to sleep with a virgin girl is time, build time as quickly as possible with your would-be partner(s) (e.g. invite them along for work things, invite multiple girls out to the club at the same time), use an opening line that stands out from the crowd, etc.
The main problem is that his end goal is, y'know, to be a pimp, so some of his advice is irrelevant or even counterproductive to finding someone you would like to build your life with. For example, does it really get you closer to marriage if you tell 5 different girls from a dating site that you're going out to the club with some friends (editor's note: the "friends" are the other four girls), would they like to come, and then also use them as social proof on other girls at the club? Are the sorts of women that a pimp is interested in - young, easy to manipulate, etc - the sort you want to marry? Etc.
In the specific case of Tate, there's also the further consideration that his success case for giving advice isn't "the people who take his advice become more fulfilled and self-actualized according to their goals", it's "as many young men as possible share his videos and give him money".
The kind of advice that maximizes the latter goal is not the advice which helps his listeners, regardless of whether they want to be pimps or family men.
Surely there's an important distinction between advice on how to pull/successfully ask someone out, on the one hand; and advice on how to develop a relationship into something long term (with or without kids). There's no particular reason why someone good at one of these should be good at the other.
But there is a very particular reason why someone who was bad at asking people out would also be bad at getting a long term relationship. That is, a) every long term relationship starts with some version of asking someone out and b) having the confidence to ask women out is important to being successful in a relationship.
Not every long term relationship starts with some version of asking someone out. Sometimes you use intermediaries, and sometimes it's "so and so really likes you" (which is a prompt for the less confident).
Very few people meet through friends these days. In fact most people meet online, so maybe the skill of asking people out is less important, so my post was incorrect.
But a man who is unable to get women to sleep with him generally is going to have a much harder time getting into an LTR than a man who can. Reasons he can't pull will often be reasons that he can't attract a long term mate.
> basically nobody is “qualified” to talk about dating bc if you’re successful then you don’t have enough experience and if you’re not then why should anyone listen to you
Besides, we just look at one videoclip from a Professional Sexy Guy like Eros Ramazotti, and we see it boils down to elegant clothes and showing emotion.
> Why would anyone take seriously the advice of someone who has failed at the primary goal of dating?
To Devil's Advocate this position, 'succeeding' at dating ends the game for monogamous people, but there's insight in 'failure'. It's entirely reasonable to think that someone who's dated a hundred people with varying but less-than-total 'success' might know more about the subject than someone who married early. I wouldn't be inclined to take job-hunting advice from someone who applied to a civil service job once, right out of university, and has had a steady career for twenty years.
Note also that I said 'varying success' above. Dating isn't a single-shot game with a binary outcome. Relationships can be deeper or more shallow, be fleeting or last for years. From the perspective of _dating_, a long-term relationship is probably only epsilon less successful than a short-term marriage.
"failed at the primary goal of dating" Interesting cultural assumption. Not everyone who is dating is trying to get married or have children. In my experience most people in th dating pool at any given point don't have that as a specific goal in mind.
That's probably one of the things which makes dating difficult. You don't just need to find mutual attraction, you need to find someone with compatible goals.
There were probably other reasons for breakups... but "wants kids eventually" was at around 95% of my high school gifted class, so... I think it depends on who you're talking to.
Cash poker is a long game. It also matters how much you win vs how much you lose. A proper poker strategy involves folding preflop about 80% of the time. Moreover, the variance is so high that the standard deviation is 3.2BB/100 (big blinds per 100 hands) in a smaple size of 100000. Note that the rake is also very high; poker is a tragic game where almost everyone is a long term loser.
Surprisingly, media from poker players who are losing IS in demand — memes, relatable scenarios, faulty but easy to understand hand analysis. Also, grifters (for a lack of better word, I don't think it's bad) who got so good at selling their content and feeding the egos of a certain type of poker player with easy-to-digest, pill-sized advice packages, that they haven't dedicated enough time at being great at poker. That makes sense though, because the income from being a poker influencer can make losing poker sustainable.
We’ve previously discussed Ellen Langer in some hidden open threads: one of the most prominent academic social psychologists in the US, the ‘mother of mindfulness’. Unfortunately, the main study on which her claims of ‘mind-body unity’ are based might as well not exist.
She appeared last week on the Lives Well Lived podcast, interviewed by Peter Singer, and listening to it, I felt the need to put my notes together an actually publish this.
Since the combination of social psychology, the replication crisis, and Peter Singer are of interest to this thread, I hope it won’t be out of place to share my own article here, a thorough look into Langer’s infamous ‘Counterclockwise’ study and its recent elaborations: https://nicoroman.substack.com/p/harvards-mother-of-mindfulness-is
Yup, Gelman has been beating this drum for ages: his co-author, Brown, also gave feedback on the article.
Not aware of any past publication specifically pointing out these issues all in one place, though. There may be some use for a more widespread 'literature review' on the mind-body unity studies, starting with this one, to trace just how removed they are from reality. It would be Losada & Frederickson x10
I'm looking for a book recommendation (or extended essays) about the history of non-Egyptian North Africa between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Muslim conquests.
It's a complete blank in my historical knowledge and it's been less than obvious how to fix that.
I don't know much about the history of the region in general, but for the Byzantine (re-)conquest, Ian Hughes' "Beliarius: The Last Roman General" has a good section on the campaign. Or, if you'd prefer primary sources, Procopius' "History of the Wars" spends a book or two on the campaign. And Robert Graves (of "I, Claudius" fame) wrote a novel, "Count Belisarius", which naturally covers the titular character's campaigns, including in Africa.
The low dose lithium orotate (currently sold as a supplement) to prevent/treat Alzheimer’s concept seems like potentially a big deal. It seems that the orotate salt bound to the lithium is key.
How fast could human trials be initiated? Who would pay for them in the absence of a patent? Why was lithium carbonate chosen over lithium orotate in the treatment of bipolar? Do national governments ever jointly fund international drug trials with high potential or does that introduce too much friction in the process?
A few months ago, my Dad had a stroke and lost the ability to care for himself, along with suffering an altered and diminished mental state. My Mom decided to put him in hospice. He passed away four weeks later. A friend recommended reading "Who By Very Slow Decay," presumably to help me accept that this was a better outcome than lingering longer with medical interventions.
I have some observations (as a non-medical guy) from the "let nature take its course" side of the fence:
"Artificial life saving measures" includes things as minor as a hydration IV. Dad's advance medical directive specified he did not want artificial interventions to extend his life, and in the event of a situation like this, he only wanted palliative care. To my mind, this means not wanting ventilators, AEDs, and other majorly intrusive measures. It can actually be much broader in scope.
The hospice's only real tool is morphine. The doctors at the hospital encouraged us to transfer Dad to hospice, and talked up how the hospice had better tools to make him comfortable, and how he would have a great pain management plan. It turned out the only tool the hospice had was morphine. Dad's breathing seems labored? Morphine. He seems scared and confused? Morphine. Morphine was the answer to every problem.
Deciding to let nature take its course is harder when the medical team is divided over whether the condition is terminal. A minority of the doctors and specialists who examined Dad thought he could recover. Dad couldn't stay in the hospital forever though, so he had to go to rehab or hospice. After several family arguments, hospice won out.
On the whole, I suspect that keeping Dad on artificial life support (even as little as IV fluids and nutrients) based on the slim hope that he could recover, probably would be a worse outcome than letting him die sooner in hospice. But it wasn't a slam-dunk decision either. Life and death are complex things, I guess.
Thanks for sharing this, and I'm sorry for you and your father's ordeal. That is a bit of an eye-opener - it's unpleasantly surprising that hydration IVs would count. I am going to keep that in mind for these sorts of things. Severe dehydration feels awful, and water+electrolytes is such an easy miracle cure (and so fast-acting) that the idea of instead just papering it over with more morphine is disturbing.
I would read it as "probably around a million, but if we're lucky then it could be two million. Two million is possible, but don't get your hopes up, it'll probably be around one."
I guess I am just too dense. To my simple mind, "up to" seems clearly to refer to whatever the maximum is, nothing to do with the minimum . . . especially since the minimum is specifically stated to be $100K.
Yes, but people do it all the time, maximum and minimum. I was once buying a house; the real estate agent said, "I believe the owner would accept a minimum offer between $150K and $175K." Gee, I wondered to myself, which minimum should I offer?
We're venturing into very nitpicky territory here but it says on their site "We provide funding up to £1 million (and in some cases, more)" and also that "The Alignment Fund will award grants ranging from £50,000 to £1,000,000."
So plausibly the $1-2m formulation was to cover "up to $1.34m (or even more)". Seems reasonable. The floor is $67k though not $100k.
Oh, sure, it's nitpicky, I was just noting a personal pet peeve. However, I was commenting only on the formulation in the post itself, not the website it was summarizing, so I am not clear how the website is relevant. But that's probably just because I am so slow.
I was describing my own nit-pickiness rather yours, and was just chiming in in in case the website gave any explanation to the formula. Given that the limit was described as "£1m (or even more)" I think this did offer some light on the formulation used (the maximum is uncertain but in most cases it's $1.3m).
For people who didn't look up the story: two people who resemble a man and a woman find they're really into each other. After the first meeting, they exchange recordings of each other rather than meeting again in person.
"For roughly $11,000, robot companies from China to California – with names like RealDolls, Lovedoll, TrueCompanion, Lumidolls, Silicon Wives – can sell you AI-enhanced, customized robot dolls for sexual purposes.
Buyers get to choose everything from hair and eye colour to the internal texture of its robot vagina and appearance of its labia (there are nipple and labia menus). It can have ‘smart skin’, so that it doesn’t feel like cold dead latex. Consumers can program its personality – cheerful, moody, sensual, jealous, chatty – or program it to be silent.
RealDolls are programmed to say: “We blink, we move, we speak, and we do it just for you.”
AI means these female-appearing machines can interact with their purchaser in a humanoid manner, rather than just being a next-level blow-up doll.
The market for sex robots continues to grow – industry analysis shows how the global sex tech market is projected to reach $107,850 billion in 2030, up from $36,555bn in 2023, an increase of 16.7pc annually.
...Anthropologist Roanne Van Voorst, author of Six In A Bed, has extensively researched sex robots, including visiting a sex doll brothel in Austria (where she had the opportunity to have sex with a male sex doll, but declined).
“I’m afraid I very largely agree with Professor Richardson,” she says. “There now exists a narrative that these dolls will soon be very normal, and that they are not harmful, but I believe that it is the industry pushing this narrative with the aim of popularising the [sex robots] and making more money from them.
“I do believe they are harmful, as they stereotype and objectify women’s bodies, and offer a very unrealistic version of sex: one in which the sexual partner is always ‘to be taken’, one in which clumsiness and awkwardness do not exist, and one in which vulnerability is not possible.
“There may be exceptions, but these are minority groups: I can imagine that prisoners who will likely never leave jail again but are wrestling with a lot of sexual frustration could use dolls, likewise people with sexual fetishes who would otherwise harm a human being.”
Dr Van Voorst recounts one individual’s atypical encounter with a sex doll, purchased for non-sexual reasons: “Once, I met a woman who identifies as asexual. She bought herself a doll because she felt it is impossible to have romantic relationships – the men in her life couldn’t cope with never having sex.
“This made her feel lonely, and having the doll around, sitting next to it on a sofa or touching its hand, decreased her sense of loneliness. Her story touched me. That having been said, the question is whether there would not be another option for her – a cat, maybe?”
Don't worry, now you can have both your AI Ada and your robot sex doll version of her!
Just doesn't make sense to me. Where I live human prostitutes get low ratings if they do not simulate enthusiasm very well. It feels good to feel sexy and wanted, even if it is fake. That is kind of the whole point, sex a "trophy", as proof of attractiveness.
I would say in Budapest in 1993 nobody talked about consent, and yet we did not rape anyone, because we understood that to truly get the trophy, there should be something that todays people would call enthusiastic consent. Real seduction, real passionate buy-in.
I am afraid, anyone who likes sex with dolls might also rape someone via spiking a drink, because this mechanism is just not there. This is just a dangerous mindset.
I think the idea is that you can program the doll to be the personality you want - so if you want bubbly, "I love you so much, I can't wait to be with you" type dialogue you get that, and if you want "stand-offish but I can't resist *you*" type, you can get that.
And if you already have an AI girlfriend/boyfriend, like the Replika instances, just download them into the preferred body. The best of both worlds!
I think the idea of this (right now) is for people who can get the money together but don't have a social life and don't want to hire prostitutes as that smacks too much of "desperate loser who can't get a real girlfriend". With their doll, they can have that girlfriend, or at the very least, only the doll witnesses them being the desperate loser who has to pay for sex that everyone else gets for free.
I like your idea of AI companions that are designed to train users at getting more comfortable with non-AI companions and encourage them to get out and practice. To be really effective I think it would have to be in VR to get the exposure effect(similar to the oVRcome app).
Pertinent C.S. Lewis quote here. From "That Hideous Strength", published 1945:
“Who is called Sulva? …Where are the cold marriages?”
Ransom replied, “Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. …On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
And it only took us eighty years to turn this from fiction into nearly-there fact!
"It's been over seven years since Joaquin Oliver was gunned down at his Parkland high school, one of 17 victims killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018.
With the use of artificial intelligence, he just did his first press interview.
Why it matters: Joaquin's parents are using AI to give their son a new voice, which they plan to use in their yearslong campaign against gun violence.
In an interview Monday on "The Jim Acosta Show," an AI rendering of Joaquin's face advocated for "stronger gun control laws, mental health support and community engagement."
"I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It's important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone."
...This isn't the first time the Olivers have backed the use of AI to send a political message using Joaquin's likeness.
In a 2020 video promoting voter registration efforts, an AI version of Joaquin talks about not being able to vote in the presidential election and his frustration with the lack of action to prevent more shootings.
The other side: Oliver responded to critics in an Instagram video saying Joaquin "has a lot of things to say" and "thanks to AI, we can bring him back."
If they want the AI replica for doing publicity, it's weird (I speak as part of the potential audience), but not as weird as if they wanted it for companionship.
There's that bit in _A Grief Observed_ about not having actual memories of a lost person, just more or less incomplete memories of memories.
I'm facing a tough medical decision, and someone on a previous open thread suggested I try and nerdsnipe someone into looking at the evidence. I worry a little this is somewhat against the norms of these Open Threads, and I apologise if it is, but I thought it might be worth a shot:
1. My problem
I've had 3 adhesive small obstructions (ASBOs) in 4 years. An ASBO is a mechanical blockage of the small intestine caused by intra-abdominal adhesions (scar bands), most often after surgery/inflammation. Some people also develop chronic adhesion-related abdominal pain between episodes; others are symptom-free between acute obstructions. My first episode seemed to be caused by a congenital adhesion, it required a laparotomy where the adhesion was released; my subsequent episodes were managed non-operatively, and are likely due to the post-surgical adhesions.
2. Current medical practice
When an ASBO episode occurs, it is sometimes managed non-operatively, but other times requires emergency surgery, which involves releasing the adhesions (called 'adhesiolysis') causing the obstruction, and sometimes removing the obstructed part of the bowel. The default is to watch-and-wait; avoid elective adhesiolysis because surgery itself can form new adhesions. Elective surgery is usually for chronic pain that’s clearly adhesion-related, or (rarely) for patients with extremely frequent recurrences (e.g., every few months).
This paper proposes a a preventive approach: use an imaging technique to map adhesions; perform planned adhesiolysis, and place 'barriers' to hinder adhesion re-formation. In their 5-year cohort, elective surgery + barriers was associated with ≈3–4× fewer ASBO readmissions vs non-operative management. However, the cohort comprised only patients with chronic abdominal pain
4. Questions
Adhesion barriers were not used in my initial laparotomy. I think the case that the authors make in the Discussion--for this approach being suitable even for people with recurrent ASBO who don't have chronic pain--makes sense. I think the fact of chronic abdominal pain is not necessary for the elective procedure to reduce future ASBO recurrence risk via the mechanism they propose, ie, barriers preventing adhesion re-formation. Some of the authors are involved in a larger scale RCT comparing their approach to the current wait-and-watch approach (https://kce.fgov.be/en/kce-trials/funded-trials/aware-elective-adhesiolysis-vs-wait-and-see-policy-to-prevent-recurrence-of-adhesive-small-bowel) which begins this September and ends in 2029. I think the evidence as it stands right now is sufficient to weight in favour of the elective approach, but this is pretty much my first time reading any kind of scientific literature. Some concerns I have are:
a. The sample size is too small to capture a meaningful effect
b. The paper is misrepresenting the existing evidence they cite in their favour
Fwiw, I've reached out to the corresponding author of the study (ten Broek), as well as other surgeons who have published on the topic of ASBO, and ten Broek has been the only one who endorsed generalising the results to people without chronic pain; the others have either deferred to ten Broek on the question, or said the evidence is insufficient to justify elective surgery without chronic pain
You'll find most people underestimate the side effects and "null response" of surgery (let alone "this surgery makes the whole issue worse"). The doctors are probably telling you "surgery is dangerous, and to be used as a last resort." Which is good advice.
It is unclear if I can fix this with diet - things like smaller meals and lower fibre intake might reduce the risk but there's no good evidence; doctors generally refrain from making any dietary recommendations. I'd love to avoid surgery altogether, but it seems like past ASBOs predict upwards of a 30% lifetime probability of future ASBOs, any of which may require emergency surgery; the paper is making the case that planned surgery now might be a better gamble than future emergency surgery
"...doctors generally refrain from making any dietary recommendations."
I can't tell if you mean that doctors generally refrain from making dietary recommendations about/for ASOB or in general. But it is quite common for doctors to recommend the DASH Diet for folks with high blood pressure. Folks doing cardiac rehab get dietary recommendations, too.
If you believe that this lack of recommendation is ASOB specific then I have no advice. But it is quite possible to get dietary advice from doctors for some conditions so if ASOB is one of those conditions then maybe you just haven't encountered the doctors who will provide dietary advice?
"God, I can't tell you how much the "There's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "your head gets screwy when your apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit,? The tiger? I've got to keep things nice and clean for the tiger."
Tentative theory (and I'm not saying this approach would work for everyone), These days, a lot of zoo animals get more consideration than a high proportion of people. Tigers are especially cool.
No one expects a tiger to prove their moral superiority by enduring bad conditions.
Zoo keepers have relatively abundant resources compared to most parents, so there aren't issues of who's in charge compared to parents who can't do everything their kids want, and who are likely to resist demands, whether reasonable or not.
I just remembered a former job, long ago, where I felt trapped. Once in a while I walked in a circle in a small empty room and muttered: "The cat is angry. He wants to be released from the cage." Then I quit, and my mental health improved a lot. :)
That's one of Jordan Peterson's 12 rules: "Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping."
It really does help. Years ago I was trying and failing to get enough dietary fiber, which I needed to do for health reasons. In my fiber research I learned more about the gut microbiome, and what kinds of foods those microbes like to eat. I started thinking about my gut bacteria as a pet I was trying to take care of, like a fish. I wouldn't forget to feed the fish! Somehow that made me more enthusiastic and conscientious about eating fiber regularly. "Got to feed my gut pets! Don't want them to go hungry."
Imagining yourself as an outside observer can be very useful for people who are too hard on themselves. One of the strategies used in cognitive behavioral therapy when people think things like "I'm worthless" is to reframe it using the criteria of "Would you say that to a friend? Would you even say that to a stranger?"
It's sort of an inverted golden rule too, treat yourself as you treat others
Assuming the current fertility trends continue for a long time[1], what does the eventual stable state look like? Like, do we end up with the population everywhere dominated by groups that have high fertility ("and the Amish shall inherit the Earth")? Does fertility rebound at some point when population density is sufficiently low? It's not obvious that this must happen--perhaps the same social/economic/cultural/whatever forces that lead to very low TFR will affect even the high-fertility groups. (IIRC, Mormons now have relatively low TFR, as do Catholics.) You can also imagine some truly bitter political / social conflicts as the wealthy high-education minority and the poorer, lower-education ever-growing majority fight over resources (more schools or better old-folks care)?
Maybe we get improved healthcare that staves off aging for longer, maybe prevents much of the age-related mental decline and the horrors of dementia for most people. That can stretch things out, but not forever. Diminishing returns apply to most everything, so maybe in the world of 2125, the LeBron James equivalent keeps playing well into his 60s and people are still doing cutting-edge science in their 90s.
Also (because this is now baked into most of the developed world) what does the actual world look like with a rapidly falling population and the median age being like 60+? I haven't really seen anyone coming to terms with what this will look like. What does the transition look like as most of the people from higher-TFR times die off?
I think demographic collapse is our future now. Maybe it could be headed off in the US in principle (imagining some new Great Awakening that turns everyone into old-style Mormons/Catholics or current-day Amish/Orthodox Jews), but maybe not in Korea or Italy--there are just not all that many girls of childbearing age available.
[1] How AI plays with all this is another question. Obv. if we all get paperclipped by hostile AI, it doesn't matter what our TFR is, and if humans are unable to do much science anymore because even the Gausses and Newtons and von Neumanns just don't have the mental horsepower to keep up, then the loss of young scientists with supple minds doesn't matter so much.
I'll say one thing I put into my future-based SF I'm writing that I haven't seen anyone's thought of yet: pawn shops will be filled with gold and precious gems because of supply/demand; museums will hand out works of art to approved applicants to care for in their homes, because the alternative is just to stack them up in warehouses. Antiques are ubiquitous and worthless, but people still like the cachet of them.
What can't you do research on, and why is that? There are significant chunks of topics that are "banned research" and thus not discoverable online. (A related question is: who keeps murdering the scientists?)
Any medical or psychological research in involuntary human test subjects. The first one that popped into my head is "The Forbidden Experiment", the name given to experiments where infants isolated from human contact are studied for their capacity for language and cognitive development. Once upon a time these experiments were conducted on purpose, nowadays it's only brought out when a "wild child" is discovered who had either been abandoned in the wilderness or seriously deprived of human affection.
There are more limited forms of this experiment, sometimes conducted by happenstance. Imagine a child with perpetual ear infections. He's not getting nearly the oral tradition, but still getting affection (some at least). Guy I know who went through this came out with a custom pictoral language. Speaking English is always translating for him.
That paper argues that FDR had Guillaine-Barre Syndrome instead of polio, which is medically interesting but definitely not deserving of all this "ooh what aren't they telling you" bullshit.
Really? That seems to a question that is unceasingly and eternally asked all the time; by the media, by medical professionals, and by random friends and relatives.
There isn't another question that gets asked more frequently in the cultural conversation, I don't think. 'Diet and Exercise' can and will fix absolutely everything that ails an individual these days. No exceptions.
It might depend on locale. In my neck of the US, I get the sense this is now a gauche question to ask; instead I hear "are you taking $drug/supplement?" or whether you took action against whatever institution did not install allowances for whatever's currently falling apart on your body. There seems to be this default assumption that individual habits are not at fault, or at least, eating and exercise habits. A person might still be considered to have a habit of not taking their vitamins or whatever.
As you might guess, I'd *prefer* to be asked about eating right and exercising.
That's a significant difference. Is this a recent change?
Here, the locus of control traditionally has been and still is firmly laid at the feet of the individual, and all things are solvable if you would only eat right and exercise more. Supplements etc are treated as being a minor sub-category of 'eating right'.
Individual behaviours are still very much at fault, and every doctor or medical professional will not hesitate to tell you so.
The impression I get is that the fault you incur in not taking some drug is even more onerous than what you incur for not eating right or exercising, because a drug is easy. It's possible that this is coupled with the assumption that a doctor who can sell you a drug gets compensation from the drug supplier, and gets nothing if he convinces you to eat or exercise better.
If this is true, then it makes sense for the doctor to favor the drug advice over the traditional advice, and it makes sense for the drug supplier to buy ads that encourage viewers to see nothing wrong with using their drug to fix their problem while making no mention of eating right or exercising. (Admittedly, this is a cynical angle, and I don't usually go for cynical explanations, but this does have the advantage of aligning with the incentives I notice.) In such an environment, "have you been eating right and exercising?" indeed becomes deprived of attention.
Now, if it's brought up, a doctor will certainly say eating right and exercising is fundamentally important to health... but I think he'll still try to sell you the Ozempic. (He won't sell many drugs if he denies the other claim, after all.)
This sounds like we are experiencing the different responses to the different incentives in our respective medical systems.
I follow your reasoning, even if it is a bit bleak. Thanks for taking the time to explain it because I doubt if I would have figured it out for myself, since I was working from a completely different set of assumptions; much more optimistic and much less focussed on drug sales.
In the light of this new information, being repeatedly told to eat right and exercise does indeed seem like a pretty solid option.
What does (or should) degrowth look like not as an ideology, but as an emergent phenomenon because of lower TFR? I see a lot of doomsaying, but the solutions are all focused on raising TFR instead of accepting it as a reality and grappling with the consequences.
The road to zero is grappling with the consequences. Electric cars are grappling with the consequences. Imagine a world where oil refinement no longer makes sense? I mean, we have all of this.
That nobody is explicitly telling you that they're planning ways to depopulate the world should not surprise you. Find better sources.
> but the solutions are all focused on raising TFR instead of accepting it as a reality and grappling with the consequences
Think of it this way - whichever country / culture solves this will literally own the future light cone. Their people, ideas, and practices will extend into the future, and nobody else's will.
Combine that with the vast majority of voters / citizens hating degrowth empirically, and you have a handy recipe for guaranteeing focus on fixing TFR rather than embracing literal cultural extinction.
Eh, maybe. It doesn't have to last forever. It's possible to imagine a 50 year period of degrowth, then a technological or social change that turns growth back on. If China's population shrunk by two thirds it would still have a gigantic market.
One thing driving polarisation is the perception that there are hardly any moderates--if you believe virtually everyone who votes for the other party is a sociopathic extremist, of course you're going to hate and/or fear the entire other side.
Of course this isn't remotely true when it comes to ordinary people, but it often looks true when it comes to vocal opinionated people, especially those who comment online. But I'm skeptical it's true even for them, to anything like the extent that it looks. I think that while a lot of commenters are extreme, a lot are also quite moderate but you'd never know it because there are a bunch of perverse incentives discouraging one from admitting this during a debate with someone they strongly disagree with (losing potential allies in that debate, and sounding like they're not really fully repudiating their opponent's values, are just two examples). Moloch strikes again.
So to declare war on Moloch, and try to not so much encourage moderation as to unmask the moderation that already exists, I propose a kind of ritual where we regularly link to examples of ourselves arguing with different sides of an issue or with partisans of opposite ideologies. One problem I have personally is that I kind of hate the term "moderate" because it implies that you take a sort of cowardly wishy washy "both sides have a point" on everything, instead of getting murderously angry at the proud sociopaths and hypocrites on all the different "sides", as I do. (EDIT: Since this is being misunderstood, I'm saying I'm not really a moderate, my attitudes are often very extreme, as in the following examples, but they're extreme in both directions, against both sides' extremists.)
May add more. I'd like the sociopaths of each side to know when I'm condemning them, it's not because of what side they're on, it's because they're a sociopath.*
Does anyone else want to share examples of them condemning both sides (of a single issue or of the political spectrum as a whole)? I honestly think the more people clearly do this, the less polarised things will be.
(*EDIT: Not saying the people actually responding to me in those threads are in that category. Merely the ones with the beliefs at issue.)
People who vote for Trump support the President deploying the military against US citizens for trivial reasons. Anybody who supports this is an enemy of civilization and I look forward to the plenitude of political violence that will be unilaterally carried out by the next Executive who opposes them. There is no comparable polarization to what Trump and his supporters have done publicly this past few months. There also is no rational argument that will convince you or his other supporters, but the full power of the state coming after you and say, indefinitely detaining you overseas like the members of the AEA flights, will hopefully be your wake up call.
Yeah, online, you're generally in the middle of a push-pushback cycle. I'm going to encourage everyone to "take the devil's advocate", and ask the other guy to do the same. If you can't argue the other guy's position (and better than he's doing), you still have a lot to learn about debate.
There are a TON of people who'd vote for Bernie and Donald Trump. Either they're "we need something new, the current approach isn't working" or they're "integrity" people -- will vote for the not-blackmailed, and let the crazy fall where it may.
> One thing driving polarisation is the perception that there are hardly any moderates--if you believe virtually everyone who votes for the other party is a sociopathic extremist, of course you're going to hate and/or fear the entire other side.
High-dimensional balls are spiky.
Take fifty different, uncorrelated issues; you're statistically likely to have a 1%-extreme (two-tailed) opinion on at least one of them, even if you're a perfect example of a random person.
That's not enough to drive extremism by itself because you don't necessarily have to care strongly about that 1%-issue, but social media is very good at amplifying your interests. Give the algorithm enough data, and your preference that your city council plant tulips rather than daisies might just become an unhinged crusade through echo-chamber amplification.
Centralized politics avoids this reducto ad insanum by pre-filtering issues through an elite filter, for both bulk issues and socially acceptable methods/reasons. E.g. it's okay to not like immigration because immigrants compete for labour, but it isn't (wasn't) okay to not like immigration because immigrants are brown.
Current politics, amplified by social media, no longer imposes this filter, and two people can arrive at similar policy preferences through very different values and reasons. It makes public principled policy pugilism precarious.
"One problem I have personally is that I kind of hate the term "moderate" because it implies that you take a sort of cowardly wishy washy "both sides have a point" on everything, instead of getting murderously angry at the proud sociopaths and hypocrites on all the different "sides", as I do."
The problem there is that a lot of people on the other side are *not* sociopaths and hypocrites; they come by their opinions honestly, or they are mistaken but not wicked, or this is how they've been brought up and influenced to think e.g. that constant stream of golden gifts that is the Sequoia Capital interview with Sam Bankman-Fried about how he reasoned his way, aged twelve, into the same conclusions about abortion as all those around him held - so convenient that he happened to come to the same conclusions, wasn't it? meant he didn't have to disagree with his parents or peers or school or environment:
"One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith."
I've had to struggle with this, coming to the mushy moderate middle "both sides have a point" view, as I too want to be the crusader of righteous anger lambasting the heathen. But not everyone is due a lambasting.
The thing is, we don't have any useful instinct or natural intuition for large-scale political/social/economic issues. Ideas can seem self-evidently right to lots of people that, when implemented as a large-scale political system, lead to godawful tragedies. See the history of Communism for a list of examples, but there are plenty of others. Even stuff like forbidding interest ("usury") or setting a maximum price on bread just a little below the cost of production seems great but will lead to awful outcomes.
The lesson I think we should take from this is that our intuitions about politics and such are just not much good, and so we should have low confidence in them. This suggests (to my mind) a cautious and incremental approach to social and political change. I don't think there's anyone who reliably has the ability to look at a massive proposed change to the government or economy or society and really understand how it will work out. Ideology is great for giving you a very confident belief that you can do this, but its track record isn't so great.
If that's what a moderate is...someone so disengaged, so brain dead, and above all so selfish and childish that they regard discussions of global moral issues as nothing but a momentary entertainment to be forgotten in a day...we really definitely need another word for what I'm referring to.
(I really hope you're not *endorsing* that attitude here. It kind of sounds like you are from the tone of your comment, but maybe I'm misreading it.)
So first there's the proud stupidity ("I'm incapable of remembering anything that happened before yesterday, and I also have no idea how to use an email search function. But this is a good thing! It's *good* to be stupid! It is! It is! Honest!")
Then there's the childishness. I can scarcely imagine someone older than, like, 12 not being able to tell the difference between a discussion of life-and-death moral questions and a random playground fight. Just...do you even comprehend the existence of an adult world where there are serious decisions with far greater consequences than something to brag about???
And finally there's the unimaginable selfishness. Apparently you not only treat democracy, truth, and the world's injustices as nothing but an opportunity to brag on the internet, but you are unable to comprehend that anyone else might not.
All in all I'm...honestly not sure I've seen anyone in this entire comments section who's deserving of less respect.
You can call those people geniuses or morons. Because they're both. Why bother considering global moral issues if you lack the capacity to change them? (Remember, the cost to bribe your local is about $2000 for a corporate interest. If you don't even have that much free money, how do you expect to change US policy about supporting terrorism?)
-Extremely late term abortion is wrong, especially when advocates of late-term abortion act as if it's wrong to question it. Some people might even bite the bullet and say it's fine to commit infanticide for newborns, following this same logic.
This probably has 80-90% agreement when framed in these terms, and outside of certain political, medical, or academic circles would almost certainly cause moral outrage. The only people who bit were people saying "I'm not familiar with anyone who advocates this" followed by some people advocating it.
-You expressed a) massive outrage at what you saw as the tyranny of criminalisation of the homeless but more importantly b) argued that everyone else was being wildly incoherent. Most people replied with some explanation of their views, which were either ignored or responded to with aghast horror. You then wrote up an ask for clarity (expressing more disbelief) and then the only people who replied said, "yep you've got it, option 2 like you outlined" which is:
"Camping in certain public spaces (sidewalks etc) is a crime, camping in other public spaces (fields or forests) is not"
This seems to me to be... eminently reasonable? Maybe 80% of people would again support this? I certainly wouldn't describe it as sociopathic.
So to my read your criticism of the left-liberals appears to be to criticise an extremely extreme position which I doubt would have majority support amongst, say, Democrat voters. And then your criticism of the right appears to be to criticise a policy position ("actually no you can't just camp anywhere") which I think probably a plurality of Democrats would support.
Have I been significantly unfair here? I didn't check your former two arguments. I suppose the point is that with this small sample size it didn't quite seem to me that you were quite as centrist as suggested.
First, I thought I made it clear that I'm actually not a moderate at all in the literal sense. But in the broader sense of being willing loudly condemn both sides of the spectrum, I am. And I want the existence of people like me to be more widely known.
Second, I did not mean to at all imply that the people I was talking to *in those particular threads* were extremists or sociopaths etc. I did provide links in one of them of the people I was condemning. I suppose I didn't make that clear.
I don't think it was clear that you weren't yourself a moderate (other than you disliked the term due to it's connotations). If you're instead just saying you aren't an extremist then that does make more sense, and point taken.
On the second point, that is clearer and more reasonable. Was the point supposed to be (and clearly I'd misunderstood) that those two latter arguments are related (anarchists would probably be fine with both?) but you're arguing on opposite sides of the issue, rather than you arguing specifically against extremists on both sides?
By moderate I meant someone who's against both sides' extremists. It seems people just take it to mean someone who's middle-of-the-road on everything. So I don't even know what term to use for the former.
I changed the last link slightly to include some of the more extreme people in that thread. I do think I'm opposing extremists in all these cases, but some of these extreme positions are so widespread it seems to actually make me an extremist for doing so. So I don't know how to answer your question.
I guess one can be a reasonable extremist (believing and advocating for extreme positions for rational reasons; cf. Shrimp welfare activists). But in general I don't know how you'd define "extreme" in any way that isn't relational.
Consider: you're pointing at some discussion around vagrancy laws and saying "look, these people are extreme and sociopaths". I look and they don't seem particularly extreme to me, in fact the views they end up defending are, to me, extremely reasonable and almost certainly mainstream (if not majority). You say, "ok well fine, maybe not the people in *those* threads, but there are people who are extreme on this issue, and I argue against them. That makes me the moderate. And anyway actually there are some people are (if not extreme) very close to being extreme in that thread. Take a closer look."
Fine fine, I check again. I still don't see anything particularly extreme, nothing that would be *that* outside the Overton window, especially not in online spaces like this one. I see people who are in and around this space arguing for things like "complete open borders now", "we should nuke the data centres", "destroy the world on a coin flip for X utility gain" and so on.
(And that's fine! This is a space where views like that are regularly aired and debated and rationally judged rather than being dismissed off hand.)
If I'm seeing views like "camping should be illegal on most public property" and not remotely viewing that as an extremist position, is it more likely that I'm wrong and so far down the rabbit hole that I can't tell any more, or that you're somewhat misguided about your own virtue and moderation.
I guess I'm just calling for a bit of epistemic humility. Your argumentation style on those links seemed relatively uncharitable. A lot of people here will be used to norms of maximum charitability and steelmanning your opponents. Steelmanning you, I think you probably think what is being said is so patently absurd and that you *are* arguing with a bunch of extremists, and that you *are* being reasonable, but at the same time someone needs to hold the tide for the 90% who are normal about these things. If so, I think you might be a little off base.
Apologies for the lecture, in retrospect this maybe sounds patronising - it wasn't intended like that.
It is normal for people to be stupid. In such cases, an extremist position is "We should hire less violent cops." Because, broadly speaking, people don't understand which cops are likely to be violent. And therefore, a very anodyne and "obvious" hiring recommendation is one that people tend to VERY STRONGLY disagree with. And, worse, the disagreement is reflected in terms of actual police hiring. (FWIW: women are more violent as cops than men -- this may be some sort of self-selection bias, but it is more probably a "lack of effective physical options" to intimidate or non-lethally take down a hostile (drunk) 200lb person.)
I think there is an interesting and useful concept of sob story resistance. It explains a lot in politics and in daily life.
Some people have none and you see them rebroadcasting tenuous and sometimes fake claims of a supposed victim trying to get support. It is important because it is a source of irrationality and has policy implications in education, welfare and crime.
It has to be kept in mind that the other side sees it as being an uncaring asshole, and that there are indeed people who overdo their cynicism (and/or hide egoism behind cynicism).
But I agree, pathological empathy enabling abusers seems to me like the bigger problem at the moment. This can happen in two ways - first, an overly trusting supporter enabling dysfunction, and second, an already powerful person gathering even more power from the public to allegedly support the downtrodden (which they mostly do, but they can easily abuse that power by either selectively withholding the support from detractors or by even actively oppressing detractors in the name of support). You can even do all at once!
That's all well and good, but often visceral reactions are much more effective at driving action and reflection than a pile of facts.
(completely tangential: I think this is more or less (EDIT: one of) the points of Sam Kriss's "Against Truth"; see also: "Lies and Truth in a Hypernormal Sense" by Lou Keep of Sam[]zdat).
I would phrase it more like: sob story resistance is useful against bad actors that want to exploit your prosocial feelings, but it also risks making you a sociopath if you categorically cannot empathize with others. Sadly, being sob-story resistant is not an absolute virtue but, like so many others, its validity rests on one's personal judgement.
Of course, due to engagement algorithms, the truthfulness of sob stories needs to be questioned often, but there are some factors that can be taken as baseline verifiers. Here are two that come to mind after a minute of reflection:
- understanding that personal tragedies can be true and also NOT be a symbol for a larger tragedy
- sometimes tradeoffs mean that some preventable evil might happen in order to achieve a greater good somewhere else
>"…sob story resistance is useful against bad actors that want to exploit your prosocial feelings, but it also risks making you a sociopath if you categorically cannot empathize with others."
Bad actors disproportionately benefit from the scale offered by modern communication technology, so the optimal balance is now closer to the sociopathic end of the spectrum than would have historically been the case.
Used honestly, the 'sob story' is also a case study, and it has merit in that regard. Such stories allow us to imagine the detailed interaction of multiple circumstances and policies that might be impossible to easily understand in the abstract.
As a hypothetical example, it's hard to understand statistically why a city might not want to cut a little-used 4am bus route. With a case study, however, we can see that Bob the Baker needs to take the 4am bus to work in order to bake bread for the 8am supermarket opening, and without that bus he might be fired and return to a life of crime and pog addiction.
> Used honestly, the 'sob story' is also a case study, and it has merit in that regard.
Similarly, one dead person is a tragedy, million dead people is a statistics. So if you make yourself resistant against "sob stories" (evidence about individuals) without simultaneously making yourself *more* sensitive to statistics, you are not making yourself impartial, only indifferent to human suffering.
Sob stories are fine, when everyone is acting in good faith. When you have hospitals refusing to do their damned duty, in terms of saving people who have miscarried, in order to make Spectacular Sob Stories about the laws (that the lawmakers had no imagination would ever cause such a thing...) then you've got cloudcuckooland advertising budget (advertising for "abortion" because it is part of a full industry of "recycling").
I was printing a photograph the other day, and it suddenly struck me that we have a machine that can make a photorealistic portrait in a manner of minutes, and that I've never known a world in which we couldn't do that, and that there was indeed a world that couldn't do that, for a very long time. And it kind of sank in that AI is going to be ingrained into the children's lives in a way that will just permanently reshape the world they live in.
A friend has a child who's now 18 or 19. About ten years ago, she was shocked to learn the existence of music CDs - she had never seen a disk that wasn't a DVD or a game. A child who's 8 now, will grow up in a world without any CDs or at all. Maybe we're all programmed to believe that the technology around us is part of the natural order - until it isn't?
I do agree that AI could be a bigger tech advance than most.
Right but, you're making it sound really scary. I think when people worry about AI destroying art (especially writing) they need to be reminded that the same could have been said for photography, and also for recorded music.
People could have said photography would destroy painting. Well, it did reduce the demand for painters a lot but it also:
(a) pushed painting into new artistic directions
(b) made classic paintings vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) became the basis for a whole new art form of its own
Then people could have said recorded music would put all musicians out of work (who'd ever go to a performance of Beethoven's symphonies again when you can just hear them in your house?). Well it did reduce the demand but it also:
(a) kept concerts alive, to the extent people still go to them a century later
(b) made music vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) created a whole new set of genres of music
And people now say LLMs will eliminate writers. Again it will reduce the demand but will probably:
(a) push human writing in new directions
(b) make classical literature vastly more accessible to the less educated (e.g. you could get an LLM to "translate" classic works into modern language for you, or into a specifically tailored vocuabulary for your tastes and reading level)
(c) form the basis of a whole new art form.
Something to bear in mind when confronted with all the doomsaying.
I think about this whenever I hear people making fun of old technological panics about how the camera/wristwatch/magazine etc will change us and society - "haha, look at these people panicking over nothing just like people are panicking about AI now"
But the thing is, those things *did* change us; every single new technology irreversibly changed the way we think and act in the world in some way. For better? For worse? Who knows, we quickly forget that we ever used to be different and our current state becomes what we think of as normal.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (unchanged from March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
22 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 20 % on March 17, 2025).
70 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 72 % on March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
There has been a lot of diplomatic smoke emitted roughly in last week, but imho only substantive action worth updating on was Trump slapping tariffs on India explicitly connected to Indian purchases of Russian oil.
Though it is far from clear whether those tariffs will really go into effect (they are scheduled to begin on August 27), that action goes somewhat beyond what I’d expected from Trump administration in terms of how much they are willing to help Ukraine (see previous updates). And it is potentially impactful action.
Russia does indeed rely on exports of oil to India (in fact, it is their largest oil export destination, currently even more important in this respect than China, see here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-07-15/trump-lobs-the-ukraine-ball-into-putin-s-court). At the same time, economic relationship between India and US, unlike that between China and US, is highly asymmetrical, in the sense that India is far more dependent on the US than vice versa, so they can’t just shrug this off, though Indian government would for face-saving reasons never admit it. But I do expect that they’ll quietly push Russia to be more conciliatory.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Can you (or someone else) explain the Trump aid freeze situation?
My impression was that Trump was going to halt military aid to Ukraine. Did he do this? If so, how come the Ukraine situation hasn't changed noticeably in the past six months? Did Ukraine manage to hold on without as much US military aid?
The last significant military aid to the Ukraine (under Biden) caused massive defections from the front line, due to a dramatic collapse in morale. You may want to re-evaluate your priors, significantly, due to this little gem of information. A discussion with someone from the Ukraine might help.
2) Ukraine still receives aid already approved by Congress under Biden administration. Also it draws from huge stockpile which it received between Trump's election and inauguration, since Biden administration frontloaded a lot of aid in that period in anticipation of possible freeze. This will eventually run out.
3) Trump does not plan to ask Congress for further aid for Ukraine, but he agreed that US government will approve purchases of military equipment paid by various western European countries and delivered to Ukraine, and also apparently that deliveries of American equipment to western European countries replacing their weapons sent to Ukraine will be prioritized. Procedures governing these things are rather byzantine and I am not even American, much less expert on details of your export controls, but I gather that this scheme will likely result in much less US equipment going to Ukraine than under Biden.
4) Ukraine is less depended on external aid than in, like, 2023, since it expanded its arms industry.
Regarding 4), I have also read that European aid can cover more than at the beginning of the war. For example, at the beginning of the war Europe couldn't contribute much in terms of artillery ammunition, except out of their stocks. Now they produce enough to sustain Ukrainian needs without relying on US.
4) is not meaningful. If it was meaningful for Russia to destroy the arms industry in the Ukraine, they'd be doing it. They consider the Ukrainians their own countrymen, and thus have very little incentive to murder them. The west's support of the Ukraine (effectively moving the "gun-making and shell-making" out of the "acceptable places to destroy") is why Russia is forced to make Ukraine pay in "military-age soldiers" (current average age of frontline soldier is somewhere upwards of 50 years).
5) It's simply not winnable. It hasn't been winnable (from an American perspective) since the "counteroffensive" failed so dramatically. The best win condition for Ukraine at this point is to murder Zelensky, and give Russia the logistical win (let them have the landbridge to Crimea, and pinky promise that they won't let America stage invasions anymore.)
>They consider the Ukrainians their own countrymen, and thus have very little incentive to murder them.
You very much misunderstand the Russian mindset then. Ukrainians being declared Russian countrymen is the very reason to murder them. Not for the benefit of those Ukrainians, of course, but for the education of Russians at home. The lesson being imparted is: if you try to leave or generally oppose the Russian Empire, we will bomb you back to the Stone Age just like we have in Grozny ("The most destroyed city on Earth"), Aleppo, or now all of Ukraine.
This is not supported by facts. This is a war with a very low civilian casualty rate compared to the wars in Iraq or Gaza. Going by the western estimates, there are about 1 Ukrainian civilian casualty per 2-6 Ukrainian military ones, depending on which estimate you use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Civilian_deaths
The cities on the frontline are bombed to stone age if there was fighting there. Russia very much prefers to take cities without doing it but that's usually impossible.
If the "facts" are really just one fact, the number of dead civilians, then you might want to deepen that analysis a bit.
Ukraine has to refrain from targeting civilians at all because that would undermine allied support; it's vital to their strategy. They also don't have the same abundance of munitions to waste on civilian targets to begin with; target selection for maximum military effect is far more important to Ukraine than to Russia.
Russia cannot operate aircraft over Ukrainian territory, let alone far behind the frontlines, and has to resort to long-range bombardment with relatively expensive drones and missiles that are also subject to thinly spread but functional AA defense. If Russia could, they absolutely would go Aleppo on Ukraine, at least on the far western parts of Ukraine, see the next point.
Russia wants to take major cities without destruction if and when they are necessary as logistics hubs for further advances, not because they want to tiptoe around civilians that have long since evacuated anyway. Take a look at any smaller, strategically unimportant city or village, and you see a moonscape.
Another factor for the low civilian casualties is that the ground war is moving slowly by now, so civilians in the way have a lot of time to evacuate. Compare to the Bucha massacre in April '22, which happened when the ground war was moving a lot more quickly and Ukrainians might not have realized how Russia would treat them.
Have you seen Czechnya lately? Russia has a policy of rebuilding better, and they do actually mean it.
Russians go out of their way to murder American soldiers in the Ukraine, as they do Europeans. That the only Russian way to win the Ukrainian war is in blood -- this is the fault of the West, for funding with arms and materiel.
Now, you could say that Russia is in the wrong for wanting to wage war, but Russia would simply say "staging sneak attacks" is not a recipe for the Ukraine getting to keep the landbridge to Crimea.
Your comment speaks of a deep-seated denial of Ukrainian sovereignty and even basic human agency, of a belief that a country of 44 million is willing to fight a bloody, years-long war just because the evil Western puppeteers put weapons in their hands. Yes, Western support allows the Ukrainins to keep fighting. That is in the West's interest, but why does your analysis stops there? You never mentioned what Ukraine wants. If they don't want to fight and join Mother Russia instead, what stops them from just putting down those weapons? Who keeps making all those videos of frontline soldiers asking for drones, weapons, ammo?
This is the most televised war in history, with unprecedented access to the opinions of simple soldiers and civilians; but the better the first-hand evidence, the bigger the conspiracy theories must become.
I mean, Russian citizen casualties in this war are estimated in hundreds of thousands, so the fact "they" (Russian leadership) consider someone their own countrymen by no means implies they value their lives highly.
The general uncertainty over long-term Trump II policies also applies to Ukraine support by the US, and the world has to take it day by day. Last month, Hegseth made an apparently unilateral decision to reverse a weapon shipment already granted under Biden, which was again reversed by Trump shortly after:
> Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused a large package of weapons shipments to Ukraine. [..] Shortly after the pause became public, Trump reversed Hegseth’s pause and vowed to continue providing defensive weapons to Ukraine [..].
Trump wants to continue delivering arms to Ukraine, but on Europe's tab.
> Trump also announced a deal with NATO to provide potentially billions of dollars in more weapons to Ukraine, made by the US but paid for by European allies.
This is consistent with yesterday's statements by JD Vance ahead of the Putin-Trump meeting:
> “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
My current expectation is that, under Trump II, the US continues to provide actual weapons but only when they're paid for, and does no longer grant direct financial aid to Ukraine. Other support, such as military intelligence, would continue as is.
The reason why the military situation has not changed much is a combination of Ukraine being innovative in the face of necessity, and European allies stepping up. The ground war is increasingly dominated by relatively cheap, available hardware (drones) that is not reliant on the US or any other single provider. The air war is much more dynamic, with Ukraine's demand for air defense increasing, but here we also see innovation and, in the medium term, decreased dependence on traditional air defense and thus on the US.
I don't know. Possible explanations are that Trump really doesn't have his house in order, or that he presidents like he campaigns: he lets members of his cabinet go ahead with actually important decisions, observes how they are received, and then decides whether to confirm the call approvingly, confirm while denying knowledge about it, or to reverse the call while still not holding anyone responsible.
These are both good explanations. Putting forth another: Trump gives contradictory orders, including ones that are DOGE related. Then he gets to greenlight, personally, aid to the Ukraine.
I knew a guy who was both under the most stringent "do not get vaccinated" orders and "you must get vaccinated" orders at the same time. Viva la military! (this was under Biden, to be clear -- the military deciding to contract itself is nothing new).
I wouldn't give much credibility to the Indian tariffs justification; they may just as well be diplomatic smoke to soften allegations of excessive friendliness towards Russia. Trump has been applying tariffs for any reason or none at all, and complying with his demands regarding today's tariffs is no guarantee that he won't apply new tariffs tomorrow. If anything, Trump seems interested in economic outcomes much more than in diplomatic ones.
I don't think that is true. Trump's justification for tariffs are often stupi...er heterodox (like levying tariffs purely for reasons of negative trade balance), but, precisely because of that, I think they are basically honest, and more importantly, will be perceived by Modi as such.
Trump is still an improvement over the last administration, which had "destroy Europe" as one of its policy goals ("If we can't have them, no one can!").
The last administration had Victoria Nuland, Cheney's protegee -- and arch neocon. She was variously the 3rd most powerful person in washington (and sometimes down to about the 10th), needless to say Joe Biden was never listed.
Destruction of Europe was the stated reason for the sanctions on Russia (this was an unexpected result of a question asked to Nuland during an internal state department meeting.)
If Europe (by which we mean Germany) doesn't remain America's vassal, it's likely to conclude that it's got geographical/logistical reasons to ally with Russia. (Trump is a big thinker, and he likes trade, and strong Eurasia... but it's been longtime policy for America to keep Germany and Russia as far apart as possible).
Honestly the take that sanctions on Russia, in which EU is participating in and which EU citizens are often supporting and voting for parties supporting them (not all EU citizens, but many of us, very much including me), are secret (or somehow, open!) Chenneyist plot to destroy us, is a pretty kooky conspiracy theory. But very creative, so respect for that, I guess.
I feel like there should be a lot of discussion of GPT-5 on here: is it just somewhere I haven't found yet (one of the subscriber-only OTs?) or are we collectively waiting to see what happens in the first few days?
As a big disclaimer: I know next-to-nothing from a technical stanpoint, besides all the pieces I picked up reading various discussions, mainly under Scott's blog and AI 2027, AI Futures, Gary Marcus and a few other voices (mostly skeptical as to the LLM>AGI>ASI short-term pipeline).
Has the new model's release impacted anyone's timelines? Is this a .5%-adjustment- or a 50%-adjustment- kind of impact?
Again, sorry if everyone is talking about this somewhere else, I wasn't able to find the place.
I've been growing more confident recently that there's not that much more juice left in the LLM paradigm, and while I haven't tried GPT-5 myself I think the muted reaction backs this up.
There's no particularly good reason to think that LLMs should be much better than they currently are, because it's still surprising that they're even at this level.
I predict there's a lot of work still to be done to get LLMs to be useful at all sorts of things, but that there's no LLM path to a singularity. An LLM can produce a document labelled "plan to take over the world" but it will be limited to the quality of the plans to take over the world that it was trained on.
I was also surprised that it wasn't discussed beyond one mini-thread (more focused on the botched slideshow) on the previous open thread - I actually came here to bring it up myself.
IMO it's the final nail in the coffin for the current LLM architecture to reach superintelligence. The big labs have all pretty clearly clustered up near an asymptote, as of I'd say May or so. The models have gotten incredibly good at coding, but are still well short of managing really large complex tasks.
The name "GPT-5" has been spoken in hushed tones since GPT-4, and it seemed understood that OpenAI wouldn't use that label until they had a real leap in capabilities on their hands. I think their use of the label for just another incremental improvement is their implicit admission that the current surge of scaling is basically done.
In terms of timeline shifting, personally I think I had been gradually discounting the probability of the "just keep scaling the current thing" avenue for several months, and this is just the formal end to it. I'd say it should only be a real update for someone who was confident that OpenAI had something huge up their sleeves, and was really shocked that GPT-5 was so underwhelming.
The overall focus on AI still seems fever-pitched, though, so it's entirely possible there's some big architectural breakthrough that keeps things going.
I’m far from a power user but so far the main improvement is that 5 is much better at helping me use it more effectively and its offers to provide additional help are much more relevant.
The first thing I did was workshop a prompt to get that 4o feeling back.
CONSUMER: Some people like it, some people don't. May depend on whether they use normal, Thinking, or Pro. OpenAI was trying to clear up confusion in its model names and choices, but this seems to have failed and people are more confused and angrier than ever. It still has lots of hallucinations and dumb mistakes - supposedly this is less than previous models, but people have found some howlers.
FUTURIST: On METR's time horizon graph, it's about halfway between the early exponential curve and the later superexponential curve, so it doesn't tell us too much more about which one is real or more likely to continue. It definitely doesn't suggest (on that graph) that progress has stopped or really slowed, just that we can't distinguish between fast and very fast. But aside from the METR graph, it "feels" less impressive than most people expected, and is obviously not some giant leap towards superintelligence.
Some people have pointed out that it might be a very small compute scaleup (or even a compute step backwards) from GPT-4.5, so maybe this doesn't prove anything about scaling laws. But maybe the fact that they didn't bother increasing compute further itself suggests they know something we don't about scaling laws slowing?
My impression is that formally, it doesn't tell us much about timelines. Informally on vibes, it's kind of disappointing and many people's timelines have grown longer. The one formal claim I heard about timelines is that its failure to be a giant leap disproves some theory that reinforcement training compute scales up superhyperfast, but I don't think this was AI 2027's theory or especially common.
"The one formal claim I heard about timelines is that its failure to be a giant leap disproves some theory that reinforcement training compute scales up superhyperfast, but I don't think this was AI 2027's theory or especially common."
I think this was a bit more common after o3 was unveiled in December and seemed to be a huge improvement on o1 in just a few months. There were a few people (sort of including myself) who thought they might unveil o4 around March/April and it would be another huge jump and we'd be coming up to o5 now. I think there was a gwern post along these lines.
However the fact that o4 hasn't appeared 8 months later suggests that the o1->o3 jump either didn't take a few months or was a one-off so the hype has diminished somewhat.
I think it should update us somewhat against METR being a good all-in metric, since a model matching the predicted METR improvement doesn't seem to have made the same improvement in practical (poorly-described) usefulness.
