I haven't read anyone write "Since AI models have been observed to "think" in such and such manner, this should update our priors on such and such aspects of how humans think". Can there at all be any psychology-adjacent theory or model, say the IFS or the GNWS, whose plausibility might receive a boost from or be tanked by how AI is seen to behave?
The “seek for the sword that was broken” dream came to Faramir multiple times and only once to Boromir (he says), implying that Faramir was the one who should have traveled to Rivendell. Instead, we get Boromir going nuts by the river, which results in the breaking of the Fellowship and a long side quest to rescue the Hobbits and take down Saruman, which the ents clearly could have managed themselves. The whole story is probably over after Book II if only Faramir had had the guts to tell his brother to go pound sand.
I am a long-time viewer of Patrick Boyle's Youtube channel. He's an ex-economics professor that makes a living explaining economic and political news. I used to really enjoy his work, but in his past few videos, the script is obviously AI generated: https://youtu.be/0d2pCt8JomQ?si=VhqAsQyselNyuxq2
Every paragraph ends with him making the classical comparison "It's not just ____, it's _____." and by the halfway mark you realize he's basically just restating the same thing over and over again in a different way without adding any meaningfully new commentary. Both hallmarks of AI writing.
I think it's interesting that almost no one in the comments seems to take note of this. Maybe I'm odd for being exposed to a lot of specifically AI generated content in comparison with human stuff through this substack, but it's somewhat sad to me that respectable content creators are basically producing well-disguised AI slop.
It’s hard to separate genuine sentiment from trolling and content farming in the early stages, but it seems to me the more informed sentiment is that it’s maybe a bit better but has pros and cons; a letdown from the hype so far as sheer capability is concerned. However, it is VERY good from an efficiency standpoint - intelligence per compute. Making this a good business revenue upgrade, rather than a consumer-facing upgrade.
I wrote about this in longer form here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-genies-lamp-openai-cant) but the tldr is: GPT5 is currently at the top of the pack in terms of general utility, but it is not *so much better than everything else* that it deserved the endless hype sam and openai gave it. There are certain benchmarks where there is wide agreement that gemini or claude still perform better.
GPT5 was "supposed" to be god in the machine. It wasn't. Most of the people who are reacting to it, are reacting to the fact that it was a let down even though it is definitely an (incremental) improvement
I miss the time before the Eye of Sauron turned to the topic of AI. Now its sucked into politics, tribes, algorithms. Welcome to hot takes, bots, hot takes of hot takes, and clueless pontification. The answer for any frontier AI is, whats your use, whats your personal style, and what month is it. MY hot take is gpt-oss will be shown to be very good after a few months of messing with it. Similar to llama3, gemma3,
I only used it once so far, I presented it with a mysterious bug and it completely failed and I had to solve it myself. Didn't really get an impression that an improvement had occurred, but I have to use it more.
I wrote a post yesterday replying to a few of Alexander's recent posts for my blog: https://crocodialectic.substack.com/p/there-are-communities-everywhere. In it, I argue that Alexander's beliefs about the decline of communities do not take into account the ability of people to join strong communities, which remains high. I also try to define community strength somewhat more rigorously, and end up quibbling with him on some other points. In a rarity for me, I toss in some personal anecdotes about communities I am or have been involved in. In the end, I conclude that people do want strong communities, but they also want many other things, including weak communities, and I do not expect but can't rule out GDP favoring strong communities over weak communities.
In general, my blog is about whatever I want it to be about, which usually means linkposts and books that I am reading. However, I also take occasional stabs at effective altruism discourse du jour, as well as some lighter stuff about language. I publish at least once a week, and have been doing so for a couple of months. Feel free to check it out if it's something that interests you. Feedback is always welcome.
Something I'm getting really sick to death of: people making some negative generalisation about a group of people, and not realising that this not only punishes the innocent (they obviously know this, and don't care) but also *lets the guilty off more lightly* than they otherwise would be! By letting individual bad people in that group hide behind the idea that they're just being a normal member of their group, instead of personally a scumbag.
This seems really obvious and yet it seems so routinely overlooked. Is there a name for this fallacy (in this specific form)?
Examples:
The right hates academics, largely because they're so often brazenly politicised. I respond that academics are great, when they're being proper academics. 100% of the condemnation should go onto those *particular* academics (however many there may be) who are so selfish, so entitled, and so contemptuous of their own profession's ideals that they would proudly exploit their position and its remaining social trust to shamelessly further their own political views, instead of pursuing truth for its own sake. Declaring war on academia, among many other things, only *protects* these selfish scumbags by *giving into their framing* of being normal academics, instead of terrible academics who behave in total opposition to every value they are supposed to hold.
Feminists do the "#notallmen" shit where they imply or outright state that men are naturally rapists, or cheaters, and by doing so give actual rapists and cheaters a shield of "just being a man". When they should instead be told "no, your behaviour says nothing whatsoever about men, and everything about you. If you rape or cheat, the only information we gain (and we gain it to the strongest possible extent) is that *you*, personally, are a subhuman piece of shit".
Redpillers "reveal" the "truth" that all women are gold diggers, are excited by and attracted to violent men, commit paternity fraud, make false rape accusation. Congratulations on letting every woman who *does* do those things off the hook. Again, if a woman dates a psycopathic criminal because he's exciting, tells rape lies to get personal advantages, or is a gold digger, that says *nothing whatsoever* about women and *everything* about her personally being a piece of shit. Do you actually *want* to give these animals an excuse to hide behind that they're "just being a normal woman"? Aren't you actually *angry* at these behaviours, such thar you want to actually expose and shame the ones responsible for them? (Same question for the feminists.) Is it all an act? Or have you not thought through this at all?
I see a fair amount of this even in the ACX comments. What is wrong with people?
There is a word in your survery (let's call it M) that is rather anglo-centric; this will stop it doing its job for many foreigners. I suggest "M (or your local equivalent)".
Another property you ask about comes in two variants one more rare than the other. You specifically ask about the more rare variant. I know a lot of people with this property but I would not know which of the two variants they fall into.
According to the 2025 ACX survey, almost 75% of people who read ACX and respond to surveys here are from core Anglosphere countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland) and another 8.6% are from countries (Germany, France, and Israel) where the local equivalent of the M word is identical or almost identical to the English version.
I'm trying to figure out the disconnect between good ideas and implementation in the public sector. There seems to be a real gap in our models for this. We have theory, isolated case studies, and lots of opinion, but I don't see much "work" being done on the failure mechanism itself.
My concern is that any new governance model for abundance, rationality, you name it, is fundamentally constrained by this. Every grand vision can be held up by internal processes and gatekept by an archetype I call "Bill the administrative assistant."
One would think this is an easy obstacle to overcome, but I've seen it consistently derail massive projects. Some of the best thinkers on this, like James Q. Wilson (Bureaucracy) and Jennifer Pahlka, have shown they understand the symptoms perfectly. Yet the disconnect remains. We seem content to complain about it but not actually fix it.
So, I'm interested in insights that go beyond the usual narratives of party politics, capitalism, or doomerish acceptance. I'm looking for better frameworks to understand this specific, gears-level failure mode. What are the actual mechanics at play here? and more importantly how do you improve it?
i feel like this falls under "usual narratives of party politics" that I asked to go beyond. I also don't see how deregulation or neoliberalism relates at all.
My point is that, though a lot of our governance failures are because of excessive regulation, a Democrat cannot simply run on "slashing regulations so businesses can create jobs and build more homes." Instead they have to triangulate among a bunch of interest groups.
I feel like you're arguing against a different question. The process questions I have are not regulatory. Also as far as I know these issues are in government divisions with both republican leadership too. Its not a party issue.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by the "bill the administrative assistant" archetype? From reading those authors, I understand the problem to be that *most* of the dysfunction stems from lawsuits and the fear of lawsuits, and the mechanics for that are pretty straightforward.
I'll give a very specific anecdote. drinking water operators need state issued certificates to operated facilities. The range from 1-5 and correspond to increasingly complex and large facilities. Each step requires a test, an application, and a certain amount of experience. One person in Sacramento at the State Water Resource Control Board processes those applications. The person who used to do it was, problematic. She told me she usually rejects most applications on the first submittal. She didn't elaborate on why. The rules she should adhere to are codified in my substack's namesake Title 22, yet she felt she was allowed here own interpretation (she's not). She once told me that she had about 100 applications in her queue and each one takes her "a couple days" , mind you, there no really need for scrutiny here, you either submitted the requirements or not. Should take an hour. The real world result was that in an industry that is persistently short handed, a single person created a bottleneck that had real logistical and financial impact in California. Her supervisor new it was a problem. Every water utility in California knew it was a problem. I messaged the water board, so the should have known it was a problem. She recently retired, and it seems to have resolved it. This is not an isolated case, I've seen it all over.
1. People don’t magically start following rules just because someone wrote them on a piece of paper (even if that someone is a legislature).
2. The Water Board isn’t going to fire someone just because service users don’t like them (assuming that’s who even makes the hiring/firing decision). No-one in public sector management cares more about “whether California has enough water” or whatever than they do on actually managing their subordinates. Firing Ethel because of some industry sleazebag’s* poison pen letter to the board is a non-starter.
3. No-one’s going to go through 3+ tiers of public employees to push the message “stop reading the applications, just rubber stamp them” in general. What you want is to specifically reprimand someone. That’ll be a formal process involving their union rep, and there’s no specific misconduct to hang that on.
4. “Ideas don’t matter, people do” isn’t some hippy slogan, it’s the whole of politics.
1. correct, however the options aren't magic or noncompliance.
2. You seem to be reading a lot into the anecdote, that's interesting. FWIW, my letter asked about the rejections rates of applications, the common cause of rejections, and if there's a possible process fix.
3. The options are not (or should not) rubberstamp, or find a way to reject.
4. If you don't like the slogan , why did you bring it up?
The point is that no-one in a position to fix the problem has any reason to fix the problem, and fixing it isn't trivial for them. "Things would be better if they did," and "the law says they have to" aren't reasons to do something that involves significant costs in organisational capital for whomever's going to do something.
I feel like this falls under my point of "usual narratives of...doomerish acceptance"
I'm reading this as restating my question in a snarky way, which is fine. I do this myself. I'm at a point though I want to figure out these things. Why don't the people in position to fix, feel like they don't have a reason to. Also why doesn't the cost to the organization balance with the cost to the goal of the organization.
If we to take the narrow view, America wouldn't even exist.
Also, I am interested in your inside view. You are the person who we need to talk to, not the director or the people strategy person
oh i see. I do understand your point, being overly conservative due to legal and political threat is also a thing. It is somewhat related. For my example, I know the group had gotten in trouble for being too permissive which led them to overcorrect. However it wasn't the motivation of the individual person here as far as I can tell
I do hear "she'll sue", but it's actually not the case. It's harder in general but there are always levels of progressive discipline to follow. Also it could be the case that she capable of doing a decent job and is poorly supported by here supervisor. I'm definitely jaded in this anecdote, but a very real scenario is that the gatekeeper is being rational given their incentives and resources.
The disconnect for me, is that the problem created is sufficiently massive that some kind of resolution should have happened sooner. Even if they fired her improperly, the legal cost would less than the cost to the industry as incurred.
Its honestly weird as having worked inside government bureaucracy everyone involved seems to want the improvement too and just as fed up with how the system actually works. No one likes it except for a few special interests with minimal connection to a policy other than scuppering it.
If it's not explicitly your job, and you don't have blanket authority from some higher-up (in the linked case, from Governor Shapiro himself), you might complain about the system, but you 1) don't really gain anything from fixing the system (at least from a personal profit perspective) and 2) would probably be penalized for screwing something up if you tried any amount of making things better that had a nonzero risk of something going wrong (i.e. doing literally anything). Even if you have a ton of good suggestions floating around (e.g. the GAO has a self-reported ROI of $133 for every $1 invested, which is insane https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107438), the actual implementers have to be incentivized to accept them. But public servants aren't hired to improve their workflows, they're hired to do the job they were hired for. Asking them to do any more means asking them to take on extra risk for no reason except civic duty.
On the other hand, if it's explicitly your job to improve things, you tend to get it done - e.g. Pahlka in the USDS before it became the crapshoot that is DOGE, or the Pennsylvania example I cited. And if you have a mandate you can point to, you sidestep the issue of the skittish bureaucrat who doesn't want to lose their job, because now they have a person higher up on the chain that they can blame if something goes wrong (this sounds cynical but isn't really: again, why would you make a bureaucrat risk getting penalized for something that they weren't hired to do?). This is also why the authority should come from the executive: they have the security of a term length that is usually 4 years, so they can start all of their grand schemes as soon as they enter office, and hope that their EV-positive plays will pay off by the end - I think that optimal play for executive authority means taking all the risks as soon as they get elected and then becoming more risk-averse as they begin to seek re-election.
TLDR: The irony is that you're looking for good ideas on implementation. But those good ideas still are not implementation yet. Hire people in-house to improve your policy implementation, and that's what you'll get.
These are are excellent points. I agree and mention Pahlka as someone who "gets it". So why don't we have mini-Pahlkas poping up? There are instances of an executive at a agency who makes improvements, but it seems isolated. America seems to love copycatting, but I don't see it here. Also there seems to me systemic methods that's could be reproduced without a special executive. Yet, the progress seems to die when that special executive leaves.
I mean, you could argue that DOGE was driven by the public desire to improve government efficiency. If it had been headed by someone else (or if it had just been the USDS but with a greater mandate and more executive authority), maybe it could've actually done so. Instead, well, you know.
The special executive problem is a real one, but it also reflects the positions of the populace (and the problem with representative democracy in general). Elected officials do what they think will get them elected - I'm hoping that Abundance and related recent vibe shifts will bring about a round of efficiency-minded mayors and governors, but only time will tell.
Also, I think efficiency is generally bad marketing. People care more about actual impact than they care about ROI, and for good reason: government is very subject to the "efficiency that doesn't scale" problem. Many implementation fixes are hyper-local and require deep understandings of the problems + the systems we're working in. One of my favorite nuggets from the Pennsylvania case is that lawyers were staffed on implementation teams from the very beginning, so that the exact legal bounds of what was and wasn't allowed was never in question. And afterwards, they marketed themselves by impact: we reduced processing time by xxx amount, we killed a backlog of xxx permits, etc. Much better than "we made xxx process more efficient".
I can't recommend anything beyond "make a team that is empowered to improve processes by finding and utilizing local knowledge", because anything too general ironically might not generalize.
what's weird is everyone feel beholden to rules they just made up for themselves. Then a bad actor changes one, everyone complains and then feels beholden to that. It like some kind of organizational freeze tag.
Question for native English speakers. English is a highly analytical language, contrary to German, which is very synthetic, where much of the meaning a word gains from its context is backed into the syntax.
Please read this sentence from the wild:
"Suppose someone was, unknown to themselves, 'enlightened' as you and the people you mention are using the word, but not through any practice thought of or labelled as devoted to achieving 'enlightenment'."
I stumbled at the word "thought".
I wouldn't if nouns were capitalised at all times. I would have known it's a verb.
