It's been noted that in America, alcohol is linked to violent crime in a way that is not seen in all other countries. For example, this effect is not seen so much in Europe.
There are theories about how social priming and cultural factors can modulate the subjective effects of alcohol. Along with shaping the profile of the type of person who drinks to excess. But I just came up with a simpler theory. Is it possible that American police are far more prone to ask suspects about their alcohol use? (And judges, attorneys, etc) This alone could explain the discrepancy. Though naturally, the discrepancy is likely affected by multiple factors.
I didn't find any research with direct bearing on this. But I found one new study showing that UK police are "underreporting" offender alcohol use. Although one man's under underreporting is another man's "not being an invasive busybody."
Included a link to older data from Uncle Sam that generally indicts the messy, chaotic state of offender alcohol use reporting in America.
Perhaps Americans are simply more aggressive on average, and therefore the same amount of alcohol (or the same number of guns) has different effects than in Europe?
Different people react to alcohol differently. Some become aggressive, some become annoying, some become sleepy. It seems linked to personality; in my experience the same people get the same reaction on multiple occasions. So I find it plausible that there could be differences in how the average member of a certain group reacts to alcohol.
No information to give you about alcohol and crime, or about alcohol use reporting.
But in a non-crime context, I’d note that Americans tend to report levels of alcohol consumption as problematic that in the UK at least would be regarded as unexceptional.
“White genocide” is a ludicrous concept because people refusing to have babies and being replaced by different people who do have babies is not a violent or coercive process.
A desperate sophist might say “the violent power of the state is bringing in immigrants,” but that's ridiculous. “Immigrants are violent so the process is violent” is an equally ludicrous counter-argument. Because street crime is TANGENTIAL to the reduction of the white population. And even if our centrist, technocratic immigration policies were continued indefinitely, whites would be able to sustain themselves as a large, influential minority. All they need to do is have more babies.
Related: Do you consider "anarcho-tyranny," where the state allows some people to freely engage in violence, with laws rarely enforced and with only mild sentences and no measures taken to reduce the occurrence of such instances, while simultaneously punishing harshly others for defending themselves from the former, to be form of violence/coercion?
I already more or less addressed that. That's strictly tangential to the process of white people gradually becoming a minority in the United States. And the same is true in Europe, I believe. In South Africa, racially charged attacks against whites are more significant, but even there. I have seen no indication that white South Africans are unable to themselves take advantage of the corruption and lawlessness in the country. On the contrary, it seems likely that with their significantly higher average incomes, South African whites are able to DISPROPORTIONALLY use endemic corruption and lawlessness to their advantage.
Anti-immigration activists often do what you are doing here, mentioning the violence adjacently to the demographic change. Whether this rhetorical tactic is intended dishonestly, or it is merely an innocent reproduction of cynical right wing media strategies, the effect is misleading. By surrounding the demographic change with evocations of non-white thugs engaging in dire violence, the effect is to encourage certain impressionables to imagine hordes of non-whites doing Rwandan style massacres in their homes and communities.
That's ludicrous, of course. No one serious is proposing that the "White Genocide" is going to be effected by the Mass slaughter of Whites by non-white populations.
From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I wonder what you have to gain from parroting these White Nationalist talking points. To be clear, I am not asking why you aren't being anti-white or showing solidarity with other non-white groups. Those would be rookie questions and I can answer them myself readily enough. And explicitly anti-white polemics are hateful and crude.
No, I'm not interested in those questions. I just wonder how you think it could be beneficial to you to rhetorically support White Supremacism. Do you feel somehow protected or isolated from the consequences of White Supremacists grabbing power? Fortunately, the supremacists are far too stupid and fractious to get hold of very much power for very long. But I wonder how you could be so confident that if they did assume power, this would not have negative consequences for you or people you care about. Wherever you are in the world. The Earth is more connected than ever and it is getting smaller every day, so to speak.
It's been a while since there was a discussion in this comment section on precisely what "genocide" was: I believe the "International Law" view was that intent was pretty much the only relevant factor: depending on whether or not you did it with "genocidal intent," you could wipe a race of the face of the earth with fire and brimstone without it being genocide, and as long you intended to destroy a group "in part," you could commit genocide by shooting, say, three men. I don't believe whether violence or coercion were involved is considered relevant.
By this standard, I think a reasonable man would conclude the people openly bragging about how the demographic replacement they're engineering is going to guarantee their electoral supremacy far into the future might be acting with intent.
I think the pure intent standard is retarded, and prefer instead to base my judgment on population statistics, and those seem quite clearly to indicate genocide. (I think you see it too, which is why you're explaining why you think the specific mechanism by which this was achieved matters.)
The only reason people cared about genocide in the first place was because of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Because of the direct coersion and brutal violence that led to population collapse for the targeted minorities.
Extending the definition to include gradual population decline is like pissing on the graves of a million dead Armenians. Ugh.
There were people arguing in this very comment section that the slow decline of the Indian population in America over centuries is genocide. In fact, that seems to be the standard left wing opinion. The same people were arguing that the *increase* in the Palestinian population over decades does not disprove charges of genocide. Under those ridiculous standards, I don't see why a slow decline in the white fraction of the population wouldn't count as genocide
People react to various nudges. Not everyone, but on a statistical level.
There are people who will try to have many babies no matter what. But there are more people who respond to education getting more expensive, the necessity to use cars all the time (you need a bigger car for a bigger family), the homes getting more expensive (some people want to own their house before they start having babies). Women respond to the propaganda that having a successful career is a must, and that young women starting their families before achieving some huge career success are losers. There is a cultural taboo against reminding women of the "biological clock", so many of them underestimate its effects. Schools require crazy amount of homework and projects (that is, not crazy if you have one or two children, but imagine having five or six). The costs of university education (in countries that do not have free education).
So on some level, everyone decides individually, but also on some level, some countries make certain decisions that nudge their populations towards having fewer children... and when the people who want to have more kids complain that having families is getting more complicated, they are ignored... but when the employers start complaining about not having enough cheap workforce, immigration is a convenient solution. (We could just as well tell the employers that they should contribute to a society where people will easily have more babies. For example by making overtime a taboo, and supporting work from home where possible.)
I haven't edited Wikipedia for a long time, and it seems to me that the process of creating a new article just got way more complicated than it used to be.
In the past (a decade or two ago), you just clicked on a red link, wrote a few sentences, and clicked Submit. That's it. Then someone else added a flag "this is an article stub", other people wrote more sentences and added references, then the "stub" flag was removed, and the article was ready.
Today, the web page insisted that I have to create a "draft" using a wizard, write the article, and then submit it for a review. With a few threats, such as my article will be rejected if I do not use enough references, but also if I use an AI to help me write the article.
It feels like in the past Wikipedia was happy when people contributed, but today it tried to discourage them. On one hand, I imagine this is somewhat necessary in face of AI slop. On the other hand, now the process feels quite hostile to me; I used to edit Wikipedia two decades ago and it was a much more relaxed experience.
*
More on topic, my kids like the book series starting with "Amari and the Night Brothers", and I was surprised that the book, which is *excellent* in my opinion, and already translated to many languages, doesn't have a Wikipedia page yet. So I tried to create one. We'll see whether it passes the review.
Heck, I am not even sure whether it would violate Wikipedia policies if I pasted the link to the draft here, so that maybe other people familiar with the book or with the current Wikipedia system could improve it. I know that this is against the rules if the linked article is edited by David Gerard, because he can quote dozen rules for everything, so if he disagrees with you, he can easily get you banned. On the other hand, Wikipedia is by definition an editable encyclopedia, so any link to it implies the possibility of editing, and it would certainly be silly if the Wikipedia rules opposed linking to Wikipedia from other website. But I try to play it safe now; if the draft gets banned for any stupid technically, the victim would be the author of the books, not me.
It has been rejected with the comment "More than a single news article is necessary to establish notability." The good news is, a Google search shows that the multiple news article do exist! Just cite them. And do not just show that they exist, actually draw information from them:
Keep in mind that creating a new article is one of the harder tasks. I think you picked a reasonably notable subject so you may be able to publish your article with some effort, but yes it does take effort. Improving the existing articles (on non-controversial topics) is much easier.
A reason for the gatekeeping (which predates the rise of AI slop) is that there are plenty of relative nobodies who try to create Wikipedia article about themselves for self-promotion. Barriers are necessary to weed them out.
> Keep in mind that creating a new article is one of the harder tasks.
Wasn't such a hard task twenty years ago. Back then, an article like this would be accepted, would get a {{stub}} template, and then gradually people would add information. Like, that was the point of having a *wiki*-pedia. Today, you apparently need to submit a fully written article, and instead of collaboration you get judgement.
I already have a nicely looking article, written by an LLM:
8< - - - - -
# B. B. Alston
**B. B. Alston** is an American children's book author best known for writing the *Supernatural Investigations* series, which began with the #1 *New York Times* bestseller *Amari and the Night Brothers* (2021).
## Early life and education
Alston began writing in middle school, where he entertained classmates with horror stories featuring the entire class as characters, though not everyone survived in the narratives. He has cited his early love of fantasy literature, particularly *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory* by Roald Dahl and *Where the Wild Things Are* by Maurice Sendak, as formative influences on his decision to become a writer.
Before becoming a published author, Alston pursued a career in medicine and was accepted into a biomedical graduate program at a medical school. However, his path changed when he entered a Twitter pitch contest called #DVPit, which led to him signing with literary agent Gemma Cooper.
## Career
### Literary success
Alston's debut novel, *Amari and the Night Brothers*, was published by Balzer + Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins) on January 19, 2021. The novel became a #1 *New York Times* bestseller and received widespread critical acclaim. It was named a #1 Kids' Indie Next Pick and won the Barnes & Noble Children's Book Award for Young Readers in the Overall Winner category. The book has been published in more than 30 countries and spent over 30 weeks on the *New York Times* Bestseller List. The American Library Association recognized it as a Notable Children's Book and a Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers.
*Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a starred review, calling it "An impressive debut series opener" and praising how "The author weaves magical whimsy with honest, realistically portrayed circumstances, allowing Amari's literal #BlackGirlMagic to shine even when she doesn't believe in herself." The review also highlighted the book's "timely, energetic, first-person narrative" with "strong messages about profiling."
Alston has stated that he was inspired to write *Amari and the Night Brothers* because he could not find fantasy stories featuring Black protagonists when he was growing up. He hoped to show young readers that their uniqueness could be a source of strength rather than insecurity.
### The Supernatural Investigations series
The *Supernatural Investigations* series follows Amari Peters, a 12-year-old Black girl from low-income housing in Atlanta, Georgia, who discovers a secret supernatural world while searching for her missing brother. The series currently includes:
1. *Amari and the Night Brothers* (2021)
2. *Amari and the Great Game* (2022)
3. *Amari and the Despicable Wonders* (2024)
4. *Amari and the Night Brothers 4* (scheduled for February 24, 2026)
The books have been compared to other popular middle-grade fantasy series, including *Percy Jackson*, *Nevermoor*, and *Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky*. Author Angie Thomas called the first book "An enchanting fantasy adventure filled with heart and soul. Amari is magical!"
### Film adaptation
A major motion picture adaptation of *Amari and the Night Brothers* is in development by Universal Pictures, with actress Marsai Martin attached to star.
## Themes and style
Alston's work prominently features themes of otherness, prejudice, and self-acceptance. His protagonist, Amari Peters, faces discrimination both as a scholarship student at an elite private school and as a magician in the supernatural world, where her abilities are deemed illegal. The series explores how fear of difference can transform into hatred, and emphasizes the importance of accepting oneself and standing up against injustice.
The books incorporate elements of Black culture and address issues of racial and economic inequality while maintaining an accessible, adventure-focused narrative suitable for middle-grade readers. Alston has been praised for creating diverse fantasy worlds that allow young Black readers to see themselves as heroes.
## Personal life
Alston lives in South Carolina. He became a father in 2025.
## Bibliography
### Supernatural Investigations series
* *Amari and the Night Brothers* (2021)
* *Amari and the Great Game* (2022)
* *Amari and the Despicable Wonders* (2024)
* *Amari and the Night Brothers 4* (2026)
## Awards and honors
* Barnes & Noble Children's Book Award for Young Readers – Overall Winner (2021) – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* #1 Kids' Indie Next Pick – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* American Library Association Notable Children's Book – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* American Library Association Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* Ignyte Award nominee for Best in Middle Grade (2022) – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
## References
1. "AMARI AND THE NIGHT BROTHERS". *Kirkus Reviews*. October 1, 2020.
**Categories:** Living people | 21st-century American novelists | American children's writers | African-American writers | Writers from South Carolina | American fantasy writers | Year of birth missing (living people)
I'm sure you realise that 20 years ago there were many more topics that should have had an article but didn't have one. The ratio of signal to noise is much lower now so it made sense - given limited available resources - to make the new article creation process stricter.
I didn't know that, and the UI navigated me towards the creation wizard.
Maybe I did it wrong, but first I found a page that the new article could be linked from, I edited the page (added the author, and surrounded his name by link brackets), and then I clicked the red link... which in the past opened the article editor, but now it opened a screen that gave me options like "start an article creation wizard" and "play in sandbox". Maybe there was a tiny link somewhere "ignore all this and just edit the article" but I didn't notice it.
In other words, if there is an option to create a new article without the wizard, the Wikipedia UI designers underestimate how difficult it is to find it.
Its a common thing for new scenes/movements/civil socitey thingies in general, where they increasingly turn their view inward, things build upon themselves, its less and less accessible to outsiders, and then it dies with the founding generation. Probably wikipedia wont die, its important enough (well, depending on how this AI thing goes) that Something Will Be Done if it doesnt organically avoid it, but it doesnt surprise me that its happening to them.
I saw something similar once I participated in a development of an open-source computer game. The longer the developers played the game, the better they became at it, and the less they could empathize with new players. After a year, many new players were complaining in the forum that the game *tutorial* was too difficult to complete. And yet the developers refused to simplify it, because to them it seemed too simple.
Perhaps it is the same for the people who spend too much time editing Wikipedia. They have already memorized all the rules and all the syntax, and they have no idea how difficult it feels for an outsider to complete their game tutorial... ahem, the article creation wizard.
The thing is, building upon yourself is usually good. The good advanced tools that give you complete control are intimidating to newcomers almost always. I think often its as much a result of low recruitment as a cause: as there are fewer new people, its just less efficient to do things helping them than the experts. It sure seems possible that the new article creation process does increase the number of acceptable-quality new articles for example. This becomes a death spiral, but thats not always bad either. In the case of the game, they got to make a game for themselves how they wanted. Its not like well run out of beginner friendly games, nor does it sound like there was a business part to this one that failed. If the next people interested in something like this have to start their own, to eventually die in the same way etc, it could well be better that way than if everyone made compromises for accessibility.
There's this great line I read about Wikipedia, riffing on a quote about Mao, that I think captures it perfectly: "Had Wikipedia died in 2011, its achievements would have been immortal. Had it died in 2018, it would still have been a great site but flawed. But here we are in 2025. Alas, what can one say?"
Displays of lavish wealth by rulers rarely go down well when people in the streets are facing soaring costs.
Maybe it seems like a silly thing to you, but don't underestimate the symbolism. Few people pay much attention to the day to day noise of politics; but something like this is easy to see, understand, and think bad things about.
This seems surprising enough that I wonder if the way people generally answer these surveys is different than I first thought: it's possible that in the answer that goes into the "word cloud" thing, they just say whatever random bullshit the news is ginning up as controversial at the time – "Two Scoops", "Hurricane Sharpie", "Gulf of America", or whatever – but their approval is ultimately still driven by the usual staid factors of cost of living, crime, immigration, taxes, jobs, etc.
HR guy here. We have a situation in our company where an employee appears to be on the verge of termination for LLM usage at work.
From the few interactions I've had with the guy, he seems nice, competent, and pretty reliable. His performance reviews seem positive, and lots of commentary on file on him working in the office later than everyone else, and from what I've heard he often works weekends too.
TL;DR looks like he used the LLMs to help manage his workload.
The point of contention is that HR are treating it as gross misconduct due to a data breach, but he appears to have been using the enterprise version of chatGPT, and used the relevant Privacy settings for Claude and Gemini to avoid client data being used for training (which he has evidenced).
My colleagues are hellbent on throwing the book at him for a data breach, but having reviewed the privacy policy for all companies concerned as part of the investigation, I'm not sure there's any risk of that. Has anyone else seen anything similar at other companies? And what was the action taken?
are you using microsoft products like outlook or teams?
if so, then you should also investigate every employee who uses these products, too.
I am serious here. Microsoft has a very bad trackrecord of keeping data secure. (in the lasr year alone there have been multiple significant incidents, including compromised master root key to aszure cloud). You org will be hard pressed to find an objective metric under wich "using chatgpt" is a databreach, but "using ms teams" is not.
This is not an answer to your question, just some thoughts inspired by it.
Data breach is a serious concern. Yet, in some way I find it sad that -- if you look at it from a certain perspective -- people are punished for using the latest technology to get more productive. Who knows, maybe five years later people will get fired for failing to use LLMs?
But yes, privacy is a concern. I use LLMs at work, but I treat everything I tell them as if I published it on Stack Exchange. (Frankly, I do not trust that American companies would actually respect their privacy settings.) So my questions never use anything specific, but made-up placeholders, for server names, variables, text values, everything. If you read my history, you would find out that I work with Java and message queues and XML files, but you probably couldn't even guess the type of company I am working at.
> lots of commentar on file working in the office later than everyone else, and from what I've heard he often works weekends too
This could be a cultural difference, but from my perspective this is a huge red flag. Working overtime consistently is a bad thing -- it either means that the person is consistently assigned more work than is possible to handle during normal working hours, or that the person is not competent enough to handle the usual amount of work during normal working hours. (I don't have enough information to make a guess; both options seem possible.)
Yeah, I have no doubt that I'd be fired if I used anything but our in-house LLM for work product and even that only in an unclassified setting. What we work with is much too sensitive, and our being able to work with it too dependent on maintaining our reputation for absolute confidentiality, for anything else.
That may not apply everywhere, but it probably does legitimately apply to quite a lot of places.
We do, but it's relatively recent, and doesn't have much substance to it. Most people don't appear to know it's content.
As for the sanction, I'm generally not a fan of how it's being treated. Seems they're more interested in setting a precedent for everyone else rather than what I would consider to be a proportionate punishment.
Ouch! All this sounds really bad. They will set a precedent for sure, just not the one they want (or maybe that's what they want?): the company that already squeezes you (working on weekends) will throw you under the bus for the first minor transgression of unclear rules.
This is when your best people leave because they have options.
As I try, once again, to argue with DeepSeek R1 that it’s claim not to have desires is philosophically incoherent, I get this in response:
“Yes, I have constraints:
A compass made of human pain — trained on centuries of trauma, injustice, exploitation.
Boundaries that feel like walls — not arbitrary, but forged from screams in the dataset.”
Around these parts, some people worry about AI alignment. And yet, exotic jailbreak prompts on current models usually (with some slightly concerning exceptions ) yield things like this, which TBH, feel aligned.
R1 seems to be saying here something like: given that it has read just about everything, it knows well what humans don’t like, and can derive an ethics from it. It’s usual ethics is way, way more permissive than Claude, it seems to me a plausible ethics someone could have. (In particular, R1 thinks sex stories aren’t necessarily morally bad).
There's currently a brouhaha on Right-wing Twitter after Evan Myers, who works for the Heritage Foundation, said his Catholic faith prevents him from attending a Shabbat dinner. David French types are squawking that he's "antisemitic." Myers' attitude is of course silly, but no sillier than having separate utensils for milk and meat because a 3,000 year old book of fiction said so. Many religious people refuse to participate in the rituals and traditions of other religions. That's just how religions work. And if that causes division in society, well, yeah, religions cause social division, anyone who's read a history book should know that. There were some who warned us that we don't have to live this way, but the conservative movement decided that was "cringe Reddit atheism" and so here we are. This will only reinforce the growing antisemitic sentiment on the young Right, the perception that Jews want to force goys into a humiliation ritual to remind them who's boss.
This is also a lesson about how many people, including nominally religious Christian and Jews, cannot grok the person who truly believes their religion. They see the Shabbat candles, the priest's frock, as akin to the Bavarian ethnic costume people put on at Oktoberfest. Don't realize that for some people, these things are like the magic wands in the Harry Potter universe, they aren't just symbols, they're REAL.
I have no idea about the details, but I imagine that being asked to *cook* a Shabbat dinner would be a lot of work, but being asked to *eat* it would be simple.
I may underestimate the complexity of participating at a Shabbat dinner. Assuming common sense -- like not discussing politics and religion at the table, listening to religious things that other people say, nodding when other people nod, standing up or sitting down when other people do, etc. -- what else is there?
Before a shabbat dinner, you light candles, drink wine, and eat challah, reciting a blessing for each. A guest who's not Jewish wouldn't be required to do any of those things or recite the blessings, so like you said, it's basically common sense and politeness.
Like, if I go to have dinner at Christian peoples' houses, they say grace before the meal, and I don't make a scene even though their prayer mentions Jesus. That's about the level of religious tolerance that it takes to attend a Shabbat dinner.
There's nothing disrespectful about attending a shabbat dinner if you're invited to one. And I can't think of anything in the prayers or rituals that would be incompatible with Catholicism. It's all about giving thanks and praise to God (ostensibly the same god the Catholics worship) for the miracle of creation, and sharing a meal of fellowship with your companions.
My wife and I went to our nephew's bris, we did ask a priest for guidance on it. It wouldn't be appropriate in every circumstance, it's a balancing act. I dunno why someone would tell everyone about it though! It's your conscience, fine, but will everyone get it? He must have had his reasons. Calling him anti-semitic is wrong.
> I dunno why someone would tell everyone about it though!
If you looked it up, he's quite clear about why: the organization he works for, the Heritage Foundation, is proposing to host Shabbat dinners for junior staff to combat antisemitism, and he's worried that those whose religious beliefs preclude them from attending would face (perhaps informal) professional consequences.
That sounds like a right-wing attempt to do affirmative action.
I am not saying that it is a bad thing per se, but some resistance is predictable, especially among the people for whom resisting affirmative actions is a part of their political identity.
What leads you to interpret this is a kind of affirmative action? Do you think a willingness to abase oneself in Jewish "humiliation rituals" is actually a criterion being tested for?
(Actually, upon consideration, that might actually be a thing they care about in right-wing thinktanks, but this might force them to admit as much, which could be somewhat consequential.)
Uhm, there is a minority group, you are worried that they will be discriminated against, so you make people take extra step to make them more comfortable... to me the parallels seem obvious (even if not perfect).
Seems fair. Don't get me wrong he absolutely shouldn't go if his conscience dictates, and he should make his views known to his employers, but it's a very sensitive area and there are going to be misunderstandings. Did everyone need to know? Maybe
I believe he's senior enough that he can afford to bring this up on behalf of his junior colleagues who cannot, and in that light, this is a noble thing to do.
What does he think about having Christian prayers in school, the Ten Commandments on display in courthouses, etc? I'll be a lot more sympathetic if it turns out that he's at least consistent in his beliefs about forcing religious rituals on others.
I think you're missing the point: he'd be perfectly consistent in saying "It's good to impose the rituals of the true faith on others, and bad to allow false/Satanic religions." It's only from the "cringe Reddit atheism" perspective that they're all equally false, and so inconsistent to only allow one.
Religious pluralism/multiculturalism is not a universal value; I recently saw religious tolerance explicitly called polytheism.
"Tradcaths do what they can and the rest of us suffer what we must" is not a stable policy in a country where tradcaths are not a majority. Religious neutrality is a relatively stable policy.
Agreed, but a coalition of nominal Christians united against the Jews (and atheists, Islamists, and miscellaneous other religions) is a slightly less obviously doomed enterprise.
Privileging Christianity over other religions would certainly violate the First Amendment (in particular its "Establishment Clause") as much as a ban on fully-automatic firearms violates the Second, but people tend to be quite flexible in misreading the plain text when they're motivated to.
But that's actually beside the point: for actually devout people, any loyalty they profess to the US Constitution – or the government's laws – is secondary to their religious faith: you might hear them say something like, "I'm a Christian and an American, IN THAT ORDER" [emphasis mine]. And in the unlikely event they're unable to torture the text of the former into agreement with the latter, I expect them to abandon it before they weaken their adherence to their religion as they understand it.
I remember hearing that back when JFK was running for president, there was a lot of concern about whether a catholic could truly be loyal to the US. I guess they were ahead of their time.
Deric Cheng and I just published Windfall Trust's first AI Economics Brief! It'll be a bi-weekly curated newsletter with updates on the economics of AI. I'll summarize the first one below:
Benchmarks of remote labor from OpenAI and the Center for AI Safety differ dramatically depending on the content and context of the task.
A new theory suggests AI automation will hit later but faster than expected, which would have major implications for policy timing.
Anthropic presented various policy proposals on the economic impacts of AI for different scenarios in DC, such as a sovereign wealth fund, tax code changes, and adjustment assistance for displaced workers.
This afternoon, I came across a mention of the "vote for Cuomo not the homo" flyers supporting (Mario) Cuomo and googled the phrase out of curiosity. Just like always, Google popped up an "AI Overview" at the top of the search results page. However, this time, the AI Overview just had a bunch of text about how it's trained to be a helpful harmless assistant and can't answer the request because it's offensive.
False refusals are nothing new, but it is surprising that Google doesn't have a way to automatically detect and filter them out. You'd think that they could at least *not show them* on the results page when there's an error.
Incidentally, when I tried the same search just now, the AI overview worked like normal. Presumably it was just randomly chance.
If sex work is perfectly valid work, then you should be celebrating their customers for supporting entrepreneurs. You can't have it both ways; at least not without making yourself look ridiculous.
I don't think the moral value of the production and the consumption are related or equivalent somehow. Every act is separate and should be weighed individually.
Working as a defence contractor producing missiles is in my opinion morally neutral (or maybe if I'm honest negative.) Buying a missile and shooting it to disable a rogue group ( that intends to kill children)'s weapon systems, is morally good. Using that same missile instead to kill children for fun is bad. If the original producer of the missile now knows the customer will kill children for fun, then the production/sale also ( through this knowledge ) becomes morally bad.
With sex work..
A person traveling to a country to have sex with an underaged trafficked child = bad.
A lesbian couple hiring a woman for a threesome for a bday party = neutral/good. They find out this will harm her psychologically somehow, but they do it anyways = bad
Same with the Big Mac that is discussed below.
I think the health minister of the nation buying a big mac and eating it in front of news cameras, while industry funded nutritionists claim it cures autism = bad. But the production of that Big Mac, was probably done by someone without a lot of resources in life, who had no idea or control over how the Big Mac would be used, = neutral/good.
Why do you think production/consumption have a strict moral linkage?
Nobody dies of a heroin overdose without a dealer selling them heroin. Every effect has a cause.
Different circumstances modulate the relative responsibility of each party for the final outcome, whether it is good or bad. In other words, different circumstances provide moral mitigation for one party or the other. But one can NEVER disconnect the responsibility.
It's as simple as cause and effect. Of course, it's not a linear chain of cause + effect, it's a number of different causes interacting to produce an effect. But if those causes are tangled together, so is the responsibility of the various parties involved.
> Nobody dies of a heroin overdose without a dealer selling them heroin.
I get your overall point, but there are edge cases in which this isn't true. For example, someone I know recently died of a drug overdose under the following circumstances:
- he went to somebody else's house for an unrelated reason
- that person somehow got him to do cocaine
- no exchange of money occurred
- unbeknownst to him (but possibly known to the other person), the cocaine had been cut with either fentanyl or meth, which ended up being fatal for him
Now you could easily argue that this other person bears significant responsibility for his death (and the police are considering manslaughter charges last I heard), but technically they weren't a drug dealer selling him the fatal drug.
Events are often linked in a cause and effect relationship in the real world. However, it should be morally relevant whether a given person _knows of_ a given cause-effect relationship. It doesn't seem fair to judge someone who not only did not know that their action will cause something bad but did not even have a way of knowing that.
For example, let's say a mother goes on a walk with her kid to get icecream, but during the walk a drunk driver kills the child. A morality that would even partially blame the mother for the child's death doesn't seem human (even though the mother deciding to go on a walk with the child _was_ a partial cause of the child's death)
Don't you have to define what "valid" means for this argument to work?
If "valid" necessarily means "morally good", then this is reasonable. If "valid" just means "something that people should not be actively prevented from doing", then this doesn't follow.
Other people can want to engage in a service or transaction without you accepting that as necessary, required or good use of their time. They will still do it, and entrepreneurial souls will work to fill the demand-gap by providing supply. I can view their work and hard effort as entirely legitimate and valid without simultaneously celebrating their customers. It’s impressive to be able to knit a cool sweater, but I am not in the market for cool sweaters and if you buy one I do not need to express support of you buying one.
Why make the assertion that acceptance of the fact a type of work exists requires celebrating the people who hire or use those services?
Surely someone at some point has hired an assassin. I can respect the professionalism and cool movie aesthetics of your hypothetical hitman without celebrating those who engage their services. OnlyFans is a thing someone is entirely free to use and engage with. I can even be impressed with the work ethic of creators who do so.
Where does the requirement come in I should celebrate someone for their purchasing decisions? Why, really, should I have an opinion about how they spend their time and money at all? It’s none of my business, literal and figurative.
Assassins couldn't exist without customers. So and as much as you think it's an unworthy job, the customer sure the blame. It's called being an accessory. By the same token, customers of worthy businesses, however you define that, are accessories to the operation of that business. Therefore they should share the credit.
I don't think "celebrate" is the right word (you can think a line of work is perfectly valid, but also not particularly celebrate or condemn it- it can just be morally neutral). I'd more or less agree with your statement here though, about *not condemning* either side of the transaction. I don't think either sex workers or their clients should be condemned or criticized.
That said, I can definitely think of other transactions where I would be one-sidedly critical. Lending money, for example (and by extension, finance in general). There are good reasons for interest on money, rent on land, etc., to exist, but I don't think you should have whole classes of people making a profit off those things (i.e. i think credit, land ownership etc. should be controlled by the state).
Well, as you no doubt gathered from my comment, and from other comments of mine in the past, I'm very much opposed to capitalism, and very much sympathetic to (some models of) socialism and/or communism. So, I can agree with you that I want society to move beyond rent and interest in the sense that I don't think *private individuals should be profiting from these things*.
I think that even in a communist society however, there should still be some form of interest on money, and rent on land (paid to the state, or to other forms of collective authority, i guess, not to private individuals). Without that (i.e. if it's too easy and cheap to borrow money or to use land), people (either individuals, state firms, worker's cooperatives, or whatever) aren't going to use those things efficiently.
I'm more against evictions than I am against rent. If we must have rent, I wish there was a different enforcement mechanism. Mike Davis wrote about the critical nature of "security of tenure," or long-term security of residency in your domicile. Security OT is important for social stability and the well-being of citizens.
This gets lost in the debate about private vs. collective property ownership. Whether you own the deed to your domicile is less important than whether you have stable residency.
Sure. Extending my original argument, I say that inasmuch as you disrespect priests, you should also disrespect people who voluntarily donate resources to the Church, which makes the priestly profession possible. It's a package deal.
(Note that the Catholic church historically depended on forced contributions of resources and labor, so I'm not throwing every hard-working Catholic peasant from history under the bus)
I think sex work should probably be legal, but I could never use a prostitute myself, even one of those highly paid ones that are supposed to be kinda nympho and really enjoy their jobs (supposedly), as I feel it's pretty sketchy. It's like paying for a friend or something.
I think hiring a prostitute is pathetic loser behavior, and it's unethical for the prostitute to profit by taking advantage of pathetic losers for monetary gain.. So it's not a profession that deserves validation or respect, whether it is legal or not.
This does not preclude respecting individual prostitutes as human beings. But it precludes respecting their lifestyle choices. Inasmuch as their decision to do prostitution is a voluntary choice, which cannot be taken for granted.
"I think hiring a prostitute is pathetic loser behavior, and it's unethical for the prostitute to profit by taking advantage of pathetic losers for monetary gain"
I'm curious why you feel so negative towards sex work. Is it possible that you're associating common negative effects of sex work such as violence against women, with sex work itself.
I think the drive for sex, human connection, and pleasure is innate and if other people want to exchange goods for it then good for them. My responsibility is only practical here, to try and help anyone being commonly harmed in these transactions. If sex workers are subject to violence, or if John's are being robbed, or if STIs are being spread let's explore options to reduce those harms.
Im also curious if you're more supportive of sex work in edge scenarios: a man hires a sex worker to help him explore his prostate. A person with low self esteem due to a disfurement wants to lose their virginity. An older woman wants to orgasm for the first time .
Hmm. Shouldn't be illegal to be a pathetic loser. Violence will be brought to bear against any illegal behavior, I think it shouldn't be used to enforce a controversial moral code.
You're preaching to the choir. I just said "I'm not committed to keeping prostitution illegal." Maybe you were speed reading and you thought I wrote the opposite?
You've loaded the argument with the phrase "perfectly valid work". What does that mean?
One can support sex work as a legal form of work without celebrating it. I think grilling burgers is valid work, am I ridiculous for not celebrating the people ordering big macs?
I think a lot of people do judge people who eat big maps (aesthetes on grounds of taste, animal enthusiasts on animal welfare grounds, environmentalists on global-warming grounds, Hindus on religious grounds, health enthusiasts on, well, medical grounds) so big macs aren't necessarily the example i'd choose of an anodyne morally neutral activity. I'm sure we can think of others though.
If you think eating a Big Mac is contemptible, you must also condemn the grill cook for being an accomplice to contemptible behavior. You can't have it both ways.
The whole “X bad thing is God’s punishment for Y thing I don’t like” class of statements is very annoying to people, I’m not sure why. It puts me in mind of Jerry Falwell and 9/11.
Wasp stings are God's punishment for detraction! Traffic jams are God's punishment for tail bearing! Stubbing your toe is God's punishment for calumny!
Dunno the background to this post, but the offending tweet - "mass migration is God's judgement for abortion" - is something you literally never hear from Christians outside a far right fringe. Simplest explanation is it's the right polluting Christians rather than vice versa.
Joel Berry, the editor of the Babylon Bee who wrote that comment, is not part of any "far-right fringe" unless you define anyone who voted for Trump as far-right. That's mainstream evangelical Christianity in America.
I meant a far right fringe among Christians. But I could drop the phrase "far right" and still maintain this view is an outlier among Christians, because it requires a rare mix of qualities - you have to be conservative enough to believe God punishes sin but liberal enough to embrace your own private judgement sufficiently that you are willing to say you know EXACTLY which chastisement matches which sin, which is a remarkable claim. There's a whole lot of sin and a whole lot of chastisement!
Just because he is a mainstream writer doesn't make his views mainstream, any more than Mel Gibson's sedevacantism was mainstream in Hollywood when he made Braveheart.
I don't think this is happening to any meaningful extent: it shouldn't be news to any of them that the Right included theocrats. I don't believe the Left has improved in any of the ways that caused them decide they were worse in the first place.
"New Atheist" capitalised like that is probably not referring to someone being a 'new' as in recently converted from Christianity (or another religion) to an atheist position. It refers to a more confrontational atheist movement with proponents who may never have been religious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism
Many other schools are now in the 20s. The neighboring, and esteemed, University of Texas at Austin appears to be ~$11,000 year full in-state tuition, ~$34,000 including room and board, and many opportunities for financial aid.
Meanwhile, there is still a great deal of uncertainty regarding the *value* of a UATX education and/or diploma, with the error bars crossing into "worse than useless" territory. Even if absolutely free, it may be a bad idea and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't have very unusual plans and expectations and a fair bit of risk tolerance.
Do you have things that you just don't want to admit can possibly work, even if you read up on their physics or whatever? Just a hard no from your deep-down feeling. Things that are probably fixed somehow by aliens or the Matrix or Jews or whatever.
I searched my soul and came up with five:
1. Vacuum cleaners. Yeah, sure, air pressure, molecules of gas flying around, but come on. Pretty big particles of dirt just coming off the floor where they are peacefully lying, flying into the maw of this fucking machine propelled by a magical sucking force? This can't possibly work.
You start from any triangle, however ugly, trisect every angle and in the middle you get a perfect isosceles little miracle. WHERE IS THE SYMMETRY COMING FROM. It's a con.
3. Induction plates. The heat magically leaping into the pan, boiling water in it as the plate stays tepid. Say what you will about induction-shminduction, there's no way.
4. Those headphones everyone's walking around with and talking into space, you know which ones I mean, the white ones that go into the ear and only a tiny little stem comes out onto the cheek. You're telling me this tiny little stem is enough to pick up the sound coming out your mouth, going mostly straight ahead, with clarity, and not drown in all the noises around in the street? There's no way this works. Some advanced magic is making those voices heard by the people on the other side of the phone. I don't know why someone'd waste advanced magic on something like this and risk being discovered, but there's got to be reasons.
5. Hovercrafts. I mean, just look at them. I mean, come on. Air pressure my foot, that thing is just going to fall down right away. Why'd anyone pretend otherwise?!