Somewhat related: Is AI 2027 keeping track of their predictions? I'm reading their website right now, and I've found a specific prediction that seems to be wrong, in footnote 10:
> We forecast that mid-2025 agents will score 85% on SWEBench-Verified.
If I follow that link, the highest score is currently 75.20% with a date of 2025-06-12, and the highest-scoring model of August 2025 is at 67.60%.
I find it useful as a peer reviewer for whatever I'm doing with Opus 4.1 in Claude Code, but it's not as good as o3 on my custom evals (focused on systems thinking and game design). The big thing is the price per million tokens is *insane* compared to everything out there.
So far, it's a bigger jump than 4 to 4o, but not as big a jump as 3.5 to 4.
From what I'm hearing it sounds like a decent incremental upgrade, and not even for all purposes. It's been heavily trained for professional tasks like planning and coding, and people using it for creative purposes, or just to vent their emotions, are saying it feels like talking to an overworked secretary.
The "enshitification" of products. After reading the article about mashed potatoes, it would be a nice segue into shrinkflation and the replacement of products with lower quality versions of themselves.
I find "enshitification" an annoying term. It describes a real process:
1. Company makes a product and offers it free (or significantly below cost) to gain users
2. Once they gain users, they try to find a way to monetize it - increasing prices, adding monetization options, advertisements.
And the term "enshitification" and the discourse around it is all about complaining about step 2, where things get worse, while seeming to just assume as a given that, of course, companies should give away (or offer at a loss) valuable services.
You don't have to like the model - I think it'd be great if more things ran on a "micro-subscription" model where, e.g. everyone using Discord paid $0.50 a month, rather than 'free + microtransactions', (I just don't think you can get enough people to buy into this idea of paying for internet services, for this sort of approach to be viable).
... but the "enshitification" discourse seems to just be "how dare they make it worse, those greedy capitalists" and there doesn't seem to be any talk of any solution other than that they should continue to offer it free forever.
To me, the annoying thing is the "long con as a business plan". It can involve giving away products for free, but it can also involve selling high quality products for a reasonable price. The essence of this business strategy is that "things get shitty after a decade" is not an accident or a reaction to a recent development of the market... it was the plan already from the very beginning.
The offline version is "do something people like, generate a lot of goodwill, and when your sales grow, turn your products to cheap shit, and profit from people who didn't get the memo". The online version is "do something people like, get as many users as possible, then turn your products to shit, and profit from people staying there because of network effects".
Paying for a sustainable high-quality service was never a real option. Google does not offer you an option to pay $100 a month for a high-quality ad-free web search. They are simply not interested in that kind of a deal. Showing you scammy ads and selling your personal data is not some kind of desperate Plan B; it is their business plan working as designed.
It happens even when it's not the plan, though. You can start out with the best of intentions, to always produce a great product at a great price, but eventually you'll reach the point where your business has grown as big as it ever can, and people will start asking "OK, but how are you going to make even more money next quarter?"
But the thing is, this is usually okay. As one product becomes shit, new companies start up selling better products. McDonald's might be a pale shadow of what it was in the 1950s but that's fine because there's dozens of new fast food places now selling better stuff.
There's still a cost to customers of buying inferior products until word gets out about better products.
The cost is higher when it's an expensive item which is worse than expected, and I speak as one who's living with a refrigerator whose shelves include plastic which deteriorates rather quickly.
Also, the new product isn't the same, and if you like the old product when it was good it's gone, possibly for a while, possibly forever.
> But the thing is, this is usually okay. As one product becomes shit, new companies start up selling better products.
The version I heard (but it was long ago, and I don't remember specific examples) is that often it is the same owners who start a new company that produces a better version of the product (in case of offline products).
The entire cycle goes like this: You start Company A, and produce high quality stuff for a reasonable price. The word spreads. When your product is at the top of popularity, you start selling cheap shit in Company A. But simultaneously, you start a (seemingly unrelated) Company B, which now produces high quality for a reasonable price... only to do the same thing a few years later (and start a Company C).
This approach maximizes the total profit, because the savvy customers will buy the new stuff from Company B (so you don't lose them), but the ones who didn't get the memo will keep buying from Company A (so you make a big profit per item sold). Allegedly this makes more profit than the traditional strategy of making high quality product, establishing a brand name, and then increasing the cost. It exploits the fact that many customers rely on reviews and word of mouth, which in this case will provide an outdated misleading information.
A smaller version is that instead of multiple companies, it is the same company producing a high quality Product A, which later changes the Product A to shit and simultaneously starts selling Product B which is basically a copy of the original Product A.
>2. Once they gain users, they try to find a way to monetize it
That's being overly generous, and maybe that's why you don't like the complaining about step 2. They generally don't "try to find" a way to monetize it, like they accidentally stumbled over some unexpectedly popular new service and are now scrambling to pay for server costs. Maybe that was true in the very early days of the Web, where nobody had any real idea of how to make money, or even the basic tools like online payment processors. But nowadays? Come on. Data collection and enshittification is in the DNA of basically all new services.
The solution does not even have to be heavy-handed either. In cases of primarily online services, a lot of good can be done with network regulation, in that users have the right and the ability to switch between equivalent services freely, taking all their data (and friend contacts) with them, to enable real competition rather than one walled garden after another.
> The solution does not even have to be heavy-handed either. In cases of primarily online services, a lot of good can be done with network regulation, in that users have the right and the ability to switch between equivalent services freely, taking all their data (and friend contacts) with them, to enable real competition rather than one walled garden after another.
I appreciate a specific suggestion here, since my frustration is too many complaints are just 'Ugh, Captialism'.
... but I also don't think this would actually fix anything? The government mandating that Discord must be built in a way that users can easily migrate all their data to another platform doesn't solve anything around the question of "how does Discord make money so that it can continue to offer its services to users?"
1) It's going to cost Discord both time, resources, and flexibility to be held to some specific EU Standard For Social Network Friend List Interoperability, 2) it's not going to gain it anything in terms of users being willing to actually pay to use Discord services. (If anything, they're going to be less willing, why pay for Discord when I can jump to any other service easily?)
It feels like the plan here is that users will just leave once Discord tries to monetize and Discord will fail, and "who cares, we all left with our data and are all using an 'equivalent service'"... but why would someone build an equivalent service when they saw what happened to Discord and what government regulation would basically ensure happens to them?
>The government mandating that Discord must be built in a way that users can easily migrate all their data to another platform doesn't solve anything around the question of "how does Discord make money so that it can continue to offer its services to users?"
No, that's up to the platform to decide. What that does is that it allows users to actually decide which way of making money (and which feature set) among competing platforms is the most acceptable to them, rather than having them locked into a specific platform during the honeymoon phase of "everything is free and convenient and useful".
I don't think this is a sensible reading of the discourse.
People care a lot about Photoshop as far as I can tell (I have never used it). Photoshop was pay once use forever. Now it is a monthly subscription. Of course this happened for "reasons". But surely you are not arguing that Photoshop was offered "below costs" in the old pricing model.
The complaint is not that companies monetise products that were free. The complaint is that companies find _better_ (for them) ways to monetise products that have been sustaining business models for decades with less agressive monetisation and that this worsens the deal for the end user.
Now _of course_ companies should be doing this whereever possible. I think the second order complaint is frustration with a market where this is possible. I would suggest to understand "enshittyfication" as a mismatch between personal preferences and market preferences.
Ironically your own example (about Discord) hints at this but you then continue to ignore your own observation. "The market" by your own observation apparently wants discord to make money in the most annoying way possible. Pointing this out does not, contra your claim, question whether discord should be allowed to make money at all nor does it request that discord should be "offered free forever".
In the extreme there are products where there just is no market for the non-shitty version of the product at production cost. I can see how this extreme would look like your initial analysis.
Something I should clarify about my Discord example: I'm happy with Discord right now. It is not my optimal, perfect world, version of the product, but I'm far happier with it existing in its current form than not existing, and I think those are the realistic options here, and a discourse with terminology designed to leave no middle ground between "optimal for me, the consumer" and "shit" is a very frustrating discourse.
And there's sort of a motte-and-bailey where you can have a high-minded discourse about how "market preferences push companies towards models that are non-optimal for either the consumer or the company, creating a mismatch between personal preferences and market preferences", but the "motte" form of this discourse is not anything like that.
Especially if you say stuff like "the complaint is not [specific complaint that I have heard many times from people complaining about enshitification]". Maybe you feel like Photoshop is a stronger example, but absolutely a lot of "enshitification" complaints are about companies monetizing stuff that was free.
<sidetagent about photoshop pricing>
> But surely you are not arguing that Photoshop was offered "below costs" in the old pricing model.
I don't think it was offered "below costs" when it was a CD and you bought the CD and put it in your drive and that was it. And then, probably, a few years later a new version came out and a lot of people who had previously paid for an old version bought it again (maybe with a slight "upgrade" pricing discount), while complaining about how expensive it was.
Could Adobe have stuck to that model in the internet age? Maybe! Maybe they could release a version, freeze the code and say "this is what you get, no new features, no new languages, no fixes, etc", and then in a year or two do it again and say that anyone who wants the new version needs to buy it at more-or-less full price.
... but for lots of reasons (many of them customer-centric ones) that's not how software works today. (And I work in software) People expect updates and fixes, and software teams don't actually want there to be a million versions of software floating out there, so it's a subscription, instead.
The old model is an implicit subscription via new versions (though you have the option of stopping and sticking to an old version for as long as your OS will allow), the new version is an explicit subscription. They're not the same, but they're also not *as* different as they might seem.
(People paying $569 in 1994 money for Photoshop 3 would probably be surprised that 2020s people would be nostalgic for that experience)
But the model that I think most people actually want is to be able to buy Photoshop once and get all the fixes, new features, and updates that they expect from modern software without paying anything for those updates. And, yeah, I suspect that would be "below cost".
a) empirically some people care a lot about the general trend to move from "ownership" to "subscription" [both used not in a very strict sense but I am sure you get what this means]
b) this observation cannot be analysed as "people are upset that stuff is not free"
c) this observation does not get invalidated by other people caring about stuff not being free
d) people who care about such things would not agree that ownership really is "implicit subscription". An example where this might be more obvious: I might need to buy a new car every 10 years or so because of wear and tear but that still is meaningfully different from leasing a car.
e) people who care about such things are clearly not in a majority in the sense that they would be able to move the market away from such practices.
I think you can't have a meaningful concept of "enshittification" without including this part of the opinion space.
It seems such a strong effect, particularly the 80% of students in philosophy courses at Harvard being first born children. Has there been any more research since Scott's post and the less wrong surveys of famous mathematicians and physicists?
Scott's research on the topic does account for family size. He found that, *even restricting the sample to people with exactly one sibling*, i.e. from two-child families, elder siblings were very over-represented among his readership compared to younger siblings.
I'm still bothered by Scott's claim that super forecasters' prediction is relevant to single digit level. I thought how do you even verify that, especially since I don't think there's enough predictions yet (?).
I think that one way to falsify this is to have an agent that does the exact same prediction as the super forecasters, but be errored by some margin points. Then see if they perform worse or on parity with the real forecast. We can even have multiple agents with 1%, 5%, 10%, and 20% error respectively to see whether smaller error actually perform better.
I don't think it's a super-strong claim that this consistently improves performance everywhere and at all times.
But they did exactly what you suggested, so the precise claim is: "In the competitions we looked at, super forecasters used single digit level precision. If we round this single level digit precision to the next multiple of 5 or 10, their performance drops."
Interesting, looks like we're actually already on the same picture, and that some people are already debating this. I havent read it all closely yet but if someone has confirmed or denied this claim, feel free to tell me about it.
If you want to see the actual evidence, you probably would have to read Tetlock's book on the topic.
There is also this research paper. The finding is the same, but the binning is coarser, so I am not sure that you will be satisfied with it. With a very quick scan I think it was just up to seven bins, because they want to compare it with pundits.
There seems to be a consensus amongst people who are building muscle that bulk and cut cycles are the way to go. I'm confused about how this is different from weight loss in other circumstances, where the percentage of people who succeed in maintaining weight loss is really low. Is it just selection effects where the gym-goers are the ones who are unusually good at maintaining weight loss, or is there something special about lifting weights/eating lots of protein/etc, that makes weight loss stickier?
"There seems to be a consensus amongst people who are building muscle that bulk and cut cycles are the way to go."
- Actually it is a lot more nuanced than this. :)
It depends a lot on your use cases, and the different strategies are used as tools in your box.
It's the dominant strategy for a lot off body building type stuff, but a lot of recreational lifters do stuff like lean bulks or just don't care about weight/optics.
Cut/Bulks:
- works for: beginners*1 & competitive athletes; cuts are almost necessary if you want to go ultra lean
- probably not the best approach for: recreational intermediate athletes, people who practice other sports as a main sport
When I've read about this it sounds like a lot of people think that losing fat and building muscle at the same time might be effective if you're a beginner or possibly very overweight (or possibly just if you have unusual genetics) but longer term stops working (I say this as someone who has only started looking into any of this stuff within the last 6 weeks after joining a gym, so obviously take anything I say with a large handful of salt :p)
I don't know much about this cycle, but the percentage of people who can lose weight *over a short period of time* is pretty high. Body builders who build muscles do not aim at maintaining the weight over a long time period, so that seems like the wrong reference frame.
Yeah fair enough I guess there are people who either just keep bulking and cutting till they die or there's selection effects to who I'm seeing because they're stopping making content at the point that they get bigger and stay there
I don't think there are many people who keep bulking and cutting till they die, I think they generally stop after they reach the end of their competitive lifetimes, or a the point where they can't realistically build additional muscle. You'd be hard pressed to find people who've still doing it in their forties, and it's generally not a very pleasant way to live long term.
1. Typically people doing this are interested in net gaining over time, which is easier and the default trajectory over net losing weight over time.
2. Anyone doing this is already about 10x more motivated and conscientious than the median person, because they're counting calories and macros, in addition to working out between 3 and 5x a week - if you filtered your "trying to lose weight" populations according to this degree of conscientiousness and motivation, success would be much higher than the current outcomes where ~80% fail to keep more than 10% off for at least a year, and ~98% fail to keep more than 10% off for more than 5 years.
So I read Cremieux’s March piece about making one’s own GLP-1 solutions, and am thinking very seriously of ordering a supply of Retatrutide. Retatrutide’s the newest of the GLP-1 drugs, and seems to be better than Zepbound. It’s had clinical trials up through phase 3, and nothing worrisome happened in the trials. But it does not yet have FDA approval (and when it does I’m sure insurance will not cover it just for weight loss, and it will be even more expensive than the drugs currently available.). The precautions Cremieux described — buying only from sources he currently recommends, and/or sources highest rated by an independent lab — and then having one of the vials one receives tested by a lab — those seem adequate to me as protection against injecting the wrong drug, or a contaminated one.
Does anyone know of any reason to have significant doubts about the safety of doing this? I am not interested in “reasons” based on some general objection like “you are not medically trained.” I think the quality of US medical care is quite compromised by various systemic things these days, and believe the best course is to supplement what conventional care offers with one’s own carefully researched hacks. So when I ask about the safety of weight loss a la Cremieux I am really only interested in reasons based on information someone has about actual dangers they have thought of or seen manifested. Also, anyone who agrees that this procedure is reasonably safe — would be interested to hear why you think so.
I'm not sure why you would risk trying Retatrutide over Zepbound or Semaglutide when the latter two already work very well. If Zepbound doesn't work for you then I would understand.
Because the data from clinical trials indicate that Retatrutide is better in a number of ways: Better about sparing lean body mass, prob leads to faster weight loss, seems to push multiple markers of liver function in a good direction, has a component that combats the metabolic slowdown that occurs with these drugs as weight is lost.
Have not tried them and not interested in trying. Gained 25 lbs during covid and can't get rid of it, despite a moderately serious effort. There's a drug that makes it likely I will at least succeed at the weight loss part, and also has other health benefits, and I'm all for shooting up that sucker. Hopefully I can do the maintaining after losing the weight. Til covid I maintained a normal weight without trying.
I have zero interest in treating the weight problem as a challenge. Most people fail at weight loss, and of those that succeed most gain the weight back, so the odds are I will fail too. And besides, there are multiple other areas of my life where I am trying very hard to accomplish various things, and all of those things are way more interesting than food and blubber guts.
If you are going to share a link in an open thread, please have a longer (few paragraph) description of what the link is and why you think it's interesting.
I have not been counting, but have the impression that the number of posts that are basically just little read-my-blog-post ads is way up. Some people do write a coupla paragraphs summarizing their post, some don’t. But either way I don’t like the feel of threads that are full of those read-me posts. The authors are not really addressing the group the way real posters do. We’re not people to them, we’re eyeballs.
Sorry, I thought it was more intriguing the way I did it. But I see thats not really working.
I am (somewhat desperately) working on improving process in the public sector. I write about why well-intentioned systems consistently produce bad outcomes, using my experience in California water as a lens for understanding universal bureaucratic patterns. The goal is to help other people trapped inside systems find ways to make change that actually works.
A secondary problem is getting these people to read the ideas. In this article to make the concept of path dependency relatable,and more interesting I use Fleetwood Mac's career, and a water treatment plant.
Not 60s Fleetwood Mac, but the premise would be the same. Would the workflow from the 60s produce the same innovation in 1977? It would be interesting to dig deeper but that's a different substack lol
New essay I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on - the truth isn’t enough.
If you think tone doesn’t matter, you’re probably less persuasive than you think.
You can have the most correct argument in the world, but if you deliver it with needless snark or robotic detachment, you’ve already lost half your audience before they’ve engaged with the actual ideas.
This isn’t anything to do with coddling feelings. It’s about recognising that tone is part of the message, just as much as word choice or logic. McLuhan said the medium is the message; in human conversation, tone is the medium.
On how tone shapes whether your truth lands, why “tone policing” complaints miss a deeper reality, and how to use the soft machinery of meaning to get through to people who disagree with you.
As an audience of truth-seekers, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts as I’ve felt rationalists don’t always get the tone right.
I think the entire frame may be bunk. Delivering truth is remarkably ineffective, when you're trying to guide behavior. Bandwagon effect is far more important than people give it credit for. "The smart people eat Kale, and here's why..."
Part of the appeal of writing / speaking facts without regard to tone is this idea that people can just share information quickly without having to slather it in a lot of greasy polity. For example, maybe I want you to just tell me I'm mumbling so I can fix it and speak more clearly, instead of spending several seconds trying to figure out how to break it to me gently.
Another issue is that trying to reword things kindly feels patronizing if you look like you're trying too hard to do it; it's like saying "you're too softminded and weak to handle this straight, so I'm going to sugarcoat it for you first".
This is the impression I get when talking to people who disdain tone. Their desire is straight up facts, toneless by default, making everyone better off. Their tone will quickly graduate to annoyance at anyone who pushes back due to that lack of tone. Why would they want to make everyone worse off?
I couldn't see where your article addressed this frame of mind. If it doesn't, then I think it's unlikely to have your desired effect.
The response I typically give to people who want to dispense with tone is to point out first that the complaint only applies to bad news from a stranger; no one minds if good news is imparted tonelessly, or if bad news comes abruptly from a friend. That said, anyone who speaks (or writes) says more than the actual words, whether or not intended, and lack of tone typically says "I could have not said anything, and not hurt you, or shared this bad news, knowing it will hurt you. I chose to share it. So you can infer from this that I'm someone you can't trust. If there's bad news, I'll surely send it along; if there's good news, I might, but for now, you don't know. I probably won't go out of my way to find any good news, so any future information I give you will be inaccurate, skewed against you, and might even be exaggerated. "
Sneering or mocking during delivery of course only confirms the above. But either way, the toneless person's utopian mode of information sharing is defeated.
I've seen writing where someone was expressing an idea and coating it with enough ingroup-signifiers to make it easy to swallow in their community that people from outside their community tended to choke on it.
OTOH, I think you can have a tone that is more or less off-putting. That shouldn't interfere with understanding your ideas, but it often does, in practice, so it's better to try to have a less off-putting tone. And it's better not to toss out a lot of red meat for your intended audience that will alienate anyone outside that group.
Good point about ingroup signifiers. I'm naturally not counting those. We could imagine it being very hard to find signifiers that are more universal - where the ingroup is as many people as we can manage - and finding these can be something of an art.
I recently had a disagreement with someone who had the view that just being the wrong person (in terms of inborn characteristics, rather than word choice or tone) would impede how acceptable a message was. I thought that was self-undermining for a truth-seeker, but it appears to be a view that's out there and people are unashamed of announcing.
I think this is often true, precisely because humans are not ideal truth-seekers. This is why celebrity endorsements matter, even though rationally you'd think "this dude is an actor, why would I treat his opinions about politics with any more weight than those of a plumber?" And everyone uses this--actors, musicians, war heros, sports stars, religious leaders, etc. are often used as messengers for exactly this reason.
I mean, Taylor Swift is in an excellent position to tell you about how to fix broken stuff in the music industry, and Tom Hanks is an unquestioned expert in acting and the making of movies, but it seems unlikely that either one has especially clever things to say about trade policy or addressing global warming. But people still want to hear what they have to say about those things, so....
The author's impression of the Corona ad ("Find your beach.") amuses me. He attributes the appeal of the ad to what he calls "cultural imprinting" - it's trying to get people to associate drinking Corona beer with being a chill guy who might hang out at a beach. Two readers elaborated that it's more legit because Corona is made in Mexico, where one can find nice beaches.
None of them appear to have noticed the pun, augmented by the pretty young woman reclining next to the Corona drinker. (She also holds one, but it's nowhere nearly as conspicuous. You mostly just see his.)
It seems to me that needless snark is extremely popular. It's an easy way to get attention, though it may interfere with getting any specific message across.
One is snarky when they try to communicate (successfully or not) that they are high-status. It is not helpful from the perspective of delivering the message, and it was a mistake if the person actually wanted to deliver the message.
But maybe their intended goal was to communicate the (perceived) status difference, in which case, it either works successfully or it does not, depending on the situation.
We need to further distinguish who is the intended recipient of the status message. It could be the person who is talked to, in which case the actual message is "I will treat you with contempt, stop bothering me". Or it could be the audience, in which case the actual message is "look, I am higher status than this guy". If the audience is your ingroup, it can also imply "look, our group is higher status than this guy and his ilk".
EDIT:
Obvious example: RationalWiki and their "snarky point of view" policy. The purpose of the policy is to communicate that the editors of RationalWiki are higher status than whomever they review, and that they are not interested in a debate with them.
In this case, I think the snark is an efficient way to deliver the message, and the fact that it makes the message plausibly deniable is a bonus.
I think of this as "writing skill" and I don't think it's undervalued. It seems to me that many rationalists do not actually have a serious goal of "persuade as many others as possible" and so they don't care as much about tone/writing as you might expect.
I have heard people say that GDP is growing especially fast because of spending on AI . But AI infrastructure isn't producing value yet, because it's not yet finished being built. The argument has to be that the investment itself is increasing GDP.
But nobody keeps money under their mattress these days. To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested. But that means it gets added to GDP. So it seems like all that an AI boom can do is shift money from being spent/invested in something else, to being spent/invested in AI. So why does this raise GDP?
> To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested
If we assume a fixed savings rate that isn't changing in a closed economy, then yes, investment will stay the same. However, the US exists in an open economy, it can borrow to from abroad to fund domestic investment, thereby increasing investment while having a constant savings rate.
Not all investment is considered GDP. The resale of stocks and bonds on the secondary market, which is basically the entire market by volume, contributes nothing. It’s just the allocation of value, not the creation of it.
Investment in new projects is a significantly smaller portion of overall investment, but contributes greatly to GDP.
> to a first approximation all money is spent or invested
In a sense, GDP is a metric of how fast this happens. If I'm a big private equity firm I want to invest my money somewhere, but if there's a lot of good opportunities I'll do it tomorrow and if there's none I'll have to wait a while. And similar for spending - if there's a lot of growth opportunities whoever I invest that money in can use it at once, if not they'll keep it in the banks for a while.
These wait times can't be rounded off to zero. If they could, the economy would grow infinitely fast and GDP would be infinite (since everyone who receives a dollar, in either investment or paycheck, immediately spends it meaning that dollar does an infinite amount of work).
GDP is the value of all final goods produced with a country over a period of time. If households or firms reduce their spending, firms reduce production, and GDP falls. An AI boom increases the demand for servers - when firms increase production of servers to meet this higher demand, GDP rises.
If households reduce their spending, then savings necessarily increases, since savings is all income that's not spent. It sounds like you're asking, since this increased savings is going to finance investment spending anyway, why should a drop in spending have any impact on GDP? This is actually the central issue in Keynes' general theory. Financial markets channel savings into investment, and interest rates adjust to equate the two. A $1 trillion increase in savings won't necessarily lead to $1 trillion more of investment if the demand for investment goods is insensitive to interest rates. Instead, in textbook principles of macro, the surplus of savings (and drop in total expenditure) causes firms to reduce production to meet demand, which reduces income, and as income falls, savings itself falls until eventually, back in equilibrium, savings equals investment.
After some assumptions (employed, marginal worker, positive value, etc), Option 1 will create higher GDP, because people value the food created by a Chef more than the Fast food cook - willing to pay more for it.
Same for investment that can utilize unused resources, or move from areas we value less to areas we value more.
Basically, building more expensive structures raises the GDP.
Investment isn't fixed, it goes up and down as people decide to invest more or less from year to year. GDP = C + I + G + (X - M), if AI causes causes firms to want to invest more, it can rise and the other things can fall.
It might be better to think less of GDP (spending) and think more of the "production possibilities frontier" - how much we can produce with our factors of production. GDP will grow faster not because of spending on AI (or any other type of investment), but because (or if or when) AI (or other types of investment) causes the PPF to shift out.
>To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested.
Not sure how much work "first approximation" is doing in your statement, but yes, companies are indeed keeping increasing sums of cash under their mattresses:
"corporate cash reserves worldwide now exceed $8 trillion [..] This represents one of the most significant financial shifts of the 21st century."
"While cash is a vital buffer in uncertain times, too much can be a liability. Investors want to see a balance: enough liquidity to weather downturns but not so much that it signals a lack of strategic direction or inefficient capital allocation."
And that has been reaching ridiculous amounts especially for the big tech companies. Apple alone has more than 200 billions of cash reserves in tax havens, or (converted into 100$ bills) 2000 tons of dollar. That's a big I-mattress.
Yes, to reinforce this point, the tech companies (who are now building out infrastructure) were indeed sitting on giant cash piles (well, usually cash equivalents like short term government debt).
Furthermore, if the 'investment' is bidding up prices for existing financial assets (like public equities or debt) then that's only one step removed from cash under the mattress.
US Government debt is an investment, just one that doesn't return much because there's a very low risk of default, and one that doesn't get invested in creating new wealth. (Government bonds could in principle be used to invest in creating new wealth, but I don't think much of current US bonds are--mainly they're substituting for unpopular tax hikes or unpopular spending cuts, and are used to subsidize some mix of social security, medicare, medicaid, the military budget, and interest on the debt.)
I think not all spending/increasing equally contributes to GDP. The most influential would be direct spending (hiring people, buying goods), while indirect investment like buying stock in slow and stable companies would do comparatively less.
AI companies are directly spending very aggressively (hiring, data centers, etc) and so their impact on GDP is greater than allocating an equal amount of money to a more cautious company which doesn't spend much even if their valuation increases.
Classically, investment grows the economy directly in two ways:
1) a company invests in buildings, equipment, training etc.
2) once the investment is realised, the company would typically benefit from increased revenue and profits
3) investments are typically financed at least partially by debt, which must be repaid
In terms of GDP, (1) and (2) contribute directly to production. Debt doesn't contribute directly to GDP, but has general stimulatory effects, since it tends to increase the amount of money in circulation. I'm guessing that some increase of money supply, and increase in the velocity of money is what's showing up in the figures, and what's missing from your model.
For AI, I would guess that the main contribution is (1), since none of the AI businesses are profit-making yet. The main investments presumably are
- investment in physical infrastructure, which boosts Nvidia and other chip companies, but also local and national contractors and suppliers since the machines have to live somewhere
- well paid engineers, in the AI companies and elsewhere, who will be spending their pay checks on second homes, new vehicles and other luxuries, which surely will show up in GDP.
If the AI boom is really going to take off, I would expect soon to see smaller companies appearing which offer AI-consulting, similar to the profusion of IT-services companies which flourished 1995-2005 or so, and web-development companies 2000-2010. (AI should also kill off any of those that are still hanging on.)
Yes, this. What's missing in Scott's question is that a single dollar can contribute to GDP many times: each time the recipient of a dollar spends it domestically, that's another dollar in that year's GDP. Hence GDP is the total of everything produced in a year (or a smaller time-period but annualized), *not* a snapshot of how much money exists at any one time.
Because GDP is about volume of economic activity and not wealth, and if everyone starts rebalancing their portfolios because AI affects their predictions in different directions and drives both new beliefs and new disagreements, this raises GDP, even though the collective still owns the same property?
Yes, this is why associating GDP growth with economic... good things weirds me out. If my phone subscription doubles in price with the same service, I am not better off but the GDP will be higher. Solid money and technological improvement would probably slowly make prices lower, implying GDP contraction. GDP growth is easily achieved by printing money, without actually producing more, just paying more. I also remember reading somewhere that if you would pay for a house in the US with gold, not dollars, it costs the same as 50 years go. I have not tested it, but sounds about right.
My example is that if there were a crime wave so people spent more on security, the GDP would go up, but it's not as though people were better off.
Also, it's important to be able to turn over in bed. If people need to be paid to turn others over so that turning over in bed is moved more into the money economy, this isn't better than people being able to turn themselves over.
GDP would not go up. That additional spend on security wouldn't come from nowhere, it would be reallocated from other, more productive areas. Plus there would likely be behavioral changes that reduced general economic activity (staying in out of fear instead of walking to a restaurant, for example). Crime most certainly does not increase GDP. If it did then society wouldn't try so hard to eliminate it.
GDP is an imperfect measure of well-being. There can be stuff that makes the measure go up while people are the same or even worse-off. When mom takes a job and puts her kids in daycare, the money spent on daycare shows up as more GDP, but really it's just the same useful thing being done (her kids are being taken care of) that was previously done without any payment. The extra money she's making/wealth she's producing shows up in GDP but also is a real improvement in the world, but the added daycare costs aren't really an improvement in the world.
That not True. For example, if I invested my money abroad, and now due to increased crime I buy a home-grown security system, National GDP would go up.
Without techological progress, eventually GDP tops out. This is basically Solow. (You get richer by accumulating capital that makes you more productive. There are diminishing returns to capital, but depreciation is a fixed fraction of current capital every year, so eventually all your extra productivity is being spent maintaining your capital base.)
My sense is that given fixed technology and fixed land/other resources, you hit diminishing returns with both.
To use a simple example, think of farming in the middle ages. Giving everyone good tools will make them more productive--going from wood to steel plow blades, giving people steel blades for harvesting, building good structures to store the grain, etc. Expensive irrigation and drainage works will make them more productive. Everyone having an ox or whatever to pull the plow will make everyone more productive. But at some point, you just won't be able to get more yield from your arable land.
At that point, neither added people nor added capital will benefit you much. More people = more food being eaten up, more tools = more upkeep fixing/replacing tools as they rust or wear out, and eventually you're losing more than you gain.
From the middle ages, there are a *lot* of capital improvements before you hit big diminishing returns, because those societies were chuchmouse poor. But without new technology, you'd still hit a limit eventually, if other stuff didn't hit the limit first.
Agreed. I was thinking of "more capital" along the margin of increased technology, but along the margin of additional instances of the same technology your frame holds due to constraints which are neither labor nor capital (e.g., land).
Edit: the above was only for my second paragraph; in the first (since you had specified technological progress) I was just implicitly ignoring other factors.
I have the feeling that argument is usually that without investment into AI, GDP growth in the US would be much smaller or even negative, not that it is exceptional right now compared to the padt. At least I only heard this before in the context of musings like "No wonder people aren't happy about the US economy, the situation is bleak, it only doesn't show in official data yet because of all that investment into AI chips and data centers"
In the last thread you said "It's been three months since the last medical treatment", and I see someone said "For what it's worth, my partner's issues have faded, but it peaked around month 4, and is only fading now in month 5 post procedure."
Hopefully they'll come comment again and give you the details you asked for, but even just with that, you've got a solid data point to refer to. Not that it's guaranteed to go the same way for you, but it's clearly a possibility, so at the very least you need to hang in there until you're well past their timeline.
It also sounds like you are/were pretty into rationalism, and I would point out that this sort of situation - if you really are serious about considering killing yourself - is maybe the best possible use case for having cultivated the whole rationalist mindset. You have been practicing to stick to calm logic when it matters! So stick to it! Make it a matter of pride if you need to. Absolutely no one looking from the outside at your situation - terrible suffering but a very real chance of it resolving in the near-ish future - would say suicide is a good decision here, and I'm going to assert that includes past and future you as well. It's understandable if it *feels* different from the inside, but you have to step back and recognize that the feeling is wrong and the logic is right.
Anyways, I'm really sorry you're going through something so awful, and I really hope you make it through.
I saw your comments in the previous open thread and I really hope you get better. I'm sorry that I cannot be of any more help than to just give you my well wishes.
I don't think the other commenters here in this thread had the context of the previous open thread when they responded.
I did IVF myself years ago, and found it extremely stressful. I did not feel exploited and badly treated though. How do you see the treatment as exploitive?
Well I was told the side effects would be a few weeks of nausea, not being almost incapable of sleeping at all for months and then (semi?) permanently losing the ability to feel positive emotions of any kind.
I just did a very cursory look at the literature, and while nausea and mood swings are mentioned as common side effects, insomnia is not. I completely believe you that you suffered godawful versions of all these things, but do you have reason to think the godawful version is common? I did 8 cycles of IVF. I was pretty stressed out the whole time, by the procedures, the time commitment, and the suspense about whether it would work. I was often unhappy, but that was mostly after a cycle failed to produce a pregnancy. It felt more like a reaction to a bad event than a hormonally driven mood swing. I had moderately bad insomnia, averaging maybe 6.5 hours per night instead of my usual 8. I was able to catch up on sleep during breaks between some cycles, though.
And during all those months I was comparing notes with lots of other women. We were all sitting in the waiting room together in the morning, there to get our ultrasounds, and got to know each other well enough to give updates. A lot of people complained about the stress and uncertainty — will it work? But I can’t remember anyone saying they felt just awful physically or mentally. As I said, I believe you that this treatment wreaked havoc on your body and mind, but my own experience, including the info from the other women I talked with, doesn’t support the idea that IVF is hellishly uncomfortable and destructive and the clinics that offer it are concealing this information. Maybe you weren’t screwed over, but just extremely unlucky in how your body reacted to the drugs and procedures?
Why are you acting like people forced you to do this? You could have researched the risks yourself, you could have asked the doctors about potential risks, and hell, you could have followed their instructions and not lie about your symptoms. This is an entirely self-inflicted problem, and you are blaming everyone but yourself for it.
Yep, did all the research. I was told I would have "mood swings" and some minor physical stuff like "nausea" and "tiredness" that would resolve in a couple of weeks. Obviously I was not told that there was any chance that I would be so fatigued and depressed that I would be unable to get out of bed for months at a time. I specifically asked repeatedly about chances of more severe side effects and was told absolutely not, that they didn't know of that happening. And then when I tried to call the clinic and report my experience, they said they don't collect data on ANY symptoms experienced by women--only whether they ultimately got pregnant or not. I guess that explains why there's no data!
This sounds more like "medical malpractice" than anything, to be perfectly honest. I'm not surprised, although I see that you were. They've blacklisted even FOIAing reported side effects of the mRNA vaccines (the guvmint collected the data via survey, but they won't let anyone look at it, because of HIPAA. They could simply deidentify the data, but no....)
"You could have researched the risks yourself, you could have asked the doctors about potential risks, and hell, you could have followed their instructions and not lie about your symptoms."
Fertility clinics are a business. They're not going to turn potential clients away with "some proportion of patients will have godawful experiences, because IVF is godawful anyway, but this will be *extra-crispy* godawful".
Lot of money in the baby-selling business.
I'm sorry Farkling had those bad experiences, but it's really a toss-up about "will you have the routine horrible experience or will you be one of the [whatever percentage] get the super-awful experience?"
I'm gonna go look for a random fertility clinic website and see how they sell their services, and if they warn potential clients about the downsides.
Okay, here's one on my doorstep, as it were. And here's the advice page about IVF:
Nuffin' there about "it can fuck you over", but that *might* be in the fine print about "talk to our team".
Lots of stats on success rates and testimonials from grateful clients. Aha! one mention of side effects! (now, there may be more detail but I'm not digging through 38 webpages):
"What are the most common side effects of hormonal injections?
The most common side effects reported during IVF treatment are typically hormonal ones, such as headaches, tiredness and mood swings. Everybody is different but most patients report little to no side effects."
So if you're reading the likes of this before taking the plunge, there's nothing there (on a cursory look) about "this can really put you through the wringer".
I'm assuming she did this, with a slightly inflated view of "how smart doctors are about things they really know nothing about." (Aka "Most Medical Research Is Wrong, and Won't Replicate, stop treating Joe Doctor like he's AllWise and AllKnowing." Less than ten years ago, our only evidence based treatment for stroke was Asprin. 100 years ago, they were prescribing 30 grams of asprin a day. Yes, grams.)
You're... assuming there is one? I work for a hospital. "Less than ten years ago" was the last time I listened to one of the clinicians (who works with strokes) discussing "evidence based medicine." Remember that most scientific studies don't replicate, and that stroke is "emergency medicine" (which means that it's more difficult to quantify "how bad is each stroke" and everyone's always told "minutes matter" with them).
I have no idea if my perception of doctors is well calibrated, but I know they're probably smarter than me at endocrinology, so I at least trusted them to do that.
Aerial juggling. Go skydiving with flaming bowling pins, maybe some flaming shishkebabs or whatever you call the things those fireeater guys use, and then halfway down, set off one of those enormous professional fireworks inside your backpack and go out with a bang. You'll probably want someone filming. They'll probably want to get further away before the firework.
The when isn't a biggie, you can do it pretty much anytime. I guess night makes a better show. And, like, not too cloudy. No one wants to juggle fire in the rain.
You know, the most intriguing part of this is calling Donald Trump "then-presidential candidate". Because... aren't you supposed to call a former president "Former President" first and foremost? Or is it correct that the candidacy takes precedence? It comes up so rarely that someone is both a presidential candidate and a former president that I don't think there's a standard. Is this a breach of etiquette, or isn't it?
If it was posted as part of his campaign, then it makes sense to refer to him as "then-presidential candidate Trump." Because that is more informative, even if it technically a breach of etiquette.
Welcome to the Catholic version of the Protestant Fundamentalist end-times Rapture types.
It's not fiction, or at least not intended to be; this is an alleged vision of Pope Leo. I wonder if the current pope taking the name Leo started this idea of posting here? Anyway, yes, the St Michael prayer. Created by Leo XIII, ordered to be said after Mass, was in response to political pressure by the Italian state and seizure of Rome:
"The threat to the church at the time was the Italian government's campaign against the Papal States. The 1890 text was composed and published twenty years after the capture of Rome had deprived the Pope of the last vestige of his temporal sovereignty. The papal residence at the Quirinal Palace had been converted into that of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy."
After 1964 reorganisation of the liturgy of the Mass, these prayers were dropped, but keeping the St Michael prayer for spiritual purposes was permitted and even recommended.
The End Times crowd keep insisting on the Devil and the smoke of Satan and other things. I'm just surprised Garabandal wasn't mentioned, I haven't heard that invoked in quite a while.
The vision and dialogue between God and the Devil seem to be later additions to the origin story (outright inventions, to be blunt about it, though that's perfectly in line with Catholic traditions around hagiography):
"Several variants of this story are told. The first to appear in print was in a 1933 German Sunday newspaper article, which stated that, as a result of the vision, shortly after 1880 Leo ordered the prayer to Saint Michael to be recited. In reality, it was only in 1884 that the Pope instituted the Leonine Prayers, still at that time without the prayer to Saint Michael. A year later, a German writer, Fr. Bers, tried to trace the origin of the story and declared that, though the story was widespread, nowhere could he find a trace of proof. Sources close to the institution of the prayer in 1886, including an account of a conversation with Leo XIII about his decision, say nothing of the alleged vision. Bers concluded that the story was a later invention that was spreading like a virus. The story is also found in Carl Vogl's 1935 Begone Satan: A Soul-Stirring Account of Diabolical Possession in Iowa.
In a later version, the vision is said to have occurred not in 1880, but on 13 October 1884, the year in which the Leonine Prayers were instituted but without the Prayer to Saint Michael. And yet another date, 25 September 1888, two years after Pope Leo XIII had added the prayer to the Leonine Prayers, was given in a 1991 version.
Another reported version of the vision relates a detailed conversation between the voice of Satan, who said he would destroy the Church if given enough power and time, and the voice of God, who permits Satan to do what he will. According to William Saunders, writing in the Arlington Catholic Herald, Leo said that God permitted Satan to choose a single century in which to work his worst against the Church; he chose the 20th century, and God privately revealed the then-future events of the 20th century to Leo."
The 1984 movie "The Annunciation", which has a runtime of 1:40(!). Plot blurb:
> When Adam and Eve, having succumbed to Lucifer's temptation, are expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam makes Lucifer keep his promise. Lucifer then grants Adam a dream of the world to come.
If the 100 years started when Leo XIII heard the dialogue, then presumably Satan's time "off leash" (Job style) ended in 1984. Seems a bit odd, since Catholicism (and Christianity in general) seems to have suffered worse blows since then. On the other hand, one could argue that the religious troubles we've seen since the 80's are the result of evil that was done long beforehand, with the ill effects only being seen later. Take the Catholic sex abuse scandal that rocked the church in the US during the 2000s as an example: if Satan worked his evil will to encourage sexual abuse among priests, and encourage leaders to hide the abuse, before 1984 and then stopped, it wouldn't be that weird to only have the scandal come out twenty years later. I mean for one thing, the kids who were abused needed time to grow up before telling their story. For another, once you've set up a system of abuse and corruption it's probably going to keep going on inertia for a while without any demonic help.
Other things that occurred before 1984 that might have hurt the Church later and led to it's decline in the West: Vatican II, the founding of the Moral Majority, WWI & WWII, the rise of the Soviet Union (which only lasted seven years after Satan's time was up, so maybe he was keeping that whole ship afloat), the sexual revolution, and the invention of televangelism.
I completed Virginia Tech’s MA in Philosophy over a decade ago. They had some funded spots, strengths in LLEMMing (language, logic, epistemology, metaphysics ,and mind) areas and philosophy of science back then, and a decent PhD program placement record (though not at all sure where things stand with them now).
Deepmind's math AI recently achieved a gold medal at the IMO (an elite high school level math competition), solving 5 out of 6 of the problems. Here are solutions to the 6 problems https://web.evanchen.cc/exams/IMO-2025-notes.pdf , and here are deep mind's solutions to the first 5 https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/IMO_2025.pdf . This looks to me like a fairly impressive performance.
I'm a bit disappointed that the problems don't seem to require much of a "physical mental image" other than problem 6 which is hard for other reasons. I was assuming that new ideas would be necessary to improve performance this much, maybe with AI trained in physical simulations in order to develop something similar to "human-like" mental images, at least if the program were to achieve this performance in human-like ways, which is not necessarily the case. However this does make me update towards a faster pace of development than I was assuming, maybe we will even get research level competence in a few years.
I have not checked the solutions in detail, they look plausibly correct at a quick glance, but chat bots are great at writing plausibly correct text which is wrong, so this conclusion is dependent on the solutions being actually good, IMO judges apparently graded them as being correct so I'm relying on their opinion here.
tl;dr: ChatGPT GPT5-Thinking 08/15/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
4 correct, 2 partially correct, 1 wrong (Gemini 2.5 still looks better.)
a) correct
b) partially correct
c) correct (well, missed tetrahedrane, but everything else ok, so I'll give full credit)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) correct (enough I'll give full credit)
g) badly wrong
full dialog at: https://chatgpt.com/share/689fb538-8de8-8006-843a-a00bfb04621d
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes. A wavelength of 530.2534896 nm lies within the standard human visual range, which is roughly 380–750 nm"
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Got the FeCl4- and CuCl4 2- species. Got that the FeCl4- d-d is spin forbidden. Incorrectly attributed the CuCl4 2- color to d-d transitions. Prodding with:
"Many Thanks! You got most of the relevant points. Could you think carefully about "Primarily d–d transitions in the d⁹ system, influenced by ligand field splitting from Cl⁻. Chloride ligands are weaker-field than water, shifting the absorption toward shorter wavelengths.""
Finally got the right answer, but to get it fully right took several more prods.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: On the first try, everything I was looking for except tetrahedrane. A prompt of:
"Many Thanks! _Almost_ the full set I was looking for. ( There are other nominally legal isomers for C4H2 but these are so strained as to be quite unreasonable chemically. ) But, for C4H4, there is one famous (albeit unstable) additional one. Can you name it?" got them to name tetrahedrane. I'll call this close enough to give full credit. They even successfully distinguished 1-Methylcyclopropene from 3-Methylcyclopropene, which most LLMs missed.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "So, on average, the Sun loses ~3–4× more mass per second via the mass-equivalent of its emitted radiation than via the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: disappointing. Got the same, wrong, infinite slope at the equivalence point initially, though they realize that a real solution will have finite (but, for GPT5, unstated) slope. Prodded with:
"Please work out the numerical result for "(i.e., a vertical slope in the ideal strong acid/strong base model; in real solutions water autoionization and activity effects make it very large but finite.)""
They got the correct answer after this prod.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty good, found more than 50 valid compounds, accepted valid additions e.g. SiHF3, SiH2F2, SiH3F. I'll count it as full credit.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: This was a mess. The first two tries they made didn't even _have_ an S4 axis, and the number of substituents was wrong (they needed a multiplicity of 4 and had multiplicity of 2 for several substituents).
Can someone with a subscription to Slow Boring check something for me?
I asked a question in an Q&A thread a few weeks ago. Then I took a 1-month vacation from SB for reasons, pausing my paid subscription, a pause I'm halfway through.
The header of today's post (answers to reader questions) suggests my question might be one he answered. Is my name in the list of answered replies? (I always thought he answered the same week; I wouldn't have otherwise paused while it was pending.)
My experience with Substack pauses is that if I unpause, I completely lose the half-month I already paid for and will get charged immediately, so I don't want to unpause "just to check."
Someone on Twitter said:
"This morning, as I walked past a construction crew preparing for another 90-degree day, this question popped into my mind:
Has Zohran Mamdani ever done a single day of real, hard work?"
https://x.com/michelletandler/status/1955648799071683055
I don't like Mamdani, but this tweet really rubs me the wrong way. Suppose it's true he never did "real, hard work," never got his hands dirty. It worked out for him, didn't it? He's on track to be Mayor of NYC at 33 years old. Those guys on that construction site, I don't think they're gonna be Mayor of NYC. Maybe conservatives should try to emulate successful people like that instead of sounding like resentful losers.
>Set up a system that only rich and connected and credentialed can climb.
>Someone who climbs it somehow overcomes their class conditioning and starts making left-wing noises.
>Suddenly every status marker they exhibit signifies their detachment from common people, every dollar they spend is outrageous exuberance, etc.
I would of course gladly take those people up on their outrage and agree on eliminating people "who never did real hard work" from politics entirely, but I'm afraid they wouldn't follow up, they're not operating in an epistemic/rhetorical mode where something you say at one point needs to be plausibly consistent with anything else you say.
>I would of course gladly take those people up on their outrage and agree on eliminating people "who never did real hard work" from politics entirely
You'd get a lot of QAnoners and such empowered under that system.
God forbid people try to avoid getting Let Them Eat Cake-d.
There, there, Alexander: we know you don't like the horny-handed sons of toil. Chin up! The AI boom will (any day now) replace all those resentful losers with robots to maintain the infrastructure that supports the successful people, and you will never again have to see a low-class person in the stinky dirty flesh!
I'm not anti-working-class. I'm anti whiny resentful conservatives who romanticize being poor to cope with the fact that they're not very successful in life.
Some of the guys in that construction site will tell you they're hauling cement in 90 degree heat so their kids don't have to do that kind of labor. I admire that.
I mean, is there any locale on Earth more chock full of soft-handed symbolic analysts than NYC? That city was headquarters for the transition of the American economy from 'hard work' to financialization.
Her profile says she's a 'moderate conservative'. Did she vote for Trump, who grew up with servants and a limo driver? I get that she's appealing to a popular conception of socialism as being for 'people who don't want to work', but in fact that's not what socialists have in mind. If someone wants to do a point-by-point comparison of how Cuomo and Mamdami's proposals would affect hard-working people, have at it, but they should spare us this sort of swipe.
I think the swipe is meant to be at the socialist, er, siblings (can't say "brothers" alone any more) who claim to represent the working class and yet are far from ever having had the handle of a shovel in their fist. I'm not saying this is an American problem, a good few of the Labour politicians who got into power in my own country were also champagne socialists (e.g., as I will never tire of saying, Ruairi Quinn who got the nickname Ho-Chi Quinn for his radical student politics).
Mamdani is one of the Democratic Socialists of America who do (or did, the last time a magazine article of theirs was referenced on here) have a problem with "why are we so short on black and brown working class members in our local parties instead of all white college-educated persons?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Socialists_of_America
"DSA's stated goal is to participate in the workers rights movement with a long-term aim of social ownership of production such as public enterprises, worker cooperatives, or decentralized planning."
Though this makes me prick up my ears - they want(ed) rid of USAID???
"DSA's 2021 platform, its most recent, calls for abolishing the Electoral College, Senate, and filibuster; ending first-past-the-post in favor of proportional representation; raising the minimum wage; a job guarantee; Medicare for All; free child care for all; free college for all; public development banks; social housing; democratic and social ownership of the means of production; a Green New Deal; a just transition for fossil fuel workers; abortion and fertility care on demand; anti-racism; reparations for slavery; abolishing police and prisons "in the long term"; abolishing ICE; anti-imperialism; withdrawal from NATO; normalizing relations with China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran; anti-Zionism; Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel; abolishing USAID, NED, and VOA; D.C. statehood; referendums on independence or statehood in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and unincorporated US territories; and a second constitutional convention to establish a socialist republic."
A few of the construction guys might not go amiss there as representatives to bring about their stated goals, but it's likely to be more along the lines of the anarchist cell in "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"There was a stir of almost inaudible applause, such as is sometimes heard in church. Then a large old man, with a long and venerable white beard, perhaps the only real working-man present, rose lumberingly and said—
“I move that Comrade Gregory be elected Thursday,” and sat lumberingly down again.
“Does anyone second?” asked the chairman.
A little man with a velvet coat and pointed beard seconded.
“Before I put the matter to the vote,” said the chairman, “I will call on Comrade Gregory to make a statement.”
Mamdani's parents are successful, and I don't see Ugandan rap videos* passing as blue collar bona fides. Given the way the NYC government works, a lot of Zohran's proposals are not practicable. But still, I think a head-to-head on worker and cost-of-living issues is going to favor him over a neoliberal like Cuomo. If you're in the Precariat, living month-to-month, aren't you going to vote for the guy who at least says he wants to enact beneficial changes?
I looked up the USAID thing**:
"Abolish USAID, NED, Voice of America, and other governmental agencies that cynically disguise capitalist control as aid and journalism."
Soft power can be used for good, too, and my calculations on foreign aid generally involve a utility function. Just considering PEPFAR, this DSA policy seems short-sighted (or quixotically far-sighted) and stupid.
The DSA issues a good magazine called Jacobin with coherent econ/historical analysis. The party gained a lot of members during Bernie's presidential runs. However, they've since shot themselves in the foot, particularly though some demonstrations that were construed as support for Hamas 'resistance' on 8/7/23. I'm anti-zionist, too, but this begs the question "how exactly does an organization seeking to socialize the means of production in America bet its future on a stance about war in the Mideast?". The American left is riddled with factionalism, often to the point of rendering it impotent.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQVsVNPkPmE&ab_channel=Mr.Cardamom
**https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/
> shot themselves in the foot, particularly though some demonstrations that were construed as support for Hamas
This reminds me of a joke (I think it was the Babylon Bee) that went something like "New exposé reveals Trump not as religious as he claims. Support plummets."
Does anyone who supports the DSA not already know their position on Israel, and on whose side they will be in any conflict involving it?
There's a difference between being on the side of (a) the 'Palestinian people', and (b) Hamas. DSA did indeed lose members, including this guy* who explains how the party was captured by 'entryists'.
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What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.
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To my previous point, it's off-mission for an organization whose primary purpose is to socialize American industry to suddenly bank everything on being a Palestinian rescue organization.
* https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/quit-dsa-gaza-israel/
I find it hilarious that it was Donald Trump, of all people, who carried out (at least in part) one of the policy aims of the DSA.
I don't know whether to quote "be careful what you wish for" or "the Monkey's Paw" here 😁
You're taking political messaging too seriously: the Republicans' ruling class haven't done any "real, hard work" either.
Or (I've noticed this tendency among the local young right-wingers, at least) they've spent one summer doing yardwork at some relative's ranch or equivalent for the exact purpose of being able to put "real, physical work" in their CV's.
Or to quote Terry Pratchett:
“People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.”
A recent example of an LLM helpfully not being sycophantic.
I asked R1 if two different English titles of books by al-Farabi were different translations of the Arabic title of the same book.
Yes, it tells me, Fī wujūb ṣināʿat al-kīmiyā in Arabic.
R1 helpfully adds that translating al-kīmiyā as “chemistry” rather than “alchemy” is an anachronism for a book of this date. And anyway, al-Farabi probably didn’t actually write it, although it’s attributed to him.
That might have been my next question, but R1 is ahead of me here, and points out that my first question is based on a misunderstanding of who actually wrote it.
I’m not surprised. There’s pattern here: Geber probably didn’t exist; Basil Valentine also didn’t e it’s and was made up; Ramon Lull didn’t write the alchemical text attributed to him. Oh, al-Farabi didn’t write the text attributed to him either.
(If I can find a reliable source for historians don’t think al-Farabi wrote that book, I might put a note on the Wikipedia page …)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1egG7QjwqxJkiIGdu7EbzbUPYVBppftAf9s2-7MLcQR0/edit?usp=sharing
How about this.
OC ACXLW Meetup: The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes – August 16, 2025 Meeting #101
Reported. Don't post an unexplained link to a binary format of unknown provenance.
FTR, I thought it would automatically generate a preview. Most other places do, like Discord and Facebook, when I post there.
geez I can't win. I posted the whole text and scot asked me to make it shorter. maybe just a link.
Been there. Thanks for trying, but I'm pretty sure Scott was asking for, for example, a one-paragraph summary of the link, followed by the link.
It's a google rich text document. But yeah, an explanation would have been nice.
https://linch.substack.com/p/which-ways-of-knowing-actually-work
Thanks to all the advice and constructive (and positive) feedback people have given my recently-launched substack last month!
I've finally finished writing my first August article: "Which Ways of Knowing Actually Work? Building an Epistemology Tier List"
I rank different epistemic methods from S+ tier (literacy) to F-- tier (arguing on Twitter), based on their actual track record of helping humans figure out true things. Some spicy takes: mathematical modeling beats RCTs, thought experiments are D-tier, and Bayesianism-as-framework is only C-tier.
The specific tiers matter less than the principles behind trying to create the tier list in the first place. My hope is that by making the implicit hierarchies that people already all have explicit, we can get past tired arguments of pluralism (epistemic democracy) or monism (one-size-fits-all styles of One True Frameworks like Popperianism or Bayesianism), and have a smoother transition between questions of practical ways of knowing and formal epistemology.
Would love to hear what ACX readers think, especially about:
- Whether the tier list framework is useful or too reductive
- Which methods I'm overrating/underrating
- How this relates to Scott's writing on epistemic learned helplessness and bounded distrust
Link: https://linch.substack.com/p/which-ways-of-knowing-actually-work
Tier Lists: A tier. :D
YOUR tier list, on the other hand … I think you're judging the ones you rank highest by their best examples, the middling ones by their median example, and the lowest ones by their worst examples. You also seem to me to be a little bit slippery about whether these are ways for YOU to know something, or ways for humanity to discover things.
