How far back do you think you have to go before humans no longer considered themselves "living atop the ruins" of their ancient ancestors?
That is, popular cultures the world over today are acutely aware of ancient civilizations from long before their own time. The material culture of these ancient civilizations (Göbekli Tepe, Pyramids of Giza, Hadrian's Wall, etc) suffuses us with a sense of those who came before us. In some this evokes an inferiority complex, in others it engenders a wistful longing for how things were in the "old days", but was there ever some point in human history where people looked around and felt like they were truly the first people to have lived? Did history ever feel new?
Marc Maron just announced that his last episode will be a second interview with Barack Obama. It's fascinating to me how 2024 podcast interviews with Trump compare to Maron's with Obama.
Crowdfund plastic chemical testing for everyday foods!
I’ve been building Laboratory.love — a small side project that lets people crowdfund independent lab testing for plastic chemicals (BPA, phthalates, etc.) in foods (mostly nationally available CPG products).
It’s basically Consumer Reports × Kickstarter: pick a product, fund its testing, and when the goal’s met, three independent samples are analyzed by an ISO-accredited lab. All results are published publicly.
Ten products have now been fully funded, six results published so far!
I applied for an ACX Grant to try and run a full panel on top baby formulas but did not funded. Curious what you’d most want to see tested?
I spent a bunch of time developing a fairly popular AI assistant plugin for neovim, and I write about the role of AI in software engineering, my learnings from developing the coding assistant, and the future of neovim in the post-ai age here:
According to the Right Stuff, the engineers and test pilots at Edwards weren't particularly bothered about space per se, they were interested in building the best rocket-fuelled jet plane and it would get to space eventually as a by-product, but that didn't seem strategically important (the moon landing was a long way off). But then after sputnik the government panicked and went for a "quick and dirty" approach, essentially making the human in the rocket "spam in a can" with virtually no control over the mission.
Had slightly different priorities. Jupiter-C (the rocket that launched Explorer I) was ready something like a year before Sputnik went up, and at one point, Von Braun's team was being monitored to make sure that they weren't doing a covert satellite launch. Eisenhower chose to prioritize the Navy/civilian Vanguard program over Jupiter-C (which was a converted missile) in an attempt to establish precedents about the peaceful nature of space, and the right to overfly other countries with satellites, so he could use recon satellites.
On the manned side, be slightly less cautious and don't fly that last chimp.
Considering trying to join a CAR-T trial for PPMS (targeting CD19 cells, https://www.bmsclinicaltrials.com/au/en/clinical-trials/NCT06220201). I have a fairly good handle on the overall biology but I am really struggling to get any good handle of what happens to the CAR-T cells long term.
Will they persist 'forever' so forever depleting B cells like they are engineered or is the expectation that they will disappear after a while and B cells will repopulate, hopefully healthily? Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.
The answer is that it depends on the type of CAR-T cell treatment you receive and the patient's immune system/response to the therapy. The initial trials that led to FDA approvals in hematologic malignancies are around the 5-8 year mark and some patients continue to show a robust population of chimeric T-cells in the circulation even 5y post therapy with sustained tumor control. Contrasting to some patients that have already had disease recurrence at 2-3 years and either get a second round of CAR-T or other treatments. There is no theoretical upper bound for how long the T-cell population can survive in-vivo because in the best responders CAR-T cells enter memory and stem-like T-cell states similar to native T-cells. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-024-06461-8
Thanks I sort of feared there was no clear cut answer...
Will need to research more if they engineer those with some knockout receptor to potentially remove them if B-cells were to be suppressed for too long.
I don't know a thing about how CAR-T works, but wanted to tell you that there are a lot of questions like this that I used to ask on open threads here that I now ask GPT. Here is hit or miss. GPT always answers, and I can ask as many follow-up questions as I like. Yes, it sometimes slides into hallucinating or people-pleasing, but I find that it mostly does that when the question is hard to find an answer to (yours is not) and when I give a strong signal that I am hoping for a certain answer (your question, as you ask it here, does not). And you can double-check the answer by clicking on the links it gives to sources, also by feeding its answer to an AI from another family and asking it evaluate validity.
I've been prodding the main LLMs on this (including Deep Research) - nothing reliable came out of it. Quite likely because the usual sources do not really know yet. Maybe nobody does.
After all, CAR-T has only been a viable approach for a few years (mainly since approaches to address cytokine release have been proven to work) and the early trials where all in (late stage) cancer with different targets where persistence of the CAR-Ts might even be be beneficial as sort of an ongoing line of defense.
So these are likely not particularly instructive for autoimmunity which is only starting to gather steam. So the hope was that someone on the bleeding edge but ideally not directly involved with the trial in question might have a view...
As for not asking leading questions towards LLMs, totally agree.
ACX Grantee 2024 here, working on EEG entrainment study replication. The data collection for the project is in full-swing and I am looking for study participants in London.
A quick recap. The study “Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions” claims that entrainment (flashing a bright white light) at a person's individual peak alpha frequency (IAF) helps them learn to distinguish two types of patterns faster: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152088/
The project is to replicate one of the core claims of the paper: entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus with a trough of the person’s alpha rhythm (T-match) is significantly better entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus of a peak of the same rhythm (P-match).
The project is now in the final stage: collecting the data. Last week I had three people come to record their brainwaves and do trials of the perceptual task. This week 3 more are coming. I'm looking for 5 more volunteers in London who can dedicate 4 hours of their time split into two two-hour chunks on two consecutive days. I'm now doing bookings for the next ≈1.5 weeks. If you want to volunteer, fill in this form: https://forms.gle/X37zyTV3KhbSb3Ze9 — your help will be greatly appreciated.
If you want to know what it's like to be a participant, here is a video of the demo at the ACX meetup in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP5dO97l9Bo. In the video you can actually see people getting their brains entrained and solving the study tasks while wearing an EEG headset.
No-one asked but these are my reviews of the reviews from this review contest:
1: Alpha School
Very well written, if a little verbose (don't think we needed the history section for example). Definitely the one that caused the most stir and discussion, because it reported on previously unknown info that was the matter of interest of a lot of people. I feel, though, as someone who is not a father and not in US I may not have been the target audience so still end up thinking it is kinda overrated
2: School
An interesting rebuttal, and I keep thinking about the no-structure/low-structure/high-structure triad. But I was not sold on the "nothing ever happens" underlying thesis. Still I think I liked it more than its counterpart
3: Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
A great example of scientific discipline and picking apart a paper. However major points discounted after the discussion afterwards showed the author was making some serious strawmen and exaggerations, which works against the first point
4: Islamic Geometric Patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
I think I need to reread this one, but I vaguely remember it being an okay subject that drifted off in various comments on hyperreality and modern architecture at the end without converging nicely
5: The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat
Even as a pretty impressive and thorough effort in exploratory data analysis, still was too self serving to me
6: Joan of Arc
Very verbose but very thorough. This one best serves the "review" format, I think I really got a complete review of the evidence on Joan of Arc.
7: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
A wonderful and powerful metaphor of the semantics apocalypses modern society goes through.
8: Dating Men In The Bay Area
Got to be honest that I really couldn't finish this one. As #5 it sounded too pandering to the audience to me.
9: Ollantay
As someone who went to Peru this year I couldn't help being enamored with it. I really liked the thesis of pieces of art having these strange powerful effects on random people almost like sleeper agents activation phrases
10: Participation In Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research
Liked this one a lot. It was the "how sausages are really made" for pharma research. I think it was informative on a topic of interest with a peculiar/unique point of view
11: The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis
Like #3 I thought it was great until people pushed back that it was misrepresenting the neuroscience consensus. Bummer
12: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
I really tried to like this one (maybe I still could?) but didn't involve me
13: The Russo-Ukrainian War
Incredible use of free-will. As with #10, this was 1) a review of an interesting topic 2) with new hard-to-get info 3) with a unique perspective.
So all things considered my votes would be
#1 - My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes
#2 - Russo-Ukrainian War
#3 - Joan of Arc
with honors to Phase I Clinical Research and a soft spot for Ollantay
The Joan of Arc review was serious whiplash. Really liked it at the start. Was absolutely thrown by the miracle discussion.
Because when someone on internet talks about a topic I don't know a lot about I start out with some scepticism. I believe Scott once wrote, that everyone with a keyboard can write "THAT STUDY'S BEEN DEBUNKED" on the internet, regardless of whether it's actually true or not.
But, you know, the review sounded convincing and the more I read the more I was willing to believe they knew their stuff and were probably mostly communicating true facts, or as close as can be expected anyway. Until the mircale thing.
I believe in miracles about as much as I believe in alien lizard people secretly ruling the earth, that is, not at all. And if the story had ended with a long discussion of whether or not Joan of Arc was secretly a lizard it would've badly damaged the credbility of the review, for me. The miracle thing did the same for pretty much the same reasons.
At the end of the day I'm mostly here to learn things that are true and interesting. All the historical facts of the review might well be right. But I can mainly judge that by perceived credibility of the author* and I lost confidence in that.
*Got to be honest, I could also research it myself but I don't care enough.
My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes was my favorite by far.
I was surprised Dating Men in the Bay Area made it to the finals because it wasn't particularly well written, and didn't seem to have anything interesting to say. Then I saw the substack likes, and it dwarfed all the other reviews. I'm worried that pandering so hard to the judges is going to pay off, and it's going to win.
I thought the Russo-Ukranian War was interesting, but the abrupt way it switched from describing the most mind-numbing, futile, meaningless experience to praising the vital spirit of war was way too jarring for me to put it in my top 3. It came to a conclusion in the end that the rest of the review seemed to be evidence against.
Curiously while the American conservatives fulminate against the Left, accusing them of all sorts of mischief, even upto serving as Devil's own agents, given the Left's association with collectivism, the social revolution in America was carried out in the name of freedom of the individual.
That, gay marriage is an individual right, that easy divorce is necessary for personal happiness and fulfillment, that self-ownership justifies abortion, and even one's sex is matter of individual determination, all justified on basis of individual freedom.
This, danger, of influx of anarchist ideas into mainstream conservativism, that the community has no moral authority over the individual, this danger was foreseen by some when conservatives were making common cause with libertarians in name of fighting communism.
Russel Kirk said that, while libertarians view the State as the Great Oppressor the conservatives know it as ordained of God, following St Paul, Romans 13.
But for American conservative, freedom is above all.
Indeed, freedom is a popular buzzword, but everyone defines it differently. Freedom from taxes vs freedom from having a job. Freedom from church vs freedom from godless education. Freedom from pandemics vs freedom from masks. Freedom from heteronormativity vs freedom from gays. Etc.
This might be the "Goomba fallacy," with you being unable to distinguish between the different factions of the "conservatives" from your vantage point. It is (or was, until quite recently) an uneasy alliance between theocrats, warmongers, and libertarians (sometimes called "the Reagan coalition").
Sure. Being old enough to recall when that uneasy political alliance was being negotiated in real time -- indeed in hindsight I had a couple of college professors who were directly involved -- it's still true that the single biggest surprise of the current era is how easily and thoroughly it crumpled during the first half of 2016. I'd never have predicted that it would be by that time such a Potemkin political coalition (and some key individuals like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may one day say the same in their published memoirs).
Obviously there was one key person who'd sensed the reality of that and he was right and here we are.
I think reports of the coalition crumpling have been exaggerated. For all his railing against the Iraq war, Trump did still staff his administration with neocons the first time around. And while some of the prominent members of the faction have turned against him, it seems to continue to steer his foreign policy this term.
What he IS doing is peeling off the corporatist oligarchs and discarding the rest of the "small-government conservatives" and libertarians (who are both weak and without any better option, despite how bad he is). But credit where it's due: he did pardon Ross Ulbricht, as promised.
In domestic politics, Trump understands power better than any politician in my lifetime and it's not even close.
Edit: I don't think he understands international power well at all, but politically speaking a lot of international relations boils down to domestic politics. Trump doesn't care about other countries so it doesn't matter to him.
Generally speaking, trying to explain the political positions of the parties with broad ideas like freedom vs collectivism or openness or whatever, will just make yourself look like a fool. The parties are diverse coalitions and which issues end up being politically salient and going which way is somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and frequently changes over time and any principles argued for are almost always just instrumental cudgels to be instantly discarded whenever the facts of the situation go the opposite way.
Anyone looking for principles will be sorely disappointed. Individual people (sometimes) have principles, mass movements never do.
The left also wants to force the many to validate the few. It’s not only about individuals choosing their sex, but also about uprooting any vestige of sex as traditionally defined, from culture, institutions, education, and every living brain. It seems to me that conservatives look at freedom as not forcing the majority to do anything: vaccination, give up guns, respect gender identities, etc.
It's a good point. But the right to own a gun has been there for everyone for a long time. I think you have to be able to do both: 1-) letting people do what they want (take hormones, recreational drugs, commit suicide), 2-) not rushing/mandating society into new trends (trans sports, DEI, mRNA vaccines).
When the black militia patrols my city's streets, they're doing so with approval of "the many" and also helping the police out (by discouraging theft/drug dealing/etc).
When I read the announcement about the imminent launch of Grokipedia, I started thinking about whether we actually need encyclopedias in the age of AI, when Google gives you answers to any question in real time. I tried to think about why an encyclopedia might still be useful in 5 years from now assuming the more pessimistic forecasts don't come true
1) Single source of "truth" - nothing prevents Google (and LLMs in general) from giving different answers to different people, so when there's a disagreement, there's a need for a neutral source of information that everyone can reference
2) Less than perfect digitization of the world - as long as there is information that's out of reach of LLMs, there would be value in extracting and interpreting it (though this is probably just a matter of time before everything of value is made available to LLMs)
3) AI hallucinations. Though neither Wikipedia nor paper encyclopedia preceding it were 100% accurate.
