-- On Tuesday Sept 9th a federal district court issued a restraining order against President Trump's firing of her "for cause" based on her having allegedly lied to a lender regarding a mortgage application in Atlanta in 2021 when she was a private citizen. The specific accusation is that she falsely sought a loan on the Atlanta property as her primary residence.
[Cook has also filed a civil lawsuit over her firing but there will be no court actions in that for weeks at least.]
-- The restraining order leaves Cook still a member of the Federal Reserve system's governing board. That is very unwelcome to the White House because the Fed has a major meeting on Sept 16th/17th, at which it is expected to consider whether to lower interest rates as demanded by the president.
-- The White House quickly asked the appellate court (DC Circuit) to stay the Sept 9th restraining order. A few hours ago that court agreed to consider the matter on a highly-accelerated schedule: Cook's attorneys must file a response to the stay request by 5 pm tomorrow, and then the administration has until 3 pm Sunday to comment in response to that. The appellate court seems to be aiming to act on the stay request before the Fed meeting convenes on Tuesday.
-- While that's been going on here comes a classic PLOT TWIST!! At 5:34 pm Eastern time (3 hours ago as I type this) Reuters [the British international-news agency] published an exclusive news story: they have obtained two different contemporaneous documents in which Cook declared the Atlanta property as a vacation home.
One of those is a loan estimate issued by her credit union during her mortgage application process in May 2021, which "shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence." The other document is "a federal form completed by Cook as she obtained security clearance for her role at the Federal Reserve, show[ing] that in December 2021 she also declared the Atlanta property as a “2nd home.” "
In addition, Reuters reports that Cook "never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to property records and a Fulton County tax official."
Neither Cook nor her primary accuser, Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, responded to requests for comment. "Reuters was unable to determine whether Pulte or administration officials are aware of Cook’s Atlanta loan estimate."
The reason why Trump is going after mortgage fraud is because there's so many (unofficial) copies of the forms sent to so many involved parties with so many updates handled by people who are not signing the forms themselves that the possibility for miscommunication presents itself as an opportunity for vindictive prosecution. He did the same thing accusing Letitia James of listing her father as who she was married on an unofficial doc (among other things) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/24/us/nyag-james-letter-to-ag-bondi.html
"At all costs"? Citation needed. Or is the citation "two Trump wins"? But that was an accident. And the third sentence contradicts it, as an "all costs" strategy doesn't use emotions as "the only tools".
"For progressives, it's not about facts deployed with reason."
This is a weird way to open a post that has literally zero facts.
"The response is only to suppress dissent at all costs."
Continuing in very hyperbolic fashion, I see...
"The only tools are overwrought emotions: guilt, fear, shame, anger..."
Wait, wait, hold on. The *only* tools are emotions? Then that's not really suppressing dissent "at all costs" is it? Like, usually when people say something needs to be done "at all costs" they're mean that some really extreme (often violent) effort has to be made. But if the only ways that progressives "suppress dissent" is by making people feel things, then it kind of seems like there must be quite a lot of costs they are *not* willing to pay.
Kinda weird that your post is all of three sentences long and still manages to soft-contradict itself.
Unlike right-wingers, who always make clear, well-reasoned arguments for their policies, and would never do a blatant power-grab like sending the military into cities controlled by their political opponents. /s
Off the top of my head, progressives tend to be in favor of single-player health care, higher top-end income taxes, pro-union labor laws, increased scope and spending for anti-poverty and education programs, stronger anti-discrimination laws, stricter gun control, increased legal immigration and amnesty for many illegalbimmigrants, some form of criminal justice reform, and a more internationist foreign policy.
I disagree with rather a lot of that agenda, but I cannot deny that is is an agenda. Nor can I deny that there are smart people making serious arguments for almost everything on that list. A lot of low-quality arguments also get made for them, but this is not a problem unique to progressives.
Not sure what term they use, but it sounds similar to what I describe as "proof by intimidation": an argumentative style where the truth of the proposition is tacitly assumed and it is asserted that opposition the proposition is a symptom of severe moral or intellectual failings.
I have seen proof by intimidation unpleasantly often from the left, but it is neither unique to progressives nor universal amongst them.
Can anyone point me to a good introduction on Bayesian reasoning, that isn't so dense? My wife is supremely clever but academically untrained, and I'm, let's say, the opposite. I was walking her through how I drew a conclusion that helped me stop being upset about something, and she wanted to know how I got there in general.
Say it's the math version of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." We can quantify how strongly we believed something to begin with, and we can also quanitify how strong a new piece of evidence is; how strongly we believe the thing after seeing the new evidence, depends on both those numbers. If we start off thinking something's ridiculously unlikely, then we'll need more evidence to end up believing it, than if we had started off only thinking it was kind of unlikely.
Then if she wants more, show her the odds form of the theorem:
Posteriod_odds(A) = Bayes factor * Prior_odds(A)
Explain that the Bayes factor = the strength of the evidence, which depends both on whether the hypothesis predicts the new evidence, and on whether you'd expect the evidence anyway even if the hypothesis was false. E.g. someone saying "I'm not a spy" isn't strong evidence that he's not a spy, because that's also what a spy would say. BF=1 means it's not evidence, BF<1 means it's evidence against, BF>1 means it's evidence for.
If she still wants more, you can talk about probabilities vs odds, and conditional probabilities, and show her how BF is a ratio of conditional probabilities, and about how the odds form of the theorem happens to be more intuitive since it comes out as posterior = BF*prior, but that if she likes there's also a probabilities form that's less intuitive but equally valid.
Try this website, I found it to be very helpful. It's designed to teach Bayesian reasoning at multiple levels of complexity, which you can choose from. There's also pictures!
I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life. George Floyd was a menace to society. Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society. If people want to stand up against the attempt to silence Charlie Kirk, let's unsilence him. Let's hear what he had to say:
"John Adams famously said the Constitution was only written for a moral religious people, it was wholly inadequate for a people of any other."
"The body politic of America was so Christian that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord."
"One of the reasons we're living through a Constitutional crisis, is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible."
"So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population."
I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse. So what do you do when you think *your liberty* is dependent on other people holding religious beliefs they refuse to hold? Will there be violence? Because I can tell you, the non-Christian population of America, who will probably be the majority in a decade or two, will not tolerate being excluded from the "Christian form of government." One reason Rightists are hyper-focused on the "threat" posed by Venezuelan gangsters and Somali Muslims is because they don't want to think about what really scares them, the white, affluent, urban, secular population of America, many of whose ancestors came on the Mayflower, and are sick of being told Americanism means living in the middle of nowhere, watching NASCAR, driving a big rig truck and talking about being "saved."
Kirk didn't always have these views. In 2018 he said, "we do have a separation of church and state, and we should support that." But like many on the young Right, he entered a spiral of self-radicalization in which transgression is elevated to the highest good. At first, simply being a conservative on college campuses was transgressive, but like the weed user looking for stronger and stronger highs, he moved further and further rightward. I don't think Kirk wanted an apocalyptic war with secularism. The stuff he said was said for the moment, so the audience can go "based!" and then go to dinner at Red Robin. Like their opponents on the woke left, one of the easiest ways to piss off people like Kirk is to treat them as the intellectually serious thinkers they pretend to be. That's not to say this stuff isn't dangerous. Sometimes things that are meant to be taken in a propagandistic context are taken at face value by literal-minded followers. Witness how radical feminists said "gender is a social construct, it has nothing to do with biology," which helped spawn the transgender movement that would later turn on them. Had Kirk not been assassinated, perhaps he would have seen the day when he was face to face with a monster of his own creation.
I spent my life promoting ideas, and ultimately decided the most appropriate social media handle was "No One Listens To Me" (not literally true but oh, so close.) So I don't think an influencer who got more attention than he deserved (and $325,000+/year) should get extra attention for being killed. And if people start listening to me just because I die and can no longer benefit from the engagement, I hereby object in advance to this unfair deprivation.
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it? Maybe Kirk was right, and American liberty depends on Christianity; maybe you're also right, and Christianity in America will inevitably decline. I suppose, in that case, we'd expect to see the government become more authoritarian and controlling, without anyone being able to (or, perhaps, wanting to) really do anything to stop this. That would be an unpleasant conclusion, but there's no guarantee the world will always be pleasant.
>OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it?
It wasn't intended to be such. You can simply look at American Christians and ask if they're particularly committed to liberty, to which the answer is negative. They're very committed to "leave *me* alone," but not to leaving others alone. Libs, likewise, think liberty is someone others owe to them without any reciprocal obligation. Only some, not all, libertarians are truly committed to defending liberty for everyone.
As the guy behind the Professor Watchlist, I don’t think he makes a great martyr for free speech, but nobody should be attacked or killed for saying something others don’t like, whether that’s Charlie Kirk or Salman Rushdie. (Assuming that’s what happened, we still don’t know why the shooter did that and may never know.)
His ideas about Christianity as the only basis for freedom are pretty unexceptional in the evangelical community. Generic, even.
> I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life.
I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
If you have negative comments about Charlie Kirk, you either could have said them a week ago, or there will be enough opportunity to say them one month later.
<I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
That's not true in most settings, though. If someone on this forum "talks shit" about Kirk, that is not cowardly, because even if Kirk was alive he would not know what the speaker said and so would not attempt to rebut them or make them look foolish. And it's unfair of you to sneak in a critique of people speaking negatively of Kirk by calling what they're doing "talking shit." I said several negative things about him in posts today that were reasoned criticisms expressed in a civil way. That's not talking shit and is not cowardly. It is also not true that "talking shit" about the murderer here or in other settings rewards the murderer, because the chance he will hear what's said here or in most settings in the country is nil.
I was trying to explain the rule in general. If your criticism was reasonable, then I think it is perfectly okay. But that is not a typical way how people on internet express opinions.
The part about "he wouldn't notice it anyway" I don't agree with, although I am too lazy to explain why, sorry for that.
>I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
Not only that, but when someone's been assassinated for political reasons, talking about how bad and harmful the deceased's views were runs the risk of radicalising more people to commit more assassinations.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by all the shit of the past few days, but thread OP's comment is kind of a relief. I've seen so many ad-hominem's about Kirk from people who've never ever consumed any of his content or bothered to verify something that too good to check before repeating it with supreme confidence. And if the first thing they said turned out to be wrong, well, they'll just say something else they heard with supreme confidence.
Meanwhile, thread OP is accurately summarizing Kirk's views on the role of Christianity in a way that Kirk would agree with.
I wouldn't really care to criticize him right now if not for the reaction to his death from many on the right, which is a combination of:
* advocating violence in response and/or using the state to go after critics
* over the top hagiography about how Kirk was the greatest person ever
* a lot of "the left is broadly responsible because of their rhetoric" from people engaged in the exact same type of rhetoric
And I'm not talking about randos online. I'm thinking of famous media personalities, members of Congress, the president.
Reason it's relevant to criticize Kirk and not just people's reactions is that the hypocrisy is a powerful argument against what they're doing. It's one thing to say "whatever you think of Kirk, you shouldn't persecute his critics", another thing to say "you attack people for supposedly extreme rhetoric but you praise as a saint a guy who said the same type of stuff".
this would be ok if the left literally didnt already criticize trump nonstop. i mean he sneezes, you get a 2 hour video about how it is a threat to democracy.
I criticize the left all the time. Their existence is no reason not to criticize the party in power as it works to break American democracy. (Though this would be a tasteless time to lambast Kirk himself)
I’m not compulsively online, so Charlie Kirk wasn’t on my radar. It seems he was a provocateur of sorts, but from what I’m reading, he seems like he engaged in fair debate with people who disagreed with him.
He was a young man with a wife and young children whose life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. This is a terrible tragedy. Give it a rest already. Let his friends and family mourn.
From the little that I’ve learned about Kirk, he was acting from his true beliefs and not some cynical clown stirring things up for personal aggrandizement.
Just stop. You are attacking a man who will justifiably be viewed as a martyr by his fellow travelers. I don’t personally share many, or necessarily any of his beliefs, but I’ll repeat, that this is a terrible tragedy.
It matters to me whether he truly believed that, as he's quoted in the press as saying, “one thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder.” If he did not believe that then he was a cynical clown. Even if he did, he seems very remiss to me in not doing some double-checking about this issue. Either he was so sloppy and irresponsible he didn't bother to check, or else he was so convinced that trans people are pieces of shit that he didn't think it was important to check the accuracy of horrifically inflammatory statements about them.
Two members of my family, now dead, were gay: my mother and my half brother. Both had some mild trans tendencies. My brother died of AIDS during the era when people were talking about AIDS as god's punishment for perversion. Do I really have to be sad about the death of this "nice family man "who spouted the kind of untruths that led to my brother dying in an atmosphere of hostile mockery, and my mother feeling so uncomfortable about her sexuality that she waited til she was facing death to tell me? They were nice people too and, unlike Nice Guy Kirk, did not spread toxic lies about people. In fact both were kind and tolerant. No, I am not in favor of assassination, but I just am not sad that Kirk got shot in the neck while lying about trans people. Frankly, I'm glad he got blown away. I'm not defending my reaction as the right and proper one, but I don't think it's that hard to understand.
One of the things I've been hearing from Kirk's advocates is that despite disagreements one might have with him, Kirk's response was to open a dialogue, not shut you down, let alone hurt you.
If that's true, then that's probably something you could root for.
One way to disprove that might have been to find a situation where a group of people waving the Kirk flag are moving to beat up a trans person, and see if Kirk tries to condemn them and call for a dialogue instead. Or find out if that had happened, since it won't be happening now. (I'm not familiar enough with Kirk to feel certain I could find a representative sample of his views.)
Going forward, a lot of conservatives are taking home the lesson that if someone tries to defend their views on a soapbox, the response is likely to be the ammo box. Maybe not the rule, but now it's an existence proof.
No, and I doubt anyone here thinks you have to. People are saying valid critiques feel very counter-productive right now.
Restraint is frustrating. Especially when some people ignore a person's faults, possibly taking advantage for political convenience. The desire to at least "correct the record" is very, very strong ... and this is the type of thinking that makes well-meaning people point out George Floyd's use of fentanyl on that fateful day.
• Was it true? I mean, sure, yes.
• Is it helpful, bringing this up? Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Is it productive, making a giant deal out of it? Probably not ... and certainly not in the immediate days after the event.
Less of this please. This is an exceptionally disgusting and tasteless way to respond to someone discussing tragedies within their family, even within an explicitly political discussion.
While it was a bit tasteless and a bit out of place, it is absolutely relevant if we are holding Kirk to account for criticizing the trans movement. Teachers trying to give kids gender dysphoria seems to be inseparable from the trans movement for whatever reason, and given that GD sufferers have sky-high suicide rates and many other problems, it is something every parent should fear.
Please kindly confine yourself to talk about real problems that occur in the real world instead of blithely spewing insane bullshit made up by hateful troglodytes to justify their heinous bigotry, thank you very much.
I fail to see any coherent argument here. You are throwing up a claim that Kirk spiraled further right becasue he made stronger and stronger moral claims. Forgive me for putting words in your mouth, but I presume you disagree with these moral claims. I think the manner of his death- while at a public appearance where microphones were distributed those opposed to his viewpoint to have their say, and then someone chose to make an argument with bullets instead of words, could not vindicate him more.
Agree or disagree with him, it is indisputable that Charlie Kirk chose speech and debate as his means of persuasion, and AFAIK never engaged in physical violence against anyone. Claims about how his speech was some sort of metaphorical violence ring desperately hollow against the graphic and vivid reality of his actual violent death.
Like, what is your actual point here? From a purely tactical perspective, every rant about Charlie on the left just digs the hole deeper. Maybe just dont say anything about it?
I disagree with this idea that killing him counterproductively amplified his message. That's wishful thinking of precisely the kind employed when people were being "de-platformed" by every major company (from social media to web hosting to payment processors): it turns out that strategy actually DOES usually work to silence people.
I read it several times. Still not finding anything. You say he's creating a monster. Where? How? What are the characteristics of this monster? You say his ideas were bad for society but leave it [citation needed]. His presumed opponents are described, but there is nothing about his adherents. Just... a rant.
But you didn't read it. I had several digs at the left there, and you didn't see them because, like many Rightists in my experience, you don't actually read, you just skim, look for keywords and generate a generic response that doesn't address what you're actually replying to.
And like many leftoids in my experience, you have hallucinated something in your writing that simply isn't there for anyone not hip to whatever the current epistomogical model for victimhood is. You continue to evade requests to supply a point, so I guess this is just a rant.
The dude was brutally murdered in a way that watching the video will make you ill: its all right to put down your hobbyhorses for five seconds and realize murder is bad for anyone and maybe say a prayer for his family.
Its honestly a bit worrisome so many netizens seem to have the empathy of turnips.
I don't think it's gay coded, I think it's woke. It has the characteristic deep structure: The speaker's assumption that they get to dictate what constitutes civilized behavior; and the mean twist at the end, directed at those who don't comply ("turnips"). Woke is all about slathering sympathy on everybody except those who disagree with the speaker -- those jerks you get to cancel.
you said this upthread, and still want to play the woke card?
"No, I am not in favor of assassination, but I just am not sad that Kirk got shot in the neck while lying about trans people. Frankly, I'm glad he got blown away."
i mean yes you admit it's a personal reaction but hell, this is ten times more woke than me being mad at people not being civil at a murder.
and im tired of woke. turok can say utter bullshit like "reality has a racist bias" and this subgroup can flirt with hbd, and somehow woke is the enemy. It turned out more that woke moved past the excesses of the left into being the right version of calling everyone you don't like a fascist.
like you literally cannot trust anyone now, give power to the left and they go superwoke, give power to the right and they go their own version of nuts.
When someone dies, we put aside arguing about ideas or whether we love or hate them to think about the fragility of life, the cruelty of it being cut short, and about those people left behind. The grave is sort of a peacemaker, and people don't like it when the peace is disturbed.
> Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society
And he thought they were good for society. Are you so much better qualified than him to say what's good or bad, or are you both mere mortals grasping for the truth in an unpredictable world?
He was murdered because of people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
All I can say is that if you get murdered tomorrow, I won't spend Saturday feverishly searching through your comment history to find things I disagree with so I can argue with your corpse.
Do you believe in universal truth? If not, then we're pretty much at the state of "I disagree with you" as the moral limit. If enough people disagree (as with Hitler) we can condemn, make laws against, etc. Do enough people disagree with Charlie Kirk to condemn him as a society? Doesn't look that way to me. He was broadly popular on the right. If you condemn him, you're condemning most of the right. Not only does that not work from a voting majority perspective, it's a horrible idea from the perspective of a civil society.
Go ahead and condemn the worst people, even if they're on your opponent's side. Please condemn the worst people on your own side. But relatively normie people who are saying things that maybe 40-60% of the country believes? Bad idea in a lot of ways. And comparing him to Hitler is downright evil.
If you do believe in universal truth, then you're still stuck with trying to convince others that your conception of truth is more accurate than someone else's. There's no shortcut here. You may be fully convinced, but that means nothing. Ironically, that was Charlie's best known attribute and plausibly what got him killed - he was in the trenches talking to people and working to convince them. Not by force, but by persuasion.
You seem not to have noticed that I didn't state *any* opinion on the subject matter *at all*, but did only criticize Melvin's critique of Alexander. And I did it regarding two points:
1. He said that that guy (who I don't even know and are not interested in) does think that his own ideas are good. And this is irrelevant. It does not make anyone, especially Alexander, change his mind about them. He finds them bad. That's why I said Hitler found his own ideas also good, because nobody changes his mind about Hitler's ideas when he learns that Hitler liked them.
2. He said nobody can know anything. But he obviously doesn't believe that, otherwise he wouldn't state that that is the case -- how could he know?
Apparently in the Rationalist's sphere people are just as irrational as everywhere else.
The point is that in a democracy you have to learn to cope with differing opinions and you don't get to establish them by force. If you believe that strong convictions are enough to murder opposition, you will soon find that most of society has strong convictions against that.
And if they don't, well, good bye civilized society.
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
"...for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range....
"Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in our annual surveys.
"Meanwhile, the share of Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity has been trending upward, though it is still in single digits.
Plus a recent survey in Britain (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/brits-beliefs-about-gods?crossBreak=1824&period=5yrs) found that the youth cohort (18-24) has gone from 49% "I do not believe in any sort of God" in 2021 to 32% today, with those who "believe there is a God" going from 24% to 37%. Another UK survey from this year found that in 2018 only 4% of adult's in Britain went to church at least once a month, and now 12% do. This is driven mostly by the younger cohorts: 18-24 year-olds went from 4% attendance to 16%, and those 25-34 went from 4% attendance to 13%.
Given this data, how certain can we be that secularization will continue and will not reverse? For all we know we might be at peak secularization in the West right now. Globally it looks like we were at peak secularization back in 2010, Pew expects the percent of the global population that is religiously affiliated to continue to drop over the next 25 years. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religiously-unaffiliated/)
"Always" over what timeframe? We've had revivals in specific countries as well as over large swaths of the world. Obviously specific religions have started, spread, shrunk and grown at different times. Christianity was pretty small in 50AD, but subsequently grew a lot - in defiance of "always down." In fact, Christianity is probably the largest its ever been right this moment, in terms of total numbers. In terms of percents it may be down compared to fairly recent metrics and when looking specifically at Europe or the US. Looking at 300 years ago Christianity has grown in both total numbers and percents in the entire non-European world.
Not globally, and we shouldn’t assume it will be in the developed nations either. Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%, leaving he system to stabilize and plateau (which is seems to have done in the US, at least over the last 5 years).
>Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%
The examples of East Germany, Czechia, and Estonia show that any such limit is around 5%.
I don't think the populations of those three countries are representative enough that we would expect that other countries will end up in the same space. Most notably, they all used to be part of or were subject states to the USSR, an officially atheist authoritarian regime that spent decades officially suppressing religion, though legal restrictions, arresting clergy, removing privileges from the openly religious, teaching atheism and mocking religion in schools, and propaganda campaigns against religiosity. It would be surprising if that didn't have an effect on the floor for religiosity! Unless you expect similar pressures to arise in the USA or the rest of Europe, we shouldn't expect similar results.
It's closer to 25% of Czechia than 5%, and there's no reason to expect that the low religiosity we see there today is going to be a *permanent* feature of life.
Meanwhile, your side will have some trouble admitting that the monster that killed him is a monster created, at least in part, by your own ideology. Or perhaps to be fair, of your willingness to tolerate one-sided viewpoints keeping people in glass bubbles.
He was a monster created by Kirk using his media empire to relentlessly encourage political violence by his calls to deploy the military against blue cities and states, celebrating Paul Pelosi's attacker, the pardoning of the seditious conspiracists, etc. You can't keep signaling "Hey guys, I'm the hip guy that supports political violence" and then fall back to "but wait, not political violence against me" because the audience you've amassed really loves political violence and one of them (even if they're a purported enemy) turns their sights on you for once.
We don't know anything about this monster, so it is a bit rich that you are accusing an entire 'side' (who is that?) of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once.
It's also very left-coded to act this way: accuse an entire group of responsibility, etc.
After Trayvon Martin, I remember a local-gov't leader quoted in the press saying, "They're killing our children!" She made it a rallying cry.
I was confused. "They"? That word ... are we not all part of the same country? Plus it was false. She should know better. But ... "they"? And the rallying cry caught on. That word flummoxed me. "They"
I've learned a lot since then.
With that incident, with Michael Brown in Ferguson, with George Floyd in Minneapolis, and a litany of other incidents, the left very loudly accused an entire giant group of people of being responsible + indifferent + closedminded all at once.
People throughout the country who were already disgusted by the facts of these incidents were summarily lumped together with the real villains, due only to their skin color or mix of policy choices & beliefs.
The woman quoted above? I honestly thought we were in the same in-group, so to speak. Seriously, up until that day, I really thought a person like she and a person like me were united, at least in some small way.
Like I said, I've learned a lot since then. Much of which from this community here.
I would rather call it dickhead-coded to label an identifiable group "of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once". (It is legit to refer to a group of people who are responsible, indifferent and closeminded, but such a group is not readily identifiable.)
But my father has been, holy shit, shockingly indifferent and closed-minded, and responsible for indulging his indifferent closed-minded influencers but shutting out his own family, for reflexively defending his man Trump. He can never acknowledge that there is anything wrong with Trump, he just deflects criticisms into accusations about The Left.
Do I think his behavior is typical of his group (rather than common to all members of the group)? Yes.
Seems like a silly gotcha to me. 1)Boston streets are very congested and no matter how you slice the pie — for ex, by slicing part of the street off and calling it a bike lane — there is not enough space to meet the needs of those driving, biking, parking, or placing their truck where it needs to be in order to make a delivery or perform a service. Everyone who does not have scrupulosity OCD parks illegally, blocks traffic, cuts people off in order to enter the stream of traffic etc. If you live there, you’ve done that stuff too.
2) Even if this truck were doing something exceptionally inconsiderate, rather than something that is happening on most blocks, what it’s doing has nothing to do with the child’s being run over. They are not incurring some of the guilt for that.
I've been on a bike too for the last 5 years. If the conditions are godawful, I ride on the sidewalk. I am careful not to hit or scare pedestrians, but they still don't like me biking on the sidewalk, and I get it. I believe biking on the sidewalk is in fact illegal. But I need to be somewhere, a bike's what I've got, and I'm not going to risk my life getting forced out into a lane crowded with fast-moving, irritable car drivers. In my view, the conditions force me to choose to do something probably illegal and certainly a bit inconsiderate. That's my point. That truck is just one of thousands of manifestations of the fact that it is impossible to travel and park in Boston and be perfectly law abiding and perfectly considerate of others. It says nothing whatever about the Krafts. And can you honestly say that if you had a friend's car for the day and were driving in Boston you would refrain from parking somewhere illegal if you thought you could run in, do your errand, and get back to the car without being ticketed?
I listened to an account a student in the crowd gave of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Student said that the shooting occurred during a Q&A. Acc/to interviewee, a student had asked Kirk whether he believed trans people committed more murders than others, and Kirk said yes, and there was a cheer from the crowd. The student asked a follow-up question, and then Kirk was shot.
It seems unlikely to me that trans people do commit more murders than other people (who are not trans but similar in other respects -- demographics, SES, etc --to the trans subjects), though I suppose it's possible. I did a quick check with GPT -- did not double check its answer -- and it said there is lots of data indicating that trans people are attacked and harmed more often than others, but no data on whether they commit more murders. So my question is, does it seem likely that Kirk actually believed that trans people are more likely to murder? If so, why? Are there sites out there somewhere citing some kind of data, some study? Did he just think it was self-evident because trans people seem obviously bad, weird and defective to him ? Did he not believe it, but say it because he knew it was a crowd pleaser? I am trying to understand his mentality.
I'm not sure if they carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-men, but they certainly seem to carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-women.
Where are you finding numbers on that? I just went looking for some and didn't find anything besides the Violence Prevention Project's dataset on public mass shootings. That does indicate a rate higher than cis women but lower than cis men, but the sample size is too small (one transgender shooter) to draw robust conclusions from. I can't find anything on murder rates in general.
It would seem that the absolute numbers of trans criminals would be too low to draw many conclusions unless the rate were staggeringly high. If the rate for transwomen were exactly the same as for cis men, we'd still be looking at numbers too low to draw conclusions about for big rare events like a mass shooting, though it would be enough to discuss more typical murders.
Agreed. About 0.8% of US adults are trans, roughly evenly distributed between trans men, trans women, and nonbinary, so if we had systematic statistics we would be able to tell the difference between trans women committing homicide at the same rate as cis men (we would expect to see about 30 per year then) or as cis women (which would be about 3 per year), especially if we were to aggregate across several years of data.
I've been looking into it too. Here's the trouble with the data available: Places that collect shooting data lump together all shootings where 4+ people were killed. There have been 4000+ in the last decade, and very few correspond to what we think of as "mass shootings." Most involve gang violence, which is just a different thing, and anyhow I'm pretty sure most gangs would not want a accept a trans member even if they were a good fit in demographics, attitudes, etc. If you just look at the large, famous incidents, the ones we think of as mass shootings, the total number of them is so small that you can't conclude anything from the number. It would be like deciding whether a coin was weighted unevenly based on 4 tosses. It is, though, kind of striking how many mass shootings were committed by people who are gender nonconforming in some way.
Anyhow: I just figured out that the Gun Violence Archive has filters, and while there isn't one that selects for what we think of as mass shootings, there is one that selects only shootings where the victims were strangers to the shooter. There aren't that many of them, and you can actually look through them and remove any that don't count as mass shootings for one reason or another. I believe there was one other filter that I thought would also be useful. But, after you select the incidents that fit the bill, you have to find out whether the shooter was trans, and many records give no info one way or the other about that. I do think it's likely that in many, possibly even most, of these cases the topic came up in court, because if the shooter is trans, there's the issue of where the person would be incarcerated -- with what gender. So I was thi nking about asking GPT to look into that. But I don't know where, exactly, to tell it to look. And I'm actually busy enough with other things that it's a bad idea for me to get fascinated by this question and pour time into it.
Another important point: very very few people commit mass murder of the kind that involves spraying a crowd of strangers with bullets. Maybe one person in a million? One in a hundred thousand? Even if it's one in a hundredn thousand, and even if trans people are 10 times a likely to be shooters as cis people, that means there's a one in 10,000 chance that the trans person next to you in line for movie tickets is a shooter. Which rounds down to zero.
My guess: Lots of trans and gay murderous villains in movies. It's a trope.
But of course the question is then why the writers of those movies wrote them like that --but not, why *they* believed this. Most writers don't believe what they write. (Harry Potter, Sci-Fi, ...)
The reason is because if your audience thinks being gay or trans is wrong and creepy, then having the villain do gay or gender-nonconforming things helps establish that they're a bad guy. They see the villain acting girly and think "ugh, that guy's a freak."
It's the same reason why crippled or deformed villains are (or were) popular - it looks freaky, it's a deviation from the norm, it visually tells the audience "this person is twisted on the outside, and they're twisted on the inside as well."
I imagine a similar effect is in play with Charlie Kirk's statement - if he thinks "ugh, this person is a mentally ill deviant" when thinking of trans people, it's easy for him to imagine that they're deviant in other ways (such as being a murderer), regardless of the facts.
Tangentially, the motif of villains having a hairline scar on the face (usually on a cheek or the forehead) is a specific historical allusion, coding the character as a member of the late 19th or early 20th century German/Prussian aristocratic officer class. It was fairly fashionable for university students of this class to fight highly-stylized "academic duels". These were nominally actual duels with real swords, but were not fought to the death and typically involved rules and equipment (armor and protective goggles) designed to minimize the risk of death or serious injury. Most of the face besides the eyes was left unprotected, since getting a highly visible scar in such a duel was seen as a positive outcome: dueling scars were seen as an indicator of courage.
Giving villains dueling scars overlaps with the tradition in American movies of the mod to late 20th century of making villains resemble Nazis, since a fair number of senior officers in Nazi Germany had dueling scars.
I think it's a talking point in conservative media right now, I don't know what evidence there is for it if any. I really doubt the timing of the shot means anything since it sounds like it was done by a rooftop sniper some distance away.
I have no problem with trans people, but if I was asked that question, without looking it up, my response would also have been yes (at least if I was answering honestly). The logic is that I've read before that trans people have much higher rates of mental illnesses than non trans people. And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
I tried to look it up myself just now as well, and also pretty much got redirected to info about trans people being harmed more than others. I'd be happy be corrected if you or anyone else finds some actual info on this.
> And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
Do you really think that?
I think people who want (want!) someone dead (because they hate them, fear them, want something from them, or them out of the way) are the ones who commit more murders on average.
I don't see how one needs to have a mental illness for that, except in special cases.
It seems likely to me that more mass murderers than one-on-one murderers are crazy. Killing someone in rage or for gain just seems like an extension of the kind of interaction that happens all the time. Yes, of course, it is bad, but is much easier for most of us to comprehend. We don't have the feeling you have to be crazy to do it.
There must be data on what kinds of mental illness are more prevalent in trans people, and I will look it up when I get a chance. Most kinds of mental illness do not make people more likely to be mass murderers. Probably half the US has qualified for depression, anxiety disorder or substance use disorder at some point in their life, but the risk that any one of them will commit mass murder is tiny.
I'm sure somebody has categorized mass murderers by mental state at the time of the event. Some mass murderers are just plain psychotic, and have delusions that, if true, would make committing mass murder make some kind of sense; some are in the midst of rage-and-despair meltdowns set off by bad things that have recently happened to them, things like being fired; some are true believers in some movement that hates a certain group, and lack the internal controls that prevent other members of the movement from actually killing outgroup members; some are hooked on the idea of the fame and glory they will get. Only the first of these groups is clearly crazy. though of course most in the other groups could be diagnosed with depression, sociopathy or naricissistic personality disorder. But the last 3 disorders are all quite common, and the risk that an individual with one of them will commit a mass murder is tiny.
They analyzed two datasets that had info on both transgender identification and various self-reported mental illnesses. The results are not very robust between datasets. One dataset shows significantly elevated rates for all mental conditions in the set (autism, ADHD, bipolar, depression, learning disability, OCD, and scizophrenia) among trans individuals, but a lot of this seems to be driven by autism correlating both with being trans and with self-reports of other conditions. The other dataset shows very strong association with autism, moderate association with depression, weaker associations with OCD, ADHD, and Bipolar, and no statistically significant associations with scizophrenia.
I also looked just now for other data on associations between gender dysphoria and either personality disorders or schizophrenia. There are some papers out there, but all the ones I've skimmed seemed to have load-bearing reliance on outdated estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria (on the order of 1 in 10,000, not the current estimate of 0.6% to 1.3% of the population).
The correlation between autism and gender dysphoria seems pretty robust and shows up in a bunch of studies. Here's a 2022 survey paper:
I wish someone would look at the data and give some stats. US gov't data on murderers and murder victims just give basic demographics, I think. I wonder if people who have relevant data sets are not analyzing them to answer this question because acc/to wokeism it's an evil question to even consider, sort of like race and IQ.
I think that if you did actually look carefully at the stats then what you'd find is that it depends how you define things and what cutoffs you take.
Here is a list of recent transgender shooters as per grok, which appears to be the only AI willing to talk about it:
* Nashville, TN (2023): Audrey Hale, identified as transgender, killed six people at The Covenant School.
* Denver, CO (2019): Alec McKinney, a transgender teenager, was involved in a school shooting that killed one and injured eight.
* Aberdeen, MD (2018): Snochia Moseley, reportedly transgender, killed three at a Rite Aid facility.
* Colorado Springs, CO (2022): Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five at an LGBTQ nightclub, was claimed to be non-binary by their lawyers, though this is disputed.
* Minneapolis, MN (2025): Robin Westman, identified as transgender, killed two children and injured 17 at Annunciation Catholic School.
I actually got GPT to cough up info. It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people. So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing. they recorded 4400 incidents in the last decade, and in only 10 of them was the shooter trans. For the well-publicized shootings, there has probably been enough light thrown on the presumed killer that there's decent info about whether they're trans. I don't know anything about the info quality of the many other shootings that met the GVA criteria. How likely are the police to try to find out whether someone is trans, if they do not volunteer the info? Do they maybe know because in most casesvthe suspect or the person's lawyer is expressing a lot of concern about what gender they will be housed with in prison?
Anyhow, going by the GVA stats, trans people are ddfinitely under represented in the shooters group. A cis person is 3-4 times as likely as a trans personvto carry out a mass shooting.
Makes sense to me. I know trans people have a higher-than-average oddness quotient, with autism especially over-represented in the group. But I would not expect autism to be a risk factor for being a shooter. Most autistic people are solitary, uncomfortable around people, and emotionally flat.
> It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people... So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing.
I think that when people say "mass shooting" they're generally thinking about the case where some nut shoots a bunch of strangers, rather than gang-related gunfights, but of course the GVA's statistics are dominated by the latter.
That's why Charlie Kirk's last words were "counting or not counting gang violence?", because it makes a huge difference to the reference class.
I agree that transgender individuals are much less likely to be the perps in gang-related shootings, but I still wonder whether they're more or less likely to be the perps in non-gang-related shootings. (Which frankly, I care a lot more about, because I'm not a gang member and neither is anyone I know.)
i think its a bit evil yes, you can't always isolate parts of a person with heinous acts like this, or if you do you can't base it on identity.
with trans people there is always pressure to oppress them, to be blunt, in the same way people are always lurking to be racist to black people, or will oppress any unpopular minority. We keep this in check by not tying traits to groups too tightly: a person is an individual moral being dependent on a lot of factors, not always one predominant.
a lot of this research is really fuel for oppression; just agree with them and ask them "what now?" and then see what comes out. It's not "we must make mental heath a priority and maybe start a charity to help at risk trans people, or low income people in general."
Absolutely disagree that about its being evil. A lot of research findings can be fuel for oppression. *Most* research findings probably are harmful to some innocent people. For instance findings about farming or manufacturing processes that produce toxic products no doubt harm some kind, fair, honest people who got into the business and had no idea their product was harming the public. Some are not in a position to adapt how they produce stuff, and go under. Some of these people probably end up bankrupt and despairing.
Of course I see that if trans people turn out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people that info can be used to oppress them. But to label the research as "just fuel for oppression" is absurd. It's like saying metal as "just a material for producing bullets." Both are many things, not all of them bad. Furthermore, if trans people are more likely to commit mass murder I'm not sure that info is going to be make things much worse for them. Lots of people already think they're likely to commit mass murder, so research data seems not to play much role in what they believe. Seems the belief is a result of publicity about incidents that fit easily with an overall negative take on transness, nurtured and magnified in an echo chamber. '
As a matter of fact, even if trans people turned out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people, that info is if anything reassuring. What fraction people commit mass murder? One in a million? So for a random trans person the chance they'll shoot up a crowd is 2 in a million? Still so low it's vanishingly unlikely, and anyone with a lick of sense will round it down to zero.
there is a difference from research that harms certain groups because of unintentional harm and research targeting group identity to link it to crimes or immoral actions.
i don't think we can be naive that certain types of research are done dispassionately or are out of care for the group researched.
Science is seen as a rubber-stamp authority too much to be sanguine on people treating it the way you think. The goal
is to have the authority behind your pet obsessions in a "God says so" way. The racist invokes science to make racism sacrosanct. Then he can argue for policy to "reflect the science."
Once you start doing that particular thing-race/group and negative traits that have moral aspects-it's extremely dangerous. People and even scientists can have bad motives.
I got in an argument with someone about the effect of money in politics. They argued that there are diminishing returns in individual races (which I simply don't have the data to argue for or against right now). But "money in politics" is not just about individual elections. There are *lots* of ways to use money. There are lots of *creative* ways to use money. There are lots of creative ways to use money, directly or indirectly, to steer public opinion and policy.
Even if TPUSA was just funding individual races, that's a lot of individual races. It wouldn't surprise me to find that TPUSA could spend nearly all its money on them without seeing meaningful diminishing returns. One race could easily spend $1M, and there are easily over 100 races. That's $100M right there.
Meanwhile, I don't think "there exist creative ways to spend money" necessarily implies an organization will find those ways. OTOH, I think that as the amount of spendable money increases, the motivation to find creative ways to spend it drops. It's easier to employ stable but less efficient spending strategies and put the rest in a war chest.
So, Charlie Kirk is dead. Things are escalating quite nicely, aren't they? While it is delightfully ironic that he died right as he was scapegoating minorities for mass shootings, he'll make for a good martyr nonetheless. How many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown? Because I feel like this isn't quite severe enough to get away with that, unless Trump's base is way more attatched to him than I thought...
In a different day and age, I might have written that perhaps we should wait with drawing conclusions until we know the first thing about the assassin other than that they're evading police. In any case, the current US administration has shown that it will start crackdowns on anyone for any reason or none at all, so I don't believe Kirk's death will have any more impact than the Minnesota legislators' shootings had a noticable calming effect. It might be referenced some more in future tweets, but the agenda has already been set. Dissenting opinions welcome, I'm not American and only read the news
While I share some of your concern, I feel like there's a good chance this won't even move the needle that much. The Trump administration really doesn't seem to be very worried about taking the pulse of its base before it acts: Trump just does what he wants, tosses out whatever lazy, bullshit justification is easiest to reach for and his base picks it up and runs with it unquestioningly. Given how often I've seen people even on this forum parroting his flimsy excuses, I can't really "doesn't have a good enough excuse to sell his people on it" to be much of a bottleneck for him.
Maybe escalation like this will make some people more likely to side with him when he crosses what they would otherwise regard as some bright line. But given how many bright lines have already fallen in the rear view mirror almost without comment, it probably won't be that big a shift. If the past several decades have taught us anything it's that in a country of 300 million and a world of 8 billion, there will always be *some* excuse ready at hand to rile up U.S. extremists.
Kirk called for someone to bail the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi out of prison. It's bad for him to have been murdered. That's because political violence is bad - a view that Charlie Kirk seemingly didn't share.
But political violence is bad even when directed at someone who thinks that it isn't bad.
Speaking truthfully about directly relevant things someone has said and done is distasteful now? Somehow, lying about or ignoring the work someone built their life around does not *actually* strike me as a respectful way to talk about them after they've passed.
I wouldn't even care to say anything if he'd just been killed and people were denouncing that he was killed. Or when people respond by calling for more civil rhetoric, not advocating violence, etc. Or if people praise Kirk on a personal level (i.e. non-political stuff like family).
It's when people go a step further and start praising Kirk as dedicated to that sort of civil rhetoric - often the same people now saying that "we" (i.e. the right) are "at war" with the left.
If we are going to have a standard about civil or not-violent rhetoric it has to apply across the board. People who are upset about that type of rhetoric should see if their personal faves are engaged in it, and if so, are they actually so opposed to it as they claim.
For posterity though I looked up the full quote on the subject:
>"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!
> Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?
> And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
> I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?
In case it's unclear, the argument being made is not that someone should bail him out because he's a hero and violence against Pelosis doesn't matter, the argument is that someone should bail him out to ask him some questions, because he was suspicious of the media narrative at the time (that Depape was some kind of right-wing extremist) and talking to him might clarify it.
Now in fact, Kirk was right, and it turns out that Depape was more of a standard issue lunatic than a political extremist:
"When given the chance to address the court before his sentencing, DePape, dressed in prison orange and with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at length about September 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being replaced by a body double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring against him."
I hadn't actually followed up on this story, I didn't realise he'd been given life without the possibility of parole. While I don't think that's an excessive penalty for assault with a deadly weapon, I can guarantee that if you or I had been attacked with a hammer by some lunatic in San Francisco then the penalty would be a lot lighter.
It's not so much "unclear" as it is "deliberate nonsense." Charlie has here an incident that made him and his associates and their rhetoric look terrible--an unstable person who aggressively soaked up all the the various flavors of conspiracy laden bullcrap that they've been peddling for easy money and simply took it seriously enough to act on it.
Instead of moderating or taking responsibility or anything of the sort, he throws out a bunch of insinuation-laden fast talk as a distraction, which includes both a suggestion to bail out a dangerous, aggressive, unstable man and some not-that-subtle implications that not everything about the attack was what it seemed.
So while I thank you for providing more detailed context--always worth doing--it doesn't make me think even a little bit better about Charlie Kirk.
<DePape spoke at length about . . . his ex-wife being replaced by a body double.
That's a clearcut psychotic delusion. In fact it's so common that it has a name: Capgras Syndrome. The man is psychotic -- unless he's faking, of course. But seems like it would not be difficult to get clear on whether or not he has believed that for a while. The other stuff he says might or might not be psychotic delusions, depending on how he came to believe them.
I am less worried about a crackdown of some sort (against whom?) than I am about other radicals deciding that it's open season on public figures they don't like. Both left-radicals deciding to copycat this shooting and right-radicals deciding that this shooting justifies some kind of retaliation. I am not eager for an American remake of The Troubles.
I did worry about it then. Also when the CEO of United Healthcare was murdered. And when Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, for that matter, and when he pardoned the rioters.
>This isn't even the first political killing in recent months.
I know. That's part of why I continue to be concerned.
My not-well-informed model here is that violently inclined crazies pick up on the pattern of what one does when one is a violent crazy person and then follow that. Going postal with a glock is a bad pattern, but find some prominent political figure and murder them is even worse. If our plentiful supply of violent crazies and our plentiful supply of guns for them to use combine with a norm of those violent crazies doing political violence (and maybe getting lauded by extremists on one side, encouraging the next crackpot), our world will get a whole lot worse.
I would be surprised if there are pardons for actual assassinations. But there may well be pardons or non-prosecutions for “reckless endangerment” and attempted murder and other things where someone maintains a plausible deniability.
It was very free with handing out pardons to people who invaded the nation's capital and attempted to do violence to its governing body. So yes, it seems quite likely the the Trump administration will something like that in the future, as it already has in the past.
I'm not here to judge. I understand that they have a narrative to maintain, I don't blame them for looking out for their own interests. I was just hoping to get some historical context or insider information so that I could figure out how fast everything is moving.
I've heard of him, but it's ludicrous to call him an ACX hero. He's a MAGA influencer-journalist, whose primary note in my memory is 'unlike most influencer-journalists, sometimes does actual journalism.'
Ah okay, I guess his name has indeed flitted across my eyeballs at some stage.
I don't blame myself for not remembering it, because I just read thirty seconds ago the sentence "the plagiarism was discovered by Chris Rufo and Blah Blah" and I've already forgotten who Blah Blah was.
He was scapegoating trans people, who are not (in actual fact) responsible for any significant degree of mass shootings.
But hey, if we're going to play that game, reality also has a well-known misandrist bias and an enormous one at that. Can we scapegoat men for mass shootings, or is it only allowed of demographic groups that you dislike?
Since you consider acknowledging facts to be "scapegoating," sure. Notice how everyone's assuming the shooter is a man.* I'd bet the investigators are even doing "gender profiling," which nobody ever has a problem with.
Do you not understand what the words "scapegoating" and "profiling" signify? Or are you simply confused about how to properly apply conditional probabilities to real-life situations?
If it's the latter, while I'm no longer an educator by profession, I'd gladly offer you a brief primer as a free public service.
Not the guy you're replying to, but anyone who doesn't explicitly understand the enormous male-bias in (especially violent) crime has a terrible map of the problems in criminal justice. If prisons were not predominantly filled by men, that would be strong evidence for an absurdly strong pro-male bias in our criminal justice system.
Yes, men are among the most most overrepresented sizeable demographic group among criminals in the US, committing 90%+ of violent crimes despite being just 49% of the population.
And you know what? As a man, this doesn't bother me at all. I feel neither guilt nor shame about it. And it certainly doesn't bother or offend me when someone points out these crime statistics -- they're facts of life!
So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics.
"So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics. "
I hope you'll pardon me for asking, but do you *actually* not know why? Like, is this genuinely something about human nature which puzzles you? Or is this just a rhetorical flourish to try to paint them as irrational?
In either case you really *ought* to be aware that it isn't *only*--indeed, often not even *primarily*--members of those groups that take such observations amiss.
As for the why, human communication has this frustrating tendency to include not only the overt words spoken or written, but sneaky little things like context and subtext. I guarantee you, for example, that an academic conference on criminology can discuss demographic breakdowns of crime trends fully and honestly without drawing even a fraction of the ire that some dude with a Sunglasses-and-MAGA-hat profile pic will draw if he Tweets out one or two *specific* statistics isolated from wider context. Because most people can model others well enough to pretty accurately guess why both the academics and the hat-and-sunglasses-guy are doing what they do: it's usually not the same motive.
> Kirk was answering a question about transgender mass shootings in the United States of America before he was shot dead. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked Kirk, according to a CNN report.
> To this, Charlie Kirk responded, "Too many". The same audience member informed Kirk that the number is five, and proceeded to ask if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in the US over the last 10 years. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
Hang on. Discussions about mass shootings do actually need to distinguish between gang violence and spree shootings, since most things you'd do to decrease one of them would have little impact on the other.
>The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
OK, and? Two gangs shooting at each other often technically count as mass shootings, depending on how many get hit, but they're not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "mass shootings", making it quite reasonable to clarify whether they're being included in the numbers.
You're familiar with the issue and know what's going on, and so you know that people who take the social issue of mass shootings seriously, like the Washington Post and Mother Jones, explicitly exempt gang shooting from their mass shooting statistics.
But you're talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on. Someone gave them a talking point -- talking about gang violence is racist -- and that's all they know.
I'm going to respond with respect equal to the respect you have shown me:
Are you aware that all categories of 'mass shootings' involve guns?
I know I'm probably <<talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on>>, but really *every* classification of gun-related death not-conducted-in-the-line-of-duty: domestic violence, felony-related, unintentional, argumentative, suicide, random mass shooting, gang-related, (and others, depending on the classification system), all of them:
*are 100% caused by guns*.
And did you know that 100% of these events could have been prevented if the gun was, say, instead, a banana?
And did you know that some [crazy] people think that *all* such gun-related incidents are tragedies? And preventable? (meaning that even "gang-related" gun-deaths are preventable tragedies?)
Charlies Kirk's "argument", if it can even be called that, amounts to "yeah, but 'those mass-shootings' are nothing compared to those 'other mass-shootings'.
This argument only means *anything* if those 'other mass-shootings' are somehow "less" or "don't count". And why would that be?
Oh yes: because of a decades-long narrative popular on "certain 24 hour news networks":
- "democrats just can't control their cities"
- "certain types of people in those cities can't control themselves"
To most people I know, these are *not* less. The lives lost in "gang-related's" are no less valuable than Charlie Kirk's own life, which was tragically cut short.
A crackdown on what? Guns? They don't want to crackdown on guns.
It makes sense to talk about a crackdown in the context of a career criminal randomly stabbing someone on the subway. You can just increase violent crime sentences and arrest people for fare evasion. Are they going to go after snipers? I guess that sucks for the two people nationwide who will get arrested for open carrying on rooftops.
Very solid. Controlling precedent is in Brandenburg v. Ohio and has been approvingly cited by the current court on several occasions. Calls for violence are only unprotected if it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
The word "imminent" here is one of the primary distinguishers of US protections vs. most other western places. For instance, take a clear hypothetical example of incitement; a tweet that says "Everyone should punch Nazis. If you're not punching Nazis, you should examine yourself and root out your cowardice. Nazis like John Smith deserve to die, and killing them is the only way we can prevent another Holocaust." Clear incitement to violence against John Smith, but it's not intended to be imminent; noone in the audience (as far as the tweeter knows) is near John and able to jump into immediate lawless action.
On the other hand, the exact same set of words would be unprotected if the person was demonstrating at John Smith's house, and John Smith had just walked up to some incredibly angry protestors when the speaker said this. That fulfils the imminence and likely to incite requirements.
A crackdown on whoever they want to crack down on. That's how Reichstag Fires work; it's not about punishing the perpetrators it's about exploiting it to increase your power.
A crackdown on leftist agitators. With enough unrest, the Trump administration can make the case that leftists are plotting against the US government, and use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against left-wing organizations and the protesters that will inevitably pop up. Right now the unrest still isn't bad enough to act as a pretext for that, but given that the military is already being deployed in some cities... it's only a matter of time until one of these confrontations turns violent.
Of course, whether this incident will even contribute to that depends on the identity and motives of the killer.
I checked and it will take 3.27 plus or minus 0.88 incidents.
I’m declining your invitation to speculate about whether Trump’s base is attached enough to him to take action and if they are what infuriating stuff they will say and what destructive acts they will engage in. Because know what engaging in that kind of discussions is? It’s a group event where we all wind each other up by making up stories about the dumb evil shit his base might do. It’s dumb and destructive. It’s a way of being part of the problem.
Look, we don't need to moralize it. Whether or not you see the administration's actions as justified, it would be nice to have some information that could be used to predict their actions, whether that's the current social currents in the US, or previous instances of political instability in other countries.
There's nothing wrong with seeking information. But that's not what you sound like you're asking for. You sound like "hey, guys, whaddya think those Maga fuckers are gonna do in response? Any really bad shit? What kinda shit you picturing those assholes doing? Think they might shoot a prominent leftist? Who they gonna go for, huh?".
If you want to know whether anyone can think of a predictor of whether this shooting will lead to violence by Trump's base, ask that. There probably are predictors, and somebody might well know what they are. Seems to me those things are pretty hard to predict. But there might be some index having to do with extremity of expressed anger and references to violence on social media platforms -- some baseline that's been established,some measures of how far above baseline we are.
> "hey, guys, whaddya think those Maga fuckers are gonna do in response? Any really bad shit? What kinda shit you picturing those assholes doing? Think they might shoot a prominent leftist? Who they gonna go for, huh?".
These bullying put down where you put your own shitty words in someone else’s mouth are truly obnoxious.
Yeah, I know, Gunflint. But I did start with a civil post where I didn't do that, but just explained why objected to his post -- how I saw as an invite for us all to play ain't-it-awful. The guy didn't get it, and I got angry quicker than usual because I, like everyone else, was upset by the Kirk shooting, and I saw his post as a continuation of the same process that led to the assassination. So somebody kills a guy on the right, presumably because they think he's going to hurt the *good* people, the *real* people --you know, **us**. So now a guy comes on here and invites us all to speculate on what the farr ight is going to do to **us**. He is fostering the development of a hate and anger, us and them, storm system that is the same kind of mental storm system that led to the shooting.
It is quite true that I am mean to people on here that seem to me to have ugly and destructive agendas. My meanness isn't made out of cruel remarks about their intellect or ethics, though, but out of my objections to their particular agendas. I try to present them in a way that makes the person see how they look to me. I do not think that's wrong to do, and don't particularly bad about doing it. I'm just not as nice as you are Gunflint.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. I have nothing against the right, and they're free to do whatever the hell they want. However, it's still going to be very disruptive to my life if and when the administration decides to make its move, and I would like to prepare for that if possible, mentally if nothing else.
think if they do move political violence might be bad enough it would be bipartisan.
you are assuming evil but some of the reaction on the left is vile and it needed to have been stopped with Luigi Mangione; dont go on reddit mainsubs right now if you don't want to dislike people.
Is the assumption you think I'm making that you have something against the right? Actually, I did come away thinking you have something against the right. That was not an assumption on my part, but a reasonable conclusion given what you said. However, your having something against the right had nothing to do with what I was objecting to. As a matter of fact, *I* have something against Trump's supporters.
What I was objecting to was not what side you were on, but the nature of your question, which seemed to me like not to be a genuine request for information and opinion, but an invitation for people to spout anxious and angry fantasies about what's going to happen next. It was an inflammatory remark, not a genuine question. I mean, think about it. You ask "how many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown?" Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown? And what counts as an "incident"? And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be? Trump forbids any assembly with more than 10 Democrats in the crowd? He goes on TV and twists off the heads of 13 random people who voted against him? He tells his base to bring guns to all future events where someone on the right is speaking?
Point is, your question is not a real question. It's an invitation to get scared and angry as a group, and fantasize. About the only thing I am sure of about the mess the country is in is that way too many people are spending time in that angry, scared space fantasizing about "them". About the other side.
Indeed. If I were a moustache twirling evil overlord and trying to amass power in today's era, I could add a new strategy to my playbook: pay someone to do something despicable to the other side, while stoking my own side to prepare retaliation for what I'm suggesting the other side's retaliation will be.
> Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown?
Well yeah, kinda. This obviously isn't the first time something like this has happened, and maybe someone more in tune with right wing social circles could give us a heads up on what the mood is like there.
> And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be?
He's already discussed using the Insurrection Act to quell protests. It's not exactly a stretch for him to use it for its other purposes, especially seeing as he just stated that he's going to go after organizations that funded or supported political violence, right after saying that left-wing rhetoric was entirely responsible for the violence. https://www.foxnews.com/video/6379075859112
Maybe you should at least be a little concerned? This really isn't buisness as usual. Political and cultural tensions are extremely high, Trump has shown zero qualms about being associated with authoritarianism, and the Republican party and military are seemingly very loyal to him. Regardless of your political affiliation, things are going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while.
That's not what I'm picking up from the tone of your original comment.
I dunno, I feel like there's some people out there who fantasise about getting oppressed. Maybe they think that being oppressed will give their lives more meaning, give it some narrative shape like a movie.
National Guard deployments to cities quell riots, increased tempo of domestic spying by the feds (both legal and illegal), increased gun control, and restrictions on retail sales of dynamite.
Does anyone here have an opinion and/or experience with Hillsdale classical schools? My daughter will be starting school next year and there is one near us, so we're considering it.
Go to Hillsdale College? To clarify, I am looking at an elementary 'classical school' that is somehow affiliated to Hillsdale (not sure if it goes beyond using a curriculum created by them). I appreciate the offer.
Is there an official name for the effect when a person who is an actual famous expert in some area starts speaking complete bullshit about a different area, speaking with the same confidence and authority?
(My friend calls it "Bukovský syndrome" after https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Bukovsk%C3%BD a Slovak expert on *nutrition* who also became famous for spreading conspiracy theories about covid. People who believe his theories use the argument by authority "but he is a famous doctor" ignoring the part that his expertise in nutrition has little in common with epidemiology.)
Dunno. I want to call it Linus Pauling syndrome (Pauling had a Nobel prize in chemistry before becoming a public crusader for the ostensibly amazing benefits of eating huge amounts of vitamin C)
I call it the Freakonomics effect when the famous expert is an economist who is talking nonsense about a complex subject after doing a few analyses on a napkin, but I don't know of a good name for it. It is always good to see a Slovak getting recognition, even if it's for the excellence of their nonsense!
Oh, definitely. If you are good at making money, it means that you understand how the Real World™ works, which automatically makes you an expert on everything. /s
In Tyler Cowen's excellent interview with Dan Kahneman, there was this wonderful comment from Kahneman: The feeling of certainty is only weakly correlated with being right.
On the listener's side of things, it's a subcase of Authority Bias: the tendency to credit claims made by authority figures even when that authority figure's position, skills, and knowledge don't give them any particular advantage in making a true claim in that subject area.
It also feels kinda like a reversal of Gell-Mann Amnesia: instead of under-weighing times your source was wrong about other subjects, you are over-weighing times they were right about other subjects.
On the speaker's side, it's "Ne supra crepidam". The term is an abbreviated quote from Pliny the Elder. The full quote translates as "Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe", i.e. an admonition to limit your analysis and criticism to areas of your own expertise. I suppose you could call the failure mode the Crepidam Fallacy.
It's an authority bias problem for the speaker as well. If your previous ideas all turned out to be absolutely brilliant, then it's easy to assume that your new ideas are brilliant too -- after all, you're a genius.
I invented Special Relativity and General Relativity when nobody else was smart enough to, therefore my ideas for one world government are presumably just as clever.
I mean, it's fine to have opinions outside your main area of expertise, it's just important to recognize that you're not an expert there. Einstein's knowledge of physics didn't necessarily make his political opinions worthwhile.
Not to be confused with "Victorian Novel Disease", an unspecified chronic and often fatal ailment frequently that primarily afflicts pretty young women. Typical symptoms include fatigue, wasting, pale complexion, and the Incurable Cough of Death.
He's far from the worst example of it; the worst you can accuse him of (as far as I'm aware) is being too opinionated on matters that epistemologically aren't scientific at all.
There's a certain common trend with Nobel Prize winners going to much worse extremes. Like Luc Montagnier with AIDS denialism.
I have been asking people around why did the squad and deadlift kind of replaced traditional body building, and the answer I mostly found was this: people who are also active outside the gym, prefer this kind of functional strength.
Very interesting, because my opinion has always been that body-building is precisely for people like me who are entirely 100% inactive outside a gym, and this way we can "cheat".
Speaking only for myself, big lifts like the deadlift are more time-efficient and arguably better for everyday activity and injury prevention, also they are more fun IMO than doing a hundred focused exercises of a hundred annoying little muscles.
They .. haven’t? I’ve been a gym rat/bro for like 17 years now, the big 3 have always been core and revered foundational movements. Starting strength and 5x5 were perennial newbie program recommendations back then.
Not so much anymore, as bodybuilders have moved away from them in recent years, with “science based” lifters having various reasons for deprecating them.
1. Bodybuilders got too good at the game and look like weird muscle aliens now. Granted, they looked weird before, but I think it's gotten more pronounced. New bodybuilding categories like "classic" physique seem to be pushing back on this.
2. We got a lot better at quantifying exercise efficiency, and it turns out that compound lifts are a lot more efficient than cable machines.
I also would push back a bit on the dichotomy; most people who look muscular can deadlift/squat reasonably well, and most powerlifter types look pretty strong.
As far as I can tell, body-building is a supernormal stimulus, and there's conflation of looking strong, being strong, and being healthy. People can die of this.
There's two point of this. One is that bodybuilding-style training has a goal of looking strong, while powerlifting-style training has a goal of being strong. Each has a fair amount of carry-over to the other goal, but both are optimized for one goal over the other and it makes sense to choose one style of training over the other depending on what your priorities are.
The other is that bodybuilding-style training takes very heavy advantage of the faster recovery cycle enabled by steroid use. Powerlifting-style training is also enhanced by steroids, of course, but not by quite as much. The reason for this is that bodybuilders need both muscle bulk and muscle definition. You get the former by doing very large volumes of training (lots of sets and reps at medium weight, often spread across many different lifts working overlapping muscle groups) and the latter by dieting off as much subcutaneous fat as possible in weeks or months leading up to a competition. More volume means your body has to more training stress to recover from, and getting/keeping body fat low cuts into your body's capacity to recover from training in a way that builds or at least maintains muscle. Steroids are one of the most effective ways of mitigating that contradiction. Powerlifters can afford to be a little pudgy, and powerlifting-style training tends to have much less volume to recover from (heavy weights for a medium number of sets and reps, doing only a handful of "big lift" exercises), so they can get a lot further with non-steroid recovery strategies (cycling between light and heavy days, eating a calorie surplus, etc).
You can still do bodybuilding-style training successfully without steroids if your goals are reasonable for your health and genetics, but make sure the advice you're getting on training and recovery strategies is targeted for "natural" (non-steroid using) lifters, not "enhanced" (steroid using) ones. I suspect a significant part of powerlifting-style training becoming fashionable over bodybuilding-style training in recent decades is that when bodybuilding-style training was fashionable, there were a ton of bodybuilding training recommendations out there based on the training routines used by big-name competitive bodybuilders who totally used steroids but didn't admit to doing so at the time. If you try to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger's training routines from the 70s and aren't doing as much steroids as he was doing back then, you're not going to get great results.
I suspect writing good ones is a better test than solving them. My partner and I got Claude to vibecode a connections interface so I could get my partner to try that days puzzle from the Times that I did while he was out. Then we realized we could have Claude write up some puzzles for us to try. All of the various puzzles Claude wrote for us worked, but several of the categories were weak (sometimes it was a rare two word phrase for one of the purples, or a bit of a weak connection for some of the others, and usually no good misdirects).
Yes. Once they get ~90% success rate, the noise of being a few percent better or worse on any given trial outweighs the signal. Once that happens, you can’t reliably tell which models are better or worse.
Yes, of a benchmark, saturation means that it has ceased to be able to distinguish between the highest tier of models because they all perform so close to perfectly.
This came up in my google searches, claims that autism is (mostly) caused by childhood exposure to acetaminophen.
I don't have the experience to evaluate this. The abstract reads like political post but the rest of it seems normal. The studies it cites all seem reasonable but I don't know how cherry-picked they are.
The latest and largest-n study has a strong case that acetaminophen doesn’t cause autism https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38592388/ . Previous studies have found weak effects of acetaminophen on autism - certainly not responsible for most cases. The more recent and larger one found even those results to be a result of familial confounding and they disappeared when using a sibling-comparison design.
The thing is, the evidence that tylenol increases the chance of autism is pretty good. However, some of the increase in autism diagnosis is undoubtedly due to changed diagnostic criteria. I'm a psychologist, and actually lived through the change in what fraction of people are diagnosed as autistic. It really was a dramatic change -- the term was being applied to people that *nobody* 5 years prior would have described as autistic. So the tylenol-autism correlation gets a huge, undeserved boost from the change in diagnostic criteria. Meanwhile, afaik the evidence for vaxes increasing the risk of autism is not good, and in any case measles, mumps etc. can cause not only severe illness and death but also lifelong disabilities. Even if our standard childhood vaxes do slightly increase the risk of autism (or heart abnormalities or whatnot) I'll bet the increase is far less than the risk of the illnesses they prevent.
I wrote a long answer to this same question on the most recent hidden open thread. You can find it with CMD-F. “Tylenol”. If you can’t access that let me know and I’ll copy-paste it here.
Scott wrote about the risks of tylenol in pregnancy in his piece "Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much). I just looked it up and reread it for a friend. Also read the summary of tylenol studies he cites: In Nature Reviews Endocrinology, Consensus Statement: Paracetamol Use In Pregnancy - A Call For Precautionary Action, by ninety-one leading scientists. Based on that, seems to me that it's likely but not certain that tylenol use during pregnancy actually does increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Just looked up studies' estimates of how much it increases the risk, and average estimate is that it increases it by about 20%. So if the risk of ASD for a baby whose mother did not use tylenol in pregnancy was 2%, it would be 2.4% for babies whose mother did use tylenol. This is nothing to sniff at, but is far too small to account for the very large increase in autism diagnoses in the last 30 years. (By the way, we don't really have any direct measure of what % of kids whose mothers took no tylenol get a ASD diagnosis, because most pregnant women take it.)
A lot of the apparent increase is due to a change in the diagnostic criteria for autism, especially the inclusion in ASD of people with Aspergers' (smart, introverted, a bit odd) in the diagnosis. Also there was legislation in the last 30 yrs. that allowed kids with an autism diagnosis to get various services in schools, and because of that many professionals became more liberal in giving an ASD diagnosis in order for the kid to get the benefit of of the school services.
One other relevant factor: RFK fucking sux.
(again, not my comment, didn't want to bother with block quotes)
Here's a follow-up comment I (author of above) made later in the thread:
Tylenol's hardly the smoking gun. Seems possible to me that changed criteria account for the rest of the increase in autism diagnoses, but also possible there are some other factors. But the diagnostic criteria change was huge. I was present for it. There was an era when I kept being startled by people talking about patients or civilians I knew as "autistic" and "autistic specturm" and I'd think *what? he's eccentric and uncomfortable around people, but to call it autism is way overstating it.*. I'm still skeptical about the broadened version of the diagnosis. Seems like pretty much anyone who doesn't easily fit into another diagnosis gets called autistic these days.
On a side note, I don't really know how the criteria for ASD are evaluated in practice by clinicians, but my impression from reading the formal guidelines was that what you're saying is not the whole picture. I never underwent a formal diagnosis for ASD, but in my own assessment (still, I did spent a substantial amount of time thinking about it and reconstructing my early childhood history), I quite clearly satisfy the DSM-IV criteria for Asperger's spectrum disorder, but it's likely I wouldn't meet the DSM-V criteria for ASD unless the psychologist was willing to stretch them somewhat.
I created a plug-and-play "Human Inference Engine." It's a probabilistic directed acyclic graph (DAG) tool that allows you to toggle between a low friction 'Bayes lite' mode and a rigorous 'Bayes heavy' mode. I'd love some feedback. I've built several example graphs from forensic investigation, to policy analysis, to DnD campaigns. It's desktop only (Chrome/Edge): https://rubesilverberg.github.io/beliefgraph3/
Hobbs idea that out pre-history ancestors lived lives that were short, brutish and mean is unscientific, illogical and irrational.
Its unscientific because it takes 17 years of childhood before a homo sapiens brain is developed enough to be considered a young adult, 21 years before being considered a peer by other adults. How could our brains have evolved this way unless children were having long and stable childhoods?
It is illogical to believe that children given childhoods that were short, brutish and mean could be other than physically, emotionally and intellectually stunted, where would they learn emotional intelligence required to work together to achieve common goals?
It is irrational to ignore the fact that the only reason to evolve a brain capable of human consciousness, intelligence and the ability to think deep and complex thoughts is because they were conscious, intelligent and thinking deep and complex thoughts. Their brains were not just spare capacity waiting for us to find a use for it, that is not how evolution works.
Small groups with stone tools, no plan or central planner, purely through organic growth, discovered the world long before we did, they were the ultimate success story and invasive species. For 300,000 years or 15,000 generations the Southern tip of Africa has been occupied by Homo Sapiens, a few bones, stones and paintings is all we have found of their presence, that is what is called a sustainable lifestyle. If each generation had left just one change to the environment the cumulative results would have made the place unliveable.
Also your reasoning is confusing to me. People are intelligent because it helps them survive. This is true in peaceful societies as well as violent ones, societies with abundance and scarcity, societies with low and high life expectancy alike.
Not to pick on you too hard but I think you're demonstrating a common failure mode in this community - you've reasoned out a position in the abstract and think the converse is therefore "irrational" (and you could maybe critique Hobbes for doing much the same), but in practice there's lots of detailed information out there that you could examine to learn the truth, and you don't seem to have done so.
Timothy M, 17 and 21 may be modern innovations but the Homo Sapiens brain is not. Body development in childhood slowed down to match brain development and brains need 17 years of childhood to develop.
Your reasoning confuses me, you use a study about peasants to debate about hunter gatherers, like comparing peasants to bankers, irrational.
I enjoyed your response and hope we have many more but I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
You say this like the designers of the human race told you so. But there aren't any.
A human brain might need 17 years of development for having 17 years of development, but not to be ready for what it is supposed to do then -- because it's not supposed to to anything then! It's not designed.
Furthermore the development of an organism depents on its environment. 17 year olds certainly were diffent then then they are now.
It is true that I compared agrarians to hunter-gatherers, on the premise that people didn't transition from having carefree childhoods for 17+ years to being child laborers. However, it is also understood that ancient hunter-gatherers had short lifespans and violence was relatively common.
Where do you come up with this "17 years" number? My understanding from undergraduate psych classes is that there's still pretty significant brain development from 18-30 compared to later time periods.
> I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
This is what I was talking about. People can and should question "assumptions" but if you want to question whether prehistoric society sucked you should do so by examining the evidence, not by sitting alone thinking about it and concluding it must "obviously" be wrong. History and anthropology and such have assembled large bodies of research that can meaningfully address these questions far better than abstract intuitions. Go look at that work. Don't just treat it as an "assumption" you can waive away.
Timothy M, a carefree childhood would poorly prepare someone for a life that is anything but carefree. When culture changed slowly if at all good parenting skills mean being the type of person you want your children to become in a community you want them to grow up in with a sustainable culture that keeps everything together.
50 Years ago near the town of Swakopmund a San woman explained to me their view of history. For the next 30 years I lived cheek by jowl with their descendants, for a while I had a Sangoma (herbalist/witchdoctor) as a partner. Their lifestyle is an adaptation to modern life, nothing like the pre farming era. I compare the views of anthropologists with the San and the San version seems more compelling.
Okay, so your general point is that you think the perspective of a single hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa is more compelling than the aggregate work of the world's anthropologists, and you therefore feel comfortable disregarding all of their work.
Timothy M, the San people belong to a confederation of tribes generally known as the San or Bushman.
Names escape me, but the woman anthropologist who claimed we were semiaquatic and many others have influenced me, the synchronized menstruation woman had something useful to say, if as yet unproven.
It would be as foolish to disregard all anthropologists as it would be to discard all San and other native folklore.
You have to remember that Hobbes was writing two centuries before a meaningful theory of evolution, and long before any sort of systematic anthropology aimed at understanding comparative theories of how humans work in different social structures. The first theories in an area are always wrong (and the ones several centuries down the line are still wrong, but more subtly so).
He’s basically a contemporary of Newton and Harvey (the guy who used some calculations to convince people that blood recirculates through the body every day, rather than being generated and sent out from the heart and then absorbed by other organs). You can see that the human sciences were much less developed at this time.
Kenny Easwaran, I agree that for his time Hobbes was an important thinker, my issue is that we have not moved on, most people still think early humans lived short horrible lives, a view I disagree with.
Oh yeah, if there are people who still think this way, they’re wrong. But your previous post was phrased as though it was saying *Hobbes* was irrational.
Kenny Easwaran, the temptation to ask Kimmi to turn my illegible writing into something more polished is at times overwhelming, laziness saves me from such impulses.
Robin Hanson's theory (not sure how well supported) is actually that we developed big brains and emotional intelligence in order to navigate social rivalries/deadly competition from other humans. Thinking deep complex thoughts was a mere side effect. Still a Hobbesian scenario. I think if you look at modern hunter gatherers, you'll find this isn't too far off the mark. EG., native Americans certainly weren't living lives of idyllic peace and harmony before Europeans showed up. Ditto for New Guinea highlanders.
Gordon Tremeshko, most of my experience is with the San communities of Southern Africa. Broadly speaking they view the time before agriculture as living as a part of nature and the time after as living apart from nature. They think we are destroying ourselves and have to be forced by the government to participate by sending their kids to school etc.
Life was very short for some, and reasonably long (albeit not as much or as commonly as now) for the rest. Half of everyone died before the age of 6, but once you did pass that hurdle, you had better odds.
At least that's in agricultural civilisation. I wouldn't be surprised if odds were a bit better in hunter-gatherers since a lot of those deaths are disease and a lot of disease can only thrive in very high density populations, and in fact several of the worst (smallpox, TB, plague) were one way or another connected to farming or to hygienic conditions that were only a problem in agricultural civilisation.
Still, obviously from our viewpoint those lives would kinda suck. But I don't expect that those living them felt miserable all the time, or like they had nothing to enjoy.
Hobbes is precisely correct. In state of nature, life is solitary (by definition), short (by direct consequence of being solitary) and brutish (similarly).
That's why man is never found naturally in a state of nature but in a state of law.
You're probably correct that Hobbes's description of life in a state of nature is somewhere between overstated and wrong, but your arguments are so poor that you might convince a reader that he was actually completely right.
The "sustainable lifestyle" you laud is no great achievement: most animals leave little trace of themselves that can be seen hundreds of years later. The worms underfoot do even better, leaving not even bones.