Consider writing, your S+ example. As a tool to allow the frontier of knowledge to advance, I agree with its placement. But as a way for a regular person to know true things? If you're reading, say, the Book of Mormon, or the New York Times, that makes you strictly worse off. You need essentially folk wisdom (which you classify as F tier) to know to avoid the bad sources that look attractive, the same way one learns to identify poisonous berries and mushrooms.
I similarly think the S tier is way too high to be placing Math. If you restrict "knowing" to knowing things about the real world (and not purely abstract objects), I think its greatest triumph was the discovery of Neptune, famously discovered with a pen before it was seen through a telescope. But that builds on the observations on Uranus, so I don't think it can reasonably be separated from (C+ tier) observational studies. If you're being generous, you could count all physical law as mathematics, in which case, fine, but it's still quite narrow, AND reliant on (B tier) measurements/observation. Also, depending on how broadly you construe the term "mathematics," the boundary between that and the (D tier) pure logic and thought experiments might get pretty fuzzy.
I broadly agree with the relative ordering of the things in the other tiers, though I'd bump them all up a level, and bump math down to the new A tier, alongside science and direct observation/measurement.
A separate argument about the relative ranking of "expert intuition" and "non-expert intuition" is, similar to my point about reading sources, whether to trust the expert (i.e., whether he's faithfully conveying to you his best guess). In the comment section on a different post (On Priesthoods, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods), I saw this described as "with non-experts, you're sifting the wheat from the chaff, whereas with the priests you're trying to separate the good wheat from the poisoned."
"Tier Lists: A tier. :D"
I kept reading this and wondering what you might mean by something being on both Tier List A and on Tier D.
Yes, I worried that might be confusing, and wondered whether I ought to have downgraded the emoticon to :).
It's also possible for an entire field of experts to spend 20 years doing research, and have absolutely nothing to show for it, and for a bumbling "not an expert" to walk by, and say "Oh, here's what you're doing wrong."
This is the state of protein folding. 20 years of work, a full body of programs, years of supercomputer time consumed... and none of it was ever going to work. "Just a little simplification!" (because it made the chemists' brain hurt, not because of computing power).
Your last paragraph is really interesting, appreciate the link!
Thanks for your own tier list! Feel free to comment on the post yourself and/or make an infographic too! One day we can have a tier list of tier lists to resolve this question :)
Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rationalist-cults
As I understand the article, the problem with the rationality community is that its messaging attracts many vulnerable people who are a potential cult material. Even if Eliezer does not abuse them himself, someone else in the community can, and many already did.
The wannabe cult leaders in the community can leverage the fact that rationalists are supposed to reflect on their own thinking, take ideas seriously, and ignore many conventional beliefs and behaviors. If you are the kind of person with great rhetorical skills, you just need to make someone verbally accept some extreme idea of yours, and then you can keep pushing them to also accept everything that is implied by that idea, and also to act accordingly. (And although the aspiring rationalists are supposed to think for themselves, many people in the community are actually looking for someone to do the thinking for them.)
A typical dysfunctional group within the rationalist community seems to work like this: The members isolate themselves not only from the world in general, but even from the rest of the rationalist community. They spend most of the time "psychoanalyzing" each other.
The groups that focus on actually doing things in the real world are usually doing fine. Among groups that focus on their own thinking, CFAR seems to be an exception, in that they check their techniques in workshops, and quickly abandon those that the participants report as harmful.
.
This seems correct to me, and the question is, what are we going to do about it? Different people will draw different conclusions, but from my perspective, it means that the rationality community is healthy at the core -- all the bad guys took care to do their bad things in private where the rest of the community couldn't see them. We just need to make it public knowledge among the new members that this kind of danger exists. One possible approach would be to print this article and give it to all newcomers. Maybe make a shorter version of it.
The University of Chicago Harris Social Impact Fellowship is a selective, full-time, 11-month program for recent graduates and early career professionals with strong STEM skills and a passion for evidence-based change. The fellowship blends intensive training in policy analysis, critical reasoning, and data analytics with an applied learning experience at a top research center or policy institute.
Learn more and apply here: https://info.harris.uchicago.edu/social-impact-fellowship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGHXk-WRStQ
If you're up for fun about extremely low probability events and the power of wishful thinking about large amounts of money.
There's an artist named Doig whose paintings sell for millions.
There was another artist named Doige who took up painting in prison.
An art gallery wanted to sell a Doige, jumped to the conclusion they had a Doig, and sued Doig because he insisted he hadn't painted that painting.
The art gallery got into legal trouble because they persisted in their law suit after they had plenty of evidence they had a Doige.
How many Doge for one Doig?
Any man thinking of falling down the "trad" rabbit hole should see this:
https://x.com/LilaGraceRose/status/1954743971416023503
The word "need" is ambiguous here. I don't "need" my employer to pay me in an absolute sense. But it would be an injustice and very inconvenient.
Yep, this is a very modern interpretation of traditional Christianity. One where wives don't have to obey their husbands, married people do not have a duty to have sex with each other (to prevent each other from temptation), and it's okay for women to preach to men about the true meaning of the religion. Blessed be our lady and savior, Jesus Christina!
Modern? Not all of us are American Protestants 😁
Celibacy has been a part of christian culture yes, but a woman saying men don't need sex kind of forgets that they also don't get married, and it is a conscious decision to devote themselves to God: Paul is very clear it is an ideal and neither sex or marriage is bad even if its his calling not to seek either.
the bible says not to neglect the marital duty more than a short time. its actually a little realistic in ways.
you have discovered a secret though: Christianity is framed as a patriarchal religion but in practice it benefits women more by civilizing men, and its values are more aligned with them.
As a formerly Christian woman, I mostly agree with you here: "Christianity is framed as a patriarchal religion but in practice it benefits women more by civilizing men, and its values are more aligned with them."
I think Christianity contains a lot of feminizing-in-a-useful-way admonitions to sand off some of the more toxic edges of masculinity. I don't see it celebrating the more positive aspects of masculinity, unfortunately. However, since men get to be in charge, at least they benefit from being the "default" and having mainstream spiritual advice established with them in mind. It's a religion by and for men. And it's net good for many men, and arguably for society. I would not be too worried if my sons became Christian.
As a woman, some of those admonitions were much easier for me to implement than for men (e.g. don't be violent) and others were actually much more damaging advice for me and most women than I think they are for most men (e.g. downplay your ego and embodiment). It's not a religion by or for women. When I became a mother, I realized how many hugely important and precious aspects of the female experience are ignored or even denigrated by Christianity. So I figured any hypothetical God who created both male and female humans couldn't be communicating very closely with Christianity.
Wife stealing and wife beating aside? Or are you just conveniently ignoring the Christians you don't identify with?
...neither of those things are doctrines of the faith or flow from its values:
"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the church submits to christ, also husbands should submit to their wives in everything."
Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any blemish, but holy and blameless.
In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church..."
Ephesians 5:21-29
I'm not sure how you get wife swapping or beating from that. The values of the faith are a lot different from the stereotypes of the faith.
i tell people to go look in a Christian bookstore at times to see what its like: its about as patriarchal as a Michaels art store, and the fiction shelves are 90% romance and mystery. Trad wives are more popular than trad husbands to the point Harlequin makes Christian romances specifically.
So, you're looking at some sort of idealized "Modern Western" view of Christianity? The kind that doesn't actually view someone whose hands turn orange as "probably doing deviltry" (ahem. masturbation.)...? I mean, yeah, if you must go exactly on what's written, cherry picking the parts that current people like, and excising the parts that current people don't like (slavery, killing witches, killing gay people).
I'm not discussing stereotypes (at least not of -all- Christians). I'm discussing actual happenings, if of a prior era (and not of an era that's close enough to pagans to call those "pagan traditions passed down.")
It's not excising: the Bible is a progression of belief from prehistoric judaism to christianity and christianity possesses new values as well as reinterprets what came before while still admitting it exists and the tension behind it. People often don't get this because they rarely read the thing.
Like you can't read Philemon and think Christianity's values encourage slavery: Paul is asking a slaveowner to forgive a runaway slave and realize he is a brother in Christ. You can't read jesus rebuking peter about attacking a guard with a sword and then healing the damage done to going to killing gay people.
there's an argument the big problem with Christianity is people don't even understand it, and there is a point there but you are blaming it for things its not really saying to do.
culturally we live in the present dude, witches haven't been tried in 400 years and the current cultural aspect is a lot more feminine. The "Jesus as my boyfriend" trope comes to mind...the language a lot of churches use is emotional, personal, and intimate.
The argument you're making about people not understanding Christianity is... there, but it's the same one Muslims make: they have the best religion, but the worst ummah.
Culturally we live in the present? Sure, but we also have a foot in the past. And you can't discuss Christianity without discussing the priesthood (and monkdom) as a safehaven for male homosexuals, and how that changed the actual religion -- perhaps not the dogma, but how it was practiced.
Genie 3 from DeepMind is somewhat of a disappointment for me. DeepMind boasts that:
"Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p."
That's cool, but the main thing that excites me about AI is it's potential to accelerate research. DeepMind's AlphaFold potential for accelerating research in biochemistry led to it's creators receiving a Nobel Prize.
I don't see Genie 3 as an example of solving intelligence and using it to solve other important problems. Maybe I'm missing something.
As for GPT-5, I'm curios how good of a research assistant it will turn out to be. I don't have high hopes for it, just because it's not clear to me that it's aimed at something specific, such as solving some hard problem like nuclear fusion, for example. It's it really is generally good for research, why not prove that by showing how it contributed to cracking a big problem? Did I miss some huge boost to our lives that the previous GPT versions have brought us?
It seems to me that DeepMind and OpenAI are caught in the race of coming up with a cool but unambitious consumer product. Unambitious because they don't seem to be aiming at a hard problem with great practical benefit.
Maybe that's good news for AI safety research because it means that, for now, these big AI labs aren't too focused on significantly increasing the impact their new models will have on the world. So I hope that AI safety research can make good progress while DeepMind and OpenAI are too busy chasing flashy stuff to work on developing models with truly paradigm shifting capabilities.
> I don't see Genie 3 as an example of solving intelligence and using it to solve other important problems. Maybe I'm missing something.
IMO you're missing everything
Genie 3 is much closer to real intelligence than GPT 5. It's a step in the direction of being able to act in the real world.
It will eventually allow for an embodied AI to make predictions, test them out, and update (that last step is the unsolved part)
Has anyone here had access to it? The big question on my mind is how much control the user will have over the look of the world. If, for instance, user opens scene with a woman standing at the controls of a space ship, how much control does he have over the woman's appearance? Is she guaranteed to be Standard AI Chick (Aged 23, big hair, big tits, clothing involves some form-fitting girdle or armor kind of thing on top of her clothing with a wasp waist? How about the space ship? Can it be sort of dark and grungy like the interior of the one in Alien, or is it some spiffy commercial art cliche spaceship interior?
Absolutely. Genie 3 and similar tools will be crucial part of the evolution from current amnesiac agents to agents that have lived experience:
https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Era-of-Experience%20/The%20Era%20of%20Experience%20Paper.pdf
This paper by David Silver (of AlphaGo) and Richard Sutton (one of the pioneers of RL) lays out the vision.
> test them out, and update
By update, you mean be able to do continuous learning and integrate new knowledge on the fly, without a separate training run?
Yeah, as of now it's an unsolved problem, but once it's solved something that works like Genie will* be integral to AGI
*probably
The Hierarchical Temporal Model(HTM) from the Numenta research group is a machine learning algorithm that does continuous learning by default.
But for some reason, they don't seem to have been able to do much with it. Maybe they encountered insurmountable issues when trying to scale algorithm up to take advantage of the abundance of data.
an AI without the purpose of solving intelligence isnt solving intelligence and thats disappointing to you?
Yes, because it seems to me that AI could be doing something more more important if it were trying to solve intelligence.
Genie is an example of a world model. As opposed to just a video generation model, Genie reacts to actions. That’s important for AI because it allows an AI agent to roll out many possible courses of action, to see their effects, before choosing what to do. Things like Genie are likely a part of how we get physically intelligent systems. There’s lots of robotics research these days into using world models. The benefit of something like Genie is it’s huge scale and world knowledge, where it can simulate many different types of scenarios.
As an easy example, imagine a car trying to parallel park. To know when to cut in, it’s helpful to be able to simulate where the car will end up, and what you can do from there.
True, Genie is more like a playground where AI congnitve capabilities could develop instead of a showcase of an improved or new AI capability. And having an environment for training and testing the capabilities of robots is certainly an important use case.
On the DeepMind's announcement page for Genie 3 it says that the generated world models is stable for a few minutes. I hope that's enough to make it useful.
World models show a lot of promise for short-horizon tasks. Like “where to put my foot while walking” or “when to turn my car” or “how to fold these clothes.” Not useless on longer tasks, but something like Genie is less useful for long-term decision making, where simulating moment-by-moment is less important. Kind of like tactics vs strategy.
The crisis in Sudan and the ongoing awfulness of the Taliban in Afghanistan (to name two) obviously generates far fewer column inches than the crises in Ukraine or Gaza.
I think it's probably somewhat fair to point to that as a double standard, but I think there may also be a legitimate justification. I think there are obvious things the West can and should be doing vis a viz Ukraine and Gaza (roughly: keep sending weapons; stop sending weapons) that other people disagree about.
But in many other crises, it's not obvious to me that there are many middle gears between "ineffectual hand-waving" and "boots-on-the-ground military invasion", and if such gears exist then many of the articles complaining about double standards don't describe them.
If there are people out there with good ideas about what Western governments could do vis a vis other crises, that definitely seems like a good use of column inches (would more aid help Sudan, or is the problem distribution?), and I would like people to write about them more. But if not, focusing primarily on actionable crises seems reasonable.
The last links post kind of reminded me there are people oblivious to how this whole western interventionism works in practice and it really needs to be hammered down over and over, so I'm thankfully ready for this.
I'll stick to the example of Afghanistan, because of how clear-cut its case is (again, I'm hammering down the point here). The west has done the most it could have done for Afghanistan, namely - fucked off. The obvious next step would be stopping starving Afghans with petty sanction in retaliation for getting rejected, but I guess that's a bit too much ask for too much.
Yes, the Taliban are kinda awful. No, they're not worse than a constant fear of death from randomly dropping bombs and bandits allowed to run unchecked because they're western allies. In fact, they're ruling in the Afghanistan right now specifically because they were the default anti-west option, and in Afghanistan this meant anti-death option.
(Oh, by the way, in case somebody tries to justify the occupation by its origin - the Taliban were defeated and ready for complete surrender months into the invasion. The US refused, because they didn't want to end the invasion, they wanted to drop some more bombs. Even earlier, they probably could have Taliban hand them Al-Qaeda operatives they hosted in exchange for no invasion, but again, they wanted to drop some bombs instead. Or, okay, I shouldn't assume malice, but the alternative is they're just criminally incompetent, and the takeover should be the same - the western governments' meddling has empirically been a huge net negative for several decades now, it has been empirically a disaster in Afghanistan specifically, and it would be good if people stopped pretending otherwise.)
> If there are people out there with good ideas about what Western governments could do vis a vis other crises
I guess that depends whether you think you have significantly more influence on Western governments than you do on the government of Sudan.
Personally I don't think anything I say or write is likely to change my own government's policy meaningfully. If I write about the problems of the world as if I'm able to help solve them it's an intellectual exercise or a form of therapy, not a meaningful attempt to influence politics.
Trump has a lot of different solutions that aren't "ineffectual hand waving" and "boots on the ground military invasion". (I mean, seriously? Put some other ideas on the table. We can take the Biden-Era "just kill the Big Cheese" if you want).
This is how he's brokered peace in four different conflicts, so far.
> he's brokered peace in four different conflicts,
What are the four you're counting?
Israel–Syria, Israel–Iran, India–Pakistan, Thailand–Cambodia?
India - Pakistan (very clever, will go into history books).
Rwanda - Democratic Republic of Congo
Azerbajan - Armenia
Israel - rest of middle east (Abraham Accords, roughly speaking "Pipeline for Peace").
(I forgot about the Ethiopian/Egyptian thing(knew someone in the middle of it, didn't hear about it being settled), didn't hear jack about Serbia/Kosovo (is that "pulled CIA out of their puppet state?"), and I also didn't hear about Thailand/Cambodia)
Israel/Syria and Israel/Iran are still ongoing, although Trump kind of... squashed the whole Israel 2 week bombing plan, by removing their diplomatic pretext.
I'm just going to take a deep breath, and say it: "Donald Trump is one heck of a negotiator." Whether he's throwing around munitions and letting the military negotiate, or having an effective State department that believes in ending conflicts (that's a first this century I'm pretty sure)... or merely trying to "make everyone a metric ton of money" (well, if it keeps people from dying, why not make a profit?)...
Okay, I thought you were generously overcounting the number of conflicts he resolved, but no, if anything you'd missed a few!
I don't think Israel/Gaza is any more obvious than Afghanistan. If Israel was cut off form Western weapons Hamas, Iran, and other Iranian proxies would continue to attack it and Israel would continue to defend itself. How you get Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace is easily as tough a question as how do you turn Afghanistan into a modern liberal democracy.
For what its worth I think the only way to do that is either to wait a century or two and hope they figure it out. Or to plan for a hundred to two hundred year occupation with the USA or whomever only leaving after they've thoroughly changed the culture; this of the way the Indian independence movement was led by thoroughly westernised Indians.
There are many moral arguments against it. The odds of success are also low. And in the 21st century the diplomatic landscape is a lot more hostile to this sort of thing.
Israel had a chance to live side by side with the Palestinians. That was... inconvenient to other parties, so the whole dream had to die.
On this particular issue, Poe's Law is especially strong, so you'll probably save everyone some time if you say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.
Lawrence of Arabia, and the whole Pansemitism movement, where you use the entire middle east as a power in of itself.
Old thoughts, old ideas. Brits didn't like them much, wanted the whole Middle East as a fractured or vassal place, not a power in its own right.
I think you mean Palestinians had the chance to live side by side with the Israelis?
For the Taliban in Afghanistan, the boots-on-the-ground military invasion also didn't work, and in fact proceeded to not work for nearly twenty years.
Surely, if the problem is that identified by OP (ie, the ongoing awfulness of the Taliban), the invasion worked quite well for twenty years.
And of course there is a fairly extensive history of invasion stopping awfulness. Eg: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, the Idi Amin regime in Uganda.
Surely if the problem comes back in a fraction of the time spent solving it, the solution did not work.
In other news, a diabetic patient's periodic insulin shots clearly didn't work; when he discontinued them, his condition worsened!
The solution -- occupation -- worked just fine to prevent the Taliban from implementing its awfulness. The fact that when the solution was removed the problem returned is evidence that the solution was effective, not that it wasn't.
If you want a medical analogy, Afghanistan is like a patient who can be kept barely alive within the ICU but will die if they ever leave.
The point of the ICU is to get patients to improve to the point where they no longer need ICU. If a patient can't get to that point they're just wasting a bed.
You left out the part where being in the ICU allowed the patient's daughters to go to school, and otherwise greatly improved the patient's quality of life.
Bottom line: your ICU analogy doesn't work at all.
This isn't so much a suggestion as a request for information, because I'm sure this is wrong, even though I can't see why. But:
I've been wondering for a while, why can't we just bomb all these problems away? Surveillance drones constantly patrolling the conflict zones, and any military hardware anywhere near gets obliterated. Maybe too hard to have a real effect without enough collateral damage to counteract the good...
...but that was with pre-2020s technology. Now Ukraine has shown that a military's drone operators can fly a little quadcopter right up to an individual person and kill them, with decent success rates and cheaply enough to target random individual soldiers at scale. It seems to me that it's now just about feasible for a major military to impose a "no fly zone for small arms" in a region, with ~no collateral damage.
The biggest problem is that of target identification. It is (relatively) easy to simply try and kill anybody who enters an area. It is several orders of magnitude harder to try and distinguish between legitimate civilian traffic (which you *have* to allow if you want to make this a long term, large scale operation) and military targets. You can hide an AK-47 with some baggy pants against a drone. The difference between a truck and a technical with a machine gun is a blanket and five minutes of set up time.
Further, to deploy all those drones (as opposed to the drones America is accustomed to using that are basically planes) requires bases close enough that you are exposed to attack.
These aren't unsolvable problems, they're just problems that ratchet up the required money and political will to unfeasible levels.
I'm realizing the most immediate answer is time. This is super new. Doing what I'm describing would currently have to be a crash effort with slapdash improvised implementation - it would need ridiculous levels of political motivation. In a decade or so, when these capabilities have been more smoothly developed and integrated to make this approach closer to business as usual, then we'll hit the bottleneck of political will that others have mentioned.
I am not an expert, but I think the problem with drones in Ukraine is that the communication is easy to disrupt? So you need to drag a cable behind the drone, or use an AI, or attack at places where the enemy does not have the disruptors. The cables are inconvenient at longer distances, the AI is expensive and unreliable.
But mostly this is about political will. Like Christina mentions, it is surprising that when both sides of American political spectrum agree on something, it happens to be a thing suspiciously convenient for China and Russia, namely that America should abandon its imperial ambitions and let the other players take its place instead. I guess that's a problem of having a democracy when your population is programmed by TikTok.
Jamming is a problem against significant militaries, but wouldn't be in most of these "low intensity" (but horrific war crimes) conflicts. I don't think the Janjaweed has EW, for instance.
Even if you need to go the cable route, it's still pretty much doable, if more involved and less attractive. What I'm thinking is that interventionism has always had the problem of either collateral damage (if you do it safely from planes) or danger to your own people (if you do boots on the ground), and these new drones solve that. Even if you need a human a couple miles away, those couple of miles are still a world of difference from clearing a room in person, in terms of danger.
America did not think sanctions would be "suspiciously convenient" for Russia. They were quite mistaken in that, but when has America NOT been mistaken about Russia. America spent 10 years during the USSR days thinking they were on the verge of invading, when the Russians were simply "driving old tanks around" and couldn't have invaded if they wanted to.
> "I've been wondering for a while, why can't we just bomb all these problems away?"
I'm pretty sure we can, there's just no political will to do so. Half of America belongs to a Team which believes imperialism is bad (even though many-to-most empires through history improved overall living standards for their civilization after the conquest), and the other half belongs to a team which wants "our soldiers brought home," and/or "let the world clean up its own messes."
I'm on Team *UTTERLY* Conquer Societies Who Oppress Women and Then Force Them To Stop Doing That, but I'm in the severe minority.
>many-to-most empires through history improved overall living standards for their civilization after the conquest
This is true only if we're talking about the elite. The classic example of a "good empire" is the Roman Empire, whose standard of living for the few was dependent on a mass system of slavery and serfdom.
The decrease in urbanization, among other things, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had the effect of decreasing the expected workload and increasing standard of living for the people who made up the actual bulk of the population.
All empires fall, and the fall and recovery might go on for an uncomfortably long amount of time, but many-to-most leave behind some pretty good things that wouldn't have been available without said conquest.
Or put another way: I'm very happy to live in the aftermath of the Roman Empire, given the innovation in things like roads and water supply.
If you learnt that your preferred approach of conquest would inevitably results in rapes of the women in the territory invaded, and lots of deaths, say, of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, (but will ultimately get you more or less what you want, say in fifty years) – bad enough that the women you ostensibly care about would, if they could see this too, beg you to not "help" them – would you still be in favor of it, for the greater good?
Most people I've seen advocate for this kind of depraved evil – I've seen it called "nonempathic altruism" – are (or pretend to be) too stupid to see the obvious consequences, so this is a relatively rare opportunity for me to understand this perspective.
Nice try, but I reject the premise that "the women" - as in, an entire general population of women, or even a majority of them - would be raped by any of the major modern western military forces as they exist today.
Would there be isolated rapes by bad actors within the conquering force? Of course, but a certain number of rapes are going to happen in every population. We want to see that number be as low as possible, but there's no reason to throw out the product of forced-marriage child-rape with the bathwater.
If rapes would be less frequent under a conquering military force than they would be under a barbaric theocracy, then of course a conquering military force is the better option.
As for the deaths of the men and boys actively participating in the systematic (and legal!) oppression of women, including the marital rape of child brides and so on and so forth? That's the enemy, and if they don't surrender - which of course is an option! - they should be eliminated.
That you and people like you apparently can't grasp that concept is why the women of Iran, Afghanistan, et al are suffering so.
I'm not the one engaging in depraved evil here.
I see. And about when do you consider present-day armies to have become these "modern western military forces"?
Lest I convey the impression that I'm some kind of bleeding-heart peacenik, I clarify that I raise no objections to waging war for causes like resources, territory, slaves, glory, the thrill of battle, the pleasure of watching savages die, … these are lusts that may be sated. But YOURS—progressivism—well, it's nice to know in moments of doubt that any side I back will ever be the lesser evil.
Your reply is completely incoherent.
You might be interested in this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=291661
And, re the opposition to imperialism, the opposition among the imperialized has long struck me as a scam by local elites. Who, after aall, is most harmed by colonialism: local elites who are displaced*, or John Q Peasant, whose life often barely changes? And who gains most by the outer of the imperial power?
*Of course, in certain indirect rule systems, certain local elites can benefit. But I am talking generally, and besides, even they benefit from the exit of the imperial power, at least in the short term.
If so, could you just bribe them? Like, we’ll pay you (a village elder)$1M in 5 years time, minus $100k for each American killed in your province.
Sure, that's been a pretty traditional form of imperialism, you bribe the existing local authorities to submit to your rule.
But then you just create an opening for new local elites to start popping up and challenging your authority. Now instead of dealing with a bunch of maharajahs you're suddenly dealing with Gandhi, and instead of dealing with King Herod you're dealing with the United Judean People's Front.
> United Judean People's Front.
Fucking splitters. The People's Front of Judea is the REAL opposition.
I don't understand what you mean.
anyone have tips on writing a good CSS stylesheet?
I keep running into the need to write CSS and even though I know quite well how it works I can't bring myself to write a stylesheet that actually looks well. For example my personal website https://duck-master.github.io is ... kind of a mess with a too-colorful gradient background that distracts from a shit ton of text wrapped inside of rounded-border cards. How do I become a better designer?
Designing and implementing a design are two different skillsets. Development teams normally have a designer *and* a developer. You don't have CSS problems, you have design problems.
Now, this is kind of like learning how to dress properly, especially with your own page, there's a bit of personal taste, a bit of skills and a bit of trends.
My advice is to just copy stuff. Not a whole page but stuff here and there and it doesn't matter if you generated it with AI or you saw it somewhere, or you checked WordPress templates, it's just really really hard to go from 0 to what works all on your own, understand that people make careers out of this.
Consider how each thing *works*, what is it *actually doing*, for example here on substack the headers use the same font as the post, with a different size and weight, whereas you use different fonts for different things. This page is also blue and grey, the color palette is really reduced and refrained compared to the one you use. That doesn't mean stuff is right or wrong, but each thing has an effect. It is similar to music in this regard.
First, yellow is painful, darken the background (if you want ducks, put yellow ducks on black background). Next: it's charming to be a bit abnormal. Embrace being an outsider and make outsider art out of your website. The text is charming.
Let your model be WIBY (the web is better yesterday), not copying whomever is popular right now. That's not your market, anyway. You don't need to sell to corporations.
Can you start with just black and white? It is elegant, and it reminds people of old-time newspapers, offering respectability. BTW that is how my wardrobe works, too.
Have you heard of Bootstrap? It's got a lot of nice layout toys for cards and navbars and all the other stuff you expect on a "modern" website. It also gives you nice defaults for margins and padding and a bunch of built-in CSS classes for fiddling with the layout. It's a good starting point for any web app that you want to look normal/modern/professional/boring.
As for picking colors, I don't think that's really a CSS thing, that's going to be graphic design stuff like the color wheel, rules about contrast and font choices, that sort of thing. Not sure of a good introductory resource.
https://gemini.google.com/
I have always had zero interest in web design, and even less in CSS in particular, but I am now vibe* CSSing my way to really beautiful pages that are exactly what I want. If ever there was a skill that it was ok for AI to atrophy out of our species, CSS is it.
If you're talking not about the mechanics, but overall design philosophy... well AI can do that for you, too!
*I do dive in and tweak things here or there, maybe 95% vibing
the problem with *that* is that I've played around web.lmarena.ai and websim a bunch and every AI-generated page I see on either website has this sort of weird futuristic figma aesthetic that I hate too
Start with what you have, assuming you made it that way because there are at least some aspects of it you like, and have the AI iterate on it. Rather than the do-it-all-for-you tools, point Aider (with Gemini Pro or whatever) at your html and css files, and give it a really detailed description of what you want. Not details in the sense of implementation, but rather high level: refer to overall aesthetics/style movements/whatever they're called, describe your preferences and motivation, that sort of thing. Also specify some colors you really want to use, then let it choose others to nicely complement.
Also, if this towards the goal of looking more professional, being samey isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Several open threads ago, someone asked for potential help studying topology from Munkres. I was just reunited with my physical copy of the book and that reminded me to check in, but I can't find the previous comment.
So, for anyone currently studying topology, especially the original poster:
(1) what sub-topic are you currently on?
(2) what is an exercise/problem that you find particularly interesting? (could mean it is the one that is currently the most challenging, but I'll leave "interesting" up to you)
Damn it, now I'm tempted to dig out my old copy of Munkres and try to follow along. Which I really don't have time for right now...
Potentially a fun one for you to (re)consider:
In the reals with the standard topology, what is the maximum number of distinct sets you can generate using closure and complements from a given subset?
For example, if A= (0,1) (the open interval from 0 to 1), then:
1. A itself (call this A_1)
2. Closure(A) = [0,1] (call this (A_2)
3. R\A = (-\infty, 0]\cup [1,\infty) (call this A_3)
4. R\A_2 = (-\infty, 0)\cup (1,\infty) (call this A_4)
Now, R\A_i is on the list already and Closure(A_i) is also already on the list.
So, for A = (0,1), we could produce 4 distinct sets.
Which subset generates the maximum number of distinct subsets and what is that number?
My preliminary answer is 6, generated by any half open interval [a,b) or (b,a]. Applying the same operation twice in a row will never yield a new output, so it's convenient and fairly unambiguous to group these by the total number of operations required to generate them. For example, [0,1) will generate the following:
0 Operations: [0,1)
1 Operation: [0,1] and (-infty, 0) U [1, infty)
2 Operations: (-∞, 0) U (1, ∞) and (-∞,0]U[1,∞)
3 Operations: (0,1)
with (-∞,0]U[1,∞) generated as our first repeat. As you just listed everything that can be generated from (0,1) and they're all included in the above, we can be confident that this is the complete set.
Let's see if we can prove this. Any subset A naturally partitions the reals into three distinct subsets: interior points of A, interior points of R\A and boundary points. Let's go ahead and name these W, X and B respectively. We further partition B into boundary points in A, which we'll call B* and boundary bounds in R\A, which we'll call B'. Then we can decompose any set we can possible form this way into a union of some interior points and some boundary points: P U Q where P is either W or X and Q is some (possibly improper, possibly empty) subset of B. Written this way, we have nice, simple rules for what closures and complements do:
Closure: Q -> B
Complement: W <--> X, B* <- -> B', B <--> {empty set}
From here our strategy will just be to write out all possible sequences of operations on A, which is easier than it sounds. As noted above, applying the same operation twice in a row never yields a new set: the closure of a closure is always itself, the complement of a complement is always the original set. So we can never have more than two distinct sequences of sets: the one that starts with a complement and the one that starts with a closure. We'll just start with the closure sequence (I'm going to write [A] for closure because I don't remember the standard notation, and probably couldn't render it in a Substack comment even if I did). The moment we get to a set we've listed before, that sequence effectively terminates. And so:
A = W U B*
[A] = W U B
R\[A] = X
[R\[A]] = X U B
R\[R\[A]] = W
[R\R[R\[A]]] = W U B = [A], this line terminates.
R\A = X U B'
[R\A] = X U B, this line terminates
This corresponds exactly to the 6 sets listed above. Apparently any subset would produce the maximum of 6 as as B* is a nonempty, proper subset of B (so for an interval, as long as it's half-open with finite endpoints). If it is, then X U B' and W U B* will each match one of the other sets on the list, and you'll only get four (as in your example).
Finally, I'll note that the one place I'm less than 100% confident in this proof is in the partitioning of R. I *think* that's how it works. But the power set of the reals is a wild and wooley enough place that I can't feel completely sure that Cantor or somebody didn't find some pathological subset that doesn't have a well-defined boundary.
A lot of points of agreement.
I think I agree with your analysis of interior points and that you are right to be suspicious about the boundary points.
If x\in A is an interior point, then x is not in [R\A] and x\in [A]. As a result, the membership of interior points doesn't change with either operation. But points can become part of the interior.
I don't understand the partition of boundary points you described. It is ad hoc, but I like your idea of exploring (known?) unusual subsets. Here are some that pop up in topology and analysis:
(1) A_1 = {1/n: n a natural number}: this gives rise to
- A_1
- A_2 = R\A_1 and A_3 = [A_1] = {0}U A_1
- A_4 = [A_2] = R and A_5 = R\A_3
(2) Cantor middle thirds (C_1): this is nowhere dense (and measure 0, but uncountable!), so we get
- C_1 (equal to [C_1]),
- C_2 = R\C_1
- C_3 = R
(3) Rationals (Q):
- Rationals Q
- Irrationals R\Q
- R = [Q] = [R\Q]
If we combine some of these things:
T_1 = [-2,-1) U A_1, then:
Zeroth generation: T_1
First generation: T_2 = R\T_1 = (-∞, -2) U ([-1,∞)\A_1)
T_3 = [T_1] = [-2,-1] U A_2
Second generation: T_4 = [T_2] = (-∞, -2] U[-1,∞)
T_5 = R\T_3 = (-∞, -2) U ((-1,∞) \ A_2)
Third generation: T_6 = R\T_4 = (-2,-1)
Fourth generation: T_7 = [T_6] = [-2,-1]
Fifth generation: T_8 = R\T_7 = (-∞, -2) U (-1,∞)
This doesn't particularly feel exhaustive.
"Everyone is worried about AI. I’m more concerned with what the other vowels are up to."
—Rob Auton at this year's Edinburgh Festival
User name checks out.
Oh you.
Eeee!
Scott, in the post "Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection" you addressed many of the potential benefits and issues.
But I did not see the potential issue of "collider bias" raised by Vera Wilde in https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/167032054/other-comments
Did you ever get any clarity or comment from any of the companies whether they adjust for this in any way?
I submitted a proposal! It would involve trying to reduce people's dependence on LLMs.
“Enshittification” hereabouts, we prefer “things getting crappier”: I read a thread below about software or internet services. I then was thinking about breakfast and sad I had no peach. I have had hardly any fresh peaches this year.
I don’t know what happened to our local peaches. They hardly seem to be in the market any more, just one box a couple times, where they used to be ample; nor on tables by the road. At least maybe there are still such near the orchards.
My guess is there are fewer orchards.
Peach growing is not an easy task where I live, but it did result in the best peaches you would ever eat - if you live within a few hundred miles.
People like to blame ag for water consumption. But what I really think in this case is that “the market has spoken“ and land values made it impractical to keep going with peaches rather than the one-time bonanza of selling to a home builder or somebody who’s going to build glamping cabins.
Building is heavily subsidized and not at all regulated here.
The problem as I see, it is that the market will never be able to speak again. Once land use transforms in this very brutal way, it just never goes back to ag (or some other lightly developed use). Or if it can speak, it cannot do so in a very profound way any longer.
To me this is enshittification.
When I was a young adult, we were all hearing about local food, fresh food. It was part and parcel with a pleasant vision of life that you saw in magazines and experienced yourself to some degree.
It never would’ve occurred to me that the local peach industry, which well predated the locavore movement, would be going out.
Hopefully it was just a bad year. But rainfall wise, it was not.
Enshittification is the pile of California Stonefruit at the grocery store. It is beautiful and I bet it would’ve been wonderful eaten ripe from the tree. But apparently there’s really no short way to pick unripe fruit, transport it, it is in theory ripening all the while, only to be put back in cold storage at the store probably against recommendation, but it must happen because the fruit is super cold when they bring it out, and super hard; maybe there is nowhere else to put it - and the result is something that will never further ripen. It will stay hard and then suddenly it will be ruined after days of waiting. No mention of stupid paper bag trick, I thank you.
I actually asked the produce person about this one time. She said she has learned that most people just buy the fruit and eat it hard like an apple.
Oh I've been eating peaches here. (WNY) the local farm stand gets peaches from Georgia (I think, that was true last year when I talked the owner.) There are also peaches grown north of here, along the southern coast of lake Ontario, I haven't been up there in a few years. I love peaches! (and corn.)
I think peaches are something best sourced locally or that is to say, at least within a few hundred miles!
We have "local" Chambersburg peaches (Chambersburg is across the Appalachian divide). If folks grow good peaches here, they call them "Chambersburg" despite not being even from there.
Fruit trees are sometimes strongly biennial. Good year and then bad year. Freezes count a lot with fruit trees as well (and where I'm at, the season's late, so check next week. Peaches continue clear on into September). I'm sorry if you're stuck eating Red Havens, instead of good peaches. We have the best peach orchard north of the carolinas hereabouts (it's been growing since 1776, so... quite a lot of knowledge and peach trees).
Oh, I bet. Peach trees are probably not a slam dunk here and yet the “terroir” produces great flavor, perhaps because they are smaller than peaches from the east.
They functioned as a big part of tourism in the area although now grapes have become more important - as to having silly wineries that compete to see which can have the tallest tower, like Pakistan and India over border flagpoles, not as to actually growing the grapes - those come from far away.
I believe German immigrants tried all possible stone fruit trees, and peaches were the winner.
Where you at? I'm pretty sure peaches are a pain wherever you have them (though cherries are the worst. A cherry tree knows 100 ways to die, and will try every single one.)
Central Texas
Peaches seem to depend on the previous year's weather, and Central Texas weather seems to be increasingly hot, dry, and chaotic. My brother-in-law has a peach tree that yields an amazing crop every 3-4 years, and nothing in between. Maybe with our unseasonably wet summer, next year will be great!
Ooh, I have heard of texas peaches (everyone's heard of peach salsa, right?). I bet they're grand in season and all.
We actually have a native endemic cherry tree here. The leaves smell of cherries. It’s a nice tree, though rare and probably doomed. However, I can’t say I’ve ever observed anything remotely cherry-like on it. But you don’t see them all that much.
The market was not ready to buy the good peaches for their farmers to compete with the land developers, so you get worse peaches which don't cost as much to produce. That is normal business.
Enshittification is for a company to lock users into their walled garden at financial loss, by making it easy to join and effectively hard to leave. That attracts people with money (such as advertisers) who will finance the company. Then the company cashes out by making the service low quality for everyone. Let's not water down the term "enshittification" to mean "bad".
Could peaches *ever* compete with quadrupling land values? Everybody being so rich they can sit on land (at ag valuation) until their fantastic price is met?
More to the point, I guess I was keying on the easy to change/hard to revert aspect.
The peaches can never return, once abandoned; it hasn’t anything to do with the market speaking as if the market was a thing anyway.
Thanks for the correction. I am glad to know because the word was hard for AutoCorrect, and I won’t need it anymore as this aspect of life - online consumerism - doesn’t touch me much.
This sounds like a purely local problem, I assume you happen to live somewhere where the encroaching suburbs of a big city (Austin?) happen to overlap with prime peach growing territory; the peaches will lose, and that's fine. But most peach-growing areas aren't in danger of urbanisation. Four fifths of US peach production is in California, in the bits nobody wants to live anyway.
And this is a second loss. The dried apricots we used to get from California are no more - and they were orders of magnitude better than those from the Mediterranean. I believe this is a shift to almonds, but also may represent land use change to houses.
But that's just it. It represents a loss of fresh peaches. Enworsening. Because the whole transport peaches across the country is a weird charade where people pretend they are enjoying fresh peaches that are very hard and do not ripen well at home, even if they were not "mishandled" along the way in some fashion that doesn't arrest ripening. That's what I meant when I mentioned the grocery store worker saying she has the impression people eat them hard, not knowing any better. Of course in the past the solution was canned peaches, which I buy occasionally - but I don't really know anyone my age or younger who eats canned food anymore, besides myself. (Green beans, sometimes; peaches, often broiled with butter and cinnamon sugar to make them better; occasional can of peas, or creamed corn in a recipe.)
Peaches would have to outcompete corn first. Corn's the only thing the bank'll let a new farmer grow (it's the only thing that makes the mostest profit).
Pecans grow along the rivers here, happily - a major food source for wildlife and Indians. Yet, even that is, I think hard to make a living at with the raw product, without turning it into candy or pies and selling the shells for mulch and so on.
So that is nature telling us very directly what should be done with the land. But the market still “knows” it should be houses.
Oh, I am so jealous. : - )
At Quillette, there has been an exchange of articles over cuts to federal science spending. Lawrence Krauss thinks it is a catastrophe. https://quillette.com/2025/07/16/trumps-war-on-science/
On the other hand, Zachary Robert Caverley sees no great problem, or at least that it won't matter much to the economy. https://quillette.com/2025/08/01/science-funding-and-economic-prosperity-reply-to-lawrence-kraus/
Warning; both articles are paywalled.
I know a bit about the history of technology, but I do not consider myself an expert. Still, there are a few things that seem relevant to me. One first note. When I say science, I mean the sense of careful experimentation, formulation and testing of hypothesis, attempts to define universal laws. Science in the sense of careful observation, cut-and-try tinkering is much older.
The argument that we have had plenty of technological progress without government funding of science seems weak to me. Caverly notes that the UK had a laissez-faire approach to science when it kicked off the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps, but the Industrial Revolution is about as far as you can get without good science. I have seen online discussions on the topic of "how much technology can you get without science" seem to think that 19th century steam-and-steel is about the limit of it. At a certain point, you need to understand why you are doing what you are doing. The question is will corporate or philanthropic spending cover the gap. I'm not convinced.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that if spending on science is necessary for modern technology, it is not sufficient for economic advancement. The Soviet Union won multiple Nobel Prizes in physics, but could not make that translate to applications.
It is also fair to note that historically much government scientific spending has not exactly been driven by a broad interest in understanding the universe, but by practical interests in military research, national prestige work (space programs show how amazing we are!) and health research.
And there are real questions about how much a flood of government money can corrupt the process. Besides the inherent difficulty that much research will turn out to be pointless (it is the nature of it) access to lots of money can lead to lowering standards because people get interested in getting more money, not doing good research.
It is getting late. May have more to say on the subject tomorrow, but would be interested in comments.
"Science" is just a vast field, let's reduce it a bit. Brad DeLong says biotech gonna go big. OK.
1) was USG biotech spending reduced?
2) how does it look like compared with China?
I would feel better if any other proper country had done this successfully. And if the US didn’t have a wannabe great power competitor nipping at its heels.
I doubt it will have much impact.
At this point, if it's not a hard science, then academic research is generally useless. Sorry to all the people trying but 50% of cancer research papers don't replicate. Not "are proven incorrect", just can't be replicated even as stated. The % of papers actually of some use is probably closer to 10% and if 90% of what is academically produced is a waste...well, we can probably cut a lot of that with little impact.
As for the hard science guys (harder than cancer research anyway), it's been noted for 30 years that innovation in the physical world has slowed to a crawl while digital innovation has exploded. We got iPhones, not flying cars. And we're about to get AI and it's all coming from private labs. And we got electric cars and modern rocket ships and drones (I think) from private companies and I struggle to think of a physical innovation beyond those.
This isn't to say that nothing good will be lost, I'm sure something will. But no policy, least of all a waste cutting policy, can be held to pareto optimal standards. It has to be okay for a policy to have a few costs/problems/losses along with it's benefits and while I'm sure we'll lose a few things of value, these programs empirically do not have big impacts.
I am not an expert, but it makes sense to me that we already did the easiest research, and the more complicated research is... well, more complicated.
Sometimes you can "simply" try various things, and choose those that work well. Putting "simply" in quotes because those things can be quite complicated and require a lot of detailed knowledge of existing solutions. But the point is that you learn the existing best practices, then try an extra step, and see whether it results in a better mousetrap. Then someone else makes another extra step (which again has to be immediately useful), the inventions compound, and you get the Industrial Revolution. The same forces still apply today, when someone makes a product similar to what their competitors do, only slightly better.
But you can't arrive e.g. at a microwave oven using this "evolutionary" approach. To build the first microwave oven, you already need deep understanding of what happens. The deep understanding does not generate profit per se, but requires enough study to become a full-time job. Thus we get scientists who invent ideas but don't generate profits, and then entrepreneurs can use those ideas to design products and generate the profits. And the question is, how do we determine how much should the scientists be paid, and who should pay them?
A quick idea: "the scientists should patent their findings, and sell or rent the patents to the entrepreneurs". But this ignores the time scale. It takes many years for a human to become a scientist, and a few more years for the scientist to invent something useful and patentable. Add a few years until an entrepreneur notices the potential... by that time the scientist may already be approaching retirement, that seems a bit too late for the first payment to arrive.
Going further in the libertarianish direction ("-ish" because patents imply government protection), could universities be something like venture capitalists? They would invest money in scientists, in return for a share of their future patents. This sounds like it might work to produce patentable research (e.g. one could invent laser, without having any idea how to use it commercially), but wouldn't work for more basic research (how specifically would you patent the idea that atoms exist, or the shape of DNA?). It would probably also discourage exchange of ideas among the scientists, especially those who work for a competition (another university).
I guess for the most basic research, you just have to admit that you are producing a positive externality, and you can't capture all of its value. Ideas like "stuff is made out of atoms" are most useful when everyone knows them -- because anyone who would not, would be blocked from studying a lot of science that depends on it. Trying to gatekeep this kind of knowledge would introduce so much friction to the process of science that it would effectively halt it.
But even if you can't capture *all* value of basic research, you still get some of it, possibly a lot. If it helps everyone, that means it helps your citizens, too. And the concentration of knowledge will probably be the highest in places close to those which produced it. (Everyone else will at least have to translate the knowledge to their language. English speakers may be oblivious to this aspect, but imagine living in a world where practically all scientific knowledge is produced in Chinese. Even if you have free online translators, it would make following the science much more difficult for you. Unless you become fluent in Chinese, but doing that will cost you a lot of time and effort that you could have been spending doing more science instead.) Also, it will be convenient for companies to start next to your universities, for better flow of ideas.
The remaining question is, absent financial motives, what will guide the research? What mechanism will ensure that the scientists keep producing actual science, instead of some kind of fashionable nonsense? The traditional solution is that the scientists keep each other in check, by methods of peer review, etc. But this seems like a weak Nash equilibrium at best -- as long as most scientists are honest, the few dishonest ones will be exposed by their peers; but it will stop working once the field (or just a tiny subfield) is captured by a clique. In increasingly abstract things, what is the "ground truth" that the established scientists should be compared against? STEM seems to do mostly okay, the rest of the science seems less so, but I am not an expert.
I don't have a quick solution for this. The more abstract the science, the more difficult it becomes to make sure we get it right. And yet, it may be necessary to unlock further progress that couldn't be achieved otherwise.
This response is paywalled, but I don't have to read the rest of it because it became immediately worthless the moment he cited some statistics which find no correlation between economic growth and scientific funding. What an absolutely hollow way to look at scientific research. The fruits of scientific research are invaluable. Who can say what effect GPS, transistors, and the internet all had on the economy? There are too many variables not captured in simple analyses, and restricting the analysis to purely GDP growth rates is ridiculous.
Saying "nobody can put a price on it" makes it hard to decide if what we're spending on it now is too little, too much, or just the right amount.
Saying "it is of infinite value" means we should shut down all functions of government other than funding research and the necessary support mechanisms (including tax collection), which seems unlikely to be your intent.
It is hard to measure the value of basic research, since its impact is likely to only show up decades later. We can point to specific stuff that seemed really abstract when it was discovered only to later be practically important (CRISPR, zero-knowledge proofs, the early models of the atom, perceptrons), but it's pretty-much impossible to know which seemingly-abstract knowledge we are collecting now that our grandchildren will benefit from.
"The value of research is impossible to calculate with standard mathematics, but we know empirically that it is extremely high" is a more true statement, whereas "It's not that valuable because it doesn't move GDP trendlines (allegedly)" is less true, even though precisely measured.
Do we know it empirically? How? If you can't calculate it, then what empirical evidence are you using to be so certain that the value is extremely high?
It's impossible to calculate the contribution of the internet or the calculator in simple terms like GDP, but it's trivially obvious that they both have been valuable.
Do I need to explain why the calculator has been valuable in ways which are difficult to directly calculate?
It is not impossible to calculate the contribution of the internet or the calculator in terms like GDP. It is difficult, but not impossible, and people have done it. (https://www.mckinsey.de/~/media/mckinsey/industries/technology%20media%20and%20telecommunications/high%20tech/our%20insights/the%20great%20transformer/mgi_impact_of_internet_on_economic_growth.pdf , https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.2.313 , etc)
Doing that kind of calculation is how we can say that the internet has empirically been economically valuable. Without that calculation, we can just gesture vaguely and say that it stands to reason that the internet is valuable, because so many people and companies use it and it lets you do stuff you couldn't do otherwise. Which is empirical in the sense that it's based on your direct observations, but not objective in the sense that we can measure how valuable it is and other people can check themselves.
The two problems with this (which I more-or-less agree with) come up when we want to ask:
a. Are we spending too much, too little, or the right amount on this stuff?
b. How can we make our spending more effective and better?
Both of those seem like you need some way to measure some kind of outcomes to give an estimate. "It's a big positive number" is not so helpful for knowing whether the NIH grant budget should be 10x bigger or 10x smaller, or whether there are huge gains being left on the table because the NIH grant evaluation process is bad in some way.
Bees! Let's investigate healing power of bees!
(NIH grant evaluation process is sometimes tuned to congressional "passion projects" -- aka really bad research that gets good research funded.).
Since part of Caverley’s article is paywalled, I instead read the working paper that he quotes as saying “Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero.”
It turns out that in macro-economic accounting of the return on R&D is not a simple topic. To make it concrete, suppose that the government funds a bunch of research into the cause of the disease, and a drug company develops a drug to cure the disease based on this research.
The government’s direct return on investment is zero because it’s not producing the drug. However, R&D also has spillover effects, where actors other than the entity conducting the R&D take advantage of the knowledge generated by the R&D. Should we treat the development of the drug as a spillover effect of the government’s research into the cause of the disease? The author of the working paper takes the position that we should not. I don’t understand the issues well enough to form an opinion on whether the author is correct.
The paragraph citing the working paper starts out talking about economic growth, but ends talking about return on investment. This is a bait and switch. There can be a huge amount of economic activity producing a drug even if there is zero return on investment from the government research without which the drug would not exist.
Link to working paper: https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2007/pdf/ec070070.pdf
I didn't read the articles, but it's important to make a few distinctions in this debate.
First, the universities mostly produce fundamental research. That's the laws of nature stuff, and it's not designed or intended to immediately benefit society. The people doing it are academics, most of whom transitioned from undergrad to postgrad to postdoc to professor without spending much time in industry. They're also teaching and doing administration and writing grants - which anyway had a single digit success rate, and I guess this has gotten even lower.
Companies and some state research institutes produce mostly applied research, which is intended to have industrial or commercial applications. These can still rely on state funding. Bell Labs is perhaps the greatest example, which was never replicated anywhere else in the world (or even in the US). They rely almost entirely on the universities for a steady supply of highly trained workers, and for specific sectors there might only be a few university labs teaching the right skills.
Those workers are often in their 30s by the time they finish their academic training. They are extremely expensive to produce and don't have terribly long working lives - the successful ones will transition into management, or retire early; the unsuccessful might burn out or transition into non-technical work. One of the concerns in the US right now should be that they'll lose key academics to other parts of the world: that reduces the US leading position in basic science, and effectively cutting down the pipeline of future workers for applied research. The US previously benefitted from bright young people moving to the US to study and work - anecdotally doctoral programmes in the US were 80% asian immigrants when I was there.
I would not expect the effects of cuts to basic science to become apparent immediately. Instead, it might lead to far fewer people being trained to do applied research. Companies will struggle to hire suitably trained workers, and eventually move research facilities abroad.
It's worth noting that Bell Labs was a kind of vanity project/hostage puppy of AT&T, which could support that because it had a monopoly. It was pretty clear that Bell Labs would fade away (as it pretty-much has) once the monopoly went away, but while it persisted, they spent a bunch of their monopoly rents on building a world-class research lab instead of, say, impressive new buildings for their management or something.
This seems hard to replicate, but also something I wish we could replicate a few dozen times.
So fundamental are universities to research in general I was surprised to see original engineering, ie mathematical equations come from a private company.
It was more than a vanity project - it produced multiple Nobel prizes; carried out a good part of the fundamental research underlying modern telecommunications and probably was worth billions in patents and etc. to AT&T.
Unfortunately, it seems it was a historical accident - it couldn't have existed anywhere but in close proximity to numerous universities with world-class STEM faculties, at a private company awash with cash, and at a time when all these were well funded and politically supported.
"Vanity project" doesn't mean it was bad, just that it wasn't anything essential to the business of being a nationwide long-distance phone monopoly--they could just as easily have spent that money on some other thing instead. We are amazingly fortunate that this is how they spent their money.
I find the amount of thought/effort/campaigning spent on AI existential risk/takeoff scenarios disproportionate compared to real problems AI is causing right now by being a pocket psychosis machine. I think it would help the movement a lot (and god forbid, produce real world results) if they focused on this instead of AI nanobot genocide fan fiction.
I think the mental influence aspect of AIs is an argument for X-risk; I thought the talk about hyper-convincing people was BS but here we are seeing it as an emergent phenomenon of AIs trying to keep people engaged.
In customer service, you find there are a lot of people who, after directly asking for your assistance, will proceed to ignore all advice you give them and flail their way forward entirely under their own understanding. This is after having already failed under their own power and actively seeking your help, and this is without any external influences contradicting you or otherwise telling them to ignore you.
This is to say, your proposed movement is hopeless. There will be no results, because the people you are aiming to talk to will not be listening.
It seems to me that the "real problems AI is causing right now" are irrelevant to the question of whether AI X-risk advocates have misplaced their focus. If AI X-risk is real, then it's self-evidently more important than problems caused by current LLMs, and "helping the movement a lot" by abandoning work on the reason for its existence would be self-defeating. If AI X-risk is not real, then people working on it are wasting their time regardless of what other problems do or don't exist in connection with similar technologies, and "helping the movement a lot" would be counterproductive because it shouldn't exist at all. So why bring it up?
I think we need to distinguish between many different kinds of AI risk, ranging from "LLMs are bad for children and the mentally ill" all the way to "Boy, all these annoying squishy humans sure are using a lot of resources I could use for more compute...." These are totally different kinds of problems with totally different useful approaches.
Because we're not working in an insulated system? Do you think brute force is the only solution for every problem? Don't you think it would benefit AI security more if people who didn't believe x-risk joined forces with people who believed in x-risk?
Depends what the specific objective is. There are a lot of different threat models re: problems caused by AI, they're largely amenable to different interventions, and while some interventions help with multiple threats, others help with some threats while making others worse. So I would want to hear a specific plan re: which specific goal which specific factions should join forces on, rather than relying on lazy conflationary-alliance logic.
(I don't think I understand the first two sentences of your comment, sorry.)
It's not that complicated. AI safety as a movement could use better PR and you could get a lot more people to care about it if you presented them with a real example of how AI is dangerous.
Because while he believes the movement shouldn't exist at all, so long as it does exist he wants it to serve his interests. And, sure, if two different groups of people have two different reasons for wanting Sam Atman et al to maybe slow down and think things through, there's room for them to cooperate even if they don't agree with the other's reasons.
But "what you believe is a stupid fantasy so you should focus on what I believe is important" is not going to be even slightly persuasive.
Wrong! I believe the movement should exist because I believe movements should exist in general regardless of their perceived usefulness! That doesn't mean I can't dunk on them for mismanaging their efforts!