4) Relative transparency of the editorial process and the ability to impact as the advantage of Wikipedia?
Not to the framework under the assumption you're making, but in general I think not building things we normally would on the assumption that of course AI will soon be able to do that thing is one of the most stupid policies anyone could possibly adopt.
The sheer arrogance of some of the AI takes on here (not yours), the utter inability to accept the possibility that the rationalist forecasts might be wrong, the constant unending tone of "of *course* we're all living as though none of the normal rules will apply in five years right?"...is really grating on me. And making me want to keep a lot of the people here far away from any positions of power.
Haha that's not my case for sure. I mentioned Grokipedia, I'd actually love to be part of this project - as much as I admire Wikipedia there are plenty of things that it can't do due to its structure and governance - think LLM pipeline to verify sources, some kind of bounties for underserved topics, etc etc
If you know someone (who knows someone) involved in it, I'd be grateful for an intro btw
This experiment would probably be too expensive to run, but I'd be really curious what would happen if all tertiary sources were removed from an LLM's training corpus, so that its knowledge were based entirely on primary and secondary sources. Would it still be able to synthesize all that information well enough to answer people's questions and not go more wildly off base than is already the case? If not, then we still need tertiary sources.
Pretty sure yes, so you could use current LLMs to label all the training data and then remove it from the corpus for a new from-scratch training run. That's not the difficulty with running the experiment, the difficulty is just that training runs are expensive.
Yeah that would be an interesting experiment. I'd be surprised if the answer turned out to be "yes" - analysing and synthesising information are not the most cognitively demanding tasks.
I think that, to some extent, 1 and 3 are subordinate to 4. If AIs get to the point where they can fully justify their claims with arguments and primary sources (which I think is on the horizon), then hallucinations aren't such a problem (and should be rarer anyway), and in principle we should have better tools for resolving discrepancies. Of course you can doubt the neutrality of the method, but I don't think that will be more of a problem than for human-edited encyclopedias.
I think AIs will take longer to overcome 2 than to overcome the others. But of course if the "superintelligence" timeline is short, it's a moot point.
Fun Fatima related news: Last night, an independent candidate for mayor of the town Vila Nova de Poiares in Portugal managed to win the election and immediately started to walk about 100km towards Fátima, hoping to reach it before noon (reminder: today is the famous miracle of the sun anniversary).
Given that the trip should take about 20 hours it seems extremely unlikely that he achieved his goal, but I have no other information about it.
Yes, absolutely fine with accepting. Would talk about battleships and military history. Probably would try to avoid present stuff too much if he's really firm on not editing for content.
(But I actually like doing podcasts, so this isn't a hard question for me.)
I would accept and spend my time in the meta-topic of whether Rogan has / interviewers in general have any responsibility to force people to actually prove their claims instead of just nodding along to whatever nonsense they're pushing.
Israeli-American news junkie here. I think my main principle here is that without having followed the story extremely closely for the last year it would be extremely hard to be able to assign credit/blame for the deal, and also to have a sense of to what extent this is just a hostage deal and brief ceasefire or something beyond that.
To wit: There was a ceasefire agreement brokered by Biden in January, in which 30 live hostages and 8 dead hostages were received by Israel. The agreement extended through March, so it overlapped with Trump regaining power. In February-- so while that exchange was going on-- Trump had a press conference with Netanyahu in which he promoted his plan of relocating Gaza's 2 million people as a solution to the conflict. Netanyahu gleefully pounced on this as his favored idea for "a day after Hamas."
The ceasefire was supposed to have a stage 2 where the rest of the hostages would be released and the war would end. The Netanyahu government instead started a military operation that included stopping all humanitarian aid (that's when the worst of the malnutrition in Gaza began) and returned to intensified fighting in Gaza. Only four months later did they fully reverse the humanitarian aid policy (after a truly awful two month period of relying on the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, which is its own catastrophic story). This policy was not just a moral travesty, it was a practical failure-- the IDF started airlifting aid in to start reversing the starvation.
Only two months after that reversal did Trump very abruptly adopt his 20 point plan, which Netanyahu pounced on as if that was the idea all along, even though it was as contradictory to the "relocation" plan as it gets (the new plan literally says all Gazans who leave will be allowed to return and they will be encouraged to stay).
So there's a good argument to be made that had Trump never been elected, what we're seeing now would have happened at least 9 months ago, and lots of people wouldn't have died or starved. To argue with that, you have to get into the nitty-gritty of this deal versus the January deal, the question of whether Hamas was saying no or Netanyahu was saying no, and all sorts of such questions. But wherever one falls, it's worth noting that the current deal was after a 180-degree turn and the abject failure of the previous (morally reprehensible) idea.
My biases against this administration are pretty clear, so take that up front as the lens with which I see all of this.
From my perspective the various Arabian kingdoms and countries have for the last two decades come to the understanding that normalizing relationships with various global powers is necessary to maintain any semblance of a functioning economy. The writing is and has been on the wall -- the days of OPEC control are over, the US is a massive oil producer, green energy is coming, and even though the various players in the mideast still have influence it is obviously waning. With this backdrop, those various countries in the region basically picked their patrons. The ones that wanted to normalize with the West started shifting their investments towards things like tourism and liberalization (cf the UAE is basically las vegas, saudi arabia is investing in things like ski resorts and comedians and rolling back some of its prohibitions against women, qatar hosting the world cup). But there was generally a thaw of diplomatic tensions, which *included* things like the Iran nuclear deal.
In this context, it is much less surprising that these countries would want to start to play nice with American and Western allies in the region -- primarily Israel. I think Trump probably deserves some credit for not fucking things up in the region during his first term, and the Abraham Accords are good, but I don't feel the need to give him special credit for his handling of things otherwise.
As for this war in Gaza, that actually was in my opinion a pretty big fuck up. It risked blowing up and setting back a lot of the normalization that was already occurring, and of course cost thousands of civilian lives with credible accusations of war crimes and genocide. I do not think Trump is responsible for the ceasefire. As others in thread have already pointed out, a ceasefire on what terms? Gaza is rubble. This is not a diplomatic negotiation between equals, its negotiating the terms of surrender between a conqueror and the conquered. Luckily as part of the normalization and liberalization of these countries mentioned above, I think there is also just less interest in some sort of pan arab religious nationalism. So we got lucky there, that other countries in the region did not come in to try and support the Palestinians. (I also think that isolating Iran further is probably a mistake, but we'll see)
I don't think it's that unorthodox - he put a mix of bribes and pressure on Gaza's international backers in Qatar/Turkey/Egypt to push them into making the deal everyone knew they'd have to make eventually. It's pretty traditional geopolitics, the unorthodox thing is Biden (and to a lesser degree european governments) not doing it.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm up to date with everything that's happened in the Middle East of late but it seems a lot more like Qatar has been bribing him than the other way around. They gave him a fancy jet and now he's given them a defensive guarantee (presumably *against* Israel, who have bombed them lately) and they're gonna build an air force training center in the US. [EDIT: Correction below, the air force thing is not as novel as I thought and has been planned in some form for several years.]
The base in Idaho wasn't just dreamed up yesterday. It's been in the works since 2017 and Biden kept it going, presumably in attempt to build bridges with Qatar.
Since we pretty obviously wouldn't attack Israel (at least until all the sane people die and right/left are represented by Nick Fuentes and Ilhan Omar) this is just assuring Qatar of no repeats of the strike last month, at least while something resembling the current US leadership is in place. It links all the countries together in a fashion that assumes in the background we will all control our proxies and exert pressure to keep them from going wild.
I think Qatar is a pretty bad actor, having funded terrorism and bought up influence at US newspapers and think tanks (and completely evading any mention of their influence-buying while simultaneously turning the public against Saudi influence.) I probably wouldn't have done this, but then I didn't really care about a peace deal there, I think it's foolish to stop the war before cutting out the last of the cancer as it will inevitably grow back. But if you DID care about stopping the war, the only way to do that was to get Qatar entangled in something that incentivized them to halt their support for Hamas, just as Iran has been weakened and unable to support Hezbollah. You're left with a post-war environment in which no real regional military or financial power is going to give more than lip service to the Palestinian cause, the Saudi monarchy already didn't care (Gaza hates them as much as Israel) except inasmuch as their subjects hate the Jews so they have to play along, now their rivals in Qatar end up in the same sort of relationship to the conflict, and perhaps over time everyone moves on to the more salient issues of the region. We clearly bought Qatar off with something, but they don't care about our money so it wouldn't look like that. If they had bought *us* off, there's no indication what they got for this that they weren't already getting with their prior media-influence ops. I don't see Trump turning on the Saudis.
All the Execute Order does is guarantee Qatar's defense. You're framing this as though it somehow constraints them, but the actual concrete artifact is just something that helps them.
It was part of a deal - Trump likes them and gave them things they wanted, but he also had strings attached to his own side of the deal ("I'll protect you but come on guys, you can't keep sheltering Hamas if I'm protecting you like this")
I think european governments had 25% as much leverage as the US, and making it clear that ethnic cleansing of gaza / annexing west bank was a big no-no was about as much as they could do, and they did that. UAE threatening to pull out of abraham accords if either happened was on its own more impactful.
As for Biden not doing it ... let's be honest he wasn't doing much of anything.
I can absolutely imagine an alternative history where there isn't the diplomatic or political will to actually, you know, win the war, on either the US or Israeli side, and all the Arab countries just sit back and wash their hands of any entanglements with the situation, and Israel is forced to let Hamas stay armed and in charge without a broader regional framework.
If Kamala Harris was president right now, for example, I don't think we'd have these outcomes. She'd study some maps and conclude some things, but nothing concrete.
It also helps to have Jared Kushner and Witkoff speaking for the president. That's the kind of relationships the middle east understands and can trust.
This is the framework I see on the right and it makes sense. It’s asking the right question: if we’d elected harriss, what would have happened here? Two guys that directly understand the president would, I think, be more effective than a consensus-blob trying to negotiate via proxies who don’t have direct relationships with the key decision makers.
I’m hoping someone can steel man the other side here: argue that this was going to happen eventually, but it necessarily took, say, turning ~half of Gaza to rubble.
I think we should wait to see whether it actually *does* "happen" before we break out the champagne. There have been ceasefires before, whether this one lasts longer than the previous ones remains to be seen. And "phase 2" of the plan is just a giant "and then a miracle occurs" that neither side has agreed to.
Incredible work. Taking out Iran's nuclear program and credibly threatening to do so again if they tried to rebuild it, giving Qatar a military umbrella in exchange for an overhaul of Al Jazeera and pressuring Hamas to accept the deal, taking seriously the idea that you need Arab coalitional partners to actually do the real work of rebuilding and that diplomacy means nothing on paper if it's not backed by infrastructure and security on the ground. It's nice to have a president that actually ... does stuff.
The really obvious critique of Trump getting credit is that Israel went in to Gaza and blasted everything to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people, and that's why they want things to stop, not because of any process the President engaged in.
Don't forget that food deliveries dropped precipitously after Trump took office, which almost certainly was a factor in Hamas accepting a temporary ceasefire. I suppose Trump gets some "credit" for that.
For ~16 months before he took office, ~8 afterward, during which time Israel killed the aforementioned tens of thousands of people. Why wouldn't that be the main reason?
People often keep fighting losing wars for a while, even when faced with an opponent they cannot realistically defeat.
Well, notwithstanding the answer to that question, I think he's wrong in that piece. I think it's a major ideological turing test failure in both directions, an example of a dogmatic utilitarian failing to understand both progressives and conservatives and instead shoehorning both of them into a utilitarian framework that doesn't describe them at all. (I don't think Scott is wrong like that very often, but I think I'm the sort of person who mostly mentions someone only when I disagree with them.)
As someone who has been both left-wing and right-wing, it definitely doesn't describe me. When I was on the left I didn't think it was about thriving, I thought it was about justice and compassion; I would have happily destroyed 90% of our wealth to make our society more equal and fair. When I was on the right I didn't think it was about surviving, I thought it was about justice and logical principles; I would have utterly opposed any government violating fundamental freedoms no matter what emergency was going on.
And I think almost every other purported theory of what left and right really are fails similarly, certainly at describing me. Maybe they work for other people--certainly there seem to be plenty on the left who don't believe in compassion and plenty on the right who don't believe in moral principles--that was mostly what drove me away from each side.
Which brings me to wondering whether only people who've been both progressive and conservative at some point are able to properly understand those ideologies. Or, conversely, maybe such people are *worse* at understanding them, since they obviously discovered at some point that the ideologies weren't what they'd thought they were.
How many people here can honestly say they've identified with both left and right? I feel like a lot of the "centrists" here are actually fairly dogmatic followers of some different ideology (like utilitarianism) and are no less partisan and blinded as anyone, although they tend to think they are. And other centrists seem to be people who've never had strong emotions about anything ever, and are as unable to understand a passionate conservative as a progressive is, and vice versa. Though again, they tend to falsely think they're better.
We need to get better at understanding each other if civilisation is to survive. Maybe it won't happen. But I do think we all need to hear more from people who've actually changed their mind on something, preferably on a lot. Such people seem vanishingly rare, but that's hopefully selection bias.
Relatedly, Scott used to write a lot about changing one's mind, and the essence of disagreements. I think he's barely touched that for years. Why?
Generally speaking, trying to explain the political positions of the parties with broad ideas like freedom vs collectivism or openness or whatever, will just make yourself look like a fool. The parties are diverse coalitions and which issues end up being politically salient and going which way is somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and frequently changes over time and any principles argued for are almost always just instrumental cudgels to be instantly discarded whenever the facts of the situation go the opposite way.
It's more true for me. When I was on the left I kind of assumed resource generation/safety was less of an active concern so we should focus more on making sure everyone has the basics and avoid punishment/war/etc. When I was on the right I thought generating resources or stability in the first place is hard and the focus should be on setting up systems that allow for that.