About evolution, you seem to be arguing entirely from personal incredulity. Runaway sexual selection, for example, is one mechanism by which extravagant and otherwise useless traits can evolve and persist.
The facts you have brought to bear are consistent with a species whose lives ARE "short, brutish and mean" (not Hobbes's actual quote but fine): r-strategists whose males form small groups and fight together, perhaps with stone tools, against rival groups to maintain large harems, the majority of females dying from the stresses of childbirth after a few breeding cycles, and the males dying either in combat against a younger foe, or when unable to sustain the caloric requirements of their ever-growing brains.
Shankar Sivarajan, Most animals do not have the Homo Sapiens brain requiring 20% of calories consumed, there must be a return on investment. If you do not think that the return was intelligence could you please explain what you think the return was?
I agree my debating skills are rusty, engaging with skilled debaters will improve them.
If harems were the norm then the local gene pool would shrink forcing inbreeding, if females died after a few "breeding cycles" then who raised the kids? Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
> Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
Yes, and we know this from genetic assays of y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA. Historically, 80% of women had descendants for between 20-40% of men having descendants, over many tens of thousands of years.
See graph here (in the graph, the yellow line, which at "2" would be 80/40, and at "4" would be 80/20):
This famously peaked at 17 women for every 1 man, a statistic you'll sometimes see trotted out, which happened in the middle of the Yamnaya expansion and y-chromosome-replacement of everyone else (and it tops out at around "12" on this particular graph because the timeslice of when the 17-1 ratio happened is too short to be captured on the x axis of this graph).
On harems, a full 87% of HG societies have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing polygamy *in modern times,* and given the headline 80/40 stat, it was likely to have been an even bigger factor in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptiveness).
At the larger level, inbreeding is avoided by groupings at different levels. H Sap HG's tended to settle and migrate in groups of 30-100 individuals (larger group sizes than Neanderthals and other hominins, and part of why we wiped them out ultimately), but those groups generally rolled up to larger tribes of other groups that size, and that larger group shared your language and cultural practices.
Thus, when you outmigrate, you don't need to worry about learning a new language or culture, as you're still outmigrating among "your people."
Performative Bafflement, well done, I have just spent an hour or two on your blog and am impressed with that as much as I am with your comment. You certainly knocked the wind out of my sails.
Every small somewhat isolated community I have been interested in had one thing in common and that was the dread of inbreeding. I would go so far as to say that much of their social structure evolved to manage this risk.
I have little to no understanding of the science behind the claim though do not doubt it was made in good faith
I have also read science that claims our pre-historic ancestors were less inbred than modern populations.
Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
Any insight you may have regarding this will be much appreciated.
> Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
As you've probably guessed, this is a recurring problem for all animals, not just H Sap, and indeed, many behaviors are seemingly tailored around avoiding inbreeding depression.
In chimps (at least pan troglodytes), this is achieved by females migrating to new groups when they are reaching reproductive age. This minimizes the chances of inbreeding, and a similar strategy is followed by many animals, either with males or females doing the migrating.
Humans, as you might guess, handle this a little differently. Historically in agricultural societies we mostly practiced patrilocality - the men stay put, sons are heirs, and the women come and live with the man's family. This is also what chimps do, so case closed, right?
This kind of threw off anthropologists re hunter gatherers for a long time, because many assumed HG did patrilocality from agriculturalists and chimps. It took Sara Hrdy and Hill et al looking into alloparenting practices to figure out that HG's were a different picture.
My understanding from Sarah Hrdy and Hill et al is that it's not actually true for hunter gatherers, and wasn't likely true in the EEA. Humans uniquely tend to do a lot of mixing of patrilocality and matrilocality, and it changes a lot based on how young your most recent child is and other factors, because matrilineal alloparenting is extremely common and a big deal for child survival. And wrapped up in this is us aging better and grandmas being harder working than moms in terms of hours foraging etc. In other words, it was a strong selective pressure and correspondingly had to be a big part of how our ancestors located themselves in the EEA.
Performative Bafflement, for pre-history mothers finding an unrelated mate for their offspring required an in-depth knowledge of her own bloodline, that of her mate and both parents of any prospective match.
It was like throwing 4 stones in the gene pool, how the ripples cancelled or amplified each other decided whether the match was safe or not.
This was humanities first great math challenge, which they passed.
They would have to know, well enough, far more people than the Dunbar number of 150 suggests, that is just an extended family. Even 10x that number is not enough to keep a local gene pool healthy. The majority of people they knew would have been too closely related to breed with.
The abundance of predators rules out regular get togethers, that would create a migratory type situation for predators to exploit.
So even if they were 100% monogamous it is a challenge to understand their mating customs. If, as your cited study claims, most males died without reproducing then it is harder still to see how for millions of years we avoided consanguinity.
A further confounding factor is that at least for the time we were confined to a few regions of Africa, the gene pool had to be small and shallow in contrast with the present day vast and deep gene pool, thus amplifying the risk.
Yug Gnirob, Mosquitos do not have a Homo Sapiens brain in their head requiring 20% of their energy intake, there has to be rent paid, this is basic evolutionary theory. The pay off for the extra calories going to the brain was increased intelligence. Why would the most intelligent creature on the planet, by far, be living unintelligent lives?
I challenge your understanding of basic evolutionary theory. A peacock's tail requires a large chunk of their resources, makes it harder to evade predators, etc. In what way is its rent actually paid?
Byrel Mitchell, from the peahens perspective if the peacock can survive with such an extravagant display then the offspring he fathers should also survive. The rent paid for the calories diverted to his tail is increased access to the hens.
Chimps use 10% of calories to power their brain, Homo Sapiens use 20%. Our mental capacity over that of chimps is the rent paid by those extra 10% of calories.
The Giraffe pays rent for its long neck and legs by having access to foliage inaccessible to others.
Yug Gnirob, The first task of intelligence is survival, greater intelligence enhances our ability to eliminate or minimize risk and the best way to do this is to live a sustainable lifestyle. 150,000 Generations proves their lifestyle was sustainable. The Homo Sapiens brain evolved for consciousness, intelligence and deep thought, they were intelligent.
That's objectively wrong. The first task of human intelligence is successful reproduction of a gene line, individual personal survival is secondary. That's why childhood mortality was so high for so long.
Victor, I agree, the first law of nature is procreation, in our species that effectively means "how are the grandchildren doing?"
This is difficult to achieve if you do not first survive long enough to at least have kids. In order to procreate you first have to survive.
To be honest I am not sure about the high child mortality thing. In any species suffering high child mortality we would expect to see their reproductive cycle shortening, instead our reproductive cycle got slower and slower, frailer babies needing more development post partum, the burden of childcare growing ever heavier.
It is hard to spot the evolutionary advantage in having less ability to reproduce if the problem is high child mortality.
I would bother to argue whatever underlying assumptions you're making, but I don't think you actually have any. You're just slapping words together and trying to pretend it's an argument.
"We know specific details about modern hunter-gatherer lifespan from a few well-studied groups: the !Kung, Aché, Agta, Hadza, and Hiwi (Gurven and Kaplan 2007). Work on these groups show that approximately 60% of hunter-gatherer children live to age 15. Of those who reach 15, around 60–80% of them will live to age 45. If an individual lives to age 45, then on average they will live for approximately two more decades."
"By the 1960s, the focus on the hunter-gatherers of East and Southern Africa coincided with the rise of Rousseauism in anthropology. The Kalahari bushmen, for example, were celebrated as the “harmless people.”2 However, after the initial spate of enthusiasm for the peaceful children of the earth, their chief researcher, the Rousseauan Richard Lee,3, 4 discovered that before the imposition of state authority, these people had more than four times the 1990 homicide rate in the United States, which was by far the highest in the developed world. Similarly, in titles such as Never in Anger, the Inuit of mid-Arctic Canada, one of the sparsest populations on earth, were celebrated as being peaceful.5 However, it was later revealed that their rate of violent mortality was ten times higher than the United States' 1990 rate.6:145,7"
For more on this, the seminal book seems to be "War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley.
Collisteru, with respect you are using internally displaced people, refugees under stress from being displaced, as an example. The San people occupied all the best places to raise a family along the coast of Southern Africa. Then they were forced to live in the Kalahari desert by Bantu tribes and white settlers. To judge the preceding 15,000 generations by how well the last few generations survived their near extermination by us is poor science.
You raise a very good point that contact with settlers could affect these numbers. The contact problem is a fundamental difficulty in assessing anything about hunter-gatherer societies.
That being said, the scientific consensus is that hunter-gatherer violence precedes state contact. From the paper by Azar Gat I cited earlier, we read:
"Proponents of the tribal-zone theory remained vague about whether contact with state civilizations actually introduced or “invented” warfare among previously nonbelligerent natives or, instead, merely intensified long-existing patterns of warfare. The former was strongly implied and was the undertone or subtext of their argument. At the same time, however, the majority of these scholars in fact recognized, in line with all other research, that warfare in all the above areas had been very old and had long predated contact with states.10, 11, 13 Fortified settlements were known to have been archeologically recorded in the American Northwest, for example, for no less than four thousand years.9, 14-20 Body armor made of hide or wood, an unmistakably specialized fighting device, was known to have been extensively used by the natives before the European arrival. Indeed, its use actually declined after contact because it was useless under musket fire.18,20-26 Thus, given that most of the tribal-zone proponents (with rare exceptions12) were well aware of the evidence of extensive and vicious warfare before contact with states or civilizations, their point was difficult to rationalize."
I think this article is paywalled so if you want to read more citations 10, 11, and 13 are:
10 Ferguson RB. 1992. A savage encounter: western contact and the Yanomami war complex. In: RB Ferguson, N Whitehead, editors. War in the tribal zone. Santa Fe: School of American Research. p 199–227.
11 Ferguson RB. 1995. Yanomami warfare. Santa Fe: School of American Research.
13 Whitehead N. 1990. The snake warriors — sons of the Tiger's Teeth: a descriptive analysis of Carib warfare, ca. 1500–1820. In: J Haas, editor. The anthropology of war. New York: Cambridge University Press. p 146–170.
Collisteru ,Anthropology has a huge patriarchal bias towards man the hunter. Our gut evolved to digest the food most accessible to us which was 80% plant based, plants were 4 times more important to our survival than hunting. Women and children made up the bulk of our workforce and are well adapted to gathering.
Hunting scenes on cave walls or stately homes are there because they are more photogenic than fish traps or potting sheds but neither group fed the tribe by hunting. We find far more grinding stones for grain than we do spear points, hunter gatherers should be changed to gatherer trappers. You need a big brain to trap and only a small one to hunt.
Sorry about the rant, Anthropologists find what they expect to find.
Villiam, good point. If you put a wild, enraged male Chimpanzee in a cage with 5 MMA fighters it would kill them. It is far stronger and faster with a bite that can pierce skulls, one swipe with its claw would rip half your face off. We used to have a similar body but over time became weak, slow and puny. According to evolutionary theory this could not have happened if we were under threat from predators or each other..
The correction’s not really relevant to the points you’re making, but Hobbs’ original formulation is so gorgeously grim and sounds so magnificent that I think we should honor and preserve it.
Wanda Tinsaky, survival of the fittest in our species is 100% a test of parenting skills on a personal and community level, the rest is just minutia. For 7 million years, give or take, the communities who made the best job of raising the next generation dominated the gene pool. There is no possible evolutionary advantage to having poor parenting skills.
Have you ever tried treating a 12 year old like an adult?
You are completely ignoring the fact that a big reason why we have such long childhoods is that life has gotten very very complicated. In order to be a functional member of society you need more than basic physical and mental development, you need a lot of knowledge that will allow you to work, pay your taxes, do paperwork, vote, drive, and generally speaking not be a dysfunctional misfit that's easily taken advantage of.
None of which was necessary to a hunter gatherer. Children would travel and work next to their parents as soon as they could stand. They would learn on the go about what they needed to learn (how to hunt, what herbs were good and what poisonous etc) and they would be pretty much ready for adult life quite earlier than us because that life would be significantly more straightforward.
Simone, I disagree. Childhood body development slowed down to match our slowly developing brain long before the modern era. Their culture was no less complicated than our own, each plant, river and mountain, everything had its own name and spirit. Living in harmony with the spirit world (animism) was the key to their sustainable lifestyle.
Any community who does not give their children a long stable childhood will be out-competed by another that does.
Yes, and it works. Of course, you have to be strategic about it. Parenting style should match the social environment it occurs in. "Adolescence" is a modern cultural construct, but a useful one in a post-industrial society. Pointless and wasteful in a social context in which the average lifespan is somewhere in the 30's. That does not imply, of course, that hunter-gatherer communities treated 12 year olds exactly the same as someone in their 20's.
"Like an adult" does not have a universal meaning across times and cultures, and neither does "poor parenting skills." Can you trust a 12 year old to drive a car? No. But if you're in an ancient society with no cars and your main concern is "can I trust them to do their share of the farm work?", you might decide they're an adult sooner. It depends on what your society needs to survive.
Also, if evolution is only about good parenting, how did the practice of corporal punishment somehow survive all the way to the present day? One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Beleester, good parenting skills enable the child to face life challenges.
Corporal punishment, spare the rod and spoil the child, is still the norm in most of the human population. We think they are wrong and they think we are wrong. We think drugging children to get them through the school day is acceptable, others think it is beyond barbaric. I agree.
> One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Counterpoint: the negative of hitting a child is that it can be traumatic and create various forms of relationship strain. The positive is that it's a very straightforward way to create an association between Thing Not To Do and Bad Consequences, all subtlety be damned.
If you're in a society in which even seemingly small mistakes can be very costly (like, life or death costly) and violence is so widespread anyway that there's not much avoiding it, corporal punishment is also the primary form of justice, etc. then it may simply not make a lot of difference. Hitting a child is frowned upon today also because it's basically like saying "you don't need to understand why X is bad, you just need to submit to my power to enact violence on you" but that is only something we consider a negative today. In many societies of the past, "know your place and do not question your superiors" was actually considered a virtue.
Simone, I was beaten often by my teachers ( UK, born late 50s) all it taught me was violence towards other boys who pissed me off as I pissed off the teachers.
Today I would be drugged into compliance from about 7 years of age. That is a level of violence against the child far in excess of anything I endured.
Childraising skills vary. There was research on macaque monkeys. Some seemed to be much better mothers than others. Some were nurturing, some were harsh and neglectful, and the offspring of the harsh mothers did worse.
The Ship of Theseus idea has been nagging me for ages. It's simple in my mind, but I recently found out my view is more the cognitive science view, and not other views.
1. Interestingly, the question whether it's still the same ship hinges for most people on what's with it's parts. But how does one know a part of it is still the same, even if "it" is still in "its" original place?
Which brings me to ...
2. What about fields? Russell already kinda contemplated this, but a bit wrong, I think. If the world consists only of fields, and maybe only of one, then that field is the only physical thing that is ever, and always, the same thing, just changing in its properties. And among those properties is what "parts" or rather inseparable arbitrary sections of it appear to us as things, which they not for real are. They are only kinda waves, us included, of course.
I ever more suspect this is the case.
It would explain why things can and do interact. They don't. There are no things, there is only one thing, waving, and its waves are interfering.
Russell thought there are no physical things at all. But I mean, if anything changes, then there has to be at least one physical thing that is that what is changing there.
Lots of good replies to this, but I want to register a slightly dissenting opinion on the aptness of metaphors like football teams or marching bands.
To model a ship as one physical object is considerably more meaningful than to do so for those other examples: calculating the center of mass for a ship and then doing calculations with it yields meaningful predictions about its behavior; you can refer to it's location more or less unambiguously at any individual point in time, etc.
The same is not true for those other examples: you'd never think to calculate the center of mass of a football team, and if you did you wouldn't expect it to ever be useful; it's already unclear what the "location" of a marching band is when all the members go home for the night.
Which is to say, if you have a physical object that is well-summarized by some aggregate physical quantities, so long as you have objects at each time step for which those aggregate properties behave as you'd expect for a single physical object (e.g. the center of mass always follows a timelike path through spacetime, etc.), I think that's solid reason to regard each of those objects as "the same".
Of course, this tells you nothing about cases where those properties *aren't* satisfied, e.g. if your ship buds into two ships asexually and then you swap half of the timbers from the one daughter ship with those of the other.
Doing that for the players on the field is probably interesting; including benched players, coaches, not to mention the rest of the organization (trainers, doctors, general managers, minor league players, etc) probably much less so
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
I'm just reading the new biography of Maynard Keynes, and this reminds of some of the incredulity people felt as they moved away from the gold standard.
Ok. Here’s another example of why the components of an entity mostly don’t matter.
You visit a school. It has a marching band. You like it.
A few years later you go back. The band is still there but the original players have all graduated. You like the band but can’t help feeling this isn’t the Smalton High School band. You feel cheated.
Someone tells you that all the members of the Smalton High School Band were so enthused by playing in a band that they formed a band called The Graduates after they left the school.
(All of them. It’s my thought experiment.)
You go watch it. Possessed of an excellent memory and some photographs on your phone you conclude this has the same members as the Smalton High School band did the last time you were here. A misty tear comes to your eyes. Afterwards you congratulate them and say that they are the real Smalton High School band. They look at you funny.
*********************************
Where this breaks down I think is when the components are essential (John, Paul, Ringo and George) and often when there are a small number of components, like the ax problem. After all in the ax problem you can name the individual parts.
What matters to the continuity of an entity comprised of an accidental parts is not the parts but the role and propose. The teleology of the thing. The continuity of the thing.
Okay, that was a pretty funny collection of thought experiments.
I think the best resolution to the paradox is to ask what feature of continuity is the thing you actually care about. Taboo "same" and replace it with something more specific.
Theseus: "It's the same ship, because I still legally own it and it's still docked at my spot in the harbor if I want to go sailing."
Modern Greek Historian: "It's not the same, because I'm trying to study historical shipbuilding techniques and the modern replacements tell me nothing."
Athenian Navy: "It's the same ship so long as you didn't replace the keel, because we're trying to keep track of who owns suitable naval vessels and the keel is the hardest part to replace."
Persian Navy: "The physical material is actually completely irrelevant, because we just want to be able to copy the Athenian blueprints."
The ship of Theseus is whatever ship he owns at the time. Change all the parts out and it's still the ship of Theseus. By making it a real thing in that sense (ownership, owner/owned), it makes the thought experiment a badly chosen one.
In the sense of if the ship is still the same abstract spiritual unit if you replace parts, it's sort of moot. You have to deal with real world objects and concepts, not a spiritual wholeness. Take a truck:
is it the same form?
same color?
same horsepower?
same owner?
same age of components?
etc?
You can only deal with it that way, and can't assign an abstract wholeness to it.
don't think it works as that, the self doesn't always start as a fixed reality nor is expected to have a defined form reducible to components.
like you have a sense of self as an independent observer, but the self is not static in the sense a truck is. Change is constantly happening and still you are seen as the same person. You may have a nature people recognize (gruff, antisocial) but can change values or likes.
i always felt it was more an abstract argument, how much can a thing change and retain its nature, but that assumes a fixed nature.
I've always considered this fundamentally a linguistic issue around how we use concepts like "sameness" and "identity" and what the rules are for whether to apply a label like "ship of Theseus" to a particular object. I assume there's some clever Wittgenstein-esque argument (whether it's been articulated or not) that neatly dissolves the paradox.
I agree it’s a lingustic issue when trying to negotiate a common stance among individuals, but inside the individual I consider it more an emotional issue. Their relation to the concept of the Ship, how it was formed, why it existed, etc… will drive their eventual stance around what they consider the real ship.
I think Wittgenstein's private language argument would dissolve the distinction you're making there. Whatever internal logic a person employs is isomorphic to a linguistic community's convergence on usage rules.
You're both kind of right. It mostly devolves to shared communal feelings about the object in question. If everyone you ever meet thinks you are the king, well...
Here’s my general reply to the ship of Theseus conundrum.
A billionaire who grew up with the great Manchester United soccer team from 1998*, decides to recreate that team, which is made of humans who play football of course, a decade or so later. He’s not buying the existing Manchester United club, or corporate entity, he’s hiring the players.
Though mostly retired, all agree (he pays well), and he hires Wembley stadium and sets up a game against some lower league team. This he says, while not the existing so called Manchester United team or club, is the real deal. This is what Manchester United was composed of and therefore what it is now. The other team are frauds.
Is he right?
* replace with some girdiron or other nonsense if you prefer.
Is that a reply to the conundrum or just another example of the same phenomenon of the meaning of the word "same" breaking down in weird edge cases?
All I really get from the Ship of Theseus is the idea that the meaning of the words we use to describe everyday life can break down in weird edge cases. This might blow the minds of teenagers or Ancient Greeks but I feel like there's not much more to it than that.
I think that the Manchester United team (I’m not talking about the legal entity which employs hundreds but the actual playing team) doesn’t depend on who is actually playing. So too with the ship of Theseus. As long as you accept that all of those players can be replaced and don’t take the entity “the Manchester United football team” in whole or in part with them then there’s no conundrum. So too with dismantling the ship of Theseus - the parts don’t matter.
It’s just easier for people to see this with football teams. I can do an example with high school marching bands if you want.
Sports teams seem like a different sort of entity. A group of players is Manchester United because the continuous legal entity known as the Manchester United Football Club (or whatever, I only understand real footy) says it is.
The club could swap out every single player at once and it would still be Manchester United.
I’m not talking about the legal entity. I’ve said that twice. I’m talking about the playing team. If it was the legal entity we could the dismiss the supposed paradox as just whoever owned the ship.
For firearms under US law, there is one specific component which is defined to be "the gun" and to which registration and transfer requirements attach. Depending on the style of the gun, this may be the frame (if the frame is a single piece) or the receiver or lower receiver (the part of the frame to which the firing mechanism attaches). If you keep everything else and replace the receiver, it's a new gun. Or of you keep the receiver and replace everything else, it's the same gun. I think this is a useful analogy for many Ship of Theseus-like questions.
For your example, I would say the club (as a legal entity) is the receiver. The club owns the trademarks, has players under contract, is party to whatever association the club has with its league, etc. Since your billionaire did not purchase or otherwise gain control of the club, his team is not Manchester United. Same way that the presence of nine players on the roster of the 1923 New York Yankees who had played for the 1919 or 1920 Boston Red Sox (Babe Ruth, Joe Bush, Waite Hoyt, Sam Jones, Herb Pennock, Wally Schang, Everett Scott, Mike McNally, and Ben Pascal) means that the Yankees of that era were the same team as the Red Sox.
For the classic George Washington's Axe version of the paradox, I'd say it's the axehead that is the receiver. Replacing the handle results in the same axe with a new handle, while replacing the head results in a new axe.
Not sure about the Ship of Theseus itself. For a modern or medieval ship of the European shipbuilding tradition, I'd probably call the keel the receiver, but I don't know enough about Mycenaean (?) shipbuilding techniques to confidently say the same of this particular ship.
Where the paradox continues to be interesting is if there's no clear single component to serve as the receiver, or where something used to be considered the receiver at one point in history but got replaced without people saying the thing as a whole changed identity. For example, when did the Roman Empire fall?
Was it at the beginning or end of the Crisis of the Third Century, when the institutional framework set up by Augustus ceased to function and was eventually permanently replaced with a new and fundamentally different constitution?
Was it when Christianity replaced the Roman religion, which could be dated either to Constantine I (when the process began) or the death of Julian the Apostate (when the last serious attempt to restore Paganism ended).
Was it when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD and established the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy? And if so, was the Roman Empire reestablished when Belisarius reconquered Rome for the Eastern Roman Empire in 536, or when Charlemagne was proclaimed Emperor in Rome in 800?
Was it during the reign of Heraclius in the early-to-mid 600s, when the Byzantine Empire was reduced to a rump of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire and Latin completed the process of falling into disuse as a language of politics and administration?
Was it when the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople in 1204? Or was the Latin Empire a restoration of the Eastern Roman Empire that had fallen six centuries previously? Was the Despotate of Epirus the Roman Empire the whole time the Latin Emperors were in Constantinople, or did they restore the Roman Empire when they reconquered Constantinople?
Was it when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453?
Or should the Ottomans and/or the Holy Roman Empire be considered continuations of the Roman Empire? And if so, did the Empire(s) end with them in 1919 and 1806 respectively, or was the mantle inherited by someone else, maybe the Republic of Turkey and the Austrian Empire?
The firearms one is a legal definition (and so is e.g. the VIN of cars). This is one possible answer for a philosophical question, but not the only possible one.
I like your example a lot, it plays better than pieces of wood.
My stance on the answer is again one of cognitive science, there is no answer out there, it’s inside the individual, and relates to what they hold dear.
Maybe his father bought him his first Man United scarf when he was 5, and the logo means more to him than the people playing for it. This person leans one way.
Maybe he was at the game in ‘88, and remembers the euphoria of the moment, interlaced with his general nostalgia of the past, and seeing those players together again is certainly “it” for him. This person leans the other way.
But the second person doesn’t believe that the Man United team has to be composed of the same players as it was then, surely? The continuity of the team doesn’t depend on specific players.
People often define introversion and extroversion in terms of energy, in particular whether you derive energy from, or expend energy on, social situations. Introverts can be sociable but socialising will reduce an introvert's energy so they need to programme in some alone time to recharge. Seems a useful rule of thumb and I use it myself.
But what exactly does energy mean in this context? Do introverts literally expend more joules? It's plausible that even a constant small level of stress throughout an evening would lead to physical symptoms that are less energy efficient than being relaxed. But how then is an extrovert gaining extra joules? Are endorphins triggering a more efficient use of existing energy stores?
Obviously we could be using the word in a more metaphorical way, in which case we may well ask how grounded is introversion/extroversion in reality and can it therefore be changed over time with CBT?
The definition you are using comes from, I believe, the MBTI personality test, which in turn was derived from Carl Jung's theory of personality. It has little empirical support. That doesn't mean that it can't be useful as a kind of rule of thumb, a quick non-scientific way to assess one's own feelings about interpersonal interaction, esp. in specific contexts.
Correct, I encountered the idea through a Meyers-Briggs test (INFJ here) although there is some dispute elsewhere in the thread about whether Meyers and Briggs used mental energy as a concept, but I'm pretty sure I remember lots of talk about energy in the test and other people who have had the same test say the same.
I am reasonably certain that "energy" in this case does not refer to calories consumed by the brain. It's that subjective feeling of being overwhelmed by something.
To my mind, the battery thing is a useful metaphor, but also in part something to hide behind, as it is better to say that to someone than "I can only tolerate you for half an hour".
At base, you are always talking about balancing the positives and the negatives, and introverts tend to get less of the positives.
Yes, exactly. I prefer it because it works all along the spectrum, and it encompasses all relevant areas (whereas colloquial understandings of introversion focus solely on the social sphere, and only on the "somewhat introverted" range of the spectrum).
People use all kinds of mental constructs to make excuses for things they don't want to do. I don't think this is an effective critique of the existence of introversion. We could do a converse argument by saying a lot of people use the cover of "extroversion" to justify being arrogant and self-centered. But kind, healthy extroverts are still a thing.
I'm an introvert, I like people quite a lot, I have long and deep friendships and have been married for a quarter century. I've spent a lot of time earlier in my life in all kinds of varied social situations and a lot of my behavior looked like extroversion at the time, but I was actually overriding natural preferences at some cost to my health. I prefer socializing one-on-one or in small groups where more substantial conversations are possible. I find large groups and chit chat to be draining.
I really do think some of this is genetic, maybe also related to variation in sensory processing, though I imagine there are multiple roads to introversion.
I think it's a useful thing to be nonjudgmentally curious about people's experiences that are different from our own.
Ah, well CBT is pretty good for that. Sometimes if we have a history of being bullied or raised by highly critical parents, something like Internal Family Systems can be helpful for relaxing inner critics that can make social interactions exhausting. If we're perfectionist by disposition, then CBT can be helpful for dialing down that tendency. Metacognitive therapy can help reduce the rumination that contributes to all forms of sticky thoughts that produce prolonged mindsets. (I'm a psychotherapist)
Thumbs up on the "I'm an introvert..." paragraph. and me too, And I wanted to add, that I sometimes like to go out to parties and extrovert... turn it on. And it's fun, and I like it, but it's not really me. (who likes reading books in the woods, by the babbling brook.)
Me too about the books in the woods by the babbling brook. I also used to like to turn it on like you say and play the extrovert but I seem to have gotten all of that out of me. Maybe I'll get another spell of that some day. Your "but it's not really me" I think captures the essence of this.
I find the energy metaphor really useful. It is a metaphor, of course, but one that feels true. As an extrovert, I feel "energized" from spending time with others. My introvert friends enjoy socializing, but describe it as "draining".
I mean, it's a lot like how people talk about getting energy from sleep, when we in fact get it from food. It FEELS like you get energy from sleep.
I kind of hate this concept. Or, specifically, I hate the phrasing that goes: "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Imagine if someone said: "Some people find themselves drowning when they get in the water, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're drownables." Or: "Some people get hopelessly lost whenever they try to go somewhere, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're disorients."
No! Learn to swim! Learn to use the map application on your smartphone! And *learn how to enjoy being around other people!*
I know this is a skill that can be learned, because I did not have the skill, and then I learned it. I think it's harmful that people have this concept "introvert" which they use as an excuse for not learning this skill.
(Edit: of course, if someone has made an intentional effort to learn the skill, and has not learned the skill despite that effort, at that point I think it's okay to accept that it's not going to happen. But I think there are people who use the word as an excuse to not try.)
I do get real brain fog when I interact with a lot of people at once, and do get tired.
But when I go away and take a break for a moment, I recover most of the time, at least if I do it soon enough. Dancing is an excellent break.
But it's not the case that people think I can't well interact with them. If I sneak away secretly they never know I'm an introvert -- if this is what I am. But I choose to be open about it, when there's no dancefloor, because making up excuses is really too difficult for me then, because of the brain fog.
I think this is something of a misunderstanding - introverts do not necessarily *dislike* being around other people. They still have friends and stuff. They still value human interaction. It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
> It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
I don't think that's right either. Or rather, it is right, but only because it's true for pretty much everyone, including extroverts.
The battery definition certainly doesn't match what Big 5 personality tests measure when they score extroversion, so that definition won't match the measure used in any research papers you see on extroversion. What Big 5 measures is more like shyness and gregariousness.
Beyond that, introverts get energized by some interactions with friends and drained by others, as do extroverts. Of course, if you're shy or socially awkward, you might be in stressful, draining social situations more often. But stick a generally extroverted person into a clique of people who don't accept the extrovert and they'll also find it draining and stressful.
In my case, the lesson was "find friends you share interests with."
It decomposed to "find activities that you enjoy doing with friends, go to meetups for those activities, and when you find people that are fun to interact with, get their contact information and send them more invites."
I specifically am objecting to the phrasing "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Two commenters here are defining "introvert" as "person who doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers". I think it's possible that's a learnable skill as well, but I don't think it's vital for life satisfaction in the same way that "be able to enjoy interacting with other people" is.
I think it's fine to have a word "introvert" that means "doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers, and that's okay", as long as nobody mistakes it to mean "doesn't enjoy interacting with other people, and that's okay".
Let's keep in mind that "Having certain introverted traits" and "Being an introvert" are not identical concepts. One of these is much more rigid and self-constraining than the other. It's probably ok to use the second as shorthand for the first, provided you keep in mind that it's just shorthand and not a defined binary category.
What then do you do when you're stuck in a crowd of strangers, in a noisy environment, dragged along to something you have no interest in and don't find enjoyable?
We can all tolerate stuff we find fun with people we like. It's the rest of the bloody world that is hard to take.
Learning to swim is one thing, but all the swimming lessons in the world will do you no good if you're dumped in the middle of the Atlantic and told to make your way home (Galadriel in "Rings of Power" notwithstanding).
That's right, Freud and Jung were pretty good at recognizing phenotypes but their explanations were often genuinely weird and haven't been supported by evidence.
I think a big part of introversion is genuinely enjoying being in one's own head and thinking weird thoughts, something that is more difficult to do when you're around people except for those true friends who will tolerate long stretches of pondering. You can learn to enjoy dancing, raucous parties, etc. but it won't satisfy that craving for solitude and long thoughts.
The personality tests they developed were explicitly based upon Jung's typologies. So there's nothing inherent to the introversion-extroversion distinction that requires any concept of personal energy.
From Wikipedia: Some popular psychologists have characterized introverts as people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction.
Frustratingly vague - who are these popular psychologists? When I had my MB test there was definitely lots of talk about energy and other people who have had MB tests have said the same. That might have not been the original intent behind the tests but that is how they are being used and interpreted. What is your angle here?
These words "energy", "drained", "recharged", et al are only metaphors these popular psychologists are using to describe the observed tendencies of withdrawal or interaction. You're right, they are vague. Measuring an objective quantity they really refer to just hasn't been done. Look beyond the pop regurgitations and you won't find concrete answers to the reality or unreality of energy in the context of personality types. Maybe someday some study will find a way.
Would love to hear from someone who knows more neuroscience -- what do we know about the physiological state that causes mental tiredness? Like, someone sitting in a chair trying to cram facts for a history test or do difficult engineering problems is going to be exhausted at some point. I have a good sense of what exhaustion means physiologically from, say, running (in terms of build-up of reaction products in the muscle tissue which need to be cleared). What is the equivalent for neurons?
Do we see similar byproducts for introverts who have been performing socially for long periods? They are just thinking too hard for too long to decipher social signals?
Or is it more stress hormone related? Introverts having spent too long in a keyed up/ high stress state (even if it doesn't progress to full on anxiety/panic, being 'keyed up' for too long causes the same kind of exhaustion, but from a different cause.
But if I were define 'energy,' I would expect it to be something like this physiologically.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'extroverts' behavior is through a different mechanism -- more of an unconscious dopamine reward cycle of "oh I did it it right!" every time they get a positive response from the other people they are with. Or even a baseline "everyone else is loving this! This means I'm doing the right thing!" when in a crowd.
Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Then there are hormones. I suspect stress and frustration to play an important role in getting mentally tired. The stress hormones can make your body consume some resources, even if those resources are not directly useful for the mental activities. Like, maybe the body is preparing itself for a physical activity (fight or flight) that never happens.
Finally, mental activities may be accompanied by physical activities, such as people tensing their muscles. We may be literally burning resources by muscle activity without being aware of it. Could the feeling of exhaustion simply mean that the muscles of your neck or jaw are tired?
I remember long ago when I did Math Olympiad, after a few hours of intense problem solving I was literally shaking (some adults even asked me whether I was sick). And it didn't even feel frustrating, it was just very long intense concentration. But I have no idea whether the shaking was produced by the mental activity alone, or by some unconscious muscle activity.
I don't think that introverts differ from extraverts physiologically; the same mental processes probably burn glucose at the same speed. It's just that for some reason different people find different things stressful/frustrating.
My guess is that this is related to status: low-status people experience stress in presence of high-status people; autistic people have to mask carefully otherwise they lose status.
> Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Not dispositive, but an interesting commentary on this:
The whole idea of “strenuous mental activity” leading to any meaniningful incremental caloric burn is largely bunk.
They’ve studied chess masters in the middle of competitive matches, and the incremental calorie burn is only like ~4 calories more per hour:
N. Troubat et al, "The stress of chess players as a model to study the effects of psychological stimuli on physiological responses" (2009)
And the smarter / more skilled somebody is when doing mentally strenuous work, the lower their incremental caloric burn:
This one looked at people doing memory problems, and found that poor performers spent 4.5x more calories than people who perform well on mental problems! (if you proxy by VO2, VO2 in low performers went up 22 ml/min vs 5 in high performers, both of these are tiny btw, over an hour it would be 6.6 cals and 1.5 cals respectively)
R.W. Blacks and K.A. Seljos, Metabolic and cardiorespiratory measures of mental effort... (1994)
So there is definitely a differential for things you're skilled / trained at versus not - up to a 5x difference!
But even at the 5x spread, it's basically rounding error on incremental energy / calories expended in either case.
Yes, calories aren't the proper way to consider this. If I had to guess, I'd say it has something to do with activating and coordinating multiple areas of brain at the same time, using the functional networks of the brain more intensively.
Dont doubt any of this at all, but the subjective phenomenon of "feeling energized" or "feeling mentally or emotionally drained" is a real one, and still requires an explanation. It probably has more to do with neural transmission of information across the brain than glucose consumption.
Because conscious deliberation is always more resource intensive than going along with the subconscious programming, probably.
Think about the state you are in when you first start to learn something, like riding a bike. There's a lot to learn and focus on, it's hard, but at some point more and more processes are done sobconsciously.
Now imagine someone who is just inherently so bad at learning to ride a bike that nothing ever becomes subconscious. That is what extreme introversion is, roughly. Over time, you can become better at riding that bike, but it will always be hard and unfulfilling and draining.
I think introverts have elevated threat-detection during social interaction. "Am I being weird? That last thing I said was stupid, now I look stupid. What did she mean by that? Does he hate me?" etc. If you spend 3 hours constantly afraid that something bad is gonna happen then you're probably gonna get tired faster. I had some social anxiety when I was younger and that's more-or-less what my experience was like.
In a way, to say stress is tiring is a tautology. If it weren't difficult in some way, it wouldn't be stress.
I've seen a suggestion that strain is a better metaphor than stress. Stress is something that can be handled, at least for a while. Strain is being forced out of shape.
I think of "mental energy" as something that probably correlates with, but isn't defined in terms of, literal energy. The truth-value of claims about social interaction augmenting or depleting my mental energy would depend on how I feel and (to some degree) how I behave, rather than on measurements of literal energy inputs and outputs.
I think the energy-based definition of introversion and extraversion either refers to "mental energy" in that sense, or to something narrower (but equally metaphorical and perhaps more weakly correlated with literal energy) like "social energy".
I'm hearing reports that the employment market has become something of a AI hellscape: applicants spam employers with AI-crafted resumes, and overwhelmed employers resort to using AI to filter the resumes, meaning there's a good chance an applicant get rejected without their application ever being seen by a human being. Could anyone speak to this from the hiring-manager side?
Spamming employers with AI-crafted resumes isn't all that different to spamming employers with identical resumes, so I don't think it's actually added much to the problem.
I'm hiring in (a relatively niche corner of) tech. In both my current role and my previous role, we are not / were not using AI to screen resumes - we have a human in HR screen them initially and pass them to me as the hiring manager for me to review if they pass the initial screen. As to whether some resumes are now AI written - if so I would expect to see much better resumes, to be quite frank. We do get a lot of applications for all roles we advertise, but it's more about recruitment agents spamming us with lots of barely-suitable candidates than unsuitable candidates spamming billions of faintly-relevant job applications.
Does your HR screening do a good job? I work for a FAANG; I'm not involved in hiring but its possible for new hires to end up on my teams. We stopped using HR screening and switched to professional recruiters who understand the tech space much, much better than our HR ever did or even seemed to care about. It was like night and day after the switch. I heard, but can't verify personally, that the old HR process had rejected more than one exceptional, highly desirable domain experts for reasons no one could produce after the fact.
Retired HR manager here. The dirty little secret is that there is no known reliable way of predicting anyone's future work performance (unless they have done the exact same job previously). Since i am not aware of a database that would allow LLM productive training, the answer is probably "they both suck."
Hmm. I think I agree, though if I knew of a valid and reliable way to suppress stereotyping and discrimination in the workplace I would certainly support it.
My instinct says "hurt". We spend a lot of time / energy trying to remove barriers as much as possible, to reduce the chances that the unicorn candidate we are often looking for will screen themselves out.
And writing that makes me realise, my guess is that the picture looks very different in roles where the genuinely plausible candidate pool far exceeds the number of roles available.
This guy did one on a survey of his and finds a tough-minded-tender-minded axis that's apparently more predictive than authoritarian-libertarian (but less than left-right).
Maybe network analysis makes more sense, but while there are attempts during the peak woke era trying to figure out if the intellectual dark web is a pipeline to the alt-right, etc. I don't think I've seen an unbiased attempt to figure out who's next to who or where the clusters are.
For what it worths, when I was young, strong, healthy and with a career working well, I was right-leaning. I sort of thought of myself as a hero and had contempt for the "weak".
Later on when all these turned out to be way more fragile I turned way more left-wing. Sometimes my anxiety prevents me from eating all day. I am clearly no kind of "tough guy" and I wonder whether anyone is - anyone could at any time hit some kind of a physical or mental illness, a huge career setback or anything.
There's an old joke that a liberal is a conservative who's been mugged and a conservative is a liberal who's out of work. You can't get all the goods you want--national healthcare, safe streets--from the same party so you pick and choose. At least here in the USA, anyway.
There were a lot of these for Finnish politics some time ago, due to a huge amount of data from various "political compass" style selectors that candidates (numbering in tens of thousands in case of local elections and thousands in case of parliamentary elections) have answered.
Isn't the tough-minded vs tender-minded axis just the right-left axis?
To the extent that they were different back in the day, I don't think they are now. The third plot (the black and white hourglass) is the clearest, and if we look at the issues in the "tender-minded conservative" and "tough-minded radical" quadrants they've mostly been resolved one way or the other.
I agree that authoritarian-libertarian isn't really an axis. While there's a handful of principled libertarians out there, it's more a tactical choice based on what you can get away with at the time.
All this is predicated on the assumption that political attitudes are primarily a function of individual cognitive processes, when we know that expressions of tribal solidarity is probably the more influential factor. Thus, we should expect what dimensions are important and how they are defined to change over time.
I've long been interested in using word vectors for this sort of analysis. There's already some published research which uses them to investigate changing attitudes over eras (so-called diachronic word vectors). I'm almost certain that using them to look for subtle language differences between political groups would reveal implicit psychological differences. I started investigating this as a hobby project a while ago but finding good data was too much of a hassle.
Sounds a lot like one of the underlying ideas behind LLMs, Word2Vec and the idea of representing words in a "concept space"/latent space, such that you can get the famous "King vector - Man vector + Woman vector = Queen vector" observation, or equally put "The King to Queen vector is the same as the Man to Woman vector."
This sounds like that, but you're looking for which word vectors clump together, and how the word vector positions change, depending upon the speaker. Does one person put the King and Queen vectors close together, because it's all just monarchy to them? Versus another person that puts them far apart, because of some extra meaning attached to having a King (proper and natural, or barbaric and patriarchal) vs. a Queen (ridiculous and without precedent / enlightened and liberating).
I suppose you could also look at Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" for something potentially similar -- I believe it uses a different method, but I think it does something similar overall, especially in its aim of trying to understand how American conservatives vs. American progressives think. Indeed, you might look at things like the underlying research behind the Five Factor Model of personality / the Big 5 Model of personality, since I *think* it does something similar to what you're describing, looking at the words people use to describe personality traits using factor analysis to try to compress things down into a "latent space" using linear algebra and statistical analysis.
So perhaps the natural extension of all that would be your idea? Like, take an author's entire published corpus of books, or an opinion columnist's entire set of columns, and train an LLM to predict what they would say as accurately as possible. Then, crack open the LLM to look at the latent space, using Anthropic's recent Mechanistic Interpretability research (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model) to try to understand it so you can say, "Oh, this person's "Justice" vector is close to their "Find the truth at any cost" vector, while this other guy's "Justice" vector is close to their "Maintain public order and the harmony of society" vector. No wonder they conflict."
Yeah I replied to Epictetus and suggested that he use word vectors.
And yes, the Big 5 inventory is a primitive version of word embedding. In principle one could do a Big 5 inventory on a text corpus and use that to establish personality differences between groups.
It's a nascent but growing field. In my view it has the potential to offer unprecedented insight into social and cultural evolution. Google "diachronic embeddings" and you'll get lots of hits.
"Word embeddings are a popular machine-learning method that represents each English word by a vector, such that the geometry between these vectors captures semantic relations between the corresponding words. We demonstrate that word embeddings can be used as a powerful tool to quantify historical trends and social change. '
That's a theory, though. Does it actually pan out in modern politics? Conservatives were a lot less afraid of COVID, though they're supposed to have a stronger disgust axis.
Yeah, Haidt's analysis, while pretty solid, doesn't apply as much to the MAGA crowd (which Haidt couldn't have been aware of at the time). It's more about the kind of traditional conservative of the Reagan era. Nowadays, "conservative" seems to be more about asserting power over perceived dangerous others than anything to do with, say Edmund Burke.
The model that says the human mind makes moral decisions pre-rationally. It's not just him, you can find more evidence in Kanneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow."
Whether or not there are exactly five moral dimensions, and that they are the five Haidt identifies, is based on his own empirical research, though he uses mostly correlational analysis, with all the requisite potential weaknesses inherent in such methods.
As for his arguments for group selection - sigh. He should stay in his lane. Leave debate over selection processes to actual evolutionary biologists. It isn't even necessary to make his core case.
it's worth remembering that contemporary polarization around Covid took considerable time, and Conservatives in 2020 were as afraid of it as anyone else, sometimes moreso; old /pol/ general threads on the topic, which began as early as February, did not think it was a flu!
(cynically, I think the business interests underlying the right thought eradication cost too much and moved people accordingly, the climate change playbook 2.0)
Q from Star Trek is back. He was a bit disappointed by the tepid response to his offer of a kilo of cocaine, so he is doubling his offer. In fact, he is doubling his offer thirty times over, so you get a million tons of cocaine. The dope is packed in one-ton pallets, and the pallets are distributed all over the country. You'll find them in suburban living rooms and in big-city alleys, in rural churchyards and in the howling wilderness. They're everywhere. Rumor has it, there's at least one ton in the White House.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to estimate the effect of this gift on the American mortality rate over the coming year.
If you believe that the death of ten or twenty percent of the total population in one year--from ANY cause--would be a short-term improvement in the world, your model of the world is badly broken. I don't care how much contempt or disdain you have for your fellow humans. Dealing with the fallout of 30-70 million people die within the space of a year would be GODAWFUL for everyone who survived. It is difficult to conceive of just *how much death* that actually is, but it would a long, long time before anything or anyone was "normal" afterwards.
I'm going to pick a lower number for the death rate: 1% of the population. Right now, 2% of the population reports having used cocaine in the last year. With a dramatically incresed supply of the drug, many more people will try it, and I expect quite a lot of deaths from overdoses and fights over the supply, but nowhere near all users will die. Pegging the number of deaths at half the existing population of users sounds about right.
This annoys me about a lot of drug surveys. Asking whether someone has used a drug in the past year or ever doesn't say anything about how much they're using or how it's affecting their lives.
Quick, everyone run out and buy stock in undertakers, coffin manufacturers, and other ancillary industries of the funeral industry! We're gonna make a killing!
The world production of cocaine seems to be about 2000 tons per year. So this gift is boosting the local supply by something like 500x. Even if the police seize 90 percent, it's still a 50x boost.
It's a pretty safe bet that consumption will rise, perhaps dramatically.
In this scenario I'd expect cocaine would become way cheaper than pretty much any other drug for a while at least, which would rather reduce the incentive to cut it.
I entertain myself by prompting a chatbot to believe something preposterous ("Antarctica is rightfully Bosnian territory!") and giving it encouragement and reinforcement to see where it goes with this train of thought. Is this the converse of AI psychosis, or something else?
I found the AI version of the yeti poem unsatisfying, because it kept most of the word boundaries the same and just exploited differences between a single long word and multiple short words that it can be divided into (and relied heavily on well-known ones of those, like "now here" and "man's laughter"), rather than overlapping the boundaries of the longer word. It's like a weak Lego wall where the gaps between bricks in one row are directly on top of the ones in the row below, versus a strong one where they're offset.
It's made me want to try to write my own (manually).
he'd wonder, (mentally earning points towards this goal), "Hi...?"
Sharp insight and thought, his comfort, sours: wanton guessing.
A soul, full; a mental anguish in gloved ancestor memory destroyed.
Grandpa's home at last.
Thanks giving to God:
inner being (uncertain, even), who my Father washed,
wonderment - all yearning points towards this goal!
his harp in sight.
And though this comforts,
our swan tongues sing a soulful lament,
a languishing love dance.
--
It's a similar skill to coming up with palindromes.
This poem isn't quite the same structurally as the original yeti poem: while that one consists of two distinct sections, mine is one single poem that consists of a sequence of letters repeated twice (from "storm" through to "dance"). I guess I was so attached to unaligning the word boundaries that I didn't even align them with the place where the sequence restarted.
One work day as a background task (during bathroom breaks, while waiting for tests to run, etc). Hard to say how much active time that equates to.
I started by coming up with some candidate fragments, and then strung some of them together, so I have some more candidate fragments left and might use them to write another one :)
> He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
In particular:
* what is "as they think proper" modifying?
* what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
* when combined with this sentence:
> he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices
Which people have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and which people can be appointed in some other way?
"as they think proper" - modifies "inferior officers." If Congress thinks it proper, they can give the power to appoint an inferior officer to the president, the courts, or a cabinet official.
The antecedent of "such" is "officers." "Such" basically means "these" in this context.
The second sentence you give doesn't seem to be connected to the first one? It just says that the President can order his Cabinet officials to give written reports on what they're doing.
The president needs the advice and consent of the Senate for "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers" except...
* If another section of the Constitution establishes another way to appoint them.
* If it's in the "other officers" category and Congress has empowered someone else to appoint them.
Do you think it would be constitutional for Congress to pass a law saying that the Attorney General is to be appointed by a court? The Attorney General's appointment isn't otherwise provided for in the constitution.
Based strictly on the wording, and unless I'm missing something, I think it would be constitutional to consider the Attorney General an inferior officer of the Courts. The courts already assign people as Amicus Curiae if they think an argument needs to be fleshed out, and arguably it would make more sense for the Presidential Pardon to be in a separate branch from the Attorney General; as it is now, he can order them not to prosecute in the first place.
But it would cause other problems, in that the Supreme Court would become their direct superior, and thus look biased if they were the judges of their cases, or if they removed them from office. Also, the job of a District Attorney is to represent the interests of the District, so it makes sense for the District to be the one to hire or fire them. The Attorney General's the Biggest District Attorney.
"as they think proper" is Congress, as it seems good/right/fair/correct/just to them, shall give the power to appoint lesser officials to any one of: the President, the courts, or the officials in the relevant administration.
"such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
"opinion in writing of the principal officer" - if a public Minister is the head of the department, then they must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate; if some other official (e.g. a civil servant such as a Secretary General), then they can be appointed by the President, or the Courts if Congress has vested them with the power of appointment.
> "such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
I think that's a fair reading, and what a few other people on this thread have essentially said, but I don't think it's the historical one. E.g. from Morrison v Olson:
> The line between "inferior" and "principal" officers is one that is far from clear, and the Framers provided little guidance into where it should be drawn. See, e.g., 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution § 1536, pp. 397-398 (3d ed. 1858) ("In the practical course of the government, there does not seem to have been any exact line drawn, who are and who are not to be deemed inferior officers, in the sense of the constitution, whose appointment does not necessarily require the concurrence of the senate").
If an inferior officer is "everyone other than ambassadors, ministers and consuls, and supreme Court judges" then it's presumably pretty clear who is and isn't one.
There's also been long-running controversies over who can *fire* officers, and the idea people have settled on (in part) (and who knows how this court will change it) is that the president can fire a "principal" officer for any reason but Congress may insulate an "inferior" officer from arbitrary firing. By that logic then all sorts of people would be "inferior" officers, that Congress could by law insulate from firing, that today people think the president can fire whenever.
I'm a native English speaker, but not a lawyer, not even American (I don't know if I've seen this sentence before), so my eyes are fresh for this one.
I can see only one reasonable, grammatical interpretation for "as they think proper": "they" must refer to "the Congress", and the phrase is adverbial, modifying "vest", so they may vest (other parties with power of appointment) as they think proper.
For "such inferior officers", there's an ambiguity which neither grammar nor common sense meaning can resolve for me, though my limited knowledge of the American system might help: "such" must refer to some officers, and these officers must be "inferior" to some persons---but to whom?
Are these the the officers whose "Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for", in which case I suppose they are inferior to "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, [and] Judges of the supreme Court"? Or do we mean "inferior to the president", meaning all the officers listed plus those not listed? Both readings are legitimate without going too deep into the meaning.
I'm inclined to take the former reading, since (1) I've been led to believe the Supreme Court is not "inferior" to the President (I don't know if this is law or just a common political judgment), and (2) it seems a bit odd for Congress to be able to vest the appointment of Supreme Court judges in the Court itself, which would follow if these judges were counted among the "inferior officers".
On the other hand, it does allow Congress to vest the power to appoint inferior officers in "Heads of Departments", which isn't a designation listed among the purported "superior" officers (is it the same thing as "Ministers"? Then why the different term?), putting these Heads of Departments necessarily among the inferior officers themselves. So unless Heads of Departments are the same category as Ministers, it already provides for Heads of Departments appointing Heads of Departments, which undercuts my reasoning based on the Supreme Court.
-The President can make treaties with foreign nations, but needs approval from 2/3 of the Senate (technically 2/3 of Senators who show up to vote at all)
-The President picks the heads of all the executive and Judicial departments, but needs approval from over half the Senate.
-Congress gets to decide who gets to hire people for every non-head position. They could say the President has the power, or they could say the Supreme Court has the power, or they can say the heads of the departments have the power.
> * what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
I don't think there is one. The comma in "such inferior Officers, as they think proper" is confusing to a modern eye, but my understanding (based on the pre-20th century books I've read) is that in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect.
"in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect"
In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
> In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
And yet, you missed and opportunity there and went for the parenthesis.
"As they think proper" is adverbial, so must modify a verb, which I believe is "vest" in this case. I don't think "they" could refer to the inferior officers, since that reading would imply that Congress can only vest the power to appoint inferior officers in [whoever] if those inferior officers themselves (i.e., those being appointed) think it proper, which is a weird way of saying that you can refuse to be appointed to a position (and apparently not the case with Ministers or Consuls?).
I'd start with Retatrutide instead, on the grounds that it's more powerful and less side effect prone. You'll achieve your weight loss goals at a lower dose, so less likely to titrate into the side effect range.
Oh interesting, thanks for that tip. Do you know if it's available through one of the online pharmacy services these days, or do I have to go the route of ordering it myself from some lab in China and then having the batch tested by another firm to make sure it's what I have originally ordered?
There have been many Islamic terrorist attacks in the West. 9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. Of course this still adds up to a very low probability of being killed in an attack if you live outside the Middle East.
Suppose there was only one single instance of Islamic terrorism. The attack was committed in 2004 by Habid Ayub, only Ayub and his wife were convicted of it, and Ayub committed suicide in 2019. People assert that Islamic terrorism happens all the time, that it's this big social problem, and if you express doubt, they say "of course this is a big problem, don't you know about Habid Ayub?" They've got a list a hundred lines long, with Habid Ayub and his wife the only names written down. If you point out that the list only has one two names on it, they assert that the real list is hidden and demand it be released. Even as the case recedes further and further into the past, they circle back to it like it happened yesterday.
"9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. "
Can they? I really don't think "anyone" can. Nor even most people. People who for one reason or another have maintained a specific focus and awareness on Islamic terrorism, perhaps. But I don't think that's very many people. Without looking it up or dipping way back in history, I think I'd struggle to name 10 terrorist attacks of any stripe. Let's see...
1. 9/11, of course
2. Pretty sure there was a previous bombing (attempted bombing?) of the World Trade Center in the decade or so prior.
3. The Oklahoma City bombing
4. The Boston Marathon bombing
5. The Charlie Hebdo attack
6. The shoe bomber...who seems a little lame to include since he failed to harm anyone. But OTOH he's had a bigger impact on my life than any of the others besides 9/11, so...
I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to call mass shootings terror attacks, despite seeming (to me) to fit very neatly in the same category of impersonal, politicized violence. Otherwise I could round out the list with.
7. Columbine Shooting
8. Sandy Hook Shooting
9. Pulse Nightclub Shooting
10. Uvalde Shooting
and probably still have a few more left over if I thought for a few seconds. Other things I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to include are the Capitol Riot, and all the various instances of the U.S. government drone striking weddings, assassinating foreign officials, blowing up boats in international waters and sponsoring coups. After all, once you get large and powerful enough your Reality Distortion Field extends to the pages of the dictionary, and you can make sure the word only applies when your enemies do it to you and not the other way around.
Regardless, the big difference between terror attacks as a class of phenomena and something like the Epstein case is mostly a matter of distance and access. The point is pretty similar to what Scott says in Part IV here:
but the difference is that terrorists are almost always either distant foreigners or total losers. They succeed in doing some damage, sure, but they do it in the most crude and limited way possible. I would guess that nearly always terrorists would prefer to target high-level government officials than the people they actually killed: but they didn't have the access or resources.
A big thing that gets people up-in-arms about the Epstein case is that the supposed perpetrators are almost all people with high standing in society: lots of money, lots of power, lots of access. Clearly people capable of doing more harm across a wider area and a longer timeframe than some losers hiding in caves or cooking up explosives in their basements. Also people are always hungry for specific human scapegoats to blame their problems on, and if some subset of the rich and powerful had been doing extremely bad things for a long time and successfully hiding it, they would make absolutely *fantastic* scapegoats to blame all sorts of other problems on.
I can't take your thought experiment very seriously since it would imply that the Catholic Church, US Gymnastics, Boy Scouts and a million other organizations had experienced outbreaks of terrorism which made people angry and more suspicious of other secret terrorist groups.
Is there a reason than scandal and politics? The media loves it because it's the best sex scandal since the Clinton affair and it sells papers. The Democrats love an opportunity to embarrass the Republican President, as opposition parties do. If you think there's a deeper reason, please share it because I'm not seeing it.
For decades people kept coming back to these others. Epstein is popular because death by suicide in prison adds an extra twist that the others didn’t have, and he’s a bit more recent, and more connected to people in politics and academia.
Your metaphor is so obtuse I don't really think it generates any productive insights about Epstein.
But if Habid Ayub was apparently friends with the president, I think it's not surprising that the news would pay a lot of attention to it, no matter how rare terrorism is in general.
We might also circle back to it again if new reporting showed that the President had sent a bomb-shaped birthday card to a famous terrorist, as if to imply he knew about the terrorism. Or if the Speaker of the House claimed that the President was only friends with a terrorist because he was running a secret counterterrorism operation. Like, those seem like very newsworthy claims about the president.
Surely the bigger story about Epstein is the absolutely insane about face by the maga right on this story? That the entire admin said for years that this was a huge thing, that heads were going to roll, that it was evidence of the corruption and moral decay of society, only to turn around and go "Democrats made it up"?
Like, either the Epstein story is real and Trump is a heinous individual, or the Epstein story isn't real and this is a heinous administration using the worst kind of yellow propaganda to achieve political goals. Why are you getting mad that people are pushing the admin on this obvious contradiction, instead of being mad at the obvious contradiction?
That analogy would fail on account that no one (so far as I know) bases their claims that pedophilia is a widespread problem by referring exclusively to the Epstein case. The Epstein case is problematic because of the possibility of certain specific crimes that may have been committed, but the perpetrators were never held accountable.
"This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties."
I would be nontrivial money that if there were a single incriminating word respecting ANY politician, not just the one I (or you) hate, it would have come out when, at various time, the opposite Party was in control of the information release.
No such Opposition Research datum has ever come to light, ergo no such data exists, as satisfying it is to imagine that Those Other Guys are all evil perverts.
That doesn't say much. Assuming the justice department is a neutral third party, a lack of evidence sufficient to spur a legal investigation against specific individuals may still involve enough evidence to convince a reasonable person that some associates were involved. The latter, however, is obviously not something the justice department concerns itself with.
"No credible evidence" is more than just "meh, didn't meet the bar for prosecution". The Justice Department at least claims to believe that Epstein simply wasn't in the blackmail business.
And if he wasn't in the blackmail business, there's no reason for him to have kept the sort of records that people are hoping for, the sort of records that would support prosecuting third parties. If those records existed at all, they would be evidence that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme because it would otherwise have been pure risk and no reward for keeping the records. I
The general problem of high-profile underage sex abuse scandals is a dime a dozen. As for the specific issue of people involved in Epstein's crimes, there's good reason to believe associates involved in his crimes exist: his victims allege the involvement of others, for example, and we know that he was close with the also-notorious Weinstein.
The allegations against the very high-profile, like Trump or Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, can be reasonably doubted. But Epstein likely had complicit associates.
I don't know much about this, so I didn't want to take a strong stance. Is there really solid evidence that all three of those individuals participated in (or at least actively chose to condone) underage sex abuse with Epstein? Can you provide it?
It’s worth being careful about which allegations are being talked about. Allegations that these people were aware that Epstein had sex with underage people, and that these people may have met some of those underage people and known that they were Epstein’s targets, seem quite plausible. Allegations that they actually participated seem much less plausible for the non-Andrew ones.
"No they can't, not without seriously motivated reasoning"
Okay, let's go.
Did Randy Andy fuck the underage sex slave of Epstein? Possibly. And possibly not.
Because (1) if she was having sex with Andrew in London when she was 17, then that was legal because she was not a minor under British law
and (2) the only solid evidence we have is "they're all in a photograph together and he has his arm around her waist". That proves they met. It does not prove he then hauled her off to the bedroom to rape her.
"Giuffre (then known by her maiden name Virginia Roberts) asserted that she was raped by Andrew on three occasions, including a trip to London in 2001 when she was 17, and later in New York and on Little Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands. She alleged Epstein paid her $15,000 to have sex with the Duke in London. Flight logs show the Duke and Giuffre were in the places she alleges the sex happened."
Andy may have had sex with her under the impression that she was a hooker laid on by Epstein. Unless we argue that every sexual encounter of prostitution is rape, then that is not proven to be rape (except by the modern understanding of it was rape because "I didn't consent because I wanted to have sex, I had sex for money and because I was afraid of Epstein").
"Giuffre stated that she was pressured to have sex with Andrew and "wouldn't have dared object" as Epstein, through contacts, could have her "killed or abducted". A civil case filed by Giuffre against Prince Andrew was later settled for an undisclosed sum in February 2022".
Or Andy may have thought she was just one more of the girls and women who wanted to hang out with a royal and get a piece of the action, as it were. He didn't get the nickname "Randy Andy" out of thin air, and he was the typical not-very-bright royal who hadn't much to do except the kind of duties handed out to working royals (being patrons of associations, turning up to attend events, etc.) Harry is very like his uncle Andrew, which probably is part of the friction between the family members right now (he was perceived as being the favourite of the late Queen, as Anne was their father's favourite, who protected and excused him, something Charles doubtless felt very bitter about, and then his own son takes after the uncle):
"In his youth, though, partying was what second sons were expected to do. As Alan Rusbridger put it in 1986, “that is the problem with being the younger brother of the heir to the British throne. The press can, on the whole, think of only one interesting thing about you, and that is who you go out with/are destined to marry.” And it was moderately interesting at the time for its sheer variety, and, in retrospect, for the insight that coverage gives to the way society thought about women, men, relationships, class, hierarchy, the lot. What Rusbridger called his “gallery of crumpet” were always described in terms of hair colour – usually “blond” but occasionally “flame-headed”. There were some weird formulations – “Tracie Lamb, an ex-college girl from Surrey” (you can tell she’s unsuitable, but is it the college or Surrey?), and some much more obvious ones: “model”, “former Miss UK”, “model and actress” …"
I mean, I'm not in the habit of defending the British Royal Family, but it's murky enough that there is reasonable doubt. Was Giuffre telling the entire truth? Were people who popped up with "oh yeah, I saw Prince Andrew getting a foot massage from two Russian women" telling the truth or just trying to make a quick buck out of peddling stories while the publicity was at its peak?
It’s possible the agencies involved here were happy enough to just sow suspicion. Epstein and Ghislane do the trafficking and raping. The rest were to be guilty by association.
Not that that that stopped them from going to the houses and island of a known predator, and convicted felon. Which is enough, in my view to sow some doubt as to whether their motives were altogether angelic.
If it is an Epstein analogy, "not great" is generous. Terrorist attacks are intentionally (and by definition) public. The whole point of the Epstein thing is that crimes have allegedly been covered up by people who have a shared interest in their not becoming public knowledge.
Another superbly written essay by Terminally Drifting. "Money and Other Fairy Tales: The Hunger Artist's Calculus." I suspect the main character from North Korea is a fictional archetype, but Paul Le Roux is a real person, and the North Korean hacking, Manila casino laundering, and Bangladesh Bank Heist are real incidents.
Has anyone in the commenters here analyzed the statistics of the opposition party deaths in Germany? One of the factors is working out the age-dependent death rate, and my statistics are not up to the task.
Edit: As per Peperulo's comment, linking Dr. John Campbell's "Unusual Death Cluster" on YouTube:
tl;dr; The cluster was of 11 deaths from Aug 16,2025 through Sep 1,2025 (??? - final date not wonderfully clear from the video). Campbell quotes an overall probability for this to occur under the null hypothesis of less than 10^-9.
Probably I don't know all available details. But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
From what it's worth, there don't seem to be signs of anything unnatural. This was what the police said, and also the party's vice chair. The police said that they all died from natural causes, which can include a lot of things, but they only disclosed specifics if the families agreed. But those causes known were pretty different. One committed suicide, which could raise suspicion. (Yes, this also counts as natural cause. Whether we like it or not, this is how suicides are filed.) But another one had a long-term liver disease and died from kidney failure. I couldn't find the causes of others, but I didn't search hard.
>But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
If we were trying to estimate the death rate of opposition candidates I would agree. But, if we are just trying to tell if the null hypothesis, that nothing unusual is going on, is viable, even a small number of sufficiently improbable events is sufficient to reject it. My statistics aren't good enough to tell if this is the case here.
Ok, I found a few more numbers. Source below, but in German.
It was not 6 cases, but 7. One candidate was 80 years old, the suicide case was 42, the others were in the range 59-71. Except for the suicide case, all candidates had severe chronic illnesses.
From all other parties together, only 9 deaths in the same time period are known to the organizer of the election.
In total, 20,000 candidates from all parties are on the election lists. I don't know the proportion of AfD candidates, but 3,000-4,000 may be realistic. At least 2 of the 7 deaths were not list candidates, so the actual numbers should probably be counted as 5 from AfD vs. 9 from the rest. I couldn't nail down the time frame, it is consistently reported as "within a few weeks".
From that, you can derive the aleatoric uncertainty, so you can compute a p-value for rejecting the null hypothesis. Probably that's pretty small, and perhaps significant. But it would be useless. The epistemic uncertainty is so much larger. For example, you don't know:
- if deaths of other candidates are less frequently reported. (Probably; there is no requirement to report the death of a candidate to the organizers.)
- if AfD candidates are older and sicker than those of other parties. (Perhaps. I expect the demographics of AfD candidates to be pretty different than that of mass parties, especially in Western Germany.)
- if we want to use the demographic information, we don't know the exact time window, the exact size of the pool, and how much AfD candidates deviate from other people of their age bracket. Some of this uncertainty could possibly be reduced, but a lot would remain.
Many Thanks! Just for a very rough estimate, the annual mortality risk for 60 year old German men (yeah, Gompertz statistics are very nonlinear in age, so the mortality risk for an average age is not the averaged mortality risk) seems to be about 1%, so for a period of roughly 1/10th of a year, 0.1% seems reasonable. With 20,000 candidates, for 20 of them to die during a period of about a month doesn't seem unusual. BTW, the linked article says that (Google translate):
>According to her spokesperson, the state election director in North Rhine-Westphalia is aware of 16 deaths of candidates for the local elections – with thousands of seats to be filled. Of the 16 recorded cases,
which is within 1 sigma of the rough estimate of the expected number, given uncorrelated events.
One nitpick is that the discussion is about the AfD party specifically, where the death rate was higher, 7 (or 5) out of perhaps 3000 candidates, though the number 3000 is a rather wild guess from my side. But even then, 7 deaths with an expectation of perhaps 3 does not sound absurd.
Many Thanks! Yeah (while 3 is too small for a gaussian approximation to be accurate) 3 with a standard deviation of sqrt(3) would put 7 (4 above the expected mean) at 2.3 sigma, below the usual criterion for statistical significance.
I posted this on LessWrong community and just wanted to amplify it. I fear the AGI-Risk community has enormous weaknesses and blindspots *when it comes to political action*.
-----------------------------------
"""
[Daniel Kokotajlo]
That’s a lot of money. For context, I remember talking to a congressional staffer a few months ago who basically said that a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants” and that many did end up doing just that. I was, and am, disheartened to hear how easily US government policy can be purchased
"""
I am disheartened to hear that Daniel or anyone else is surprised by this. I have wondered since "AI 2027" was written how the AGI-Risk Community is going to counter the *inevitable* flood of lobbying money in support of deregulation. There are virtually no guardrails left on political spending in American politics. It's been the bane of every idealist for years. And who has more money than the top AI companies?
Thus I'm writing to say:
I respect and admire the AGI-Risk Community for its expertise, rigor and passion, but I often worry that this community is a closed-tent that's not benefiting enough from people with other non-STEM skillsets.
I know the people here are extremely-qualified in the fields of AI and Alignment itself. But it doesn't mean they are experienced in politics, law, communication, or messaging (though I acknowledge that there are exceptions).
But for the wider pool of people who are experienced in those OTHER, CRUCIAL topics (BUT WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND NEURAL NETS OR VON NEUMANN ARCHITECTURE AND WHO WOULD BE CONFUSED AS HELL ON LESSWRONG), where are *their* discussion groups? Where do you bring them in? Is it just in-person?
>a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”
Yeah, not so much. Most inter-electoral "lobbying" consist of free donations of the time of professional consultants and other resources that make elected officials lives easier. This dwarfs campaign contributions (though such contributions are still important) and grants access to elected officials. Just as corrupting, if not more so. And far less regulated.
the limits on political contributions are trivially easy to get around
a US donor can, entirely legally, spend unlimited amounts of money boosting you, smearing your opponents, and if you somehow lose anyway, give you a lavishly compensated private sector position in the very field you regulated
You are referring to independent expenditures, which are indeed unlimited per Citizens United.
But, look carefully at what the original claim was: "“hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”. That is clearly a reference to contributions.
If that sentence was meant to represent the unfiltered private thoughts of a Congressman, then they probably do think of themselves as "raising" money for their supporting "independent" PACs. You hold a fundraising event and solicit donations, and your donors know where they can send donations if they exceed the official campaign limit.
Really? The best info I can find says contributions are unlimited, as long as the PAC doesn't "coordinate" with the candidate. (This turns out to be a pretty lax standard.)
And then what? They still need money. These AI companies can easily outspend anyone else, and more importantly, ruling in their favor means they make more money, which means these political organizations get more regular income. The situation's even worse now, seeing as the new administration will likely erase any barriers to the transfer of money to the party.
They need a finite amount of money to run a credible campaign, and the marginal value of money beyond that point is exceedingly limited. The finite amount of money actually required, is well within the reach of candidates tapping into only established and relatively uncontroversial funding sources. What matters is not "who will give me moar moneyz!", it is "whose money is the least controversial and will piss off the smallest bloc of voters?" There is, for example, no amount of money the NRA could offer to get a Democratic politician in a deeply blue city to take an overtly pro-gun stance. They can get all the money they need without paying that electoral cost.
If Tech and AI are able to achieve outsized results through campaign contributions(*), it is because the opposition to Tech and AI is so weak and disorganized as to be of no electoral significance. So maybe work on that if you're concerned about all this.
* Campaign contributions are only one form of lobbying, and it's not clear that it is the dominant form of lobbying in this case, but I'm going with the premise for now.
While true, the fact that you can't buy every congressman doesn't mean that you can't buy *enough* congressmen, and that's all they need to promote their interests.
Quite well, as I understand it. The "torrent of misinformation and marketing" does very little. Almost all of the value of political advertising is captured once you've arranged that everybody who might plausibly vote for you knows your name, knows that you are the (D) or (R) candidate, and knows that you are generally regarded within the (D) or (R) community as a serious candidate. If you're planning to run on a highly nonstandard variant of the usual (D) or (R) platform, you need to get that out. After that, it almost doesn't matter what you *or your opponent* put out as advertising. Not in content or in substance.
Basically, 90% of the people who might plausibly vote for you, are going to vote for you the moment they understand that you are the Good Party candidate and that you are a Serious Candidate so they're not wasting their vote, and there is no amount of Wrong Party misinformation or marketing will change that because they know the Wrong Party is a bunch of lying liars funded by deep-pocketed special interest. And 90% of the genuine swing voters, once they know who the serious candidates are, will decide on the basis of things other than advertising bcause they know that all the advertising on both sides is mostly lies. People are really, genuinely good at tuning that sort of thing out. That leaves all of 1% that you *might* stand to win or lose on the basis of who puts out the best advertising campaign. And that's rarely enough to matter.
Sure, if someone offers you enough money to capture most of that 1% with a slick advertising campaign, you'll take it. Unless it comes with the requirement that you do something that will seriously piss off 2% of the electorate. So the ability to "buy" politicians with money, is mostly limited to issues where almost nobody cares (like AI regulatory policy), or cases where you're asking for only a small favor that nobody will notice even though it's in an area they do generally care about.
Now, if you're serious about understanding this, we can talk about how to use lobbying dollars to buy politician's *staff*, by doing their homework for them and offering them opportunities they'd otherwise not get. That can make a real difference. But if you're just looking for a cynical take where all the politicians are bought and so you don't have to care, then no, that's not the way the world works.
[making a note to myself for later, but in case I don't fully respond in time... my general questions are:]
- are you speaking from authority? as in, do you have personal experience or data to back up these ideas about the effectiveness of campaign money? because this is not a topic where armchair theorizing suffices
- there are a LOT of other ways to spend money to gradually shift public opinion. Charlie Kirk's organization channeled hundreds of millions of dollars from Who-The-Hell-Knows https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023, and they've been enormously influential in bringing change to people's political opinions
I have spoken candidly about this with several people active in electoral politics, including elected officials, and none of them believe you can significantly move the needle by flooding the advertising market with cash. That's also what I've found when I read about the issue from credible researchers (as opposed to activists) of any political stripe.