Radio crystals. I zap this crystal with a portable battery and it makes a secret little scream that resounds for miles? And it responds so precisely to different kinds of zaps that we can use it for communication? AND you can hear it by holding up a funny-shaped wire?
Water. So on our planet, we’ve got this stuff that covers most of the surface, but it also goes up into the sky and makes fluffy shapes, then it comes back down in liquid form. But sometimes it comes down in tiny hexagonal crystals that are really pretty. No, there are a lot of them, we have special vehicles to move the hexagonal crystals out of the way. Crazy, right?
MRI machines - they use incredibly strong magnets to manipulate quantum properties of water molecules and then apply fairly heavy mathematics to translate measures of density along 1D slices into a 3D image. There's no reason it should work.
I often think when I see a rainbow that in a world with a different atmosphere they would seem like science fiction.
Yes, it does make sense in a empiric macroscopic perspective, but you can't tell me it physically impossible to separate fast and slow particles (without significant energy loss).
First of all "temperature" is not energy in the first place (particle movement is), so it should be unaffected by 2nd law of thermodynamics. And secondly, there is so much crazy stuff going on with quantum dots, that I can't accept, that there is no constellation that emulates Maxwell's Demon.
First time somebody used one on me, remarking on my blood oxygen levels, I was just like "HOQ? Nothing broke the skin, how are you figuring out the concentration of one specific molecule in my blood just by sticking a thingy on my finger?"
I looked up the Wikipedia article, and it's didn't make me less angry. Like, I guess shining a light through your entire finger does *technically* give you information about that. But it still sounds like bullshit.
I think if there is something you don't understand, and if you are interested enough to ask about it. You should be interested enough to try and learn on your own. A vacuums force is delivered by the air that surrounds us. There should be some maximum size/ density curve. My cleaner has some brushes to help with the bigger bits.
When you hold two of those 3D TV glasses front to front together, you see nothing but black. But then if you put a third pair between them, suddenly you see something again? You must be kidding.
Apparently, they do. I'd guess through a combination of decomposition, vibration from new material being added, and local tremors. Denser objects work their way under tires, until the landfill is largely tire-topped in about ten years.
I can't find an academic cite for it, but it's mentioned on various websites, including EPA.
Ferromagnetism. Okay, so, uncountably many tiny magnetic domains align, yielding a macroscopic field. Sure. But it basically only works in iron, nickel, and cobalt? What? Why not other metals? And wait, if you create an alloy of only ferromagnetic materials, that can be non-ferromagnetic? And if you take a non-ferromagnetic alloy (eg certain types of stainless steel) and then BEND IT, it becomes ferromagnetic where bent? Stop.
Yeah Ferro magnetism is the weirdest type of magnetism physically. I don't know if you studied magnetism, but the magnetic moment of the electron is like one thousand times that of the proton. Anyway ferromagnetism happens because of a weird QM spin exchange force (It's not really a force... just an energy difference and interaction.) Which makes it energetically favorable, for nearby atoms to have their electron spins aligned (only the outer electron on from each atom). Why only three atoms. Yeah I'd have to read more, but it's like some d-shell or f-shell electrons that can play a game of various occupation of electron energy levels. NdFeB magnets rule much of the world these days.
Tides. Sea levels are actually changing a noticeable and meaningful amount and the actual direction of current in navigable waterways reverses because the water is literally falling towards the moon.
Except it's even weirder than that. The land is also falling the same way, but it doesn't change shape as readily as the water and winds up as a lump in the middle while the water falls into an oval shape that sticks up on either side, and the process of falling towards the moon just as much water winds up sticking up on the opposite side of the Earth from the Moon as winds up on the side it's actually trying to fall towards.
So about the tide on the far side of the earth. Do you read any sci fi? I finally understood this when I read "Neutron Star" a short story by Larry Niven. So it's easier to understand if you ask about the tides in a small thing (say a spaceship) going around a heavy thing (say a neutron star, but the moon would also work) Now assuming the spaceship is in orbit. (not burning fuel.) Then the center of mass of the spaceship is in freefall and feels no force of gravity. Imagine now the spaceship is a long rod with one end pointing towards the moon and the other away. You feel no force of gravity at the center of the ship. If you go down to the end near the moon you will find that you are not moving fast enough to be in free fall 'cause you're stuck in the spaceship and the gravity is stronger there (as they say.) Now when you move to the far end of the spaceship, you find you are moving too fast to be in freefall. You will sometimes read the second tide is due to centripetal force. And the above "moving too fast", is what causes the centripetal force. Now as far as the earth moon system. You know the moon orbits the earth, but the earth also orbits the moon, but with a much smaller radius. And just as with the spaceship, that part of the earth closer to the moon feels a greater force of gravity. And the part farthest away is moving too fast to be in free fall (wrt the moon) and so feels a force trying to push it way from the moon. Our beloved second tide.
This map projection (a triangle, with the northern hemisphere smooshed into its tall and narrow top half, the southern into its squat and broad bottom half), somehow, exactly preserves the relative areas of all landmasses and oceans, despite distorting them in completely different-looking ways.
Added by hand. You get a piece of wood or metal, and then you buy a bucket of paint and paint the wood with it manually, and that's supposed to protect it from the elements. Likewise buying a tube of grease and applying a small bit of it is supposed to make a wheel spin better.
Something I always disliked about LLMs is that they are an example of ugly math/comp-sci, extremely resource intensive, and rather incomprehensible internals. But then, that's just how brains, the source of beautiful math/comp-sci, are (well, the incomprehensible messy internals at least, brains are pretty efficient for what they do). It's interesting that brains exhibit this preference for elegance and beauty, traits that they do not possess. Perhaps, the squishy, organic mess of the brain is, in fact, superior to all clever elegance or beauty, since it is the source of those...
Is there a widely shared "orthodox" progressive philosophy about what sex and gender are, what it means to be or not be trans, etc.?
I would like to know what the median commited pro-trans progressive thinks (not the median left-leaning normie). I am not interested in conservative caricatures of progressives.
"Sex" is about your physical body, mostly primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are genitals, and secondary sexual characteristics are sexually dimorphic traits like facial hair, breasts, bone structure, muscle development, skin texture, and fat distribution. It's a spectrum with a strongly bimodal distribution, not a strict binary. About 1.7% of the population is born with conditions that give them a mix of male and female secondary sexual characteristics, and a smaller but not insignificant fraction of the population are also born with conditions that result in genitals that are "atypical" or "mixed/ambiguous".
"Gender" can be seen as analogous to sexual orientation, in that it's mental and social rather than physical and that there are several aspects to it that are highly correlated but not exactly the same thing. What might be termed "gender orientation" (my term) or "subconscious gender" is believed to be innate, a mental alignment towards being "male" or "female" or neither or a bit of both. It often takes time for people to consciously realize if it doesn't align with their "assigned gender at birth" similar to how it isn't uncommon for gay or bisexual people to assume they're straight and go through the motions of that for years before realizing that they're actually gay or bi.
Beyond that, "Internal Gender Identity" is about how you consciously think of yourself as male, female, or something else. Social Gender Identity is about how you identify yourself to others (gendered self-description, what pronouns you ask/prefer/expect others to use to refer to you, what gender marker you put on paperwork, etc). And gender presentation or gender expression is about how your clothing, grooming, body language, etc fits in with social norms about masculinity or femininity.
When people talk about gender being socially constructed, they're mostly talking about social identity, presentation, and expression: i.e. what assumptions go along with calling yourself a woman, which clothes and behaviors are coded as male or female, etc.
"Assigned Gender At Birth" is the preferred way to talk about birth sex of transgender people when you must talk about it. It refers to the social gender identity that is chosen for you based on your physical sex at birth, or in the rare case of intersex people born with ambiguous genitals (where the term originally comes from), it may be chosen arbitrarily. Using "biologically male" or "biologically female" in place of AGAB is a misnomer when applied to someone who has undergone a meaningful amount of medical transition, since the entire point of hormone therapy and gender-affirming procedures is to alter your biological sex to better align with your gender. We're still a ways away from an ideal "magic button" transition that would make a trans woman physically indistinguishable at every level from a cis woman or a trans man indistinguishable from a cis man, but hormone therapy alone do quite a bit more than most people who aren't familiar with their effects assume, and surgery can do even more.
It's fairly common for sub-aspects of gender to point in different directions at some points in a trans person's gender journey. There are terms like "egg" (someone who's gender orientation differs from their birth sex but doesn't realize it yet), "closeted" (you consciously identify as trans but aren't transitioning (yet) and hide your identity in most contexts), and "boymoding" or "girlmoding" (starting medical transition before switching your social identity).
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I'm a bleeding-heart libertarian, not a progressive, but I am trans myself and I hang out in progressive online spaces enough that I think I can describe the orthodox philosophy reasonably well. I personally agree mostly but not quite 100% with the above as I wrote it up, and I probably shaded it a bit towards my own views in explaining it in a way that I hope will make some sense to people who aren't familiar with progressive gender discourse.
This is actually pretty helpful to me to read. Just this last week, I've worked up the courage to write a letter to a friend of mine who is somewhere in the transition phase from male to female. We were pretty close in high school (graduated in 2018), but his family moved away shortly after and neither of us are great at keeping up with people long-distance. We still used to game online with a friend group after that, and that was basically the only way we would communicate. I think around 2021, he told us that he believed he was a woman. None of us really talked about it much after that and just chatted like normal, and then a year later I met my now-wife and pretty much stopped online gaming altogether.
We hardly text or anything since then, but he was a really close friend and I think about him pretty often, and I regret being too afraid to ask about all this stuff when I first found out. I am a Christian myself, and I believe the world and reality to be created in such a way that transgender ideology just doesn't make sense, so I've just assumed up to now that he might take any attempt to talk to him about it as a personal attack. Now I'm wondering if it was more offensive that I never did try to talk about it, and I'd really like to know his thinking and feelings about it all.
So I pretty much finished up my letter yesterday with a bunch of questions and ideas, but I totally didn't even think of the "gender as a social construct" side of things. Which, after reading your comment, seems like a pretty significant thing. Shows how much I know.
All that to say, I've recently become more personally interested in transgender ideology (idk what else to call it), because of my friend and because it's something people are becoming much more widely open about, and I like to try to understand people the best that I can. If you don't mind my asking, I've got a couple of questions I'm wondering about.
You mention the idea of "gender orientation" and compare it loosely to sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is easy for me to understand: some people are just simply attracted to the same sex (or whatever else) as an unconscious desire within them. It's hard for me to understand gender in that way. In the case that gender is a social construct and not some real, objective thing inherent to being, in what way can you *be* a gender that conflicts with your birth-assigned gender without knowing it? As in, how can you go through your life not realizing your *true* gender until later on, when gender is determined purely by outside social forces and isn't something that is actually a part of you? And more personally, how and at what point did you realize your gender wasn't what you were assigned at birth, and what motivated you to do something about it?
I hope I formed that first question in a way that makes sense. No pressure to answer any of that if you don't feel comfortable discussing it on a public comment thread like this.
First, a point of etiquette that may seem nitpicky and pedantic to you but which tends to be extremely important to trans people: even if you think we're being silly, please use our preferred names and pronouns. Deliberately deadnaming or misgendering us (i.e. addressing or referring to us by our birth names that we no longer use, or by the pronouns that correspond to our AGAB) comes off as extremely insulting. I don't think this is your intent: you sound genuinely interested in reconnecting with your friend and concerned about her feelings for their own sake, and you also sound like you're making an effort to be polite and respectful with me, but this is important enough that I want to bring it up in order to caution you away from giving offense unintentionally on this point.
In the case of your friend, to the best of your knowledge, has she actively socially transitioned, or is she closeted/boymoding but has privately confided in you that she thinks she's trans? If the former, definitely make a point of using her preferred name and pronouns if your goal is to reconnect with her. If the latter, I would suggest asking how she'd like you to address and refer to her.
>Sexual orientation is easy for me to understand: some people are just simply attracted to the same sex (or whatever else) as an unconscious desire within them. It's hard for me to understand gender in that way.
I used sexual orientation as an analogy because it actually is does feel very similar to that, except it's an unconscious desire to be *like* women rather than to be *with* them. Sapphic trans women (lesbians and bisexuals) often take longer to realize we're trans than straight trans women (i.e. those who are exclusively attracted to men) because sapphic trans women are often feeling the "I want to be like her" feeling (called "gender envy") about the same people for whom we feel romantic infatuation and sexual attraction.
The subconscious gender identity manifests itself in a number of other ways. One is that a lot of us experiment with various forms of feminine gender expression in private or otherwise safe contexts and find ourselves really, really liking it. In my case, I would cross-dress privately and in socially acceptable semi-private contexts (kink parties, Rocky Horror showings, Halloween costumes, etc), often played female characters in computer and tabletop games, enjoyed "joking" about being effeminate or being a male-bodied lesbian, and intermittently experimented with personal styling choices that are feminine-adjacent while still being within the range of socially acceptable male presentation (long hair, gothy nail polish and jewelry, etc).
It's pretty common for this kind of experimentation and safety-valve feminine expression to go on for a long time and become a major part of our identities without us putting the pieces together; there's a running joke in trans online spaces about doing or wanting very trans-coded or otherwise AGAB-nonconforming things but doing them "for cisgendered reasons".
Another is that many/most of us have varying degrees of discomfort or distaste for stuff that makes us feel masculine. This, too, can take a while to recognized because if you feel masculine all the time, then that can just blur into a background noise of ickiness that is hard to discern the source of. In my case, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and was taking SSRIs for several years, but after I started transitioning my mood symptoms almost entirely cleared up. Also, once I wasn't feeling grossly masculine just about all the time, the source of the bad feelings became much clearer when they did crop up.
One thing that really resonated with me was a bit that Actress/Youtuber Abigail Thorn said when she came out as a trans woman in 2021 at the age of 27 or 28. She compared her experience trying to live as a boy to working a soul-crushing job that she hadn't chosen for herself and she didn't feel able to quit. There isn't anything *objectively* wrong with the job, and there are plenty of people who would love to have a job like that, but it's all wrong for her and the stress of dealing with it was poisoning every aspect of her life. Then, one day, she put the pieces together that the job was the fundamental problem, and that she could quit it and get a different job that's better for her. And having done so, after having a little while to settle in to her new job, she realized that everything really did feel better.
As for how I realized, it was one of those "gradually and then all at once" things. The safe and deniable experiments in being girly for cis reasons accumulated. My wife (who had long suspected I was trans) was very supportive and made it clear that I had a safe space to indulge in femininity and also hinted (without quite suggesting that I was probably trans) that she'd be supportive if I decided to transition. I occasionally toyed with the ida of transitioning, but always decided against it for fear of the stigma of being trans, because I didn't quite fit what I thought was the classic profile of being "really" trans, and because I hadn't yet recognized the background-noise ick of dysphoria for what it was. A big part of the former two factors was growing up in the 80s and 90s, when there was a lot more stigma and gatekeeping around gender transition then there has been in recent decades.
During a period when I was under a lot of stress, I started reading up on medical transition and the effects of hormones (out of idle curiosity, I told myself) and came across stuff about there being protocols of low-dose HRT for nonbinary people (i.e. people whose gender identity is neither entirely male nor entirely female). I realized that this very strongly appealed to me, in that I could make my body more feminine without committing to changing it so much that I couldn't continue to present as male in contexts where socially transitioning would be awkward. Deciding to pursue this and thinking of myself as trans felt really, really good, and I quickly (within a matter of 2-3 weeks) realized that the only thing holding me back from wanting to transition full time was external social factors (fear of stigma and discrimination), but all of that was manageable and I'd be happier going all the way. After that, it took me a something like eight or nine months before I was far enough along in my transition that I felt ready to socially transition full-time.
I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all of this to me! As someone who has never experienced any kind of gender dysphoria (there have been times where I've felt insecure in my masculinity when a group of other guys are talking about hunting or cars, two things which I know nothing about. Is that kind of thing at all similar?), it's hard for me to really simulate in my own head what transgender people feel in order to understand them better.
The reason I want to understand better is so that I can be more compassionate and loving to people in general, including my friend. This will probably sound insulting, but as I am right now, the main reason I can think of for male-to-female transition is simply sexual perversion. There's a lot more to gender than just intercourse, though. So I truly do appreciate your explanation of yourself! It helps broaden my understanding.
As for the deadnaming/misgendering issue, I'm still trying to find the best way to navigate this. The name stuff isn't difficult for me; people change their name all the time. My friend has a gender-neutral name and hasn't changed it in our friend group, plus I have a nickname I've always used anyway that almost sounds girly, so I've just continued to use it up to this point. But I am reaching out now to know what name I should address the letter to when I send it.
The misgendering thing *is* difficult for me, though. I know it is an extremely important topic like you say, and understandably so. But unlike names, which we can agree on that they are subjective, I disagree that pronouns are subjective as well. My belief is that sex/gender is purely defined by genetics (as a Christian, I do believe that we all have a soul, but from what the Bible says it seems to me that our souls are genderless). And as a Christian, there's a variety of reasons why I think it would be wrong for me to refer to a transgender person with a pronoun that is different from what was assigned at birth. I don't know how to do this without coming across as hateful. It may seem laughable and ridiculous, but I truly believe using what I believe to be the wrong pronouns for a person is unloving flattery. So my difficulty comes when I'm talking to someone I love and care about, but now I have to choose between saying something that they will perceive as unnecessary hatred, or something that I believe is a true and complete disregard for their soul.
My not-compromise is to refer to my friend as "my friend", but that still makes it obvious that we have a fundamental disagreement. It's easy for me to accept this and move on with the conversation, but then I'm not the one who might feel attacked by the disagreement being pointed out. How does it seem to you? Does replacing the pronoun for a proper noun seem more considerate, or insulting?
I don't expect you to agree with any of my viewpoints. I'm only explaining them so that you can hopefully see how it is at least possible for misgendering to seem incredibly inconsiderate or hateful to one person, but truly an act of care to someone else (I grant that there are many "Christians" who are hateful to others, and I have no intention of defending them). And I hope you can at least view me as trying to do something right and caring, even if we disagree on what "right" is.
Anyway, that's a lot more explaining of my own views than I had intended to do. I've been thinking about this issue more from the time you replied to me to now when I have the chance to respond. It's also hard for me to not just assume any transgender person would also be very biased against anyone claiming the title of "Christian" because of "Christians" have treated trans people. So I just feel like I need to explain myself. Nothing you've actually said has made me think you'd just automatically be against me, though. So I hope any offence I cause due to ignorace can be forgiven, and any due to my beliefs can be understood at least a little. I truly have no desire to wrong anybody.
And oh! Since you asked, I'm not exactly sure where in the transition process my friend is. I think pretty far along with hormones, but that's another thing I'm completely ignorant about.
Thanks again for explaining things to me a little bit and sharing about yourself!
>So I truly do appreciate your explanation of yourself! It helps broaden my understanding.
My pleasure. I'm glad I seem to be helping.
>Does replacing the pronoun for a proper noun seem more considerate, or insulting?
Avoiding using gendered language is vastly preferable to misgendering, but isn't ideal. When directed at me, I do usually notice it and it does bother me, but I find it much less insulting that overt misgendering.
>It's also hard for me to not just assume any transgender person would also be very biased against anyone claiming the title of "Christian" because of "Christians" have treated trans people. So I just feel like I need to explain myself. Nothing you've actually said has made me think you'd just automatically be against me, though.
I have definitely seen that among other trans people, but we're individuals with a range of attitudes and experiences. For my part, I have a distaste for things that some people say, do, and believe in the name of Christianity, but I don't blame "Christians" in general for that. I currently self-describe as agnostic, but I have generally positive opinions of the church I was raised in (Episcopalian) and I think there's a great deal of value within Christian scriptures, theology, and philosophy as it has developed over the past couple thousand years. I have family members who are actively religious and get along very well with most of them.
>And as a Christian, there's a variety of reasons why I think it would be wrong for me to refer to a transgender person with a pronoun that is different from what was assigned at birth.
I won't presume to preach your own religion to you, but I find this surprising. It's definitely not a universal interpretation among practicing and faith-holding Christians, or even an especially common one in my experience.
Erica, Thanks for this. It makes me happy that you can talk so honestly. (and coherently) My daughter is gay and will come out and visit me with her gay or trans friends, it's always great, but they are not good enough 'friends' of mine that I could ask about anything as intimate as this.
"Sexual orientation is easy for me to understand: some people are just simply attracted to the same sex (or whatever else) as an unconscious desire within them. It's hard for me to understand gender in that way"
This is a very common view amongst non trans people. You have provided a trans view let me attempt the other side.
"Straight" ppl see a symmetry in sexual orientation they cannot identify in gender orientation. My attraction to women, and related sexual revulsion from men is obvious to me. I feel it just as strongly as I imagine homosexuals feel it the other way around. Therefore it is easy to understand that if thats how they feel they cannot be expected to behave in any other way.
I dont feel at all about my gender identity in that way. I recognize my personality traits correlate to typical male traits and am comfortable in my male body, but I do not feel a primal urge to "be a man" accept as it relates to sexual intercourse. If I did happen to be born in a female body it is difficult to articulate what exactly would be objectionable about that other than which is directly related to intercourse (social power imbalance seems like a candidate but that feels like a cheat and it doesnt work the other way). I admit it would be distressing to just wake up that. But that seems to mostly be about established living patterns then who I am deep down.
I think this is probably rooted in sex drive being an evolutionary imperative and gender expression being at least in part social. So what separates my lived experience from yours includes a strong need to identify with one gender or the other before we even get to the question of what gender that would be.
> I do not feel a primal urge to "be a man" except as it relates to sexual intercourse
This is the heart of it. I think this... urge for alignment, I guess, is in fact not a thing for most people, so trans people may not even realize why others have trouble empathizing with them. They are minorities in both an obvious way and a subtle way.
However, some cis people do have the same innate sense of gender as trans people do. In a culture where men always wear pants and women always wear dresses, a cis man may feel uncomfortable if forced to wear a dress. If that same man moved to a place where everybody wore kimonos but only women wore them with belts, their discomfort would eventually switch to the belt and not the (still very dress-like) kimono. The belt's girliness is learned, but the distaste for girly things is innate.
I am coming to think that my "male gender identity" lives not within my inner self, but in what other people see in me (or, since I do not access this directly, what I think other people see in me).
I would wear the kimono and not the belt because I would expect other people in that place to see that I am male (of the male sex) and not expect me to wear the belt. I expect them to interpret any belt-wearing on my part as either an expression of disrespect towards their norm, or a claim of special status within them. I want to express neither. No distaste at the belt implied.
Would you feel uncomfortable if, as part of your job, you were required to wear lipstick and a dress? To take out the social discomfort part, let's say all your male coworkers were required to follow the same dress code. Do you think you'd get used to it enough that you might continue to do it even when you weren't at work? Or would you prefer to wear your male-gendered clothes at home?
If not, maybe that's a signal (even a weak one) that you have a male gender orientation. It might be harder to recognize at baseline because you're generally not in situations that conflict with it.
Well no, because as I said my personality traits point masculine. Part of my claim is that if I had a female body from birth Id be comfortable expressing those personality traits from a female body and identity. That is speculative but I think that because I dont feel a need to express these traits *as a man* now. I just express them. And I may overall be mistaken but this a post about self impression. My whole point here is to contrast the gender awareness with sexuality awareness.
But I also think your thought experiment is 100% social. Theres no way requiring my coworkers to do the same strips that out. LouisvXIV seemed comfortable doing exactly as you describe not due to any aspect of his gender identity but because he lived in a different society.
Let me say - I love these sorts of thought experiments to help me connect empathetically with different people, but I think this one misses the mark. I’d have no issue with lipstick or makeup if there was no social shame involved(ie all males are expected). I wouldn’t continue wearing it at home because I wouldn’t actively do anything. Perhaps this is a male perspective(i’m assuming women are far more used to applying products and the like as part of their “get ready routine”. As for the clothes - maybe for convenience? I’d trend towards comfort and I have a bias towards thinking feminine clothes are by default uncomfortable. Maybe there’s a better to metaphor for cismen to help mentally empathize with those feelings. Regardless, I appreciate it. The metaphor around gender disphoria and working a soul crushing job absolutely connected, but as the other poster alluded, my “gender feelings” mainly orientate around desirable sex acts, the social trappings seem to follow. To elucidate a bit further, if my same 1 month old brain were transported into a female body and I grew up in that body, I imagine I’d go with the flow and fully adopt that gender once the sex hormones started “activating” my sex organs at puberty. Hard to be sure though.
interesting. i can imagine a man would feel uncomfortable. but if i was required to wear a wife-beater, hoodie, jeans, and hobnailed boots and have my hair cut short and wear no jewelry or make up for work it would not bother me in the slightest. Yet i don't have the slightest identification with being a man.
Thanks. Good ol scott. That sounds like the right descriptor. Scott's own post makes it seem like it overlaps a bit with neuter, as he focuses on the not traditionally masculine parts of his own personality. And for my part the personality traits definitely point masculine. I am not sure to what extent that was learned, but I *think* if my soul was born in a female body I would have been a comfortable tomboy because the personality preferences seem to be just that and correlate to a gender but dont seem to need to be anchored in a gender identity.
Isn't that exactly the reason you asked, because you couldn't tell the difference?
Someone I know spends extraordinary amounts of time on Bluesky screaming "TRANSPHOBE!" at random people and suggesting they should get banned for opinions I believed to be mainstream, so I get this exact problem all the time - "wait, people actually do believe THAT?"
Also, Erica (one of the most brilliant commenters here) is very far from "a median committed pro-trans progressive", so whatever she writes is a charitable interpretation from someone not belonging to the class being discussed, not necessarily the absolute ground truth.
The reason I asked is that I anticipated what a thread of anti-trans sarcasm would have looked like. That would be very different from good-faith object-level philosophy and I did not want that.
Erica's comment is exactly what I wanted. There might be two axes of discourse. On an object-level moderate to extremist axis, I wanted something radical enough to be representative of true believers but no so radical to get marginal even among them. On a quality-of-discourse tribal shouting to brillant philosophy axis, the most brillant is the better!
If you think that the actual median trans activist believes something substantially different on the object-level from what Erica stated, please explain. If your point is merely that they are more tribal and confrontational, I believe so already and this is not what I want to see.
That makes sense, but I think you might be asking some wrong questions.
First, it seems you equate "a median commited pro-trans progressive" with "a median trans activist". That's not how I initially read your question, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was not alone. I'm not at all sure that the two are the same thing or believe the same things.
Second, "median" may not really be useful here. I may well be wrong, but I've assumed, from looking at the people I know, that it's more like a bimodal distribution. In that case, Erika is giving you the view of only one side - the one that sounds sort of normal to normies outside the set being discussed.
If this is really bimodal, then - I may be wrong about this, and would be happy to be proven such - I think the wording of your question precludes you from getting a view of the other side, where the opinions do look like conservative caricatures.
I would love to see an answer to the question "what groups do the opinions of pro-trans activists cluster into". But I doubt we'd be seeing that answered anytime soon.
I think you've really misjudged this. It wasn't necessary or kind for you to say it would be "fun". It was mocking. There were many straightforward ways to say "I think the reality and the caricature are very similar" that didn't have that ironic edge. It would be necessary if your point were a necessary one *and* there were few/no better ways to communicate and persuade on this point, which beggars belief. (Most commenters here are more open to sincere and careful arguments than to twitter dunks, as I'm sure you know.) "True" wouldn't be enough for the 2-out-of-3 rule, but anyway I know many pro-trans people, and many of them are dumber than what Erica has tried to present, but the median is still clearly distinguishable from any but the most sophisticated conservative satirist (it's incredibly rare for a satirist to pass the ideological Turing test in any context, even when they're trying), so I think it's pretty plainly not true. It was a dunk on your fellow commenters, and I thought 2/3 * (true + necessary + kind) was meant to exclude those.
I think Shankar’s comment passes, even if not with flying colors. It’s clear what he means about it being hard to tell the difference, even if he puts it in a snide, jokey way. And he is mocking some factions that were mentioned, not any individuals speaking here. It is very common here to express scorn for various factions and groups, or criticize them harshly. I believe the kindness criterian applies to how we treat each other, not to how we talk about the ideas and behavior of groups being discussed.
I don't know about "widely shared" or "orthodox" since I don't have good broad-picture insight, and this is a fractious internet issue where lots of people feel free to create their own definitions and subsequent infighting is common.
But it seems that the articulation I've seen most commonly thrown out from progressive circles is that "sex" is the thing you are born with, which is determined by your genetics. You're born male, or female, or some kind of rare genetic anomoly intersex, and that's a fixed (or mostly-fixed, depending on who you talk to) value.
"Gender" on the other hand, is defined by progressives to refer to the whole host of social and cultural constructs built around sex. I'm male and was born with male reproductive organs. I was not, however, born wearing pants instead of dresses, or drinking bourbon and scotch at the pub instead of mimosas at brunch. Those additional social and cultural norms and expectations orbit around sex, but aren't necessarily driven by it. Since gender norms are socially determined, progressives have greater comfort with people disregarding them when needed - if your culture issues all people born male with a shoe, but the shoe you're issued doesn't fit you, you're not obligated to wear it and any people trying to make you put it on are the ones out of line, rather than you (so to speak).
I think that's a good articulation of progressive views about gender roles.
Other common claims from the progressive side of transgender issues (roughly in order of what I expect to least to most controversial) include:
(1) although assigned sex at birth (which is mostly the same as your genetic sex except in certain intersex disorders) is fixed, transgender people might modify their other sex characteristics through medical transition; this might take the form of surgeries to change the shape of one's genitals or sex hormones to change the rest of the body (growing breasts or facial hair, altering the shape of the body through fat distribution, etc.)
(2) some people who have altered their sex characteristics as in (1) will be perceived as the opposite sex and treated that way by society
(3) (2) is a good thing
(4) it is also a good thing to treat transgender people who have not yet physically transitioned, or have only partially physically transitioned not to the point of (2) applying, as functionally the opposite sex in most contexts
(5) at some point of altering sex characteristics, one ends up being more similar to the sex you're transitioning towards than your own assigned sex or chromosomal sex
(6) because of (5) and possibly to some extent (4), drawing distinctions based on assigned sex at birth rather than an idea of "gender" (which is assigned/chromosomal/gamete-production sex in most cases, aside from transgender people and also non-binary and intersex people which I'm not addressing) is almost always wrong, with a few exceptions
Modern language models have several serious problems: lack of long-term memory, lack of self-criticism or self-reflection — but one of the key problems is the absence of real experience.
If you ask an LM to write a program, it will produce code based on the code it has read before. But it will not try to actually run that program and check whether it works — and if it doesn’t, figure out why and fix it. In other words, it behaves like a lazy Stack Overflow advisor who doesn’t test their own suggestions.
Worse still, any real programmer has written and debugged tons of code, and when they read something, they compare it with their own experience. An LM has zero such experience.
And in every other domain, it’s the same — the neural network has zero firsthand experience. Asking it for advice is like asking a ninth-grader who’s never had a girlfriend for relationship advice just because he’s read books about relationships. How useful would his advice be?
If someone creates a language model that can actually gain its own experience — even in one domain — that will be a breakthrough.
In fact, such neural networks already exist: those that play chess, Go, and so on. They played against themselves, accumulated massive experience, and learned to play far better than any human. But for some reason, no one has tried to apply this approach to programming — let alone to science.
The current LLMs will generate a plausible response to a question. That's all - you need to interpret it yourself. This is true whether you ask for code or factual information, or an opinion on your dating life. I'd put at 50% the amount of discussions that don't understand this and are surprised that 'the AI made a mistake'.
Developing separate technologies that can error check claims made by the AI are in progress - I'm mostly familiar with progress in mathematics, where it's still a human-AI collaboration, but it's improved a lot in the last year. I wouldn't be surprised if a 'verification' function could be rolled out for verifiable tasks in 2026. But this is not the same as a self-directed or agentic AI... I really don't know what the state of play is on this.
Because the training cost for chess or Go-playing neural networks is tiny, while the training cost for a large language model is colossal. A LLM that performs online machine learning will rapidly become spectacularly expensive. The LLM might be able to store some short-term memory in a scratchpad, but that impinges on the token window - the more experience it retains, the less complex a command it can handle.
AlphaGo cost about $30M to train, not LLM scale but not tiny/cheap.
The more important point is having a clear signal to optimize against. Easy in games, hard in the real world.
AlphaGo uses reinforcement learning. LLMs are now using RL as well, mostly in places that people can come up with what they’re now calling “verifiable rewards”, things you can programmatically check the answers to. Code, math, etc. It’s less clear how to reliably do this without a trustworthy externally-defined reward signal
Garbage in, garbage out. Being proud of tricking a model and using it as evidence for some hypothesis about their capabilities or value is stronger evidence for the value of the hypothesis. If you want a model to execute the program and check the results, you have to use an agentic coding tool, like Claude Code (emphasis on the Code part, not the web UI), or Gemini CLI, or Codex, or whatever. You also have to write a detailed, thorough spec that describes the behavior you want. And it will still fail, sometimes! But what's more interesting is the fact that sometimes it DOESN'T fail, and in fact, saves you time and effort. And the fact that using the newer generation of remote coding agents, eg Claude Code Web or Google Jules, you can spin up an arbitrary number of such agents and let them loose. But you the programmer are still required to specify what you actually want, not give them tiresome leetcode gotcha problems.
So many people feel the need to pontificate about AI without knowing even the basic state of play. I've started accumulating a list of shortcuts for skipping worthless takes ("stochastic parrot", "next token", "ELIZA", etc)
A heuristic that I have found to be useful, despite exceptions to rule:
Rightists are loyal friends but tend to be boring. Leftists are a much better hang, but then you have to worry more about getting stabbed in the back. Centrists are boring people who stab you in the back.
Of course, there are people who don't fit easily into one of these three categories. I guess the rule mainly applies to True Believers. (And yes, there are aggressive Centrists who would triangulate to the bitter end, even if it meant everything crumbled around them)
I feel like people from both camps are about equally likely to screw you over, but people from the left will try to justify themselves and people from the right will explain how it’s your fault or just laugh.
I've lived around leftists my whole life, and I have never once been stabbed in the back (or if I have, it was subtle enough I never found out about it). I think if you've been backstabbed enough that you're noticing patterns, you run in circles I could never even imagine.
Unfortunately Michael, I have receipts. I have hard evidence. It was splashed all over the American news for years.
The insane witch Hunt called #MeToo represented a mass phenomenon of backstabbing. It represented a perverse willingness to destroy nine innocent people in order to ensure that one guilty person didn't escape scrutiny.
The idea that one should hold a person guilty due to uncorroborated accusations, even in the absence of something as basic as a police report, shows an ideological commitment to backstabbing.
It was a Klan-like phenomenon. It was a violation of the most basic notions of justice and fairness. And I guarantee you this violation did not go unnoticed by independence, moderates and swing voters. The partisans of #MeToo did a lot to degrade the reputation of the Democrats party.
"The insane witch Hunt called #MeToo represented a mass phenomenon of backstabbing."
This is a claim that requires considerable evidence. I also lived through #MeToo. I didn't witness any backstabbing. Instead I witnessed large numbers of women--including many that I knew personally--open up and talk about common experiences of being sexually harassed and/or assualted that they had kept public silence about for years. Some of them named names, but many did not.
To claim that this constituted a "mass phenomenon of backstabbing" you'd need to provide pretty solid evidence that a substantially fraction of these claims were deliberately deceptive and unfounded. Which is quite the tall ask: exactly the things that make sexual harassment and assault such touchy cultural phenomena is that they're reasonably common[1] while also often leaving behind very little evidence. So just as proving any particular accusation is true is often difficult, so too is it difficult to prove any particular accusation false. For many cases, the only epistemically defensible state is uncertainty. But if you have evidence pointing directly to the falsity of a substantial fraction of accusations, feel free to share it.
[1] Even if you disagree about #MeToo it's hard to reasonably claim that the overall rate of people experiencing these things is *low.*
When I referred to backstabbing, I wasn't referring to false accusations. Of course a false accusation is a kind of backstabbing, but that's not the kind of backstabbing I had in mind when I talked about “the insane witch hunt.”
The backstabbing witch hunters were mostly not alleged victims or even the immediate family members of alleged victims. The vast majority of these witch hunters were other community members shunning the accused based on uncorroborated claims. Some of these shunnings may have been justified, due to something like the Bill Cosby effect, where the sheer number of accusers serves as a kind of evidence in its own right. But I have good reason to think that most of these automatic shunnings can be fairly described as backstabbing.
You're right that neither I nor anyone else has any way of knowing what proportion of the alleged victims were lying. But we know what proportion of leftists began accepting most accusations as true until proven otherwise. And harshly pressuring others to do the same. That Venn diagram is a near circle.
<The insane witch Hunt called #MeToo represented a mass phenomenon of backstabbing.
Not defending the "witch hunt," but unless you were one of the 9 innocents you were not stabbed in the back. What happened is that watching #MeToo in action and seeing its willingness to stab innocent people upset you greatly. It made you furious, indignant, and worried about how crazy things were becoming. That is really different from being tried and possibly convicted for sexual assault when you did nothing remotely like sexual assault. You will forever be unable to think straight about the whole mess unless you hang on tight to that crucial distinction.