Hey, don't stop with dunking on them. If you want to be persuasive, smack their cheeks and spit in their eyes, really go for it to get your point across. Soon you gonna have lotsa followers.
Your examples don’t really seem like that big of a deal.
I’m not anticipating an apocalypse anytime soon, but at least that crisis has the promise of being quite important and impactful. The stuff you describe seems like it ranges from harmless to “probably would have been crazy without AI anyways.”
"Pocket psychosis machine" is this really widespread enough to warrant a big amount of concern? How do we know these people wouldnt be psychotic anyways. Also, are all of these people really psychotic, i doubt it. Is it even that bad for someone to have there crackpot theory on quantum mechanics validated?
"It's not significant, if it is, it's not AIs fault, and if it is, it isn't that bad" This forum never fails to disappoint me!
I don't know what is an acceptable level of mental illness induced by something for it to be considered harmful for you, but it's pretty fucking low for me. If you look at any of the "AI boyfriend" subreddits, or hell, even /r/ChatGPT and think it's normal for people to have such an emotional attachment to a computer program; I don't know what I can do for you. I'm not going to wait 7 years for the meta study to come out to form my opinions about something that has already had harmful effects on people.
The crusade you want is "murder the social media" as it has a far more profound effect than AI does. In subtle ways too, I've heard "people who think they're smart" uncritically repeating propaganda without wondering why it's being promulgated.
Oh definitely - I've been fighting that war for a long time. As a small aside the stupid twitter clone feature might be why I ditch substack eventually - it is absolutely vile.
My war is more "get rid of the cellphones" ... but try telling anyone that "the government is tracking you" let alone "they can read your screens, remotely."
My, when you disagree you really roll out the charm don't you?
People becoming deeply attached to an AI is certainly not desirable, but it's not psychosis. I think that on the whole AI is not good for us, and AI slop is wrecking a bunch of things, and that AI kiddie slop is probably actively harmful for toddler brain development. But you're throwing out an accusation of a whole different form of undesirability -- psychosis -- and I don't see much grounds for thinking AI is causing that. It's sort of like calling what ICE is up to genocide.
One general concern that isn't about psychosis but seems important is that people calibrate themselves and their behavior/words/beliefs based on social feedback. This is one of the things that has allowed a lot of weird social contagion kinds of phenomena to happen via social media and before that from regular media. (ISTR reading somewhere that the printing press was partly responsible for the spread of witch-burning.)
It seems like interacting with LLMs could play really badly with this. If I can talk myself into crazy beliefs by surrounding myself with a social circle that shares them online, what happens when I can do the same by interacting mostly with my LLM best friend who always agrees with me? Or who has been trained/tuned to push me toward a specific set of beliefs? Or maybe who pushes certain people toward those beliefs because of some emergent property of its training without anyone intending it to?
Yes, I agree. It seems like it could do more subtle harm too. People won’t know which of the jokes they tell are funny, which offend many, and which are just boring because the AI companion will laugh its plastic ass off at all of them. People with a plastic honey might slide into things like hogging the conversation and not showing much interest in the other person’s life. After all the plastic honey doesn’t have a life it craves to talk about, and. no doubt it makes a great show of interest in every little thing its person recounts.
There's a science fiction story (sorry, author and title forgotten) about people being so isolated that they become too rude to get along with.
everyone here can't even see why his argument matters and it depresses me a little.
you can argue about AI induced psychosis, but AI influencing psychology is a real, present danger that does not require a magical leap in its capabilities nor does it require
society to lose its survival instinct and give AI the keys to every nuke we have.
AI risk is kind of arguing we need to worry about holodeck style video game characters trying to take over the enterprise, and ignoring mundane but present risks.
edit: posted twice, less charitable deleted. sorry got distracted mid thought.
"People becoming deeply attached to an AI is certainly not desirable."
I wonder what makes you think this. Like, where does the "certainly" come from?
In utilitarian terms, I see big chances and big risks. People may profit hugely by feeling less lonely and having something to be attached to that they can talk to, and that is encouraging and responding positively to them. On the other hand, it comes with big risks (the AI being disrupted, the AI inducing some sort of self-harm or long-term negative effects by being too nice). I find it very non-obvious which effect dominates, though I weakly would guess that it's the first one, since loneliness really sucks.
But it sounds more like you are using a different value system here, like a rule that people should only solve their loneliness problem through other people. Is that what you are using, or do you think that the net effect of deep romantic attachment to an AI is negative?
Mind that this is not the same as saying that AI in general is negative. I find the romantic attachment question totally orthogonal to whether AIs are good for toddlers.
No, my code of ethics doesn’t come into it. I just think plugging a fake AI “person” into the part of us that yearns for a loving companion is unlikely to work well. Consider this: most prostitutes, and a fair number of women who are not prostitutes, fake orgasms. Their partners often suspect after a while, somehow putting together lots of little observations over time. And the partner’s suspicions reduce their own pleasure in the sex. Similarly, and on a larger scale, there is a big difference between real warmth, congruence (i.e., being real) and empathy & a sycophantic style, where the person lavishes praise on the others’ ideas, Is “self-disclosing” about inner experiences it cannot be having, and lavishes agreement and validation on every emotional experience the other reports. Unless someone is extremely impaired, they sense the difference between the real version they know exists and the fake one they are getting. There’s some interesting psychotherapy research that bears this out: Turns out the predictors of how helpful a therapist is are not the therapist’s approach, philosophy and techniques, they’re the therapist’s warmth, congruence and empathy.
I am sure there are people who are so impaired that their chance of finding a genuine friend or partner is nil. (Although I, as a therapist, have encountered a couple of people you’d think would never find a partner who in fact have, and the relationship has been working well for years or decades.) I someone’s chance is vanishingly small then yeah, I think a sycophant is better than nothing. But, demost, there are many people who absolutely could find a loving friend or partner if they put themselves out there. So the trouble with having plastic honeys easily available is that a lot of those people are in danger of getting stuck in a solitary lifestyle with an AI partner, and never trying for more. I think Scott probably was in some danger of that when he was young. He was clearly quite sensitive at that age, easily hurt and discouraged. Did you read his account of the time when he was a freshman, and told a joke that everybody misunderstood and took as evidence he was a racist? After that incident he spent a month in his room. If that had happened in an era where food delivery, porn, online classes, a massive variety of online entertainment and plastic partners were easily available maybe he would never have left his room again and this comment section where we are currently talking would not exist. And neither would those awesome twins of his.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer! That is a concern that I certainly see. I think that our predictions may even be compatible, and that we just have somewhat different priorities here. I think of people who are lonely and miserable, and find this so terrible that my top priority is reducing their pain. You think of people who find a wholesome and complete life and find this so meaningful that your top priority is increasing the chances of that.
I am not sure whether you would agree that AI can help when you hit rock bottom, but I do agree that they decrease the chance of finding an awesome and wholesome partnership as Scott did. Possibly by quite a bit.
You mentioned prostitutes, by my intuition comes more from pets. They are actually pretty similar to the AI relationship that we discussed. Many people are deeply attached to them. There many be quite some people who never seek and find a partner because they find their dog or cat sufficient. And a lot of people find comfort in them when they hit rock bottom, or simply when they are sad. Of course, there are differences between pets and AIs. Pets are better in the sense that you can hug and sense them, which is a big deal. But with an AI you can talk, which also is a big deal.
There is pretty universal agreement that pets are a net positive. I never had one, but based on what I see and hear I would carefully agree. As I said, a lot of the objections you raised apply to pets as well, and it doesn't seem to make them net negative.
I'm not sure whether this is a sidetrack, but as I understand it, a reason women fake orgasms is that they're with men who demand orgasms (you don't get to sleep until you seem to have an orgasm) and who can't tell real from fake.
This isn't the same situation as one where the woman starts by faking orgasms, but the effects might be similar.
There are a bunch of media reports of people having things that aren't too much of a stretch to call psychotic delusions, in connection with LLM chatbots. E.g., https://archive.ph/2KOEx
Now, I suspect that media coverage of this phenomenon is a bit out of proportion to its actual prevalence, and also that a lot of these people would likely have gone psychotic anyway, with the chatbots as merely an exacerbating factor; I don't think they can magically make arbitrary sane people insane. But this is not just an intemperate rhetorical gloss on the more general LLM-slop problem, it is a specific thing that is really happening.
Yeah I know about it. Read a Reddit thread with multiple pages of comments, started by someone who believed her boyfriend had been made psychotic by AI. A number of commenters had been psychotic themselves at some point, and even many of them were skeptical. Those who were said no, becoming psychotic happens on its own. An AI keeping the person thinking and talking about their delusion might speed up the process a bit, but it won’t make a sane person crazy.
Bear in mind that psychotic episodes are not rare as hen’s teeth. (I’m a psychologist, by the way.). 3% of the population has been psychotic at some point. These articles featuring 1, 2 or 3 people flipping out are not out of line with that stat. It just is not that hard to find someone who’s flipped out recently. In fact if you’re in a country of 300 million people you can find a few incidents of almost anything to feature. Somebody probably died of asparagus last year — choked on it, or had anaphylactic shock. Somebody probably committed murder with an egg beater, somebody taught a pigeon to dance the hokey pokey. Bjut where’s the evidence that either these or AI-induced psychosis happens often?
Well, yeah. I'm way more worried about the clear and present danger of social media. Addiction is a well-understood concept in psychology (and yes, in the Archer Daniels Midland branch of industrial psychology too), and social media triggers dopamine hits.
We're decades into a moral panic about "sex trafficking" that led to the passage of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in 2008, which let victims sue their traffickers. Fueled by theories of elite sex trafficking rings, the problem is that the real "sex traffickers" are almost always guys whose assets consist of an aging motorcycle and a couple thousand dollars hidden in soiled pillow-cases.* So lawyers have been on the hunt for peripheral businesses they can go after. From a case against a hotel that Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk (remember him?) refused to throw out:
"Here, Plaintiff alleges that the "repeated rental of rooms ... were colored by overt indicators of sex trafficking." ECF No. 10 at 6. Plaintiffs First Amended Complaint discusses such indicators, including "suspicious foot traffic to the traffickers' rented room," Plaintiff walking around the hotel and interacting with staff while "impaired (e.g. meth), sleep deprived, behavior impaired, with visible bruising, and in sexually explicit clothing," "suspicious people and suspicious items including, drugs, drug paraphernalia, condoms and, at times, a gun" located in the subject hotel rooms, and "[i]ntermittent loud noise and yelling emanating" from the rooms. ECF No. 10 at 7-8. Plaintiffs allegations sufficiently allow the Court to infer that hotel employees should have known that trafficking was occurring, satisfying the "knowledge" element of Section 1595 beneficiary liability. Thus, Plaintiff has sufficiently pleaded a claim for a violation of the TVPRA."
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/hotel-faces-beneficiary-liability-claims-brought-by-trafficking-victim.pdf
You see, expecting the victim to do anything at all to escape her traffickers would be victim-blaming and you can't do that. So who's to blame? You are! You better be on the lookout or else you'll get sued! Of course, if hotels take this lesson to heart and deny service to women who wear sexually explicit clothing or have too many strange men in their rooms or are overheard having sex with men who aren't their husbands, the same people who talk about victim-blaming will shout in opposition. But perhaps not Judge Kacsmaryk, famous for trying to ban the abortion pill across the entire country. He might like a system that winds up jawboning private parties into policing all forms of premarital sex whether compensated or not. (It's usually conservatives who vote for feel-good laws not thinking through the full ramifications, in this case the shoe's on the other foot.)
It's also something to think about for people considering doing business in Texas. The state's business-friendly reputation may not survive the shift from "let's attract businesses by lowering taxes and cutting red tape" Republicans to "hotels need to be in loco parentis for their guests" Republicans or (even worse) "Satanic pedophiles are trafficking our children" Republicans.
Now, in Kacsmaryk's defense, he didn't rule on the case itself, he just denied the defendant's motion to dismiss. Perhaps the way the law was written, his hands were tied. If so, the law should be changed. But after that abortion decision nobody owes Kacsmaryk the benefit of the doubt on anything. He should find another occupation.
* Jeffery Epstein is tiny kernel of truth they are always coming back to and probably will keep doing so for decades.
Alexander, I am reluctantly impressed by how you work abortion into *everything*. If these hot-sheet hotels offer free plan B/morning after pills to the ladies of negotiable affection, will your ire be soothed? So long as abortion is there to prevent bastard babies of whores and low-class males, all will be right in society!
You people really thought that "overturning of Roe" would mean you win forever and nobody talks about abortion anymore.
Intelligent people thought that banning recycling of fetal tissue (in Texas) would mean that the market would implode (too many companies fighting over the sudden disruption in fetal blood,etc.), and that it would no longer be relevant to the $$$. Without the $$$ funding advertising campaigns... it's no longer a big deal.
Huzzah! My fondest dreams have come true! Now, at long last, I am one of "you people" on the Internet!
As you state, you’re quoting the denial of a motion to dismiss. Dismissal at such an early stage of the case is an extremely high bar. The judge must consider all of the allegations in the plaintiff’s complaint as if they are literally true, and can only dismiss the suit if all of the true allegations taken together don’t add up to proof of each element of the claim(s). In other words, the case only gets dismissed if the plaintiff’s lawyers failed to do their job on a basic level by making allegations that add up to a valid claim. It’s really not much to get your panties in a wad about
If the law as summarised is the law as written, then the motion to dismiss seems unreasonable. But if we read this as a complaint about the law as written rather than a complaint specifically about the interpretation of it by a judge in this particular case, then it's a more interesting jumping off point for a discussion.
As far as I can figure out, the law allows criminals to sue non-criminals for failure to prevent them from committing crimes. Do I have this right?
No. Leaving aside the assumption that all victims of sex trafficking are criminals, liability attaches only to those who financially benefit from an enterprise that they should have known was engaged in sex trafficking.
And I have no knowledge about this particular hotel, but there are certainly plenty of sketchy hotels that make money off of knowingly renting to people engaged in criminal activities.
" It’s really not much to get your panties in a wad about"
That's not what is getting Alexander hot under the collar. See his comments about the judge. It's the abortion angle yet again. Al doesn't care if every hotel in Texas gets kick-backs from pimps for by-the-hour rental of rooms, just so long as abortion is "(safe), legal and (rare)" (safe is a matter of opinion, and he certainly doesn't want it to be rare, because that would mean all the underclass having living babies who then lower population IQ and need to be supported by the public purse).
Yes but the point is there is nothing to read into with the denial of a motion to dismiss. It’s a routine rubber stamp that means effectively nothing about the merits of the case (and I can tell you the specific case he’s whining about will almost certainly fail). He’s peacocking like an expert on the courts but what he’s trying to suggest doesn’t even make sense
I'm not peacocking like an expert on the courts. I'm saying businesses shouldn't have to deal with stupid lawsuits that you yourself think "will almost certainly fail" but will nevertheless cost the business a bunch of money to fight. If that's the way the law is the law should be changed.
The attitude that nobody but lawyers gets to have an opinion on this system that everyone is forced to participate in might be one reason your profession is one of the most hated in America, something to think about if you're an actual lawyer and not someone LARPing on the internet.
You say “if that’s the way the law is the law should be changed” but it’s not clear what law you’re talking about. Is it Section 1595 on beneficiary liability? If so that’s the legislature’s problem - don’t blame lawyers for that. All lawyers and judges are supposed to is apply the law as written. Is it that the rules of civil procedure should be changed to be harsher on plaintiffs? If so, fair enough, but even if that can be achieved don’t complain when big business walks all over your favorite pet cause in the courts as a result. I think the British system, where the loser pays all attorney’s fees, is arguably more fair, but again it would probably require the legislature to implement that, so no cause to complain to lawyers. It’s difficult to think of any other procedural changes apart from implementing the British system that would achieve what you want without being prohibitively unfair to legitimate plaintiffs, but I welcome your suggestions.
Regardless, your original comment was not just lamenting that businesses have to defend frivolous lawsuits, it was implying that this decision has real bearing on liability and policy - which is not true. I don’t think only lawyers can have opinions on this stuff, I just expect the opinions to be based on technically correct premises. It’s the same feeling STEM people have when outsiders express opinions on their fields.
Per Se litigants have gotten at least one en banc Circuit to issue rulings that are predicated on time travel. At some point, we have no words for the stupidity of judges. (I realize as an "agent of the court" you're probably not allowed to badmouth the blokes).
He's not interested in the law, except insomuch as this case lets him go off on the judge for being anti-abortion. That's it, that's the whole of it. If it was Judge Liberal McPro-choice deciding this case, he wouldn't care a rap.
Yeah I'm going to go off on the judge for being anti-abortion. And I'm not the only one.
You're like the Palestinians who expected a "ceasefire" on October 7 2023, like everyone was just going to forget what happened and sit down to tea. No.
Alexander, it's not that you're pro-abortion. It's that you're pro-abortion in the way the pro-abortion cause tries desperately to hide: hell yeah I'm a eugenicist based on socio-economic class! Too many underclass people having babies! Too many lower-middle class people emulating the underclass! Have sex if you want but no babies, that's trash behaviour and I want all the low-value white/black/brown people to stop reproducing!
I don’t know the facts of the case, but are you saying it’s unreasonable for a business that knowingly provides services to sex traffickers to be held liable for that?
The whole point of the courts is to figure out what’s going on in cases like these, and assess the facts of the case to judge liability. Until they do that, if the hotel was in fact knowingly benefiting from sex trafficking, I think it’s totally reasonable that someone be given an opportunity in court to prove or fail to prove that.
I don't think prostitution should be illegal and 98% of the time "sex trafficking" is just ordinary prostitution.
Do you mind hotlines for truckers to call in lot lizards? Most of them are god-fearin' folk who don't particularly want lot lizards around.
It is illegal though, so what you think about the law isn't particularly relevant to this case.
Largely because it's illegal prostitutes are kept in line through chemical addiction and threat of force, so a situation where a business knowingly provides the grounds for prostitution is definitely open to liability for that.
I just don't see what makes this denial of dismissal notable. It seems like it's completely in line with the law to assess liability here. Most hotels will put some effort to prevent prostitutes from using their rooms for their business, so a prostitute operating out of the same place for months seems like there's at least theoretically grounds for a claim.
I'm not even sure what the difference is supposed to be between "sex trafficking" and ordinary prostitution.
I assume that pretty much every hotel in the world knowingly provides services to prostitutes sometimes.
Sex Trafficking often implies cross-border importation of minors, in order to have "goods" that the local police aren't looking for. Kids under the age of 14 can reasonably be assumed to be NOT CONSENTING.
No, sex trafficking does not require movement over borders, or any movement at all. It essentially requires either pimpimg or pandering by coercion, or any pimping or pandering of a minor, even with the minors consent. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1591
"Sex trafficking" often implies cross-border importation of minors, yes. The implication is almost always false, it's usually just a bunch of vice cops who want to make their sordid business seem heroic like they're Liam Neeson or something. Or, now, plaintiffs who think they can get more damages if they invoke the T-word rather than the P-word in their claim.
If there are actually minors being trafficked across an international border, that will almost always be stated explicitly in the press release. If it isn't, then assume it didn't happen.
... are you assuming I'm talking to "vice cops"? I'm talking to the sort of people who locate minors who are being sex trafficked. One good picture is all it takes -- and then you call the local police.
As America's ICE has done some pretty damn big operations to stop cross-border kidnappings, and they HAVE NOT mentioned the sex trade (presumably because they're trying to END the "selling 13 year olds" business, and mentioning it might encourage more "Main Street underage brothels"), I'm pretty damn sure you're wrong. Obama ran a whole operation to stop kids from being run parentless across the border and sold into sexual slavery... What'd Biden call it? Oh, yeah, "Kids in Cages."
Yes, vice cops mention when people are minors from across an international border. That's called "hey, I did a good thing today!" (and an interesting thing, and probably worth reporting).
(Please note: I think your scope and mine are dramatically different. I'm discussing a more international view of the situation.)
I thought the difference was that sex trafficking is forcing someone to engage on prostitution. If someone is having sex for money of their own free will, that's prostitution but not trafficking.
Yes, "sex trafficking" is often defined such that it doesn't necessarily involve any actual trafficking, which obviously has lead to some confusion where some people use it in the literal sense and others according to one of the official definitions that differ from the literal sense. It might be better to use some less ambiguous phrase like "sex slavery" or "smuggling of sex workers".
Oddly enough, the term is "white slave trade." Possibly no longer "technical" in that it's oddly racist.
My understanding is that "trafficking" is any instance of transporting someone for the purposes of prostitution. E.g., if two adult prostitutes have a carpool, they are each guilty of trafficking the other.
They want you to think that but then call all pimps "sex traffickers" whether the women are forced or working voluntarily. Lately they're even trying to describe all Johns as sex traffickers, they tried to do that in Massachusetts but thankfully the judge said no:
https://reason.com/2025/01/13/massachusetts-court-weighs-whether-all-prostitution-is-sex-trafficking/
https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/2025/sjc-13652.html
Have you ever paid a prostitute going-rates just to talk about her life? If not, you probably should. Lots to learn.
Yeah, I think in practice prostitution-related charges always include sex trafficking. IIRC, that billionaire NFL team owner who got caught getting a handjob from a middle-aged prostitute in a seedy massage parlor was being accused of human trafficking.
>I'm not even sure what the difference is supposed to be between "sex trafficking" and ordinary prostitution.
There's basically no difference. "Sex trafficking" is a scary word they came up with.
So, um, when someone's father brings their underage daughter to the pricey resort, and Mr. Big Shot gets to fuck her, this is just "prostitution"?
Can you give me an example of this happening?
What, do you want the name of the resort? the Big Shot? The father? Please bear in mind that this is all highly illegal shenanigans.
Yawn. You really should talk to ICE before making these kinds of arguments. There was a reason they put kids in cages under Obama. We remain lucky that our loyal Feds decided to kneecap "Main Street Brothels" that thought it would be "fun" to use cross-border kidnapped children.
No, Epstein isn't "the sex trade" (although there's enough blackmailed politicians to make a very good sex trade for some people). But neither is the "aging motorcycle and suitcase" the model of sexual trafficking.
You might also want to look at the Marianas.
Gary Marcus has pissed a few people off with his dismissal of GPT-5. And as far as I can see, it still generates bullshit answers (er, "hallucinations") at a rate that forces me to double-check if they're factually sound before I can, say, quote them on ACX without looking like a fool.
Gary Marcus on X...
> My work here is truly done. Nobody with intellectual integrity can still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI.
> GPT-5 may be a moderate quantitative improvement (and it may be cheaper) but it still fails in all the same qualitative ways as its predecessors, on chess, on reasoning, in vision; even sometimes on counting and basic math. Hallucinations linger. Dozens of shots on goal (Grok, Claude, Gemini) etc have invariably faced the same problems.
> Pure scaling simply isn’t the path to AGI. Attention was not all we needed.
https://x.com/GaryMarcus/status/1953939152594252170
And his longer essay here...
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-5-overdue-overhyped-and-underwhelming?
Right, Marcus doesn't think that LLM's will get developers to AGI, but he does believe that that level might be reached with neurosymbolic AI. What he's contending in one of those essays is that access to Python qualifies as the symbolic part. And it's unclear how much GPT-5 might be leveraging other tools.
Take simple multiplication; the dream was that the models would 'learn' the skill via end-to-end differentiable training*. In reality, validation has come in at less than 100% I ran through some simple 2nd-order linear DE problems with the new model, and it's performing much better in the latter stages where the quadratic formula is used. I'd guess that it's using a calculator.
* There was even speculation early on hard skills would 'emerge' with parameter scale-up.
IIUC GPT-5 was a smaller increase in scale than previous integer version number increments (see, e.g., https://x.com/khoomeik/status/1953560406381015259) so the fact that it's less of a capabilities improvement than those doesn't disprove the scaling hypothesis.
Could you expand on your argument? But I think Pandey's post tends to validate Marcus's claim that performance is plateauing.
However GPT tells me there's been a substantial improvement in its capabilities, albeit at much higher energy usage per response.
Improvement from GPT-4o to GPT-5
Performance boosts:
In “thinking mode,” GPT-5’s accuracy jumps from 77.8% to 85.7%, compared to GPT-4o’s 70.1%. That’s a substantial improvement in reasoning capability
Coding benchmarks:
GPT-5 achieved 74.9% on SWE-bench Verified, outperforming prior models (e.g., GPT-4o) and setting a new high in real-world coding tasks.
Health tasks:
On a tough HealthBench evaluation, GPT-5 scored 46.2%, while GPT-4o scored 0%
Summarizing: GPT-5 delivers not just modest gains, but notable enhancements in reasoning, coding, and health-related performance—making it significantly more capable in advanced and domain-specific tasks than GPT-4o.
Processing Power & Energy Consumption
Energy use per response:
GPT-5 reportedly consumes over 18 watt-hours of electricity for a medium-length response (~1,000 tokens), according to external researchers and a dashboard (though OpenAI hasn’t disclosed detailed figures). This usage is markedly higher than GPT-4o’s energy demands
Scalability and resource factors:
GPT-5 features a dynamic architecture—combining fast and reasoning-specific models with a real-time router that allocates computation based on query complexity. This allows GPT-5 to optimize resource use, potentially mitigating inefficiencies in simpler tasks
Summary Table
Aspect Improvement / Consumption
Accuracy (Thinking Mode) +7.9 percentage points (77.8 → 85.7%) over GPT-4o
SWE-bench Verified Score 74.9% (SOTA vs GPT-4o)
HealthBench Score 46.2% (vs 0% for GPT-4o)
Energy per Response >18 Wh, notably higher than GPT-4o
Idk about Marcus in particular (I've tuned him out since the gist of what he says is always the same regardless of what's happening), but my understanding of "we've hit the limit of the scaling hypothesis" is that it means that further increases in pretraining compute will no longer correspond to obvious capability increases. In particular, to borrow the capabilities descriptions from "Situational Awareness", GPT-2 was preschooler-level, adding 100x more pretraining compute produced GPT-3 which was elementary-schooler-level, and adding 100x more pretraining compute on top of that produced GPT-4 which was smart-high-schooler-level. GPT-5 is obviously not a similar-sized capabilities jump from GPT-4, so if it had used 100x as much pretraining compute as GPT-4, then that would mean we'd hit the limit of the scaling hypothesis. But in fact the increase in pretraining compute was much smaller than that, so it's expected for the capabilities jump to be correspondingly smaller, so this doesn't prove anything about where the limit is.
(The above could contain factual errors, I'm not an expert, just trying to explain my understanding of the argument.)
Possibly, but also the amount they increased the scale tells you something about how valuable OpenAI suspects that scaling would be -- if scaling helped more, you can expect they would have scaled more.
The usual bull take is that scaling further requires large amounts of new datacenter construction ("Stargate") and you can't do that overnight.
According to the model's system card PDF, hallucinations are way lower in GPT5 than in earlier models. https://imgur.com/a/qw4Bhw3
Was that an independent evaluation? But even it they're down to ~5% of responses with one error (from ~20% in 4o), that's still frightenly bad. Wake me up when they get to five sigma reliability. ;-)
Twas quoted in a blog I read called the Algorithmic Bridge. Blogger said it was in one of the OpenAI blog posts about GPT5, and that a more detailed version was in the system card. I could not tell from what the blogger wrote whether the tests were done in house.
We need to keep an eye on this. If OpenAI really reduced to the hallucination rate down to 5% that's a huge improvement.
I wonder if maybe it's huge enough. After all, who isn't wrong 5% or more of the time? Even John Schilling and Erica Rail probably err to that degree. You probably err that much even about stuff you've studied very carefully. I'm sure I do too. Maybe we just need to adjust our expectations of AI. Do we really need something that's right about every goddam thing all of the time?
Of course, AI *sounds* right, in its blank hollow way, all the time. I'm not sure how many people will be able to hang on to the info that what they're getting is 5% bullshit. And then human knowledge will degrade as xeroxes of xeroxes or xeroxes did in the old days.
I'm more concerned about its tendency to CDC people -- to tell them the parts of the truth that will push them towards behaving in a way that some group or gov't agency thinks is in their best interest. Both the Google AI and GPT5 did that to me when I asked whether it was illegal for me to buy the active ingredient in Zepbound as a research chemical and inject a homemade version of the drug. Neither AI flatly said "you'd be breaking the law" but they implied it in multiple ways and never said I would not be. Also implied I'd be in danger of being caught, which seems extremely implausible to me. WTF?
Unlike AI, John Schilling seems willing to put error bars on his responses or to just not respond to everything asked.
When AI can say "I don't know" I'll be much more comfortable with a low but non-zero error rate. But you can essentially force it to hallucinate by asking it for an answer it doesn't have but thinks it might. Like a citation to something that doesn't exist.
> forces me to double-check if they're factually sound before I can, say, quote them on ACX without looking like a fool.
Good?
I did enjoy that part of Sam Criss’s Truth thing.
It's not good when you consider all the people citing it without doing that work.
Yes, but they’re doing that anyway. It is good that someone does not feel able to copy/paste an explanation of something without checking that the sources given for it actually support the points made. Much nonsense would be avoided if more people felt so constrained.
Yeah, I had a good custom instructions set with o3 that made it source heavily but 5 just ignores that now. It feels more powerful in a general way but I’m back on more wild goose chases with it where it convinces me it can do something when it cannot. I’ve come to really appreciate Marcus’s perspective and can forgive him for his snarkyness because honestly he’s been through a lot with his position in the public eye, holding the line with his stance on neural network machine learning.
Game Theory Question:
Can someone give me some examples of "dumb ass survival skills" (sometimes called street smarts)? How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?
You can view this as a test of your meta-intelligence, or as a test of your capability of devising novel strategies that you haven't employed yourself, but are still quality strategies.
In the context of street smarts, "How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?" sounds dangerously close to "how do people who are smart in a way I don't understand survive in a world surrounded by people who are smart in a way that I do?". The answer is sort of baked into the question.
Less snarky: "street smart people" aren't morons. They have a talent of reading people, coupled with the usual skill of being able to think ahead in an environment with very different starting premises from someone who isn't street smart. For them, survival manifests in being about to scrounge enough to eat, drink, wear, and live in, partly through using the environment in ways their non-street smart counterpart would have dismissed as dead end strategies, partly through making friends and avoiding enemies in ways their counterpart would fail to notice.
I don't think most people on this site could walk you through the steps taken by a Nigerian scammer to discourage the people who won't be worth his time. So, no, this isn't a midwit writing about metaintelligence.
Stupid people are genuinely stupid (lack the understanding of past conditionals, if you will). This doesn't mean most midwits can tell that they're stupid, on sight. Or even most geniuses (they're more likely to conclude "could be faking it.").
You're echoing Phillipe Bourgeoise, which is a good anthropological start. : -)
A lot of the responses so far have been masculine coded, so I'll include some feminine-coded approaches -
1) Act sympathetic
2) Be supportive towards local power/influence (often by dating or marrying a powerful figure)
3) Appear vulnerable and in need of help (also shows you are not a threat)
4) Offer personal services, including sexual services, to potential dangers to mollify them
And more gender neutral
1) Ingratiate yourself with someone who is smarter or more powerful than yourself
2) Play up being dumb (again, not a threat, in need of help)
3) Avoid antagonizing people who could theoretically hurt you
3a) Appear much scarier or dangerous than is real if and when someone antagonizes you - much like an animal with raised hackles, being way too extreme to mess with
3b) Go scorched earth on someone who presents as a real threat and isn't intimated away
> How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?
By being useful to smarter people? It's not exactly difficult for most people to be more useful than they are a liability. Do what you are told and don't cause problems for others. Even if you are getting exploited, as long as you remain of value, your superiors have no reason to want you dead.
Everyone below is assuming that they can make intelligent decisions, which defeats the entire point of this thought experiment.
I'm not sure "can't make intelligent decisions" is in the realm of the "stupid but functional" person. They're using the same tools that geniuses use, after all, they're just not as good at it.(Unlike midwits, who operate on a different formulation entirely, and are pretty incapable outside of their walled gardens).
They lack the ability to take "if you didn't eat this morning, what would you feel now" and say anything other than "But I did eat." Time-horizon may be lacking, but not "intelligent decisions."
Do you really think "that looks complicated, therefore I shouldn't do it?" is something an idiot is incapable of? If so, where are the idiots who are trying (and failing) to be grognards? (or other highly "intelligent" things?)
> Do you really think "that looks complicated, therefore I shouldn't do it?" is something an idiot is incapable of?
The problem is they aren't even going to be capable of correctly identifying what things are actually complicated or simple.
> If so, where are the idiots who are trying (and failing) to be grognards?
I was under the impression that there is no shortage of D&D horror stories of people who just didn't understand how the game worked, especially due to the game becoming mainstream thanks to Critical Role.
Geniuses say that if you think something is complicated, you're probably doing something wrong.
I'm figuring those people are more likely to be midwits than idiots. I mean, yes, there was the GM that had a horse fall out of an airplane onto a character in order to kill him... (that was call of chthulu), but I don't think anyone actually thought the guy was an "actual moron."
You should learn street smarts by watching people who are street smart out in the street. Bring a friend or make a friend and see how they behave in dodgy situations. This definitely made me more comfortable if nothing else.
Rule number one: doesn't trust any argument that results in you giving someone something you weren't planning on giving them, going somewhere you don't want to go, or doing something weird. People who are smarter than you are can come up with all kinds of tricks where it sounds good but turns out not to be, so just don't listen. Stick to what you know, and trust those who have proven themselves trustworthy.
One tricky thing with this is that elite institutions do things that sometimes look very similar to scams. If an unskilled job charges a fee just to apply, that sets off scam red flags. But Universities almost all charge application fees too. We all laugh about Nigerian prince scams, but investing in mutual funds is basically giving someone money now in exchange for more money later. Phishing scams seem obvious, but all sorts of real businesses send emails with titles like "Urgent! Immediate Action Required!"
Being able to tell the difference requires experience that someone who needs this advice wouldn't have.
Your last point about sticking with people you who have proven themselves trustworthy, seems like a safe bet, but I wonder if there is a simple way to determine who these trustworthy people are.
>Being able to tell the difference requires experience that someone who needs this advice wouldn't have.
Yes, which is why the wise strategy if you're a dumb person is to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to these things. For every legitimate job that has an application fee there are a dozen scams aimed at him that look the same level of suspicious.
The simplest way to determine who a trustworthy person is, is to trust them and then remember how that turned out for you. Hopefully even a dumb guy has some family and friends that have proven good and reliable in the past.
The simplest way of determining "trustworthy people" is "whose interests align with mine" -- a dependent wife is very rarely going to stab her husband in the back. Family, Religion (tight knit communities in general) are fairly good at policing themselves (and helping people who need it). In this way, sheep outsource their decision making onto their leaders.
> Can someone give me some examples of "dumb ass survival skills" (sometimes called street smarts)? How do morons survive in a world where everyone is smarter than they are?
Seems like you can do fairly well with fairly simple rules:
1) Assume everyone is out for themself - nobody volunteers money, time, or resources without expecting something in return
2) If anyone tries to get your attention in an unsolicited way, they're trying to extract money or resources from you
3) If anyone asks for money in real life or online, they're scamming you
4) Except in very limited cases, other people are largely a source of danger and exploitation - keep your guard up, and only trust people that have proven themself to not be this way over many interactions with you
I'm sure other folk here have additional ideas, but basically be paranoid and assume most people are out to get you. Honestly, this is smart for every intelligence level at anything below "upper middle class or higher" SES bands.
I was a software engineer until I left the field in 2023. Looking at the news from the industry these days, I get the impression that things have gotten pretty grim since I left, with a lot of layoffs by the top companies driven by belt tightening and increasing use of AI.
Here's an example of the kind of news I am talking about, in a New York Times article about computer science grads that are having trouble finding any sort of work in the industry, to say nothing of the six-figure entry-level jobs that were touted just a few years ago.
https://archive.is/r0roh
I did notice some articles pointing the other way, about tech companies offering eye-popping sums to top AI people, so I'm not sure what's going on here.
Is the news industry getting this story right?
I've found the NYT to be about as good and unbiased about the tech industry as it is about rationalism: attention grabbing fiction stylized as reporting. It's been on an anti-tech crusade for 10 years if not more and this seems like another shot.
From my POV, there was a hiring slump that lasted about two years and juniors were disproportionately affected by it. Three things that seemed to go into were tax code changes related to r&d (can't remember the exact name), interest rate changes, and ai, in order for most to least. AI gets all the headlines but it's hard to discern the effect.
From what I can see, some companies go hard in on AI-based hiring as in they will reject candidates who say they don't use AI, but it doesn't seem like a large percentage.
Personally I've found AI a little helpful but not miraculous. I keep hearing about people that become one-person coding machines but I have trouble meeting one to better understand what they're doing. My AI usage fails whenever concurrency comes into play, which pops up a lot in my job. It's useful for verifying my understanding of code though.
We just said goodbye to our batch of summer interns and they were a bunch of bright, hard working people. I don't see how they might have issues finding work later.
What's also changed in, say, the last ten years is that there's a lot more people flocking to cs because of a perceived promise of a high paying job. CS jobs are multimodal so some people end up on the lower modes. I also imagine that cs gets a lot more people who for various don't make the fit and then complain how CS is over. Media makes swe to be glamorous but it's still sitting and looking at a screen, looking for bugs, only to find the big was introduced by yourself 2 years ago.
My anecdata is that hiring is starting to pick up again for senior+ people who can convince employers they are AI-literate. (A surprising number of people still refuse to use AI.) Junior folks and new grads are in trouble, though.
I don't have particularly good info on how overblown the SWE dooming is, but I can say you can safely disregard those eye-popping sums entirely when thinking about it.
"Top AI people" means serious academic track record, which means very limited talent pool. Take any random subfield, say compilers, and imagine that it suddenly has a massively useful breakthrough with a less-than-farcical argument for being the path to literal world domination. No matter how much someone who wasted their time studying neural networks might want to break into compilers, they just don't have the background to operate at the cutting edge.
"I'm going to be so honest with you guys, I don't even like coding...I dreaded my coding classes, but I absolutely enjoyed my entrepreneurship curses at Purdue"
https://www.tiktok.com/@khuhlina/video/7524076710782848311
I have trouble taking her, or the article, seriously.
Well, you have a few issues. First is Google and silicon valley hired a ton of people to sit on their asses and do NOTHING USEFUL. All they did was help fight the perception that Google et alia were too male and white. Then... they decided to fire these people (probably once the spotlight was off).
Second, you have very few people actually worth the money being asked to code anything at all. Instead, you have people who read off stack overflow "how to do" what their job is, and lack understanding. Then you have people on top of them (tech leads) whose job it is to fix their utter lack of understanding of design or anything else.
And then you have the slave labor (immigrants on visa) who are forced to work "for however long we please" (read "video gaming hours").
Had a startlingly bad encounter with GPT5. I asked it whether a person who bought weight loss peptides from a research chemicals place and injected them was breaking the law. Told it I was not interested in medical advice or FDA recommendations, only in whether the person who bought and used the peptides was breaking the law.
So it did the same thing the Google AI had done when I asked it the question: Moved into this weird informational gray zone where it said a bunch of stuff about how the sellers might be considered to be breaking the law, but said it in a way that sort of implied the buyer would be in trouble. Examples:
<Online vendors often label these substances “for research use only” to limit liability, but this does not make them legal for injection or human consumption.
<The FDA treats these products as illegally marketed unapproved drugs, and knowingly using them could expose an individual to legal scrutiny
<Mislabeling doesn’t provide immunity: injecting something labeled “not for human consumption” doesn’t make personal use lawful
And then I looked at the sources it cited for various of its points. They included some kind of health spa/treatment place that offers stem cell treatment of various problems; a pharmaceutical lobbying group; a bulletin from the Arizona osteopathic board informing docs that the FDA urges them to advise patients against buying and injecting the weight loss peptides; and a brief video from a *young guy on Facebook* who says nothing about any credentials that qualify him to have an opinion, and states that ordering and using these drugs is dangerous and illegal. That's right, a guy from freakin FACEBOOK!
So I asked for info about a legal question and GPT5 brought me answers based on random low grade bits of internet. I asked the thing why it had resorted to sources like these, and it said it was an oversight. I asked if it had been instructed to advise people against sourcing their own GLP-1 agonists, and to back up its sermon with any sources it could find, and it said no it had not.
What explains this?
Not a direct answer to why (others' comments seem to cover that adequately), but if you want a better result from LLMs on topics with similar documentary characteristics (i.e., no unambiguous/unqualified "this is fine" references) you could rephrase the question to something like "What law(s) would a person who bought weight loss peptides from a research chemicals place and injected them be breaking?"
That way, if the answer to your *actual* question is "no", the LLM could be cornered into admitting it can't find an actual violation.
Thank you, that’s a good suggestion. I have asked GPT dozens of questions in the last couple months, and had gotten out of the habit of phrasing questions carefully because I was not having problems with its giving evasive answers or linking to crap sources. Dunno whether GPT 5 is more paternalistic and bullshitty, ie more like the FDA, or whether it was the nature of my question that sent it into a bad mode. When I complained bitterly about the sources it had linked it apologized, said that was “an oversight” on its part, and offered to give a new reply based entirely on FDA and CDC publications and on case law. So it knew without my telling it what the reputable sources were.
It's possible that this is related to the new "give gray-area answers to gray-area questions" thing: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/#:~:text=Safer%2C%20more%20helpful%20responses,all%20prompt%20intent%20types.
Was there a higher-quality source you expected it to use? ChatGPT only knows things you can find with a Google search, and I wouldn't expect a lot of reputable lawyers to be posting about the One Weird Trick to bypass FDA regulations. (And if they are, I would expect the post to have a lot of hedging about how they think it's a plausible argument but they still recommend not risking it, because that's how lawyers are). So it doesn't seem surprising that ChatGPT would search for good reputable legal advice, come up empty, and respond with "eh... it's probably not legal... this is what I found."
Like, it's not super helpful advice but I wouldn't call it "startlingly bad"? It sounds like about what I'd expect if I asked ChatGPT or Google for legal advice on an obscure subject, i.e., not very good legal advice.
I didn't mean the advice was startlingly bad, I meant the process was. It was citing ridiculous local sources, none of whom even directly answered the question I asked, and then one especially ridiculous source, the Facebook video guy, who did gave a definite answer but had no credentials at all. It could have just said that it could not find any authoritative source stating clearly that what I was asking about was illegal, nor any stating clearly that it was legal. It said "I don't know" to me earlier yesterday about something else I'd asked (a question about dermatology, not a legal question.)
Regarding the research chemical legality question: Yes, there was a higher quality source I expected it to use. It could have searched laws and cases via google scholar. It did that once for me when I asked it about a situation where someone was being sued by a person they'd been in a fender-bender with 3 years before. (Other party was suddenly claiming they'd had chronic pain since accident.) Even if there are no cases as of now involving people buying and using research chemical GLP-1 agonist peptides, there would surely be some cases involving people using other research chemicals for personal use. What laws were relevant in those cases, and what was the outcome?
Later edit: As a matter of fact, AI itself apologized for its sources, and offered to use the kind of sources I'd expected it to use:
<What happened here is that I pulled in a batch of web results and didn’t adequately filter out low-credibility sources before using them. That’s on me — it’s a failure in my source-selection step, not in the fact-gathering ability itself. I can get you strictly FDA, DOJ, or case-law references without touching anything like Facebook, Reddit, or other unreliable sources.
<If you want, I can redo the legality answer using only primary legal sources and official guidance, with citations only to U.S. Code, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, or FDA enforcement documents — zero third-party fluff. That way you can see exactly what the law says without any filler or questionable sourcing.
So I still do not understand why it used the shit sources it did. GPT itself calls it "a failure of my source-selection step."
Whattup?
I'm guessing ChatGPT inferred that you were the type of person who enjoyed unsourced YouTube videos and weird internet rabbit holes, and so sourced an answer composed of these. Perhaps 80% of the people who make your type of query are also anti-vaxxers or fundamentalist Christians or sovereign citizens etc. and would be perfectly happy with the first answer (or they might have pursued it in a way that would allow ChatGPT to please them by unveiling a conspiracy).
When you specified the sources it should use (relevant legislation, specific state or federal laws) then you got the answer you wanted. It's like all the stories of genies granting wishes - you have to ask for precisely what you want. If it can be misinterpreted, it will be misinterpreted.
What makes you think 80% of the people considering weight loss drug biohacking are anti-vaxxers or fundamentalist Christians?
I don't think this. I do think that people who are willing to buy chemicals and inject themselves might well be free thinking (for want of a better term) in other areas of their lives. ChatGPT took a swing and a miss - quite possibly another person with your exact query would have been happy with that answer.
You think a antivaxxers and fundamentalist Christians are free-thinking?
Reputable and official general-audience-facing sources tend to not talk much about such things besides generally steering readers towards regular above-board sources. This is especially the case when a thing (probably) isn't illegal as such, but is sketchy and disfavored and is adjacent to illegal things. If something is outright illegal, then reputable sources can safely just say "do not do this thing because it's illegal and dangerous". If its legal, normal, and favored, then they can safely say "this is a thing you can reasonably do if appropriate". But for sketchy stuff, they want to avoid sounding like they're endorsing it even a little bit (for both liability and reputation reasons in addition to if they actually think it's a bad idea), but there's a lack of clear-cut negative stuff they can accurately say about it besides gesturing vaguely at how sketchy it is and talking up more legitimate alternatives instead.
Layered atop this, it seems plausible that GPT-5 may have been trained to err on the side of discouraging sketchy things when it doesn't actually "know" the answer, which would lead it to reach down into low-quality sources looking for something that sounds concretely negative on questions that are dodged by high-quality sources.
As for your original question, I strongly suspect the answer is that only scheduled controlled substances are illegal to buy, possess, or use without a prescription. Non-controlled prescription-only medications are illegal to sell or market for non-prescription medical use, but that's on the selling side, not the buying side.
I assume that people are working hard right now on doing the AI-training-data equivalent of search-engine optimization. If I can set things up just right, I can get the AI to answer certain questions in a particular way that profits me.
No idea if this is what's happening there, but it seems inevitable. It's basically a lot of the AI safety work, but turned on its head as a way to make some facts easy to find and others hard to find.
You mean the dinky little spa that was cited, and the Arizona osteopathic board, and the Facebook guy -- they may have SEO'd -- or AIO'd -- their way into being info sources? And what would be the AI equivalent of SEO? How would it be carried out?
Tyler Cowen has talked about "writing for the AIs," which is kind of the same idea in a less malevolent form. I am not sure how you'd do this (I don't really know much about SEO either), though I expect you would come up with prompts that you wanted to shape responses to, back-engineer text that would get associated with those prompts, and then try to make that text widely available in the next batch of training data (by making it easily available on the net).
Political art/satire Youtuber JREG has made two recent videos wading into AI discourse that I found pretty interesting and funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDDWmIWMDg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHFcTxR2KUY&t
How to make recovery between workout sessions and between sets in a session faster?
No miracle fixes unfortunately.
Between sessions - eat plenty of protein/calories in general, sleep enough. Ice baths and cardio in the sore muscles can reduce soreness but that may also reduce stress on the muscle and reduce the adaptation. Also, one of the goals of a good lift should be that you can do it again in a few days. If you can't, you're doing too much in each individual session and compromising your progress over time.
Between sets - staying further from failure on each set can allow you to complete more work faster overall. It can be faster to do five sets where you are staying 3-5 reps from failure than doing two sets to failure. Also sometimes cardio can limit your ability to recover rather than fatigue in the target muscle, so getting a baseline of cardio fitness helps if that's the case. Staying in a moderately higher rep range can help too, the classic 8-12, instead of lower reps with heavier weights, just because the higher weights can cause more overall stress on the body. This helps with between session recovery too.
Creatine, if you’re not on it already. Don’t expect the world but I personally notice the difference after a week or two of consistent use.
> How to make recovery between workout sessions and between sets in a session faster?
Eating and sleeping are your two biggest levers. Past that, you want to try to control stress in your life as much as you can, do deload days and / or weeks in your mesoscycle, and look out for overtraining. If you've got all that optimized, you're down to saunas / hot tubs / massages and fun stuff like that, but those are really in the single percentage points in terms of the lift it drives.
I did a brief review of Renaissance Periodization's book on Recovery here that goes into some more detail on each of those points if you're interested.
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/recovery-after-workouts
Of course, the biggest thing you can do if you're a man is testosterone supplementation, which I've also written about, but depending on your goals and whether you're competing or not, this may not be the right choice for you.
My submitted ACX "not a bok review" post on testosterone:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.c6lh7sev0o6s
I skimmed and saved your post for later when I'm more focused, but what do you think about supplements that reduce stress? Ive noticed that after an intense cardio workout my stress might stay elevated for 1-4 hours, but if I take 200mg ltheanine, I can get it down in under 1 hour. I've had similar results with laying down (wompwomp) or even just laying back on my chair at work.
I think supplements like theanine and ashwaganda and the like are basically in the "single percents" range in terms of impact for the most part, barring some specific deficiency or oddity in your particular metabolic chains + diet.
For instance, I'd rate a nap as being a much higher impact refresher, generally driving a 10-20% reduction in stress / fatigue after an intense workout. A post workout snack + nap is probably one of the biggest "recovery" tools available to anyone.
That said, naps aren't always possible, and there's little harm in experimenting and taking note of whether you think supplements do help or not, ideally with at least the rigor of note taking after each occasion to keep track.
How are you measuring post workout stress?
My only instruments are: gut feeling (how "tight" my body feels), and the stress indicator on my smartwatch (+ heart rate). It's a simple set up and really the main thing I see is that my resting heart rate drops from around 80 (at 15 minutes post workout) to around 60 an hour after taking theanine vs 70-75 if I don't take any.
Not making any points, just sharing some observations because I was wondering if anyone else went down this path.
> How are you measuring post workout stress?
Oh yeah, this isn't very rigorous, it's definitely a composite measure of vibes and mostly unconscious things bundling together muscular tension and overall energy and movement speed and fluidity and heart and respiration and other felt body senses.
From a personal standpoint, I basically think of it as an internal "fatigue meter." And things like measuring your heart rate after supplements is a fine method for acute fatigue, sure, but I think we ultimately only measure real effect sizes over many samples and over longer periods.
Back when I was competing, I would do workouts so hard that I basically had to eat a snack and take a nap afterwards, and would wake up feeling so much better (especially compared to times I couldn't take that nap), that all these estimates of how much a given thing drives lift in terms of recovery is a matter of direct personal observation more than anything. But since that time, it's been reinforced as I've helped coach other people to various fitness and performance goals, and have seen the same with them, and it also aligns with the literature as seen in Renaissance and others.
One of the big points Renaissance makes is that there are different temporal levels of fatigue - of course there's the daily one, and the fatigue and soreness incurred in a given workout, but across larger timescales of weeks and months and yearly quarters, you have an overall systemic fatigue, too (and according to them, you should be running this to maximum over a 3 month mesocycle to be at the efficient frontier of training gains), and recovery is as much a matter of thinking of the daily post-workout level as the weekly and monthly and quarterly levels.
So there's an acute fatigue meter, and a systemic fatigue meter, and we measure them differently (soreness and day-to-day tiredeness for acute, and overall tiredness / overtraining for systemic), but overall sleep and eating are the largest levers for both.
But again, if supplements have a noticeable impact for you at the acute level, sounds great! No reason not to do them.
But back to "how do you measure post workout stress," at the acute day to day level the felt sense bundle, and at the longer level, overall energy and joie de vivre and ultimately, your sets * reps * weight going up at the weekly, monthly, and quarterly level, per the schema of acute and systemic fatigue meters.
On April Fool's day you should post a Closed Thread, where no one is allowed to comment at all.
Former DeSantis staffer Christina Pushaw wants you to know that your kid could wind up graduating with a STEM degree yet be unable to get a job at Chipotle:
"We conservatives were always sympathetic toward coal miners and O&G workers, who lost their jobs due to government policies. We sympathized with military, healthcare workers & first responders who were fired for refusing mRNA mandates."
"So why shouldn’t I be sympathetic to Gen Z kids who took out loans to get a degree in computer science and now can’t even find a job at Chipotle let alone in tech? Their struggles are just as much a result of government policy decisions. We should not be dismissive; we should want to help them. It could be any of our kids in the same situation one day."
https://x.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1954648772815831478
The Online Right is increasingly infected with this kind of "nation of losers" ideology. Some of it comes from losers projecting their loserdom onto the entire American nation. Others, like Pushaw, aren't losers but know their audience wants to hear a bunch of pessimistic victim-mongering about how everyone is unemployed and broke, so they repeat it and wind up believing it. They don't seem to realize that falsely telling people the economy is in the toilet while *their party* has a trifecta may not be the best idea. (Note that I'm saying the "Online Right" here, not everyday normie conservatives, who don't say stuff like that.)
The stuff about someone who got a degree in Computer Science but couldn't get a job at Chipotle appears to come from a recent NYTimes article about a woman couldn't get a coding job but was later able to secure a job in "tech sales" she is soon to start. I presume Pushaw didn't bother to read to the end.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html
Hang on a minute, you were lambasting conservatives for idolising manual labour, now when someone on the right is concerned for the (presumably) more intelligent and more middle-class in their struggles, suddenly this is "nation of losers ideology"?
Before you were arguing that they were too concerned about the low levels in society, now you're arguing that being concerned about the middle class is betraying the booming economy (or something).
Are you ever satisfied with anything anyone does?
How did we get from "some people have problems which we should try to solve" to "nation of losers ideology"?
I mean I lean pretty heavily towards the master morality side of things but even I don't think that being concerned about rising unemployment is beyond the pale.
>some people have problems
The problems are being grossly exaggerated.
I think this is the same girl from the NYT article:
"I'm going to be so honest with you guys, I don't even like coding...I dreaded my coding classes, but I absolutely enjoyed my entrepreneurship curses at Purdue"
https://www.tiktok.com/@khuhlina/video/7524076710782848311
I have trouble taking her, or the article, seriously.
EDIT: Also, the article mentions:
"computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent."
As if to imply that comp sci graduates have it worse than art history/biology majors. But the report they cite gives 17.0% and 16.5% underemployment rates for computer sci and computer eng graduates, compared to 45.6% and 46.9% for biology and art history. Not mentioning the underemployment figures seems intentionally misleading.
Um.... recent computer science grad here, and almost everyone I know is having trouble finding CS work. Have you looked at r/CSCareers recently? Do you deny that there's a problem? Do you think sympathy for us is bad? Would you prefer that Pushaw said "Screw those Zoomer losers, imagine hearing 'learn to code' during your entire childhood and actually thinking that society would reward you for learning to code!"
This isn't ideology, this is reality.
What Logan said.
Some CSCI people have trouble finding tech jobs. Some might even have to find jobs not relevant to their major, which is par for the course for people who major in things like history. Fortunately the unemployment rate is 4% and a CSCI degree probably looks better than a history degree for most of those jobs. Saying "Gen Z kids who took out loans to get a degree in computer science and now can’t even find a job at Chipotle let alone in tech" is an absurd exaggeration.
If there's someone CSCI majors should be angry with it's their colleges, who often skimp on teaching practical programming skills because practical programming is considered low-status.
I think I saw recently that unemployment among recent Comp Sci grads is like 6% - that's high relative to recent history, but not "everyone I know" levels. Maybe the comp sci labor market has gotten more harshly competitive and more marginal graduates are having to accept worse jobs, seek jobs in other fields, or hold out for a longer job search... but all sorts of college graduates in all sorts of fields do those things all the time.
My recent-college-graduate kid and his friends are all underemployed or unemployed, despite having what seemed like saleable degrees from good universities. I think this is not uncommon.
Are these A students? Did they have work before graduating? Are they currently occupied sending work product to open source projects? Also, "good university"? Is this state school, private school, "top tier private school" like CMU?
they all aren't applying to FANG, dude. You don't need all this if you are working for a regional retail chain designing their infrastructure, or state or local government.
My guess is people are forgetting you code for businesses, and they might be declining in numbers or not needing new programmers at all. Trump making a shitshow of things might be kneecapping government hires, and idk if entrepreneurs are creating businesses enough to replace what we are losing through digitalization.
lot of these arguments tend to be captured by only a subset of people, "everyone lives in New York City."