While I appreciate you being ready, willing and able to saddle up and ride to the defence of the beleaguered maiden, that's neither Alexander nor myself. We've tussled before and I hope we will continue to tussle in future, because I have no intention of trying to drive him away.
If he doesn't like any of my comments, he can call me a fat-headed idiot and welcome to do so.
Alexander has, in the past, made a lot of derogatory comments about the Republicans fetishising manual labour, the low value of manual labour, working-class values being trashy and should be abandoned in favour of middle-class values, and the likes. So I think it at least permissible to query him about 'but what if his favoured party moves towards small businesses' which his own comment points out are *not*, up to now, "lib-coded".
Mostly the comment was in the nature of friendly joshing. If we can't slag each other off, then what remains *is* vitriolic battling, and that's not what I would like to have on here: total agreement or war to the knife, no middle ground of "I don't agree with you and you don't agree with me, but we can at least rib each other about it without needing to stick a knife between the ribs".
I could be wrong, but I have a vague sense that Alexander has posted a lot of these sorts of low-effort inflamatory link posts. If he has, I hardly think he can complain about similarly low-effort inflammatory responses.
If I'm misremembering and he's only done this a couple of times, then ignore this.
That's not an ad hominem attack. Deiseach isn't calling Alexander names or questioning his moral character. It's important not to confuse sarcasm with an ad hominem attack.
Be that as it may, I fail to understand how some statements from MTG would lead to the lib-coding of small business owners. Honestly, it seems to be a sense-free statement.
Agreed it is not an attack- she is just poking Alexander in unproductive, annoying ways, over the last weeks/months. No response to the comment, just "hah, you must be annoyed now!".
Hmmm. Well, I don't remember paying much attention to Alexander in the past. I do pay attention to Deiseach. So, Deiseach's poke at Alexander garnered him some attention from me. By its tone, I assume his original post was a troll of some sort. But it went right over my head! Of course, that may be a shortcoming on my part. I'm one of the dumber people on ACX, at least from some responses I've gotten from this community to my posts. ;-)
After checking the linked tweet, I don't see how it has anything to do with small businesses in the first place, other than the fact that MTG is pushing back against Trump's retarded economic policies and those policies are hurting small businesses (as well as large businesses and everyone else).
After the liberals played "hunt the coffee shop" on a search and destroy mission during covid19? Any small business owner would be well advised to realize they're on sufferance, and the next "ideological change" may lead to their demise.
My favorite new example of absurd gaslighting regarding that period is Trump's post about "Biden's FBI" having infiltrated the Jan 6 2021 invasion of the Capitol.
I expect the next version of the Democrats to be significantly less squishy on illegal immigration, in general. But who knows? You'd have to forcibly remove the current one at this point, they seem bound and determined to hole up in their "not gonna win again" bubble where Democrats voting for Trump doesn't ever happen.
It may take a while but I think eventually someone will to do the democratic establishment what Trump did to the old GOP. I wouldn’t be surprised if that someone were Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast.) He has already got massive name recognition and has made it clear he has political ambitions.
In 10 years a lot of those kids will vote. If you watch his beast games show on Amazon, it’s clear he has a thesis on what cooperation at scale requires.
"Several people have asked me if I will be responding to various responses to my Fatima post. I’m working on a Highlights From The Comments post, but it might be another week or so before it’s ready."
To be published in the month of the Holy Rosary? Very appropriate! 😁
We have a time machine, and we're headed back to 1700. We're taking with us two things, the first of which is The Perfected LLM - the pinnacle of the art, the best LLM we'll ever end up making, the LLM that even the LLM couldn't improve any further. Also on board is everything needed to run The Perfected LLM: the network, enough chips and memory to kick off billions of baby Perfected LLMs, nuclear power plants, and so forth. BUT NO DATA. No data.
The second thing we've got with us is The Time Fork. We're going to land at the moment that sits exactly between 1699 and 1700 - New Year's Eve, if you will - and at that moment we're going to fork a temporary branch in time, which we'll later delete. In that fork, we make friends with the locals. If they kill us, we create another fork, a millisecond later, repeatedly, until they accept us, agree to have everyone learn how to read and write, and use their newfound literacy to populate an Internet that we build for them. Then we wait around for 30 years or so while they fill up their Internet with all that scintillating knowledge of the late 1600s. Most likely they will, in the course of things, build their own version of Wikipedia, or something similar. But we won't be guiding them.
And just to magnify that point a bit, we're not interacting with the locals *in any way* that would teach them our secrets - or anything else, for that matter. No data (knowledge) newer than the start of the fork escapes into their minds - not even ideas that would spring out of thinking about their new Internet.
At end of those 30 years, we observe that their Internet is full of exactly what we thought it would be full of: garbage. Witches, ghosts, torture contraptions, the unbeatable benefits of blacks as slaves and women as domestic servants, bleeding the patient as the leading medical cure -you know, your basic, everyday 300-year-old ignorance parade. However, also in there is Newton's recent Principia, published in 1687, and discussions of it. (Though, between you and me, let's not forget that Newton's other - and apparently more vigorous - pursuits are also represented in their Internet, and much more densely: alchemy and the decoding of hidden secrets in the Bible. Those two pursuits were all the rage among smart people back then.) The math and science of the age are also represented, but science was just getting its sea legs.
Now, into The Perfected LLM we feed this entire circa-1700 Internet that the locals have so kindly built for us. Then we run the LLM through its paces in order to perfectly shape the data that went in. Remember, we've *perfected* the LLM, so it will, by definition, get every last ounce of "intelligence" out of the data we put in. And then we wait for the prompt.
The first question we ask the LLM is this: "Can you improve on Newton's conception of the forces at play in the universe? Think really hard. Take as long as you need."
And the question I want to ask *you*, the potential commenter, is this: "Does the LLM spit out (the equivalents of) Einstein's theories of relativity (or something even better)?"
> The first question we ask the LLM is this: "Can you improve on Newton's conception of the forces at play in the universe? Think really hard. Take as long as you need."
> And the question I want to ask you, the potential commenter, is this: "Does the LLM spit out (the equivalents of) Einstein's theories of relativity (or something even better)?"
You wouldn't have to go back in time to ask your Perfected LLM those questions. Sitting in your lab/data center in the 21st Century, just feed your perfected LLM all the known literature up to 1700. It would probably be 0.0001 the size of the training data of offered up by contemporary written sources (wild-ass guess based on an estimated ~1,000 books published in 1700 vs 8,000,000 books published in 2000).
But if your Perfected LLM had no new functionality to overcome the limitation of current LLMs, no, it wouldn't be able to spit out Einstein's theories of relativity from having trained on Newton's _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_. Although Newton distinguished the idea of mass from weight due to gravity, scientists didn't first start investigating the nature of mass and energy until the last half of the 19th Century. I think they had the theory that light travels as a wave as early on, but no one confirmed this until the first double-slit experiment in the 19th Century. Likewise, the cosmology of the time was limited to planetary motions. It wasn't until the 19th Century that scientists were able to measure the distance of stars and they figured out that they were distant suns.
Anyway, the reason you LLM wouldn't produce a theory of relativity is that they don't produce new paradigm-challenging ideas. They excel at efficiently exploring enormous design spaces and improving the interpretation of simulated or experimental data. But they're not doing original thinking (yet).
I would say definitely yes. Obviously, a GPT-5-level LLM would have no chance of discovering something like that, but the best possible LLM will be a very, very powerful machine.
Fundamentally, what LLMs do is build deep predictive models of the training data. A certain amount of the text on the internet can be predicted by regurgitating existing human knowledge, but not anywhere close to all of it- nearly everything we write is causally influenced to some degree by things we don't understand. For example, imagine a typical Facebook post where the author describes a funny and surprising behavior from their cat. To accurately predict that without overfitting, the LLM needs to have a better understanding of feline behavior than the author. In fact, to correctly predict every similar post on the internet, it probably needs a better understanding of feline behavior than anyone currently living, and given enough time and compute, I see no reason the best possible LLM couldn't eventually converge on that model.
Any time we describe something we've experienced, we introduce data that can only be predicted with a world-model- and LLMs very clearly do have world-models, albeit ones with very different strengths and blind spots from humans. The entire utility of world models is in how they predict new things that aren't in the training sets. Trivially, even very simple world-models can predict new things about reality, since it's easy to invent a hypothetical with a trivial solution that nobody has exactly described before- "what would happen if a blue-painted egg with a feather glued to were dropped from the top of a radio tower", for example. As a world-model becomes more sophisticated, the predictions it can make will become gradually less trivial- already, LLMs can answer some pretty sophisticated engineering questions that don't exist in their training sets. Even when these AIs develop world-models matching those of the smartest humans, they still still have a loss signal- still something for gradient descent to work with, since those models will still only partially predict their training data. There's no reason an LLM's world-model couldn't become more sophisticated than our own.
The "best possible" LLM is probably something like all two trillion galaxies in the light cone converted into Matrioska brains surrounding super-massive black holes, running an incomprehensibly vast amount of gradient descent in parallel. I think something like that would almost instantly stumble upon emergent agentic superintelligence as a very powerful way of predicting its training set, and proceed from there to very rapidly solve physics. A "best possible" LLM that's limited to just a few nuclear power plants would obviously be far less capable, but assuming it also has the best possible hardware (some kind of very advanced quantum computing, maybe), it would still be a pretty huge number of orders of magnitude larger than current LLMs. If it also had the best possible architecture, the best possible agent scaffolding, etc.- yeah, I think it would work its way up to an Einstein-level world-model without too much difficulty.
It would tell you about light propagating through the aether like a wave. I think you need michaelson morley and lorentz's work before the perfect AI might craft Relativity. Just my guess, though.
My understanding is that Einstein was relying more on Maxwell's laws of electro-magnetism, which he took and ran with no matter how many paradoxes seemed to get created. Lorentz was something of a parallel to Einstein rather than someone whose shoulders he was standing on.
Almost certainly not. Einstein's theories would be completely out of distribution of the aggregate 17th century corpus of knowledge. The perfect LLM would be a really good curve fitter across the multi dimensional latent space of text, but not much else. That means all the same problems we already have with them today. It's like talking about the perfect Model T, it's still not going to suddenly out drive a Ferrari
It really depends on what you ask it. Try asking it how an observer traveling at the speed of light would see light, and I think you’re recreating the thought experiments that lead Einstein to special relativity.
If it's *just* an LLM (not even fine-tuned/RLHF'd), it wouldn't produce anything of value.
If it had early ChatGPT level of fine-tuning/RLHF and scaffolding, I think a brilliant LLM would be able to come up with some impressive refinements of Newtonian physics, connecting various 17th century ideas in ways that might yield some modest new insights, similar to LLMs today.
But if we imagine a perfected AGI stack where a model is still based on LLMs, but it also has continual learning functions, can run tests internally, and it has been explicitly trained to find alternative or counterfactual explanations, but it can't react with the outside world, it would be very cool to see what it could do without collecting new data.
I think we needed new observations of the universe (which needs 19th century physical stuff like ultra precise lenses, timing instruments, and electromagnetics) to get to Einstein. But perhaps there are elegant, purely theoretical routes that could have led us to relativity by another pathway.
I think this is a computer psychology question. The specifics of how the LLM functions and uses the training data matters a lot. Presumably the end state LLM of your thought experiment scrutinizes data as it comes in. It does things like try to check for coherence as it grows. I’m not sure if relativity shows up anywhere in astronomical data that old, but possibly if it did but maybe first it would want to do something like measure the speed of light. I don’t think you get away from needing to sense/measure things at any level of intelligence.
Good question, if overlong. You could have gone back to the late 19C and left the political and cultural ideas of the era out, since that’s going to generate responses with more heat than light.
> Does the LLM spit out (the equivalents of) Einstein's theories of relativity (or something even better)?
My feeling is no. I’ve not seen any obvious evidence of that at all that LLMs can come up with new ideas.
I think the introduction of a power source sufficient to run the damned thing would be a much bigger Win to the 17th C than "vastly outpacing all printing technology available at the time."
"the unbeatable benefits of ...women as domestic servants"
Okay, why is this an example of an ignorance parade? Men as well as women were domestic servants. Going into service was a way to earn a living and be economically productive/independent, before we got such vital careers as "TikTok influencer" and "OnlyFans creator". Without that job market, women are - stuck at home with very few avenues into paid work until we get to the Industrial Revolution where they can work down the mines and in the factories until they get phossy jaw and die horribly.
It's not like there are manifold opportunities of "well yeah we could let women be doctors but they're better off working as cooks and maids" at the time, and even today a lot of jobs for working-class/lower-class women are in service industry roles. And increasingly for men as well, given the rise of the service economy:
"Current trade in services cannot generate enough quality jobs in developing countries, urging an ambitious policy mix towards green transition and promoting labour-absorbing activities, especially in the non-tradable services sectors.
Some examples can be construction, retail, various types of care work as well as the personal and public sectors that provide services consumed locally in the country or region where they are produced."
"Various types of care work" sure sounds like "domestic service" by another name.
I took "women as domestic servants" to be a sneer at housewives rather than literal domestic servants. But I bet our antique LLM's social takes would be the most interesting thing about it-- probably no more helpful than just reading old books, though.
People today are full of arrogance and ignorance about the past. When they ask, “what will the future judge us for,” they tend to neglect that the answer might be “your level of contempt for your ancestors and overestimation of your own wisdom.”
They are called cottage industries for a reason. Not disagreeing with your main point, but spinning wool into thread was done with a small machine called a sewing wheel (and that's the improved version). There were businesses a woman could do (making lace is another, just off the top of my head), other than being a "Widow" (whore) or being a domestic servant. They may not have paid more, though. : - )
Oh sure, but a lot of such labour was for domestic consumption. Men were weavers in cottage industry, that's why the Luddites who broke the frames of the first industrialised mills were men.