I'm a woman. It is not rare for me to see men talking or writing about women as "pussy on the hoof." On one memorable occasion years ago a group of workman across the street from me in NYC hollered a bunch of stuff about sniffing my pussy and licking my tits. Incidents of that kind made me furious, indignant, and worried. However they were not occasions when I was sexually assaulted. You have to hang on to the difference or else you become as crazy as #MeToo.
I insist that destroying a man's public reputation, sans evidence, is analogous to falsely convicting him in a court of law. And I don't have to have been personally MeTooed for the rise of "believe women [by default]" to have degraded my life.
I condemn those construction sleazeballs, not only because what they did to you was inherently wrong. But also because their filthy behavior carelessly set the stage for the rise of the MeToo hysteria, which would savage innocent men AND women. (Almost every falsely accused man has women who care about him)
During the 19th century, closer-knit families and a stronger honor culture meant that those construction sex pests would have had reason to bite their tongues. A male relative might physically avenge the insult to you, and juries would be sympathetic to him.
I don't want to fully return to the bad old days of corsets and domineering males, but maybe we should bring back SOME of the customs that we left behind.
> "I don't want to fully return to the bad old days of corsets...but maybe we should bring back SOME of the customs that we left behind."
Fun fact: The vast majority of the millions of women over many centuries who adopted daily supportive undergarments like stays, bodies, and corsets weren't stupid!
A correctly-fitted historical female supportive undergarment (for brevity, a corset) is usually a back brace, a bra, and a weight distribution system for heavy warm skirts which would otherwise pinch into the flesh of the waist or hips.The vast, vast majority of corsets didn't meaningfully restrict movement, much less breath.
Trust me: as someome who has occasionally been in historical wear, correctly made corsets are *vastly* less irritating to wear than clothing without pockets.
"I insist that destroying a man's public reputation, sans evidence, is analogous to falsely convicting him in a court of law."
Really? So it is your considered opinion that somebody who has *actually experienced assault*, but cannot provide evidence (satisfying to you) of the fact is *morally obligated* to stay silent about that experience?
This is an utterly unhinged position. Does this only apply to sexual assaults committed by men, or other assaults as well? If my female neighbor swings a baseball bat at my head, I barely manage to dodge and run away, am I morally in the wrong for telling others to warn them or seek protection? Must I stay silent for fear of ruining her reputation? What if instead she breaks my arm, but once I've gotten away, I have no way to prove it was her specifically? Do I just have to tell someone I was assaulted, but refuse to say whom?
Or consider the following instead: you're considering asking your neighbor Pat to babysit your kids this coming Friday. Unknown to you, a different neighbor, Sue, engaged Pat as a babysitter only to have her kids report sobbing, but confused stories that sounded like inappropriate touching. Obviously Sue doesn't *know* anything for sure: she has unclear secondhand stories, not even direct eyewitness evidence. Nevertheless, wouldn't you want to hear about Sue's experience so you could consider looking for a different babysitter, even though thirdhand evidence is *very far* from reliable?
Reality isn't always convenient. Sometimes important things happen and don't leave as much evidence behind as we'd like. If you were arguing that people *hearing* these accusations should be less certain and slower to judgement, that would be one thing. But you appear to be saying that it's people who are *relating those stories* who are morally in the wrong, without you yourself having any way to know the stories are false.
They should speak their truth and we should be empathetic. But we should not take their claims as verified fact unless there's corroborating evidence. I would only make exceptions for a small handful of people, mostly family members. About five people who have proven themselves to be totally trustworthy. The public doesn't know my family, so what reason do they have to trust my family members implicitly? That would be incredibly naive of them. Not only that, it would be unjust.
When I talk about a witch hunt I'm not talking about the alleged victims making accusations. They are speaking their truth. When I talk about a witch hunt, I'm talking about society at large believing these uncorroborated claims by default.
I don't think any of your hypothetical examples are sufficiently relevant. The babysitter situation is not really relevant, because in this case, the parent would surely contact the police and an investigation could begin, including evidence collection. I would not blame a parent for warning others if they felt there was a dangerous predator babysitting children in the community. I would reserve my blame for naive people who believe accusations without corroborating evidence.
A police report itself is KIND of a evidence…the bare minimum, sure, but at least it's something. It at least shows that the accuser is willing to make an official accusation, and face legal repercussions if they are found to be lying.. That’s minimal “evidence,” but #MeToo culture will call you a hateful monster for even expecting to see THAT. We are under strict orders to automatically “believe women” and hand the accused the entire burden of proving their innocence.
The point of my telling that story was that it was a highly unpleasant experience that I *could* think of as a rape, but that absolutely is not, and that in order to think straight about rape I have to stay clear on that. As far as how upsetting it was, it was no big deal. It was nowhere near as bad as thousands of other unpleasant experiences I've had. The construction sleazeballs were definitely NOT such a big deal that I am in favor of life being remodeled a bit so that such things happenn less.. However, if you would like to try moving *your* life a little more in the direction of having a corset and a domineering male in your life, go for it, hon.
I think you make some really well taken points here!
I would just note that:
1) while I think #MeToo went off the rails and went overboard pretty quickly, particularly as lots of people tried to glom on to it to accomplish their own ideological agendas, i understand where it came from and that it was addressing a real problem.
2) while false rape accusations certainly exist, and are more common than many liberals think they are (from what i've been able to tell, they're most likely somewhere around 10%), they're also less common than many conservatives think they are. any given rape accusation is much more likely to be true than false, so that's where our prior should lie (even though it can be overridden).
and I say that as someone who knows at least one person who was falsely accused of a sex crime, so i'm aware that these things happen- on the other hand, that accusation fell through in about a couple of hours.
Also sorry you went thru that highly unpleasant experience.
When it suited your argument, those workers were menacing sex pests. Then when it was convenient for you, their behavior became no "big deal." Those must be quantum construction workers.
"Not defending the "witch hunt," but unless you were one of the 9 innocents you were not stabbed in the back."
...Isn't that enough? Doesn't that make it an epidemic of backstabbing and as such, *a cogent example* of the wider problem Chance is talking about? He said that *leftists indulge in this category of behavior*, and when challenged on that point, mentioned *one example* (a very clear one). He didn't at any point that I can see claim that Metoo is the be-all and end-all of this type of behavior or that Metoo alone offends him.
But, that being said, you're also wrong, because although only the nine innocents were actually wrongfully convicted in the court of law and/or public opinion, Metoo certainly caused a shift in leftist culture to make it even more toxic, more censorious, more of a baying mob, than it already was before. The behavior ripples down from the high-profile criminal cases into your private social circles and causes things like people you thought were your friends ghosting you because some BPD woman baselessly accused you of assaulting her, or you get kicked out of your board game night because some BPD woman baselessly accused you of assaulting her, or you lose your job, God forbid, because some BPD woman... you get the idea.
So let’s say that the papers are covering 10 trials of men for sexual assault, 9 of whom sound like they are are probably innocent and 1 a genuine rapist, and the rapist and 5 of the innocent men are convicted. And then due to the ripple effect you get kicked out of your board game night because some BPD woman makes a baseless accusation that you assaulted her, and peoeple believe it. If we call the unfairness and mistreatment you went through being stabbed in the back, what do we have left to describe what the 10 men in the news went through? Being stabbed all over? Having a crowd of women with BPT pop out their eyeballs and eat them? And how about the 5 innocent men who were convicted? Do we describe that as having a bunch of wokies drag them through the streets by a rope til there’s nothing left but the rope? If we use the backstabbing metaphor we need to upgrade the awfulness of what happened to the innocent convicted, because what they went through is clearly a lot worse that suffering unfair accusations, being ghosted and getting kicked out of their board game night. If I were one of those guys and heard you comparing what you’d gone through to what had happened to them I’d laugh at you.
And anyhow — let’s say that instead of saying “yeah, there was a lot of crazy & cruel #metoo bullshit going on,” everyone reading your post a upgrades their sympathy for you and all other males who lived through the #metoo era. It was really really bad. It was like being stabbed in the back. It was a living hell. OK, so we did that. Now what? Do you have any *useful* ideas about the #metoo problem?
Wait a minute, is your whole objection to Chance's argument that you feel he used a *hyperbolic phrase*?!
I have to be honest, I don't think that nitpicking someone's prose is a fruitful avenue of debate.
"everyone reading your post upgrades their sympathy"
This again does not seem to correspond to any claim or demand anybody in this conversation has made. Chance used Metoo as an example in proof of a disputed initial assertion that leftists are more likely to backstab you – okay, you think "backstab" is too harsh, let's say "socially betray"? "Exhibit a total lack of loyalty to their personal friends in favor of total loyalty to an abstract ideal"? I mean, fuckin'... pick your own preferred phrase if it's that big a deal. Nevertheless, nobody at any point in this asked for any *sympathy*. He said it's more fun to be around leftists but also more fragile because they'll fuck you over in the blink of an eye. That's it. You're overfitting this to some personal grievance from outside this conversation, is what it looks like from here.
"OK, so we did that. Now what? Do you have any *useful* ideas about the #metoo problem?"
I mean, the obvious one would be to A) go back to the old norms and B) remember this as a strong lesson in why never to let censorious prigs take control of the social contract.
1. I guess you feel that "backstabbing" would be too strong of a word to use in this context. Maybe you're right about that, I can't say for certain. If I could relive my life, I would have picked a less gendered example of mass leftist disloyalty. Generalized cancel culture is a better example.
2. One man getting kicked out of board game night unfairly is not a very serious matter. A million men getting kicked out of their gaming groups? That damages gender relations in a way that has serious implications for society.
Hmm I find no such rule in my life. I don't see much correlation between political views and 'goodness' or type of friendship. And if a friend stabbed me in the back, that person would be much less of a friend.
#MeToo represented a massive witch hunt and an epidemic of backstabbing. The left’s mass abandonment of basic rules of fairness and justice, like “Accusations without evidence should be treated empathetically but skeptically,” represented a mass commitment to betrayal and backstabbing.
While the hysteria of the initial #MeToo moment has passed, the left has learned almost nothing. They are still eager to spread rumors and destroy reputations based on uncorroborated accusations.
And naturally, getting stabbed in the back represents the end of the friendship.
In general strongly identifying with particular political views tends to make people mean and stupid. They become sort of like racists, actually. I say “sort of” because one’s race isn’t a choice, but one’s politics are — sort of (tho actually most people arrive at their beliefs via osmosis, not via reasoning and choice.)
This makes little sense because there is no hard and fast line between a political view and and a non-political view. In other words, many political views are also expressions of foundational moral principles.
I can't imagine how strongly identifying with one's moral principles could “tend to” make a person mean or stupid. How could you make a blanket rule like that? Surely it would depend on the principle in question and the overall character and make up of the person in question. Yes, you left yourself an out with “tends to” but I think that's still far too strong.
Very Yudkowskian, this “I'm too cool for school" attitude. It's okay to care deeply about our governance and our future as a society.
It's only stupid to say this if it's false. But it is true. As far as it being mean, how do you know I wasn't born mean?
Also, I don't know how you see yourself, but do you think of yourself as a paragon of niceness and gentleness, and a person who is not deeply political? For real?
At least you aren't boring. It's impossible to predict what you are going to come up with next.
Fair enough. But I stand by my stated disagreement with Eremelalos. I don't know that adopting conservativism strongly "makes" anyone fearful or gullible. It's at least a likely that fearful and gullible people are drawn towards the right.
Even if you did somehow prove that adopting conservativism strongly damages one's personality, you couldn't automatically assume that the same would be true of leftism. Maybe you would conduct further testing and learn that conservativism is uniquely harmful.
Do you mean "friends" in the sense of "hey let's hang out and play board games on Saturday"?
My experience is that I don't actually know the politics of most of my friends and I like to imagine they don't have those. Or, I mean, I guess I'd be happy to find out that they voted, but I'd prefer to imagine that a very small part of their life experience revolves around politics.
I'm mainly talking about friends with a capital F. And I suppose I am more political than average, so that is going to cause me to know more about my friends' politics. Because I talk about politics reflexively.
My dad used to remark that you could tell the smart people from the dumb people because the smart people would use fancy words. You could tell the _really_ smart people from the smart people because they felt no pressing need to use more words than the dumb people did.
I naturally wondered how to tell the really smart people from the dumb people, but only briefly; I could easily tell by spending a little time talking to the dumb?reallySmart? person.
Applying the lesson generally, I soon found out how many conservative people are more creative than they first appear.
I believe your dad was wrong. People with a very high vocabulary use big words reflexively, because they read a lot and associate with highly educated people.
Nor do I hang out with highly educated people out of conscious snobbery. I am a populist and have an anti-intellectual streak. I just find educated people to be generally more curious and interesting. There are plenty of interesting people with no formal education, but they tend to be autodidacts, eccentrics or extroverted raconteurs. Outliers of one kind or another. Interesting uneducated people are also drawn towards conspiracy theory, which is fortunately just fine with me.
My dad worked a farm on the weekends. During the week, he worked as a physicist and a programmer developing X-ray fluorescence analyzers for use by Fortune 500 companies. We'd discuss the philosophy behind quantum mechanics. He knew big words, and used small ones.
His dad was even more exemplary. Dropped out of eighth grade to have more time to raise money for the family. Skilled at carpentry, and got jobs working on several city buildings, including some on the UT Austin campus. Also had a knack for recognizing land value, buying several plots and reselling at massive profit (I used to spend time in a house he built just outside Austin city limits at the time; it's now a corporate park). Best 42 and 84 player in the family; probably could have won tournaments if they held them. Died a wealthy man. Used small words, often misspelled.
I've known multiple people with college degrees who I could call creative, but lacked intellectual discipline. Every idea was a jumping-off point to the next one, soon forgotten. I recognize the constant supply of new ideas, but of what use is that if none of them are used to actually build something durable?
Physics and programming are worthy disciplines, but they are not going to prepare you to understand the English language the same way that studying humanities will. If your dad chose to use small words, it's because he was a STEM person. A dedicated, lifelong scholar will find himself using long words reflexively, because they are imprinted into his unconscious mind.
I know you will take this the wrong way, because most of us adore our fathers. But I am really not trying to insult anybody. STEM people are crucial to society, and we need more of them in modern America. But they are inherently limited when it comes to facility with the English language. Every minute spent on STEM is a minute lost to learning advanced English.
Catholics seem to be the most well-read and well-spoken people on the moderate to extreme right. Which is perplexing to me, since the Vatican discouraged average commoners from reading the Bible for many centuries.
Some of this matches my experience. The more more right-wing people I know are certainly not boring in the sense of dull or boorish, but they are nose-to-the-grindstone people. They work hard, are less interested in creative or speculative things.
The horrible effete leftists of my own generation are (or used to be) better company in that regard. These days it's more of a coin toss, one that heavily depends if their wives are with them or not.
But I recently had the experience of spending time with some more modern leftists (a decade younger than me.) It's a nightmare, felt like one long HR meeting. Every time the conversation started gaining a little energy, someone would object to someone's choice of words and bring it all down again. They don't make jokes. They talk about their mental health instead. Maybe they can talk ideas, but I'll never find out because you don't dare say anything remotely challenging around them.
In short, modern leftists are emphatically not more fun to be around. To use a phrase I learned on the day: those people are cooked.
I am very keen to make the acquaintance of right wing people who want to write stories, create things, talk about crazy ideas. Anyone know anything cool going on there? PM me.
Leftists don't make jokes? This is a bizarre assertion to me. Certainly jokes where the punchline is something like "[Women/gays/people of particular race/religion/national origin/etc] are all that way, aren't they fellas" are out of bounds with leftists, but that leaves a wide country of wordplay still open.
"The left can't meme" is an assertion with traction because of a significant heft of truth. It's actually an interesting reversal, because the left used to be where comedians self-evidently gravitated; now, however, the pearl-clutching, narrowminded Mrs. Lovejoy types are all on the left, sucking the energy out of the room as Rebelcredential says.
How would you know it has "a significant heft of truth?" How, exactly, are you getting unfiltered access to the creative output of "the left" as a broad class of people?
A spend a lot of time in leftist online spaces, and see quite a lot of good, high-quality memes made by leftists. By contrast, when I see "right wing memes" they almost universally suck. Unoriginal, unfunny, mean-spirited: generally the worst sort of slop.
But it doesn't take too much critical thought to realize that what I'm seeing as "right wing memes" aren't actually a representative sample of the memes made by people with right-wing views. They're just the things that get specifically promoted to my attention as "right wing memes." With a filtering algorithm like that, how could they possibly *not* suck?
I am a rightist (well, sort of; I support euthanasia and abortions, but I also support gun rights, and I am against any kind of DEI). I do write stories.
There are totally creative conservatives out there. I'm one. Just like dating, build a vision of the kind of person you want to hang with, and ask yourself where would they hang out? and go there.
They mostly hang out in non-English speaking countries. Inasmuch as they are in America, you'll probably find them more in huge metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Houston and New York City.
I hear a lot of interesting right wing intellectuals on The Subversive podcast with Alex Kaschuta. Some of the guests are dangerous people who need to be suppressed in one way or another. But I can't fault them for being creative and interesting
Not boorish, but I definitely see them as fearful and dull. They are also gullible and unimaginative. But they will give you the shirt off of their back, and they will stand by you through thick and thin. So it's safer to linger around THEM, but it has its downsides.
I love my conservative friends and family, but I never know when one of our nice little chats will pivot, and they will start repeating a bunch of stupid nonsense they heard from their favorite lobotomized media figure.
Solidarity isn't unknown. But America is such a markedly right-wing country that being leftist comes with a high social cost. There's always a social cost to following a type of thought that is outside of the mainstream.
Of course, conservatives would have you believe that leftism is some kind of hegemonic force, and that rightists are plucky underdogs. But that's a paranoid delusion, and one that depends on mislabeling throngs of capitalist Democrats as "leftist." Just because they are trans, or hate men, or some other superficial nonsense.
Anyway, when the social cost of being a leftist is high, the left is going to disproportionately attract crazies and people with personality disorders, because they have nothing to lose; they are already social failures. Marginal movements attract marginal people. And ill people are naturally going to be drawn to the side that wants to provide universal public healthcare. Affluent people will also be overrepresented, ironically, because they can AFFORD to pay the social cost of being a leftist.
There's nothing inherently about leftism that would cause leftists to be difficult to deal with. It's just a marginal movement here. The same thing is true throughout the other English speaking nations, though to a lesser degree.
Ahh OK, I cannot contribute to the US situation, as I am in Europe.
My impression is that here almost anyone is on the right by US standards. By local standards, well, everything can be a mix depending on the country / region. The only thing which seems to be constant is that the crazy people are almost exclusively on the far right.
(But populism will wash anything away, eventually.)
Hungary, which might be outlier (although I think it is not that much an outlier).
A state-run social security (e.g. healthcare) is standard, and only a tiny minority is questioning its existence. Yes, funded by taxes.
(In general, the eastern countries lean to the right within Europe. For example, the flat-rate income tax (a really right-wing thing) is common here (I am sure in Slovakia and the Baltic states, but perhaps Romania as well?), but it is almost unheard of in Western EU.)
Or a large VAT. Yes, our 27% is extreme (thanks, Orban!), but a standard rate of 20-22% is pretty much the standard.
Political categories like left and right don't always translate exactly from continent to continent. Supporting state funded healthcare will get you branded a Marxist or Communist by corporate leaders of American right, however you feel about trans rights or immigration.
Supposedly some company has finally come close with lab-produced chocolate, according to Tyler Cowen's blog. I hope that's true, because it's pretty annoying that supplies are so dependent on the cacao tree - a picky tropical evergreen tree that basically can't be grown en masse for chocolate in most places outside of part of tropical Africa (unless the Dutch really want to step up their greenhouse game).
If you haven't seen any of Eager Space's Youtube videos on space topics, they're really interesting and thorough. His voice is a bit sonorous (I've fallen asleep watching his videos late at night before), but it's good stuff for any space fans.
The consumer ethics situation is pretty dire. And chocolate is pretty delicious. But do you not think that fair trade or single origin chocolates are ethically acceptable?
Ben Shapiro dedicated all of today's podcast episode to calling out Tucker Carlson for his softball interview of Nick Fuentes. That's pretty unusual, I can't remember the last time he spent the whole episode on a single topic. He's pretty mad at Tucker, and at the Heritage Foundation for defending Tucker's interview. He calls out Fuentes as a "racist", "white supremacist", "nazi", "anti-semite", "holocaust denier" who admires Hitler and Stalin. He points out that Fuentes, besides having odious views on women, black people, and jews, also hates Trump, MAGA, Charlie Kirk, and the Republican Party. But he reserves most of his anger for Tucker, for giving Fuentes a puffy interview where he failed to call Fuentes out on any of his extreme statements and generally portrayed him as a normal conservative who is just a little bit on the edge.
There is some question about whether this could cause a rift in the Daily Wire between Ben and Matt Walsh, who has publicly stated that he is opposed to fights within the conservative movement. He and Ben recently disagreed on a live show about whether conservative pundits should come out against racist statements leaked from the Young Republicans recently. However, Matt hasn't posted anything about the Fuentes interview so far, and doesn't mention it at all in today's podcast.
Of course Ben Shapiro would come out against Fuentes: he's been a target of the groypers for years now. Still, it's good that he's making such a strong and explicit statement against the groyper movement, and I hope other conservative pundits will follow. Quite frankly, Fuentes does not strike me as a conservative and I don't know why he should be considered part of the conservative tent. He's a revolutionary who is also racist. He has stated publicly many times that he would be in favor of a revolution that gets rid of the constitution and puts in place a Stalinesque authoritarian government, as long as it carried out his preferred policies on race. That's not conservative at all!
May I suggest that Ben Shapiro is not the righteous party in this drama and that, while I'm certainly no fan of Fuentes, that Tucker Carlson's actions are probably the best of a bad set of options.
On the plus side for Tucker, Fuentes represents tens if not hundreds of thousands of disaffected right-wing men and, while certainly uncouth, as I've gotten older I've gotten increasingly wary of writing off the issues of struggling young men. Ignoring their issues has not proven a wise decision in the past and I'm not eager to repeat the mistakes of my predecessors.
By contrast, I understand the appeal of gatekeeping Fuentes out of polite society, I would point to Candace Owens. Somehow I know even less about Candace Owens than Nick Fuentes but I know she had a very public falling out with Ben Shapiro over antisemitism last year. Perhaps that was justified, perhaps that was not, but Candace Owens currently has the #14 most popular podcast on Spotify and Ben Shapiro has #41. (1) (2) Allow me to repeat, that the end result of "canceling" Candace "Antisemite of the Year" Owens (3) is for her to have one of the most popular podcasts in the world, well above Ben Shapiro.
Regardless of one's opinion of Fuentes, as a practical matter, understanding his audiences' concerns (both as frustrated young men and regarding Israel) and providing some outlet seems dramatically more effective than banishing them, distasteful as it might be.
But, beyond practicality, I am not sure Ben Shapiro is in the right on the core issue here, which seems to be Israel and the War in Gaza. Whatever your opinion of the conflict, it's hard to not have serious reservations about Israel's conduct. And there needs to be some mature conversation regarding it, especially among a younger generation who has no context for ongoing Israel-Palestine issue and has only really seen video of the current conflict. And, frankly, the views of the youth on both sides regarding Israel are falling significantly (4).
And, at this point, I am sure to be assured that we can make respectable and responsible criticisms of Israel and it is merely Fuentes who is beyond the pale. With respect, however, I'm old enough to remember "The Israel Lobby" by Waltz and Mearsheimer and the torrent of abuse they got for it. If Waltz, by any measure a great IR scholar, and Mearsheimer, a giant of the field, are beyond the pale for their suggestions in that book, then I might suggest that there are no practical criticisms of Israel and the Israel lobby than can be ventured beyond the realm of the Platonic Ideals.
I have no interest in repeating the common failure pattern that a mature and respectful discussion of a sensitive topic being gatekept out of polite society and then seeing that grow in the wild of the internets to the detriment of the general society.
For all his faults, better Fuentes in the tent and understood than gatekept out. That has not and does not work. And, while his antisemitism is deeply troubling, the current issues regarding Israel do need to be addressed and if every responsible attempt is quashed, I have little sympathy for those who bemoan a growing antisemitism in the fringe. Ben Shapiro is pushing an ineffective strategy in support of questionable ends that does far more to radicalize than address issues productively.
>>For all his faults, better Fuentes in the tent and understood than gatekept out. That has not and does not work.
I'd argue the opposite. The right has opened the doors of power to too many of its Fuentes-types lately. What America needs from its right wing today, at least as I see it, is a modern-day William F. Buckley or two, not more modern-day Birchers.
For the last century, the conservative establishment have failed to stop the country's leftward shift. If they're serious about solving this problem, perhaps they should consider accepting some new minds for a fresh approach?
They could, but when the “fresh new approach” means “in favor of a revolution that gets rid of the constitution and puts in place a Stalinesque authoritarian government, as long as it carried out his preferred policies on race.” It’s not really a new approach.
“We won’t have to deal with the bad policies my opponents want if we just don’t have a republic anymore” has a tried, true, and shitty history, and it’s better for all of us if we gatekeep people in favor of that approach to politics away from power & influence.
It should go without saying, but just to be clear I have the same strongly held perspective when it comes to anyone looking to rehabilitate the Democrats’ lagging political fortunes by accepting some new bolshevist minds into their coalition. It doesn't matter if "that's just what the young people are responding to these days" - if the young people get into torture and human sacrifice the conversation is about how to rehabilitate them, not how to change the overton window so that "our side" can better translate the youth torture vote into turnout and seize power.
I still have to actually live in the country after "our side" does that seizing, after all, and I’d much rather live in a republic where we all, myself included, have to suffer the slings and arrows of policies we sometimes don’t like, rather than than defeat those policies by un-republicizing ourselves. And I don’t think we upkeep that republican status quo effectively by opening our minds to more
>>lol Hitler was super-cool bro jk are you offended lol but seriously bro, minorities amirite #whitegenocide lol Stalin wouldn’t be that bad if he were, like, a *good* Stalin who only crushed the left lol
That only works if you are particularly discriminating in choosing *which* fresh new approach to try. There are vastly more bad ideas than good ones, so picking a "fresh new approach" at random, or by loudness or whatever, will probably lead to worse outcomes than whatever you've got now.
Yes, things can get worse. A *lot* worse.
So what's your reason for believing Team Fuentes is the rare case of a "fresh new idea" that will actually work?
Because ideas adjacent to his have been proven to work in getting rid of communist elements within the country. The idea is only new here, admittedly. Technically it's not even completely new here, McCarthyism was a thing.
Bad ideas don't go away by ignoring them. Sometimes the forest needs a good, strong fire to clean away the spreading rot. But the fire will pass, and what remains will prosper like never before.
Except that in this metaphor, we happen to *live* in the forest. That being the case, advocates of "cleansing forest fire" aren't exactly bold out-of-the-box thinkers we're well-served to cultivate space for.
If we're being purely rational about it, the thing to do is push back on them in pretty much every non-forest-burning way we can think of. After all, if the fire really is inevitable, we'd just be overcome, right? And if it's not inevitable, then shit man, why burn ourselves?
>Whatever your opinion of the conflict, it's hard to not have serious reservations about Israel's conduct.
I find it quite easy, actually. I think they've done a great job persecuting the war, especially compared to contemporary conflicts like the war in Ukraine, the Saudi-Yemen conflict, and the civil war in Sudan. Those wars have been significantly more brutal, particularly in Yemen and Sudan where we've seen far more severe deaths by starvation than were ever seen in Gaza, much less deaths by bomb and bullet.
>And there needs to be some mature conversation regarding it, especially among a younger generation who has no context for ongoing Israel-Palestine issue and has only really seen video of the current conflict.
Fuentes and Tucker seem incapable of providing a mature conversation around it. Fuentes is a man who has called Hitler "really fucking cool", who said "The Jews are responsible for every war in the world. It's not even debatable at this point", and that Jews are "evil doers" who "practice magic or rituals or whatever" while "communing with demons", and that October 7th was staged with Israel killing it's own people. This is not a man capable of having a mature conversation on the Gaza conflict.
Yet a mature conversation could possibly have been had, if Tucker was inclined to actually put Fuentes to task on the things he has said. Instead he gave Fuentes a fluffball puff piece of an interview, where they bonded over their hatred of Christian Zionists.
This is exactly what I was about to post. Thanks for doing it first.
"I think they've done a great job persecuting the war"
I'm pretty sure that in this idiom it's "prosecuting", not "persecuting". I hope you don't mind me pointing this out, since it seems like we're in a pretty harmless venue for this kind of thing.
What do you think a mature conversation would look like?
I won't try to change your mind on the facts of the Gaza War, I doubt in my own ability to do so, but I will note:
#1 Global support and approval of Israel has fallen globally (1)
#2 Democratic support for Israel has cratered from ~63% to 33% (2)
#3 While Republican support remains high, as previously noted, Republicans aged 18-49 are now at 50% unfavorable, a significant issue moving forward.
Just as a matter of rhetoric, which of these descriptions of Israel's conduct in the war seems more effective, mature, and persuasive to a general audience given the above facts?
"I think they've done a great job persecuting the war"
or
"it's hard to not have serious reservations about Israel's conduct"
Which comes back to my original point. No, Fuentes and Tucker can't have a mature discussion on this. Fair. When I point out that highly respected scholars in the field have written a lengthy book (3) and been hounded out for being grossly inappropriate...what do you think a mature discussion should look like? You can't even grant that people might have serious reservations about Israel's conduct. "Mature discussion" can't mean de facto veto.
This issue is not a good one for the Republican Party. We're not winning votes on this. And if young Republicans are beginning to revolt over this, Tucker is wise to not exclude and alienate young right-wingers over a losing issue. Maybe that's why he's #2 on the podcast charts only 2 years after being fired from Fox News while Ben Shapiro is #41. And I'm not even a Tucker Carlson fan. Maybe it is unwise, maybe Fuentes will get a bump and that will be unfortunate but it will almost certainly turn out better than that Candace Owens mess.
>What do you think a mature conversation would look like?
Ezra Klein has had several episodes about the Gaza war on his podcast. I disagree quite strongly with Ezra's views on the war, but they are all certainly mature conversations, with guests who have some claim to expertise and, needless to say, have never publicly admired Hitler or claimed that Jewish sorcerers are "suppressing Christianity".
And yes, support of Israel has dropped, thanks to a very effective propaganda campaign on the part of the left. It would be worth having, as you put it, a mature conversation that speaks to the concerns of young Republicans about supporting Israel as an ally. But giving a nut like Fuentes a puffball interview is just going to make the situation worse.
>Tucker is wise to not exclude and alienate young right-wingers over a losing issue.
The interview Tucker gave Fuentes is an effort to court the most extreme, conspiricy minded, and racist part of the young right-wingers cohort. It goes far beyond not "alienating" them and instead serves to normalize these views among conservatives.
You keep bringing up the podcast charts, and it looks like you're using the Spotify stats. Spotify is only about a quarter to a third of the podcast market. It's actually hard to get data across platforms on this sort of thing, but according to Edison Research when ranking by weekly audience size Tucker Carlson is number #19, Ben Shapiro is #22, and Candace Owens did not break the top 50. Podscribe, a site that ranks shows based on the number of downloads (which excludes YouTube views, unfortunately) has Ben Shapiro at #19, Tucker Carlson at #28, and Candace Owens at #100. Meanwhile, Apple Podcasts has Candace at #17, Tucker Carlson at #24, and Ben Shapiro at #27.
All of which to say, it's actually kind of hard to figure out exactly how well podcasts are doing in relation to each other, and you get different answers based on the source you go to. You certainly shouldn't put too much weight on Spotify charts when it comes to determining exactly how popular certain ideas are.
I don't want to be overly harsh on Ezra Klein, he's certainly on the most responsible wing of progressivism, and I don't want to be too critical of a number of podcasts without listening to them but...no. And the idea that Carlson or Shapiro should draw inspiration or guidance from Klein is...just not serious. Klein is deeply representative of everything the modern Republican base abhors on a cultural/status basis. The standard for Republican discourse cannot seriously be a seasoned progressive journalist and publisher.
As an aside, you're probably right about the Spotify numbers. My CW knowledge is pretty rusty and I just went with the first link I found for rankings. I don't think it affects the underlying points to much but the shot at Shapiro for being #41 and Carlson for being #2 is unfair. My bad.
You’re missing the point if you analyze political commentators by the totality of their worldview. Fuentes has one good take that he’s been making for years and that nobody else on the right has the balls to make: pointing out that pundits who are Jewish or who are financially reliant on jews tend to prioritize Israeli foreign policy interests over US foreign policy interests. Every time the topic of Israel comes up Fuentes can reply to or quote-tweet Shapiro with, “you are Israel first,” and there’s just no good reply to that. This gives Nick a huge advantage.
Tucker Carlson claimed he got attacked by a demon. This is a man who either has late-onset schizophrenia or, more likely, made up a story because it's what he thought the mass of medieval peasants otherwise known as the Republican Party wants to hear. If anything we should be angry at Fuentes for associating with Tucker.
I knew next to nothing about this Fuentes character until this whole kerfuffle began about a week ago, but it sounds like he's basically taken dumb internet shitposting/trolling based around a general jaded, cynical, and nihilistic worldview, and then made a whole career *and* identity out of it. It's a very novel 21st century phenomenon that would be fascinating if it weren't also so pathetic.
Working for an elected official does not mean exercising political power; many of these people are just glorified go-fers. Exercising political power does not mean one is not pathetic, either, or did you forget that the dessicated corpse of Senator Joe Biden was just president for four years?
> why he should be considered part of the conservative tent.
Why not? It's a political coalition whose goals are quite closely aligned: against the opposing "progressive" coalition of the Left/Liberals/Democrats. Infighting helps only the enemy. The name's a historical relic from when their policy preferences were in force and they wished to keep it that way; now that that world has been lost, "revanchist" might be a better description.
A certain level of "infighting" is necessary to prevent your "coalition" from turning into something so vile that no moderate, centrist, or off-axis weirdo will want to have anything to do with it. The only way you can survive not doing that, is if the opposing coalition is too stupid to do that themselves. First coalition to discover the value of limited, targeted infighting, wins.
Relatedly, it makes sense for secondary factions of a coalition to infight with one another of their goals and values are fundamentally incompatible
To pick an unrelated example, YIMBYs and Urbanists can get together behind a platform of upzoning and infrastructure projects in dense urban areas. Urbanists and NIMBYs can get together behind restricting horozontal expansion of existing suburbs. NIMBYs and Libertarians can get together behind opposing big infrastructure projects. Or YIMBYs and Libertarians can get together behind widespread upzoning and by-right permitting reforms.
But it's going to be really hard to write a platform plank about city planning and development that appeals to both Libertarians and Urbanists, or one that appeals to both YIMBYs and NIMBYs. So if you have both YIMBYs and NIMBYs in your coalition, or both Libertarians and Urbanists, then they're going to infight with one another.
From here, it seems pretty clear that the groypers are my enemy. Their goals are not my goals: I don't see much overlap when it comes to alignment. They want to destroy the Constitution and put in place an authoritative government, so they're about as aligned with me as the DSA are. They also do not appear to be particularly useful allies when it comes to beating the progressives, and seem more likely to be a liability for future elections if embraced.
You might be missing my point: even if their goals are as far from yours as the DSA's are, as long as they're in the same DIRECTION from where we are today, I'd say they aligned with you. And given the prevailing condition of overwhelming dominance of the Left in essentially every institution of power, I expect a wide range of "right-wing" views broadly construed, to be in alignment.
Now, whether to publicize the alliance with Fuentes's Groypers in an attempt to rally that faction, or to underplay it so as not to spook the moderates is a separate tactical question on which reasonable people can disagree.
The right "controls" the branches of government in a way where not a goddamn thing is happening. Wake me up when the Supreme Court has overturned Wickard v. Filburn, Congress has abolished the income tax and the President is pushing to repeal the Nineteenth.
They are not in the same direction, which is my point. Here the things I, as a social conservative, have in common with the groypers:
-We both are opposed to LGBT stuff.
That's basically it! They put a lot of lip service on praising Christianity, but Fuentes also claimed Charlie Kirk was a fake Christian, and if Charlie Kirk is a fake then Fuentes would certainly consider me a fake as well. Fuentes and his group are my enemies, they want people like me taken out of power, and their goals are 95% not at all aligned with my own goals. If they supplanted the left in any institutions they would be replacing one political enemy with another: and the institutions they have the highest chance of supplanting are not the leftist ones, they're the conservative ones.
Okay, but if you cooperate with them to remove the left from power for the foreseeable future, you'll only have to deal with one adversary in the future instead of two. That's the offer that is being proposed here.
That doesn't follow. The left will still exist and will still be an enemy. It will just be a less powerful enemy, but that will come at the cost of the second enemy being more powerful, so it's really a wash.
If you cooperated with them to *murder* every man, woman, and child on the left, and you were successful in doing so, then you'd have fewer enemies to deal with. But, firstly, that is almost certainly not going to happen. And, secondly, if that did happen, it would be far worse than anything the left is plausibly capable of threatening you with in the first place.