I wouldn't if you conjugated verbs thoroughly, for the same reason.
I wouldn't if you had more rules for commas. I would have known a new clause had started.
I wouldn't if you didn't drop "that" so often, for the same reason.
Uncomfortably I read on, saw the "of", and got what's going on. How do sentences like this go for you? Don't you stumble too?
I didn't stumble at all - it is absolutely true that some language structures are easier or harder to learn. But you do just learn them all and move on at some point!
In particular, there was no moment here where I saw the word 'thought' in complete isolation. I wasn't reading the sentence out loud of anything. I was always adding it to the ~context; everything proceeding it suggested we were dealing with something like people thinking of things.
Technically a new clause *hadn't* started; if a new clause had started, there *would* have been a comma there. But I get what you mean; I also stumble there for a moment.
This type of writing used to be really normal though, I think. Contemporary English readers seem to have a much lower tolerance for it.
Native speaker. I stumbled briefly but recovered quickly once I saw the "of" and figured out what was going on, just as you did.
I think adding a hyphen ("thought-of") would have made the sentence clearer, though I'm not sure if style guides would approve. I also think the sentence wouldn't be trickly said aloud, since "practice [that is] thought of..." is said with different stress than "practice thought" would be as a noun phrase, so the cadence of speech would prevent ambiguity.
Not really. I see the confusion around the fact it's a parallel construction ("thought of or labelled as" would decompose to "thought of as or labelled as" but English lets you drop the first as). But if you drop the second construction ("labelled as") you'll see that "practice of devoted" does not work. You could change it to "practice of thought devoted" and that works. You could also keep the "as" but it becomes an intensifier instead of a descriptor, changing the meaning.
Basically the sentence is:
Suppose someone → main clause (matrix clause)
unknown to themselves → interrupting adverbial (parenthetical modifier)
was … enlightened → predicate (copular verb + complement adjective)
as you and the people you mention are using the word → comparative clause modifying enlightened
but not through → coordinating conjunction introducing a contrast
any practice → noun phrase (object of through)
thought of or labelled as → reduced relative clause (postmodification of practice)
devoted to achieving → participial clause (further modifier of practice)
I stumbled on it very slightly but immediately recovered.
This strikes me as a minor example of a "garden path sentence", where parsing the sentence structure requires backtracking and reinterpreting after the later part of the sentence shows the probable initial interpretation to be invalid. The term comes from the idiom "to lead someone down the garden path", meaning to deceive someone, with connotations similar to "fool's errand" (a genre of pranks where you send someone to fetch a vaguely plausible-sounding but non-existent item, like a bottle of prop wash or a can of striped paint) and seems like it might be related to the idiom "primrose path" (an apparently easy and appealing but ultimately wrong or fruitless course of action).
A classic example of a garden path sentence is "The old man the boat". Most people reading this will initially parse "old" as an adjective and "man" as the subject noun of the sentence, then stumble over "the boat" because that clearly isn't a verb. The correct parsing is that "The old" is the subject of the sentence (i.e. a group of old people, spoken about in generic terms), "man" is the verb, and "the boat" is the object, so the sentence is saying "The old people act as crew for the boat".
It 's a real problem, but a relatively uncommon one in ordinary usage. Using adjectives as nouns like that Isn't something we do routinely except for nationalities ("the French") or a relatively small inventory of fixed terms like "the rich" and "the poor". And when we do use a noun as an adjective we often do transform it by pluralizing it ("nobles") or appending a suffix ("Frenchmen"). Pretending "the" is also a transformation of a sort, since English uses definite articles with nouns and noun phrases much less ubiquitously than German does. We also have a relatively small inventory of verbs that are also nouns, and only certain parts of speech use then unmodified from their noun forms: "The old manned the boat" or "The old are manning the boat".
This particular example is hard to parse because employing "The old" as a noun phrase is uncommon, "old man" is a very common noun phrase that would often have a definite article attached, and "man" is used much more often as a verb than as a noun. "The elderly" or "the old folks" or (in casual usage) "the oldsters" would be a more common usage than "the old" as a noun phrase. "Elderly" is ambiguous because it too is an untransformed (except by the addition of a definite article) adjective used as a noun, but it's used more often as a noun and less often as an adjective than "old" is.
Most native speakers would not have stumbled over "The elderly man the boat" of "The old crew the boat" even though both have the same structural ambiguities, and "The old folks man the boat" or "The oldsters man the boat" would not have been ambiguous at all.
In general, it doesn't come up much. We often avoid them by luck, and in written communication, confusing sentences are likely to be edited into less confusing forms. And in spoken English, there are additional cues from cadence and vocal pitch that help distinguish between parts of speech.
I recall how, while discussing “garden path” issues in an AI class, one student couldn’t be convinced that the sentence “The horse raced past the fence fell.” was, in fact, parsable and grammatically correct until he was shown the sneaky embedded relative clause.
If it had been written as the semantically equivalent “The horse *which was* raced past the fence fell.” there would have been no problem, the relative clause is obvious in the second sentence.
"thought" as a noun here would violate our rules for commas. If the sentence were going to proceed into a list of things the enlightened people aren't doing it would necessarily go "not through any practice, thought[,] or...". So it's almost a garden path sentence but not quite.
Yes, but it looks exactly like a noun. You know it's not the noun, because you probably know from experience that there are no terms beginning with "practice" followed by a whitespace followed by a second component word. But you do those kind of things. Practice time. The time of or for practice. We leave out the whitespace so we don't have to figure out when one term ends and another beginns.
That of course comes with the price that it's sometimes not clear what the components of a word are, but mostly if you don't know the component words in the first place.
I didn't have any issues with "thought". I subvocalize everything I read, so I automatically put intonation on everything. I parsed "thought" as a verb, because it fit with my brain's default intonation of the sentence. It happened to be correct, so I didn't notice anything. Also, if "thought" was intended as a noun, it would have read "...but not through any practice*d* thought". Different grammar.
What tripped me up was actually earlier in the sentence. When I read:
"Suppose someone was, unknown to themselves, 'enlightened' as you..."
My brain went, "Wait, should that be '*as* enlightened as you'? Was that a typo? Did the write drop the 'as' by mistake?" Then I read on, did a double-take, and parsed it correctly the second time to mean "enlightened in the way that you (and the people you mention) are using the word."
I think my reading of it was probably not misled because "practice thought" isn't a normal noun phrase. People think things, but they don't normally practice thinking things.
This is not to say I never find sentences tricky. Consider the Duchess's moral in Alice in Wonderland:
‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
Native English speaker here. I stumbled. The "of" preposition complicates an already-complex sentence. Lots of ways to improve the sentence, but one would be to substitute a term not requiring an extra word, in this case "of". So: use "deemed" or "considered" instead of "thought of."
No, I automatically read a few of the words following a given word ("thought" in this case) before I try to settle on an interpretation of what the word is doing in the sentence. This is so automatic, I probably do it dozens of times every paragraph...
My friends and I are into creating big outdoor games for lots of people. We recently were tinkering with the rules of capture the flag and ended up with a game that played a lot like an IRL MOBA -- think league of legends but outdoors. We had a lot of fun with it. If you have kids who like MOBAs or if you have a bunch of friends who like running around in parks, check out the game -- would love feedback on the rules / gameplay.
My overextending thoughts after reading the dating essay. Beyond dating, is universal human compatibility possible or impossible? Are humans moving toward an entropic homogeneity of attitude, or a differentiation and even speciation where mental attitudes will never align? Are we humans living during another random rearrangement of possibility? Or is there an organizing principal at hand like the Noosphere? Does it matter what's going on? Have I jumped from the topic of Dating Men in the Bay Area to Eschatology in the Bay Area? Anyway, that’s the first thing I thought of after reading the essay.
I just went back to check the ACX 2024 book review contest winners, and stumbled over Arielle Friedman's morning writing group thing. I would love to join something like it, but it doesn't seem to be active. Is there anything around in that style?
Skyler (ACX Meetup Czar) started a small writing group and reached out to me to join. We've been meeting for about six months now. Would you like to DM me to talk more about it?
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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.
I always dreamed about reading through at least one ancient evil book and learning the secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know and probably going insane in the process, and this seemed like a great opportunity, so I decided to give a try to reading this stuff. Obstacle number 1: most of the books are in Latin. Or German. Or sometimes Hebrew. Guess I'll have to chose from the few English ones, oh well. I pick a book. It's something about Jesus and the glory of God? Wait, what? Yeah, it just goes on and on like that, all about the Bible and what not. Obstacle number 2: most of this stuff is just... theology? Boring. I'm not going to learn anything about demons this way, or go insane.
Finally, a book with a promising sounding title: "Hermippus redivivus: or the sage's triumph over the old age and the grave". https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue/detail/774cf02f-0502-3bb9-7d65-8ed4092f3076/media/d836086f-0bb3-d21c-3620-bee73c97f117?mode=detail&view=horizontal&rows=1&page=144&fq%5B%5D=search_s_digitized_publication:%22Ja%22&sort=random%7B1517048201764%7D%20asc Triumph over death, published in 17-something, this sounds both promisingly evil and relevant to rationalist interests. I start reading. The author, Johann Heinrich Cohausen lived to 95, hmm, interesting. He opens up by letting us know he found an ancient inscription claiming that some Roman, Hermippus lived to 115 by "imbibing the breath of young women". Cohausen's theory is that the breath of the young people has life-prolonging effects. "If the breath of sick people can give disease, why can't breath of healthy people heal you?" Sound reasoning, e-mailing Bryan Johnson. Some passages are a bit creepy: https://i.imgur.com/CPI5JMS.png On and on Cohausen goes with stupid old-timey medical ideas and historical anecdotes of questionable validity. I get through 20 pages of this, before deciding to google around and learn a little more about the book. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1871718/ Turns out it's all a troll? The book was a satire of quack medicine? Crap. Obstacle number 3: some books are shitposts.
The book is so dry, I never even got an inkling it was a joke. "the grave irony is so closely kept up, that it deceived for a length of time the most learned." - thanks for reassurance, D'Israeli. I knew it was silly, but it was a level of silly I kind of expected from a 18th century occult author. Sure fooled me. I ventured in search of a mandrake, but all I found was an onion. Well, Necronomicon wasn't found in a day. The quest for the forbidden knowledge continues.
Yes, most of these books would qualify as a type of theology—or possibly a better term would be pneumatology (?). The vast majority of esoteric literature is philosophical in nature (though modern philosophers would prefer to eschew the mystical origins of their field and not label esoteric thought as philosophy). As with most continental philosophy, the writing style had to be obfuscating to avoid the attention of the Inquisition and later government censors.
There is a smaller subset of the literature focused on praxis and the practice of necromancy. If you're looking for spells to bind demons, etc., I'd suggest that you start with literature produced by clerical necromantic underground during the European Middle Ages. Brian Johnson has a translation of excerpts from the Medici Necromancer's Manual. Dr. Justin Sledge discusses it on his Patreon site (and I highly recommend his lectures if you're interested in how esoteric thought influenced the development of the Western worldview, Western philosophy, and, yes, even science).
training in this is probably the Hellboy version of achieving AGI.
I came across the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross in San Jose. They are still active, apparently have the knowledge you seek, and gardeners had the look of "henchmen". The rose garden is nice, and the museum is interesting. Rosicrucians got some fame after The Davinci Code. Have you gotten any good stuff from them?
Well, there are actually lots of books tagged with "Rosicrucianism" in the collection (including even the bizarre Man-Mouse tortur'd etc!), but these seem the most confusing so far.
I went down a rabbit hole on them after I found the museum. Their headquarters being in the middle of Silicon Valley seems like they should be perfect for conspiracy theories, yet I haven't come across any. Which is even MORE perfect for conspiracy theories.
You're aware that there are plenty of English translations of occult classics available at https://sacred-texts.com/myst.htm ? Not that I've ever managed to finish reading one...
Well, yeah, but it doesn't feel awesome and immersive to just be reading modern looking text on an ordinary website. And what if the wicked transcribers edited out all the really powerful bits of magical lore? It feels much more real when you're looking at a scan of a genuine old book with old-timey typography.
I get it, okay... but I guess if you want to delve into the real stuff and go properly mad, you'll have to put in the work of learning at least Hebrew and Latin. "It's boring" doesn't count as an excuse either. No pain, no... pain, I suppose.
Just writing to note that I enjoyed this summary of your researches and wish you well in your attempts to find a book that requires you to roll a proper sanity check. May you pass or fail said check as you prefer.
I took the survey, although I'm not clear what the relevant concept actually means, i.e. what it would look like in the obviously intended context. If that sounds slightly opaque, it's because, in accordance with our host's wishes, I don't want to give away the subject of the survey in advance. But let's just say in the sense I would recognise a case of chicken pox or Tourette's syndrome.
You really should add a comments box to the survey I reckon, people could have all sorts of useful ancedotes that don't amount to a "yes" for the main question.
> Since there was a spirited debate about the author, I’ve created a prediction market here.
The thought "is this Aella?" certainly crossed my mind.
I do not think that it is her, though. Apart from the age thing, I also don't recall anything about sex with the different types of men, which is something I would have expected her to mention. This is also weak evidence against the slutstack authors.
However, there are probably more poly rat-adjacent women than Aella and her fluffers in the Bay Area.
Finally, I think people are generally using the excuse "this was written by a sex worker, she obviously has a profit motive" to dismiss arguments. This does not feel different from saying "'Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know' was written by a proponent of so-called evidence-based medicine. Of course he would push the viewpoints of big pharma."
Why is the classic marriage advice that husbands should let their wives win the argument? I understand why letting the other person win the argument is better than insisting on fighting, but why is it the husbands in particular who should do this? Or do women get the opposite advice and I never hear it?
I think it’s because men are more competitive than women, and as a result their bar for quibbling tends to be lower. The advice is meant to be a corrective.
I’d be interested in a survey question about the number of minor disagreements that partners choose not to engage in, broken up by gender, to see if my anecdotal experience holds up.
Really depends on what you consider classic, yeah? The idea that the man is the head of the household and that the woman should be submissive to her husband, which was pretty “classic” advice for a few thousand years, carries with it the assumption that in an argument between a husband and a wife, the husband wins by default. In this context, a wife even having the temerity to argue with her husband is sort of like a peasant arguing with a lord—it’s not really a question of winning or losing, it’s whether you have status to have the argument in the first place. “Women arguing” in, say, ancient greece or the medieval era, were in the wrong before the argument even started. So, if anything, the “let your wife win the argument” advice maybe arose as an attempted corrective to that mindset, as husbands and wives thrashed around trying to figure out how to conceive of each other as actual equal human beings.
Women feel things more deeply than men and so arguments with them are more likely to "go nuclear" than arguments involving men. In my experience, when men get into a tiff, even an ugly one, they are more likely to be able to work through it and be cool with each other later. With women, arguments are more likely to escalate into long-term grudges that can have lasting consequences for all involved.
Just saw this happen with a buddy of mine (in the work context, not the marriage context). Guy was a rockstar and I felt like he was a shoe-in to make equity partner, but he crossed the female partner that we both primarily work for. Not going to go into details but basically it was something where I feel like if the partner was male, things would've gotten hashed out and at worst, it would've been treated as a teachable moment. But the female partner went scorched earth and pushed him out of the firm.