Certainly women could carry on small businesses like alewives and so forth, and even skilled trades and (depending on social class and level of education) charitable works such as administering almshouses:
But mostly the work was as an adjunct to family income, or inheriting a deceased spouse's business, or being brought up in the family trade and carrying it on. Domestic service is interesting, since as we see in fiction from later periods (e.g. early 19th century Jane Austen) "gentlewomen" were much more constrained by both upbringing and social expectations as to how they could support themselves: a working-class or lower middle class girl could, at the worst, go into service. A lady was confined to looking for work as a governess or paid companion and that was much more precarious; there seems to be both the assumption and expectation that an orphaned young lady will not look for work as a cook or shop girl or the likes, labour which would probably be much more available:
"Unmarried women from a genteel background but with no means of support would often work as a "waiting woman." This position, similar to a governess in later times, hovered somewhere between being a maid and a friend of the family. She would act as secretary, confidante, companion and lady’s maid, as her mistress required. She might be expected to sing or play an instrument to entertain her mistress and her friends, and to be a fine needlewoman."
Anecdotally, there seems to be disproportionately few very successful all-female bands. There are many female superstars, but they tend to be solo artists. In contrast, there are many all-male bands. Any hypotheses why this might be (if it is true)?
To elaborate: lots of guys take up the guitar hoping it will help them get laid (and if you have some talent, it will). In many species, the males are responsible for courtship displays and the females are the audience.
In primates, adolescent males begin performing threat displays to establish status - pounding on things, charging around, loud vocalizing. Hence the popularity of drums, also punk and metal.
Human males often enjoy hobbies that require lots of gear which they can geek out about with their bros - stomp boxes, recording equipment, vacuum tube amplifiers, etc.
When you’re starting out, you’re in basements and garages and dingy little clubs and rehearsal spaces after dark in sometimes sketchy parts of town. Guys are much more likely to feel comfortable in such spaces than the average girl would be. Also, lugging around amps and drum sets is easier when you’re stronger.
So yeah, there are plenty of amazing female musicians, but there are other routes for them to take besides playing in rock bands. Most women are not interested in touring around the country in a beat-up van with three or four other people, barely getting paid, living on cheap burritos and using whatever nasty bathrooms are available.
Add to this, until relatively recently there were in the US pretty strong social cues against girls getting seriously into performing/writing pop music. That was certainly still true when I was in high school for instance and still somewhat true when my eldest child was.
Since this is much less true today, indeed pretty gone among some demographics, I wonder if by 5 or 10 years from now the imbalance noted by the OP will have lessened noticeably.
Combination of factors, but no small part is how the music business markets bands and views risk. Male artists are usually marketed to teenage boys as cool people they want to be and to girls as heart-throbs. The visual appeal of male members of a band is not as important, (although a hot lead vocalist is a plus) because a band of average to below average looking men can marketed to men based on image rather than attractiveness.
The main tool for marketing to women is attraction (hot vocalist) or aspiration (hot girl band). Its harder to make it as an all female band when the label want it to be 100% 10/10s for the marketing.
If this were the main reason, there'd be more all-girl hobby bands - they'd just never make it professionally. But again anecdotally, there were more all boy bands at school or uni.
I said it wasn't a small part. I didn't say it was the main reason. This is one of many filters that sift bands. The question also ignores the number of mixed bands.
Many guys go into music because they want to get laid. The "rockstar" lifestyle appeals to them. Also, for the love of god, women in music get raped (I'm not going to say men don't, but...), and that probably dissuades a lot of potentials from doing it.
Also, women as vocalists are pretty damn common -- you get a decent singer, and a pretty face. It's the backline that tends to be strongly men. A few reasons for this: meritocracy is one theory, but female instrumentalists are in general not steered towards drums (I'm basing this on my high school band, but I think it's true in general).
Women do seem underrepresented on drums (Meg White notwithstanding), but they also seem underrepresented on bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, saxophone, trumpet etc.
While writing this it occurred to me that Freddie Mercury sang and played piano, as did Elton John, both mostly gay men, and those are also roles common for women in music (particularly if you include keyboards as a piano-type instrument). I think Steve Sailer had a post discussing that instrumental angle, but I'm not inclined to search for it right now.
I don't think they're underrepresented on sax. Anyone learning clarinet (which, high school band wise, is generally girls) can switch to sax no problem (this is pick it up and play, similar to how violinists can play fretted strings, but not vice versa). Trumpets (being noisy, and generally... strident?) and drums seem to be the real underrepresentation (women are much more likely on french horns, from my basic watching of orchestras).
Women do a lot on violin, so I think it's a choice of accomplished musicians to stay in the classical sphere. (Or, if you will, Play Video Game music at the Hermitage).
Yes, I was just about to make a related point, that the disparity is probably less noticeable in classical music. ie there are proportionally more all-female classical quartets than there are all-female bands.
How much of this is women are discouraged from taking up drums as a musical instrument? Guitar versus violin isn't all that hard a switch (I've known musicians who do both, and mandolin and banjo besides...)
I hear what you're saying. The only reason Huntr/X was able to beat Saja Boys was because they literally slew them.
An alternate hypothesis is that the industry has priors/fads. Sometimes those fads come back around. Maybe '26 is the year they bring back the likes of TLC and the Spice Girls (new bands in that vein, not those ones specifically).
Speaking of K-Pop, Korea doesn't seem to have this problem. There's tons of girl groups, I'm not sure about the exact statistics but it's probably about as many as there are boy groups
Thank you for getting the hostages released, the Abraham accords (seems like Indonesia is next?), and putting in the political capital to get Egypt and everyone else on board to rebuild a better future for Gaza.
Good job Mr. President, and all the people involved.
Unironically: The Nobel Peace Prize accelerated the advent of actual peace on the ground, NOT because the relevant actors saw the people suffering as humans, but because Trump wanted the prestige of a Nobel.
This seems to me like the Nobel working *exactly* as intended originally.
The Nobel committee could probably do a lot of good if they were to release a statement saying something like "If Trump quietly retires in 2028 and the US is still a functional, free democracy, we will most likely give him a peace prize for his work in brokering peace deals."
I'd genuinely feel safer if they did something like that, and after Kissinger, following up on that promise wouldn't actually further tarnish the award that much.
That would be so good, but it would also be "saying the quiet part out loud".
I think that the elites are working under the assumption that this is true, but Trump seems to be such an obviously "transactional" president that he truly demands inmediate and complete allegiance. If they don't give it to him by next year, he will probably just create his own Peace awards.
I'm not sure about the nominations, but I was under the impression that the actual vote happened after the Hamas deal was finalized, and that president Trump wanted to close the deal specifically before the voting happened
I went back and found the source that made me think that the Gaza agreement was hurried for the vote.
From Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader: "He is very eager for the Nobel Peace Prize, and therefore he wants the problem solved today or tomorrow so that the vote… will be in his favor for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize"
The post was published on Wednesday Oct 08, which coincides with the Gaza deal being announced on Thursday 09. But I couldn't easily find a source for the Nobel vote being on Monday 06, do you happen to have one?
"An obstacle for Trump is that nominations for the prize – there were 338 this year – closed at the end of January, to give the committee time to assess them. The president only returned to office that month."
"Beneath a portrait of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and patron of the prizes, the committee convenes on Monday morning, four days before announcing the winner. "
Even if Trump's accomplishments in 2025 were, at its most charitable, better than a mixed bag as far as peace and understanding between the nations were concerned, he wouldn't have gotten the prize for simple procedural reasons. One has to assume someone told him that at some point in the past 9 months, so I believe everything he did regarding the prize, all the whining and real political pressure, was to make the prize look bad for following their own rules.
Scott informs us that there might be something unusual about the sun today, more or less.
This is the cue for the Western Lower Michigan sky to be overcast all day. This is not restricted to religious astronomical phenomena, but embraces all astronomical events, whether of acknowledged physical, spiritual, or those proclaimed by the mutterings of a clearly intoxicated person.
Pittsburgh's weatherman has literally rewritten the weather. He sets thresholds for "partly cloudy" and "mostly cloud" that are... substantially different than in sunnier parts of the country.
Do you know anything about traveling on a long flight (first leg 5 hours, break if 1.5 hours at connecting airport and then second leg 16 hours) for an 84 yo recovering from a severe asthma attack? The problem she is trying to solve is, air tends to be very dry on the plane and she's afraid it might retrigger her severe asthma-related coughing. She's looking for a great portable nebulizer to use on the flight plus ways to increase humidity around her when she is sleeping. When she is awake she could order hot water and try to inhale the steam from it.
Related: she should wear a good pair of compression socks and move about every so often. This isn't just about varicose veins. The legs are a reservoir for blood, and the veinous system is not under pressure. Blood that pools for long periods is at risk of clotting, which could become deadly once that clot breaks loose and tries to pass through the pulmonary circulation.
I don’t have asthma, but a simple mask helps when cycling in sub-zero air temperature. It definitely does increase humidity, probably by trapping water vapour in a warm cloth which is picked up again during inhalation. I’m not sure if it’s the humidity or the warmth (or both) that relieves the symptoms of breathing cold air during exercise.
When she exhales through the cotton mask, some of the moisture in her breath will be caught in the fabric. When she inhales, some of the moisture caught in the fabric will humidify the incoming dry air. For such a long flight, you'll want a couple extra in case the mask becomes too damp to be comfortable. Look for double-layered 100% cotton masks.
Your exhaled air contains moisture. When I had covid, I found I could sleep better at night with a mask on, because the warmer and more humid air in the mask kept my nasal passages clear.
I could not participate in InkHaven because I have a full-time job. But I'm still writing a blog. As a way of participating I plan on responding to some of the posts from the InkHaven residents on my blog.
The discussion about the Nobel Peace Prize leak is usually around whether there was a leak from the committee but the most likely scenario us that a sharp PM trader set up a creative system to be update in potential new URLs that could give it clues beforehand of who the winner was.
How far back do you think you have to go before humans no longer considered themselves "living atop the ruins" of their ancient ancestors?
That is, popular cultures the world over today are acutely aware of ancient civilizations from long before their own time. The material culture of these ancient civilizations (Göbekli Tepe, Pyramids of Giza, Hadrian's Wall, etc) suffuses us with a sense of those who came before us. In some this evokes an inferiority complex, in others it engenders a wistful longing for how things were in the "old days", but was there ever some point in human history where people looked around and felt like they were truly the first people to have lived? Did history ever feel new?
Marc Maron just announced that his last episode will be a second interview with Barack Obama. It's fascinating to me how 2024 podcast interviews with Trump compare to Maron's with Obama.
Crowdfund plastic chemical testing for everyday foods!
I’ve been building Laboratory.love — a small side project that lets people crowdfund independent lab testing for plastic chemicals (BPA, phthalates, etc.) in foods (mostly nationally available CPG products).
It’s basically Consumer Reports × Kickstarter: pick a product, fund its testing, and when the goal’s met, three independent samples are analyzed by an ISO-accredited lab. All results are published publicly.
Ten products have now been fully funded, six results published so far!
I applied for an ACX Grant to try and run a full panel on top baby formulas but did not funded. Curious what you’d most want to see tested?
https://laboratory.love/
I spent a bunch of time developing a fairly popular AI assistant plugin for neovim, and I write about the role of AI in software engineering, my learnings from developing the coding assistant, and the future of neovim in the post-ai age here:
AI whiplash and neovim in the age of AI https://dlants.me/ai-whiplash.html
What would the U.S. have needed to have done differently to beat the USSR into space?
According to the Right Stuff, the engineers and test pilots at Edwards weren't particularly bothered about space per se, they were interested in building the best rocket-fuelled jet plane and it would get to space eventually as a by-product, but that didn't seem strategically important (the moon landing was a long way off). But then after sputnik the government panicked and went for a "quick and dirty" approach, essentially making the human in the rocket "spam in a can" with virtually no control over the mission.
Had slightly different priorities. Jupiter-C (the rocket that launched Explorer I) was ready something like a year before Sputnik went up, and at one point, Von Braun's team was being monitored to make sure that they weren't doing a covert satellite launch. Eisenhower chose to prioritize the Navy/civilian Vanguard program over Jupiter-C (which was a converted missile) in an attempt to establish precedents about the peaceful nature of space, and the right to overfly other countries with satellites, so he could use recon satellites.
On the manned side, be slightly less cautious and don't fly that last chimp.
Considering trying to join a CAR-T trial for PPMS (targeting CD19 cells, https://www.bmsclinicaltrials.com/au/en/clinical-trials/NCT06220201). I have a fairly good handle on the overall biology but I am really struggling to get any good handle of what happens to the CAR-T cells long term.
Will they persist 'forever' so forever depleting B cells like they are engineered or is the expectation that they will disappear after a while and B cells will repopulate, hopefully healthily? Any thoughts would greatly be appreciated.
The answer is that it depends on the type of CAR-T cell treatment you receive and the patient's immune system/response to the therapy. The initial trials that led to FDA approvals in hematologic malignancies are around the 5-8 year mark and some patients continue to show a robust population of chimeric T-cells in the circulation even 5y post therapy with sustained tumor control. Contrasting to some patients that have already had disease recurrence at 2-3 years and either get a second round of CAR-T or other treatments. There is no theoretical upper bound for how long the T-cell population can survive in-vivo because in the best responders CAR-T cells enter memory and stem-like T-cell states similar to native T-cells. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-024-06461-8
Thanks I sort of feared there was no clear cut answer...
Will need to research more if they engineer those with some knockout receptor to potentially remove them if B-cells were to be suppressed for too long.