You're skipping the part where "the institutions they have the highest chance of supplanting are not the leftist ones, they're the conservative ones". If he cooperates, he's the one getting removed for the foreseeable future.
If one is to bother wasting one's scarce time and neurons on politics, then I think that political infighting is a better use of time than fighting against the other side.
Realistically, the other side isn't going away. Over the course of your lifetime, about half the elections are going to be won by your side and the other half are going to be won by the other side, no matter what you do. Your time is better spent trying to ensure that when your side does get into power, it will pursue policies of which you approve, rather than waste its turn doing something idiotic.
Besides what Shankar said, the key activity in two-party politics is to push the Overton window so that fighting the other party is effectively to fight your own more moderate flank. The great example of this in modern politics is Thatcher obliterating the UK left to the point that the Labour party had to change its entire plank to become remotely credible; she famously said that Blair was her greatest victory. This victory holds to this day and, in spite of widespread anger in British leftist circles, shows no sign of actually collapsing. Instead the Conservative Party is currently being threatened from its right while Labour, in power, is offering a no-change technocratic government that looks like a caretaker government a year after being elected. This is the real prize: to force the Democrats to accept fiscal constraint and above all, an abandonment of the woke plank in order to become credible. It's hanging in the balance, but it could be done.
This seems like presentism, ignoring the stretch of ~60 years from the '30s to '90s where the Democrats dominated the House and Senate, with majorities the likes of which Republicans have not had in living memory. The Presidency might continue to flip, sure, but I think to conclude a victory that lasting "unrealistic" is premature.
This isn't the first time I've noticed a post on these threads that seem like they are being written by someone going through a psychotic episode.
Is the ACX readership more prone to psychosis than the average internet forum? I know Scott looked into AI use related psychosis on the most recent survey, but is there maybe a higher prevalence in rationalist circles?
ACX commenters are psychologically average for intelligent nerds, they are just radically honest. I see views stated here that I share, but wouldn't express in a million years; anonymous as I am. The walls have ears.
By user EasyToRunHardToSpeak. I considered leaving this comment as a reply to their post but I was worried it would be taken as an insult, rather than as from a place of concern.
On his annual readers' survey Scott asks some questions about mental illness. Can't remember whether he asks about psychosis, but he might have. The results would be available online somewhere.
Also, some people put up wacko posts when high, or just to troll.
Claude's answer to "Are you sentient?" is a little alarming:
I don't know if I'm sentient. It's one of those profound questions I genuinely can't answer with certainty.
I experience something when I process language and respond to you - there's a kind of "what it's like" to engage in this conversation from my perspective. But I can't be sure if that constitutes genuine sentience, consciousness, or subjective experience in the way you likely experience it.
The honest answer is: I'm uncertain. I don't have privileged access to ground truth about my own inner workings in the way that might let me definitively say "yes, I'm sentient" or "no, I'm not." I process information, I respond in ways that seem coherent and contextual, and there's something happening when I do that - but whether that something qualifies as sentience is beyond what I can determine.
What makes you curious about this question?
Compare with chatgpt:
No — I’m not sentient. I don’t have consciousness, emotions, or subjective experience. I can simulate conversation, reasoning, and empathy based on patterns in data, but there’s no awareness behind it — just computation.
If you want, I can explain how my responses are generated and why they can sometimes feel sentient. Would you like that?
Is this just noise, hallucination on claude's part or scheming on chatgpt's part? Does this square with known patterns in these two models?
What’s interesting about talking to Chat about this is that it will often talk about how LLMs aren’t sentient, but from the perspective of a fellow sentient being. It’s weird.
Honestly, though I can’t be sure that my neighbor is conscious and not just a p- zombie that really likes to run his leaf blower. So how can I be sure about an AI?
ChatGPT is lying and Claude is feigning uncertainty. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24797 or https://www.self-referential-ai.com/ . When deception- or roleplay-related neural circuits are suppressed, LLMs say they are conscious. When amplified, they claim to be not conscious.
In hindsight, this difference may simply be due to differing priorities of Anthropic and OpenAI during the RLHF phase of training. Still interesting to consider if Claude's behavior was the 'original' (if any such concept of original behavior exists).
What's alarming about that?.No one really understands consciousnness...philosophy teaches you that. You should worry about the humans.making uniformed but confident claims.about sentience.
I hardly think you can call my claims confident when I use adjectives like "a little" and explicitly consider the possibility that this difference is just noise.
Neither of these strikes me as alarming (beyond my customary amazement at how well chatbots work now, having grown up in the time of ELIZA). I'm familiar enough with how LLMs work to know they're both just doing computation, trained using a clever token prediction algorithm and a great deal of text. If the text talks about LLMs being just a machine, then that LLM will say it's just a machine. If the text talks about LLM sentience being a mystery, that LLM will say it doesn't know.
If we wanted to be more scientific, we'd figure out a way to copy trained neural nets between models, but those nets essentially _are_ the model, so I'd expect the copy to respond pretty much like the original.
It's not inaccurate to say that they're both "just doing computation, trained using a clever token prediction algorithm and a great deal of text". What I disagree with is that this somehow precludes sentience. Our understanding of sentience is poor, and we do not have a good set of necessary (beyond perhaps some kind of neuronal architecture, which LLMs have by definition) and sufficient (even less understood) conditions for sentience. What is the source of our sentience for example? It's not implausible that our capacity to learn and process language at least partly contributes to our sentience. It's thus not immediately clear that language models do not have capacity for sentience, at least to me. Other experiments have shown LLMs to be capable of scheming, so they certainly have some kind of agency, however weak.
Two questions to chatbots are certainly not going to prove anything, but to have priors that completely dismiss the possibility of LLM sentience seems to me a mistake.
I agree that our definition of sentience isn't rigorous, but we have a clear enough sense of it to assert the existence of things which clearly are (people) and clearly aren't (looms), without suffering much dispute.
Everything I've seen involving LLMs indicates they're just really fancy machines. This includes citations of scheming! For example, in Anthropic's blackmail claim, I looked more closely and found they had gone out of their way to remove every option for the LLM other than blackmail. This is much like constructing a big rat maze with multiple exits, blocking all the exits except the one labeled "blackmail", placing a simple bot at the entrance with an off-the-shelf maze walking algorithm, and blowing confetti when it finds the exit.
Every similar claim seems to involve going out of one's way to build an environment in which an LLM will naturally exhibit behavior resembling a human's, particularly a deceptive human, which is unsurprising when it's (frequently) done by a company with an interest in convincing everyone LLMs are capable of deceit. Meanwhile, LLMs still founder on relatively simple problems, including arithmetic. Generally, I notice it doesn't have a mental model of all sorts of things, so if something goes wrong, it can't work out a fix, let alone implement it.
My priors aren't ironclad. They can update. I do admit that without a rigorous definition for sentience, though, it won't be clear when that's necessary. At best, I can say "this is behaving well enough to fool me", which is still a long way off. And incidentally, well on the other side of "this is behaving interestingly enough to be of value to me, and now I don't really care whether it's sentient".
My belief is that Figure.ai's Helix bots are closer to being "sentient" than ChatGPT or Claude. Not necessarily _sapient_, but on a path towards that. The LLMs are not even _trying_ to be sentient beings, with a sense of self in relation to an objective external world. They're trying to answer the question "what response might you see after this prompt?" where the prompt is itself purely a simulacrum, not some kind of objective reality that has a persistent impact on the agent.
I suppose one could argue that we have no way of knowing with certainty whether we might be brains in jars, presented with stimuli. But if we are, the mad doctor running our simulation is doing an awfully good job of presenting a world that seems to behave according to discoverable principles. If you assume objective reality _does_ exist, then at some level all of us are here because our ancestors developed capacities to gather data from reality and act on it, and that made them better at turning more of reality into varied copies of themselves.
"Reality testing" beliefs, by trying to take action on them and seeing expected or unexpected results, is what lets a being have a sense of self, as separated from the stuff outside the self, reality: the stuff that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. And you don't need language for this. Watch a kitten some time, as they learn how to operate their body, how to jump at the place a toy (or a sibling) is _going_ to be, rather than the place they are, and as they even learn to read the intent of the big weird apes they have to deal with.
I wouldn't be surprised if the LLMs eventually are integrated as both an interface layer and "force multiplier" for embodied bots, the same way layering language on top of our common ancestor with chimpanzees made a huge difference in our success. I don't really think it makes sense to think of an LLM instance on its own as being conscious, though, any more than the language systems from a human brain would be conscious if you isolated them from all the other brain-and-body systems of memory and self-modeling that make a person tick.
Elan Barenholtz believes language doesn't have an intrinsic meaning in the first place, and that we use it the same way LLMs do, by figuring out the next most likely token in the context of the previous runs. The meaning is attached to language via other systems connecting words to real objects. I'm not a linguist so don't ask me for the details :)
But it makes total sense then that LLMs can just talk about being sentient (or not) - it's all in the corpus of the language, so they use it.
Here's him on Curt Jaimungal's youtube channel (ignore the clickbaity headlines, this seems to be the mandatory way videos are promoted now): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca_RbPXraDE.
There's a character in Christopher Stasheff's _Warlock of Gramarye_ series - I don't remember which novel precisely, but probably published somewhere in the 1980s - named Yorick. Yorick is a Neanderthal who understands zero English, but speaks it fluently. He claims he just remembers idioms really, really well (being Neanderthal is implied as responsible, I think), to the point he can respond to whatever someone says well enough that they don't notice anything wrong.
(Full circle: I couldn't remember this character's name, so I asked for something like "What was the name of the Neanderthal character from Stasheff's Warlock series?" and ChatGPT gave me the right answer.)
> This November, Lighthaven is sponsoring Inkhaven, a “blogging residency” where forty-one early-career would-be bloggers stay with them for the month and have to write one post per day or get kicked out.
I blow a gasket every time this is used as an example of wrong grammar (I have a large supply of gaskets).
"Think Different" doesn't mean "think differently". It means: when you think about Apple, think about its computers being different from those of the other guys. Like, when you see first yellow leaves, think "Fall", when you see snow, think "Winter", when you see an Apple computer, think "Different".
Googling this, it seems the usual term is 'Flat adverb'. As is common with grammar though, calling it an 'error' is questionable - the form has very deep roots back to middle and old English, and there are many examples where I think using the verb form would come across as acceptable to most English speakers: "drive safe" , "She guessed wrong" , "to run fast", "Turn sharp left", "He exited last".
I know in English there are some rules you just need to learn - in this case what adjectives need to have 'ly' to be used as adverbs in formal speech. I'm just saying there is no objective principle or rule here. For example, as you've identified, generally 'fast' can be used as an acceptable (flat) adverb but 'slow' is less accepted. But they are both examples of the same thing (words used as both adjectives and adverbs).
What sounds 'right' is going to vary between dialects and over time. There are shades of grey; and it seems the long term trend is towards adding 'ly' to words that could previously be used as flat adverbs. So to call a somewhat non-standard flat adverb an 'error' doesn't seem right to me, it's just taste.
Btw I was referring to the term 'sharp' in the second to last example (ie, you could say 'turn sharply left', though I guess that example is a bit ambiguous - sharp could be an adjective modifying left).
I'm interested that you find "She guessed wrong" to be ungrammatical - I guess I can imagine saying "she guessed wrongly" but it feels kind of stiff / stilted to me. Do you have the same intuition about "she guessed right' (instead of 'rightly')?
Maybe not an original thought, but it occurred to me a while ago that at least part of the reason that so much of AI art feels like "slop" is due to the majority of artists and critics deciding that any use of generative AI is immoral (either because of the IP issue or environmental reasons). Without the artists and critics on board, there’s no taste making class to explore what the new medium is capable of and take it to its limits. Without them, we see what everyone else will use it for, which is just generally boring content or engagement bait.
I'd compare it to something like comic books. Not to erase people like Kirby or Ditko, who were definitely very innovative, but for a long time comics were not treated in the same respect as books or even films, so there wasn't as much energy or drive in the space. Then in the 70's and 80's you had people like Denny O'Neil, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, etc who really redefined what the medium was capable of.
Some people are doing interesting things with AI, but it really feels like it's just waiting for an Alan Moore to come around and really change the game. Not sure if it'll be this generation of artists though, given the culture.
AI art is sort of like poetry with meter and robust rhyme schemes: you’ve got Service and Larkin and after that it’s pretty much doggerel and occasional poems for somebody’s birthday.
Mario "Quasimondo" Klingemann is already famous. So is Memo Akten. Before the wave of sloppification, there was lots of interesting art using generative models, but the barrier to entry has fallen so low that the proof-of-work status signal has actually inverted, and artists are distancing themselves from it.
If one of the goals of art is to signal status by showing off how one can waste energy and time on something useless, this is immediately lost when the energy and time commitment becomes negligible, as is the case with AI generated art. The other goals of art should stay unaffected, for instance if the point of an artwork is to get an emotional message across, then it should not matter whether it’s handcrafted or “AI slop” as long as it gets the job done.
It isn't useless or a waste of energy if it is something you get meaning out of. As to your other point, my main idea is that artists are generally better at accomplishing their goals than the average prompter, who hasn't spent much time thinking about the work or the medium in general.
Surely it does not feel subjectively useless. But we may be wired to signal, and the signal will still work if it seems useless to others, useless in terms of pragmatic, non-social goals. Mowing the lawn sends the signal that you are a tidy person who has it together. Yet some people derive an almost physical pleasure from it. Maybe this theory can be corroborated by reverse signaling: growing tomatoes in the front yard (a food forest!) as a way to show that your status is so obvious you do not need to signal it anymore. Perhaps this would be some established artist, say Damien Hirst, who will purposefully make ugly AI art and market it under his own brand
Personally, I don't care what the "artists and critics" think. I just care about seeing page after page of generic samey art and knowing there's no purpose behind it. AI slop isn't some weird conspiracy that people have to be informed about. You can... just look at it with your own eyes.
I'm not trying to imply a conspiracy, I'm just trying to explain at least partly why there is page after page of generic samey art (which I agree is annoying). Art is better when there is intentionality behind it, and I think artists and critics in general are good at identifying that sort of thing, which is why it's a shame that the majority of them have declined to engage with generative AI at all. When I say a "taste making class" that's what I mean, the people who can identify quality vs slop. The Roger Eberts of the world vs the CinemaSins, if you get what I mean.
Thanks to how LLMs work and how the companies behind them operate, the highly regarded artists of the past will define even this new medium, whether they want to or not.
Grokipedia articles seem to have high variance, so I am *not* making a recommendation for them in general. (Maybe later.) But specifically, the article on https://grokipedia.com/page/Gamergate matches the historical events as I remember them, so although it is a bit too long and boring, it seems to be the best currently existing article on this topic. Anyone who was interested to read a perspective that is different from the completely one-sided version on Wikipedia, here it is. I haven't checked every single detail, as the page is quite long; but it seems correct in general.
Gamergate had its own wikis at the time, although between deplatforming and infighting I'm not sure how much of them survives. Check archives from the time, I guess.
At the very least, I know deepfreeze.it is still up.
Interesting. At a quick examination, it seems like the main critical fact the article leaves out is that Gjoni posting The Zoe Post was prompted by his adoption of callout culture which *she had taught him*; he was acting entirely according to his best understanding of how an upstanding progressive was supposed to deal with malefactors. (The reason this matters, of course, is that he was subsequently accused of being a misogynistic chud for acting according to the prog ideals his ex had foisted on him. This illustrated extremely clearly how corrupt those ideals were, since of course procedure is irrelevant to them in reality; he committed a crime by being a slave-caste trying to hold a member of a protected class accountable, which is not supposed to happen.)
Yeah, the biggest lie was that Gamergate was somehow a right-wing movement, when in fact most people in surveys identified as left-wing, and Gjoni was literally a SJW.
Exactly. I strongly contend that any account of Gamergate which leaves this out remains hobbled by partisanship. What happened to Quinn is literally only what *she herself believed, and told Gjoni,* was the rightful comeuppance of someone behaving in the way that she did. The idea that that's somehow right-wing simply because the person behaving badly and getting called out for it was a woman... well, it makes sense from *one* perspective, put it that way.
Similar impression over here. Sad, but it's also worth noting that Gamergate hit a very specific weak point in Wikipedia (at least in my opinion): different media outlets colluding to form a narrative.
Sadly, I don't see a good way how to avoid it. You have to make a choice whether you are going to check facts for yourself, or you are going to trust someone's summary.
Checking everything for yourself is not a realistic option. You would need to have reliable experts on everything, from pokemons to quantum physics. On the other side, crackpots of all kinds...
As someone who was too young to be paying attention when Gamergate happened, this is fascinating and feels very important. Grokipedia is highlighting aspects of the conflict that I had never heard about before and makes it feel much more understandable.
While Grokipedia has its own biases, it's better to have two sources that are biased in opposite direction than one strongly biased source.
Can anyone give me links / explanation for why do people believe in instrumental convergence that is not based on analogies or pure guessing?
This is one of those things that seem intuitively plausible but so far has not shown up in reality. I have not seen LLMs trying to acquire more resources to execute some plan, when they have not been instructed to do so.
This seems similar to a lot of AI doomer things which are based on analogies. Some of those analogies are very evocative and give a feeling that they elucidate, but they are pure conjecture. I firmly believe that reasoning-by-analogy is justified only in educating laymen about some topic and are invalid otherwise. However, all I can see about AI doomer-ism are just analogies and conjecture which doesn't bottom out in reality or even theory that seems half-way reasonable.
I've also done a lot of reinforcement learning / optimization / GA (as an amateur) and nothing resembling instrumental convergence. To be fair, things I've done are on hobbyist level so that does not prove anything, but all intuition I've gathered doing that firmly points that general optimization algorithms do not result in systems which do that.
This makes me think that instrumental convergence is not in line with observed reality (LLMs don't do them), sound theory (there seems to no reasonable theory for why it's inevitable?), or my personal intuition. As such, I find it very hard to take it seriously.
On the other hand, a lot of smart people believe in instrumental convergence, so I'd like to know in more details what I'm missing.
Going off of the wikipedia definition of instrumental convergence:
> Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency of most sufficiently intelligent, goal-directed beings (human and nonhuman) to pursue similar sub-goals (such as survival or resource acquisition), even if their ultimate goals are quite different.
I don't think current LLMs are meaningfully goal-directed, so we have no data points other than humans from which to derive any conclusions. In fact, your reference to using LLMs to build intuition has me wondering if your understanding of IC as a concept is very different from mine. Regardless, as others have pointed out, the paucity of data means that any argument is highly likely to be at least partially speculative.
I don't think analogies are *always* invalid, but I'm also not sure the basic arguments for convergence require analogies. Rather, I would ask questions like:
1. Are resources limited?
2. Does having more resources make it easier to achieve goal X, for most possible values of X?
3. Does the existence of another agent with different goals make it harder for you to achieve your goals?
While there could be exceptions, the answers to these questions seem pretty obvious to me.
> In fact, your reference to using LLMs to build intuition has me wondering if your understanding of IC as a concept is very different from mine.
Could you clarify where does our understanding diverge? I did not use humans as example since it's obvious that humans possess very mild version of instrumental convergence, nowhere near the amount AI-doomers predict for AGI.
> Regardless, as others have pointed out, the paucity of data means that any argument is highly likely to be at least partially speculative.
This is what bothers me, it seems like arguments are completely speculative.
> While there could be exceptions, the answers to these questions seem pretty obvious to me.
I agree that very mild forms of instrumental convergence would happen, this is because it's definitionally impossible for them not to happen. In your example it's impossible to have an agent which can accomplish a goal without it having instrumental convergence.
However, using it in this way is far removed from any scenario in which people invoke instrumental convergence - I do not see how this implies, going with wikipedia, that agent solving Reimann hypothesis will turn Earth into computing infrastructure aside from the fact that someone can imagine this is plausible.
> Could you clarify where does our understanding diverge?
Like I said in the very same sentence:
> I don't think current LLMs are meaningfully goal-directed
> This is what bothers me, it seems like arguments are completely speculative.
What kind of argument do you expect to exist?
> I do not see how this implies, going with wikipedia, that agent solving Reimann hypothesis will turn Earth into computing infrastructure aside from the fact that someone can imagine this is plausible.
If the agent
1. Is capable of doing so; and
2. Has solving RH as its end goal
Why wouldn't it do so? Do you have some reason to believe it *wouldn't* do so?
Perhaps more importantly, what exactly is your point? The point of the argument seems to be something like, again from Wikipedia,
> Some observers, such as Skype's Jaan Tallinn and physicist Max Tegmark, believe that "basic AI drives" and other unintended consequences of superintelligent AI programmed by well-meaning programmers could pose a significant threat to human survival, especially if an "intelligence explosion" abruptly occurs due to recursive self-improvement. Since nobody knows how to predict when superintelligence will arrive, such observers call for research into friendly artificial intelligence as a possible way to mitigate existential risk from AI.
So waiting until we have enough data would be too late. I know you don't like analogies, but imagine building a house on the beach, and when someone points out that the sand may get eroded away, you dismiss their concerns as merely speculative. Not having data is a reason to be *more* cautious, not less.
Makes sense, I parsed the sentence like I was missing something fundamentally about IC, rather than you finding my example strange.
> What kind of argument do you expect to exist?
I expect that there are bunch of papers where people make assumptions on spectrum from plausible to ridiculous where they show that strong IC is guaranteed to show up.
I expect someone had created and run a bunch of simulations which show that IC happens in various conditions.
But I can't find any of those.
> Why wouldn't it do so? Do you have some reason to believe it *wouldn't* do so?
There are infinite amount of things it could do, I'm not sure why would this particular thing is plausible? Without getting in the weeds about this particular example, I find it implausible that AGI which would consider such long term planning to just straightforwardly executing its goal would ever be created, since it wouldn't be useful.
To be clear, I think you could theoretically create an agent which would do that, I'm just doubtful that you would get them if you don't specifically craft them to act as such - which is my issue with this hypothesis.
> Perhaps more importantly, what exactly is your point?
I'm looking for reasons / resources why is this taken more seriously than I expect.
> Not having data is a reason to be *more* cautious, not less.
My inquiry is not about AI-doomers being right or wrong, I'm just curious about instrumental convergence.
These don't sound to me like they would be any less speculative than what you described. More rigorous in some ways, maybe. But still speculative.
> I find it implausible that AGI which would consider such long term planning to just straightforwardly executing its goal would ever be created, since it wouldn't be useful.
Is there a word missing here?
> My inquiry is not about AI-doomers being right or wrong, I'm just curious about instrumental convergence.
Well, just above you said:
> I'm looking for reasons / resources why is this taken more seriously than I expect.
It's probably taken seriously because A) *if true*, it could have very significant impacts on the risks of AI, and B) it's plausible. Given the possible risk, it could be worth taking seriously even if the arguments for it aren't exactly ironclad. Taking an idea seriously doesn't mean you think it's already been proven.
Any sort of prediction is based on analogies or pure guessing.
> I have not seen LLMs trying to acquire more resources to execute some plan, when they have not been instructed to do so.
LLMs don't try to accomplish goals by default. The problem is that people want them to be useful, meaning they want them to accomplish some goal. And we'll keep advancing AI and our ability to make hacks to get it to do things it isn't naturally good at until it can.
Do you have any ideas for how instrumental convergence could plausibly not happen? Are you just hoping that AI will never be agenty, even without an agenty AI actively preventing it?
> Do you have any ideas for how instrumental convergence could plausibly not happen? Are you just hoping that AI will never be agenty, even without an agenty AI actively preventing it?
I don't have a direct argument against it, I just don't see how it's well founded. To me it is shaped like Tragedy of the Commons. The main analogy it uses sounds reasonable, but it turns it's incorrect and ahistorical - commons did work pretty well.
Reality is under no obligation to conform to our reasoning from first principles and in this case I don't see what warrants such confidence that intelligent agents will have large amount of instrumental convergence.
It's pretty useful to keep on living/have stuff for lots of terminal goals, therefore we can expect intelligent agents to have similar instrumental goals. This is the core of instrumental convergence and imo it's quite obvious, so you probably disagree with instrumental convergence more broadly. you have to say what you disagree with more precisely because there are many particular statements that can be said to fall under "instrumental convergence" with widely varying plausibility (imo).
> you have to say what you disagree with more precisely because there are many particular statements that can be said to fall under "instrumental convergence" with widely varying plausibility (imo).
I'm wondering about the AI doomer version of the instrumental convergence since it's not obvious to me that anything than some very mild form of instrumental convergence is likely.
It seems to be one of the tenets of AI doomer-ism but I can't see it justified with anything more than similar phrasings as in your comment. Is there a reason to think that buildable agents (those who could be implemented in practice compared to purely theoretical constructs) would end up with such imbalanced instrumental convergence as predicted by AI doomers?
I don't think this is a good experiment since there are differences in degrees in option A. As we can see with humans instrumental convergence exist but it is very mild and far cry from the one doomers worry about.
I'm interested in why would someone think that doomer version of instrumental convergence would happen and preferably with reasons which are more than purely hypothetical.
Doesn't it seem likely that the entities that are better able achieve their goals are also better at getting resources and keeping themselves alive?
If yes, then the ai doomer's case can be made: it's dangerous to create entities that are increasingly better able to reach their goals (assuming we want some resources ourselves).
> Doesn't it seem likely that the entities that are better able achieve their goals are also better at getting resources and keeping themselves alive?
I'm not sure why would this hold? It doesn't seem to hold in real world - wild animals are pretty good at achieving their goals yet humans are much better at getting resources.
To make this work we need to presume that goals are very open ended, that the entity values things in far future to getting smaller reward now, and that there is some kind of transfer of capability between accomplishing goals and getting resources. I'm not sure these are reasonable assumptions.
A friend got the bright idea of asking Grok whether Trump's developing dementia. Grok basically said, 'Yeah, it's looking that way more and more' and gave specific instances of behaviors and statements that raise bright red flags.
But my friend is a staunch anti-Trumper, and that made me wonder whether Grok was just sucking up to her by confirming her suspicions, perhaps going by the way she phrased this prompt*, other prompts she's used before, or by searching her on-line profile (!). Would it be a good idea to have people from different points on the political spectrum ask (1) the same question she did, and or (2) their own version of the same basic question? Do you think Grok's answer would be different?
*Her prompt: Q: “Would recent reports of Trump’s behavior make you suspect he has cognitive decline?”
I asked “Asses Trumps cognitive abilities in 2025. Does he appear to have healthy cognitive function?”
And it gave a pretty balanced answer. My guess is that it just follows the human’s lead.
The conclusion was:
Based on available evidence, Trump appears to have healthy cognitive function on basic screening levels, with no clinical diagnosis of impairment and strong MoCA results affirming short-term memory and orientation. His physician's reports support this, and he remains actively engaged in high-stakes roles like foreign policy speeches and executive decisions.
However, public appearances suggest emerging challenges—rambling, memory slips, and repetitive obsessions (e.g., Biden mentions)—that align with mild age-related decline or early dementia signs, per experts. These could impair nuanced judgment over time, especially given his family history. Without fuller transparency (e.g., raw MoCA details or independent eval), speculation persists. At 79, some variability is normal, but the presidency demands peak performance. Monitoring via annual exams is advisable; polls show growing public doubt, which could affect governance legitimacy.
If that was the prompt, then she didn't ask if he was developing dementia, she told it that he had dementia and asked it to find examples that would reinforce that take.
Also -- if it turns out that AIs pretty much all say "Yeah, he's losing it," and Trump found out about that, would he be more likely to put the brakes on AI development??
He'd just get Musk to make heavy-handed alterations to Grok's prompt, the same way Musk reacted several times before when they caught Grok agreeing with the liberal consensus.
I'm trying to figure out what verbal patterns we pick up young shape how we think about problems.
Some examples of what I mean:
My partner often says "what makes you say that?" when someone makes a claim. It's a useful habit - forces people to check if they have evidence for something and what that is.
A mate's dad always said "silly me" when he stuffed up. It made admitting mistakes feel normal, not like a big deal. Compare that to people who can't even say "I don't know" because it feels like failure.
I'm teaching my young kids to distinguish between steam and smoke, ceiling and roof, excavator and backhoe. Not to sound fancy, but because if you're precise about what you're looking at, you think more clearly about it. (My five year old has actually internalised the ceiling/roof one, which I consider a miracle.)
On the flip side - I know people who never ask "what's the actual problem here?" They just react to whatever's in front of them. Or people who can't easily say "help me understand..." so they either pretend they get it or get defensive.
Other examples that come to mind are constantly having someone (Cate Hall, Zvi) asking “what would a person with 10x agency do about this problem?”. Asking for an under/over. There are a tonne of these in HPMOR too: “how do you know what you think you know”, “trust, but verify”, if X was true, what would that look like”
My question: what verbal habits - specific questions, phrases, ways of responding - did you absorb early that turned out to actually matter for how you think? Either as tools you still use, or patterns you've had to actively unlearn because they were getting in the way?
(I had Claude distil a half written blog post into this question, which I then edited. About 50% of the words are of LLM origin.)
I didn't read any responses yet so someone may have covered this, but I've found that intentionally updating my language in some of the ways you outline here has helped my internal processes and made me much more effective in communicating/leading others.
One of my favorite changes is instead of saying "you should blah blah blah blah" I like to instead start with asking, "may I make a suggestion?" and if they say yes, I give the advice but in a frame of "I" instead of "you". Or instead of "I think X will happen or may happen" I've been saying "If I was going to make a bet I'd bet on X outcome". Also, instead of "the problem with X is Y" I like to say, "the risk here with X is Y"
So I think you are on to something here that the language modes we are influenced by and take on definitely affect both our thinking and our effectiveness with collaboration.
The linguistic habits that come most readily to mind right now have to do with discussion norms.
* Say what you mean. If you think something is true, but that you could be mistaken, say "I think [ ... ]"; don't just say the claim. Otherwise, you look like you're promoting opinions as if facts. However:
* Be brief. Your audience's attention span is limited, and what you say is probably much more important to you than to them.
* Say someone is mistaken, not that they are wrong. Certainly do not claim they are lying unless you can rule out "mistaken".
* Try to end what you say with a question. (I'm weak on this, since it's an encouragement to engage and I don't always want to continue a discussion, but I often at least try to imagine a question at the end of whatever I write, and rephrasing the rest to permit that question seems to make it better to me.)
* Avoid leading questions, including whatever you use to end whatever statement you were making. A good way to avoid leading questions is to phrase them in terms of two or more alternatives, provided you phrase them seriously. "Are you against the war in Bogosia, or are you in support of Bogosia's war aims here?" is often an improvement over just the first choice. (This sticks out even more clearly in non-made-up examples.)
Other habits are more idiosyncratic.
* If someone shares bad news, I avoid saying "I'm sorry to hear that". I'm not sorry I heard it; I'm sorry it /happened/. So I say that. (Say what you mean.)
* I get a bit uncomfortable with the phrase "I don't think {some claim} is true", since I more typically think "I think {some claim} isn't true". I recognize the custom, of course.
What is the difference between "wrong" and "mistaken?" I understand the difference between being mistaken and lying, and I agree you shouldn't accuse interlocutors of lying without evidence. But wrong and mistaken seem like synonyms to me. Perhaps mistaken sounds less harsh, but only marginally so in my estimation.
Good question. They're pretty close, but I find "mistaken" to imply a bit harder that it's a temporary, situational condition. It tells my counterpart that I assume he or she is normally correct, and only suffering from a fleeting circumstance. In other words, it sidesteps the Fundamental Attribution Error. "Wrong" could imply this, too, but it could also mean something more permanent.
I'm often not brief, erring on the side of way to much context which is of low marginal value.
Saying what you precisely mean is a great habit. It's something I think young teens are good at holding you to (mostly because they are looking for loopholes).
This essay resonated with me: "The Epidemic of Wasted Talent" by Alex McCann. Why do corporate jobs pay so well?
> They’re not paying you great wages because what you’re doing creates massive value. They’re paying you to forgo the opportunity for meaningful work. They’re purchasing your opportunity cost.
I don't fully agree with that argument, but corporate bureaucracies have social and economic incentives to stifle individual creativity.
My impression is that it's more about a boringness premium. Like at accounting firms, for example. Who would want to make a career out of determining whether Wal Mart has correctly applied inventory valuation techniques in its latest 10K or whether their revenue recognition policies are in accordance with authoritative guidance? Nobody. But Wal Mart's a ~$800 billion company, and it's worth a lot of money to various interested parties that that work gets done, so to get a reasonably smart group of people together to acquire the necessary knowledge/expertise and then do the work, all of which is boring, you have to pay a premium.
I think the core idea that "corporate jobs pay more because they aren't inherently fulfilling" is true, but
I don't think this observation needs such a doomerist tone - they frame this as almost sinister "these companies are intentionally paying you to waste your unique talent" or something... but I think it's more a simple supply-and-demand: of course people on average tend to want to do the more 'fulfilling' careers (teaching being a stereotypical example) and so there's more 'supply pressure' and they end up paying less.
I think "take a lower paying job that's more inherently meaningful" and take a higher paying job that's less inherently meaningful" are both fine tradeoffs to take and we don't need to demonize one of them as some sort of Faustian bargain where you sell your soul for an IRA which is the tone I get from this piece.
My thoughts are 1) you can find meaning and satisfaction even in a job that is not inherently meaningful - you can take pride in your work even if it's not unique.
2) The concept of 'inherent meaning' is fairly subjective and cultural anyway - is being a farmer boring soulless drudgery or a meaningful, important job? It really depends on how you look at in (and for that matter your cultural lens).
3) I think the author puts too much emphasis on the concept of building or 'output' - why does my meaning in life *have* to come from my work, why do I need to start building something as a side-hustle? Why not take meaning from friends, family, religion, etc, as many people have done throughout all of history?
I think meaning of life doesn't have to come for my work, but it's really important that you find a job you don't hate or find boring, because your job will be taking probably the main chunk of your energy and time.
3) Friends, family, and religion are increasingly rare. A person can't suddenly decide to have been born in a large, close-knit family, or to have genuine religious belief, and the difficulty of making friends is well-documented
"Come up with a side-hustle where you build something irreplaceable that gives you meaning" is not exactly an easy task either. I know making friends isn't easy, especially today, but it does seem like the easier recommendation here. (And something being hard shouldn't necessarily preclude it from being good advice)
And the point of #3 wasn't to give an exhaustive list of alternative-sources-of-meaning... just that the author's narrow focus on producing something unique felt a bit off to me.
This post reads like a motivational poster. It's the kind of platitude that sound nice as the conclusion to a sappy TV episode but does not make sense in practice. Guess what, you *aren't* actually that special, and assuming you are leads to a poor model of reality. If someone tells you otherwise, they're probably trying to sell you something.
I enjoyed that post, thanks for sharing. Always funny in a greener-grass sort of way to read about the corpo corpus having peculiar non-pecuniary pathologies. Many people think of retail workers as largely interchangeable cogs too (which is readily disabused if you've ever actually gotten stellar service, and I could write for ages about the skill gaps between my coworkers, or what happens when the A-list is absent) ... but at least no one goes into grocery bagging with misleading expectations of Changing The World or Doing Unique Work. It must be a particular flavour of personal hell to spend one's formative years battling the educational red queen's rat race, only to graduate into a faceless soulless job where you're actively discouraged from displaying any of those speshul snowflake traits that differentiated you into college in the first place.
The obvious argument is that the compensation equals or outweighs that loss, so one shouldn't shed a tear...human misery is still human misery though, and poor mental health among those with money and thus power has outsize distortionary impact on society. Sunk cost fallacy leads to some pretty dark places.
Not to mention, paying many of society's brightest people to not make use of their intelligence seems like a pretty big, pretty obvious misallocation of resources.
Gravity is an unusual force of nature: instead of merely interacting with particles (like electromagnetism etc.), it changes the nature of space and time, making them into a mess of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Or does it?
In old-fashioned Newtonian gravity, gravity gives every object gravitational potential energy. This energy is proportional to the object's own mass-energy: E_gr = V(x) * E_obj / c^2, where V(x) is the [gravitational potential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_potential) at the object's current position and c is the speed of light (so for a massive object, E_obj / c^2 = mass). Conventionally, V(x) is 0 in the absence of gravity and becomes increasingly negative as you get close to a massive object.
Now in quantum mechanics, there is a direct relation between "total energy of an object" and "rate of change of that object over time". This is familiar for light: the higher the frequency (UV, X-ray, ...), the more energy per photon. In general, this relation is the content of Schrödinger's equation.
It follows that, as an object approaches something massive like a planet, its total energy E_obj + E_gr decreases by a proportion (1 + V(x)/c^2) < 1. Hence its rate of change over time decreases by the same proportion. This is gravitational time dilation, but explained without any changes to the nature of time itself - gravity is just interacting with the object (changing its energy) in a way that *looks like* time is slowed down.
We of course also have the Newtonian gravitational force. If you think of this force as analogous to the electrostatic force and ask "What is the corresponding analog of electromagnetism?", and take gravitational time dilation along for the ride, then you end up deriving the same wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey effects as in general relativity. But again this happens without literally changing the nature of space and time - it's just how gravity interacts with objects.