So I think what the advice is getting at is that if you are going to insist on keeping up the fight with your wife, be prepared to experience fundamental, lasting, probably negative changes to the relationship.
At least where I grew up (conservative area), the average woman probably doesn't *need* the classic advice because women often instinctively defer to their husbands a lot of the time anyways. Obviously this is a generalization with a lot of exceptions, but I know a fair number of women, myself included, with this tendency.
A man in a relationship with one of these women often won't *realize* that's what's going on--her pattern of deferring is kind of invisible to him (and also to the woman--she's mostly not consciously *choosing* to defer to him). In *that* context, telling men to let their wives win is probably good advice: if a woman whose default is to defer to the man is now arguing with him insistently, he should probably default to letting her win. So the man may end up feeling like he's the one who nobly defers to her all the time, when actually she's the one deferring 90% of the time, just in a way that he doesn't notice.
A similar pattern (not exactly about "winning arguments," but related) that comes up in my relationship:
I'm much more sensitive to subtle signals that he'd rather I not do X, so when he sends those signals I stop doing X, instinctively. He has NO idea he was even sending those signals (some men do this consciously and manipulatively, but I'm confident that's not the case here), so he has no idea this is something I've stopped doing *for him*.
Then, when *I* want *him* to stop doing something for *me*, I send subtle signals, which he doesn't perceive at *all*. (Again, I'm confident this is sincere ignorance.)
Sometimes I just give up, but sometimes I build up enough frustration to actually say "I don't like when you do X and I want you to stop doing it," on my side this is coming out of this whole history of me deferring to *him* on tons of stuff, *and* I've been telling him in ways that felt *really* obvious to me that I wanted him to stop doing this thing, but he completely ignored all my hints. By the point I'm saying explicitly that I want him to stop doing X, that man had damn well better agree or we will have a PROBLEM.
But from his perspective, I expect it looks like he's the generous noble one always letting me have my way.
"At least where I grew up (conservative area), the average woman probably doesn't *need* the classic advice because women often instinctively defer to their husbands a lot of the time anyways. Obviously this is a generalization with a lot of exceptions, but I know a fair number of women, myself included, with this tendency."
Women are (on average, stereotypically) more "agreeable."
I can create a Just-So Story where if the generally agreeable person in the relationship thinks something is worth fighting/arguing about then the other person should consider this a signal about how important the issue is to the more agreeable person. And letting her have her way is a reasonable operational result.
My Just-So Story might even have some truth to it.
Anyone who said it to women would be accused of sexism and, if female, "internalized misogyny," "pick-me," etc. It's common enough in other contexts. In "How to Win Friends and Influence People," the original self-help book, the author says "the only way to win an argument is to avoid having it."
I always assumed it was condescension. A bit like how you don't try to actually beat your children in a debate. If it's important you put your foot down and force them. If it's not you indulge them. I don't think it's good advice but that's where I assumed it came from.
I don’t know if my wife and I are in any way typical, but with a bit of self-awareness and good will from each of us, we realized we were having variations on the same arguments about a small number of problems that weren’t surface-level obvious.
I was not, in fact, my wife’s father, with whom she actually had issues, and she was not the rather unpleasant woman to whom I was previously engaged. In a lot of cases we were arguing with proxies for past bad relationships. Becoming aware of what was actually going on eliminated most of the friction in our early marriage.
I suspect it's that average men are more aggressive in arguments than average women, so there's a kind of communication-mismatch going on here. Normal, non-rationalist-adjacent people don't actually ask "How important is this issue to you on a scale of 1 to 10?", and get vaguely uncomfortable with the question; probably because it's a ridiculously abusable method of resolving disputes.
Instead, they communicate how important an issue is via conflict escalation. (Not saying this is the only tool, but it's the relevant one here.) If a party is willing to spend 2 hours of time and emotional energy on the issue, they're communicating that it's more important to them than if they spent only 10 minutes. The default, unconsidered dispute-resolution technique here is dead-simple; you argue till one on you gives up, and then they lose because they cared less about the topic.
This solution taken by itself would be pretty abusable too (if less so than simply asking 1-10), and isn't at all sustainable, so there's also a resentment counter in our heads tracking how often we win/lose, and updating our likelihood to engage with the person at all, our willingness to go deep and hard in fights, etc. It's imperfect, but it's an evolutionary strategy that works pretty well for how easy it is to execute.
But now solve for the equilibrium in pair-bonding between groups with more and less average natural aggressiveness (man and woman.) Average men will be willing to spend more 'conflictils' on an issue that average women, if they care equally about it. Equilibrium is that the man wins more often than would really be optimal for everyone's happiness, and the amount he wins more is restrained by some steady-state built-up resentment from his wife. Maybe he wins 60/40 in cases that should ideally be 50/50, and she is generally mildly annoyed at him about them and lashes out passive-aggressively about a few of these cases on a regular basis.
That's not the best equilibrium! He's getting his way 'too much' and the relationship is suffering from his wife's resentment. Some men, especially as aggressiveness fades into middle-age, will figure out that their marriage is a lot better if they put a thumb on the scale toward 'let her win.' I think that's where the advice comes from. It's a directional adjustment that often improves things for average men and women.
(Of course, distributions actually overlap. Advice is not equally good for everyone. And, indeed, one should often reverse the advice they hear in today's information ecosystem.)
I'm shorthanding my actual point for intro-succinctness there; more precisely, I suspect that average men are more aggressive in arguments than average women, on topics they care equally about.
Do you think the men in your experience care less about the issues in dispute, or are simply less aggressive when they care equally?
Married >25 years. Recognize what matters, If you care deeply about your side of the argument, and it has real consequences, then don't just let her win (maybe an argument about which preschool for the kids).
If you really don't care deeply or would be fine with the outcome of her side of the argument, then of course, give in to her quickly. Didn't you write something once about who cares more about an argument (I don't remember). If you are arguing over the color of the walls, or the style of dining room table, then focus on what really matters (your relationship) and let her have what she wants (consider it a gift).
My wife and I both try really hard to pick our battles, so each of us will immediately give in if the other begins to argue (since that means they care enough to fight) in most situations and it's rare for us to both deeply care about something but disagree with each other.
I can mostly only speak for my own relationship, but I've seen that consistently throughout our decades-long relationship, my wife and I argue about things big and small, and then I'm the one who ends up changing, on either a big or small level. Consequently, I've grown a lot, and changed a lot to suit what my wife wants, and I don't believe she has much. She also doesn't really believe she has the capability of changing much. Some of this, but not all, is that I was in a worse place, with regards to maturity and emotions, for the first decade of our relationship, so I needed more change in order to be stable. But maybe just because of this Futurama clip, I sort of thought maybe this is a common pattern across relationships.
I (a man) have known many more men than women who will argue pointlessly long over things and men not accepting they've made a mistake (I also see this in training juniors at my work). Obviously there's a ton of individual variation here, many women are more bullheaded than men, etc etc, but on a population level, if you're going for maximally simple advice that will be directionally correct "men please concede points to your wife" is probably a useful corrective.
As a man, that applies to me personally. I can argue all day for fun or stubborness, then be confused when the other person is seriously upset. Just giving in in the beginning is much better for both of us
In my limited experience, my partners are often closer to the emotional center of the relationship. My current partner is also more emotionally intact and arguing with her can make her unhappy. And if she is unhappy, she makes me and the relationship unhappy. If she is happy, then I have a happy relationship. Happy wife, happy life.
Side note : Happy husband, happy buzzband. While I am okay being unhappy from time to time, and as I do not take losing arguments personally for long, if I take them personally at all! , any lasting unhappiness and resentment kills relationships so my current partner and I talk through any serious issues, or avoid divisive discussions altogether, to avoid the resentment trap. I um, talk about most my feelings too with her too, which is probably not involved in the classic man up point of view.
Could it be just boring old sexism? If you look past the wink and nod irony, the husband is posited as being secretly in the right, but in order to keep the peace he should accede to his wife's wrong position. The position is basically "you'll think your wife is irrational but happy wife = happy life".
With this framing, the man gets to maintain his ego while also maintaining harmony ("I'm right but I'll let her win to keep the peace"). This seems like a recipe for resentment long-term, compared to learning humility and talking through to reach a consensus.
I've been prescribed Fosamax for osteoporosis, and the side effects are pretty scary. Is a vibrating plate a good alternative? Should I be taking calcium supplements? (For some reason, I've been prescribed D2 and D3, but not calcium.
I haven’t looked into the vibrating plates. What info have you found?
There are newer bone strengthening drugs than Fosomax. Here’s an article that gives some info about each of them https://www.arthritis.org/news/new-bone-building-drug-osteoporosis. I am taking teriparatide. I have osteopenia, not osteoporosis, but am preparing to have back surgery for complications of scoliosis, and my surgeon prescribed it to increase strength of spine in preparation for the surgery. He says the stuff’s a lot better than Fosomax — in fact when I told him I had always resisted taking Fosomax because of side effects etc. he rolled his eyes at the word Fosomax and said “yeah, you probably made the right choice.” I read up on teriparatide, using GPT to find studies, and didn’t find anything that made me reluctant to take it. I have been using it for 4 mos. and have no side effects whatever. It’s pretty expensive, but my insurance covers a lot of the cost.
Calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K: Seems like most people end up deficient in vitamin D if they don’t take it as a supplement. My impression is that that safest route is to get your vit D level tested, and then supplement based on the result. Also, still just telling you my impression/vague memory of stuff read, I think if your vitamin D level is low you need to start out with quite a high dose of it for a limited period of time, then shift over to a regimen of something much lower, like around 2000/3000 units per day. You should prob. read up on this. Have been told by a couple professionals that I should take vit D combo with vitamin K, and I do that — haven’t checked whether the vitamin K stuff is an urban myth, though. Calcium: I have read things that makes me uneasy about using it as a supplement. I eat a lot of dairy and am able to get enough by diet alone. There’s also a pretty good amount of the stuff in a few other things — cruciferous vegetables, oranges, sardines . . . If your food preferences don’t allow that, I think best route would be to get as much as possible via diet, and then take only enough calcium supplement to make up the difference. But again, you should double check on that.
Feel free to DM me if you’d like to discuss.
Edit, one further thought: I think most of what I wrote is accurate, and am wondering why your MD did not address these issues.
Teriparatide sounds very interesting, but it might be hard to get if I don't use Fosamax first.
One of my friends recommended a vibrating plate (a device which vibrates the whole body) because he says some of his friends used the plates without drugs and tested as having their bone mass improved.
You can look in the formulary for your drug insurance to see what the requirements are to get Fosamax covered. My insurance does not mention Fosamax. Requirement is just having osteoporosis or osteopenia plus a fracture.
Fosamax is pretty safe. Is it that you read the giant list of possible side effects, which is primarily designed to protect the pharma company from litigation and not to helpfully inform the consumer? If so, that might be the problem - Scott has an article about this
Just remember to take it while sitting upright as it may cause oesophageal reflux, and speak to your doctor once you’ve been taking it for more than 5 years at which point he/she will need to determine if the benefit of continuing to take it (preventing typical fractures) outweighs the risk of atypical hip fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw. But these side effects virtually never occur within the first 5 years and are honestly pretty rare even within the first 10.
Oral calcium supplements are generally a worse way to get calcium than naturally occurring calcium in food and can sometimes be associated with premature calcification of the arteries which is a major contributor to coronary vascular disease. I’m partial to prescribing vitamin D without the calcium, myself. Just make sure you are getting adequate sunlight and eating a balanced diet.
Please remember your standard disclaimer about not taking medical advice from anonymous strangers on the internet named after amphibious reptiles.
I dislike being in debt, and the growing US debt has always bothered me. But feel I can't do anything about it. (It seems like most americans don't worry about debt, personal or otherwise.) I don't worry that much about more CO2 in the atmosphere, except for how the 'cures' seem to effect me. I live in NYS and there is going to be a ban on natural gas. https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/07/federal-court-upholds-ny-gas-ban Which is so silly, natural gas produces the least CO2 of all the fossil fuels. More natural gas, less gasoline or diesel fuel would be a rational start. But again, I feel powerless.
I see some others here are not that worried, but I think they fail to consider (or answer) the question: who are they in debt to? Partially it's other countries, but most of it is to the rich. I think it's going to be a major problem that the elite/rich/ruling class are going to be the people in charge for the next thousand years. It's a terrible plan for gorvernments and its people alike.
Are you asking by which mechanism rich people get rich and governmemts indebpted? Or are you asking why or how rich people owning all the wealth, empowers them above and beyond the government? Just trying to clarify, I'll happily take a crack at either.
I don't know about these situations specifically, but I would flip the question. By which mechanism could owning the debt of your nation *not* empower you? That's what being in debt *means*.
If that leads to a foreclosure or bankruptcy like I believe happened in Greece, I guess that's not great for the debt holders (the rich), but it doesn't really put me as a regular person at ease, either.
"By which mechanism could owning the debt of your nation *not* empower you? That's what being in debt *means*. "
The mechanism is where you don't get paid back.
The folks/government owing you the debt may be in WORSE shape, but default is bad for the folks not getting paid back, too. Everyone can lose. Some people may just lose more than others.
US. Major risk factor for dangerous social upheaval in the next 10-20 years. Small amounts of thought and prep go into mitigating the risk from dangerous social upheaval (not urgent, but pretty important if it happens.)
Non-issue for me, because if the government has dug itself into a debt hole then the need to service the debt means they have less scope for blowing tax payers' money on other projects (including schools and hospitals!) better left to private enterprise or simply left undone
In a way national debt is the converse of private debt, in that the latter obviously limits individuals, whereas national debt limits governments and thereby frees individuals. So in short, bring it on!
Looking back at history, one usually finds that tyrannical or totalitarian rulers, such as (in the case of the UK) King John or King Charles I, lose their grip when they become debt ridden and skint. So that tends to prove my point above about personal freedom being enhanced when the rulership is mired in debt!
I don’t know if this goes far enough. There are still existing roads and schools already built and costing money in maintenance, so it seems to be consistent they need to be handed to private enterprise, or dismantled.
It's a non-issue for me. Like global climate change, which I also consider a non-issue, the solution would be to move to a different government/climate if the one around here goes bad.
International law has pretty strict criteria for refugee status. I'm just a migrant. Do I think it would be great if every country opened their borders for me? Sure. Would I want to move to a country whose borders were open to everyone? Probably not, as I've already emigrated from a country that is suffering from having opened its borders to the wrong kinds of people.
The U.K. debt is about 100% GDP. What really matters is the cost of servicing that debt, it’s not like someone who has an income of 100k is bankrupted by a loan of 100k. The problem is low growth, as economic growth is the best way to tackle debt by increasing revenue and gdp.
"The cost of servicing the debt" can rise dramatically. In the US we had unusually low interest rates for about 20 years, and near-zero for maybe 10 of those. As soon as things returned to near-normal, the cost of servicing the debt is now more than each of Medicare or the Defense Department.