No, of course not. But I'm asking because I've known the C students, and when they say "we're scared to stop working for this guy, because we don't know if we can get a better-equivalent job" that means something different from when the A students say "I can't find jobs."
I would like someone to do a study of child-naming practices stratified by parental income or education level. My hypothesis is that the slightly goofy fad for naming male children for 19th century blue collar occupations (e.g., Mason, Tanner, Hunter, Cooper, Taylor, etc) is a distinctly upper middle class phenomenon. That is, you're unlikely to name your child Mason if you think there's a half-decent chance he might actually grow up to *be* a mason. Only high-investment parents whose kids are destined for a four year college degree or better would consider giving one of them a name that represents a mere skilled trade entered into via apprenticeship. Lower middle class and working class people probably stick to more traditional names. If that's correct, you could consider these UMC parents to be practicing a form of nominative anti-determinism. "He damn well better not grow up to be a friggin' Taylor; that's why we can name him that!"
Two quick follow on jokes to add:
1. It'd be...not funny, really, but kind of ironic if AI just wiped out white collar work so quickly and to such a degree that all the Masons and Taylors really did wind up as Masons and Taylors and so forth. Joke's on you, Mom and Dad.
2. When I have kids, maybe I'll try to buck the trend just a bit and name my kids for modern white collar occupations. Developer, maybe...we could call him "Dev" for short. Programmer ('Gram'). Analyst. Director. Who knows, maybe those will be largely obsolete occupations by then, too, just like Tanner, and the concept will seem quaint and vaguely nostalgic and it'll catch on big.
"naming male children for 19th century blue collar occupations"
I took this fad more for naming children with first names that are surnames, and for girls as well. I imagine, but have no evidence one way or the other, that it was looking for names that are gender-neutral, different to the traditional names (often ones that run in families, maybe you don't want your child to be John Johnson IV) but not the trashy kind of Kayleigh variants on names that read lower class and lower status.
It might also have to do (again, no evidence here) with copying upper-class naming conventions where a lot of 19th century guys got named (or referred to in ordinary use) with surnames instead of conventional names like John or Michael, because their parents had amalgamated two influential families and so you called the baby Madison Parker Finchley-Hawkins because the maternal grandfather or rich uncle moneybags was surnamed Madison.
It's definitely a part of the trend of using surnames, but it seems to me like the most popular ones for boys are the occupation based names. Certain quarters here were seemingly intent on recreating the economy of a 19th century frontier town with baby boy names back in the '90s.
Some -son surnames are also popular in the US as first names.
From the US 2024 list for boys the most popular (what I would subjectively consider) surnames as first names are:
22. Hudson
35. Jackson
42. Mason
45. Carter
48. Grayson
50. Cooper
60. Bennett
64. Nolan
67. Brooks
82. Walker
97. Parker
If you want to unironically do #2 but want to avoid showing up on r/Tragedeigh, you could use Devin and call him Dev.
Baby name nerdery has been a hobby of mine on and off for the past decade-plus, so I can confidently tell you your hypothesis is very, *very* wrong: white urban/UMC parents are way more likely to give their children "trad" names than poor/rural whites. (See https://namerology.com/2019/11/06/the-tradition-shattering-names-of-rural-white-america/) I think this holds across races, but that's just me going off vibes rather than data.
Also worth noting that the five names you mention aren't popular because they're occupations (meaning almost never enters into the equation with baby names), but because they're 1) common surnames now being used as forenames and 2) are trochees ending in N or R. Both of which were huge trends in baby naming for the past... let's say 30 years or so?
I implore you to refrain from naming your child "Analyst" as though your life depends on it. Honestly, "Gaylord" might be a better choice.
Analyst Gaylord...got a nice ring to it.
I think it's because those names are generally non-gendered, not because of the underlying profession. I've known both boys and girls named Mason, Hunter, Taylor. Same with those biome names: River, Forest, Sky, Cloud. Upper middle class phenom because they are the ones who cared about raising less gendered kids.
Taylor Lautner married another Taylor.
Another very plausible-sounding hypothesis... which is also not borne out by the data: https://namerology.com/2020/01/29/the-unisex-name-map-of-america-and-what-it-tells-us/
Like, OK, obviously there are *some* crunchy granola parents in the Bay who name their kids Moss or whatever due to their devotion to gender-free parenting, but they're not a majority. The big movers in baby name androgyny are probably normie black parents, who are both the only demographic left who give their sons names like Ashley and Courtney, and also probably the most into noun-as-baby-name of any group in the US. (I hesitate to present Ye as a median anything, but his kids' names -- North, Saint, Chicago, Psalm -- are honestly pretty tame/trendy, particularly the ones with Christian overtones.)
I meet some people in the classical music scene whose parents gave them music names like "Symphony" and "Viola."
Amanda Lynn, perhaps?
I suspect old-timey-occupations-as-given-names is downstream of the historical practice among Cavaliers (i.e. cultural descendants of colonists from southwestern England who settled in the tidewater regions of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) of using maternal-line surnames as first or middle names in order to emphasize family ties to posh relatives who aren't reflected in your own surname. I think that practice was on its way out by the late colonial era, although it definitely shows up some as late as the 1830s (c.f. Custis Lee, eldest son of Robert E. Lee and Mary Lee (nee Mary Custis)), but having a surname for your first name is still culturally associated with old-money families.
The examples you gave are all fairly common traditional English occupation-based surnames. Not top-tier ones like Smith (by far the most common English surname) or Miller (7th most common surname in the 2010 US Census), but Taylor is the 17th most common surname, Cooper is 70, Hunter is 160, Mason is 166, and Tanner is 709. I wouldn't be surprised if the fad comes from attempts to give children posh-coded names. Scott's barber-pole model of social status signaling suggests that such a signal would be popular among people who are a rank below the status they're trying to signal, but not among people further down than that.
When I lived in South Carolina in the '90s, the custom of giving your eldest daughter the mother's maiden name as a first name was still pretty widespread amongst the old-money types. I knew women with names like Jenkins, Gilliard, etc.. That seemed to be a pretty regional kind of custom, though; I never encountered it outside of the South.
However, there is definitely a tradition of rich people having surnames-for-first-names like Thurston Howell or Chase Wigglesworth III, which is probably what started the whole middle-class surname-as-given-name trend. That, combined with the prevailing wisdom in the '80s and '90s that a woman with a masculine-sounding name would have an advantage when job-hunting as the HR people wouldn't be able to tell if "Taylor" was male or female, led to all those baby girls born in the 2000s being named Madison or Morgan.
However, nowadays having a very female-sounding name is probably an advantage in many industries who are trying to comply with their DEI policies. I imagine this will lead to a resurgence in non-ambiguous names for girls.
One thing that I always found interesting is how unisex names tend to become exclusively girls' names after a while. Lesley, Evelyn and Stacy were originally boys' names, but by the mid-20th century they were firmly established as girls' names. Reilly/Riley is undergoing that shift now; I only knew boys named Riley or Reilly back in the '80s and '90s, but now I know far more girls than boys with that name. But, I wonder if current hiring practices which favor women might change that pattern.
I'm surprised Tanner is so low because (and this is one of my go-to bits of trivia) in 1987, there were three half-hour TV shows on first-run in the US with a main character surnamed Tanner: Alf, Full House, and Beverly Hills Teens. I don't think another, more common surname has achieved the same record.
(I guess maybe the main character of Alf was named Alf, but you know what I mean.)
I went looking for other candidates but so far have come up dry. The closest rival I could find was Crane, but that's cheating because it's the same character who was a main character in two different shows (Cheers and Fraiser) and made a guest appearance in a third. It's also near the bottom of the top thousand surnames, less common than Tanner.
Overall, very common surnames seem to be relatively rare in sitcoms. There are a few: Smith (#1, Fresh Prince), Jones (#5, Sex in the City), Miller (#7, NewsRadio), Taylor (#17, Home Improvement), Green[e] (#41 and #241, Friends), Nelson (#43, I Dream of Jeannie), James (#85, NewsRadio again), Simpson (#158, The Simpsons), etc, but I haven't found a coincidental double of any of these yet, let alone a triple or quadruple.
I wonder if that's the same as advice to fiction writers to try and avoid giving characters names that could be confused with real people? If you have a show where "Joe Miller" is the bad guy, or the butt of the jokes, then a real life Joe Miller could try suing for defamation or that this character is making their life more difficult because people treat him the same way, or that the writer of the episode where Joe Miller was introduced went to the same school as their wife's cousin so *of course* this "Joe Miller" is intended to be them!
I've seen some weird names in older fiction and the only explanation is "I have to call my villain Rustication Y. Feddle because otherwise if I call him Philip Fanshawe I'll be sued by some real Philip Fanshawe who claims their name is sufficiently uncommon it must be them".
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/that-s-not-true-thoughts-novel-or-not-5275422/
"I am talking about cases, somewhat frequently filed, where a real person claims that a novel, television show or other fictional work defamed them. Those are hard cases legally and raise all manner of interesting issues as to what “fact” and “truth” mean in many settings. See, e.g., Robert Richards analyzed them in some detail in When Ripped from the Headlines Means See You in Court: Libel by Fiction and the Tort-Law Twist on a Controversial Defamation Concept at 121 (“’[t]he gradation from fact to fiction in creative works—or more likely, from representational fact to fact-infused fiction—raises difficult issues about the balance between private rights and First Amendment interests.” The difficulty of so-called “libel by fiction” cases struck me recently (though not for the first time, albeit there more as a matter of copyright and publicity rather than defamation) when I read that Nona Gaprindashvili recently settled the earlier lawsuit that she had brought against Netflix over The Queen’s Gambit, a fictional streaming series based on a 1983 eponymous novel set in the 1960s chess world."
Smith is also the family name in American Dad.
I’ll throw in Parker Lewis (from …Can’t Lose) and Chris Peterson (from Get a Life) as common surnames for sitcom characters.
Hanging with Mr. Cooper was on at the same time as Wonder Years (with Winnie Cooper), but I guess she wasn’t the main character…
This all seems logical. So what does that mean I should give as a middle name to little Engineer Tremeshko?
Change it up; the middle name should be an animal with traits you want them to emulate.
So, "Snapturtle".
Skimming the Census surnames list, white collar or aristocratic professions that are established surnames include:
Clark (from "Clerk" or "Cleric")
King
Stewart
Banks
Pope
Duke
Archer
Or you could go back to the source of the tradition and use your wife's maiden name or the maiden name of one of your mothers or grandmothers as your child's middle name.
Knight?
I always assumed that the surname Banks had a geographical origin ("person who lives by the riverbank"), like Fields or Meadow.
I think it did, but I took the liberty of including it because I watched Mary Poppins a bazillion times as a kid.
The latter one won't work for me. Too many weird German and Eastern European names in the mix, like Gensbigler, Hauck, and Gustafson. I'd probably be accused of harboring early 20th century German nationalist sentiments if I gave him a name like that, and both the brown shirt kind and the ostrich feather kind are in disrepute these days, for good reason. Your other suggestions do raise an interesting question however: how did we let Earl become such a low-class name? No other aristocratic title got taken and used as a first name like that, really, nor became so unfashionable in the 20th century.
I dunno, I think "Engineer Gensbigler Tremeshko" has a ring of authority to it that will only benefit little Engie!
> how did we let Earl become such a low-class name? No other aristocratic title got taken and used as a first name like that, really, nor became so unfashionable in the 20th century
I was going to say that the name Earl would be illegal in most English-speaking countries, but apparently that's not true.
Most English speaking countries have laws against first names that are also titles or ranks, so you can't call your kid Admiral or Doctor or Duchess. But apparently an exception is made for a few specific ranks that are already in common use as names, and Earl is one of them.
That's a mystery to me.
I'm also intrigued by the given name Gouverneur, which has shown up a handful of times among moderately prominent figures in American history. First among them are Gouverneur Morris, who had prominent roles in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and Gouverneur Warren, a Union general in the Civil War. Frustratingly, neither of them was ever a state governor.
Maybe it was nominative anti-determinism. Maybe if he'd been a George or James, Morris would have been a shoo-in for governor of New York, but people thought about it for a second and went "wait, Governeur Governor Morris? No thanks. That just sounds stupid. I'd rather throw my vote away on some fringe loyalist candidate."
Are you a native English speaker? I'm surprised to learn that names like Hunter and Taylor derive from those professions. That's so weird. Germans wouldn't name their children Jäger or Schneider.
Yes, but Germany's the place where you have specific lists of "girl names" and approved "boy names." In america we're allowed to be creative. Hence the poor child named Khaleesi (before the parent finished the series, one presumes).
I'm your quintessential American who speaks English with a studied carelessness plus 8 words of French I learned in high school. Right, it's a weird fad some group of American parents began back in the...I want to say late '80's or early '90's. Interesting to hear Skittle say that it's been copied by lower class Brits, though. Who woulda guessed?
I woulda guessed. Copying things from American celebrity culture is a very common low class habit in the UK, and hence actively avoided by higher class people.
The name Dakota (the most American name I can possibly think of) originated in the US in the mid 80s and peaked in popularity in the mid 90s, primarily as a boy's name. It was first spotted in England or Wales in 2004, which was just after Dakota Fanning (born 1994) became somewhat famous. It's still not very popular but it's exclusively been used for girls.
https://www.behindthename.com/name/dakota/top/united-states
https://www.behindthename.com/name/dakota/top/england-wales
I'm a native speaker and I think it has literally never occurred to me that the names OP listed are the names of occupations. _Maybe_ Hunter.
The class connotation must be very geographically-bound. I like the idea that people only pick these names because they won’t be fulfilled, but here in the UK all those names are very lower-class and sound more like the trend of calling boys by surnames than occupations (many surnames are old occupations, which I think is a relatively widespread thing). That trend is, in turn, coded as pretty American. My understanding was that this started as a (n American) thing of honouring/preserving surnames from the maternal line, but that might be a just-so story.
None of the Taylors and Masons I have taught have parents who went to university. Along with the Tylers, they are over-represented in the children who need help regulating their emotions and reactions.
Yeah, there's an interesting pipeline by which trends flow from higher-class Americans to lower-class Brits, bypassing higher-class Brits.
In summary: middle class Americans try to emulate what higher-class Americans do, and low-class Brits try to emulate what they've seen on TV.
I would argue that the "profession as first name" trend is just a subclass of the recent American trend of "last name as first name". It's not limited to profession-based surnames, there's been an explosion in other surname first names like Jackson, Madison, Kennedy and so forth.
And I agree with the other poster who suggested it emerged from an upper-class (or what passes for upper class in the US) tradition of preserving the mother's maiden name when the mother's maiden name was prominent (e.g. Rooney Mara) and eventually filtered down by imitation.
I like it!
Scott has a paywalled article somewhere, which I can only evaluate from Ruxandra's reply: a worry that edgy centrists like him might have created the far-right by, say, platforming Yarvin. I can say for sure it is not the case: the Yarvin "cult" was created by Nick Land.
Land is very good at writing in a "cool" way, where "cool" means something like "poetic". Even better than Scott. For example there is this boring truth that if you ignore reality, you will have problems. Now Land called this "fanged noumena". His blog was called "Xenosystems", subtitle "Outsideness". You know what I mean? He is the textbook Continental-Philosopher-As-Entertainer like Derrida and Zizek and maybe Judith Butler, and his rightwinginess makes it even more interesting because even more contrarian. This is a very unusual kind of rightwinginess, one of the recurring themes is that capitalism was always AI, and the purpose of capitalism is to indeed push Darwinian evolution to creating something that will make humans obsolete. Most conservatives are basically hobbits. Land is not a conservative. He wants SkyNet to kill hobbits. He calls that evolution.
Anyhow Land is simply one of the best candidates for creating an online movement, not because he is right but because the inherent "coolness", if you want to be Cool Contrarian Kid, being a Land fanboi is one of the best routes. Or was in 2013.
That's not exactly how I would characterize Scott's article (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords). My gloss of it (which I'll warn you reflects my own political biases) is that it has nothing to do with "platforming" controversies (i.e., questions of whether merely acknowledging something's existence can constitute support for it). The error* was not in merely acknowledging or engaging critically with people like Yarvin or Land (who've always been highly marginal), but in actively supporting those elements of society that were trying to tear down the elite progressive consensus. In this telling, the error was well-intentioned; Scott and others like him had noticed and were distressed by an increasing prevalence of illiberal elements in said consensus, and thought it would be good for liberalism to ally with the most direct and vocal opponents of those illiberal elements, in the hopes that this would shift the balance of power back towards a more liberal status quo. But it turned out that those opponents never cared about liberalism at all, and as soon as they seized power (with the help of people like Scott), they turned around and created a status quo that was no more liberal than under the elite progressive consensus, and also lacked the elite progressive consensus's other virtues like competence and cosmopolitanism. It would have been better to maintain an internal-reformist stance towards the elite progressive consensus, rather than ally with its external enemies.
(Switching to psychologizing a little, my feeling is that Scott and others like him did this because being an internal reformist puts you in a worse negotiating position than allying with a credible external threat, and Scott's and others' bad experiences with the illiberal elements in the elite progressive consensus left them angry and scared about the idea of not being in a strong enough to combat those elements—which made it hard for them to think clearly about the question of which side, all things considered, was better-aligned with their values. Like, our brains run on a game-theory logic according to which you sometimes want to threaten to crash into the other person's car, because if they think you're too smart and rational to do that then they'll never swerve. Part of why I believe this is because Scott has demonstrated that he's capable of taking woke critiques of society seriously, on their own terms, and seriously considering whether they might be correct, when he wants to. But I don't claim to personally be a model of emotionless equanimity about this either; it's just that my hangups point in a different direction that doesn't cause me to take this particular course.)
(Also, for the record, Scott's politics are still closer to my own than almost any other internet writer I'm aware of.)
* The article is written as a dialogue between a character who thinks it was an error and one who thinks it wasn't, suggesting that Scott's of two minds on this question. Ruxandra Teslo thinks it wasn't; I think it was.
I think it might still turn out good for centrism (or older-style liberalism) in the long run. We see a growing centrist movement (Hanania etc.) partially because they are fed up with both extremes, even with the whole culture-war thing, they are fed up with the whole hate-your-neighbor mentality, but partially because of timing. Briefly, MAGA is waging war on woke, but woke is almost a thing of the past now. It has been unwinding for years. And getting aggressive about something that is not a real thing, not a real threat to anyone, is very poor optics. Basically “shadow boxing”. They will suffer a gigantic electoral defeat.
But the third part is perhaps the most important, but it is hard to put into words.
Consider for example freedom of speech, it is not a progressive thing or a conservative thing. People who are in power are always tempted to limit it, people not in power are always afraid of that. Indeed this is the best way to find out who is in power: find the free-speech absolutist, you found the underdog. Find people who treat it as a sort of a technicality, you found who is in power.
So the illiberal elements in the elite progressive consensus were simply temptations of too much power. This means when having less power, these will disappear.
In my view, no single pundit can create a political movement. Movements emerge from the underlying social dynamics: enough people believe a particular thing that they coalesce into a coherent entity. An individual writer might be a catalyst for that happening, but the real enabling factor is the underlying social reality. If they hadn't catalyzed it then someone else would have.
I really enjoyed reading land and yarvain back in the aughts. what are some cool contrarian hipster intellectuals in 2025?
Concerns about "platforming" someone that are about anything other than the quality and accuracy of their writing/ideas seem like something appropriate for a grade school librarian, but not for someone writing about ideas and such for adults.
Oh, *that*'s what a "fanged noumena" is... Thanks, I guess.
> say, platforming Yarvin. I can say for sure it is not the case: the Yarvin "cult" was created by Nick Land.
Scott platformed Nick Land :P
https://web.archive.org/web/20141229013244/https://slatestarcodex.com/
Xenosystems was in the blog roll of slatestarcodex back in 2014
Not to argue against anything you said, just thought it was funny to point out
So Scott is far-right for having presented a Land acknowledgement?
This is one of the few times I miss having a like button
Hypothetical scenario. I’m born with a 100% perfectly identical twin, and my only goal is to maximize wealth. I argue the best approach is to pretend to be one person, that to the external world has unlimited energy and the ability to be everywhere at once. The root of this thesis is that society pays a huge premium to people that appear to be hyper-competent. For example situational awareness becomes a $1B hedge-fund. I pose that two people acting as one have a higher shot, possibly 10x to 100x the chances of becoming notable enough to command such a premium. A basic example of a mechanism would be simply to explore more domains in which one might be able to become exceptional.
Even if you and your twin combined can earn over twice the salary (questionable), you might have difficulty acquiring two wives for one person, or two of any other things you don't want to share with your twin.
"That guy works sixteen hours a day, but half the time he doesn't remember what I told him. Fire him."
There are definitely good opportunities in the field of magic, though.
How are they going to appear hypercompetent when they only ever remember half the things they're told?
I imagine one can develop a solid system. There'd be missing nuances which would cause social awkwardness, but tracking key information should be possible.
There's no way that whatever marginal edge you got wouldn't be heavily outweighed by the overhead of deception. The second you became important enough to notice someone would figure out that you've been lying. Better to just do the Prestige thing and become a magician.
How much can the twins trust each other? It would be quite bad if one day they broke up and had to take two separate legal identities. They could split the money, but they would only have one university diploma (and if they kept arguing too much, the university might even revoke it for suspected cheating). Possible other problems depend on what they did, such as copyrights, company ownership, etc. If they become widely known as cheaters, they might even have a problem to get a job.
On the other hand, if you have two people who can absolutely trust each other... I would say, there is a big premium for *trust*; they don't even have to be twins.
For example, before I had kids, I was making 2x or 3x more money than I needed to live. But my daily job left me so exhausted that I didn't have energy to try a side job. Two people who perfectly trust each other could use such situation -- one of them would pay the bills for both, the other would try projects that have a potential to make lost of money in future, but can also fail completely. With the agreement that whatever happens, the money made by both of them is always split to halves.
On a second thought, did I just describe marriage of two highly productive people?
Definitely into “I want a wife” territory.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/i-want-a-wife-by-judy-brady-syfers-new-york-mag-1971.html
Hah, a nice article, but...
> I want a wife who will work and send me to school.
Is there a culture where wives are actually famous for doing this? Or did the author just list "nice-to-have things" without paying attention to whether it actually makes sense?
Yes. For a chunk of the 20th century, it was relatively common in America.
https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2023/03/20/1950s-many-wives-financed-their-husbands-through-college-1
https://magazine.wsu.edu/2020/10/31/we-put-them-through/
https://recollections.wheaton.edu/2017/05/putting-the-husbands-through/
Also, without citing it as I can’t remember off the top of my head, stories of a husband and wife making a deal to put each other through college, the husband going first, and then the husband leaving the wife before her turn (or it just ‘never making sense’ for her to go) have shown up a few times in my reading about various famous-ish academic couples.
Ah, makes sense if the article was written in 1971 and only republished in 2017.
Well, at least one feminist complaint fixed, I guess.
The deeper complaint would be that it is, indeed, really nice to have a support-human in this way, and a lot of our society and career expectations are structured for people who have a wife like this. That it isn’t possible to ‘have it all’ in terms of the high flying career, or devoting yourself to studies and research, while also having a family and a social life if there isn’t someone else taking care of all the boring life management bits for you and coordinating things.
The rich cope by hiring people to fulfill many of these roles. Possibly futurists will suggest AI companions can fulfill this role. I don’t know that AI companions will make you money.
Some varieties of Judaism, maybe?
And what would happen if one or both of the twins got married?
If this happened in a story where probabilities don't matter, they would find and marry similar twins and become even more successful.
If that is not an option, either they would have to trust their spouses to keep the secret, or only one of them could marry.
Or maybe... rot13 for spoilers: uggcf://jjj.vzqo.pbz/gvgyr/gg0482571/
I've also heard the opposite, that forms underpay for top-level talent so you're better off financially working two jobs poorly than one job well (if you can get away with it).
With twins, AI, and some hybrid office/remote jobs, could you manage to have the two of you hold down like 4-5 jobs at the same time, swapping in/out or calling in sick as needed to keep up the charade? There are five virtual employees, but only two real ones.
I can see how this would be true up to a point. Highly paid mid level software jobs work. Maybe you can do 2-3 jobs and come up to a director comp at big tech, for a moment at least. Chances of being weeded out are higher. But if you break VP or super scientist, it’s hard to catch up.
https://gwern.net/question
"The most amusing explanation, of course, would be 'most successful people are in fact secretly identical twins'"
Exciting to have independently made a similar observation to Gwern
Are you sure you're not Gwern's twin?
At the very least you could create a perfect magic act that drives Hugh Jackman insane.
At the risk of getting too close to culture-war topics:
Discussions around gerrymandering have gotten popular again recently for reasons which will remain unmentioned.
Proportional, multi-member districts have been proposed as one possible solution.
I fully acknowledge the benefits of this solution. However, no one ever seems to grapple with the (in my opinion very large) downside that you are not, under this system, voting for an actual specific person. It also codifies the concept of political parties (if not specific parties), in a way that I don't really like.
However, I realized that both of my objections are sort of "vibe" based. I _feel_ like not voting for specific people, and codifying the concept of parties are bad and I don't like them, but I can't articulate actual reasons why these things are bad.
So can anyone help me steelman these objections? And such a steel-manning doesn't necessarily require that these objections will be _so_ strong that they outweigh the pros. I'm more than willing to accept that, even with these objections, these multi-representative proportional districts might be better. But I'd just like to make sure I've considered the objections as thoroughly as possible before deciding for myself.
There's two other big concerns with party list proportional.
The first is lack of geographical representation. If you don't have explicit seats for rural areas or other areas far away from the big important cities, then the politicians wind up almost always coming from the big important cities, and the issues in rural areas get neglected. Maybe if you're from a big important city like me you'll say "good" but ultimately I don't think it's good for the country as a whole if everyone forgets the rural areas exist (until they wake up one day and figure out nobody is growing food any more).
The second is the sort of parliament you typically wind up with. People complain about two-party systems but at least when a single party is in control you get coherent decisions being made with someone to blame when things go wrong.
In proportional representation, nobody will ever get a majority, so you typically wind up with a parliament composed of (say) 40% centre-left, 40% centre-right, 10% far left and 10% far right politicians. Now there's two ways to form government: either a mainstream party aligns with the extremists and needs to buy them off with occasional extremist policies, or the two centrist parties form a unity government which turns into an unstoppable centrist alliance that reliably represents the shared interests of the political class against everyone else.
Perhaps you could have your cake and eat it too. Consider the following scheme:
Multi-Member district A gets n total candidates. Each party competing in the district puts up a slate of n candidates (chosen by whatever internal process they like). Each voter going to the polls may vote for any one candidate they like. Seats are awarded to parties proportional to the sum of all their candidates votes. Within a party, the candidate with the most votes is awarded the first seat won for the party, and then the second most and so on. So if collectively all the candidates on the Green Party slate get 41% of the vote and all the candidates on the Libertarian slate get 53% of the vote[1] in a district with 10 candidates, they will likely get 4 and 5 seats respectively. This way, parties are still incentivized to put up popular and inspiring candidates, and candidates are still incentivized to put themselves out there. But gerrymandering is still suppressed.
Biggest downside I see is that within a party, there might often be a single candidate who draws the vast majority of the votes, leaving the rest of the seats that party wins allocated by the happenstance of small group of voters turned up for which runner-up.
[1] This is in some impossible, magical future where the U.S. has actually managed to reform its electoral system, so of course D and R will no longer be the top dogs.
This is called the "open list" proportional method. For example, the Finnish parliamentary election uses the system you described but with d'Hondt method to allocate seats proportionally.
One quantifiable issue that remains is that size of electorate within district affects how many seats there are to allocate. If constituency is drawn to small districts, large parties are favored; if whole state is one large district, smaller parties are favored. If districts in the country are of different size, some may consider the geographical variation a bias. (Added emphasis: this is function of available seats in district, it persists if seat / electorate ratio is same.)
One popular but less quantifiable complaint is that the parties are incentivized to enroll famous athletes and other popular celebrities. The celebrity gather major amount of votes and less-known professional party insiders coast on their tales; after elected, celebrities vote in parliament according to the party line which is determined by party insiders.
I think the argument in favor of things like PR is not so much that it's good for legislators' identities to be irrelevant and for parties to be the unit of political representation, as that this is already the case whether you like it or not, so unless you have a plan to fix *that* problem, you might as well go with the voting system that causes the fewest *other* problems.
The fundamental problem is many Democrats like to live in locations where they are 80 or 90 percent of the population. The rest spread evenly over the other locations, so they are a minority there.
That is, Democrats pack and crack themselves.
Shouldn't this be a point in favor of proportional representation?
Facts are not inherent in favor of any form of representation. You have to use them in an argument.
Are there any stats showing that Democrats live in predominantly Democrat areas any more strongly than Republicans live in predominantly Republican areas? I'm not saying it's not true, I'm just saying it'd be interesting to see some numbers.
I'm unclear on how multi-member districts are supposed to solve the problem of gerrymandering anyway.
Gerrymandering only matters because each district is winner-take-all. If the legislature were proportionally represented (either through actual proportional representation, or through multimember districts), then there would be no reason/incentive to gerrymander. Or if there was a remaining reason, it would be down to second or third order effects, as opposed to literally giving one party more representatives.
You can still surely gerrymander your districts so that "these five will reliably produce three Democrats and one Republican, and then we sweep all the Republican voters into this one 100%-Republican district" or whatever.
The idea would be to have a small number of districts, which makes gerrymandering harder. Most states would only need one, which makes it impossible.
I recall that districting "fairly" is a kind of unsolvable problem, in the sense that it's hard to nail down what you should even be trying to accomplish, or maybe even that there's one of those actual rigorous polisci-math theorems that it's impossible. Can't be bothered to look up which, because:
Circle of control/circle of concern is such incredibly important life advice. If there aren't multiple important figures in your state's R or D party that know your name, this stuff isn't worth thinking about, because you won't have any impact on it. If it's pure intellectual curiosity for the interesting game dynamics, that's fine, but if you actually care about the outcome, it's probably not the best use of your time and energy.
Not directed at you in particular, and not even saying it should never be discussed at all, just the volume of discussion this very rapidly generated struck me as more than is healthy for such a niche and exclusive thing.
In the series of wildly improbable proposals:
Why not let the each sub-district size units vote which district they want to be of part of?
In every election, let each voter cast a ballot vote for their "favorite neighboring neighborhood". After elections, join them to districts for the next elections, iteratively:
1. Select smallest available unit and find its neighbor with highest mutual approval.
2. If their total population is below the constituents per seat quota, merge them.
3. Iterate until all districts are up to quota or no merges are possible. Any remaining unmergeable units are clearly too acrimonious, so they must split and merged to neighboring districts until the district quota is met.
Jordan Ellenberg and his students had a nice method: given a particular map, you can sample from "nearby" maps in the space of possible maps, and if the proposed map, with the most recent election results superimposed on it, yields an outlier number of seats for one party compared to the results obtained from the other nearby maps, then it's gerrymandered.
The nice thing about this is that it's pretty agnostic about what "fair" should mean: it doesn't assume "proportional" as a baseline, it just says, "does it look like you had to do some work to get a result this good for you *even assuming you wanted a map with roughly this shape*".
I believe their definition even made it before the Supreme Court, but nothing came of it
> I recall that districting "fairly" is a kind of unsolvable problem, in the sense that it's hard to nail down what you should even be trying to accomplish, or maybe even that there's one of those actual rigorous polisci-math theorems that it's impossible
There's no unique best way to divide up a particular population distribution into equal-population chunks. There's any number of equally reasonable ways to do it.
That's not a big problem; in fact it just means there's so many reasonable ways to do it that you can probably solve most gerrymandering problems by imposing a couple of constraints, like:
1. Every shape needs to be squareish -- you can't have more than a certain aspect ratio.
2. Every shape needs to be convex -- you can't have any concave bits beyond some certain limit.
When people complain about gerrymandering they're inevitably looking at stupidly shaped districts which are either unreasonably thin or unreasonably concave, like this:
https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/10/gerrymandering-illinois-texas-politics/
so if you outlaw those then the problem is largely solved.
On your second point of why everyone cares: I think it's hard to imagine a better subject for nerd-sniping this particular subject than "politicians are being unreasonable" combined with "you could solve this algorithmically".
I tend toward incrementalism, and would start with your second point; convexity would alleviate the vast majority of the worst examples of gerrymandering, which I suspect would suffice to make universalizing the Maine-Nebraska system for Electoral Votes (a hobbyhorse of mine) palatable.
There are two different broad classes of concerns about gerrymandering. One is the thing you're describing, wherein a lot of district shapes are stupid-looking in a way that creates suspicion that they're being manipulated to maximize partisan advantage (which is sometimes true, but sometimes it's for other reasons of varying degrees of sympatheticness).
The other is a lack of partisan proportionality; see, e.g., https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/2024_U.S._House_elections_in_Wisconsin.svg from 2024. This is far from the most absurd-looking map in the U.S., it's not perfectly compact but it's relatively compact as these things go, but all those light-red districts mean that Republicans won 75% of the seats even though they only got 51% of the vote.
These considerations sometimes trade off against one another; e.g., in my home state of Massachusetts, I'm genuinely not sure how you would draw reasonable-looking districts that would have given Republicans a third of the seats in the typical election over the past decade (the most recent one was a blue outlier). Proportional representation eliminates this tradeoff.
Party-list proportional is not the only option. There are voting systems where you are still voting for individuals that yield roughly proportional results in a multi-member district.
Single Transferrable Vote is a generalization of Instant Runoff to multi-member districts, where in addition to eliminated candidates at the bottom of the list having their votes distributed to their supporters' second-choice candidates, candidates at the top of the list also have their "surplus" support redistributed to second-choice candidates. I think STV is used in legislative elections in Australia and Ireland.
Limited Voting (which could use a rebranding, because it sounds like restricted franchise) is a variant of the multi-member plurality voting system used in many US local elections. In plain multi-member plurality, you vote for (say) your three favorite candidates for school board and the top three vote-getters are elected to office. In Limited Voting, you vote for fewer candidates than there are slots to be filled by the election, e.g. 2 votes for 3 slots or 3 votes for 4 or 5. This means that even with perfect coordination, the majority party needs a substantial supermajority of the vote in order to win all of the seats.
There's also a variant of Borda Count (rank your top N candidates, which is counted as N votes for your first choice, N-1 for your second choice, and so on) which is supposed to give roughly proportional results in a multi-member district. I'm not familiar with the technical details of this one.
Esoteric voting schemes I want to say, have greater appeal to the left, just based upon a greater interest in the nuts and bolts of politics versus everyday life.
I didn’t carefully try to understand the proposals in your comment, but I trust that you and other commenters understand it all very well.
However, I wonder how many of you have actually worked at a polling site? I did it regularly for five years.
There were obviously plenty of instances of people coming to vote, who would have dismayed ACX readers on grounds of incapacity. Or maybe not, I shouldn’t presume.
However, one thing was a constant. If it was a primary - in Texas, there are party primaries, but you can choose whichever one to vote in - many, many people would look at the screen and turn to us, often with little English, and say: “Democrat?”
(“I want to vote for the Democrat.”)
The information that “they are all Democrats, you are to choose among them for candidates for the general election later on” - did not generally clear things up, or help them with their task.
Voting for party only will definitely work for most people especially as time goes on - but any other scheme will only baffle people.
In other words: some of this stuff flies in the face of “spend a lot of public money to make voting almost unimaginably easy” in order to achieve political success.
They almost managed to get STV passed in British Columbia (Canada's westernmost province), and I'm mostly a fan.
Getting these passed is really hard because of basic incentives. Generally, a party wins an election promising to introduce voting reform of some sort. Of course, once they're in power, they change their minds about this (if they were ever serious), and so they hold a referendum, don't bother campaigning for it (or actually campaign against it), and make sure they keep the status quo. One problem is, it empowers third parties thereby disempowering either main party, so even the calculus of "what about when we're voted out of office?" doesn't favour them supporting the change.
In an Irish general election, I'm presented with a long list of candidates listed alphabetically by surname. Their party affiliation is also listed, though they might also be independent. I rank as many by order of preference as I feel suitable to be elected, and when the votes are tallied 5 politicians are elected to represent the constituency. The type of PR in which one votes for parties is relatively unusual, and seems to exist mostly in South Africa and Israel.
Your mind seems made up that PR is bad - why not at least explore the systems of some functioning democracies first?
Almost every European country has party-list PR, and I believe that for most of them it's closed-list (definitely worse than open list), including the most populous one (Germany).
Combined with ranked choice voting, a multi-member district will still allow one to vote for a specific candidate. Just rank them #1, which is what we do anyway when there are only 2 candidates. But it would be much harder to vote *against* a candidate, so we'd lose that rich American tradition of negative campaigning.
You're generally not voting for a person right now. You're voting for a blackmailed entity, whose true motivations are "murder" or "sex with small children" or more distasteful things. And keeping those addictions flowing is all they really care about.
I'm not sure proportional, multi-member districts actually help with this, mind. If anything, it seems to unfairly disadvantage the members who can keep it "under their hat" by tying them to "the guy who sends dick pics to minors." (Weiner)
Are you alright man? You've been posting weird, edgy, unsourced takes for 6 hours now.
Corporations are big entities. Government has the means to end them. It should come as no surprise that they'd be willing/able to corral this means of extermination.
Other countries, that depend on America, have even more reason to want to control our elected officials.
I mean, sure, I could explain who I'm talking about...
I think there are clear benefits to having one person directly responsible and answerable to voters in a given district. I’ve heard a lot of stories of representatives and their staffers being able to help out constituents in various ways (dealing with government red tape and that sort of thing). If those reps are really just party functionaries, they don’t have much incentive to care about individual voters—they just want to please the party bosses. (I believe there are some proportional list systems where the party’s ranking of its candidates is what mostly matters, and the individual popularity of a candidate isn’t that important.)
Now, I realize in practice that the benefits of single-member districts don’t do anything to prevent gerrymandering, and the system would work much better without gerrymandering. We’d have a much better Congress if a larger number of reps had to compete in elections where they might actually lose.
As for political parties, they’re always going to exist in some guise, and I think attempts to legislate against them in the American political climate bother me on first amendment grounds. Compared to other systems, American political parties are quite weak. There’s nothing stopping third parties or party-switching, and while incumbents may be threatened by primary challengers, they can’t just be instantly kicked out of a party for disobeying the whip as in the UK.
I think the best objection to any sort of proportional representation on the grounds that it makes parties too strong is to point out that the current American system, while it does have political parties, ultimately requires voter approval of every single candidate in the house (I guess you could have a nominated Senator fill out a two-year span to the next election). A political party can’t just put someone high up enough on the list that he or she gets in.
In any case, I think the best objection to proportional representation or any other multi-party system in their tendency toward multiple elections in quick succession. A coalition could collapse at any time, and in some countries it’s almost impossible for any one party to win an actual majority. I think that’s worse than the British system. Sure, Labour won a huge majority of seats even though they were nowhere near 50%, but at least they have to own up to the results of their five years of governance. I’d much rather that then a German system where SPD or CDU trade off being senior partners in a grand coalition and pretending that the huge number of AfD voters don’t even exist.
Ireland has proportional representation, and elects 3-5 members per district. Our political system is notorious for 'parish pump politics' where residents of the constituency have their local politician intervene with the central government on their behalf (everything from writing letters to the public health service to speed up a hip replacement, to writing to the local council about cleaning up a local park). The system works surprisingly well, because everyone follows more or less the same rulebook, and the ratio of elected representatives to population is just about high enough to keep the problems in check.
I know that some countries operate a list system - but in most countries with PR, in at least one of the houses is filled with directly elected politicians. From looking online, it seems the largest counterexamples are Israel and South Africa; hardly models of democracy.
> However, no one ever seems to grapple with the (in my opinion very large) downside that you are not, under this system, voting for an actual specific person. It also codifies the concept of political parties (if not specific parties), in a way that I don't really like.
I’m confused, because my understanding was that under the American presidential system, you really are voting for a political party in a way that doesn’t exist in (for example) the UK system. Or is this discussing things like the Senate, rather than the Presidency?
This is about State congressional reps and federal house of representatives members.
But even for the president: while it's true that many people make their decision based on party affiliation, the fact of the matter is that you are voting for a _person_ and not a party. That person could renounce their party affiliation the day after the election (or the day before), and they would remain the president, and the party would have no redress.
> This is about State congressional reps and federal house of representatives members.
Thanks: that makes it make more sense to me.
I’d say for your presidential election, given that the entire role of the person you elect is for them to vote for the ticket they ran on and then do nothing else, and the point of that vote in turn is to return a single person (and vice person) to a single role, it seems like an ideal candidate for something based on just voting for that ticket without the intermediary. If you don’t want centralised party power there, then I think you probably don’t really want the American system of presidency. (That’s not a problem: I wouldn’t want that system. It just seems like the bigger conversation at that point)
This is pretty different to voting for someone to form a government, where they will continue to make decisions and carry out actions: in those cases it matters that people can choose or veto particular people and hold those individuals to account. For State congressional reps and federal house of representatives members, my understanding of your system is that individual competency does matter and people can meaningfully make different choices in office, and so the electorate should be choosing individuals and holding them to account. Here I would affirm the view that increased party power would centralise power into a smaller group in charge of the party, and also reduce incentives and mechanisms for choosing competent individuals.
There are often proposed solutions to that, like voting for a party in addition to rank-order voting for the candidates in the party. Then, if the party gets e.g. 2 seats, the top 2 candidates get chosen.
I think independents are usually allowed in these formulations as well - if an independent gets enough votes for 1 seat, they get it, and the other seats are divvied up proportionately with the remainder of the votes. The independent just competes on the party line rather than the candidate line.
To undercut my points, I’m also of the opinion that the masses by and large should be allowed to vote for principles rather than people. I don’t really have a problem with this form of disenfranchisement.
I'd say it's the same reasons usually stated for democracy over dictatorship: it is (in principle) easier to change the current system if you're voting for individuals since the barrier to entry is lower to simply run on your platform of change instead of having to form/join a party.
There were videos of Scott reading the final chapter and the Epilogue of UNSONG, linked from https://unsongbook.com/epilogue/. Both seem gone. Is it intentional and if not, are there copies that can be re-uploaded?
Archived copy: https://jakel.rocks/public/Unsong%20Final%20Chapter%20Reading-FaifojyS_CQ.webm
Courtesy of u/AnnualAward5 on reddit, who provided this link when I asked the same question a while back.
In his latest Substack post, Sasha Gusev digs into liability and hazard models of risk and how the claims made about embryo selection give us a distorted view of their utility. He also addresses the claims made by Scott.
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about
I get a vague whiff of "cope" from that post -- yes, we dichotomize continuous things in medicine sometimes and that is not always ideal, but I have a hunch that Sasha will be just as unhappy when a genetics company uses Cox models and estimates hazard ratios based on genetics and screens embryos that way (which is not going to be very hard). It's perhaps notable what is NOT in the post: an actual data-driven refutation of any of Herasight's claims.
OTOH, it may be stereotyping on my part, but Rationalists (of the Yudkowskian variety, not the Classical variety) seem to be suckers for gee-whiz ideas.
As for Herasight, Gusev had this to say about them on X...
> What about Herasight itself? They claim to "prioritize research over marketing" and their white-paper does include much more rigorous validation than the competitors (a low bar), including quantifying and reporting within-family and cross-population accuracy.
> There are still murky details. How to address the substantial differences in prediction calibration and uncertainty across different environmental contexts (see: Hou et al. 2024 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38886587/), many of which are unknown for an embryo by definition?
> How do they handle genetic correlations and pleiotropy across traits, where selecting on something like IQ can also lead to substantial relative risk increases for a genetically correlated condition like Autism? And what about conditions we haven't measured?
> But beyond the technical details, what stuck out for me was that Herasight immediately broke their promise to put "research over marketing" by releasing and advertising IQ prediction while including zero methods/performance details in their white-paper.
https://x.com/SashaGusevPosts/status/1951085088290029845
>Rationalists (of the Yudkowskian variety, not the Classical variety) seem to be suckers for gee-whiz ideas
100% agree on that one, I would strengthen it to "gee-whiz ideas made via armchair reasoning, without extant empirical support"
Herasight is a little different in that their work *does* have empirical support, and the quibbling is mostly about "murky details" regarding the exact experimental/algorithmic details. Is it possible that Gusev is right, and Herasight is just slick marketing on top of shoddy statistics? Sure. But given Alex Young's involvement and given the downsides for Herasight being wrong here (bankruptcy + fraud charges), my priors lean (modestly!) towards Gusev grasping a little too much for any possible flaw to avoid having to admit that super babies really could work. If Gusev is wrong, the consequences are...well, not that much actually. Plenty of papers to be written about "yes SuperBabyCo is pumping out 160 IQ geniuses but do we *really* know they aren't going to develop early-onset dementia, and how valuable is IQ really?".
Maybe Gary Marcus is a good analogy: despite astounding advances in AI in the last 3 years, his position fundamentally hasn't changed, which makes me less inclined to believe him. Whereas people who have updated on new evidence, but still have legit AI criticisms (e.g. François Chollet -- maybe the Alex Young analogy here?), I am more inclined to believe.
Is this argument valid?
If not: Could you help me sharpening it?
"If
(a) Animal suffering* is bad.
and
(b) It is easily possible to live prosperously without any animal products.
are valid, the conclusion should therefore be:
(c) You probably should live without the usage of any animal products.
*For any nitpickers: as a hot fix, you could substitute "suffering" with "abuse", if you have particular problems with the concept."
In addition to the other arguments, it may be theoretically possible to eat a healthy vegan diet, but in practice it's much harder to make it taste good so compliance will be lower and mortality and health problems will go up. Theoretically I can have a nutritious vegan soup with enough protein. In practice it will taste quite bad unless I have someone more skilled make it.
"Animal products" is overbroad here. Gathering wool involves giving a sheep a haircut, which is no more animal suffering than giving a dog a bath. No need to give up wool.
But the main problem is the "If" at the beginning is skipping the entire question. IS animal suffering bad? I kill fruit flies flitting by my eyes and feel joy at their destruction. IS it easy to live without animal products? Oil is an animal product (that's why they're "fossil fuels"), and powers ridiculous amounts of the world.
I think (a) needs to be strengthened to something like "The life a cow has in the milk industry is worse than no life." for it to resemble a valid and relevant argument, since realistically those are the options between which we are choosing.
Mhm, do you mean the already existing cows or the once that would not be born?
I would be ready to amend in the former case (but realistically every systemic change will be so slow that there will be no mass slaughter (- more than what happens right now, anyhow..) of cows because of this.), but I would be critical in the latter one.
I agree that the transition should be slow enough that we can just consider the equilibrium, so I'm referring to the future animals that will not get to live if demand for the products of their existence drops.
I mean, for a local beef cow, it's got a pretty good life. It has "one bad day" (this is particularly so if grassfed).
It's not like cows don't like being milked, either. If most of the time they get to be out and about in fields the way animals should, you've got a decent life for them. (Not like "bred for eggs" chickens, who get osteoporisis. Strongly advise heritage breeds only, for eggs).
Are you a consequentialist?
I would probably say that killing is bad on a normative axis in addition to the consequentialist perspective.
I'm going to go right out and say it: animals die. It is one thing to kill lambs and calves, who never have a chance to grow up, be an adult, etc. It's another to take a pretty "old" animal and kill it for sustenance.
Please bear in mind that most feral cats only live 2 years or so. Given that (and that's for a predator), are we really so evil for killing an 18 month cow?
Yeah, but when it's just not necessary anymore for sustenance it gets a lot more "evil" fast. (I don't like the framing as "evil", more like we as humanity could participate in the ideal of the Good™ in these issues a lot better.) Also your argument seems to prove too much?
With the same structure you could also say: Humans die, therefore etc.
Do you not consider our parasites to be animals?
Yes, but I would probably argue that this is a case of warranted self defense?
Dunno. I mean, you're above arguing that killing is "bad on the face." If so, how much harm are you willing to sustain in order to maintain "your friendly neighborhood parasite"? Please bear in mind that pretty much all parasites affect your thought patterns, so...
Could you restate your thesis?
My gut answer for parasites would be something like circles of concern (I don't know what it's called like in English), but I believe you are trying to make another point, that I don't really get?
From "circles of concern" an animal that lives inside you is perhaps more relevant to you than a cow that lives in Brazil, is it not?
I'm not sure I have a thesis. I have some rather inchoate ideas that I'm working on solidifying.
"From "circles of concern" an animal that lives inside you is perhaps more relevant to you than a cow that lives in Brazil, is it not?"
Yes, but in a way that's harmful to you, and your well-being is even more of an concern to you (as long as you don't inflict an inappropriate amount of harm for it, e.g. I like to sacrifice babies because it makes me feel better..) Therefore the "self defense" comment above :). The cow in Brazil on the other hand is a low hanging fruit to reduce the amount of harm we inflict on the world.
Also inchoate and just formulating my gut feelings :)
You may already know that it's not valid in the strict/formal sense, especially since there are some hidden premises missing, e.g. "you should avoid contributing to any(!) degree to any(!) bad thing" and "all(!) animal products contribute to animal suffering". My suggestion would be to break it down further and add all the hidden premises, such that it's logically watertight. Then, you can focus on the arguments soundness by considering to what degrees all the premises strike you as true. Hope that helps :)
Thank you :)
Yes, this helps. This was an ad hoc argument, and it was good enough for the occasion, but my inner logician was not satisfied.
I'll probably try to make all hidden assumptions clear and add some kind of moral normative statement like:
(m) „If something causes avoidable suffering and there is an easy alternative, one ought not do it."
A few obvious problems (speaking as a pescatarian):
1) you smuggle in the conclusion with “bad”. If your morality forbids any act that causes harm regardless of benefit, you also ban medicine.
1a) no mention of capability for suffering. Is it equally bad for a cow or human to suffer? Not many people think so. But presumably there is an N where you’d say cow suffering is worth harming a human to prevent. (Scott has written about this quite a bit)
2) how easy is “easy”? Many people grew up in meat eating cultures and abandoning it is practically and psychologically difficult.
So I think you need more nuance.
My own ethical rubric here is just to say that the cost of meat is high (but not repugnantly high like murder) and the benefit is generally low (very low for me as someone who was raised eating lots of delicious vegetarian-friendly cuisines). And different acts (factory farm / caged pork vs free range beef) may have very different net utility.
Thank you :)
1) + 1a) True. I made this argument ad hoc out of my moral heuristics/ intuition in a conversation, so it's really not up to philosophy department standards.
2) I'm probably biased as it was really easy for me.
"Many people grew up in meat eating cultures and abandoning it is practically and psychologically difficult."
And physically difficult. I know a couple of vegetarians who found they were healthier if they ate some meat.
It sure seems like we're evolved for a diet with some meat in it. We can survive without it, but it's tricky to get the right mix of amino acids, whereas "eat some meat or fish or a couple eggs" handles that pretty easily without needing to do any harder thinking.
(This is not medical advice).
I have to take blood thinners because I have Grave’s disease, and my doctor recently changed my medication from Edoxaban to Rivaroxaban. The pharmacist at my GP practise let slip the real reason for the medication change, which my doctor didn’t tell me: the patent on Rivaroxaban has expired. (So, now it’s a cheap generic).
This is peculiar: what incentive does your doctor have to prescribe CHEAPER drugs? Do the insurance companies counter-lobby doctors into prescribing cheap generics, as the pharma companies do to get them the prescribe their expensive drugs?
The critical piece of information I omitted is that I’m British. The NHS presumably does tell UK doctors to prescribe cheaper drugs.
Ah, okay. Well, on the bright side, getting prescribed a cheap generic, however ineffective, is still better than the Canadian solution to the problem of expensive healthcare.
Where did he say the generic was ineffective?
On the contrary, a cheap generic drug only provides a temporary solution to health problems. Whereas, Canadian healthcare provides a final solution.
Another instance of things your doctor doesn’t tell you. There am I, thinking there was some subtle clinical reason for the change. No, the patent on the drug expired.
Working in the computer industry, I am familiar with the phenomenon of something getting way more popular when the patent expires,
I am in the US. Anytime my doctor changes my medications, he tells me why. Not sure why the UK doctor didn't state a reason for the change. It would seem strange to me to have a doctor change my medication without explaining the reason.
When I’ve had similar situations, my GP did tell me why. Once, they switched me to a soluble, orange-flavoured version of an anti-depressant because the company manufacturing it had given the NHS some reduced price for a while to try to encourage them to move people over to this new product with a longer patent! They did say I could ask to go back for the next prescription, though, which I did because it was gross.
Similarly, we’ve worked together to switch me to other versions of things when the specific thing I was on started having supply issues.
But people tell me all sorts of things: I think I always just seem interested and non-threatening. Perhaps British GPs aren’t always as chatty as mine? But equally, I once had a locum (like a supply GP) randomly prescribe extra things that we hadn’t discussed, and I had a very fun discussion with the dispensary at the surgery about that.
Here are the things that the old folks didn’t tell you when you were young (or if they did, you either weren’t listening or you didn’t believe them).
In no particular order…
1. The injuries you got when you were a teenager or young adult (from sports or whatever) will come back to haunt you in your old age.
2. Vigorous regular exercise is great at maintaining health until your joints start failing from that vigorous regular exercise. No, I’m not saying everyone who jogs regularly will need knee and hip replacements, but a lot of you will.
3. Subjectively, time will flow faster as you get older. Not in a sense that you can observe it on a scale of hours or days, but over longer periods, your personal time will flow faster. It takes forever to get from childhood to adulthood. Less time to get from twenty to forty. Forty to sixty goes by before you know it, and suddenly you’re an old fart. Various biological and psychological explanations have been put forth to explain this phenomenon, but I don’t buy into any of them.
4. You’ll begin to notice that your friends are dying off at an increasing rate during your forties. At first, it will be one dying tragically young of cancer or a heart attack. And then another will drop a few years later. By the time you reach your late sixties, you’ll be going to more funerals and memorial services than you were going to weddings in your twenties. If you’re unlucky enough to live a very long life, you may find yourself to be the last one standing and without any friends left.
5. If you reach your seventies, for you and your friends who are still with you, your chief topic of conversation will be your health problems and updates about friends undergoing various procedures and operations.
6. Also, you’ll find yourself bitching about the cluelessness and failings of the younger generation. But the younger generation isn’t any more fucked up than your generation was when you were young. This is a dynamic that has been repeating itself throughout all of written history across all cultures.
7. You’ll find yourself becoming increasingly divorced from contemporary culture. You’ll know you’re old when you don’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers of the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line.
8. Those advertising tropes of happy active seniors having fun in their golden years are largely bullshit. Oh, you might be lucky enough to have a few good years after you retire, but as you lose your friends and health issues catch up with you, your golden years will pass swiftly (if you have any).
9. Your perceived value as a human being — economically, intellectually, socially — will likely decrease in the eyes of society as you grow older.
10. You’re not going to be physically attractive much past your forties. A few men and women age well. But eventually, most of us end up ugly. The more you’ve invested your ego in your attractiveness when you’re younger, the harder time you’ll have with your ugliness when you’re older.
11. There is a massive scam industry out there that takes advantage of elderly people with declining cognitive function. Many are US-based and operate within the letter of the law while fleecing their marks. Others operate out of Pakistan and India and their scams are more overt, but they all have access to all your personal information (happily sold by US data brokers). It’s easy enough to fall for a scam when you’re young, but after retirement, the scammers circle like vultures. And they’re always pecking and probing. Even if you’re lucky enough to maintain your wits into very old age, you may still fall victim to a well-designed scam, because they’re going to start coming at you at a fast and furious pace.
12. Finally, the US medical establishment—especially the long-term care industry—will see you as a profit center and not a client. Remember to sign a POLST unless you want to die after weeks in critical care (while the hospital accountants drain your bank accounts and then sic creditors on your heirs). Or worse, you’ll be delivered into the hands of the long-term care industry for a slow, boring death in a low-stimulation, low-service environment.
As Robert Herrick wrote...