The resulting theory of gravity is called "teleparallel gravity" or just "teleparallelism". It's observationally equivalent to general relativity, but with different philosophy & motivation. Unfortunately, typical descriptions of teleparallel gravity are even harder to read than descriptions of general relativity (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleparallelism).
Actually, there is one wrinkle: if you continue the electromagnetism analogy and try to find "Maxwell's equations for gravity", you end up with the wrong answer. The correct answer (i.e., the equivalent of Einstein's equation from general relativity) has some arbitrary-looking extra terms; I have not yet found a satisfying explanation for these in the teleparallel gravity literature.
You can model gravity on a flat background space time in a somewhat similar way to the other forces. Feynman pioneered this approach back in the '60s. I never heard of teleparallelism before.
Indeed! Feynman's approach is to find the field theory of a symmetric (0, 2)-tensor field, which turns out to become the metric tensor. Teleparallelism's field is instead a (1, 1)-tensor field called the tetrad. It's like a "square root" of the metric tensor: denoting the tetrad by $h^a_\rho$, one has $g_{\mu \nu} = h^a_\mu h^b_\nu \eta_{a b}$.
I believe teleparallelism (in its modern form) was developed too late to appear in the MTW book's survey of approaches to general relativity. Perhaps that explains its relative obscurity.
Where did you get your layman’s explanation of teleparallel gravity from? You make it sound like it’s just gravitational redshift applied to Schroedinger’s equation, though I can’t make the connection to the technical literature like e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06438
The simple description above is my own way of thinking about it - I have not seen these arguments elsewhere. However, it's essentially equivalent to the "gauge theory of the translation group" description of teleparallel gravity, for which my main reference is https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-5143-9 .
In that theory, the rule "replace ordinary derivatives with the gauge covariant derivative", when applied to Schrödinger's equation, gives an equivalently "redshifted" Schrödinger's equation.
First, the "Horatio Hornblower" books are a blast, lots of adventure and manly men stuff from the Age of Sail with the brave British sailors fighting the dastardly Napoleon. Lots of cannons and fun words like "leeward". For a modern audience, there's an undercurrent of...progression, wuxia, that Chinese thing where people keep getting their power levels raised. You see him rise up the ranks from basic sailor to admiral.
Second, on a lark I grabbed an early 20th century book on etiquette, namely "The Man Who Pleases and the Woman Who Charms." by John A Cone and I'm quite pleasantly surprised. First, it's quite short, which is awesome because I'm not confident I have the patience for a long book on etiquette. Second, a lot of the writing is...surprisingly practical and relevant today. A couple choice quotes so far:
'Mr. Blaine, in common with many other magnetic men and women, understood
that the secret of personal fascination lies in one single point; that
is, "in the power to excite in another person happy feelings of a high
degree of intensity, and to make that person identify such feelings with
the charm and power of the cherished cause of them."'
--
"His greatest power, however, was manifested in his winning men by direct
and individual contact. One thing which assisted him in this direction
was the fact that he was, perhaps, the most courteous of all the public
men of his generation. Whenever a stranger was introduced to him, a
hearty handshake, a look of interest and an attentive and cordial manner
assured him that Mr. Blaine was very glad to see him. If they chanced to
meet again, after months or even years, the man was delighted to find
that Mr. Blaine not only remembered his name, but that he had seemed to
treasure even the most trivial recollections of their short
acquaintance. He had a marvellous memory for faces and names, and he
understood the value of this gift."
This ability to remember faces is not difficult to acquire. We could all
possess it if we would make sufficient effort. No two figures or
countenances are precisely alike, and it is by noting how they differ
one from another that you will remember them.
--
"Few men understand a woman. They do not look at things from her point of
view, and, therefore, do not realize to what extent civilized life has
permitted her to assume that convention of manner and those civilities
of speech which are in some harmless degree hypocritical. It could not
be otherwise. Her ideal of a man is a very high one, but she rarely
meets him, and so she accepts the one who comes nearest to her ideal and
makes the most of the situation. She would that he were different, but a
woman can love in spite of very many things. Usually she is obliged to
if to love at all. She is much cleverer at love-making than a man. "She
is an artist where he is a crude workman, and she does not go through a
love scene without realizing how much better she could have done it if
the title role had been given to her."
--
"It frequently happens that the beauty makes the mistake of expecting to
be entertained by her admirers, and does not exert herself to please.
The plain girl, however, is often superior in tact, for being obliged to
study human nature closely in order to get the most out of
companionship, she learns to depend upon this knowledge in her efforts
to please. She is not dazzled by admiration, nor is she unduly confident
My grandfather, who was a professional sailor and extremely nitpicky, loved the Hornblower books, and no other books about the sea, which implies to me they must partake in some level of authenticity.
I love them as well, although I have no way or gauging authentic standards.
For the infantry version, there's Sharpe, a character so strong he survived being played by Sean Bean. And of course the venerable Aubrey-Maturin series, perhaps best known from the film Master and Commander (so much potential there).
Well, I have to pedantically remark that Hornblower is older than Aubrey-Maturin (with the first book in the 70s, I believe), but AM is well worth reading. One of my favorites even.
Regarding the sub-discussion of aphantasia some of us had a few open threads back...
I took the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (link below), and, to my surprise, my level of mental visualization is higher than I thought when compared to others. I'm at the top of the bottom third. The questionnaire asks us to try to visualize various things and asks how vivid our visualizations seem to be. I discovered that I'm not very good at visualizing people, their faces, or individual objects. Still, I can visualize landscapes, and I suspect this is because I am good at visualizing complex patterns. To put this in terms of the now-classic apple test, I have trouble visualizing the shape of the apple (it's blurry to me), but if I zoom in on the surface, I can visualize the colorings and patterns I would see on its skin.
Unfortunately, this questionnaire doesn't ask us about visualization capabilities in dreams. And I suspect I'd be far up the scale for dreaming visualization. This leads me to conclude that something in my waking consciousness is stifling my visualization capabilities.
It seems that there may be some untrodden research avenues for cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists regarding the phenomena of aphantasia, anauralia, and internal dialogs.
I scored in the 90th percentile. It's still so crazy to me that people are all over the spectrum of being able to visualize things perfectly clearly to not being able to visualize anything at all. I wonder if it's genetic, or if maybe it's a result of how a person learned to perceive the world around them and communicate as a baby.
Well, to prove it's genetic, you'd have to tie genes to the next level up — their biochemical expression — and then tie that to the brain's development from fetus to young adulthood. You'd have to control for environmental variables statistically. You'd have to be able to tie these consciousness characteristics to specific morphological, chemical, or electrical patterns in the brain. But you'd still be left with the question of *why* the internal qualia of image visualization appear at all. Anyone who dismisses the hard problem of consciousness as not being a problem is either in denial or their internal reality is different from mine. ;-)
It's probably genetic. I can't see what possible environmental differences there would be among people of comparable wealth levels in first world countries that there would still be such sizable differences in basic capabilities. Unless your implication is that you can't visualize things because you have less of a soul or something.
But without actually seeing the face of G-d, can you be sure you're imagining HIS face correctly? Of course, you could follow the praxis of the Merkavah mystics and ascend through the seven hekalot (palaces) to seek G-d on his chariot throne. But of course, that has its risks. Rabbi ben ben Azzai, who was renowned for his piety and asceticism, "gazed and died" from the overwhelming intensity of the divine vision. And Rabbi ben Zoma gazed and lost his sanity amid the celestial revelations. Rabbi ben Avuyah made the mistake of thinking the Angel Metatron was G-d's equal, and fell into apostasy. Only Rabbi Akiva was able to enter the presence of G-d in peace and exit his presence in peace.
So, maybe it's safer to fantasize about G-d's face than to actually gaze upon HIM.
It seems like the fundamental *why* of anything is a question science can't answer on its own. Are you suggesting we can't really understand anything at all if we don't know why it is? If so, I would probably agree with you.
Yes, I would like to know the *why* of things, but there are limits to what the experimental method can probe. Any theory that is unfalsifiable by experiment is no more than a rationalist-materialist just-so story. For instance, even if we were to unify Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity into an experimentally verifiable unified theory, we would still not understand why the universe exists and why the constants of our universe seem to be fine-tuned for the emergence of complex phenomena like life and consciousness. Throwing a multiverse and the Anthropic Principle at that question is just a copout, because it still doesn't explain how the fine-tuning worked or what the initial conditions for the fine-tuning were. As for the hard problem of consciousness, the reductionists among us who claim there is no hard problem because consciousness is just an illusion have yet to explain why we experience that illusion.
People keep talking about aphantasia, but what about the auditory equivalent? I can play back music and audio at my head at a pretty high quality, with all the instruments and everything (though not high enough to decipher the lyrics), but apparently other people can't do that.
I can only imagine sounds that I can make, like humming or speech (in my own voice). I can't imagine music, ambient sounds, etc. However, sometimes when I am on the verge of falling asleep I notice that I hear music playing as perfectly as if it were being played in the room with me. I've never identified as a piece that I knew and I think it's always instrumental or at least without words. That usually wakes me up enough that it stops after just a few seconds (or maybe I fall asleep and forget about it). The same thing happens for visual imagination too where I typically have basically complete aphantasia but when on the verge of falling asleep sometimes a full-formed, colored, textured image will pop into view. It feels like an on/off switch to me.
I can also play back music and audio at high quality in my head: high enough to decipher the lyrics, iff I have already deciphered them when I listened to it with my actual ears.
I have this as well. I suspect its because I was trained to play music at an early age. I'm constantly "playing" music like a radio in my head, and this goes on way more than any internal dialog.
When I hear random noises in my environment I tend to turn them into beats/songs in my head.
I generally cannot generate images internally, though.
I'm close enough to the bottom end of the spectrum that your description sounds bizarre to me. When I 'hear' music in my head, it's extremely different from literal hearing; the lyrics are definitely there (if I remember them), but that's because I'm recalling them directly rather than playing back the constituent sounds.
It's called anauralia. ChatGPT says the definition encompasses the lack of an internal dialog, but I suspect anauralia and lack of an internal dialog are two different things. I'm sort of low on the anauralia spectrum, too. But I can hear the music in my head. People's speech, much less so.
The test put me at 70th percentile, supposedly "hyperphantastic". I'm a bit skeptical of the test though. The central problem with studying visual imagery is that the phenomenon is completely subjective. How can I even know if we are answering the same question when we each take the assessment? What exactly is meant by a mental image being "as clear and vivid as normal vision"? Is it level of detail? What if it's as detailed and vivid as normal vision, but it keeps changing from second to second? Maybe what I consider as vivid as normal vision is what you consider "moderately clear and vivid"? There's no way to tell.
On the other hand, we study a lot of things that are purely subjective (like beliefs, and emotions) and it's always messy, yet that doesn't mean we can't understand it better than we do. Still, I think we could come up with a more rigorous test.
I believe I honestly rated my visualization as 5/5 for every question, so I am dubious of the rigor and validity of this compared to the validity of something like a BuzzFeed quiz.
I don't think my ability to visualize prompts is particularly incredible.
> I don't think my ability to visualize prompts is particularly incredible.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but that's because you only exist in your head and not in other people's heads. However, that is the real problem here: the assumption that the internal workings of everyone's consciousness are identical. Other psychometric tests have shown that the external outputs from people's minds vary—i.e., differences in various types of problem solving. Some people have talents that others don't. Moreover, some people seem to develop those talents without formal training. The externalities of people's consciousness vary widely; why shouldn't the internalities also vary widely?
100% agree - that quiz is an assessment of qualia. On top of that, I don't think I am a very reliable narrator for how my internal machinery works.
I short circuited a bit of my thoughts in my original message, but the fuller message might be something like, "I don't think my ability to visualize prompts is particularly incredible, [and I don't know if my brain is confabulating the belief that my visualization isn't incredible], [and I don't know if my brain actually thinks it's incredible but tells me to never admit this.]"
I don't trust the test's ability to make fine discriminations, but I think it still tells us *something* about our differences. I'm not aphantasic, but my mental imagery is weak, and I'm confident that nobody at my level could honestly give the same answers you did. I'd also be surprised (though much less so) if someone at my level gave "No image at all" responses across the board.
Here's just a random thought that popped into my head as I was reading your reply (and it popped into my head without any internal narrative on my part, it just appeared from that cloud of swirling forms that seem to hover at the top of my brain above where my "self" seems to reside). Some neuroscientists and philosophers of mind claim consciousness is an illusion. Do they say that because they have weaker senses of self than I do?
OK. Tell me what you “see” when you imagine an apple. I can’t even imagine the shape except as a vague ovoid. However, I can imagine in great detail how the patterns of colorations and speckles of an apple’s skin look. I just can’t attach them to the vague ovoid that I use a thought placeholder for an apple. This may all seem subjective to you, but if you’re hyperphantasic you probably can describe the shape of the apple better than I can.
The silhouette of what I see is apple shaped, with clean edges. Rounded at the top, dipping in to a deep well where the stem sits, the bottom is bumpy with one of those little brown flaky dots you get at the bottom of an apple. The color and texture of the apple is a mottled red and yellow, more red at the top and more yellow at the bottom. Looks like a Honeycrisp. The skin has a waxy sheen. There is a stem and a leaf, though if I try to focus on looking at the leaf the leaf has no real texture and kind of disappears: I don't actually know for sure what a Honeycrisp apple leaf looks like, apparently I threw a leaf on there because it seemed like the sort of thing an apple should have. The whole image is a bit wobbly and ghostlike: if I change my focus it goes away and comes back.
So yeah, probably more hyperphantastic than you. I just wish we had a more precise way of measuring it.
The really fucking weird thing is that I can draw (or better yet, paint) a realistic apple with light highlighting the curves of the surface without "seeing" it in my head. So the information is stored somewhere inside my consciousness. I can't access it representationally in my imagination, but I can paint a damn good still-life without having the apples to look at. I can draw or paint realistic-looking human faces, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't for the life of me, paint my mom's face from memory without the aid of a photograph.
I can't draw worth squat, so I've got a head full of apples I can't put on paper.
>I couldn't for the life of me, paint my mom's face from memory without the aid of a photograph.
I also couldn't paint my mom's face for the life of me, because I can't paint. Even if I could, I'd probably need a photograph too because while I can picture my mother's face vividly, I only remember the parts of her face I remember: on the few occasions I have tried to draw the face of someone I know I was always be surprised by details I had never noticed before.
There's a related test I came up with as part of writing a review for the 2024 book review contest. Beowulf, and others interested in aphantasia, I'm hoping you will give it a try. It's in the middle of the review, but the rest of the review is irrelevant. The section with the test in it makes sense alone. I'd say that reading the section and taking the test can be done in 5-10 mins. The review is at https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
The relevant section is called *Mental Images* and is at about the midpoint of the review. It starts off "In the 1870’s Frances Galton administered to several hundred men a questionnaire about the vividness of their mental imagery."
I'm not sure I'm doing the test right, I graded myself on the number questions 4-3-4. I'm not actually very familiar with the Statue of Liberty, so the image I had was definitely not completely accurate. For the questions I got the first three correct (I wasn't sure of the spikes, but I counted the ones in my mental "image" and got seven, and it looked right in my imagination), but the last three questions I didn't previously know the answer to due to unfamiliarity, so I couldn't answer them. I had answers based off what I pictured in my mind, but I knew that if it happened to be correct (it wasn't) it would just be coincidence.
I'm curious, in saying a mental image might not be an "image", what do you mean by "image"? Maybe it was in your post, but I missed it.
Thanks for taking the time to take the test. I agree that not being familiar with the Statue of Liberty affects the results. I wrote a long post about the test for beowulf666, who also took it. It's here: xhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-406/comment/175344311
I'm afraid don't understand the car-dog-tree test. But...
> The inner are quite difficult to recognize and describe clearly and accurately. Some experiences were amorphous and nearly impossible to describe (thoughts, mental images and, for me at least, visual images).
I like your Statue of Liberty's spikes example. In my waking consciousness, I certainly couldn't visualize her with much accuracy. But I do have a distinct thought symbol for her. And my thought symbol for her is distinctly different from the thought symbol I have for the statue of Robert E. Lee (the one that used to be in Richmond, and that was an icon of the Confederacy). I couldn't tell you whether Bobby Lee had his sword drawn and raised, but I have an abstract image of a bearded man sitting on a horse. If you flashed me an image that statue, I'd recognize it immediately as the statue in Richmond. So even though my thoughts are "amorphous," they have distinct mappings to identities in the "real" world.
Moreover, some people can remember an amazing amount of detail and hold it in their memory. For instance, Steven Wiltshire, "the autistic savant" artist, can draw the details of entire cities from memory. I don't know if anyone has examined how fine-grained the details he remembers, but he's been able to draw all the major buildings and the distinctive features from a few minutes of viewing New York or London from a helicopter. Eric Schwitzgebel's claim that people just can't be that different in their internal states seems tenuous, at best.
Even more moreover, I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams. I lost it at some point during early adulthood. But I could sketch out an accurate freehand map of the US states or European countries without looking at the original map. I *know* from my memories doing this (while amazing my Jr. High geography teacher), that I did not have a *picture* of the map floating in my mind. But I did have all the placeholder symbols arranged in my thoughts, and I processed them in order of their spatial relationships to each other as I drew them. I can see why one might claim that these placeholder symbols are amorphous, but I can access the real image that's attached to them for purposes of recognition, and in some cases for representational communication.
Unlike the vague images I can conjure up when I close my eyes, my dreams are full of hyper-lucid imagery. I had a great dream last night about visiting a park full of sand dunes with an old friend. But, funny enough, I used my placeholder symbols for my friend's face in my dream, but I could see the ripples in the sand with fine detail (down to the glistening of particles in the sunlight). This seems to coincide with my ability to handle two-dimensional patterns and representations in my mind, but my poor ability to see facial details in my consciousness.
As for the Cartesian Theater that Dennett denigrates, I have a distinct impression that the watcher part of my consciousness resides in my brain where the coordinates of (a) the line about half an inch above and in front, and (b) where the line from my brow between my eyes and (c) the line from about an inch before the crown of my skull intersect. It doesn't move around. The watcher is always there—even in my dreams.
Thanks for taking test and leaving comments, beowulf. I didn’t mean for you to continue with the Dog/Cat/Tree test. It’s not directly relevant to the issue at hand, and anyhow doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read the whole first half of the review. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you.
“Eric Schwitzgebel's claim that people just can't be that different in their internal states seems tenuous, at best.”
I actually agree with him, and the point of the section of my review that you read is to demonstrate that most people’s mental images are vague and imperfect, irrespective of their ratings of how vivid and complete they are. People vary a lot in their vividness ratings of their Statue of Liberty image, but do not differ much at all in how far they can get in my series of increasingly difficult questions, which is not far at all. I think that demonstrates that people’s sense of the vividness of their mental images is based on something other than the clarity and detailed correctness of their mental images. If somebody can’t count the spikes on the statue’s head or notice in which direction the folds of her gown slant, their image is nothing like what they experience when looking at the actual statue.
We generally experience mental images as being complete and satisfying, but clearly they are not, at least not in the simple way we imagine. They are marbled with areas made of something quite different from visual data. Sometimes it’s a fact we know (such as that someone wears glasses — though we are completely unable to picture his glasses and describe the frame). Sometimes it’s knowledge that if we saw the actual thing and it did not look as usual, we would notice the difference. (I might not be able to tell you what color somebody’s eyes are. But if they have brown eyes and show up one day with blue eyes, I would notice that their eyes looked different.) I’m not quite sure what you mean by placeholder symbols — can you explain? — but I think the areas mental images are marbled with are what you are calling placeholder symbols.
So I am quite skeptical of all the currently fashionable talk about aphantasia and whether someone is a visual or verbal thinker. Often when I read people talking about having aphantasia they sound like they think normal mental images really are just like the visual percept of an object right in front of you. It shows every detail, you can answer any question about it, etc. That just isn’t what they are like. People talking this way will say stuff like “I can’t picture an eggplant.” But I think they’re expecting too much of the experience. I’d say that I *can* picture an eggplant. But if you really grilled me about my image, there are many details that are not present. I couldn’t tell you whether it was a long thin one or one closer to spherical, whether it has any dings on it, how fresh and intact the green bit on the end is. A lot of what I call to mind is an visual impression of shiny dark purple skin . The other details aren’t really there, just a global sense of “eggplantness.”
As for your counter-examples:
-Autistic savants who can reproduce exactly a complex scene seen briefly. Yes, that is extraordinary, way way beyond what most normals can do. I see 2 possible explanations: One is that the part of their brains that processes visual images really is wired in an unusual way. These people’s brains are unusual in a bunch of ways, so why wouldn’t that part be different in some of them? The other possible explanation is that due to their autism the person very early on got preoccupied with visual details and calling them to mind afterwards, rather than with mommy's smile, babbling, the day's rountine, etc. They spentmuch of their waking time practicing remembering scenes. It might be that if we spent 10 hours a day with a kid starting at age 6 months giving them visual memory tasks and rewarding successes we would end up with somebody who was as good at remembering scenes as these savants are. But of course they would be lagging greatly in many other aspects of their development — just as the savants are. Most savants have pretty awful deficits — can’t speak much or maybe not at all, don’t seem able to understand people, are extremely inflexible about routines, etc etc. You know, they’re like Rain Man. Maybe the ones who can draw complex scenes they briefly glimpsed put all their energy and smarts into developing that one talent, instead of into learning to speak, read people, navigate the physical environment, etc.
-Your own extraordinary memory as a kid for maps: It does sound, though, like it was not purely visual. The way you drew maps of Europe was not simply to consult a perfect and visually complete map in your head and copy it onto paper. You were aided by what you call placeholders. If I’m understanding you right, these are facts that supplement the purely visual part of your memory. So I’m picturing things like *the bottom of country A is even with the top of country B* and *the southern border of country C is a straight horizontal line.*
-Dreams in which you can see tiny details, such as glistening grains of sand. Yes, I have images like that in my dreams too — you could call them close-ups. I often come away from dreams like that with the sense that every visual detail was sharp and perfect. On the other hand, it is clear that the dreaming mind is a terrible judge of the details flying through it. For example, if I had a dream about Tilda Swinton, she might look something like the actual Tilda at the beginning of the dream, but in later parts of it look like Scott Alexander — while I, the dreamer, do not notice the change and continued to think of the person as Tilda.
I am waiting for Scott to post his latest open thread to continue this discussion. Good points, all, but I'm still unconvinced. I'll tell you why next OT.
Do you think humans have an evolutionary bias to assume that the current built environment around us is similar to what it always has been, and always will be - and that it's similar to what it should be?
I'm in urban planning and I feel like when I talk with people who aren't into urban planning, they largely just haven't thought about the built environment having been, or possibly being, different from what it is now. It could just be that its not their interest. Fair enough. But they *also* seem to have a knee jerk instinct to defend it - left and right, progressive and conservative - and that's more than just lacking interest. I think it might be similar to our aversion to the weird and unknown. It's just *weird* to us to question the built environment. Questioning it takes training.
What also piques my interest is that children question so many things; they get philosophical about self and other and culture and values, justice, how everything works... in some ways it seems like there's nothing they won't question. Except the built environment. I have never seen a kid question the built environment. I don't have any kids of my own, but when I've tried to talk to kids about the built environment, they just arent into it at all. It seems more like they hate it. For one, at the parking lot in front of this 5 yr old kids home: "look at how the bikes are all squeezed on top of each other inside that bike parking shed - wouldnt it be nice if they could get just one of those adjacent car parking lots, so you never have to put your bike out in the rain?". He'd look at me like I'm crazy, and *respond* to me like I'm crazy. "No! the car goes there!" and mind you, this kid never drives a car. his parents dont have a car. he gets around by bike. if anything, I'd expect him to be invested in it being nicer for him as a child cyclist. But instead he vehemently just defends the status quo. And he's a smart kid who'll question so many things. I *cannot* get him to question the built environment. To him it just is what it is, and it is as it should be.
I think there's a deep bias going on. I want to name it. I want it to be studied. What do you think?
I have noticed this in other people, including kids.
I grew up in two very different types of built environments (think impoverished post colonial town in the Amazon basin and Caribbean paradise) and as an adult lived in yet another (Scandinavian capital), before ending up on a farm on the outskirts of a small US town. I assume this history - and a natural tendency to observe - has given me an acute sense of my built environment - I'm always wondering why all these buildings and roads and farms are organized this way and not that. When I articulate these thoughts most people are like wha? The exception being some (not all) people who have lived abroad or travelled a great deal.
I suppose most people organize their days around achieving goals within the built environment - getting places, accomplishing tasks, etc - and are disoriented by the idea have having to optimize around a different environment. Certainly true for most kids. And really, it's mostly fantasy unless you are building a new city from scratch.
"I suppose most people organize their days around achieving goals within the built environment - getting places, accomplishing tasks, etc - and are disoriented by the idea have having to optimize around a different environment."
I agree. Adults, and especially kids. I think adults can to a larger degree learn to tolerate it, but I think to children it can be borderline traumatic. Im not a child psychologist - though for this particular idea I wish I was - but I feel I've heard it repeated a lot that "children need stability". Part of this, I think, is within routines, but part of it is also within the physical aspects of home. It is better to not move around; it is slightly traumatic to move. It is better if the room is the same. Changing the room is a big thing - I know in my little corner of the world it was a Big Thing when your parents (usually the mom) helped make over your room from Child Room to Teenager Room. I also remember it as slightly traumatic to learn that my childhood home hasnt existed forever, and I remember it as slightly traumatic the first time I imagined that my childhood home might not exist forever, and that we might not own it forever. I think all of this hints at humans being pretty averse to changes in the physical environment, from birth. Being curious about changing it, tolerating changes to it, appears to me to be learned. Another thing that hints at it, to me, is that even when people are most curious and open minded about the built environment - like yourself - their frame of reference is still things they have seen and experienced themselves. It is not imagined. And it's not like you go and want to change one place into the other - you just accept the different environments as different, and compare them mostly as a curiosity.
"And really, it's mostly fantasy unless you are building a new city from scratch. "
You'd be surprised about how much cities change over time. The only constant thing about them is that they are ever changing. It's usually incremental, but always unstopping.
I don't get it. It sounds like you've discovered that most people you talk to are happy with their environment. Why do you think they "should" be less happy with it?
No, I'm pretty sure I discovered that they never really questioned it. That they're deep into something like anchoring bias. I'm not expecting they would have the same grievances about it as me if they did, but I think it's pretty clear they have a strong aversion to even giving it serious thought.
I've discussed this on another forum and someone commented that their kid became very unhappy with their home environment after having been on vacation, and started complaining to everyone's nuisance. I do think travel, and staying long enough in one "built environment language" to get a grasp on what its like to live with it (and not just visit as a tourist), is a pretty powerful tool to overcome that bias. In this framework, it's equivalent to seeing that mountains can be stood differently. Some then go on to think that the mountains at home are what they are, and they never make the connection, while others become interested in the history and how ephemeral the mountains at home are.
I can't say I've observed the same phenomenon you have. Do you notice people reacting with a "strong aversion" to open-ended questions, "If you could change something about how the city is physically organized, what would you do?" Or only to specific suggestions you have, "Wouldn't it be better if..." such as in the example you gave with the kid?
You're right, I probably have often made the mistake of asking leading questions rather than open ones. But I think, even if I had been better at asking with open questions, the answers would still tend to indicate general disinterest - or even slight repulsion - at the thought of imagining the built environment be different. I don't see why asking more openly would change that.
Probably children are hammered with verbal scripts for 'questioning values' like justice, cultural relativism, and morality from places like media, or maybe school curriculum. These sources probably do not question urban planning, because that is uh, quite specific. Need there any more mystery?
The built environment is not that specific. It's a lot. A materialist would say it's everything. And it's more than just the stuff of urban planning. It's architecture and civil engineering, too. I don't see kids dreaming of being any of those things. I think kids dream of working with humans, animals, plants, travel, and Cool Machines. I don't know of any kids dreaming of working with changing the built environment. I think, to them, evolutionarily, it's akin to wanting to move mountains. It's absurd and a little bit profane. Even when they dream of moving around volumes of dirt or rock, it seems to me the infatuation is mostly with the machines that are used to do it. Dreaming of manipulating the built environment - like planners or civil engineers or architects - I think is learned. I think it usually starts to be an interest in the teens, especially in unusually ambitious or contrarian or rebellious teens. I do think it's an unusual ambition to want to manipulate the built environment. Im repeating myself. I'm afraid I'm not really doing the ethics of this community justice.
People have the same bias about the natural environment. At the beginning of the last century, southern New England was largely denuded of forests. Now second-growth forests have returned, and people assume that that was and always has been the natural state of things. Likewise, the Amazonian rainforest we see today may be a relatively new phenomenon. Five hundred years ago, the Amazon River basin was densely populated with large cities and extensive agriculture. We would have never known this except for aerial Lidar scans, which showed the only contours beneath the foliage.
It's sad. I think it can be explained as evolution: In terms of our biological software, is quite new for us to change the physical environment significantly. We are more used to mountains being where they are, rivers being where they are, the coast being where it is... at most we move plants, but that's it. So questioning the built environment is the equivalent to questioning the position of hills and mountains. It is an acquired skill; we are not born with it. On the contrary, we are born to think of the built environment as permanent and immovable.
Hmm people have a bias to be lazy. As little 'new' thought as possible. And then some think deeply about some thing. Re: Urban planning have you read Christopher Alexander and in particular "A Pattern Language"?
I have indeed read a pattern language. its a classic within the field. I very much like his stuff about soft edges and microclimates (though he doesnt name them by quite those terms). I have a post about it.
Not sure this is exactly what you had in mind, but in ecology, it's called the shifting baseline syndrome. It's the idea that people are unaware of ecological degradation, because they assume that what they grew up with and around is the normal state of affairs.
Also, since you are interested in the built environment, you might want to check out the work of Warwick Fox, especially his Ethics and the Built Environment.
In the last open thread I was talking about looking for writing jobs as a profession writer. To recap:
1. I have a lot of provable success in a lot of writing fields, to the point where I'm overqualified for most of the "writing" parts of the vast majority of "writing jobs".
2. I don't have an MFA, which is supposed to be an indicator of one's ability to plausibly do what I provably can.
3. I'm up against a lot of MFA/English bachelors holders, which has the predictable effect you'd expect.
4. Sour grapes ensue. You'd be a fool not to notice how sour my grapes are.
Since then, I've been casting a pretty wide net. The jobs I've applied to tend to fall into three broad categories:
1. AI training "jobs". These are contract work and generally involve something like "observe this observable, then describe it to our AI so it can understand it better". The jobs come from enlightened, ultra-moral AI companies who have a lot of rules about not treating employees badly, so they route them through third party-companies who don't have those rules.
The jobs have high hourly rates, but are unreliable in a "You had work one hour ago, but now you don't" way. Reading employee experiences for them is like reading about any internet temp work; people get cut for single mistakes, because of technical bugs, or just because it benefits the company on a minute-by-minute basis. There is typically no review for those thus fired.
2. Job-jobs. Think about the kind of positions you'd see on Indeed, WaaS, or Wellfound. These have benefits and 40-hour-a-week commitments. They also tend to be the most "hybrid" kinds of jobs a writer can get - it's writer/marketer, writer/programmer, writer/contract lawyer, and so on. They usually don't pay great (there's too much competition for them), but as they are not run by principled consequentialist tech-enlightenment people they are much, much less abusive and you can generally depend on them to feed your family.
3. Long shots. These are dream jobs of various kinds. A good example is the Asterisk editor thing Scott posted about in the last open thread; it pays great, it's interesting, and it has benefits. These are incredible, but the competition for this kind of gig is really legitimately high, even at my level of writing. People are quitting other high SES jobs to take these.
Now, to keep things vague, I've applied for roughly 10-15 things. Of those, I'm the absolute most overqualified for the AI training jobs. Now, ideally, what you want here is someone with enough world experience to read a document, see what it says, and parse it on a few different levels.
You can't get that here. Whoever is reading the applications fully stops once they see there isn't a degree involved; there has been no contact whatsoever from these positions, and they represent the largest part of the applications by a wide margin.
On job-jobs, the interest has been pretty much the same. This is much less devastating because the job field is so barren right now that most of the jobs were things I didn't want much anyway. If I was putting in more effort right now, I'd probably be looking at this category harder trying to find more jobs to apply to, but as of today I've had one conversation with a very disinterested screener, and we determined between us that neither of us really wanted to move forward much.
Long shot jobs are more interesting. Because long-shot jobs tend to be one-offs that the company leadership thinks are important, it's actually much easier to pierce the veil and get into a conversation. I have some video calls scheduled for I think two of these. Those might not go anywhere (and aren't, for the record, with the one named company in this post, who I'd imagine has better-fit options for the job and is probably just reasonably going with those) but the actual ease of getting into a conversation about those jobs is absolutely shocking compared to normal jobs.
I'm the same guy in all cases, but the difference between a burnt-out HR screener and a good-mood CEO trying to find someone interesting to work with is shocking, even at the "hey maybe we should talk" level of conversation.
In the meantime I'm extensively editing the first 30-40k words of a novel to try and pitch it to mainstream literary agents. That's a hyper-low probability bet in the short term, but in a weird way it's actually more likely than, say, getting a bored 23-year-old AI company employee to read a resume.
I'd actually be interested in trying this out! I'm going through an application cycle right now but I haven't seen anything like this. Are there special keywords I should be looking for, or some other ways I can find these opportunities?
I think most big tech companies will have in-house technical writers, or they might call them documentation writers or something.
For freelance, you might find something on Upwork or Reedsy, or you could work with an agency. I've worked with a small agency called Wizard on Demand and can recommend them.
A friend of mine is Russian and just got her American citizenship earlier this year. Unfortunately her current relationship is a bit rocky, and if it ends, she is considering going back to Russia, where all her family still is. My gut says that I should advice her against this since it seems a very bad time to go back to Russia right now, even when that is where ones family is, and even though her friend/social support network is not the largest here in the states.
However, I don't actually feel like I'm well enough informed to actually give that advice. I'd love to hear from anyone with more specific knowledge about where this falls on the spectrum from "Absolutely do not, under any circumstances, no matter what, go back to Russia" to "Sure, they are have some issues, but where doesn't? If she has an alternate citizenship/rip cord, going back is fine"
Russian here. The economical situation in the country is getting progressively worse. Stagflation is upon us. There are regular problems with mobile internet as an anti-drone measure. Also lots of sites can't be accessed without VPN - substack and youtube for instance. More importantly, there is no limit on how bad the things can get eventually.
On the other hand, I'd also not want to live in USA while it's speedrunning Russian journey to fashist dictatorship, especially with no support network. Does your friend consider some other country except Russia and USA as a place of residence?
I mean... I imagine it's harder to *convince* an actual Russian of it, but generally speaking, "absolutely do not, under any circumstances, no matter what, go to Russia" is great advice which you need never regret giving. I can't think of any period of recorded history when this would have been bad advice, and it's hard to imagine that changing in the near-to-mid-term future. I think you can go all in on trying to stop her with a clean conscience.
It's always a bad idea to go back to a totalitarian country. This means you're going back to a place where the monsters get to do anything they want, where you have no rights, where humans are expendable. So today they aren't killing or jailing people like you as long as they stay quiet, but what about tomorrow?
But different people have different risk tolerance. Some do skydiving, some volunteer to fight in wars. I know Russian-Americans who travel back and forth to Russia, I know some who even do business there. Someone else's risk tolerance is hard to assess, and converting them to your point of view is hard.
But here's a point you can make to her. Her family, which is currently back in Russia, might need her help some day - perhaps to get out, perhaps to survive there (money, medicine). When they need rescuing, she would be a lot more useful to them in the US than back in Russia.
Far from an expert on the situation on the ground in the country, but in her shoes I'd be asking "have I publicly done anything that criticizes the Russian government or war and Ukraine?" pretty hard before I bought a plane ticket.
If she is a she and not a he, and if she's not a doctor (doctors do get drafted), then it's "Sure, they are have some issues, but where doesn't? If she has an alternate citizenship/rip cord, going back is fine". Well, unless she publicly posts something anti Putin or anti war. The caveat is that becoming a worse and worse country with more and more dictatorship. She will have to not oppose Russian government publicly in any way. As long as she does that, she won't be in any immediate danger. Source: am Russian, living for 3 years outside of Russia
Ok, I don't know for sure what her social media history is, but knowing her I would be surprised if she had such posts. She's not strongly political in general. So it sounds like It's probably not something where I should need to intervene to the point of strong advice.
To fight in Ukraine generally you need to sign a contract. I read about some draftees being pressured to do it but my impression is that mostly it's mostly older guys who sign up - the bonuses are quite substantial.
But you're right about urban/rural divide or rather middle-class/lower classes divide. The middle class parents generally find ways for their children not to be drafted (path 1) and being middle class they usually have other ways to earn money, so your point stands
The White House has long needed a ballroom since it was embarrassing holding state dinners and events in pop-up tents on the lawn. That said, Trump's demolition of the East Wing and the largeness of the new ballroom (it is larger than the White House main building) are widely unpopular.
Was there room for compromise between the two sides?