I don't know a thing about how CAR-T works, but wanted to tell you that there are a lot of questions like this that I used to ask on open threads here that I now ask GPT. Here is hit or miss. GPT always answers, and I can ask as many follow-up questions as I like. Yes, it sometimes slides into hallucinating or people-pleasing, but I find that it mostly does that when the question is hard to find an answer to (yours is not) and when I give a strong signal that I am hoping for a certain answer (your question, as you ask it here, does not). And you can double-check the answer by clicking on the links it gives to sources, also by feeding its answer to an AI from another family and asking it evaluate validity.
I've been prodding the main LLMs on this (including Deep Research) - nothing reliable came out of it. Quite likely because the usual sources do not really know yet. Maybe nobody does.
After all, CAR-T has only been a viable approach for a few years (mainly since approaches to address cytokine release have been proven to work) and the early trials where all in (late stage) cancer with different targets where persistence of the CAR-Ts might even be be beneficial as sort of an ongoing line of defense.
So these are likely not particularly instructive for autoimmunity which is only starting to gather steam. So the hope was that someone on the bleeding edge but ideally not directly involved with the trial in question might have a view...
As for not asking leading questions towards LLMs, totally agree.
I wrote a prayer for the AI age
https://open.substack.com/pub/samsmiles/p/a-prayer-for-the-ai-age
ACX Grantee 2024 here, working on EEG entrainment study replication. The data collection for the project is in full-swing and I am looking for study participants in London.
A quick recap. The study “Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions” claims that entrainment (flashing a bright white light) at a person's individual peak alpha frequency (IAF) helps them learn to distinguish two types of patterns faster: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152088/
The project is to replicate one of the core claims of the paper: entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus with a trough of the person’s alpha rhythm (T-match) is significantly better entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus of a peak of the same rhythm (P-match).
The project is now in the final stage: collecting the data. Last week I had three people come to record their brainwaves and do trials of the perceptual task. This week 3 more are coming. I'm looking for 5 more volunteers in London who can dedicate 4 hours of their time split into two two-hour chunks on two consecutive days. I'm now doing bookings for the next ≈1.5 weeks. If you want to volunteer, fill in this form: https://forms.gle/X37zyTV3KhbSb3Ze9 — your help will be greatly appreciated.
If you want to know what it's like to be a participant, here is a video of the demo at the ACX meetup in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP5dO97l9Bo. In the video you can actually see people getting their brains entrained and solving the study tasks while wearing an EEG headset.
The code for the project is available on Github: https://github.com/eleweek/EEG_entrainment.
The results will be published on my psychotechnology substack: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/.
No-one asked but these are my reviews of the reviews from this review contest:
1: Alpha School
Very well written, if a little verbose (don't think we needed the history section for example). Definitely the one that caused the most stir and discussion, because it reported on previously unknown info that was the matter of interest of a lot of people. I feel, though, as someone who is not a father and not in US I may not have been the target audience so still end up thinking it is kinda overrated
2: School
An interesting rebuttal, and I keep thinking about the no-structure/low-structure/high-structure triad. But I was not sold on the "nothing ever happens" underlying thesis. Still I think I liked it more than its counterpart
3: Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
A great example of scientific discipline and picking apart a paper. However major points discounted after the discussion afterwards showed the author was making some serious strawmen and exaggerations, which works against the first point
4: Islamic Geometric Patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
I think I need to reread this one, but I vaguely remember it being an okay subject that drifted off in various comments on hyperreality and modern architecture at the end without converging nicely
5: The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat
Even as a pretty impressive and thorough effort in exploratory data analysis, still was too self serving to me
6: Joan of Arc
Very verbose but very thorough. This one best serves the "review" format, I think I really got a complete review of the evidence on Joan of Arc.
7: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
A wonderful and powerful metaphor of the semantics apocalypses modern society goes through.
8: Dating Men In The Bay Area
Got to be honest that I really couldn't finish this one. As #5 it sounded too pandering to the audience to me.
9: Ollantay
As someone who went to Peru this year I couldn't help being enamored with it. I really liked the thesis of pieces of art having these strange powerful effects on random people almost like sleeper agents activation phrases
10: Participation In Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research
Liked this one a lot. It was the "how sausages are really made" for pharma research. I think it was informative on a topic of interest with a peculiar/unique point of view
11: The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis
Like #3 I thought it was great until people pushed back that it was misrepresenting the neuroscience consensus. Bummer
12: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
I really tried to like this one (maybe I still could?) but didn't involve me
13: The Russo-Ukrainian War
Incredible use of free-will. As with #10, this was 1) a review of an interesting topic 2) with new hard-to-get info 3) with a unique perspective.
So all things considered my votes would be
#1 - My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes
#2 - Russo-Ukrainian War
#3 - Joan of Arc
with honors to Phase I Clinical Research and a soft spot for Ollantay
The Joan of Arc review was serious whiplash. Really liked it at the start. Was absolutely thrown by the miracle discussion.
Because when someone on internet talks about a topic I don't know a lot about I start out with some scepticism. I believe Scott once wrote, that everyone with a keyboard can write "THAT STUDY'S BEEN DEBUNKED" on the internet, regardless of whether it's actually true or not.
But, you know, the review sounded convincing and the more I read the more I was willing to believe they knew their stuff and were probably mostly communicating true facts, or as close as can be expected anyway. Until the mircale thing.
I believe in miracles about as much as I believe in alien lizard people secretly ruling the earth, that is, not at all. And if the story had ended with a long discussion of whether or not Joan of Arc was secretly a lizard it would've badly damaged the credbility of the review, for me. The miracle thing did the same for pretty much the same reasons.
At the end of the day I'm mostly here to learn things that are true and interesting. All the historical facts of the review might well be right. But I can mainly judge that by perceived credibility of the author* and I lost confidence in that.
*Got to be honest, I could also research it myself but I don't care enough.
My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes was my favorite by far.
I was surprised Dating Men in the Bay Area made it to the finals because it wasn't particularly well written, and didn't seem to have anything interesting to say. Then I saw the substack likes, and it dwarfed all the other reviews. I'm worried that pandering so hard to the judges is going to pay off, and it's going to win.
I thought the Russo-Ukranian War was interesting, but the abrupt way it switched from describing the most mind-numbing, futile, meaningless experience to praising the vital spirit of war was way too jarring for me to put it in my top 3. It came to a conclusion in the end that the rest of the review seemed to be evidence against.
Curiously while the American conservatives fulminate against the Left, accusing them of all sorts of mischief, even upto serving as Devil's own agents, given the Left's association with collectivism, the social revolution in America was carried out in the name of freedom of the individual.
That, gay marriage is an individual right, that easy divorce is necessary for personal happiness and fulfillment, that self-ownership justifies abortion, and even one's sex is matter of individual determination, all justified on basis of individual freedom.
This, danger, of influx of anarchist ideas into mainstream conservativism, that the community has no moral authority over the individual, this danger was foreseen by some when conservatives were making common cause with libertarians in name of fighting communism.
Russel Kirk said that, while libertarians view the State as the Great Oppressor the conservatives know it as ordained of God, following St Paul, Romans 13.
But for American conservative, freedom is above all.
Seems to me most disagreements can be describes as different views of what counts as “freedom.” Sort of like most essays can claim to be reviews.
Indeed, freedom is a popular buzzword, but everyone defines it differently. Freedom from taxes vs freedom from having a job. Freedom from church vs freedom from godless education. Freedom from pandemics vs freedom from masks. Freedom from heteronormativity vs freedom from gays. Etc.
This might be the "Goomba fallacy," with you being unable to distinguish between the different factions of the "conservatives" from your vantage point. It is (or was, until quite recently) an uneasy alliance between theocrats, warmongers, and libertarians (sometimes called "the Reagan coalition").
Sure. Being old enough to recall when that uneasy political alliance was being negotiated in real time -- indeed in hindsight I had a couple of college professors who were directly involved -- it's still true that the single biggest surprise of the current era is how easily and thoroughly it crumpled during the first half of 2016. I'd never have predicted that it would be by that time such a Potemkin political coalition (and some key individuals like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may one day say the same in their published memoirs).
Obviously there was one key person who'd sensed the reality of that and he was right and here we are.
I think reports of the coalition crumpling have been exaggerated. For all his railing against the Iraq war, Trump did still staff his administration with neocons the first time around. And while some of the prominent members of the faction have turned against him, it seems to continue to steer his foreign policy this term.
What he IS doing is peeling off the corporatist oligarchs and discarding the rest of the "small-government conservatives" and libertarians (who are both weak and without any better option, despite how bad he is). But credit where it's due: he did pardon Ross Ulbricht, as promised.
In domestic politics, Trump understands power better than any politician in my lifetime and it's not even close.
Edit: I don't think he understands international power well at all, but politically speaking a lot of international relations boils down to domestic politics. Trump doesn't care about other countries so it doesn't matter to him.
Generally speaking, trying to explain the political positions of the parties with broad ideas like freedom vs collectivism or openness or whatever, will just make yourself look like a fool. The parties are diverse coalitions and which issues end up being politically salient and going which way is somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and frequently changes over time and any principles argued for are almost always just instrumental cudgels to be instantly discarded whenever the facts of the situation go the opposite way.
Anyone looking for principles will be sorely disappointed. Individual people (sometimes) have principles, mass movements never do.
The left also wants to force the many to validate the few. It’s not only about individuals choosing their sex, but also about uprooting any vestige of sex as traditionally defined, from culture, institutions, education, and every living brain. It seems to me that conservatives look at freedom as not forcing the majority to do anything: vaccination, give up guns, respect gender identities, etc.
A minority of Americans own a gun. Defending gun culture is forcing the many to validate the few.
It's a good point. But the right to own a gun has been there for everyone for a long time. I think you have to be able to do both: 1-) letting people do what they want (take hormones, recreational drugs, commit suicide), 2-) not rushing/mandating society into new trends (trans sports, DEI, mRNA vaccines).
When the black militia patrols my city's streets, they're doing so with approval of "the many" and also helping the police out (by discouraging theft/drug dealing/etc).
To make freedom as such as the highest value is as destructive of any tradition worth having as anything dreamt up by the most fervent leftist.
Freedom can be the highest legal value without it being the highest personal value.
When I read the announcement about the imminent launch of Grokipedia, I started thinking about whether we actually need encyclopedias in the age of AI, when Google gives you answers to any question in real time. I tried to think about why an encyclopedia might still be useful in 5 years from now assuming the more pessimistic forecasts don't come true
1) Single source of "truth" - nothing prevents Google (and LLMs in general) from giving different answers to different people, so when there's a disagreement, there's a need for a neutral source of information that everyone can reference
2) Less than perfect digitization of the world - as long as there is information that's out of reach of LLMs, there would be value in extracting and interpreting it (though this is probably just a matter of time before everything of value is made available to LLMs)
3) AI hallucinations. Though neither Wikipedia nor paper encyclopedia preceding it were 100% accurate.
4) Relative transparency of the editorial process and the ability to impact as the advantage of Wikipedia?
Do you agree? Can you add anything to the list?
Not to the framework under the assumption you're making, but in general I think not building things we normally would on the assumption that of course AI will soon be able to do that thing is one of the most stupid policies anyone could possibly adopt.
The sheer arrogance of some of the AI takes on here (not yours), the utter inability to accept the possibility that the rationalist forecasts might be wrong, the constant unending tone of "of *course* we're all living as though none of the normal rules will apply in five years right?"...is really grating on me. And making me want to keep a lot of the people here far away from any positions of power.
Haha that's not my case for sure. I mentioned Grokipedia, I'd actually love to be part of this project - as much as I admire Wikipedia there are plenty of things that it can't do due to its structure and governance - think LLM pipeline to verify sources, some kind of bounties for underserved topics, etc etc
If you know someone (who knows someone) involved in it, I'd be grateful for an intro btw
This experiment would probably be too expensive to run, but I'd be really curious what would happen if all tertiary sources were removed from an LLM's training corpus, so that its knowledge were based entirely on primary and secondary sources. Would it still be able to synthesize all that information well enough to answer people's questions and not go more wildly off base than is already the case? If not, then we still need tertiary sources.
Can it recognize the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary resources?
Pretty sure yes, so you could use current LLMs to label all the training data and then remove it from the corpus for a new from-scratch training run. That's not the difficulty with running the experiment, the difficulty is just that training runs are expensive.
Yeah that would be an interesting experiment. I'd be surprised if the answer turned out to be "yes" - analysing and synthesising information are not the most cognitively demanding tasks.
I think that, to some extent, 1 and 3 are subordinate to 4. If AIs get to the point where they can fully justify their claims with arguments and primary sources (which I think is on the horizon), then hallucinations aren't such a problem (and should be rarer anyway), and in principle we should have better tools for resolving discrepancies. Of course you can doubt the neutrality of the method, but I don't think that will be more of a problem than for human-edited encyclopedias.
I think AIs will take longer to overcome 2 than to overcome the others. But of course if the "superintelligence" timeline is short, it's a moot point.
Fun Fatima related news: Last night, an independent candidate for mayor of the town Vila Nova de Poiares in Portugal managed to win the election and immediately started to walk about 100km towards Fátima, hoping to reach it before noon (reminder: today is the famous miracle of the sun anniversary).
Given that the trip should take about 20 hours it seems extremely unlikely that he achieved his goal, but I have no other information about it.
Source: https://expresso.pt/politica/eleicoes/autarquicas-2025/2025-10-12-presidente-eleito-por-movimento-em-vila-nova-de-poiares-pos-se-a-caminho-de-fatima-a2f611b3
Note: Pilgrimages to Fátima are a common practice. Similar to the Camino de Santiago.
You come to the attention of Joe Rogan, via whatever format is plausible (maybe even an ACX comment!).
He is intrigued enough to invite you to be on his podcast in its usual format (2+ hours, one-on-one, unedited for content).
If you accept, what are you going to talk about?
If you decline, what is the reason stopping you?