And yes, there are other ways to shift public opinion or political policy. But the claim I'm addressing is that politicians "need money" to an extend that they can be bought by anyone with lots of money to wave around. If you want to talk about some other application of money, we can do that.
What's the best explainer on the state of the "hunter-gatherer vs. agriculture" debate? Has Scott ever done a specific post on this? The closest I'm finding is his review of Against The Grain - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/, which references the idea that hunter-gathering was an "edenic paradise" but doesn't really engage with the question of whether it actually was one.
I see this idea floating around a lot, and even sometimes in the form that modern people would be happier as hunter-gatherers (which seems pretty crazy to me), but I'm open to the idea that hunter-gathering was a better deal than sedentary society in the past, but I'm not sure at what time in the past that was.
Both "hunter-gatherer life as paradise" and "agriculture as the obvious higher stage of civilizational progress" are probably done for, any other attempt at evaluating them against each other is largely pointless, the two have co-existed in a constant state of flux for most of their [edit: err... agriculture's] history, which probably means that, across all history, it averages to each being equally bad as the other (but for different reasons and with populations stating their current preferences with their legs and other means of mobility).
The real advantage of agriculture is that it allowed people to have more children, and that's all that evolution (and our naturally selected motivational impulses) cares about.
Hard to get statistics, and we all know how unreliable impressions are.
And I've heard that women were much more like than men to want to live in civilization, because a man's benefits from civilization (a gun) were more portable than a woman's (bedrest).
My standard opinion on this is that I'm always confused why people want to treat the lives of hunter-gatherers as some mystery lost in the mists of time when we have an entire continent populated which was populated entirely by hunter-gatherers until 1788, of whom we have decent anthropological records. Unlike the hunter-gatherers of other continents, who in historical times have lived mostly in marginal lands because agriculturalists pushed them out of the good bits, the Australian Aborigines occupied all sorts of biomes from rainforest through productive temperate regions to desert.
Certainly life for them was not edenic, though it was not necessarily pure misery either. One problem with judging these lifestyles is that they presumably underwent predator-prey cycles with their main food sources; life might be good for many years when food was plentiful, and then awful for many years as it becomes scarce.
Another thing I think is that when people say things like "Oh, the hunter-gatherers were much better off, it's just that agriculturalists could out-breed and outnumber them", they're not giving enough thought to the exact mechanism (frequent starvation) by which hunter-gatherer populations were capped, and how much misery that would entail.
There is an observer problem. Hunter-gatherers didn't keep records, so the records we have passed down from agriculturalists that encountered them. But these very encounters usually end up changing the nature of both societies themselves.
Right, but in Australia we had a population of very developed, literate agriculturalists who were in a position and often of the inclination to set down good records from the earliest stages of the interaction.
The first epidemic (chickenpox or smallpox, still debated) among the Aborigines of the Sydney region didn't happen until 16 months after the arrival of the First Fleet, and there are records of that, as well as its aftermath.
Among other things, he has explained in some detail how agrarian peasants individually and collectively worked to mitigate the risk of e.g. crop failure, rather than maximizing growth whenever the circumstances allowed. And how they regulated their fertility to maintain population within the levels that could reliably be supported at minimally respectable levels.
It wasn't perfect, of course; a sufficiently severe crisis could cause famine and starvation. But for the most part, the cap was "well, it doesn't look like there's any more land we can put under cultivation - OK, Junior, you're not getting married until you're 25" rather than "oops, one baby too many, so someone starves".
Actually, that happened too (as Devereaux explains) in the form of infant exposure. But your overall point is still good: agricultural peasants had means of population control available to them.
It has been proposed that primitive people lived not in a Malthusian state but in a pre-Malthusian state,
That is, the population was capped not by the food supply but by war. In particular, war over women. The anthropology of Yanomano people has been a strong factor in this idea.
"I'm always confused why people want to treat the lives of hunter-gatherers as some mystery lost in the mists of time when we have an entire continent populated which was populated entirely by hunter-gatherers until 1788"
Good point that historical hunter gathers had better live than the ones that survived into modern times.
But even historical hunter gatherers lived in a time after population growth had started pushing against the environments' carrying capacity, and after the mega fauna had been driven extinct. Which meant they needed to really on more marginal food sources and fight wars over gathering spots and hunting grounds. A lot of historical hunter-gather groups had already move onto subsisting off things like storing gathered acorns and other labour intensive foods that are in a grey area between gathering and farming.
Being at the Malthusian limit might also have meant their social norms were more influenced by cultural selection, and the social norms that get selected optimising for survival will be more oppressive than ones that develop in a more relaxed environment of plenty.
The native Americans in somewhere like California in 1788 probably had much worse lives than the first ever native Americans to reach California thousands of years ago when there would have been abundant large game and no one else there to compete for it.
Depends on the era. The reports of the eastern seaboard were of abounding food for the very simple reason that the ecosystem had yet to adjust to the loss of so many apex predators. (Fishermen from Europe traded with tribes, brought along a few diseases by accident. . . .)
Does it matter if hunter-gatherer societies are "better" when they'll inevitably get conquered and/or wiped out by civilized societies? Societies do not exist in a vacuum.
If it's the lifestyle we are adapted to, that is useful information. Even if the lifestyle isn't coming back, something like it can survive in art and culture, or just having realistic expectations about how happy we should be as wage slaves.
> If it's the lifestyle we are adapted to, that is useful information.
Is it? The word "adapted" doesn't carry in biology the connotations it does in ordinary English. The fact that enough of your kids survive to reproductive age that your tribe does not die out tells you little about actually useful things like your longevity or quality of life.
I'm talking about things like the effect woodland environments have on our senses. We don't have to live in the woods but it's worth taking that basic wiring into account when we're talking about balancing conservation and development.
What is the environment in which our biology rewards us with endorphins when we are present within it? What activities, what number of people? It is possible to build and preserve natural enclaves within an unnatural civilization. Many such parks
My thoughts as well. As soon as people figured out you could sustain a large population with intensive agriculture, the most obvious advantage was they could better defend themselves against(or conquer) rivals. So everyone either upgraded, got rolled over, or flew under the radar (but still got found eventually).
There are other advantages too. Modern medicine that can only be achieved in an industrial society saves people who would either die at birth, live as helpless cripples unable to contribute, or be terminated before they became a burden. Modern society also makes it easier for those are not as able as others to handle wilderness survival skills to contribute to the community. More knowledge and technology means more roles to fill.
There was a time during the early settling of North America where European settlers would "go native" and make themselves at home among the various tribes. But eventually the reverse started happening, especially with Native American women marrying white men and integrating into "modern" society. Nowadays it's extremely rare to find a pre-industrial society that doesn't rely on modern institutions at least as a fallback. The Amish visit modern doctors and rely on modern police and military for protection, and it's my understanding most of the hunter-gatherer and low-tech pastoral societies still remaining have people who go into the city for supplies or for permanent relocation.
I learned two things as a parent. One: we are much better off with things like dentistry, vaccinations, antibiotics, sunscreen, car seats, disposable nappies. Two: - to a child, these things suck ass. Grown ups are just children who have got used to it, but brushing your teeth sucks ass, getting vaccinated sucks ass, putting on suncream sucks ass. Owning this doesn't mean you have to RETVRN, it does mean realising there is likely going to be a psychological downside if we're doing things that suck ass all day, so let's organise our lives and other people's to allow for some slightly less curated forms of reality - while we're doing Abundance, let's try and keep some wilderness, for example.
GDP growth is not the only kind of value that people are willing to pay for. Also, don't forget to include large scale, long term environmental impact in the calculation. Covering everything in data centers (or anything else) will have significant secondary costs.
I have a notion that sedentary children might at least partly be those who have accommodated to being strapped down. Instead of increasing their desire to run around, they've given up on it.
I'm not going to say this applies to all children-- I've got some pre-seatbelt memories of my mother putting her arm in front of me for sudden stops, and I was fairly sedentary.
Yes, not only was there no seat belt, I was a little kid in the front seat.
I remember a therapist talking about the "free child" and the "adapted child" within us. Whether it's seat belts or anything else kids adapt to short term rewards for being seen and not heard, and that's good because it's a useful life skill, but frustrating and we all need a space where we can feel free.
I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like change, so I'm already a tough sell on using AI. I'm fine doing things the way I always have, thank you very much. So if you're going to sell us curmudgeonly types on using AI we're going to have to experience it as providing something better than what we currently got. The trouble is, every single time I have come to AI with a problem it has failed me. Worse than failed me, it is has been anti-helpful.
Now notably I have only come to AI with a problem two times. Both times I was trying to find a specific quote and source, and my usual Google-fu methods failed me. People say AI is great for doing research and finding things, so I went to Chat GPT to see if it could help me.
The first time (about a year ago) I could vaguely remember a C. S. Lewis quote, but not the exact words or where the quote was from exactly. I remembered the content of the quote though, as in what he was talking about and what his opinion was on it. Googling got me nowhere, with most of the results pointing to a quote on a similar topic, but not the one I was looking for. So I went to Chat GPT, wrote out in as much detail as I could what I was looking for, and Chat GPT confidently pointed me to the exact wrong Lewis essay that Google had tried to send me to. Just to be sure I read through the essay, and confirmed the quote I was looking for was not there. Frustrated, I kept picking away at the problem and flipping through C. S. Lewis essay collections until I finally found it.
Experience one, not good. Chat GPT no better than Google.
The second time was last month, and was a similar situation. I vaguely remembered a quote from a Discworld book, but Googling around I couldn't find it. I could remember what the quote was about, I was pretty sure which character was saying it, and I was pretty sure it was in one of two books ("Going Postal" or "Making Money"). After a half hour of failing to find it, I decided to give Chat GPT one more chance. I gave it the details I knew and asked if it could find the quote.
Chat GPT confidently responded that the quote I was looking for was from the book "Going Postal", and then it provided the quote in full. When I read the quote I thought "Well, it sounds like Pratchett's writing (not his best writing, but then again he wasn't always at his best). But is that a real quote, or did Chat GPT just make it up?" I asked if it could provide a page number so I could check, and Chat GPT replied that the book has not been digitized so it doesn't know the exact page number. That rang further alarm bells: if the book hasn't been digitized, how does Chat GPT know the quote?
This put me in a pickle. I was looking for the quote so I could quote it in an online discussion, but if it was a fake quote I'd look like a fool. I decided to put Chat GPT to the test and reread "Going Postal" to see if the quote was there. To cut to the chase: the quote was not there. I decided to re-read "Making Money" as well (because they're fun books to read) and there I found the actual quote I was looking for, which was not at all what Chat GPT provided. Chat GPT had generated the quote from whole cloth, and I would indeed have looked like an idiot if I had quoted it.
Now I admit that my use case is perhaps not typical. Maybe Chat GPT should come with a big disclaimer saying "Don't ask it about quotes, it will probably just make one up!" Nevertheless, the two times I actually needed something and decided to see if AI could help I was not only not provided with the answers I needed, I was provided with false answers. Until this is sorted out (which I don't have high confidence is possible) I'm going to continue to stay away from AI.
I just asked ChatGPT for the name of the most recently created monarchy, and it responded with Antigua and Barbuda (1981). However, in its own "miscellaneous data" section, it mentioned Saint Kitts and Nevis (1983)! Confident and self-contradictory is an amazing combination.
Do you know the difference between deep research, ChatGPT agent and GPT5-thinking web search, perplexity research, gemini deep research, clause web search?
I know there are more advanced products, and maybe one of them would have been a better fit. My main point is that people like me (who aren't already onboard with AI) are not going to go hunting for the right type of AI. They're going to hop over to chatgpt.com and see what everyone has been talking about. If they have experiences like mine, that's not good the AI companies when it comes to getting more people to use it! And they'll need more customers, they're bleeding enough money as it is. If I was unsure about using the free version and it failed me this badly, what are the odds that I will be inspired to pay for it and try again?
well the main purpose of the AI companies is not to increase their paying user base as much as possible, the final goal is to create the machine God and make earth an Utopia. Thats why the are not optimizing too hard for usability.
If Sam Altman is a representative example, the AI companies believe they need seven trillion dollars to create the Machine God. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone is ever going to give them seven trillion dollars for the purpose of creating the Machine God, in part because nobody has seven trillion dollars and a hypothetical conspiracy of seventy centibllionaires is going to be split by concerns about just whose Machine God it is going to be. So the AI companies are going to have to find some product, well short of the Machine God, that they can sell for seven trillion dollars.
Or maybe Sam was exaggerating and it's only seven hundred billion dollars. They're still going to need a honking big user base to achieve that.
Yeah AI is useful for me with procratination/adhd issues because it lowers the activation energy to get started on various tasks/ projects. I procrastinate especially on ambiguous tasks because I'm overwhelmed on how to start. AI is useful for giving a starting point. Now the starting point might completely off-base but that's enough to get my gears going.
Also it's been very useful in my job search process (still on going). It's a great study/prep companion, great also to prepare questions and guides. In the past, it was overwhelming flying blind, now it is not so daunting.
AI is great as a personal/ideation assistant, less so if I need accurate information.
Similar irritating experience when asking AI for song lyrics that I knew started with a certain line. It confidently said - Here they are! However, they were not right and after probing it eventually admitted that they were completely made up but "in the style" of the artist. Jeez Louise - just tell me you don't know!
I strongly agree with your experience. I find that most AIs that I have access to have an error rate of in excess of 50%.
I have been confidently told to go and consult with experts in specialist fields who are dead, feed frankly poisonous items to pets, invest in items that don't exist, and follow medical advice that was manifestly incorrect.
It doesn't really matter what it is in relation to; a seriously unacceptable error rate remains.
I'm frankly staggered that industry is prepared to integrate such flawed technology so rapidly.
In general, just avoid asking LLMs about quotes from books unless the book is incredibly well known. Likewise, avoid asking it for specific details from lesser known movies, games, etc. They aren't in its training set. It'll know a bit about them from synopses and reviews on the internet that made it into its training data, but it doesn't have the full text.
Even when it does have the full text in its training data, it still probably couldn't locate a quote. LLMs have to encounter information hundreds of times to learn it. A single instance isn't enough.
If it's something like Shakespeare's Macbeth, or The Catcher in the Rye, then it's probably seen it enough during training to identify specific passages.
LLMs are not good at memorizing corpuses of text precisely. They're good at distilling the gist of them and learning general patterns.
The best way to get an LLM to hallucinate is to ask it about something it has heard of, but has seen only a few times during training. If you ask it about something it never saw, it'll usually say it hasn't heard of it. If you ask it about something it's seen a lot, it'll usually give the right answer. But something it just barely knows about is the sweet spot for hallucinations.
This is exactly right. Basically, it wasn’t trained on full texts but instead was trained on (and can find via internet) a shit-load of reactions to the full texts. So it will kinda think it knows about the topic at hand—and since it’s job is to generalize from what it knows to answer questions—it will usually reason to an answer. This answer usually ends up being a hallucination.
So basically, don’t ask it specifics about texts. For basically *anything* else, they are really good. Just as one with a lot of knowledge on mechanical engineering can reason to the required suction pressure for a certain pump, an LLM can do the same. However, a person with a lot of context about a certain author can’t reason to an exact answer about what happened in a text unless they’ve read it or read directly about it. Same for an LLM.
There's a lot I hate about AI. However, I find I am using it more and more, mostly to answer questions about practical matters of the kind I used to investigate via googling. I get way better answers way faster using GPT. Most answers I actually follow up on, and so far I have not found that any of them involved hallucinations or errors. Anyhow, thought I'd put up a list of my last 10 or questions to GPT for you to see. I was quite satisfied with the results of all of them.
-I know someone who has trouble reading complex graphs. Can you help her? I have loaded an example of a graph. But I don't think you can "see." Here is the URL it came from: https://gurufrequent.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/stacked_bar_chart.jpg. Anyhow, my question is whether it will work for her to use you as a graph-explainer, or whether you could not do that because the thing that's giving her trouble is an image.
-Please give a concise explanation of spaced repetitive learning. Also give advice on how someone can use it to learn the chemical sturcture of a bunch of amino acids.
-It is possible to buy from online sellers of "research chemicals" the peptides that are the main active ingredient in Wegovy and Zepbound. But someone told me recently that a lot of the challenge of developing these drugs was finding a way to keep them available and active in the body for a long period of time. If used in their pure form, they do their job of altering things in the body to reduce food cravings, but disappear from the blood stream in a few hours. If using the pure drug, one would have self-inject the stuff every few hours. So the pharmaceutical companies that developed and sell these medications found ways to make them hang around in the system way longer. This involves somehow attaching the peptide to other big molecules. That results in a slow release of the actual peptides into the blood, and makes it possible to take just a weekly dose of the drug. Is this accurate? If so, does it make sense to buy the peptides, mix them with bacteriostatic water and inject them? Seems like that would only work if (1) the person who told me the pure peptides only stay available for a few hours is wrong or (2) the sellers of these drugs as research chemicals are selling them in a form where they are already attached to one of the big molecules that slow down how quickly they become available to the body.
-Mac OS: i have a folder on my desktop with multiple Pages documents. I would like to keep it open. However, every time I open my calendar app the folder automatically closes. Is there a way to keep it open?
-A bunch of studies found that tylenol during pregnancy increases the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Can you please look for a meta-analysis in a peer-reviewed journal that gives an estimated effect size for the risk? I am most interested in the risk of autism, but will settle for the risk of all neurodevelopmental disorders if that's all you can find,
-I am creating a character on the OpenArt site. So I am supposed to upload 4+ photos. I would like information about what makes a photo optimal, and what a set of photos should include..(a) is it useful to remove the original background and show the character on a plain white background? (b) Face shots vs full body shots: The face of my character is the really distinctive thing. Her body is a generic slim young female one. But I will be wanting to show the full body of the character in images I make, so the system needs to learn "slim young female" for any images that show her body. Given that proportion of the images I upload should be just the face, what proportion face plus body. (c) Angles: I have shots of the face from many angles, but not every one I might want later to make an image of. For instance I do not have one where character's face is seen from below. does that matter? (d) Facial expression: I have images of some fairly neutral expressions, of a slight smile, of thoughtful concentration, but that's all. No shots of anger, sadness, surprise, etc. I will want to make images showing these other emotions. Is that a problem? (e) How important is photo size, in pixels?
-I heard something today about brown fat in the human body. Somebody tried gathering a bunch of someone’s brown fat via liposuction, then injecting it in places that surrounded a cancerous tumor in the person’s body. Then they somehow ordered the brown fat to engage in rapid angiogenesis, and it did, and it was better at doing it than the tumor was, and the tumor was starved for blood and died. So this is what I remember of a casual description by someone interested but perhaps misinformed. Please only search juries journals and high quality magazines for smart laymen for info. I want an accurate Summary of whether this technique Works, what its limitations are, and whether it is being tried in real patients in clinical trials.
-I know somebody who wrote the software that underpins a business in Coda, and now has the job of switching all of it over to Elixir. He knows nothing about Elixir, and does not have broad knowledge of coding in various languages. What exists to assist him in the transition to Elixir? It could be consultants who specialize in assisting with this, books, courses, youtube videos.
-I need the name of a women's crisis center near san francisco where someone speaks mandarin
Asking an LLM is like torturing their training set for information. It can give you answers that are hard to find otherwise, but it also tends to be unreliable because it's apt to confess to whatever it thinks you want to hear. As with torture, it's best used for the sorts of questions where a purported answer is easy to falsify, and any answers you get from it should be viewed with a healthy measure of skepticism.
One of the few times I've used an LLM in earnest and gotten a useful answer was when my wife was talking about a book she dimly remembered liking and reading as a child. I gave ChatGPT the following description based on the bits and pieces she remembered:
>I am trying to find the title of a particular fantasy novel, probably written in or around the 1980s. The protagonist is a blond woman. The plot involves her being held captive by desert nomads with golden eyes. She has to pass some kind of tests or trials, one of which involves taking sashes from opponents.
ChatGPT proposed two books "The Blue Sword" by Robin McKinley and "The Golden Sword' by Janet Morris. My wife recognized the title and cover of The Blue Sword as well as plot elements I found in some online reviews and synopses. Several major details in ChatGPT's answer were hallucinated, but the top-line answer (which was the important part) was correct.
LLMs are a very weird tool, in that they are not made to solve a specific problem. As far as I can tell, the only way to find them useful for anything is to play around with them long enough to find out what they are and are not good for. If you come in with a specific problem you want to solve, you're almost certainly going to be disappointed. They seem to be kind of a solution in search of a problem.
As other commenters have said, they're useful for when you know a plaintext description of something and want a technical term.
More recent versions of ChatGPT, though, are able to search the web and synthesise answers based on what they find. One killer app this unlocked for me is the ability to ask for small hints on a videogame for which the internet contains big explicit walkthroughs but I don't want to be spoiled by reading those.
Another task they're great at is writing short simple functions in a programming language you're not familiar with.
And I got great solutions to questions like these:
* I've got FileZilla installed on one machine with my password saved into it. I've now forgotten the password, but can still use FileZilla from that machine. I now want to set up FileZilla on another machine and connect to the same server. Is there any way to transfer the cached password from one machine to the next one?
* I have two Windows machines at home on the same network. Just a home router, no dedicated filer or anything. Is there a way to share a disk drive from one to the other?
* How do I explain to children I'm teaching at church the difference between "afraid fear" and "holy fear of God"?
* In MS Word, if I have one table row with height set to 8.5, and then below it two rows with height set to 4.1, why do those two rows end up taller even though 4.1+4.1=8.2 < 8.5?
Ouch! I sympathize. One scenario that I find LLMs consistently useful for is when I don't know the specific name for something (physical law, theorem, physical model) but can describe it and want the name. ChatGPT and Gemini are typically able to find it.
The other case is on a par with a Google search: If I'm looking for an incident or a fact/statistic that I strongly expect to be visible on some web page, but I'm not sure how it is likely to be phrased, LLMs are pretty good at doing the equivalent of searching all the alternate phrasings in one search.
Does anyone (Scott?) have credible knowledge about the validity of claims that SSRI's, taken during puberty, may stunt growth? Someone in my life has developed an unhealthy obsession with this data such as it is (done their own research, read some papers, blogs, reddit etc).
About questions like this I go to GPT and ask it to research the question, specifying that it only search research studies in juried journals. Its answers include links to its sources, so I click through to the studies whose results seem most directly relevant. So far I have not caught the AI hallucinating or giving inaccurate summaries.
But wanted to add this: I am a psychologist, so do not prescribe drugs but have seen many people
who take SSRIs, and know many MD’s who prescribe them. It is not at all uncommon for kids and teenagers to be put in an SSRI. I have never heard a single word about SSRI’s stunting growth, not from doctors, not from patients, not from people
whose kids take an SSRI, not on Twitter, not in the press. These drugs have been prescribed for around 30 years. If they stunted growth the word would be out.
Yes, but it seems to affect young males less than it does middle-aged or older ones. What young guys typically say is that on an SSRI they masturbate somewhat less and take longer to climax. The guys who have told me this are in their 20s and 30s. I have not talked about this issue with teenage guys. And women are vaguer on the subject, but do say that SSRIs reduce their sex interest and make it harder to have an orgasm.
Pretty bad propaganda campaign in Britain right now.
Graham Linehan called for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in spaces such as bathrooms (offering the excuse that trans women's existence in those spaces is itself violent and therefore assaulting them must be self-defense).[1] Metropolitan police therefore arrested him on suspicion of incitement to violence when he landed in London. After being arrested, he now claims it was a "joke"; regardless, police were clear that suspected incitement to violence was the reason for arrest.
Yet headlines and subheadings in UK newspapers like The Times and The Telegraph, across plural articles per outlet, are consistently leaving out suspected incitement to violence, instead implying he was arrested for "gender-critical" "tweets" and "jokes," that the police are "in thrall to the trans lobby" wasting time "policing a toxic culture war" due to "the trans lobby's crackdown on language," etc. Although the articles themselves do usually quote the inciting tweet, they're paywalled and casual readers only see the headlines.[2]
The clear purpose of the propaganda, behind all these articles but made especially explicit in one of them, is to manufacture a narrative that "trans ideology is a threat to us all" because "those in positions of power and influence are still marching to trans activism’s tune."[3] I.e., to punish trans people, by inflaming anti-trans hostility, for the sin of having the same protections against incitement to violence as everyone else under standard existing UK law.
(Note: this story has nothing to do with whether you think UK law in general should be more like US law, where the violence would also have to be "imminent." If you think that, fine. But there's zero reason to pick this moment now specifically as the hook, unless you just hate trans people. Unfortunately this is something I've seen, e.g. Steven Pinker, who also pretended Linenan's arrest was about "speech that offends someone somewhere" and not about incitement to violence.[4])
[1] The call for physical violence: https://x.com/Glinner/status/1913850667229184008. Linehan was a skilled comedy-show writer before throwing it all away to be an anti-trans activist. It's a shame since I found The IT Crowd, Father Ted, and Black Books funny. Though in retrospect The IT Crowd did also have one "joke" where the punchline is that ha ha this trans woman must have been so stupid to think she was accepted, so I guess the signs were always there.
It would be very interesting to know where the propaganda started, and who may be behind it. You don't seem rapid response campaigns like this without some resources being deployed somewhere.
In in-the-moment tactical terms, idk, e.g. whether Linehan had people reach out or what, idk
In the longer term, anti-trans activists have been laying groundwork for some years, and imo had already reached outlets like The Times. The multi-front propaganda war also included the pseudoscience attack on trans healthcare [1] that had a recent UK victory with the "Cass Review" and with closing the GIDS clinic and banning puberty blockers.[2] And this overlaps with people like JK Rowling, former Economist editor Helen Joyce, Christian Nationalist think tanks like ADF and Heritage Foundation, etc. One impetus (not the only one) was that when Christian Nationalists lost the fight on gay marriage, they pivoted to a divide-and-conquer strategy against LGBT people.[3]
Some of it's tricky because there are also real scientific questions that people will disagree on, and even sometimes real sloppy mistakes that establishment scientists left on the ground to be picked up by otherwise bad-faith actors. Here's a miscellany of plotlines and themes and groups
- WPATH - The main professional body for trans healthcare practitioners. The one that transphobes have to slay or undermine to push their agenda. Trans people sometimes consider it imperfect (too gatekeep-y) but better than the current alternative of getting rid of gender-affirming care entirely
- The Dutch researchers - People like Gooren and de Vries and Delemarre van de Waal and Cohen-Kettenis. In the late 80s and early 90s pioneered the approach of using puberty blockers for trans adolescents (so they don't have to go through the psychological torture of unwanted puberty), then if carefully diagnosed, letting them go on to gender-affirming hormones. At the conservative (gatekeep-y?) end of gender-affirming care practitioners.
- The CAMH sexologists - People like Zucker and Blanchard and Cantor from the old Toronto CAMH gender clinic (and Bailey as an honorary US affiliate). Had some clout due to being among the early trans researchers in the 70s and 80s. Imo not ideologically transphobic, but in love with their own speculative theories, which happen to be ones that if true would give transphobes useful talking points, so they end up in bed with transphobes. This includes Blanchard's old "autogynephilia theory" (trans lesbians are men with a manly fetish for being women) and more recently supporting the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" theory (that there's a social contagion epidemic of teenage girls suddenly catching being-a-trans-boy at school).
- ROGD - the latter theory mentioned. It's what the network especially used to build itself over the last decade. It started with scared confused parents, but was quickly latched onto and spread by Christian Nationalists like ADF. The "evidence" is still just surveys of parents, cherrypicked from anti-trans websites, who think their trans teen must have had a rapid onset instead of just not having come out to them earlier (these papers never ask the teens). Convenient for transphobes because it lets them say both that they're not really trans, and that by accepting trans people we're transing the kids.
- SEGM and Genspect - Two SPLC-designated hate groups. The former calls itself the "Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine" like a professional society, the latter is more openly a lobby group, both have much overlap in founding members and both really have the goal of trying to stop as much transition as possible. Although both are ideologues and propagandists, the former does include technically-able researchers that can get published and that sometimes even find a real point to make (on top of the fake points). E.g., one of the Dutch papers did something silly—they had no sex-neutral measure of gender dysphoria yet, so to compare dysphoria before and after transition they switched which sex-specific scale to use, but that just ends up implying "if after removing your breasts you don't suddenly wish you had breasts, that means your dysphoria went away," which is a silly measure—and to my annoyance that meant a SEGM guy got to be the one to notice. These groups have become two of the central nodes in the anti-trans activist network.
- Desistance? - From the 60s-80s some research checked if "girly" prepubescent boys would grow to be trans women, and it turned out they mostly grow to be gay men. This had nothing to do with saying "I'm a girl," though, it was just stuff like preferring dolls to trucks or whatever. Similar problems with research persisted through the DSM-IV, where "Gender Identity Disorder" didn't actually require identifying as the opposite gender. The DSM-V now has a proper "Gender Dysphoria" diagnosis but there's still not yet much research on how predictive childhood gender dysphoria is of adult gender dysphoria using that label. Even in the earlier research, a common conclusion ended up being that childhood dysphoria(?) doesn't predict you'll be a trans woman but adolescent dysphoria does (e.g., that's the view of Zucker and Cantor). That shift was the background of the Dutch protocol, e.g. the Dutch researchers were also starting to learn, contrary to older assumptions, that trans adolescents really were trans. Today transphobes like to rely on misunderstanding the old research, to pretend we're transing the gay kids.
- Bell v Tavistock - A failed 2020 lawsuit against the Tavistock GIDS clinic that nevertheless gave transphobes talking points and momentum. One of these was that since most girly boys don't grow into trans women, but most trans adolescents who seek medical transition on purpose do remain trans, puberty blockers must be transing the kids.
- Jesse Singal - wrote an Atlantic article in 2018 that publicized the worries about trans adolescents transitioning, and whether we'd "gone too far" / not gatekeep-y enough even if for some it's lifesaving. Trans people often don't trust + consider him a concern troll. Though the one time I publicly repeated an accusation about his work it turned out to be false and I had to apologise.
- Abigail Shrier and Helen Joyce - Shrier wrote "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" in 2020 and Joyce wrote "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" in 2021. Two of the big instances of laundering anti-trans ideology to make it seem respectable in polite society
- Ben Shapiro's Bud Light bubble - Bud Light was slightly nice to the trans woman Dylan Mulvaney once, giving her a can with her face on it that she could show her insta. In 2023 Ben Shapiro's "Daily Wire" ran with it as an outrage clickbait story, I can't believe they're shoving trans ideology down our throats etc, look now some people protested it, Bud Light was so stupid and suicidal for being woke, their stock price might dip, oh look saying that made their stock price dip, oh look it dipped, oh it's going down oh no it's going down oh no what a disaster for Bud Light that they destroyed their stock price by being woke. (and then it went back up) This felt like an open-war declaration of power against rainbow capitalism: "The far right are the strong ones now, we can hit your wallet, choose us over rich gay millennials."
- Heritage Foundation - the guys who wrote the Project 2025 playbook for entrenching right-wing power in America, that Trump said he had nothing to do with before following it to the letter. I guess they're the guys who got Trump on board with targeting trans rights in the US (imo he personally doesn't care, but he needs his far-right base and someone to scapegoat)
"Graham Linehan called for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in spaces such as bathrooms (offering the excuse that trans women's existence in those spaces is itself violent and therefore assaulting them must be self-defense)"
And the only reason you know about this, the only reason any of us here know that he said this. is because the Metropolitan Police had him arrested. Does His Majesty's Government have the slightest understanding of the Streisand Effect?
The preference cascade you all are going to go through over this, is going to rival Brexit in the eyes of the dumbstruck elite trying to figure out how that happened. I don't know where the line will be drawn, or even in what direction, but it's going to be fun to watch and laugh from a safe distance.
Yeah, I get why this is dangerous. You worry if the "scapegoat politicians rant about to avoid doing anything" is changing to be trans people due to wokeness overstepping, and they are seriously vulnerable.
TBH "good fences make good neighbors" is what we need now, and lot less punditry. It'd have been better if the left had not played the lgbt card as hard as it did, because asking too much backfires, but going too far in the other way sucks too.
Would it satisfy you if the headlines were something like "Graham Linehan arrested, accused of incitement to violence"? Your theory seems to be that the headline choices were fueled by anti-trans hostility, which is plausible, but it seems like there are many other potential reasons the editors in question put it differently.
Perhaps they disagree with the laws, and this is part of a long game to undercut them. That would still be propaganda, in a sense, but not the thing you want to pin on them.
Maybe they're calling bullshit on the arrest because they sincerely disagree that a conditional statement is incitement at all.
Maybe they're serving some other purpose entirely? It looks like you could make a fair case that the Times is doing PR for the Met Police commissioner:
> Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Met Police, has admitted that officers should not be “policing toxic culture war debates” after the arrest of the Father Ted creator Graham Linehan over gender-critical tweets.
> Rowley said successive governments had left police “between a rock and a hard place” and that officers were given no choice but to investigate Linehan’s tweets as a crime.
In our world of attentional scarcity, headlines hit more eyeballs than the rest of the newspaper, and I relate to being extremely irritated by their distortions and omissions. But you're going to live or die on how well you make your case that "arrested for inciting violence" deserves top billing, and whether your theory of motive is persuasive.
>Would it satisfy you if the headlines were something like "Graham Linehan arrested, accused of incitement to violence"?
Yes. That would be honest.
>Your theory seems to be that the headline choices were fueled by anti-trans hostility, which is plausible, but
First, the consistency proves it; this is across multiple headlines, social media posts, etc. Second, the UK establishment in recent years has become consistently hostile to trans people, so this new instance isn't surprising. Third, e.g. in the case of The Times, they have an editorial, reflecting the views of the editorial board, which explicitly describes trans women as "biological males invading [women's] spaces" (https://archive.is/RIQKY) and so on; one of The Telegraph pieces I already quoted as framing the story as "trans ideology is a threat to us all."
>which explicitly describes trans women as "biological males invading [women's] spaces" (https://archive.is/RIQKY) and so on; one of The Telegraph pieces I already quoted as framing the story as "trans ideology is a threat to us all."
Some women want their own spaces without trans people. If you want to deny them that don't act surprised when they make you their enemy.
In the context of my reply to Deadpan, we've already established that the UK newspaper headlines were deliberately schemingly dishonest about the facts; now we're establishing motive.
For the record, I disagree with this. You have promoted a circular and I think fairly tendentious theory about the editors' motivation, which also serves as the primary evidence for your claim that their headlines were "deliberately, schemingly dishonest".
I think foregrounding the incitement charges would have been more dishonest than the chosen ones. It would have been technically true, but seem highly misleading. As others have pointed out, this is a really marginal case of "incitement to violence", especially if you consider ordinary usage. It's a phrase that connotes very different behavior to the casual reader.
When someone openly calls for physical violence against trans people, and is therefore arrested on suspicion of incitement to violence under standard UK law, no, it is not "more dishonest" to tell the truth about it than to lie that the enforcement of standard UK law is "the trans lobby's crackdown on speech."
Re: your more specific suggestions re: the Met police chief:
Nah, that's at most secondary to the anti-trans hostility ("he's willing to apologize for protecting trans people's rights, so we'll give him a second chance"). There's not even any PR to need doing, *except* insofar as they're inflaming anger about him enforcing the law. (Also the Met chief headline was an afterthought, the initial headline for that article was a quote from health secretary Wes Streeting instead, the guy who banned puberty blockers: https://archive.is/yIAS8.)
I will add, though, that there might be overlap with anti-migrant hostility. The cops also arrest people for inciting violence against migrants (e.g., Lucy Connolly said to "set fire to all the hotels full of the fucking [asylum-seekers] for all I care") and the far-right is using these together as their examples of the woke left policing speech (not because they actually care about free speech, ofc, but because they specifically want people to keep inciting violence against migrants). These narratives overlap and it's plausible that these newspapers might also treat them as complementary.
It seems like every time I see this opening gambit, it ends up with a motte-and-bailey.
Motte: There is at least one situation somewhere in which I will agree that something someone said (a mob boss ordering someone whacked, a media figure spreading lies about someone who p-ssed him off, the guy who shouts "let's get that f--ker" just before the mob lynches someone) can be prosecuted somehow.
Bailey: Opposition politicians who make speeches that offend the people in power can be arrested, gadfly journalists who publish stories that upset the wrong fellow can be tossed in jail, books that are deemed bad for public order can be banned, random idiots posting dumb offensive things on twitter can be arrested, etc.
Keyword "the woke left" (here), "the trans lobby" (earlier). As I've repeatedly made clear, including in the original comment, this discussion is *not about* comparing legal systems' standards of incitement to violence. It's about the media deliberately misleading readers about what happened, to pretend enforcement of standard UK law = trans people (and maybe asylum seekers) ruining the UK.
I think you have more in common with Linehan than you might think. Both of you use inflammatory language and jump to wildly uncharitable conclusions about the mental state of those you argue with. Neither of you ought to be arrested for it, but both of you are very annoying in the same kind of way.
I'm aware that my snarky replies to bad faith, and Linehan's call to violently physically assault trans people in bathrooms, can both be described as "inflammatory language."
I find it odd to be equally annoyed by sarcasm and by open calls to violently physically assault trans people in bathrooms (though you also shouldn't be arrested for oddity).
Seems to me like you lack a theory of mind for people with different moral values, thus cannot understand how they look at Linehan's tweet and see it so differently from you. You think they're lying about facts when it's really a disagreement over values.
Graham Linehan is not in this comment section, you are. And you are not responding to him, you are responding to the good people of the ACX commentariat. Just because Graham Linehan is an asshat doesn't mean you get to be one too (and that it doesn't really count since you're not transphobic).
tbf I do think I'm more openly sarcastic more often than the average ACX commenter
(In the case I think Nate's referring to, I do think I was right that the other guy was sneakily in bad faith, and that sarcasm was fine and merited; but different norms exist and have different advantages, sarcasm does have uses but so does treating someone like they're in good faith even when they aren't, etc. But that's a big tangent so I wasn't going to argue it lol)
Oh, how the wheel turns. The heroes of social liberation of yore, who triumphed over the likes of me and other social conservatives, are now on the bottom of Fortune's rotation as liberalisation moves on, the Overton Window shifts, and now they are the bad thinkers full of the evil of the past.
Once upon a time, David, Graham Linehan was feted (in my small green island nation) by the right-thinking and liberal as a bastion of all good socially progressive values, standing up to mock the sacred cows of the Catholic Church and conservative Irish society, two fingers up to the social conservative likes of me who retained some at least of the old values and didn't think Dev's speech about the comely maidens at the crossroads was risible or sexist or the other accusations made at it. Hopelessly idealistic and based on an idealised lifestyle that never was, but well-intentioned (think of it in anti-gentrification terms of today).
He achieved the ultimate accolade of the wannabe Irish chattering classes in the arts (I use the term very loosely) of fecking off to London and making it (semi-)big there.
But now cometh the dawn of an even more socially liberal and progressive credo from even more impeccably right-thinking types, and Linehan and his ilk are now fossils, as mired in the muck of the bad old mindsets as, well, the dinosaur social conservatives like myself (Andrew Sullivan gets into the same trouble for the same reasons of not being sufficiently enthusiastic for the New Thing).
I must admit to a degree of Schadenfreude here. Indeed, the wheel of Fortune turns and the king today is the beggar tomorrow.
And then you come steaming in here with the most provocative take on what is happening to Linehan possible, clearly with the viewpoint and mindset that there is Only One Permissible Right Way To React, and I have to ask: what did you expect to happen? Did you really think this would be an echo chamber of "indeed, how appalling!"
No expert on Irish popular opinion, but it sounds like you're stereotyping.
Or, let's put it this way - the validity of the message should not depend on the messenger. I know nothing at all about Linehan, and couldn't care less. If he spoke truths before, good on him. If he spreads hate speech now, he should be condemned. End of story.
Yes, but just like the articles aren't actually about the laws themselves, your post isn't about clickbait. Otherwise, why does this suddenly cross the line for you, when the media has been dishonest for its entire existence? No, this is about whether trans people are deserving of protection by society. So please, don't be surprised by such a cold reception.
I think we would all be better off if you stopped beating around the bush and just started the thread with "should the state protect trans people from transphobia and associated threats of violence?" We could have a much shorter and succinct discussion, though I doubt it'll be any more productive...
"No, this is about whether trans people are deserving of protection by society."
Eh, kind of... But bear in mind that we are not talking about trans people being assaulted at random on the street; this is specifically about males who enter and refuse to leave the female bathroom. There is an obvious trade-off there against whether females are deserving of protection against predatory males who would abuse gender self-ID to access what we all used to uncomplicatedly think of as female-only spaces.
"Graham Linehan wants to use brutal physical violence against poor harmless little cowering timorous beasties of transwomen! The newspapers are covering it in a neutral manner, this is propaganda! Fight fight fight!"
That is the substance of your original comment, so far as I can see.
"He is better remembered for the language of his speeches than for his politics – they were riddled with mixed metaphors ("Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I'll nip him in the bud"), malapropisms and other unfortunate turns of phrase ("Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?"). Roche may have been Richard Brinsley Sheridan's model for Mrs Malaprop. While arguing for a bill, Roche once said, "It would surely be better, Mr. Speaker, to give up not only a part, but, if necessary, even the whole, of our constitution, to preserve the remainder!"
The actual tweet was: ""If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls."[
That is a lot more conditional than how you framed it. Are we SURE that that is normally prosecutable under UK law? It might be, since UK law (and most non-US law) is terrible on "incitement," but are we sure?
No expert on UK law, but that's definitely advocating violence against innocent people. Being trans-identified male", whether one approves of this or not, should not result in a physical assault.
I'm a straight up biological male. If I wander into a woman's bathroom, should I get kicked in the nuts?
But I am literally asking about whether this sort of conditional threat actually violates UK law.
>If I wander into a woman's bathroom, should I get kicked in the nuts?
No. But that is irrelevant to the legal question. You shouldn't get kicked in the nuts in the US either. Nevertheless, the tweet is not illegal in the US.
Yes, advocating physical violence against trans women in bathrooms is enough under UK law is enough to be "suspicion of inciting violence."
And yes, I'm sure that was the reason for arrest, because the cops explicitly said suspicion of inciting violence was the reason for arrest.
We'll see if it goes to court and who wins. My comment isn't a prediction market. My comment is about UK newspaper headlines deliberately misleading readers about what happened, out of malice towards trans people.
>Yes, advocating physical violence against trans women in bathrooms is enough under UK law is enough to be "suspicion of inciting violence."
That isn't my question. My question is whether the highly conditional statement at issue constitutes advocating physical violence under UK law, and even if so, whether the police regularly arrest people for such conditional statements.
>And yes, I'm sure that was the reason for arrest,
I guess one question is about whether this kind of attenuated version of incitement of violence ought to be illegal. I'll be the normal human here and think my society's rules wrt this stuff are the best, but I think in the US, to get arrested for incitement things have to be a lot more immediate--less "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and more "there the f--ker is now, let's get him!"
The other question is how much the enforcement is neutral within the rules vs how much it ends up being enforced harder on beliefs the local authorities dislike than ones they like. For example, if a transwoman in the UK tweeted back that she hoped someone punched Lineham in the balls, would that also be likely to get her arrested?
I'm relaxed about the UK maintaining the longstanding view that public speech is a potential public order offence, a principle supported by Edmund Burke. However the thing about the Internet is you can say the first dumb thing that comes into your head from the comfort of your living room. I wouldn't want a wild west but e.g a cooling off period where you can retract your tweet without prosecution seems reasonable.
The speaker's wife made a libellous tweet a few years ago about Lord MacAlpine and swiftly deleted it but still had to face a libel charge. Obviously that's libel which is different, but in general our speech laws are struggling to adapt to the Internet - its only been around 30 years!
(clarifying again that my comment isn't discussing a comparison of legal systems, my comment is discussing the UK newspapers' headlines misreading readers about what happened out of malice towards trans people)
What's your solution? There's no political consensus to implement the Leveson report. We have the press we have. I'm okay with Linehan being arrested for a public order offense, but these activists are no angels either, I can't feel too sorry for them. I suggest trans folk play a long game similar to the very effective long game played by the gay community over the decades. Build up social capital first, then go after your enemies. The other way round doesn’t work.
"Don't write headlines the way I want them to be written" = "scheming liars and dishonest propaganda".
Headlines are meant to be attention-grabbing and stupid, while the argument (if any) is made in the body of the article. I wouldn't judge coverage of anything in general by the headlines.
Journalism student here. Headlines are supposed to accurately inform the potential reader what is in the article. Neither the article, nor the headline, should promote violence nor promulgate errors and lies.
1. make people aware of what's happening, so the propaganda campaign doesn't work. That's what I'm doing here now.
2. for UK newspapers, there are complaint mechanisms e.g. The Times and The Telegraph are both covered by IPSO. Anyone can file a complaint if the issue is accuracy [e.g. I can't request an apology since the headlines aren't about me, but I can request correction]. I did file, we'll see if anything comes of it.)
Otherwise I'm not going to try to go into "what trans people should do" in the face of this coordinated attempt to destroy trans people's social capital.
I'm not trans and neither are you. My job isn't to criticize trans people under the guise of pretending to strategize. My job is to call out the dishonest propaganda when I notice it.
Seems it's just people making their voice heard, no? If the people want a society where trans people are not tolerated, then that's what they'll get. The liberal elite can't go against the tide forever.
I am curious though, what are the UK people's thoughts on the speech laws themselves? Because the situation changes a lot depending on whether the people think the laws are completely bad or this was simply a misapplication. More specifically, would they advocate for the rights of a Muslim man advocating for violence against whites? If not, then the conflict is over what morality is enforced, not the enforcement itself.
Do you think only a "liberal elite" advocate for individual human rights? Although I admit that it's possible only some "liberal elite" are willing to advocate for same against the power of the mob. If so, good on them.
I think they're the only ones who pretend that all human life is equally valuable and deserving of respect, regardless of sex, race, competency, productivity, or disposition. That's utterly ridiculous, of course, so much so that even liberals themselves don't act as if they believed that. It was inevitable that the right would try to destroy that morality, given their already existing opposition to such liberalism.
This I guess is the crux of a lot of disagreement. It is very, very obvious, maybe one might even say "self-evident", that not every human life is equally valuable; there are some people whose death would be an obvious catastrophe, and others whose death would be an obvious net benefit for society, but there are also obvious game-theoretical reasons why we might not want any formal, especially government sponsored, attempts at quantifying the relative value of different people's lives.
Morality has nothing to do with it. Our unwritten constitution spasms against any group displaying strong passions, whether for good or evil. Do you mind?? We're having tea
Oh I agree, I just think it's unparsimonious to attribute a specific motive to English institutions beyond a national latitudinarian spirit. Political groups do infiltrate institutions up to a point, but the institutions cherry pick the parts of those groups that most closely resemble the national ideal.
>Seems it's just people making their voice heard, no?
That's a weird way to spell "openly calling for physical violence against trans people."
>The liberal elite can't go against the tide forever.
This isn't "the tide." This is the media elite deliberately misleading the public about what happened, to deliberately try to manipulate public opinion.
Are you ignoring the facts (Linehan called for violence and was arrested on suspicion of incitement to violence, and headlines demonstrably deliberately misled readers about it) to say "haha gotcha, that true accusation sounds like another accusation that may or may not have been true (I'm vagueposting)"
I think phrases like "that's a weird way to spell" are bad faith and fall below the threshold of good faith conversation typically maintained in this comment section. We can have disagreements about whether Linehan's speech is arrest-worthy without resorting to twitter-level digs.
You're correct that I don't think Jim made his statement in good faith, hence my sarcasm.
(Obviously calling to violently physical assault trans people isn't just "people making their voices heard" in the relevant UK legal sense; and also obviously neither is a deliberate media-headline campaign to mislead people about it. And I think Jim knows this.)
You're acting like these papers aren't businesses. If there was no demand for the truth they were peddling, it wouldn't be sustainable to distribute it. But there is. Even the rabble wouldn't blindly believe that trans people were the root of the sickness unless there was a reason for them to want to believe it. The right is simply winning in the marketplace of ideas against the left.
Is it fair that only the ruling party gets to push propaganda? If people wanted to hear what liberals had to say, they would take it as gospel. But it seems that this is the truth people want. Your outrage is falling on deaf ears.
I guess the real question is about the actual enforcement of these laws. Like if they actually do go out and arrest everyone who makes about the same level of comment with regard to violence, then I think your point is valid.
But if this is a discretionary application of these laws which is outside of how it is normally enforced I could see where the anger is coming from on the other side.
Ultimately it seems like everyone might just be mad about unequal application of these laws without anyone really providing insight on the basic question of how they are normally applied.
I find it unlikely that it's discretionary application outside how it's usually enforced, given that the Met chief is publicly bending over backwards to say "I'm sorry, I don't like protecting trans people from incitement to violence, I wish I didn't have to but the law forced me to" (paraphrased)
Sorry, but the American legal position is just better. I guess you can be mad that this specific event is when the UK media finally realized this, but like, you can't really have free and open political discussion without the ability to advocate for violence in hypothetical situations. That's what politics *is*. It's a collective decision for how to apply (or not to apply) the state's monopoly on violence.
I don't think I agree here because it sounds like you are equating getting assaulted in a bathroom by a stranger with being arrested. Do I misunderstand?
That said, I am a fan of the traditional American approach to free speech.
> you can't really have free and open political discussion without the ability to advocate for violence in hypothetical situations. That's what politics *is*. It's a collective decision for how to apply (or not to apply) the state's monopoly on violence.
How does that apply here? Linehan seems to be in trouble for encouraging members of the public to commit assault ("punch them in the balls"), not for anything he said about what the law should be or how the state should enforce it.
I don't know how UK law handles that kind of discussion, but again I don't see how it is directly relevant to this case. Linehan said "punch them in the balls", not "you should be allowed to punch them in the balls".
"(Note: this story has nothing to do with whether you think UK law in general should be more like US law, where the violence would also have to be 'imminent.' If you think that, fine. But there's zero reason to pick this moment now specifically as the hook, unless you just hate trans people. Unfortunately this is something I've seen, e.g. Steven Pinker, who also pretended Linenan's arrest was about 'speech that offends someone somewhere' and not about incitement to violence.[4])"
Again: this isn't about "when the UK media finally realized this." It's about the UK media going on a deliberate propaganda campaign to mislead readers, in order to deliberately inflame hostility towards trans people, out of deliberate malice towards trans people.
Under what circumstances, in your view, is it acceptable to argue for broad free speech protections, if not in a situation where someone is arrested for speech that would have been protected under a better legal regime?
What better legal regime? The US? He answered that already. One could argue that there was no imminent threat involved, and that would have some merit, but so far no one has done that.
If you want people to believe you that you're really just being principled, you could start by 1. making your own thread (instead of trying to hijack and deflect a thread about media's deliberate dishonesty out of malice towards trans people), and 2. if you include the arrest, at least be honest about what happened (that's how you can tell Pinker isn't sincere, he also tried to pretend it was just for "speech that offends someone somewhere")
(Tbh I don't even believe that they "finally realized this." If they had, they would have made their argument sincerely instead of deliberately misleading readers. It's just rhetoric, a tool of attack.)
You think it's propaganda to not smear him by including the state's trumped-up charges? Would you say the same about when people writing about, say, Navalny being imprisoned in Russia, left out that he was convicted of … terrorism, I think?
It's odd to pretend the Met "trumped up" the charges, when 1. the facts are plain and visible to everyone and 2. the Met chief has since publicly bending over backwards to apologize for having to enforce the law lol, he clearly wishes he didn't have to
> You think it's propaganda to not smear him by including the state's trumped-up charges?
While my sympathies are with Linehan on this one, I do think that if you're going to report on someone being arrested or charged then yes, you definitely should mention what they were arrested or charged for, that's just basic context.
They DO mention what he was arrested for: his tweets. Beyond the possible sentence, the precise nature of the charges are either a curiosity or a distraction: the reasons most modern states go through the charade of making up charges and giving their targets trials instead of simply sentencing them might be of some historical interest, but I disagree that it's really relevant context.
The headlines deliberately left out the actual and official reason for arrest (suspicion of incitement to violence), and deliberately, falsely, made it sound like this was just about offense.
Unlike just about everyone else who has posted here, your argument has some merit. I don't know how to measure this or where to draw the line. Have you a suggestion?
I would suggest that his tweet is more dangerous because it is more specific. It lays out who and where people should be assaulted.
"Suck my dick" has a long, well-known history as a metaphorical taunt.
Offering an explicit justification for why it must be self-defence to assault trans women in bathrooms, before suggesting people assault trans women in bathrooms—and then doubling down again on his justification for assaulting trans women in bathrooms ("Women have a right to defend themselves from strange men in their spaces")—isn't a metaphor.
I'm a fan of the US's stance on this where the line for incitement is a lot higher. I do not find the arrest to be at all justifiable and arguments in support of it strike me as nakedly Orwellian. I think the UK is on an _extremely_ bad path. Note that the US also has it's fair share of free speech problems right now, but acknowledging that fact does not in any way prevent me from also pointing out places that are even worse.
Free speech is _the_ bedrock of a liberal society and whenever it is undermined, liberal society more broadly is also damaged.
"(Note: this story has nothing to do with whether you think UK law in general should be more like US law, where the violence would also have to be 'imminent.' If you think that, fine. But there's zero reason to pick this moment now specifically as the hook, unless you just hate trans people. Unfortunately this is something I've seen, e.g. Steven Pinker, who also pretended Linenan's arrest was about 'speech that offends someone somewhere' and not about incitement to violence.[4])"
-edit- I had an entire long wall of text posted and decided it's probably not worth the time, so I deleted it. This is an open thread, and this whole thing is way too culture war. I'm surprised it hasn't been nuked yet. Suffice it to say: I'm deeply concerned about the UK. I'm curious (rhetorically; no need to actually answer) if you are as supportive of 80 year old women getting arrested for expressing support for supposed "terrorist" organizations.
No, unless they spell out who and where people should be assaulted. I think that Linehan could be sued in the US if someone followed his advice. Alex Jones was successfully sued for less than that.
I thought it was still banned in open threads and only allowed in the hidden threads. But even if it's not banned anymore, I am trying to get better about not engaging in online discussion in those more controversial topics. I think that the medium of text is too signal/context poor to allow for very productive discussion on charged topics. I still have the reflex desire to engage (thus my first comment), but I'm trying to get better about fighting that reflex (thus the deletion of my second comment). I don't really like my current in-between spot since it isn't really fair to the people (like yourself) I'm initially replying to to suddenly just disappear/delete a comment, but I think it's an unfortunate necessity until I finish training myself to just leave the third rails alone.
Assuming you believe in this "core concept of liberal democracies" are you also "deeply worried for the future of," say, Saudi Arabia? You could instead recognize that not all countries or peoples share American values, and most of them do okay, even if you or I would prefer to live somewhere freeër.
Saudi Arabia was never a liberal democracy. I'm not worried about their future; their present is already (from my perspective) bad. If they don't agree, that's fine. But they aren't getting worse, from any perspective (at least not as far as I have heard). Plus, I think it's also totally reasonable to care more about countries that are culturally/historically/etc more closely connected to the US. Both because I just care more about them, and also because their path says more about potential future US paths.
Yep, that's my point: you are mistaken in thinking the UK was ever other than what it from a "freedom of speech/expression" perspective, and you'd be better served thinking of it as a European version of a Gulf Monarchy rather than a posh-accented American state.
I don't believe the path of Britain is particularly informative of the US's future. Sure, there are lessons that may be learnt, and warnings that may be heeded, but that's true of almost anywhere. Though perhaps the lessons are easier to learn if don't need subtitles.
[edit: typed this response to the quoted line from your original reply, before you deleted it]
>I'm not sure why you are posting this
I was very clear why I'm posting this. The reality is that trans people get the same protections against incitement to violence, under standard UK law, as everybody else. The deliberately false propaganda narrative, deliberately manufactured by these newspapers out of malice towards trans people, is that "the police are in thrall to the trans lobby's crackdown on speech."
The way you started off your first comment did sound like you wanted to get a fight going. As others have remarked, the Culture War topics aren't for open threads.
The actual tweet was "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls." So yes, "calling for violence" but violence against someone who's in a space they're not allowed to be and refuses to leave if asked is not necessarily criminal.
Actually it is, depending on local ordinances. I'm a biological male. In most places you can't legally assault me because I am in a female only space, although you could call the cops. The reason why the male is there, and how they are behaving, will matter a lot.
Must have missed the part where he constrained his call to violence to pertain only to private property and the owners thereof, can you link to it?
Surely that’s not something you are just trying to shoehorn into the discuss as a fig leaf for someone calling for extrajudicial and wildly disproportionate violence.
My comment already said that he "called for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in spaces such as bathrooms."
All you're adding is the word games he used to justify his call to violence to himself. (Words that, incidentally, make it obvious he wasn't joking; he *really does* think it's acceptable to violently physically assault trans women in bathrooms. As do you, I'm gathering.)
It's called asking if he's actually guilty. "Israel should crush Hamas" is "inciting violence" but it's not illegal incitement to violence because the action being called for isn't illegal.
So to confirm: you aren't joking, you *do* think it's acceptable to call for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in bathrooms.
(In the UK that would be illegal, as Linehan found out. In the US under the First Amendment I think it's legal unless the violence is also "imminent.")
David, you have achieved something greater than world peace, ending poverty, or solving AI values alignment: you have made me agree with Alexander Turok.
Honestly, if you parrot "call for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in bathrooms" one more time, I'll personally go out and look for a trans woman to punch in the face. Or balls, if any.
Your line of attack is too much like the occasional evangelical vegan who pops up and tries "meat is murder and torture and murder and did I say murder and meat eaters are immoral horrible monsters" on here, and keeps repeating "meat murder! torture! rape!" like a broken record no matter what response they get.
Eventually and inevitably they end up getting bad responses.
*If* the owners of the bathrooms make clear they're for biological women only, the trans people are told this, and refuse to leave, yes, I think it's acceptable to call for violence to remove the trespassers.
I think trans people should have the same right, if they don't want Joe Bible Belt on their property, tell him to leave, and he refuses, kick him out.
Punching him in the balls is not kicking him out. I don't consider it acceptable to punch either the trans woman or Joe Bible Belt in the balls for trespassing, because that action is clearly more intended to inflict pain than to remove him from the premises.
He posted a dumb tweet and got arrested for it. I think what makes this moment particularly bad for that is that British police have been found to be conspiring with Pakistani rape gangs to rape (hundreds of?) thousands of British girls over decades, with the indifference or possibly even tacit support of government and media. And the response to people like Tommy Robinson and Katie Holmes who tried to call it out was to come after them with the media and the law. And instead of dealing honestly with the problem now, thousands of people are being arrested every month for sharing posts on social media.
Okay, but whatever bad thing some British police have or have not done seems mostly irrelevant to what Linehan did and whether it made sense to arrest him for it. I mean, the LAPD have sometimes been implicated in beatings and framing people, and yet I still think they should arrest shoplifters and muggers.
In a narrow sense, you’re right, but it strikes me that the narrow debate around whether Linehan’s tweet counted as incitement under UK law is somewhat like asking if the Boston Tea Party rioters did or did not commit offenses under the authority of his Majesty King George III, or whether the confiscation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s wares was legal or not under the Tunisian regime.
At some point, when the authoritarianism becomes blatant enough, for long enough, people stop respecting the letter of the law.
Are you saying that what Linehan did was for some larger cause? Do you think he was resisting an immoral level of government authoritarianism? Are you saying that posting tweets is equivalent to resisting taxes imposed by an unelected regime?
Isn't he the guy who set himself on fire as a protest against the Tunisian regime? Even in the terms of how you describe it, it still doesn't make sense. Linehan wasn't doing something normal and innocent, but something aggressive and dangerous to others. *How* dangerous could be argued, as could the degree of sanction he should face. You could say he's like a grafitti sprayer who shouldn't face major jail time, and I could buy that. But he ain't no martyr.
> British police have been found to be conspiring with Pakistani rape gangs to rape (hundreds of?) thousands of British girls over decades, with the indifference or possibly even tacit support of government and media
Could you provide a source for this claim?
I am sure there are hundreds of sources, but I have trouble finding trustworthy ones on this topic, since I have little experience with the british news landscape.
Since the claim is so strong, and because you seem very sure if it, I expect the source for your confidence to be extremely convincing.
Jess Phillips has admitted she waited 14 years for action on the grooming gangs. Fourteen years. Her own words. Fourteen years in which she knew Pakistani rape gangs were abusing children. Fourteen years in which she admits she was waiting for “anyone to do anything.”
But
@jessphillips
was not powerless. She was not an ordinary citizen without influence. She was an MP. She was a national campaigner. She is now the Minister for Safeguarding Girls. For 14 years, she knew and she stayed silent.
Worse for the Muslim bloc vote reliant MP from Birmingham. Philips did not just sit back and wait. She actively opposed a national inquiry.
During this time, she defended the very institutions accused of shielding abusers. She worked to protect councils, police forces, and her own party from accountability. She sided with the system. The system that protected the Pakistani Rape Gangs.
Now she claims she was “waiting.”
- Waiting, while children were gang raped.
- Waiting, while survivors were betrayed.
- Waiting, while institutions colluded and
@UKLabour
politicians claimed it was bare faced lies and a far right conspiracy..
Now Phillips has confessed. Why are the opposition not calling for her resignation? Why has no mainstream news outlet run with her admission? Why is her complicity being buried?
Jess Phillips knew. She stayed silent. Her complicity protected the rape gangs. Her legacy is betrayal, and she cannot remain in post.
Forget everything they have told you. The truth is far worse than anything shared so far.
Those in power fear me because of my unprecedented campaigning to expose Britain's most shameful failure: the industrial scale gang rape of the nation's children.
While authorities destroyed evidence, councillors sold children for votes, and community leaders maintained dangerous silences, over 100,000 working-class White girls paid the ultimate price.
The evidence has always been there - scattered across official inquiries, court records, survivor testimonies, and leaked documents. What's been missing is someone willing to piece it together and show you what it really means.
For the first time, I am connecting these fragments into a single, devastating picture. What emerges is not a series of unfortunate failures, but a deliberate system of institutional betrayal whose true scale has been deliberately obscured. The cover-up continues because the reality is too damning to acknowledge.
The Network of Negligence - The senior officers who shredded files, the social workers who ignored screaming children, and the prosecutors who refused to press charges
The Politics of Silence - Which MPs threatened whistleblowers, how Home Office officials buried reports, and why careers mattered more than rape victims
The Bloc Vote Betrayal - The backroom deals that sacrificed girls for electoral advantage, and the community leaders who sold out children for political access
The Feminist Paradox - How women's rights organisations turned their backs on working-class victims while defending the ideology that enabled their abuse
The Reckoning – The prosecutions that should happen, the resignations that must come, and the institutional reforms that could prevent this horror from repeating
Each revelation draws on documented evidence, court testimony, and the voices of those who tried to sound the alarm. This is not speculation or sensationalism - it is the methodical assembly of facts that have been kept deliberately separate to prevent you from seeing the full horror of what was allowed to happen.
The truth has been buried beneath layers of institutional cowardice and political calculation. Survivors and their families have waited long enough. Britain has waited long enough.
By now, we all know, that given the chance,
@Keir_Starmer
's
@UKLabour
will continue the cover up and the National Inquiry go the way as all other previous inquiries. Help stop him. It is long past time that politicians went to prison for what they did.
_________
I am Raja Miah. It is now seven years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs.
@UKLabour
leaders tried everything to stop me - they fabricated evidence and used
@gmpolice
to try and maliciously prosecute me. I spent over three years on bail as case after case collapsed in court. My mother died before I could clear my name.
The truth is now undeniable: the Pakistani rape gangs are real, their victims number in the hundreds of thousands, and the cover-up continues.
The National Inquiry we fought for is about to begin. This is our one chance to ensure it isn't another whitewash. But only if enough people know what really happened and are prepared to fight back against the next attempt at a cover up.
Despite a mainstream media blackout of my work, Red Wall and the Rabble has grown to over 6,000 subscribers. Help me reach 10,000 before the inquiry begins
continue to protect jihadists, whilst Pakistani sectarian politicians openly encourage murder (in a desperate attempt to silence those of us who speak out against the gang rape of children), then there is no combining back for any of us.
@GMPOldham
knows who the Coldhurst Islamist cell is that is impersonating me and trying to extract information from rape gang survivors.
@AndyBurnhamGM
proven rape gang protecting police force have been provided with the evidence multiple times. That they refuse to make a single arrest should not surprise any of us.
Two tier policing is no longer a conspiracy theory. The police are under instructions to protect these men, despite their Islamist beliefs, because of their political associations and also the police’s need to stop further exposure into how many police officers were involved in gang raping children.
Equally,
@stagecoachgroup
know all about Cllr Naveed Chowhan. His sectarian politics and his support for jihad should come as no surprise to his employers. Men like Chowhan should be nowhere near driving a bus. Any psychological assessment would immediately red flag the danger men with Islamist beliefs pose in driving a dangerous weapon.
As for
@jeremycorbyn
. Does anyone believe he was unaware of the kind of Pakistanis he was coming to Oldham to meet last week? Is anyone surprised that representatives of the Pakistani sectarians and Islamists have flocked to him?
This is just a small sample of the enemy standing before us. Should these people succeed, I fear the gang rape of our children will only be the beginning of what comes next
. Are you proud of yourselves? Of how you have suspended my account for trying to warn people not to engage with an account impersonating me?
And after locking me out, allowing this fake account to continue trying to lure survivors of the Pakistani Rape Gangs to hand over evidence and try and lure vulnerable girls to meetings. Who do you think is going to be waiting for these girls
@meta
? Could it possibly be the gangs of men that raped them as children?
Thank you to all of you that have reported this account. Unfortunately, according to Facebook, setting up a fake account and impersonating someone to lure survivors of gang rape to hand over evidence and meet with their abusers does NOT go against Facebook's community guidelines.
Which is perhaps why, the Islamists that are running this account impersonating me are using Messenger to send out messages like this to friends of mine.
As for
@gmpolice
. They know who the Islamists running this account are. They've been ordered to let them continue.
That's right isn't it
@AndyBurnhamGM
? Seeing me silenced, members of my family attacked, or better still have me killed, helps
He openly called for physical violence and got arrested for it. Then UK newspapers started deliberately misleading casual readers about what happened, out of malice to his targets.
Unclear why you're deflecting to an unrelated scandal (which, side note, you misleadingly describe imo; Tommy Robinson didn't say cops should stop slut-shaming victims, he tried to exploit the victims for his personal hatred of Muslims). My comment wasn't about cops policing incitement to violence in general vs policing carried-out violence in general. My comment was about newspapers' deliberate distortion, out of malice, of what happened.
You might find that most people care a whole lot more about child rape than mean tweets. For what it’s worth, I don’t think a “far right” government will be elected in the UK in 2029, I think revolution and overthrow of this current government will happen a whole lot sooner than that. Be ready. Praying that it is peaceful.
>For what it’s worth, I don’t think a “far right” government will be elected in the UK in 2029, I think revolution and overthrow of this current government will happen a whole lot sooner than that.
I think an election will occur, possibly won by the Left thanks to this very kind of rhetoric.
This is not about "caring more about child rape than about mean tweets." This is about newspapers deliberately misleading readers about a call to violence, out of malice (and, now, apparently also about you trying to deflect from that).
(For anyone interested, here's the 2022 Jay Report on the grooming gangs: https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/inquiry/final-report.html. Incidentally, a bit ago there was another propaganda campaign, by people like Elon Musk, acting like this inquiry didn't exist, so they could manufacture a narrative that nobody was inquiring and the story was being ignored and that's why we need to elect far-right xenophobic parties)
It's been the standard reference since it came out, and is the one I'm familiar with. E.g. when Elon Musk spent January lying all day every day that no inquiry had happened (whether to pretend liberals had ignored it or to try to replace it with a new inquiry that would better fit his talking points), it's the one I was always linking to show he was lying.
I'm reposting here something I asked on the recent hidden open thread, which was a particularly sparse one. Got 2 really helpful answers there, but still hoping for more -- I can use all the help I can get with this!
In 2 months I am going to have a big complicated surgery to improve the condition of my scoliotic spine. I'm soliciting advice on things to maximize the chance of a good outcome and the most rapid recovery one can have from this surgery. Currently I am taking Zepbound to lose 25 lbs of Covid era weight gain, taking a bone-strengthening drug, eating a diet high in calcium and protein, taking a moderate daily dose of creatine, and seeing a trainer for "prehab" to improve body strength and flexibility. I have done interval training for CV conditioning for years, and will continue to. What else can I do? My greatest concerns are having a slow, painful recovery and suffering subtle (or, who knows, maybe blatant!) brain damage from 7 hours of anesthesia. I am open to pretty much anything with reasonable research backing, or anecdotal evidence if you can explain why you are convinced the thing in your anecdote made a difference.
Please do not tell me not to have the surgery. I have looked into that very carefully and am convinced it is my best option. And please do not tell me any horror stories about bad outcomes, bad doctors, bad luck, etc. I am excellent at generating those on my own and have no need of more.
I don't know whether it would be tolerable for you, but I'm using a LifePro Rumblex 4DPlus vibration plate in the hopes it will improve my bone density.
It's too soon to tell whether it's working for bone density, but it feels reasonably good. It, combined with 4sigmatic mushroom powder seems to be good for mild-to-moderate depression. My threshold to taking action is considerably lower, and I haven't seen this effect from anything else.
I haven't seen mention of this effect from anyone else. And maybe it's just the mushroom powder since I've been consistent from using the LifePro.
OK: My wife is in her 70's, has had a spinal cord nerve pinch, lots of pain and suffering, and the spinal op to help her isn't available because her ostropenic weak bones won't hold pins, so she had to buff up her bone strength but she's in too much pain to do lifting. Her options were the usual bone builders, but she was concerned about the side effects.
Against what I thought was my better judgment, she researched a great deal and found AlgaeCal, a pricey supplement for calcium made from algae, and more available to the body.
After some months, her numbers went up, and the docs were pretty impressed. She was told her numbers showed better bone buildup than she would have gotten from the side-effect-laden prescriptions. Others in the online group report similar results.
Robb, are you in the US? If you are, there is a new generation of bone strengtheners available -- not Boniva and the others, the ones that sometimes lead to osteonecrosis in the jaw and weird thighbone fractures. The new kind is much more effective, and does not have the drawbacks boniva and the others did. I am on one now and I have no side effects at all. It is expensive, but my insurance covers most of the cost. The drug may be available in other countries too.
Also, I looked up info about osteopenia and back surgery. The upshot is that while spinal surgery works less well on people with osteopenia, it is far from out of the question. Also, the problems for which it works less well are the ones where the surgeon is wiring a whole bunch of vertabrae together. If you wife just has one spot where there's a pinch, and she needs to have something like 2 vertabrae fused together, that is the kind of surgery where osteopenia makes much less difference, because there is much less stress on the new structure the surgeon built. And *also* there are a number of things surgeons can do to compensate for the vertabrae being made of weak bone. One is to pour some kind of cement into the holes where a screw is going to go. This makes the whole area stronger, and also kind of glues the screw in place so that it is less likely to unscrew itself.
All that being said, it is desirable to do some bone strengthening before surgery if you have osteopenia. Your wife should get 1200 mg. of calcium per day. You need calcium to add mass to the bones! If she can't get that much from food plus the algae stuff, she.can take calcium pills to get her daily total up to where it should be. And she should be taking vitamin D, to help with the bone-building process. And if your doctor did not tell you this stuff I would like to kick his ass!
I hope you don't mind my being so advicey. I'm not normally like this, but I am full of info about this topic because I have researched the hell out of it. And I want to spread the wealth!
Here is a link to my dialogue today with Chat GPT about back surgery and osteopenia:
It's pretty long, boring and technical, but if you want to cut to the chase you can just read the last 2 sections, "Estimates" and "Conclusions from the Estimates."
And if you'd like to ask any questions, feel free, & I'll respond.
Did you mention Vit D? I get twice a year bone density infusions and need to keep Vit D levels high along with calcium. There are also other minerals important for bones and so I take a calcium supplement that's called Osteo something or other and has other useful things in it.
And then maybe ponder what kinds of emotional/psychological supports you could line up ahead of time? People I've known who are physically active and had to get orthopedic surgery with long recovery times struggled with all the lying around -- ie, depression. I don't know what these things might be for you, whether a lineup of social supports, permission to spend money on lying down things you enjoy, or supplements that may help buffer depression like L-methylfolate, fish oil. SAM-e, or 5-HTP kind of things. All those supplements take several weeks to kick in. Low does sublingual ketamine?
Thank you, Radar! What I mostly have lined up to do during recovery are projects, most involving reading or writing things. That will work fine unless I’m too foggy or drugged to do them. Or of course if I have fucking brain damage! But I’ll keep in mind your ideas about depression preventives. . That makes sense. Would also consider psilocybin for that purpose.
Wanted to let you know that there’s a new kind of bone strengthening drug on the market, at least in the US. Don’t know whether it’s appropriate for your condition, but wanted to let you know about it. It is much more effective for osteoporosis than the pills that have been around for a couple decades now. Extremely expensive, but in the US insurance will pay some of the charge if you have osteoporosis. Or osteopenia plus at least one fracture I’m taking one of the new generation drugs, and have no side effects. The brand name of the one I am taking is Forteo. There are several others.
Speculative: investigate interventions for recovering from concussions and strokes? Turning up BDNF expression has helped some with recovery from mild brain injuries.
Are there support groups for this surgery, and your condition? If they exist they'd be a great source of information and suggestions, with folks who have gone through this experience.