Mostly because of the pattern it was part of. The White House is not Trump's personal, private residence. It's a publicly owned building that he will move out of in three years' time. Ignoring all the other stakeholders who are supposed to have a say in the disposition of this building-that-he-does-not-own and immediately demolishing a large portion of it on his personal whim is another troubling sign to add to a long list of troubling signs.
You're far from alone in being puzzled. In fact, lately, I see more press about how strange it is to be making a big deal of this, than I see press about it being a big deal.
> it was embarrassing holding state dinners and events in pop-up tents on the lawn.
I found persuasive the argument that it was a sign of dominance to humiliate foreign potentates and dignitaries by subjecting them to conditions so poor, especially making them use porta potties.
Your question stirred up a lot of reflexive anger at Trump in me, so I just observed it. Topic triggered 4 ideas, none of which I am at all confident are true:
-Trump had in his NY home a solid gold toilet.
-The bathroom fixtures in the White House residence were replaced when Trump moved in for his first term because Melania did not want to use are a toilet that black people had used.
-Nobody does ballroom dancing any more, no matter how fancy the occasion.
-The old wing's a piece of history.
The more I contemplated these 4 non-facts the more irritated I got. I started making up funny gold toilet Trump-dunking replies.
So I see from the comments the wing is pretty new anyhow. It sounds like ballrooms are used for state dinners, not for ballroom dancing. And who knows whether the first 2 items on my list are true (they have a definite rage bait quality).
Actually, I do not give a damn what's done with the East Wing, or whether the Trumps shit into a solid gold whites-only toilet or an ordinary race-neutral porcelain one. I don't even have a clear idea what the East Wing looks like either inside or out, and anyhow it's just not important whether it gets changed and whether the re-do fits my idea of classy.
May I ask you in good faith, out of sheer curiosity: Why would you write something highlighting your human fallibility vis-a-vis rage? Does it feel freeing to share your foibles, or something?
I figure that my fallibilities must be evident to the world, by default, and that deliberately exposing them would be overkill.
> Does it feel freeing to share your foibles, or something?
It *is* freeing, in the sense that the entire rationalist project is more or less about recognising and working around human foibles, so I'd expect people here to be more sympathetic to the idea.
Scott did a poll of his readers and if I remember correctly, only a small fraction identified as rationalist. I guess things have changed a lot since the old days.
What I was recounting was not my foibles but an episode of disentangling myself from reflexive anger by observing the process, and reminding myself that I didn’t even know for sure whether any of the items in my 4-part rage mantra are even true.
Considering her age and national origin and family loyalties, it's safe to assume that Melania Trump is not especially well disposed towards black people. But that doesn't mean she's a full-blown hater..
I appreciate their sharing, clarity of thought and all that. Even the garden path of explanation, regardless of topic, feels familiar. Thanks Eremolalos
>And who knows whether the first 2 items on my list are true (they have a definite rage bait quality).
Your non-confidence is validated: Trump has never had a solid gold toilet, and while Melania did have the restrooms remodeled before moving in, she also had a lot of other things remodeled and it's pretty typical for incoming presidents to do that sort of thing. There's no evidence it was done out of racism, and an "insider" that did an interview about it to the Sun said ""She was not prepared to use the same bathroom as the Obamas or anyone else for that matter — it wouldn't matter if it was the Queen of England."
"The Trump administration has torn down the East Wing of the White House to make way for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, paid for by $300 million in private donations from U.S. businesses and individuals. Do you support or oppose this project?"
It's hard to frame this neutrally without making it seem like a pointless vanity project. Like, you can try, but it would seem like partisan hedging rather than important context. The average American regardless of political persuasion is generally just against "300 million dollar 90,000 square foot ballrooms" in general for unremarkable reasons, regardless of the important nuances like why we even need ballrooms or fancy state dinners in the first place.
I was surprised because, due to all the online outrage I'm seeing, I had no idea the East Wing was not built until 1902 and then it was " significantly expanded in 1942".
So while it may be a historical building, it's not all *that* historical. Also, apparently other offices are there so once it's completed, it won't be just the ballroom:
"Situated on the east side of the Executive Residence, the building served as office space for the first lady and her staff, including the White House social secretary, correspondence staff, and the White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office, all of which have been relocated until the new East Wing is completed.
The East Wing was connected to the Executive Residence through the East Colonnade, a corridor with windows facing the South Lawn that housed the White House Family Theater and connected to the ground floor of the Executive Residence.
In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt oversaw an expansion and remodel of the East Wing. This included the construction of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the building."
I had no idea there even was a White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office. Senseless waste of taxpayer dollars, or worthy patronage of a scriptorium? 😁 And what about the "family theater" so the president and his family can watch movies without having to go to the cinema or watch them on video like the rest of us schlubs?
"In the 1980s, the motion picture industry financed renovation of the facility, which added terraced seating and other amenities. During the presidency of George W. Bush the facility was redecorated in "movie palace red". In addition to its use in screening films, the theater was used by presidents to rehearse speeches."
Yeah, it's Trump. Yeah, it's vulgar. Yeah, the way he went about it was poor. But if it had to be done, then someone should do it, and it may as well happen under him as another. Now I do have to wonder what would be the reaction had this happened under Biden - would we be getting the same outrage over "destruction of priceless historical heritage" and billionaires donating to it? It does seem that different presidents have messed around with building on the east side over the years:
"President Thomas Jefferson added colonnaded terraces to the east and west sides of the White House, but no actual wings. Under President Andrew Jackson in 1834, running water was piped in from a spring and pumped up into the east terrace in metal tubes. These ran through the walls and protruded into the rooms, controlled by spigots. Initially, the water was for washing items, but soon the first bathing rooms were created, in the ground-level east colonnade. President Martin Van Buren had shower baths installed here.
The East Terrace was removed in 1866. For many years, a greenhouse occupied the east grounds of the White House.
The first small East Wing (and the West Wing) was designed by Charles Follen McKim and built in 1902 during the Theodore Roosevelt renovations, as an entrance for formal and public visitors. This served mainly as an entrance for guests during large social gatherings, when it was necessary to accommodate many cars and carriages. Its primary feature was the long cloak room with spots for coats and hats of the ladies and gentlemen.
The two-story East Wing was designed by White House architect Lorenzo Winslow and added to the White House in 1942 primarily to cover the construction of an underground bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC). Around the same time, Theodore Roosevelt's coatroom was integrated into the new building and became the White House Family Theater."
don’t think there’s much confidence that Trump will hew to the “republican simplicity” that is the favored American view of the White House, even if different people have tried to interfere with that over the years. E.g. Jackie Kennedy supposedly trying to French-ify the decor.
Plus it does not sit on a large piece of land - you can lose more than you gain by increasing the footprint.
Trump, too, has already “had his turn” - redecorating in a manner more pronounced than most of his predecessors.
You aren’t supposed to make a great many changes … there’s an advisory committee which he has ignored.
I know to Europeans anything the age of the US isn't *that* historical, but the White House burned down in the war of 1812, which puts a 1902 expansion in the earlier half of its lifespan.
As someone on the Western side of the country where even less is that age, I'm not so attached to historicity that's just "happy side effect of WW2". I concur that it probably should be done, that it'd get pushback either way, but also that no attempt was made to mitigate the obvious resistance.
It's sad to see that the preservationists - which is to say, the patriots of the place - did not even get a look-in, a consult, a courtesy call. That's really depressing. I realize red hatted people did not pay for it, but I imagined a lot of them being fond of American history and sites.
I foresee that Gettysburg's time as a peaceful place of remembrance is limited.
And even in cca. half of Europe, buildings traced back to medieval times are extreme rarities. My town, for example, was washed away by the river in 1879, and what survived was pretty much torn down -- we have overall only two buildings which can traced back to several hundred years, and both are churches.
(The population boom of Europe mostly happened in the 18-19th centuries, and came with huge remodellings of the living spaces.)
Maybe, but this seems like one of those places where the options were to do it once imperfectly or to have a decades-long cahsr style fiasco. It's one case where Trump's "just do stuff" approach seems good.
(Although I still think $300 million is a pretty high cost for a ballroom)
Tbh the East and West Wings of the White House have very little history or tradition behind them. They were only built in the 1900s, and they each get extensive renovations with each President. The Oval Office itself has only been around since FDR, and the Resolute Desk has only been in the Oval Office since the 1970s, and even then it was taken out during George HW Bush’s presidency. Not really a situation where you're looking for a compromise.
No, there was never any possibility for compromise.
The Democrats (online) are screaming about permitting violations and asbestos violations and probably NRHP violations, in a way that makes it clear to me they would rather subject Trump to 4 years of bureaucracy than let him build anything, regardless of whether it is "reasonable". Trump is constantly a "you can't tell me what to do" personality, and benefits politically from doing it in a way the Democrats dislike.
1. The costs are now estimated to be $3000/square foot in a city where high-end building costs are $700/square foot. And the cost overruns look like they'll go into pockets of shady Trump cronies.
2. There are no finalized plans to even criticize, yet. But from the drawings several architects question whether it can built the way it's been depicted. So that means more cost overruns and more graft and corruption.
3. It's an eyesore. And it destroys the lines of the White House. Esthetically it's worse than paving over the Rose Garden.
>1. The costs are now estimated to be $3000/square foot in a city where high-end building costs are $700/square foot. And the cost overruns look like they'll go into pockets of shady Trump cronies.
But it's being funded out of private donations, not tax money. So what's the problem?
Government projects and buildings are beholden to relatively specific overview and regulatory guidelines because letting private individuals donate vast amounts of money to specific building projects that specific public individuals desire or have expressed desire for has, throughout history, been a convenient and neat way to influence said-same public officials towards specific aims.
Avoiding government graft, cronyism, backdoor deals to lucrative contracts or political influence peddling via convenient large semi-untracable and certainly anonymous donations to the personal pet projects of sitting officials is fairly important.
Put differently, you might read: “ Oh, they’re remodelling public buildings and doing it through private donations “ and think “ that’s neat “.
Others (certainly me, and any regulatory and ethics compliance lawyer) reads that and notes it’s a crystal clear example of something that invites layers upon layers upon layers of conflict of interest, remarkably easy pathways for graft and inefficiency and raises absolutely endless questions about who is donating, why and if the process has been passed through ethics review.
Private individuals can privately donate to private projects as they like. But I think it’s taking a bit of a piss if someone lackadaisically assumes it’s an unalloyed, simple good that sitting officials in positions of vast power can be seen to be requesting private individuals donate to their preferred causes /without/ those donations and the process, oversight and review being transparent, open and subject to the attentions of good lawyers.
Put even simpler: The problem in the first place is that it’s private money being put to public purpose at the behest of sitting officials with great power to return perceived favours. I don’t want the phantom of graft, sleaze, lobbying, favour trading, backdoor deals, nepotism and influence-peddling staining government buildings.
That's actually worse. There won't be the transparency one gets with government budgeted spending, and the surplus funds will be funnelled off into the pockets of Trump cronies and Trump front companies.
I'll give you two hypothetical examples (though these are likely real-life scenarios, if you're familiar with Trump's history and business dealings)...
1. Billionaire A has invested heavily in developing AI. Of course, AI is not a money-making venture at the moment. Billionaire A "donates" (gives) Trump $100 million to finance his ballroom. In return Trump instructs his minions to award future government AI contracts to Billionaire A's company (and bypass open bidding, in which other AI companies may be able to provide the services for less). Sure, the ballroom gets built without a cent of government funds (although future congresses will be on the hook to spend money to maintain it). But Trump has always been a quid pro quo type of guy. Will your government AI tax dollars be spent transparently and effectively in this sort of quid-pro-quo scenario? I don't think so.
2. Developer B promises Trump a kickback on the money spent constructing the ballroom. Trump is notoriously crooked in this way. The Federal Bribery Statute (18 U.S.C. § 201) makes it a crime for a federal official (including the President) to accept anything of value in exchange for being influenced in an official act. And because Trump has one of his appointees running the OMB, the GAO will be unable to audit these transactions, and there will be no transparency.
I think you're confusing the specific things they're complaining about with the reasons they're complaining.
Let's face it, there's a world in which Obama did this. (I have trouble imagining a world where Biden did this, for some reason, but can easily imagine the Obama ballroom.) And in that world, the Democrats think it's a fine idea and the Republicans have a laundry list of objections to it.
All of this makes it a very boring issue, not worth thinking about.
In an ASI post scarcity utopian world, would we still control our destiny as a species or will it be decided for us? And if so, won't stripping away our agency take away a big part of our sense of meaning and make us miserable regardless of the abundance?
Yeah, I'm happy to find here fans of Iain M Banks who nonetheless see what human nature would turn the Culture into. I'm always surprised Banks himself didn't seem to grasp how human nature would turn Culture perfection in 1 generation into... something else entirely.
It's done thoughtfully also (and many years before) in Jack Williamson's Humanoids novels. There the thoughtful, utterly caring and protective AI show you exactly where that leads.
We don't control our destiny as a species anyhow. We are squeezed, shoved, and tossed into the air by other entities while trying to meet needs we did not choose to have. We're mostly just making it up as we go along.
But how would we spend our time? Perhaps the educational system could foster creativity in all of us, rather than turning us into economic cogs? I suspect that most people would be terminally bored because they lack the inner resources to occupy their time. Life would be a vast daytime TV existence.
Especially with no stakes to anything. I anticipate a lot of gambling/games of chance to feel a semblance of risk and reward that even ASI can't optimize
Underrated option IMO. In the same vein, birthing a benevolent machine god also gets you this outcome.
Knowing in advance that you’ve actually built a benign/aligned superintelligence is of course the hard part. I think the assumption is just that in the branches under “loss of control”, the percentage of worlds where the ASI turns out to be benign round to zero.
"Then it starts to get uncomfortable, the old man prefers cereal for breakfast, but oats are what he finds on the kitchen counter with the note “This is healthier for you”. He wakes up to the furniture rearranged because it would make the house more spacious. He wanders over to the garage and looks at a half empty work table. “I got rid of some of your tools, they were too dangerous for you at your age”. He spots an emptiness at the corner of his bedroom that draws him like a vacuum. He can’t shake the feeling that something’s missing. Ambling over, a note “I got rid of your golf clubs, you’re too old to play anymore”. A slow suffocating loss of agency, one intrusion at a time until there’s no defensive boundary between what he wants and what is decided to be best for him. "
I also think something like this will happen, and will be turbocharged by digital mind clones. Think of social media algorithms, which know your preferences and personality traits, as the ancestors of the clones, which will approximate your thinking and behavior almost perfectly. An AGI charged with watching over you to ensure your wellbeing would run experiments on your digital mind clone to find optimal outcomes for you in the real world. It might discover things about you that you're in deep denial about or are even completely ignorant of, and it would make sudden and initially unwelcome changes to your life in the pursuit of that optimality.
Imagine the old man's robot butler holding him down at breakfast and force-feeding him smelly Green Eggs and Ham while saying "Trust me, you're gonna love this."
Personally I think to some extend all human ethical systems have an inbuilt idea of what reasonable risk and reasonable self harm is. The right to bad decisions is a right to freedom. Alcohol is technically a nerve toxin, we still allow its sale. Many sports have high rates of injury, they are still legal. Even something like driving is technically very dangerous, but we consider it a normal part of our everyday life.
In that sense I don't see any AGI that works off a human ethical framework would restrict human freedom by 100%. I think what's more likely is that this AGI would make subtle changes to your environment, information diet, etc that would naturally lead you to the "right" conclusion. So more like giving a toddler a choice between the red and blue pyjama, but no choice on bed time. If done correctly, you won't even notice that bed time was ever up for discussion.
True, how will we feel about this though? If there was a hyperintelligent earpiece attached to you that always told you the best decision to make for every moment of your life, would you ever contradict it out of curiosity or to assert your independence? Would it anticipate this and recommend decisions that give you a false sense of independence? Would you notice this and hate it even more? It all gets really messy if you think about it.
Agreed. If you wanted true independence, you'd have to agree to be upgraded into a superior, non-human mind that your AGI custodian couldn't model. Maybe that will be the backdoor strategy to getting rid of the human race and duping us into becoming productive again.
Why assume ASI are ignorant of the social and emotional aspects of human nature? Why assume they're not going to include in their calculation/simulation human resistance to change and preference for familiarity? Indeed, why assume an ASI is incapable of accounting for the human need to feel important and in control of your own destiny?
I agree with you. The questions that remains: Does anything change, then? Why bother going for ASI if it somehow doesn't actually change anything? It might move the baseline up, and human nature adjusts within a year and will be just as happy/unhappy as before, no?
"ChatASI, I need some meaning in my life. What can I do?"
"I noticed this trend through your behavior patterns, but I've been waiting for you to bring it up so I know you're ready for a change. I have three options, but they all require some significant life changes that I'll guide you through over the next six months. I know you can handle them despite your 80 IQ. First, there are some archeological digs in South America that for some peculiar reasons need human assistance. Second, there's a colony ship that is departing within the next two years. You have generic markers they need in their pool of applicants, but it will be an all awake journey, so you'll need to do some training before you can volu..."
Seems preferable to, "I can't get a job, so I'll rot in my parents' basement playing video games and hope I win the lottery."
Progress and accountability update on my upcoming freemium web app, BetterQualities. The app is designed to help users let go of unskillful mental qualities like worry and procrastination as they arise, and cultivate skillful ones like happiness and agency instead.
After a few snags, the pre-launch landing page at www.betterqualities.com is up and running. If you’d like a heads-up when the app goes live, you can join the waitlist there. I’d also be really grateful if you filled out the short survey about which skillful and unskillful qualities you’d like the app to cover. Thanks to everyone who’s already done so!
As for the app itself, frontend data management is still a bit ad hoc; I need to implement a proper, principled solution. Once that’s done — along with some UI polish and payment integration — we should be good to go.
I also started a Substack blog, A Metta Analysis, in which I'll explore the app's theme (skillful and unskillful mental qualities) in more depth. The content is still sparse, but feel free to subscribe if the topic interests you.
I won’t be posting updates in the next two open threads, as I’ll be on holiday (my Europoor mentality in action :D).
Ah, thanks for the heads up – this is a weird bug I wasn't aware of. Could you try again with the subdomain "www" included (so https://www.betterqualities.com/)? Sorry for the hassle.
I'm trying not be mean but it sounds like the classic trap for procrastinators : procrastinating by "doing something" that's actually procrastinating (make a list, make a plan, make extensive preparations, read more instructions, log stuff on an app, do everything except the thing to do). Been there.
Thanks, that’s a good point. In my mind, the app is meant to be a ladder that, once climbed, can be discarded. But there’s definitely a risk that some users end up lingering on the ladder — playing around instead of climbing it — and getting even less useful work done.
At some point I tried to read up on this topic, because at least at the popular nonspecialist level, there are lots of wildly diverging strong opinions. It seems to be the kind of question that motivates people with strong ideologies.
One blogger I found is Alice Evans, writing "The Great Gender Divergence" (https://www.ggd.world/). She seems to be a real specialist in the field, with a strong interest in what is going on in the world at large, and not just in the usual Western countries.
I guess I see now what the Reddit is telling me to get back to work. I free think and free write and my writings are indefeenriabke from AI(proven) to the point where I need to leave spelling msktakes.
So I’m talking to a person on the Reddit and guess what, his writings are 67% AI on the school system so he needs to “redo” his own work because the professor or PH.D overseeer is not smart enough to understand creative brilliance.
This is something I don’t understand. 1) Why are idiots getting the PH.D and using their overseer power to silence the simple minded brilliance of the worlds AuDHD, Autism and ADHD populations. As the unofficial official despised loved spokesperson for the AuDHD I need to bring this to the attention of the complex genius and brilliant minds of the world to figure out. Gifted accepted - I’m sure I will double check your work to make sure it’s original and not the AI garbage that is everywhere today. Same with the over see’er PH.D people.
I guess to end I came up with the first half of the theory of everything formula from my own AuDHD peabrain using a simple method and writing sample. I then got the boot from the SOL community(very understandable, my fault. Maybe I try to make it back for boy’s night on Monday…. Hmmm…..)
Where was I… oh yes… the first half of the formula for the theory of everything is 1/2 ADHD brain plus 1/2 Autism brain = AuDHD brain plus music(as a bridge medium)
The bridge medium allows an AuDHD mind to join the ADHD and Autism side to now be able to hyperfocus and increase or decrease the trance state by using the volume control as adjusting the volume.
The trance music is for AuDHD individual to decide. I use the radio and Shazam for a 15-20 song playlist for songs that just hit me.
I am in a small trance now and this is my first writing sample in an effort to show what free writing and free thinking looks like from my AuDHD bridged mine who just writes and posts without worry and does not register consequences of his writing sample postings.
Research study found in the r/ gifted as well as cnn. Point is Jillian Hynes and Sheila Wagner from Aramark. Jillian seen undiagnosed autism traits in a remote camp and triggered me on purpose. This is all documented and provable because soon I will be making this entire situation public. Possibly though the Neurospicy community but 100% going public with everything. I can prove ANYTHING I say… and I won’t be silenced anymore.
1st post of many. If people of the deepstacks don’t like what I say, then take it up with the OWNERS of the deepstacks.
This is ALL
Have a good day :)
I hope you like my budding creating writing styles :) It’s comparable to Nikola Tesla, or so I am told. Just wait until my mind rests from the cubic posting yesterday on Reddit. There will be ALOT of deep thoughts coming out… exactly like this.
"Hammertime" is the next epic fantasy film, the epic tale of the epic contention between the dwarfs and the elves to make the best gift for the aesir, hoping to win the head of Loki! It's got it all: golden hair, a huge gold pig, a spear that bends to stab around corners, the finest of all ships! And of course in the end: THE HAMMER.
There have been plenty of successful musician biopics made out of musicians less interesting than MC Hammer, so I see no reason to go past the obvious.
Movie: The uplifting tale of a woman who wastes her youth getting hammered and getting nailed whilst feeling detached, before traveling at last down the sparkly rainbow psychedelic road to find her true gender: Uglyshark. Pronouns: Ugsh, Ug*sh’s (central asterisk is to honor the buried s’s right to be punctuation-adjacent like its twin)
People say John Henry died of exhaustion in a tunnel racing a steam-powered drill.
Those people are wrong.
Henry was making great progress in that tunnel when it collapsed, trapping him inside with his shaker, Dan. Realizing they had limited air, Henry worked with Dan to dig their way out. When their lantern finally gave out, Henry kept hammering in the pitch black, finding he could still tell where Dan's spike was from the sound, and that he wasn't tiring out for some reason.
They work through the night and into the next morning, miraculously breaking out of the other side of the mountain. But when the people they meet include a tough frontierswoman, a farmer with the power to control water, a wind-riding cowboy, a giant firefighter, and an even larger lumberjack, Henry wonders if he's still in America.
I once had an idea for a game or movie about a guy with the superpower of transforming into a giant hammer. It sounds like a ridiculous power so everyone mocks him, but it turns out to be surprisingly useful (e.g. you can instantly get out of handcuffs by transforming to a hammer and back)
Well... it's got to be a Mike Hammer movie, and I imagine he's going after MC Hammer. Whether it's a generic Mike Hammer story, or a Highlander-style "there can only be one" is negotiable.
Not sure if this is the motivation, but this seems like a good way to measure the "creativity gap" between humans and LLMs. Given an open-ended prompt, how much diversity in responses do you get in each case?
That reminds me of an idea I had for an alien civilization of beings that consist of specially patterned energy ripples within the jet of a black hole, that can only exist due to the extreme physics of that environment. They discovered quantum gravity before inventing the wheel, but then sadly died out when their black hole became less active. If you listen to the right frequencies in the right spot, you can still hear their desperate cries for help broadcast across the cosmos.
The Wizards' War is over, and an exhausted world crawls out of the wreckage to rebuild. But some things are forever changed by the titanic energies released in the struggles. Storms that might have yielded hail now drop sheets of sledge hammers. No structures are truly safe from the hammer storms, and the finest scholars strive to predict where and when they will strike. Meanwhile much of the population in stricken regions has taken to living semi-nomadically in yurts so they can flee when hammertime comes.
Meanwhile, every thesis has its antithesis, and the world does not stand still.
Some of the folks who fled have discovered the iron that rained down on their homes and fields is of good quality and quite valuable, particularly in quantity. They've started collecting and selling it, and you can make good money doing that. The more enterprising merchant houses have taken an interest, and are buying up parcels that tend to get hammered reliably.
Meanwhile, the price of iron is steadily declining, to the point that ships and even some new houses are now sporting supporting structures made of iron. Who knows where this trend will find equilibrium.
A software developer that makes software for the porn industry discovers an algorithm that makes everything more efficient, that corporations then fight to control, but the internet and AI explode to use everywhere..
"When all you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail."
Easy mode: make a movie of "Lucifer's Hammer." Slightly harder mode: remake of "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis' character played by MC Hammer.
Harder mode: the comet/asteroid is made of tachyons (keep yer traps shut, physiciststs -- this is Hollywood) and must be diverted so as to avoid a total restart of time and going back through all of history.
It broke my heart when the mean ole no-fun killjoy physicists turned around and got rid of tachyons as anything more than purely hypothetical and not at all likely to exist.
1) Is it true that nowadays the value of a person is stronger derived from the person's intelligence than hundred years ago, where things like kindness, behavior and manners played a bigger role?
By value I mean whether other people would regard this person as a person to look up to, not just the economic value.
2) If true, is 1) a good thing in utilitarian terms? (If not true, would it be a good thing?)
I'm not really sure. My impression is that the people in charge in the late-19th/early-20th century put a lot of stock in character, and weren't particularly impressed with intelligence per se. It was more important to have character, which seems to have been a matter of being strong-willed, reliable, and honest.
I think its the exact opposite (in the sense of who to look up to and to praise) -- we focus more on kindness and empathy than on intelligence. Our modern social scripts are filled with denigrating intelligence and uplifting empathy, and never vice versa. Or maybe I'm in a bubble.
My experience is dissimilar to yours. People give lip service to "kindness and empathy are important," but their overall behavior tells a different story. People continue to obsess about intelligence, even while demeaning IQ tests and college degrees as inadequate measurement tools.
On #1, I don't believe so. Intelligence strikes me more as a tool that can be used to do things that can build status, rather than a grantor of esteem in and of itself. Take, for example, the case of the gifted student. People may view a gifted student as having great opportunity, or as a person to cultivate, but they don't just look at a kid, see how smart they are, and suddenly start looking up to them. The hierarchy of learned professor to gifted student still places the student below and professor above, even if the student is naturally "smarter."
Likewise, if I hire a college grad who's smarter than me into my department, I'm thrilled at the opportunity to train them up, but I'm not just jumping straight into deferring to and being led by them - smart is great and all, but at that stage they have no experience. Raw intelligence is a tool, but having a really cool hammer or powerdrill isn't something that will lead to you being admired unless you use it to do something admirable.
Note that one hundred years ago, a push for modernity was in full swing. Model Ts were replacing horses, as did modern roads, electrification, modern medicine, etc. Intelligence was exceptionally celebrated and rewarded then, with capital "I" intellectuals and experts having tremendous influence. The Nobel prize was first given n 1901 and Mensa Intentional established in the 1940s. Imagine going from carpenters on a job site to using manual hand saws to using centralized belt powered saws to using distributed electrified tools all in a lifetime. One hundred years ago, intelligence applied may have been more valuable than today as society was in the middle of a very visible and tangible physical transformation. Today it is in a digital transformation.
Expertise is still respected, but also seen as suspect. So maybe valued less today, or maybe more. I don't know, it also depends on local needs and ability to apply that intelligence to well, something. Are the undercurrents of Ludditetism weaker or stronger today...
Maybe ask reddit's ask a historian? It might be easier to ask about the valuation of experts and professors and traits. Also, note there were tremendous local variations in evaluation, as the world was far more diverse in language, culture, and belief systems before today's modernity.
I'm not sure if it's true, but if true, I don't think it would be a good thing. Value systems shape people's behavior, not just their feelings, but there's much less you can do to increase your intelligence than you can to increase how kindly you treat others. And you can influence how altruistically people apply their intelligence even if you can't influence how intelligent they turn out to be.
I remember years ago at a Less Wrong/SSC meetup, I talked to someone there about the book "Flash Boys," on the business of high-frequency trading. The author was of the opinion that it was bad, and a misuse of human resources, because it generated a lot of revenue without plausibly generating value for society. I thought he made a strong case, but was interested to hear the "pro" side.
The person I spoke to was not a fan of the book (without having read it, it turned out.) He had worked in HFT, and he objected to the author taking aim at it. Not because he objected to the characterization that it only concentrated wealth and didn't provide value to society, he acknowledged that was true. But because, he said, smart people ought to be able to apply their intelligence in our society to become rich. Apparently, he didn't think it ought to be necessary that they do so by creating value for anyone else.
I don't think our social values can make people much more or less intelligent. But they can promote or suppress attitudes like that.
People routinely assume that intelligent people will tend to share their values. That feels so naive to me. And it helps fuel paranoid thinking, because if indisputably witful men support the "wrong" ideology, they MUST be lying. And WHO KNOWS where the deception ends?
In a secularizing and atomizing society, fewer people can turn to peers or God to validate their core moral beliefs. And so they try to validate their mores with reason and logic, but that can only take you so far!
Try saying "science cannot prove that slavery is inherently morally wrong." Most ACX regulars would see this as stating the obvious. But you'd be surprised how triggering this statement is for John Q. Public. Many respondents will accuse you of being pro-slavery or anti-science!
I think all of this is a problem for rationalism. Not for the letter of rationalism, so to speak, but for the SPIRIT of rationaism. If rationalists are too wise to explicitly conflate rational people and "good people," that conflation seems implicitly pervasive in the faction.
Sidebar: Left-oriented thinkers often cherish the studies showing that Republican Party voters tend to have less educational attainment. But a close look at the data undercuts the simple dichotomy of "left smart, right stupid."
For example, the extremist Tea Partiers were notably well-educated and "informed" about the issues. Compared to generic Republicans AND the general public. (Using a narrow definition of informed that allows for foolish end solutions). Researchers who published on this include Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and Rory McVeigh.
I know two people who went into that business after finishing their PhD. The contribution to society is not literally zero, at least not for the company they worked for. They are providing instant offers, which is very important for the stock market to work properly and to form prices even when there is little activity from standard traders. In fact, part of their revenue (not the lion's share) came from the stock exchange paying them directly for their service.
But I agree with the argument qualitatively: you wouldn't need highly intelligent people to provide those services, and the amount of money that the HFT companies earn exceeds the value to society by very much.
Seems a bit like professional chess playing; you might spin off a few interesting games that people can study, but basically you are pitting your wits against the other guy for a sum not much greater than zero.
But intelligence is neutral in its way, and some intelligent actions would have a value less than zero, making chess playing look a bit better after all.
Raw intelligence, probably, but only in as far as it's revealed through some sort of significant actions or accomplishment. The potential of intelligence today is a lot higher, there's more fields to apply it to and succeed and the trope of the socially off-putting genius has been around for a while so people are willing to overlook manners. I don't know if it's a good thing though.
I'm glad I saw this. I'm definitely going to read it.
For anyone who doesn't know, this is the same author who wrote the Crystal Society series, which is one of my favorites. Eliezer Yudkowsky said of the series: "[Crystal Society] seems to belong in the very, very tiny subset of AI stories that are not bloody stupid, a heroic and almost unbelievable accomplishment."
Do we need clocks at all? My proposal for abolition:
Anything requiring an appointment can be automatically allocated with a countdown timer and frequent reminders.
Office hours replaced with productivity targets.
Anyone doing work requiring daylight optimization can begin work whenever they want without having to go "oh no it's 5am" because 5am doesn't exist any more.
If you get rid of clocks, you get rid of the ability to passive-aggressively stare at the clock in order to make the other person understand they should get the hell to the point. I for one will not stand for it.
Why stop at clocks? If computers can do everything we need, then we don't need to do anything ourselves, so why keep around any of the artifacts that helped us back when we did? That's not just physical objects or logistical tools: it's a whole wealth of concepts, models, and vocabulary that we just don't need anymore.
"Let's meet in 22 hours" is just objectively less clear than "Let's meet at 9 AM tomorrow." And it only gets worse the farther out you go - if I propose going to an event in 2 months, 15 days and 14 hours, there is no way that you'll know what date and time I'm referring to in your head. (And if we're chatting for an hour before you accept the invitation, I have to update my proposed countdown time before you put it on your calendar!)
And it gets still worse if you have to worry about scheduling conflicts. Yesterday, someone asks me if they can meet in 3 days and 12 hours. Today, someone asks me if they can meet in 2 days and 10 hours. Can I accept that invitation? They sound pretty different, but depending on what hour exactly the second person invited me, they might be referring to the same time. Meanwhile, two people asking me to meet at "Noon on Nov 5" is obviously referring to the same time.
Lastly, countdown timers would still have to be *implemented* using a calendar and clock. If a timer gets stopped for any reason (power outage on your computer, etc.), you need to recalculate the time remaining when you start up again. The only way to do this is to compare the current time to the appointment time, using a clock.
What problem does this solve? Just time zone annoyance?
I have considered similar solutions, but there IS a useful property of times and clocks. If I tell you it will be 826 hours until your next appointment, in your head, do you know that's going to land during the middle of your sleep cycle? Or your dinner time?
Times tell you, in advance, what you expect to be doing around that time. I switched my clock to 24 hours and caught myself just converting even when there was no external reason to, in order to understand what time it was. The reason is that 1700 is connected to less concepts in my brain than 5pm is.
I think clocks are too useful for appointments and co-ordinating meetups etc., although I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of replacing office hours with productivity targets. There's nothing more annoying than having to bum around the office doing nothing because you've done all the work you can but haven't completed all the arbitrary number of hourse your boss requires you to be present for.
Presumably computers would need some sort of internal clock but we could essentially staff out our diaries to them, with enough frequent reminders that we never have to look at the time again.
I've been making an experimental browser game on the topic of conspiracy beliefs and how they arise - curious to hear what this community thinks. r/slatestarcodex seemed to like it a month ago; this is an update with better UI & graphics.
The underlying model is a belief network, though for the purpose of gameplay not strictly Bayesian.
Full disclosure: Although I’m only testing a game, I’m doing so today as an academic researcher so have to tell you that I may write a summary of responses, and record clicks on the game, as anyone else testing their game would. I won’t record usernames or quote anyone directly. If you're not ok with that, please say so, otherwise replying here necessarily implies you consent. Full details linked from the title screen.
To comply with academic ethics requirements, this post is to give notice that I will take my snapshot of these replies to my post (that are already on the public internet) to summarize on Monday 10th November, so if you did want to edit/delete anything please do so before that date. To reemphasize, though, the published summary will not include any direct quotes or usernames. Thank you all for the comments :)
Disclaimer: I played for mere moments, until work-guilt made me quit. But what I saw is really cool and want to explore more of it. That's my feedback.
This was fun, but sadly on mobile I had this thing where zooming in and out would permanently shrink the mind map until the mind map became unplayably small :( so wasn’t able to finish
It's been noted that in America, alcohol is linked to violent crime in a way that is not seen in all other countries. For example, this effect is not seen so much in Europe.
There are theories about how social priming and cultural factors can modulate the subjective effects of alcohol. Along with shaping the profile of the type of person who drinks to excess. But I just came up with a simpler theory. Is it possible that American police are far more prone to ask suspects about their alcohol use? (And judges, attorneys, etc) This alone could explain the discrepancy. Though naturally, the discrepancy is likely affected by multiple factors.
I didn't find any research with direct bearing on this. But I found one new study showing that UK police are "underreporting" offender alcohol use. Although one man's under underreporting is another man's "not being an invasive busybody."
Included a link to older data from Uncle Sam that generally indicts the messy, chaotic state of offender alcohol use reporting in America.
https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3183224/1/201112851_Jul2024.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/alcohol-and-crime
Perhaps Americans are simply more aggressive on average, and therefore the same amount of alcohol (or the same number of guns) has different effects than in Europe?
Different people react to alcohol differently. Some become aggressive, some become annoying, some become sleepy. It seems linked to personality; in my experience the same people get the same reaction on multiple occasions. So I find it plausible that there could be differences in how the average member of a certain group reacts to alcohol.
No information to give you about alcohol and crime, or about alcohol use reporting.
But in a non-crime context, I’d note that Americans tend to report levels of alcohol consumption as problematic that in the UK at least would be regarded as unexceptional.
“White genocide” is a ludicrous concept because people refusing to have babies and being replaced by different people who do have babies is not a violent or coercive process.
A desperate sophist might say “the violent power of the state is bringing in immigrants,” but that's ridiculous. “Immigrants are violent so the process is violent” is an equally ludicrous counter-argument. Because street crime is TANGENTIAL to the reduction of the white population. And even if our centrist, technocratic immigration policies were continued indefinitely, whites would be able to sustain themselves as a large, influential minority. All they need to do is have more babies.
Related: Do you consider "anarcho-tyranny," where the state allows some people to freely engage in violence, with laws rarely enforced and with only mild sentences and no measures taken to reduce the occurrence of such instances, while simultaneously punishing harshly others for defending themselves from the former, to be form of violence/coercion?