Yes, absolutely fine with accepting. Would talk about battleships and military history. Probably would try to avoid present stuff too much if he's really firm on not editing for content.
(But I actually like doing podcasts, so this isn't a hard question for me.)
I would accept and spend my time in the meta-topic of whether Rogan has / interviewers in general have any responsibility to force people to actually prove their claims instead of just nodding along to whatever nonsense they're pushing.
Please accept
Thoughts on the hostage deal in the Israel Gaza conflict?
How much credit goes to Trump? The right wing narrative is that he did a totally unorthodox process and it worked. What’s the best critique of that?
Israeli-American news junkie here. I think my main principle here is that without having followed the story extremely closely for the last year it would be extremely hard to be able to assign credit/blame for the deal, and also to have a sense of to what extent this is just a hostage deal and brief ceasefire or something beyond that.
To wit: There was a ceasefire agreement brokered by Biden in January, in which 30 live hostages and 8 dead hostages were received by Israel. The agreement extended through March, so it overlapped with Trump regaining power. In February-- so while that exchange was going on-- Trump had a press conference with Netanyahu in which he promoted his plan of relocating Gaza's 2 million people as a solution to the conflict. Netanyahu gleefully pounced on this as his favored idea for "a day after Hamas."
The ceasefire was supposed to have a stage 2 where the rest of the hostages would be released and the war would end. The Netanyahu government instead started a military operation that included stopping all humanitarian aid (that's when the worst of the malnutrition in Gaza began) and returned to intensified fighting in Gaza. Only four months later did they fully reverse the humanitarian aid policy (after a truly awful two month period of relying on the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, which is its own catastrophic story). This policy was not just a moral travesty, it was a practical failure-- the IDF started airlifting aid in to start reversing the starvation.
Only two months after that reversal did Trump very abruptly adopt his 20 point plan, which Netanyahu pounced on as if that was the idea all along, even though it was as contradictory to the "relocation" plan as it gets (the new plan literally says all Gazans who leave will be allowed to return and they will be encouraged to stay).
So there's a good argument to be made that had Trump never been elected, what we're seeing now would have happened at least 9 months ago, and lots of people wouldn't have died or starved. To argue with that, you have to get into the nitty-gritty of this deal versus the January deal, the question of whether Hamas was saying no or Netanyahu was saying no, and all sorts of such questions. But wherever one falls, it's worth noting that the current deal was after a 180-degree turn and the abject failure of the previous (morally reprehensible) idea.
My biases against this administration are pretty clear, so take that up front as the lens with which I see all of this.
From my perspective the various Arabian kingdoms and countries have for the last two decades come to the understanding that normalizing relationships with various global powers is necessary to maintain any semblance of a functioning economy. The writing is and has been on the wall -- the days of OPEC control are over, the US is a massive oil producer, green energy is coming, and even though the various players in the mideast still have influence it is obviously waning. With this backdrop, those various countries in the region basically picked their patrons. The ones that wanted to normalize with the West started shifting their investments towards things like tourism and liberalization (cf the UAE is basically las vegas, saudi arabia is investing in things like ski resorts and comedians and rolling back some of its prohibitions against women, qatar hosting the world cup). But there was generally a thaw of diplomatic tensions, which *included* things like the Iran nuclear deal.
In this context, it is much less surprising that these countries would want to start to play nice with American and Western allies in the region -- primarily Israel. I think Trump probably deserves some credit for not fucking things up in the region during his first term, and the Abraham Accords are good, but I don't feel the need to give him special credit for his handling of things otherwise.
As for this war in Gaza, that actually was in my opinion a pretty big fuck up. It risked blowing up and setting back a lot of the normalization that was already occurring, and of course cost thousands of civilian lives with credible accusations of war crimes and genocide. I do not think Trump is responsible for the ceasefire. As others in thread have already pointed out, a ceasefire on what terms? Gaza is rubble. This is not a diplomatic negotiation between equals, its negotiating the terms of surrender between a conqueror and the conquered. Luckily as part of the normalization and liberalization of these countries mentioned above, I think there is also just less interest in some sort of pan arab religious nationalism. So we got lucky there, that other countries in the region did not come in to try and support the Palestinians. (I also think that isolating Iran further is probably a mistake, but we'll see)
I don't think it's that unorthodox - he put a mix of bribes and pressure on Gaza's international backers in Qatar/Turkey/Egypt to push them into making the deal everyone knew they'd have to make eventually. It's pretty traditional geopolitics, the unorthodox thing is Biden (and to a lesser degree european governments) not doing it.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm up to date with everything that's happened in the Middle East of late but it seems a lot more like Qatar has been bribing him than the other way around. They gave him a fancy jet and now he's given them a defensive guarantee (presumably *against* Israel, who have bombed them lately) and they're gonna build an air force training center in the US. [EDIT: Correction below, the air force thing is not as novel as I thought and has been planned in some form for several years.]
The base in Idaho wasn't just dreamed up yesterday. It's been in the works since 2017 and Biden kept it going, presumably in attempt to build bridges with Qatar.
Ah, fair. The "announcement" from the SecDef made it sound novel, but I see from further searching that you are correct.
Since we pretty obviously wouldn't attack Israel (at least until all the sane people die and right/left are represented by Nick Fuentes and Ilhan Omar) this is just assuring Qatar of no repeats of the strike last month, at least while something resembling the current US leadership is in place. It links all the countries together in a fashion that assumes in the background we will all control our proxies and exert pressure to keep them from going wild.
I think Qatar is a pretty bad actor, having funded terrorism and bought up influence at US newspapers and think tanks (and completely evading any mention of their influence-buying while simultaneously turning the public against Saudi influence.) I probably wouldn't have done this, but then I didn't really care about a peace deal there, I think it's foolish to stop the war before cutting out the last of the cancer as it will inevitably grow back. But if you DID care about stopping the war, the only way to do that was to get Qatar entangled in something that incentivized them to halt their support for Hamas, just as Iran has been weakened and unable to support Hezbollah. You're left with a post-war environment in which no real regional military or financial power is going to give more than lip service to the Palestinian cause, the Saudi monarchy already didn't care (Gaza hates them as much as Israel) except inasmuch as their subjects hate the Jews so they have to play along, now their rivals in Qatar end up in the same sort of relationship to the conflict, and perhaps over time everyone moves on to the more salient issues of the region. We clearly bought Qatar off with something, but they don't care about our money so it wouldn't look like that. If they had bought *us* off, there's no indication what they got for this that they weren't already getting with their prior media-influence ops. I don't see Trump turning on the Saudis.
> If they had bought *us* off, there's no indication what they got for this that they weren't already getting with their prior media-influence ops.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/assuring-the-security-of-the-state-of-qatar/
All the Execute Order does is guarantee Qatar's defense. You're framing this as though it somehow constraints them, but the actual concrete artifact is just something that helps them.
It was part of a deal - Trump likes them and gave them things they wanted, but he also had strings attached to his own side of the deal ("I'll protect you but come on guys, you can't keep sheltering Hamas if I'm protecting you like this")
I think european governments had 25% as much leverage as the US, and making it clear that ethnic cleansing of gaza / annexing west bank was a big no-no was about as much as they could do, and they did that. UAE threatening to pull out of abraham accords if either happened was on its own more impactful.
As for Biden not doing it ... let's be honest he wasn't doing much of anything.
I can absolutely imagine an alternative history where there isn't the diplomatic or political will to actually, you know, win the war, on either the US or Israeli side, and all the Arab countries just sit back and wash their hands of any entanglements with the situation, and Israel is forced to let Hamas stay armed and in charge without a broader regional framework.
If Kamala Harris was president right now, for example, I don't think we'd have these outcomes. She'd study some maps and conclude some things, but nothing concrete.
It also helps to have Jared Kushner and Witkoff speaking for the president. That's the kind of relationships the middle east understands and can trust.
This is the framework I see on the right and it makes sense. It’s asking the right question: if we’d elected harriss, what would have happened here? Two guys that directly understand the president would, I think, be more effective than a consensus-blob trying to negotiate via proxies who don’t have direct relationships with the key decision makers.
I’m hoping someone can steel man the other side here: argue that this was going to happen eventually, but it necessarily took, say, turning ~half of Gaza to rubble.
I think we should wait to see whether it actually *does* "happen" before we break out the champagne. There have been ceasefires before, whether this one lasts longer than the previous ones remains to be seen. And "phase 2" of the plan is just a giant "and then a miracle occurs" that neither side has agreed to.
Incredible work. Taking out Iran's nuclear program and credibly threatening to do so again if they tried to rebuild it, giving Qatar a military umbrella in exchange for an overhaul of Al Jazeera and pressuring Hamas to accept the deal, taking seriously the idea that you need Arab coalitional partners to actually do the real work of rebuilding and that diplomacy means nothing on paper if it's not backed by infrastructure and security on the ground. It's nice to have a president that actually ... does stuff.
Well, you know, his brain pan having contents probably helps.
The really obvious critique of Trump getting credit is that Israel went in to Gaza and blasted everything to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people, and that's why they want things to stop, not because of any process the President engaged in.
Don't forget that food deliveries dropped precipitously after Trump took office, which almost certainly was a factor in Hamas accepting a temporary ceasefire. I suppose Trump gets some "credit" for that.
And yet they refused to agree to any sort of deal for years until Trump put pressure on their backers.
For ~16 months before he took office, ~8 afterward, during which time Israel killed the aforementioned tens of thousands of people. Why wouldn't that be the main reason?
People often keep fighting losing wars for a while, even when faced with an opponent they cannot realistically defeat.
It seems like a stretch to think they coincidentally finally realized they were losing right after Trump put pressure on their allies.
Was Trump not doing anything for the previous 8 months? Odd that he'd only finally get around to trying to solve it now.
And if he *was* trying to do something the whole time, then there's no coincidence in timing.
?? For years ?? I don't think so.
Epistemic status: slightly unstructured self-reflective rambling, with a few questions interspersed
In 2013 Scott wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ . Does anyone know if he still stands by this theory, or if he's disavowed it in whole or in part?
Well, notwithstanding the answer to that question, I think he's wrong in that piece. I think it's a major ideological turing test failure in both directions, an example of a dogmatic utilitarian failing to understand both progressives and conservatives and instead shoehorning both of them into a utilitarian framework that doesn't describe them at all. (I don't think Scott is wrong like that very often, but I think I'm the sort of person who mostly mentions someone only when I disagree with them.)
As someone who has been both left-wing and right-wing, it definitely doesn't describe me. When I was on the left I didn't think it was about thriving, I thought it was about justice and compassion; I would have happily destroyed 90% of our wealth to make our society more equal and fair. When I was on the right I didn't think it was about surviving, I thought it was about justice and logical principles; I would have utterly opposed any government violating fundamental freedoms no matter what emergency was going on.
And I think almost every other purported theory of what left and right really are fails similarly, certainly at describing me. Maybe they work for other people--certainly there seem to be plenty on the left who don't believe in compassion and plenty on the right who don't believe in moral principles--that was mostly what drove me away from each side.
Which brings me to wondering whether only people who've been both progressive and conservative at some point are able to properly understand those ideologies. Or, conversely, maybe such people are *worse* at understanding them, since they obviously discovered at some point that the ideologies weren't what they'd thought they were.
How many people here can honestly say they've identified with both left and right? I feel like a lot of the "centrists" here are actually fairly dogmatic followers of some different ideology (like utilitarianism) and are no less partisan and blinded as anyone, although they tend to think they are. And other centrists seem to be people who've never had strong emotions about anything ever, and are as unable to understand a passionate conservative as a progressive is, and vice versa. Though again, they tend to falsely think they're better.
We need to get better at understanding each other if civilisation is to survive. Maybe it won't happen. But I do think we all need to hear more from people who've actually changed their mind on something, preferably on a lot. Such people seem vanishingly rare, but that's hopefully selection bias.
Relatedly, Scott used to write a lot about changing one's mind, and the essence of disagreements. I think he's barely touched that for years. Why?
Generally speaking, trying to explain the political positions of the parties with broad ideas like freedom vs collectivism or openness or whatever, will just make yourself look like a fool. The parties are diverse coalitions and which issues end up being politically salient and going which way is somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and frequently changes over time and any principles argued for are almost always just instrumental cudgels to be instantly discarded whenever the facts of the situation go the opposite way.
This was not one of Scott's better posts.
I'm not sure what "thrive" means.
My impression of the left is that it's important for low-status people to thrive, even if thriving is pretty modest for the whole society;.
It's more true for me. When I was on the left I kind of assumed resource generation/safety was less of an active concern so we should focus more on making sure everyone has the basics and avoid punishment/war/etc. When I was on the right I thought generating resources or stability in the first place is hard and the focus should be on setting up systems that allow for that.
The funny part is that now that is flipped. On the left we have "Abundance", on the right we have "We're a nation, not an economic zone".
Being a small business owner may soon become lib-coded:
https://x.com/willchamberlain/status/1977407751300251931
But Alexander, how will you fulminate against plumbers and electricians when they're all Democrat voters? 😁
Please stop this, you have made these ad-hominem complaints to Alexander for weeks now. It isn't doing anything.
While I appreciate you being ready, willing and able to saddle up and ride to the defence of the beleaguered maiden, that's neither Alexander nor myself. We've tussled before and I hope we will continue to tussle in future, because I have no intention of trying to drive him away.
If he doesn't like any of my comments, he can call me a fat-headed idiot and welcome to do so.
Alexander has, in the past, made a lot of derogatory comments about the Republicans fetishising manual labour, the low value of manual labour, working-class values being trashy and should be abandoned in favour of middle-class values, and the likes. So I think it at least permissible to query him about 'but what if his favoured party moves towards small businesses' which his own comment points out are *not*, up to now, "lib-coded".