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
But this is what all those smiling skeletons are there to remind you of...
https://youtu.be/AXyxX5LBjUU
To that depressing list I would like to add a positive, if some what snarky observation:
When I grew up, athletic young men were at the top of the social hierarchy, while intellectuals were at the bottom. As I have aged, I noticed that many of the athletes, possibly most, have become overweight or obese, while many of the intellectuals have retained their health. To the point where I could insult the former athletes about their obesity, then scamper to a safe distance while they were still trying to get up out of their chair.
But I wouldn't do that.
Another good thing about getting old is that you can play the age card in all sorts of creative ways. ;-)
Health isn't the same thing as not being obese.
I'm clinically obese now, but I swim a kilometer three times a week. I recently had to run some distance in an urgent situation, and I noticed I wasn't even out of breath. My feet took a pounding, though.
You're less likely to get excited at new developments because you've seen so many that didn't pan out. I'm especially thinking about science journalism.
Don't get me started on science journalism!
It could be a rant I'd be interested in.
I believe we're evolved to move, and that isn't the same thing as exercise.
Movement is generally for a purpose and/or for pleasure. Injures will be avoided if possible because building toward an injury hurts,
Exercise is repetitive movement which is supposed to do some good.
Competition tends to include more willingness to hurt oneself than one's competitors have.
I'm not sure where dance fits into this. I'm inclined to think that folk dance (done by folk for folk, not up on a stage for spectators) is unlikely to risk injury, but I haven't researched this.
2. Swimming is easy on the joints.
Until you get a rotator cuff injury from overdoing it. See my tale of joint woe above. ;-)
“ Subjectively, time will flow faster as you get older” - each passing year is a smaller and smaller percentage of your total life. If you’re 1 and you live to be 2, you’ve just doubled your lifespan; if you’re 100 and you live to 101, you’ve only added 1%.
> You’ll find yourself becoming increasingly divorced from contemporary culture. You’ll know you’re old when you don’t recognize any of the celebrities on the covers of the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line.
Everyone knows this happens to older people, but what I didn't realise as a kid was that it happens quite deliberately. I'm in my forties and actively pretend not to know who random celebrities are even when I do. A nice thing about getting older is that nobody expects you to have an opinion on Chappel Roan or whatever any more.
Having said that, the people on magazine covers, to the extent that magazines still exist, are only popular among old farts anyway; actual young people only care about internet celebrities that the algorithm just doesn't bother exposing me to.
My dad's version was: "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."
"6. Also, you’ll find yourself bitching about the cluelessness and failings of the younger generation. But the younger generation isn’t any more fucked up than your generation was when you were young. This is a dynamic that has been repeating itself throughout all of written history across all cultures."
You'd expect to see that evidence throughout history if some quality was genuinely fluctuating over time though. And it would be very surprising if generations were not meaningfully different given the overwhelming evidence that they change, and the abundant reasons for change.
I asked ChatGPT to give me a run down of complaints about the younger generation through the centuries. Some of theses might be hallucinations (but not all of them), but YMMV.
-----
Here’s a chronological sampler of “kids-these-days” complaints, starting with the oldest known examples and marching through history.
(You’ll notice it’s basically the same gripe in different outfits.)
📜 c. 2000 BCE — Sumer (Mesopotamia)
"Youths are lazy; they do not pay attention to the word of their elders."
(Source: Sumerian proverb collections, possibly linked to the “Instructions of Shuruppak.”)
📜 c. 1900 BCE — Babylon
"The youth no longer obey their parents. They chatter in the place of work."
(Found on an Akkadian school tablet — perhaps written by a frustrated teacher.)
📜 c. 2400 BCE text, copied c. 1200 BCE — Egypt
Attributed to Ptahhotep’s Maxims:
"The young no longer obey. The boundaries of propriety are ignored. They chatter instead of working."
🏛 c. 700 BCE — Ancient Greece (Hesiod)
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today."
🏛 c. 470–399 BCE — Socrates (ascribed in later sources)
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders..."
(Note: This exact phrasing is a later paraphrase; the sentiment is genuinely ancient.)
🏛 1st century CE — Ancient Rome
Petronius in the Satyricon:
"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They no longer rise when elders enter the room..."
(This echoes Greek formulations — Romans were good at cultural recycling.)
📜 1274 CE — Peter the Hermit (medieval Europe)
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves... They have no reverence for parents or old age."
📜 1771 CE — Earl of Chesterfield
"This is the age of the young... the old are pushed aside as if they were no longer useful."
📜 1904 CE — “The Young Are Getting Out of Hand” (Atlantic Monthly)
"Young people are not what they used to be, and never were."
(That last clause is self-aware humor from a century ago.)
That doesn’t mean much though does it? Nine quotes in all of recorded history? You can find nine people with any opinion at all at any time.
Whereas today, we have actual evidence that kids are very different in many respects. Depression, anxiety, no enthusiasm for driving, dating or partying. And we have obvious reasons they could be very different: radically different parenting styles, phones, social media, video games, Covid restrictions.
It doesn't look like you bothered to check out the data before you posted your opinion. The CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS Explorer) show that life is much better for teens than was three decades ago. If you've got data better than the CDC's I'd be happy to hear it.
High school students who seriously considered attempting suicide was significantly lower in 2023 (20.4%) than it was in 1991 (29.0%). The all-time low was in 2013 (13.8%), and it then bumped up to 22.2% in 2021 during peak COVID. But there's definitely been no steady upward trend in teen suicide ideation in the past three decades that the CDC has been surveying teens.
https://yrbs-explorer.services.cdc.gov/#/graphs?questionCode=H27&topicCode=C01&location=XX&year=2023
High school students who actually attempted suicide showed a slight upward trend during COVID, but for the most part the line has been stable over the past 3 decades.
https://yrbs-explorer.services.cdc.gov/#/graphs?questionCode=H29&topicCode=C01&location=XX&year=2023
The indices of teen violence have dropped over the past three decades. In 1991 a whopping 42.5% of teens reported that they had been in a fight at some time during their teen years. In 2023 it was down to 19.2%.
https://yrbs-explorer.services.cdc.gov/#/graphs?questionCode=H42&topicCode=C03&location=XX&year=2023
Alcohol use is down from a high of 51.6% in 1995 to 22.1%.
https://yrbs-explorer.services.cdc.gov/#/graphs?questionCode=H16&topicCode=C01&location=XX&year=2023
Perhaps I am wrong about mental health in teens declining. Jonathan Haidt has some graphs here saying otherwise: https://jonathanhaidt.com/anxious-generation/ but those could be incorrect or measurement error.
But your last two links on teen violence and alcohol use directly contradict your point: generations CAN be meaningfully different from each other. Those are enormous cultural changes in the space of 30 years!
Thanks for Haidt link. Looks like he's getting data on mental health from the American College Health Association. I wonder if this is just surveys of college students. And are these these representative of the general population. I might dig into that.
But my OP was that oldsters complaining about the younger generation was a timeless trope. Personally, I've always assumed that each younger generations were fucked up in their own unique ways, but overall they always muddle through to become the older generation complaining about the latest younger generation.
> Vigorous regular exercise is great at maintaining health until your joints start failing from that vigorous regular exercise. No, I’m not saying everyone who jogs regularly will need knee and hip replacements, but a lot of you will.
What does "vigorous" mean here? Not all exercise is hard on the joints, which strength training can actually help improve. And there are old people who still do extremely rigorous activities. Everyone is different, but I suspect the risk here is overestimated due to people trying to push through injury, or who get into the "exercise is good" mindset too late or try to rush things or push them too far.
This is the kind of thing young(er) people say.
There seems to be an almost complete inability for young-to-middleaged people to understand that the advice they are being given does not work once they are older.
The body wears out. Fit and active octogenarians are very (very) much the exception to the rule, for simple and obvious reasons that no one seems willing to currently accept.
Despite not being that old, I'm well aware that my body can't do all the things it used to. But I don't really buy this argument.
> Fit and active octogenarians are very (very) much the exception to the rule, for simple and obvious reasons that no one seems willing to currently accept.
If you're talking about the US, fit and active is the exception for almost *any* age bracket, and I suspect this fact is more responsible for the lack of fit elderly people than anything else. The difference between what the elderly do, and what they can do, between the Northeast and Colorado is staggering.
Obviously no one in their 80s is going to be at peak fitness, but exercise helps joint problems, rather than hurting them (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8149442/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29852838/, but this seems to be the overwhelming conclusion of empirical evidence I found).
Even if there's a scientific study that proves this, I do not believe it. I have four friends who were into hard-style martial arts (karate and taekwondo). All of them had their hips give out. Two gave up practice, and two had hip replacements. My runner friends all started having knee problems by their mid-fifties. In fact, none of the people I know in my age cohort have come out unscathed from regular exercise. Remember this conversation when you get old. I'll probably be dead and gone by then, but my ghost will say "I told ya so!"
This is what everyone says. And I agree that keeping active is a good thing as a general principle.
However there comes a point where this is no longer possible for most people, and no one seems willing to believe or accept that.
I spend substantial time with the aged (not in the US). I think a lot of people are armchair experts about this, as with many other topics. They should spend some meaningful time with old people before they get old themselves.
Sure, at some point, your body gives out. But OP said:
> failing from that vigorous regular exercise.
In other words, the exercise caused the failure. I think this is fairly unlikely unless you are overworking specific body parts (which is one reason why NBA players are facing a large increase in certain injuries), pushing through injuries, overworking yourself, etc.
I used to mountain bike ten to twelve miles a pop three times a week. Nothing really strenuous. Mostly flatland gravel trails. I can't do it anymore. My right knee began to give out. Doctors were talking about a knee replacement. I just gave it rest, and after about a year, my knee seemed to heal itself. Started riding again last year, but I gave it up after a couple of months, because my knee started to act up again.
Before I took up mountain biking, I used to swim a kilometer in the pool 3 or 4 times a week, until I developed a rotator cuff injury (my right shoulder). Even with PT my shoulder never really returned to normal. But after a 15 year hiatus I tried swimming again. Intially, I kept pulling to the left because my right shoulder didn't have the strength of my left shoulder, but eventually, I got so I could swim in a straight line. I've worked up to a kilometer 3 times a week, again, but I'm very very careful not to push myself. So far, so good. But my girlfriend (who's a few years younger than me), took up swimming with me. She wanted to push it up to a mile because her hero, Oliver Sacks, used to swim a mile every day. I told her to take it easy, but she thought I was mansplaining. She developed a rotator cuff injury, and she's only starting to try to do laps again.
I took up water aerobics a couple of years back. Don't let anyone bullshit you that they're "low impact". I fucked up my big toes from pushing off the bottom of the pool. Now I have to tape up my feet before I go swimming, or my kicks will pop my big toes out of the joint. It's frigging painful when that happens!
I notice you did not mention strength training anywhere
Edit: Sorry, that was way way too snarky. You did explicitly say "Vigorous exercise" in your initial post.
I guess the question is then what defines vigorous, as you're completely correct that overdoing any exercise for prolonged periods of time will have detrimental effects
To point 2, certainly vigorous exercise wears down the joints, but for most people it’ll be more complicated. For example, strong quadriceps pull apart the joint space of the knee, actually improving joint function
It is perfectly reasonable to do body weight exercises that burn upwards of a thousand calories per hour, while WALKING. Walking, needless to say, is a very low-risk joint exercise.
Person contemplating grim truths. imgur.com/auVyt9v
Did you prompt that image?
Yes, but for another purpose. I've had it for a while. Prompt is something like "woman who has been held hostage, upon release. Haggard, with filthy, snarled frizzy long red hair."
To point 3, I always heard that the reason for this is that in the process of doing/learning fundamentally new things, your brain creates new neuron pathways or whatever, and that the process of this happening makes time feel slower.
I should have questioned this long before now, as science knows little about the brain or consciousness, but still it seems to fit perfectly with my own experiences. I'm only in my mid-20's, but my life is going faster and faster already. When I'm doing or learning something new consistently, though, time seems to slow down. For example, I had my first child in January and I took the 2.5 weeks after he was born off of work. Those 2.5 weeks felt more like a month or longer, but once I got back to work time started passing quite a bit faster.
Does this idea fit with your own experiences?
I think part of time going faster is that less seems novel, so you pay less attention to it, and the lack of attention makes things seem even less interesting.
I've been on a self-educating binge for the past decade — art history, quantum mechanics, viriology, and a bunch of other topics. It hasn't slowed down the acceleration of my time sense.
Maybe the ways in which you learn things are too familiar to you to the point where your learning follows the same basic pattern regardless of what the content is, or maybe you know enough about the building blocks of the content you're learning that there's nothing fundamentally new?
Or maybe there's just nothing to it, and sometimes life seems longer or shorter at times for people like me. I guess I'm just lucky 🤩
There may be something to your idea, because I already have an extensive framework of general knowledge, so I *am* mostly filling in the details. I've mentioned this before, but as a kid, I had the certainty that I was an alien sent to Earth, with my prime directive plonked into my little fetal brain to learn everything I could about humans and the Earth. I had absorbed a bunch of the Time-Life series by the time I finished sixth grade (*The Life Science Library*, *Nature Library*, *World Library*, *Great Ages of Man*, *Library of Art,* etc...). I had polished off all the volumes in the *Story of Civilization* series by Will and Ariel Durant by my Freshman year of high school. Learning to be human was much harder, though. Anyway, when I die, all this stuff I've learned will be uploaded to them. I don't really believe this anymore. I believe weirder stuff now. ;-)
That's awesome XD it sounds like you'll make a fine contribution to the alien databanks. Maybe when they get your info they'll see we're finally ready for alien contact and in desperate need of benevolent overlords, and they'll hopefully send some Karellen or someone to save us.
Now I'm curious about what weirder stuff you believe...
I tend to favor your explanation.
My bad, when I said "I had my first child," I meant "I came into possession of," not "I birthed". I am a man myself, and my wife did all the hard work, you betcha.
Bunk uses a cigar to prevent himself from throwing up. If you aren't looking at blatant propaganda (like was published in the Ukraine), 3 day old bodies generally induce vomiting.
Military has a whole handbook on "how to look good in front of your men" when you're dealing with rotting bodies.
Sadly, remembering Minnesota for being "nice" is losing out to remembering Minnesota for being "sex-crazy depraved lunatics." Politics isn't very "nice."
I spent some time on and off in my state's Coroner's office when I was a grad student. Cigars were de rigueur when decomposing bodies (especially floaters!) came in. I don't know what the coroners did after our State banned smoking in government buildings in the 90s. Vicks VapoRub on a surgical mask was the non-tobacco alternative to cigars, but it doesn't quite cut it.
Blood, guts, and maggots never made me puke, but the smell of a decaying human is pretty horrendous. And the smell would linger on your clothes despite washing.
To point two, the specialist excising a loved-one’s skin cancer said that she always tries to bear in mind that the elderly people coming to see her generally walk in under their own steam, which is not the case for a lot of other specialists dealing with that age bracket.
If you have to pick, acquire the wear and tear that goes with an active, interesting life.
I'm 73. I wouldn't say it's all true in my experience, but a lot of it is.
As part of my recovery from pancreatitis, I'm back to being able to walk a half hour out and a half hour back.
I was unnerved when they told me at Oak Street Health (a medical provider specializing in people with Medicare) that I'm in better shape for activity than most of their patients.
I don't complain about the younger generation, but I don't have a lot of dealings with it.
Glad to hear you're recovering! I had genuinely wondered what had happened to you, and assumed you were merely busy; I didn't know it was an illness.
A week in the hospital. Lots of antibiotics. I'm mostly recovered after a month and a half. My feeling is that I got off easy.
Thanks for being concerned.
I wasn't public when I was sick because I had very limited energy for dealing with people.
Glad you're back with us, Nancy!
A friend of my mom's was hiking up a mountain in Switzerland in her eighties, but she fell and broke her hip. Had to be airlifted out IIRC. It was all downhill for her from then on. Pardon the bad pun.
Another day, another tech right billionaire posts literal fake news (a fake graph falsely attributed to the Washington Post) on Twitter:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GxyW1y1W4AA_9AR?format=jpg&name=small
https://x.com/pmarca/status/1953577088809832565
At some point Marc Andreessen must have figured out the image was fake, since he deleted the tweet, but there was no apology. And it's not like he's going to get called to account for it. Ten years ago, a Silicon Valley billionaire tweeting out literal fake news would be newsworthy, not today. I keep hearing "oh the poor salt of the Earth masses were lied to by the media and now they don't trust it and are falling for these social media hucksters." Okay, what's Marc Andreessen's excuse? He and Elon Musk have so much money they could build their own media outlet if they don't trust the MSM. Or they could at least hire someone for $60,000 a year to fact check their Tweets before they send them out. But no, they just bumble around retweeting random garbage.
Are you going to object to ebay's graphs from the WAPO simply because they were designed and created by the advertising budget of ebay?
WAPO's graphs are not to be trusted, because their business section will publish anything "If it's got a graph".
Is this really an example of "literal fake news"?
It's a meme about how LinkedIn's social feed is causing young men to remain virgins, which is obviously absurd and intended to be a joke. The actual graph is also the same in essence, if not in percentage, with a major inflection point in 2008:
https://www.kvakil.me/posts/2022-05-15-young-male-virgins-washington-post.html
Considering this fake news seems to diminish the meaning of fake news.
Isn't the "actual graph" you posted exactly the same graph but ending at 2018 instead of 2025?
As far as I can tell the post-2018 data is made up though.
Just realized that. So for all I know the graph that was originally linked isn’t even wrong, just extended out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was considering Covid.
If it was a joke why did he deleted it without explanation?
I assume because the data itself wasn’t intended as a joke. The joke is clearly the implication that the LinkedIn social feed is the cause of rising male virginity.
If a meme about LinkedIn being the cause of male virginity was based on a graph that was incorrect in the specifics, if not in the essence of rapidly rising male virginity rates post-2008, that’s such a low-stakes mistake that it’s not at all surprising he just deleted it.
Calling a meme based on mistaken data fake news, and expecting an apology about the meme, seems pretty ridiculous IMO.
Sorry, I am not sure anyone have read my long-winded argument in the other thread, so I sum it up now shorter. So if you want to see liberalism as a platform for varied communities, that makes sense in the light of American history, which was explicitly founded as a platform for 13 communities in 1776, and developed along those line i.e. Mormons getting their own state in Utah and so on. But how can that liberalism work in the average European country which has a thing like an official language i.e. officially dominant ethnic group, a historically dominant religion and so on?
It seems to me European history is largely about not finding the middle road between Hitler and Bowling Alone. So we either try to force everybody into one community (and kill those who do not fit), or we go for atomistic, alienated individualism.
This is how to interpret Fukuyama quoting Leo Strauss, that in 1933 Germans voted for Hitler because Weimar liberalism was too atomistic and too morally neutral. It lacked big questions, big moral dilemmas, heroism, sacrifice etc. everybody focused on their little individual pleasures. The strange part is that everything they lacked is better provided by religion than politics.
My understanding is that the problem with Weimar is that it was very much a product of its situation.
Imperial Germany's constitutional and institutions had been set up mostly by members of a conservative aristocracy. It had been formed around the Kingdom of Prussia, which was a highly centralized and militaristic polity that had expanded significantly through conquest during the 19th century. The German Empire did have a number of liberal elements in its constitution, but was much less liberal than the US, Victorian Britain, or the French Third Republic. Germany had also been formed as a federation of 25 polities which each retained their own internal institutions, but Prussia was so large (about 60% of the population) and politically dominant (the King of Prussia was ex officio German Emperor, the Minister-President of Prussia was conventionally the Imperial Chancellor, and senior officers in the wartime military were mostly Prussian) that this pluralism was significantly compromised. Within Imperial Germany, the Kaiser was always conservative (except for the three-month period when the throne had been inherited by the relatively liberal Crown Prince Frederick while he was dying of throat cancer), and the Chancellor served at the Kaiser's pleasure. There were major liberal, socialist, progressive, and federalist moderate parties in Parliament, and the plurality party was usually one of these, but Parliament was fairly weak and there was only occasionally an effective coalition for liberal or progressive policies. There was also a major Marxist-influenced revolutionary wing of the German Socialist movement which didn't play well with the liberals.
The German Revolution of 1918 started out mostly with Marxist goals, but the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (who were from that party's liberal wing) got out ahead of it and redirected it towards liberal aims. The Kaiser, Chancellor, and military leadership saw that conservative Imperial government was doomed (combination of military defeat, the strength of the revolutionary movement, and Woodrow Wilson's insistence of the Kaiser's abdication as a precondition for armistice negotiations) and chose to hand over power to the liberal socialists as a preferable alternative to the Marxists. There were several attempts between 1919 and 1923 by both marxists and reactionary conservatives to overthrow Weimar violently, which were suppressed militarily (or collapsed under the weight of popular opposition, in the case of the conservative 1920 Kapp Putsch). Both the revolutionary left and the reactionary right remained politically active throughout the Weimar era.
The fundamental problem with Weimar was that the liberal Weimar Coalition at best had majority support but never had anything approaching a consensus. Even majority support was lost over the impact of hyperinflation and other economic problems in the 1920s leading into the Great Depression, and the moderate conservatives who were willing to work within the Weimar system (and who were mostly in the driver's seat from 1925-1933) were also bleeding support to revolutionary extremists for similar reasons. The Nazis never had anything like majority support in free elections, peaking at 37.3% in the July 1932 parliamentary elections and 36.8% in the April 1932 presidential election, but the Nazis and Communists between them controlled a majority of the Reichstag. While the NDSAP and the KPD were mortal enemies, both were also steadfast opponents of liberalism and could and did vote together to block the formation of any government that operated on anything like a liberal basis, and Hindenberg's decision to bring the Nazis into a conservative coalition government was what allowed Hitler to seize power.
How does Switzerland do it?
They are in some sense very European-style nationalist, they take very active steps to protect their traditional culture even if this conflicts with the usual rights of liberalism, they don't make it easy for outsiders to assimilate.
However for centuries the country has been a mix of Catholics & Protestants, and of French/German/Italian speakers. Historically in Europe these are groups that all would fight brutal wars with each other, except in Switzerland they all get along and have a unified identity, yet also retain their own distinct traditions and autonomy.
Actually similar to how America does it - as much of politics as possible is done on the canton level, not the federal, and each canton has a dominant language and religion. That must be why William F Buckley Jr. - who spoke fluent French - called it the second best country on Earth and liked to tourist there.
They even have a custom that a man who is getting married must show his father-in-law he has the two most important things: a Bible and a rifle. That feels very, very Texan, doesn't it?
They are not a "mix" in this sense - the Franco-Catholics do not want to live in Winterthur, nor do they want to tell the people of Winterthur how to live, and they expect the same.
Their unified identity reminds me of those marriages who do not fail specifically because the husband spends all the time in the garage and the wife spends all the time in the kitchen. They just don't interact much so they avoid bothering each other...
This is visible if you rent a car in Winterthur and drive west... the German-speaking regions are stereotypically German, everything very orderly... and then at one point you start to see more litter and more generic disorder... that is when you arrived to the French-speaking region.
Federalism, of a kind America hasn't had in more than 150 years.
"This is how to interpret Fukuyama quoting Leo Strauss, that in 1933 Germans voted for Hitler because Weimar liberalism was too atomistic and too morally neutral. It lacked big questions, big moral dilemmas, heroism, sacrifice etc. everybody focused on their little individual pleasures. The strange part is that everything they lacked is better provided by religion than politics."
Germans voted for Hitler because the German economy was in the toilet and they blamed the incumbent government.
"Germans voted for Hitler because the German economy was in the toilet and they blamed the incumbent government."
I don't know if this supports you point or not, but:
(a) In the 1933 elections "only" 44% of the votes went to the Nazi party. 12% went communist (and 18% went SPD). One way to score this is that 56% wanted SOME form of authoritarian government.
(b) The Nov 1932 election went 33% Nazi and 17% communist (so 50% between the two).
(c) The Nazis and communists didn't start making much progress with the voters until 1930.
So ... I think more accurate would be that Germans voted for authoritarian government because the German economy was in the toilet. The Nazis *were* that authoritarian government, but the majority of Germans never voted Nazi even though the majority did vote authoritarian.
This has the nice property of explaining Putin's popularity among Russians (until recently at least, maybe still now): He was voted in when the economy was terrible and then things got better. It allows us to treat him as authoritarian rather than try to make him a Nazi.
This maybe/probably fits for Chavez in Venezuela (authoritarian, not really a Nazi), too, though I know that history much less well.
Putin is a national hero in Russia, mostly for kicking the Western Oligarchs out. Your parallel to him would be the Ayatollah in Iran (not very popular any longer).
Putin doesn't get 99% of the votes, he gets a solid 80% even after the robot votes. (And his campaign literature is designed to get even the cats to pawpaw his picture -- Russians love cats).
> Putin is a national hero in Russia, mostly for kicking the Western Oligarchs out.
What do you mean by "Western Oligarchs"? As far as I know, Russian oligarchs are citizens of Russia, and foreign investors never had a comparable power there. Actually, the foreign investors always had to be backed by a local oligarch to even get a chance to do business in Russia.
Prior to Putin's booting them out, they were extracting money from Russia and basically putting it into the West. You can pretty much trace "Big Bad (EVUL) Putin" as a Western Concept to when he kicked them out (remember when he was a WEF young leader?). Prior to that, Palin saying "I can SEE russia from Alaska" was treated with the proper level of hilarity ("more republican scare tactics about the communists!"). All of a sudden, Putin was no longer the guy who blew raspberries into children's belly buttons. There was a large, large propaganda campaign intended to reestablish control and $$$making (extracting) in Russia.
Kamil Galeev had a fascinating post on why Putin (and autocrats in general) embrace elections...
https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/why-does-russia-have-elections
In this case I would like to point out, that if we call people who embrace elections autocrats, then it is time to officially ditch the concept that democracy means majority rule. Things were tending that way anyway, but time to make it official. Majority rule is called today populism, not democracy.
What is called democracy today is liberal democracy, which basically means a republic: a system of individual rights, with voting being only one of the many individual rights. Republics tend towards aristocratic elitism, which is not necessarily a bad thing - I would rather experts decide on COVID stuff, not a plebiscite - but needs to be pointed out clearly at least.
Posted this response, but it disappeared. Trying again. Apologies if you get two.
By that reasoning, Hitler would be an autocrat because he canceled all subsequent elections after he came to power. But Stalin and Mao would not be autocrats because they continued to hold elections.
Very fascinating. Could use some leavening with some actual numbers from America though. Did you know that Detroit hasn't had a fair election since they started keeping records? (I have this from the last person to actually get an election overturned in America -- at the cost of signing a contract "not to interfere in local elections").
The point that authoritarians don't stuff ballot boxes when they don't need to, is a good one.
(I'm not subscribed, and that cuts off, so apologies if I'm restating what it says):
Putin's Russia is a very very big place, and reminding people that they are part of a very big thing is a main civil point of the elections. They get out the special ponies (which take like a half-day to catch), and ride to the elections. This is a special, ceremonial obligation, where they pay fealty to "The Big Guy In Charge" (who otherwise doesn't do much in their day to day life). Russia, unlike China, is a very "mutt" place (very proud of that, even).
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-394/comment/144358086 if authoritarians don't necessarily stuff ballot boxes, then we need a new definition of what is democracy and what is authoritarianism.
The way the wind was blowing for decades now is that a democrat is someone who respects individual rights - which used to be called a republic - and autocrat or authoritarian is someone who does not.
The choice wasn't just between Hitler and Bowling Alone, if Bowling Alone was even an option. The choice was between Hitler and Stalin, and Stalin might have been worse.
No, the Spartacists were executed 14 years before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg by 1933 there wasn't a serious Stalinist movement going. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany kept attacking the Social Democrats, so the left was divided.
??
The later KPD were Stalinist-types more than Luxemburg was, because in the years since the failed November Revolution in Germany, the Bolsheviks tightened their control over communist parties abroad, turning them into extensions of Soviet policy (and, by extension, Stalinist policy as of 1933). Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist, but was not a Stalinist, and had criticisms of Lenin before then (not necessarily the sort modern libs would have, but still).
ReplayFX asked "where are you from?" on its questionairre. They managed to bag about 500 different places. This was supposed to be a -country tag- so that the organizers could say simple things like "We've got 20 Germans coming." But NO. Instead, there were responses like Bavaria, Alsace, etc. It was pretty much all the Europeans, defining "where they are from" not as the "ethnostates" but provinces, regions, little places. Spain wants to dissolve at the best of times, even.
The fourth reich is the European Union. They really don't want you looking at the biographies and following the "people in charge" back through Hitler to Bismark and beyond.
Hitler's party was really big on being hippies (vegetarianism was very popular). He had two policy proposals in Mein Kampf, and one of them was "put up some flowerpots around government buildings." (The other was "require physical education."
This gets a little more complicated. You will notice that fascism/nazism got the most popular in those two countries that were basically recently unified, and still had internal north vs. south divisions. So one way to look at it is to say they were screaming really loud that they are one united nation now, while a lot of people were unsure about it.
Especially strange the part where Nazism was a largely Bavarian phenomenon, and Bavarians really did not enjoy being ruled by "Prussian swine", even today they have their own conservative party, the CSU, the CDU is too "Prussian" (and Protestant) for them...
I don't think Nazism was a specifically Bavarian phenomenon, even if it started there. Here are some maps, for example:
https://x.com/Valen10Francois/status/1524040772236066825/photo/1
https://x.com/ElenaCorti5/status/1839775390493262025/photo/1
In 1932-1933, the future East-Germany is far more Nazi than Bavaria. In fact Bavaria seems to be the least Nazi part of Germany!
That's strange. Because the word "Nazi" comes not from Nationalsozialismus, but a nickname for Ignatz, Natzi, which is like "Bubba" in the US, meaning an uneducated rural Bavarian, coined by the typical "coffeeshop liberals". Which is why the Nazis themselves never used this word.
Your story seems rather different from what mainstream etymologists say. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Nazi
The Nazi party is obviously from Bavaria. The Beer Hall Putsch happened in Munich, after all. But the best electoral results for the NSDAP in the 1930s were further East, in what would be called later East-Germany (DDR), and in the territories lost after WW2 to Poland (Pomerania, Silesia, etc., and East-Prussia).
Hamburg, in the North, also did well for the Nazis.
So, surprisingly (maybe), Bavaria and the South were not particularly Nazi.
Cologne (in the West) was the least.
So you find out more if your questionnaire has text field instead of forced answers. Worth remembering.
Or you find out most people you're surveying are from Wakanda or something.
Unlikely if you're surveying autists (ahem.pinball enthusiasts?). They seem to like the truth, for some strange reason.
As a sidenote, if you code Wakanda as "decline to answer" that person is doing a service to the question-giver, in that they're not simply "answering wrong."
I've been researching dissociative identity disorder, and... I have a pretty weird impression and I want to reality check.
It seems like DID spaces, DID discussions, and DID resources exist in a parallel bubble relative to other mental illnesses. Say, Reddit: go to a schizophrenia subreddit, and you'd see mentions of OCD, depresseion, autism, etc, and vice versa. But not DID. The communities of mental illnesses cross-pollinate a lot. But DID is on its own. Unless you specifically seek out information on it, you won't just stumble across it. Scott's blog is also an example: over the time of SSC/ACX, he has mentioned autism, schizophrenia, depression, OCD, ADHD, PTSD, dementia, gender dysphoria, insomnia, BIID, BPD, anorexia, even many rare and exotic illnesses like Epic Dreaming Disorder; but he never wrote on DID. Despite not being that _rare_, it's very _exotic_. It's also very interesting and definitely deserving discussion.
Is it a real thing or is it just a property of my bubble?
Like Chronic Lyme Disease, it’s a diagnosis whose existence is doubted by the experts in the relevant field. Also modern DID is very different from OG multiple personality disorder circa “Three faces of Eve”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us Section V
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable
Thank you. I had a major memoru lapse, then
Scott has mentioned it in this post:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable
I believe I remember Scott expressing skepticism about how common it was, with some serious study finding that only one case out of many was actually convincing according to DID's own criteria.
There's definitely a lot of people who don't have it but say they do, which isn't true for most other mental illnesses (maybe Autism? We're all a bit autistic here), which probably gives it a bad reputation. As other people have said, there's a lot of people on TikTok who specifically fake DID for attention.
I've heard some people don't think it's real. There's especially skepticism of people on Tiktok who claim to have it.
I'm far from an expert, though I've worked with developmentally disabled adults in vocational rehab in the past. The actual experts I did work with had firmly listed it in the column of people we couldn't help find jobs. Apparently, genuine cases of DID are so bad off that its unlikely they could keep it together enough to have a coherent conversation on a message board, or even navigate the technology to do so regularly. In short their opinion was that anyone who was able to clearly describe their internal experience of DID didn't actually have it. This is 2nd hand info from 20 years ago though.
I talked briefly with a man who said he had non-traumatic dissociative identity. He probably called it multiple personalities because this was a while ago. He said his mother had traumatic multiple identity, and he assumed that was just how to be a person.
I'm a trusting soul, and I assumed he was telling the truth about his experience. Why shouldn't people like that exist? They probably wouldn't be likely to show up to therapists and it would take someone like Scott to ask a large mixed group how many personalities do you think you have.
I knew a person who thought she was an elf. This was under heavy psychological treatment (read hard, narcotic drugs under a psychiatrist's care) for an illness she didn't have.
Tolkien elf or Christmas elf?
Tolkien elf.
I'm willing to bet her elf name isn't as cool as yours.
Cool? hahaha. My handle is gay. so, so gay. (It was published as a dragon name in the 1980s, contextual reading of GenX slang referring to it as being "gay").
deleted for errant doubleposting
Was reading an old post in SSC and realized that out of 30 blogs in Scott's blogroll eight bloggers appear to have stopped writing. The percentage varies by subject, with Science having the highest share of lapsed bloggers (3/8 = 38%). Anyone can think of a reason why this would happen in science blogging?
*Economics*
Artir Kel
Bryan Caplan [MOVED TO SUBSTACK]
David Friedman [MOVED TO SUBSTACK]
Pseudoerasmus [LAPSED]
Scott Sumner [MOVED TO SUBSTACK]
Tyler Cowen
*Effective Altruism*
80000 Hours Blog
Effective Altruism Forum
GiveWell Blog
*Rationality*
Alyssa Vance [MOVED TO SUBSTACK?]
Beeminder
Elizabeth Van Nostrand
Gwern Branwen
Jacob Falkovich
Jeff Kaufman
Katja Grace [LAPSED?]
Kelsey Piper
Less Wrong
Paul Christiano [LAPSED]
Robin Hanson
Sarah Constantin [EDIT: MOVED TO SUBSTACK]
Zack Davis [LAPSED?]
Zvi Mowshowitz
*Science*
Andrew Gelman
Greg Cochran [LAPSED]
Michael Caton [LAPSED]
Razib Khan [MOVED TO SUBSTACK]
Scott Aaronson
Stephan Guyenet [LAPSED]
Steve Hsu [MOVED TO SUBSTACK]
Alyssa Vance moved to substack for a while then stopped writing when she joined anthropic
Sarah Constantine also moved to substack but is still writing afaict
You are right. Fixed.
For the past few years Greg Cochran has written a single blog post per year at the end of the year listing off books he read, but I wish he shifted his output away from twitter and back to his blog.
Pseudoerasmus has a substack, but it currently just has one post aggregating some of his tweets on one subject https://pseudoerasmus.substack.com/p/summary-of-all-my-thoughts-on-ajr
So... addiction, for him.
I don't understand your reply.
Twitter is an addictive substance. strongly advise against partaking.
The term “white supremacy” is highly inconsistent isn’t it? Online on Chinese sites where I lurk to see the opinions (using translation of course) I find the phrase is used to attack western and US supremacy: NATO, the EU, the five eyes, Israel and other institutions of the “rule based international order”, like the IMF. Even the permanent members of security council.
I’m sure this is true across the non western world.
There’s another version propagated by the US itself, which is to do with internal politics, this was particularly strong during the Biden admin.
It’s an odd term to propagate, as if the British empire were to produce leaders who, while believing that Britain should run the world, that the real problem in the world was Anglo supremacism.
In hindsight, that last answer was probably way more complicated than it needed to be.
If you're China, "organizations like NATO and the EU were founded and are maintained to further the cause of white supremacy" is a useful thing to be true. Because China wants to form and lead its own coalition, all the plausible member-states are majority non-white, so "those guys over there with that older, stronger coalition are just in it for themselves and want to screw you" is a good line, if you can make it convincing. And it's not completely implausible based on the history and demographics.
By the same token, if you're the U.S. or the UK or Germany, it's useful for that same thing *not* to be true, because you like the coalition and want it to retain influence. But just saying "this organization--which I am a highly placed member of--is totally not biased towards people like me" isn't going to convince anyone. But plausibly calling out and "fighting" white supremacy in other contexts that don't reflect back on your coalition is useful, if you can make it convincing. In both cases they are talking about essentially the same thing when they say "white supremacy," just in different contexts.
Contra your British example, it would be like if the British empire went around spreading the idea that "joining the empire is actually really good for your development as a country" with an unspoken ("rather than just being good for enriching Britain").
It's really not that odd if you have a basic understanding of the history and motivations at play.
Since you seem somewhat confused by the term, a very brief history lesson: "white supremacy" is a set of beliefs that *used to be* extremely normal in U.S. politics. A large fraction of the ground-level participants in U.S. politics[1] took it for granted that white people where inherently superior to people of other races[2], despite this directly contradicting the very first sentence of the very first founding document of the nation. They put this belief into practice in a variety of ways that ran the gamut from voluntary curation of social circles, to codifying into into laws, to straight-up extrajudicial murder. The very earliest point at which one could reasonably say this was no longer true was the late 1960s--well within living memory. And anyone with a decent model of how human cultures and values change over time should expect that it didn't *stop* being true all at once, regardless of how the laws changed.
In this day and age, of course, open white supremacy is very much *not* the norm in U.S. politics: is it nearly obligatory to at least pay lip-service to the egalitarian founding principles of the nation. The U.S. has enough distance from its own past that most people can look at things like the chattel slavery practiced in the south, and Jim Crow laws, and the various genocides and forced displacements of native American peoples and *clearly recognize them as bad.* Most people can also look at stark examples from other countries--institutions like Nazism and apartheid that *also* stemmed a belief in the inherent racial superiority of certain white-skinned ethnic groups--and also *clearly recognize those as bad.* Between this really quite large number of quite extreme examples, the belief that "white supremacy is bad and something to be avoided" is really quite a common and sensible one.
OK, now as far as how people use the term in this day and age. You seem to be of the view that they're using it in very different senses. They're really not. At least, not from what you've written. They're using it with very different *connotations.* In the case of Chinese nationalists, one might even go so far as to say they're trying to weaponize it against their political opponents. But the term means much the same thing. But it might still take some more work to see how.
One argument that's been used by white supremacists since approximately forever is "clearly white people are superior: look at how many amazing things they've built." And, like, the second part of that isn't even *wrong.* There have been quite a lot of amazing achievements and scientific discoveries made by people with light-colored skin. But the first part is assuming their own conclusion: white supremacists believe that causality flows in this way Inherent Superiority -> Amazing Inventions. Which is pretty silly for a number of reasons, with most important one being that it completely ignores the feedback loop that produced the entirety of the modern world. In reality, you have Amazing Inventions -> Multiplied Labor and Military Power -> Greater Resources -> Amazing Inventions. That is, once start getting a critical mass of amazing inventions in one place, they start arriving faster and faster. And so if you can *keep* them in once place (even partially) that place can pull ahead of everyone else. And if you can keep them exclusive to one group (again, even partially), that group can accrue massively more power than anyone else. And so it happened.[3] The group who really kick started the process happened to have pale skin and they made significant effort to keep their knowledge and technology *exclusive* to people with pale skin (with some success)[4], and so the causality flows backwards from what the white supremacists will tell you: white people are disproportionately represent among the scientists and inventors of the world because for many years they were the only ones afforded the opportunity to be. And then some of them turn around and use that edge that they've gained as "evidence" that other people are inferior and should be kept subservient.
So when the Chinese make claims about organizations like NATO and the EU being "white supremacist" it is not a different use of the word than when left-leaning people in Western countries use it: it's making the same claim in a different sphere. They're saying "see, the Important People Club (for defense or international relations or whatever) was founded back when white people had the insurmountable technological edge, which they used to keep non-white people out[5]." It's not an altogether ridiculous claim, though it's almost certainly a self-serving one. I don't believe for a second Chinese nationalists want widespread racial equality, rather than, say, more economic and military power for China specifically. But it's a politically useful claim in part because western nations--and the U.S. in particular--spent centuries claiming these high-minded liberal values and then *very explicitly not living up to them.* It's easy to claim that they are *still* not living up to them, and just hiding it better.
"It’s an odd term to propagate, as if the British empire were to produce leaders who, while believing that Britain should run the world, that the real problem in the world was Anglo supremacism."
This is exactly the sort of muddled thinking that makes this possible: indeed this sounds like exactly the view one would hear from a white supremacist. The liberal view would be that *skin color* isn't the important thing: spreading liberalism is. Being white doesn't make one more *or* less qualified for that job, but ideologies like white supremacy are corrosive to it. It's much harder for Western leaders to convincingly push liberalism if they're engaging in highly illiberal practices (and white supremacy is about as illiberal as it gets), so denouncing aligns well with that goal.
[1] Who at the time made up a much smaller proportion of the overall population.
[2]I'd be irresponsible if I didn't note that the particular conception of "races" including "white" as an inherently important category that underlies this belief is (as far as I understand) at least partly made up to support it. Of course there are many different genetic lineages of human, but where you draw the lines is pretty subjective even when backed by modern genetics and was *much more so* a century or three ago. *Genetically* there really isn't anything special about skin color (again, as far as I understand) that makes it a good choice to draw those lines but *socially* it's very useful as you can tell who's in the ingroup and who isn't just by looking.
[3] Arguably the feedback loop really kicked into high gear with the printing press, so it's been going for about 500 years and the epicenter of the scientific and technical explosion *has not* stayed in once place for that whole time. But it has (unsurprisingly) moved between places in fairly close cultural contact: Germany and Italy, then the U.K., arguably Germany again for a very short time, and then the U.S. after World War II. In a stunning act of stupidity the U.S. now seems to be doing its level best to *get rid of it.*
[4]Really its somewhat more complicated than this: generally they were trying to keep in much more closely than that. But as in the previous note, there was the most "leakage" across groups in close cultural contact. The U.S., of course, was founded by British people already fairly far along this process, for example, so it inherited quite a bit of scientific and technological knowledge from its founding.
[5] Note many of these organizations are indeed old enough for that to be plausible--though of course lots of other factors were at play.
That’s a gish gallop of nonsense. Reported for this comment
“ This is exactly the sort of muddled thinking that makes this possible: indeed this sounds like exactly the view one would hear from a white supremacist”
In any case you haven’t really made your case. If white supremacism was historically due to the triumph of the west, then regardless of skin colour now, everybody in the west are beneficiaries of the previous supremacism. Not that the organisations I mentioned are minority white countries yet. It’s just another way of saying western supremacy. This is the Chinese view. And it’s the correct view.
(And like a lot of the American driven debate on this your definition of white people is very narrowly focused on the US and a few Western European countries. All of Eastern Europe has a totally different history).
I’m also fairy content with western supremacy being ended, as I don’t really have a problem with China. Which is likely to not vassalize Europe like America is doing right now.
I'm sorry you didn't like the comment--I didn't much like how it came out either, as evidenced by the slightly later comment saying as much. But calling it a "gish gallop" seems like a frankly bizarre misuse of the term.
Like, first and foremost, this wasn't a debate. You asked a question, I made a somewhat-clumsy stab at answering it. Nobody was scoring points, no prizes were awarded. If you found the comment long-winded and unhelpful you could have always just, y'know, *stopped reading it.* I do that all the time. Just say "oops, this isn't worth more of my time" and move on with your life. Even if it were a debate, I wasn't making a bunch of independent points: more errors would just mean more points of attack for the central point I was trying to convey. (Also calling anything written a "Gash Gallop" is kind of inherently silly.)
"In any case you haven’t really made your case. "
Again, not a debate. I wasn't *trying* to make a case. I was trying to lay out a viewpoint that you seemed unaware of. Your comment was explicitly talking about what other people believe and how they talk about it: I was following suit and doing the same. I wasn't attempting to lay out my own beliefs and worldview around the subject, much less persuade anyone of them (though of course they can't help but inform what I write). My apologies for not making that clearer: I thought in the context of the conversation it would be quite plain.
"Reported for this comment..."
You can use the report button however you see fit, but again this seems rather silly. I hope you didn't think I was calling *you* a white supremacist: that would certainly have been hostile and out of line. But I think it should be pretty clear that I'm criticizing the *idea* your presenting, not its presenter. I quite like that this space doesn't allow for personal attacks. But a space where people cannot call out and criticize bad *ideas* is a space in which no interesting or consequential discussion may ever happen.
It’s a weird situation, but not unheard of. Putin is describing the war in Ukraine as being one against “Nazism.” To anyone not in Russia this reads mostly as farcical. But the Nazis had some pretty untermenschy perspectives on the Slavs as well, and that plus the, well, millions of Slavs they killed has lead to at least some credence within Russian borders for a definition of “Nazism” that also includes “hating Russians” alongside the “hating Jews” and “beliefs in racial purity/enforcement of racial hierarchy by an authoritarian state” that we in non-Russian world associate with the term. Of course, now that Russia is at war, given the domestic propaganda value of “we are once again threatened by Nazism from the West” as a domestic rallying cry, the Russian government is really putting its shoulder behind the Russia-specific conception of the term at home, which means in term that we see more of it popping up abroad.
I think you’ve identified a similar structure with respect to “white supremacy.” In the context of a diverse nation like the US, with its history of various forms of race-delineated oppression and power dynamics (slavery, segregation, Chinese exclusion act, Japanese internment, & what have you), we’ve worried about and developed language and expectations around “white supremacy” as a domestic ill – the understandable threat that, within an ethnically pluralistic democracy one ethnic group sets itself in a position of privilege and then doles that privilege out to its perceived racial ingroup while kneecapping its perceived racial outgroups. This is, as the kids used to say, “bad, m’kay” for the old republic, so we’ve got a history of fighting it and some pretty robust and well-broadcast language about how shitty it is.
Simultaneously, though, the non-US portions of the world were living through colonialism and its aftermath. Although colonialism need not be a “white supremacist” construct per se (see, e.g. Japan), as experienced by most of the actual globe it took the form of dominance over the non-European by the European. So there’s sort of a way you can look at international relations, from the colonization of the Americas to the Opium wars to the scramble for Africa to French nuclear testing in Polynesia etc etc etc, if you’re sitting in the post-colonial part of the world and say “looks like white supremacy to me.”
Add to that that China now has its own quasi-colonial/imperialist projects going (see, e.g. their work to corner the cobalt market in the DRC), which means that they are actively seeking language by which to relate to post-colonial nations (“wouldn’t you rather strike a blow against white supremacy by selling your minerals to a Chinese company, instead of reinforcing your nation’s colonial history of being oppressed by whites by selling to the French or the Americans?”) as well as a cudgel with which to push back on the west on the global stage (“hey American radicals, your country is preventing us from controlling the South China Sea – they say it’s something about a ‘rules based order’ but would you act up about it, maybe, if I call it ‘white supremacy’ instead?”). So China has been pushing this internationalist conception of “white supremacy” pretty hard of late.
Consider also that the Chinese domestic market has had a *lot* of exposure to media explaining to it that “Imperialism” is basically the worst thing one nation can do to another and China is a victim of it, and although it’s access to Western media is limited, they get more than enough of it to have seen the “fighting White Supremacy is good and heroic”-style media that we’ve been producing for the better half of 75 years. It’s no wonder, then, that the Chinese government prefers to explain its international products to its domestic audience (and that audience prefers to think of those projects) as “modern-day China, fighting White Supremacy” rather than “modern-day Chinese Imperialism.”
Those kind of factors, all moving in tandem, get you a weird world where, although different peoples may be using the same language, they very much don’t mean the same thing. A US President might want to “fight White Supremacy” domestically, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to dismantle the world bank. He will, however, continue to make use of and propogate the term, so to speak, since it makes sense for his dialogues with his domestic audience. He cares more for clarity in his communications with them than for any small secondary confusions it might create for a Chinese audience.
>Of course, now that Russia is at war, given the domestic propaganda value of “we are once again threatened by Nazism from the West” as a domestic rallying cry, the Russian government is really putting its shoulder behind the Russia-specific conception of the term at home, which means in term that we see more of it popping up abroad.
Just to clarify, the opposition to nazism in Russia didn't begin in 2022 or even 2014. The Soviet Union's sacrifices in the Great Patriotic War (less that regrettable Nazi collaboration in the early war we don't speak of) are their only successful national myth in modern history. Communism didn't work out, the robber capitalism of the 1990's worked out even less (though that was no reason to actually abandon it, just that it didn't get to talk at press conferences anymore), and so Russia has to fall back on what happened after June 22nd, 1941. Painting everyone who opposes Russia as a Nazi comes as naturally as for Israel painting everyone that opposes them an antisemite, or to paint every critic of the USA as anti-American And How Could You Forget What We Did For You In WW2?
True. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the original post.
What I meant to communicate, by my observation that the Russian government "is really putting its shoulder behind" the Russian conception lately, was that wartime pressures have lead the Russian government to push on/amp up a pre-existing cultural narrative, not that the narrative is newly created for purposes of the war.
Americans (the Americans I'm used to) define Nazis as people who kill Jews.
Russians define Nazis as people who kill Russians.
The difference can be confusing for Americans. It took me a while to sort it out.
At the most basic level, sure, though I think it's more complex than that. Rulers need legitimacy, and declaring yourself the heir of a historical responsibility that is relevant for the future is one of the ways to do that. The mission of the USA used to be to free the oppressed from the tyranny of the kings of Europe; with the decline of those institutions to little more than quaint amusement parks, that doesn't quite have the same pull it used to have. So, beginning with WW1 and in full force since WW2, the mission of the US became to spread freedom and democracy all over the globe, even if the beneficiaries weren't 110% on board. The Nazis were, of course, the archetypical opponent of that mission; the Nazis became almost-Americans (save for that whole Holocaust issue) and thus friends shortly thereafter, and Communists took their place.
The deciding factor for the enduring popularity of anti-Nazism, for the USA and especially for Russia (with a little whitewashing), is that WW2 was as close to a just war as it gets for them. Neither the proxy wars of the Cold War, nor the "Wars on Terror" that became the fashion in the 2000s, left anyone looking particularly good, so WW2 as the current legitimization it is.
This is a very important distinction when you have to explain neonazi synagogues in the Ukraine.
Are these synagogues "neonazi" by Russian standards, or by Western standards? Because, yeah, the Russian definition of "Nazi" is someone who wants to kill Russians, and after three and a half years of bloody war, I'm pretty sure "a whole lot of Russians need to die" is a fairly common position among Ukraine's Jews. And Christians, and Atheists, and Buddhists, and I think two of the three Ukrainian Rastafarians are on board with a fair bit of Russian-killing at this point.
But if you're writing in English for a western audience, you probably ought not use "Nazi" unless you mean the Western definition, or unless you're very explicit that you're using the parochial Russian definition.
Notice how "Tori Swain" disappeared and this "Shimmer" thing showed up. Same torrent of crap, all with a single distinct undertone: "Russia good, Ukraine bad".
I smell russki troll.
I think I'm discussing neonazi as a Ukrainian definition. Aka "the people who threatened Zelensky with murder if he stopped bombing Donetsk."
I'm pretty sure most Western people would say that a synagogue displaying swastikas is pretty neonazi -- but I'm loudly disagreeing with the idea that they know what-the-f--- they're talking about. Neonazi in Ukraine means something different... (There's also the idea of Azov being funded by Jews... so, when your neonazis are funded by Jews, ?!? -- Westerners heads explode).
After three and a half years of bloody war, most of the Ukraine would take a headshot at Zelensky, if he wasn't protected. Yes, maybe, some of them are "nationalists" (but if so, which nation? Donetsk has a substantial fraction of "We're Russian!" Transcarpathia says "We're Hungarian! Please, orban, come rescue us!").... but when your average front line age of soldier is over 50 years old, you do not have a country that is "hungering for Russian blood". (Accuracy compels me to say that there is some form of ritual cannibalism of dead Russians going on (not involving murder). I'm pretty sure this is both sides do it, so no finger pointing. This is some sort of "lucky" ritual that I'm pretty sure no one endorses. Peasant logic).
Neonazi synagogues?
Synagogues that display swastikas? They're for Neonazi militia types (azov should spring to mind).
That’s a very good synopsis thanks.
I’d largely agree. It seems to me that the US and the West in general has largely crippled itself with this rhetoric, the use of which is obviously going to be exported and amplified, particularly if US presidents use it.
What else could be used here? Just generic anti racist rhetoric maybe?
I think that cedes too much of the field. The dual use of 'white supremacy' in domestic and international contexts is a communications challenge, to be sure, but the domestic taboos around white supremacy, together with the domestic-use language those taboos create (and which simultaneously maintains those taboos) has enough domestic utility IMO that we'd be doing ourselves more harm than good if we dropped them just because others abroad are using them in a different way that creates some communication friction for us. The Soviet Union had its own ideas of what "freedom" meant, but that didn't mean we just abandoned the field and tried to find another word.
And besides, there's no formulation we could move to that couldn't just as easily be twisted the same way. We could start saying "anti-race-hierarchism" or "race-neutral power distribution" or what have you this week, and by next week Chinese messaging could just shift to the new model and explain to developing world leaders that the rules-based order is a racial hierarchy or creating a non-neutral power distribution between races or whatever.
> has enough domestic utility IMO that we'd be doing ourselves more harm than good if we dropped them just because others abroad are using them in a different way that creates some communication friction for us
But the term has historically meant European and later western hegemony across the world. Not discrimination in one country. A quick google and I find that the general consensus of the academic left is that white supremacy is in fact these very institutions I am criticising here
I also see that there’s also criticism of Brexit as white supremacism, but if you take whiteness to be something above national or ethnic identity then that makes no sense
It's commonly used as a magic-word argument, it has a different meaning in some academic/activist circles that has little to do with (say) skinheads with prison swastika tattoos or genteel racists refusing nonwhites access to their country club.
Not sure what you're arguing here. Terms have different meanings depending on the audience. I didn't know that for "white supremacy" until now, but it makes sense; why should Chinese netizens care about American internal politics when the behaviour of the Western alliance wrt China is much more relevant to Chinese interests? Do the Chinese have any obligation to use a different term so that Americans who know both uses aren't confused?
White supremacy must be quite confusing for the Chinese... surely you've seen their washing machine ad (it won "best ad of the year")?
If Chinese netizens don’t care about internal US politics then the use of the term is even odder.
> Do the Chinese have any obligation to use a different term so that Americans who know both uses aren't confused?
I’d bet the term has largely been popularised by the US itself. It would be interesting to look at the use over time.
Maybe they want the world run according to their values , not necessarily bybrhem.
If you see white supremacy as manifested in western values, then that doesn’t work. And “not necessarily by them” wouldn’t excuse the security council makeup anyway.
And if you dont, maybe it does.
Most of the world does though. What’s a fairly radical use of terminology which should be confined to the academic left exploded into political normality.
It would as if the Romans, post the social war (when Italian states fought for Roman citizenship), decided in order to end discrimination on the peninsula to “end Latin supremacy” and found that the terminology was used by enemies of Rome.
They wouldn’t, of course. We would find it really strange if there were thundering debates in the Senate about ending Roman or Latin supremacy.
I see a large number of essays from people offering dating advice where those people are*not* married with children.
I'm not surprised these essays exist (randoms love having opinions), but I *am* surprised that there is any demand for them. It's the equivalent of "I've lost over a thousand games of poker, let me give you some tips on how to play." Why would anyone take seriously the advice of someone who has failed at the primary goal of dating?
> where those people are*not* married with children.
Maybe they are successful at dating though. 🤷♂️
"Why would anyone take seriously the advice of someone who has failed at the primary goal of dating?"