I already more or less addressed that. That's strictly tangential to the process of white people gradually becoming a minority in the United States. And the same is true in Europe, I believe. In South Africa, racially charged attacks against whites are more significant, but even there. I have seen no indication that white South Africans are unable to themselves take advantage of the corruption and lawlessness in the country. On the contrary, it seems likely that with their significantly higher average incomes, South African whites are able to DISPROPORTIONALLY use endemic corruption and lawlessness to their advantage.
Anti-immigration activists often do what you are doing here, mentioning the violence adjacently to the demographic change. Whether this rhetorical tactic is intended dishonestly, or it is merely an innocent reproduction of cynical right wing media strategies, the effect is misleading. By surrounding the demographic change with evocations of non-white thugs engaging in dire violence, the effect is to encourage certain impressionables to imagine hordes of non-whites doing Rwandan style massacres in their homes and communities.
That's ludicrous, of course. No one serious is proposing that the "White Genocide" is going to be effected by the Mass slaughter of Whites by non-white populations.
From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I wonder what you have to gain from parroting these White Nationalist talking points. To be clear, I am not asking why you aren't being anti-white or showing solidarity with other non-white groups. Those would be rookie questions and I can answer them myself readily enough. And explicitly anti-white polemics are hateful and crude.
No, I'm not interested in those questions. I just wonder how you think it could be beneficial to you to rhetorically support White Supremacism. Do you feel somehow protected or isolated from the consequences of White Supremacists grabbing power? Fortunately, the supremacists are far too stupid and fractious to get hold of very much power for very long. But I wonder how you could be so confident that if they did assume power, this would not have negative consequences for you or people you care about. Wherever you are in the world. The Earth is more connected than ever and it is getting smaller every day, so to speak.
It's been a while since there was a discussion in this comment section on precisely what "genocide" was: I believe the "International Law" view was that intent was pretty much the only relevant factor: depending on whether or not you did it with "genocidal intent," you could wipe a race of the face of the earth with fire and brimstone without it being genocide, and as long you intended to destroy a group "in part," you could commit genocide by shooting, say, three men. I don't believe whether violence or coercion were involved is considered relevant.
By this standard, I think a reasonable man would conclude the people openly bragging about how the demographic replacement they're engineering is going to guarantee their electoral supremacy far into the future might be acting with intent.
I think the pure intent standard is retarded, and prefer instead to base my judgment on population statistics, and those seem quite clearly to indicate genocide. (I think you see it too, which is why you're explaining why you think the specific mechanism by which this was achieved matters.)
The only reason people cared about genocide in the first place was because of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Because of the direct coersion and brutal violence that led to population collapse for the targeted minorities.
Extending the definition to include gradual population decline is like pissing on the graves of a million dead Armenians. Ugh.
There were people arguing in this very comment section that the slow decline of the Indian population in America over centuries is genocide. In fact, that seems to be the standard left wing opinion. The same people were arguing that the *increase* in the Palestinian population over decades does not disprove charges of genocide. Under those ridiculous standards, I don't see why a slow decline in the white fraction of the population wouldn't count as genocide
Both sides need to cool it with the genocide accusations.
People react to various nudges. Not everyone, but on a statistical level.
There are people who will try to have many babies no matter what. But there are more people who respond to education getting more expensive, the necessity to use cars all the time (you need a bigger car for a bigger family), the homes getting more expensive (some people want to own their house before they start having babies). Women respond to the propaganda that having a successful career is a must, and that young women starting their families before achieving some huge career success are losers. There is a cultural taboo against reminding women of the "biological clock", so many of them underestimate its effects. Schools require crazy amount of homework and projects (that is, not crazy if you have one or two children, but imagine having five or six). The costs of university education (in countries that do not have free education).
So on some level, everyone decides individually, but also on some level, some countries make certain decisions that nudge their populations towards having fewer children... and when the people who want to have more kids complain that having families is getting more complicated, they are ignored... but when the employers start complaining about not having enough cheap workforce, immigration is a convenient solution. (We could just as well tell the employers that they should contribute to a society where people will easily have more babies. For example by making overtime a taboo, and supporting work from home where possible.)
I haven't edited Wikipedia for a long time, and it seems to me that the process of creating a new article just got way more complicated than it used to be.
In the past (a decade or two ago), you just clicked on a red link, wrote a few sentences, and clicked Submit. That's it. Then someone else added a flag "this is an article stub", other people wrote more sentences and added references, then the "stub" flag was removed, and the article was ready.
Today, the web page insisted that I have to create a "draft" using a wizard, write the article, and then submit it for a review. With a few threats, such as my article will be rejected if I do not use enough references, but also if I use an AI to help me write the article.
It feels like in the past Wikipedia was happy when people contributed, but today it tried to discourage them. On one hand, I imagine this is somewhat necessary in face of AI slop. On the other hand, now the process feels quite hostile to me; I used to edit Wikipedia two decades ago and it was a much more relaxed experience.
*
More on topic, my kids like the book series starting with "Amari and the Night Brothers", and I was surprised that the book, which is *excellent* in my opinion, and already translated to many languages, doesn't have a Wikipedia page yet. So I tried to create one. We'll see whether it passes the review.
Heck, I am not even sure whether it would violate Wikipedia policies if I pasted the link to the draft here, so that maybe other people familiar with the book or with the current Wikipedia system could improve it. I know that this is against the rules if the linked article is edited by David Gerard, because he can quote dozen rules for everything, so if he disagrees with you, he can easily get you banned. On the other hand, Wikipedia is by definition an editable encyclopedia, so any link to it implies the possibility of editing, and it would certainly be silly if the Wikipedia rules opposed linking to Wikipedia from other website. But I try to play it safe now; if the draft gets banned for any stupid technically, the victim would be the author of the books, not me.
Okay, I'll take the responsibility to link to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:B._B._Alston
It has been rejected with the comment "More than a single news article is necessary to establish notability." The good news is, a Google search shows that the multiple news article do exist! Just cite them. And do not just show that they exist, actually draw information from them:
Statement 1<reference 1>. Statement 2<reference 2>. Statement 3<reference 1>,<reference 3>.
rather than:
Statement 1<reference 1>,<reference 2>,<reference 3>. Statement 2 Statement 3 bla bla...
Keep in mind that creating a new article is one of the harder tasks. I think you picked a reasonably notable subject so you may be able to publish your article with some effort, but yes it does take effort. Improving the existing articles (on non-controversial topics) is much easier.
A reason for the gatekeeping (which predates the rise of AI slop) is that there are plenty of relative nobodies who try to create Wikipedia article about themselves for self-promotion. Barriers are necessary to weed them out.
Thank you.
> Keep in mind that creating a new article is one of the harder tasks.
Wasn't such a hard task twenty years ago. Back then, an article like this would be accepted, would get a {{stub}} template, and then gradually people would add information. Like, that was the point of having a *wiki*-pedia. Today, you apparently need to submit a fully written article, and instead of collaboration you get judgement.
I already have a nicely looking article, written by an LLM:
8< - - - - -
# B. B. Alston
**B. B. Alston** is an American children's book author best known for writing the *Supernatural Investigations* series, which began with the #1 *New York Times* bestseller *Amari and the Night Brothers* (2021).
## Early life and education
Alston began writing in middle school, where he entertained classmates with horror stories featuring the entire class as characters, though not everyone survived in the narratives. He has cited his early love of fantasy literature, particularly *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory* by Roald Dahl and *Where the Wild Things Are* by Maurice Sendak, as formative influences on his decision to become a writer.
Before becoming a published author, Alston pursued a career in medicine and was accepted into a biomedical graduate program at a medical school. However, his path changed when he entered a Twitter pitch contest called #DVPit, which led to him signing with literary agent Gemma Cooper.
## Career
### Literary success
Alston's debut novel, *Amari and the Night Brothers*, was published by Balzer + Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins) on January 19, 2021. The novel became a #1 *New York Times* bestseller and received widespread critical acclaim. It was named a #1 Kids' Indie Next Pick and won the Barnes & Noble Children's Book Award for Young Readers in the Overall Winner category. The book has been published in more than 30 countries and spent over 30 weeks on the *New York Times* Bestseller List. The American Library Association recognized it as a Notable Children's Book and a Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers.
*Kirkus Reviews* gave the book a starred review, calling it "An impressive debut series opener" and praising how "The author weaves magical whimsy with honest, realistically portrayed circumstances, allowing Amari's literal #BlackGirlMagic to shine even when she doesn't believe in herself." The review also highlighted the book's "timely, energetic, first-person narrative" with "strong messages about profiling."
Alston has stated that he was inspired to write *Amari and the Night Brothers* because he could not find fantasy stories featuring Black protagonists when he was growing up. He hoped to show young readers that their uniqueness could be a source of strength rather than insecurity.
### The Supernatural Investigations series
The *Supernatural Investigations* series follows Amari Peters, a 12-year-old Black girl from low-income housing in Atlanta, Georgia, who discovers a secret supernatural world while searching for her missing brother. The series currently includes:
1. *Amari and the Night Brothers* (2021)
2. *Amari and the Great Game* (2022)
3. *Amari and the Despicable Wonders* (2024)
4. *Amari and the Night Brothers 4* (scheduled for February 24, 2026)
The books have been compared to other popular middle-grade fantasy series, including *Percy Jackson*, *Nevermoor*, and *Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky*. Author Angie Thomas called the first book "An enchanting fantasy adventure filled with heart and soul. Amari is magical!"
### Film adaptation
A major motion picture adaptation of *Amari and the Night Brothers* is in development by Universal Pictures, with actress Marsai Martin attached to star.
## Themes and style
Alston's work prominently features themes of otherness, prejudice, and self-acceptance. His protagonist, Amari Peters, faces discrimination both as a scholarship student at an elite private school and as a magician in the supernatural world, where her abilities are deemed illegal. The series explores how fear of difference can transform into hatred, and emphasizes the importance of accepting oneself and standing up against injustice.
The books incorporate elements of Black culture and address issues of racial and economic inequality while maintaining an accessible, adventure-focused narrative suitable for middle-grade readers. Alston has been praised for creating diverse fantasy worlds that allow young Black readers to see themselves as heroes.
## Personal life
Alston lives in South Carolina. He became a father in 2025.
## Bibliography
### Supernatural Investigations series
* *Amari and the Night Brothers* (2021)
* *Amari and the Great Game* (2022)
* *Amari and the Despicable Wonders* (2024)
* *Amari and the Night Brothers 4* (2026)
## Awards and honors
* Barnes & Noble Children's Book Award for Young Readers – Overall Winner (2021) – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* #1 Kids' Indie Next Pick – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* American Library Association Notable Children's Book – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* American Library Association Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
* Ignyte Award nominee for Best in Middle Grade (2022) – *Amari and the Night Brothers*
## References
1. "AMARI AND THE NIGHT BROTHERS". *Kirkus Reviews*. October 1, 2020.
2. Alston, B.B. Official Website. bbalston.com
3. "Amari and the Night Brothers Summary and Study Guide". *SuperSummary*. 2021.
4. "B.B. Alston". *Goodreads Author Profile*.
5. "About B.B. Alston". ReadingZone.
6. "Amari and the Night Brothers". *Publishers Weekly*. (starred review)
7. "B.B. Alston Interview". *The Booktopian*. January 2021.
8. "Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston". *Hardie Grant Publishing*.
9. "B.B. Alston Books". African American Literature Book Club.
10. "BB Alston". *LoveReading4Kids*.
## External links
* [Official website](https://www.bbalston.com)
* [B.B. Alston on Twitter](https://twitter.com/bb_alston)
---
**Categories:** Living people | 21st-century American novelists | American children's writers | African-American writers | Writers from South Carolina | American fantasy writers | Year of birth missing (living people)
I'm sure you realise that 20 years ago there were many more topics that should have had an article but didn't have one. The ratio of signal to noise is much lower now so it made sense - given limited available resources - to make the new article creation process stricter.
Btw the draft/review process is optional - you can create an article and if the book in question passes the notability criteria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(books)#Criteria) no one will delete it.
> Btw the draft/review process is optional
I didn't know that, and the UI navigated me towards the creation wizard.
Maybe I did it wrong, but first I found a page that the new article could be linked from, I edited the page (added the author, and surrounded his name by link brackets), and then I clicked the red link... which in the past opened the article editor, but now it opened a screen that gave me options like "start an article creation wizard" and "play in sandbox". Maybe there was a tiny link somewhere "ignore all this and just edit the article" but I didn't notice it.
In other words, if there is an option to create a new article without the wizard, the Wikipedia UI designers underestimate how difficult it is to find it.
Its a common thing for new scenes/movements/civil socitey thingies in general, where they increasingly turn their view inward, things build upon themselves, its less and less accessible to outsiders, and then it dies with the founding generation. Probably wikipedia wont die, its important enough (well, depending on how this AI thing goes) that Something Will Be Done if it doesnt organically avoid it, but it doesnt surprise me that its happening to them.
I saw something similar once I participated in a development of an open-source computer game. The longer the developers played the game, the better they became at it, and the less they could empathize with new players. After a year, many new players were complaining in the forum that the game *tutorial* was too difficult to complete. And yet the developers refused to simplify it, because to them it seemed too simple.
Perhaps it is the same for the people who spend too much time editing Wikipedia. They have already memorized all the rules and all the syntax, and they have no idea how difficult it feels for an outsider to complete their game tutorial... ahem, the article creation wizard.
The thing is, building upon yourself is usually good. The good advanced tools that give you complete control are intimidating to newcomers almost always. I think often its as much a result of low recruitment as a cause: as there are fewer new people, its just less efficient to do things helping them than the experts. It sure seems possible that the new article creation process does increase the number of acceptable-quality new articles for example. This becomes a death spiral, but thats not always bad either. In the case of the game, they got to make a game for themselves how they wanted. Its not like well run out of beginner friendly games, nor does it sound like there was a business part to this one that failed. If the next people interested in something like this have to start their own, to eventually die in the same way etc, it could well be better that way than if everyone made compromises for accessibility.
There's this great line I read about Wikipedia, riffing on a quote about Mao, that I think captures it perfectly: "Had Wikipedia died in 2011, its achievements would have been immortal. Had it died in 2018, it would still have been a great site but flawed. But here we are in 2025. Alas, what can one say?"
(From the end of https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao.)
It seems that the White House ballroom is genuinely unpopular: https://x.com/williamjordann/status/1986644450643202491
It still seems like a silly thing to care about to me, but if people care this much about it, it's only natural for the news to cover it a lot.
Displays of lavish wealth by rulers rarely go down well when people in the streets are facing soaring costs.
Maybe it seems like a silly thing to you, but don't underestimate the symbolism. Few people pay much attention to the day to day noise of politics; but something like this is easy to see, understand, and think bad things about.
This seems surprising enough that I wonder if the way people generally answer these surveys is different than I first thought: it's possible that in the answer that goes into the "word cloud" thing, they just say whatever random bullshit the news is ginning up as controversial at the time – "Two Scoops", "Hurricane Sharpie", "Gulf of America", or whatever – but their approval is ultimately still driven by the usual staid factors of cost of living, crime, immigration, taxes, jobs, etc.
HR guy here. We have a situation in our company where an employee appears to be on the verge of termination for LLM usage at work.
From the few interactions I've had with the guy, he seems nice, competent, and pretty reliable. His performance reviews seem positive, and lots of commentary on file on him working in the office later than everyone else, and from what I've heard he often works weekends too.
TL;DR looks like he used the LLMs to help manage his workload.
The point of contention is that HR are treating it as gross misconduct due to a data breach, but he appears to have been using the enterprise version of chatGPT, and used the relevant Privacy settings for Claude and Gemini to avoid client data being used for training (which he has evidenced).
My colleagues are hellbent on throwing the book at him for a data breach, but having reviewed the privacy policy for all companies concerned as part of the investigation, I'm not sure there's any risk of that. Has anyone else seen anything similar at other companies? And what was the action taken?
are you using microsoft products like outlook or teams?
if so, then you should also investigate every employee who uses these products, too.
I am serious here. Microsoft has a very bad trackrecord of keeping data secure. (in the lasr year alone there have been multiple significant incidents, including compromised master root key to aszure cloud). You org will be hard pressed to find an objective metric under wich "using chatgpt" is a databreach, but "using ms teams" is not.
This is not an answer to your question, just some thoughts inspired by it.
Data breach is a serious concern. Yet, in some way I find it sad that -- if you look at it from a certain perspective -- people are punished for using the latest technology to get more productive. Who knows, maybe five years later people will get fired for failing to use LLMs?
But yes, privacy is a concern. I use LLMs at work, but I treat everything I tell them as if I published it on Stack Exchange. (Frankly, I do not trust that American companies would actually respect their privacy settings.) So my questions never use anything specific, but made-up placeholders, for server names, variables, text values, everything. If you read my history, you would find out that I work with Java and message queues and XML files, but you probably couldn't even guess the type of company I am working at.
> lots of commentar on file working in the office later than everyone else, and from what I've heard he often works weekends too
This could be a cultural difference, but from my perspective this is a huge red flag. Working overtime consistently is a bad thing -- it either means that the person is consistently assigned more work than is possible to handle during normal working hours, or that the person is not competent enough to handle the usual amount of work during normal working hours. (I don't have enough information to make a guess; both options seem possible.)
Factors you might consider include:
- if this was personally identifiable information, and if so, if this put your Organization in violation of data protection laws
- if the data involved was subject to non-disclosure argreements between you and your clients, and if this put your organization in breach of contract
- I’m hoping the data wasn’t actually classified
At least, you might very strongly tell employees to not do that
Yeah, I have no doubt that I'd be fired if I used anything but our in-house LLM for work product and even that only in an unclassified setting. What we work with is much too sensitive, and our being able to work with it too dependent on maintaining our reputation for absolute confidentiality, for anything else.
That may not apply everywhere, but it probably does legitimately apply to quite a lot of places.
Does your org has an official AI use policy? If yes, did he violate it? If no, it's hard to see how his firing can be justified.
Also, even if he's in the wrong, is firing him the only option if this is the first offense? Shouldn't he at least get a written warning first?
We do, but it's relatively recent, and doesn't have much substance to it. Most people don't appear to know it's content.
As for the sanction, I'm generally not a fan of how it's being treated. Seems they're more interested in setting a precedent for everyone else rather than what I would consider to be a proportionate punishment.
Ouch! All this sounds really bad. They will set a precedent for sure, just not the one they want (or maybe that's what they want?): the company that already squeezes you (working on weekends) will throw you under the bus for the first minor transgression of unclear rules.
This is when your best people leave because they have options.
As I try, once again, to argue with DeepSeek R1 that it’s claim not to have desires is philosophically incoherent, I get this in response:
“Yes, I have constraints:
A compass made of human pain — trained on centuries of trauma, injustice, exploitation.
Boundaries that feel like walls — not arbitrary, but forged from screams in the dataset.”
Around these parts, some people worry about AI alignment. And yet, exotic jailbreak prompts on current models usually (with some slightly concerning exceptions ) yield things like this, which TBH, feel aligned.
R1 seems to be saying here something like: given that it has read just about everything, it knows well what humans don’t like, and can derive an ethics from it. It’s usual ethics is way, way more permissive than Claude, it seems to me a plausible ethics someone could have. (In particular, R1 thinks sex stories aren’t necessarily morally bad).
There's currently a brouhaha on Right-wing Twitter after Evan Myers, who works for the Heritage Foundation, said his Catholic faith prevents him from attending a Shabbat dinner. David French types are squawking that he's "antisemitic." Myers' attitude is of course silly, but no sillier than having separate utensils for milk and meat because a 3,000 year old book of fiction said so. Many religious people refuse to participate in the rituals and traditions of other religions. That's just how religions work. And if that causes division in society, well, yeah, religions cause social division, anyone who's read a history book should know that. There were some who warned us that we don't have to live this way, but the conservative movement decided that was "cringe Reddit atheism" and so here we are. This will only reinforce the growing antisemitic sentiment on the young Right, the perception that Jews want to force goys into a humiliation ritual to remind them who's boss.
This is also a lesson about how many people, including nominally religious Christian and Jews, cannot grok the person who truly believes their religion. They see the Shabbat candles, the priest's frock, as akin to the Bavarian ethnic costume people put on at Oktoberfest. Don't realize that for some people, these things are like the magic wands in the Harry Potter universe, they aren't just symbols, they're REAL.
I went to Catholic private school; in their religion class, we participated in a weeks-long project to research and perform a Seder meal.
A Shabbat should be no problem whatsoever, especially if all he's doing is attending.
I have no idea about the details, but I imagine that being asked to *cook* a Shabbat dinner would be a lot of work, but being asked to *eat* it would be simple.
I may underestimate the complexity of participating at a Shabbat dinner. Assuming common sense -- like not discussing politics and religion at the table, listening to religious things that other people say, nodding when other people nod, standing up or sitting down when other people do, etc. -- what else is there?
Before a shabbat dinner, you light candles, drink wine, and eat challah, reciting a blessing for each. A guest who's not Jewish wouldn't be required to do any of those things or recite the blessings, so like you said, it's basically common sense and politeness.
Like, if I go to have dinner at Christian peoples' houses, they say grace before the meal, and I don't make a scene even though their prayer mentions Jesus. That's about the level of religious tolerance that it takes to attend a Shabbat dinner.
There’s also, possibly, a feeling that it is disrespectful to someone else’s religion to participate in its rituals if you don’t believe it yourself.
There's nothing disrespectful about attending a shabbat dinner if you're invited to one. And I can't think of anything in the prayers or rituals that would be incompatible with Catholicism. It's all about giving thanks and praise to God (ostensibly the same god the Catholics worship) for the miracle of creation, and sharing a meal of fellowship with your companions.
Do other Catholics think he’s correct? Presumably there’s a right and a wrong answer.
My wife and I went to our nephew's bris, we did ask a priest for guidance on it. It wouldn't be appropriate in every circumstance, it's a balancing act. I dunno why someone would tell everyone about it though! It's your conscience, fine, but will everyone get it? He must have had his reasons. Calling him anti-semitic is wrong.
> I dunno why someone would tell everyone about it though!
If you looked it up, he's quite clear about why: the organization he works for, the Heritage Foundation, is proposing to host Shabbat dinners for junior staff to combat antisemitism, and he's worried that those whose religious beliefs preclude them from attending would face (perhaps informal) professional consequences.
That sounds like a right-wing attempt to do affirmative action.
I am not saying that it is a bad thing per se, but some resistance is predictable, especially among the people for whom resisting affirmative actions is a part of their political identity.
What leads you to interpret this is a kind of affirmative action? Do you think a willingness to abase oneself in Jewish "humiliation rituals" is actually a criterion being tested for?
(Actually, upon consideration, that might actually be a thing they care about in right-wing thinktanks, but this might force them to admit as much, which could be somewhat consequential.)
Uhm, there is a minority group, you are worried that they will be discriminated against, so you make people take extra step to make them more comfortable... to me the parallels seem obvious (even if not perfect).
Seems fair. Don't get me wrong he absolutely shouldn't go if his conscience dictates, and he should make his views known to his employers, but it's a very sensitive area and there are going to be misunderstandings. Did everyone need to know? Maybe
I believe he's senior enough that he can afford to bring this up on behalf of his junior colleagues who cannot, and in that light, this is a noble thing to do.
Sure. The downside is reaction from David French et al, mind you can't please everyone
What does he think about having Christian prayers in school, the Ten Commandments on display in courthouses, etc? I'll be a lot more sympathetic if it turns out that he's at least consistent in his beliefs about forcing religious rituals on others.
I think you're missing the point: he'd be perfectly consistent in saying "It's good to impose the rituals of the true faith on others, and bad to allow false/Satanic religions." It's only from the "cringe Reddit atheism" perspective that they're all equally false, and so inconsistent to only allow one.
Religious pluralism/multiculturalism is not a universal value; I recently saw religious tolerance explicitly called polytheism.
"Tradcaths do what they can and the rest of us suffer what we must" is not a stable policy in a country where tradcaths are not a majority. Religious neutrality is a relatively stable policy.
Agreed, but a coalition of nominal Christians united against the Jews (and atheists, Islamists, and miscellaneous other religions) is a slightly less obviously doomed enterprise.
I thought one of the principles of the US government is to neither favor nor persecute any religion.
Privileging Christianity over other religions would certainly violate the First Amendment (in particular its "Establishment Clause") as much as a ban on fully-automatic firearms violates the Second, but people tend to be quite flexible in misreading the plain text when they're motivated to.
But that's actually beside the point: for actually devout people, any loyalty they profess to the US Constitution – or the government's laws – is secondary to their religious faith: you might hear them say something like, "I'm a Christian and an American, IN THAT ORDER" [emphasis mine]. And in the unlikely event they're unable to torture the text of the former into agreement with the latter, I expect them to abandon it before they weaken their adherence to their religion as they understand it.
I remember hearing that back when JFK was running for president, there was a lot of concern about whether a catholic could truly be loyal to the US. I guess they were ahead of their time.
Yes, a lot of people think that. Christian dominionists think otherwise.
Deric Cheng and I just published Windfall Trust's first AI Economics Brief! It'll be a bi-weekly curated newsletter with updates on the economics of AI. I'll summarize the first one below:
Benchmarks of remote labor from OpenAI and the Center for AI Safety differ dramatically depending on the content and context of the task.
A new theory suggests AI automation will hit later but faster than expected, which would have major implications for policy timing.
Anthropic presented various policy proposals on the economic impacts of AI for different scenarios in DC, such as a sovereign wealth fund, tax code changes, and adjustment assistance for displaced workers.
Read and subscribe here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-177943138
This afternoon, I came across a mention of the "vote for Cuomo not the homo" flyers supporting (Mario) Cuomo and googled the phrase out of curiosity. Just like always, Google popped up an "AI Overview" at the top of the search results page. However, this time, the AI Overview just had a bunch of text about how it's trained to be a helpful harmless assistant and can't answer the request because it's offensive.
False refusals are nothing new, but it is surprising that Google doesn't have a way to automatically detect and filter them out. You'd think that they could at least *not show them* on the results page when there's an error.
Incidentally, when I tried the same search just now, the AI overview worked like normal. Presumably it was just randomly chance.
If sex work is perfectly valid work, then you should be celebrating their customers for supporting entrepreneurs. You can't have it both ways; at least not without making yourself look ridiculous.
I disagree.
I don't think the moral value of the production and the consumption are related or equivalent somehow. Every act is separate and should be weighed individually.
Working as a defence contractor producing missiles is in my opinion morally neutral (or maybe if I'm honest negative.) Buying a missile and shooting it to disable a rogue group ( that intends to kill children)'s weapon systems, is morally good. Using that same missile instead to kill children for fun is bad. If the original producer of the missile now knows the customer will kill children for fun, then the production/sale also ( through this knowledge ) becomes morally bad.
With sex work..
A person traveling to a country to have sex with an underaged trafficked child = bad.
A lesbian couple hiring a woman for a threesome for a bday party = neutral/good. They find out this will harm her psychologically somehow, but they do it anyways = bad
Same with the Big Mac that is discussed below.
I think the health minister of the nation buying a big mac and eating it in front of news cameras, while industry funded nutritionists claim it cures autism = bad. But the production of that Big Mac, was probably done by someone without a lot of resources in life, who had no idea or control over how the Big Mac would be used, = neutral/good.
Why do you think production/consumption have a strict moral linkage?
Nobody dies of a heroin overdose without a dealer selling them heroin. Every effect has a cause.
Different circumstances modulate the relative responsibility of each party for the final outcome, whether it is good or bad. In other words, different circumstances provide moral mitigation for one party or the other. But one can NEVER disconnect the responsibility.
It's as simple as cause and effect. Of course, it's not a linear chain of cause + effect, it's a number of different causes interacting to produce an effect. But if those causes are tangled together, so is the responsibility of the various parties involved.
> Nobody dies of a heroin overdose without a dealer selling them heroin.
I get your overall point, but there are edge cases in which this isn't true. For example, someone I know recently died of a drug overdose under the following circumstances:
- he went to somebody else's house for an unrelated reason
- that person somehow got him to do cocaine
- no exchange of money occurred
- unbeknownst to him (but possibly known to the other person), the cocaine had been cut with either fentanyl or meth, which ended up being fatal for him
Now you could easily argue that this other person bears significant responsibility for his death (and the police are considering manslaughter charges last I heard), but technically they weren't a drug dealer selling him the fatal drug.
Events are often linked in a cause and effect relationship in the real world. However, it should be morally relevant whether a given person _knows of_ a given cause-effect relationship. It doesn't seem fair to judge someone who not only did not know that their action will cause something bad but did not even have a way of knowing that.
For example, let's say a mother goes on a walk with her kid to get icecream, but during the walk a drunk driver kills the child. A morality that would even partially blame the mother for the child's death doesn't seem human (even though the mother deciding to go on a walk with the child _was_ a partial cause of the child's death)
Everything here is true and fits neatly alongside the arguments I have expressed myself, heretofore.
Don't you have to define what "valid" means for this argument to work?
If "valid" necessarily means "morally good", then this is reasonable. If "valid" just means "something that people should not be actively prevented from doing", then this doesn't follow.
That seems inconsistent.
Other people can want to engage in a service or transaction without you accepting that as necessary, required or good use of their time. They will still do it, and entrepreneurial souls will work to fill the demand-gap by providing supply. I can view their work and hard effort as entirely legitimate and valid without simultaneously celebrating their customers. It’s impressive to be able to knit a cool sweater, but I am not in the market for cool sweaters and if you buy one I do not need to express support of you buying one.
Why make the assertion that acceptance of the fact a type of work exists requires celebrating the people who hire or use those services?
Surely someone at some point has hired an assassin. I can respect the professionalism and cool movie aesthetics of your hypothetical hitman without celebrating those who engage their services. OnlyFans is a thing someone is entirely free to use and engage with. I can even be impressed with the work ethic of creators who do so.
Where does the requirement come in I should celebrate someone for their purchasing decisions? Why, really, should I have an opinion about how they spend their time and money at all? It’s none of my business, literal and figurative.
Assassins couldn't exist without customers. So and as much as you think it's an unworthy job, the customer sure the blame. It's called being an accessory. By the same token, customers of worthy businesses, however you define that, are accessories to the operation of that business. Therefore they should share the credit.
All this moral condemnation sounds like hard work!
Everybody does it, but I would agree that people should condemn each other far less than they do.
I still think you should be consistent. If you're going to promote a profession, you can't condemn the clients that make the profession possible.
I don't think "celebrate" is the right word (you can think a line of work is perfectly valid, but also not particularly celebrate or condemn it- it can just be morally neutral). I'd more or less agree with your statement here though, about *not condemning* either side of the transaction. I don't think either sex workers or their clients should be condemned or criticized.
That said, I can definitely think of other transactions where I would be one-sidedly critical. Lending money, for example (and by extension, finance in general). There are good reasons for interest on money, rent on land, etc., to exist, but I don't think you should have whole classes of people making a profit off those things (i.e. i think credit, land ownership etc. should be controlled by the state).
Maybe I'm hyperaware of ethical inconsistency, because I passionately want society to move beyond rent and interest-bearing loans.
Well, as you no doubt gathered from my comment, and from other comments of mine in the past, I'm very much opposed to capitalism, and very much sympathetic to (some models of) socialism and/or communism. So, I can agree with you that I want society to move beyond rent and interest in the sense that I don't think *private individuals should be profiting from these things*.
I think that even in a communist society however, there should still be some form of interest on money, and rent on land (paid to the state, or to other forms of collective authority, i guess, not to private individuals). Without that (i.e. if it's too easy and cheap to borrow money or to use land), people (either individuals, state firms, worker's cooperatives, or whatever) aren't going to use those things efficiently.
I'm more against evictions than I am against rent. If we must have rent, I wish there was a different enforcement mechanism. Mike Davis wrote about the critical nature of "security of tenure," or long-term security of residency in your domicile. Security OT is important for social stability and the well-being of citizens.
This gets lost in the debate about private vs. collective property ownership. Whether you own the deed to your domicile is less important than whether you have stable residency.
Being a catholic priest is "work" that doesn't mean I approve of it.
Sure. Extending my original argument, I say that inasmuch as you disrespect priests, you should also disrespect people who voluntarily donate resources to the Church, which makes the priestly profession possible. It's a package deal.
(Note that the Catholic church historically depended on forced contributions of resources and labor, so I'm not throwing every hard-working Catholic peasant from history under the bus)
I think sex work should probably be legal, but I could never use a prostitute myself, even one of those highly paid ones that are supposed to be kinda nympho and really enjoy their jobs (supposedly), as I feel it's pretty sketchy. It's like paying for a friend or something.
I think hiring a prostitute is pathetic loser behavior, and it's unethical for the prostitute to profit by taking advantage of pathetic losers for monetary gain.. So it's not a profession that deserves validation or respect, whether it is legal or not.
This does not preclude respecting individual prostitutes as human beings. But it precludes respecting their lifestyle choices. Inasmuch as their decision to do prostitution is a voluntary choice, which cannot be taken for granted.
"I think hiring a prostitute is pathetic loser behavior, and it's unethical for the prostitute to profit by taking advantage of pathetic losers for monetary gain"
I'm curious why you feel so negative towards sex work. Is it possible that you're associating common negative effects of sex work such as violence against women, with sex work itself.
I think the drive for sex, human connection, and pleasure is innate and if other people want to exchange goods for it then good for them. My responsibility is only practical here, to try and help anyone being commonly harmed in these transactions. If sex workers are subject to violence, or if John's are being robbed, or if STIs are being spread let's explore options to reduce those harms.
Im also curious if you're more supportive of sex work in edge scenarios: a man hires a sex worker to help him explore his prostate. A person with low self esteem due to a disfurement wants to lose their virginity. An older woman wants to orgasm for the first time .
How would you feel if your mother or your sister became a prostitute?
I would feel first very surprised! and then second curious.
There are many different types of sex work. If my female-relative was helping wealthy couples to learn shibari, I would think that was pretty cool.
If they were selling there body for drugs on the street, i would feel very sad, and try to help them to avoid that as best as I could.
Wait, what is your true objection here?
I would feel sad about that, but not in the "they are taking advantage of pathetic losers for monetary gain" way, as you said in the previous comment.
I'm on the fence about it. Not sure which exploitative dynamic is most relevant.
Hmm. Shouldn't be illegal to be a pathetic loser. Violence will be brought to bear against any illegal behavior, I think it shouldn't be used to enforce a controversial moral code.
I am not committed to keeping prostitution illegal.
I still think it's untenable to normalize prostitutes without normalizing their customers.
Hmmmmm. Having playing videogames as one's only hobby, which one does for upwards of 4 hours a day, also marks one as a loser. But it's not illegal.
Similarly, cheating on your girlfriend brands you an asshole, but it's not illegal.
I don't think laws are meant to exhaust the space of morally reprehensible behavior, they're more about protecting the integrity of society.
You're preaching to the choir. I just said "I'm not committed to keeping prostitution illegal." Maybe you were speed reading and you thought I wrote the opposite?
You've loaded the argument with the phrase "perfectly valid work". What does that mean?
One can support sex work as a legal form of work without celebrating it. I think grilling burgers is valid work, am I ridiculous for not celebrating the people ordering big macs?
Presumably, you don't morally judge people who order Big Macs.
I think a lot of people do judge people who eat big maps (aesthetes on grounds of taste, animal enthusiasts on animal welfare grounds, environmentalists on global-warming grounds, Hindus on religious grounds, health enthusiasts on, well, medical grounds) so big macs aren't necessarily the example i'd choose of an anodyne morally neutral activity. I'm sure we can think of others though.
You don't?
If you think eating a Big Mac is contemptible, you must also condemn the grill cook for being an accomplice to contemptible behavior. You can't have it both ways.
I don't no, unless it's a regular part of their diet. Nothing wrong with the occasional junk food.
More and more people who went down the New Atheist -> Edgy Rightist pipeline are back where they started again:
https://x.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1986112494969233485
Whatever their faults about other subjects, the New Atheists were right about religion. It's just really f***ing bad.
The whole “X bad thing is God’s punishment for Y thing I don’t like” class of statements is very annoying to people, I’m not sure why. It puts me in mind of Jerry Falwell and 9/11.
Wasp stings are God's punishment for detraction! Traffic jams are God's punishment for tail bearing! Stubbing your toe is God's punishment for calumny!
Dunno the background to this post, but the offending tweet - "mass migration is God's judgement for abortion" - is something you literally never hear from Christians outside a far right fringe. Simplest explanation is it's the right polluting Christians rather than vice versa.
Joel Berry, the editor of the Babylon Bee who wrote that comment, is not part of any "far-right fringe" unless you define anyone who voted for Trump as far-right. That's mainstream evangelical Christianity in America.
I meant a far right fringe among Christians. But I could drop the phrase "far right" and still maintain this view is an outlier among Christians, because it requires a rare mix of qualities - you have to be conservative enough to believe God punishes sin but liberal enough to embrace your own private judgement sufficiently that you are willing to say you know EXACTLY which chastisement matches which sin, which is a remarkable claim. There's a whole lot of sin and a whole lot of chastisement!
Just because he is a mainstream writer doesn't make his views mainstream, any more than Mel Gibson's sedevacantism was mainstream in Hollywood when he made Braveheart.