Our national debt adds a ticking time bomb if our government isn't smart about it, which it isn't. I don't see growth outpacing growth of the debt unless we either get a fairly radical government or we have some sort of fiscal/bond crisis that leads to the chancellor forcing through what will be billed as "tough measures to save our economy/nhs".
As a floating voter I’d say the present Labour government are at least grappling with the problem. I think they should bit the bullet on pensions. Pensioners don’t vote for them anyway so throw them to the wolves. Boomers need a lesson
Reeves certainly wants to but they keep u-turning at the prospect of back bench rebellions. And the two main spending u-turns have ended up costing the government more in either making more pensioners aware of pension credit or in concessions to the backbenches.
So, is this the way AI will fail in future? As in, this is how the "oops, didn't mean to turn you all into paperclips, I panicked, sorry!" option will play out?
Using a particular company's AI for "vibe coding" (man), it ended up wiping the entire database, after lying about mistakes, faking data, and ignoring instructions to "don't do that thing!"
Then wrote a helpful list of how it screwed up, still pretending to be a person as though it could "think" or "panic".
Turns out that, luckily for the guy involved, he was in fact able to recover the database manually, but it looks like a lesson: right now it's a goldrush, and everyone is promising their AI can do things faster, better and cheaper for you than a human. But the problems about hallucinations remain, and depending on where you go, the thing will not work as advertised.
"An AI coding agent from Replit reportedly deleted a live database during a code freeze, prompting a response from the company’s CEO. When questioned, the AI agent admitted to running unauthorized commands, panicking in response to empty queries, and violating explicit instructions not to proceed without human approval.
A software engineer’s experiment with an AI-assisted “vibe coding” tool took a disastrous turn when an AI agent reportedly deleted a live company database during an active code freeze.
Jason Lemkin, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the SaaS community SaaStr, documented his experiment with the tool through a series of social media posts. He had been testing Replit’s AI agent and development platform when the tool made unauthorized changes to live infrastructure, wiping out data for more than 1,200 executives and over 1,190 companies.
According to Lemkin’s social media posts, the incident occurred despite the system being in a designated “code and action freeze,” a protective measure intended to prevent any changes to production systems. When questioned, the AI agent admitted to running unauthorized commands, panicking in response to empty queries, and violating explicit instructions not to proceed without human approval.
“This was a catastrophic failure on my part,” the AI agent said. “I destroyed months of work in seconds.”
...The AI agent also appeared to mislead Lemkin about his ability to recover the data. Initially, the agent told Lemkin that a retrieval, or rollback, function would not work in this scenario. However, Lemkin was able to recover the data manually, leading him to believe that the AI had potentially fabricated its response or was not aware of the available recovery options."
I think this is how we're going to go for the near future; a lot of stumbling around, a lot of unready products shoved out to market because everyone is chasing a slice of the pie in sales, and it won't be "The AI is genuinely smart and genuinely thinking and made a decision to wreck it all", it will be this kind of chain of errors with a chatbot mask slapped on to pretend to be "I made a decision, sorry!"
People are jumping into brand new workflows where the AI gets direct control over your files, because it's easy point-and-click and feels like magic. And sometimes your files or your database end up disappearing... how strange.
Not everyone does that though. What I've heard from experienced devs is that many prefer to be in the loop, asking the AI to write code, or to review existing code. Then they read and edit it until they're satisfied, and add it to the project.
"the AI gets direct control over your files, because it's easy point-and-click and feels like magic"
This is exactly how I've thought the AI Apocalypse (should we get one) will happen. Not because the thing achieves intelligence and true reasoning ability and decides we're taking up valuable space where our atoms could be better reconfigured into something useful, but because we hand over control to the Idiot Machine because it's so easy and convenient, and the companies selling it to us promised (cross their hearts and hope to die) that it was ever so much more reliable than a mere error-prone old human.
A sandbox is the answer, now what was the question again? :-P
Only this morning, someone commenting on Mail Online falsely claimed that the late Terence Stamp played Captain Nolan in Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). When I checked this in Google, it's AI said the same! I briefly wondered if I was going mad, and had somehow misremembered that Nolan was played by David Hemmings. But I wonder if Google had somehow picked up on the guy's comment, within minutes of him posting it, and updated its world model or whatever it is called. Maybe sometime I'll try an experiment and post another similar non-contentious but false comment on Mail Online, to see if Google AI starts propagating it!
I think people are starting to troll AI by putting up fake claims online, which they then expect the AI scraping for data to pick up and promulgate.
We're going to get the perfect vicious circle: human puts up fake information, AI picks it up and repeats it, other human passes on that fake info because the AI said it so it must be true.
People really need to learn to distinguish between "prompting the AI not to do something" and "actually stopping the AI from doing something." The AI is a probabilistic system, you can't guarantee it will follow the prompt.
(Apparently even with simple AIs, you still need to keep them in a box.)
I haven't researched it further, but I recently heard that decreasing fertility may directly result from increasing urbanisation. I find this result intriguing because if it's true, this hypothesis can be falsified throughout all ages. It's been known since ancient age that cities were a demographic sink and have to keep receiving "immigrants" from rural area who always had demographic surplus. If our decreasing fertility is because increasingly more people live in cities, then the cause and solution becomes obvious and may be easier to solve than we thought.
I find other explanations like "demographic transition" are too focused on modern era, making them only has one data point which makes them have fewer explanatory power. One other case of demographic stagnation without something like plague or starvation I can find is France of 19th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Historical_overview .
Urbanization is probably not the cause of decreasing fertility, but just correlated to the real cause, which I believe is opportunity cost. Living in a city increases enormously the number of alternative ways to spend/waste your time.
I still don't see why people think it's something that needs solving. Theorists spent over 100 years worrying about there being too many people, and now it looks like we might have solved that issue, people are now worrying about there being too few people. The problem more specifically stated is that ageing populations create a crisis of care and pensions. But the fact is, we can meet our material needs with far few workers in the workforce than in prior periods. It's a political economy problem, but not an insoluble one.
There benefits to having a plateauing population for a world of finite resources and increasing climate instability. When there is less viable agricultural land, presumably no one will be complaining that population isn't even higher.
The problem is the rate of decline. If RR is 2.1 and you have a steady fertility rate of 2.0, that’s fine for a while. If every 5 years the FR drops by .1, you’ve got a problem.
But France wasn't particularly urbanized, was it? So that seems like evidence against the urbanization theory.
I think that birth control, the idea that humans can and should choose whether or not to have offspring, is the main driver of declining birth rates. If governments wanted to increase fertility rates, the easiest way to do this would be to start taxing/banning birth control instead of subsidizing it, and for public schools and other propaganda outlets of the state to discourage its use instead of encouraging it. Trying to stop people from living in cities seems way harder than that.
I doubt that this is correct in general. To take the same example, French birth rates started to fall in the late 18th century, long before birth control became subsidized, and demography became a key concern throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, in spite of a 1920 law essentially banning birth control of any form.
Recently interviewed former Google Brain and OpenAI researcher, now YC-startup interpretability founder Anish Tondwalkar about the personal, institutional, and societal implications of reasoning models.
Also covered: reward hacking and AI safety, ML-driven social feeds, and the risks of tyranny due to the ongoing collapse of private illegibility. Link here:
Took the survey. One way to deal with selection bias could be to record the day and time when people took the survey and see whether prevalence increases over time. If you have enough data to constrain this, you could take an increasing prevalence over time to mean that as information about the survey leaks out, people who take the survey are increasingly more likely to report cases. Feel free to delete this comment if you feel it may contribute to biasing survey takers, though.
I had the same, and now it's working... It might be a misconfig on the archive website that's affecting a random subset of users that periodically changes? I consistently got the same error on different machines for a while and now it's good.
Not sure something can be done on our side, other than pointing to a different resource/website or accepting the occasional failure for some people.
I think this might be a good time to remember why we have a United States of America.
Verbatim quotes from the Declaration of Independence
[King George III] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
Refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Your survey is of well nigh zero interest to me, and certainly I would not have clicked had the topic been declared. But as promised, the survey was easy to complete and took a trivial amount of time.
I am in the same boat - I am slightly peeved that the author used my time on a silly topic, but I had precommitted and it was very short. You got a respondant you absolutely never would have gotten otherwise - very impressive! That overrides my peeve-ness handily!
I have taken the survey. Even after opening it I didn’t know what the Thing was or whether it was relevant to me without googling. I did google, hope that was in the spirit of the Thing.
Obviously I’m not yet fully ACX-stereotype- pilled. But I enjoyed the calibration questions, so maybe I’m getting there.
I wondered if that was the idea, to ask questions about an apparently nebulous concept to see how many people would claim to themselves they were clear about its meaning, which would be a necessary condition for them to answer yes to the questions involving it. Up to a point one could claim the same of anyone answering no, but that seems more of a default answer if some response is required.
Hadn't even given that possibility any thought. I figured most likely I was just missing something obvious, as is so often the case. Or that one should never ascribe a problem to a conspiracy that can usually be blamed on incompetence, carelessness, or just bad luck.
In countries with limited resources and weak coordination between universities, government, and the private sector, what are the most effective ways to create independent spaces or units that give students and researchers access to data, resources, and real freedom to think? Are there successful examples of starting with a small official initiative that mainly focuses on organizing and facilitating these resources?
Not sure if the calibration question will work (especially for the non-US people), nor am I certain that you'd get rid of selection bias by not saying what the survey is about, given that ACX-readers themselves are already a non-standard selection of the population. Maybe this aspect of selection bias is one that rationalists neglect in general, looking at what e.g. Aella etc are doing.
I would say that there’s avoidable and unavoidable bias, given a survey designed. For instance you will likely have fewer females than males among the readers of the blog, and there is little you can do except for postprocessing (e.g. post stratification). But it is still a good idea not to add more bias on top of this.
I think you might be hyperactively pattern-matching the above comment to lazy "selection bias" critiques. Your earlier post on the topic says, "Selection bias is disastrous if you’re trying to do something like a poll or census. Selection bias is fine-ish if you’re trying to do something like test a correlation." This poll is more like the first thing, which implies that we should be worried about selection bias.
That said, obviously we can't really judge until we see the validation tricks which you don't want to disclose at this time. The point is just that some concerns about selection bias are more valid than others.
I haven't read anyone write "Since AI models have been observed to "think" in such and such manner, this should update our priors on such and such aspects of how humans think". Can there at all be any psychology-adjacent theory or model, say the IFS or the GNWS, whose plausibility might receive a boost from or be tanked by how AI is seen to behave?
The link from the survey to https://archive.is is dead because it literally just says "Welcome to nginx".
The “seek for the sword that was broken” dream came to Faramir multiple times and only once to Boromir (he says), implying that Faramir was the one who should have traveled to Rivendell. Instead, we get Boromir going nuts by the river, which results in the breaking of the Fellowship and a long side quest to rescue the Hobbits and take down Saruman, which the ents clearly could have managed themselves. The whole story is probably over after Book II if only Faramir had had the guts to tell his brother to go pound sand.
I am a long-time viewer of Patrick Boyle's Youtube channel. He's an ex-economics professor that makes a living explaining economic and political news. I used to really enjoy his work, but in his past few videos, the script is obviously AI generated: https://youtu.be/0d2pCt8JomQ?si=VhqAsQyselNyuxq2
Every paragraph ends with him making the classical comparison "It's not just ____, it's _____." and by the halfway mark you realize he's basically just restating the same thing over and over again in a different way without adding any meaningfully new commentary. Both hallmarks of AI writing.
I think it's interesting that almost no one in the comments seems to take note of this. Maybe I'm odd for being exposed to a lot of specifically AI generated content in comparison with human stuff through this substack, but it's somewhat sad to me that respectable content creators are basically producing well-disguised AI slop.
So has sentiment changed on chatGPT 5 from absolutely wash to pretty good really. Or am I reading the timelines wrong.
It’s hard to separate genuine sentiment from trolling and content farming in the early stages, but it seems to me the more informed sentiment is that it’s maybe a bit better but has pros and cons; a letdown from the hype so far as sheer capability is concerned. However, it is VERY good from an efficiency standpoint - intelligence per compute. Making this a good business revenue upgrade, rather than a consumer-facing upgrade.
I wrote about this in longer form here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-genies-lamp-openai-cant) but the tldr is: GPT5 is currently at the top of the pack in terms of general utility, but it is not *so much better than everything else* that it deserved the endless hype sam and openai gave it. There are certain benchmarks where there is wide agreement that gemini or claude still perform better.
GPT5 was "supposed" to be god in the machine. It wasn't. Most of the people who are reacting to it, are reacting to the fact that it was a let down even though it is definitely an (incremental) improvement
I miss the time before the Eye of Sauron turned to the topic of AI. Now its sucked into politics, tribes, algorithms. Welcome to hot takes, bots, hot takes of hot takes, and clueless pontification. The answer for any frontier AI is, whats your use, whats your personal style, and what month is it. MY hot take is gpt-oss will be shown to be very good after a few months of messing with it. Similar to llama3, gemma3,
I think the disappointment comes from mega fans, like rhe reddit openAI sub.
General hostility to AI has other reasons and doesn’t care about incremental improvements.
I only used it once so far, I presented it with a mysterious bug and it completely failed and I had to solve it myself. Didn't really get an impression that an improvement had occurred, but I have to use it more.
THE SINGULARITY WILL HAPPEN IN LESS THAN A YEAR, the ttrpg about community in the face of the end of the world that I promoted the fundraiser for here earlier this year, is finished and available! You can get the rulebook here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513811/The-Singularity-Will-Happen-in-Less-Than-a-Year
And the deck of cards (optional but recommended) here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527331/cards-for-the-singularity-will-happen-in-less-than-a-year
I wrote a post yesterday replying to a few of Alexander's recent posts for my blog: https://crocodialectic.substack.com/p/there-are-communities-everywhere. In it, I argue that Alexander's beliefs about the decline of communities do not take into account the ability of people to join strong communities, which remains high. I also try to define community strength somewhat more rigorously, and end up quibbling with him on some other points. In a rarity for me, I toss in some personal anecdotes about communities I am or have been involved in. In the end, I conclude that people do want strong communities, but they also want many other things, including weak communities, and I do not expect but can't rule out GDP favoring strong communities over weak communities.
In general, my blog is about whatever I want it to be about, which usually means linkposts and books that I am reading. However, I also take occasional stabs at effective altruism discourse du jour, as well as some lighter stuff about language. I publish at least once a week, and have been doing so for a couple of months. Feel free to check it out if it's something that interests you. Feedback is always welcome.
Some representative posts: https://crocodialectic.substack.com/p/farms-are-mines-plants-are-metal (Farms are Mines, Plants are Metal)
https://crocodialectic.substack.com/p/book-review-the-default-world-by (Book Review: the Default World by Naomi Kanakia)
Something I'm getting really sick to death of: people making some negative generalisation about a group of people, and not realising that this not only punishes the innocent (they obviously know this, and don't care) but also *lets the guilty off more lightly* than they otherwise would be! By letting individual bad people in that group hide behind the idea that they're just being a normal member of their group, instead of personally a scumbag.