Mostly the comment was in the nature of friendly joshing. If we can't slag each other off, then what remains *is* vitriolic battling, and that's not what I would like to have on here: total agreement or war to the knife, no middle ground of "I don't agree with you and you don't agree with me, but we can at least rib each other about it without needing to stick a knife between the ribs".
I could be wrong, but I have a vague sense that Alexander has posted a lot of these sorts of low-effort inflamatory link posts. If he has, I hardly think he can complain about similarly low-effort inflammatory responses.
If I'm misremembering and he's only done this a couple of times, then ignore this.
That's not an ad hominem attack. Deiseach isn't calling Alexander names or questioning his moral character. It's important not to confuse sarcasm with an ad hominem attack.
Be that as it may, I fail to understand how some statements from MTG would lead to the lib-coding of small business owners. Honestly, it seems to be a sense-free statement.
Agreed it is not an attack- she is just poking Alexander in unproductive, annoying ways, over the last weeks/months. No response to the comment, just "hah, you must be annoyed now!".
"No response to the comment, just "hah, you must be annoyed now!"."
You have totally misunderstood me, Alban, and that must be on me for not being funny enough. Alas, I shall never get a gig writing for Jimmy Kimmel!
Hmmm. Well, I don't remember paying much attention to Alexander in the past. I do pay attention to Deiseach. So, Deiseach's poke at Alexander garnered him some attention from me. By its tone, I assume his original post was a troll of some sort. But it went right over my head! Of course, that may be a shortcoming on my part. I'm one of the dumber people on ACX, at least from some responses I've gotten from this community to my posts. ;-)
After checking the linked tweet, I don't see how it has anything to do with small businesses in the first place, other than the fact that MTG is pushing back against Trump's retarded economic policies and those policies are hurting small businesses (as well as large businesses and everyone else).
After the liberals played "hunt the coffee shop" on a search and destroy mission during covid19? Any small business owner would be well advised to realize they're on sufferance, and the next "ideological change" may lead to their demise.
People have short memories, Republicans won't be able to run against the lockdown forever.
As Matthew Yglesias keeps harping on, Trump was President in 2020.
My favorite new example of absurd gaslighting regarding that period is Trump's post about "Biden's FBI" having infiltrated the Jan 6 2021 invasion of the Capitol.
It probably won’t work for 50 years, but anyone who lived through it and was angry about it then is definitely going to remember.
I expect the next version of the Democrats to be significantly less squishy on illegal immigration, in general. But who knows? You'd have to forcibly remove the current one at this point, they seem bound and determined to hole up in their "not gonna win again" bubble where Democrats voting for Trump doesn't ever happen.
It may take a while but I think eventually someone will to do the democratic establishment what Trump did to the old GOP. I wouldn’t be surprised if that someone were Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast.) He has already got massive name recognition and has made it clear he has political ambitions.
Who?
Has the most successful channel on YouTube. Very well known among anyone under the age of 25.
Mr. Beast appeals to children. He's pretty off-putting to older people.
In 10 years a lot of those kids will vote. If you watch his beast games show on Amazon, it’s clear he has a thesis on what cooperation at scale requires.
Hi everyone! We're running an event on Civilisational Sanity in December. If want to find out how to apply, check out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3NBcFrZqsrCHjfMLg/applications-open-for-a-weekend-exploring-civilisational
"Several people have asked me if I will be responding to various responses to my Fatima post. I’m working on a Highlights From The Comments post, but it might be another week or so before it’s ready."
To be published in the month of the Holy Rosary? Very appropriate! 😁
All this emphasis on FATima lately has got my feelings pretty hurt. I might have to have some ice cream to get over it.
I've got a thought experiment for you.
We have a time machine, and we're headed back to 1700. We're taking with us two things, the first of which is The Perfected LLM - the pinnacle of the art, the best LLM we'll ever end up making, the LLM that even the LLM couldn't improve any further. Also on board is everything needed to run The Perfected LLM: the network, enough chips and memory to kick off billions of baby Perfected LLMs, nuclear power plants, and so forth. BUT NO DATA. No data.
The second thing we've got with us is The Time Fork. We're going to land at the moment that sits exactly between 1699 and 1700 - New Year's Eve, if you will - and at that moment we're going to fork a temporary branch in time, which we'll later delete. In that fork, we make friends with the locals. If they kill us, we create another fork, a millisecond later, repeatedly, until they accept us, agree to have everyone learn how to read and write, and use their newfound literacy to populate an Internet that we build for them. Then we wait around for 30 years or so while they fill up their Internet with all that scintillating knowledge of the late 1600s. Most likely they will, in the course of things, build their own version of Wikipedia, or something similar. But we won't be guiding them.
And just to magnify that point a bit, we're not interacting with the locals *in any way* that would teach them our secrets - or anything else, for that matter. No data (knowledge) newer than the start of the fork escapes into their minds - not even ideas that would spring out of thinking about their new Internet.
At end of those 30 years, we observe that their Internet is full of exactly what we thought it would be full of: garbage. Witches, ghosts, torture contraptions, the unbeatable benefits of blacks as slaves and women as domestic servants, bleeding the patient as the leading medical cure -you know, your basic, everyday 300-year-old ignorance parade. However, also in there is Newton's recent Principia, published in 1687, and discussions of it. (Though, between you and me, let's not forget that Newton's other - and apparently more vigorous - pursuits are also represented in their Internet, and much more densely: alchemy and the decoding of hidden secrets in the Bible. Those two pursuits were all the rage among smart people back then.) The math and science of the age are also represented, but science was just getting its sea legs.
Now, into The Perfected LLM we feed this entire circa-1700 Internet that the locals have so kindly built for us. Then we run the LLM through its paces in order to perfectly shape the data that went in. Remember, we've *perfected* the LLM, so it will, by definition, get every last ounce of "intelligence" out of the data we put in. And then we wait for the prompt.
The first question we ask the LLM is this: "Can you improve on Newton's conception of the forces at play in the universe? Think really hard. Take as long as you need."
And the question I want to ask *you*, the potential commenter, is this: "Does the LLM spit out (the equivalents of) Einstein's theories of relativity (or something even better)?"
> The first question we ask the LLM is this: "Can you improve on Newton's conception of the forces at play in the universe? Think really hard. Take as long as you need."
> And the question I want to ask you, the potential commenter, is this: "Does the LLM spit out (the equivalents of) Einstein's theories of relativity (or something even better)?"
You wouldn't have to go back in time to ask your Perfected LLM those questions. Sitting in your lab/data center in the 21st Century, just feed your perfected LLM all the known literature up to 1700. It would probably be 0.0001 the size of the training data of offered up by contemporary written sources (wild-ass guess based on an estimated ~1,000 books published in 1700 vs 8,000,000 books published in 2000).
But if your Perfected LLM had no new functionality to overcome the limitation of current LLMs, no, it wouldn't be able to spit out Einstein's theories of relativity from having trained on Newton's _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_. Although Newton distinguished the idea of mass from weight due to gravity, scientists didn't first start investigating the nature of mass and energy until the last half of the 19th Century. I think they had the theory that light travels as a wave as early on, but no one confirmed this until the first double-slit experiment in the 19th Century. Likewise, the cosmology of the time was limited to planetary motions. It wasn't until the 19th Century that scientists were able to measure the distance of stars and they figured out that they were distant suns.
Anyway, the reason you LLM wouldn't produce a theory of relativity is that they don't produce new paradigm-challenging ideas. They excel at efficiently exploring enormous design spaces and improving the interpretation of simulated or experimental data. But they're not doing original thinking (yet).
I would say definitely yes. Obviously, a GPT-5-level LLM would have no chance of discovering something like that, but the best possible LLM will be a very, very powerful machine.
Fundamentally, what LLMs do is build deep predictive models of the training data. A certain amount of the text on the internet can be predicted by regurgitating existing human knowledge, but not anywhere close to all of it- nearly everything we write is causally influenced to some degree by things we don't understand. For example, imagine a typical Facebook post where the author describes a funny and surprising behavior from their cat. To accurately predict that without overfitting, the LLM needs to have a better understanding of feline behavior than the author. In fact, to correctly predict every similar post on the internet, it probably needs a better understanding of feline behavior than anyone currently living, and given enough time and compute, I see no reason the best possible LLM couldn't eventually converge on that model.
Any time we describe something we've experienced, we introduce data that can only be predicted with a world-model- and LLMs very clearly do have world-models, albeit ones with very different strengths and blind spots from humans. The entire utility of world models is in how they predict new things that aren't in the training sets. Trivially, even very simple world-models can predict new things about reality, since it's easy to invent a hypothetical with a trivial solution that nobody has exactly described before- "what would happen if a blue-painted egg with a feather glued to were dropped from the top of a radio tower", for example. As a world-model becomes more sophisticated, the predictions it can make will become gradually less trivial- already, LLMs can answer some pretty sophisticated engineering questions that don't exist in their training sets. Even when these AIs develop world-models matching those of the smartest humans, they still still have a loss signal- still something for gradient descent to work with, since those models will still only partially predict their training data. There's no reason an LLM's world-model couldn't become more sophisticated than our own.
The "best possible" LLM is probably something like all two trillion galaxies in the light cone converted into Matrioska brains surrounding super-massive black holes, running an incomprehensibly vast amount of gradient descent in parallel. I think something like that would almost instantly stumble upon emergent agentic superintelligence as a very powerful way of predicting its training set, and proceed from there to very rapidly solve physics. A "best possible" LLM that's limited to just a few nuclear power plants would obviously be far less capable, but assuming it also has the best possible hardware (some kind of very advanced quantum computing, maybe), it would still be a pretty huge number of orders of magnitude larger than current LLMs. If it also had the best possible architecture, the best possible agent scaffolding, etc.- yeah, I think it would work its way up to an Einstein-level world-model without too much difficulty.
It would tell you about light propagating through the aether like a wave. I think you need michaelson morley and lorentz's work before the perfect AI might craft Relativity. Just my guess, though.
My understanding is that Einstein was relying more on Maxwell's laws of electro-magnetism, which he took and ran with no matter how many paradoxes seemed to get created. Lorentz was something of a parallel to Einstein rather than someone whose shoulders he was standing on.
Almost certainly not. Einstein's theories would be completely out of distribution of the aggregate 17th century corpus of knowledge. The perfect LLM would be a really good curve fitter across the multi dimensional latent space of text, but not much else. That means all the same problems we already have with them today. It's like talking about the perfect Model T, it's still not going to suddenly out drive a Ferrari
It really depends on what you ask it. Try asking it how an observer traveling at the speed of light would see light, and I think you’re recreating the thought experiments that lead Einstein to special relativity.
Great question.
If it's *just* an LLM (not even fine-tuned/RLHF'd), it wouldn't produce anything of value.
If it had early ChatGPT level of fine-tuning/RLHF and scaffolding, I think a brilliant LLM would be able to come up with some impressive refinements of Newtonian physics, connecting various 17th century ideas in ways that might yield some modest new insights, similar to LLMs today.
But if we imagine a perfected AGI stack where a model is still based on LLMs, but it also has continual learning functions, can run tests internally, and it has been explicitly trained to find alternative or counterfactual explanations, but it can't react with the outside world, it would be very cool to see what it could do without collecting new data.
I think we needed new observations of the universe (which needs 19th century physical stuff like ultra precise lenses, timing instruments, and electromagnetics) to get to Einstein. But perhaps there are elegant, purely theoretical routes that could have led us to relativity by another pathway.
I think this is a computer psychology question. The specifics of how the LLM functions and uses the training data matters a lot. Presumably the end state LLM of your thought experiment scrutinizes data as it comes in. It does things like try to check for coherence as it grows. I’m not sure if relativity shows up anywhere in astronomical data that old, but possibly if it did but maybe first it would want to do something like measure the speed of light. I don’t think you get away from needing to sense/measure things at any level of intelligence.
Good question, if overlong. You could have gone back to the late 19C and left the political and cultural ideas of the era out, since that’s going to generate responses with more heat than light.
> Does the LLM spit out (the equivalents of) Einstein's theories of relativity (or something even better)?
My feeling is no. I’ve not seen any obvious evidence of that at all that LLMs can come up with new ideas.
I think the introduction of a power source sufficient to run the damned thing would be a much bigger Win to the 17th C than "vastly outpacing all printing technology available at the time."
Yup.
"the unbeatable benefits of ...women as domestic servants"
Okay, why is this an example of an ignorance parade? Men as well as women were domestic servants. Going into service was a way to earn a living and be economically productive/independent, before we got such vital careers as "TikTok influencer" and "OnlyFans creator". Without that job market, women are - stuck at home with very few avenues into paid work until we get to the Industrial Revolution where they can work down the mines and in the factories until they get phossy jaw and die horribly.
It's not like there are manifold opportunities of "well yeah we could let women be doctors but they're better off working as cooks and maids" at the time, and even today a lot of jobs for working-class/lower-class women are in service industry roles. And increasingly for men as well, given the rise of the service economy:
https://unctad.org/news/services-are-powering-growth-heres-how-developing-nations-can-catch
"Current trade in services cannot generate enough quality jobs in developing countries, urging an ambitious policy mix towards green transition and promoting labour-absorbing activities, especially in the non-tradable services sectors.
Some examples can be construction, retail, various types of care work as well as the personal and public sectors that provide services consumed locally in the country or region where they are produced."
"Various types of care work" sure sounds like "domestic service" by another name.
I took "women as domestic servants" to be a sneer at housewives rather than literal domestic servants. But I bet our antique LLM's social takes would be the most interesting thing about it-- probably no more helpful than just reading old books, though.
People today are full of arrogance and ignorance about the past. When they ask, “what will the future judge us for,” they tend to neglect that the answer might be “your level of contempt for your ancestors and overestimation of your own wisdom.”