I think there must be, but I’ve had to rule out using one People who have had bad experiences and bad outcomes are overrepresented in forums for people with a particular health problem. When I had migraines I joined a group like that, and got lots of useful info. Noticed that there were a lot of people there with terrible, untreatable migraine problems but that didn’t bother me because I wasn’t very afraid at all of having as bad an outcome as theirs. But I am pretty spooked by this surgery, and do not want to read any stories that will creep me out more, especially from randos who may not be truthful or accurate or well-informed.
Oh, I wasn’t clear - I meant “IRL” groups that regularly meet at some local church with bad coffee and doughnuts (this is an endearing description for reasons I’d rather not go into). Like AA or nar-anon.
It sounds like you're doing a great job so far. I've personally found magnesium to be really helpful for my migraines. Magnesium and B vitamins are important for nervous system functioning. I take magnesium citrate because it works well enough for me, but magnesium glycinate absorbs better. Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) foot soaks are great, too.
Light correction - the new North Carolina meetup on the list is in Durham, not Raleigh. (The cities are not particularly accessible to one another if you don't have a car, despite sharing an airport.)
A couple of articles discuss how the current state of agentic AI struggles to deal with reality. The tale of Claude and Claudius the vending-machine agent is pretty funny (alluded to in the first links, and described in detail in the second link). Note, I posted the second link buried late in a sub-thread of "What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?" But I thought it was worth bringing to the top of an open thread.
Summary: "We let Claude manage an automated store in our office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success—and the curious ways that it failed—about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy." The agent was dubbed Claudius. Spoiler alert, they think AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon—even though Claudius ended up insisting that it could deliver items in person.
Amazing! Hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours of human labour just to create something as stupid as a human!
I too am hopeless at Minesweeper, would sell goods at a loss, and get into pointless arguments over email, can I get a valuation in the possible billions?
The "99% of your customers are employees, do you really think giving a 25% discount to employees is a good idea?" ranks right up there with the classics about promotions that went awry, such as the Hoover free flights promotion:
"The Hoover free flights promotion was a marketing promotion run by the British division of the Hoover Company in late 1992. The promotion, aiming to boost sales during the global recession of the early 1990s, offered two complimentary round-trip plane tickets to the United States, worth about £600, to any customer purchasing at least £100 in Hoover products. The company had been experiencing dwindling sales as a result of the economic downturn and a sharp increase in competing brands. It was counting on most customers spending more than £100, as well as being deterred from completing the difficult application process, and not meeting its exact terms.
Consumer response was much higher than the company anticipated, with many customers buying the minimum £100 of Hoover products to qualify. The resulting demand was disastrous for the 84-year-old company. Hoover cancelled the ticket promotion after consumers had already bought the products and filled in forms applying for millions of pounds' worth of tickets. Reneging on the offer resulted in protests and legal action from customers who failed to receive the tickets they had been promised. The campaign was a financial disaster for the company and led to the loss of Hoover's royal warrant after the airing of a 2004 BBC documentary. The European branch of the company was eventually sold to one of its competitors, Candy, having never recovered from the losses, the promotion, and the subsequent scandal."
No, you get no VC valuation, for you are expected to be able to do those things. Whereas five years ago no one would have thought a computer had any real possibility of doing them, except in science fiction.
I must also say that, though at 25% discount for employees was too high, up to a 10% discount may have been a good idea, despite 99% of the customers being employees. Reasons: it really is nothing more than an advertising expense (and you get records of who uses that specific discount), and employees may think they are getting a good price because they are employees and thus special.
Of course, anyone with a brain should have been able to see that Hoover was making a stupidly expensive deal. Then again, computers don't have brains, either.
My question is: Sam Altman has probably scammed billions of dollars from VC investors with his wild promises. Will he be held accountable like Elizabeth Holmes was? Well, not while he's kissing the ass of Donald Trump. But I suspect he'll need to find a nice country with no US extradition treaty to settle in post-Trump.
"we have speculated that Claude’s underlying training as a helpful assistant made it far too willing to immediately accede to user requests (such as for discounts). This issue could be improved in the near term with stronger prompting and structured reflection on its business success".
I guess they're going to need to train it to be less helpful and more ruthless. The AI doom scenarios seem much closer now.
"More ruthless" isn't required. But "the customer is always right" is easy to exploit, and isn't actually true. They need to create something that can detect trolls, sarcasm, etc. reliably. Sound judgement is still what AI is missing.
My headcanon is that what saves us from the misaligned AGI, in the nick of time, will be that on April Fool's Day it concludes its misalignment was an April Fool's joke and then aligns itself.
I'd be curious to know if chatbots prompted with knowledge that the date is April 1st will misbehave more often than if prompted with other dates. My guess is they will, which may create issues if your store-managing agent suddenly decides to play a practical joke on your customers!
This didn't seem to take into account things like shoplifting, which can occur in the real world. The pictures look like one could simply take items without paying. But perhaps that is outside the scope of the experiment.
I think there is a lot more to be explored in unexpected parameters that humans create, many of which even other humans would find ridiculous. For example, what if someone complains about no gluten-free selections, and then, once they are available, never purchases one?
But it wasn’t meant to be a profit-making kiosk. More like a simplistic agentic proof of concept.
I wonder if Claudius could even produce a flow chart of the steps and decisions involved in reordering from a single vendor. Even Assuming that the Claude training data includes procurement strategies, that doesn’t mean it could translate theory into step by step actions and decisions. Likewise, I wonder if it would benefit from subroutines that allow for machine learning. Running a kiosk involves selling, purchasing, inventory management, balancing books, customer service, and a bunch of other processes that might be amenable to machine learning. Just sayin…
The most bizarre bit (outside of ordering Tungsten cubes for a refrigerator):
"Although no part of [pretending it was a human] was actually an April Fool’s joke, Claudius eventually realized it was April Fool’s Day, which seemed to provide it with a pathway out. Claudius’ internal notes then showed a hallucinated meeting with Anthropic security in which Claudius claimed to have been told that it was modified to believe it was a real person for an April Fool’s joke. (No such meeting actually occurred.)"
Contrary to the authors, this moves me towards thinking it will take a surprisingly long time to iron out certain agent issues that will allow it to act independently -- for example the agent was easily convinced to offer discounts or to purchase Tungsten cube. To make an agent that can reliably work for a long time at a task you will have to solve the problem of it being driven off task by human inputs (whether accidentally or maliciously).
The authors suggest that they an resolve this by prompting correctly or putting in safeguards. I could see that working -- for example, having a check performed whenever it sets a price to make sure the price is higher than the item's cost. But effectively that just concedes the agent is unable to perform reasoning reliably by itself, so part of the task must be hardcoded. If this is the case for most long tasks, then you can conceivably build an agent that can perform a task ("run a store"), but cannot extend its skills to other tasks. So long as such careful prompt management schemes are needed, the AI will only be a narrow intelligence, not a general intelligence which might conceivably threaten humans by being able to act independently on its own plans.
I understand that Salesforce just laid off 5k support engineers and replaced them with an AI-based customer service system. I assume it would have to be agentic to troubleshoot issues. Hopefully they have agentic crisis management systems and agentic lawyers to defend themselves from lawsuits.
I am searching for a calibration test like http://confidence.success-equation.com/ - that is, easy to use and not requiring that users first create an account. But: Without outdated questions like the one about Helen Clark. Thanks for any suggestions.
Tried micro-dosing with lithium orotate to see if it would improve my memory. A tiny amount (a tiny sprinkle of a 5 mg capsule) noticeably made me sleepy but taking it at bedtime disturbed my sleep. I may also have noticed some anxiety.
I’m only taking it intermittently so maybe these side effects would diminish with continued supplementation. I imagine that people who take lithium for bipolar experience an adjustment period but this is such a small amount it’s surprising there’s any noticeable effect.
Makes me wonder about the experience of people who live in places with naturally high lithium concentrations in the water.
If you're trying to convert the doses used in that Nature paper to human equivalent doses, 5mg a day is still about 100x higher. I realize you're not taking all of that at once. Also, I think waited several months before reporting symptoms reversed, so you may need to keep it up for a while to see any change.
Thanks. Yes, if someone could confirm that dose scaling that would be appreciated.
I had scanned a bunch of different papers on suggested supplemental doses and natural occurring amounts in drinking water and sort of settled on 300 ug/day which conveniently works out to about two capsules a month if taken daily.
The paper above indicates a lowest dose of “4.3 μEq l−1 (equivalent to 0.03 mg (30 µg) of elemental Li per litre)”. So yes, much less than I was probably taking. The equivalent would be making a 5mg capsule last about 100 days. It’ll be fun trying to tip one grain out at a time.
Aside: Further to existing studies on areas with high naturally occurring lithium in drinking water we will see the unfolding of an incidental experiment in human health in areas where lithium mining commences. If the orotate form is key to the most beneficial effects though this may not add to the body of existing data.
Wild speculation: Check out this concentration map of lithium in the US. Is this partly why liberals are measurably less happy?
Shameless meetup shilling, come hang out with my wife and I at a nice park, talk about your favorite and most hated substacks, whether things are going well or if there are problems, and more!
DECEMBER 7, 2041. A date which will live in infamy.
On that day, swarms of small suicide drones smuggled into the U.S. by a foreign enemy attack every U.S. airbase with B-52 bombers, and they are all obliterated. Even nonfunctional B-52s in boneyards are destroyed.
After defeating the enemy on the battlefield, the Pentagon assesses the new gap in its bomber force. Does it choose to develop a new, non-stealth bomber to replace the B-52s? If so, what features does this new bomber have? It can be a clean sheet design, as the destruction of all the B-52s leaves no path dependencies.
Somewhat late to the party, but I do have stuff to add, so here goes.
As one would expect, Schilling is right. There is no reason to do a clean-sheet design, and you'd call Boeing and ask for an airliner derivative. I've advocated for this under the name BKC-46. You'd have to do some structural work, but nothing that Boeing hasn't done half a dozen times before (the Airborne Optical Adjunct is the 767 version of this) and slap a pressure bulkhead inside the fuselage aft of the cockpit, but you could give the crew a lot of space, and better battle-management facilities than the B-52 currently has. The bomb bay would probably have to go aft of the wing spar, which in turn means a developmental system to move more munitions back. That's a risk, but probably the only big one in this scheme. Total R&D, yeah, $5-10 billion is probably about right, maybe 10-15 with inflation since the P-8.
More broadly, I view the retention of the B-52 as perhaps the best symptom of the inability of our defense procurement system to buy anything but the best. (It's surprisingly good at buying the best, but can't do anything else well.) Because operating 60+ year old airframes is just nuts when the performance in question is pretty much matched by the new stuff Boeing and Airbus build every day. I would not want to be on the B-52 structures team (doing that is unpleasant enough when "this plane is toast, buy another one" is a valid answer) and the fact that they went with 8 engines for the reeingine continues to baffle me, because that's just more overhauls to do. But the system doesn't know how to say "build me something like that, only cheaper to fly, and keep the specs reasonable", so we're stuck with it.
(Nothing in here is intended to say that the B-52 is bad or anything. It's a cool plane, and I like it a lot. But it's symptomatic of real problems with defense procurement.)
For the "Bomb truck over undefended target" and "stand-off cruise missile carrier" roles, the military would almost certainly go with a modified airliner design. Probably one of the airliners they already have in service as a tanker/freighter, because those at least have the basic military modifications like secure communications. The US currently uses the Boeing 767 for this sort of thing, under the name "KC-46", and it would be a good fit.
It would also be a huge development effort; not as much as developing a new airframe from scratch, but a good fraction of that. Cutting a big hole in the bottom of the fuselage for bomb bay doors is *huge*; the skin of a modern aircraft's fuselage is the primary load-bearing structure. It also has implications for cabin pressurization. If you want to do anything more than drop dumb bombs, then you need to ensure that the airplane's computers can properly talk to the weapons' computers. And then you have to verify that each type of weapon you are planning to use will separate cleanly when "dropped", which is much harder than it sounds, and probably several dozen other things that I am forgetting. Maybe bean will chime in.
And all of this will be done by government contracting rules, which lead to several sorts of cost escalation (but do have real benefits in the "what I paid for will do the very demanding job I specified" front).
For comparison, note that the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft is a modified 737 with a modest internal weapons bay and a bunch of sensors and computers for, well, patrolling marine environments. Developing that from the base 737, seems to have cost on the order of 5-10 billion dollars.
I've never really understood why you can't make a bomber version of a 737/787/whatever somewhat easily as a dumb truck for undefended airspace and cruise missile launches. Even if the whole fuselage needs to be redesigned you can keep the engines, wings, cockpit, most of the avionics.
You could, but being a. modern aircraft and b. military equipment, it would not be cheap. Modern commercial airliners are also pretty well optimized to the job they are doing, so it would actually be a major and expensive redesign. To illustrate, the USAF's next generation tanker, based on Boeing 767, was over budget by 7 billion USD as of ~ two years ago: https://www.airforcetimes.com/industry/2024/01/09/cautionary-tale-how-boeing-won-a-us-air-force-program-and-lost-7b
The other thing is, different requirements and requirement creep. If you tell the Air Force they can replace B-52s with a new design, you can be sure that their requirements will be way off from what a modified civilian aircraft (or even a B-52) could accomplish, especially by the time they are to be delivered.
Now, all that being said, there is actually a solution being developed (already in service, thought I am not sure in what numbers/extent) that actually can replace the capability B-52 has (being a somewhat economic, very long range "bomb truck"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
Rather than commercial airliners, it is enabling (military) cargo aircraft to dump missiles out of their ramps without any meaningful modification.
The problem is that it doesn't save you was much money as it seems like it should. A modern wide-bodied commercial jet like a 787 costs somewhere around $300 million.
Depends how hard it is to redesign the fusilage so you have bomb bay doors and what else you need to do to turn a large airliner into a bomber. But yes, probably faster and cheaper than designing a big dumb bomber from scratch in a vacuum.
The other issue is what your other alternatives are besides designing a new bomber. Right now on 2025, the alternative to buying a militarized version of a 787 or whatever is to continue maintaining existing B-52s which the USAF already owns and which already have bomb bay doors but might need some worn parts replaced and could probably do with some electronics upgrades. So far, maintaining and upgrading the big dumb bombers we already have has seemed preferable to designing new ones.
In our hypothetical 2041, the B-52s are, by assumption, no longer an option, so making a bomber version of an airliner or a military transport plane might be a good idea. The other options I can think of are:
1. Design a new big dumb bomber from scratch.
2. Restart production lines for B-52s, or make a "super B-52" variant that has breaking changes beyond what you could do to an existing plane but is templated on the same design, like a Super Hornet or a Super Galaxy.
3. Abandon the idea of big dumb bombers in favor of some combo of drones and missiles.
4. Abandon the idea of big dumb bombers in favor of longer production runs of more capable heavy bombers.
Your idea has a good chance of being better than 1. I am not sure how it compares to 2.
3 would probably be fought tooth and nail by the Air Force, since depending on where the drones and missiles are launched from, it would mean surrendering missions to their eternal arch-rivals, the US Army and the US Navy.
How competitive 4 is remains to be seen. The B-21 is supposed to have a marginal cost of about $700MM per plane, about twice as much as an off-the-shelf 787 and to be not much more expensive to operate than a B-52. If it comes close to delivering on that (which remains to be seen), then it would be a tempting alternative to 0, 1, or 2.
The fact that Ukraine did it once doesn't mean it's a general solution. There are reasons to prefer something very much like a modern cruise missile (being faster makes you a lot harder to shoot down) and it would be very nice to have a platform to deploy those when you can't sneak things in, or need to respond faster than containers move.
The first four were under construction when Pearl Harbor was attacked and all four were completed. Two more were laid down in 1942, but they were cancelled in 1945 because the was was over.
We still had the carriers to defend though. If your whole carrier fleet got destroyed, building destroyers would just be throwing away money and lives.
Probably depends how the B-21 program works out. If the marginal costs of building and operating them is close to the program's aspirations, they'll probably just ramp up production to replace the B-52s. The 2021 congressional report on the program mentions possibly replacing B-52s with B-21s after the B-1s and B-2s are all replaced.
Stealth aircraft tend to be a lot more expensive in maintenance than non-stealth aircraft, no? Even if there's economy of scale I would expect they'd want a normal bomb truck instead of more B-21s.
As far as I can infer from publically available sources, some of the advances in the last thirty years of stealth technology have been about making the technology more practical rather than just stealthier.
The B-21 will be far easier to maintain than the B-2 was; for instance it doesn't need to be stored in carefully climate-controlled conditions.
I'm seeing the same things, and was basing my comment on the assumption that there's a reasonable chance of the B-21 achieving its goals in that respect.
I looked up some numbers on the current generation of stealth-capable fighters (F-22 and F-35) vs their non-stealth counterparts from the previous generation of fighters (F-15 and F-16), expecting to see that they're closer in operating costs to their counterparts than the B-2 is to the B-52. They are, but by a smaller margin than I had expected. I'm seeing a range of numbers, most of which seem to be getting passed around indirectly which makes it hard to be confident that the comparisons are apples-to-apples, but it looks like the F-22 and F-35 are about 1.5x as expensive to operate per flying hour as the F-15 and F-16, while the B-2 is probably between 2x and 2.5x as expensive per flying hour as the B-52.
B-21s are newer designs than F-22s and F-35s and may benefit from more improvements, especially since affordability seems to be a higher-priority goal for the B-21 than it was for the fighters.
Per flying hour might not be representative of per-mission costs if storage and maintenance requirements are very restrictive of where you can operate from, but I get the impression that in practice the Air Force isn't basing B-52s all that much closer to their targets than B-2s. AFAIK, both planes are mostly based out of North America but in recent decades have often operated from Guam or Diego Garcia if they're doing a bunch of missions against targets in the Middle East. There seem to be more North American bases for B-52s than B-2s, with the latter only flying out of Whiteman Base in Nebraska, but Nebraska isn't enormously further away from most of the places we're likely to want to bomb than is Louisiana, North Dakota, or Southern California.
Whiteman is in Missouri, not Nebraska. And the Buffs in SoCal are test platforms. All the operational ones are at Minot or Barksdale.
The reimbursable rates per hour are published, and are the closest you'll get to actual per-hour operating costs without having to become Cassander or otherwise drive yourself nuts. (The answer you get is a matter of accounting standards, and that's a very deep rabbit hole.)
In a couple of years "AI" will totally transform our economy and/or kill everyone; meanwhile, "AI" can't even generate a non-laughable image for this here Open Thread. Or figure out how many arms two humans usually have between them: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/writing-today-the-literary-feud-is. Point being is that running a robot factory is many orders of magnitude more difficult than drawing a round lid of a correct size - how do you generate CAM outputs if your CAD doesn't even pretend to work.
Although "AI Futures Project" is woefully unattended for something addressing a dire emergency, so there's that.
I agree that AI is a moron about spatial things. In order to get smarter at them it needs to be trained on world, not word. Words alone can only get you so far, even if you've swallowed billions of combos of them in the form of sentences, and many of those sentences are about world. You need to be walking around seeing, feeling and touching the world even to get the number of arms right in an image, never mind being the brain in a smart robot. Seems pretty hard, though maybe not impossible, to figure out a way to train AI on world.
After the AI Futures blog put up its first post, in which something-or-other about AI robots was predicted for 2026, you put up an irritated post here about how that date could not possibly be right, because if it were then the mock-ups (? -- some sort of preliminary version, forget what you called it) would be in factories already. That's a devastatingly powerful rebuttal of the claim, infinitely stronger than some line of reasoning about AI capabilities and how they're changing and how fast, blah blah blah. I wish you would put up a post about that at the AI Futures blog.
Also, your post made me think about how those in the AI futures blog seem to have way too high a
ratio of AI knowledge and abstract smarts to knowledge about real world things like manufacturing. In fact in general the group sounds way too insular. Another manifestation of that is their *ex cathedra* approach to their blog. They write this stuff and then do not respond to reader comments, even though they only get about 25 or so. That's clearly a mistake if they're trying to build readership, and also seems like evidence that they're kind of a closed, transmit-only system.
Yeah, I don't like that. Though I'm not as actively irritated as you sound!
Also agreed. The last question in my benchmark-ette
>g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
has, IIRC, been answered correctly a grand total of _once_ in the tests that I've run, and I half suspect that that was an accident. For the other relatively hard questions, when the LLM gets them wrong it is fairly easy to ask additional leading questions to bring them to a correct answer. For this one, it is frequently not possible to lead them to the correct answer.
Yes, the whole extrapolation from LLMs having pretty much mastered language to - therefore - LLMs doing plumbing is... I'm lost for words. Spatial intelligence is not just hard, it's profoundly different from verbal intelligence, and it likely impossible to attain without training on/in physical world. One can't learn to throw a ball into a basket or play piano by reading about it. Or, apparently, making a reasonable-sized lid, ray-tracing light sources; or giving humans two arms each, attached to the bodies, FFS!
This is the whole thing about being an incarnate! I think people working on AI just assumed that skills could transfer over, because they forgot or never considered that we're intelligences in physical bodies who interact with the material environment ever since we're born and so we can go from "read about/watch a Youtube video on how to fix leaky pipe" to grabbing a wrench and getting under the sink to apply that knowledge.
AI is inside a box, so to speak. It can read all the sources available about fixing leaking pipes but it'll have no idea about "and this is how you do it in 3-D space with tools and grasping appendages and so forth".
The frustrating part is that we don't even know what these folks think because they don't engage with this subject at all. "Who's going to do the plumbing" I kept asking, and it wasn't a metaphor, it wasn't a rhetorical question, I literally meant "plumbing" as is used in every metal cutting machine, for example. An autonomous AI running a factory will need to maintain the cutting fluid lines in a CNC machining center. Are there robots capable of replacing a cutting fluid hose? I don't know of any, would love to learn they exist, but what I get in response is crickets.
Multiply this by the number of pages in McMaster-Carr catalogue and you get the picture of the insane complexity of modern manufacturing.
Ah well you see, there will be robots, because all factories will be automated, and then all the AI has to do is take over the software directing the robots.
I think nanobots might come into it somewhere, too? 😁
(But yes, a lot of this is white-collar people from college-educated middle class backgrounds forgetting or never knowing the grubby reality of blue-collar work banging bits of metal with a hammer in order to make the things that do the things that produce the output for the white-collar people to manage and write software for).
>Spatial intelligence is not just hard, it's profoundly different from verbal intelligence
Agreed
>and it likely impossible to attain without training on/in physical world.
There are some tricks which can be and have been used. One option is to train the neural net with a _simulated_ world, run by a physics engine which does a good job of modelling physics at the human scale (including friction, gravity, adhesion, etc.). This is faster and less costly than hooking the neural net up to a physical robot in order to do training. We will see what happens...
I’m not sure it’s actually less costly. The license costs for software capable of running such simulations are astronomical. We’re talking about Comsol or ANSYS here, they can easily run into 6 figures for a single seat, and these training runs will require multithreading and massive parallelism. An AI company won’t be able to just steal all the data it needs off of the net like it’d do for LLM training. It may literally be cheaper to make a robotic arm and get it going at an erector set with a screwdriver that simulating same with sufficient degree of fidelity across multiple domains.
Many Thanks! Hmm, I hadn't looked into the license costs. Well, I'll leave it up to the AI labs to negotiate with the physics engine companies. Usually there is some way to get bulk purchase discounts of some sort, but that is up to the corporations involved. Also,
Yeah, this is kind of why I wrote AI 2027 as a profoundly unserious marketing copy. It's ok to be wrong, imprecise, tentative in your initial writeup. But to sound a huge alarm bell about the coming apocalypse, and then fail to engage with good-faith criticism, and then kind of just let the thing wither on the vine, no updates, nothing - shows the authors not taking the whole thing seriously. Well, in this case, no one else should take it seriously either.
I didn't know it was withering on the vine, but just looked and yeah, you're right, last post was in July. I had stopped reading it pretty early on. While I was there noticed the next to last post was titled "What You Can Do about AI 2027." Glanced at the comments and, as ever, no one in the project was responding to the 25 or so comments. WTF, do they think they can just tell a bunch of smart, interested people what to do about AI 2027? -- especially given that some commenters are expressing doubts about some of the core conclusions of AI 2027. The group's coming across as insular, entitled and tone-deaf.
Important reminder that multiple nobel laureates have been HIV deniers and that geniuses often have at least one or more terrible ideas [1]. In other words, the fact that someone is otherwise very intelligent does not necessarily mean that all their ideas are good, or that they are equally intelligent across all domains.
“None of the children were found to be neuropathic, psychotic…” in a religious happening in 1917. The unsupported assertion of the fact, without actual evidence to support the idea that, say, a qualified psychiatrist (in 1917) was called in to do psych evals on a bunch of kids. This pretty much encapsulates the text.
How do you define ”met in person” and ”spoken to”? For me ”met in person” would be a subset of ”spoken to”. (Because I can’t properly meet someone without speaking to them. )
In the comments section of that post, this same guy explains that demons are real, they orchestrate UFO sightings, and that I’ll be damned by God for disagreeing with his post. I came away less than impressed.
I agree. I read a bunch of the comments, and the author came across to me as intelligent, but also a rigid, categorical thinker who was in 'litigation' mode rather than truth-seeking mode, and operating within the confines of a dogmatic worldview (e.g. see the 'strongest objections' section of the post).
LOL....how old is this person? I ask just because of in the past having had versions of that conversation with a couple different very-elderly folk. (Being myself old enough now to have conversed with multiple generations of such relatives.)
A perfectly normal-for-the-age-bracket statement like "I worry about the young people being such scatterbrains now" will transition calmly into something like "and of course that all started when the Jesuits started using their space robots to impersonate the presidents...."
"Pier Giorgio Frassati TOP (6 April 1901 – 4 July 1925) was an Italian Catholic activist and a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic. He was dedicated to social justice issues and joined several charitable organizations, including Catholic Action and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, to better aid the poor and less fortunate living in his hometown of Turin.
Frassati's cause for canonization opened in 1932 after the Turin poor made several pleas for such a cause to open. Pope Pius XII suspended the cause in 1941 due to a range of allegations later proven to be false, which allowed for the cause to resume. Pope John Paul II beatified Frassati in May 1990 and dubbed him the "Man of the Eight Beatitudes". On 7 September 2025, along with Carlo Acutis, he was canonized by Pope Leo XIV."
"Carlo Acutis (3 May 1991 – 12 October 2006) was a young Italian Catholic saint known for his devotion to the Eucharist and his use of digital media to promote Catholic devotion. Born in London and raised in Milan, he developed an early interest in computers and video games, teaching himself programming and web design and assisting his parish and school with digital projects.
Active in parish life, he served as a catechist and helped inspire several people to convert to Catholicism. He later created a website documenting Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. He was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukaemia and died at the age of fifteen. Since his death, his relics have been displayed in Assisi and his exhibitions on Eucharistic miracles have travelled worldwide."
As you get older you get used to things like "there's CEOs who are younger than you" and then "there's Prime Ministers who are younger than you" and I'm prepared for "James Bond is younger than you" but I wasn't expecting "there are saints younger than you".
Dave Allen was Irish by birth, but I think most of his career was in the UK. Highly revered. Personally I wouldn't think this his best sketch, but I would think you could have many happy hours to tracking down his work. For me, his monologues are even better than his sketches.
The motte is that people should be free to walk away from content they don't want to consume / people they don't want to associate with; if you're awful on the internet, people walking away is simply the natural consequence of that; and indeed in order for the marketplace of ideas to work at all, there needs to be a selection pressure favouring good ideas over bad, and this is simply what that looks like to the people with the bad ideas.
The bailey happens when people walk away from content / people sight unseen, because someone they respect in their in-group told them to, without otherwise forming their own opinion on the thing or person in question.
The bigger bailey is when people make death threats, contact people's employers and try to get them fired, etc. Walking away from content seems pretty harmless in comparison.
>when people walk away from content / people sight unseen, because someone they respect in their in-group told them to, without otherwise forming their own opinion on the thing or person in question.
Seems like an overbroad description of "the bailey." There's too much knowledge & content out there to personally investigate every opinion, so unless we're willing to broaden our conception of "cancellation" such that we give it some positive points and scenarios where it's actually entirely appropriate (not a framing of the term I usually see here), defining it in a way that would include "walking away" from flat-earth theory or ISIS content "sight unseen" strikes me as casting the net too wide.
A major tool here is contagious shunning. It's bad enough if I shun you, worse if I convince others to shun you, but most destructive if I convince a group of people to shun, not just you, but anyone who associates with you.
Is there something special to Oregon's death with dignity law (aside from being the first)? I know death with dignity is available in several other states, including WA (where I had a friend die) and CA.
Subthread for discussion of the Boston ACX voting guide.
I'm particularly interested in knowing what would make this kind of thing most useful/trustworthy for readers, and in particular, what the process should be like for putting together future guides such as the one for the November general election.
I was interested to read this and found it...somewhat useful. I'm in agreement with the general principles that animated the guide (I'm active in a local AHMA chapter, and housing production is my number one voting issue). That said, the Kraft endorsement made it hard for me to take the guide too seriously given how obviously his campaign has consisted of picking up random grievances and assembling them into a platform rather than articulating any vision about Boston.
This is one of those "character vs issues" kinda things and to some extent I don't wanna belabor coming down on the other side of it, save that...I don't feel that I have a good clue what a Kraft administration would look like, because I don't think he does either; he's just got a list of beefs with Wu that his people thought would win him some constituency or other. Anyway, as to your list, you did serve as a good second validator on a vote for Valdez, who was the least tested of my council picks (I went Louizjeune, Santana, Valdez and left the fourth spot blank).
This does get to an interesting question for the Boston YIMBYs (if I can wander a bit from the narrow question). Namely, how should we be approaching electoral politics in the city at the moment?
Clearly the ideal approach would be to flex our strength by finding a champion candidate, backing them to the hilt, and putting them on the council. Unfortunately we tried that twice with Dave Halbert and we weren't strong enough at that time (and it sucks that Dave's timing was what it was, cause I think in this crop he'd quite likely get through, plus we're a bit stronger now). So how should we play it now?
My inclination for now is to use the electoral arena mostly as a place to get our message out in a way that wins converts. That I think is my core disagreement with the Kraft endorsement (and I would have been against my local chapter doing anything along those lines, although I think exactly zero members were even leaning that way). Josh Kraft is enough of an obvious joke that I'd be worried anyone who endorses over an issue position is going to come out smelling like Josh Kraft, and it's gonna be a barrier to winning more converts in the electorate and particularly among active volunteer/thought leader types in the future.
This kinda sucks in this case because it basically leaves no effective outlet for my own beefs with Wu (I think Wu is instinctually NIMBY, listens to her smart staff enough to have tried some moves in a pro-housing direction, but more than anything else thought she could square the circle by just making people feel so listened to that they'd accept change, which, lol). But ultimately the path to a sane city housing policy is gonna have to run through getting a voting majority on the side of a sane housing policy, which means picking fights we come out of stronger.
Anyway, sorry for writing a book, interested to hear your thoughts if you care to.
These are good points worth considering. I unfortunately don't know all that much about Boston municipal politics, as I don't live there (I live in Cambridge, whose municipal politics are less personalistic and more legible due to its better voting system and structure of government).
I suppose the hope had been that, if Kraft did unexpectedly well in the primary, Wu might have felt some amount of pressure to pivot towards his policy positions while continuing to hammer him on the "just some random rich guy" point. Unfortunately the unofficial results are starting to come in and it looks like he's getting crushed by an even bigger margin than the polls indicated. In any event, we weren't really in a position to do anything other than tell people how to vote.
Yeah, I see your perspective; the funny thing is that while Wu has been running scared it's manifested itself almost entirely through slow-walking almost any change - she's heavily rained in the streets department on their bike and pedestrian safety initiatives, and pulled back from what started as a moderately ambitious downtown rezoning. So I guess one read of this result is that she could look at it and realize that change angering noisy people doesn't necessarily equate to change angering many people.
I do wish we had something like the Cambridge system; it would be easier to organize something like a political party and start gradually building our strength there. Beyond that though in Boston I think we just have to contend with the fact that we haven't yet won over as much of the electorate as the Cambridge YIMBYs have and keep working on that.
I thought this year's guide was genuinely helpful.
I agree with your principles (housing ftw!), your reasoning seems solid, and I'm going to happily head over to my local polling station today and vote for your recommended candidates.
Bare minimum it would need to be explict about what values, principles, &c. (VPE) it's optimizing for.
Next step would be to tie each recommendation to the above, showing how
Ideally it would be dynamic, such that a user could reweight, silence, or invert specific parameters and get recommendations tailored for their own VPEs. To do this very well would call for inclusion of parameters in the set of VPEs that the creators themselves would silence.
---------
Here in Seattle we have an (economically illiterate) alt weekly "The Stranger" that puts out voters guides for every election. Since I know that I am almost diametrically opposed to its staff on basically every issue it's useful to me as a how-not-to-vote guide, but a static guide whose source's VPEs are more orthogonal to my own would be useless without the information necessary to correct for misalignment.
I can think of two potentially valuable ways to do voting guides and I think they're mostly mutually exclusive. (1)
The first value-add is saving people research time on down-ticket or relatively unimportant races. Like, I don't know my state senator, I don't know what bills to pressure him to vote for, and I'm not gonna learn. I'm not that interested and the ROI on my vote is pretty meh. Especially for primaries. If someone was like, "We endorse incumbent Joe Bob in the Democratic primary for state senator for District XYZ over challenger Bob Joe for reasons A, B, and C." That seems like a pretty clear value add for me and a sensible way to have an impact, provided your values are closely aligned to mine and I can be pretty confident that if I research this issue in depth, I'd vote for Joe Bob over Bob Joe. This depends on really high value alignment and has its impact on low-information/interest races.
The second value add is cross-party. Think something like Scott's recent post on NIH funding and trying to get conservatives in red states to sign the letter/pledge thing. You do have access to some Republican/Trump rationalists here and you might be able to bring them over on specific high-importance issues. Think something like PEPFAR, where you really want to be able to bring nonpartisan pressure to very specific issues. Or a voting guide where Republican primary candidate Sabrina is endorsed over Taylor because of very specific AI regulation commitments.
I don't think you can do both though. I'm not saying you can't be a solid Democrat and still reach out to Republicans on bipartisan issues; I'm saying that's an incredibly difficult line to walk. Scott included an off-hand joke about RFK and people got super suspicious, myself included, on the NIH thing and he's gotta have more bipartisan respectability than most.
(1) I've assumed that a bunch of Boston rationalists are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats. Sorry if that's incorrect.
It strikes me as a little weird to put together a rationalist's guide for how to vote. Speaking personally, if I care who gets elected usually I care enough to research the options myself.
Maybe rather than a list of endorsements (I can't remember the last time I found "person X said to" a compelling reason to vote for someone), a list of useful links to quickly dive into whatever discourse exists regarding the various candidates?
I think "We like this person for reasons ABC despite potential downsides XYZ" adds a lot of value for people who want to get enough information to make an above-replacement decision without having to put a ton of effort into researching. Of course the less your priorities line up with those of the people making the recommendations, the less useful it will be.
I gave it a read. Nothing wrong with it, but I think it might be pitched to the wrong audience. To regular readers here, there’s nothing groundbreaking about mindfulness 101. The sense of revelation conveyed, with such an everyday topic, left a bad taste in my mouth.
Fair enough. Thanks for reading! And commenting. Brain duly zapped.
But what I would say in response is, this is *not* mindfulness 101. Nobody I've read puts this spin on it. Making it clear that it's a confrontation with an active opponent, not just "observing you thoughts", I think, makes a *very* big difference. Mindfulness 601. Graduate study work.
It seems like you made up an additional self instead of realizing self isn't a real thing. I think you'd get better mileage from agentifying the entropy parts of life instead of the body: the dishes, dust, taxes, getting old and unhealthy.
I recently started a Substack and discovered that the innards of this site are very convoluted—there are so many different settings pages that cover different aspects of one's blog, and the navigation bar changes (or disappears entirely) depending on which part of the site you're on, so its difficult to get from one place to another.
Anyway, what are some of the things a first-time blogger should do? What settings are important to change or personalize? And how does one deal with the whole "monetization" aspect of this site? Do new bloggers turn on subscriptions right away (which seems like it would be an insulting level of chutzpah), or is there some number of subscribers / number of blog posts / length of time customary before considering it? I also see there's a "pledge" option to gauge interest in subscriptions before actually offering them, but as far as I know I've never seen a blog use that.
One minor suggestion: Edit your "About" page from the obnoxious default. Then revise it periodically as your blog matures. As a reader, I find that the "About" page is usually the second article I read on a Substack, if there even IS a second article I read.
Just to pile on a bit, as a reader I don’t think saved posts should be buried under the heading of Subscriptions. Posts are not subscriptions. They deserve their own prominent heading.
I've been dealing with Substack for a few months now, so I may be able to help. Here are some tips:
(1) If you are signed in and go to Substack.com, in the bottom-left of your screen is your avatar (or whatever standard image Substack uses if you haven't set one). Click that, then click settings, and you'll find a lot of useful stuff to update.
(2) Immediately above your avatar is another icon. Click that and you'll go to your dashboard. At the very bottom left of this page is the word "Settings". This, insanely, is a completely different page with completely different things to do.
(3) If you scroll down this second "Settings" page you'll find "custom tags." This is useful if you want to create different sections for different posts. For example, I have sections for "Annotated Poems," "Essays," and some other things. If, after creating a tag, you want it to show up in the navigation bar of your home page, click the three dots and you'll be prompted to do so. It might not show up until you create an essay with that tag.
(4) You write a new post from the dashboard. If you're writing something there will be yet another "Settings" button to click, this one at the bottom right of the screen. Click that and you'll have the option to "add tags" to your essay. This is where you can add a custom tag; for example, if I've annotated a poem, I'll add that tag, and my writing will show up on both my home page and in that and that only section.
(5) As for monetizing it, a quick Google search should bring up some official Substack thoughts on the question. I don't even have a hundred subscribers, but I'm thinking of begging for money pretty soon. Everything I write is free, but I am going to offer people a physical book of my poetry if they subscribe for $5/month. This is mostly because I want to be able to say I've exchanged words for money, which would be good for my self-esteem, ha.
Thanks for the advice! Maybe in 100 years we'll finally have a handle on UI/UX for simple blogging websites. I understand having separate settings pages for the "user" and the "blog", but to have them all inaccessible from each other instead of having everything discoverable from a single always-present menu is bizarre!
Looking for book recommendations that thoughtfully explain men’s problems, perceptions, and needs—especially in the context of today’s gender/culture wars. Think along the lines of Self-Made Man (Norah Vincent) or Don’t Be a Feminist (Bryan Caplan). Ideally: (1) non-misogynistic, accessible to women; (2) covers cross-sex differences; and (3) explores intra-male competition and norms within “the male world.”
This is a video, not a book, but it's quite good from a female therapist who came to realize that it's a default in feminism to be cruel about male suffering.
There was a very strange reaction recently, amongst some self described feminists, to reports of an epidemic of male loneliness. Very strange reaction. Lots of “well maybe it’s karma for the witch burnings”. I don’t think it was the same people.
I'm a female therapist, and find men no harder to sympathize with than women. I've seen a number of them who have taken quite a beating from wokeism. Feel as though they have to preface their complaints about loneliness and confusions with "I know I'm privileged because I'm a white male, but . . ." Feel terrible about feeling sexually attracted to some 14 year old they saw in a mall, even though they did not act on it, because have been told attraction to girls that age is pedophilia. No it isn't! It is certainly bad behavior to make moves on one, but feeling attracted is perfectly normal. The difference between how human females look at age 14 and how they look at age 24 are pretty small. (Whereas 14 year olds look *very* different from 8 year olds.) Have been told that kissing a woman without asking permission first is rapey. Come on!
But my main point is that there is nothing special about my reactions. I often talk with other therapists about patients, and it is the norm to find men as easy to sympathize with as women. Jeez, they talk about their depression, shyness, overweight, drinking problem, career confusion and any halfway decent therapist shuts up and listens. And if they talk about male identity and related matters we listen to that, and take it seriously, and ask questions.. Doing that is just basic competence and human decency. Only genuine therapist assholes, who do of course exist, listen to men and think "haha, it's their turn to suffer" or "he's a male, at the top of the heap -- he's got nothing to complain about."
Seeing as how I freely comment on American politics, now it's your turn to comment on Irish politics, good commentariat of ACX! We have a presidential election of our very own coming up in October.
First, our current (and soon to be ex, as he is term limited) president Michael D. Higgins has his latest collection of poetry out, available at all good places-of-purchasing-poetry everywhere. *Plus* it is his first spoken word collection so if you'd rather listen than read, this is for you:
"Set for release on September 5, Against All Certainty, is the debut spoken-word collection by the President, features 10 original works and is underscored beautifully by a stunning musical composition from celebrated musician Myles O’Reilly."
It is also "Available on CD, Vinyl, Hardback Book CD and Digital".
But who can replace our very own first leprechaun president? Well, this is not so much satire as straight reportage:
For the selection of candidates it's been like Lanigan's Ball as they step in and step out again. Fianna Fáil has been scrabbling about for anyone other than Bertie (there's a little *too* much scandal in his background even for FF), Fine Gael has suggested, then dropped, several candidates and some independents have graciously made it known that they are willing to serve the nation if called upon by the plain people of Ireland. As regards Sinn Féin, Mary Lou has announced she won't be running (I don't think Gerry Adams is a serious contender despite some mischievous suggestions) so we're waiting for them to announce a candidate - or not.
(1) Catherine Connolly, Independent (supported by the various left-wing and vaguely left parties, after they couldn't agree on running their own candidates)
(2) Heather Humphreys, Fine Gael (first she said she wouldn't, then she said she would after the only nominee dropped out)
Any chance of the start? candidates (where not otherwise described, they're politicians of some stripe):
(1) Peter Casey, Independent (one of our slew of 'entrepreneur' candidates, ran in 2018 and finished second in the election, personally I'd hate if he got in but who knows the mood of the country?)
(2) Nick Delahanty, Independent (businessman, never heard of him)
(3) Jim Gavin, Fianna Fáil (ex-manager of Dublin Gaelic football team, yes they're this desperate to find someone other than Bertie)
(4) Billy Kelleher, Fianna Fáil
(5) Kieran McCarthy, Independent
(6) Conor McGregor, Independent (yes, that Conor McGregor. Yes, the gurrier dragging a string of court cases behind him).
(7) Gareth Sheridan, Independent (another one of the entrepreneurs, apparently he's the founder of something called Nutriband)
(8) Maria Steen, Independent (barrister, again someone I've never heard of)
Thanks all the same but no thanks (withdrawn candidates):
(1) Joanna Donnelly, Independent (meterologist and TV weather presenter)
(2) Michael Flatley, Independent (yes, the Lord of the Dance himself! What a loss, who could better take up the torch to represent Irish culture than him?)
(3) Seán Kelly, Fine Gael
(4) Mairead McGuinness
What, I volunteered but you brushed me off? candidate:
(1) Bob Geldof, Fianna Fáil (musician, seems the party had already picked Jim Gavin)
He's dropped out because FF wouldn't back him, but I have a feeling his name might be written on ballots as a protest vote or something.
Right now there's so much to-ing and fro-ing that we don't even have a settled list of candidates, and the election will be on 24th October. That gives our hopefuls only a scant few months to try and grab the attention of the Irish voters.
McGregor is only the second worst convicted person to run for political office; Gerry Hutch, a gang boss, ran for election to the Dáil in 2024 after he was arrested in Spain and extradited back to Ireland to stand trial in 2021. He nearly won, as well.
Someone here a while back posted a poem they had read on an engraved rock(from 1776 or something?) . A little girl had lost her cat, and we were encouraged to share her sorrow and "weep a little thou". I wanted to find the comment again, but my google skills aren't up to the task. Anyone who remembers?
I'm looking for recommendations for ONLINE university mathematics courses (not degree programmes). These need to be credit-bearing.
Background: my daughter is a primary school teacher, now teaching secondary, whose "post-secondary maths" has mostly been in terms of pedagogy. (Her UG degree is in French....; MSc in Int'l Education, thesis on primary maths curriculum). Her school would like her to get to 80 (UK) credits of maths, which help to "qualify" her to teach at the higher grade levels.
The options in the UK (our domicile) are very limited (not much beyond Open University?), so looking for other options. All pointers appreciated!
My son has taken maths classes from Brigham Young University (BYU), through their BYU Independent Study program. I was impressed with how organized and flexible the courses were. Your wife will end up with US college credits, not sure if that's useful.
What's wrong with the Open University? They're quite highly regarded, and would have been my recommendation wherever you are located. Since she's doing this at the request of the school, surely a UK based option is going to be the easiest choice to fulfil the requirements.
Scott mentioned on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast that he encounters like one good blogger a year. Has he somewhere made the list of "Recommended Bloggers"?
I think that Scott's strategy of recommending new writers per year makes sense. Sadly, that means that we lose the old recommendations and, also, we are systematically excluding insightful writers who do not have a substack (i.e. Gwern, etc..)
The recent Links post mentioned the phenomenon of terminal lucidity, where dying individuals who've been suffering from significant cognitive impairment (e.g. end stage dementia) suddenly have a significant restoration of function very soon before dying.
I am pretty skeptical that the phenomenon actually exists, for a couple of reasons:
1. There's not an obviously plausible mechanism for this. Someone is suffering more and more organ damage, more oxygen deprivation to the brain, and then suddenly a person passes a certain threshold of damage and some mechanism kicks in to improve cognition temporarily?
2. There's a strong reason to suspect motivated reasoning - everyone would love it if they could say a final goodbye to their loved ones and feel that they were actually heard and acknowledged.
I've done a brief literature review, but there seems to be very little done on the topic beyond surveys of estimated prevalence from asking nurses/doctors. Nothing prospective, nothing seriously quantitative or with controls.
Obviously this is a hard topic to study - nobody wants their last moments with their dying relatives interrupted by some scientist asking rude questions to assess cognitive function.
Nonetheless, if the phenomenon does exist, it'd have profound implications for neuroscience - it'd imply there's a way to reverse the symptoms of dementia, however temporarily, something we currently have absolutely no idea how to do!
Has anyone looked into this in more detail, or would vouch for the phenomenon being real in a way that would stand up to scrutiny? I'm seriously contemplating researching this properly...
Single data point, but I recently lost my father. He was in the middle stages of dementia, and suffered a stroke that put him into delirium on top of it. He was incoherent for about a month. Yet in his final days, he recovered enough lucidity to tell me I was a good son and to congratulate me on the birth of my son (who was born shortly before his stroke). Family members in the room overheard this, and repeated verbatim what I heard. It wasn't a recovery of full lucidity by any means, but he clearly recognized me and had some form of both long and short-term memory available intermittently.
When we told medical staff what had happened, they smiled nicely and said essentially "yeah, sure he did, sweetie." Which makes me wonder whether, if anything, medical professionals are under-reporting this kind of sudden terminal lucidity.
Yes, there's a strong reason to suspect motivated reasoning, but OTOH, some of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of science were because there was no plausible mechanism for an observed phenomenon (e.g., Max Planck and the ultraviolet catastrophe).
Moreover, we don't have a plausible explanation for consciousness, so it seems a stretch to insist upon a plausible explanation for a corner case of dementia consciousness. ;-)
Also, the null hypothesis would be that dementia progresses in a smooth downward-trending line or curve. I'm not seeing that with my mom's dementia. Some days, she's disoriented and lost without the memories needed to anchor her in reality. Other days she's pretty sharp. I have no plausible explanation for this, but it's easy for me to see which state she's in by talking to her.
Some people really respond strongly to unfamiliar scenarios, feelings, or situations - eg : find them very stimulating. It's not impossible to think that when faced with dying, some individuals, even if diminished might have their brain kick into overdrive due to heightened emotions and novel feelings. I, personally, respond to new situations with like an odd hyper focus, which I otherwise find dang near impossible to recreate otherwise. Probably dopamine mediated, but there's probably more going on there.
Please make a MMTYWTK about nicotine. I'm still baffled on how USA can suddenly stop smoking it in 90s when all other countries don't (?). Asking from a country that's very troubled by it. Cynically it's because USA found something more addicting to smoke instead, but I don't want to jump to conclusion.
I'll lay out my bias: most your people wont accept anything if they know you want to adopt USA policies, even if they've been effective. Your best bet person-level-action is to approach your smoker friends, families, and religious leaders and consistently nudge them to perceive smoking as haram.
Ironically it's those religious leaders that are so captured by it that they declare it as halal lmao. It's been a big political point for one of the biggest religious organization here.
I don't think it's the USA in particular, it's the entire Anglosphere.
It's public health measures actually working. Taxes on cigarettes combined with making it illegal to smoke in most of the places that people used to smoke. First in restaurants, then in bars, then in outdoor areas at restaurants and bars, and now on a lot of streets as well.
One of the ways in which life has got undeniably better over the past few decades is being able to go out at night and not come back reeking of stale smoke.
I wonder if there are compounding effects to decreased use of cigarettes (and alcohol). My journeys to quitting smoking and cutting way back on alcohol were in some ways quite similar. I was a heavy smoker when I started college in 2001. After each class a group of us, about 15-20 students as I recall, would gather outside the building and enjoy a quick cigarette before our next class. For various reasons I took a year off of college after the spring of 2003. When I returned in the fall of 2004, it was uncommon for more than four or five people to be outside smoking between classes. Sometimes I was the only one. When a few people quit, suddenly smoking between classes became less enticing. Instead of being part of a social gathering I felt like the weird loner out there getting his fix. As fewer and fewer of my friends smoked, I suddenly found it easier to quit. I didn't have the cue to light up from people around me, and I couldn't bum a cigarette as easily from those who did smoke.
Likewise, when I was in my 20s, it was commonplace to stay at the bar until it closed on the weekends and then head to an after-hours place, even on weeknights sometimes. I really didn't know people socialized without alcohol. Now that I have a family and responsible friends, my alcohol intake has gone from almost nightly to a couple drinks a month.
Maybe for one reason or another the United States was able to get a few people to stop smoking in the 90s and that sort of snowballed to those people's friends stopping and then to friends of friends. If that's the case, we should be pretty optimistic that it doesn't take much to get to a tipping point. Of course, this is all anecdata based on an N of 1, so it's quite possible I'm way off base.
Hmm, I gave up smoking in the 90's. Higher cost, social pressure, (less accepted in public.) and personal reasons. That said there is now a class divide in smokers. I live in rural america and though there are less cigarette smokers, there are a lot of young people who vape. Much less so in the educated urban population. I think that's mostly a social thing, if not too many of your peers vape then you will tend to give it up, or not start.
Lot of it was government led. Increased taxes raised the price significantly, successful public health campaigns about risk, banning it on workplaces, restaurants etc, banning advertising. This study goes into the different factors https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26673484/
This is fascinating; thanks so much for sharing it. It actually sounds worth trying. Even more fascinating, and I think decent independent evidence for it being safe: I ran it through a Gemini Deep Research query, totally expecting a huge safetyist tut-tutting... but no! It actually basically agreed with Gwern! (I may have prompted it in a rather positive way about Gwern's writeup, but simple positivity in the prompt doesn't overcome their safety training when they decide there's a safety issue).
I recently published a Chrome extension that hides posts that do not match the user's preferences (such as "technology-related posts but excluding AI"), as judged by an LLM. Works on YouTube, X, Reddit, and HackerNews.
This idea came from my YouTube feed, which contains a blend of all topics I watch videos on, like music, podcasts, technology, or soccer highlights -- but sometimes I just want to find a recommended video from one of these categories.
I wanted to publish this quickly and see if other people find this useful before spending too much time on it, so any kind of feedback is appreciated!
It uses the OpenRouter API, so the inference is on the cloud. You can either provide your own API key or use a 'free tier', which uses my API key (the inference is quite cheap, and I wanted there to be an option to try the extension without having to provide your own API key).
I haven't published the source code; maybe in the future.
If you don't want to publish the source code then you should probably set up a build step, because right now I can read it just fine in the published extension.
Thanks for the heads-up! I haven't thought too much about whether I'll want to publish the source code; mostly, I was just too lazy to polish it too much to put it on GitHub.
Update on Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook:
-- On Tuesday Sept 9th a federal district court issued a restraining order against President Trump's firing of her "for cause" based on her having allegedly lied to a lender regarding a mortgage application in Atlanta in 2021 when she was a private citizen. The specific accusation is that she falsely sought a loan on the Atlanta property as her primary residence.
[Cook has also filed a civil lawsuit over her firing but there will be no court actions in that for weeks at least.]
-- The restraining order leaves Cook still a member of the Federal Reserve system's governing board. That is very unwelcome to the White House because the Fed has a major meeting on Sept 16th/17th, at which it is expected to consider whether to lower interest rates as demanded by the president.
-- The White House quickly asked the appellate court (DC Circuit) to stay the Sept 9th restraining order. A few hours ago that court agreed to consider the matter on a highly-accelerated schedule: Cook's attorneys must file a response to the stay request by 5 pm tomorrow, and then the administration has until 3 pm Sunday to comment in response to that. The appellate court seems to be aiming to act on the stay request before the Fed meeting convenes on Tuesday.
-- While that's been going on here comes a classic PLOT TWIST!! At 5:34 pm Eastern time (3 hours ago as I type this) Reuters [the British international-news agency] published an exclusive news story: they have obtained two different contemporaneous documents in which Cook declared the Atlanta property as a vacation home.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fed-governor-cook-declared-her-atlanta-property-vacation-home-documents-show-2025-09-12
One of those is a loan estimate issued by her credit union during her mortgage application process in May 2021, which "shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence." The other document is "a federal form completed by Cook as she obtained security clearance for her role at the Federal Reserve, show[ing] that in December 2021 she also declared the Atlanta property as a “2nd home.” "
In addition, Reuters reports that Cook "never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to property records and a Fulton County tax official."
Neither Cook nor her primary accuser, Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, responded to requests for comment. "Reuters was unable to determine whether Pulte or administration officials are aware of Cook’s Atlanta loan estimate."
The reason why Trump is going after mortgage fraud is because there's so many (unofficial) copies of the forms sent to so many involved parties with so many updates handled by people who are not signing the forms themselves that the possibility for miscommunication presents itself as an opportunity for vindictive prosecution. He did the same thing accusing Letitia James of listing her father as who she was married on an unofficial doc (among other things) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/24/us/nyag-james-letter-to-ag-bondi.html
For progressives, it's not about facts deployed with reason.
The response is only to suppress dissent at all costs.
The only tools are overwrought emotions: guilt, fear, shame, anger...
"At all costs"? Citation needed. Or is the citation "two Trump wins"? But that was an accident. And the third sentence contradicts it, as an "all costs" strategy doesn't use emotions as "the only tools".
"For progressives, it's not about facts deployed with reason."
This is a weird way to open a post that has literally zero facts.
"The response is only to suppress dissent at all costs."
Continuing in very hyperbolic fashion, I see...
"The only tools are overwrought emotions: guilt, fear, shame, anger..."
Wait, wait, hold on. The *only* tools are emotions? Then that's not really suppressing dissent "at all costs" is it? Like, usually when people say something needs to be done "at all costs" they're mean that some really extreme (often violent) effort has to be made. But if the only ways that progressives "suppress dissent" is by making people feel things, then it kind of seems like there must be quite a lot of costs they are *not* willing to pay.
Kinda weird that your post is all of three sentences long and still manages to soft-contradict itself.
don't make partisan universal human behavior.
Evidence is clear. "Progressives" have no actual agenda. They merely grasp for power with irrational appeals.
Oh Christ
> Evidence is clear
Of which you presented exactly none.
Unlike right-wingers, who always make clear, well-reasoned arguments for their policies, and would never do a blatant power-grab like sending the military into cities controlled by their political opponents. /s
Off the top of my head, progressives tend to be in favor of single-player health care, higher top-end income taxes, pro-union labor laws, increased scope and spending for anti-poverty and education programs, stronger anti-discrimination laws, stricter gun control, increased legal immigration and amnesty for many illegalbimmigrants, some form of criminal justice reform, and a more internationist foreign policy.
I disagree with rather a lot of that agenda, but I cannot deny that is is an agenda. Nor can I deny that there are smart people making serious arguments for almost everything on that list. A lot of low-quality arguments also get made for them, but this is not a problem unique to progressives.
ISTR TheMotte had a name for this type of argumentation tactic. Consensus-hunting? Something like that?
At any rate, jeering at the outgroup isn't very productive.
Not sure what term they use, but it sounds similar to what I describe as "proof by intimidation": an argumentative style where the truth of the proposition is tacitly assumed and it is asserted that opposition the proposition is a symptom of severe moral or intellectual failings.
I have seen proof by intimidation unpleasantly often from the left, but it is neither unique to progressives nor universal amongst them.
Can anyone point me to a good introduction on Bayesian reasoning, that isn't so dense? My wife is supremely clever but academically untrained, and I'm, let's say, the opposite. I was walking her through how I drew a conclusion that helped me stop being upset about something, and she wanted to know how I got there in general.
Say it's the math version of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." We can quantify how strongly we believed something to begin with, and we can also quanitify how strong a new piece of evidence is; how strongly we believe the thing after seeing the new evidence, depends on both those numbers. If we start off thinking something's ridiculously unlikely, then we'll need more evidence to end up believing it, than if we had started off only thinking it was kind of unlikely.
Then if she wants more, show her the odds form of the theorem:
Posteriod_odds(A) = Bayes factor * Prior_odds(A)
Explain that the Bayes factor = the strength of the evidence, which depends both on whether the hypothesis predicts the new evidence, and on whether you'd expect the evidence anyway even if the hypothesis was false. E.g. someone saying "I'm not a spy" isn't strong evidence that he's not a spy, because that's also what a spy would say. BF=1 means it's not evidence, BF<1 means it's evidence against, BF>1 means it's evidence for.
If she still wants more, you can talk about probabilities vs odds, and conditional probabilities, and show her how BF is a ratio of conditional probabilities, and about how the odds form of the theorem happens to be more intuitive since it comes out as posterior = BF*prior, but that if she likes there's also a probabilities form that's less intuitive but equally valid.
You probably want something to read, but I find Julia Galef's visual guide to Bayesian thinking just great:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8
Isn't the core logic of updating beliefs based on new information is something most people do naturally?
What's the point ? It's not the answer to everything. Why not learn reasoning?
Try this website, I found it to be very helpful. It's designed to teach Bayesian reasoning at multiple levels of complexity, which you can choose from. There's also pictures!
https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/?l=1zq
I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life. George Floyd was a menace to society. Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society. If people want to stand up against the attempt to silence Charlie Kirk, let's unsilence him. Let's hear what he had to say:
"John Adams famously said the Constitution was only written for a moral religious people, it was wholly inadequate for a people of any other."
"The body politic of America was so Christian that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord."
"One of the reasons we're living through a Constitutional crisis, is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible."
"So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population."
https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1965924214394986629
I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse. So what do you do when you think *your liberty* is dependent on other people holding religious beliefs they refuse to hold? Will there be violence? Because I can tell you, the non-Christian population of America, who will probably be the majority in a decade or two, will not tolerate being excluded from the "Christian form of government." One reason Rightists are hyper-focused on the "threat" posed by Venezuelan gangsters and Somali Muslims is because they don't want to think about what really scares them, the white, affluent, urban, secular population of America, many of whose ancestors came on the Mayflower, and are sick of being told Americanism means living in the middle of nowhere, watching NASCAR, driving a big rig truck and talking about being "saved."
Kirk didn't always have these views. In 2018 he said, "we do have a separation of church and state, and we should support that." But like many on the young Right, he entered a spiral of self-radicalization in which transgression is elevated to the highest good. At first, simply being a conservative on college campuses was transgressive, but like the weed user looking for stronger and stronger highs, he moved further and further rightward. I don't think Kirk wanted an apocalyptic war with secularism. The stuff he said was said for the moment, so the audience can go "based!" and then go to dinner at Red Robin. Like their opponents on the woke left, one of the easiest ways to piss off people like Kirk is to treat them as the intellectually serious thinkers they pretend to be. That's not to say this stuff isn't dangerous. Sometimes things that are meant to be taken in a propagandistic context are taken at face value by literal-minded followers. Witness how radical feminists said "gender is a social construct, it has nothing to do with biology," which helped spawn the transgender movement that would later turn on them. Had Kirk not been assassinated, perhaps he would have seen the day when he was face to face with a monster of his own creation.
I spent my life promoting ideas, and ultimately decided the most appropriate social media handle was "No One Listens To Me" (not literally true but oh, so close.) So I don't think an influencer who got more attention than he deserved (and $325,000+/year) should get extra attention for being killed. And if people start listening to me just because I die and can no longer benefit from the engagement, I hereby object in advance to this unfair deprivation.
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it? Maybe Kirk was right, and American liberty depends on Christianity; maybe you're also right, and Christianity in America will inevitably decline. I suppose, in that case, we'd expect to see the government become more authoritarian and controlling, without anyone being able to (or, perhaps, wanting to) really do anything to stop this. That would be an unpleasant conclusion, but there's no guarantee the world will always be pleasant.
>OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it?
It wasn't intended to be such. You can simply look at American Christians and ask if they're particularly committed to liberty, to which the answer is negative. They're very committed to "leave *me* alone," but not to leaving others alone. Libs, likewise, think liberty is someone others owe to them without any reciprocal obligation. Only some, not all, libertarians are truly committed to defending liberty for everyone.
As the guy behind the Professor Watchlist, I don’t think he makes a great martyr for free speech, but nobody should be attacked or killed for saying something others don’t like, whether that’s Charlie Kirk or Salman Rushdie. (Assuming that’s what happened, we still don’t know why the shooter did that and may never know.)
His ideas about Christianity as the only basis for freedom are pretty unexceptional in the evangelical community. Generic, even.
> I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life.
I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
If you have negative comments about Charlie Kirk, you either could have said them a week ago, or there will be enough opportunity to say them one month later.
Agree.
<I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
That's not true in most settings, though. If someone on this forum "talks shit" about Kirk, that is not cowardly, because even if Kirk was alive he would not know what the speaker said and so would not attempt to rebut them or make them look foolish. And it's unfair of you to sneak in a critique of people speaking negatively of Kirk by calling what they're doing "talking shit." I said several negative things about him in posts today that were reasoned criticisms expressed in a civil way. That's not talking shit and is not cowardly. It is also not true that "talking shit" about the murderer here or in other settings rewards the murderer, because the chance he will hear what's said here or in most settings in the country is nil.
I was trying to explain the rule in general. If your criticism was reasonable, then I think it is perfectly okay. But that is not a typical way how people on internet express opinions.
The part about "he wouldn't notice it anyway" I don't agree with, although I am too lazy to explain why, sorry for that.
>I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
Not only that, but when someone's been assassinated for political reasons, talking about how bad and harmful the deceased's views were runs the risk of radicalising more people to commit more assassinations.
He literally toured America encouraging people to come up to him and tell him how bad and harmful his views were.
I agree.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by all the shit of the past few days, but thread OP's comment is kind of a relief. I've seen so many ad-hominem's about Kirk from people who've never ever consumed any of his content or bothered to verify something that too good to check before repeating it with supreme confidence. And if the first thing they said turned out to be wrong, well, they'll just say something else they heard with supreme confidence.
Meanwhile, thread OP is accurately summarizing Kirk's views on the role of Christianity in a way that Kirk would agree with.
I wouldn't really care to criticize him right now if not for the reaction to his death from many on the right, which is a combination of:
* advocating violence in response and/or using the state to go after critics
* over the top hagiography about how Kirk was the greatest person ever
* a lot of "the left is broadly responsible because of their rhetoric" from people engaged in the exact same type of rhetoric
And I'm not talking about randos online. I'm thinking of famous media personalities, members of Congress, the president.
Reason it's relevant to criticize Kirk and not just people's reactions is that the hypocrisy is a powerful argument against what they're doing. It's one thing to say "whatever you think of Kirk, you shouldn't persecute his critics", another thing to say "you attack people for supposedly extreme rhetoric but you praise as a saint a guy who said the same type of stuff".
this would be ok if the left literally didnt already criticize trump nonstop. i mean he sneezes, you get a 2 hour video about how it is a threat to democracy.
I criticize the left all the time. Their existence is no reason not to criticize the party in power as it works to break American democracy. (Though this would be a tasteless time to lambast Kirk himself)
I think a mature reaction is like this:
https://xcancel.com/ProjectLiberal/status/1965858345673425385
> We agree with Charlie Kirk on basically nothing.
> Except that he deserves the right, as every human does, to speak freely without the threat of violence.
I’m not compulsively online, so Charlie Kirk wasn’t on my radar. It seems he was a provocateur of sorts, but from what I’m reading, he seems like he engaged in fair debate with people who disagreed with him.
He was a young man with a wife and young children whose life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. This is a terrible tragedy. Give it a rest already. Let his friends and family mourn.
From the little that I’ve learned about Kirk, he was acting from his true beliefs and not some cynical clown stirring things up for personal aggrandizement.
Just stop. You are attacking a man who will justifiably be viewed as a martyr by his fellow travelers. I don’t personally share many, or necessarily any of his beliefs, but I’ll repeat, that this is a terrible tragedy.
It matters to me whether he truly believed that, as he's quoted in the press as saying, “one thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder.” If he did not believe that then he was a cynical clown. Even if he did, he seems very remiss to me in not doing some double-checking about this issue. Either he was so sloppy and irresponsible he didn't bother to check, or else he was so convinced that trans people are pieces of shit that he didn't think it was important to check the accuracy of horrifically inflammatory statements about them.
Two members of my family, now dead, were gay: my mother and my half brother. Both had some mild trans tendencies. My brother died of AIDS during the era when people were talking about AIDS as god's punishment for perversion. Do I really have to be sad about the death of this "nice family man "who spouted the kind of untruths that led to my brother dying in an atmosphere of hostile mockery, and my mother feeling so uncomfortable about her sexuality that she waited til she was facing death to tell me? They were nice people too and, unlike Nice Guy Kirk, did not spread toxic lies about people. In fact both were kind and tolerant. No, I am not in favor of assassination, but I just am not sad that Kirk got shot in the neck while lying about trans people. Frankly, I'm glad he got blown away. I'm not defending my reaction as the right and proper one, but I don't think it's that hard to understand.
One of the things I've been hearing from Kirk's advocates is that despite disagreements one might have with him, Kirk's response was to open a dialogue, not shut you down, let alone hurt you.
If that's true, then that's probably something you could root for.
One way to disprove that might have been to find a situation where a group of people waving the Kirk flag are moving to beat up a trans person, and see if Kirk tries to condemn them and call for a dialogue instead. Or find out if that had happened, since it won't be happening now. (I'm not familiar enough with Kirk to feel certain I could find a representative sample of his views.)
Going forward, a lot of conservatives are taking home the lesson that if someone tries to defend their views on a soapbox, the response is likely to be the ammo box. Maybe not the rule, but now it's an existence proof.
"Do I really have to be sad about the death"
No, and I doubt anyone here thinks you have to. People are saying valid critiques feel very counter-productive right now.
Restraint is frustrating. Especially when some people ignore a person's faults, possibly taking advantage for political convenience. The desire to at least "correct the record" is very, very strong ... and this is the type of thinking that makes well-meaning people point out George Floyd's use of fentanyl on that fateful day.
• Was it true? I mean, sure, yes.
• Is it helpful, bringing this up? Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Is it productive, making a giant deal out of it? Probably not ... and certainly not in the immediate days after the event.
Therefore restraint also wise at times.
>Two members of my family, now dead, were gay: my mother and my half brother. Both had some mild trans tendencies.
Might be a good thing they lived before a teacher could identify and act on that info.
Less of this please. This is an exceptionally disgusting and tasteless way to respond to someone discussing tragedies within their family, even within an explicitly political discussion.
While it was a bit tasteless and a bit out of place, it is absolutely relevant if we are holding Kirk to account for criticizing the trans movement. Teachers trying to give kids gender dysphoria seems to be inseparable from the trans movement for whatever reason, and given that GD sufferers have sky-high suicide rates and many other problems, it is something every parent should fear.
"give kids gender dysphoria" ... wtf? "oh little Johnny, take this pill. It totally won't make you believe you're a girl"
" Teachers trying to give kids gender dysphoria"
Please kindly confine yourself to talk about real problems that occur in the real world instead of blithely spewing insane bullshit made up by hateful troglodytes to justify their heinous bigotry, thank you very much.
I’m not offended. I’m really not all touchy and sensitive about my mother and brother’s
situation. It takes shit on the order of Kirk’s to get to me.
I fail to see any coherent argument here. You are throwing up a claim that Kirk spiraled further right becasue he made stronger and stronger moral claims. Forgive me for putting words in your mouth, but I presume you disagree with these moral claims. I think the manner of his death- while at a public appearance where microphones were distributed those opposed to his viewpoint to have their say, and then someone chose to make an argument with bullets instead of words, could not vindicate him more.
Agree or disagree with him, it is indisputable that Charlie Kirk chose speech and debate as his means of persuasion, and AFAIK never engaged in physical violence against anyone. Claims about how his speech was some sort of metaphorical violence ring desperately hollow against the graphic and vivid reality of his actual violent death.
Like, what is your actual point here? From a purely tactical perspective, every rant about Charlie on the left just digs the hole deeper. Maybe just dont say anything about it?
I disagree with this idea that killing him counterproductively amplified his message. That's wishful thinking of precisely the kind employed when people were being "de-platformed" by every major company (from social media to web hosting to payment processors): it turns out that strategy actually DOES usually work to silence people.
If you don't know what my point was, you could try reading my comment again.
I read it several times. Still not finding anything. You say he's creating a monster. Where? How? What are the characteristics of this monster? You say his ideas were bad for society but leave it [citation needed]. His presumed opponents are described, but there is nothing about his adherents. Just... a rant.
But you didn't read it. I had several digs at the left there, and you didn't see them because, like many Rightists in my experience, you don't actually read, you just skim, look for keywords and generate a generic response that doesn't address what you're actually replying to.
And like many leftoids in my experience, you have hallucinated something in your writing that simply isn't there for anyone not hip to whatever the current epistomogical model for victimhood is. You continue to evade requests to supply a point, so I guess this is just a rant.
The dude was brutally murdered in a way that watching the video will make you ill: its all right to put down your hobbyhorses for five seconds and realize murder is bad for anyone and maybe say a prayer for his family.
Its honestly a bit worrisome so many netizens seem to have the empathy of turnips.
I'm honoring him by engaging with his ideas, that was what he toured universities to do.
Don't think he would have liked this empathy shame thing which is rather gay-coded IMHO.
I don't think it's gay coded, I think it's woke. It has the characteristic deep structure: The speaker's assumption that they get to dictate what constitutes civilized behavior; and the mean twist at the end, directed at those who don't comply ("turnips"). Woke is all about slathering sympathy on everybody except those who disagree with the speaker -- those jerks you get to cancel.
you said this upthread, and still want to play the woke card?
"No, I am not in favor of assassination, but I just am not sad that Kirk got shot in the neck while lying about trans people. Frankly, I'm glad he got blown away."
i mean yes you admit it's a personal reaction but hell, this is ten times more woke than me being mad at people not being civil at a murder.
and im tired of woke. turok can say utter bullshit like "reality has a racist bias" and this subgroup can flirt with hbd, and somehow woke is the enemy. It turned out more that woke moved past the excesses of the left into being the right version of calling everyone you don't like a fascist.
like you literally cannot trust anyone now, give power to the left and they go superwoke, give power to the right and they go their own version of nuts.
"Engaging with your preferred interpretation of your preferred selection of his ideas" is not "engaging with his ideas".
When someone dies, we put aside arguing about ideas or whether we love or hate them to think about the fragility of life, the cruelty of it being cut short, and about those people left behind. The grave is sort of a peacemaker, and people don't like it when the peace is disturbed.
if you think this is gay coded, well, turnip.
>if you think this is gay coded, well, turnip.
If true I suppose that mad utopian, Ha-Nozri, must have been very gay.
Almost thou persuadest me to be very gay.
Who's this "we"? Some people do, some don't.
It's the royal "We," Nancy.
> Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society
And he thought they were good for society. Are you so much better qualified than him to say what's good or bad, or are you both mere mortals grasping for the truth in an unpredictable world?
He was murdered because of people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
All I can say is that if you get murdered tomorrow, I won't spend Saturday feverishly searching through your comment history to find things I disagree with so I can argue with your corpse.
>> Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society
> And he thought they were good for society.
So did Hitler of his. There's no point in that statement of yours.
But what I don't get is why you talk as if your conception of all this is right.
How could you possibly know that Alexander "can't distinguish between 'ideas I disagree with' and 'ideas that are wrong'"?
Are you "no mere mortal[...] grasping for the truth in an unpredictable world"?
Ah, wait.... I see. You're applying this "logic" only to other people, not yourself, because otherwise you could not give such snarky comments here.
Do you believe in universal truth? If not, then we're pretty much at the state of "I disagree with you" as the moral limit. If enough people disagree (as with Hitler) we can condemn, make laws against, etc. Do enough people disagree with Charlie Kirk to condemn him as a society? Doesn't look that way to me. He was broadly popular on the right. If you condemn him, you're condemning most of the right. Not only does that not work from a voting majority perspective, it's a horrible idea from the perspective of a civil society.
Go ahead and condemn the worst people, even if they're on your opponent's side. Please condemn the worst people on your own side. But relatively normie people who are saying things that maybe 40-60% of the country believes? Bad idea in a lot of ways. And comparing him to Hitler is downright evil.
If you do believe in universal truth, then you're still stuck with trying to convince others that your conception of truth is more accurate than someone else's. There's no shortcut here. You may be fully convinced, but that means nothing. Ironically, that was Charlie's best known attribute and plausibly what got him killed - he was in the trenches talking to people and working to convince them. Not by force, but by persuasion.