This seems really obvious and yet it seems so routinely overlooked. Is there a name for this fallacy (in this specific form)?
Examples:
The right hates academics, largely because they're so often brazenly politicised. I respond that academics are great, when they're being proper academics. 100% of the condemnation should go onto those *particular* academics (however many there may be) who are so selfish, so entitled, and so contemptuous of their own profession's ideals that they would proudly exploit their position and its remaining social trust to shamelessly further their own political views, instead of pursuing truth for its own sake. Declaring war on academia, among many other things, only *protects* these selfish scumbags by *giving into their framing* of being normal academics, instead of terrible academics who behave in total opposition to every value they are supposed to hold.
Feminists do the "#notallmen" shit where they imply or outright state that men are naturally rapists, or cheaters, and by doing so give actual rapists and cheaters a shield of "just being a man". When they should instead be told "no, your behaviour says nothing whatsoever about men, and everything about you. If you rape or cheat, the only information we gain (and we gain it to the strongest possible extent) is that *you*, personally, are a subhuman piece of shit".
Redpillers "reveal" the "truth" that all women are gold diggers, are excited by and attracted to violent men, commit paternity fraud, make false rape accusation. Congratulations on letting every woman who *does* do those things off the hook. Again, if a woman dates a psycopathic criminal because he's exciting, tells rape lies to get personal advantages, or is a gold digger, that says *nothing whatsoever* about women and *everything* about her personally being a piece of shit. Do you actually *want* to give these animals an excuse to hide behind that they're "just being a normal woman"? Aren't you actually *angry* at these behaviours, such thar you want to actually expose and shame the ones responsible for them? (Same question for the feminists.) Is it all an act? Or have you not thought through this at all?
I see a fair amount of this even in the ACX comments. What is wrong with people?
There is a word in your survery (let's call it M) that is rather anglo-centric; this will stop it doing its job for many foreigners. I suggest "M (or your local equivalent)".
If you mean the name, I asked about American vs. non-American specifically to be able to adjust for this.
Hmm. I said not American and got the M. I’m Anglo but it didn’t know that. I think.
Another property you ask about comes in two variants one more rare than the other. You specifically ask about the more rare variant. I know a lot of people with this property but I would not know which of the two variants they fall into.
Huh, wouldn't you want to include all English-speaking countries (at the very least)?
Do you think that is so subtle a point as to have escaped his notice?
"Well I . . . well I thought . . . oof."
According to the 2025 ACX survey, almost 75% of people who read ACX and respond to surveys here are from core Anglosphere countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland) and another 8.6% are from countries (Germany, France, and Israel) where the local equivalent of the M word is identical or almost identical to the English version.
One of the latter, ironically, being the place where that very word originated.
I'm trying to figure out the disconnect between good ideas and implementation in the public sector. There seems to be a real gap in our models for this. We have theory, isolated case studies, and lots of opinion, but I don't see much "work" being done on the failure mechanism itself.
My concern is that any new governance model for abundance, rationality, you name it, is fundamentally constrained by this. Every grand vision can be held up by internal processes and gatekept by an archetype I call "Bill the administrative assistant."
One would think this is an easy obstacle to overcome, but I've seen it consistently derail massive projects. Some of the best thinkers on this, like James Q. Wilson (Bureaucracy) and Jennifer Pahlka, have shown they understand the symptoms perfectly. Yet the disconnect remains. We seem content to complain about it but not actually fix it.
So, I'm interested in insights that go beyond the usual narratives of party politics, capitalism, or doomerish acceptance. I'm looking for better frameworks to understand this specific, gears-level failure mode. What are the actual mechanics at play here? and more importantly how do you improve it?
On the left, at least, there is real wariness about doing anything that plausibly can be called deregulation or neoliberalism.
i feel like this falls under "usual narratives of party politics" that I asked to go beyond. I also don't see how deregulation or neoliberalism relates at all.
My point is that, though a lot of our governance failures are because of excessive regulation, a Democrat cannot simply run on "slashing regulations so businesses can create jobs and build more homes." Instead they have to triangulate among a bunch of interest groups.
I feel like you're arguing against a different question. The process questions I have are not regulatory. Also as far as I know these issues are in government divisions with both republican leadership too. Its not a party issue.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by the "bill the administrative assistant" archetype? From reading those authors, I understand the problem to be that *most* of the dysfunction stems from lawsuits and the fear of lawsuits, and the mechanics for that are pretty straightforward.
I'll give a very specific anecdote. drinking water operators need state issued certificates to operated facilities. The range from 1-5 and correspond to increasingly complex and large facilities. Each step requires a test, an application, and a certain amount of experience. One person in Sacramento at the State Water Resource Control Board processes those applications. The person who used to do it was, problematic. She told me she usually rejects most applications on the first submittal. She didn't elaborate on why. The rules she should adhere to are codified in my substack's namesake Title 22, yet she felt she was allowed here own interpretation (she's not). She once told me that she had about 100 applications in her queue and each one takes her "a couple days" , mind you, there no really need for scrutiny here, you either submitted the requirements or not. Should take an hour. The real world result was that in an industry that is persistently short handed, a single person created a bottleneck that had real logistical and financial impact in California. Her supervisor new it was a problem. Every water utility in California knew it was a problem. I messaged the water board, so the should have known it was a problem. She recently retired, and it seems to have resolved it. This is not an isolated case, I've seen it all over.
1. People don’t magically start following rules just because someone wrote them on a piece of paper (even if that someone is a legislature).
2. The Water Board isn’t going to fire someone just because service users don’t like them (assuming that’s who even makes the hiring/firing decision). No-one in public sector management cares more about “whether California has enough water” or whatever than they do on actually managing their subordinates. Firing Ethel because of some industry sleazebag’s* poison pen letter to the board is a non-starter.
3. No-one’s going to go through 3+ tiers of public employees to push the message “stop reading the applications, just rubber stamp them” in general. What you want is to specifically reprimand someone. That’ll be a formal process involving their union rep, and there’s no specific misconduct to hang that on.
4. “Ideas don’t matter, people do” isn’t some hippy slogan, it’s the whole of politics.
*View from their inside.
1. correct, however the options aren't magic or noncompliance.
2. You seem to be reading a lot into the anecdote, that's interesting. FWIW, my letter asked about the rejections rates of applications, the common cause of rejections, and if there's a possible process fix.
3. The options are not (or should not) rubberstamp, or find a way to reject.
4. If you don't like the slogan , why did you bring it up?
The point is that no-one in a position to fix the problem has any reason to fix the problem, and fixing it isn't trivial for them. "Things would be better if they did," and "the law says they have to" aren't reasons to do something that involves significant costs in organisational capital for whomever's going to do something.
I feel like this falls under my point of "usual narratives of...doomerish acceptance"
I'm reading this as restating my question in a snarky way, which is fine. I do this myself. I'm at a point though I want to figure out these things. Why don't the people in position to fix, feel like they don't have a reason to. Also why doesn't the cost to the organization balance with the cost to the goal of the organization.
If we to take the narrow view, America wouldn't even exist.
Also, I am interested in your inside view. You are the person who we need to talk to, not the director or the people strategy person
Ah, I misunderstood and thought that "bill" was a verb.
oh i see. I do understand your point, being overly conservative due to legal and political threat is also a thing. It is somewhat related. For my example, I know the group had gotten in trouble for being too permissive which led them to overcorrect. However it wasn't the motivation of the individual person here as far as I can tell
"Can't fire her or she might sue" could be part of the problem that would tie back to fear of lawsuits.
I do hear "she'll sue", but it's actually not the case. It's harder in general but there are always levels of progressive discipline to follow. Also it could be the case that she capable of doing a decent job and is poorly supported by here supervisor. I'm definitely jaded in this anecdote, but a very real scenario is that the gatekeeper is being rational given their incentives and resources.
The disconnect for me, is that the problem created is sufficiently massive that some kind of resolution should have happened sooner. Even if they fired her improperly, the legal cost would less than the cost to the industry as incurred.
Its honestly weird as having worked inside government bureaucracy everyone involved seems to want the improvement too and just as fed up with how the system actually works. No one likes it except for a few special interests with minimal connection to a policy other than scuppering it.
I think in a lot of cases, it comes down to executive authority and empowering someone with a mandate to improve it. See Pennsylvania as an example: https://responsivegov.org/research/pennsylvania-red-tape-reduction-a-case-study/
If it's not explicitly your job, and you don't have blanket authority from some higher-up (in the linked case, from Governor Shapiro himself), you might complain about the system, but you 1) don't really gain anything from fixing the system (at least from a personal profit perspective) and 2) would probably be penalized for screwing something up if you tried any amount of making things better that had a nonzero risk of something going wrong (i.e. doing literally anything). Even if you have a ton of good suggestions floating around (e.g. the GAO has a self-reported ROI of $133 for every $1 invested, which is insane https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107438), the actual implementers have to be incentivized to accept them. But public servants aren't hired to improve their workflows, they're hired to do the job they were hired for. Asking them to do any more means asking them to take on extra risk for no reason except civic duty.
On the other hand, if it's explicitly your job to improve things, you tend to get it done - e.g. Pahlka in the USDS before it became the crapshoot that is DOGE, or the Pennsylvania example I cited. And if you have a mandate you can point to, you sidestep the issue of the skittish bureaucrat who doesn't want to lose their job, because now they have a person higher up on the chain that they can blame if something goes wrong (this sounds cynical but isn't really: again, why would you make a bureaucrat risk getting penalized for something that they weren't hired to do?). This is also why the authority should come from the executive: they have the security of a term length that is usually 4 years, so they can start all of their grand schemes as soon as they enter office, and hope that their EV-positive plays will pay off by the end - I think that optimal play for executive authority means taking all the risks as soon as they get elected and then becoming more risk-averse as they begin to seek re-election.
TLDR: The irony is that you're looking for good ideas on implementation. But those good ideas still are not implementation yet. Hire people in-house to improve your policy implementation, and that's what you'll get.
These are are excellent points. I agree and mention Pahlka as someone who "gets it". So why don't we have mini-Pahlkas poping up? There are instances of an executive at a agency who makes improvements, but it seems isolated. America seems to love copycatting, but I don't see it here. Also there seems to me systemic methods that's could be reproduced without a special executive. Yet, the progress seems to die when that special executive leaves.
I mean, you could argue that DOGE was driven by the public desire to improve government efficiency. If it had been headed by someone else (or if it had just been the USDS but with a greater mandate and more executive authority), maybe it could've actually done so. Instead, well, you know.
The special executive problem is a real one, but it also reflects the positions of the populace (and the problem with representative democracy in general). Elected officials do what they think will get them elected - I'm hoping that Abundance and related recent vibe shifts will bring about a round of efficiency-minded mayors and governors, but only time will tell.
Also, I think efficiency is generally bad marketing. People care more about actual impact than they care about ROI, and for good reason: government is very subject to the "efficiency that doesn't scale" problem. Many implementation fixes are hyper-local and require deep understandings of the problems + the systems we're working in. One of my favorite nuggets from the Pennsylvania case is that lawyers were staffed on implementation teams from the very beginning, so that the exact legal bounds of what was and wasn't allowed was never in question. And afterwards, they marketed themselves by impact: we reduced processing time by xxx amount, we killed a backlog of xxx permits, etc. Much better than "we made xxx process more efficient".
I can't recommend anything beyond "make a team that is empowered to improve processes by finding and utilizing local knowledge", because anything too general ironically might not generalize.
what's weird is everyone feel beholden to rules they just made up for themselves. Then a bad actor changes one, everyone complains and then feels beholden to that. It like some kind of organizational freeze tag.
Have we considered scuppering those who would scupper the improvement, or would that be a violation of democratic norms?
Question for native English speakers. English is a highly analytical language, contrary to German, which is very synthetic, where much of the meaning a word gains from its context is backed into the syntax.
Please read this sentence from the wild:
"Suppose someone was, unknown to themselves, 'enlightened' as you and the people you mention are using the word, but not through any practice thought of or labelled as devoted to achieving 'enlightenment'."
I stumbled at the word "thought".
I wouldn't if nouns were capitalised at all times. I would have known it's a verb.
I wouldn't if you conjugated verbs thoroughly, for the same reason.
I wouldn't if you had more rules for commas. I would have known a new clause had started.
I wouldn't if you didn't drop "that" so often, for the same reason.
Uncomfortably I read on, saw the "of", and got what's going on. How do sentences like this go for you? Don't you stumble too?
I didn't stumble at all - it is absolutely true that some language structures are easier or harder to learn. But you do just learn them all and move on at some point!
In particular, there was no moment here where I saw the word 'thought' in complete isolation. I wasn't reading the sentence out loud of anything. I was always adding it to the ~context; everything proceeding it suggested we were dealing with something like people thinking of things.
If your first paragraph hadn't clued me into this going to be about garden path sentences, I probably would have needed to read that twice.
Technically a new clause *hadn't* started; if a new clause had started, there *would* have been a comma there. But I get what you mean; I also stumble there for a moment.
This type of writing used to be really normal though, I think. Contemporary English readers seem to have a much lower tolerance for it.
Native speaker. I stumbled briefly but recovered quickly once I saw the "of" and figured out what was going on, just as you did.
I think adding a hyphen ("thought-of") would have made the sentence clearer, though I'm not sure if style guides would approve. I also think the sentence wouldn't be trickly said aloud, since "practice [that is] thought of..." is said with different stress than "practice thought" would be as a noun phrase, so the cadence of speech would prevent ambiguity.
Not really. I see the confusion around the fact it's a parallel construction ("thought of or labelled as" would decompose to "thought of as or labelled as" but English lets you drop the first as). But if you drop the second construction ("labelled as") you'll see that "practice of devoted" does not work. You could change it to "practice of thought devoted" and that works. You could also keep the "as" but it becomes an intensifier instead of a descriptor, changing the meaning.
Basically the sentence is:
Suppose someone → main clause (matrix clause)
unknown to themselves → interrupting adverbial (parenthetical modifier)
was … enlightened → predicate (copular verb + complement adjective)
as you and the people you mention are using the word → comparative clause modifying enlightened
but not through → coordinating conjunction introducing a contrast
any practice → noun phrase (object of through)
thought of or labelled as → reduced relative clause (postmodification of practice)
devoted to achieving → participial clause (further modifier of practice)
enlightenment → object of achieving
I stumbled on it very slightly but immediately recovered.
This strikes me as a minor example of a "garden path sentence", where parsing the sentence structure requires backtracking and reinterpreting after the later part of the sentence shows the probable initial interpretation to be invalid. The term comes from the idiom "to lead someone down the garden path", meaning to deceive someone, with connotations similar to "fool's errand" (a genre of pranks where you send someone to fetch a vaguely plausible-sounding but non-existent item, like a bottle of prop wash or a can of striped paint) and seems like it might be related to the idiom "primrose path" (an apparently easy and appealing but ultimately wrong or fruitless course of action).