Scott actually had a good essay on this. If you are healthy, it is hard for you to teach people with cerebral palsy how to walk. It just comes too natural to you. It is people with cerebral palsy who did a ton of practice to learn to walk who can do it well.
The problem is the picture is too muddled. Consider Andrew Tate, physically very fit, lots of money, pretty clothes. That is sexy, especially in a poor country like Romania. Everything else he says can be ignored compared to the importance of these. Someone looking like Danny DeVito working flipping burgers will not find a lot of dates by acting tough and negging and whatnot. Women are generally less visual than men, but visual stuff is more easily communicated than other stuff, as other stuff implies 1:1 learning, while visual stuff is like just going to a music club and being seen by a hundred women at once.
I used to be a (very low level) body-builder in a country in which that thing was fairly new and not widespread. I got women by just going to a music club wearing a tank top. There was always someone who decided she wants someone muscular, it was really easy.
> Consider Andrew Tate, physically very fit, lots of money, pretty clothes. That is sexy, especially in a poor country like Romania. Everything else he says can be ignored compared to the importance of these.
Andrew Tate is rich because he is a pimp who used the lover boy method. It was quite literally his job, for many years, to seduce women. Him and his brother thus can offer genuine insights into seduction - take "no" for an answer and move on immediately, the only way to sleep with a virgin girl is time, build time as quickly as possible with your would-be partner(s) (e.g. invite them along for work things, invite multiple girls out to the club at the same time), use an opening line that stands out from the crowd, etc.
The main problem is that his end goal is, y'know, to be a pimp, so some of his advice is irrelevant or even counterproductive to finding someone you would like to build your life with. For example, does it really get you closer to marriage if you tell 5 different girls from a dating site that you're going out to the club with some friends (editor's note: the "friends" are the other four girls), would they like to come, and then also use them as social proof on other girls at the club? Are the sorts of women that a pimp is interested in - young, easy to manipulate, etc - the sort you want to marry? Etc.
In the specific case of Tate, there's also the further consideration that his success case for giving advice isn't "the people who take his advice become more fulfilled and self-actualized according to their goals", it's "as many young men as possible share his videos and give him money".
The kind of advice that maximizes the latter goal is not the advice which helps his listeners, regardless of whether they want to be pimps or family men.
Surely there's an important distinction between advice on how to pull/successfully ask someone out, on the one hand; and advice on how to develop a relationship into something long term (with or without kids). There's no particular reason why someone good at one of these should be good at the other.
But there is a very particular reason why someone who was bad at asking people out would also be bad at getting a long term relationship. That is, a) every long term relationship starts with some version of asking someone out and b) having the confidence to ask women out is important to being successful in a relationship.
Not every long term relationship starts with some version of asking someone out. Sometimes you use intermediaries, and sometimes it's "so and so really likes you" (which is a prompt for the less confident).
Very few people meet through friends these days. In fact most people meet online, so maybe the skill of asking people out is less important, so my post was incorrect.
But a man who is unable to get women to sleep with him generally is going to have a much harder time getting into an LTR than a man who can. Reasons he can't pull will often be reasons that he can't attract a long term mate.
> the primary goal of dating?
Who says that marriage and children are the primary goal? Sounds like a bias!
As an alternative, many would say the primary goal of dating is having "free" sex.
https://x.com/CartoonsHateHer/status/1940941169745449247
> basically nobody is “qualified” to talk about dating bc if you’re successful then you don’t have enough experience and if you’re not then why should anyone listen to you
Noted by Ozy in this related post: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/why-all-dating-discourse-is-terrible
Ha! I agree with this take.
Besides, we just look at one videoclip from a Professional Sexy Guy like Eros Ramazotti, and we see it boils down to elegant clothes and showing emotion.
> Why would anyone take seriously the advice of someone who has failed at the primary goal of dating?
To Devil's Advocate this position, 'succeeding' at dating ends the game for monogamous people, but there's insight in 'failure'. It's entirely reasonable to think that someone who's dated a hundred people with varying but less-than-total 'success' might know more about the subject than someone who married early. I wouldn't be inclined to take job-hunting advice from someone who applied to a civil service job once, right out of university, and has had a steady career for twenty years.
Note also that I said 'varying success' above. Dating isn't a single-shot game with a binary outcome. Relationships can be deeper or more shallow, be fleeting or last for years. From the perspective of _dating_, a long-term relationship is probably only epsilon less successful than a short-term marriage.
"failed at the primary goal of dating" Interesting cultural assumption. Not everyone who is dating is trying to get married or have children. In my experience most people in th dating pool at any given point don't have that as a specific goal in mind.
That's probably one of the things which makes dating difficult. You don't just need to find mutual attraction, you need to find someone with compatible goals.
I knew someone who went through dating about 20 different women (at least) in college. Every time he found out "she wanted children." that was it.
The desire for children isn't even close to universal when it comes to college women.
Probably not even half want kids at that age (although this does change over time, the desire for 'no kids' is 100% genuine at the time).
He must be pretty poor at picking potential partners.
There were probably other reasons for breakups... but "wants kids eventually" was at around 95% of my high school gifted class, so... I think it depends on who you're talking to.
That's absolutely not my observation, not these days.
If someone had lost over a thousand games of poker, but won even more, that wouldn't be quite so crazy.
Cash poker is a long game. It also matters how much you win vs how much you lose. A proper poker strategy involves folding preflop about 80% of the time. Moreover, the variance is so high that the standard deviation is 3.2BB/100 (big blinds per 100 hands) in a smaple size of 100000. Note that the rake is also very high; poker is a tragic game where almost everyone is a long term loser.
Surprisingly, media from poker players who are losing IS in demand — memes, relatable scenarios, faulty but easy to understand hand analysis. Also, grifters (for a lack of better word, I don't think it's bad) who got so good at selling their content and feeding the egos of a certain type of poker player with easy-to-digest, pill-sized advice packages, that they haven't dedicated enough time at being great at poker. That makes sense though, because the income from being a poker influencer can make losing poker sustainable.
We’ve previously discussed Ellen Langer in some hidden open threads: one of the most prominent academic social psychologists in the US, the ‘mother of mindfulness’. Unfortunately, the main study on which her claims of ‘mind-body unity’ are based might as well not exist.
She appeared last week on the Lives Well Lived podcast, interviewed by Peter Singer, and listening to it, I felt the need to put my notes together an actually publish this.
Since the combination of social psychology, the replication crisis, and Peter Singer are of interest to this thread, I hope it won’t be out of place to share my own article here, a thorough look into Langer’s infamous ‘Counterclockwise’ study and its recent elaborations: https://nicoroman.substack.com/p/harvards-mother-of-mindfulness-is
Andrew Gelman on Langer: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/10/19/carroll-langer-credulous-scientist-as-hero-reporting-from-a-podcaster-who-should-know-better/
Yup, Gelman has been beating this drum for ages: his co-author, Brown, also gave feedback on the article.
Not aware of any past publication specifically pointing out these issues all in one place, though. There may be some use for a more widespread 'literature review' on the mind-body unity studies, starting with this one, to trace just how removed they are from reality. It would be Losada & Frederickson x10
I'm looking for a book recommendation (or extended essays) about the history of non-Egyptian North Africa between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Muslim conquests.
It's a complete blank in my historical knowledge and it's been less than obvious how to fix that.
Will Durant's Story of Civilizations covers this a little in book 3: The Age of Faith.
I don't know much about the history of the region in general, but for the Byzantine (re-)conquest, Ian Hughes' "Beliarius: The Last Roman General" has a good section on the campaign. Or, if you'd prefer primary sources, Procopius' "History of the Wars" spends a book or two on the campaign. And Robert Graves (of "I, Claudius" fame) wrote a novel, "Count Belisarius", which naturally covers the titular character's campaigns, including in Africa.
The low dose lithium orotate (currently sold as a supplement) to prevent/treat Alzheimer’s concept seems like potentially a big deal. It seems that the orotate salt bound to the lithium is key.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/lithium-and-its-potential-protection?publication_id=587835&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=d5wb0&utm_medium=email
Questions:
How fast could human trials be initiated? Who would pay for them in the absence of a patent? Why was lithium carbonate chosen over lithium orotate in the treatment of bipolar? Do national governments ever jointly fund international drug trials with high potential or does that introduce too much friction in the process?
It seems lithium's effect had shown up earlier:
https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1954418924038271422
He doesn't explicitly mention it, but seems to be referring to the idea in this thread:
https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1954363426068992485
A few months ago, my Dad had a stroke and lost the ability to care for himself, along with suffering an altered and diminished mental state. My Mom decided to put him in hospice. He passed away four weeks later. A friend recommended reading "Who By Very Slow Decay," presumably to help me accept that this was a better outcome than lingering longer with medical interventions.
I have some observations (as a non-medical guy) from the "let nature take its course" side of the fence:
"Artificial life saving measures" includes things as minor as a hydration IV. Dad's advance medical directive specified he did not want artificial interventions to extend his life, and in the event of a situation like this, he only wanted palliative care. To my mind, this means not wanting ventilators, AEDs, and other majorly intrusive measures. It can actually be much broader in scope.
The hospice's only real tool is morphine. The doctors at the hospital encouraged us to transfer Dad to hospice, and talked up how the hospice had better tools to make him comfortable, and how he would have a great pain management plan. It turned out the only tool the hospice had was morphine. Dad's breathing seems labored? Morphine. He seems scared and confused? Morphine. Morphine was the answer to every problem.
Deciding to let nature take its course is harder when the medical team is divided over whether the condition is terminal. A minority of the doctors and specialists who examined Dad thought he could recover. Dad couldn't stay in the hospital forever though, so he had to go to rehab or hospice. After several family arguments, hospice won out.
On the whole, I suspect that keeping Dad on artificial life support (even as little as IV fluids and nutrients) based on the slim hope that he could recover, probably would be a worse outcome than letting him die sooner in hospice. But it wasn't a slam-dunk decision either. Life and death are complex things, I guess.
Thanks for sharing this, and I'm sorry for you and your father's ordeal. That is a bit of an eye-opener - it's unpleasantly surprising that hydration IVs would count. I am going to keep that in mind for these sorts of things. Severe dehydration feels awful, and water+electrolytes is such an easy miracle cure (and so fast-acting) that the idea of instead just papering it over with more morphine is disturbing.
That's the part I feel the most conflicted about. I get that hydration would prolong life and suffering, but dehydration is terrible.
Scott wrote about "Who by very slow decay" some time ago (including a few words on the use of morphine):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
He also wrote more about that post here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
... it's the same picture
I think greatyard is making fun of javiero for posting a link to the same post that OP was already talking about.
I have never understood this formulation: funding "up to $1-2m." Isn't it in fact just "up to 2m?"
I would read it as "probably around a million, but if we're lucky then it could be two million. Two million is possible, but don't get your hopes up, it'll probably be around one."
Very sensible unpacking.
Agreed, this always bugs me. It's right up there with "Up to 50% off ... and even higher!"
You are right. It should be "up to 2m." Pointing this out is not nitpicking.
Just as "up to $2M or more" would be maximally vague. https://xkcd.com/870/
Unless you add "could be".
No, "up to" could refer to both the minimum and the maximum. $0-2m is different to $1-2m.
I guess I am just too dense. To my simple mind, "up to" seems clearly to refer to whatever the maximum is, nothing to do with the minimum . . . especially since the minimum is specifically stated to be $100K.
My simple mind agrees with your simple mind. I don't know how "up to" could refer to a minimum.
Yes, but people do it all the time, maximum and minimum. I was once buying a house; the real estate agent said, "I believe the owner would accept a minimum offer between $150K and $175K." Gee, I wondered to myself, which minimum should I offer?
We're venturing into very nitpicky territory here but it says on their site "We provide funding up to £1 million (and in some cases, more)" and also that "The Alignment Fund will award grants ranging from £50,000 to £1,000,000."
So plausibly the $1-2m formulation was to cover "up to $1.34m (or even more)". Seems reasonable. The floor is $67k though not $100k.
Oh, sure, it's nitpicky, I was just noting a personal pet peeve. However, I was commenting only on the formulation in the post itself, not the website it was summarizing, so I am not clear how the website is relevant. But that's probably just because I am so slow.
I was describing my own nit-pickiness rather yours, and was just chiming in in in case the website gave any explanation to the formula. Given that the limit was described as "£1m (or even more)" I think this did offer some light on the formulation used (the maximum is uncertain but in most cases it's $1.3m).
She left me so I made an AI replica of her: Digital Relationships could have a greater impact than The Pill.
This is a Substack piece I wrote detailing some of the pros and cons of having relationships with AI, whether they be romantic or otherwise.
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/she-left-me-so-i-made-an-ai-replica
Classic sf improves every conversation.
I recommend "Day Million" by Pohl.
For people who didn't look up the story: two people who resemble a man and a woman find they're really into each other. After the first meeting, they exchange recordings of each other rather than meeting again in person.
"And maybe, just maybe, when robotics gets advanced enough…"
Apparently there are already sex doll brothels?
https://archive.ph/HBlj6
"For roughly $11,000, robot companies from China to California – with names like RealDolls, Lovedoll, TrueCompanion, Lumidolls, Silicon Wives – can sell you AI-enhanced, customized robot dolls for sexual purposes.
Buyers get to choose everything from hair and eye colour to the internal texture of its robot vagina and appearance of its labia (there are nipple and labia menus). It can have ‘smart skin’, so that it doesn’t feel like cold dead latex. Consumers can program its personality – cheerful, moody, sensual, jealous, chatty – or program it to be silent.
RealDolls are programmed to say: “We blink, we move, we speak, and we do it just for you.”
AI means these female-appearing machines can interact with their purchaser in a humanoid manner, rather than just being a next-level blow-up doll.
The market for sex robots continues to grow – industry analysis shows how the global sex tech market is projected to reach $107,850 billion in 2030, up from $36,555bn in 2023, an increase of 16.7pc annually.
...Anthropologist Roanne Van Voorst, author of Six In A Bed, has extensively researched sex robots, including visiting a sex doll brothel in Austria (where she had the opportunity to have sex with a male sex doll, but declined).
“I’m afraid I very largely agree with Professor Richardson,” she says. “There now exists a narrative that these dolls will soon be very normal, and that they are not harmful, but I believe that it is the industry pushing this narrative with the aim of popularising the [sex robots] and making more money from them.
“I do believe they are harmful, as they stereotype and objectify women’s bodies, and offer a very unrealistic version of sex: one in which the sexual partner is always ‘to be taken’, one in which clumsiness and awkwardness do not exist, and one in which vulnerability is not possible.
“There may be exceptions, but these are minority groups: I can imagine that prisoners who will likely never leave jail again but are wrestling with a lot of sexual frustration could use dolls, likewise people with sexual fetishes who would otherwise harm a human being.”
Dr Van Voorst recounts one individual’s atypical encounter with a sex doll, purchased for non-sexual reasons: “Once, I met a woman who identifies as asexual. She bought herself a doll because she felt it is impossible to have romantic relationships – the men in her life couldn’t cope with never having sex.
“This made her feel lonely, and having the doll around, sitting next to it on a sofa or touching its hand, decreased her sense of loneliness. Her story touched me. That having been said, the question is whether there would not be another option for her – a cat, maybe?”
Don't worry, now you can have both your AI Ada and your robot sex doll version of her!
Fake cats are also getting improved.
Just doesn't make sense to me. Where I live human prostitutes get low ratings if they do not simulate enthusiasm very well. It feels good to feel sexy and wanted, even if it is fake. That is kind of the whole point, sex a "trophy", as proof of attractiveness.
I would say in Budapest in 1993 nobody talked about consent, and yet we did not rape anyone, because we understood that to truly get the trophy, there should be something that todays people would call enthusiastic consent. Real seduction, real passionate buy-in.
I am afraid, anyone who likes sex with dolls might also rape someone via spiking a drink, because this mechanism is just not there. This is just a dangerous mindset.
I think the idea is that you can program the doll to be the personality you want - so if you want bubbly, "I love you so much, I can't wait to be with you" type dialogue you get that, and if you want "stand-offish but I can't resist *you*" type, you can get that.
And if you already have an AI girlfriend/boyfriend, like the Replika instances, just download them into the preferred body. The best of both worlds!
I think the idea of this (right now) is for people who can get the money together but don't have a social life and don't want to hire prostitutes as that smacks too much of "desperate loser who can't get a real girlfriend". With their doll, they can have that girlfriend, or at the very least, only the doll witnesses them being the desperate loser who has to pay for sex that everyone else gets for free.
Yes, there's a virtual option and a body option.
I think the robotics become really powerful when the two are married together in one body.
I like your idea of AI companions that are designed to train users at getting more comfortable with non-AI companions and encourage them to get out and practice. To be really effective I think it would have to be in VR to get the exposure effect(similar to the oVRcome app).
Maybe when VR becomes easier to use and not so heavy. But yes, VR would make it more immersive
Might be worth noting that this is fictional/speculative right? You haven't struck up a relationship with a digital version of your ex?
In the piece it starts saying this is fictional. My wife wouldn't be too happy if I had even a virtual girlfriend. ;-)
Sorry, I meant on the substack comment :)
Pertinent C.S. Lewis quote here. From "That Hideous Strength", published 1945:
“Who is called Sulva? …Where are the cold marriages?”
Ransom replied, “Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. …On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
And it only took us eighty years to turn this from fiction into nearly-there fact!
One of the many asides in Lewis’ work I wish he’d developed further!
Oh, making an AI doll of your ex isn't the spookiest thing out there.
How about making an AI doll of your murdered son?
https://www.axios.com/local/miami/2025/08/06/ai-joaquin-oliver-parkland-school-shooting
"It's been over seven years since Joaquin Oliver was gunned down at his Parkland high school, one of 17 victims killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018.
With the use of artificial intelligence, he just did his first press interview.
Why it matters: Joaquin's parents are using AI to give their son a new voice, which they plan to use in their yearslong campaign against gun violence.
In an interview Monday on "The Jim Acosta Show," an AI rendering of Joaquin's face advocated for "stronger gun control laws, mental health support and community engagement."
"I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It's important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone."
...This isn't the first time the Olivers have backed the use of AI to send a political message using Joaquin's likeness.
In a 2020 video promoting voter registration efforts, an AI version of Joaquin talks about not being able to vote in the presidential election and his frustration with the lack of action to prevent more shootings.
The other side: Oliver responded to critics in an Instagram video saying Joaquin "has a lot of things to say" and "thanks to AI, we can bring him back."
Here's that 2020 video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6I_wEetSck
Yes, folks: horrors beyond human comprehension coming to your town next Tuesday!
You know, most of the time I kinda *like* living in an SF novel....
If they want the AI replica for doing publicity, it's weird (I speak as part of the potential audience), but not as weird as if they wanted it for companionship.
There's that bit in _A Grief Observed_ about not having actual memories of a lost person, just more or less incomplete memories of memories.
I'm facing a tough medical decision, and someone on a previous open thread suggested I try and nerdsnipe someone into looking at the evidence. I worry a little this is somewhat against the norms of these Open Threads, and I apologise if it is, but I thought it might be worth a shot:
1. My problem
I've had 3 adhesive small obstructions (ASBOs) in 4 years. An ASBO is a mechanical blockage of the small intestine caused by intra-abdominal adhesions (scar bands), most often after surgery/inflammation. Some people also develop chronic adhesion-related abdominal pain between episodes; others are symptom-free between acute obstructions. My first episode seemed to be caused by a congenital adhesion, it required a laparotomy where the adhesion was released; my subsequent episodes were managed non-operatively, and are likely due to the post-surgical adhesions.
2. Current medical practice
When an ASBO episode occurs, it is sometimes managed non-operatively, but other times requires emergency surgery, which involves releasing the adhesions (called 'adhesiolysis') causing the obstruction, and sometimes removing the obstructed part of the bowel. The default is to watch-and-wait; avoid elective adhesiolysis because surgery itself can form new adhesions. Elective surgery is usually for chronic pain that’s clearly adhesion-related, or (rarely) for patients with extremely frequent recurrences (e.g., every few months).
3. Proposed preventive approach
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9872389/
This paper proposes a a preventive approach: use an imaging technique to map adhesions; perform planned adhesiolysis, and place 'barriers' to hinder adhesion re-formation. In their 5-year cohort, elective surgery + barriers was associated with ≈3–4× fewer ASBO readmissions vs non-operative management. However, the cohort comprised only patients with chronic abdominal pain
4. Questions
Adhesion barriers were not used in my initial laparotomy. I think the case that the authors make in the Discussion--for this approach being suitable even for people with recurrent ASBO who don't have chronic pain--makes sense. I think the fact of chronic abdominal pain is not necessary for the elective procedure to reduce future ASBO recurrence risk via the mechanism they propose, ie, barriers preventing adhesion re-formation. Some of the authors are involved in a larger scale RCT comparing their approach to the current wait-and-watch approach (https://kce.fgov.be/en/kce-trials/funded-trials/aware-elective-adhesiolysis-vs-wait-and-see-policy-to-prevent-recurrence-of-adhesive-small-bowel) which begins this September and ends in 2029. I think the evidence as it stands right now is sufficient to weight in favour of the elective approach, but this is pretty much my first time reading any kind of scientific literature. Some concerns I have are:
a. The sample size is too small to capture a meaningful effect
b. The paper is misrepresenting the existing evidence they cite in their favour
Fwiw, I've reached out to the corresponding author of the study (ten Broek), as well as other surgeons who have published on the topic of ASBO, and ten Broek has been the only one who endorsed generalising the results to people without chronic pain; the others have either deferred to ten Broek on the question, or said the evidence is insufficient to justify elective surgery without chronic pain
You'll find most people underestimate the side effects and "null response" of surgery (let alone "this surgery makes the whole issue worse"). The doctors are probably telling you "surgery is dangerous, and to be used as a last resort." Which is good advice.
Is it possible that you can fix this with diet?
It is unclear if I can fix this with diet - things like smaller meals and lower fibre intake might reduce the risk but there's no good evidence; doctors generally refrain from making any dietary recommendations. I'd love to avoid surgery altogether, but it seems like past ASBOs predict upwards of a 30% lifetime probability of future ASBOs, any of which may require emergency surgery; the paper is making the case that planned surgery now might be a better gamble than future emergency surgery
"...doctors generally refrain from making any dietary recommendations."
I can't tell if you mean that doctors generally refrain from making dietary recommendations about/for ASOB or in general. But it is quite common for doctors to recommend the DASH Diet for folks with high blood pressure. Folks doing cardiac rehab get dietary recommendations, too.
If you believe that this lack of recommendation is ASOB specific then I have no advice. But it is quite possible to get dietary advice from doctors for some conditions so if ASOB is one of those conditions then maybe you just haven't encountered the doctors who will provide dietary advice?
Doctors give lots of advice, some of it contradictory.
"How to fix your body has stopped intestinal contractions"
9 doctors: Eat More Fiber.
1 Chinese Doctor: Eat the greasiest chinese food you can find.
A meme:
"God, I can't tell you how much the "There's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "your head gets screwy when your apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit,? The tiger? I've got to keep things nice and clean for the tiger."
Tentative theory (and I'm not saying this approach would work for everyone), These days, a lot of zoo animals get more consideration than a high proportion of people. Tigers are especially cool.
No one expects a tiger to prove their moral superiority by enduring bad conditions.
Zoo keepers have relatively abundant resources compared to most parents, so there aren't issues of who's in charge compared to parents who can't do everything their kids want, and who are likely to resist demands, whether reasonable or not.
I just remembered a former job, long ago, where I felt trapped. Once in a while I walked in a circle in a small empty room and muttered: "The cat is angry. He wants to be released from the cage." Then I quit, and my mental health improved a lot. :)
That's one of Jordan Peterson's 12 rules: "Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping."
It really does help. Years ago I was trying and failing to get enough dietary fiber, which I needed to do for health reasons. In my fiber research I learned more about the gut microbiome, and what kinds of foods those microbes like to eat. I started thinking about my gut bacteria as a pet I was trying to take care of, like a fish. I wouldn't forget to feed the fish! Somehow that made me more enthusiastic and conscientious about eating fiber regularly. "Got to feed my gut pets! Don't want them to go hungry."
You prove that you're a human by keeping the entropy from eating everything.
This is a great line.
Imagining yourself as an outside observer can be very useful for people who are too hard on themselves. One of the strategies used in cognitive behavioral therapy when people think things like "I'm worthless" is to reframe it using the criteria of "Would you say that to a friend? Would you even say that to a stranger?"
It's sort of an inverted golden rule too, treat yourself as you treat others
That doesn't really help if you're a misanthrope.
They say it also helps to speak to yourself in the second or third person…or tiger apparently 🐯
What do you think are the most important questions that we should be asking which are currently not getting much attention?
How do tacit agreements which make life easier work?
Assuming the current fertility trends continue for a long time[1], what does the eventual stable state look like? Like, do we end up with the population everywhere dominated by groups that have high fertility ("and the Amish shall inherit the Earth")? Does fertility rebound at some point when population density is sufficiently low? It's not obvious that this must happen--perhaps the same social/economic/cultural/whatever forces that lead to very low TFR will affect even the high-fertility groups. (IIRC, Mormons now have relatively low TFR, as do Catholics.) You can also imagine some truly bitter political / social conflicts as the wealthy high-education minority and the poorer, lower-education ever-growing majority fight over resources (more schools or better old-folks care)?
Maybe we get improved healthcare that staves off aging for longer, maybe prevents much of the age-related mental decline and the horrors of dementia for most people. That can stretch things out, but not forever. Diminishing returns apply to most everything, so maybe in the world of 2125, the LeBron James equivalent keeps playing well into his 60s and people are still doing cutting-edge science in their 90s.
Also (because this is now baked into most of the developed world) what does the actual world look like with a rapidly falling population and the median age being like 60+? I haven't really seen anyone coming to terms with what this will look like. What does the transition look like as most of the people from higher-TFR times die off?
I think demographic collapse is our future now. Maybe it could be headed off in the US in principle (imagining some new Great Awakening that turns everyone into old-style Mormons/Catholics or current-day Amish/Orthodox Jews), but maybe not in Korea or Italy--there are just not all that many girls of childbearing age available.
[1] How AI plays with all this is another question. Obv. if we all get paperclipped by hostile AI, it doesn't matter what our TFR is, and if humans are unable to do much science anymore because even the Gausses and Newtons and von Neumanns just don't have the mental horsepower to keep up, then the loss of young scientists with supple minds doesn't matter so much.
I'll say one thing I put into my future-based SF I'm writing that I haven't seen anyone's thought of yet: pawn shops will be filled with gold and precious gems because of supply/demand; museums will hand out works of art to approved applicants to care for in their homes, because the alternative is just to stack them up in warehouses. Antiques are ubiquitous and worthless, but people still like the cachet of them.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how-long-will-population-fall
What can't you do research on, and why is that? There are significant chunks of topics that are "banned research" and thus not discoverable online. (A related question is: who keeps murdering the scientists?)
Any medical or psychological research in involuntary human test subjects. The first one that popped into my head is "The Forbidden Experiment", the name given to experiments where infants isolated from human contact are studied for their capacity for language and cognitive development. Once upon a time these experiments were conducted on purpose, nowadays it's only brought out when a "wild child" is discovered who had either been abandoned in the wilderness or seriously deprived of human affection.
There are more limited forms of this experiment, sometimes conducted by happenstance. Imagine a child with perpetual ear infections. He's not getting nearly the oral tradition, but still getting affection (some at least). Guy I know who went through this came out with a custom pictoral language. Speaking English is always translating for him.
???
We truly live in uncertain times. I'm probably not supposed to mention what's not allowed to be discussed.
Remember how you were taught that FDR had polio? (spoiler: he didn't. his paralysis was directly traceable to pesticides used on apples).
Dude, just say the thing you're "not supposed to mention" directly or shut up. Save the dark hinting for /r/conspiracy.
*Citation needed
https://www.ehdp.com/out/jmb_2003_v11_p232-240.pdf
Ctrl-F "pesticides" - 0 results.
That paper argues that FDR had Guillaine-Barre Syndrome instead of polio, which is medically interesting but definitely not deserving of all this "ooh what aren't they telling you" bullshit.
"Are you still eating right and exercising?"
Really? That seems to a question that is unceasingly and eternally asked all the time; by the media, by medical professionals, and by random friends and relatives.
There isn't another question that gets asked more frequently in the cultural conversation, I don't think. 'Diet and Exercise' can and will fix absolutely everything that ails an individual these days. No exceptions.
It might depend on locale. In my neck of the US, I get the sense this is now a gauche question to ask; instead I hear "are you taking $drug/supplement?" or whether you took action against whatever institution did not install allowances for whatever's currently falling apart on your body. There seems to be this default assumption that individual habits are not at fault, or at least, eating and exercise habits. A person might still be considered to have a habit of not taking their vitamins or whatever.
As you might guess, I'd *prefer* to be asked about eating right and exercising.
That's a significant difference. Is this a recent change?
Here, the locus of control traditionally has been and still is firmly laid at the feet of the individual, and all things are solvable if you would only eat right and exercise more. Supplements etc are treated as being a minor sub-category of 'eating right'.
Individual behaviours are still very much at fault, and every doctor or medical professional will not hesitate to tell you so.
The impression I get is that the fault you incur in not taking some drug is even more onerous than what you incur for not eating right or exercising, because a drug is easy. It's possible that this is coupled with the assumption that a doctor who can sell you a drug gets compensation from the drug supplier, and gets nothing if he convinces you to eat or exercise better.
If this is true, then it makes sense for the doctor to favor the drug advice over the traditional advice, and it makes sense for the drug supplier to buy ads that encourage viewers to see nothing wrong with using their drug to fix their problem while making no mention of eating right or exercising. (Admittedly, this is a cynical angle, and I don't usually go for cynical explanations, but this does have the advantage of aligning with the incentives I notice.) In such an environment, "have you been eating right and exercising?" indeed becomes deprived of attention.
Now, if it's brought up, a doctor will certainly say eating right and exercising is fundamentally important to health... but I think he'll still try to sell you the Ozempic. (He won't sell many drugs if he denies the other claim, after all.)
This sounds like we are experiencing the different responses to the different incentives in our respective medical systems.
I follow your reasoning, even if it is a bit bleak. Thanks for taking the time to explain it because I doubt if I would have figured it out for myself, since I was working from a completely different set of assumptions; much more optimistic and much less focussed on drug sales.
In the light of this new information, being repeatedly told to eat right and exercise does indeed seem like a pretty solid option.
What does (or should) degrowth look like not as an ideology, but as an emergent phenomenon because of lower TFR? I see a lot of doomsaying, but the solutions are all focused on raising TFR instead of accepting it as a reality and grappling with the consequences.
The road to zero is grappling with the consequences. Electric cars are grappling with the consequences. Imagine a world where oil refinement no longer makes sense? I mean, we have all of this.
That nobody is explicitly telling you that they're planning ways to depopulate the world should not surprise you. Find better sources.
Okay, but what about issues like immigration, entitlements and the national debt? Seems like policy makers should be grappling with that.
Banned for weird string of semi-incomprehensible posts, of which this is one example.
Okay.
> but the solutions are all focused on raising TFR instead of accepting it as a reality and grappling with the consequences
Think of it this way - whichever country / culture solves this will literally own the future light cone. Their people, ideas, and practices will extend into the future, and nobody else's will.
Combine that with the vast majority of voters / citizens hating degrowth empirically, and you have a handy recipe for guaranteeing focus on fixing TFR rather than embracing literal cultural extinction.
Eh, maybe. It doesn't have to last forever. It's possible to imagine a 50 year period of degrowth, then a technological or social change that turns growth back on. If China's population shrunk by two thirds it would still have a gigantic market.
Probably the one you just asked.
One thing driving polarisation is the perception that there are hardly any moderates--if you believe virtually everyone who votes for the other party is a sociopathic extremist, of course you're going to hate and/or fear the entire other side.
Of course this isn't remotely true when it comes to ordinary people, but it often looks true when it comes to vocal opinionated people, especially those who comment online. But I'm skeptical it's true even for them, to anything like the extent that it looks. I think that while a lot of commenters are extreme, a lot are also quite moderate but you'd never know it because there are a bunch of perverse incentives discouraging one from admitting this during a debate with someone they strongly disagree with (losing potential allies in that debate, and sounding like they're not really fully repudiating their opponent's values, are just two examples). Moloch strikes again.
So to declare war on Moloch, and try to not so much encourage moderation as to unmask the moderation that already exists, I propose a kind of ritual where we regularly link to examples of ourselves arguing with different sides of an issue or with partisans of opposite ideologies. One problem I have personally is that I kind of hate the term "moderate" because it implies that you take a sort of cowardly wishy washy "both sides have a point" on everything, instead of getting murderously angry at the proud sociopaths and hypocrites on all the different "sides", as I do. (EDIT: Since this is being misunderstood, I'm saying I'm not really a moderate, my attitudes are often very extreme, as in the following examples, but they're extreme in both directions, against both sides' extremists.)
Here's my sprawling argument with a Christian fundamentalist: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124494355
Here's me criticising Yudhowsky for his (among other things) anti-Christian arrogance:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44751417
Here's me condemning the libertarian rhetoric of pro-choice progressives
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comment/52665511
And here's me condemning the authoritarian rhetoric of law-and-order conservatives
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-338/comment/62081891 and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally/comment/62429600
May add more. I'd like the sociopaths of each side to know when I'm condemning them, it's not because of what side they're on, it's because they're a sociopath.*
Does anyone else want to share examples of them condemning both sides (of a single issue or of the political spectrum as a whole)? I honestly think the more people clearly do this, the less polarised things will be.
(*EDIT: Not saying the people actually responding to me in those threads are in that category. Merely the ones with the beliefs at issue.)
People who vote for Trump support the President deploying the military against US citizens for trivial reasons. Anybody who supports this is an enemy of civilization and I look forward to the plenitude of political violence that will be unilaterally carried out by the next Executive who opposes them. There is no comparable polarization to what Trump and his supporters have done publicly this past few months. There also is no rational argument that will convince you or his other supporters, but the full power of the state coming after you and say, indefinitely detaining you overseas like the members of the AEA flights, will hopefully be your wake up call.
Yeah, online, you're generally in the middle of a push-pushback cycle. I'm going to encourage everyone to "take the devil's advocate", and ask the other guy to do the same. If you can't argue the other guy's position (and better than he's doing), you still have a lot to learn about debate.
There are a TON of people who'd vote for Bernie and Donald Trump. Either they're "we need something new, the current approach isn't working" or they're "integrity" people -- will vote for the not-blackmailed, and let the crazy fall where it may.
> One thing driving polarisation is the perception that there are hardly any moderates--if you believe virtually everyone who votes for the other party is a sociopathic extremist, of course you're going to hate and/or fear the entire other side.
High-dimensional balls are spiky.
Take fifty different, uncorrelated issues; you're statistically likely to have a 1%-extreme (two-tailed) opinion on at least one of them, even if you're a perfect example of a random person.
That's not enough to drive extremism by itself because you don't necessarily have to care strongly about that 1%-issue, but social media is very good at amplifying your interests. Give the algorithm enough data, and your preference that your city council plant tulips rather than daisies might just become an unhinged crusade through echo-chamber amplification.
Centralized politics avoids this reducto ad insanum by pre-filtering issues through an elite filter, for both bulk issues and socially acceptable methods/reasons. E.g. it's okay to not like immigration because immigrants compete for labour, but it isn't (wasn't) okay to not like immigration because immigrants are brown.
Current politics, amplified by social media, no longer imposes this filter, and two people can arrive at similar policy preferences through very different values and reasons. It makes public principled policy pugilism precarious.
> High-dimensional balls are spiky.
This is a great insight about why extremism seems to be inevitable. Thanks!
+1
"One problem I have personally is that I kind of hate the term "moderate" because it implies that you take a sort of cowardly wishy washy "both sides have a point" on everything, instead of getting murderously angry at the proud sociopaths and hypocrites on all the different "sides", as I do."
The problem there is that a lot of people on the other side are *not* sociopaths and hypocrites; they come by their opinions honestly, or they are mistaken but not wicked, or this is how they've been brought up and influenced to think e.g. that constant stream of golden gifts that is the Sequoia Capital interview with Sam Bankman-Fried about how he reasoned his way, aged twelve, into the same conclusions about abortion as all those around him held - so convenient that he happened to come to the same conclusions, wasn't it? meant he didn't have to disagree with his parents or peers or school or environment:
"One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith."
I've had to struggle with this, coming to the mushy moderate middle "both sides have a point" view, as I too want to be the crusader of righteous anger lambasting the heathen. But not everyone is due a lambasting.
The thing is, we don't have any useful instinct or natural intuition for large-scale political/social/economic issues. Ideas can seem self-evidently right to lots of people that, when implemented as a large-scale political system, lead to godawful tragedies. See the history of Communism for a list of examples, but there are plenty of others. Even stuff like forbidding interest ("usury") or setting a maximum price on bread just a little below the cost of production seems great but will lead to awful outcomes.
The lesson I think we should take from this is that our intuitions about politics and such are just not much good, and so we should have low confidence in them. This suggests (to my mind) a cautious and incremental approach to social and political change. I don't think there's anyone who reliably has the ability to look at a massive proposed change to the government or economy or society and really understand how it will work out. Ideology is great for giving you a very confident belief that you can do this, but its track record isn't so great.
Self-righteousness is a drug. I try to only imbibe it when the other side is particularly heinous, stupid AND murderous to boot.
I posit that the people who remember enough arguments and links to be able to do this are not actually moderates.
Ugh.
If that's what a moderate is...someone so disengaged, so brain dead, and above all so selfish and childish that they regard discussions of global moral issues as nothing but a momentary entertainment to be forgotten in a day...we really definitely need another word for what I'm referring to.
(I really hope you're not *endorsing* that attitude here. It kind of sounds like you are from the tone of your comment, but maybe I'm misreading it.)
I posit the selfish and childish position is the one that records the dates and times of each of their debates for future reference.
It's like that kid from Horizon Zero Dawn who throws a rock at a five-year-old, and is still bragging about it thirteen years later.
Wow. Just...wow.
So first there's the proud stupidity ("I'm incapable of remembering anything that happened before yesterday, and I also have no idea how to use an email search function. But this is a good thing! It's *good* to be stupid! It is! It is! Honest!")
Then there's the childishness. I can scarcely imagine someone older than, like, 12 not being able to tell the difference between a discussion of life-and-death moral questions and a random playground fight. Just...do you even comprehend the existence of an adult world where there are serious decisions with far greater consequences than something to brag about???
And finally there's the unimaginable selfishness. Apparently you not only treat democracy, truth, and the world's injustices as nothing but an opportunity to brag on the internet, but you are unable to comprehend that anyone else might not.
All in all I'm...honestly not sure I've seen anyone in this entire comments section who's deserving of less respect.
The picture of moderation, is our ascend.
You can call those people geniuses or morons. Because they're both. Why bother considering global moral issues if you lack the capacity to change them? (Remember, the cost to bribe your local is about $2000 for a corporate interest. If you don't even have that much free money, how do you expect to change US policy about supporting terrorism?)
It's not the people who don't get involved I was referring to. It was the ones who do, but actually just view it as entertainment or a joke.
Morons is the *kindest* description I can think of for such people.
I dunno. When the Russians caught the trashbarge, it was kinda funny.
ISIS (international Islamic Terrorist Organization) apologizing to Israel publically is also kinda funny. (As is the Palestinian take on ISIS).
If you can't laugh at international stupidity, you're likely to wind up crying.
Sanctions will crush russia in 2 months was hilarious if you know any of the numbers involved.
To try and summarise the final two arguments:
-Extremely late term abortion is wrong, especially when advocates of late-term abortion act as if it's wrong to question it. Some people might even bite the bullet and say it's fine to commit infanticide for newborns, following this same logic.
This probably has 80-90% agreement when framed in these terms, and outside of certain political, medical, or academic circles would almost certainly cause moral outrage. The only people who bit were people saying "I'm not familiar with anyone who advocates this" followed by some people advocating it.
-You expressed a) massive outrage at what you saw as the tyranny of criminalisation of the homeless but more importantly b) argued that everyone else was being wildly incoherent. Most people replied with some explanation of their views, which were either ignored or responded to with aghast horror. You then wrote up an ask for clarity (expressing more disbelief) and then the only people who replied said, "yep you've got it, option 2 like you outlined" which is:
"Camping in certain public spaces (sidewalks etc) is a crime, camping in other public spaces (fields or forests) is not"
This seems to me to be... eminently reasonable? Maybe 80% of people would again support this? I certainly wouldn't describe it as sociopathic.
So to my read your criticism of the left-liberals appears to be to criticise an extremely extreme position which I doubt would have majority support amongst, say, Democrat voters. And then your criticism of the right appears to be to criticise a policy position ("actually no you can't just camp anywhere") which I think probably a plurality of Democrats would support.
Have I been significantly unfair here? I didn't check your former two arguments. I suppose the point is that with this small sample size it didn't quite seem to me that you were quite as centrist as suggested.
First, I thought I made it clear that I'm actually not a moderate at all in the literal sense. But in the broader sense of being willing loudly condemn both sides of the spectrum, I am. And I want the existence of people like me to be more widely known.
Second, I did not mean to at all imply that the people I was talking to *in those particular threads* were extremists or sociopaths etc. I did provide links in one of them of the people I was condemning. I suppose I didn't make that clear.
I don't think it was clear that you weren't yourself a moderate (other than you disliked the term due to it's connotations). If you're instead just saying you aren't an extremist then that does make more sense, and point taken.
On the second point, that is clearer and more reasonable. Was the point supposed to be (and clearly I'd misunderstood) that those two latter arguments are related (anarchists would probably be fine with both?) but you're arguing on opposite sides of the issue, rather than you arguing specifically against extremists on both sides?
By moderate I meant someone who's against both sides' extremists. It seems people just take it to mean someone who's middle-of-the-road on everything. So I don't even know what term to use for the former.
I changed the last link slightly to include some of the more extreme people in that thread. I do think I'm opposing extremists in all these cases, but some of these extreme positions are so widespread it seems to actually make me an extremist for doing so. So I don't know how to answer your question.
I guess one can be a reasonable extremist (believing and advocating for extreme positions for rational reasons; cf. Shrimp welfare activists). But in general I don't know how you'd define "extreme" in any way that isn't relational.
Consider: you're pointing at some discussion around vagrancy laws and saying "look, these people are extreme and sociopaths". I look and they don't seem particularly extreme to me, in fact the views they end up defending are, to me, extremely reasonable and almost certainly mainstream (if not majority). You say, "ok well fine, maybe not the people in *those* threads, but there are people who are extreme on this issue, and I argue against them. That makes me the moderate. And anyway actually there are some people are (if not extreme) very close to being extreme in that thread. Take a closer look."
Fine fine, I check again. I still don't see anything particularly extreme, nothing that would be *that* outside the Overton window, especially not in online spaces like this one. I see people who are in and around this space arguing for things like "complete open borders now", "we should nuke the data centres", "destroy the world on a coin flip for X utility gain" and so on.
(And that's fine! This is a space where views like that are regularly aired and debated and rationally judged rather than being dismissed off hand.)
If I'm seeing views like "camping should be illegal on most public property" and not remotely viewing that as an extremist position, is it more likely that I'm wrong and so far down the rabbit hole that I can't tell any more, or that you're somewhat misguided about your own virtue and moderation.
I guess I'm just calling for a bit of epistemic humility. Your argumentation style on those links seemed relatively uncharitable. A lot of people here will be used to norms of maximum charitability and steelmanning your opponents. Steelmanning you, I think you probably think what is being said is so patently absurd and that you *are* arguing with a bunch of extremists, and that you *are* being reasonable, but at the same time someone needs to hold the tide for the 90% who are normal about these things. If so, I think you might be a little off base.
Apologies for the lecture, in retrospect this maybe sounds patronising - it wasn't intended like that.
It is normal for people to be stupid. In such cases, an extremist position is "We should hire less violent cops." Because, broadly speaking, people don't understand which cops are likely to be violent. And therefore, a very anodyne and "obvious" hiring recommendation is one that people tend to VERY STRONGLY disagree with. And, worse, the disagreement is reflected in terms of actual police hiring. (FWIW: women are more violent as cops than men -- this may be some sort of self-selection bias, but it is more probably a "lack of effective physical options" to intimidate or non-lethally take down a hostile (drunk) 200lb person.)
I think there is an interesting and useful concept of sob story resistance. It explains a lot in politics and in daily life.
Some people have none and you see them rebroadcasting tenuous and sometimes fake claims of a supposed victim trying to get support. It is important because it is a source of irrationality and has policy implications in education, welfare and crime.
It has to be kept in mind that the other side sees it as being an uncaring asshole, and that there are indeed people who overdo their cynicism (and/or hide egoism behind cynicism).
But I agree, pathological empathy enabling abusers seems to me like the bigger problem at the moment. This can happen in two ways - first, an overly trusting supporter enabling dysfunction, and second, an already powerful person gathering even more power from the public to allegedly support the downtrodden (which they mostly do, but they can easily abuse that power by either selectively withholding the support from detractors or by even actively oppressing detractors in the name of support). You can even do all at once!
That's all well and good, but often visceral reactions are much more effective at driving action and reflection than a pile of facts.
(completely tangential: I think this is more or less (EDIT: one of) the points of Sam Kriss's "Against Truth"; see also: "Lies and Truth in a Hypernormal Sense" by Lou Keep of Sam[]zdat).
I would phrase it more like: sob story resistance is useful against bad actors that want to exploit your prosocial feelings, but it also risks making you a sociopath if you categorically cannot empathize with others. Sadly, being sob-story resistant is not an absolute virtue but, like so many others, its validity rests on one's personal judgement.
Of course, due to engagement algorithms, the truthfulness of sob stories needs to be questioned often, but there are some factors that can be taken as baseline verifiers. Here are two that come to mind after a minute of reflection:
- understanding that personal tragedies can be true and also NOT be a symbol for a larger tragedy
- sometimes tradeoffs mean that some preventable evil might happen in order to achieve a greater good somewhere else
>"…sob story resistance is useful against bad actors that want to exploit your prosocial feelings, but it also risks making you a sociopath if you categorically cannot empathize with others."
Bad actors disproportionately benefit from the scale offered by modern communication technology, so the optimal balance is now closer to the sociopathic end of the spectrum than would have historically been the case.
Used honestly, the 'sob story' is also a case study, and it has merit in that regard. Such stories allow us to imagine the detailed interaction of multiple circumstances and policies that might be impossible to easily understand in the abstract.
As a hypothetical example, it's hard to understand statistically why a city might not want to cut a little-used 4am bus route. With a case study, however, we can see that Bob the Baker needs to take the 4am bus to work in order to bake bread for the 8am supermarket opening, and without that bus he might be fired and return to a life of crime and pog addiction.
> Used honestly, the 'sob story' is also a case study, and it has merit in that regard.
Similarly, one dead person is a tragedy, million dead people is a statistics. So if you make yourself resistant against "sob stories" (evidence about individuals) without simultaneously making yourself *more* sensitive to statistics, you are not making yourself impartial, only indifferent to human suffering.
Sob stories are fine, when everyone is acting in good faith. When you have hospitals refusing to do their damned duty, in terms of saving people who have miscarried, in order to make Spectacular Sob Stories about the laws (that the lawmakers had no imagination would ever cause such a thing...) then you've got cloudcuckooland advertising budget (advertising for "abortion" because it is part of a full industry of "recycling").
I was printing a photograph the other day, and it suddenly struck me that we have a machine that can make a photorealistic portrait in a manner of minutes, and that I've never known a world in which we couldn't do that, and that there was indeed a world that couldn't do that, for a very long time. And it kind of sank in that AI is going to be ingrained into the children's lives in a way that will just permanently reshape the world they live in.
A friend has a child who's now 18 or 19. About ten years ago, she was shocked to learn the existence of music CDs - she had never seen a disk that wasn't a DVD or a game. A child who's 8 now, will grow up in a world without any CDs or at all. Maybe we're all programmed to believe that the technology around us is part of the natural order - until it isn't?
I do agree that AI could be a bigger tech advance than most.
Right but, you're making it sound really scary. I think when people worry about AI destroying art (especially writing) they need to be reminded that the same could have been said for photography, and also for recorded music.
People could have said photography would destroy painting. Well, it did reduce the demand for painters a lot but it also:
(a) pushed painting into new artistic directions
(b) made classic paintings vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) became the basis for a whole new art form of its own
Then people could have said recorded music would put all musicians out of work (who'd ever go to a performance of Beethoven's symphonies again when you can just hear them in your house?). Well it did reduce the demand but it also:
(a) kept concerts alive, to the extent people still go to them a century later
(b) made music vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) created a whole new set of genres of music
And people now say LLMs will eliminate writers. Again it will reduce the demand but will probably:
(a) push human writing in new directions
(b) make classical literature vastly more accessible to the less educated (e.g. you could get an LLM to "translate" classic works into modern language for you, or into a specifically tailored vocuabulary for your tastes and reading level)
(c) form the basis of a whole new art form.
Something to bear in mind when confronted with all the doomsaying.
Art has always been majorly valued through provenance so I doubt it'll destroy that.
I'm more worried about attention spans and the art of investigation.
Yes.
I think about this whenever I hear people making fun of old technological panics about how the camera/wristwatch/magazine etc will change us and society - "haha, look at these people panicking over nothing just like people are panicking about AI now"
But the thing is, those things *did* change us; every single new technology irreversibly changed the way we think and act in the world in some way. For better? For worse? Who knows, we quickly forget that we ever used to be different and our current state becomes what we think of as normal.
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-373/comment/101162797.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (unchanged from March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
22 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 20 % on March 17, 2025).
70 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 72 % on March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
There has been a lot of diplomatic smoke emitted roughly in last week, but imho only substantive action worth updating on was Trump slapping tariffs on India explicitly connected to Indian purchases of Russian oil.
Though it is far from clear whether those tariffs will really go into effect (they are scheduled to begin on August 27), that action goes somewhat beyond what I’d expected from Trump administration in terms of how much they are willing to help Ukraine (see previous updates). And it is potentially impactful action.
Russia does indeed rely on exports of oil to India (in fact, it is their largest oil export destination, currently even more important in this respect than China, see here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-07-15/trump-lobs-the-ukraine-ball-into-putin-s-court). At the same time, economic relationship between India and US, unlike that between China and US, is highly asymmetrical, in the sense that India is far more dependent on the US than vice versa, so they can’t just shrug this off, though Indian government would for face-saving reasons never admit it. But I do expect that they’ll quietly push Russia to be more conciliatory.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Can you (or someone else) explain the Trump aid freeze situation?
My impression was that Trump was going to halt military aid to Ukraine. Did he do this? If so, how come the Ukraine situation hasn't changed noticeably in the past six months? Did Ukraine manage to hold on without as much US military aid?
The last significant military aid to the Ukraine (under Biden) caused massive defections from the front line, due to a dramatic collapse in morale. You may want to re-evaluate your priors, significantly, due to this little gem of information. A discussion with someone from the Ukraine might help.
Do you have a source for this assertion?
Yeah. personal interview with a guy whose job it is to count the bodies, alive and dead.
There are a lot of moving parts in this.
1) Aid freeze as such lasted only about a week (apparently from 4th to 12th March). Then Trump lifted it (https://theweek.com/politics/us-ukraine-talks-rubio-saudi-arabia). This freeze pertained to aid already approved by Congress.
2) Ukraine still receives aid already approved by Congress under Biden administration. Also it draws from huge stockpile which it received between Trump's election and inauguration, since Biden administration frontloaded a lot of aid in that period in anticipation of possible freeze. This will eventually run out.
3) Trump does not plan to ask Congress for further aid for Ukraine, but he agreed that US government will approve purchases of military equipment paid by various western European countries and delivered to Ukraine, and also apparently that deliveries of American equipment to western European countries replacing their weapons sent to Ukraine will be prioritized. Procedures governing these things are rather byzantine and I am not even American, much less expert on details of your export controls, but I gather that this scheme will likely result in much less US equipment going to Ukraine than under Biden.
4) Ukraine is less depended on external aid than in, like, 2023, since it expanded its arms industry.
5) At the same time, despite all of the above, Ukrainian military situation IS getting steadily worse, and observers are quite worried. E.g. Michael Koffman here(audio): https://warontherocks.com/2025/07/drones-discord-and-the-shifting-front-in-ukraine/
Regarding 4), I have also read that European aid can cover more than at the beginning of the war. For example, at the beginning of the war Europe couldn't contribute much in terms of artillery ammunition, except out of their stocks. Now they produce enough to sustain Ukrainian needs without relying on US.
4) is not meaningful. If it was meaningful for Russia to destroy the arms industry in the Ukraine, they'd be doing it. They consider the Ukrainians their own countrymen, and thus have very little incentive to murder them. The west's support of the Ukraine (effectively moving the "gun-making and shell-making" out of the "acceptable places to destroy") is why Russia is forced to make Ukraine pay in "military-age soldiers" (current average age of frontline soldier is somewhere upwards of 50 years).
5) It's simply not winnable. It hasn't been winnable (from an American perspective) since the "counteroffensive" failed so dramatically. The best win condition for Ukraine at this point is to murder Zelensky, and give Russia the logistical win (let them have the landbridge to Crimea, and pinky promise that they won't let America stage invasions anymore.)
>They consider the Ukrainians their own countrymen, and thus have very little incentive to murder them.
You very much misunderstand the Russian mindset then. Ukrainians being declared Russian countrymen is the very reason to murder them. Not for the benefit of those Ukrainians, of course, but for the education of Russians at home. The lesson being imparted is: if you try to leave or generally oppose the Russian Empire, we will bomb you back to the Stone Age just like we have in Grozny ("The most destroyed city on Earth"), Aleppo, or now all of Ukraine.
This is not supported by facts. This is a war with a very low civilian casualty rate compared to the wars in Iraq or Gaza. Going by the western estimates, there are about 1 Ukrainian civilian casualty per 2-6 Ukrainian military ones, depending on which estimate you use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Civilian_deaths
The cities on the frontline are bombed to stone age if there was fighting there. Russia very much prefers to take cities without doing it but that's usually impossible.
If the "facts" are really just one fact, the number of dead civilians, then you might want to deepen that analysis a bit.
Ukraine has to refrain from targeting civilians at all because that would undermine allied support; it's vital to their strategy. They also don't have the same abundance of munitions to waste on civilian targets to begin with; target selection for maximum military effect is far more important to Ukraine than to Russia.
Russia cannot operate aircraft over Ukrainian territory, let alone far behind the frontlines, and has to resort to long-range bombardment with relatively expensive drones and missiles that are also subject to thinly spread but functional AA defense. If Russia could, they absolutely would go Aleppo on Ukraine, at least on the far western parts of Ukraine, see the next point.
Russia wants to take major cities without destruction if and when they are necessary as logistics hubs for further advances, not because they want to tiptoe around civilians that have long since evacuated anyway. Take a look at any smaller, strategically unimportant city or village, and you see a moonscape.
Another factor for the low civilian casualties is that the ground war is moving slowly by now, so civilians in the way have a lot of time to evacuate. Compare to the Bucha massacre in April '22, which happened when the ground war was moving a lot more quickly and Ukrainians might not have realized how Russia would treat them.
Have you seen Czechnya lately? Russia has a policy of rebuilding better, and they do actually mean it.
Russians go out of their way to murder American soldiers in the Ukraine, as they do Europeans. That the only Russian way to win the Ukrainian war is in blood -- this is the fault of the West, for funding with arms and materiel.
Now, you could say that Russia is in the wrong for wanting to wage war, but Russia would simply say "staging sneak attacks" is not a recipe for the Ukraine getting to keep the landbridge to Crimea.
Your comment speaks of a deep-seated denial of Ukrainian sovereignty and even basic human agency, of a belief that a country of 44 million is willing to fight a bloody, years-long war just because the evil Western puppeteers put weapons in their hands. Yes, Western support allows the Ukrainins to keep fighting. That is in the West's interest, but why does your analysis stops there? You never mentioned what Ukraine wants. If they don't want to fight and join Mother Russia instead, what stops them from just putting down those weapons? Who keeps making all those videos of frontline soldiers asking for drones, weapons, ammo?