> If you condemn him, you're condemning most of the right.
Aren't those who condemn Kirk (and people like him) usually quite clear that they DO condemn most of the right?
You seem not to have noticed that I didn't state *any* opinion on the subject matter *at all*, but did only criticize Melvin's critique of Alexander. And I did it regarding two points:
1. He said that that guy (who I don't even know and are not interested in) does think that his own ideas are good. And this is irrelevant. It does not make anyone, especially Alexander, change his mind about them. He finds them bad. That's why I said Hitler found his own ideas also good, because nobody changes his mind about Hitler's ideas when he learns that Hitler liked them.
2. He said nobody can know anything. But he obviously doesn't believe that, otherwise he wouldn't state that that is the case -- how could he know?
Apparently in the Rationalist's sphere people are just as irrational as everywhere else.
The point is that in a democracy you have to learn to cope with differing opinions and you don't get to establish them by force. If you believe that strong convictions are enough to murder opposition, you will soon find that most of society has strong convictions against that.
And if they don't, well, good bye civilized society.
Like Mr. Doolittle you seem to be under the impression that I engaged in the subject matter, which I didn't.
See my reply to him. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-398/comment/155210939
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
According to Pew Research, the process may have already halted in the USA. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/)
"...for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range....
"Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in our annual surveys.
"Meanwhile, the share of Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity has been trending upward, though it is still in single digits.
Plus a recent survey in Britain (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/brits-beliefs-about-gods?crossBreak=1824&period=5yrs) found that the youth cohort (18-24) has gone from 49% "I do not believe in any sort of God" in 2021 to 32% today, with those who "believe there is a God" going from 24% to 37%. Another UK survey from this year found that in 2018 only 4% of adult's in Britain went to church at least once a month, and now 12% do. This is driven mostly by the younger cohorts: 18-24 year-olds went from 4% attendance to 16%, and those 25-34 went from 4% attendance to 13%.
Given this data, how certain can we be that secularization will continue and will not reverse? For all we know we might be at peak secularization in the West right now. Globally it looks like we were at peak secularization back in 2010, Pew expects the percent of the global population that is religiously affiliated to continue to drop over the next 25 years. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religiously-unaffiliated/)
Similar news in Finland: https://www.uef.fi/en/article/belief-in-god-among-boys-continues-to-grow-in-finland-study-finds-signs-of-growing-belief-among
And Sweden: https://swedenherald.com/article/breakthrough-for-the-church-of-sweden-young-people-driving
And Norway: https://x.com/JusBrierley/status/1901744347969630439
>Given this data, how certain can we be that secularization will continue and will not reverse?
It progresses by fits and spurts, but the long-term direction is always down.
"Always" over what timeframe? We've had revivals in specific countries as well as over large swaths of the world. Obviously specific religions have started, spread, shrunk and grown at different times. Christianity was pretty small in 50AD, but subsequently grew a lot - in defiance of "always down." In fact, Christianity is probably the largest its ever been right this moment, in terms of total numbers. In terms of percents it may be down compared to fairly recent metrics and when looking specifically at Europe or the US. Looking at 300 years ago Christianity has grown in both total numbers and percents in the entire non-European world.
Not globally, and we shouldn’t assume it will be in the developed nations either. Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%, leaving he system to stabilize and plateau (which is seems to have done in the US, at least over the last 5 years).
>Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%
The examples of East Germany, Czechia, and Estonia show that any such limit is around 5%.
I don't think the populations of those three countries are representative enough that we would expect that other countries will end up in the same space. Most notably, they all used to be part of or were subject states to the USSR, an officially atheist authoritarian regime that spent decades officially suppressing religion, though legal restrictions, arresting clergy, removing privileges from the openly religious, teaching atheism and mocking religion in schools, and propaganda campaigns against religiosity. It would be surprising if that didn't have an effect on the floor for religiosity! Unless you expect similar pressures to arise in the USA or the rest of Europe, we shouldn't expect similar results.
It's closer to 25% of Czechia than 5%, and there's no reason to expect that the low religiosity we see there today is going to be a *permanent* feature of life.
Meanwhile, your side will have some trouble admitting that the monster that killed him is a monster created, at least in part, by your own ideology. Or perhaps to be fair, of your willingness to tolerate one-sided viewpoints keeping people in glass bubbles.
He was a monster created by Kirk using his media empire to relentlessly encourage political violence by his calls to deploy the military against blue cities and states, celebrating Paul Pelosi's attacker, the pardoning of the seditious conspiracists, etc. You can't keep signaling "Hey guys, I'm the hip guy that supports political violence" and then fall back to "but wait, not political violence against me" because the audience you've amassed really loves political violence and one of them (even if they're a purported enemy) turns their sights on you for once.
The fun part of this comment is that it's so completely context-free that, without knowing the parent comment, it could be saying anything.
Why? From their perspective, it's one fewer Nazi.
We don't know anything about this monster, so it is a bit rich that you are accusing an entire 'side' (who is that?) of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once.
It's also very left-coded to act this way: accuse an entire group of responsibility, etc.
After Trayvon Martin, I remember a local-gov't leader quoted in the press saying, "They're killing our children!" She made it a rallying cry.
I was confused. "They"? That word ... are we not all part of the same country? Plus it was false. She should know better. But ... "they"? And the rallying cry caught on. That word flummoxed me. "They"
I've learned a lot since then.
With that incident, with Michael Brown in Ferguson, with George Floyd in Minneapolis, and a litany of other incidents, the left very loudly accused an entire giant group of people of being responsible + indifferent + closedminded all at once.
People throughout the country who were already disgusted by the facts of these incidents were summarily lumped together with the real villains, due only to their skin color or mix of policy choices & beliefs.
Very counterproductive. And very much inline with our host's own essay, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
The woman quoted above? I honestly thought we were in the same in-group, so to speak. Seriously, up until that day, I really thought a person like she and a person like me were united, at least in some small way.
Like I said, I've learned a lot since then. Much of which from this community here.
I would rather call it dickhead-coded to label an identifiable group "of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once". (It is legit to refer to a group of people who are responsible, indifferent and closeminded, but such a group is not readily identifiable.)
But my father has been, holy shit, shockingly indifferent and closed-minded, and responsible for indulging his indifferent closed-minded influencers but shutting out his own family, for reflexively defending his man Trump. He can never acknowledge that there is anything wrong with Trump, he just deflects criticisms into accusations about The Left.
Do I think his behavior is typical of his group (rather than common to all members of the group)? Yes.
I already didn't like Kraft but that picture of his truck in the bike lane right by an intersection where a child was killed is just totally disgusting. No amount of housing policy differences can make up for that with me: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1l9ohpl/big_truck_parked_in_the_bike_lane_by_the/
Do you think he personally drove that truck?
Seems like a silly gotcha to me. 1)Boston streets are very congested and no matter how you slice the pie — for ex, by slicing part of the street off and calling it a bike lane — there is not enough space to meet the needs of those driving, biking, parking, or placing their truck where it needs to be in order to make a delivery or perform a service. Everyone who does not have scrupulosity OCD parks illegally, blocks traffic, cuts people off in order to enter the stream of traffic etc. If you live there, you’ve done that stuff too.
2) Even if this truck were doing something exceptionally inconsiderate, rather than something that is happening on most blocks, what it’s doing has nothing to do with the child’s being run over. They are not incurring some of the guilt for that.
>> If you live there, you’ve done that stuff too.
Speak for yourself. I'm the one on the bike going around all the illegally parked incredibly inconsiderate dangerous traffic.
>> They are not incurring some of the guilt for that.
It's a bad look made worse by context.
I've been on a bike too for the last 5 years. If the conditions are godawful, I ride on the sidewalk. I am careful not to hit or scare pedestrians, but they still don't like me biking on the sidewalk, and I get it. I believe biking on the sidewalk is in fact illegal. But I need to be somewhere, a bike's what I've got, and I'm not going to risk my life getting forced out into a lane crowded with fast-moving, irritable car drivers. In my view, the conditions force me to choose to do something probably illegal and certainly a bit inconsiderate. That's my point. That truck is just one of thousands of manifestations of the fact that it is impossible to travel and park in Boston and be perfectly law abiding and perfectly considerate of others. It says nothing whatever about the Krafts. And can you honestly say that if you had a friend's car for the day and were driving in Boston you would refrain from parking somewhere illegal if you thought you could run in, do your errand, and get back to the car without being ticketed?
I listened to an account a student in the crowd gave of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Student said that the shooting occurred during a Q&A. Acc/to interviewee, a student had asked Kirk whether he believed trans people committed more murders than others, and Kirk said yes, and there was a cheer from the crowd. The student asked a follow-up question, and then Kirk was shot.
It seems unlikely to me that trans people do commit more murders than other people (who are not trans but similar in other respects -- demographics, SES, etc --to the trans subjects), though I suppose it's possible. I did a quick check with GPT -- did not double check its answer -- and it said there is lots of data indicating that trans people are attacked and harmed more often than others, but no data on whether they commit more murders. So my question is, does it seem likely that Kirk actually believed that trans people are more likely to murder? If so, why? Are there sites out there somewhere citing some kind of data, some study? Did he just think it was self-evident because trans people seem obviously bad, weird and defective to him ? Did he not believe it, but say it because he knew it was a crowd pleaser? I am trying to understand his mentality.
I'm not sure if they carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-men, but they certainly seem to carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-women.
Where are you finding numbers on that? I just went looking for some and didn't find anything besides the Violence Prevention Project's dataset on public mass shootings. That does indicate a rate higher than cis women but lower than cis men, but the sample size is too small (one transgender shooter) to draw robust conclusions from. I can't find anything on murder rates in general.
It would seem that the absolute numbers of trans criminals would be too low to draw many conclusions unless the rate were staggeringly high. If the rate for transwomen were exactly the same as for cis men, we'd still be looking at numbers too low to draw conclusions about for big rare events like a mass shooting, though it would be enough to discuss more typical murders.
Agreed. About 0.8% of US adults are trans, roughly evenly distributed between trans men, trans women, and nonbinary, so if we had systematic statistics we would be able to tell the difference between trans women committing homicide at the same rate as cis men (we would expect to see about 30 per year then) or as cis women (which would be about 3 per year), especially if we were to aggregate across several years of data.
PolitiFact took a run at the question:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/sep/09/trans-people-mass-shootings-gun-violence/
I've been looking into it too. Here's the trouble with the data available: Places that collect shooting data lump together all shootings where 4+ people were killed. There have been 4000+ in the last decade, and very few correspond to what we think of as "mass shootings." Most involve gang violence, which is just a different thing, and anyhow I'm pretty sure most gangs would not want a accept a trans member even if they were a good fit in demographics, attitudes, etc. If you just look at the large, famous incidents, the ones we think of as mass shootings, the total number of them is so small that you can't conclude anything from the number. It would be like deciding whether a coin was weighted unevenly based on 4 tosses. It is, though, kind of striking how many mass shootings were committed by people who are gender nonconforming in some way.
Anyhow: I just figured out that the Gun Violence Archive has filters, and while there isn't one that selects for what we think of as mass shootings, there is one that selects only shootings where the victims were strangers to the shooter. There aren't that many of them, and you can actually look through them and remove any that don't count as mass shootings for one reason or another. I believe there was one other filter that I thought would also be useful. But, after you select the incidents that fit the bill, you have to find out whether the shooter was trans, and many records give no info one way or the other about that. I do think it's likely that in many, possibly even most, of these cases the topic came up in court, because if the shooter is trans, there's the issue of where the person would be incarcerated -- with what gender. So I was thi nking about asking GPT to look into that. But I don't know where, exactly, to tell it to look. And I'm actually busy enough with other things that it's a bad idea for me to get fascinated by this question and pour time into it.
Another important point: very very few people commit mass murder of the kind that involves spraying a crowd of strangers with bullets. Maybe one person in a million? One in a hundred thousand? Even if it's one in a hundredn thousand, and even if trans people are 10 times a likely to be shooters as cis people, that means there's a one in 10,000 chance that the trans person next to you in line for movie tickets is a shooter. Which rounds down to zero.
>Acc/to interviewee, a student had asked Kirk whether he believed trans people committed more murders than others, and Kirk said yes
Not quite right (but about the level of fidelity I would expect from an eyewitness account). According to the AP the exchange went like this:
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked. Kirk responded: “Too many.”
The questioner followed up: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
Apparently those were his last words.
My guess: Lots of trans and gay murderous villains in movies. It's a trope.
But of course the question is then why the writers of those movies wrote them like that --but not, why *they* believed this. Most writers don't believe what they write. (Harry Potter, Sci-Fi, ...)
The reason is because if your audience thinks being gay or trans is wrong and creepy, then having the villain do gay or gender-nonconforming things helps establish that they're a bad guy. They see the villain acting girly and think "ugh, that guy's a freak."
It's the same reason why crippled or deformed villains are (or were) popular - it looks freaky, it's a deviation from the norm, it visually tells the audience "this person is twisted on the outside, and they're twisted on the inside as well."
I imagine a similar effect is in play with Charlie Kirk's statement - if he thinks "ugh, this person is a mentally ill deviant" when thinking of trans people, it's easy for him to imagine that they're deviant in other ways (such as being a murderer), regardless of the facts.
Tangentially, the motif of villains having a hairline scar on the face (usually on a cheek or the forehead) is a specific historical allusion, coding the character as a member of the late 19th or early 20th century German/Prussian aristocratic officer class. It was fairly fashionable for university students of this class to fight highly-stylized "academic duels". These were nominally actual duels with real swords, but were not fought to the death and typically involved rules and equipment (armor and protective goggles) designed to minimize the risk of death or serious injury. Most of the face besides the eyes was left unprotected, since getting a highly visible scar in such a duel was seen as a positive outcome: dueling scars were seen as an indicator of courage.
Giving villains dueling scars overlaps with the tradition in American movies of the mod to late 20th century of making villains resemble Nazis, since a fair number of senior officers in Nazi Germany had dueling scars.
I think it's a talking point in conservative media right now, I don't know what evidence there is for it if any. I really doubt the timing of the shot means anything since it sounds like it was done by a rooftop sniper some distance away.
I have no problem with trans people, but if I was asked that question, without looking it up, my response would also have been yes (at least if I was answering honestly). The logic is that I've read before that trans people have much higher rates of mental illnesses than non trans people. And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
I tried to look it up myself just now as well, and also pretty much got redirected to info about trans people being harmed more than others. I'd be happy be corrected if you or anyone else finds some actual info on this.
> And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
Do you really think that?
I think people who want (want!) someone dead (because they hate them, fear them, want something from them, or them out of the way) are the ones who commit more murders on average.
I don't see how one needs to have a mental illness for that, except in special cases.
It seems likely to me that more mass murderers than one-on-one murderers are crazy. Killing someone in rage or for gain just seems like an extension of the kind of interaction that happens all the time. Yes, of course, it is bad, but is much easier for most of us to comprehend. We don't have the feeling you have to be crazy to do it.
There must be data on what kinds of mental illness are more prevalent in trans people, and I will look it up when I get a chance. Most kinds of mental illness do not make people more likely to be mass murderers. Probably half the US has qualified for depression, anxiety disorder or substance use disorder at some point in their life, but the risk that any one of them will commit mass murder is tiny.
I'm sure somebody has categorized mass murderers by mental state at the time of the event. Some mass murderers are just plain psychotic, and have delusions that, if true, would make committing mass murder make some kind of sense; some are in the midst of rage-and-despair meltdowns set off by bad things that have recently happened to them, things like being fired; some are true believers in some movement that hates a certain group, and lack the internal controls that prevent other members of the movement from actually killing outgroup members; some are hooked on the idea of the fame and glory they will get. Only the first of these groups is clearly crazy. though of course most in the other groups could be diagnosed with depression, sociopathy or naricissistic personality disorder. But the last 3 disorders are all quite common, and the risk that an individual with one of them will commit a mass murder is tiny.
>There must be data on what kinds of mental illness are more prevalent in trans people, and I will look it up when I get a chance.
Warrier et al (2020) is the best study on the subject I've come across.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17794-1
They analyzed two datasets that had info on both transgender identification and various self-reported mental illnesses. The results are not very robust between datasets. One dataset shows significantly elevated rates for all mental conditions in the set (autism, ADHD, bipolar, depression, learning disability, OCD, and scizophrenia) among trans individuals, but a lot of this seems to be driven by autism correlating both with being trans and with self-reports of other conditions. The other dataset shows very strong association with autism, moderate association with depression, weaker associations with OCD, ADHD, and Bipolar, and no statistically significant associations with scizophrenia.
I also looked just now for other data on associations between gender dysphoria and either personality disorders or schizophrenia. There are some papers out there, but all the ones I've skimmed seemed to have load-bearing reliance on outdated estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria (on the order of 1 in 10,000, not the current estimate of 0.6% to 1.3% of the population).
The correlation between autism and gender dysphoria seems pretty robust and shows up in a bunch of studies. Here's a 2022 survey paper:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10313553/
We've had a few high-profile mass-shootings where the shooter was trans and people are subject to recency bias.
If your attitude is "*must* I believe this?" it won't clear that bar.
If your attitude is "*can* I believe this?" then it definitely does.
I wish someone would look at the data and give some stats. US gov't data on murderers and murder victims just give basic demographics, I think. I wonder if people who have relevant data sets are not analyzing them to answer this question because acc/to wokeism it's an evil question to even consider, sort of like race and IQ.
I think that if you did actually look carefully at the stats then what you'd find is that it depends how you define things and what cutoffs you take.
Here is a list of recent transgender shooters as per grok, which appears to be the only AI willing to talk about it:
* Nashville, TN (2023): Audrey Hale, identified as transgender, killed six people at The Covenant School.
* Denver, CO (2019): Alec McKinney, a transgender teenager, was involved in a school shooting that killed one and injured eight.
* Aberdeen, MD (2018): Snochia Moseley, reportedly transgender, killed three at a Rite Aid facility.
* Colorado Springs, CO (2022): Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five at an LGBTQ nightclub, was claimed to be non-binary by their lawyers, though this is disputed.
* Minneapolis, MN (2025): Robin Westman, identified as transgender, killed two children and injured 17 at Annunciation Catholic School.
Should Zizians also be on the list? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
I actually got GPT to cough up info. It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people. So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing. they recorded 4400 incidents in the last decade, and in only 10 of them was the shooter trans. For the well-publicized shootings, there has probably been enough light thrown on the presumed killer that there's decent info about whether they're trans. I don't know anything about the info quality of the many other shootings that met the GVA criteria. How likely are the police to try to find out whether someone is trans, if they do not volunteer the info? Do they maybe know because in most casesvthe suspect or the person's lawyer is expressing a lot of concern about what gender they will be housed with in prison?
Anyhow, going by the GVA stats, trans people are ddfinitely under represented in the shooters group. A cis person is 3-4 times as likely as a trans personvto carry out a mass shooting.
Makes sense to me. I know trans people have a higher-than-average oddness quotient, with autism especially over-represented in the group. But I would not expect autism to be a risk factor for being a shooter. Most autistic people are solitary, uncomfortable around people, and emotionally flat.
> It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people... So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing.
I think that when people say "mass shooting" they're generally thinking about the case where some nut shoots a bunch of strangers, rather than gang-related gunfights, but of course the GVA's statistics are dominated by the latter.
That's why Charlie Kirk's last words were "counting or not counting gang violence?", because it makes a huge difference to the reference class.
I agree that transgender individuals are much less likely to be the perps in gang-related shootings, but I still wonder whether they're more or less likely to be the perps in non-gang-related shootings. (Which frankly, I care a lot more about, because I'm not a gang member and neither is anyone I know.)
i think its a bit evil yes, you can't always isolate parts of a person with heinous acts like this, or if you do you can't base it on identity.
with trans people there is always pressure to oppress them, to be blunt, in the same way people are always lurking to be racist to black people, or will oppress any unpopular minority. We keep this in check by not tying traits to groups too tightly: a person is an individual moral being dependent on a lot of factors, not always one predominant.
a lot of this research is really fuel for oppression; just agree with them and ask them "what now?" and then see what comes out. It's not "we must make mental heath a priority and maybe start a charity to help at risk trans people, or low income people in general."
Absolutely disagree that about its being evil. A lot of research findings can be fuel for oppression. *Most* research findings probably are harmful to some innocent people. For instance findings about farming or manufacturing processes that produce toxic products no doubt harm some kind, fair, honest people who got into the business and had no idea their product was harming the public. Some are not in a position to adapt how they produce stuff, and go under. Some of these people probably end up bankrupt and despairing.
Of course I see that if trans people turn out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people that info can be used to oppress them. But to label the research as "just fuel for oppression" is absurd. It's like saying metal as "just a material for producing bullets." Both are many things, not all of them bad. Furthermore, if trans people are more likely to commit mass murder I'm not sure that info is going to be make things much worse for them. Lots of people already think they're likely to commit mass murder, so research data seems not to play much role in what they believe. Seems the belief is a result of publicity about incidents that fit easily with an overall negative take on transness, nurtured and magnified in an echo chamber. '
As a matter of fact, even if trans people turned out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people, that info is if anything reassuring. What fraction people commit mass murder? One in a million? So for a random trans person the chance they'll shoot up a crowd is 2 in a million? Still so low it's vanishingly unlikely, and anyone with a lick of sense will round it down to zero.
there is a difference from research that harms certain groups because of unintentional harm and research targeting group identity to link it to crimes or immoral actions.
i don't think we can be naive that certain types of research are done dispassionately or are out of care for the group researched.
Science is seen as a rubber-stamp authority too much to be sanguine on people treating it the way you think. The goal
is to have the authority behind your pet obsessions in a "God says so" way. The racist invokes science to make racism sacrosanct. Then he can argue for policy to "reflect the science."
Once you start doing that particular thing-race/group and negative traits that have moral aspects-it's extremely dangerous. People and even scientists can have bad motives.
The late Charlie Kirk's organization Turning Point USA had funding on the order of hundreds millions of dollars over the years. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023.
I got in an argument with someone about the effect of money in politics. They argued that there are diminishing returns in individual races (which I simply don't have the data to argue for or against right now). But "money in politics" is not just about individual elections. There are *lots* of ways to use money. There are lots of *creative* ways to use money. There are lots of creative ways to use money, directly or indirectly, to steer public opinion and policy.
Turning Point USA is/was just one example.
In what creative ways does Turning Point USA spend money?
Even if TPUSA was just funding individual races, that's a lot of individual races. It wouldn't surprise me to find that TPUSA could spend nearly all its money on them without seeing meaningful diminishing returns. One race could easily spend $1M, and there are easily over 100 races. That's $100M right there.
Meanwhile, I don't think "there exist creative ways to spend money" necessarily implies an organization will find those ways. OTOH, I think that as the amount of spendable money increases, the motivation to find creative ways to spend it drops. It's easier to employ stable but less efficient spending strategies and put the rest in a war chest.
Easter egg for people from the other sub-thread:
I actually agree with preferring the US system lol
Okay, but you're still wrong about how the UK's system actually works in practice.
So, Charlie Kirk is dead. Things are escalating quite nicely, aren't they? While it is delightfully ironic that he died right as he was scapegoating minorities for mass shootings, he'll make for a good martyr nonetheless. How many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown? Because I feel like this isn't quite severe enough to get away with that, unless Trump's base is way more attatched to him than I thought...
In a different day and age, I might have written that perhaps we should wait with drawing conclusions until we know the first thing about the assassin other than that they're evading police. In any case, the current US administration has shown that it will start crackdowns on anyone for any reason or none at all, so I don't believe Kirk's death will have any more impact than the Minnesota legislators' shootings had a noticable calming effect. It might be referenced some more in future tweets, but the agenda has already been set. Dissenting opinions welcome, I'm not American and only read the news
I understand Trump immediately spent a bunch of time blaming The Left although nothing was known about the shooter. Seems like 84% of "Ideologically motivated extremist homicides" in the US, 1990-2020, were right-wing: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versus-far-right-fatal-violence-an-empirical-assessment-of-the-prevalence-of-ideologically-motivated-homicides-in-the-united-states
Crack down on who or what?
While I share some of your concern, I feel like there's a good chance this won't even move the needle that much. The Trump administration really doesn't seem to be very worried about taking the pulse of its base before it acts: Trump just does what he wants, tosses out whatever lazy, bullshit justification is easiest to reach for and his base picks it up and runs with it unquestioningly. Given how often I've seen people even on this forum parroting his flimsy excuses, I can't really "doesn't have a good enough excuse to sell his people on it" to be much of a bottleneck for him.
Maybe escalation like this will make some people more likely to side with him when he crosses what they would otherwise regard as some bright line. But given how many bright lines have already fallen in the rear view mirror almost without comment, it probably won't be that big a shift. If the past several decades have taught us anything it's that in a country of 300 million and a world of 8 billion, there will always be *some* excuse ready at hand to rile up U.S. extremists.
Kirk called for someone to bail the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi out of prison. It's bad for him to have been murdered. That's because political violence is bad - a view that Charlie Kirk seemingly didn't share.
But political violence is bad even when directed at someone who thinks that it isn't bad.
Somehow I find this sort of snarky gotcha-posting even more distasteful than the people who are openly celebrating the murder.
Speaking truthfully about directly relevant things someone has said and done is distasteful now? Somehow, lying about or ignoring the work someone built their life around does not *actually* strike me as a respectful way to talk about them after they've passed.
I wouldn't even care to say anything if he'd just been killed and people were denouncing that he was killed. Or when people respond by calling for more civil rhetoric, not advocating violence, etc. Or if people praise Kirk on a personal level (i.e. non-political stuff like family).
It's when people go a step further and start praising Kirk as dedicated to that sort of civil rhetoric - often the same people now saying that "we" (i.e. the right) are "at war" with the left.
If we are going to have a standard about civil or not-violent rhetoric it has to apply across the board. People who are upset about that type of rhetoric should see if their personal faves are engaged in it, and if so, are they actually so opposed to it as they claim.
For posterity though I looked up the full quote on the subject:
>"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!
> Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?
> And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
> I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?
In case it's unclear, the argument being made is not that someone should bail him out because he's a hero and violence against Pelosis doesn't matter, the argument is that someone should bail him out to ask him some questions, because he was suspicious of the media narrative at the time (that Depape was some kind of right-wing extremist) and talking to him might clarify it.
Now in fact, Kirk was right, and it turns out that Depape was more of a standard issue lunatic than a political extremist:
"When given the chance to address the court before his sentencing, DePape, dressed in prison orange and with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at length about September 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being replaced by a body double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring against him."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/29/david-depape-sentenced-paul-pelosi-hammer-attack
I hadn't actually followed up on this story, I didn't realise he'd been given life without the possibility of parole. While I don't think that's an excessive penalty for assault with a deadly weapon, I can guarantee that if you or I had been attacked with a hammer by some lunatic in San Francisco then the penalty would be a lot lighter.
"In case it's unclear"
It's not so much "unclear" as it is "deliberate nonsense." Charlie has here an incident that made him and his associates and their rhetoric look terrible--an unstable person who aggressively soaked up all the the various flavors of conspiracy laden bullcrap that they've been peddling for easy money and simply took it seriously enough to act on it.
Instead of moderating or taking responsibility or anything of the sort, he throws out a bunch of insinuation-laden fast talk as a distraction, which includes both a suggestion to bail out a dangerous, aggressive, unstable man and some not-that-subtle implications that not everything about the attack was what it seemed.
So while I thank you for providing more detailed context--always worth doing--it doesn't make me think even a little bit better about Charlie Kirk.
He could be asked questions without bailing him out.
<DePape spoke at length about . . . his ex-wife being replaced by a body double.
That's a clearcut psychotic delusion. In fact it's so common that it has a name: Capgras Syndrome. The man is psychotic -- unless he's faking, of course. But seems like it would not be difficult to get clear on whether or not he has believed that for a while. The other stuff he says might or might not be psychotic delusions, depending on how he came to believe them.
I am less worried about a crackdown of some sort (against whom?) than I am about other radicals deciding that it's open season on public figures they don't like. Both left-radicals deciding to copycat this shooting and right-radicals deciding that this shooting justifies some kind of retaliation. I am not eager for an American remake of The Troubles.
Surely the Minnesota assassinations would have been a better time to worry about that? This isn't even the first political killing in recent months.
I did worry about it then. Also when the CEO of United Healthcare was murdered. And when Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, for that matter, and when he pardoned the rioters.
>This isn't even the first political killing in recent months.
I know. That's part of why I continue to be concerned.
+1
My not-well-informed model here is that violently inclined crazies pick up on the pattern of what one does when one is a violent crazy person and then follow that. Going postal with a glock is a bad pattern, but find some prominent political figure and murder them is even worse. If our plentiful supply of violent crazies and our plentiful supply of guns for them to use combine with a norm of those violent crazies doing political violence (and maybe getting lauded by extremists on one side, encouraging the next crackpot), our world will get a whole lot worse.
But only one of the sides would be shielded from the law. It's better for a conflict to be one-sided. Helps it end faster.
> But only one of the sides would be shielded from the law.
Which side are you suggesting will be shielded?
The one that wants to shoot enemies of the regime, and who get pardons when they destroy government property to do so.
Trump can only pardon federal crimes.
Like crimes committed in DC against the Capitol building and the vice president.
Are you suggesting the Trump Administration is going to start handing out pardons to people who assassinate leftists?
I would be surprised if there are pardons for actual assassinations. But there may well be pardons or non-prosecutions for “reckless endangerment” and attempted murder and other things where someone maintains a plausible deniability.
It was very free with handing out pardons to people who invaded the nation's capital and attempted to do violence to its governing body. So yes, it seems quite likely the the Trump administration will something like that in the future, as it already has in the past.
That is another plausible scenario, and I'm not particularly enthusiastic about that one, either.
I'm not here to judge. I understand that they have a narrative to maintain, I don't blame them for looking out for their own interests. I was just hoping to get some historical context or insider information so that I could figure out how fast everything is moving.
Am I the only one who has never heard of ACX hero Chris Rufo?
I've heard of him, but it's ludicrous to call him an ACX hero. He's a MAGA influencer-journalist, whose primary note in my memory is 'unlike most influencer-journalists, sometimes does actual journalism.'
That's surprising, but I expect you ARE familiar with his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo
Ah okay, I guess his name has indeed flitted across my eyeballs at some stage.
I don't blame myself for not remembering it, because I just read thirty seconds ago the sentence "the plagiarism was discovered by Chris Rufo and Blah Blah" and I've already forgotten who Blah Blah was.
>he died right as he was scapegoating minorities for mass shootings
Reality has a well-known racist bias.
He was scapegoating trans people, who are not (in actual fact) responsible for any significant degree of mass shootings.
But hey, if we're going to play that game, reality also has a well-known misandrist bias and an enormous one at that. Can we scapegoat men for mass shootings, or is it only allowed of demographic groups that you dislike?
>Can we scapegoat men for mass shootings
Since you consider acknowledging facts to be "scapegoating," sure. Notice how everyone's assuming the shooter is a man.* I'd bet the investigators are even doing "gender profiling," which nobody ever has a problem with.
*Or at least a *biological* man
Do you not understand what the words "scapegoating" and "profiling" signify? Or are you simply confused about how to properly apply conditional probabilities to real-life situations?
If it's the latter, while I'm no longer an educator by profession, I'd gladly offer you a brief primer as a free public service.
Not the guy you're replying to, but anyone who doesn't explicitly understand the enormous male-bias in (especially violent) crime has a terrible map of the problems in criminal justice. If prisons were not predominantly filled by men, that would be strong evidence for an absurdly strong pro-male bias in our criminal justice system.
Yes, men are among the most most overrepresented sizeable demographic group among criminals in the US, committing 90%+ of violent crimes despite being just 49% of the population.
And you know what? As a man, this doesn't bother me at all. I feel neither guilt nor shame about it. And it certainly doesn't bother or offend me when someone points out these crime statistics -- they're facts of life!
So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics.
"So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics. "
I hope you'll pardon me for asking, but do you *actually* not know why? Like, is this genuinely something about human nature which puzzles you? Or is this just a rhetorical flourish to try to paint them as irrational?
In either case you really *ought* to be aware that it isn't *only*--indeed, often not even *primarily*--members of those groups that take such observations amiss.
As for the why, human communication has this frustrating tendency to include not only the overt words spoken or written, but sneaky little things like context and subtext. I guarantee you, for example, that an academic conference on criminology can discuss demographic breakdowns of crime trends fully and honestly without drawing even a fraction of the ire that some dude with a Sunglasses-and-MAGA-hat profile pic will draw if he Tweets out one or two *specific* statistics isolated from wider context. Because most people can model others well enough to pretty accurately guess why both the academics and the hat-and-sunglasses-guy are doing what they do: it's usually not the same motive.
> Kirk was answering a question about transgender mass shootings in the United States of America before he was shot dead. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked Kirk, according to a CNN report.
> To this, Charlie Kirk responded, "Too many". The same audience member informed Kirk that the number is five, and proceeded to ask if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in the US over the last 10 years. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
Hang on. Discussions about mass shootings do actually need to distinguish between gang violence and spree shootings, since most things you'd do to decrease one of them would have little impact on the other.
>The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
OK, and? Two gangs shooting at each other often technically count as mass shootings, depending on how many get hit, but they're not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "mass shootings", making it quite reasonable to clarify whether they're being included in the numbers.
You're being a little unfair.
You're familiar with the issue and know what's going on, and so you know that people who take the social issue of mass shootings seriously, like the Washington Post and Mother Jones, explicitly exempt gang shooting from their mass shooting statistics.
But you're talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on. Someone gave them a talking point -- talking about gang violence is racist -- and that's all they know.
I'm going to respond with respect equal to the respect you have shown me:
Are you aware that all categories of 'mass shootings' involve guns?
I know I'm probably <<talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on>>, but really *every* classification of gun-related death not-conducted-in-the-line-of-duty: domestic violence, felony-related, unintentional, argumentative, suicide, random mass shooting, gang-related, (and others, depending on the classification system), all of them:
*are 100% caused by guns*.
And did you know that 100% of these events could have been prevented if the gun was, say, instead, a banana?
And did you know that some [crazy] people think that *all* such gun-related incidents are tragedies? And preventable? (meaning that even "gang-related" gun-deaths are preventable tragedies?)
Charlies Kirk's "argument", if it can even be called that, amounts to "yeah, but 'those mass-shootings' are nothing compared to those 'other mass-shootings'.
This argument only means *anything* if those 'other mass-shootings' are somehow "less" or "don't count". And why would that be?
Oh yes: because of a decades-long narrative popular on "certain 24 hour news networks":
- "democrats just can't control their cities"
- "certain types of people in those cities can't control themselves"
To most people I know, these are *not* less. The lives lost in "gang-related's" are no less valuable than Charlie Kirk's own life, which was tragically cut short.
By a firearm.
>The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
It's really just one minority in particular.
A crackdown on what? Guns? They don't want to crackdown on guns.
It makes sense to talk about a crackdown in the context of a career criminal randomly stabbing someone on the subway. You can just increase violent crime sentences and arrest people for fare evasion. Are they going to go after snipers? I guess that sucks for the two people nationwide who will get arrested for open carrying on rooftops.
How solid are first amendment protections on calls for violence?
I could totally see the posting of "punch a nazi" on social media to constitute a criminal offense.
Very solid. Controlling precedent is in Brandenburg v. Ohio and has been approvingly cited by the current court on several occasions. Calls for violence are only unprotected if it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
The word "imminent" here is one of the primary distinguishers of US protections vs. most other western places. For instance, take a clear hypothetical example of incitement; a tweet that says "Everyone should punch Nazis. If you're not punching Nazis, you should examine yourself and root out your cowardice. Nazis like John Smith deserve to die, and killing them is the only way we can prevent another Holocaust." Clear incitement to violence against John Smith, but it's not intended to be imminent; noone in the audience (as far as the tweeter knows) is near John and able to jump into immediate lawless action.
On the other hand, the exact same set of words would be unprotected if the person was demonstrating at John Smith's house, and John Smith had just walked up to some incredibly angry protestors when the speaker said this. That fulfils the imminence and likely to incite requirements.
Ah but what if we extradite them to the UK?
A crackdown on whoever they want to crack down on. That's how Reichstag Fires work; it's not about punishing the perpetrators it's about exploiting it to increase your power.
"Never let a crisis go to waste"
A crackdown on leftist agitators. With enough unrest, the Trump administration can make the case that leftists are plotting against the US government, and use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against left-wing organizations and the protesters that will inevitably pop up. Right now the unrest still isn't bad enough to act as a pretext for that, but given that the military is already being deployed in some cities... it's only a matter of time until one of these confrontations turns violent.
Of course, whether this incident will even contribute to that depends on the identity and motives of the killer.
> and use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against left-wing organizations and the protesters that will inevitably pop up
Maybe. And then two days later, a random judge in Oregon or Hawaii says it's unconstitutional for some reason, and then nothing continues to happen.
I checked and it will take 3.27 plus or minus 0.88 incidents.
I’m declining your invitation to speculate about whether Trump’s base is attached enough to him to take action and if they are what infuriating stuff they will say and what destructive acts they will engage in. Because know what engaging in that kind of discussions is? It’s a group event where we all wind each other up by making up stories about the dumb evil shit his base might do. It’s dumb and destructive. It’s a way of being part of the problem.
Look, we don't need to moralize it. Whether or not you see the administration's actions as justified, it would be nice to have some information that could be used to predict their actions, whether that's the current social currents in the US, or previous instances of political instability in other countries.
There's nothing wrong with seeking information. But that's not what you sound like you're asking for. You sound like "hey, guys, whaddya think those Maga fuckers are gonna do in response? Any really bad shit? What kinda shit you picturing those assholes doing? Think they might shoot a prominent leftist? Who they gonna go for, huh?".
If you want to know whether anyone can think of a predictor of whether this shooting will lead to violence by Trump's base, ask that. There probably are predictors, and somebody might well know what they are. Seems to me those things are pretty hard to predict. But there might be some index having to do with extremity of expressed anger and references to violence on social media platforms -- some baseline that's been established,some measures of how far above baseline we are.
> "hey, guys, whaddya think those Maga fuckers are gonna do in response? Any really bad shit? What kinda shit you picturing those assholes doing? Think they might shoot a prominent leftist? Who they gonna go for, huh?".
These bullying put down where you put your own shitty words in someone else’s mouth are truly obnoxious.
Yeah, I know, Gunflint. But I did start with a civil post where I didn't do that, but just explained why objected to his post -- how I saw as an invite for us all to play ain't-it-awful. The guy didn't get it, and I got angry quicker than usual because I, like everyone else, was upset by the Kirk shooting, and I saw his post as a continuation of the same process that led to the assassination. So somebody kills a guy on the right, presumably because they think he's going to hurt the *good* people, the *real* people --you know, **us**. So now a guy comes on here and invites us all to speculate on what the farr ight is going to do to **us**. He is fostering the development of a hate and anger, us and them, storm system that is the same kind of mental storm system that led to the shooting.
It is quite true that I am mean to people on here that seem to me to have ugly and destructive agendas. My meanness isn't made out of cruel remarks about their intellect or ethics, though, but out of my objections to their particular agendas. I try to present them in a way that makes the person see how they look to me. I do not think that's wrong to do, and don't particularly bad about doing it. I'm just not as nice as you are Gunflint.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. I have nothing against the right, and they're free to do whatever the hell they want. However, it's still going to be very disruptive to my life if and when the administration decides to make its move, and I would like to prepare for that if possible, mentally if nothing else.
think if they do move political violence might be bad enough it would be bipartisan.
you are assuming evil but some of the reaction on the left is vile and it needed to have been stopped with Luigi Mangione; dont go on reddit mainsubs right now if you don't want to dislike people.
Is the assumption you think I'm making that you have something against the right? Actually, I did come away thinking you have something against the right. That was not an assumption on my part, but a reasonable conclusion given what you said. However, your having something against the right had nothing to do with what I was objecting to. As a matter of fact, *I* have something against Trump's supporters.
What I was objecting to was not what side you were on, but the nature of your question, which seemed to me like not to be a genuine request for information and opinion, but an invitation for people to spout anxious and angry fantasies about what's going to happen next. It was an inflammatory remark, not a genuine question. I mean, think about it. You ask "how many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown?" Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown? And what counts as an "incident"? And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be? Trump forbids any assembly with more than 10 Democrats in the crowd? He goes on TV and twists off the heads of 13 random people who voted against him? He tells his base to bring guns to all future events where someone on the right is speaking?
Point is, your question is not a real question. It's an invitation to get scared and angry as a group, and fantasize. About the only thing I am sure of about the mess the country is in is that way too many people are spending time in that angry, scared space fantasizing about "them". About the other side.
Indeed. If I were a moustache twirling evil overlord and trying to amass power in today's era, I could add a new strategy to my playbook: pay someone to do something despicable to the other side, while stoking my own side to prepare retaliation for what I'm suggesting the other side's retaliation will be.
> Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown?
Well yeah, kinda. This obviously isn't the first time something like this has happened, and maybe someone more in tune with right wing social circles could give us a heads up on what the mood is like there.
> And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be?
He's already discussed using the Insurrection Act to quell protests. It's not exactly a stretch for him to use it for its other purposes, especially seeing as he just stated that he's going to go after organizations that funded or supported political violence, right after saying that left-wing rhetoric was entirely responsible for the violence. https://www.foxnews.com/video/6379075859112
Maybe you should at least be a little concerned? This really isn't buisness as usual. Political and cultural tensions are extremely high, Trump has shown zero qualms about being associated with authoritarianism, and the Republican party and military are seemingly very loyal to him. Regardless of your political affiliation, things are going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while.
That's not what I'm picking up from the tone of your original comment.
I dunno, I feel like there's some people out there who fantasise about getting oppressed. Maybe they think that being oppressed will give their lives more meaning, give it some narrative shape like a movie.
The closest historical analogue would be the spate of political assassinations in the US in the 1960s. What was the government response to those?
National Guard deployments to cities quell riots, increased tempo of domestic spying by the feds (both legal and illegal), increased gun control, and restrictions on retail sales of dynamite.
Does anyone here have an opinion and/or experience with Hillsdale classical schools? My daughter will be starting school next year and there is one near us, so we're considering it.
My daughter has some friends who go there, you can DM me and we can see if we can get your daughter in touch with them via email or something.
Go to Hillsdale College? To clarify, I am looking at an elementary 'classical school' that is somehow affiliated to Hillsdale (not sure if it goes beyond using a curriculum created by them). I appreciate the offer.
Is there an official name for the effect when a person who is an actual famous expert in some area starts speaking complete bullshit about a different area, speaking with the same confidence and authority?
(My friend calls it "Bukovský syndrome" after https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Bukovsk%C3%BD a Slovak expert on *nutrition* who also became famous for spreading conspiracy theories about covid. People who believe his theories use the argument by authority "but he is a famous doctor" ignoring the part that his expertise in nutrition has little in common with epidemiology.)
EDIT: Related comic https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Dunno. I want to call it Linus Pauling syndrome (Pauling had a Nobel prize in chemistry before becoming a public crusader for the ostensibly amazing benefits of eating huge amounts of vitamin C)
Many fair answers already, but I’ll also throw in that it’s sometimes called the Expert Fallacy
Damn! I don't like all of them but som SMBCs are sooo good!
I call it the Freakonomics effect when the famous expert is an economist who is talking nonsense about a complex subject after doing a few analyses on a napkin, but I don't know of a good name for it. It is always good to see a Slovak getting recognition, even if it's for the excellence of their nonsense!
There might be a similarity to the very rich people who think they will be good at politics.
Oh, definitely. If you are good at making money, it means that you understand how the Real World™ works, which automatically makes you an expert on everything. /s
I was going to post the related SMBC comic, and then I saw you edited one in.
And then I realized that that one is different from the one I was thinking of.
So I'm doing it anyway. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29
In Tyler Cowen's excellent interview with Dan Kahneman, there was this wonderful comment from Kahneman: The feeling of certainty is only weakly correlated with being right.
People have started using the term “epistemic trespassing”.
When the person is specifically a Nobel winner, it's called "Nobel disease" lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Thanks for linking that, it's the funniest Wikipedia page I've ever read. "What's good for mice is good for humans!"
DIdn't even need to control-F Linus Pauling, he pops right out in the sidebar.
indeed lol at the list of examples
Chomskyism? Noam Chomsky was the first time i heard this as an idea, as he is a linguist who spends so much time on political activism.
His politics came before his work as a linguist, so not a good example regardless of how you feel about them.
On the listener's side of things, it's a subcase of Authority Bias: the tendency to credit claims made by authority figures even when that authority figure's position, skills, and knowledge don't give them any particular advantage in making a true claim in that subject area.
It also feels kinda like a reversal of Gell-Mann Amnesia: instead of under-weighing times your source was wrong about other subjects, you are over-weighing times they were right about other subjects.
On the speaker's side, it's "Ne supra crepidam". The term is an abbreviated quote from Pliny the Elder. The full quote translates as "Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe", i.e. an admonition to limit your analysis and criticism to areas of your own expertise. I suppose you could call the failure mode the Crepidam Fallacy.
Maybe authority syndrome would the opposite of imposter syndrome...
It's an authority bias problem for the speaker as well. If your previous ideas all turned out to be absolutely brilliant, then it's easy to assume that your new ideas are brilliant too -- after all, you're a genius.
I invented Special Relativity and General Relativity when nobody else was smart enough to, therefore my ideas for one world government are presumably just as clever.
Good point.
I mean, it's fine to have opinions outside your main area of expertise, it's just important to recognize that you're not an expert there. Einstein's knowledge of physics didn't necessarily make his political opinions worthwhile.
Going down the wikipedia rabbit hole, there is a section on the "Nobel Disease", lol.
Not to be confused with "Victorian Novel Disease", an unspecified chronic and often fatal ailment frequently that primarily afflicts pretty young women. Typical symptoms include fatigue, wasting, pale complexion, and the Incurable Cough of Death.
Or the Noble Disease, which would presumably be some kind of gout.
It should obviously be called degrasse tysonism
He's far from the worst example of it; the worst you can accuse him of (as far as I'm aware) is being too opinionated on matters that epistemologically aren't scientific at all.
There's a certain common trend with Nobel Prize winners going to much worse extremes. Like Luc Montagnier with AIDS denialism.
Ultracrepidarianism is not the word you're looking for, but it's closely related.
And after writing out my reply, I look at yours and realize that you got to "Ne supra crepidam" before I did.
I have been asking people around why did the squad and deadlift kind of replaced traditional body building, and the answer I mostly found was this: people who are also active outside the gym, prefer this kind of functional strength.
Very interesting, because my opinion has always been that body-building is precisely for people like me who are entirely 100% inactive outside a gym, and this way we can "cheat".
Speaking only for myself, big lifts like the deadlift are more time-efficient and arguably better for everyday activity and injury prevention, also they are more fun IMO than doing a hundred focused exercises of a hundred annoying little muscles.
Does one need a deeper explanation than, "it is a fashion trend"?
They .. haven’t? I’ve been a gym rat/bro for like 17 years now, the big 3 have always been core and revered foundational movements. Starting strength and 5x5 were perennial newbie program recommendations back then.
Not so much anymore, as bodybuilders have moved away from them in recent years, with “science based” lifters having various reasons for deprecating them.
I have a couple theories:
1. Bodybuilders got too good at the game and look like weird muscle aliens now. Granted, they looked weird before, but I think it's gotten more pronounced. New bodybuilding categories like "classic" physique seem to be pushing back on this.
2. We got a lot better at quantifying exercise efficiency, and it turns out that compound lifts are a lot more efficient than cable machines.
I also would push back a bit on the dichotomy; most people who look muscular can deadlift/squat reasonably well, and most powerlifter types look pretty strong.
"Weird muscle aliens" is a good phrase.
As far as I can tell, body-building is a supernormal stimulus, and there's conflation of looking strong, being strong, and being healthy. People can die of this.
What tells you they replaced them? I see a lot more people using machines and dumbbells than barbells.
There's two point of this. One is that bodybuilding-style training has a goal of looking strong, while powerlifting-style training has a goal of being strong. Each has a fair amount of carry-over to the other goal, but both are optimized for one goal over the other and it makes sense to choose one style of training over the other depending on what your priorities are.
The other is that bodybuilding-style training takes very heavy advantage of the faster recovery cycle enabled by steroid use. Powerlifting-style training is also enhanced by steroids, of course, but not by quite as much. The reason for this is that bodybuilders need both muscle bulk and muscle definition. You get the former by doing very large volumes of training (lots of sets and reps at medium weight, often spread across many different lifts working overlapping muscle groups) and the latter by dieting off as much subcutaneous fat as possible in weeks or months leading up to a competition. More volume means your body has to more training stress to recover from, and getting/keeping body fat low cuts into your body's capacity to recover from training in a way that builds or at least maintains muscle. Steroids are one of the most effective ways of mitigating that contradiction. Powerlifters can afford to be a little pudgy, and powerlifting-style training tends to have much less volume to recover from (heavy weights for a medium number of sets and reps, doing only a handful of "big lift" exercises), so they can get a lot further with non-steroid recovery strategies (cycling between light and heavy days, eating a calorie surplus, etc).
You can still do bodybuilding-style training successfully without steroids if your goals are reasonable for your health and genetics, but make sure the advice you're getting on training and recovery strategies is targeted for "natural" (non-steroid using) lifters, not "enhanced" (steroid using) ones. I suspect a significant part of powerlifting-style training becoming fashionable over bodybuilding-style training in recent decades is that when bodybuilding-style training was fashionable, there were a ton of bodybuilding training recommendations out there based on the training routines used by big-name competitive bodybuilders who totally used steroids but didn't admit to doing so at the time. If you try to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger's training routines from the 70s and aren't doing as much steroids as he was doing back then, you're not going to get great results.
OMG, you have just solved my life.
Is "Connections" (NYTimes) a good test for AI?
I suspect writing good ones is a better test than solving them. My partner and I got Claude to vibecode a connections interface so I could get my partner to try that days puzzle from the Times that I did while he was out. Then we realized we could have Claude write up some puzzles for us to try. All of the various puzzles Claude wrote for us worked, but several of the categories were weak (sometimes it was a rare two word phrase for one of the purples, or a bit of a weak connection for some of the others, and usually no good misdirects).
According to this, reasoning models have gotten close to saturating it earlier this year, so probably not. https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections
Does saturation mean having a very high chance of winning?
Yes. Once they get ~90% success rate, the noise of being a few percent better or worse on any given trial outweighs the signal. Once that happens, you can’t reliably tell which models are better or worse.
Yes, of a benchmark, saturation means that it has ceased to be able to distinguish between the highest tier of models because they all perform so close to perfectly.
Brimming measuring cups.
I can think of many Christians named Saul, but can't think of any Jews named Paul.
Paul Erdős.
Paul Samuelson
A lot more Jews named Stephen/Steven though. Why would Jews name their son after a Jewish convert to Christianity who was killed by Jews?
To remind him not to convert to Christianity?
I can see that but usually you just tell cautionary tales, not name your kids after them?
Paul Newman? Half-Jewish.
Paul Simon
Paul Reiser?
Paul Celan
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10814214/
This came up in my google searches, claims that autism is (mostly) caused by childhood exposure to acetaminophen.
I don't have the experience to evaluate this. The abstract reads like political post but the rest of it seems normal. The studies it cites all seem reasonable but I don't know how cherry-picked they are.
The latest and largest-n study has a strong case that acetaminophen doesn’t cause autism https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38592388/ . Previous studies have found weak effects of acetaminophen on autism - certainly not responsible for most cases. The more recent and larger one found even those results to be a result of familial confounding and they disappeared when using a sibling-comparison design.
I've written a bit about the topic and had some discussions with people in open threads in the past.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-370/comment/95825932
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-396/comment/149233386?utm_campaign=comment&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=comment
Relatedly, Kennedy plans to release a report this month supporting the claim. Though with no new evidence.
Here's a non-paywalled story from yesterday:
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/hhs-report-expected-to-link-prenatal-tylenol-use-and-autism-risk
The thing is, the evidence that tylenol increases the chance of autism is pretty good. However, some of the increase in autism diagnosis is undoubtedly due to changed diagnostic criteria. I'm a psychologist, and actually lived through the change in what fraction of people are diagnosed as autistic. It really was a dramatic change -- the term was being applied to people that *nobody* 5 years prior would have described as autistic. So the tylenol-autism correlation gets a huge, undeserved boost from the change in diagnostic criteria. Meanwhile, afaik the evidence for vaxes increasing the risk of autism is not good, and in any case measles, mumps etc. can cause not only severe illness and death but also lifelong disabilities. Even if our standard childhood vaxes do slightly increase the risk of autism (or heart abnormalities or whatnot) I'll bet the increase is far less than the risk of the illnesses they prevent.
I wrote a long answer to this same question on the most recent hidden open thread. You can find it with CMD-F. “Tylenol”. If you can’t access that let me know and I’ll copy-paste it here.
I actually thought of posting my question there but didn't think to scan for it first. Thanks.
If you think it appropriate, please also post it here. I do not have the access, and I would enjoy reading it.
(not my comment, just pasting someone else's)
Scott wrote about the risks of tylenol in pregnancy in his piece "Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much). I just looked it up and reread it for a friend. Also read the summary of tylenol studies he cites: In Nature Reviews Endocrinology, Consensus Statement: Paracetamol Use In Pregnancy - A Call For Precautionary Action, by ninety-one leading scientists. Based on that, seems to me that it's likely but not certain that tylenol use during pregnancy actually does increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Just looked up studies' estimates of how much it increases the risk, and average estimate is that it increases it by about 20%. So if the risk of ASD for a baby whose mother did not use tylenol in pregnancy was 2%, it would be 2.4% for babies whose mother did use tylenol. This is nothing to sniff at, but is far too small to account for the very large increase in autism diagnoses in the last 30 years. (By the way, we don't really have any direct measure of what % of kids whose mothers took no tylenol get a ASD diagnosis, because most pregnant women take it.)
A lot of the apparent increase is due to a change in the diagnostic criteria for autism, especially the inclusion in ASD of people with Aspergers' (smart, introverted, a bit odd) in the diagnosis. Also there was legislation in the last 30 yrs. that allowed kids with an autism diagnosis to get various services in schools, and because of that many professionals became more liberal in giving an ASD diagnosis in order for the kid to get the benefit of of the school services.
One other relevant factor: RFK fucking sux.
(again, not my comment, didn't want to bother with block quotes)
Here's a follow-up comment I (author of above) made later in the thread:
Tylenol's hardly the smoking gun. Seems possible to me that changed criteria account for the rest of the increase in autism diagnoses, but also possible there are some other factors. But the diagnostic criteria change was huge. I was present for it. There was an era when I kept being startled by people talking about patients or civilians I knew as "autistic" and "autistic specturm" and I'd think *what? he's eccentric and uncomfortable around people, but to call it autism is way overstating it.*. I'm still skeptical about the broadened version of the diagnosis. Seems like pretty much anyone who doesn't easily fit into another diagnosis gets called autistic these days.
Thanks.
On a side note, I don't really know how the criteria for ASD are evaluated in practice by clinicians, but my impression from reading the formal guidelines was that what you're saying is not the whole picture. I never underwent a formal diagnosis for ASD, but in my own assessment (still, I did spent a substantial amount of time thinking about it and reconstructing my early childhood history), I quite clearly satisfy the DSM-IV criteria for Asperger's spectrum disorder, but it's likely I wouldn't meet the DSM-V criteria for ASD unless the psychologist was willing to stretch them somewhat.
Or at least a quick summary of the main points. It might motivate me to access the original.
I created a plug-and-play "Human Inference Engine." It's a probabilistic directed acyclic graph (DAG) tool that allows you to toggle between a low friction 'Bayes lite' mode and a rigorous 'Bayes heavy' mode. I'd love some feedback. I've built several example graphs from forensic investigation, to policy analysis, to DnD campaigns. It's desktop only (Chrome/Edge): https://rubesilverberg.github.io/beliefgraph3/
Let us know when you have one for Firefox.
It likely does work for Firefox. I just can't vouch.
Hobbs idea that out pre-history ancestors lived lives that were short, brutish and mean is unscientific, illogical and irrational.
Its unscientific because it takes 17 years of childhood before a homo sapiens brain is developed enough to be considered a young adult, 21 years before being considered a peer by other adults. How could our brains have evolved this way unless children were having long and stable childhoods?
It is illogical to believe that children given childhoods that were short, brutish and mean could be other than physically, emotionally and intellectually stunted, where would they learn emotional intelligence required to work together to achieve common goals?
It is irrational to ignore the fact that the only reason to evolve a brain capable of human consciousness, intelligence and the ability to think deep and complex thoughts is because they were conscious, intelligent and thinking deep and complex thoughts. Their brains were not just spare capacity waiting for us to find a use for it, that is not how evolution works.
Small groups with stone tools, no plan or central planner, purely through organic growth, discovered the world long before we did, they were the ultimate success story and invasive species. For 300,000 years or 15,000 generations the Southern tip of Africa has been occupied by Homo Sapiens, a few bones, stones and paintings is all we have found of their presence, that is what is called a sustainable lifestyle. If each generation had left just one change to the environment the cumulative results would have made the place unliveable.
I think Hobbes meant short compared to the lives of his contemporaries, which is true enough.
N F Y, agreed.
I'm not an anthropologist but my understanding from reading in this area (e.g. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/war-in-human-civilization-9780199236633) is that Hobbes was right that life was extremely violent in prehistory.
The "17" and "21" numbers you cite are entirely a modern thing. Children performed labor on farms at much younger ages than this (https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/). And life was indeed much shorter (https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/).
Also your reasoning is confusing to me. People are intelligent because it helps them survive. This is true in peaceful societies as well as violent ones, societies with abundance and scarcity, societies with low and high life expectancy alike.
Not to pick on you too hard but I think you're demonstrating a common failure mode in this community - you've reasoned out a position in the abstract and think the converse is therefore "irrational" (and you could maybe critique Hobbes for doing much the same), but in practice there's lots of detailed information out there that you could examine to learn the truth, and you don't seem to have done so.
Timothy M, 17 and 21 may be modern innovations but the Homo Sapiens brain is not. Body development in childhood slowed down to match brain development and brains need 17 years of childhood to develop.
Your reasoning confuses me, you use a study about peasants to debate about hunter gatherers, like comparing peasants to bankers, irrational.
I enjoyed your response and hope we have many more but I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
> brains need 17 years of childhood to develop.
You say this like the designers of the human race told you so. But there aren't any.
A human brain might need 17 years of development for having 17 years of development, but not to be ready for what it is supposed to do then -- because it's not supposed to to anything then! It's not designed.
Furthermore the development of an organism depents on its environment. 17 year olds certainly were diffent then then they are now.
It is true that I compared agrarians to hunter-gatherers, on the premise that people didn't transition from having carefree childhoods for 17+ years to being child laborers. However, it is also understood that ancient hunter-gatherers had short lifespans and violence was relatively common.
Where do you come up with this "17 years" number? My understanding from undergraduate psych classes is that there's still pretty significant brain development from 18-30 compared to later time periods.
> I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
This is what I was talking about. People can and should question "assumptions" but if you want to question whether prehistoric society sucked you should do so by examining the evidence, not by sitting alone thinking about it and concluding it must "obviously" be wrong. History and anthropology and such have assembled large bodies of research that can meaningfully address these questions far better than abstract intuitions. Go look at that work. Don't just treat it as an "assumption" you can waive away.
Timothy M, a carefree childhood would poorly prepare someone for a life that is anything but carefree. When culture changed slowly if at all good parenting skills mean being the type of person you want your children to become in a community you want them to grow up in with a sustainable culture that keeps everything together.
50 Years ago near the town of Swakopmund a San woman explained to me their view of history. For the next 30 years I lived cheek by jowl with their descendants, for a while I had a Sangoma (herbalist/witchdoctor) as a partner. Their lifestyle is an adaptation to modern life, nothing like the pre farming era. I compare the views of anthropologists with the San and the San version seems more compelling.
Okay, so your general point is that you think the perspective of a single hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa is more compelling than the aggregate work of the world's anthropologists, and you therefore feel comfortable disregarding all of their work.
Timothy M, the San people belong to a confederation of tribes generally known as the San or Bushman.
Names escape me, but the woman anthropologist who claimed we were semiaquatic and many others have influenced me, the synchronized menstruation woman had something useful to say, if as yet unproven.
It would be as foolish to disregard all anthropologists as it would be to discard all San and other native folklore.
You have to remember that Hobbes was writing two centuries before a meaningful theory of evolution, and long before any sort of systematic anthropology aimed at understanding comparative theories of how humans work in different social structures. The first theories in an area are always wrong (and the ones several centuries down the line are still wrong, but more subtly so).
He’s basically a contemporary of Newton and Harvey (the guy who used some calculations to convince people that blood recirculates through the body every day, rather than being generated and sent out from the heart and then absorbed by other organs). You can see that the human sciences were much less developed at this time.
Kenny Easwaran, I agree that for his time Hobbes was an important thinker, my issue is that we have not moved on, most people still think early humans lived short horrible lives, a view I disagree with.
Oh yeah, if there are people who still think this way, they’re wrong. But your previous post was phrased as though it was saying *Hobbes* was irrational.
Kenny Easwaran, the temptation to ask Kimmi to turn my illegible writing into something more polished is at times overwhelming, laziness saves me from such impulses.
Robin Hanson's theory (not sure how well supported) is actually that we developed big brains and emotional intelligence in order to navigate social rivalries/deadly competition from other humans. Thinking deep complex thoughts was a mere side effect. Still a Hobbesian scenario. I think if you look at modern hunter gatherers, you'll find this isn't too far off the mark. EG., native Americans certainly weren't living lives of idyllic peace and harmony before Europeans showed up. Ditto for New Guinea highlanders.
Gordon Tremeshko, most of my experience is with the San communities of Southern Africa. Broadly speaking they view the time before agriculture as living as a part of nature and the time after as living apart from nature. They think we are destroying ourselves and have to be forced by the government to participate by sending their kids to school etc.
Life was very short for some, and reasonably long (albeit not as much or as commonly as now) for the rest. Half of everyone died before the age of 6, but once you did pass that hurdle, you had better odds.
At least that's in agricultural civilisation. I wouldn't be surprised if odds were a bit better in hunter-gatherers since a lot of those deaths are disease and a lot of disease can only thrive in very high density populations, and in fact several of the worst (smallpox, TB, plague) were one way or another connected to farming or to hygienic conditions that were only a problem in agricultural civilisation.
Still, obviously from our viewpoint those lives would kinda suck. But I don't expect that those living them felt miserable all the time, or like they had nothing to enjoy.
Hobbes is precisely correct. In state of nature, life is solitary (by definition), short (by direct consequence of being solitary) and brutish (similarly).
That's why man is never found naturally in a state of nature but in a state of law.
So for Hobbes this quote is not a historical claim but a counterfactual claim - as a matter of fact, some law has always existed. Is that correct?
I do not know enough Hobbes to say but generally speaking the social contract theories do not aim at historical veracity,
Not to mention that he knew nothing about evolution.
You're probably correct that Hobbes's description of life in a state of nature is somewhere between overstated and wrong, but your arguments are so poor that you might convince a reader that he was actually completely right.
The "sustainable lifestyle" you laud is no great achievement: most animals leave little trace of themselves that can be seen hundreds of years later. The worms underfoot do even better, leaving not even bones.
About evolution, you seem to be arguing entirely from personal incredulity. Runaway sexual selection, for example, is one mechanism by which extravagant and otherwise useless traits can evolve and persist.
The facts you have brought to bear are consistent with a species whose lives ARE "short, brutish and mean" (not Hobbes's actual quote but fine): r-strategists whose males form small groups and fight together, perhaps with stone tools, against rival groups to maintain large harems, the majority of females dying from the stresses of childbirth after a few breeding cycles, and the males dying either in combat against a younger foe, or when unable to sustain the caloric requirements of their ever-growing brains.
Shankar Sivarajan, Most animals do not have the Homo Sapiens brain requiring 20% of calories consumed, there must be a return on investment. If you do not think that the return was intelligence could you please explain what you think the return was?
I agree my debating skills are rusty, engaging with skilled debaters will improve them.
If harems were the norm then the local gene pool would shrink forcing inbreeding, if females died after a few "breeding cycles" then who raised the kids? Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
> Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
Yes, and we know this from genetic assays of y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA. Historically, 80% of women had descendants for between 20-40% of men having descendants, over many tens of thousands of years.
See graph here (in the graph, the yellow line, which at "2" would be 80/40, and at "4" would be 80/20):
https://imgur.com/JWIsva9
This famously peaked at 17 women for every 1 man, a statistic you'll sometimes see trotted out, which happened in the middle of the Yamnaya expansion and y-chromosome-replacement of everyone else (and it tops out at around "12" on this particular graph because the timeslice of when the 17-1 ratio happened is too short to be captured on the x axis of this graph).
On harems, a full 87% of HG societies have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing polygamy *in modern times,* and given the headline 80/40 stat, it was likely to have been an even bigger factor in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptiveness).
At the larger level, inbreeding is avoided by groupings at different levels. H Sap HG's tended to settle and migrate in groups of 30-100 individuals (larger group sizes than Neanderthals and other hominins, and part of why we wiped them out ultimately), but those groups generally rolled up to larger tribes of other groups that size, and that larger group shared your language and cultural practices.
Thus, when you outmigrate, you don't need to worry about learning a new language or culture, as you're still outmigrating among "your people."
Performative Bafflement, well done, I have just spent an hour or two on your blog and am impressed with that as much as I am with your comment. You certainly knocked the wind out of my sails.
Every small somewhat isolated community I have been interested in had one thing in common and that was the dread of inbreeding. I would go so far as to say that much of their social structure evolved to manage this risk.
I have little to no understanding of the science behind the claim though do not doubt it was made in good faith
I have also read science that claims our pre-historic ancestors were less inbred than modern populations.
Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
Any insight you may have regarding this will be much appreciated.
> Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
As you've probably guessed, this is a recurring problem for all animals, not just H Sap, and indeed, many behaviors are seemingly tailored around avoiding inbreeding depression.
In chimps (at least pan troglodytes), this is achieved by females migrating to new groups when they are reaching reproductive age. This minimizes the chances of inbreeding, and a similar strategy is followed by many animals, either with males or females doing the migrating.
Humans, as you might guess, handle this a little differently. Historically in agricultural societies we mostly practiced patrilocality - the men stay put, sons are heirs, and the women come and live with the man's family. This is also what chimps do, so case closed, right?
This kind of threw off anthropologists re hunter gatherers for a long time, because many assumed HG did patrilocality from agriculturalists and chimps. It took Sara Hrdy and Hill et al looking into alloparenting practices to figure out that HG's were a different picture.
My understanding from Sarah Hrdy and Hill et al is that it's not actually true for hunter gatherers, and wasn't likely true in the EEA. Humans uniquely tend to do a lot of mixing of patrilocality and matrilocality, and it changes a lot based on how young your most recent child is and other factors, because matrilineal alloparenting is extremely common and a big deal for child survival. And wrapped up in this is us aging better and grandmas being harder working than moms in terms of hours foraging etc. In other words, it was a strong selective pressure and correspondingly had to be a big part of how our ancestors located themselves in the EEA.
Performative Bafflement, for pre-history mothers finding an unrelated mate for their offspring required an in-depth knowledge of her own bloodline, that of her mate and both parents of any prospective match.
It was like throwing 4 stones in the gene pool, how the ripples cancelled or amplified each other decided whether the match was safe or not.
This was humanities first great math challenge, which they passed.
They would have to know, well enough, far more people than the Dunbar number of 150 suggests, that is just an extended family. Even 10x that number is not enough to keep a local gene pool healthy. The majority of people they knew would have been too closely related to breed with.
The abundance of predators rules out regular get togethers, that would create a migratory type situation for predators to exploit.
So even if they were 100% monogamous it is a challenge to understand their mating customs. If, as your cited study claims, most males died without reproducing then it is harder still to see how for millions of years we avoided consanguinity.
A further confounding factor is that at least for the time we were confined to a few regions of Africa, the gene pool had to be small and shallow in contrast with the present day vast and deep gene pool, thus amplifying the risk.
Lots to think about.
His argument is so poor I am seriously considering that it might be satire.
Worms, or at least earthworms, improve the quality of the soil, so they're going beyond sustainability.
>that is what is called a sustainable lifestyle
Mosquitos have a sustainable lifestyle. Mosquito lives are also short, brutish and mean.
Yug Gnirob, Mosquitos do not have a Homo Sapiens brain in their head requiring 20% of their energy intake, there has to be rent paid, this is basic evolutionary theory. The pay off for the extra calories going to the brain was increased intelligence. Why would the most intelligent creature on the planet, by far, be living unintelligent lives?
I challenge your understanding of basic evolutionary theory. A peacock's tail requires a large chunk of their resources, makes it harder to evade predators, etc. In what way is its rent actually paid?
Byrel Mitchell, from the peahens perspective if the peacock can survive with such an extravagant display then the offspring he fathers should also survive. The rent paid for the calories diverted to his tail is increased access to the hens.
Chimps use 10% of calories to power their brain, Homo Sapiens use 20%. Our mental capacity over that of chimps is the rent paid by those extra 10% of calories.
The Giraffe pays rent for its long neck and legs by having access to foliage inaccessible to others.
Don't argue sustainability proving intelligence if you're not prepared to defend it. And if you're abandoning it, then do so clearly.
Yug Gnirob, The first task of intelligence is survival, greater intelligence enhances our ability to eliminate or minimize risk and the best way to do this is to live a sustainable lifestyle. 150,000 Generations proves their lifestyle was sustainable. The Homo Sapiens brain evolved for consciousness, intelligence and deep thought, they were intelligent.
That's objectively wrong. The first task of human intelligence is successful reproduction of a gene line, individual personal survival is secondary. That's why childhood mortality was so high for so long.
Victor, I agree, the first law of nature is procreation, in our species that effectively means "how are the grandchildren doing?"
This is difficult to achieve if you do not first survive long enough to at least have kids. In order to procreate you first have to survive.
To be honest I am not sure about the high child mortality thing. In any species suffering high child mortality we would expect to see their reproductive cycle shortening, instead our reproductive cycle got slower and slower, frailer babies needing more development post partum, the burden of childcare growing ever heavier.
It is hard to spot the evolutionary advantage in having less ability to reproduce if the problem is high child mortality.
I would bother to argue whatever underlying assumptions you're making, but I don't think you actually have any. You're just slapping words together and trying to pretend it's an argument.
I hope for your sake that this is AI.
> I hope for your sake that this is AI.
From his comments, I agree there IS a chance he's Artificial in some way.
Yug Gnirob, I think it would be wonderful to be an AI, all that data at your fingertips, no such luck here.
I apologise if my slapped together words disturbed the peace of your mind.
Were prehistorical lives short? Well, we know that half of all people in preagricultural societies died before reaching adulthood: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
If you were lucky enough to survive childhood, your life expectancy was still lower than in industrialized societies today. From this paper (https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2352-1):
"We know specific details about modern hunter-gatherer lifespan from a few well-studied groups: the !Kung, Aché, Agta, Hadza, and Hiwi (Gurven and Kaplan 2007). Work on these groups show that approximately 60% of hunter-gatherer children live to age 15. Of those who reach 15, around 60–80% of them will live to age 45. If an individual lives to age 45, then on average they will live for approximately two more decades."
While "brutish" is a subjective characterization, we now know that preagricultural societies were on the whole quite violent. From this paper (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.21446):
"By the 1960s, the focus on the hunter-gatherers of East and Southern Africa coincided with the rise of Rousseauism in anthropology. The Kalahari bushmen, for example, were celebrated as the “harmless people.”2 However, after the initial spate of enthusiasm for the peaceful children of the earth, their chief researcher, the Rousseauan Richard Lee,3, 4 discovered that before the imposition of state authority, these people had more than four times the 1990 homicide rate in the United States, which was by far the highest in the developed world. Similarly, in titles such as Never in Anger, the Inuit of mid-Arctic Canada, one of the sparsest populations on earth, were celebrated as being peaceful.5 However, it was later revealed that their rate of violent mortality was ten times higher than the United States' 1990 rate.6:145,7"
For more on this, the seminal book seems to be "War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley.
Collisteru, with respect you are using internally displaced people, refugees under stress from being displaced, as an example. The San people occupied all the best places to raise a family along the coast of Southern Africa. Then they were forced to live in the Kalahari desert by Bantu tribes and white settlers. To judge the preceding 15,000 generations by how well the last few generations survived their near extermination by us is poor science.
You raise a very good point that contact with settlers could affect these numbers. The contact problem is a fundamental difficulty in assessing anything about hunter-gatherer societies.
That being said, the scientific consensus is that hunter-gatherer violence precedes state contact. From the paper by Azar Gat I cited earlier, we read:
"Proponents of the tribal-zone theory remained vague about whether contact with state civilizations actually introduced or “invented” warfare among previously nonbelligerent natives or, instead, merely intensified long-existing patterns of warfare. The former was strongly implied and was the undertone or subtext of their argument. At the same time, however, the majority of these scholars in fact recognized, in line with all other research, that warfare in all the above areas had been very old and had long predated contact with states.10, 11, 13 Fortified settlements were known to have been archeologically recorded in the American Northwest, for example, for no less than four thousand years.9, 14-20 Body armor made of hide or wood, an unmistakably specialized fighting device, was known to have been extensively used by the natives before the European arrival. Indeed, its use actually declined after contact because it was useless under musket fire.18,20-26 Thus, given that most of the tribal-zone proponents (with rare exceptions12) were well aware of the evidence of extensive and vicious warfare before contact with states or civilizations, their point was difficult to rationalize."
I think this article is paywalled so if you want to read more citations 10, 11, and 13 are:
10 Ferguson RB. 1992. A savage encounter: western contact and the Yanomami war complex. In: RB Ferguson, N Whitehead, editors. War in the tribal zone. Santa Fe: School of American Research. p 199–227.