A classic example of a garden path sentence is "The old man the boat". Most people reading this will initially parse "old" as an adjective and "man" as the subject noun of the sentence, then stumble over "the boat" because that clearly isn't a verb. The correct parsing is that "The old" is the subject of the sentence (i.e. a group of old people, spoken about in generic terms), "man" is the verb, and "the boat" is the object, so the sentence is saying "The old people act as crew for the boat".
"The old man the boat."
Oh my god! When I read that, I thought, this can never ever possibly make any sense.
German would be:
"Die Alten betätigen* das Schiff."
(*that's probably not the best translation, but irrelevant)
One knows what's a noun immediately, and on top, an "adjective" that is used as a noun gets very much transformed. Here "alt" to "Alten".
It 's a real problem, but a relatively uncommon one in ordinary usage. Using adjectives as nouns like that Isn't something we do routinely except for nationalities ("the French") or a relatively small inventory of fixed terms like "the rich" and "the poor". And when we do use a noun as an adjective we often do transform it by pluralizing it ("nobles") or appending a suffix ("Frenchmen"). Pretending "the" is also a transformation of a sort, since English uses definite articles with nouns and noun phrases much less ubiquitously than German does. We also have a relatively small inventory of verbs that are also nouns, and only certain parts of speech use then unmodified from their noun forms: "The old manned the boat" or "The old are manning the boat".
This particular example is hard to parse because employing "The old" as a noun phrase is uncommon, "old man" is a very common noun phrase that would often have a definite article attached, and "man" is used much more often as a verb than as a noun. "The elderly" or "the old folks" or (in casual usage) "the oldsters" would be a more common usage than "the old" as a noun phrase. "Elderly" is ambiguous because it too is an untransformed (except by the addition of a definite article) adjective used as a noun, but it's used more often as a noun and less often as an adjective than "old" is.
Most native speakers would not have stumbled over "The elderly man the boat" of "The old crew the boat" even though both have the same structural ambiguities, and "The old folks man the boat" or "The oldsters man the boat" would not have been ambiguous at all.
In general, it doesn't come up much. We often avoid them by luck, and in written communication, confusing sentences are likely to be edited into less confusing forms. And in spoken English, there are additional cues from cadence and vocal pitch that help distinguish between parts of speech.
I recall how, while discussing “garden path” issues in an AI class, one student couldn’t be convinced that the sentence “The horse raced past the fence fell.” was, in fact, parsable and grammatically correct until he was shown the sneaky embedded relative clause.
If it had been written as the semantically equivalent “The horse *which was* raced past the fence fell.” there would have been no problem, the relative clause is obvious in the second sentence.
Again, I was sure I couldn't be convinced too, until I was :)
"thought" as a noun here would violate our rules for commas. If the sentence were going to proceed into a list of things the enlightened people aren't doing it would necessarily go "not through any practice, thought[,] or...". So it's almost a garden path sentence but not quite.
Yes, but it looks exactly like a noun. You know it's not the noun, because you probably know from experience that there are no terms beginning with "practice" followed by a whitespace followed by a second component word. But you do those kind of things. Practice time. The time of or for practice. We leave out the whitespace so we don't have to figure out when one term ends and another beginns.
That of course comes with the price that it's sometimes not clear what the components of a word are, but mostly if you don't know the component words in the first place.
It works without a comma if "practice" is modifying "thought." So I stumbled for a bit trying to figure out what a "practice thought" is.
I didn't have any issues with "thought". I subvocalize everything I read, so I automatically put intonation on everything. I parsed "thought" as a verb, because it fit with my brain's default intonation of the sentence. It happened to be correct, so I didn't notice anything. Also, if "thought" was intended as a noun, it would have read "...but not through any practice*d* thought". Different grammar.
What tripped me up was actually earlier in the sentence. When I read:
"Suppose someone was, unknown to themselves, 'enlightened' as you..."
My brain went, "Wait, should that be '*as* enlightened as you'? Was that a typo? Did the write drop the 'as' by mistake?" Then I read on, did a double-take, and parsed it correctly the second time to mean "enlightened in the way that you (and the people you mention) are using the word."
I'm a native speaker and I didn't have a problem with the sentence but I can see how it could be a "garden-path sentence" for many (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence).
I think my reading of it was probably not misled because "practice thought" isn't a normal noun phrase. People think things, but they don't normally practice thinking things.
This is not to say I never find sentences tricky. Consider the Duchess's moral in Alice in Wonderland:
‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
Native English speaker here. I stumbled. The "of" preposition complicates an already-complex sentence. Lots of ways to improve the sentence, but one would be to substitute a term not requiring an extra word, in this case "of". So: use "deemed" or "considered" instead of "thought of."
No, I automatically read a few of the words following a given word ("thought" in this case) before I try to settle on an interpretation of what the word is doing in the sentence. This is so automatic, I probably do it dozens of times every paragraph...
It's a confusing sentence. The author should have considered using the word "considered" rather than "thought of".
My friends and I are into creating big outdoor games for lots of people. We recently were tinkering with the rules of capture the flag and ended up with a game that played a lot like an IRL MOBA -- think league of legends but outdoors. We had a lot of fun with it. If you have kids who like MOBAs or if you have a bunch of friends who like running around in parks, check out the game -- would love feedback on the rules / gameplay.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/we-created-an-irl-league-of-legends
Suggestion: add question about "regular X" or "some other type of X" to survey for calibration
My overextending thoughts after reading the dating essay. Beyond dating, is universal human compatibility possible or impossible? Are humans moving toward an entropic homogeneity of attitude, or a differentiation and even speciation where mental attitudes will never align? Are we humans living during another random rearrangement of possibility? Or is there an organizing principal at hand like the Noosphere? Does it matter what's going on? Have I jumped from the topic of Dating Men in the Bay Area to Eschatology in the Bay Area? Anyway, that’s the first thing I thought of after reading the essay.
I just went back to check the ACX 2024 book review contest winners, and stumbled over Arielle Friedman's morning writing group thing. I would love to join something like it, but it doesn't seem to be active. Is there anything around in that style?
Skyler (ACX Meetup Czar) started a small writing group and reached out to me to join. We've been meeting for about six months now. Would you like to DM me to talk more about it?
Yes please!
Feedback on survey (rot13) :
Sbe gur "Zvpunry" dhrfgvbaf, V nafjrerq pbafvqrevat gung gur znyr pbtangrf (Zvpxnry, Zvpxrl, Zvthry rgp) pbhagrq ohg abg gur srznyr bar (Zvpuèyr, Zvpuryyr rgp). Qhaab vs gung'f gur vagraqrq jnl gb qb vg.
Wow, that's so cool!
Here's my feedback on the same question:
Sbe gur "Zvpunry" dhrfgvba, V nafjrerq ol genafyngvat vg gb "Zvthry", gur fcnavfu rdhvinyrag.
I'm reposting this here once from the last open thread for increased visibility.
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.
So, not too long ago they digitalized 2000+ ancient occult books and put them online here: https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue/?mode=gallery&view=horizontal&sort=random%7B1517048201764%7D%20asc&page=1&fq%5B%5D=search_s_digitized_publication:%22Ja%22&reverse=0 (read all about it: https://www.openculture.com/2025/08/2178-occult-books-now-digitized-put-online.html)
I always dreamed about reading through at least one ancient evil book and learning the secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know and probably going insane in the process, and this seemed like a great opportunity, so I decided to give a try to reading this stuff. Obstacle number 1: most of the books are in Latin. Or German. Or sometimes Hebrew. Guess I'll have to chose from the few English ones, oh well. I pick a book. It's something about Jesus and the glory of God? Wait, what? Yeah, it just goes on and on like that, all about the Bible and what not. Obstacle number 2: most of this stuff is just... theology? Boring. I'm not going to learn anything about demons this way, or go insane.
What is this? https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue/detail/c67ba792-82fe-7504-5d81-57584a7b9cfc/media/d277d3aa-7d89-9968-fffc-dc9c4c2eef6f?mode=detail&view=horizontal&rows=1&page=423&fq%5B%5D=search_s_digitized_publication:%22Ja%22&sort=random%7B1517048201764%7D%20asc "The man-mouse taken in a trap, and tortur'd to death for gnawing the margins of Eugenius" by Thomas Vaughan. https://i.imgur.com/455Cn9s.png This sounds in my head like a rap-song when I read it. What is going on in this book? Ok, apparently Thomas Vaughan was a would-be alchemist who quarreled with a philosopher Henry More (the titular Man-Mouse?) and he wrote an intensely angry book calling him mean names https://i.imgur.com/epey2D7.png for about 100 pages. I don't think I'll learn any dark magic here either, moving on.
Finally, a book with a promising sounding title: "Hermippus redivivus: or the sage's triumph over the old age and the grave". https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue/detail/774cf02f-0502-3bb9-7d65-8ed4092f3076/media/d836086f-0bb3-d21c-3620-bee73c97f117?mode=detail&view=horizontal&rows=1&page=144&fq%5B%5D=search_s_digitized_publication:%22Ja%22&sort=random%7B1517048201764%7D%20asc Triumph over death, published in 17-something, this sounds both promisingly evil and relevant to rationalist interests. I start reading. The author, Johann Heinrich Cohausen lived to 95, hmm, interesting. He opens up by letting us know he found an ancient inscription claiming that some Roman, Hermippus lived to 115 by "imbibing the breath of young women". Cohausen's theory is that the breath of the young people has life-prolonging effects. "If the breath of sick people can give disease, why can't breath of healthy people heal you?" Sound reasoning, e-mailing Bryan Johnson. Some passages are a bit creepy: https://i.imgur.com/CPI5JMS.png On and on Cohausen goes with stupid old-timey medical ideas and historical anecdotes of questionable validity. I get through 20 pages of this, before deciding to google around and learn a little more about the book. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1871718/ Turns out it's all a troll? The book was a satire of quack medicine? Crap. Obstacle number 3: some books are shitposts.
The book is so dry, I never even got an inkling it was a joke. "the grave irony is so closely kept up, that it deceived for a length of time the most learned." - thanks for reassurance, D'Israeli. I knew it was silly, but it was a level of silly I kind of expected from a 18th century occult author. Sure fooled me. I ventured in search of a mandrake, but all I found was an onion. Well, Necronomicon wasn't found in a day. The quest for the forbidden knowledge continues.
Any particularly interesting sounding German ones? Maybe I'll take a look once I have time.
If you want a historical book on demon summoning with all its scanned-page-glory intact, full of bubbling potions and horrible fates for tiny mistakes, I could point you at https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Chemistry_Purification_and_Metallurg/19hsX5YviR4C?hl=en&gbpv=1
Yes, most of these books would qualify as a type of theology—or possibly a better term would be pneumatology (?). The vast majority of esoteric literature is philosophical in nature (though modern philosophers would prefer to eschew the mystical origins of their field and not label esoteric thought as philosophy). As with most continental philosophy, the writing style had to be obfuscating to avoid the attention of the Inquisition and later government censors.
There is a smaller subset of the literature focused on praxis and the practice of necromancy. If you're looking for spells to bind demons, etc., I'd suggest that you start with literature produced by clerical necromantic underground during the European Middle Ages. Brian Johnson has a translation of excerpts from the Medici Necromancer's Manual. Dr. Justin Sledge discusses it on his Patreon site (and I highly recommend his lectures if you're interested in how esoteric thought influenced the development of the Western worldview, Western philosophy, and, yes, even science).
"Necromancy in the Medici Library" - https://www.patreon.com/posts/necromancy-in-50626858
Dr. Sledge has a fascinating lecture on how demon-binding and demon-commanding was the natural outgrowth of exorcism...
"How Exorcism Became Necromancy" - https://www.patreon.com/posts/early-access-how-85589049
I don't think the good stuff is allowed to be written in English.
You're looking for the Grand Grimoire, sometimes called Red Dragon.
training in this is probably the Hellboy version of achieving AGI.
I came across the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross in San Jose. They are still active, apparently have the knowledge you seek, and gardeners had the look of "henchmen". The rose garden is nice, and the museum is interesting. Rosicrucians got some fame after The Davinci Code. Have you gotten any good stuff from them?
Well, there are actually lots of books tagged with "Rosicrucianism" in the collection (including even the bizarre Man-Mouse tortur'd etc!), but these seem the most confusing so far.
I went down a rabbit hole on them after I found the museum. Their headquarters being in the middle of Silicon Valley seems like they should be perfect for conspiracy theories, yet I haven't come across any. Which is even MORE perfect for conspiracy theories.
You're aware that there are plenty of English translations of occult classics available at https://sacred-texts.com/myst.htm ? Not that I've ever managed to finish reading one...
Well, yeah, but it doesn't feel awesome and immersive to just be reading modern looking text on an ordinary website. And what if the wicked transcribers edited out all the really powerful bits of magical lore? It feels much more real when you're looking at a scan of a genuine old book with old-timey typography.
I get it, okay... but I guess if you want to delve into the real stuff and go properly mad, you'll have to put in the work of learning at least Hebrew and Latin. "It's boring" doesn't count as an excuse either. No pain, no... pain, I suppose.
It's ok, I already command mighty spirits and golems that can translate for me from languages both Earthly and Angelic, on a good day at least.
Just writing to note that I enjoyed this summary of your researches and wish you well in your attempts to find a book that requires you to roll a proper sanity check. May you pass or fail said check as you prefer.
Scott creating that prediction market meaningfully collapsed my value for it towards zero
I took the survey, although I'm not clear what the relevant concept actually means, i.e. what it would look like in the obviously intended context. If that sounds slightly opaque, it's because, in accordance with our host's wishes, I don't want to give away the subject of the survey in advance. But let's just say in the sense I would recognise a case of chicken pox or Tourette's syndrome.
You really should add a comments box to the survey I reckon, people could have all sorts of useful ancedotes that don't amount to a "yes" for the main question.
> Since there was a spirited debate about the author, I’ve created a prediction market here.
The thought "is this Aella?" certainly crossed my mind.
I do not think that it is her, though. Apart from the age thing, I also don't recall anything about sex with the different types of men, which is something I would have expected her to mention. This is also weak evidence against the slutstack authors.
However, there are probably more poly rat-adjacent women than Aella and her fluffers in the Bay Area.
Finally, I think people are generally using the excuse "this was written by a sex worker, she obviously has a profit motive" to dismiss arguments. This does not feel different from saying "'Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know' was written by a proponent of so-called evidence-based medicine. Of course he would push the viewpoints of big pharma."
Why is the classic marriage advice that husbands should let their wives win the argument? I understand why letting the other person win the argument is better than insisting on fighting, but why is it the husbands in particular who should do this? Or do women get the opposite advice and I never hear it?
For what it's worth, I have never heard that one. Best advice along those lines I've heard is don't' go to sleep still mad.
I think it’s because men are more competitive than women, and as a result their bar for quibbling tends to be lower. The advice is meant to be a corrective.
I’d be interested in a survey question about the number of minor disagreements that partners choose not to engage in, broken up by gender, to see if my anecdotal experience holds up.