This is the most televised war in history, with unprecedented access to the opinions of simple soldiers and civilians; but the better the first-hand evidence, the bigger the conspiracy theories must become.
I mean, Russian citizen casualties in this war are estimated in hundreds of thousands, so the fact "they" (Russian leadership) consider someone their own countrymen by no means implies they value their lives highly.
The general uncertainty over long-term Trump II policies also applies to Ukraine support by the US, and the world has to take it day by day. Last month, Hegseth made an apparently unilateral decision to reverse a weapon shipment already granted under Biden, which was again reversed by Trump shortly after:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/08/politics/pentagon-could-divert-weapons-for-ukraine-us-stockpiles
> Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused a large package of weapons shipments to Ukraine. [..] Shortly after the pause became public, Trump reversed Hegseth’s pause and vowed to continue providing defensive weapons to Ukraine [..].
Trump wants to continue delivering arms to Ukraine, but on Europe's tab.
> Trump also announced a deal with NATO to provide potentially billions of dollars in more weapons to Ukraine, made by the US but paid for by European allies.
This is consistent with yesterday's statements by JD Vance ahead of the Putin-Trump meeting:
https://thehill.com/homenews/5445500-vance-done-funding-ukraine-war-business/
> “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
My current expectation is that, under Trump II, the US continues to provide actual weapons but only when they're paid for, and does no longer grant direct financial aid to Ukraine. Other support, such as military intelligence, would continue as is.
The reason why the military situation has not changed much is a combination of Ukraine being innovative in the face of necessity, and European allies stepping up. The ground war is increasingly dominated by relatively cheap, available hardware (drones) that is not reliant on the US or any other single provider. The air war is much more dynamic, with Ukraine's demand for air defense increasing, but here we also see innovation and, in the medium term, decreased dependence on traditional air defense and thus on the US.
This is the second time Hegseth has paused aid without Trump's knowledge, then changed course. Is there an explainer of why?
I don't know. Possible explanations are that Trump really doesn't have his house in order, or that he presidents like he campaigns: he lets members of his cabinet go ahead with actually important decisions, observes how they are received, and then decides whether to confirm the call approvingly, confirm while denying knowledge about it, or to reverse the call while still not holding anyone responsible.
These are both good explanations. Putting forth another: Trump gives contradictory orders, including ones that are DOGE related. Then he gets to greenlight, personally, aid to the Ukraine.
I knew a guy who was both under the most stringent "do not get vaccinated" orders and "you must get vaccinated" orders at the same time. Viva la military! (this was under Biden, to be clear -- the military deciding to contract itself is nothing new).
Trump's proximate goal is a ceasefire, currently at 25% odds. The numbers improve after Zelensky's death, naturally.
Mostly a combination of (not necessarily ordered by importance)
1) A delay between stopping the aid and the consequences - Ukraine had a stock of weapons and supplies that would last for a while
2) Currently the defense largely relies on drones which are manufactured in Ukraine from components imported from China and other suppliers
3) European deliveries
I wouldn't give much credibility to the Indian tariffs justification; they may just as well be diplomatic smoke to soften allegations of excessive friendliness towards Russia. Trump has been applying tariffs for any reason or none at all, and complying with his demands regarding today's tariffs is no guarantee that he won't apply new tariffs tomorrow. If anything, Trump seems interested in economic outcomes much more than in diplomatic ones.
India is exporting their own oil, why would they need to buy Russian oil?
They produce 770K barrels a day and consume 5.2 million.
Regardless of why, per Bloomberg article which I've linked in original post, India does import A LOT of Russian oil.
They are a middleman for Russian oil.
I don't think that is true. Trump's justification for tariffs are often stupi...er heterodox (like levying tariffs purely for reasons of negative trade balance), but, precisely because of that, I think they are basically honest, and more importantly, will be perceived by Modi as such.
Trump is still an improvement over the last administration, which had "destroy Europe" as one of its policy goals ("If we can't have them, no one can!").
Could you explain how you mean this?
The last administration had Victoria Nuland, Cheney's protegee -- and arch neocon. She was variously the 3rd most powerful person in washington (and sometimes down to about the 10th), needless to say Joe Biden was never listed.
Destruction of Europe was the stated reason for the sanctions on Russia (this was an unexpected result of a question asked to Nuland during an internal state department meeting.)
If Europe (by which we mean Germany) doesn't remain America's vassal, it's likely to conclude that it's got geographical/logistical reasons to ally with Russia. (Trump is a big thinker, and he likes trade, and strong Eurasia... but it's been longtime policy for America to keep Germany and Russia as far apart as possible).
Honestly the take that sanctions on Russia, in which EU is participating in and which EU citizens are often supporting and voting for parties supporting them (not all EU citizens, but many of us, very much including me), are secret (or somehow, open!) Chenneyist plot to destroy us, is a pretty kooky conspiracy theory. But very creative, so respect for that, I guess.
Thank you, I'll look it up :)
I feel like there should be a lot of discussion of GPT-5 on here: is it just somewhere I haven't found yet (one of the subscriber-only OTs?) or are we collectively waiting to see what happens in the first few days?
As a big disclaimer: I know next-to-nothing from a technical stanpoint, besides all the pieces I picked up reading various discussions, mainly under Scott's blog and AI 2027, AI Futures, Gary Marcus and a few other voices (mostly skeptical as to the LLM>AGI>ASI short-term pipeline).
Has the new model's release impacted anyone's timelines? Is this a .5%-adjustment- or a 50%-adjustment- kind of impact?
Again, sorry if everyone is talking about this somewhere else, I wasn't able to find the place.
I've been growing more confident recently that there's not that much more juice left in the LLM paradigm, and while I haven't tried GPT-5 myself I think the muted reaction backs this up.
There's no particularly good reason to think that LLMs should be much better than they currently are, because it's still surprising that they're even at this level.
I predict there's a lot of work still to be done to get LLMs to be useful at all sorts of things, but that there's no LLM path to a singularity. An LLM can produce a document labelled "plan to take over the world" but it will be limited to the quality of the plans to take over the world that it was trained on.
I was also surprised that it wasn't discussed beyond one mini-thread (more focused on the botched slideshow) on the previous open thread - I actually came here to bring it up myself.
IMO it's the final nail in the coffin for the current LLM architecture to reach superintelligence. The big labs have all pretty clearly clustered up near an asymptote, as of I'd say May or so. The models have gotten incredibly good at coding, but are still well short of managing really large complex tasks.
The name "GPT-5" has been spoken in hushed tones since GPT-4, and it seemed understood that OpenAI wouldn't use that label until they had a real leap in capabilities on their hands. I think their use of the label for just another incremental improvement is their implicit admission that the current surge of scaling is basically done.
In terms of timeline shifting, personally I think I had been gradually discounting the probability of the "just keep scaling the current thing" avenue for several months, and this is just the formal end to it. I'd say it should only be a real update for someone who was confident that OpenAI had something huge up their sleeves, and was really shocked that GPT-5 was so underwhelming.
The overall focus on AI still seems fever-pitched, though, so it's entirely possible there's some big architectural breakthrough that keeps things going.
I’m far from a power user but so far the main improvement is that 5 is much better at helping me use it more effectively and its offers to provide additional help are much more relevant.
The first thing I did was workshop a prompt to get that 4o feeling back.
What I've been hearing:
CONSUMER: Some people like it, some people don't. May depend on whether they use normal, Thinking, or Pro. OpenAI was trying to clear up confusion in its model names and choices, but this seems to have failed and people are more confused and angrier than ever. It still has lots of hallucinations and dumb mistakes - supposedly this is less than previous models, but people have found some howlers.
FUTURIST: On METR's time horizon graph, it's about halfway between the early exponential curve and the later superexponential curve, so it doesn't tell us too much more about which one is real or more likely to continue. It definitely doesn't suggest (on that graph) that progress has stopped or really slowed, just that we can't distinguish between fast and very fast. But aside from the METR graph, it "feels" less impressive than most people expected, and is obviously not some giant leap towards superintelligence.
Some people have pointed out that it might be a very small compute scaleup (or even a compute step backwards) from GPT-4.5, so maybe this doesn't prove anything about scaling laws. But maybe the fact that they didn't bother increasing compute further itself suggests they know something we don't about scaling laws slowing?
My impression is that formally, it doesn't tell us much about timelines. Informally on vibes, it's kind of disappointing and many people's timelines have grown longer. The one formal claim I heard about timelines is that its failure to be a giant leap disproves some theory that reinforcement training compute scales up superhyperfast, but I don't think this was AI 2027's theory or especially common.
"The one formal claim I heard about timelines is that its failure to be a giant leap disproves some theory that reinforcement training compute scales up superhyperfast, but I don't think this was AI 2027's theory or especially common."
I think this was a bit more common after o3 was unveiled in December and seemed to be a huge improvement on o1 in just a few months. There were a few people (sort of including myself) who thought they might unveil o4 around March/April and it would be another huge jump and we'd be coming up to o5 now. I think there was a gwern post along these lines.
However the fact that o4 hasn't appeared 8 months later suggests that the o1->o3 jump either didn't take a few months or was a one-off so the hype has diminished somewhat.
I think it should update us somewhat against METR being a good all-in metric, since a model matching the predicted METR improvement doesn't seem to have made the same improvement in practical (poorly-described) usefulness.
Somewhat related: Is AI 2027 keeping track of their predictions? I'm reading their website right now, and I've found a specific prediction that seems to be wrong, in footnote 10:
> We forecast that mid-2025 agents will score 85% on SWEBench-Verified.
If I follow that link, the highest score is currently 75.20% with a date of 2025-06-12, and the highest-scoring model of August 2025 is at 67.60%.
I find it useful as a peer reviewer for whatever I'm doing with Opus 4.1 in Claude Code, but it's not as good as o3 on my custom evals (focused on systems thinking and game design). The big thing is the price per million tokens is *insane* compared to everything out there.
So far, it's a bigger jump than 4 to 4o, but not as big a jump as 3.5 to 4.
From what I'm hearing it sounds like a decent incremental upgrade, and not even for all purposes. It's been heavily trained for professional tasks like planning and coding, and people using it for creative purposes, or just to vent their emotions, are saying it feels like talking to an overworked secretary.
The "enshitification" of products. After reading the article about mashed potatoes, it would be a nice segue into shrinkflation and the replacement of products with lower quality versions of themselves.
I find "enshitification" an annoying term. It describes a real process:
1. Company makes a product and offers it free (or significantly below cost) to gain users
2. Once they gain users, they try to find a way to monetize it - increasing prices, adding monetization options, advertisements.
And the term "enshitification" and the discourse around it is all about complaining about step 2, where things get worse, while seeming to just assume as a given that, of course, companies should give away (or offer at a loss) valuable services.
You don't have to like the model - I think it'd be great if more things ran on a "micro-subscription" model where, e.g. everyone using Discord paid $0.50 a month, rather than 'free + microtransactions', (I just don't think you can get enough people to buy into this idea of paying for internet services, for this sort of approach to be viable).
... but the "enshitification" discourse seems to just be "how dare they make it worse, those greedy capitalists" and there doesn't seem to be any talk of any solution other than that they should continue to offer it free forever.
To me, the annoying thing is the "long con as a business plan". It can involve giving away products for free, but it can also involve selling high quality products for a reasonable price. The essence of this business strategy is that "things get shitty after a decade" is not an accident or a reaction to a recent development of the market... it was the plan already from the very beginning.
The offline version is "do something people like, generate a lot of goodwill, and when your sales grow, turn your products to cheap shit, and profit from people who didn't get the memo". The online version is "do something people like, get as many users as possible, then turn your products to shit, and profit from people staying there because of network effects".
Paying for a sustainable high-quality service was never a real option. Google does not offer you an option to pay $100 a month for a high-quality ad-free web search. They are simply not interested in that kind of a deal. Showing you scammy ads and selling your personal data is not some kind of desperate Plan B; it is their business plan working as designed.
It happens even when it's not the plan, though. You can start out with the best of intentions, to always produce a great product at a great price, but eventually you'll reach the point where your business has grown as big as it ever can, and people will start asking "OK, but how are you going to make even more money next quarter?"
But the thing is, this is usually okay. As one product becomes shit, new companies start up selling better products. McDonald's might be a pale shadow of what it was in the 1950s but that's fine because there's dozens of new fast food places now selling better stuff.
There's still a cost to customers of buying inferior products until word gets out about better products.
The cost is higher when it's an expensive item which is worse than expected, and I speak as one who's living with a refrigerator whose shelves include plastic which deteriorates rather quickly.
Also, the new product isn't the same, and if you like the old product when it was good it's gone, possibly for a while, possibly forever.
> But the thing is, this is usually okay. As one product becomes shit, new companies start up selling better products.
The version I heard (but it was long ago, and I don't remember specific examples) is that often it is the same owners who start a new company that produces a better version of the product (in case of offline products).
The entire cycle goes like this: You start Company A, and produce high quality stuff for a reasonable price. The word spreads. When your product is at the top of popularity, you start selling cheap shit in Company A. But simultaneously, you start a (seemingly unrelated) Company B, which now produces high quality for a reasonable price... only to do the same thing a few years later (and start a Company C).
This approach maximizes the total profit, because the savvy customers will buy the new stuff from Company B (so you don't lose them), but the ones who didn't get the memo will keep buying from Company A (so you make a big profit per item sold). Allegedly this makes more profit than the traditional strategy of making high quality product, establishing a brand name, and then increasing the cost. It exploits the fact that many customers rely on reviews and word of mouth, which in this case will provide an outdated misleading information.
A smaller version is that instead of multiple companies, it is the same company producing a high quality Product A, which later changes the Product A to shit and simultaneously starts selling Product B which is basically a copy of the original Product A.
This was an interesting discussion to an outsider.
>2. Once they gain users, they try to find a way to monetize it
That's being overly generous, and maybe that's why you don't like the complaining about step 2. They generally don't "try to find" a way to monetize it, like they accidentally stumbled over some unexpectedly popular new service and are now scrambling to pay for server costs. Maybe that was true in the very early days of the Web, where nobody had any real idea of how to make money, or even the basic tools like online payment processors. But nowadays? Come on. Data collection and enshittification is in the DNA of basically all new services.
The solution does not even have to be heavy-handed either. In cases of primarily online services, a lot of good can be done with network regulation, in that users have the right and the ability to switch between equivalent services freely, taking all their data (and friend contacts) with them, to enable real competition rather than one walled garden after another.
> The solution does not even have to be heavy-handed either. In cases of primarily online services, a lot of good can be done with network regulation, in that users have the right and the ability to switch between equivalent services freely, taking all their data (and friend contacts) with them, to enable real competition rather than one walled garden after another.
I appreciate a specific suggestion here, since my frustration is too many complaints are just 'Ugh, Captialism'.
... but I also don't think this would actually fix anything? The government mandating that Discord must be built in a way that users can easily migrate all their data to another platform doesn't solve anything around the question of "how does Discord make money so that it can continue to offer its services to users?"
1) It's going to cost Discord both time, resources, and flexibility to be held to some specific EU Standard For Social Network Friend List Interoperability, 2) it's not going to gain it anything in terms of users being willing to actually pay to use Discord services. (If anything, they're going to be less willing, why pay for Discord when I can jump to any other service easily?)
It feels like the plan here is that users will just leave once Discord tries to monetize and Discord will fail, and "who cares, we all left with our data and are all using an 'equivalent service'"... but why would someone build an equivalent service when they saw what happened to Discord and what government regulation would basically ensure happens to them?
>The government mandating that Discord must be built in a way that users can easily migrate all their data to another platform doesn't solve anything around the question of "how does Discord make money so that it can continue to offer its services to users?"
No, that's up to the platform to decide. What that does is that it allows users to actually decide which way of making money (and which feature set) among competing platforms is the most acceptable to them, rather than having them locked into a specific platform during the honeymoon phase of "everything is free and convenient and useful".
I don't think this is a sensible reading of the discourse.
People care a lot about Photoshop as far as I can tell (I have never used it). Photoshop was pay once use forever. Now it is a monthly subscription. Of course this happened for "reasons". But surely you are not arguing that Photoshop was offered "below costs" in the old pricing model.
The complaint is not that companies monetise products that were free. The complaint is that companies find _better_ (for them) ways to monetise products that have been sustaining business models for decades with less agressive monetisation and that this worsens the deal for the end user.
Now _of course_ companies should be doing this whereever possible. I think the second order complaint is frustration with a market where this is possible. I would suggest to understand "enshittyfication" as a mismatch between personal preferences and market preferences.
Ironically your own example (about Discord) hints at this but you then continue to ignore your own observation. "The market" by your own observation apparently wants discord to make money in the most annoying way possible. Pointing this out does not, contra your claim, question whether discord should be allowed to make money at all nor does it request that discord should be "offered free forever".
In the extreme there are products where there just is no market for the non-shitty version of the product at production cost. I can see how this extreme would look like your initial analysis.
Something I should clarify about my Discord example: I'm happy with Discord right now. It is not my optimal, perfect world, version of the product, but I'm far happier with it existing in its current form than not existing, and I think those are the realistic options here, and a discourse with terminology designed to leave no middle ground between "optimal for me, the consumer" and "shit" is a very frustrating discourse.
And there's sort of a motte-and-bailey where you can have a high-minded discourse about how "market preferences push companies towards models that are non-optimal for either the consumer or the company, creating a mismatch between personal preferences and market preferences", but the "motte" form of this discourse is not anything like that.
Especially if you say stuff like "the complaint is not [specific complaint that I have heard many times from people complaining about enshitification]". Maybe you feel like Photoshop is a stronger example, but absolutely a lot of "enshitification" complaints are about companies monetizing stuff that was free.
<sidetagent about photoshop pricing>
> But surely you are not arguing that Photoshop was offered "below costs" in the old pricing model.
I don't think it was offered "below costs" when it was a CD and you bought the CD and put it in your drive and that was it. And then, probably, a few years later a new version came out and a lot of people who had previously paid for an old version bought it again (maybe with a slight "upgrade" pricing discount), while complaining about how expensive it was.
Could Adobe have stuck to that model in the internet age? Maybe! Maybe they could release a version, freeze the code and say "this is what you get, no new features, no new languages, no fixes, etc", and then in a year or two do it again and say that anyone who wants the new version needs to buy it at more-or-less full price.
... but for lots of reasons (many of them customer-centric ones) that's not how software works today. (And I work in software) People expect updates and fixes, and software teams don't actually want there to be a million versions of software floating out there, so it's a subscription, instead.
The old model is an implicit subscription via new versions (though you have the option of stopping and sticking to an old version for as long as your OS will allow), the new version is an explicit subscription. They're not the same, but they're also not *as* different as they might seem.
(People paying $569 in 1994 money for Photoshop 3 would probably be surprised that 2020s people would be nostalgic for that experience)
But the model that I think most people actually want is to be able to buy Photoshop once and get all the fixes, new features, and updates that they expect from modern software without paying anything for those updates. And, yeah, I suspect that would be "below cost".
</tangent>
I believe that it is worth pointing out that
a) empirically some people care a lot about the general trend to move from "ownership" to "subscription" [both used not in a very strict sense but I am sure you get what this means]
b) this observation cannot be analysed as "people are upset that stuff is not free"
c) this observation does not get invalidated by other people caring about stuff not being free
d) people who care about such things would not agree that ownership really is "implicit subscription". An example where this might be more obvious: I might need to buy a new car every 10 years or so because of wear and tear but that still is meaningfully different from leasing a car.
e) people who care about such things are clearly not in a majority in the sense that they would be able to move the market away from such practices.
I think you can't have a meaningful concept of "enshittification" without including this part of the opinion space.
What is the article about mashed potatoes?
The finalist post about Y Dada Instant Mashed Potatos
Is there any update on birth order effects?
It seems such a strong effect, particularly the 80% of students in philosophy courses at Harvard being first born children. Has there been any more research since Scott's post and the less wrong surveys of famous mathematicians and physicists?
Given the very low fertility of academics, this stat does not surprise me much even if assuming that birth order has little effect.
Scott's research on the topic does account for family size. He found that, *even restricting the sample to people with exactly one sibling*, i.e. from two-child families, elder siblings were very over-represented among his readership compared to younger siblings.
Do you have any kind of citation for the fertility of academic families? I'm very interested in this but stats are hard to come by.
I'm still bothered by Scott's claim that super forecasters' prediction is relevant to single digit level. I thought how do you even verify that, especially since I don't think there's enough predictions yet (?).
I think that one way to falsify this is to have an agent that does the exact same prediction as the super forecasters, but be errored by some margin points. Then see if they perform worse or on parity with the real forecast. We can even have multiple agents with 1%, 5%, 10%, and 20% error respectively to see whether smaller error actually perform better.
I don't think it's a super-strong claim that this consistently improves performance everywhere and at all times.
But they did exactly what you suggested, so the precise claim is: "In the competitions we looked at, super forecasters used single digit level precision. If we round this single level digit precision to the next multiple of 5 or 10, their performance drops."
Interesting, looks like we're actually already on the same picture, and that some people are already debating this. I havent read it all closely yet but if someone has confirmed or denied this claim, feel free to tell me about it.
I have never looked into this topic myself. A quick search gives this blog post on the topic.
https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/tetlock-and-gardners-superforecasting-the-art-and-science-of-prediction#:~:text=The%20most%20surprising%20finding%20(to,forecasts%20and%20granularity%20predicts%20accuracy.
If you want to see the actual evidence, you probably would have to read Tetlock's book on the topic.
There is also this research paper. The finding is the same, but the binning is coarser, so I am not sure that you will be satisfied with it. With a very quick scan I think it was just up to seven bins, because they want to compare it with pundits.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/rzeckhauser/files/value_of_precision.pdf
Sources I read so far seems to rely on Tetlock. Sounds ripe for replication then.
There seems to be a consensus amongst people who are building muscle that bulk and cut cycles are the way to go. I'm confused about how this is different from weight loss in other circumstances, where the percentage of people who succeed in maintaining weight loss is really low. Is it just selection effects where the gym-goers are the ones who are unusually good at maintaining weight loss, or is there something special about lifting weights/eating lots of protein/etc, that makes weight loss stickier?
"There seems to be a consensus amongst people who are building muscle that bulk and cut cycles are the way to go."
- Actually it is a lot more nuanced than this. :)
It depends a lot on your use cases, and the different strategies are used as tools in your box.
It's the dominant strategy for a lot off body building type stuff, but a lot of recreational lifters do stuff like lean bulks or just don't care about weight/optics.
Cut/Bulks:
- works for: beginners*1 & competitive athletes; cuts are almost necessary if you want to go ultra lean
- probably not the best approach for: recreational intermediate athletes, people who practice other sports as a main sport
1 But almost everything works for beginners..
Also Martin Berkhan showed ages ago, that cut + bulk at the same time is possible with intermittent fasting. But maybe he has unusual genetics.
When I've read about this it sounds like a lot of people think that losing fat and building muscle at the same time might be effective if you're a beginner or possibly very overweight (or possibly just if you have unusual genetics) but longer term stops working (I say this as someone who has only started looking into any of this stuff within the last 6 weeks after joining a gym, so obviously take anything I say with a large handful of salt :p)
I don't know much about this cycle, but the percentage of people who can lose weight *over a short period of time* is pretty high. Body builders who build muscles do not aim at maintaining the weight over a long time period, so that seems like the wrong reference frame.
Yeah fair enough I guess there are people who either just keep bulking and cutting till they die or there's selection effects to who I'm seeing because they're stopping making content at the point that they get bigger and stay there
I don't think there are many people who keep bulking and cutting till they die, I think they generally stop after they reach the end of their competitive lifetimes, or a the point where they can't realistically build additional muscle. You'd be hard pressed to find people who've still doing it in their forties, and it's generally not a very pleasant way to live long term.
Two thoughts:
1. Typically people doing this are interested in net gaining over time, which is easier and the default trajectory over net losing weight over time.
2. Anyone doing this is already about 10x more motivated and conscientious than the median person, because they're counting calories and macros, in addition to working out between 3 and 5x a week - if you filtered your "trying to lose weight" populations according to this degree of conscientiousness and motivation, success would be much higher than the current outcomes where ~80% fail to keep more than 10% off for at least a year, and ~98% fail to keep more than 10% off for more than 5 years.
Good points, thank you
So I read Cremieux’s March piece about making one’s own GLP-1 solutions, and am thinking very seriously of ordering a supply of Retatrutide. Retatrutide’s the newest of the GLP-1 drugs, and seems to be better than Zepbound. It’s had clinical trials up through phase 3, and nothing worrisome happened in the trials. But it does not yet have FDA approval (and when it does I’m sure insurance will not cover it just for weight loss, and it will be even more expensive than the drugs currently available.). The precautions Cremieux described — buying only from sources he currently recommends, and/or sources highest rated by an independent lab — and then having one of the vials one receives tested by a lab — those seem adequate to me as protection against injecting the wrong drug, or a contaminated one.
Does anyone know of any reason to have significant doubts about the safety of doing this? I am not interested in “reasons” based on some general objection like “you are not medically trained.” I think the quality of US medical care is quite compromised by various systemic things these days, and believe the best course is to supplement what conventional care offers with one’s own carefully researched hacks. So when I ask about the safety of weight loss a la Cremieux I am really only interested in reasons based on information someone has about actual dangers they have thought of or seen manifested. Also, anyone who agrees that this procedure is reasonably safe — would be interested to hear why you think so.
I'm not sure why you would risk trying Retatrutide over Zepbound or Semaglutide when the latter two already work very well. If Zepbound doesn't work for you then I would understand.
Because the data from clinical trials indicate that Retatrutide is better in a number of ways: Better about sparing lean body mass, prob leads to faster weight loss, seems to push multiple markers of liver function in a good direction, has a component that combats the metabolic slowdown that occurs with these drugs as weight is lost.
Low-carb or keto doesn't work for you?
Have not tried them and not interested in trying. Gained 25 lbs during covid and can't get rid of it, despite a moderately serious effort. There's a drug that makes it likely I will at least succeed at the weight loss part, and also has other health benefits, and I'm all for shooting up that sucker. Hopefully I can do the maintaining after losing the weight. Til covid I maintained a normal weight without trying.
I have zero interest in treating the weight problem as a challenge. Most people fail at weight loss, and of those that succeed most gain the weight back, so the odds are I will fail too. And besides, there are multiple other areas of my life where I am trying very hard to accomplish various things, and all of those things are way more interesting than food and blubber guts.
That makes sense.
Path dependency and Fleetwood Mac... https://open.substack.com/pub/title22/p/stevie-nicks-saves-the-water-dept?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2o3x1e
If you are going to share a link in an open thread, please have a longer (few paragraph) description of what the link is and why you think it's interesting.
I have not been counting, but have the impression that the number of posts that are basically just little read-my-blog-post ads is way up. Some people do write a coupla paragraphs summarizing their post, some don’t. But either way I don’t like the feel of threads that are full of those read-me posts. The authors are not really addressing the group the way real posters do. We’re not people to them, we’re eyeballs.
“Out, vile jelly!”
Sorry, I thought it was more intriguing the way I did it. But I see thats not really working.
I am (somewhat desperately) working on improving process in the public sector. I write about why well-intentioned systems consistently produce bad outcomes, using my experience in California water as a lens for understanding universal bureaucratic patterns. The goal is to help other people trapped inside systems find ways to make change that actually works.
A secondary problem is getting these people to read the ideas. In this article to make the concept of path dependency relatable,and more interesting I use Fleetwood Mac's career, and a water treatment plant.
Not 60s Fleetwood Mac, but the premise would be the same. Would the workflow from the 60s produce the same innovation in 1977? It would be interesting to dig deeper but that's a different substack lol
New essay I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on - the truth isn’t enough.
If you think tone doesn’t matter, you’re probably less persuasive than you think.
You can have the most correct argument in the world, but if you deliver it with needless snark or robotic detachment, you’ve already lost half your audience before they’ve engaged with the actual ideas.
This isn’t anything to do with coddling feelings. It’s about recognising that tone is part of the message, just as much as word choice or logic. McLuhan said the medium is the message; in human conversation, tone is the medium.
On how tone shapes whether your truth lands, why “tone policing” complaints miss a deeper reality, and how to use the soft machinery of meaning to get through to people who disagree with you.
As an audience of truth-seekers, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts as I’ve felt rationalists don’t always get the tone right.
Essay: https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-truth-isnt-enough
I think the entire frame may be bunk. Delivering truth is remarkably ineffective, when you're trying to guide behavior. Bandwagon effect is far more important than people give it credit for. "The smart people eat Kale, and here's why..."
Part of the appeal of writing / speaking facts without regard to tone is this idea that people can just share information quickly without having to slather it in a lot of greasy polity. For example, maybe I want you to just tell me I'm mumbling so I can fix it and speak more clearly, instead of spending several seconds trying to figure out how to break it to me gently.
Another issue is that trying to reword things kindly feels patronizing if you look like you're trying too hard to do it; it's like saying "you're too softminded and weak to handle this straight, so I'm going to sugarcoat it for you first".
This is the impression I get when talking to people who disdain tone. Their desire is straight up facts, toneless by default, making everyone better off. Their tone will quickly graduate to annoyance at anyone who pushes back due to that lack of tone. Why would they want to make everyone worse off?
I couldn't see where your article addressed this frame of mind. If it doesn't, then I think it's unlikely to have your desired effect.
The response I typically give to people who want to dispense with tone is to point out first that the complaint only applies to bad news from a stranger; no one minds if good news is imparted tonelessly, or if bad news comes abruptly from a friend. That said, anyone who speaks (or writes) says more than the actual words, whether or not intended, and lack of tone typically says "I could have not said anything, and not hurt you, or shared this bad news, knowing it will hurt you. I chose to share it. So you can infer from this that I'm someone you can't trust. If there's bad news, I'll surely send it along; if there's good news, I might, but for now, you don't know. I probably won't go out of my way to find any good news, so any future information I give you will be inaccurate, skewed against you, and might even be exaggerated. "
Sneering or mocking during delivery of course only confirms the above. But either way, the toneless person's utopian mode of information sharing is defeated.
I've seen writing where someone was expressing an idea and coating it with enough ingroup-signifiers to make it easy to swallow in their community that people from outside their community tended to choke on it.
OTOH, I think you can have a tone that is more or less off-putting. That shouldn't interfere with understanding your ideas, but it often does, in practice, so it's better to try to have a less off-putting tone. And it's better not to toss out a lot of red meat for your intended audience that will alienate anyone outside that group.
Good point about ingroup signifiers. I'm naturally not counting those. We could imagine it being very hard to find signifiers that are more universal - where the ingroup is as many people as we can manage - and finding these can be something of an art.
I recently had a disagreement with someone who had the view that just being the wrong person (in terms of inborn characteristics, rather than word choice or tone) would impede how acceptable a message was. I thought that was self-undermining for a truth-seeker, but it appears to be a view that's out there and people are unashamed of announcing.
https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1954601107335889083
I think this is often true, precisely because humans are not ideal truth-seekers. This is why celebrity endorsements matter, even though rationally you'd think "this dude is an actor, why would I treat his opinions about politics with any more weight than those of a plumber?" And everyone uses this--actors, musicians, war heros, sports stars, religious leaders, etc. are often used as messengers for exactly this reason.
I mean, Taylor Swift is in an excellent position to tell you about how to fix broken stuff in the music industry, and Tom Hanks is an unquestioned expert in acting and the making of movies, but it seems unlikely that either one has especially clever things to say about trade policy or addressing global warming. But people still want to hear what they have to say about those things, so....
There's an argument that the success of advertising doesn't depend on people being irrational:
https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
The author's impression of the Corona ad ("Find your beach.") amuses me. He attributes the appeal of the ad to what he calls "cultural imprinting" - it's trying to get people to associate drinking Corona beer with being a chill guy who might hang out at a beach. Two readers elaborated that it's more legit because Corona is made in Mexico, where one can find nice beaches.
None of them appear to have noticed the pun, augmented by the pretty young woman reclining next to the Corona drinker. (She also holds one, but it's nowhere nearly as conspicuous. You mostly just see his.)
It seems to me that needless snark is extremely popular. It's an easy way to get attention, though it may interfere with getting any specific message across.
Is there such a thing as needed snark?
Snark communicates status.
One is snarky when they try to communicate (successfully or not) that they are high-status. It is not helpful from the perspective of delivering the message, and it was a mistake if the person actually wanted to deliver the message.
But maybe their intended goal was to communicate the (perceived) status difference, in which case, it either works successfully or it does not, depending on the situation.
We need to further distinguish who is the intended recipient of the status message. It could be the person who is talked to, in which case the actual message is "I will treat you with contempt, stop bothering me". Or it could be the audience, in which case the actual message is "look, I am higher status than this guy". If the audience is your ingroup, it can also imply "look, our group is higher status than this guy and his ilk".
EDIT:
Obvious example: RationalWiki and their "snarky point of view" policy. The purpose of the policy is to communicate that the editors of RationalWiki are higher status than whomever they review, and that they are not interested in a debate with them.
In this case, I think the snark is an efficient way to deliver the message, and the fact that it makes the message plausibly deniable is a bonus.
It's an effective use of the dark arts, but a poor way to get to the truth.
I was thinking about The Bulwark. They have reasons for being opposed to Trump, but they also use a lot of insults.
I think of this as "writing skill" and I don't think it's undervalued. It seems to me that many rationalists do not actually have a serious goal of "persuade as many others as possible" and so they don't care as much about tone/writing as you might expect.
I have heard people say that GDP is growing especially fast because of spending on AI . But AI infrastructure isn't producing value yet, because it's not yet finished being built. The argument has to be that the investment itself is increasing GDP.
But nobody keeps money under their mattress these days. To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested. But that means it gets added to GDP. So it seems like all that an AI boom can do is shift money from being spent/invested in something else, to being spent/invested in AI. So why does this raise GDP?
> To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested
If we assume a fixed savings rate that isn't changing in a closed economy, then yes, investment will stay the same. However, the US exists in an open economy, it can borrow to from abroad to fund domestic investment, thereby increasing investment while having a constant savings rate.
Not all investment is considered GDP. The resale of stocks and bonds on the secondary market, which is basically the entire market by volume, contributes nothing. It’s just the allocation of value, not the creation of it.
Investment in new projects is a significantly smaller portion of overall investment, but contributes greatly to GDP.
> to a first approximation all money is spent or invested
In a sense, GDP is a metric of how fast this happens. If I'm a big private equity firm I want to invest my money somewhere, but if there's a lot of good opportunities I'll do it tomorrow and if there's none I'll have to wait a while. And similar for spending - if there's a lot of growth opportunities whoever I invest that money in can use it at once, if not they'll keep it in the banks for a while.
These wait times can't be rounded off to zero. If they could, the economy would grow infinitely fast and GDP would be infinite (since everyone who receives a dollar, in either investment or paycheck, immediately spends it meaning that dollar does an infinite amount of work).
GDP is the value of all final goods produced with a country over a period of time. If households or firms reduce their spending, firms reduce production, and GDP falls. An AI boom increases the demand for servers - when firms increase production of servers to meet this higher demand, GDP rises.
If households reduce their spending, then savings necessarily increases, since savings is all income that's not spent. It sounds like you're asking, since this increased savings is going to finance investment spending anyway, why should a drop in spending have any impact on GDP? This is actually the central issue in Keynes' general theory. Financial markets channel savings into investment, and interest rates adjust to equate the two. A $1 trillion increase in savings won't necessarily lead to $1 trillion more of investment if the demand for investment goods is insensitive to interest rates. Instead, in textbook principles of macro, the surplus of savings (and drop in total expenditure) causes firms to reduce production to meet demand, which reduces income, and as income falls, savings itself falls until eventually, back in equilibrium, savings equals investment.
Let's say a person has 2 career options:
1) Fast Food Cook
2) Chef at pricy restaurant.
After some assumptions (employed, marginal worker, positive value, etc), Option 1 will create higher GDP, because people value the food created by a Chef more than the Fast food cook - willing to pay more for it.
Same for investment that can utilize unused resources, or move from areas we value less to areas we value more.
Basically, building more expensive structures raises the GDP.
Investment isn't fixed, it goes up and down as people decide to invest more or less from year to year. GDP = C + I + G + (X - M), if AI causes causes firms to want to invest more, it can rise and the other things can fall.
It might be better to think less of GDP (spending) and think more of the "production possibilities frontier" - how much we can produce with our factors of production. GDP will grow faster not because of spending on AI (or any other type of investment), but because (or if or when) AI (or other types of investment) causes the PPF to shift out.
>To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested.
Not sure how much work "first approximation" is doing in your statement, but yes, companies are indeed keeping increasing sums of cash under their mattresses:
https://www.hec.edu/en/executive-education/news/corporate-cash-boom-what-every-ceo-needs-know
"corporate cash reserves worldwide now exceed $8 trillion [..] This represents one of the most significant financial shifts of the 21st century."
"While cash is a vital buffer in uncertain times, too much can be a liability. Investors want to see a balance: enough liquidity to weather downturns but not so much that it signals a lack of strategic direction or inefficient capital allocation."
And that has been reaching ridiculous amounts especially for the big tech companies. Apple alone has more than 200 billions of cash reserves in tax havens, or (converted into 100$ bills) 2000 tons of dollar. That's a big I-mattress.
http://www.ahead-education.eu/why-apple-sits-on-so-much-cash.html
Yes, to reinforce this point, the tech companies (who are now building out infrastructure) were indeed sitting on giant cash piles (well, usually cash equivalents like short term government debt).
Furthermore, if the 'investment' is bidding up prices for existing financial assets (like public equities or debt) then that's only one step removed from cash under the mattress.
US Government debt is an investment, just one that doesn't return much because there's a very low risk of default, and one that doesn't get invested in creating new wealth. (Government bonds could in principle be used to invest in creating new wealth, but I don't think much of current US bonds are--mainly they're substituting for unpopular tax hikes or unpopular spending cuts, and are used to subsidize some mix of social security, medicare, medicaid, the military budget, and interest on the debt.)
I think not all spending/increasing equally contributes to GDP. The most influential would be direct spending (hiring people, buying goods), while indirect investment like buying stock in slow and stable companies would do comparatively less.
AI companies are directly spending very aggressively (hiring, data centers, etc) and so their impact on GDP is greater than allocating an equal amount of money to a more cautious company which doesn't spend much even if their valuation increases.
Classically, investment grows the economy directly in two ways:
1) a company invests in buildings, equipment, training etc.
2) once the investment is realised, the company would typically benefit from increased revenue and profits
3) investments are typically financed at least partially by debt, which must be repaid
In terms of GDP, (1) and (2) contribute directly to production. Debt doesn't contribute directly to GDP, but has general stimulatory effects, since it tends to increase the amount of money in circulation. I'm guessing that some increase of money supply, and increase in the velocity of money is what's showing up in the figures, and what's missing from your model.
For AI, I would guess that the main contribution is (1), since none of the AI businesses are profit-making yet. The main investments presumably are
- investment in physical infrastructure, which boosts Nvidia and other chip companies, but also local and national contractors and suppliers since the machines have to live somewhere
- well paid engineers, in the AI companies and elsewhere, who will be spending their pay checks on second homes, new vehicles and other luxuries, which surely will show up in GDP.
If the AI boom is really going to take off, I would expect soon to see smaller companies appearing which offer AI-consulting, similar to the profusion of IT-services companies which flourished 1995-2005 or so, and web-development companies 2000-2010. (AI should also kill off any of those that are still hanging on.)
Thanks for the clear explanation.
Yes, this. What's missing in Scott's question is that a single dollar can contribute to GDP many times: each time the recipient of a dollar spends it domestically, that's another dollar in that year's GDP. Hence GDP is the total of everything produced in a year (or a smaller time-period but annualized), *not* a snapshot of how much money exists at any one time.
Because GDP is about volume of economic activity and not wealth, and if everyone starts rebalancing their portfolios because AI affects their predictions in different directions and drives both new beliefs and new disagreements, this raises GDP, even though the collective still owns the same property?
GDP is about economic activity X price.
The (Really old) joke was that "GDP is a metric that goes down when a man marries his secretary."
Yes, this is why associating GDP growth with economic... good things weirds me out. If my phone subscription doubles in price with the same service, I am not better off but the GDP will be higher. Solid money and technological improvement would probably slowly make prices lower, implying GDP contraction. GDP growth is easily achieved by printing money, without actually producing more, just paying more. I also remember reading somewhere that if you would pay for a house in the US with gold, not dollars, it costs the same as 50 years go. I have not tested it, but sounds about right.
>GDP growth is easily achieved by printing money, without actually producing more,
What you're describing is inflation. Real GDP adjusts for that.
But, this is why real GDP, not nominal GDP, is what competent policymakers seek to maximize.
My example is that if there were a crime wave so people spent more on security, the GDP would go up, but it's not as though people were better off.
Also, it's important to be able to turn over in bed. If people need to be paid to turn others over so that turning over in bed is moved more into the money economy, this isn't better than people being able to turn themselves over.
GDP would not go up. That additional spend on security wouldn't come from nowhere, it would be reallocated from other, more productive areas. Plus there would likely be behavioral changes that reduced general economic activity (staying in out of fear instead of walking to a restaurant, for example). Crime most certainly does not increase GDP. If it did then society wouldn't try so hard to eliminate it.
GDP is an imperfect measure of well-being. There can be stuff that makes the measure go up while people are the same or even worse-off. When mom takes a job and puts her kids in daycare, the money spent on daycare shows up as more GDP, but really it's just the same useful thing being done (her kids are being taken care of) that was previously done without any payment. The extra money she's making/wealth she's producing shows up in GDP but also is a real improvement in the world, but the added daycare costs aren't really an improvement in the world.
That not True. For example, if I invested my money abroad, and now due to increased crime I buy a home-grown security system, National GDP would go up.
Without techological progress, eventually GDP tops out. This is basically Solow. (You get richer by accumulating capital that makes you more productive. There are diminishing returns to capital, but depreciation is a fixed fraction of current capital every year, so eventually all your extra productivity is being spent maintaining your capital base.)
Per capita GDP would top out, but with a consistently growing population (looks around nervously) the total still increases.
Also labor & capital are complementary (at least pre-ASI), which can overpower the diminishing returns of each.
My sense is that given fixed technology and fixed land/other resources, you hit diminishing returns with both.
To use a simple example, think of farming in the middle ages. Giving everyone good tools will make them more productive--going from wood to steel plow blades, giving people steel blades for harvesting, building good structures to store the grain, etc. Expensive irrigation and drainage works will make them more productive. Everyone having an ox or whatever to pull the plow will make everyone more productive. But at some point, you just won't be able to get more yield from your arable land.
At that point, neither added people nor added capital will benefit you much. More people = more food being eaten up, more tools = more upkeep fixing/replacing tools as they rust or wear out, and eventually you're losing more than you gain.
From the middle ages, there are a *lot* of capital improvements before you hit big diminishing returns, because those societies were chuchmouse poor. But without new technology, you'd still hit a limit eventually, if other stuff didn't hit the limit first.
Agreed. I was thinking of "more capital" along the margin of increased technology, but along the margin of additional instances of the same technology your frame holds due to constraints which are neither labor nor capital (e.g., land).
Edit: the above was only for my second paragraph; in the first (since you had specified technological progress) I was just implicitly ignoring other factors.
I have the feeling that argument is usually that without investment into AI, GDP growth in the US would be much smaller or even negative, not that it is exceptional right now compared to the padt. At least I only heard this before in the context of musings like "No wonder people aren't happy about the US economy, the situation is bleak, it only doesn't show in official data yet because of all that investment into AI chips and data centers"
In the last thread you said "It's been three months since the last medical treatment", and I see someone said "For what it's worth, my partner's issues have faded, but it peaked around month 4, and is only fading now in month 5 post procedure."
Hopefully they'll come comment again and give you the details you asked for, but even just with that, you've got a solid data point to refer to. Not that it's guaranteed to go the same way for you, but it's clearly a possibility, so at the very least you need to hang in there until you're well past their timeline.
It also sounds like you are/were pretty into rationalism, and I would point out that this sort of situation - if you really are serious about considering killing yourself - is maybe the best possible use case for having cultivated the whole rationalist mindset. You have been practicing to stick to calm logic when it matters! So stick to it! Make it a matter of pride if you need to. Absolutely no one looking from the outside at your situation - terrible suffering but a very real chance of it resolving in the near-ish future - would say suicide is a good decision here, and I'm going to assert that includes past and future you as well. It's understandable if it *feels* different from the inside, but you have to step back and recognize that the feeling is wrong and the logic is right.
Anyways, I'm really sorry you're going through something so awful, and I really hope you make it through.
Good point, I've retracted my original comment.
Using the last erg of negentropy in the universe.
I saw your comments in the previous open thread and I really hope you get better. I'm sorry that I cannot be of any more help than to just give you my well wishes.
I don't think the other commenters here in this thread had the context of the previous open thread when they responded.
TLDR no hard feelings to anyone
I did IVF myself years ago, and found it extremely stressful. I did not feel exploited and badly treated though. How do you see the treatment as exploitive?
Well I was told the side effects would be a few weeks of nausea, not being almost incapable of sleeping at all for months and then (semi?) permanently losing the ability to feel positive emotions of any kind.
I just did a very cursory look at the literature, and while nausea and mood swings are mentioned as common side effects, insomnia is not. I completely believe you that you suffered godawful versions of all these things, but do you have reason to think the godawful version is common? I did 8 cycles of IVF. I was pretty stressed out the whole time, by the procedures, the time commitment, and the suspense about whether it would work. I was often unhappy, but that was mostly after a cycle failed to produce a pregnancy. It felt more like a reaction to a bad event than a hormonally driven mood swing. I had moderately bad insomnia, averaging maybe 6.5 hours per night instead of my usual 8. I was able to catch up on sleep during breaks between some cycles, though.
And during all those months I was comparing notes with lots of other women. We were all sitting in the waiting room together in the morning, there to get our ultrasounds, and got to know each other well enough to give updates. A lot of people complained about the stress and uncertainty — will it work? But I can’t remember anyone saying they felt just awful physically or mentally. As I said, I believe you that this treatment wreaked havoc on your body and mind, but my own experience, including the info from the other women I talked with, doesn’t support the idea that IVF is hellishly uncomfortable and destructive and the clinics that offer it are concealing this information. Maybe you weren’t screwed over, but just extremely unlucky in how your body reacted to the drugs and procedures?
Why are you acting like people forced you to do this? You could have researched the risks yourself, you could have asked the doctors about potential risks, and hell, you could have followed their instructions and not lie about your symptoms. This is an entirely self-inflicted problem, and you are blaming everyone but yourself for it.
Yep, did all the research. I was told I would have "mood swings" and some minor physical stuff like "nausea" and "tiredness" that would resolve in a couple of weeks. Obviously I was not told that there was any chance that I would be so fatigued and depressed that I would be unable to get out of bed for months at a time. I specifically asked repeatedly about chances of more severe side effects and was told absolutely not, that they didn't know of that happening. And then when I tried to call the clinic and report my experience, they said they don't collect data on ANY symptoms experienced by women--only whether they ultimately got pregnant or not. I guess that explains why there's no data!
This sounds more like "medical malpractice" than anything, to be perfectly honest. I'm not surprised, although I see that you were. They've blacklisted even FOIAing reported side effects of the mRNA vaccines (the guvmint collected the data via survey, but they won't let anyone look at it, because of HIPAA. They could simply deidentify the data, but no....)
"You could have researched the risks yourself, you could have asked the doctors about potential risks, and hell, you could have followed their instructions and not lie about your symptoms."
Fertility clinics are a business. They're not going to turn potential clients away with "some proportion of patients will have godawful experiences, because IVF is godawful anyway, but this will be *extra-crispy* godawful".
Lot of money in the baby-selling business.
I'm sorry Farkling had those bad experiences, but it's really a toss-up about "will you have the routine horrible experience or will you be one of the [whatever percentage] get the super-awful experience?"
I'm gonna go look for a random fertility clinic website and see how they sell their services, and if they warn potential clients about the downsides.
Okay, here's one on my doorstep, as it were. And here's the advice page about IVF:
https://waterstoneclinic.ie/trash-ivf-what-to-expect/
Nuffin' there about "it can fuck you over", but that *might* be in the fine print about "talk to our team".
Lots of stats on success rates and testimonials from grateful clients. Aha! one mention of side effects! (now, there may be more detail but I'm not digging through 38 webpages):
https://waterstoneclinic.ie/12-frequently-asked-questions-about-undergoing-ivf/
"What are the most common side effects of hormonal injections?
The most common side effects reported during IVF treatment are typically hormonal ones, such as headaches, tiredness and mood swings. Everybody is different but most patients report little to no side effects."
So if you're reading the likes of this before taking the plunge, there's nothing there (on a cursory look) about "this can really put you through the wringer".
I'm assuming she did this, with a slightly inflated view of "how smart doctors are about things they really know nothing about." (Aka "Most Medical Research Is Wrong, and Won't Replicate, stop treating Joe Doctor like he's AllWise and AllKnowing." Less than ten years ago, our only evidence based treatment for stroke was Asprin. 100 years ago, they were prescribing 30 grams of asprin a day. Yes, grams.)
What's the recently developed stroke treatment?
Tenecteplase (TNK), a clot-dissolving drug. Must be given in first few hours after symptoms begin.
You're... assuming there is one? I work for a hospital. "Less than ten years ago" was the last time I listened to one of the clinicians (who works with strokes) discussing "evidence based medicine." Remember that most scientific studies don't replicate, and that stroke is "emergency medicine" (which means that it's more difficult to quantify "how bad is each stroke" and everyone's always told "minutes matter" with them).
I have no idea if my perception of doctors is well calibrated, but I know they're probably smarter than me at endocrinology, so I at least trusted them to do that.
Being an expert at something in particular is very different from being smart.
Aerial juggling. Go skydiving with flaming bowling pins, maybe some flaming shishkebabs or whatever you call the things those fireeater guys use, and then halfway down, set off one of those enormous professional fireworks inside your backpack and go out with a bang. You'll probably want someone filming. They'll probably want to get further away before the firework.
The when isn't a biggie, you can do it pretty much anytime. I guess night makes a better show. And, like, not too cloudy. No one wants to juggle fire in the rain.
That'd be a pretty selfish way to do it: think of the ramifications for the skydiving company and future customers.
It's not ethical to make people complicit in one's death without informed consent.
The best answer is still Tyrion's:
In my own bed, at the age of 80, with a belly full of wine and a girls mouth around my cock.
Likely to be traumatic for the girl.
I agree. Sentence that guy to a lifetime of pocket pussies. Here ya go, Tyrion https://m.bestvibe.com/1405-dual-channel-mouth-vaginal-pocket-pussy.html?srsltid=AfmBOoqUTzeZLLyskxE5mp19VXLB7-fxNj8aw4Y8RSPi9k-v8dVE1OtS
That's what the money's for.
Plane crashes happen, but they usually aren't counted as part of what's bought with the ticket.
You know, the most intriguing part of this is calling Donald Trump "then-presidential candidate". Because... aren't you supposed to call a former president "Former President" first and foremost? Or is it correct that the candidacy takes precedence? It comes up so rarely that someone is both a presidential candidate and a former president that I don't think there's a standard. Is this a breach of etiquette, or isn't it?
This is the true power of Satan.
If it was posted as part of his campaign, then it makes sense to refer to him as "then-presidential candidate Trump." Because that is more informative, even if it technically a breach of etiquette.
I'm genuinely confused by your motive for posting this here.
Is this an incomplete fictional short story? Is this a joke, or are you deliberately trolling this community with an easily-shredded speculation?
Something else?
Welcome to the Catholic version of the Protestant Fundamentalist end-times Rapture types.
It's not fiction, or at least not intended to be; this is an alleged vision of Pope Leo. I wonder if the current pope taking the name Leo started this idea of posting here? Anyway, yes, the St Michael prayer. Created by Leo XIII, ordered to be said after Mass, was in response to political pressure by the Italian state and seizure of Rome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_to_Saint_Michael
"The threat to the church at the time was the Italian government's campaign against the Papal States. The 1890 text was composed and published twenty years after the capture of Rome had deprived the Pope of the last vestige of his temporal sovereignty. The papal residence at the Quirinal Palace had been converted into that of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy."
After 1964 reorganisation of the liturgy of the Mass, these prayers were dropped, but keeping the St Michael prayer for spiritual purposes was permitted and even recommended.
The End Times crowd keep insisting on the Devil and the smoke of Satan and other things. I'm just surprised Garabandal wasn't mentioned, I haven't heard that invoked in quite a while.
The vision and dialogue between God and the Devil seem to be later additions to the origin story (outright inventions, to be blunt about it, though that's perfectly in line with Catholic traditions around hagiography):
"Several variants of this story are told. The first to appear in print was in a 1933 German Sunday newspaper article, which stated that, as a result of the vision, shortly after 1880 Leo ordered the prayer to Saint Michael to be recited. In reality, it was only in 1884 that the Pope instituted the Leonine Prayers, still at that time without the prayer to Saint Michael. A year later, a German writer, Fr. Bers, tried to trace the origin of the story and declared that, though the story was widespread, nowhere could he find a trace of proof. Sources close to the institution of the prayer in 1886, including an account of a conversation with Leo XIII about his decision, say nothing of the alleged vision. Bers concluded that the story was a later invention that was spreading like a virus. The story is also found in Carl Vogl's 1935 Begone Satan: A Soul-Stirring Account of Diabolical Possession in Iowa.
In a later version, the vision is said to have occurred not in 1880, but on 13 October 1884, the year in which the Leonine Prayers were instituted but without the Prayer to Saint Michael. And yet another date, 25 September 1888, two years after Pope Leo XIII had added the prayer to the Leonine Prayers, was given in a 1991 version.
Another reported version of the vision relates a detailed conversation between the voice of Satan, who said he would destroy the Church if given enough power and time, and the voice of God, who permits Satan to do what he will. According to William Saunders, writing in the Arlington Catholic Herald, Leo said that God permitted Satan to choose a single century in which to work his worst against the Church; he chose the 20th century, and God privately revealed the then-future events of the 20th century to Leo."
100 years, 140 years, what's a 40% error between friends?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123381/
The 1984 movie "The Annunciation", which has a runtime of 1:40(!). Plot blurb:
> When Adam and Eve, having succumbed to Lucifer's temptation, are expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam makes Lucifer keep his promise. Lucifer then grants Adam a dream of the world to come.
Coincidence? I should think not!
"This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence"
If the 100 years started when Leo XIII heard the dialogue, then presumably Satan's time "off leash" (Job style) ended in 1984. Seems a bit odd, since Catholicism (and Christianity in general) seems to have suffered worse blows since then. On the other hand, one could argue that the religious troubles we've seen since the 80's are the result of evil that was done long beforehand, with the ill effects only being seen later. Take the Catholic sex abuse scandal that rocked the church in the US during the 2000s as an example: if Satan worked his evil will to encourage sexual abuse among priests, and encourage leaders to hide the abuse, before 1984 and then stopped, it wouldn't be that weird to only have the scandal come out twenty years later. I mean for one thing, the kids who were abused needed time to grow up before telling their story. For another, once you've set up a system of abuse and corruption it's probably going to keep going on inertia for a while without any demonic help.
Other things that occurred before 1984 that might have hurt the Church later and led to it's decline in the West: Vatican II, the founding of the Moral Majority, WWI & WWII, the rise of the Soviet Union (which only lasted seven years after Satan's time was up, so maybe he was keeping that whole ship afloat), the sexual revolution, and the invention of televangelism.
It's really quite a hopeful prophecy as far as we are concerned, since it implies that Satan is back on the leash now. In the US at least Christianity is no longer in decline and seems to have stabilized at just over 60% of the population (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/).
What MA program are you looking at?
Happy to take a look at your LW paper if you like. Feel free to DM me.
I completed Virginia Tech’s MA in Philosophy over a decade ago. They had some funded spots, strengths in LLEMMing (language, logic, epistemology, metaphysics ,and mind) areas and philosophy of science back then, and a decent PhD program placement record (though not at all sure where things stand with them now).