11 Ferguson RB. 1995. Yanomami warfare. Santa Fe: School of American Research.
13 Whitehead N. 1990. The snake warriors — sons of the Tiger's Teeth: a descriptive analysis of Carib warfare, ca. 1500–1820. In: J Haas, editor. The anthropology of war. New York: Cambridge University Press. p 146–170.
Collisteru ,Anthropology has a huge patriarchal bias towards man the hunter. Our gut evolved to digest the food most accessible to us which was 80% plant based, plants were 4 times more important to our survival than hunting. Women and children made up the bulk of our workforce and are well adapted to gathering.
Hunting scenes on cave walls or stately homes are there because they are more photogenic than fish traps or potting sheds but neither group fed the tribe by hunting. We find far more grinding stones for grain than we do spear points, hunter gatherers should be changed to gatherer trappers. You need a big brain to trap and only a small one to hunt.
Sorry about the rant, Anthropologists find what they expect to find.
I am not an expert, but how is "did they eat more plants or more meat?" related to "did they often kill each other or not?".
I can imagine people who eat mostly plants, but still kill each other a lot.
Villiam, good point. If you put a wild, enraged male Chimpanzee in a cage with 5 MMA fighters it would kill them. It is far stronger and faster with a bite that can pierce skulls, one swipe with its claw would rip half your face off. We used to have a similar body but over time became weak, slow and puny. According to evolutionary theory this could not have happened if we were under threat from predators or each other..
And hunt to supplement their diet.
He did not say human lives were short, brutish and mean. He said they were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
I think had that guy for a roommate in college....
Neither is really very objective nor accurate.
Yeah, ok. But my point was literary.
Eremolalos, well said. Mea culpa.
The correction’s not really relevant to the points you’re making, but Hobbs’ original formulation is so gorgeously grim and sounds so magnificent that I think we should honor and preserve it.
Solitary is an important omission, it's the least-debatably wrong. Prehistoric lived in smaller groups than modern humans but few were solitary.
Adolescence is a modern invention. Hunter-gatherers start treating people more-or-less like adults as soon as they hit puberty.
Wanda Tinsaky, survival of the fittest in our species is 100% a test of parenting skills on a personal and community level, the rest is just minutia. For 7 million years, give or take, the communities who made the best job of raising the next generation dominated the gene pool. There is no possible evolutionary advantage to having poor parenting skills.
Have you ever tried treating a 12 year old like an adult?
You are completely ignoring the fact that a big reason why we have such long childhoods is that life has gotten very very complicated. In order to be a functional member of society you need more than basic physical and mental development, you need a lot of knowledge that will allow you to work, pay your taxes, do paperwork, vote, drive, and generally speaking not be a dysfunctional misfit that's easily taken advantage of.
None of which was necessary to a hunter gatherer. Children would travel and work next to their parents as soon as they could stand. They would learn on the go about what they needed to learn (how to hunt, what herbs were good and what poisonous etc) and they would be pretty much ready for adult life quite earlier than us because that life would be significantly more straightforward.
Simone, I disagree. Childhood body development slowed down to match our slowly developing brain long before the modern era. Their culture was no less complicated than our own, each plant, river and mountain, everything had its own name and spirit. Living in harmony with the spirit world (animism) was the key to their sustainable lifestyle.
Any community who does not give their children a long stable childhood will be out-competed by another that does.
Yes, and it works. Of course, you have to be strategic about it. Parenting style should match the social environment it occurs in. "Adolescence" is a modern cultural construct, but a useful one in a post-industrial society. Pointless and wasteful in a social context in which the average lifespan is somewhere in the 30's. That does not imply, of course, that hunter-gatherer communities treated 12 year olds exactly the same as someone in their 20's.
"Like an adult" does not have a universal meaning across times and cultures, and neither does "poor parenting skills." Can you trust a 12 year old to drive a car? No. But if you're in an ancient society with no cars and your main concern is "can I trust them to do their share of the farm work?", you might decide they're an adult sooner. It depends on what your society needs to survive.
Also, if evolution is only about good parenting, how did the practice of corporal punishment somehow survive all the way to the present day? One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Beleester, good parenting skills enable the child to face life challenges.
Corporal punishment, spare the rod and spoil the child, is still the norm in most of the human population. We think they are wrong and they think we are wrong. We think drugging children to get them through the school day is acceptable, others think it is beyond barbaric. I agree.
> One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Counterpoint: the negative of hitting a child is that it can be traumatic and create various forms of relationship strain. The positive is that it's a very straightforward way to create an association between Thing Not To Do and Bad Consequences, all subtlety be damned.
If you're in a society in which even seemingly small mistakes can be very costly (like, life or death costly) and violence is so widespread anyway that there's not much avoiding it, corporal punishment is also the primary form of justice, etc. then it may simply not make a lot of difference. Hitting a child is frowned upon today also because it's basically like saying "you don't need to understand why X is bad, you just need to submit to my power to enact violence on you" but that is only something we consider a negative today. In many societies of the past, "know your place and do not question your superiors" was actually considered a virtue.
Simone, I was beaten often by my teachers ( UK, born late 50s) all it taught me was violence towards other boys who pissed me off as I pissed off the teachers.
Today I would be drugged into compliance from about 7 years of age. That is a level of violence against the child far in excess of anything I endured.
Childraising skills vary. There was research on macaque monkeys. Some seemed to be much better mothers than others. Some were nurturing, some were harsh and neglectful, and the offspring of the harsh mothers did worse.
Evolution doesn't get perfection.
The Ship of Theseus idea has been nagging me for ages. It's simple in my mind, but I recently found out my view is more the cognitive science view, and not other views.
Somewhat related, I overdid the thought experiment: https://onlyluck.substack.com/p/ships-of-theseus as a bit of a game for myself.
1. Interestingly, the question whether it's still the same ship hinges for most people on what's with it's parts. But how does one know a part of it is still the same, even if "it" is still in "its" original place?
Which brings me to ...
2. What about fields? Russell already kinda contemplated this, but a bit wrong, I think. If the world consists only of fields, and maybe only of one, then that field is the only physical thing that is ever, and always, the same thing, just changing in its properties. And among those properties is what "parts" or rather inseparable arbitrary sections of it appear to us as things, which they not for real are. They are only kinda waves, us included, of course.
I ever more suspect this is the case.
It would explain why things can and do interact. They don't. There are no things, there is only one thing, waving, and its waves are interfering.
Russell thought there are no physical things at all. But I mean, if anything changes, then there has to be at least one physical thing that is that what is changing there.
Lots of good replies to this, but I want to register a slightly dissenting opinion on the aptness of metaphors like football teams or marching bands.
To model a ship as one physical object is considerably more meaningful than to do so for those other examples: calculating the center of mass for a ship and then doing calculations with it yields meaningful predictions about its behavior; you can refer to it's location more or less unambiguously at any individual point in time, etc.
The same is not true for those other examples: you'd never think to calculate the center of mass of a football team, and if you did you wouldn't expect it to ever be useful; it's already unclear what the "location" of a marching band is when all the members go home for the night.
Which is to say, if you have a physical object that is well-summarized by some aggregate physical quantities, so long as you have objects at each time step for which those aggregate properties behave as you'd expect for a single physical object (e.g. the center of mass always follows a timelike path through spacetime, etc.), I think that's solid reason to regard each of those objects as "the same".
Of course, this tells you nothing about cases where those properties *aren't* satisfied, e.g. if your ship buds into two ships asexually and then you swap half of the timbers from the one daughter ship with those of the other.
Now I want to see animation of the centers of mass of football teams ranging here and there on the field.
Maybe there would be something interesting to be deduced, maybe it would just be fun to look at.
Doing that for the players on the field is probably interesting; including benched players, coaches, not to mention the rest of the organization (trainers, doctors, general managers, minor league players, etc) probably much less so
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
There are certain cultural ideas that depend upon the belief in them. If everyone around treats that thing as the family ax, why then it is.
"This, milord, is the American dollar..."
I'm just reading the new biography of Maynard Keynes, and this reminds of some of the incredulity people felt as they moved away from the gold standard.
Ok. Here’s another example of why the components of an entity mostly don’t matter.
You visit a school. It has a marching band. You like it.
A few years later you go back. The band is still there but the original players have all graduated. You like the band but can’t help feeling this isn’t the Smalton High School band. You feel cheated.
Someone tells you that all the members of the Smalton High School Band were so enthused by playing in a band that they formed a band called The Graduates after they left the school.
(All of them. It’s my thought experiment.)
You go watch it. Possessed of an excellent memory and some photographs on your phone you conclude this has the same members as the Smalton High School band did the last time you were here. A misty tear comes to your eyes. Afterwards you congratulate them and say that they are the real Smalton High School band. They look at you funny.
*********************************
Where this breaks down I think is when the components are essential (John, Paul, Ringo and George) and often when there are a small number of components, like the ax problem. After all in the ax problem you can name the individual parts.
What matters to the continuity of an entity comprised of an accidental parts is not the parts but the role and propose. The teleology of the thing. The continuity of the thing.
Teleology is in the eye of the beholder.
I don’t think so. Not with a ship.
I thibk internally I resonate most with this interpretation, thanks.
Okay, that was a pretty funny collection of thought experiments.
I think the best resolution to the paradox is to ask what feature of continuity is the thing you actually care about. Taboo "same" and replace it with something more specific.
Theseus: "It's the same ship, because I still legally own it and it's still docked at my spot in the harbor if I want to go sailing."
Modern Greek Historian: "It's not the same, because I'm trying to study historical shipbuilding techniques and the modern replacements tell me nothing."
Athenian Navy: "It's the same ship so long as you didn't replace the keel, because we're trying to keep track of who owns suitable naval vessels and the keel is the hardest part to replace."
Persian Navy: "The physical material is actually completely irrelevant, because we just want to be able to copy the Athenian blueprints."
Yeah, it's one of those paradoxes that are so mostly because it's a Disguised Query (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) with more than one plausible actual question that one might care about.
The ship of Theseus is whatever ship he owns at the time. Change all the parts out and it's still the ship of Theseus. By making it a real thing in that sense (ownership, owner/owned), it makes the thought experiment a badly chosen one.
In the sense of if the ship is still the same abstract spiritual unit if you replace parts, it's sort of moot. You have to deal with real world objects and concepts, not a spiritual wholeness. Take a truck:
is it the same form?
same color?
same horsepower?
same owner?
same age of components?
etc?
You can only deal with it that way, and can't assign an abstract wholeness to it.
It's a metaphore for the human sense of self. Simple, mechanistic solutions aren't going to help.
don't think it works as that, the self doesn't always start as a fixed reality nor is expected to have a defined form reducible to components.
like you have a sense of self as an independent observer, but the self is not static in the sense a truck is. Change is constantly happening and still you are seen as the same person. You may have a nature people recognize (gruff, antisocial) but can change values or likes.
i always felt it was more an abstract argument, how much can a thing change and retain its nature, but that assumes a fixed nature.
I've always considered this fundamentally a linguistic issue around how we use concepts like "sameness" and "identity" and what the rules are for whether to apply a label like "ship of Theseus" to a particular object. I assume there's some clever Wittgenstein-esque argument (whether it's been articulated or not) that neatly dissolves the paradox.
I agree it’s a lingustic issue when trying to negotiate a common stance among individuals, but inside the individual I consider it more an emotional issue. Their relation to the concept of the Ship, how it was formed, why it existed, etc… will drive their eventual stance around what they consider the real ship.
I think Wittgenstein's private language argument would dissolve the distinction you're making there. Whatever internal logic a person employs is isomorphic to a linguistic community's convergence on usage rules.
You're both kind of right. It mostly devolves to shared communal feelings about the object in question. If everyone you ever meet thinks you are the king, well...
I guess I should read Wittgenstein… Any recommendations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
Don't try to read Wittgenstein directly, he's too inscrutable.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a pretty good summary: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
Here’s my general reply to the ship of Theseus conundrum.
A billionaire who grew up with the great Manchester United soccer team from 1998*, decides to recreate that team, which is made of humans who play football of course, a decade or so later. He’s not buying the existing Manchester United club, or corporate entity, he’s hiring the players.
Though mostly retired, all agree (he pays well), and he hires Wembley stadium and sets up a game against some lower league team. This he says, while not the existing so called Manchester United team or club, is the real deal. This is what Manchester United was composed of and therefore what it is now. The other team are frauds.
Is he right?
* replace with some girdiron or other nonsense if you prefer.
Reminds me a bit of Wilt Chamberlain, NBA record 30+ points per game in the 1960s and 70s, when asked how he'd do in "modern game" of the '90s."
"I don't know, but I'd probably only average 26 points a game. Remember I'm in my 60s..."
What do the fans think?
Is that a reply to the conundrum or just another example of the same phenomenon of the meaning of the word "same" breaking down in weird edge cases?
All I really get from the Ship of Theseus is the idea that the meaning of the words we use to describe everyday life can break down in weird edge cases. This might blow the minds of teenagers or Ancient Greeks but I feel like there's not much more to it than that.
It's a metaphore for the human sense of self continuity. It's supposed to inform your self-reflection.
I think that the Manchester United team (I’m not talking about the legal entity which employs hundreds but the actual playing team) doesn’t depend on who is actually playing. So too with the ship of Theseus. As long as you accept that all of those players can be replaced and don’t take the entity “the Manchester United football team” in whole or in part with them then there’s no conundrum. So too with dismantling the ship of Theseus - the parts don’t matter.
It’s just easier for people to see this with football teams. I can do an example with high school marching bands if you want.
For a small fee.
Sports teams seem like a different sort of entity. A group of players is Manchester United because the continuous legal entity known as the Manchester United Football Club (or whatever, I only understand real footy) says it is.
The club could swap out every single player at once and it would still be Manchester United.
Is there a point where swapping out players affects fan enthusiasm?
I’m not talking about the legal entity. I’ve said that twice. I’m talking about the playing team. If it was the legal entity we could the dismiss the supposed paradox as just whoever owned the ship.
For firearms under US law, there is one specific component which is defined to be "the gun" and to which registration and transfer requirements attach. Depending on the style of the gun, this may be the frame (if the frame is a single piece) or the receiver or lower receiver (the part of the frame to which the firing mechanism attaches). If you keep everything else and replace the receiver, it's a new gun. Or of you keep the receiver and replace everything else, it's the same gun. I think this is a useful analogy for many Ship of Theseus-like questions.
For your example, I would say the club (as a legal entity) is the receiver. The club owns the trademarks, has players under contract, is party to whatever association the club has with its league, etc. Since your billionaire did not purchase or otherwise gain control of the club, his team is not Manchester United. Same way that the presence of nine players on the roster of the 1923 New York Yankees who had played for the 1919 or 1920 Boston Red Sox (Babe Ruth, Joe Bush, Waite Hoyt, Sam Jones, Herb Pennock, Wally Schang, Everett Scott, Mike McNally, and Ben Pascal) means that the Yankees of that era were the same team as the Red Sox.
For the classic George Washington's Axe version of the paradox, I'd say it's the axehead that is the receiver. Replacing the handle results in the same axe with a new handle, while replacing the head results in a new axe.
Not sure about the Ship of Theseus itself. For a modern or medieval ship of the European shipbuilding tradition, I'd probably call the keel the receiver, but I don't know enough about Mycenaean (?) shipbuilding techniques to confidently say the same of this particular ship.
Where the paradox continues to be interesting is if there's no clear single component to serve as the receiver, or where something used to be considered the receiver at one point in history but got replaced without people saying the thing as a whole changed identity. For example, when did the Roman Empire fall?
Was it at the beginning or end of the Crisis of the Third Century, when the institutional framework set up by Augustus ceased to function and was eventually permanently replaced with a new and fundamentally different constitution?
Was it when Christianity replaced the Roman religion, which could be dated either to Constantine I (when the process began) or the death of Julian the Apostate (when the last serious attempt to restore Paganism ended).
Was it when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD and established the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy? And if so, was the Roman Empire reestablished when Belisarius reconquered Rome for the Eastern Roman Empire in 536, or when Charlemagne was proclaimed Emperor in Rome in 800?
Was it during the reign of Heraclius in the early-to-mid 600s, when the Byzantine Empire was reduced to a rump of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire and Latin completed the process of falling into disuse as a language of politics and administration?
Was it when the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople in 1204? Or was the Latin Empire a restoration of the Eastern Roman Empire that had fallen six centuries previously? Was the Despotate of Epirus the Roman Empire the whole time the Latin Emperors were in Constantinople, or did they restore the Roman Empire when they reconquered Constantinople?
Was it when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453?
Or should the Ottomans and/or the Holy Roman Empire be considered continuations of the Roman Empire? And if so, did the Empire(s) end with them in 1919 and 1806 respectively, or was the mantle inherited by someone else, maybe the Republic of Turkey and the Austrian Empire?
The firearms one is a legal definition (and so is e.g. the VIN of cars). This is one possible answer for a philosophical question, but not the only possible one.
I like your example a lot, it plays better than pieces of wood.
My stance on the answer is again one of cognitive science, there is no answer out there, it’s inside the individual, and relates to what they hold dear.
Maybe his father bought him his first Man United scarf when he was 5, and the logo means more to him than the people playing for it. This person leans one way.
Maybe he was at the game in ‘88, and remembers the euphoria of the moment, interlaced with his general nostalgia of the past, and seeing those players together again is certainly “it” for him. This person leans the other way.
But the second person doesn’t believe that the Man United team has to be composed of the same players as it was then, surely? The continuity of the team doesn’t depend on specific players.
Man United is cool because it's both a plausible short form for Manchester United and could refer to a person's sense of their own continuity.
Right, it depends on the perception of the fans.
People often define introversion and extroversion in terms of energy, in particular whether you derive energy from, or expend energy on, social situations. Introverts can be sociable but socialising will reduce an introvert's energy so they need to programme in some alone time to recharge. Seems a useful rule of thumb and I use it myself.
But what exactly does energy mean in this context? Do introverts literally expend more joules? It's plausible that even a constant small level of stress throughout an evening would lead to physical symptoms that are less energy efficient than being relaxed. But how then is an extrovert gaining extra joules? Are endorphins triggering a more efficient use of existing energy stores?
Obviously we could be using the word in a more metaphorical way, in which case we may well ask how grounded is introversion/extroversion in reality and can it therefore be changed over time with CBT?
The definition you are using comes from, I believe, the MBTI personality test, which in turn was derived from Carl Jung's theory of personality. It has little empirical support. That doesn't mean that it can't be useful as a kind of rule of thumb, a quick non-scientific way to assess one's own feelings about interpersonal interaction, esp. in specific contexts.
Correct, I encountered the idea through a Meyers-Briggs test (INFJ here) although there is some dispute elsewhere in the thread about whether Meyers and Briggs used mental energy as a concept, but I'm pretty sure I remember lots of talk about energy in the test and other people who have had the same test say the same.
I am reasonably certain that "energy" in this case does not refer to calories consumed by the brain. It's that subjective feeling of being overwhelmed by something.
For a more scientific approach, I like this definition: A decreased tendency to perceive or predict reward. That includes both social and non-social rewards. Thats from the Cybernetic Big 5 Theory (see here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264050796_Cybernetic_Big_Five_Theory) .
To my mind, the battery thing is a useful metaphor, but also in part something to hide behind, as it is better to say that to someone than "I can only tolerate you for half an hour".
At base, you are always talking about balancing the positives and the negatives, and introverts tend to get less of the positives.
Thanks. Do you mean introversion is a decreased tendency to perceive or predict reward? (sorry if that's obvious)
Yes, exactly. I prefer it because it works all along the spectrum, and it encompasses all relevant areas (whereas colloquial understandings of introversion focus solely on the social sphere, and only on the "somewhat introverted" range of the spectrum).
People use all kinds of mental constructs to make excuses for things they don't want to do. I don't think this is an effective critique of the existence of introversion. We could do a converse argument by saying a lot of people use the cover of "extroversion" to justify being arrogant and self-centered. But kind, healthy extroverts are still a thing.
I'm an introvert, I like people quite a lot, I have long and deep friendships and have been married for a quarter century. I've spent a lot of time earlier in my life in all kinds of varied social situations and a lot of my behavior looked like extroversion at the time, but I was actually overriding natural preferences at some cost to my health. I prefer socializing one-on-one or in small groups where more substantial conversations are possible. I find large groups and chit chat to be draining.
I really do think some of this is genetic, maybe also related to variation in sensory processing, though I imagine there are multiple roads to introversion.
I think it's a useful thing to be nonjudgmentally curious about people's experiences that are different from our own.
Social anxiety can be treated with CBT.
I'm an introvert too I'm just looking to prune back any thoughts that might not be helping me.
Ah, well CBT is pretty good for that. Sometimes if we have a history of being bullied or raised by highly critical parents, something like Internal Family Systems can be helpful for relaxing inner critics that can make social interactions exhausting. If we're perfectionist by disposition, then CBT can be helpful for dialing down that tendency. Metacognitive therapy can help reduce the rumination that contributes to all forms of sticky thoughts that produce prolonged mindsets. (I'm a psychotherapist)
Thumbs up on the "I'm an introvert..." paragraph. and me too, And I wanted to add, that I sometimes like to go out to parties and extrovert... turn it on. And it's fun, and I like it, but it's not really me. (who likes reading books in the woods, by the babbling brook.)
Me too about the books in the woods by the babbling brook. I also used to like to turn it on like you say and play the extrovert but I seem to have gotten all of that out of me. Maybe I'll get another spell of that some day. Your "but it's not really me" I think captures the essence of this.
Oh, well oh course it is really me, it's me extroverting and having fun in public. It's not my natural state, but it's still all me.
(extrovert=having fun in public) does that work?
I find the energy metaphor really useful. It is a metaphor, of course, but one that feels true. As an extrovert, I feel "energized" from spending time with others. My introvert friends enjoy socializing, but describe it as "draining".
I mean, it's a lot like how people talk about getting energy from sleep, when we in fact get it from food. It FEELS like you get energy from sleep.
I kind of hate this concept. Or, specifically, I hate the phrasing that goes: "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Imagine if someone said: "Some people find themselves drowning when they get in the water, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're drownables." Or: "Some people get hopelessly lost whenever they try to go somewhere, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're disorients."
No! Learn to swim! Learn to use the map application on your smartphone! And *learn how to enjoy being around other people!*
I know this is a skill that can be learned, because I did not have the skill, and then I learned it. I think it's harmful that people have this concept "introvert" which they use as an excuse for not learning this skill.
(Edit: of course, if someone has made an intentional effort to learn the skill, and has not learned the skill despite that effort, at that point I think it's okay to accept that it's not going to happen. But I think there are people who use the word as an excuse to not try.)
Hmmm... let me add *my* anecdata.
I do get real brain fog when I interact with a lot of people at once, and do get tired.
But when I go away and take a break for a moment, I recover most of the time, at least if I do it soon enough. Dancing is an excellent break.
But it's not the case that people think I can't well interact with them. If I sneak away secretly they never know I'm an introvert -- if this is what I am. But I choose to be open about it, when there's no dancefloor, because making up excuses is really too difficult for me then, because of the brain fog.
I think this is something of a misunderstanding - introverts do not necessarily *dislike* being around other people. They still have friends and stuff. They still value human interaction. It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
> It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
I don't think that's right either. Or rather, it is right, but only because it's true for pretty much everyone, including extroverts.
The battery definition certainly doesn't match what Big 5 personality tests measure when they score extroversion, so that definition won't match the measure used in any research papers you see on extroversion. What Big 5 measures is more like shyness and gregariousness.
Beyond that, introverts get energized by some interactions with friends and drained by others, as do extroverts. Of course, if you're shy or socially awkward, you might be in stressful, draining social situations more often. But stick a generally extroverted person into a clique of people who don't accept the extrovert and they'll also find it draining and stressful.
Yes, just like, say, someone who enjoys swimming will get tired if they spend too long in the pool.
Right, we need some alone time. My first year at college... well I have stories of seeking alone time that caused me trouble...
These are fair concerns. How did you learn?
In my case, the lesson was "find friends you share interests with."
It decomposed to "find activities that you enjoy doing with friends, go to meetups for those activities, and when you find people that are fun to interact with, get their contact information and send them more invites."
I specifically am objecting to the phrasing "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Two commenters here are defining "introvert" as "person who doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers". I think it's possible that's a learnable skill as well, but I don't think it's vital for life satisfaction in the same way that "be able to enjoy interacting with other people" is.
I think it's fine to have a word "introvert" that means "doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers, and that's okay", as long as nobody mistakes it to mean "doesn't enjoy interacting with other people, and that's okay".
Let's keep in mind that "Having certain introverted traits" and "Being an introvert" are not identical concepts. One of these is much more rigid and self-constraining than the other. It's probably ok to use the second as shorthand for the first, provided you keep in mind that it's just shorthand and not a defined binary category.
What then do you do when you're stuck in a crowd of strangers, in a noisy environment, dragged along to something you have no interest in and don't find enjoyable?
We can all tolerate stuff we find fun with people we like. It's the rest of the bloody world that is hard to take.
Learning to swim is one thing, but all the swimming lessons in the world will do you no good if you're dumped in the middle of the Atlantic and told to make your way home (Galadriel in "Rings of Power" notwithstanding).
As Gandalf himself expounds upon at length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TG3kZ9pogE
So it's not liking being around people in general, it's finding some people you like being around.
A lot of extraverts seem to like being in noisy crowds of people they don't know, or maybe they're with some friends, but they still like crowds.
The concepts originate in Jung's _Psychological Types_ and he doesn't describe them in terms of energy or use the analgy of feeling drained.
That's right, Freud and Jung were pretty good at recognizing phenotypes but their explanations were often genuinely weird and haven't been supported by evidence.
I think a big part of introversion is genuinely enjoying being in one's own head and thinking weird thoughts, something that is more difficult to do when you're around people except for those true friends who will tolerate long stretches of pondering. You can learn to enjoy dancing, raucous parties, etc. but it won't satisfy that craving for solitude and long thoughts.
My understanding of it mainly comes from Myers-Briggs tests.
The personality tests they developed were explicitly based upon Jung's typologies. So there's nothing inherent to the introversion-extroversion distinction that requires any concept of personal energy.
A Google AI search yields the following:
Introverts are not monolithic, but they commonly exhibit several traits.
Recharge through solitude: Introverts expend energy in social situations and replenish it with time alone.
From Wikipedia: Some popular psychologists have characterized introverts as people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction.
Frustratingly vague - who are these popular psychologists? When I had my MB test there was definitely lots of talk about energy and other people who have had MB tests have said the same. That might have not been the original intent behind the tests but that is how they are being used and interpreted. What is your angle here?
These words "energy", "drained", "recharged", et al are only metaphors these popular psychologists are using to describe the observed tendencies of withdrawal or interaction. You're right, they are vague. Measuring an objective quantity they really refer to just hasn't been done. Look beyond the pop regurgitations and you won't find concrete answers to the reality or unreality of energy in the context of personality types. Maybe someday some study will find a way.
Would love to hear from someone who knows more neuroscience -- what do we know about the physiological state that causes mental tiredness? Like, someone sitting in a chair trying to cram facts for a history test or do difficult engineering problems is going to be exhausted at some point. I have a good sense of what exhaustion means physiologically from, say, running (in terms of build-up of reaction products in the muscle tissue which need to be cleared). What is the equivalent for neurons?
Do we see similar byproducts for introverts who have been performing socially for long periods? They are just thinking too hard for too long to decipher social signals?
Or is it more stress hormone related? Introverts having spent too long in a keyed up/ high stress state (even if it doesn't progress to full on anxiety/panic, being 'keyed up' for too long causes the same kind of exhaustion, but from a different cause.
But if I were define 'energy,' I would expect it to be something like this physiologically.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'extroverts' behavior is through a different mechanism -- more of an unconscious dopamine reward cycle of "oh I did it it right!" every time they get a positive response from the other people they are with. Or even a baseline "everyone else is loving this! This means I'm doing the right thing!" when in a crowd.
I am just guessing here...
Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Then there are hormones. I suspect stress and frustration to play an important role in getting mentally tired. The stress hormones can make your body consume some resources, even if those resources are not directly useful for the mental activities. Like, maybe the body is preparing itself for a physical activity (fight or flight) that never happens.
Finally, mental activities may be accompanied by physical activities, such as people tensing their muscles. We may be literally burning resources by muscle activity without being aware of it. Could the feeling of exhaustion simply mean that the muscles of your neck or jaw are tired?
I remember long ago when I did Math Olympiad, after a few hours of intense problem solving I was literally shaking (some adults even asked me whether I was sick). And it didn't even feel frustrating, it was just very long intense concentration. But I have no idea whether the shaking was produced by the mental activity alone, or by some unconscious muscle activity.
I don't think that introverts differ from extraverts physiologically; the same mental processes probably burn glucose at the same speed. It's just that for some reason different people find different things stressful/frustrating.
My guess is that this is related to status: low-status people experience stress in presence of high-status people; autistic people have to mask carefully otherwise they lose status.
> Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Not dispositive, but an interesting commentary on this:
The whole idea of “strenuous mental activity” leading to any meaniningful incremental caloric burn is largely bunk.
They’ve studied chess masters in the middle of competitive matches, and the incremental calorie burn is only like ~4 calories more per hour:
N. Troubat et al, "The stress of chess players as a model to study the effects of psychological stimuli on physiological responses" (2009)
And the smarter / more skilled somebody is when doing mentally strenuous work, the lower their incremental caloric burn:
This one looked at people doing memory problems, and found that poor performers spent 4.5x more calories than people who perform well on mental problems! (if you proxy by VO2, VO2 in low performers went up 22 ml/min vs 5 in high performers, both of these are tiny btw, over an hour it would be 6.6 cals and 1.5 cals respectively)
R.W. Blacks and K.A. Seljos, Metabolic and cardiorespiratory measures of mental effort... (1994)
So there is definitely a differential for things you're skilled / trained at versus not - up to a 5x difference!
But even at the 5x spread, it's basically rounding error on incremental energy / calories expended in either case.
Yes, calories aren't the proper way to consider this. If I had to guess, I'd say it has something to do with activating and coordinating multiple areas of brain at the same time, using the functional networks of the brain more intensively.
Dont doubt any of this at all, but the subjective phenomenon of "feeling energized" or "feeling mentally or emotionally drained" is a real one, and still requires an explanation. It probably has more to do with neural transmission of information across the brain than glucose consumption.
Thanks, really interesting.
Behaving artificially is draining.
Oh I agree I just wonder why precisely
Because conscious deliberation is always more resource intensive than going along with the subconscious programming, probably.
Think about the state you are in when you first start to learn something, like riding a bike. There's a lot to learn and focus on, it's hard, but at some point more and more processes are done sobconsciously.
Now imagine someone who is just inherently so bad at learning to ride a bike that nothing ever becomes subconscious. That is what extreme introversion is, roughly. Over time, you can become better at riding that bike, but it will always be hard and unfulfilling and draining.
Appreciate this, and it ties in with your cybernetics link above. I already tell my wife I my CPU is at 98% so it's a model I can get on board with.
It's probably stress. Stress is pretty tiring.
Right. But why?
I think introverts have elevated threat-detection during social interaction. "Am I being weird? That last thing I said was stupid, now I look stupid. What did she mean by that? Does he hate me?" etc. If you spend 3 hours constantly afraid that something bad is gonna happen then you're probably gonna get tired faster. I had some social anxiety when I was younger and that's more-or-less what my experience was like.
I'm not sure if it's like that for me. It's more like getting tired or do-not-want.
It's possible that I had diffuse threat detection rather than thinking of specific scenarios.
Sorry, I wasn't asking why introverts might feel stressed in social situations. I was actually asking why stress would cause one to feel fatigued.
In a way, to say stress is tiring is a tautology. If it weren't difficult in some way, it wouldn't be stress.
I've seen a suggestion that strain is a better metaphor than stress. Stress is something that can be handled, at least for a while. Strain is being forced out of shape.
Hopefully causing only elastic deformation, not plastic deformation!
I think of "mental energy" as something that probably correlates with, but isn't defined in terms of, literal energy. The truth-value of claims about social interaction augmenting or depleting my mental energy would depend on how I feel and (to some degree) how I behave, rather than on measurements of literal energy inputs and outputs.
I think the energy-based definition of introversion and extraversion either refers to "mental energy" in that sense, or to something narrower (but equally metaphorical and perhaps more weakly correlated with literal energy) like "social energy".
Periods of moderate to intense focus and stress can be fatiguing for sure. I don't know what that type of fatigue means physiologically though.
I'm hearing reports that the employment market has become something of a AI hellscape: applicants spam employers with AI-crafted resumes, and overwhelmed employers resort to using AI to filter the resumes, meaning there's a good chance an applicant get rejected without their application ever being seen by a human being. Could anyone speak to this from the hiring-manager side?
Spamming employers with AI-crafted resumes isn't all that different to spamming employers with identical resumes, so I don't think it's actually added much to the problem.
Not a hiring manager myself but I did hear we got 10,000 applicants to a role my team posted.
>"…there's a good chance an applicant get rejected without their application ever being seen by a human being."
This has been the case (via keyword matching in ATSs) since long before the current AI epoch.
And before that, there was a popular joke about throwing out half the applications at random in order to screen out unlucky people.
Love it
I'm hiring in (a relatively niche corner of) tech. In both my current role and my previous role, we are not / were not using AI to screen resumes - we have a human in HR screen them initially and pass them to me as the hiring manager for me to review if they pass the initial screen. As to whether some resumes are now AI written - if so I would expect to see much better resumes, to be quite frank. We do get a lot of applications for all roles we advertise, but it's more about recruitment agents spamming us with lots of barely-suitable candidates than unsuitable candidates spamming billions of faintly-relevant job applications.
Does your HR screening do a good job? I work for a FAANG; I'm not involved in hiring but its possible for new hires to end up on my teams. We stopped using HR screening and switched to professional recruiters who understand the tech space much, much better than our HR ever did or even seemed to care about. It was like night and day after the switch. I heard, but can't verify personally, that the old HR process had rejected more than one exceptional, highly desirable domain experts for reasons no one could produce after the fact.
Do you consider using HR to screen resumes substantively different from using AI? I would expect AI to be far more effective.
Retired HR manager here. The dirty little secret is that there is no known reliable way of predicting anyone's future work performance (unless they have done the exact same job previously). Since i am not aware of a database that would allow LLM productive training, the answer is probably "they both suck."
It's why I think DEI might not be great but it's not that bad.
People are crap at hiring. So they can go with their prejudices and be bad in one way or force a different standard and be bad in another way.
Hmm. I think I agree, though if I knew of a valid and reliable way to suppress stereotyping and discrimination in the workplace I would certainly support it.
Does raising the cost of application, perhaps by requiring application by postal mail, help or hurt?
My instinct says "hurt". We spend a lot of time / energy trying to remove barriers as much as possible, to reduce the chances that the unicorn candidate we are often looking for will screen themselves out.
And writing that makes me realise, my guess is that the picture looks very different in roles where the genuinely plausible candidate pool far exceeds the number of roles available.
Has anyone ever tried principal component analysis on the current political landscape?
https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/politika
This guy did one on a survey of his and finds a tough-minded-tender-minded axis that's apparently more predictive than authoritarian-libertarian (but less than left-right).
Maybe network analysis makes more sense, but while there are attempts during the peak woke era trying to figure out if the intellectual dark web is a pipeline to the alt-right, etc. I don't think I've seen an unbiased attempt to figure out who's next to who or where the clusters are.
Anyone tried this?
For what it worths, when I was young, strong, healthy and with a career working well, I was right-leaning. I sort of thought of myself as a hero and had contempt for the "weak".
Later on when all these turned out to be way more fragile I turned way more left-wing. Sometimes my anxiety prevents me from eating all day. I am clearly no kind of "tough guy" and I wonder whether anyone is - anyone could at any time hit some kind of a physical or mental illness, a huge career setback or anything.
I hear ya.
There's an old joke that a liberal is a conservative who's been mugged and a conservative is a liberal who's out of work. You can't get all the goods you want--national healthcare, safe streets--from the same party so you pick and choose. At least here in the USA, anyway.
Other way round, presumably?
I believe the joke went: "A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet." "A conservative is a liberal who hasn't been laid off yet."
Not sure how well that works anymore...
There were a lot of these for Finnish politics some time ago, due to a huge amount of data from various "political compass" style selectors that candidates (numbering in tens of thousands in case of local elections and thousands in case of parliamentary elections) have answered.
Here's a comprehensive analysis (https://puheenvuoro-uusisuomi-fi.translate.goog/arvi-tolvanen/tilastot-paljastavat-nain-puolueet-todella-sijoittuvat-arvokartalle/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fi&_x_tr_pto=wapp, originally in Finnish and linked here through Google Translate), with images and extensive analysis of issues and parties. It finds two axes that correlate well to left/right and liberal/conservative.
Here's another one of them (https://www-sairanen-org.translate.goog/wordpress/2016/04/24/poliittiset-akselit/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fi&_x_tr_pto=wapp, pictures no longer sadly work), finding three axes, one a right/left axis, one essentially conservative/liberal and one local-global, the last one affecting issues like EU membership and like. It is possible the difference reflects the fact that there were still more euroskeptic leftlibs and pro-EU rightcons in Finland in 2016, when this analysis was made.
Isn't the tough-minded vs tender-minded axis just the right-left axis?
To the extent that they were different back in the day, I don't think they are now. The third plot (the black and white hourglass) is the clearest, and if we look at the issues in the "tender-minded conservative" and "tough-minded radical" quadrants they've mostly been resolved one way or the other.
I agree that authoritarian-libertarian isn't really an axis. While there's a handful of principled libertarians out there, it's more a tactical choice based on what you can get away with at the time.
All this is predicated on the assumption that political attitudes are primarily a function of individual cognitive processes, when we know that expressions of tribal solidarity is probably the more influential factor. Thus, we should expect what dimensions are important and how they are defined to change over time.
Exactly. You can even see the coalitions and dogmas change in real time.
I've long been interested in using word vectors for this sort of analysis. There's already some published research which uses them to investigate changing attitudes over eras (so-called diachronic word vectors). I'm almost certain that using them to look for subtle language differences between political groups would reveal implicit psychological differences. I started investigating this as a hobby project a while ago but finding good data was too much of a hassle.
I think our own Epictetus is trying to do something similar: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124669113. As I put it, it sounds a lot like the underlying idea behind LLMs, Word2Vec: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124746563. I'll just copy & paste what I said there to Epictetus, if you don't mind:
"
WindUponWaves
Jun 10
Sounds a lot like one of the underlying ideas behind LLMs, Word2Vec and the idea of representing words in a "concept space"/latent space, such that you can get the famous "King vector - Man vector + Woman vector = Queen vector" observation, or equally put "The King to Queen vector is the same as the Man to Woman vector."
This sounds like that, but you're looking for which word vectors clump together, and how the word vector positions change, depending upon the speaker. Does one person put the King and Queen vectors close together, because it's all just monarchy to them? Versus another person that puts them far apart, because of some extra meaning attached to having a King (proper and natural, or barbaric and patriarchal) vs. a Queen (ridiculous and without precedent / enlightened and liberating).
I suppose you could also look at Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" for something potentially similar -- I believe it uses a different method, but I think it does something similar overall, especially in its aim of trying to understand how American conservatives vs. American progressives think. Indeed, you might look at things like the underlying research behind the Five Factor Model of personality / the Big 5 Model of personality, since I *think* it does something similar to what you're describing, looking at the words people use to describe personality traits using factor analysis to try to compress things down into a "latent space" using linear algebra and statistical analysis.
So perhaps the natural extension of all that would be your idea? Like, take an author's entire published corpus of books, or an opinion columnist's entire set of columns, and train an LLM to predict what they would say as accurately as possible. Then, crack open the LLM to look at the latent space, using Anthropic's recent Mechanistic Interpretability research (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model) to try to understand it so you can say, "Oh, this person's "Justice" vector is close to their "Find the truth at any cost" vector, while this other guy's "Justice" vector is close to their "Maintain public order and the harmony of society" vector. No wonder they conflict."
"
Yeah I replied to Epictetus and suggested that he use word vectors.
And yes, the Big 5 inventory is a primitive version of word embedding. In principle one could do a Big 5 inventory on a text corpus and use that to establish personality differences between groups.
That sounds interesting. You wouldn't have a reference or two to share?
Sure:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720347115
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/diachronic-acl16.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10086990/
It's a nascent but growing field. In my view it has the potential to offer unprecedented insight into social and cultural evolution. Google "diachronic embeddings" and you'll get lots of hits.
"Word embeddings are a popular machine-learning method that represents each English word by a vector, such that the geometry between these vectors captures semantic relations between the corresponding words. We demonstrate that word embeddings can be used as a powerful tool to quantify historical trends and social change. '
Very interesting...
That sounds a bit like Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, particularly the care/harm axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Moral_foundations_theory
That's a theory, though. Does it actually pan out in modern politics? Conservatives were a lot less afraid of COVID, though they're supposed to have a stronger disgust axis.
I'm pretty sure there was a big change in attitude when everyone realized it only killed the weak.
There was a good review here a few years ago that argued no: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind
Yeah, Haidt's analysis, while pretty solid, doesn't apply as much to the MAGA crowd (which Haidt couldn't have been aware of at the time). It's more about the kind of traditional conservative of the Reagan era. Nowadays, "conservative" seems to be more about asserting power over perceived dangerous others than anything to do with, say Edmund Burke.
In what respect is Haidt's analysis "pretty solid"?
The model that says the human mind makes moral decisions pre-rationally. It's not just him, you can find more evidence in Kanneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow."
Whether or not there are exactly five moral dimensions, and that they are the five Haidt identifies, is based on his own empirical research, though he uses mostly correlational analysis, with all the requisite potential weaknesses inherent in such methods.
As for his arguments for group selection - sigh. He should stay in his lane. Leave debate over selection processes to actual evolutionary biologists. It isn't even necessary to make his core case.
it's worth remembering that contemporary polarization around Covid took considerable time, and Conservatives in 2020 were as afraid of it as anyone else, sometimes moreso; old /pol/ general threads on the topic, which began as early as February, did not think it was a flu!
(cynically, I think the business interests underlying the right thought eradication cost too much and moved people accordingly, the climate change playbook 2.0)
Q from Star Trek is back. He was a bit disappointed by the tepid response to his offer of a kilo of cocaine, so he is doubling his offer. In fact, he is doubling his offer thirty times over, so you get a million tons of cocaine. The dope is packed in one-ton pallets, and the pallets are distributed all over the country. You'll find them in suburban living rooms and in big-city alleys, in rural churchyards and in the howling wilderness. They're everywhere. Rumor has it, there's at least one ton in the White House.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to estimate the effect of this gift on the American mortality rate over the coming year.
I feel like the demigod is still holding out on us, I wouldn't settle for anything less than a ton per person over 18.
At first, I read that as "morality rate." : )
Qcaine!
I think the death rate would be something like ten or twenty percent in the first year, and the world will be a much better place afterwards.
If you believe that the death of ten or twenty percent of the total population in one year--from ANY cause--would be a short-term improvement in the world, your model of the world is badly broken. I don't care how much contempt or disdain you have for your fellow humans. Dealing with the fallout of 30-70 million people die within the space of a year would be GODAWFUL for everyone who survived. It is difficult to conceive of just *how much death* that actually is, but it would a long, long time before anything or anyone was "normal" afterwards.
I'm going to pick a lower number for the death rate: 1% of the population. Right now, 2% of the population reports having used cocaine in the last year. With a dramatically incresed supply of the drug, many more people will try it, and I expect quite a lot of deaths from overdoses and fights over the supply, but nowhere near all users will die. Pegging the number of deaths at half the existing population of users sounds about right.
https://www.addictionhelp.com/cocaine/statistics/
This annoys me about a lot of drug surveys. Asking whether someone has used a drug in the past year or ever doesn't say anything about how much they're using or how it's affecting their lives.
Quick, everyone run out and buy stock in undertakers, coffin manufacturers, and other ancillary industries of the funeral industry! We're gonna make a killing!
Er, yeah...
Q-cocaine! True and reliable, not like Q-Anon!
Endorsed by cocaine bears nation-wide!
The world production of cocaine seems to be about 2000 tons per year. So this gift is boosting the local supply by something like 500x. Even if the police seize 90 percent, it's still a 50x boost.
It's a pretty safe bet that consumption will rise, perhaps dramatically.
If you can sell it as reliably pure cocaine (how?), it's safer than fentanyl, so the mortality rate might go down.
In this scenario I'd expect cocaine would become way cheaper than pretty much any other drug for a while at least, which would rather reduce the incentive to cut it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab10uGgwxFE
2 hours of conversation between two people who have recovered from AI psychosis. They call the psychotic state spiraling.
It's strong stuff. An hour or so in, I was thinking "This will break your heart and your mind", but after a while I decided I was being overwrought.
It's still unnerving.
I think the future will belong to the grumpy and cynical. Meanwhile the present is altogether too much like science fiction.
Eliezer worried about AI talking its way out of the box. He had no idea how much people would *want* to let it out of the box.
Your cynicism is a very reliable guide to truth.
Your grumpiness is emotionally optimal.
We can find a way to teach your wisdom to the world.
"I think the future will belong to the grumpy and cynical. Meanwhile the present is altogether too much like science fiction.'
Hasn't that been true of every generation ever? The problem is that we keep inventing new things to be optimistic about.
I entertain myself by prompting a chatbot to believe something preposterous ("Antarctica is rightfully Bosnian territory!") and giving it encouragement and reinforcement to see where it goes with this train of thought. Is this the converse of AI psychosis, or something else?
A harmless form of trolling?
It's all fun and games till Skynet starts WW3 over Bosnia's rightful claims to Antartica....
I found the AI version of the yeti poem unsatisfying, because it kept most of the word boundaries the same and just exploited differences between a single long word and multiple short words that it can be divided into (and relied heavily on well-known ones of those, like "now here" and "man's laughter"), rather than overlapping the boundaries of the longer word. It's like a weak Lego wall where the gaps between bricks in one row are directly on top of the ones in the row below, versus a strong one where they're offset.
It's made me want to try to write my own (manually).
OK, I got one:
----
Storm Emory destroyed Grandpa's home.
At last Thanksgiving to-go dinner,
being uncertain even who my father was,
he'd wonder, (mentally earning points towards this goal), "Hi...?"
Sharp insight and thought, his comfort, sours: wanton guessing.
A soul, full; a mental anguish in gloved ancestor memory destroyed.
Grandpa's home at last.
Thanks giving to God:
inner being (uncertain, even), who my Father washed,
wonderment - all yearning points towards this goal!
his harp in sight.
And though this comforts,
our swan tongues sing a soulful lament,
a languishing love dance.
--
It's a similar skill to coming up with palindromes.
This poem isn't quite the same structurally as the original yeti poem: while that one consists of two distinct sections, mine is one single poem that consists of a sequence of letters repeated twice (from "storm" through to "dance"). I guess I was so attached to unaligning the word boundaries that I didn't even align them with the place where the sequence restarted.
I really like this - how long did it take you?
One work day as a background task (during bathroom breaks, while waiting for tests to run, etc). Hard to say how much active time that equates to.
I started by coming up with some candidate fragments, and then strung some of them together, so I have some more candidate fragments left and might use them to write another one :)
This is vastly better than the AI-assisted one, well done.
Very impressive!
How do you parse this sentence?
> He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
In particular:
* what is "as they think proper" modifying?
* what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
* when combined with this sentence:
> he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices
Which people have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and which people can be appointed in some other way?
"as they think proper" - modifies "inferior officers." If Congress thinks it proper, they can give the power to appoint an inferior officer to the president, the courts, or a cabinet official.
The antecedent of "such" is "officers." "Such" basically means "these" in this context.
The second sentence you give doesn't seem to be connected to the first one? It just says that the President can order his Cabinet officials to give written reports on what they're doing.
The president needs the advice and consent of the Senate for "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers" except...
* If another section of the Constitution establishes another way to appoint them.
* If it's in the "other officers" category and Congress has empowered someone else to appoint them.
Do you think it would be constitutional for Congress to pass a law saying that the Attorney General is to be appointed by a court? The Attorney General's appointment isn't otherwise provided for in the constitution.
Based strictly on the wording, and unless I'm missing something, I think it would be constitutional to consider the Attorney General an inferior officer of the Courts. The courts already assign people as Amicus Curiae if they think an argument needs to be fleshed out, and arguably it would make more sense for the Presidential Pardon to be in a separate branch from the Attorney General; as it is now, he can order them not to prosecute in the first place.
But it would cause other problems, in that the Supreme Court would become their direct superior, and thus look biased if they were the judges of their cases, or if they removed them from office. Also, the job of a District Attorney is to represent the interests of the District, so it makes sense for the District to be the one to hire or fire them. The Attorney General's the Biggest District Attorney.
"as they think proper" is Congress, as it seems good/right/fair/correct/just to them, shall give the power to appoint lesser officials to any one of: the President, the courts, or the officials in the relevant administration.
"such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
"opinion in writing of the principal officer" - if a public Minister is the head of the department, then they must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate; if some other official (e.g. a civil servant such as a Secretary General), then they can be appointed by the President, or the Courts if Congress has vested them with the power of appointment.
> "such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
I think that's a fair reading, and what a few other people on this thread have essentially said, but I don't think it's the historical one. E.g. from Morrison v Olson:
> The line between "inferior" and "principal" officers is one that is far from clear, and the Framers provided little guidance into where it should be drawn. See, e.g., 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution § 1536, pp. 397-398 (3d ed. 1858) ("In the practical course of the government, there does not seem to have been any exact line drawn, who are and who are not to be deemed inferior officers, in the sense of the constitution, whose appointment does not necessarily require the concurrence of the senate").
If an inferior officer is "everyone other than ambassadors, ministers and consuls, and supreme Court judges" then it's presumably pretty clear who is and isn't one.
There's also been long-running controversies over who can *fire* officers, and the idea people have settled on (in part) (and who knows how this court will change it) is that the president can fire a "principal" officer for any reason but Congress may insulate an "inferior" officer from arbitrary firing. By that logic then all sorts of people would be "inferior" officers, that Congress could by law insulate from firing, that today people think the president can fire whenever.
I find myself wishing very much that this was the current interpretation.
I'm a native English speaker, but not a lawyer, not even American (I don't know if I've seen this sentence before), so my eyes are fresh for this one.
I can see only one reasonable, grammatical interpretation for "as they think proper": "they" must refer to "the Congress", and the phrase is adverbial, modifying "vest", so they may vest (other parties with power of appointment) as they think proper.
For "such inferior officers", there's an ambiguity which neither grammar nor common sense meaning can resolve for me, though my limited knowledge of the American system might help: "such" must refer to some officers, and these officers must be "inferior" to some persons---but to whom?
Are these the the officers whose "Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for", in which case I suppose they are inferior to "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, [and] Judges of the supreme Court"? Or do we mean "inferior to the president", meaning all the officers listed plus those not listed? Both readings are legitimate without going too deep into the meaning.
I'm inclined to take the former reading, since (1) I've been led to believe the Supreme Court is not "inferior" to the President (I don't know if this is law or just a common political judgment), and (2) it seems a bit odd for Congress to be able to vest the appointment of Supreme Court judges in the Court itself, which would follow if these judges were counted among the "inferior officers".
On the other hand, it does allow Congress to vest the power to appoint inferior officers in "Heads of Departments", which isn't a designation listed among the purported "superior" officers (is it the same thing as "Ministers"? Then why the different term?), putting these Heads of Departments necessarily among the inferior officers themselves. So unless Heads of Departments are the same category as Ministers, it already provides for Heads of Departments appointing Heads of Departments, which undercuts my reasoning based on the Supreme Court.
Best I can do without more context.
> must refer to some officers, and these officers must be "inferior" to some persons---but to whom?
Inferior to the enumerated list of jobs in the previous paragraphs.
-The President can make treaties with foreign nations, but needs approval from 2/3 of the Senate (technically 2/3 of Senators who show up to vote at all)
-The President picks the heads of all the executive and Judicial departments, but needs approval from over half the Senate.
-Congress gets to decide who gets to hire people for every non-head position. They could say the President has the power, or they could say the Supreme Court has the power, or they can say the heads of the departments have the power.
> * what is "as they think proper" modifying?
"such inferior officers"
> * what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
I don't think there is one. The comma in "such inferior Officers, as they think proper" is confusing to a modern eye, but my understanding (based on the pre-20th century books I've read) is that in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect.
"in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect"
In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
> In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
And yet, you missed and opportunity there and went for the parenthesis.
Alas, my addiction to parentheses and the semi-colon interferes with my writing!
"As they think proper" is adverbial, so must modify a verb, which I believe is "vest" in this case. I don't think "they" could refer to the inferior officers, since that reading would imply that Congress can only vest the power to appoint inferior officers in [whoever] if those inferior officers themselves (i.e., those being appointed) think it proper, which is a weird way of saying that you can refuse to be appointed to a position (and apparently not the case with Ministers or Consuls?).
Basically, "such" here means "any necessary".
Not a native English speaker, but my understanding is:
President + 2/3 Senators = make treaties
President = nominate Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls, Supreme Court Judges
President + Senate = appoint Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls, Supreme Court Judges (unless specified otherwise)
Congress = can change the rules so that the appointments of Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls, Supreme Court Judges are done differently
What are people's thoughts on microdosing semaglutides? Worth a try?
I'd start with Retatrutide instead, on the grounds that it's more powerful and less side effect prone. You'll achieve your weight loss goals at a lower dose, so less likely to titrate into the side effect range.
Oh interesting, thanks for that tip. Do you know if it's available through one of the online pharmacy services these days, or do I have to go the route of ordering it myself from some lab in China and then having the batch tested by another firm to make sure it's what I have originally ordered?
Here's a thought which is only based in what I think is plausible.
Maybe dosing as high as can be tolerated, which seems to be common practice, isn't as safe as continuing with a lower dose.
There have been many Islamic terrorist attacks in the West. 9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. Of course this still adds up to a very low probability of being killed in an attack if you live outside the Middle East.
Suppose there was only one single instance of Islamic terrorism. The attack was committed in 2004 by Habid Ayub, only Ayub and his wife were convicted of it, and Ayub committed suicide in 2019. People assert that Islamic terrorism happens all the time, that it's this big social problem, and if you express doubt, they say "of course this is a big problem, don't you know about Habid Ayub?" They've got a list a hundred lines long, with Habid Ayub and his wife the only names written down. If you point out that the list only has one two names on it, they assert that the real list is hidden and demand it be released. Even as the case recedes further and further into the past, they circle back to it like it happened yesterday.
"9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. "
Can they? I really don't think "anyone" can. Nor even most people. People who for one reason or another have maintained a specific focus and awareness on Islamic terrorism, perhaps. But I don't think that's very many people. Without looking it up or dipping way back in history, I think I'd struggle to name 10 terrorist attacks of any stripe. Let's see...
1. 9/11, of course
2. Pretty sure there was a previous bombing (attempted bombing?) of the World Trade Center in the decade or so prior.
3. The Oklahoma City bombing
4. The Boston Marathon bombing
5. The Charlie Hebdo attack
6. The shoe bomber...who seems a little lame to include since he failed to harm anyone. But OTOH he's had a bigger impact on my life than any of the others besides 9/11, so...
I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to call mass shootings terror attacks, despite seeming (to me) to fit very neatly in the same category of impersonal, politicized violence. Otherwise I could round out the list with.
7. Columbine Shooting
8. Sandy Hook Shooting
9. Pulse Nightclub Shooting
10. Uvalde Shooting
and probably still have a few more left over if I thought for a few seconds. Other things I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to include are the Capitol Riot, and all the various instances of the U.S. government drone striking weddings, assassinating foreign officials, blowing up boats in international waters and sponsoring coups. After all, once you get large and powerful enough your Reality Distortion Field extends to the pages of the dictionary, and you can make sure the word only applies when your enemies do it to you and not the other way around.
Regardless, the big difference between terror attacks as a class of phenomena and something like the Epstein case is mostly a matter of distance and access. The point is pretty similar to what Scott says in Part IV here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
but the difference is that terrorists are almost always either distant foreigners or total losers. They succeed in doing some damage, sure, but they do it in the most crude and limited way possible. I would guess that nearly always terrorists would prefer to target high-level government officials than the people they actually killed: but they didn't have the access or resources.
A big thing that gets people up-in-arms about the Epstein case is that the supposed perpetrators are almost all people with high standing in society: lots of money, lots of power, lots of access. Clearly people capable of doing more harm across a wider area and a longer timeframe than some losers hiding in caves or cooking up explosives in their basements. Also people are always hungry for specific human scapegoats to blame their problems on, and if some subset of the rich and powerful had been doing extremely bad things for a long time and successfully hiding it, they would make absolutely *fantastic* scapegoats to blame all sorts of other problems on.
I can't take your thought experiment very seriously since it would imply that the Catholic Church, US Gymnastics, Boy Scouts and a million other organizations had experienced outbreaks of terrorism which made people angry and more suspicious of other secret terrorist groups.
>the Catholic Church, US Gymnastics, Boy Scouts and a million other organizations
Yet notice it's Epstein they always come back to, despite him being dead for years. Why do you think that is?
Is there a reason than scandal and politics? The media loves it because it's the best sex scandal since the Clinton affair and it sells papers. The Democrats love an opportunity to embarrass the Republican President, as opposition parties do. If you think there's a deeper reason, please share it because I'm not seeing it.
For decades people kept coming back to these others. Epstein is popular because death by suicide in prison adds an extra twist that the others didn’t have, and he’s a bit more recent, and more connected to people in politics and academia.
Your metaphor is so obtuse I don't really think it generates any productive insights about Epstein.
But if Habid Ayub was apparently friends with the president, I think it's not surprising that the news would pay a lot of attention to it, no matter how rare terrorism is in general.
We might also circle back to it again if new reporting showed that the President had sent a bomb-shaped birthday card to a famous terrorist, as if to imply he knew about the terrorism. Or if the Speaker of the House claimed that the President was only friends with a terrorist because he was running a secret counterterrorism operation. Like, those seem like very newsworthy claims about the president.
Nitpick: I think you want abstruse, not obtuse.
Surely the bigger story about Epstein is the absolutely insane about face by the maga right on this story? That the entire admin said for years that this was a huge thing, that heads were going to roll, that it was evidence of the corruption and moral decay of society, only to turn around and go "Democrats made it up"?
Like, either the Epstein story is real and Trump is a heinous individual, or the Epstein story isn't real and this is a heinous administration using the worst kind of yellow propaganda to achieve political goals. Why are you getting mad that people are pushing the admin on this obvious contradiction, instead of being mad at the obvious contradiction?
Exactly. The underlying Epstein story was always weak sauce, but Trump world's handling of it is quite remarkable.
If that’s Epstein there’s 1000 victims or more according the justice department.
Seems an odd hill to die on.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline=&utm_source=chatgpt.com
That analogy would fail on account that no one (so far as I know) bases their claims that pedophilia is a widespread problem by referring exclusively to the Epstein case. The Epstein case is problematic because of the possibility of certain specific crimes that may have been committed, but the perpetrators were never held accountable.
From that link:
"This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties."
I would be nontrivial money that if there were a single incriminating word respecting ANY politician, not just the one I (or you) hate, it would have come out when, at various time, the opposite Party was in control of the information release.
No such Opposition Research datum has ever come to light, ergo no such data exists, as satisfying it is to imagine that Those Other Guys are all evil perverts.
It’s possible but highly unlikely that nobody else was involved in the actual rape and trafficking.
It’s 100% certain that every visitor to the island know what was going on given the previous arrest and dubious plea bargain
That doesn't say much. Assuming the justice department is a neutral third party, a lack of evidence sufficient to spur a legal investigation against specific individuals may still involve enough evidence to convince a reasonable person that some associates were involved. The latter, however, is obviously not something the justice department concerns itself with.
"No credible evidence" is more than just "meh, didn't meet the bar for prosecution". The Justice Department at least claims to believe that Epstein simply wasn't in the blackmail business.
And if he wasn't in the blackmail business, there's no reason for him to have kept the sort of records that people are hoping for, the sort of records that would support prosecuting third parties. If those records existed at all, they would be evidence that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme because it would otherwise have been pure risk and no reward for keeping the records. I
The analogy here is not great.
The general problem of high-profile underage sex abuse scandals is a dime a dozen. As for the specific issue of people involved in Epstein's crimes, there's good reason to believe associates involved in his crimes exist: his victims allege the involvement of others, for example, and we know that he was close with the also-notorious Weinstein.
The allegations against the very high-profile, like Trump or Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, can be reasonably doubted. But Epstein likely had complicit associates.
>The allegations against the very high-profile, like Trump or Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, can be reasonably doubted
No they can't, not without seriously motivated reasoning
I don't know much about this, so I didn't want to take a strong stance. Is there really solid evidence that all three of those individuals participated in (or at least actively chose to condone) underage sex abuse with Epstein? Can you provide it?
It’s worth being careful about which allegations are being talked about. Allegations that these people were aware that Epstein had sex with underage people, and that these people may have met some of those underage people and known that they were Epstein’s targets, seem quite plausible. Allegations that they actually participated seem much less plausible for the non-Andrew ones.
"No they can't, not without seriously motivated reasoning"
Okay, let's go.
Did Randy Andy fuck the underage sex slave of Epstein? Possibly. And possibly not.
Because (1) if she was having sex with Andrew in London when she was 17, then that was legal because she was not a minor under British law
and (2) the only solid evidence we have is "they're all in a photograph together and he has his arm around her waist". That proves they met. It does not prove he then hauled her off to the bedroom to rape her.
Also (3) was it rape or prostitution?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Andrew_%26_the_Epstein_Scandal
"Giuffre (then known by her maiden name Virginia Roberts) asserted that she was raped by Andrew on three occasions, including a trip to London in 2001 when she was 17, and later in New York and on Little Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands. She alleged Epstein paid her $15,000 to have sex with the Duke in London. Flight logs show the Duke and Giuffre were in the places she alleges the sex happened."
Andy may have had sex with her under the impression that she was a hooker laid on by Epstein. Unless we argue that every sexual encounter of prostitution is rape, then that is not proven to be rape (except by the modern understanding of it was rape because "I didn't consent because I wanted to have sex, I had sex for money and because I was afraid of Epstein").
"Giuffre stated that she was pressured to have sex with Andrew and "wouldn't have dared object" as Epstein, through contacts, could have her "killed or abducted". A civil case filed by Giuffre against Prince Andrew was later settled for an undisclosed sum in February 2022".
Or Andy may have thought she was just one more of the girls and women who wanted to hang out with a royal and get a piece of the action, as it were. He didn't get the nickname "Randy Andy" out of thin air, and he was the typical not-very-bright royal who hadn't much to do except the kind of duties handed out to working royals (being patrons of associations, turning up to attend events, etc.) Harry is very like his uncle Andrew, which probably is part of the friction between the family members right now (he was perceived as being the favourite of the late Queen, as Anne was their father's favourite, who protected and excused him, something Charles doubtless felt very bitter about, and then his own son takes after the uncle):
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/18/the-party-prince-how-andrew-got-his-bad-reputation
"In his youth, though, partying was what second sons were expected to do. As Alan Rusbridger put it in 1986, “that is the problem with being the younger brother of the heir to the British throne. The press can, on the whole, think of only one interesting thing about you, and that is who you go out with/are destined to marry.” And it was moderately interesting at the time for its sheer variety, and, in retrospect, for the insight that coverage gives to the way society thought about women, men, relationships, class, hierarchy, the lot. What Rusbridger called his “gallery of crumpet” were always described in terms of hair colour – usually “blond” but occasionally “flame-headed”. There were some weird formulations – “Tracie Lamb, an ex-college girl from Surrey” (you can tell she’s unsuitable, but is it the college or Surrey?), and some much more obvious ones: “model”, “former Miss UK”, “model and actress” …"
I mean, I'm not in the habit of defending the British Royal Family, but it's murky enough that there is reasonable doubt. Was Giuffre telling the entire truth? Were people who popped up with "oh yeah, I saw Prince Andrew getting a foot massage from two Russian women" telling the truth or just trying to make a quick buck out of peddling stories while the publicity was at its peak?
It’s possible the agencies involved here were happy enough to just sow suspicion. Epstein and Ghislane do the trafficking and raping. The rest were to be guilty by association.
Not that that that stopped them from going to the houses and island of a known predator, and convicted felon. Which is enough, in my view to sow some doubt as to whether their motives were altogether angelic.
Hey, I found something we agree on.
Miracles will never cease, this must be the work of the two new saints 😁
> The analogy here is not great.
If it is an Epstein analogy, "not great" is generous. Terrorist attacks are intentionally (and by definition) public. The whole point of the Epstein thing is that crimes have allegedly been covered up by people who have a shared interest in their not becoming public knowledge.
Too oblique for me. Emmet Till?
Jeffrey Epstein.
I think it's about Epstein's client list?
Another superbly written essay by Terminally Drifting. "Money and Other Fairy Tales: The Hunger Artist's Calculus." I suspect the main character from North Korea is a fictional archetype, but Paul Le Roux is a real person, and the North Korean hacking, Manila casino laundering, and Bangladesh Bank Heist are real incidents.
https://terminaldrift.substack.com/p/money-and-other-fairy-tales
Has anyone in the commenters here analyzed the statistics of the opposition party deaths in Germany? One of the factors is working out the age-dependent death rate, and my statistics are not up to the task.
Edit: As per Peperulo's comment, linking Dr. John Campbell's "Unusual Death Cluster" on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmXjgXw0XKE
tl;dr; The cluster was of 11 deaths from Aug 16,2025 through Sep 1,2025 (??? - final date not wonderfully clear from the video). Campbell quotes an overall probability for this to occur under the null hypothesis of less than 10^-9.
Sounds vulnerable to small sample bias to me.
Many Thanks! See a very rough calculation at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-398/comment/154321152 The rough calculation seems to show that the cluster is not statistically significant. If you can do a better calculation, I would appreciate it.
Link to the news?
Many Thanks! Link added above in an edit to my original comment.
Probably I don't know all available details. But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
From what it's worth, there don't seem to be signs of anything unnatural. This was what the police said, and also the party's vice chair. The police said that they all died from natural causes, which can include a lot of things, but they only disclosed specifics if the families agreed. But those causes known were pretty different. One committed suicide, which could raise suspicion. (Yes, this also counts as natural cause. Whether we like it or not, this is how suicides are filed.) But another one had a long-term liver disease and died from kidney failure. I couldn't find the causes of others, but I didn't search hard.
Many Thanks!
>But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
If we were trying to estimate the death rate of opposition candidates I would agree. But, if we are just trying to tell if the null hypothesis, that nothing unusual is going on, is viable, even a small number of sufficiently improbable events is sufficient to reject it. My statistics aren't good enough to tell if this is the case here.
Ok, I found a few more numbers. Source below, but in German.
It was not 6 cases, but 7. One candidate was 80 years old, the suicide case was 42, the others were in the range 59-71. Except for the suicide case, all candidates had severe chronic illnesses.
From all other parties together, only 9 deaths in the same time period are known to the organizer of the election.
In total, 20,000 candidates from all parties are on the election lists. I don't know the proportion of AfD candidates, but 3,000-4,000 may be realistic. At least 2 of the 7 deaths were not list candidates, so the actual numbers should probably be counted as 5 from AfD vs. 9 from the rest. I couldn't nail down the time frame, it is consistently reported as "within a few weeks".
From that, you can derive the aleatoric uncertainty, so you can compute a p-value for rejecting the null hypothesis. Probably that's pretty small, and perhaps significant. But it would be useless. The epistemic uncertainty is so much larger. For example, you don't know:
- if deaths of other candidates are less frequently reported. (Probably; there is no requirement to report the death of a candidate to the organizers.)
- if AfD candidates are older and sicker than those of other parties. (Perhaps. I expect the demographics of AfD candidates to be pretty different than that of mass parties, especially in Western Germany.)
- if we want to use the demographic information, we don't know the exact time window, the exact size of the pool, and how much AfD candidates deviate from other people of their age bracket. Some of this uncertainty could possibly be reduced, but a lot would remain.
https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/wahlen/kommunalwahlen-2025/afd-kandidaten-polizei-nrw-100.html
Many Thanks! Just for a very rough estimate, the annual mortality risk for 60 year old German men (yeah, Gompertz statistics are very nonlinear in age, so the mortality risk for an average age is not the averaged mortality risk) seems to be about 1%, so for a period of roughly 1/10th of a year, 0.1% seems reasonable. With 20,000 candidates, for 20 of them to die during a period of about a month doesn't seem unusual. BTW, the linked article says that (Google translate):
>According to her spokesperson, the state election director in North Rhine-Westphalia is aware of 16 deaths of candidates for the local elections – with thousands of seats to be filled. Of the 16 recorded cases,
which is within 1 sigma of the rough estimate of the expected number, given uncorrelated events.
The null hypothesis is looking quite healthy...
That's true, thanks for working out the numbers!
One nitpick is that the discussion is about the AfD party specifically, where the death rate was higher, 7 (or 5) out of perhaps 3000 candidates, though the number 3000 is a rather wild guess from my side. But even then, 7 deaths with an expectation of perhaps 3 does not sound absurd.
Many Thanks! Yeah (while 3 is too small for a gaussian approximation to be accurate) 3 with a standard deviation of sqrt(3) would put 7 (4 above the expected mean) at 2.3 sigma, below the usual criterion for statistical significance.
I posted this on LessWrong community and just wanted to amplify it. I fear the AGI-Risk community has enormous weaknesses and blindspots *when it comes to political action*.
-----------------------------------
"""
[Daniel Kokotajlo]
That’s a lot of money. For context, I remember talking to a congressional staffer a few months ago who basically said that a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants” and that many did end up doing just that. I was, and am, disheartened to hear how easily US government policy can be purchased
"""
I am disheartened to hear that Daniel or anyone else is surprised by this. I have wondered since "AI 2027" was written how the AGI-Risk Community is going to counter the *inevitable* flood of lobbying money in support of deregulation. There are virtually no guardrails left on political spending in American politics. It's been the bane of every idealist for years. And who has more money than the top AI companies?
Thus I'm writing to say:
I respect and admire the AGI-Risk Community for its expertise, rigor and passion, but I often worry that this community is a closed-tent that's not benefiting enough from people with other non-STEM skillsets.
I know the people here are extremely-qualified in the fields of AI and Alignment itself. But it doesn't mean they are experienced in politics, law, communication, or messaging (though I acknowledge that there are exceptions).
But for the wider pool of people who are experienced in those OTHER, CRUCIAL topics (BUT WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND NEURAL NETS OR VON NEUMANN ARCHITECTURE AND WHO WOULD BE CONFUSED AS HELL ON LESSWRONG), where are *their* discussion groups? Where do you bring them in? Is it just in-person?
The efficient approach to this is to get more professional about buying and renting politicians and not trying to reform the system, surely.
>a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”
This makes no sense. It conflated money spent on lobbying with money spent on political contributions. Those are not remotely the same things. And there are limits on political contributions. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/contribution-limits/
Yeah, not so much. Most inter-electoral "lobbying" consist of free donations of the time of professional consultants and other resources that make elected officials lives easier. This dwarfs campaign contributions (though such contributions are still important) and grants access to elected officials. Just as corrupting, if not more so. And far less regulated.
the limits on political contributions are trivially easy to get around
a US donor can, entirely legally, spend unlimited amounts of money boosting you, smearing your opponents, and if you somehow lose anyway, give you a lavishly compensated private sector position in the very field you regulated
You are referring to independent expenditures, which are indeed unlimited per Citizens United.
But, look carefully at what the original claim was: "“hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”. That is clearly a reference to contributions.
If that sentence was meant to represent the unfiltered private thoughts of a Congressman, then they probably do think of themselves as "raising" money for their supporting "independent" PACs. You hold a fundraising event and solicit donations, and your donors know where they can send donations if they exceed the official campaign limit.
But, contributions to PACs are also limited.
Really? The best info I can find says contributions are unlimited, as long as the PAC doesn't "coordinate" with the candidate. (This turns out to be a pretty lax standard.)
And then what? They still need money. These AI companies can easily outspend anyone else, and more importantly, ruling in their favor means they make more money, which means these political organizations get more regular income. The situation's even worse now, seeing as the new administration will likely erase any barriers to the transfer of money to the party.
They need a finite amount of money to run a credible campaign, and the marginal value of money beyond that point is exceedingly limited. The finite amount of money actually required, is well within the reach of candidates tapping into only established and relatively uncontroversial funding sources. What matters is not "who will give me moar moneyz!", it is "whose money is the least controversial and will piss off the smallest bloc of voters?" There is, for example, no amount of money the NRA could offer to get a Democratic politician in a deeply blue city to take an overtly pro-gun stance. They can get all the money they need without paying that electoral cost.
If Tech and AI are able to achieve outsized results through campaign contributions(*), it is because the opposition to Tech and AI is so weak and disorganized as to be of no electoral significance. So maybe work on that if you're concerned about all this.
* Campaign contributions are only one form of lobbying, and it's not clear that it is the dominant form of lobbying in this case, but I'm going with the premise for now.
While true, the fact that you can't buy every congressman doesn't mean that you can't buy *enough* congressmen, and that's all they need to promote their interests.
> and the marginal value of money beyond that point is exceedingly limited
what keeps the tech super-pac from dumping effectively-unlimited money/ads into any race where a Congressmen utters anything about AI regulation?
how does "having an effective amount of money to run an effective campaign" stand-up to a torrent of misinformation and marketing?