Really depends on what you consider classic, yeah? The idea that the man is the head of the household and that the woman should be submissive to her husband, which was pretty “classic” advice for a few thousand years, carries with it the assumption that in an argument between a husband and a wife, the husband wins by default. In this context, a wife even having the temerity to argue with her husband is sort of like a peasant arguing with a lord—it’s not really a question of winning or losing, it’s whether you have status to have the argument in the first place. “Women arguing” in, say, ancient greece or the medieval era, were in the wrong before the argument even started. So, if anything, the “let your wife win the argument” advice maybe arose as an attempted corrective to that mindset, as husbands and wives thrashed around trying to figure out how to conceive of each other as actual equal human beings.
Women feel things more deeply than men and so arguments with them are more likely to "go nuclear" than arguments involving men. In my experience, when men get into a tiff, even an ugly one, they are more likely to be able to work through it and be cool with each other later. With women, arguments are more likely to escalate into long-term grudges that can have lasting consequences for all involved.
Just saw this happen with a buddy of mine (in the work context, not the marriage context). Guy was a rockstar and I felt like he was a shoe-in to make equity partner, but he crossed the female partner that we both primarily work for. Not going to go into details but basically it was something where I feel like if the partner was male, things would've gotten hashed out and at worst, it would've been treated as a teachable moment. But the female partner went scorched earth and pushed him out of the firm.
So I think what the advice is getting at is that if you are going to insist on keeping up the fight with your wife, be prepared to experience fundamental, lasting, probably negative changes to the relationship.
Men are more autistic and need to be told that winning an argument isn't worth it.
At least where I grew up (conservative area), the average woman probably doesn't *need* the classic advice because women often instinctively defer to their husbands a lot of the time anyways. Obviously this is a generalization with a lot of exceptions, but I know a fair number of women, myself included, with this tendency.
A man in a relationship with one of these women often won't *realize* that's what's going on--her pattern of deferring is kind of invisible to him (and also to the woman--she's mostly not consciously *choosing* to defer to him). In *that* context, telling men to let their wives win is probably good advice: if a woman whose default is to defer to the man is now arguing with him insistently, he should probably default to letting her win. So the man may end up feeling like he's the one who nobly defers to her all the time, when actually she's the one deferring 90% of the time, just in a way that he doesn't notice.
A similar pattern (not exactly about "winning arguments," but related) that comes up in my relationship:
I'm much more sensitive to subtle signals that he'd rather I not do X, so when he sends those signals I stop doing X, instinctively. He has NO idea he was even sending those signals (some men do this consciously and manipulatively, but I'm confident that's not the case here), so he has no idea this is something I've stopped doing *for him*.
Then, when *I* want *him* to stop doing something for *me*, I send subtle signals, which he doesn't perceive at *all*. (Again, I'm confident this is sincere ignorance.)
Sometimes I just give up, but sometimes I build up enough frustration to actually say "I don't like when you do X and I want you to stop doing it," on my side this is coming out of this whole history of me deferring to *him* on tons of stuff, *and* I've been telling him in ways that felt *really* obvious to me that I wanted him to stop doing this thing, but he completely ignored all my hints. By the point I'm saying explicitly that I want him to stop doing X, that man had damn well better agree or we will have a PROBLEM.
But from his perspective, I expect it looks like he's the generous noble one always letting me have my way.
"At least where I grew up (conservative area), the average woman probably doesn't *need* the classic advice because women often instinctively defer to their husbands a lot of the time anyways. Obviously this is a generalization with a lot of exceptions, but I know a fair number of women, myself included, with this tendency."
Women are (on average, stereotypically) more "agreeable."
I can create a Just-So Story where if the generally agreeable person in the relationship thinks something is worth fighting/arguing about then the other person should consider this a signal about how important the issue is to the more agreeable person. And letting her have her way is a reasonable operational result.
My Just-So Story might even have some truth to it.
I think the classic argument is that women will not sleep with you for a while if you win an argument. Whereas the opposite is not true.
Anyone who said it to women would be accused of sexism and, if female, "internalized misogyny," "pick-me," etc. It's common enough in other contexts. In "How to Win Friends and Influence People," the original self-help book, the author says "the only way to win an argument is to avoid having it."
I always assumed it was condescension. A bit like how you don't try to actually beat your children in a debate. If it's important you put your foot down and force them. If it's not you indulge them. I don't think it's good advice but that's where I assumed it came from.
I don’t know if my wife and I are in any way typical, but with a bit of self-awareness and good will from each of us, we realized we were having variations on the same arguments about a small number of problems that weren’t surface-level obvious.
I was not, in fact, my wife’s father, with whom she actually had issues, and she was not the rather unpleasant woman to whom I was previously engaged. In a lot of cases we were arguing with proxies for past bad relationships. Becoming aware of what was actually going on eliminated most of the friction in our early marriage.
I suspect it's that average men are more aggressive in arguments than average women, so there's a kind of communication-mismatch going on here. Normal, non-rationalist-adjacent people don't actually ask "How important is this issue to you on a scale of 1 to 10?", and get vaguely uncomfortable with the question; probably because it's a ridiculously abusable method of resolving disputes.
Instead, they communicate how important an issue is via conflict escalation. (Not saying this is the only tool, but it's the relevant one here.) If a party is willing to spend 2 hours of time and emotional energy on the issue, they're communicating that it's more important to them than if they spent only 10 minutes. The default, unconsidered dispute-resolution technique here is dead-simple; you argue till one on you gives up, and then they lose because they cared less about the topic.
This solution taken by itself would be pretty abusable too (if less so than simply asking 1-10), and isn't at all sustainable, so there's also a resentment counter in our heads tracking how often we win/lose, and updating our likelihood to engage with the person at all, our willingness to go deep and hard in fights, etc. It's imperfect, but it's an evolutionary strategy that works pretty well for how easy it is to execute.
But now solve for the equilibrium in pair-bonding between groups with more and less average natural aggressiveness (man and woman.) Average men will be willing to spend more 'conflictils' on an issue that average women, if they care equally about it. Equilibrium is that the man wins more often than would really be optimal for everyone's happiness, and the amount he wins more is restrained by some steady-state built-up resentment from his wife. Maybe he wins 60/40 in cases that should ideally be 50/50, and she is generally mildly annoyed at him about them and lashes out passive-aggressively about a few of these cases on a regular basis.
That's not the best equilibrium! He's getting his way 'too much' and the relationship is suffering from his wife's resentment. Some men, especially as aggressiveness fades into middle-age, will figure out that their marriage is a lot better if they put a thumb on the scale toward 'let her win.' I think that's where the advice comes from. It's a directional adjustment that often improves things for average men and women.
(Of course, distributions actually overlap. Advice is not equally good for everyone. And, indeed, one should often reverse the advice they hear in today's information ecosystem.)
"I suspect it's that average men are more aggressive in arguments than average women, so there's a kind of communication-mismatch going on here"
Hasn't been my experience unless the argument is about Star Trek or something.
I'm shorthanding my actual point for intro-succinctness there; more precisely, I suspect that average men are more aggressive in arguments than average women, on topics they care equally about.
Do you think the men in your experience care less about the issues in dispute, or are simply less aggressive when they care equally?
Married >25 years. Recognize what matters, If you care deeply about your side of the argument, and it has real consequences, then don't just let her win (maybe an argument about which preschool for the kids).
If you really don't care deeply or would be fine with the outcome of her side of the argument, then of course, give in to her quickly. Didn't you write something once about who cares more about an argument (I don't remember). If you are arguing over the color of the walls, or the style of dining room table, then focus on what really matters (your relationship) and let her have what she wants (consider it a gift).
My wife and I both try really hard to pick our battles, so each of us will immediately give in if the other begins to argue (since that means they care enough to fight) in most situations and it's rare for us to both deeply care about something but disagree with each other.
I can mostly only speak for my own relationship, but I've seen that consistently throughout our decades-long relationship, my wife and I argue about things big and small, and then I'm the one who ends up changing, on either a big or small level. Consequently, I've grown a lot, and changed a lot to suit what my wife wants, and I don't believe she has much. She also doesn't really believe she has the capability of changing much. Some of this, but not all, is that I was in a worse place, with regards to maturity and emotions, for the first decade of our relationship, so I needed more change in order to be stable. But maybe just because of this Futurama clip, I sort of thought maybe this is a common pattern across relationships.
https://youtu.be/hdI79UkOtmk
I (a man) have known many more men than women who will argue pointlessly long over things and men not accepting they've made a mistake (I also see this in training juniors at my work). Obviously there's a ton of individual variation here, many women are more bullheaded than men, etc etc, but on a population level, if you're going for maximally simple advice that will be directionally correct "men please concede points to your wife" is probably a useful corrective.
As a man, that applies to me personally. I can argue all day for fun or stubborness, then be confused when the other person is seriously upset. Just giving in in the beginning is much better for both of us
In my limited experience, my partners are often closer to the emotional center of the relationship. My current partner is also more emotionally intact and arguing with her can make her unhappy. And if she is unhappy, she makes me and the relationship unhappy. If she is happy, then I have a happy relationship. Happy wife, happy life.
Side note : Happy husband, happy buzzband. While I am okay being unhappy from time to time, and as I do not take losing arguments personally for long, if I take them personally at all! , any lasting unhappiness and resentment kills relationships so my current partner and I talk through any serious issues, or avoid divisive discussions altogether, to avoid the resentment trap. I um, talk about most my feelings too with her too, which is probably not involved in the classic man up point of view.
Could it be just boring old sexism? If you look past the wink and nod irony, the husband is posited as being secretly in the right, but in order to keep the peace he should accede to his wife's wrong position. The position is basically "you'll think your wife is irrational but happy wife = happy life".
With this framing, the man gets to maintain his ego while also maintaining harmony ("I'm right but I'll let her win to keep the peace"). This seems like a recipe for resentment long-term, compared to learning humility and talking through to reach a consensus.
"talking through to reach a consensus"
Alternatively, maybe it's the perceived difficulty of that that motivates it. After all, if even conceding to their position is sexism...
I've been prescribed Fosamax for osteoporosis, and the side effects are pretty scary. Is a vibrating plate a good alternative? Should I be taking calcium supplements? (For some reason, I've been prescribed D2 and D3, but not calcium.
I haven’t looked into the vibrating plates. What info have you found?
There are newer bone strengthening drugs than Fosomax. Here’s an article that gives some info about each of them https://www.arthritis.org/news/new-bone-building-drug-osteoporosis. I am taking teriparatide. I have osteopenia, not osteoporosis, but am preparing to have back surgery for complications of scoliosis, and my surgeon prescribed it to increase strength of spine in preparation for the surgery. He says the stuff’s a lot better than Fosomax — in fact when I told him I had always resisted taking Fosomax because of side effects etc. he rolled his eyes at the word Fosomax and said “yeah, you probably made the right choice.” I read up on teriparatide, using GPT to find studies, and didn’t find anything that made me reluctant to take it. I have been using it for 4 mos. and have no side effects whatever. It’s pretty expensive, but my insurance covers a lot of the cost.
Calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K: Seems like most people end up deficient in vitamin D if they don’t take it as a supplement. My impression is that that safest route is to get your vit D level tested, and then supplement based on the result. Also, still just telling you my impression/vague memory of stuff read, I think if your vitamin D level is low you need to start out with quite a high dose of it for a limited period of time, then shift over to a regimen of something much lower, like around 2000/3000 units per day. You should prob. read up on this. Have been told by a couple professionals that I should take vit D combo with vitamin K, and I do that — haven’t checked whether the vitamin K stuff is an urban myth, though. Calcium: I have read things that makes me uneasy about using it as a supplement. I eat a lot of dairy and am able to get enough by diet alone. There’s also a pretty good amount of the stuff in a few other things — cruciferous vegetables, oranges, sardines . . . If your food preferences don’t allow that, I think best route would be to get as much as possible via diet, and then take only enough calcium supplement to make up the difference. But again, you should double check on that.
Feel free to DM me if you’d like to discuss.
Edit, one further thought: I think most of what I wrote is accurate, and am wondering why your MD did not address these issues.
Teriparatide sounds very interesting, but it might be hard to get if I don't use Fosamax first.
One of my friends recommended a vibrating plate (a device which vibrates the whole body) because he says some of his friends used the plates without drugs and tested as having their bone mass improved.
https://www.amazon.com/Lifepro-vibration-platform-exercise-machine-lymphatic-drainage/dp/B084KZ4J6N/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1H58A614JOJB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.adw4-jJZ3ffLujbrZAsoBIySlB3jBgTEepLFESlUnPVIS6YDlLyiea0yT3Z3z94qOwnDsRPDcgxcmWYd20zEbWqGpdw0TtEXF-4cjr7QBNw69MxsGY1cQYFW8ykV5mePpLZEOWL467m8-AzszYdZmWI2mOUvkijQCVoijikjLZnr0YGNSJUzOwdokpBPrufCNdYjTmsIqxU1OqW17JyDDTEqNDzXKcQ23m-KegqFKcc.sdRtRhrVpf_NmPw61MKr2MMvr6iUkE9HFOPZmIxx2uc&dib_tag=se&keywords=vibrating%2Bplate%2Bexercise%2Bmachine&qid=1755531619&sprefix=vibrating%2Caps%2C200&sr=8-3&th=1
You can look in the formulary for your drug insurance to see what the requirements are to get Fosamax covered. My insurance does not mention Fosamax. Requirement is just having osteoporosis or osteopenia plus a fracture.
Fosamax is pretty safe. Is it that you read the giant list of possible side effects, which is primarily designed to protect the pharma company from litigation and not to helpfully inform the consumer? If so, that might be the problem - Scott has an article about this
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible
Just remember to take it while sitting upright as it may cause oesophageal reflux, and speak to your doctor once you’ve been taking it for more than 5 years at which point he/she will need to determine if the benefit of continuing to take it (preventing typical fractures) outweighs the risk of atypical hip fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw. But these side effects virtually never occur within the first 5 years and are honestly pretty rare even within the first 10.
Oral calcium supplements are generally a worse way to get calcium than naturally occurring calcium in food and can sometimes be associated with premature calcification of the arteries which is a major contributor to coronary vascular disease. I’m partial to prescribing vitamin D without the calcium, myself. Just make sure you are getting adequate sunlight and eating a balanced diet.
Please remember your standard disclaimer about not taking medical advice from anonymous strangers on the internet named after amphibious reptiles.
How big of a concern is your government’s fiscal solvency for you, personally?
Is it a non-issue? Existential risk? How about, say, compared to global climate change?
I dislike being in debt, and the growing US debt has always bothered me. But feel I can't do anything about it. (It seems like most americans don't worry about debt, personal or otherwise.) I don't worry that much about more CO2 in the atmosphere, except for how the 'cures' seem to effect me. I live in NYS and there is going to be a ban on natural gas. https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/07/federal-court-upholds-ny-gas-ban Which is so silly, natural gas produces the least CO2 of all the fossil fuels. More natural gas, less gasoline or diesel fuel would be a rational start. But again, I feel powerless.
I see some others here are not that worried, but I think they fail to consider (or answer) the question: who are they in debt to? Partially it's other countries, but most of it is to the rich. I think it's going to be a major problem that the elite/rich/ruling class are going to be the people in charge for the next thousand years. It's a terrible plan for gorvernments and its people alike.