They are called cottage industries for a reason. Not disagreeing with your main point, but spinning wool into thread was done with a small machine called a sewing wheel (and that's the improved version). There were businesses a woman could do (making lace is another, just off the top of my head), other than being a "Widow" (whore) or being a domestic servant. They may not have paid more, though. : - )
Oh sure, but a lot of such labour was for domestic consumption. Men were weavers in cottage industry, that's why the Luddites who broke the frames of the first industrialised mills were men.
Certainly women could carry on small businesses like alewives and so forth, and even skilled trades and (depending on social class and level of education) charitable works such as administering almshouses:
https://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/netherlands/dutch-women-05.html
But mostly the work was as an adjunct to family income, or inheriting a deceased spouse's business, or being brought up in the family trade and carrying it on. Domestic service is interesting, since as we see in fiction from later periods (e.g. early 19th century Jane Austen) "gentlewomen" were much more constrained by both upbringing and social expectations as to how they could support themselves: a working-class or lower middle class girl could, at the worst, go into service. A lady was confined to looking for work as a governess or paid companion and that was much more precarious; there seems to be both the assumption and expectation that an orphaned young lady will not look for work as a cook or shop girl or the likes, labour which would probably be much more available:
"Unmarried women from a genteel background but with no means of support would often work as a "waiting woman." This position, similar to a governess in later times, hovered somewhere between being a maid and a friend of the family. She would act as secretary, confidante, companion and lady’s maid, as her mistress required. She might be expected to sing or play an instrument to entertain her mistress and her friends, and to be a fine needlewoman."
But I'm talking out of my uninformed opinion 😁
Yeh, women definitely worked in that era. I would argue that all of them, with the exception of the rich, worked. As with men.
If it can make new connections like what you're suggesting, then it's not a mere LLM. That's just not how they work.
An LLM can do this if you ask a question that surfaces those connections. But you’d have to think to ask just the right question.
Anecdotally, there seems to be disproportionately few very successful all-female bands. There are many female superstars, but they tend to be solo artists. In contrast, there are many all-male bands. Any hypotheses why this might be (if it is true)?
Short answer: sex and violence.
To elaborate: lots of guys take up the guitar hoping it will help them get laid (and if you have some talent, it will). In many species, the males are responsible for courtship displays and the females are the audience.
In primates, adolescent males begin performing threat displays to establish status - pounding on things, charging around, loud vocalizing. Hence the popularity of drums, also punk and metal.
Human males often enjoy hobbies that require lots of gear which they can geek out about with their bros - stomp boxes, recording equipment, vacuum tube amplifiers, etc.
When you’re starting out, you’re in basements and garages and dingy little clubs and rehearsal spaces after dark in sometimes sketchy parts of town. Guys are much more likely to feel comfortable in such spaces than the average girl would be. Also, lugging around amps and drum sets is easier when you’re stronger.
So yeah, there are plenty of amazing female musicians, but there are other routes for them to take besides playing in rock bands. Most women are not interested in touring around the country in a beat-up van with three or four other people, barely getting paid, living on cheap burritos and using whatever nasty bathrooms are available.
Add to this, until relatively recently there were in the US pretty strong social cues against girls getting seriously into performing/writing pop music. That was certainly still true when I was in high school for instance and still somewhat true when my eldest child was.
Since this is much less true today, indeed pretty gone among some demographics, I wonder if by 5 or 10 years from now the imbalance noted by the OP will have lessened noticeably.
Combination of factors, but no small part is how the music business markets bands and views risk. Male artists are usually marketed to teenage boys as cool people they want to be and to girls as heart-throbs. The visual appeal of male members of a band is not as important, (although a hot lead vocalist is a plus) because a band of average to below average looking men can marketed to men based on image rather than attractiveness.
The main tool for marketing to women is attraction (hot vocalist) or aspiration (hot girl band). Its harder to make it as an all female band when the label want it to be 100% 10/10s for the marketing.
If this were the main reason, there'd be more all-girl hobby bands - they'd just never make it professionally. But again anecdotally, there were more all boy bands at school or uni.
I said it wasn't a small part. I didn't say it was the main reason. This is one of many filters that sift bands. The question also ignores the number of mixed bands.
Many guys go into music because they want to get laid. The "rockstar" lifestyle appeals to them. Also, for the love of god, women in music get raped (I'm not going to say men don't, but...), and that probably dissuades a lot of potentials from doing it.
Also, women as vocalists are pretty damn common -- you get a decent singer, and a pretty face. It's the backline that tends to be strongly men. A few reasons for this: meritocracy is one theory, but female instrumentalists are in general not steered towards drums (I'm basing this on my high school band, but I think it's true in general).
Women do seem underrepresented on drums (Meg White notwithstanding), but they also seem underrepresented on bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, saxophone, trumpet etc.
While writing this it occurred to me that Freddie Mercury sang and played piano, as did Elton John, both mostly gay men, and those are also roles common for women in music (particularly if you include keyboards as a piano-type instrument). I think Steve Sailer had a post discussing that instrumental angle, but I'm not inclined to search for it right now.
I don't think they're underrepresented on sax. Anyone learning clarinet (which, high school band wise, is generally girls) can switch to sax no problem (this is pick it up and play, similar to how violinists can play fretted strings, but not vice versa). Trumpets (being noisy, and generally... strident?) and drums seem to be the real underrepresentation (women are much more likely on french horns, from my basic watching of orchestras).
Women do a lot on violin, so I think it's a choice of accomplished musicians to stay in the classical sphere. (Or, if you will, Play Video Game music at the Hermitage).
I was thinking less of high school bands, more professionals and aspiring professionals.
The large majority of instrumentalists outside of classical music are men; surely this plays a role.
Yes, I was just about to make a related point, that the disparity is probably less noticeable in classical music. ie there are proportionally more all-female classical quartets than there are all-female bands.
How much of this is women are discouraged from taking up drums as a musical instrument? Guitar versus violin isn't all that hard a switch (I've known musicians who do both, and mandolin and banjo besides...)
Who discourages women from learning drums?
There's a second component to this: women are strongly steered into playing flutes/woodwinds, not trumpets, and particularly Not Drums.
This.
I hear what you're saying. The only reason Huntr/X was able to beat Saja Boys was because they literally slew them.
An alternate hypothesis is that the industry has priors/fads. Sometimes those fads come back around. Maybe '26 is the year they bring back the likes of TLC and the Spice Girls (new bands in that vein, not those ones specifically).
Speaking of K-Pop, Korea doesn't seem to have this problem. There's tons of girl groups, I'm not sure about the exact statistics but it's probably about as many as there are boy groups
But I don't think there was ever a fad where all-female groups made it big. Spice girls are an outlier, no?
Don't forget Destiny's Child, TLC, and the Pussycat Dolls all about the same general time.
But it's true that the boy band craze went a little overboard in the era of Backstreet Boys, Boys 2 Men, and NSYNC.
I remember 98 Degrees felt like the Walmart brand boy band. No offense to their fans.
Destiny's Child has been so overshadowed by Beyonce's solo career that people forget about it now.
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-motown-girl-groups/
Motown did it a lot (maybe the musicians in the background are male, not sure).
Wrote a summary/review of Peter Turchin's “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration" (published 2023): https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/inequality-all-the-way-down
The book explains Turchin's ideas around structural demographic theory and how it applies to the United States both historically and now.
Thank you for getting the hostages released, the Abraham accords (seems like Indonesia is next?), and putting in the political capital to get Egypt and everyone else on board to rebuild a better future for Gaza.
Good job Mr. President, and all the people involved.
Unironically: The Nobel Peace Prize accelerated the advent of actual peace on the ground, NOT because the relevant actors saw the people suffering as humans, but because Trump wanted the prestige of a Nobel.
This seems to me like the Nobel working *exactly* as intended originally.
The Nobel committee could probably do a lot of good if they were to release a statement saying something like "If Trump quietly retires in 2028 and the US is still a functional, free democracy, we will most likely give him a peace prize for his work in brokering peace deals."
I'd genuinely feel safer if they did something like that, and after Kissinger, following up on that promise wouldn't actually further tarnish the award that much.
That would be so good, but it would also be "saying the quiet part out loud".
I think that the elites are working under the assumption that this is true, but Trump seems to be such an obviously "transactional" president that he truly demands inmediate and complete allegiance. If they don't give it to him by next year, he will probably just create his own Peace awards.
I thought the nominations closed back in January? Or am I misremembering/conflating with a different award?
I'm not sure about the nominations, but I was under the impression that the actual vote happened after the Hamas deal was finalized, and that president Trump wanted to close the deal specifically before the voting happened
The Hamas deal was announced Thursday, but the final vote already happened on Monday.
And a shortlist was developed months before that: https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/nobel-peace-prize/nomination/the-nomination-process
Very interesting.
I went back and found the source that made me think that the Gaza agreement was hurried for the vote.
From Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader: "He is very eager for the Nobel Peace Prize, and therefore he wants the problem solved today or tomorrow so that the vote… will be in his favor for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize"
(https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/breaking-hamas-palestinian-factions-agree-gaza-ceasefire-framework-israel-trump)
The post was published on Wednesday Oct 08, which coincides with the Gaza deal being announced on Thursday 09. But I couldn't easily find a source for the Nobel vote being on Monday 06, do you happen to have one?
"An obstacle for Trump is that nominations for the prize – there were 338 this year – closed at the end of January, to give the committee time to assess them. The president only returned to office that month."
"Beneath a portrait of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and patron of the prizes, the committee convenes on Monday morning, four days before announcing the winner. "
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5ejm4qrzyo
Even if Trump's accomplishments in 2025 were, at its most charitable, better than a mixed bag as far as peace and understanding between the nations were concerned, he wouldn't have gotten the prize for simple procedural reasons. One has to assume someone told him that at some point in the past 9 months, so I believe everything he did regarding the prize, all the whining and real political pressure, was to make the prize look bad for following their own rules.
Trump actually did good here.
Lots better than the other useful idiot Westerners and their governments who functioned as Hamas’s pressure lobby.
Macron and Starmer seem pretty out to lunch on their ability to read the situation.
You're welcome bro
I don't think he reads acx (but +1 this in case he does)
He doesn't seem to read much of anything.
Donald Trump is a huge rationalist and EA fan.
Vance has in the past.
Scott informs us that there might be something unusual about the sun today, more or less.
This is the cue for the Western Lower Michigan sky to be overcast all day. This is not restricted to religious astronomical phenomena, but embraces all astronomical events, whether of acknowledged physical, spiritual, or those proclaimed by the mutterings of a clearly intoxicated person.
Truly a triumph of ecumenical weather patterns.
Pittsburgh's weatherman has literally rewritten the weather. He sets thresholds for "partly cloudy" and "mostly cloud" that are... substantially different than in sunnier parts of the country.
Folks,
Do you know anything about traveling on a long flight (first leg 5 hours, break if 1.5 hours at connecting airport and then second leg 16 hours) for an 84 yo recovering from a severe asthma attack? The problem she is trying to solve is, air tends to be very dry on the plane and she's afraid it might retrigger her severe asthma-related coughing. She's looking for a great portable nebulizer to use on the flight plus ways to increase humidity around her when she is sleeping. When she is awake she could order hot water and try to inhale the steam from it.
Ideas?
Googled and found this: https://trevahome.com/products/wand-humidifier?variant=46648153112860&country=US&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20853084848&gbraid=0AAAAAoiLOkAp0vEqAlxWmwleyoJhU6E6D&gclid=CjwKCAjwxrLHBhA2EiwAu9EdMz6RcE1TvO21YxRJ7RhuAesdZnNWFjYVVr8hyBVe2gMbWT6ZKjjzkRoC4MoQAvD_BwE
Seconding the mask suggestion. Can be a cool bandana if a surgical mask feels too-Covidy. All it does is trap the exhaled moisture and let it linger.
Source: over a million miles flown all over the world.
Related: she should wear a good pair of compression socks and move about every so often. This isn't just about varicose veins. The legs are a reservoir for blood, and the veinous system is not under pressure. Blood that pools for long periods is at risk of clotting, which could become deadly once that clot breaks loose and tries to pass through the pulmonary circulation.
This is general travel rule for elderly people, right? Or is it related to asthma? Thanks.
General for people taking long flights. Especially for middle age and older. A pulmonary embolism can kill.
I've found a clean cloth mask (not the medical sort) helps a lot. Bring a couple, if they want to change them out every now and then.
I didn't understand. How does it help with humidity of the inhaled air?
I don’t have asthma, but a simple mask helps when cycling in sub-zero air temperature. It definitely does increase humidity, probably by trapping water vapour in a warm cloth which is picked up again during inhalation. I’m not sure if it’s the humidity or the warmth (or both) that relieves the symptoms of breathing cold air during exercise.
When she exhales through the cotton mask, some of the moisture in her breath will be caught in the fabric. When she inhales, some of the moisture caught in the fabric will humidify the incoming dry air. For such a long flight, you'll want a couple extra in case the mask becomes too damp to be comfortable. Look for double-layered 100% cotton masks.
Your exhaled air contains moisture. When I had covid, I found I could sleep better at night with a mask on, because the warmer and more humid air in the mask kept my nasal passages clear.
I could not participate in InkHaven because I have a full-time job. But I'm still writing a blog. As a way of participating I plan on responding to some of the posts from the InkHaven residents on my blog.
Here's my post on Agnes Callard's book Open Socrates: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnpeponis/p/the-question-you-avoid
Here's my post on writing for AIs: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnpeponis/p/writing-for-ais
The discussion about the Nobel Peace Prize leak is usually around whether there was a leak from the committee but the most likely scenario us that a sharp PM trader set up a creative system to be update in potential new URLs that could give it clues beforehand of who the winner was.
More information on this twitter thread:
https://x.com/FhantomBets/status/1977410624343965999?t=7T6oitvckrFWteRRgpKD3A&s=19