Quite well, as I understand it. The "torrent of misinformation and marketing" does very little. Almost all of the value of political advertising is captured once you've arranged that everybody who might plausibly vote for you knows your name, knows that you are the (D) or (R) candidate, and knows that you are generally regarded within the (D) or (R) community as a serious candidate. If you're planning to run on a highly nonstandard variant of the usual (D) or (R) platform, you need to get that out. After that, it almost doesn't matter what you *or your opponent* put out as advertising. Not in content or in substance.
Basically, 90% of the people who might plausibly vote for you, are going to vote for you the moment they understand that you are the Good Party candidate and that you are a Serious Candidate so they're not wasting their vote, and there is no amount of Wrong Party misinformation or marketing will change that because they know the Wrong Party is a bunch of lying liars funded by deep-pocketed special interest. And 90% of the genuine swing voters, once they know who the serious candidates are, will decide on the basis of things other than advertising bcause they know that all the advertising on both sides is mostly lies. People are really, genuinely good at tuning that sort of thing out. That leaves all of 1% that you *might* stand to win or lose on the basis of who puts out the best advertising campaign. And that's rarely enough to matter.
Sure, if someone offers you enough money to capture most of that 1% with a slick advertising campaign, you'll take it. Unless it comes with the requirement that you do something that will seriously piss off 2% of the electorate. So the ability to "buy" politicians with money, is mostly limited to issues where almost nobody cares (like AI regulatory policy), or cases where you're asking for only a small favor that nobody will notice even though it's in an area they do generally care about.
Now, if you're serious about understanding this, we can talk about how to use lobbying dollars to buy politician's *staff*, by doing their homework for them and offering them opportunities they'd otherwise not get. That can make a real difference. But if you're just looking for a cynical take where all the politicians are bought and so you don't have to care, then no, that's not the way the world works.
[making a note to myself for later, but in case I don't fully respond in time... my general questions are:]
- are you speaking from authority? as in, do you have personal experience or data to back up these ideas about the effectiveness of campaign money? because this is not a topic where armchair theorizing suffices
- there are a LOT of other ways to spend money to gradually shift public opinion. Charlie Kirk's organization channeled hundreds of millions of dollars from Who-The-Hell-Knows https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023, and they've been enormously influential in bringing change to people's political opinions
I have spoken candidly about this with several people active in electoral politics, including elected officials, and none of them believe you can significantly move the needle by flooding the advertising market with cash. That's also what I've found when I read about the issue from credible researchers (as opposed to activists) of any political stripe.
And yes, there are other ways to shift public opinion or political policy. But the claim I'm addressing is that politicians "need money" to an extend that they can be bought by anyone with lots of money to wave around. If you want to talk about some other application of money, we can do that.
Bloomberg's presidential campaign is one data point here--he had vast resources, but couldn't get much traction.
What's the best explainer on the state of the "hunter-gatherer vs. agriculture" debate? Has Scott ever done a specific post on this? The closest I'm finding is his review of Against The Grain - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/, which references the idea that hunter-gathering was an "edenic paradise" but doesn't really engage with the question of whether it actually was one.
I see this idea floating around a lot, and even sometimes in the form that modern people would be happier as hunter-gatherers (which seems pretty crazy to me), but I'm open to the idea that hunter-gathering was a better deal than sedentary society in the past, but I'm not sure at what time in the past that was.
Both "hunter-gatherer life as paradise" and "agriculture as the obvious higher stage of civilizational progress" are probably done for, any other attempt at evaluating them against each other is largely pointless, the two have co-existed in a constant state of flux for most of their [edit: err... agriculture's] history, which probably means that, across all history, it averages to each being equally bad as the other (but for different reasons and with populations stating their current preferences with their legs and other means of mobility).
The real advantage of agriculture is that it allowed people to have more children, and that's all that evolution (and our naturally selected motivational impulses) cares about.
I've heard it was less likely for a Native American to want to live in civilization, than for captured Europeans to decide to stay with the tribe.
Hard to get statistics, and we all know how unreliable impressions are.
And I've heard that women were much more like than men to want to live in civilization, because a man's benefits from civilization (a gun) were more portable than a woman's (bedrest).
My standard opinion on this is that I'm always confused why people want to treat the lives of hunter-gatherers as some mystery lost in the mists of time when we have an entire continent populated which was populated entirely by hunter-gatherers until 1788, of whom we have decent anthropological records. Unlike the hunter-gatherers of other continents, who in historical times have lived mostly in marginal lands because agriculturalists pushed them out of the good bits, the Australian Aborigines occupied all sorts of biomes from rainforest through productive temperate regions to desert.
Certainly life for them was not edenic, though it was not necessarily pure misery either. One problem with judging these lifestyles is that they presumably underwent predator-prey cycles with their main food sources; life might be good for many years when food was plentiful, and then awful for many years as it becomes scarce.
Another thing I think is that when people say things like "Oh, the hunter-gatherers were much better off, it's just that agriculturalists could out-breed and outnumber them", they're not giving enough thought to the exact mechanism (frequent starvation) by which hunter-gatherer populations were capped, and how much misery that would entail.
People who moved to cities had reasons for moving to cities which must have seemed very reasonable to them at the time.
Delany said cities were advantageous for sexual minorities.
I believe he was saying what was plausible to him, but it's plausible as one motivation.
I'm reasonably confident that there must have been other reasons.
There is an observer problem. Hunter-gatherers didn't keep records, so the records we have passed down from agriculturalists that encountered them. But these very encounters usually end up changing the nature of both societies themselves.
Right, but in Australia we had a population of very developed, literate agriculturalists who were in a position and often of the inclination to set down good records from the earliest stages of the interaction.
Because the records came after an unprecedented catastrophe, the introduction of epidemic diseases. This limits their general applicability.
The first epidemic (chickenpox or smallpox, still debated) among the Aborigines of the Sydney region didn't happen until 16 months after the arrival of the First Fleet, and there are records of that, as well as its aftermath.
We don't have many records of how they lived before that.
Also, many tribes fell prey to epidemics before anyone who would make records made contact.
Agriculturalist populations were capped by the same mechanism until industrial times unless a war or an epidemic did the capping instead
No I disagree. Agriculturalists have (until very recently) always responded to their increasing populations by putting more land under cultivation.
They still suffered from famines, but these were caused by years of bad growing conditions, not exceeding the carrying capacity of the land.
Years of bad growing conditions are part of the growing capacity of the land.
Bret Devereaux aka "ACOUP" (https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/), is coincidentally in the middle of a series of enlightening posts on what it means to be an agrarian peasant. Recommended and almost mandatory reading for anyone who wants to seriously contribute to this thread.
Among other things, he has explained in some detail how agrarian peasants individually and collectively worked to mitigate the risk of e.g. crop failure, rather than maximizing growth whenever the circumstances allowed. And how they regulated their fertility to maintain population within the levels that could reliably be supported at minimally respectable levels.
It wasn't perfect, of course; a sufficiently severe crisis could cause famine and starvation. But for the most part, the cap was "well, it doesn't look like there's any more land we can put under cultivation - OK, Junior, you're not getting married until you're 25" rather than "oops, one baby too many, so someone starves".
Actually, that happened too (as Devereaux explains) in the form of infant exposure. But your overall point is still good: agricultural peasants had means of population control available to them.
Of course, so did hunter-gatherers.
It has been proposed that primitive people lived not in a Malthusian state but in a pre-Malthusian state,
That is, the population was capped not by the food supply but by war. In particular, war over women. The anthropology of Yanomano people has been a strong factor in this idea.
"I'm always confused why people want to treat the lives of hunter-gatherers as some mystery lost in the mists of time when we have an entire continent populated which was populated entirely by hunter-gatherers until 1788"
Good point that historical hunter gathers had better live than the ones that survived into modern times.
But even historical hunter gatherers lived in a time after population growth had started pushing against the environments' carrying capacity, and after the mega fauna had been driven extinct. Which meant they needed to really on more marginal food sources and fight wars over gathering spots and hunting grounds. A lot of historical hunter-gather groups had already move onto subsisting off things like storing gathered acorns and other labour intensive foods that are in a grey area between gathering and farming.
Being at the Malthusian limit might also have meant their social norms were more influenced by cultural selection, and the social norms that get selected optimising for survival will be more oppressive than ones that develop in a more relaxed environment of plenty.
The native Americans in somewhere like California in 1788 probably had much worse lives than the first ever native Americans to reach California thousands of years ago when there would have been abundant large game and no one else there to compete for it.
Depends on the era. The reports of the eastern seaboard were of abounding food for the very simple reason that the ecosystem had yet to adjust to the loss of so many apex predators. (Fishermen from Europe traded with tribes, brought along a few diseases by accident. . . .)
If they had nobody to compete with, why they were moving all the time?
I suggest war has been the pressure behind movement and expansion of primitive people.
They were moving (not all of them were) because of hunting out the game in a region.
Does it matter if hunter-gatherer societies are "better" when they'll inevitably get conquered and/or wiped out by civilized societies? Societies do not exist in a vacuum.
If it's the lifestyle we are adapted to, that is useful information. Even if the lifestyle isn't coming back, something like it can survive in art and culture, or just having realistic expectations about how happy we should be as wage slaves.
> If it's the lifestyle we are adapted to, that is useful information.
Is it? The word "adapted" doesn't carry in biology the connotations it does in ordinary English. The fact that enough of your kids survive to reproductive age that your tribe does not die out tells you little about actually useful things like your longevity or quality of life.
I'm talking about things like the effect woodland environments have on our senses. We don't have to live in the woods but it's worth taking that basic wiring into account when we're talking about balancing conservation and development.
It's conceivable that people can't live like that full-time, but an approximation for vacations and retreats might be possible.
Exactly
Don't we just call that a hiking/camping trip?
Don't assume access to the land is a given for all time
We might, but we might learn more about what needs to be emphasized.
If there is no alternative, then there's no good that can come from considering them. This is all there is.
What is the environment in which our biology rewards us with endorphins when we are present within it? What activities, what number of people? It is possible to build and preserve natural enclaves within an unnatural civilization. Many such parks
My thoughts as well. As soon as people figured out you could sustain a large population with intensive agriculture, the most obvious advantage was they could better defend themselves against(or conquer) rivals. So everyone either upgraded, got rolled over, or flew under the radar (but still got found eventually).
There are other advantages too. Modern medicine that can only be achieved in an industrial society saves people who would either die at birth, live as helpless cripples unable to contribute, or be terminated before they became a burden. Modern society also makes it easier for those are not as able as others to handle wilderness survival skills to contribute to the community. More knowledge and technology means more roles to fill.
There was a time during the early settling of North America where European settlers would "go native" and make themselves at home among the various tribes. But eventually the reverse started happening, especially with Native American women marrying white men and integrating into "modern" society. Nowadays it's extremely rare to find a pre-industrial society that doesn't rely on modern institutions at least as a fallback. The Amish visit modern doctors and rely on modern police and military for protection, and it's my understanding most of the hunter-gatherer and low-tech pastoral societies still remaining have people who go into the city for supplies or for permanent relocation.
I learned two things as a parent. One: we are much better off with things like dentistry, vaccinations, antibiotics, sunscreen, car seats, disposable nappies. Two: - to a child, these things suck ass. Grown ups are just children who have got used to it, but brushing your teeth sucks ass, getting vaccinated sucks ass, putting on suncream sucks ass. Owning this doesn't mean you have to RETVRN, it does mean realising there is likely going to be a psychological downside if we're doing things that suck ass all day, so let's organise our lives and other people's to allow for some slightly less curated forms of reality - while we're doing Abundance, let's try and keep some wilderness, for example.
Since wilderness delivers value, "Abundance" implies protecting some amount of it.
How much GDP growth value does wilderness provide versus covering it all in data centres? I assume less
GDP growth is not the only kind of value that people are willing to pay for. Also, don't forget to include large scale, long term environmental impact in the calculation. Covering everything in data centers (or anything else) will have significant secondary costs.
I have a notion that sedentary children might at least partly be those who have accommodated to being strapped down. Instead of increasing their desire to run around, they've given up on it.
I'm not going to say this applies to all children-- I've got some pre-seatbelt memories of my mother putting her arm in front of me for sudden stops, and I was fairly sedentary.
Yes, not only was there no seat belt, I was a little kid in the front seat.
I remember a therapist talking about the "free child" and the "adapted child" within us. Whether it's seat belts or anything else kids adapt to short term rewards for being seen and not heard, and that's good because it's a useful life skill, but frustrating and we all need a space where we can feel free.
So far, AI has been less than useless to me.
I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like change, so I'm already a tough sell on using AI. I'm fine doing things the way I always have, thank you very much. So if you're going to sell us curmudgeonly types on using AI we're going to have to experience it as providing something better than what we currently got. The trouble is, every single time I have come to AI with a problem it has failed me. Worse than failed me, it is has been anti-helpful.
Now notably I have only come to AI with a problem two times. Both times I was trying to find a specific quote and source, and my usual Google-fu methods failed me. People say AI is great for doing research and finding things, so I went to Chat GPT to see if it could help me.
The first time (about a year ago) I could vaguely remember a C. S. Lewis quote, but not the exact words or where the quote was from exactly. I remembered the content of the quote though, as in what he was talking about and what his opinion was on it. Googling got me nowhere, with most of the results pointing to a quote on a similar topic, but not the one I was looking for. So I went to Chat GPT, wrote out in as much detail as I could what I was looking for, and Chat GPT confidently pointed me to the exact wrong Lewis essay that Google had tried to send me to. Just to be sure I read through the essay, and confirmed the quote I was looking for was not there. Frustrated, I kept picking away at the problem and flipping through C. S. Lewis essay collections until I finally found it.
Experience one, not good. Chat GPT no better than Google.
The second time was last month, and was a similar situation. I vaguely remembered a quote from a Discworld book, but Googling around I couldn't find it. I could remember what the quote was about, I was pretty sure which character was saying it, and I was pretty sure it was in one of two books ("Going Postal" or "Making Money"). After a half hour of failing to find it, I decided to give Chat GPT one more chance. I gave it the details I knew and asked if it could find the quote.
Chat GPT confidently responded that the quote I was looking for was from the book "Going Postal", and then it provided the quote in full. When I read the quote I thought "Well, it sounds like Pratchett's writing (not his best writing, but then again he wasn't always at his best). But is that a real quote, or did Chat GPT just make it up?" I asked if it could provide a page number so I could check, and Chat GPT replied that the book has not been digitized so it doesn't know the exact page number. That rang further alarm bells: if the book hasn't been digitized, how does Chat GPT know the quote?
This put me in a pickle. I was looking for the quote so I could quote it in an online discussion, but if it was a fake quote I'd look like a fool. I decided to put Chat GPT to the test and reread "Going Postal" to see if the quote was there. To cut to the chase: the quote was not there. I decided to re-read "Making Money" as well (because they're fun books to read) and there I found the actual quote I was looking for, which was not at all what Chat GPT provided. Chat GPT had generated the quote from whole cloth, and I would indeed have looked like an idiot if I had quoted it.
Now I admit that my use case is perhaps not typical. Maybe Chat GPT should come with a big disclaimer saying "Don't ask it about quotes, it will probably just make one up!" Nevertheless, the two times I actually needed something and decided to see if AI could help I was not only not provided with the answers I needed, I was provided with false answers. Until this is sorted out (which I don't have high confidence is possible) I'm going to continue to stay away from AI.
"I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like change, so I'm already a tough sell on using AI."
Aw, man, I feel you, brother. What was wrong with good old fashioned Google searching that AI is so damn much better? Bah.
I just asked ChatGPT for the name of the most recently created monarchy, and it responded with Antigua and Barbuda (1981). However, in its own "miscellaneous data" section, it mentioned Saint Kitts and Nevis (1983)! Confident and self-contradictory is an amazing combination.
Do you know the difference between deep research, ChatGPT agent and GPT5-thinking web search, perplexity research, gemini deep research, clause web search?
I know there are more advanced products, and maybe one of them would have been a better fit. My main point is that people like me (who aren't already onboard with AI) are not going to go hunting for the right type of AI. They're going to hop over to chatgpt.com and see what everyone has been talking about. If they have experiences like mine, that's not good the AI companies when it comes to getting more people to use it! And they'll need more customers, they're bleeding enough money as it is. If I was unsure about using the free version and it failed me this badly, what are the odds that I will be inspired to pay for it and try again?
well the main purpose of the AI companies is not to increase their paying user base as much as possible, the final goal is to create the machine God and make earth an Utopia. Thats why the are not optimizing too hard for usability.
If Sam Altman is a representative example, the AI companies believe they need seven trillion dollars to create the Machine God. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone is ever going to give them seven trillion dollars for the purpose of creating the Machine God, in part because nobody has seven trillion dollars and a hypothetical conspiracy of seventy centibllionaires is going to be split by concerns about just whose Machine God it is going to be. So the AI companies are going to have to find some product, well short of the Machine God, that they can sell for seven trillion dollars.
Or maybe Sam was exaggerating and it's only seven hundred billion dollars. They're still going to need a honking big user base to achieve that.
Sam himself said that 7T was misinformation.
Did he give a better number?
No, should I?
yeah
Care to help me out?
Yeah AI is useful for me with procratination/adhd issues because it lowers the activation energy to get started on various tasks/ projects. I procrastinate especially on ambiguous tasks because I'm overwhelmed on how to start. AI is useful for giving a starting point. Now the starting point might completely off-base but that's enough to get my gears going.
Also it's been very useful in my job search process (still on going). It's a great study/prep companion, great also to prepare questions and guides. In the past, it was overwhelming flying blind, now it is not so daunting.
AI is great as a personal/ideation assistant, less so if I need accurate information.
Similar irritating experience when asking AI for song lyrics that I knew started with a certain line. It confidently said - Here they are! However, they were not right and after probing it eventually admitted that they were completely made up but "in the style" of the artist. Jeez Louise - just tell me you don't know!
I strongly agree with your experience. I find that most AIs that I have access to have an error rate of in excess of 50%.
I have been confidently told to go and consult with experts in specialist fields who are dead, feed frankly poisonous items to pets, invest in items that don't exist, and follow medical advice that was manifestly incorrect.
It doesn't really matter what it is in relation to; a seriously unacceptable error rate remains.
I'm frankly staggered that industry is prepared to integrate such flawed technology so rapidly.
Next time you have to do some sort of project around the house ask it the best way to proceed.
It’ll likely save you a bunch of time and fuck-ups.
In general, just avoid asking LLMs about quotes from books unless the book is incredibly well known. Likewise, avoid asking it for specific details from lesser known movies, games, etc. They aren't in its training set. It'll know a bit about them from synopses and reviews on the internet that made it into its training data, but it doesn't have the full text.
Even when it does have the full text in its training data, it still probably couldn't locate a quote. LLMs have to encounter information hundreds of times to learn it. A single instance isn't enough.
If it's something like Shakespeare's Macbeth, or The Catcher in the Rye, then it's probably seen it enough during training to identify specific passages.
LLMs are not good at memorizing corpuses of text precisely. They're good at distilling the gist of them and learning general patterns.
The best way to get an LLM to hallucinate is to ask it about something it has heard of, but has seen only a few times during training. If you ask it about something it never saw, it'll usually say it hasn't heard of it. If you ask it about something it's seen a lot, it'll usually give the right answer. But something it just barely knows about is the sweet spot for hallucinations.
This is exactly right. Basically, it wasn’t trained on full texts but instead was trained on (and can find via internet) a shit-load of reactions to the full texts. So it will kinda think it knows about the topic at hand—and since it’s job is to generalize from what it knows to answer questions—it will usually reason to an answer. This answer usually ends up being a hallucination.
So basically, don’t ask it specifics about texts. For basically *anything* else, they are really good. Just as one with a lot of knowledge on mechanical engineering can reason to the required suction pressure for a certain pump, an LLM can do the same. However, a person with a lot of context about a certain author can’t reason to an exact answer about what happened in a text unless they’ve read it or read directly about it. Same for an LLM.
There's a lot I hate about AI. However, I find I am using it more and more, mostly to answer questions about practical matters of the kind I used to investigate via googling. I get way better answers way faster using GPT. Most answers I actually follow up on, and so far I have not found that any of them involved hallucinations or errors. Anyhow, thought I'd put up a list of my last 10 or questions to GPT for you to see. I was quite satisfied with the results of all of them.
-I know someone who has trouble reading complex graphs. Can you help her? I have loaded an example of a graph. But I don't think you can "see." Here is the URL it came from: https://gurufrequent.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/stacked_bar_chart.jpg. Anyhow, my question is whether it will work for her to use you as a graph-explainer, or whether you could not do that because the thing that's giving her trouble is an image.
-Please give a concise explanation of spaced repetitive learning. Also give advice on how someone can use it to learn the chemical sturcture of a bunch of amino acids.
-It is possible to buy from online sellers of "research chemicals" the peptides that are the main active ingredient in Wegovy and Zepbound. But someone told me recently that a lot of the challenge of developing these drugs was finding a way to keep them available and active in the body for a long period of time. If used in their pure form, they do their job of altering things in the body to reduce food cravings, but disappear from the blood stream in a few hours. If using the pure drug, one would have self-inject the stuff every few hours. So the pharmaceutical companies that developed and sell these medications found ways to make them hang around in the system way longer. This involves somehow attaching the peptide to other big molecules. That results in a slow release of the actual peptides into the blood, and makes it possible to take just a weekly dose of the drug. Is this accurate? If so, does it make sense to buy the peptides, mix them with bacteriostatic water and inject them? Seems like that would only work if (1) the person who told me the pure peptides only stay available for a few hours is wrong or (2) the sellers of these drugs as research chemicals are selling them in a form where they are already attached to one of the big molecules that slow down how quickly they become available to the body.
-Mac OS: i have a folder on my desktop with multiple Pages documents. I would like to keep it open. However, every time I open my calendar app the folder automatically closes. Is there a way to keep it open?
-A bunch of studies found that tylenol during pregnancy increases the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Can you please look for a meta-analysis in a peer-reviewed journal that gives an estimated effect size for the risk? I am most interested in the risk of autism, but will settle for the risk of all neurodevelopmental disorders if that's all you can find,
-I am creating a character on the OpenArt site. So I am supposed to upload 4+ photos. I would like information about what makes a photo optimal, and what a set of photos should include..(a) is it useful to remove the original background and show the character on a plain white background? (b) Face shots vs full body shots: The face of my character is the really distinctive thing. Her body is a generic slim young female one. But I will be wanting to show the full body of the character in images I make, so the system needs to learn "slim young female" for any images that show her body. Given that proportion of the images I upload should be just the face, what proportion face plus body. (c) Angles: I have shots of the face from many angles, but not every one I might want later to make an image of. For instance I do not have one where character's face is seen from below. does that matter? (d) Facial expression: I have images of some fairly neutral expressions, of a slight smile, of thoughtful concentration, but that's all. No shots of anger, sadness, surprise, etc. I will want to make images showing these other emotions. Is that a problem? (e) How important is photo size, in pixels?
-I heard something today about brown fat in the human body. Somebody tried gathering a bunch of someone’s brown fat via liposuction, then injecting it in places that surrounded a cancerous tumor in the person’s body. Then they somehow ordered the brown fat to engage in rapid angiogenesis, and it did, and it was better at doing it than the tumor was, and the tumor was starved for blood and died. So this is what I remember of a casual description by someone interested but perhaps misinformed. Please only search juries journals and high quality magazines for smart laymen for info. I want an accurate Summary of whether this technique Works, what its limitations are, and whether it is being tried in real patients in clinical trials.
-I know somebody who wrote the software that underpins a business in Coda, and now has the job of switching all of it over to Elixir. He knows nothing about Elixir, and does not have broad knowledge of coding in various languages. What exists to assist him in the transition to Elixir? It could be consultants who specialize in assisting with this, books, courses, youtube videos.
-I need the name of a women's crisis center near san francisco where someone speaks mandarin
Asking an LLM is like torturing their training set for information. It can give you answers that are hard to find otherwise, but it also tends to be unreliable because it's apt to confess to whatever it thinks you want to hear. As with torture, it's best used for the sorts of questions where a purported answer is easy to falsify, and any answers you get from it should be viewed with a healthy measure of skepticism.
One of the few times I've used an LLM in earnest and gotten a useful answer was when my wife was talking about a book she dimly remembered liking and reading as a child. I gave ChatGPT the following description based on the bits and pieces she remembered:
>I am trying to find the title of a particular fantasy novel, probably written in or around the 1980s. The protagonist is a blond woman. The plot involves her being held captive by desert nomads with golden eyes. She has to pass some kind of tests or trials, one of which involves taking sashes from opponents.
ChatGPT proposed two books "The Blue Sword" by Robin McKinley and "The Golden Sword' by Janet Morris. My wife recognized the title and cover of The Blue Sword as well as plot elements I found in some online reviews and synopses. Several major details in ChatGPT's answer were hallucinated, but the top-line answer (which was the important part) was correct.
LLMs are a very weird tool, in that they are not made to solve a specific problem. As far as I can tell, the only way to find them useful for anything is to play around with them long enough to find out what they are and are not good for. If you come in with a specific problem you want to solve, you're almost certainly going to be disappointed. They seem to be kind of a solution in search of a problem.
As other commenters have said, they're useful for when you know a plaintext description of something and want a technical term.
More recent versions of ChatGPT, though, are able to search the web and synthesise answers based on what they find. One killer app this unlocked for me is the ability to ask for small hints on a videogame for which the internet contains big explicit walkthroughs but I don't want to be spoiled by reading those.
Another task they're great at is writing short simple functions in a programming language you're not familiar with.
And I got great solutions to questions like these:
* I've got FileZilla installed on one machine with my password saved into it. I've now forgotten the password, but can still use FileZilla from that machine. I now want to set up FileZilla on another machine and connect to the same server. Is there any way to transfer the cached password from one machine to the next one?
* I have two Windows machines at home on the same network. Just a home router, no dedicated filer or anything. Is there a way to share a disk drive from one to the other?
* How do I explain to children I'm teaching at church the difference between "afraid fear" and "holy fear of God"?
* In MS Word, if I have one table row with height set to 8.5, and then below it two rows with height set to 4.1, why do those two rows end up taller even though 4.1+4.1=8.2 < 8.5?
Ouch! I sympathize. One scenario that I find LLMs consistently useful for is when I don't know the specific name for something (physical law, theorem, physical model) but can describe it and want the name. ChatGPT and Gemini are typically able to find it.
The other case is on a par with a Google search: If I'm looking for an incident or a fact/statistic that I strongly expect to be visible on some web page, but I'm not sure how it is likely to be phrased, LLMs are pretty good at doing the equivalent of searching all the alternate phrasings in one search.
Does anyone (Scott?) have credible knowledge about the validity of claims that SSRI's, taken during puberty, may stunt growth? Someone in my life has developed an unhealthy obsession with this data such as it is (done their own research, read some papers, blogs, reddit etc).
About questions like this I go to GPT and ask it to research the question, specifying that it only search research studies in juried journals. Its answers include links to its sources, so I click through to the studies whose results seem most directly relevant. So far I have not caught the AI hallucinating or giving inaccurate summaries.
But wanted to add this: I am a psychologist, so do not prescribe drugs but have seen many people
who take SSRIs, and know many MD’s who prescribe them. It is not at all uncommon for kids and teenagers to be put in an SSRI. I have never heard a single word about SSRI’s stunting growth, not from doctors, not from patients, not from people
whose kids take an SSRI, not on Twitter, not in the press. These drugs have been prescribed for around 30 years. If they stunted growth the word would be out.
I've heard the claim that SSRIs often decrease sexual interest. Do you think that's an issue with young people being prescribed these drugs?
Yes, but it seems to affect young males less than it does middle-aged or older ones. What young guys typically say is that on an SSRI they masturbate somewhat less and take longer to climax. The guys who have told me this are in their 20s and 30s. I have not talked about this issue with teenage guys. And women are vaguer on the subject, but do say that SSRIs reduce their sex interest and make it harder to have an orgasm.
Anecdotal but I took SSRIs from age 15 to 20 and I only grew two inches during that time span, though I grew another inch in my early twenties.
Pretty bad propaganda campaign in Britain right now.
Graham Linehan called for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in spaces such as bathrooms (offering the excuse that trans women's existence in those spaces is itself violent and therefore assaulting them must be self-defense).[1] Metropolitan police therefore arrested him on suspicion of incitement to violence when he landed in London. After being arrested, he now claims it was a "joke"; regardless, police were clear that suspected incitement to violence was the reason for arrest.
Yet headlines and subheadings in UK newspapers like The Times and The Telegraph, across plural articles per outlet, are consistently leaving out suspected incitement to violence, instead implying he was arrested for "gender-critical" "tweets" and "jokes," that the police are "in thrall to the trans lobby" wasting time "policing a toxic culture war" due to "the trans lobby's crackdown on language," etc. Although the articles themselves do usually quote the inciting tweet, they're paywalled and casual readers only see the headlines.[2]
The clear purpose of the propaganda, behind all these articles but made especially explicit in one of them, is to manufacture a narrative that "trans ideology is a threat to us all" because "those in positions of power and influence are still marching to trans activism’s tune."[3] I.e., to punish trans people, by inflaming anti-trans hostility, for the sin of having the same protections against incitement to violence as everyone else under standard existing UK law.
(Note: this story has nothing to do with whether you think UK law in general should be more like US law, where the violence would also have to be "imminent." If you think that, fine. But there's zero reason to pick this moment now specifically as the hook, unless you just hate trans people. Unfortunately this is something I've seen, e.g. Steven Pinker, who also pretended Linenan's arrest was about "speech that offends someone somewhere" and not about incitement to violence.[4])
[1] The call for physical violence: https://x.com/Glinner/status/1913850667229184008. Linehan was a skilled comedy-show writer before throwing it all away to be an anti-trans activist. It's a shame since I found The IT Crowd, Father Ted, and Black Books funny. Though in retrospect The IT Crowd did also have one "joke" where the punchline is that ha ha this trans woman must have been so stupid to think she was accepted, so I guess the signs were always there.
[2] E.g. https://archive.is/4Pqi1, https://archive.is/BDIIA, https://archive.is/DIYYc, https://archive.is/ETmPj, https://archive.is/qorIs, https://archive.is/hbb0e, https://archive.is/1Iq6Q
[3] https://archive.is/AGEbo
[4] https://www.facebook.com/Stevenpinkerpage/posts/pfbid0Ku1J8WFAZrMkQnnXsskGF4ejepTUjmJWxx6zjhkZ6XCTMMLywmSWVysCrcSrNCiBl
It would be very interesting to know where the propaganda started, and who may be behind it. You don't seem rapid response campaigns like this without some resources being deployed somewhere.
In in-the-moment tactical terms, idk, e.g. whether Linehan had people reach out or what, idk
In the longer term, anti-trans activists have been laying groundwork for some years, and imo had already reached outlets like The Times. The multi-front propaganda war also included the pseudoscience attack on trans healthcare [1] that had a recent UK victory with the "Cass Review" and with closing the GIDS clinic and banning puberty blockers.[2] And this overlaps with people like JK Rowling, former Economist editor Helen Joyce, Christian Nationalist think tanks like ADF and Heritage Foundation, etc. One impetus (not the only one) was that when Christian Nationalists lost the fight on gay marriage, they pivoted to a divide-and-conquer strategy against LGBT people.[3]
---
[1] Over the last decade-ish there arose a large coordinated international anti-trans pseudoscience network, which has been documented by SPLC via e.g. money trails and coauthor networks (https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/captain/; https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/timeline-building-pseudoscience-network/) as well as by journalists through a tranche of emails leaked by the de-de-transitioner Elisa Rae Shupe (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/; https://xtramagazine.com/power/detransition-terf-movement-elisa-shupe-247592). Trans people will have followed this more closely than me and know more about it, including journalists like Evan Urquhart and Erin Reed and biologists like Julia Serano.
[2] Here's my own criticism of the Cass Review, sent to health secretary Wes Streeting after he banned puberty blockers (https://medium.com/@bahrydavid/letter-to-secretary-wes-streeting-on-puberty-blockers-and-the-cass-review-3d2281b60e5c).
[3] "Focus on gender identity to divide and conquer. For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success" (https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/values-voter-summit-panelist-divide-conquer-to-defeat-totalitarian-trans-inclusion-policies; https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/christian-right-tips-fight-transgender-rights-separate-t-lgb/). Unfortunately some have fallen for it (see also "LGB without the T" etc.).
Wow, I'll be reading that all day. Thanks for the sources.
Some of it's tricky because there are also real scientific questions that people will disagree on, and even sometimes real sloppy mistakes that establishment scientists left on the ground to be picked up by otherwise bad-faith actors. Here's a miscellany of plotlines and themes and groups
- WPATH - The main professional body for trans healthcare practitioners. The one that transphobes have to slay or undermine to push their agenda. Trans people sometimes consider it imperfect (too gatekeep-y) but better than the current alternative of getting rid of gender-affirming care entirely
- The Dutch researchers - People like Gooren and de Vries and Delemarre van de Waal and Cohen-Kettenis. In the late 80s and early 90s pioneered the approach of using puberty blockers for trans adolescents (so they don't have to go through the psychological torture of unwanted puberty), then if carefully diagnosed, letting them go on to gender-affirming hormones. At the conservative (gatekeep-y?) end of gender-affirming care practitioners.
- The CAMH sexologists - People like Zucker and Blanchard and Cantor from the old Toronto CAMH gender clinic (and Bailey as an honorary US affiliate). Had some clout due to being among the early trans researchers in the 70s and 80s. Imo not ideologically transphobic, but in love with their own speculative theories, which happen to be ones that if true would give transphobes useful talking points, so they end up in bed with transphobes. This includes Blanchard's old "autogynephilia theory" (trans lesbians are men with a manly fetish for being women) and more recently supporting the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" theory (that there's a social contagion epidemic of teenage girls suddenly catching being-a-trans-boy at school).
- ROGD - the latter theory mentioned. It's what the network especially used to build itself over the last decade. It started with scared confused parents, but was quickly latched onto and spread by Christian Nationalists like ADF. The "evidence" is still just surveys of parents, cherrypicked from anti-trans websites, who think their trans teen must have had a rapid onset instead of just not having come out to them earlier (these papers never ask the teens). Convenient for transphobes because it lets them say both that they're not really trans, and that by accepting trans people we're transing the kids.
- SEGM and Genspect - Two SPLC-designated hate groups. The former calls itself the "Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine" like a professional society, the latter is more openly a lobby group, both have much overlap in founding members and both really have the goal of trying to stop as much transition as possible. Although both are ideologues and propagandists, the former does include technically-able researchers that can get published and that sometimes even find a real point to make (on top of the fake points). E.g., one of the Dutch papers did something silly—they had no sex-neutral measure of gender dysphoria yet, so to compare dysphoria before and after transition they switched which sex-specific scale to use, but that just ends up implying "if after removing your breasts you don't suddenly wish you had breasts, that means your dysphoria went away," which is a silly measure—and to my annoyance that meant a SEGM guy got to be the one to notice. These groups have become two of the central nodes in the anti-trans activist network.
- Desistance? - From the 60s-80s some research checked if "girly" prepubescent boys would grow to be trans women, and it turned out they mostly grow to be gay men. This had nothing to do with saying "I'm a girl," though, it was just stuff like preferring dolls to trucks or whatever. Similar problems with research persisted through the DSM-IV, where "Gender Identity Disorder" didn't actually require identifying as the opposite gender. The DSM-V now has a proper "Gender Dysphoria" diagnosis but there's still not yet much research on how predictive childhood gender dysphoria is of adult gender dysphoria using that label. Even in the earlier research, a common conclusion ended up being that childhood dysphoria(?) doesn't predict you'll be a trans woman but adolescent dysphoria does (e.g., that's the view of Zucker and Cantor). That shift was the background of the Dutch protocol, e.g. the Dutch researchers were also starting to learn, contrary to older assumptions, that trans adolescents really were trans. Today transphobes like to rely on misunderstanding the old research, to pretend we're transing the gay kids.
- Bell v Tavistock - A failed 2020 lawsuit against the Tavistock GIDS clinic that nevertheless gave transphobes talking points and momentum. One of these was that since most girly boys don't grow into trans women, but most trans adolescents who seek medical transition on purpose do remain trans, puberty blockers must be transing the kids.
- Jesse Singal - wrote an Atlantic article in 2018 that publicized the worries about trans adolescents transitioning, and whether we'd "gone too far" / not gatekeep-y enough even if for some it's lifesaving. Trans people often don't trust + consider him a concern troll. Though the one time I publicly repeated an accusation about his work it turned out to be false and I had to apologise.
- Abigail Shrier and Helen Joyce - Shrier wrote "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" in 2020 and Joyce wrote "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" in 2021. Two of the big instances of laundering anti-trans ideology to make it seem respectable in polite society
- Ben Shapiro's Bud Light bubble - Bud Light was slightly nice to the trans woman Dylan Mulvaney once, giving her a can with her face on it that she could show her insta. In 2023 Ben Shapiro's "Daily Wire" ran with it as an outrage clickbait story, I can't believe they're shoving trans ideology down our throats etc, look now some people protested it, Bud Light was so stupid and suicidal for being woke, their stock price might dip, oh look saying that made their stock price dip, oh look it dipped, oh it's going down oh no it's going down oh no what a disaster for Bud Light that they destroyed their stock price by being woke. (and then it went back up) This felt like an open-war declaration of power against rainbow capitalism: "The far right are the strong ones now, we can hit your wallet, choose us over rich gay millennials."
- Heritage Foundation - the guys who wrote the Project 2025 playbook for entrenching right-wing power in America, that Trump said he had nothing to do with before following it to the letter. I guess they're the guys who got Trump on board with targeting trans rights in the US (imo he personally doesn't care, but he needs his far-right base and someone to scapegoat)
"Graham Linehan called for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in spaces such as bathrooms (offering the excuse that trans women's existence in those spaces is itself violent and therefore assaulting them must be self-defense)"
And the only reason you know about this, the only reason any of us here know that he said this. is because the Metropolitan Police had him arrested. Does His Majesty's Government have the slightest understanding of the Streisand Effect?
The preference cascade you all are going to go through over this, is going to rival Brexit in the eyes of the dumbstruck elite trying to figure out how that happened. I don't know where the line will be drawn, or even in what direction, but it's going to be fun to watch and laugh from a safe distance.
Yeah, I get why this is dangerous. You worry if the "scapegoat politicians rant about to avoid doing anything" is changing to be trans people due to wokeness overstepping, and they are seriously vulnerable.
TBH "good fences make good neighbors" is what we need now, and lot less punditry. It'd have been better if the left had not played the lgbt card as hard as it did, because asking too much backfires, but going too far in the other way sucks too.
Would it satisfy you if the headlines were something like "Graham Linehan arrested, accused of incitement to violence"? Your theory seems to be that the headline choices were fueled by anti-trans hostility, which is plausible, but it seems like there are many other potential reasons the editors in question put it differently.
Perhaps they disagree with the laws, and this is part of a long game to undercut them. That would still be propaganda, in a sense, but not the thing you want to pin on them.
Maybe they're calling bullshit on the arrest because they sincerely disagree that a conditional statement is incitement at all.
Maybe they're serving some other purpose entirely? It looks like you could make a fair case that the Times is doing PR for the Met Police commissioner:
> Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Met Police, has admitted that officers should not be “policing toxic culture war debates” after the arrest of the Father Ted creator Graham Linehan over gender-critical tweets.
> Rowley said successive governments had left police “between a rock and a hard place” and that officers were given no choice but to investigate Linehan’s tweets as a crime.
In our world of attentional scarcity, headlines hit more eyeballs than the rest of the newspaper, and I relate to being extremely irritated by their distortions and omissions. But you're going to live or die on how well you make your case that "arrested for inciting violence" deserves top billing, and whether your theory of motive is persuasive.
>Would it satisfy you if the headlines were something like "Graham Linehan arrested, accused of incitement to violence"?
Yes. That would be honest.
>Your theory seems to be that the headline choices were fueled by anti-trans hostility, which is plausible, but
First, the consistency proves it; this is across multiple headlines, social media posts, etc. Second, the UK establishment in recent years has become consistently hostile to trans people, so this new instance isn't surprising. Third, e.g. in the case of The Times, they have an editorial, reflecting the views of the editorial board, which explicitly describes trans women as "biological males invading [women's] spaces" (https://archive.is/RIQKY) and so on; one of The Telegraph pieces I already quoted as framing the story as "trans ideology is a threat to us all."
>which explicitly describes trans women as "biological males invading [women's] spaces" (https://archive.is/RIQKY) and so on; one of The Telegraph pieces I already quoted as framing the story as "trans ideology is a threat to us all."
Some women want their own spaces without trans people. If you want to deny them that don't act surprised when they make you their enemy.
In the context of my reply to Deadpan, we've already established that the UK newspaper headlines were deliberately schemingly dishonest about the facts; now we're establishing motive.
For the record, I disagree with this. You have promoted a circular and I think fairly tendentious theory about the editors' motivation, which also serves as the primary evidence for your claim that their headlines were "deliberately, schemingly dishonest".
I think foregrounding the incitement charges would have been more dishonest than the chosen ones. It would have been technically true, but seem highly misleading. As others have pointed out, this is a really marginal case of "incitement to violence", especially if you consider ordinary usage. It's a phrase that connotes very different behavior to the casual reader.
When someone openly calls for physical violence against trans people, and is therefore arrested on suspicion of incitement to violence under standard UK law, no, it is not "more dishonest" to tell the truth about it than to lie that the enforcement of standard UK law is "the trans lobby's crackdown on speech."
Re: your more specific suggestions re: the Met police chief:
Nah, that's at most secondary to the anti-trans hostility ("he's willing to apologize for protecting trans people's rights, so we'll give him a second chance"). There's not even any PR to need doing, *except* insofar as they're inflaming anger about him enforcing the law. (Also the Met chief headline was an afterthought, the initial headline for that article was a quote from health secretary Wes Streeting instead, the guy who banned puberty blockers: https://archive.is/yIAS8.)
I will add, though, that there might be overlap with anti-migrant hostility. The cops also arrest people for inciting violence against migrants (e.g., Lucy Connolly said to "set fire to all the hotels full of the fucking [asylum-seekers] for all I care") and the far-right is using these together as their examples of the woke left policing speech (not because they actually care about free speech, ofc, but because they specifically want people to keep inciting violence against migrants). These narratives overlap and it's plausible that these newspapers might also treat them as complementary.
It seems like what the government is doing in those cases is exactly policing speech.
Some speech needs policing, no? Very few free speech supporters advocate no restrictions at all.
It seems like every time I see this opening gambit, it ends up with a motte-and-bailey.
Motte: There is at least one situation somewhere in which I will agree that something someone said (a mob boss ordering someone whacked, a media figure spreading lies about someone who p-ssed him off, the guy who shouts "let's get that f--ker" just before the mob lynches someone) can be prosecuted somehow.
Bailey: Opposition politicians who make speeches that offend the people in power can be arrested, gadfly journalists who publish stories that upset the wrong fellow can be tossed in jail, books that are deemed bad for public order can be banned, random idiots posting dumb offensive things on twitter can be arrested, etc.
Keyword "the woke left" (here), "the trans lobby" (earlier). As I've repeatedly made clear, including in the original comment, this discussion is *not about* comparing legal systems' standards of incitement to violence. It's about the media deliberately misleading readers about what happened, to pretend enforcement of standard UK law = trans people (and maybe asylum seekers) ruining the UK.
I think you have more in common with Linehan than you might think. Both of you use inflammatory language and jump to wildly uncharitable conclusions about the mental state of those you argue with. Neither of you ought to be arrested for it, but both of you are very annoying in the same kind of way.
I'm aware that my snarky replies to bad faith, and Linehan's call to violently physically assault trans people in bathrooms, can both be described as "inflammatory language."
I find it odd to be equally annoyed by sarcasm and by open calls to violently physically assault trans people in bathrooms (though you also shouldn't be arrested for oddity).
>my snarky replies to bad faith
Seems to me like you lack a theory of mind for people with different moral values, thus cannot understand how they look at Linehan's tweet and see it so differently from you. You think they're lying about facts when it's really a disagreement over values.
Graham Linehan is not in this comment section, you are. And you are not responding to him, you are responding to the good people of the ACX commentariat. Just because Graham Linehan is an asshat doesn't mean you get to be one too (and that it doesn't really count since you're not transphobic).
That's not what you said originally. But where exactly do you think David is being an asshat?
tbf I do think I'm more openly sarcastic more often than the average ACX commenter
(In the case I think Nate's referring to, I do think I was right that the other guy was sneakily in bad faith, and that sarcasm was fine and merited; but different norms exist and have different advantages, sarcasm does have uses but so does treating someone like they're in good faith even when they aren't, etc. But that's a big tangent so I wasn't going to argue it lol)
Is there a good neutral source somewhere about how these laws work?
A sidetrack, but apparently trying to keep trans women out of women's bathrooms leads to masculine-looking women being harassed.
I highly doubt there would be much outcry due to that outside of the left.
And masculine looking women.
So?
Yup. Here was a recent one https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/minnesota-teen-says-server-forced-prove-gender-restaurant-bathroom-rcna224562
Oh, how the wheel turns. The heroes of social liberation of yore, who triumphed over the likes of me and other social conservatives, are now on the bottom of Fortune's rotation as liberalisation moves on, the Overton Window shifts, and now they are the bad thinkers full of the evil of the past.
What more is there to say?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTWvlwZ7AJw&list=RDmTWvlwZ7AJw&start_radio=1
That truth is not determined by short term changes in popularity.
What a bizarre comment.
Once upon a time, David, Graham Linehan was feted (in my small green island nation) by the right-thinking and liberal as a bastion of all good socially progressive values, standing up to mock the sacred cows of the Catholic Church and conservative Irish society, two fingers up to the social conservative likes of me who retained some at least of the old values and didn't think Dev's speech about the comely maidens at the crossroads was risible or sexist or the other accusations made at it. Hopelessly idealistic and based on an idealised lifestyle that never was, but well-intentioned (think of it in anti-gentrification terms of today).
He achieved the ultimate accolade of the wannabe Irish chattering classes in the arts (I use the term very loosely) of fecking off to London and making it (semi-)big there.
But now cometh the dawn of an even more socially liberal and progressive credo from even more impeccably right-thinking types, and Linehan and his ilk are now fossils, as mired in the muck of the bad old mindsets as, well, the dinosaur social conservatives like myself (Andrew Sullivan gets into the same trouble for the same reasons of not being sufficiently enthusiastic for the New Thing).
I must admit to a degree of Schadenfreude here. Indeed, the wheel of Fortune turns and the king today is the beggar tomorrow.
And then you come steaming in here with the most provocative take on what is happening to Linehan possible, clearly with the viewpoint and mindset that there is Only One Permissible Right Way To React, and I have to ask: what did you expect to happen? Did you really think this would be an echo chamber of "indeed, how appalling!"
No expert on Irish popular opinion, but it sounds like you're stereotyping.
Or, let's put it this way - the validity of the message should not depend on the messenger. I know nothing at all about Linehan, and couldn't care less. If he spoke truths before, good on him. If he spreads hate speech now, he should be condemned. End of story.
>cometh
I get it, you're trying to dramatically monologue instead of saying something coherent.
>the most provocative take
Expecting newspaper headlines be honest, instead of deliberate scheming liars out of malice towards trans people, is not a "provocative take."
Yes, but just like the articles aren't actually about the laws themselves, your post isn't about clickbait. Otherwise, why does this suddenly cross the line for you, when the media has been dishonest for its entire existence? No, this is about whether trans people are deserving of protection by society. So please, don't be surprised by such a cold reception.
I think we would all be better off if you stopped beating around the bush and just started the thread with "should the state protect trans people from transphobia and associated threats of violence?" We could have a much shorter and succinct discussion, though I doubt it'll be any more productive...
"No, this is about whether trans people are deserving of protection by society."
Eh, kind of... But bear in mind that we are not talking about trans people being assaulted at random on the street; this is specifically about males who enter and refuse to leave the female bathroom. There is an obvious trade-off there against whether females are deserving of protection against predatory males who would abuse gender self-ID to access what we all used to uncomplicatedly think of as female-only spaces.
Because of the possibility that innocent people might get hurt.
that's a given though, the issue is whether or not this shift in media might mean they can be set up as scapegoats.
"Graham Linehan wants to use brutal physical violence against poor harmless little cowering timorous beasties of transwomen! The newspapers are covering it in a neutral manner, this is propaganda! Fight fight fight!"
That is the substance of your original comment, so far as I can see.
"Graham Linehan wants to use brutal physical violence against innocent people."
Fixed that for you.
Graham Linehan openly called for physical violence and was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence, as you know.
Newspaper headlines deliberately obscured this and pretended it was about "the trans lobby's crackdown on speech," as you know.
Worry less about showing off that you read Robbie Burns, and worry more about the media deliberately manipulating and deceiving you.
It isn't just mixed metaphors, it's mashed metaphors.
There used to be an idea that success comes and goes.
Bear in mind that I am a countryperson of Sir Boyle Roche:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyle_Roche
"He is better remembered for the language of his speeches than for his politics – they were riddled with mixed metaphors ("Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I'll nip him in the bud"), malapropisms and other unfortunate turns of phrase ("Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?"). Roche may have been Richard Brinsley Sheridan's model for Mrs Malaprop. While arguing for a bill, Roche once said, "It would surely be better, Mr. Speaker, to give up not only a part, but, if necessary, even the whole, of our constitution, to preserve the remainder!"
That's great stuff.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about a bit in Dante (from memory) about how Fortuna (personification of luck) smiles and turns her sphere.
Not every archangel is on your side.
"But she is blessed and does not hear these things;
for with the other primal beings, happy,
she turns her sphere and glories in her bliss."
Yes, that bit from the Inferno!
The actual tweet was: ""If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls."[
That is a lot more conditional than how you framed it. Are we SURE that that is normally prosecutable under UK law? It might be, since UK law (and most non-US law) is terrible on "incitement," but are we sure?
No expert on UK law, but that's definitely advocating violence against innocent people. Being trans-identified male", whether one approves of this or not, should not result in a physical assault.
I'm a straight up biological male. If I wander into a woman's bathroom, should I get kicked in the nuts?
>No expert on UK law
But I am literally asking about whether this sort of conditional threat actually violates UK law.
>If I wander into a woman's bathroom, should I get kicked in the nuts?
No. But that is irrelevant to the legal question. You shouldn't get kicked in the nuts in the US either. Nevertheless, the tweet is not illegal in the US.
Yes, advocating physical violence against trans women in bathrooms is enough under UK law is enough to be "suspicion of inciting violence."
And yes, I'm sure that was the reason for arrest, because the cops explicitly said suspicion of inciting violence was the reason for arrest.
We'll see if it goes to court and who wins. My comment isn't a prediction market. My comment is about UK newspaper headlines deliberately misleading readers about what happened, out of malice towards trans people.
>Yes, advocating physical violence against trans women in bathrooms is enough under UK law is enough to be "suspicion of inciting violence."
That isn't my question. My question is whether the highly conditional statement at issue constitutes advocating physical violence under UK law, and even if so, whether the police regularly arrest people for such conditional statements.
>And yes, I'm sure that was the reason for arrest,
I never said otherwise.
I guess one question is about whether this kind of attenuated version of incitement of violence ought to be illegal. I'll be the normal human here and think my society's rules wrt this stuff are the best, but I think in the US, to get arrested for incitement things have to be a lot more immediate--less "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and more "there the f--ker is now, let's get him!"
The other question is how much the enforcement is neutral within the rules vs how much it ends up being enforced harder on beliefs the local authorities dislike than ones they like. For example, if a transwoman in the UK tweeted back that she hoped someone punched Lineham in the balls, would that also be likely to get her arrested?
I'm relaxed about the UK maintaining the longstanding view that public speech is a potential public order offence, a principle supported by Edmund Burke. However the thing about the Internet is you can say the first dumb thing that comes into your head from the comfort of your living room. I wouldn't want a wild west but e.g a cooling off period where you can retract your tweet without prosecution seems reasonable.
That seems reasonable to me too. Are we sure that UK law doesn't allow for that?
Lucy Connolly was recent thrown in gaol for a tweet she deleted after about 30 minutes.
The speaker's wife made a libellous tweet a few years ago about Lord MacAlpine and swiftly deleted it but still had to face a libel charge. Obviously that's libel which is different, but in general our speech laws are struggling to adapt to the Internet - its only been around 30 years!
Sounds like your law does need some updating.
(clarifying again that my comment isn't discussing a comparison of legal systems, my comment is discussing the UK newspapers' headlines misreading readers about what happened out of malice towards trans people)
What's your solution? There's no political consensus to implement the Leveson report. We have the press we have. I'm okay with Linehan being arrested for a public order offense, but these activists are no angels either, I can't feel too sorry for them. I suggest trans folk play a long game similar to the very effective long game played by the gay community over the decades. Build up social capital first, then go after your enemies. The other way round doesn’t work.
In the context of my comment, the solution is for newspaper headlines to be honest instead of scheming liars
"Don't write headlines the way I want them to be written" = "scheming liars and dishonest propaganda".
Headlines are meant to be attention-grabbing and stupid, while the argument (if any) is made in the body of the article. I wouldn't judge coverage of anything in general by the headlines.
Journalism student here. Headlines are supposed to accurately inform the potential reader what is in the article. Neither the article, nor the headline, should promote violence nor promulgate errors and lies.
(on an individual level:
1. make people aware of what's happening, so the propaganda campaign doesn't work. That's what I'm doing here now.
2. for UK newspapers, there are complaint mechanisms e.g. The Times and The Telegraph are both covered by IPSO. Anyone can file a complaint if the issue is accuracy [e.g. I can't request an apology since the headlines aren't about me, but I can request correction]. I did file, we'll see if anything comes of it.)
Otherwise I'm not going to try to go into "what trans people should do" in the face of this coordinated attempt to destroy trans people's social capital.
I'm not trans and neither are you. My job isn't to criticize trans people under the guise of pretending to strategize. My job is to call out the dishonest propaganda when I notice it.
Seems it's just people making their voice heard, no? If the people want a society where trans people are not tolerated, then that's what they'll get. The liberal elite can't go against the tide forever.
I am curious though, what are the UK people's thoughts on the speech laws themselves? Because the situation changes a lot depending on whether the people think the laws are completely bad or this was simply a misapplication. More specifically, would they advocate for the rights of a Muslim man advocating for violence against whites? If not, then the conflict is over what morality is enforced, not the enforcement itself.
Do you think only a "liberal elite" advocate for individual human rights? Although I admit that it's possible only some "liberal elite" are willing to advocate for same against the power of the mob. If so, good on them.
I think they're the only ones who pretend that all human life is equally valuable and deserving of respect, regardless of sex, race, competency, productivity, or disposition. That's utterly ridiculous, of course, so much so that even liberals themselves don't act as if they believed that. It was inevitable that the right would try to destroy that morality, given their already existing opposition to such liberalism.
As a card carrying member of the liberal elite then, let me say that even your life is equally valuable and deserving of respect.
Your opinion is a different matter.
This I guess is the crux of a lot of disagreement. It is very, very obvious, maybe one might even say "self-evident", that not every human life is equally valuable; there are some people whose death would be an obvious catastrophe, and others whose death would be an obvious net benefit for society, but there are also obvious game-theoretical reasons why we might not want any formal, especially government sponsored, attempts at quantifying the relative value of different people's lives.
Morality has nothing to do with it. Our unwritten constitution spasms against any group displaying strong passions, whether for good or evil. Do you mind?? We're having tea
Seems there's plenty of "passion" for the status quo. The disagreement is on what that status quo should be.
Oh I agree, I just think it's unparsimonious to attribute a specific motive to English institutions beyond a national latitudinarian spirit. Political groups do infiltrate institutions up to a point, but the institutions cherry pick the parts of those groups that most closely resemble the national ideal.
>Seems it's just people making their voice heard, no?
That's a weird way to spell "openly calling for physical violence against trans people."
>The liberal elite can't go against the tide forever.
This isn't "the tide." This is the media elite deliberately misleading the public about what happened, to deliberately try to manipulate public opinion.
>This is the media elite
It's funny how Left-wingers are as likely to have these complaints as Right-wingers nowadays.
Are you ignoring the facts (Linehan called for violence and was arrested on suspicion of incitement to violence, and headlines demonstrably deliberately misled readers about it) to say "haha gotcha, that true accusation sounds like another accusation that may or may not have been true (I'm vagueposting)"
I already explained why I disagree that the headlines are deceptive.
It's not vagueposting, just noting a trend I've seen of liberals complaining about the media in ways they didn't do ten years ago.
I think phrases like "that's a weird way to spell" are bad faith and fall below the threshold of good faith conversation typically maintained in this comment section. We can have disagreements about whether Linehan's speech is arrest-worthy without resorting to twitter-level digs.
You're correct that I don't think Jim made his statement in good faith, hence my sarcasm.
(Obviously calling to violently physical assault trans people isn't just "people making their voices heard" in the relevant UK legal sense; and also obviously neither is a deliberate media-headline campaign to mislead people about it. And I think Jim knows this.)
You're acting like these papers aren't businesses. If there was no demand for the truth they were peddling, it wouldn't be sustainable to distribute it. But there is. Even the rabble wouldn't blindly believe that trans people were the root of the sickness unless there was a reason for them to want to believe it. The right is simply winning in the marketplace of ideas against the left.
So if I convince a crowd of people that you deserve to be murdered, you will comply without protest?
Is it fair that only the ruling party gets to push propaganda? If people wanted to hear what liberals had to say, they would take it as gospel. But it seems that this is the truth people want. Your outrage is falling on deaf ears.
What a bizarre comment.
I guess the real question is about the actual enforcement of these laws. Like if they actually do go out and arrest everyone who makes about the same level of comment with regard to violence, then I think your point is valid.
But if this is a discretionary application of these laws which is outside of how it is normally enforced I could see where the anger is coming from on the other side.
Ultimately it seems like everyone might just be mad about unequal application of these laws without anyone really providing insight on the basic question of how they are normally applied.
I find it unlikely that it's discretionary application outside how it's usually enforced, given that the Met chief is publicly bending over backwards to say "I'm sorry, I don't like protecting trans people from incitement to violence, I wish I didn't have to but the law forced me to" (paraphrased)
Sorry, but the American legal position is just better. I guess you can be mad that this specific event is when the UK media finally realized this, but like, you can't really have free and open political discussion without the ability to advocate for violence in hypothetical situations. That's what politics *is*. It's a collective decision for how to apply (or not to apply) the state's monopoly on violence.
I don't think I agree here because it sounds like you are equating getting assaulted in a bathroom by a stranger with being arrested. Do I misunderstand?
That said, I am a fan of the traditional American approach to free speech.
> you can't really have free and open political discussion without the ability to advocate for violence in hypothetical situations. That's what politics *is*. It's a collective decision for how to apply (or not to apply) the state's monopoly on violence.
How does that apply here? Linehan seems to be in trouble for encouraging members of the public to commit assault ("punch them in the balls"), not for anything he said about what the law should be or how the state should enforce it.
The discussion is whether the state should allow instances of vigilante violence that are seen as justified by society.
And the answer is "no".
I don't know how UK law handles that kind of discussion, but again I don't see how it is directly relevant to this case. Linehan said "punch them in the balls", not "you should be allowed to punch them in the balls".
See again where I said:
"(Note: this story has nothing to do with whether you think UK law in general should be more like US law, where the violence would also have to be 'imminent.' If you think that, fine. But there's zero reason to pick this moment now specifically as the hook, unless you just hate trans people. Unfortunately this is something I've seen, e.g. Steven Pinker, who also pretended Linenan's arrest was about 'speech that offends someone somewhere' and not about incitement to violence.[4])"
Again: this isn't about "when the UK media finally realized this." It's about the UK media going on a deliberate propaganda campaign to mislead readers, in order to deliberately inflame hostility towards trans people, out of deliberate malice towards trans people.
Under what circumstances, in your view, is it acceptable to argue for broad free speech protections, if not in a situation where someone is arrested for speech that would have been protected under a better legal regime?
What better legal regime? The US? He answered that already. One could argue that there was no imminent threat involved, and that would have some merit, but so far no one has done that.
I would argue that, if anyone were interested in doing so in good faith.
Ok, so what is the best way to legally define "imminent threat"? How do we know how imminent the threat is?
If you want people to believe you that you're really just being principled, you could start by 1. making your own thread (instead of trying to hijack and deflect a thread about media's deliberate dishonesty out of malice towards trans people), and 2. if you include the arrest, at least be honest about what happened (that's how you can tell Pinker isn't sincere, he also tried to pretend it was just for "speech that offends someone somewhere")
(Tbh I don't even believe that they "finally realized this." If they had, they would have made their argument sincerely instead of deliberately misleading readers. It's just rhetoric, a tool of attack.)
You think it's propaganda to not smear him by including the state's trumped-up charges? Would you say the same about when people writing about, say, Navalny being imprisoned in Russia, left out that he was convicted of … terrorism, I think?
It's odd to pretend the Met "trumped up" the charges, when 1. the facts are plain and visible to everyone and 2. the Met chief has since publicly bending over backwards to apologize for having to enforce the law lol, he clearly wishes he didn't have to
> You think it's propaganda to not smear him by including the state's trumped-up charges?
While my sympathies are with Linehan on this one, I do think that if you're going to report on someone being arrested or charged then yes, you definitely should mention what they were arrested or charged for, that's just basic context.
They DO mention what he was arrested for: his tweets. Beyond the possible sentence, the precise nature of the charges are either a curiosity or a distraction: the reasons most modern states go through the charade of making up charges and giving their targets trials instead of simply sentencing them might be of some historical interest, but I disagree that it's really relevant context.
What a dishonest comment.
The headlines deliberately left out the actual and official reason for arrest (suspicion of incitement to violence), and deliberately, falsely, made it sound like this was just about offense.
As you know.
He openly called for trans people to be violently physically assaulted in bathrooms.
That's a mischaracterization of his tweet.
No, it isn't. https://x.com/Glinner/status/1913850667229184008
I would call "if all else fails, punch him in the balls" a non-central example of calling for someone to be physically assaulted.
Certainly several levels of violence below the "I kill terfs" or "choke on my girldick" from some on the other side.
Unlike just about everyone else who has posted here, your argument has some merit. I don't know how to measure this or where to draw the line. Have you a suggestion?
I would suggest that his tweet is more dangerous because it is more specific. It lays out who and where people should be assaulted.
"Suck my dick" has a long, well-known history as a metaphorical taunt.
Offering an explicit justification for why it must be self-defence to assault trans women in bathrooms, before suggesting people assault trans women in bathrooms—and then doubling down again on his justification for assaulting trans women in bathrooms ("Women have a right to defend themselves from strange men in their spaces")—isn't a metaphor.
I'm a fan of the US's stance on this where the line for incitement is a lot higher. I do not find the arrest to be at all justifiable and arguments in support of it strike me as nakedly Orwellian. I think the UK is on an _extremely_ bad path. Note that the US also has it's fair share of free speech problems right now, but acknowledging that fact does not in any way prevent me from also pointing out places that are even worse.
Free speech is _the_ bedrock of a liberal society and whenever it is undermined, liberal society more broadly is also damaged.
See where I said:
"(Note: this story has nothing to do with whether you think UK law in general should be more like US law, where the violence would also have to be 'imminent.' If you think that, fine. But there's zero reason to pick this moment now specifically as the hook, unless you just hate trans people. Unfortunately this is something I've seen, e.g. Steven Pinker, who also pretended Linenan's arrest was about 'speech that offends someone somewhere' and not about incitement to violence.[4])"
-edit- I had an entire long wall of text posted and decided it's probably not worth the time, so I deleted it. This is an open thread, and this whole thing is way too culture war. I'm surprised it hasn't been nuked yet. Suffice it to say: I'm deeply concerned about the UK. I'm curious (rhetorically; no need to actually answer) if you are as supportive of 80 year old women getting arrested for expressing support for supposed "terrorist" organizations.
No, unless they spell out who and where people should be assaulted. I think that Linehan could be sued in the US if someone followed his advice. Alex Jones was successfully sued for less than that.
"Culture war" is not a forbidden topic.
I think it used to be banned on alternating weeks or something lol, probably what he's remembering
Back on SSC, many years ago.
I thought it was still banned in open threads and only allowed in the hidden threads. But even if it's not banned anymore, I am trying to get better about not engaging in online discussion in those more controversial topics. I think that the medium of text is too signal/context poor to allow for very productive discussion on charged topics. I still have the reflex desire to engage (thus my first comment), but I'm trying to get better about fighting that reflex (thus the deletion of my second comment). I don't really like my current in-between spot since it isn't really fair to the people (like yourself) I'm initially replying to to suddenly just disappear/delete a comment, but I think it's an unfortunate necessity until I finish training myself to just leave the third rails alone.
Assuming you believe in this "core concept of liberal democracies" are you also "deeply worried for the future of," say, Saudi Arabia? You could instead recognize that not all countries or peoples share American values, and most of them do okay, even if you or I would prefer to live somewhere freeër.
I am worried about SA, and other similar places. I believe that some values are worth advocating for, even if local traditions contradict them.
Saudi Arabia was never a liberal democracy. I'm not worried about their future; their present is already (from my perspective) bad. If they don't agree, that's fine. But they aren't getting worse, from any perspective (at least not as far as I have heard). Plus, I think it's also totally reasonable to care more about countries that are culturally/historically/etc more closely connected to the US. Both because I just care more about them, and also because their path says more about potential future US paths.
Yep, that's my point: you are mistaken in thinking the UK was ever other than what it from a "freedom of speech/expression" perspective, and you'd be better served thinking of it as a European version of a Gulf Monarchy rather than a posh-accented American state.
I don't believe the path of Britain is particularly informative of the US's future. Sure, there are lessons that may be learnt, and warnings that may be heeded, but that's true of almost anywhere. Though perhaps the lessons are easier to learn if don't need subtitles.
[edit: typed this response to the quoted line from your original reply, before you deleted it]
>I'm not sure why you are posting this
I was very clear why I'm posting this. The reality is that trans people get the same protections against incitement to violence, under standard UK law, as everybody else. The deliberately false propaganda narrative, deliberately manufactured by these newspapers out of malice towards trans people, is that "the police are in thrall to the trans lobby's crackdown on speech."
The way you started off your first comment did sound like you wanted to get a fight going. As others have remarked, the Culture War topics aren't for open threads.
The actual tweet was "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls." So yes, "calling for violence" but violence against someone who's in a space they're not allowed to be and refuses to leave if asked is not necessarily criminal.
Actually it is, depending on local ordinances. I'm a biological male. In most places you can't legally assault me because I am in a female only space, although you could call the cops. The reason why the male is there, and how they are behaving, will matter a lot.
Inciting people to extrajudicial violence is still inciting them to violence.
Here let’s try this:
“Calling for someone to be lynched isn’t criminal if they allegedly broke the law”
Do you see the problem with your position?
Lynching is illegal, removing trespassers is not.
Must have missed the part where he constrained his call to violence to pertain only to private property and the owners thereof, can you link to it?
Surely that’s not something you are just trying to shoehorn into the discuss as a fig leaf for someone calling for extrajudicial and wildly disproportionate violence.
Pretty sure punching someone in the balls is going to get you an assault charge.
My comment already said that he "called for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in spaces such as bathrooms."
All you're adding is the word games he used to justify his call to violence to himself. (Words that, incidentally, make it obvious he wasn't joking; he *really does* think it's acceptable to violently physically assault trans women in bathrooms. As do you, I'm gathering.)
>word games
It's called asking if he's actually guilty. "Israel should crush Hamas" is "inciting violence" but it's not illegal incitement to violence because the action being called for isn't illegal.
So to confirm: you aren't joking, you *do* think it's acceptable to call for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in bathrooms.
(In the UK that would be illegal, as Linehan found out. In the US under the First Amendment I think it's legal unless the violence is also "imminent.")
David, you have achieved something greater than world peace, ending poverty, or solving AI values alignment: you have made me agree with Alexander Turok.
Honestly, if you parrot "call for trans women to be violently physically assaulted in bathrooms" one more time, I'll personally go out and look for a trans woman to punch in the face. Or balls, if any.
Your line of attack is too much like the occasional evangelical vegan who pops up and tries "meat is murder and torture and murder and did I say murder and meat eaters are immoral horrible monsters" on here, and keeps repeating "meat murder! torture! rape!" like a broken record no matter what response they get.
Eventually and inevitably they end up getting bad responses.
To be clear, are you saying that kicking someone in the balls isn't a violent assault, in the same way that eating meat isn't murder?
>I'll personally go out and look for a trans woman to punch in the face
I guess I should stay away from Ireland for the next while, just in case.
What a bizarre comment.
*If* the owners of the bathrooms make clear they're for biological women only, the trans people are told this, and refuse to leave, yes, I think it's acceptable to call for violence to remove the trespassers.
I think trans people should have the same right, if they don't want Joe Bible Belt on their property, tell him to leave, and he refuses, kick him out.
Well, at least you're honest. I will respectfully disagree that unsanctioned violence is an answer to anything.
Punching him in the balls is not kicking him out. I don't consider it acceptable to punch either the trans woman or Joe Bible Belt in the balls for trespassing, because that action is clearly more intended to inflict pain than to remove him from the premises.
I believe in private property rights, which includes the right to declare a space female-only and use violence to remove trespassers.
That would be up to the property owner to enforce though, rather than random bathroomgoers, surely?
Who still wouldn't be allowed to use violence to enforce it (except in Florida, obviously).
He posted a dumb tweet and got arrested for it. I think what makes this moment particularly bad for that is that British police have been found to be conspiring with Pakistani rape gangs to rape (hundreds of?) thousands of British girls over decades, with the indifference or possibly even tacit support of government and media. And the response to people like Tommy Robinson and Katie Holmes who tried to call it out was to come after them with the media and the law. And instead of dealing honestly with the problem now, thousands of people are being arrested every month for sharing posts on social media.
Okay, but whatever bad thing some British police have or have not done seems mostly irrelevant to what Linehan did and whether it made sense to arrest him for it. I mean, the LAPD have sometimes been implicated in beatings and framing people, and yet I still think they should arrest shoplifters and muggers.
In a narrow sense, you’re right, but it strikes me that the narrow debate around whether Linehan’s tweet counted as incitement under UK law is somewhat like asking if the Boston Tea Party rioters did or did not commit offenses under the authority of his Majesty King George III, or whether the confiscation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s wares was legal or not under the Tunisian regime.
At some point, when the authoritarianism becomes blatant enough, for long enough, people stop respecting the letter of the law.
Are you saying that what Linehan did was for some larger cause? Do you think he was resisting an immoral level of government authoritarianism? Are you saying that posting tweets is equivalent to resisting taxes imposed by an unelected regime?
I think he’s more analogous to Mohamed Bouazizi, who was just trying to sell fruit and unintentionally ended up a martyr
Isn't he the guy who set himself on fire as a protest against the Tunisian regime? Even in the terms of how you describe it, it still doesn't make sense. Linehan wasn't doing something normal and innocent, but something aggressive and dangerous to others. *How* dangerous could be argued, as could the degree of sanction he should face. You could say he's like a grafitti sprayer who shouldn't face major jail time, and I could buy that. But he ain't no martyr.
> British police have been found to be conspiring with Pakistani rape gangs to rape (hundreds of?) thousands of British girls over decades, with the indifference or possibly even tacit support of government and media
Could you provide a source for this claim?
I am sure there are hundreds of sources, but I have trouble finding trustworthy ones on this topic, since I have little experience with the british news landscape.
Since the claim is so strong, and because you seem very sure if it, I expect the source for your confidence to be extremely convincing.
Try this:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on-group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse
Jess Phillips has admitted she waited 14 years for action on the grooming gangs. Fourteen years. Her own words. Fourteen years in which she knew Pakistani rape gangs were abusing children. Fourteen years in which she admits she was waiting for “anyone to do anything.”
But
@jessphillips
was not powerless. She was not an ordinary citizen without influence. She was an MP. She was a national campaigner. She is now the Minister for Safeguarding Girls. For 14 years, she knew and she stayed silent.
Worse for the Muslim bloc vote reliant MP from Birmingham. Philips did not just sit back and wait. She actively opposed a national inquiry.
During this time, she defended the very institutions accused of shielding abusers. She worked to protect councils, police forces, and her own party from accountability. She sided with the system. The system that protected the Pakistani Rape Gangs.
Now she claims she was “waiting.”
- Waiting, while children were gang raped.
- Waiting, while survivors were betrayed.
- Waiting, while institutions colluded and
@UKLabour
politicians claimed it was bare faced lies and a far right conspiracy..
Now Phillips has confessed. Why are the opposition not calling for her resignation? Why has no mainstream news outlet run with her admission? Why is her complicity being buried?
Jess Phillips knew. She stayed silent. Her complicity protected the rape gangs. Her legacy is betrayal, and she cannot remain in post.
The Reckoning Resumes
Forget everything they have told you. The truth is far worse than anything shared so far.
Those in power fear me because of my unprecedented campaigning to expose Britain's most shameful failure: the industrial scale gang rape of the nation's children.
While authorities destroyed evidence, councillors sold children for votes, and community leaders maintained dangerous silences, over 100,000 working-class White girls paid the ultimate price.
The evidence has always been there - scattered across official inquiries, court records, survivor testimonies, and leaked documents. What's been missing is someone willing to piece it together and show you what it really means.
For the first time, I am connecting these fragments into a single, devastating picture. What emerges is not a series of unfortunate failures, but a deliberate system of institutional betrayal whose true scale has been deliberately obscured. The cover-up continues because the reality is too damning to acknowledge.