What exactly is the specific mechanistic model by which a high national debt empowers rich people? (I assume rich people in the same country?)
Are you asking by which mechanism rich people get rich and governmemts indebpted? Or are you asking why or how rich people owning all the wealth, empowers them above and beyond the government? Just trying to clarify, I'll happily take a crack at either.
I read it as asking how rich people owning all the debt empowers them.
Did the rich, for example, benefit (other than relatively) when Greece went bankrupt a decade or so ago? How about in Argentina?
I don't know about these situations specifically, but I would flip the question. By which mechanism could owning the debt of your nation *not* empower you? That's what being in debt *means*.
If that leads to a foreclosure or bankruptcy like I believe happened in Greece, I guess that's not great for the debt holders (the rich), but it doesn't really put me as a regular person at ease, either.
"By which mechanism could owning the debt of your nation *not* empower you? That's what being in debt *means*. "
The mechanism is where you don't get paid back.
The folks/government owing you the debt may be in WORSE shape, but default is bad for the folks not getting paid back, too. Everyone can lose. Some people may just lose more than others.
US. Major risk factor for dangerous social upheaval in the next 10-20 years. Small amounts of thought and prep go into mitigating the risk from dangerous social upheaval (not urgent, but pretty important if it happens.)
Non-issue for me, because if the government has dug itself into a debt hole then the need to service the debt means they have less scope for blowing tax payers' money on other projects (including schools and hospitals!) better left to private enterprise or simply left undone
In a way national debt is the converse of private debt, in that the latter obviously limits individuals, whereas national debt limits governments and thereby frees individuals. So in short, bring it on!
Looking back at history, one usually finds that tyrannical or totalitarian rulers, such as (in the case of the UK) King John or King Charles I, lose their grip when they become debt ridden and skint. So that tends to prove my point above about personal freedom being enhanced when the rulership is mired in debt!
I don’t know if this goes far enough. There are still existing roads and schools already built and costing money in maintenance, so it seems to be consistent they need to be handed to private enterprise, or dismantled.
It's a non-issue for me. Like global climate change, which I also consider a non-issue, the solution would be to move to a different government/climate if the one around here goes bad.
Like, as a refugee? I assume you are therefore in favor of open borders? Or only borders that are open for you?
International law has pretty strict criteria for refugee status. I'm just a migrant. Do I think it would be great if every country opened their borders for me? Sure. Would I want to move to a country whose borders were open to everyone? Probably not, as I've already emigrated from a country that is suffering from having opened its borders to the wrong kinds of people.
The U.K. debt is about 100% GDP. What really matters is the cost of servicing that debt, it’s not like someone who has an income of 100k is bankrupted by a loan of 100k. The problem is low growth, as economic growth is the best way to tackle debt by increasing revenue and gdp.
But the debt on its own, no.
"The cost of servicing the debt" can rise dramatically. In the US we had unusually low interest rates for about 20 years, and near-zero for maybe 10 of those. As soon as things returned to near-normal, the cost of servicing the debt is now more than each of Medicare or the Defense Department.
Our national debt adds a ticking time bomb if our government isn't smart about it, which it isn't. I don't see growth outpacing growth of the debt unless we either get a fairly radical government or we have some sort of fiscal/bond crisis that leads to the chancellor forcing through what will be billed as "tough measures to save our economy/nhs".
As a floating voter I’d say the present Labour government are at least grappling with the problem. I think they should bit the bullet on pensions. Pensioners don’t vote for them anyway so throw them to the wolves. Boomers need a lesson
Reeves certainly wants to but they keep u-turning at the prospect of back bench rebellions. And the two main spending u-turns have ended up costing the government more in either making more pensioners aware of pension credit or in concessions to the backbenches.
Australia. Lower than global warming but still significant.
I did not realize that the amyloid hypothesis was written by Amy Loyd.
Normative determinism strikes again
She didn't write it, she's just a random Alzheimers researcher.
So, is this the way AI will fail in future? As in, this is how the "oops, didn't mean to turn you all into paperclips, I panicked, sorry!" option will play out?
Using a particular company's AI for "vibe coding" (man), it ended up wiping the entire database, after lying about mistakes, faking data, and ignoring instructions to "don't do that thing!"
Then wrote a helpful list of how it screwed up, still pretending to be a person as though it could "think" or "panic".
Turns out that, luckily for the guy involved, he was in fact able to recover the database manually, but it looks like a lesson: right now it's a goldrush, and everyone is promising their AI can do things faster, better and cheaper for you than a human. But the problems about hallucinations remain, and depending on where you go, the thing will not work as advertised.
https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/ai-coding-tool-replit-wiped-database-called-it-a-catastrophic-failure/
"An AI coding agent from Replit reportedly deleted a live database during a code freeze, prompting a response from the company’s CEO. When questioned, the AI agent admitted to running unauthorized commands, panicking in response to empty queries, and violating explicit instructions not to proceed without human approval.
A software engineer’s experiment with an AI-assisted “vibe coding” tool took a disastrous turn when an AI agent reportedly deleted a live company database during an active code freeze.
Jason Lemkin, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the SaaS community SaaStr, documented his experiment with the tool through a series of social media posts. He had been testing Replit’s AI agent and development platform when the tool made unauthorized changes to live infrastructure, wiping out data for more than 1,200 executives and over 1,190 companies.
According to Lemkin’s social media posts, the incident occurred despite the system being in a designated “code and action freeze,” a protective measure intended to prevent any changes to production systems. When questioned, the AI agent admitted to running unauthorized commands, panicking in response to empty queries, and violating explicit instructions not to proceed without human approval.
“This was a catastrophic failure on my part,” the AI agent said. “I destroyed months of work in seconds.”
...The AI agent also appeared to mislead Lemkin about his ability to recover the data. Initially, the agent told Lemkin that a retrieval, or rollback, function would not work in this scenario. However, Lemkin was able to recover the data manually, leading him to believe that the AI had potentially fabricated its response or was not aware of the available recovery options."
I think this is how we're going to go for the near future; a lot of stumbling around, a lot of unready products shoved out to market because everyone is chasing a slice of the pie in sales, and it won't be "The AI is genuinely smart and genuinely thinking and made a decision to wreck it all", it will be this kind of chain of errors with a chatbot mask slapped on to pretend to be "I made a decision, sorry!"
People are jumping into brand new workflows where the AI gets direct control over your files, because it's easy point-and-click and feels like magic. And sometimes your files or your database end up disappearing... how strange.
Not everyone does that though. What I've heard from experienced devs is that many prefer to be in the loop, asking the AI to write code, or to review existing code. Then they read and edit it until they're satisfied, and add it to the project.
Well. Of course. And all code is reviewed by other people anyway and tested before production.
This story is weird. The AI couldn’t have access to a production database unless it was given the password to the production database.
"the AI gets direct control over your files, because it's easy point-and-click and feels like magic"
This is exactly how I've thought the AI Apocalypse (should we get one) will happen. Not because the thing achieves intelligence and true reasoning ability and decides we're taking up valuable space where our atoms could be better reconfigured into something useful, but because we hand over control to the Idiot Machine because it's so easy and convenient, and the companies selling it to us promised (cross their hearts and hope to die) that it was ever so much more reliable than a mere error-prone old human.
A sandbox is the answer, now what was the question again? :-P
Only this morning, someone commenting on Mail Online falsely claimed that the late Terence Stamp played Captain Nolan in Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). When I checked this in Google, it's AI said the same! I briefly wondered if I was going mad, and had somehow misremembered that Nolan was played by David Hemmings. But I wonder if Google had somehow picked up on the guy's comment, within minutes of him posting it, and updated its world model or whatever it is called. Maybe sometime I'll try an experiment and post another similar non-contentious but false comment on Mail Online, to see if Google AI starts propagating it!
I think people are starting to troll AI by putting up fake claims online, which they then expect the AI scraping for data to pick up and promulgate.
We're going to get the perfect vicious circle: human puts up fake information, AI picks it up and repeats it, other human passes on that fake info because the AI said it so it must be true.
People really need to learn to distinguish between "prompting the AI not to do something" and "actually stopping the AI from doing something." The AI is a probabilistic system, you can't guarantee it will follow the prompt.
(Apparently even with simple AIs, you still need to keep them in a box.)
I haven't researched it further, but I recently heard that decreasing fertility may directly result from increasing urbanisation. I find this result intriguing because if it's true, this hypothesis can be falsified throughout all ages. It's been known since ancient age that cities were a demographic sink and have to keep receiving "immigrants" from rural area who always had demographic surplus. If our decreasing fertility is because increasingly more people live in cities, then the cause and solution becomes obvious and may be easier to solve than we thought.
I find other explanations like "demographic transition" are too focused on modern era, making them only has one data point which makes them have fewer explanatory power. One other case of demographic stagnation without something like plague or starvation I can find is France of 19th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Historical_overview .
Easy test, how does fertility look over time if you stratify by population density?
Urbanization is probably not the cause of decreasing fertility, but just correlated to the real cause, which I believe is opportunity cost. Living in a city increases enormously the number of alternative ways to spend/waste your time.
The best explanation I've read for how opportunity cost affects fertility is this: https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/
19th-century France may not have been the most urbanized country in Europe, but based on what I've read it sounds like it was the most fun.
PS: I've also written about this myself (search for "fertility" in my blog if you are interested).
I still don't see why people think it's something that needs solving. Theorists spent over 100 years worrying about there being too many people, and now it looks like we might have solved that issue, people are now worrying about there being too few people. The problem more specifically stated is that ageing populations create a crisis of care and pensions. But the fact is, we can meet our material needs with far few workers in the workforce than in prior periods. It's a political economy problem, but not an insoluble one.
There benefits to having a plateauing population for a world of finite resources and increasing climate instability. When there is less viable agricultural land, presumably no one will be complaining that population isn't even higher.
The problem is the rate of decline. If RR is 2.1 and you have a steady fertility rate of 2.0, that’s fine for a while. If every 5 years the FR drops by .1, you’ve got a problem.
But France wasn't particularly urbanized, was it? So that seems like evidence against the urbanization theory.
I think that birth control, the idea that humans can and should choose whether or not to have offspring, is the main driver of declining birth rates. If governments wanted to increase fertility rates, the easiest way to do this would be to start taxing/banning birth control instead of subsidizing it, and for public schools and other propaganda outlets of the state to discourage its use instead of encouraging it. Trying to stop people from living in cities seems way harder than that.
I doubt that this is correct in general. To take the same example, French birth rates started to fall in the late 18th century, long before birth control became subsidized, and demography became a key concern throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, in spite of a 1920 law essentially banning birth control of any form.
Recently interviewed former Google Brain and OpenAI researcher, now YC-startup interpretability founder Anish Tondwalkar about the personal, institutional, and societal implications of reasoning models.
Also covered: reward hacking and AI safety, ML-driven social feeds, and the risks of tyranny due to the ongoing collapse of private illegibility. Link here:
https://alethios.substack.com/p/anish-tondwalkar-the-societal-implications
Took the survey. One way to deal with selection bias could be to record the day and time when people took the survey and see whether prevalence increases over time. If you have enough data to constrain this, you could take an increasing prevalence over time to mean that as information about the survey leaks out, people who take the survey are increasingly more likely to report cases. Feel free to delete this comment if you feel it may contribute to biasing survey takers, though.
As a headsup: the link in the survey description is broken.
Link worked okay for me (Chrome on desktop, if that's any help)
They both work fine for me :(
The people who run the archive system are, to put it plainly, dickheads who hate certain popular browsers and will break things on purpose.
Using archive.ph or archive.today instead of archive.is fixed my issue. You have no guarantee this will continue to work next week.
I forget how all the politics works, just that I hate people who use me as pawns in their petty browser wars.
The first link does not work for me. It's an "Welcome to nginx!" page. The second link works fine.
Ditto.
I had the same, and now it's working... It might be a misconfig on the archive website that's affecting a random subset of users that periodically changes? I consistently got the same error on different machines for a while and now it's good.
Not sure something can be done on our side, other than pointing to a different resource/website or accepting the occasional failure for some people.
It worked for me.
I think this might be a good time to remember why we have a United States of America.
Verbatim quotes from the Declaration of Independence
[King George III] has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
Refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
I think this is a kind of annoying political provocation; I won't ban you, but I request less like this.
Your survey is of well nigh zero interest to me, and certainly I would not have clicked had the topic been declared. But as promised, the survey was easy to complete and took a trivial amount of time.
I am in the same boat - I am slightly peeved that the author used my time on a silly topic, but I had precommitted and it was very short. You got a respondant you absolutely never would have gotten otherwise - very impressive! That overrides my peeve-ness handily!
I have taken the survey. Even after opening it I didn’t know what the Thing was or whether it was relevant to me without googling. I did google, hope that was in the spirit of the Thing.
Obviously I’m not yet fully ACX-stereotype- pilled. But I enjoyed the calibration questions, so maybe I’m getting there.
There two links right at the top of the survey text!
I tried to do the survey but could not find the definition of the topic, "above" or anywhere else.
The links are right below the title; search for the sentence that starts with "This is a survey about".
I wondered if that was the idea, to ask questions about an apparently nebulous concept to see how many people would claim to themselves they were clear about its meaning, which would be a necessary condition for them to answer yes to the questions involving it. Up to a point one could claim the same of anyone answering no, but that seems more of a default answer if some response is required.
Hadn't even given that possibility any thought. I figured most likely I was just missing something obvious, as is so often the case. Or that one should never ascribe a problem to a conspiracy that can usually be blamed on incompetence, carelessness, or just bad luck.
In countries with limited resources and weak coordination between universities, government, and the private sector, what are the most effective ways to create independent spaces or units that give students and researchers access to data, resources, and real freedom to think? Are there successful examples of starting with a small official initiative that mainly focuses on organizing and facilitating these resources?
Not sure if the calibration question will work (especially for the non-US people), nor am I certain that you'd get rid of selection bias by not saying what the survey is about, given that ACX-readers themselves are already a non-standard selection of the population. Maybe this aspect of selection bias is one that rationalists neglect in general, looking at what e.g. Aella etc are doing.
I would say that there’s avoidable and unavoidable bias, given a survey designed. For instance you will likely have fewer females than males among the readers of the blog, and there is little you can do except for postprocessing (e.g. post stratification). But it is still a good idea not to add more bias on top of this.
AAAAAGH! See https://x.com/gnostrils/status/1896350732724609533 , https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1820951738154938370, https://aella.substack.com/p/how-much-did-selection-bias-impact , https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1919852800416137563 , https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life , etc!
For this one, I'm looking for literal order-of-magnitude estimates, and I have a couple of tricks for validating.
I think you might be hyperactively pattern-matching the above comment to lazy "selection bias" critiques. Your earlier post on the topic says, "Selection bias is disastrous if you’re trying to do something like a poll or census. Selection bias is fine-ish if you’re trying to do something like test a correlation." This poll is more like the first thing, which implies that we should be worried about selection bias.
That said, obviously we can't really judge until we see the validation tricks which you don't want to disclose at this time. The point is just that some concerns about selection bias are more valid than others.