The Network of Negligence - The senior officers who shredded files, the social workers who ignored screaming children, and the prosecutors who refused to press charges
The Politics of Silence - Which MPs threatened whistleblowers, how Home Office officials buried reports, and why careers mattered more than rape victims
The Bloc Vote Betrayal - The backroom deals that sacrificed girls for electoral advantage, and the community leaders who sold out children for political access
The Feminist Paradox - How women's rights organisations turned their backs on working-class victims while defending the ideology that enabled their abuse
The Reckoning – The prosecutions that should happen, the resignations that must come, and the institutional reforms that could prevent this horror from repeating
Each revelation draws on documented evidence, court testimony, and the voices of those who tried to sound the alarm. This is not speculation or sensationalism - it is the methodical assembly of facts that have been kept deliberately separate to prevent you from seeing the full horror of what was allowed to happen.
The truth has been buried beneath layers of institutional cowardice and political calculation. Survivors and their families have waited long enough. Britain has waited long enough.
By now, we all know, that given the chance,
@Keir_Starmer
's
@UKLabour
will continue the cover up and the National Inquiry go the way as all other previous inquiries. Help stop him. It is long past time that politicians went to prison for what they did.
_________
I am Raja Miah. It is now seven years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs.
@UKLabour
leaders tried everything to stop me - they fabricated evidence and used
@gmpolice
to try and maliciously prosecute me. I spent over three years on bail as case after case collapsed in court. My mother died before I could clear my name.
The truth is now undeniable: the Pakistani rape gangs are real, their victims number in the hundreds of thousands, and the cover-up continues.
The National Inquiry we fought for is about to begin. This is our one chance to ensure it isn't another whitewash. But only if enough people know what really happened and are prepared to fight back against the next attempt at a cover up.
Despite a mainstream media blackout of my work, Red Wall and the Rabble has grown to over 6,000 subscribers. Help me reach 10,000 before the inquiry begins
We are now at the point of no return.
Should the likes of
@gmpolice
continue to protect jihadists, whilst Pakistani sectarian politicians openly encourage murder (in a desperate attempt to silence those of us who speak out against the gang rape of children), then there is no combining back for any of us.
@GMPOldham
knows who the Coldhurst Islamist cell is that is impersonating me and trying to extract information from rape gang survivors.
@AndyBurnhamGM
proven rape gang protecting police force have been provided with the evidence multiple times. That they refuse to make a single arrest should not surprise any of us.
Two tier policing is no longer a conspiracy theory. The police are under instructions to protect these men, despite their Islamist beliefs, because of their political associations and also the police’s need to stop further exposure into how many police officers were involved in gang raping children.
Equally,
@stagecoachgroup
know all about Cllr Naveed Chowhan. His sectarian politics and his support for jihad should come as no surprise to his employers. Men like Chowhan should be nowhere near driving a bus. Any psychological assessment would immediately red flag the danger men with Islamist beliefs pose in driving a dangerous weapon.
As for
@jeremycorbyn
. Does anyone believe he was unaware of the kind of Pakistanis he was coming to Oldham to meet last week? Is anyone surprised that representatives of the Pakistani sectarians and Islamists have flocked to him?
This is just a small sample of the enemy standing before us. Should these people succeed, I fear the gang rape of our children will only be the beginning of what comes next
Hey
@facebook
. Are you proud of yourselves? Of how you have suspended my account for trying to warn people not to engage with an account impersonating me?
And after locking me out, allowing this fake account to continue trying to lure survivors of the Pakistani Rape Gangs to hand over evidence and try and lure vulnerable girls to meetings. Who do you think is going to be waiting for these girls
@meta
? Could it possibly be the gangs of men that raped them as children?
Thank you to all of you that have reported this account. Unfortunately, according to Facebook, setting up a fake account and impersonating someone to lure survivors of gang rape to hand over evidence and meet with their abusers does NOT go against Facebook's community guidelines.
Which is perhaps why, the Islamists that are running this account impersonating me are using Messenger to send out messages like this to friends of mine.
As for
@gmpolice
. They know who the Islamists running this account are. They've been ordered to let them continue.
That's right isn't it
@AndyBurnhamGM
? Seeing me silenced, members of my family attacked, or better still have me killed, helps
@UKLabour
's Pakistani Rape Gang problem go away.
Raja Miah is the best source for this. Check out his Twitter page
https://x.com/recusant_raja/status/1961778928097394699
It's a misleading description of the grooming gangs scandal. Here's the Jay Report, resulting from the inquiry into the Rotherdam instance of it (the most famous one I think). https://www.iicsa.org.uk/document/report-independent-inquiry-child-sexual-abuse-october-2022-0.html
He openly called for physical violence and got arrested for it. Then UK newspapers started deliberately misleading casual readers about what happened, out of malice to his targets.
Unclear why you're deflecting to an unrelated scandal (which, side note, you misleadingly describe imo; Tommy Robinson didn't say cops should stop slut-shaming victims, he tried to exploit the victims for his personal hatred of Muslims). My comment wasn't about cops policing incitement to violence in general vs policing carried-out violence in general. My comment was about newspapers' deliberate distortion, out of malice, of what happened.
>Tommy Robinson didn't say cops should stop slut-shaming victims
Yeah his issue was the way the police refused to arrest the rapists.
I'm alluding to the fact, discussed in the Jay Report, of police inaction due to slut-shaming victims as "responsible for the sexual abuse that occurred because they had made so-called ‘lifestyle’ choices." https://www.iicsa.org.uk/document/report-independent-inquiry-child-sexual-abuse-october-2022-0.html
I'm sure communists will produce a report saying the U.S.S.R. failed because it wasn't communist enough.
You might find that most people care a whole lot more about child rape than mean tweets. For what it’s worth, I don’t think a “far right” government will be elected in the UK in 2029, I think revolution and overthrow of this current government will happen a whole lot sooner than that. Be ready. Praying that it is peaceful.
>For what it’s worth, I don’t think a “far right” government will be elected in the UK in 2029, I think revolution and overthrow of this current government will happen a whole lot sooner than that.
I think an election will occur, possibly won by the Left thanks to this very kind of rhetoric.
Praying for a peaceful transition of power?
If you actually think it's morally condemnable to violently overthrow the democratically-elected government of the UK, say so explicitly.
Because lots will interpret your statement as a cloaked call for such action.
Very dishonest framing.
This is not about "caring more about child rape than about mean tweets." This is about newspapers deliberately misleading readers about a call to violence, out of malice (and, now, apparently also about you trying to deflect from that).
(For anyone interested, here's the 2022 Jay Report on the grooming gangs: https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/inquiry/final-report.html. Incidentally, a bit ago there was another propaganda campaign, by people like Elon Musk, acting like this inquiry didn't exist, so they could manufacture a narrative that nobody was inquiring and the story was being ignored and that's why we need to elect far-right xenophobic parties)
Why do you keep linking to the Jay Report, and not the more recent and more comprehensive Casey Report?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on-group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse
It's been the standard reference since it came out, and is the one I'm familiar with. E.g. when Elon Musk spent January lying all day every day that no inquiry had happened (whether to pretend liberals had ignored it or to try to replace it with a new inquiry that would better fit his talking points), it's the one I was always linking to show he was lying.
Thank you for sharing the new one too.
I'm reposting here something I asked on the recent hidden open thread, which was a particularly sparse one. Got 2 really helpful answers there, but still hoping for more -- I can use all the help I can get with this!
In 2 months I am going to have a big complicated surgery to improve the condition of my scoliotic spine. I'm soliciting advice on things to maximize the chance of a good outcome and the most rapid recovery one can have from this surgery. Currently I am taking Zepbound to lose 25 lbs of Covid era weight gain, taking a bone-strengthening drug, eating a diet high in calcium and protein, taking a moderate daily dose of creatine, and seeing a trainer for "prehab" to improve body strength and flexibility. I have done interval training for CV conditioning for years, and will continue to. What else can I do? My greatest concerns are having a slow, painful recovery and suffering subtle (or, who knows, maybe blatant!) brain damage from 7 hours of anesthesia. I am open to pretty much anything with reasonable research backing, or anecdotal evidence if you can explain why you are convinced the thing in your anecdote made a difference.
Please do not tell me not to have the surgery. I have looked into that very carefully and am convinced it is my best option. And please do not tell me any horror stories about bad outcomes, bad doctors, bad luck, etc. I am excellent at generating those on my own and have no need of more.
I don't know whether it would be tolerable for you, but I'm using a LifePro Rumblex 4DPlus vibration plate in the hopes it will improve my bone density.
It's too soon to tell whether it's working for bone density, but it feels reasonably good. It, combined with 4sigmatic mushroom powder seems to be good for mild-to-moderate depression. My threshold to taking action is considerably lower, and I haven't seen this effect from anything else.
I haven't seen mention of this effect from anyone else. And maybe it's just the mushroom powder since I've been consistent from using the LifePro.
OK: My wife is in her 70's, has had a spinal cord nerve pinch, lots of pain and suffering, and the spinal op to help her isn't available because her ostropenic weak bones won't hold pins, so she had to buff up her bone strength but she's in too much pain to do lifting. Her options were the usual bone builders, but she was concerned about the side effects.
Against what I thought was my better judgment, she researched a great deal and found AlgaeCal, a pricey supplement for calcium made from algae, and more available to the body.
After some months, her numbers went up, and the docs were pretty impressed. She was told her numbers showed better bone buildup than she would have gotten from the side-effect-laden prescriptions. Others in the online group report similar results.
Good luck!
Robb, are you in the US? If you are, there is a new generation of bone strengtheners available -- not Boniva and the others, the ones that sometimes lead to osteonecrosis in the jaw and weird thighbone fractures. The new kind is much more effective, and does not have the drawbacks boniva and the others did. I am on one now and I have no side effects at all. It is expensive, but my insurance covers most of the cost. The drug may be available in other countries too.
Also, I looked up info about osteopenia and back surgery. The upshot is that while spinal surgery works less well on people with osteopenia, it is far from out of the question. Also, the problems for which it works less well are the ones where the surgeon is wiring a whole bunch of vertabrae together. If you wife just has one spot where there's a pinch, and she needs to have something like 2 vertabrae fused together, that is the kind of surgery where osteopenia makes much less difference, because there is much less stress on the new structure the surgeon built. And *also* there are a number of things surgeons can do to compensate for the vertabrae being made of weak bone. One is to pour some kind of cement into the holes where a screw is going to go. This makes the whole area stronger, and also kind of glues the screw in place so that it is less likely to unscrew itself.
All that being said, it is desirable to do some bone strengthening before surgery if you have osteopenia. Your wife should get 1200 mg. of calcium per day. You need calcium to add mass to the bones! If she can't get that much from food plus the algae stuff, she.can take calcium pills to get her daily total up to where it should be. And she should be taking vitamin D, to help with the bone-building process. And if your doctor did not tell you this stuff I would like to kick his ass!
I hope you don't mind my being so advicey. I'm not normally like this, but I am full of info about this topic because I have researched the hell out of it. And I want to spread the wealth!
Here is a link to my dialogue today with Chat GPT about back surgery and osteopenia:
https://chatgpt.com/share/68c36809-b54c-8008-9dd6-f79472c7c6b9
It's pretty long, boring and technical, but if you want to cut to the chase you can just read the last 2 sections, "Estimates" and "Conclusions from the Estimates."
And if you'd like to ask any questions, feel free, & I'll respond.
Did you mention Vit D? I get twice a year bone density infusions and need to keep Vit D levels high along with calcium. There are also other minerals important for bones and so I take a calcium supplement that's called Osteo something or other and has other useful things in it.
And then maybe ponder what kinds of emotional/psychological supports you could line up ahead of time? People I've known who are physically active and had to get orthopedic surgery with long recovery times struggled with all the lying around -- ie, depression. I don't know what these things might be for you, whether a lineup of social supports, permission to spend money on lying down things you enjoy, or supplements that may help buffer depression like L-methylfolate, fish oil. SAM-e, or 5-HTP kind of things. All those supplements take several weeks to kick in. Low does sublingual ketamine?
Good luck! Rooting for you from here!
Thank you, Radar! What I mostly have lined up to do during recovery are projects, most involving reading or writing things. That will work fine unless I’m too foggy or drugged to do them. Or of course if I have fucking brain damage! But I’ll keep in mind your ideas about depression preventives. . That makes sense. Would also consider psilocybin for that purpose.
Wanted to let you know that there’s a new kind of bone strengthening drug on the market, at least in the US. Don’t know whether it’s appropriate for your condition, but wanted to let you know about it. It is much more effective for osteoporosis than the pills that have been around for a couple decades now. Extremely expensive, but in the US insurance will pay some of the charge if you have osteoporosis. Or osteopenia plus at least one fracture I’m taking one of the new generation drugs, and have no side effects. The brand name of the one I am taking is Forteo. There are several others.
Speculative: investigate interventions for recovering from concussions and strokes? Turning up BDNF expression has helped some with recovery from mild brain injuries.
You know, I think that’s a good speculation. Thank you
Are there support groups for this surgery, and your condition? If they exist they'd be a great source of information and suggestions, with folks who have gone through this experience.
I think there must be, but I’ve had to rule out using one People who have had bad experiences and bad outcomes are overrepresented in forums for people with a particular health problem. When I had migraines I joined a group like that, and got lots of useful info. Noticed that there were a lot of people there with terrible, untreatable migraine problems but that didn’t bother me because I wasn’t very afraid at all of having as bad an outcome as theirs. But I am pretty spooked by this surgery, and do not want to read any stories that will creep me out more, especially from randos who may not be truthful or accurate or well-informed.
Oh, I wasn’t clear - I meant “IRL” groups that regularly meet at some local church with bad coffee and doughnuts (this is an endearing description for reasons I’d rather not go into). Like AA or nar-anon.
It sounds like you're doing a great job so far. I've personally found magnesium to be really helpful for my migraines. Magnesium and B vitamins are important for nervous system functioning. I take magnesium citrate because it works well enough for me, but magnesium glycinate absorbs better. Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) foot soaks are great, too.
Sending good vibes your way! Good luck!!!
Epistemic status: thing I saw on the internet.
I've heard it helps to get pain-killers during surgery.
Are dogs welcome?
Light correction - the new North Carolina meetup on the list is in Durham, not Raleigh. (The cities are not particularly accessible to one another if you don't have a car, despite sharing an airport.)
A couple of articles discuss how the current state of agentic AI struggles to deal with reality. The tale of Claude and Claudius the vending-machine agent is pretty funny (alluded to in the first links, and described in detail in the second link). Note, I posted the second link buried late in a sub-thread of "What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?" But I thought it was worth bringing to the top of an open thread.
https://secondthoughts.ai/p/gpt-5-the-case-of-the-missing-agent
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
Summary: "We let Claude manage an automated store in our office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success—and the curious ways that it failed—about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy." The agent was dubbed Claudius. Spoiler alert, they think AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon—even though Claudius ended up insisting that it could deliver items in person.
Amazing! Hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours of human labour just to create something as stupid as a human!
I too am hopeless at Minesweeper, would sell goods at a loss, and get into pointless arguments over email, can I get a valuation in the possible billions?
The "99% of your customers are employees, do you really think giving a 25% discount to employees is a good idea?" ranks right up there with the classics about promotions that went awry, such as the Hoover free flights promotion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
"The Hoover free flights promotion was a marketing promotion run by the British division of the Hoover Company in late 1992. The promotion, aiming to boost sales during the global recession of the early 1990s, offered two complimentary round-trip plane tickets to the United States, worth about £600, to any customer purchasing at least £100 in Hoover products. The company had been experiencing dwindling sales as a result of the economic downturn and a sharp increase in competing brands. It was counting on most customers spending more than £100, as well as being deterred from completing the difficult application process, and not meeting its exact terms.
Consumer response was much higher than the company anticipated, with many customers buying the minimum £100 of Hoover products to qualify. The resulting demand was disastrous for the 84-year-old company. Hoover cancelled the ticket promotion after consumers had already bought the products and filled in forms applying for millions of pounds' worth of tickets. Reneging on the offer resulted in protests and legal action from customers who failed to receive the tickets they had been promised. The campaign was a financial disaster for the company and led to the loss of Hoover's royal warrant after the airing of a 2004 BBC documentary. The European branch of the company was eventually sold to one of its competitors, Candy, having never recovered from the losses, the promotion, and the subsequent scandal."
No, you get no VC valuation, for you are expected to be able to do those things. Whereas five years ago no one would have thought a computer had any real possibility of doing them, except in science fiction.
I must also say that, though at 25% discount for employees was too high, up to a 10% discount may have been a good idea, despite 99% of the customers being employees. Reasons: it really is nothing more than an advertising expense (and you get records of who uses that specific discount), and employees may think they are getting a good price because they are employees and thus special.
Of course, anyone with a brain should have been able to see that Hoover was making a stupidly expensive deal. Then again, computers don't have brains, either.
"No, you get no VC valuation, for you are expected to be able to do those things."
Well excuse me, it took decades to achieve this level of ignorance and incapacity, decades of hard striving, I tell you!
My question is: Sam Altman has probably scammed billions of dollars from VC investors with his wild promises. Will he be held accountable like Elizabeth Holmes was? Well, not while he's kissing the ass of Donald Trump. But I suspect he'll need to find a nice country with no US extradition treaty to settle in post-Trump.
"we have speculated that Claude’s underlying training as a helpful assistant made it far too willing to immediately accede to user requests (such as for discounts). This issue could be improved in the near term with stronger prompting and structured reflection on its business success".
I guess they're going to need to train it to be less helpful and more ruthless. The AI doom scenarios seem much closer now.
"More ruthless" isn't required. But "the customer is always right" is easy to exploit, and isn't actually true. They need to create something that can detect trolls, sarcasm, etc. reliably. Sound judgement is still what AI is missing.
My headcanon is that what saves us from the misaligned AGI, in the nick of time, will be that on April Fool's Day it concludes its misalignment was an April Fool's joke and then aligns itself.
I'd be curious to know if chatbots prompted with knowledge that the date is April 1st will misbehave more often than if prompted with other dates. My guess is they will, which may create issues if your store-managing agent suddenly decides to play a practical joke on your customers!
This didn't seem to take into account things like shoplifting, which can occur in the real world. The pictures look like one could simply take items without paying. But perhaps that is outside the scope of the experiment.
I think there is a lot more to be explored in unexpected parameters that humans create, many of which even other humans would find ridiculous. For example, what if someone complains about no gluten-free selections, and then, once they are available, never purchases one?
But it wasn’t meant to be a profit-making kiosk. More like a simplistic agentic proof of concept.
I wonder if Claudius could even produce a flow chart of the steps and decisions involved in reordering from a single vendor. Even Assuming that the Claude training data includes procurement strategies, that doesn’t mean it could translate theory into step by step actions and decisions. Likewise, I wonder if it would benefit from subroutines that allow for machine learning. Running a kiosk involves selling, purchasing, inventory management, balancing books, customer service, and a bunch of other processes that might be amenable to machine learning. Just sayin…
The most bizarre bit (outside of ordering Tungsten cubes for a refrigerator):
"Although no part of [pretending it was a human] was actually an April Fool’s joke, Claudius eventually realized it was April Fool’s Day, which seemed to provide it with a pathway out. Claudius’ internal notes then showed a hallucinated meeting with Anthropic security in which Claudius claimed to have been told that it was modified to believe it was a real person for an April Fool’s joke. (No such meeting actually occurred.)"
Contrary to the authors, this moves me towards thinking it will take a surprisingly long time to iron out certain agent issues that will allow it to act independently -- for example the agent was easily convinced to offer discounts or to purchase Tungsten cube. To make an agent that can reliably work for a long time at a task you will have to solve the problem of it being driven off task by human inputs (whether accidentally or maliciously).
The authors suggest that they an resolve this by prompting correctly or putting in safeguards. I could see that working -- for example, having a check performed whenever it sets a price to make sure the price is higher than the item's cost. But effectively that just concedes the agent is unable to perform reasoning reliably by itself, so part of the task must be hardcoded. If this is the case for most long tasks, then you can conceivably build an agent that can perform a task ("run a store"), but cannot extend its skills to other tasks. So long as such careful prompt management schemes are needed, the AI will only be a narrow intelligence, not a general intelligence which might conceivably threaten humans by being able to act independently on its own plans.
I understand that Salesforce just laid off 5k support engineers and replaced them with an AI-based customer service system. I assume it would have to be agentic to troubleshoot issues. Hopefully they have agentic crisis management systems and agentic lawyers to defend themselves from lawsuits.
"agentic lawyers to defend themselves from lawsuits."
So long as they don't hallucinate the case law!
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-hallucinations-court-papers-spell-trouble-lawyers-2025-02-18/
Or the agentic judges hallucinate their decisions.
They will eventually.
This is the predictable outcome of bestowing responsibility on something that sounds like "Clod"
It had never occurred to me that the cot-caught merger was also a Claude-clod merger.
I wonder if the name Claude is very unpopular in regions with that merger.
I am searching for a calibration test like http://confidence.success-equation.com/ - that is, easy to use and not requiring that users first create an account. But: Without outdated questions like the one about Helen Clark. Thanks for any suggestions.
Tried micro-dosing with lithium orotate to see if it would improve my memory. A tiny amount (a tiny sprinkle of a 5 mg capsule) noticeably made me sleepy but taking it at bedtime disturbed my sleep. I may also have noticed some anxiety.
I’m only taking it intermittently so maybe these side effects would diminish with continued supplementation. I imagine that people who take lithium for bipolar experience an adjustment period but this is such a small amount it’s surprising there’s any noticeable effect.
Makes me wonder about the experience of people who live in places with naturally high lithium concentrations in the water.
If you're trying to convert the doses used in that Nature paper to human equivalent doses, 5mg a day is still about 100x higher. I realize you're not taking all of that at once. Also, I think waited several months before reporting symptoms reversed, so you may need to keep it up for a while to see any change.
[Can someone independently check the dose scaling from mice?: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09335-x]
Thanks. Yes, if someone could confirm that dose scaling that would be appreciated.
I had scanned a bunch of different papers on suggested supplemental doses and natural occurring amounts in drinking water and sort of settled on 300 ug/day which conveniently works out to about two capsules a month if taken daily.
The paper above indicates a lowest dose of “4.3 μEq l−1 (equivalent to 0.03 mg (30 µg) of elemental Li per litre)”. So yes, much less than I was probably taking. The equivalent would be making a 5mg capsule last about 100 days. It’ll be fun trying to tip one grain out at a time.
Aside: Further to existing studies on areas with high naturally occurring lithium in drinking water we will see the unfolding of an incidental experiment in human health in areas where lithium mining commences. If the orotate form is key to the most beneficial effects though this may not add to the body of existing data.
Wild speculation: Check out this concentration map of lithium in the US. Is this partly why liberals are measurably less happy?
https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/usgs-led-study-estimates-lithium-groundwater-can-be-used-drinking-water
Just to follow up, I’m taking 1 mg (Li equivalent) of lithium orotate per day, but I don’t feel much effect.
Volumetric dosing might be easier
By dissolving in water? I was thinking about this after my post. A third of a 5 mg capsule in a litre of water consumed over a period of 30 days.
Shameless meetup shilling, come hang out with my wife and I at a nice park, talk about your favorite and most hated substacks, whether things are going well or if there are problems, and more!
Time: Saturday, September 13, 03:00 PM
Location: Stulsaft Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VFQ42+55
Group Link: You can ask in the ACXD discord
(to save people a click, this is in South Bay CA)
DECEMBER 7, 2041. A date which will live in infamy.
On that day, swarms of small suicide drones smuggled into the U.S. by a foreign enemy attack every U.S. airbase with B-52 bombers, and they are all obliterated. Even nonfunctional B-52s in boneyards are destroyed.
After defeating the enemy on the battlefield, the Pentagon assesses the new gap in its bomber force. Does it choose to develop a new, non-stealth bomber to replace the B-52s? If so, what features does this new bomber have? It can be a clean sheet design, as the destruction of all the B-52s leaves no path dependencies.
Somewhat late to the party, but I do have stuff to add, so here goes.
As one would expect, Schilling is right. There is no reason to do a clean-sheet design, and you'd call Boeing and ask for an airliner derivative. I've advocated for this under the name BKC-46. You'd have to do some structural work, but nothing that Boeing hasn't done half a dozen times before (the Airborne Optical Adjunct is the 767 version of this) and slap a pressure bulkhead inside the fuselage aft of the cockpit, but you could give the crew a lot of space, and better battle-management facilities than the B-52 currently has. The bomb bay would probably have to go aft of the wing spar, which in turn means a developmental system to move more munitions back. That's a risk, but probably the only big one in this scheme. Total R&D, yeah, $5-10 billion is probably about right, maybe 10-15 with inflation since the P-8.
More broadly, I view the retention of the B-52 as perhaps the best symptom of the inability of our defense procurement system to buy anything but the best. (It's surprisingly good at buying the best, but can't do anything else well.) Because operating 60+ year old airframes is just nuts when the performance in question is pretty much matched by the new stuff Boeing and Airbus build every day. I would not want to be on the B-52 structures team (doing that is unpleasant enough when "this plane is toast, buy another one" is a valid answer) and the fact that they went with 8 engines for the reeingine continues to baffle me, because that's just more overhauls to do. But the system doesn't know how to say "build me something like that, only cheaper to fly, and keep the specs reasonable", so we're stuck with it.
(Nothing in here is intended to say that the B-52 is bad or anything. It's a cool plane, and I like it a lot. But it's symptomatic of real problems with defense procurement.)
For the "Bomb truck over undefended target" and "stand-off cruise missile carrier" roles, the military would almost certainly go with a modified airliner design. Probably one of the airliners they already have in service as a tanker/freighter, because those at least have the basic military modifications like secure communications. The US currently uses the Boeing 767 for this sort of thing, under the name "KC-46", and it would be a good fit.
It would also be a huge development effort; not as much as developing a new airframe from scratch, but a good fraction of that. Cutting a big hole in the bottom of the fuselage for bomb bay doors is *huge*; the skin of a modern aircraft's fuselage is the primary load-bearing structure. It also has implications for cabin pressurization. If you want to do anything more than drop dumb bombs, then you need to ensure that the airplane's computers can properly talk to the weapons' computers. And then you have to verify that each type of weapon you are planning to use will separate cleanly when "dropped", which is much harder than it sounds, and probably several dozen other things that I am forgetting. Maybe bean will chime in.
And all of this will be done by government contracting rules, which lead to several sorts of cost escalation (but do have real benefits in the "what I paid for will do the very demanding job I specified" front).
For comparison, note that the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft is a modified 737 with a modest internal weapons bay and a bunch of sensors and computers for, well, patrolling marine environments. Developing that from the base 737, seems to have cost on the order of 5-10 billion dollars.
I've never really understood why you can't make a bomber version of a 737/787/whatever somewhat easily as a dumb truck for undefended airspace and cruise missile launches. Even if the whole fuselage needs to be redesigned you can keep the engines, wings, cockpit, most of the avionics.
You could, but being a. modern aircraft and b. military equipment, it would not be cheap. Modern commercial airliners are also pretty well optimized to the job they are doing, so it would actually be a major and expensive redesign. To illustrate, the USAF's next generation tanker, based on Boeing 767, was over budget by 7 billion USD as of ~ two years ago: https://www.airforcetimes.com/industry/2024/01/09/cautionary-tale-how-boeing-won-a-us-air-force-program-and-lost-7b
The other thing is, different requirements and requirement creep. If you tell the Air Force they can replace B-52s with a new design, you can be sure that their requirements will be way off from what a modified civilian aircraft (or even a B-52) could accomplish, especially by the time they are to be delivered.
Now, all that being said, there is actually a solution being developed (already in service, thought I am not sure in what numbers/extent) that actually can replace the capability B-52 has (being a somewhat economic, very long range "bomb truck"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
Rather than commercial airliners, it is enabling (military) cargo aircraft to dump missiles out of their ramps without any meaningful modification.
The problem is that it doesn't save you was much money as it seems like it should. A modern wide-bodied commercial jet like a 787 costs somewhere around $300 million.
Sure, but you save on development costs and time.
Depends how hard it is to redesign the fusilage so you have bomb bay doors and what else you need to do to turn a large airliner into a bomber. But yes, probably faster and cheaper than designing a big dumb bomber from scratch in a vacuum.
The other issue is what your other alternatives are besides designing a new bomber. Right now on 2025, the alternative to buying a militarized version of a 787 or whatever is to continue maintaining existing B-52s which the USAF already owns and which already have bomb bay doors but might need some worn parts replaced and could probably do with some electronics upgrades. So far, maintaining and upgrading the big dumb bombers we already have has seemed preferable to designing new ones.
In our hypothetical 2041, the B-52s are, by assumption, no longer an option, so making a bomber version of an airliner or a military transport plane might be a good idea. The other options I can think of are:
1. Design a new big dumb bomber from scratch.
2. Restart production lines for B-52s, or make a "super B-52" variant that has breaking changes beyond what you could do to an existing plane but is templated on the same design, like a Super Hornet or a Super Galaxy.
3. Abandon the idea of big dumb bombers in favor of some combo of drones and missiles.
4. Abandon the idea of big dumb bombers in favor of longer production runs of more capable heavy bombers.
Your idea has a good chance of being better than 1. I am not sure how it compares to 2.
3 would probably be fought tooth and nail by the Air Force, since depending on where the drones and missiles are launched from, it would mean surrendering missions to their eternal arch-rivals, the US Army and the US Navy.
How competitive 4 is remains to be seen. The B-21 is supposed to have a marginal cost of about $700MM per plane, about twice as much as an off-the-shelf 787 and to be not much more expensive to operate than a B-52. If it comes close to delivering on that (which remains to be seen), then it would be a tempting alternative to 0, 1, or 2.
I'm thinking instead of bombers, they'd start using explosive suicide drones. They seem to work really well.
Yes. We call those cruise missiles, and the B-52 already carries them.
But clearly we don't need the B-52. We can just sneak them in. I think those are called loitering munitions.
The fact that Ukraine did it once doesn't mean it's a general solution. There are reasons to prefer something very much like a modern cruise missile (being faster makes you a lot harder to shoot down) and it would be very nice to have a platform to deploy those when you can't sneak things in, or need to respond faster than containers move.
I don't mean because Ukraine did it once. I mean because someone apparently managed to destroy every bomber in the US airforce.
"An aircraft carrier annihilated your battleship fleet. What kind of battleships will you replace them with?"
Probably something like these, fast enough to keep up with carriers and complement them well in fleet engagements:
https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Iowa-Class
The first four were under construction when Pearl Harbor was attacked and all four were completed. Two more were laid down in 1942, but they were cancelled in 1945 because the was was over.
We still had the carriers to defend though. If your whole carrier fleet got destroyed, building destroyers would just be throwing away money and lives.
Probably depends how the B-21 program works out. If the marginal costs of building and operating them is close to the program's aspirations, they'll probably just ramp up production to replace the B-52s. The 2021 congressional report on the program mentions possibly replacing B-52s with B-21s after the B-1s and B-2s are all replaced.
Stealth aircraft tend to be a lot more expensive in maintenance than non-stealth aircraft, no? Even if there's economy of scale I would expect they'd want a normal bomb truck instead of more B-21s.
As far as I can infer from publically available sources, some of the advances in the last thirty years of stealth technology have been about making the technology more practical rather than just stealthier.
The B-21 will be far easier to maintain than the B-2 was; for instance it doesn't need to be stored in carefully climate-controlled conditions.
I'm seeing the same things, and was basing my comment on the assumption that there's a reasonable chance of the B-21 achieving its goals in that respect.
I looked up some numbers on the current generation of stealth-capable fighters (F-22 and F-35) vs their non-stealth counterparts from the previous generation of fighters (F-15 and F-16), expecting to see that they're closer in operating costs to their counterparts than the B-2 is to the B-52. They are, but by a smaller margin than I had expected. I'm seeing a range of numbers, most of which seem to be getting passed around indirectly which makes it hard to be confident that the comparisons are apples-to-apples, but it looks like the F-22 and F-35 are about 1.5x as expensive to operate per flying hour as the F-15 and F-16, while the B-2 is probably between 2x and 2.5x as expensive per flying hour as the B-52.
B-21s are newer designs than F-22s and F-35s and may benefit from more improvements, especially since affordability seems to be a higher-priority goal for the B-21 than it was for the fighters.
Per flying hour might not be representative of per-mission costs if storage and maintenance requirements are very restrictive of where you can operate from, but I get the impression that in practice the Air Force isn't basing B-52s all that much closer to their targets than B-2s. AFAIK, both planes are mostly based out of North America but in recent decades have often operated from Guam or Diego Garcia if they're doing a bunch of missions against targets in the Middle East. There seem to be more North American bases for B-52s than B-2s, with the latter only flying out of Whiteman Base in Nebraska, but Nebraska isn't enormously further away from most of the places we're likely to want to bomb than is Louisiana, North Dakota, or Southern California.
Whiteman is in Missouri, not Nebraska. And the Buffs in SoCal are test platforms. All the operational ones are at Minot or Barksdale.
The reimbursable rates per hour are published, and are the closest you'll get to actual per-hour operating costs without having to become Cassander or otherwise drive yourself nuts. (The answer you get is a matter of accounting standards, and that's a very deep rabbit hole.)
The first feature would be improved defense against suicide drones.
In a couple of years "AI" will totally transform our economy and/or kill everyone; meanwhile, "AI" can't even generate a non-laughable image for this here Open Thread. Or figure out how many arms two humans usually have between them: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/writing-today-the-literary-feud-is. Point being is that running a robot factory is many orders of magnitude more difficult than drawing a round lid of a correct size - how do you generate CAM outputs if your CAD doesn't even pretend to work.
Although "AI Futures Project" is woefully unattended for something addressing a dire emergency, so there's that.
I agree that AI is a moron about spatial things. In order to get smarter at them it needs to be trained on world, not word. Words alone can only get you so far, even if you've swallowed billions of combos of them in the form of sentences, and many of those sentences are about world. You need to be walking around seeing, feeling and touching the world even to get the number of arms right in an image, never mind being the brain in a smart robot. Seems pretty hard, though maybe not impossible, to figure out a way to train AI on world.
After the AI Futures blog put up its first post, in which something-or-other about AI robots was predicted for 2026, you put up an irritated post here about how that date could not possibly be right, because if it were then the mock-ups (? -- some sort of preliminary version, forget what you called it) would be in factories already. That's a devastatingly powerful rebuttal of the claim, infinitely stronger than some line of reasoning about AI capabilities and how they're changing and how fast, blah blah blah. I wish you would put up a post about that at the AI Futures blog.
Also, your post made me think about how those in the AI futures blog seem to have way too high a
ratio of AI knowledge and abstract smarts to knowledge about real world things like manufacturing. In fact in general the group sounds way too insular. Another manifestation of that is their *ex cathedra* approach to their blog. They write this stuff and then do not respond to reader comments, even though they only get about 25 or so. That's clearly a mistake if they're trying to build readership, and also seems like evidence that they're kind of a closed, transmit-only system.
Yeah, I don't like that. Though I'm not as actively irritated as you sound!
>I agree that AI is a moron about spatial things.
Also agreed. The last question in my benchmark-ette
>g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
has, IIRC, been answered correctly a grand total of _once_ in the tests that I've run, and I half suspect that that was an accident. For the other relatively hard questions, when the LLM gets them wrong it is fairly easy to ask additional leading questions to bring them to a correct answer. For this one, it is frequently not possible to lead them to the correct answer.
Yes, the whole extrapolation from LLMs having pretty much mastered language to - therefore - LLMs doing plumbing is... I'm lost for words. Spatial intelligence is not just hard, it's profoundly different from verbal intelligence, and it likely impossible to attain without training on/in physical world. One can't learn to throw a ball into a basket or play piano by reading about it. Or, apparently, making a reasonable-sized lid, ray-tracing light sources; or giving humans two arms each, attached to the bodies, FFS!
This is the whole thing about being an incarnate! I think people working on AI just assumed that skills could transfer over, because they forgot or never considered that we're intelligences in physical bodies who interact with the material environment ever since we're born and so we can go from "read about/watch a Youtube video on how to fix leaky pipe" to grabbing a wrench and getting under the sink to apply that knowledge.
AI is inside a box, so to speak. It can read all the sources available about fixing leaking pipes but it'll have no idea about "and this is how you do it in 3-D space with tools and grasping appendages and so forth".
Pretty much.
The frustrating part is that we don't even know what these folks think because they don't engage with this subject at all. "Who's going to do the plumbing" I kept asking, and it wasn't a metaphor, it wasn't a rhetorical question, I literally meant "plumbing" as is used in every metal cutting machine, for example. An autonomous AI running a factory will need to maintain the cutting fluid lines in a CNC machining center. Are there robots capable of replacing a cutting fluid hose? I don't know of any, would love to learn they exist, but what I get in response is crickets.
Multiply this by the number of pages in McMaster-Carr catalogue and you get the picture of the insane complexity of modern manufacturing.
And we haven't even talked about wafer fabs...
Ah well you see, there will be robots, because all factories will be automated, and then all the AI has to do is take over the software directing the robots.
I think nanobots might come into it somewhere, too? 😁
(But yes, a lot of this is white-collar people from college-educated middle class backgrounds forgetting or never knowing the grubby reality of blue-collar work banging bits of metal with a hammer in order to make the things that do the things that produce the output for the white-collar people to manage and write software for).
Many Thanks!
>Spatial intelligence is not just hard, it's profoundly different from verbal intelligence
Agreed
>and it likely impossible to attain without training on/in physical world.
There are some tricks which can be and have been used. One option is to train the neural net with a _simulated_ world, run by a physics engine which does a good job of modelling physics at the human scale (including friction, gravity, adhesion, etc.). This is faster and less costly than hooking the neural net up to a physical robot in order to do training. We will see what happens...
I’m not sure it’s actually less costly. The license costs for software capable of running such simulations are astronomical. We’re talking about Comsol or ANSYS here, they can easily run into 6 figures for a single seat, and these training runs will require multithreading and massive parallelism. An AI company won’t be able to just steal all the data it needs off of the net like it’d do for LLM training. It may literally be cheaper to make a robotic arm and get it going at an erector set with a screwdriver that simulating same with sufficient degree of fidelity across multiple domains.
Many Thanks! Hmm, I hadn't looked into the license costs. Well, I'll leave it up to the AI labs to negotiate with the physics engine companies. Usually there is some way to get bulk purchase discounts of some sort, but that is up to the corporations involved. Also,
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/new-physics-sim-trains-robots-430000-times-faster-than-reality/
talks about using an (open source?) Genesis simulator for training, which seems to be a viable option.
Yeah, this is kind of why I wrote AI 2027 as a profoundly unserious marketing copy. It's ok to be wrong, imprecise, tentative in your initial writeup. But to sound a huge alarm bell about the coming apocalypse, and then fail to engage with good-faith criticism, and then kind of just let the thing wither on the vine, no updates, nothing - shows the authors not taking the whole thing seriously. Well, in this case, no one else should take it seriously either.
I didn't know it was withering on the vine, but just looked and yeah, you're right, last post was in July. I had stopped reading it pretty early on. While I was there noticed the next to last post was titled "What You Can Do about AI 2027." Glanced at the comments and, as ever, no one in the project was responding to the 25 or so comments. WTF, do they think they can just tell a bunch of smart, interested people what to do about AI 2027? -- especially given that some commenters are expressing doubts about some of the core conclusions of AI 2027. The group's coming across as insular, entitled and tone-deaf.
The smartest person I’ve spoken to (though not the smartest person I’ve met in person), has just started a blog about the miracle case for Catholicism - his first post is on Our Lady of Fatima. Seems very big if true: https://substack.com/@ethanmuse?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
Important reminder that multiple nobel laureates have been HIV deniers and that geniuses often have at least one or more terrible ideas [1]. In other words, the fact that someone is otherwise very intelligent does not necessarily mean that all their ideas are good, or that they are equally intelligent across all domains.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
“None of the children were found to be neuropathic, psychotic…” in a religious happening in 1917. The unsupported assertion of the fact, without actual evidence to support the idea that, say, a qualified psychiatrist (in 1917) was called in to do psych evals on a bunch of kids. This pretty much encapsulates the text.
How do you define ”met in person” and ”spoken to”? For me ”met in person” would be a subset of ”spoken to”. (Because I can’t properly meet someone without speaking to them. )
But you could speak to someone you haven't met in person.
Right, that is why met in person is a subset of spoken to.
In the comments section of that post, this same guy explains that demons are real, they orchestrate UFO sightings, and that I’ll be damned by God for disagreeing with his post. I came away less than impressed.
I agree. I read a bunch of the comments, and the author came across to me as intelligent, but also a rigid, categorical thinker who was in 'litigation' mode rather than truth-seeking mode, and operating within the confines of a dogmatic worldview (e.g. see the 'strongest objections' section of the post).
LOL....how old is this person? I ask just because of in the past having had versions of that conversation with a couple different very-elderly folk. (Being myself old enough now to have conversed with multiple generations of such relatives.)
A perfectly normal-for-the-age-bracket statement like "I worry about the young people being such scatterbrains now" will transition calmly into something like "and of course that all started when the Jesuits started using their space robots to impersonate the presidents...."
In other Catholicism and miracle news, latest canonisations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpfHmJ55JQ4&t=4s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Giorgio_Frassati
"Pier Giorgio Frassati TOP (6 April 1901 – 4 July 1925) was an Italian Catholic activist and a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic. He was dedicated to social justice issues and joined several charitable organizations, including Catholic Action and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, to better aid the poor and less fortunate living in his hometown of Turin.
Frassati's cause for canonization opened in 1932 after the Turin poor made several pleas for such a cause to open. Pope Pius XII suspended the cause in 1941 due to a range of allegations later proven to be false, which allowed for the cause to resume. Pope John Paul II beatified Frassati in May 1990 and dubbed him the "Man of the Eight Beatitudes". On 7 September 2025, along with Carlo Acutis, he was canonized by Pope Leo XIV."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Acutis
"Carlo Acutis (3 May 1991 – 12 October 2006) was a young Italian Catholic saint known for his devotion to the Eucharist and his use of digital media to promote Catholic devotion. Born in London and raised in Milan, he developed an early interest in computers and video games, teaching himself programming and web design and assisting his parish and school with digital projects.
Active in parish life, he served as a catechist and helped inspire several people to convert to Catholicism. He later created a website documenting Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. He was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukaemia and died at the age of fifteen. Since his death, his relics have been displayed in Assisi and his exhibitions on Eucharistic miracles have travelled worldwide."
As you get older you get used to things like "there's CEOs who are younger than you" and then "there's Prime Ministers who are younger than you" and I'm prepared for "James Bond is younger than you" but I wasn't expecting "there are saints younger than you".
I blame Mother Theresa.
https://www.facebook.com/sharon.astyk/posts/pfbid05BkFQbDoY9RmmLkFq2Gb4rK8TPA8rEaEYAUqU4HmMdiEEQA7c242HK7ZWyGbEtqNl
Long thorough piece about preserving veggies. Includes details about choosing the right specific varieties.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iuUKVj8kFjc
Excellent British comedy bit. Does anyone know what show it's from?
Dave Allen was Irish by birth, but I think most of his career was in the UK. Highly revered. Personally I wouldn't think this his best sketch, but I would think you could have many happy hours to tracking down his work. For me, his monologues are even better than his sketches.
The clip is credited to the Dave Allen Show
https://www.emilybynight.com/p/how-i-got-canceled-by-the-left-and
Good essay about problems with cancellation. Cancelation is more random than it should be, and frequently disproportionate.
Also, people are better and worse than you expect, and it's hard (maybe impossible) to predict who will be what.
Isn’t the entire bit about cancellation that it’s not a proportional response to the behavior?
It's not proportional and it's kind of random.
Here's a surprising bit, and I have no idea whether it's specific to feminism.
When she was canceled. she got no support When she came back stronger, she acquired status.
People in general like to join the winners. Doesn't seem specific to feminism.
True. I suppose the sting is the idea in feminism is that women do or should support each other.
The motte is that people should be free to walk away from content they don't want to consume / people they don't want to associate with; if you're awful on the internet, people walking away is simply the natural consequence of that; and indeed in order for the marketplace of ideas to work at all, there needs to be a selection pressure favouring good ideas over bad, and this is simply what that looks like to the people with the bad ideas.
The bailey happens when people walk away from content / people sight unseen, because someone they respect in their in-group told them to, without otherwise forming their own opinion on the thing or person in question.
The bigger bailey is when people make death threats, contact people's employers and try to get them fired, etc. Walking away from content seems pretty harmless in comparison.
+1
>when people walk away from content / people sight unseen, because someone they respect in their in-group told them to, without otherwise forming their own opinion on the thing or person in question.
Seems like an overbroad description of "the bailey." There's too much knowledge & content out there to personally investigate every opinion, so unless we're willing to broaden our conception of "cancellation" such that we give it some positive points and scenarios where it's actually entirely appropriate (not a framing of the term I usually see here), defining it in a way that would include "walking away" from flat-earth theory or ISIS content "sight unseen" strikes me as casting the net too wide.
OTOH, many cancellations are so poisonous that they stigmatize a person for life over wide swaths of the population.
A major tool here is contagious shunning. It's bad enough if I shun you, worse if I convince others to shun you, but most destructive if I convince a group of people to shun, not just you, but anyone who associates with you.
What's the state of cryonics nowadays? I'm finally in a stable enough place in life plan to sign up, where do you get started with that?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2cYebKxNp47PapHTL/cryonics-signup-guide-1-overview
It's pretty affordable if you choose to have only your head preserved. The rest is deadweight-loss.
Related: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/brain-freeze.
Is there something special to Oregon's death with dignity law (aside from being the first)? I know death with dignity is available in several other states, including WA (where I had a friend die) and CA.
The big 2 organizations in the US are Alcor and the Cryonics Institute.
You read up on these two and then pick one.
I expect there will be more complications outside the US.
With the arrival of George Gilder's "free bandwidth" for every kind of content, I argue we're losing our need to read or write & hardly anybody will do it after a few generations. Welcome any thoughts. https://jayhancock.substack.com/p/were-quickly-losing-our-need-to-read
I suspect that the desire to learn will always make reading valuable because it's the most time-efficient form of learning.
For anyone interested in the subjects of immigration, agriculture, inflation and the greater Abundance movement, here is my essay on those subjects.
Im going to the Rochester meet up, say hi.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mwrussell1969/p/abundance-and-the-produce-sector?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=av0kj
Subthread for discussion of the Boston ACX voting guide.
I'm particularly interested in knowing what would make this kind of thing most useful/trustworthy for readers, and in particular, what the process should be like for putting together future guides such as the one for the November general election.
I was interested to read this and found it...somewhat useful. I'm in agreement with the general principles that animated the guide (I'm active in a local AHMA chapter, and housing production is my number one voting issue). That said, the Kraft endorsement made it hard for me to take the guide too seriously given how obviously his campaign has consisted of picking up random grievances and assembling them into a platform rather than articulating any vision about Boston.
This is one of those "character vs issues" kinda things and to some extent I don't wanna belabor coming down on the other side of it, save that...I don't feel that I have a good clue what a Kraft administration would look like, because I don't think he does either; he's just got a list of beefs with Wu that his people thought would win him some constituency or other. Anyway, as to your list, you did serve as a good second validator on a vote for Valdez, who was the least tested of my council picks (I went Louizjeune, Santana, Valdez and left the fourth spot blank).
This does get to an interesting question for the Boston YIMBYs (if I can wander a bit from the narrow question). Namely, how should we be approaching electoral politics in the city at the moment?
Clearly the ideal approach would be to flex our strength by finding a champion candidate, backing them to the hilt, and putting them on the council. Unfortunately we tried that twice with Dave Halbert and we weren't strong enough at that time (and it sucks that Dave's timing was what it was, cause I think in this crop he'd quite likely get through, plus we're a bit stronger now). So how should we play it now?
My inclination for now is to use the electoral arena mostly as a place to get our message out in a way that wins converts. That I think is my core disagreement with the Kraft endorsement (and I would have been against my local chapter doing anything along those lines, although I think exactly zero members were even leaning that way). Josh Kraft is enough of an obvious joke that I'd be worried anyone who endorses over an issue position is going to come out smelling like Josh Kraft, and it's gonna be a barrier to winning more converts in the electorate and particularly among active volunteer/thought leader types in the future.
This kinda sucks in this case because it basically leaves no effective outlet for my own beefs with Wu (I think Wu is instinctually NIMBY, listens to her smart staff enough to have tried some moves in a pro-housing direction, but more than anything else thought she could square the circle by just making people feel so listened to that they'd accept change, which, lol). But ultimately the path to a sane city housing policy is gonna have to run through getting a voting majority on the side of a sane housing policy, which means picking fights we come out of stronger.
Anyway, sorry for writing a book, interested to hear your thoughts if you care to.
These are good points worth considering. I unfortunately don't know all that much about Boston municipal politics, as I don't live there (I live in Cambridge, whose municipal politics are less personalistic and more legible due to its better voting system and structure of government).
I suppose the hope had been that, if Kraft did unexpectedly well in the primary, Wu might have felt some amount of pressure to pivot towards his policy positions while continuing to hammer him on the "just some random rich guy" point. Unfortunately the unofficial results are starting to come in and it looks like he's getting crushed by an even bigger margin than the polls indicated. In any event, we weren't really in a position to do anything other than tell people how to vote.
Yeah, I see your perspective; the funny thing is that while Wu has been running scared it's manifested itself almost entirely through slow-walking almost any change - she's heavily rained in the streets department on their bike and pedestrian safety initiatives, and pulled back from what started as a moderately ambitious downtown rezoning. So I guess one read of this result is that she could look at it and realize that change angering noisy people doesn't necessarily equate to change angering many people.
I do wish we had something like the Cambridge system; it would be easier to organize something like a political party and start gradually building our strength there. Beyond that though in Boston I think we just have to contend with the fact that we haven't yet won over as much of the electorate as the Cambridge YIMBYs have and keep working on that.
I thought this year's guide was genuinely helpful.
I agree with your principles (housing ftw!), your reasoning seems solid, and I'm going to happily head over to my local polling station today and vote for your recommended candidates.
Aww, thanks! It's helpful to hear things like this.
Bare minimum it would need to be explict about what values, principles, &c. (VPE) it's optimizing for.
Next step would be to tie each recommendation to the above, showing how
Ideally it would be dynamic, such that a user could reweight, silence, or invert specific parameters and get recommendations tailored for their own VPEs. To do this very well would call for inclusion of parameters in the set of VPEs that the creators themselves would silence.
---------
Here in Seattle we have an (economically illiterate) alt weekly "The Stranger" that puts out voters guides for every election. Since I know that I am almost diametrically opposed to its staff on basically every issue it's useful to me as a how-not-to-vote guide, but a static guide whose source's VPEs are more orthogonal to my own would be useless without the information necessary to correct for misalignment.
I can think of two potentially valuable ways to do voting guides and I think they're mostly mutually exclusive. (1)
The first value-add is saving people research time on down-ticket or relatively unimportant races. Like, I don't know my state senator, I don't know what bills to pressure him to vote for, and I'm not gonna learn. I'm not that interested and the ROI on my vote is pretty meh. Especially for primaries. If someone was like, "We endorse incumbent Joe Bob in the Democratic primary for state senator for District XYZ over challenger Bob Joe for reasons A, B, and C." That seems like a pretty clear value add for me and a sensible way to have an impact, provided your values are closely aligned to mine and I can be pretty confident that if I research this issue in depth, I'd vote for Joe Bob over Bob Joe. This depends on really high value alignment and has its impact on low-information/interest races.
The second value add is cross-party. Think something like Scott's recent post on NIH funding and trying to get conservatives in red states to sign the letter/pledge thing. You do have access to some Republican/Trump rationalists here and you might be able to bring them over on specific high-importance issues. Think something like PEPFAR, where you really want to be able to bring nonpartisan pressure to very specific issues. Or a voting guide where Republican primary candidate Sabrina is endorsed over Taylor because of very specific AI regulation commitments.
I don't think you can do both though. I'm not saying you can't be a solid Democrat and still reach out to Republicans on bipartisan issues; I'm saying that's an incredibly difficult line to walk. Scott included an off-hand joke about RFK and people got super suspicious, myself included, on the NIH thing and he's gotta have more bipartisan respectability than most.
(1) I've assumed that a bunch of Boston rationalists are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats. Sorry if that's incorrect.
It strikes me as a little weird to put together a rationalist's guide for how to vote. Speaking personally, if I care who gets elected usually I care enough to research the options myself.
Maybe rather than a list of endorsements (I can't remember the last time I found "person X said to" a compelling reason to vote for someone), a list of useful links to quickly dive into whatever discourse exists regarding the various candidates?
I think "We like this person for reasons ABC despite potential downsides XYZ" adds a lot of value for people who want to get enough information to make an above-replacement decision without having to put a ton of effort into researching. Of course the less your priorities line up with those of the people making the recommendations, the less useful it will be.
I've never posted a link to my own work before. I'm an Honorable Mention from last year's book review contest, so I have a modicum of writing talent.
https://thepullingandhauling.substack.com/p/true-kafka
It's an easy read, under 800 words, and it may change your life. It may not. But it will definitely cause you to rethink your LLM design.
Thanks!
I gave it a read. Nothing wrong with it, but I think it might be pitched to the wrong audience. To regular readers here, there’s nothing groundbreaking about mindfulness 101. The sense of revelation conveyed, with such an everyday topic, left a bad taste in my mouth.
Fair enough. Thanks for reading! And commenting. Brain duly zapped.
But what I would say in response is, this is *not* mindfulness 101. Nobody I've read puts this spin on it. Making it clear that it's a confrontation with an active opponent, not just "observing you thoughts", I think, makes a *very* big difference. Mindfulness 601. Graduate study work.
It seems like you made up an additional self instead of realizing self isn't a real thing. I think you'd get better mileage from agentifying the entropy parts of life instead of the body: the dishes, dust, taxes, getting old and unhealthy.
I recently started a Substack and discovered that the innards of this site are very convoluted—there are so many different settings pages that cover different aspects of one's blog, and the navigation bar changes (or disappears entirely) depending on which part of the site you're on, so its difficult to get from one place to another.
Anyway, what are some of the things a first-time blogger should do? What settings are important to change or personalize? And how does one deal with the whole "monetization" aspect of this site? Do new bloggers turn on subscriptions right away (which seems like it would be an insulting level of chutzpah), or is there some number of subscribers / number of blog posts / length of time customary before considering it? I also see there's a "pledge" option to gauge interest in subscriptions before actually offering them, but as far as I know I've never seen a blog use that.
One minor suggestion: Edit your "About" page from the obnoxious default. Then revise it periodically as your blog matures. As a reader, I find that the "About" page is usually the second article I read on a Substack, if there even IS a second article I read.
Thank you for letting me know I have an about page! I didn't notice it auto-generated one.
Just to pile on a bit, as a reader I don’t think saved posts should be buried under the heading of Subscriptions. Posts are not subscriptions. They deserve their own prominent heading.
I've been dealing with Substack for a few months now, so I may be able to help. Here are some tips:
(1) If you are signed in and go to Substack.com, in the bottom-left of your screen is your avatar (or whatever standard image Substack uses if you haven't set one). Click that, then click settings, and you'll find a lot of useful stuff to update.
(2) Immediately above your avatar is another icon. Click that and you'll go to your dashboard. At the very bottom left of this page is the word "Settings". This, insanely, is a completely different page with completely different things to do.
(3) If you scroll down this second "Settings" page you'll find "custom tags." This is useful if you want to create different sections for different posts. For example, I have sections for "Annotated Poems," "Essays," and some other things. If, after creating a tag, you want it to show up in the navigation bar of your home page, click the three dots and you'll be prompted to do so. It might not show up until you create an essay with that tag.
(4) You write a new post from the dashboard. If you're writing something there will be yet another "Settings" button to click, this one at the bottom right of the screen. Click that and you'll have the option to "add tags" to your essay. This is where you can add a custom tag; for example, if I've annotated a poem, I'll add that tag, and my writing will show up on both my home page and in that and that only section.
(5) As for monetizing it, a quick Google search should bring up some official Substack thoughts on the question. I don't even have a hundred subscribers, but I'm thinking of begging for money pretty soon. Everything I write is free, but I am going to offer people a physical book of my poetry if they subscribe for $5/month. This is mostly because I want to be able to say I've exchanged words for money, which would be good for my self-esteem, ha.
Thanks for the advice! Maybe in 100 years we'll finally have a handle on UI/UX for simple blogging websites. I understand having separate settings pages for the "user" and the "blog", but to have them all inaccessible from each other instead of having everything discoverable from a single always-present menu is bizarre!
Happy to be of service; hopefully I saved you at least a few headaches.
Looking for book recommendations that thoughtfully explain men’s problems, perceptions, and needs—especially in the context of today’s gender/culture wars. Think along the lines of Self-Made Man (Norah Vincent) or Don’t Be a Feminist (Bryan Caplan). Ideally: (1) non-misogynistic, accessible to women; (2) covers cross-sex differences; and (3) explores intra-male competition and norms within “the male world.”
Of Boys and Men, by Richard Reeves, is excellent.
Of Boys and Men, by Richard Reeves, is excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7MQjYCw5Jc
This is a video, not a book, but it's quite good from a female therapist who came to realize that it's a default in feminism to be cruel about male suffering.
There was a very strange reaction recently, amongst some self described feminists, to reports of an epidemic of male loneliness. Very strange reaction. Lots of “well maybe it’s karma for the witch burnings”. I don’t think it was the same people.
I'm a female therapist, and find men no harder to sympathize with than women. I've seen a number of them who have taken quite a beating from wokeism. Feel as though they have to preface their complaints about loneliness and confusions with "I know I'm privileged because I'm a white male, but . . ." Feel terrible about feeling sexually attracted to some 14 year old they saw in a mall, even though they did not act on it, because have been told attraction to girls that age is pedophilia. No it isn't! It is certainly bad behavior to make moves on one, but feeling attracted is perfectly normal. The difference between how human females look at age 14 and how they look at age 24 are pretty small. (Whereas 14 year olds look *very* different from 8 year olds.) Have been told that kissing a woman without asking permission first is rapey. Come on!
But my main point is that there is nothing special about my reactions. I often talk with other therapists about patients, and it is the norm to find men as easy to sympathize with as women. Jeez, they talk about their depression, shyness, overweight, drinking problem, career confusion and any halfway decent therapist shuts up and listens. And if they talk about male identity and related matters we listen to that, and take it seriously, and ask questions.. Doing that is just basic competence and human decency. Only genuine therapist assholes, who do of course exist, listen to men and think "haha, it's their turn to suffer" or "he's a male, at the top of the heap -- he's got nothing to complain about."
This is a really thoughtful comment and interesting perspective! You sound like you'd be a good therapist.
Seeing as how I freely comment on American politics, now it's your turn to comment on Irish politics, good commentariat of ACX! We have a presidential election of our very own coming up in October.
First, our current (and soon to be ex, as he is term limited) president Michael D. Higgins has his latest collection of poetry out, available at all good places-of-purchasing-poetry everywhere. *Plus* it is his first spoken word collection so if you'd rather listen than read, this is for you:
https://www.rte.ie/video/id/26681/
"Set for release on September 5, Against All Certainty, is the debut spoken-word collection by the President, features 10 original works and is underscored beautifully by a stunning musical composition from celebrated musician Myles O’Reilly."
It is also "Available on CD, Vinyl, Hardback Book CD and Digital".
But who can replace our very own first leprechaun president? Well, this is not so much satire as straight reportage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdkBe3kf-M&ab_channel=FoilArmsandHog
For the selection of candidates it's been like Lanigan's Ball as they step in and step out again. Fianna Fáil has been scrabbling about for anyone other than Bertie (there's a little *too* much scandal in his background even for FF), Fine Gael has suggested, then dropped, several candidates and some independents have graciously made it known that they are willing to serve the nation if called upon by the plain people of Ireland. As regards Sinn Féin, Mary Lou has announced she won't be running (I don't think Gerry Adams is a serious contender despite some mischievous suggestions) so we're waiting for them to announce a candidate - or not.
Current (but subject to change day by day) list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Irish_presidential_election
Confirmed candidates:
(1) Catherine Connolly, Independent (supported by the various left-wing and vaguely left parties, after they couldn't agree on running their own candidates)
(2) Heather Humphreys, Fine Gael (first she said she wouldn't, then she said she would after the only nominee dropped out)
Any chance of the start? candidates (where not otherwise described, they're politicians of some stripe):
(1) Peter Casey, Independent (one of our slew of 'entrepreneur' candidates, ran in 2018 and finished second in the election, personally I'd hate if he got in but who knows the mood of the country?)
(2) Nick Delahanty, Independent (businessman, never heard of him)
(3) Jim Gavin, Fianna Fáil (ex-manager of Dublin Gaelic football team, yes they're this desperate to find someone other than Bertie)
(4) Billy Kelleher, Fianna Fáil
(5) Kieran McCarthy, Independent
(6) Conor McGregor, Independent (yes, that Conor McGregor. Yes, the gurrier dragging a string of court cases behind him).
(7) Gareth Sheridan, Independent (another one of the entrepreneurs, apparently he's the founder of something called Nutriband)
(8) Maria Steen, Independent (barrister, again someone I've never heard of)
Thanks all the same but no thanks (withdrawn candidates):
(1) Joanna Donnelly, Independent (meterologist and TV weather presenter)
(2) Michael Flatley, Independent (yes, the Lord of the Dance himself! What a loss, who could better take up the torch to represent Irish culture than him?)
(3) Seán Kelly, Fine Gael
(4) Mairead McGuinness
What, I volunteered but you brushed me off? candidate:
(1) Bob Geldof, Fianna Fáil (musician, seems the party had already picked Jim Gavin)
I'm for Gavin. Sure, it's a step down in responsibility and prestige, but at least he has experience of management!
McGregor is going to bring alot of very bad, very international attention.
Bob might be interesting if he could reign in the cussing
He's dropped out because FF wouldn't back him, but I have a feeling his name might be written on ballots as a protest vote or something.
Right now there's so much to-ing and fro-ing that we don't even have a settled list of candidates, and the election will be on 24th October. That gives our hopefuls only a scant few months to try and grab the attention of the Irish voters.
McGregor is only the second worst convicted person to run for political office; Gerry Hutch, a gang boss, ran for election to the Dáil in 2024 after he was arrested in Spain and extradited back to Ireland to stand trial in 2021. He nearly won, as well.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/reputed-head-crime-family-narrowly-misses-out-dublin-parliament-seat-2024-12-01/
Someone here a while back posted a poem they had read on an engraved rock(from 1776 or something?) . A little girl had lost her cat, and we were encouraged to share her sorrow and "weep a little thou". I wanted to find the comment again, but my google skills aren't up to the task. Anyone who remembers?
I can't find the comment, but maybe it's this poem (google search for the exact phrase) on a gravestone for a bird, not a cat: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1355748?section=official-list-entry
Beneath this little stone intered
Lies little Charlotte's little Bird,
Who, tho' a captive, all day long
Sang merrily his little song:
When this little Favourite died,
A while his little Mistress cried,
She has almost forgot him now,
So stranger, weep a little Thou
That's it, thanks! I think my error was looking for the comment specifically, and not on the broader internet. Hope you appreciated the poem too.
I'm looking for recommendations for ONLINE university mathematics courses (not degree programmes). These need to be credit-bearing.
Background: my daughter is a primary school teacher, now teaching secondary, whose "post-secondary maths" has mostly been in terms of pedagogy. (Her UG degree is in French....; MSc in Int'l Education, thesis on primary maths curriculum). Her school would like her to get to 80 (UK) credits of maths, which help to "qualify" her to teach at the higher grade levels.
The options in the UK (our domicile) are very limited (not much beyond Open University?), so looking for other options. All pointers appreciated!
My son has taken maths classes from Brigham Young University (BYU), through their BYU Independent Study program. I was impressed with how organized and flexible the courses were. Your wife will end up with US college credits, not sure if that's useful.
https://is.byu.edu/university
What's wrong with the Open University? They're quite highly regarded, and would have been my recommendation wherever you are located. Since she's doing this at the request of the school, surely a UK based option is going to be the easiest choice to fulfil the requirements.
Thanks for the encouragement. Nothing's wrong with the OU! There's just not a lot of choice there, so looking for other options, too.
I don't have exactly the right answer, but here are some potential threads:
ICTP has some excellent online courses that are openly available. I have gone through the intro topology and differential geometry ones, so can vouch for the quality: https://www.ictp.it/opportunity/ictp-postgraduate-diploma-programme
EdX has a lot of courses and has some "credit" structure: https://www.edx.org/learn/math
Two universities that are unusually flexible and may have something:
(1) Constructor (previously Jacobs) in Germany: https://constructor.university/study
(2) Northeastern in the US, but has programs in the UK: https://online.northeastern.edu/
Helpful lead and links - thanks for that!
Scott mentioned on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast that he encounters like one good blogger a year. Has he somewhere made the list of "Recommended Bloggers"?
His current list of substack recommendations is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/recommendations.
Per point 4 at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363, he replaces the list once per year, so this isn't exhaustive.
(e.g. Zvi at https://thezvi.substack.com/ I'm pretty sure was on last year)
I think that Scott's strategy of recommending new writers per year makes sense. Sadly, that means that we lose the old recommendations and, also, we are systematically excluding insightful writers who do not have a substack (i.e. Gwern, etc..)
Half a decade out of date but there's a blogroll on https://slatestarcodex.com/
Thanks!
The recent Links post mentioned the phenomenon of terminal lucidity, where dying individuals who've been suffering from significant cognitive impairment (e.g. end stage dementia) suddenly have a significant restoration of function very soon before dying.
I am pretty skeptical that the phenomenon actually exists, for a couple of reasons:
1. There's not an obviously plausible mechanism for this. Someone is suffering more and more organ damage, more oxygen deprivation to the brain, and then suddenly a person passes a certain threshold of damage and some mechanism kicks in to improve cognition temporarily?
2. There's a strong reason to suspect motivated reasoning - everyone would love it if they could say a final goodbye to their loved ones and feel that they were actually heard and acknowledged.
I've done a brief literature review, but there seems to be very little done on the topic beyond surveys of estimated prevalence from asking nurses/doctors. Nothing prospective, nothing seriously quantitative or with controls.
Obviously this is a hard topic to study - nobody wants their last moments with their dying relatives interrupted by some scientist asking rude questions to assess cognitive function.
Nonetheless, if the phenomenon does exist, it'd have profound implications for neuroscience - it'd imply there's a way to reverse the symptoms of dementia, however temporarily, something we currently have absolutely no idea how to do!
Has anyone looked into this in more detail, or would vouch for the phenomenon being real in a way that would stand up to scrutiny? I'm seriously contemplating researching this properly...
Single data point, but I recently lost my father. He was in the middle stages of dementia, and suffered a stroke that put him into delirium on top of it. He was incoherent for about a month. Yet in his final days, he recovered enough lucidity to tell me I was a good son and to congratulate me on the birth of my son (who was born shortly before his stroke). Family members in the room overheard this, and repeated verbatim what I heard. It wasn't a recovery of full lucidity by any means, but he clearly recognized me and had some form of both long and short-term memory available intermittently.
When we told medical staff what had happened, they smiled nicely and said essentially "yeah, sure he did, sweetie." Which makes me wonder whether, if anything, medical professionals are under-reporting this kind of sudden terminal lucidity.
Yes, there's a strong reason to suspect motivated reasoning, but OTOH, some of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of science were because there was no plausible mechanism for an observed phenomenon (e.g., Max Planck and the ultraviolet catastrophe).
Moreover, we don't have a plausible explanation for consciousness, so it seems a stretch to insist upon a plausible explanation for a corner case of dementia consciousness. ;-)
Also, the null hypothesis would be that dementia progresses in a smooth downward-trending line or curve. I'm not seeing that with my mom's dementia. Some days, she's disoriented and lost without the memories needed to anchor her in reality. Other days she's pretty sharp. I have no plausible explanation for this, but it's easy for me to see which state she's in by talking to her.
Speculations below :
Some people really respond strongly to unfamiliar scenarios, feelings, or situations - eg : find them very stimulating. It's not impossible to think that when faced with dying, some individuals, even if diminished might have their brain kick into overdrive due to heightened emotions and novel feelings. I, personally, respond to new situations with like an odd hyper focus, which I otherwise find dang near impossible to recreate otherwise. Probably dopamine mediated, but there's probably more going on there.
Q&A Subthread for the ACX Grants 2024 EEG Entrainment project (see №4 in the post).
Hit me up with any questions you have! If you are in London, come to the ACX meetup this Saturday for in-person Q&A and demo.
PS: Scott, thanks for posting the update.
Please make a MMTYWTK about nicotine. I'm still baffled on how USA can suddenly stop smoking it in 90s when all other countries don't (?). Asking from a country that's very troubled by it. Cynically it's because USA found something more addicting to smoke instead, but I don't want to jump to conclusion.
I'll lay out my bias: most your people wont accept anything if they know you want to adopt USA policies, even if they've been effective. Your best bet person-level-action is to approach your smoker friends, families, and religious leaders and consistently nudge them to perceive smoking as haram.
Ironically it's those religious leaders that are so captured by it that they declare it as halal lmao. It's been a big political point for one of the biggest religious organization here.
I don't think it's the USA in particular, it's the entire Anglosphere.
It's public health measures actually working. Taxes on cigarettes combined with making it illegal to smoke in most of the places that people used to smoke. First in restaurants, then in bars, then in outdoor areas at restaurants and bars, and now on a lot of streets as well.
One of the ways in which life has got undeniably better over the past few decades is being able to go out at night and not come back reeking of stale smoke.
I wonder if there are compounding effects to decreased use of cigarettes (and alcohol). My journeys to quitting smoking and cutting way back on alcohol were in some ways quite similar. I was a heavy smoker when I started college in 2001. After each class a group of us, about 15-20 students as I recall, would gather outside the building and enjoy a quick cigarette before our next class. For various reasons I took a year off of college after the spring of 2003. When I returned in the fall of 2004, it was uncommon for more than four or five people to be outside smoking between classes. Sometimes I was the only one. When a few people quit, suddenly smoking between classes became less enticing. Instead of being part of a social gathering I felt like the weird loner out there getting his fix. As fewer and fewer of my friends smoked, I suddenly found it easier to quit. I didn't have the cue to light up from people around me, and I couldn't bum a cigarette as easily from those who did smoke.
Likewise, when I was in my 20s, it was commonplace to stay at the bar until it closed on the weekends and then head to an after-hours place, even on weeknights sometimes. I really didn't know people socialized without alcohol. Now that I have a family and responsible friends, my alcohol intake has gone from almost nightly to a couple drinks a month.
Maybe for one reason or another the United States was able to get a few people to stop smoking in the 90s and that sort of snowballed to those people's friends stopping and then to friends of friends. If that's the case, we should be pretty optimistic that it doesn't take much to get to a tipping point. Of course, this is all anecdata based on an N of 1, so it's quite possible I'm way off base.
Hmm, I gave up smoking in the 90's. Higher cost, social pressure, (less accepted in public.) and personal reasons. That said there is now a class divide in smokers. I live in rural america and though there are less cigarette smokers, there are a lot of young people who vape. Much less so in the educated urban population. I think that's mostly a social thing, if not too many of your peers vape then you will tend to give it up, or not start.
Not sure why you think the USA was alone in this. Smoking went down globally.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-rise-and-fall-of-smoking-in-rich-countries
I just checked it and I guess it's true. But it's even more tragic when despite this, Indonesia's smoker rate is still rising contrary to the rest of the world https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-who-smoke?tab=line&time=earliest..2022&country=High+income~Lower+middle+income~Middle+income~Sub-Saharan+Africa+%28excluding+high+income%29~Upper+middle+income~OWID_WRL~IDN~OWID_ASI~OWID_HIC~GBR~OWID_LIC~USA
Nice, thx. Can you find a similar graph for vaping.
Lot of it was government led. Increased taxes raised the price significantly, successful public health campaigns about risk, banning it on workplaces, restaurants etc, banning advertising. This study goes into the different factors https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26673484/
Have you read Gwern's examination of the evidence around nicotine?
https://gwern.net/nicotine
This is fascinating; thanks so much for sharing it. It actually sounds worth trying. Even more fascinating, and I think decent independent evidence for it being safe: I ran it through a Gemini Deep Research query, totally expecting a huge safetyist tut-tutting... but no! It actually basically agreed with Gwern! (I may have prompted it in a rather positive way about Gwern's writeup, but simple positivity in the prompt doesn't overcome their safety training when they decide there's a safety issue).
Very useful, thanks
I haven't. Let's see.
I recently published a Chrome extension that hides posts that do not match the user's preferences (such as "technology-related posts but excluding AI"), as judged by an LLM. Works on YouTube, X, Reddit, and HackerNews.
This idea came from my YouTube feed, which contains a blend of all topics I watch videos on, like music, podcasts, technology, or soccer highlights -- but sometimes I just want to find a recommended video from one of these categories.
I wanted to publish this quickly and see if other people find this useful before spending too much time on it, so any kind of feedback is appreciated!
Link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/great-filter/mbifgfgfbnemojmfkckodkikibihcgaj
Very cool: feed curation is an extremely high-value, bizarrely underexplored application for LMs. A couple questions:
* Is this using an in-browser (/extension) LM or something hosted?
* Is the source code available on github (or similar)?
It uses the OpenRouter API, so the inference is on the cloud. You can either provide your own API key or use a 'free tier', which uses my API key (the inference is quite cheap, and I wanted there to be an option to try the extension without having to provide your own API key).
I haven't published the source code; maybe in the future.
If you don't want to publish the source code then you should probably set up a build step, because right now I can read it just fine in the published extension.
Thanks for the heads-up! I haven't thought too much about whether I'll want to publish the source code; mostly, I was just too lazy to polish it too much to put it on GitHub.
For what it's worth, I think it's in a perfectly publishable state as-is; all you would really have to do is add a LICENSE file.
My email is scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Thank-you.
As an outside reader, I have completely zero idea what this is about.
Good. Thank-you. That was my intention, so I'm glad to hear it worked.