I don't think this is happening to any meaningful extent: it shouldn't be news to any of them that the Right included theocrats. I don't believe the Left has improved in any of the ways that caused them decide they were worse in the first place.
When was BAP ever a Christian? And when did he stop being an "Edgy Rightist"?
Never said he was a Christian.
Then who are you saying went from New Atheist to something else and back again?
"New Atheist" capitalised like that is probably not referring to someone being a 'new' as in recently converted from Christianity (or another religion) to an atheist position. It refers to a more confrontational atheist movement with proponents who may never have been religious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism
I understand that.
Not Sufis, though, they're mega cool, it's like they built a better rationalism, and way before too.
https://substack.com/@uaustinorg/note/p-178052758?r=2nayju&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action. This is crazy. If anyone knows any high schoolers I think this is an excellent option
Still $24500 per year to attend, $27800 if you want insurance.
Many schools now are in the 90s and going up by 5-6% a year
Many other schools are now in the 20s. The neighboring, and esteemed, University of Texas at Austin appears to be ~$11,000 year full in-state tuition, ~$34,000 including room and board, and many opportunities for financial aid.
Meanwhile, there is still a great deal of uncertainty regarding the *value* of a UATX education and/or diploma, with the error bars crossing into "worse than useless" territory. Even if absolutely free, it may be a bad idea and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't have very unusual plans and expectations and a fair bit of risk tolerance.
Do you have things that you just don't want to admit can possibly work, even if you read up on their physics or whatever? Just a hard no from your deep-down feeling. Things that are probably fixed somehow by aliens or the Matrix or Jews or whatever.
I searched my soul and came up with five:
1. Vacuum cleaners. Yeah, sure, air pressure, molecules of gas flying around, but come on. Pretty big particles of dirt just coming off the floor where they are peacefully lying, flying into the maw of this fucking machine propelled by a magical sucking force? This can't possibly work.
2. Morley's Theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morley%27s_trisector_theorem
You start from any triangle, however ugly, trisect every angle and in the middle you get a perfect isosceles little miracle. WHERE IS THE SYMMETRY COMING FROM. It's a con.
3. Induction plates. The heat magically leaping into the pan, boiling water in it as the plate stays tepid. Say what you will about induction-shminduction, there's no way.
4. Those headphones everyone's walking around with and talking into space, you know which ones I mean, the white ones that go into the ear and only a tiny little stem comes out onto the cheek. You're telling me this tiny little stem is enough to pick up the sound coming out your mouth, going mostly straight ahead, with clarity, and not drown in all the noises around in the street? There's no way this works. Some advanced magic is making those voices heard by the people on the other side of the phone. I don't know why someone'd waste advanced magic on something like this and risk being discovered, but there's got to be reasons.
5. Hovercrafts. I mean, just look at them. I mean, come on. Air pressure my foot, that thing is just going to fall down right away. Why'd anyone pretend otherwise?!
Wanna add to my list?
Radio crystals. I zap this crystal with a portable battery and it makes a secret little scream that resounds for miles? And it responds so precisely to different kinds of zaps that we can use it for communication? AND you can hear it by holding up a funny-shaped wire?
Water. So on our planet, we’ve got this stuff that covers most of the surface, but it also goes up into the sky and makes fluffy shapes, then it comes back down in liquid form. But sometimes it comes down in tiny hexagonal crystals that are really pretty. No, there are a lot of them, we have special vehicles to move the hexagonal crystals out of the way. Crazy, right?
Including the vaccum there breaks my suspension of disbelief. Humans use suction from the day theyre born, its more intuitive than object permanence.
MRI machines - they use incredibly strong magnets to manipulate quantum properties of water molecules and then apply fairly heavy mathematics to translate measures of density along 1D slices into a 3D image. There's no reason it should work.
I often think when I see a rainbow that in a world with a different atmosphere they would seem like science fiction.
Maxwell's Demon / Second Law of Thermodynamics
Yes, it does make sense in a empiric macroscopic perspective, but you can't tell me it physically impossible to separate fast and slow particles (without significant energy loss).
First of all "temperature" is not energy in the first place (particle movement is), so it should be unaffected by 2nd law of thermodynamics. And secondly, there is so much crazy stuff going on with quantum dots, that I can't accept, that there is no constellation that emulates Maxwell's Demon.
Pulse Oximeters.
First time somebody used one on me, remarking on my blood oxygen levels, I was just like "HOQ? Nothing broke the skin, how are you figuring out the concentration of one specific molecule in my blood just by sticking a thingy on my finger?"
I looked up the Wikipedia article, and it's didn't make me less angry. Like, I guess shining a light through your entire finger does *technically* give you information about that. But it still sounds like bullshit.
I think if there is something you don't understand, and if you are interested enough to ask about it. You should be interested enough to try and learn on your own. A vacuums force is delivered by the air that surrounds us. There should be some maximum size/ density curve. My cleaner has some brushes to help with the bigger bits.
Get off the thread, you don't get it.
When you hold two of those 3D TV glasses front to front together, you see nothing but black. But then if you put a third pair between them, suddenly you see something again? You must be kidding.
Light polarization is great because it shows that QM is non-commutative. AxB doesn't equal BxA. The order of things matters.
Tires rise to the top of landfills.
Huh, really? Do land fills move a lot?
Apparently, they do. I'd guess through a combination of decomposition, vibration from new material being added, and local tremors. Denser objects work their way under tires, until the landfill is largely tire-topped in about ten years.
I can't find an academic cite for it, but it's mentioned on various websites, including EPA.
https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/tires/web/html/basic.html
Brains. I refuse to believe ugly, messy, organic brains are the source of all mathematics, engineering feats, science, and art.
They're made out of meat...
Ferromagnetism. Okay, so, uncountably many tiny magnetic domains align, yielding a macroscopic field. Sure. But it basically only works in iron, nickel, and cobalt? What? Why not other metals? And wait, if you create an alloy of only ferromagnetic materials, that can be non-ferromagnetic? And if you take a non-ferromagnetic alloy (eg certain types of stainless steel) and then BEND IT, it becomes ferromagnetic where bent? Stop.
Yeah Ferro magnetism is the weirdest type of magnetism physically. I don't know if you studied magnetism, but the magnetic moment of the electron is like one thousand times that of the proton. Anyway ferromagnetism happens because of a weird QM spin exchange force (It's not really a force... just an energy difference and interaction.) Which makes it energetically favorable, for nearby atoms to have their electron spins aligned (only the outer electron on from each atom). Why only three atoms. Yeah I'd have to read more, but it's like some d-shell or f-shell electrons that can play a game of various occupation of electron energy levels. NdFeB magnets rule much of the world these days.
Insane Clown Posse was right all along about magnets.
Tides. Sea levels are actually changing a noticeable and meaningful amount and the actual direction of current in navigable waterways reverses because the water is literally falling towards the moon.
Except it's even weirder than that. The land is also falling the same way, but it doesn't change shape as readily as the water and winds up as a lump in the middle while the water falls into an oval shape that sticks up on either side, and the process of falling towards the moon just as much water winds up sticking up on the opposite side of the Earth from the Moon as winds up on the side it's actually trying to fall towards.
Also some times the peak tides are higher or lower. Presumably it depends on the distance to the sun and moon, and also on the seasons in weird ways.
So about the tide on the far side of the earth. Do you read any sci fi? I finally understood this when I read "Neutron Star" a short story by Larry Niven. So it's easier to understand if you ask about the tides in a small thing (say a spaceship) going around a heavy thing (say a neutron star, but the moon would also work) Now assuming the spaceship is in orbit. (not burning fuel.) Then the center of mass of the spaceship is in freefall and feels no force of gravity. Imagine now the spaceship is a long rod with one end pointing towards the moon and the other away. You feel no force of gravity at the center of the ship. If you go down to the end near the moon you will find that you are not moving fast enough to be in free fall 'cause you're stuck in the spaceship and the gravity is stronger there (as they say.) Now when you move to the far end of the spaceship, you find you are moving too fast to be in freefall. You will sometimes read the second tide is due to centripetal force. And the above "moving too fast", is what causes the centripetal force. Now as far as the earth moon system. You know the moon orbits the earth, but the earth also orbits the moon, but with a much smaller radius. And just as with the spaceship, that part of the earth closer to the moon feels a greater force of gravity. And the part farthest away is moving too fast to be in free fall (wrt the moon) and so feels a force trying to push it way from the moon. Our beloved second tide.
Crookes radiometers
I agree with this. Having gone down the Crookes radiometer rabbit hole some time in the distant past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collignon_projection
This map projection (a triangle, with the northern hemisphere smooshed into its tall and narrow top half, the southern into its squat and broad bottom half), somehow, exactly preserves the relative areas of all landmasses and oceans, despite distorting them in completely different-looking ways.
Planes I’m in staying aloft.
Protective paint coating. Something that thin and externally sourced is not allowed to be that important.
Likewise, lubrication. Something that thin and externally sourced is not allowed to be that important.
Re paint; UV light is deadly to many things.
lubrication... I think we all understand on a personal level how nice a little lubrication can be. Machines are not that different from us.
What do you mean by "externally sourced"?
Added by hand. You get a piece of wood or metal, and then you buy a bucket of paint and paint the wood with it manually, and that's supposed to protect it from the elements. Likewise buying a tube of grease and applying a small bit of it is supposed to make a wheel spin better.
Something I always disliked about LLMs is that they are an example of ugly math/comp-sci, extremely resource intensive, and rather incomprehensible internals. But then, that's just how brains, the source of beautiful math/comp-sci, are (well, the incomprehensible messy internals at least, brains are pretty efficient for what they do). It's interesting that brains exhibit this preference for elegance and beauty, traits that they do not possess. Perhaps, the squishy, organic mess of the brain is, in fact, superior to all clever elegance or beauty, since it is the source of those...
Is there a widely shared "orthodox" progressive philosophy about what sex and gender are, what it means to be or not be trans, etc.?
I would like to know what the median commited pro-trans progressive thinks (not the median left-leaning normie). I am not interested in conservative caricatures of progressives.
"Sex" is about your physical body, mostly primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are genitals, and secondary sexual characteristics are sexually dimorphic traits like facial hair, breasts, bone structure, muscle development, skin texture, and fat distribution. It's a spectrum with a strongly bimodal distribution, not a strict binary. About 1.7% of the population is born with conditions that give them a mix of male and female secondary sexual characteristics, and a smaller but not insignificant fraction of the population are also born with conditions that result in genitals that are "atypical" or "mixed/ambiguous".
"Gender" can be seen as analogous to sexual orientation, in that it's mental and social rather than physical and that there are several aspects to it that are highly correlated but not exactly the same thing. What might be termed "gender orientation" (my term) or "subconscious gender" is believed to be innate, a mental alignment towards being "male" or "female" or neither or a bit of both. It often takes time for people to consciously realize if it doesn't align with their "assigned gender at birth" similar to how it isn't uncommon for gay or bisexual people to assume they're straight and go through the motions of that for years before realizing that they're actually gay or bi.
Beyond that, "Internal Gender Identity" is about how you consciously think of yourself as male, female, or something else. Social Gender Identity is about how you identify yourself to others (gendered self-description, what pronouns you ask/prefer/expect others to use to refer to you, what gender marker you put on paperwork, etc). And gender presentation or gender expression is about how your clothing, grooming, body language, etc fits in with social norms about masculinity or femininity.
When people talk about gender being socially constructed, they're mostly talking about social identity, presentation, and expression: i.e. what assumptions go along with calling yourself a woman, which clothes and behaviors are coded as male or female, etc.
"Assigned Gender At Birth" is the preferred way to talk about birth sex of transgender people when you must talk about it. It refers to the social gender identity that is chosen for you based on your physical sex at birth, or in the rare case of intersex people born with ambiguous genitals (where the term originally comes from), it may be chosen arbitrarily. Using "biologically male" or "biologically female" in place of AGAB is a misnomer when applied to someone who has undergone a meaningful amount of medical transition, since the entire point of hormone therapy and gender-affirming procedures is to alter your biological sex to better align with your gender. We're still a ways away from an ideal "magic button" transition that would make a trans woman physically indistinguishable at every level from a cis woman or a trans man indistinguishable from a cis man, but hormone therapy alone do quite a bit more than most people who aren't familiar with their effects assume, and surgery can do even more.
It's fairly common for sub-aspects of gender to point in different directions at some points in a trans person's gender journey. There are terms like "egg" (someone who's gender orientation differs from their birth sex but doesn't realize it yet), "closeted" (you consciously identify as trans but aren't transitioning (yet) and hide your identity in most contexts), and "boymoding" or "girlmoding" (starting medical transition before switching your social identity).
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I'm a bleeding-heart libertarian, not a progressive, but I am trans myself and I hang out in progressive online spaces enough that I think I can describe the orthodox philosophy reasonably well. I personally agree mostly but not quite 100% with the above as I wrote it up, and I probably shaded it a bit towards my own views in explaining it in a way that I hope will make some sense to people who aren't familiar with progressive gender discourse.
Thanks a lot Erica. Those are a lot of interesting points and I might come back to it.
I must say you are in my opinion one of the best commenters in this community.
This is actually pretty helpful to me to read. Just this last week, I've worked up the courage to write a letter to a friend of mine who is somewhere in the transition phase from male to female. We were pretty close in high school (graduated in 2018), but his family moved away shortly after and neither of us are great at keeping up with people long-distance. We still used to game online with a friend group after that, and that was basically the only way we would communicate. I think around 2021, he told us that he believed he was a woman. None of us really talked about it much after that and just chatted like normal, and then a year later I met my now-wife and pretty much stopped online gaming altogether.
We hardly text or anything since then, but he was a really close friend and I think about him pretty often, and I regret being too afraid to ask about all this stuff when I first found out. I am a Christian myself, and I believe the world and reality to be created in such a way that transgender ideology just doesn't make sense, so I've just assumed up to now that he might take any attempt to talk to him about it as a personal attack. Now I'm wondering if it was more offensive that I never did try to talk about it, and I'd really like to know his thinking and feelings about it all.
So I pretty much finished up my letter yesterday with a bunch of questions and ideas, but I totally didn't even think of the "gender as a social construct" side of things. Which, after reading your comment, seems like a pretty significant thing. Shows how much I know.
All that to say, I've recently become more personally interested in transgender ideology (idk what else to call it), because of my friend and because it's something people are becoming much more widely open about, and I like to try to understand people the best that I can. If you don't mind my asking, I've got a couple of questions I'm wondering about.
You mention the idea of "gender orientation" and compare it loosely to sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is easy for me to understand: some people are just simply attracted to the same sex (or whatever else) as an unconscious desire within them. It's hard for me to understand gender in that way. In the case that gender is a social construct and not some real, objective thing inherent to being, in what way can you *be* a gender that conflicts with your birth-assigned gender without knowing it? As in, how can you go through your life not realizing your *true* gender until later on, when gender is determined purely by outside social forces and isn't something that is actually a part of you? And more personally, how and at what point did you realize your gender wasn't what you were assigned at birth, and what motivated you to do something about it?
I hope I formed that first question in a way that makes sense. No pressure to answer any of that if you don't feel comfortable discussing it on a public comment thread like this.
I'm glad this is helpful.
First, a point of etiquette that may seem nitpicky and pedantic to you but which tends to be extremely important to trans people: even if you think we're being silly, please use our preferred names and pronouns. Deliberately deadnaming or misgendering us (i.e. addressing or referring to us by our birth names that we no longer use, or by the pronouns that correspond to our AGAB) comes off as extremely insulting. I don't think this is your intent: you sound genuinely interested in reconnecting with your friend and concerned about her feelings for their own sake, and you also sound like you're making an effort to be polite and respectful with me, but this is important enough that I want to bring it up in order to caution you away from giving offense unintentionally on this point.
In the case of your friend, to the best of your knowledge, has she actively socially transitioned, or is she closeted/boymoding but has privately confided in you that she thinks she's trans? If the former, definitely make a point of using her preferred name and pronouns if your goal is to reconnect with her. If the latter, I would suggest asking how she'd like you to address and refer to her.
>Sexual orientation is easy for me to understand: some people are just simply attracted to the same sex (or whatever else) as an unconscious desire within them. It's hard for me to understand gender in that way.
I used sexual orientation as an analogy because it actually is does feel very similar to that, except it's an unconscious desire to be *like* women rather than to be *with* them. Sapphic trans women (lesbians and bisexuals) often take longer to realize we're trans than straight trans women (i.e. those who are exclusively attracted to men) because sapphic trans women are often feeling the "I want to be like her" feeling (called "gender envy") about the same people for whom we feel romantic infatuation and sexual attraction.
The subconscious gender identity manifests itself in a number of other ways. One is that a lot of us experiment with various forms of feminine gender expression in private or otherwise safe contexts and find ourselves really, really liking it. In my case, I would cross-dress privately and in socially acceptable semi-private contexts (kink parties, Rocky Horror showings, Halloween costumes, etc), often played female characters in computer and tabletop games, enjoyed "joking" about being effeminate or being a male-bodied lesbian, and intermittently experimented with personal styling choices that are feminine-adjacent while still being within the range of socially acceptable male presentation (long hair, gothy nail polish and jewelry, etc).
It's pretty common for this kind of experimentation and safety-valve feminine expression to go on for a long time and become a major part of our identities without us putting the pieces together; there's a running joke in trans online spaces about doing or wanting very trans-coded or otherwise AGAB-nonconforming things but doing them "for cisgendered reasons".
Another is that many/most of us have varying degrees of discomfort or distaste for stuff that makes us feel masculine. This, too, can take a while to recognized because if you feel masculine all the time, then that can just blur into a background noise of ickiness that is hard to discern the source of. In my case, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and was taking SSRIs for several years, but after I started transitioning my mood symptoms almost entirely cleared up. Also, once I wasn't feeling grossly masculine just about all the time, the source of the bad feelings became much clearer when they did crop up.
One thing that really resonated with me was a bit that Actress/Youtuber Abigail Thorn said when she came out as a trans woman in 2021 at the age of 27 or 28. She compared her experience trying to live as a boy to working a soul-crushing job that she hadn't chosen for herself and she didn't feel able to quit. There isn't anything *objectively* wrong with the job, and there are plenty of people who would love to have a job like that, but it's all wrong for her and the stress of dealing with it was poisoning every aspect of her life. Then, one day, she put the pieces together that the job was the fundamental problem, and that she could quit it and get a different job that's better for her. And having done so, after having a little while to settle in to her new job, she realized that everything really did feel better.
As for how I realized, it was one of those "gradually and then all at once" things. The safe and deniable experiments in being girly for cis reasons accumulated. My wife (who had long suspected I was trans) was very supportive and made it clear that I had a safe space to indulge in femininity and also hinted (without quite suggesting that I was probably trans) that she'd be supportive if I decided to transition. I occasionally toyed with the ida of transitioning, but always decided against it for fear of the stigma of being trans, because I didn't quite fit what I thought was the classic profile of being "really" trans, and because I hadn't yet recognized the background-noise ick of dysphoria for what it was. A big part of the former two factors was growing up in the 80s and 90s, when there was a lot more stigma and gatekeeping around gender transition then there has been in recent decades.
During a period when I was under a lot of stress, I started reading up on medical transition and the effects of hormones (out of idle curiosity, I told myself) and came across stuff about there being protocols of low-dose HRT for nonbinary people (i.e. people whose gender identity is neither entirely male nor entirely female). I realized that this very strongly appealed to me, in that I could make my body more feminine without committing to changing it so much that I couldn't continue to present as male in contexts where socially transitioning would be awkward. Deciding to pursue this and thinking of myself as trans felt really, really good, and I quickly (within a matter of 2-3 weeks) realized that the only thing holding me back from wanting to transition full time was external social factors (fear of stigma and discrimination), but all of that was manageable and I'd be happier going all the way. After that, it took me a something like eight or nine months before I was far enough along in my transition that I felt ready to socially transition full-time.
I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all of this to me! As someone who has never experienced any kind of gender dysphoria (there have been times where I've felt insecure in my masculinity when a group of other guys are talking about hunting or cars, two things which I know nothing about. Is that kind of thing at all similar?), it's hard for me to really simulate in my own head what transgender people feel in order to understand them better.
The reason I want to understand better is so that I can be more compassionate and loving to people in general, including my friend. This will probably sound insulting, but as I am right now, the main reason I can think of for male-to-female transition is simply sexual perversion. There's a lot more to gender than just intercourse, though. So I truly do appreciate your explanation of yourself! It helps broaden my understanding.
As for the deadnaming/misgendering issue, I'm still trying to find the best way to navigate this. The name stuff isn't difficult for me; people change their name all the time. My friend has a gender-neutral name and hasn't changed it in our friend group, plus I have a nickname I've always used anyway that almost sounds girly, so I've just continued to use it up to this point. But I am reaching out now to know what name I should address the letter to when I send it.
The misgendering thing *is* difficult for me, though. I know it is an extremely important topic like you say, and understandably so. But unlike names, which we can agree on that they are subjective, I disagree that pronouns are subjective as well. My belief is that sex/gender is purely defined by genetics (as a Christian, I do believe that we all have a soul, but from what the Bible says it seems to me that our souls are genderless). And as a Christian, there's a variety of reasons why I think it would be wrong for me to refer to a transgender person with a pronoun that is different from what was assigned at birth. I don't know how to do this without coming across as hateful. It may seem laughable and ridiculous, but I truly believe using what I believe to be the wrong pronouns for a person is unloving flattery. So my difficulty comes when I'm talking to someone I love and care about, but now I have to choose between saying something that they will perceive as unnecessary hatred, or something that I believe is a true and complete disregard for their soul.
My not-compromise is to refer to my friend as "my friend", but that still makes it obvious that we have a fundamental disagreement. It's easy for me to accept this and move on with the conversation, but then I'm not the one who might feel attacked by the disagreement being pointed out. How does it seem to you? Does replacing the pronoun for a proper noun seem more considerate, or insulting?
I don't expect you to agree with any of my viewpoints. I'm only explaining them so that you can hopefully see how it is at least possible for misgendering to seem incredibly inconsiderate or hateful to one person, but truly an act of care to someone else (I grant that there are many "Christians" who are hateful to others, and I have no intention of defending them). And I hope you can at least view me as trying to do something right and caring, even if we disagree on what "right" is.
Anyway, that's a lot more explaining of my own views than I had intended to do. I've been thinking about this issue more from the time you replied to me to now when I have the chance to respond. It's also hard for me to not just assume any transgender person would also be very biased against anyone claiming the title of "Christian" because of "Christians" have treated trans people. So I just feel like I need to explain myself. Nothing you've actually said has made me think you'd just automatically be against me, though. So I hope any offence I cause due to ignorace can be forgiven, and any due to my beliefs can be understood at least a little. I truly have no desire to wrong anybody.
And oh! Since you asked, I'm not exactly sure where in the transition process my friend is. I think pretty far along with hormones, but that's another thing I'm completely ignorant about.
Thanks again for explaining things to me a little bit and sharing about yourself!
>So I truly do appreciate your explanation of yourself! It helps broaden my understanding.
My pleasure. I'm glad I seem to be helping.
>Does replacing the pronoun for a proper noun seem more considerate, or insulting?
Avoiding using gendered language is vastly preferable to misgendering, but isn't ideal. When directed at me, I do usually notice it and it does bother me, but I find it much less insulting that overt misgendering.
>It's also hard for me to not just assume any transgender person would also be very biased against anyone claiming the title of "Christian" because of "Christians" have treated trans people. So I just feel like I need to explain myself. Nothing you've actually said has made me think you'd just automatically be against me, though.
I have definitely seen that among other trans people, but we're individuals with a range of attitudes and experiences. For my part, I have a distaste for things that some people say, do, and believe in the name of Christianity, but I don't blame "Christians" in general for that. I currently self-describe as agnostic, but I have generally positive opinions of the church I was raised in (Episcopalian) and I think there's a great deal of value within Christian scriptures, theology, and philosophy as it has developed over the past couple thousand years. I have family members who are actively religious and get along very well with most of them.
>And as a Christian, there's a variety of reasons why I think it would be wrong for me to refer to a transgender person with a pronoun that is different from what was assigned at birth.
I won't presume to preach your own religion to you, but I find this surprising. It's definitely not a universal interpretation among practicing and faith-holding Christians, or even an especially common one in my experience.
Erica, Thanks for this. It makes me happy that you can talk so honestly. (and coherently) My daughter is gay and will come out and visit me with her gay or trans friends, it's always great, but they are not good enough 'friends' of mine that I could ask about anything as intimate as this.
Again Thankyou.
George
"Sexual orientation is easy for me to understand: some people are just simply attracted to the same sex (or whatever else) as an unconscious desire within them. It's hard for me to understand gender in that way"
This is a very common view amongst non trans people. You have provided a trans view let me attempt the other side.
"Straight" ppl see a symmetry in sexual orientation they cannot identify in gender orientation. My attraction to women, and related sexual revulsion from men is obvious to me. I feel it just as strongly as I imagine homosexuals feel it the other way around. Therefore it is easy to understand that if thats how they feel they cannot be expected to behave in any other way.
I dont feel at all about my gender identity in that way. I recognize my personality traits correlate to typical male traits and am comfortable in my male body, but I do not feel a primal urge to "be a man" accept as it relates to sexual intercourse. If I did happen to be born in a female body it is difficult to articulate what exactly would be objectionable about that other than which is directly related to intercourse (social power imbalance seems like a candidate but that feels like a cheat and it doesnt work the other way). I admit it would be distressing to just wake up that. But that seems to mostly be about established living patterns then who I am deep down.
I think this is probably rooted in sex drive being an evolutionary imperative and gender expression being at least in part social. So what separates my lived experience from yours includes a strong need to identify with one gender or the other before we even get to the question of what gender that would be.
> I do not feel a primal urge to "be a man" except as it relates to sexual intercourse
This is the heart of it. I think this... urge for alignment, I guess, is in fact not a thing for most people, so trans people may not even realize why others have trouble empathizing with them. They are minorities in both an obvious way and a subtle way.
However, some cis people do have the same innate sense of gender as trans people do. In a culture where men always wear pants and women always wear dresses, a cis man may feel uncomfortable if forced to wear a dress. If that same man moved to a place where everybody wore kimonos but only women wore them with belts, their discomfort would eventually switch to the belt and not the (still very dress-like) kimono. The belt's girliness is learned, but the distaste for girly things is innate.
I am coming to think that my "male gender identity" lives not within my inner self, but in what other people see in me (or, since I do not access this directly, what I think other people see in me).
I would wear the kimono and not the belt because I would expect other people in that place to see that I am male (of the male sex) and not expect me to wear the belt. I expect them to interpret any belt-wearing on my part as either an expression of disrespect towards their norm, or a claim of special status within them. I want to express neither. No distaste at the belt implied.
Would you feel uncomfortable if, as part of your job, you were required to wear lipstick and a dress? To take out the social discomfort part, let's say all your male coworkers were required to follow the same dress code. Do you think you'd get used to it enough that you might continue to do it even when you weren't at work? Or would you prefer to wear your male-gendered clothes at home?
If not, maybe that's a signal (even a weak one) that you have a male gender orientation. It might be harder to recognize at baseline because you're generally not in situations that conflict with it.
Well no, because as I said my personality traits point masculine. Part of my claim is that if I had a female body from birth Id be comfortable expressing those personality traits from a female body and identity. That is speculative but I think that because I dont feel a need to express these traits *as a man* now. I just express them. And I may overall be mistaken but this a post about self impression. My whole point here is to contrast the gender awareness with sexuality awareness.
But I also think your thought experiment is 100% social. Theres no way requiring my coworkers to do the same strips that out. LouisvXIV seemed comfortable doing exactly as you describe not due to any aspect of his gender identity but because he lived in a different society.
Let me say - I love these sorts of thought experiments to help me connect empathetically with different people, but I think this one misses the mark. I’d have no issue with lipstick or makeup if there was no social shame involved(ie all males are expected). I wouldn’t continue wearing it at home because I wouldn’t actively do anything. Perhaps this is a male perspective(i’m assuming women are far more used to applying products and the like as part of their “get ready routine”. As for the clothes - maybe for convenience? I’d trend towards comfort and I have a bias towards thinking feminine clothes are by default uncomfortable. Maybe there’s a better to metaphor for cismen to help mentally empathize with those feelings. Regardless, I appreciate it. The metaphor around gender disphoria and working a soul crushing job absolutely connected, but as the other poster alluded, my “gender feelings” mainly orientate around desirable sex acts, the social trappings seem to follow. To elucidate a bit further, if my same 1 month old brain were transported into a female body and I grew up in that body, I imagine I’d go with the flow and fully adopt that gender once the sex hormones started “activating” my sex organs at puberty. Hard to be sure though.
I would be afraid of being shamed by someone, and being embarrassed. But if there was no social shame aspect of it, I don't see why I would mind.
interesting. i can imagine a man would feel uncomfortable. but if i was required to wear a wife-beater, hoodie, jeans, and hobnailed boots and have my hair cut short and wear no jewelry or make up for work it would not bother me in the slightest. Yet i don't have the slightest identification with being a man.
Nearly half of the respondents of a SSC survey considered themselves "cis by default", similar to how you describe above. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/ on the topic.
Thanks. Good ol scott. That sounds like the right descriptor. Scott's own post makes it seem like it overlaps a bit with neuter, as he focuses on the not traditionally masculine parts of his own personality. And for my part the personality traits definitely point masculine. I am not sure to what extent that was learned, but I *think* if my soul was born in a female body I would have been a comfortable tomboy because the personality preferences seem to be just that and correlate to a gender but dont seem to need to be anchored in a gender identity.
The comments are surprisingly good... and a sad illustration of how the quality of the comment section has declined.
People were more interested in designing and honestly dealing with thought experiments, rather than posting cheap political jabs.
> what the median committed pro-trans progressive thinks
> conservative caricatures of progressives.
It'd be fun to see if you can tell the difference.
It'd be fun to see you link to an example of a caricature that you view as indistinguishable from a sincere discussion on this topic.
Of course we can. Erica's posts here are clearly written in good faith. Yours, I am not so sure.
Isn't that exactly the reason you asked, because you couldn't tell the difference?
Someone I know spends extraordinary amounts of time on Bluesky screaming "TRANSPHOBE!" at random people and suggesting they should get banned for opinions I believed to be mainstream, so I get this exact problem all the time - "wait, people actually do believe THAT?"
Also, Erica (one of the most brilliant commenters here) is very far from "a median committed pro-trans progressive", so whatever she writes is a charitable interpretation from someone not belonging to the class being discussed, not necessarily the absolute ground truth.
The reason I asked is that I anticipated what a thread of anti-trans sarcasm would have looked like. That would be very different from good-faith object-level philosophy and I did not want that.
Erica's comment is exactly what I wanted. There might be two axes of discourse. On an object-level moderate to extremist axis, I wanted something radical enough to be representative of true believers but no so radical to get marginal even among them. On a quality-of-discourse tribal shouting to brillant philosophy axis, the most brillant is the better!
If you think that the actual median trans activist believes something substantially different on the object-level from what Erica stated, please explain. If your point is merely that they are more tribal and confrontational, I believe so already and this is not what I want to see.
That makes sense, but I think you might be asking some wrong questions.
First, it seems you equate "a median commited pro-trans progressive" with "a median trans activist". That's not how I initially read your question, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was not alone. I'm not at all sure that the two are the same thing or believe the same things.
Second, "median" may not really be useful here. I may well be wrong, but I've assumed, from looking at the people I know, that it's more like a bimodal distribution. In that case, Erika is giving you the view of only one side - the one that sounds sort of normal to normies outside the set being discussed.
If this is really bimodal, then - I may be wrong about this, and would be happy to be proven such - I think the wording of your question precludes you from getting a view of the other side, where the opinions do look like conservative caricatures.
I would love to see an answer to the question "what groups do the opinions of pro-trans activists cluster into". But I doubt we'd be seeing that answered anytime soon.
Not really kind, necessary or true.
I disagree. I see it as all three.
If you think saying someone's political positions are indistinguishable from conservative caricatures is "kind" then I don't know what to tell you.
Except maybe "I hope you receive exactly the same sort of kindness that you give to others."
I think you've really misjudged this. It wasn't necessary or kind for you to say it would be "fun". It was mocking. There were many straightforward ways to say "I think the reality and the caricature are very similar" that didn't have that ironic edge. It would be necessary if your point were a necessary one *and* there were few/no better ways to communicate and persuade on this point, which beggars belief. (Most commenters here are more open to sincere and careful arguments than to twitter dunks, as I'm sure you know.) "True" wouldn't be enough for the 2-out-of-3 rule, but anyway I know many pro-trans people, and many of them are dumber than what Erica has tried to present, but the median is still clearly distinguishable from any but the most sophisticated conservative satirist (it's incredibly rare for a satirist to pass the ideological Turing test in any context, even when they're trying), so I think it's pretty plainly not true. It was a dunk on your fellow commenters, and I thought 2/3 * (true + necessary + kind) was meant to exclude those.
I think Shankar’s comment passes, even if not with flying colors. It’s clear what he means about it being hard to tell the difference, even if he puts it in a snide, jokey way. And he is mocking some factions that were mentioned, not any individuals speaking here. It is very common here to express scorn for various factions and groups, or criticize them harshly. I believe the kindness criterian applies to how we treat each other, not to how we talk about the ideas and behavior of groups being discussed.
I don't know about "widely shared" or "orthodox" since I don't have good broad-picture insight, and this is a fractious internet issue where lots of people feel free to create their own definitions and subsequent infighting is common.
But it seems that the articulation I've seen most commonly thrown out from progressive circles is that "sex" is the thing you are born with, which is determined by your genetics. You're born male, or female, or some kind of rare genetic anomoly intersex, and that's a fixed (or mostly-fixed, depending on who you talk to) value.
"Gender" on the other hand, is defined by progressives to refer to the whole host of social and cultural constructs built around sex. I'm male and was born with male reproductive organs. I was not, however, born wearing pants instead of dresses, or drinking bourbon and scotch at the pub instead of mimosas at brunch. Those additional social and cultural norms and expectations orbit around sex, but aren't necessarily driven by it. Since gender norms are socially determined, progressives have greater comfort with people disregarding them when needed - if your culture issues all people born male with a shoe, but the shoe you're issued doesn't fit you, you're not obligated to wear it and any people trying to make you put it on are the ones out of line, rather than you (so to speak).
I think that's a good articulation of progressive views about gender roles.
Other common claims from the progressive side of transgender issues (roughly in order of what I expect to least to most controversial) include:
(1) although assigned sex at birth (which is mostly the same as your genetic sex except in certain intersex disorders) is fixed, transgender people might modify their other sex characteristics through medical transition; this might take the form of surgeries to change the shape of one's genitals or sex hormones to change the rest of the body (growing breasts or facial hair, altering the shape of the body through fat distribution, etc.)
(2) some people who have altered their sex characteristics as in (1) will be perceived as the opposite sex and treated that way by society
(3) (2) is a good thing
(4) it is also a good thing to treat transgender people who have not yet physically transitioned, or have only partially physically transitioned not to the point of (2) applying, as functionally the opposite sex in most contexts
(5) at some point of altering sex characteristics, one ends up being more similar to the sex you're transitioning towards than your own assigned sex or chromosomal sex
(6) because of (5) and possibly to some extent (4), drawing distinctions based on assigned sex at birth rather than an idea of "gender" (which is assigned/chromosomal/gamete-production sex in most cases, aside from transgender people and also non-binary and intersex people which I'm not addressing) is almost always wrong, with a few exceptions
My thoughts about the following: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/technology/ai-meta-google-openai-periodic.html
Modern language models have several serious problems: lack of long-term memory, lack of self-criticism or self-reflection — but one of the key problems is the absence of real experience.
If you ask an LM to write a program, it will produce code based on the code it has read before. But it will not try to actually run that program and check whether it works — and if it doesn’t, figure out why and fix it. In other words, it behaves like a lazy Stack Overflow advisor who doesn’t test their own suggestions.
Worse still, any real programmer has written and debugged tons of code, and when they read something, they compare it with their own experience. An LM has zero such experience.
And in every other domain, it’s the same — the neural network has zero firsthand experience. Asking it for advice is like asking a ninth-grader who’s never had a girlfriend for relationship advice just because he’s read books about relationships. How useful would his advice be?
If someone creates a language model that can actually gain its own experience — even in one domain — that will be a breakthrough.
In fact, such neural networks already exist: those that play chess, Go, and so on. They played against themselves, accumulated massive experience, and learned to play far better than any human. But for some reason, no one has tried to apply this approach to programming — let alone to science.
The current LLMs will generate a plausible response to a question. That's all - you need to interpret it yourself. This is true whether you ask for code or factual information, or an opinion on your dating life. I'd put at 50% the amount of discussions that don't understand this and are surprised that 'the AI made a mistake'.
Developing separate technologies that can error check claims made by the AI are in progress - I'm mostly familiar with progress in mathematics, where it's still a human-AI collaboration, but it's improved a lot in the last year. I wouldn't be surprised if a 'verification' function could be rolled out for verifiable tasks in 2026. But this is not the same as a self-directed or agentic AI... I really don't know what the state of play is on this.
Allowing an LLM to date, thousands of people for a training purposes would be expensive and also violate the Futurama rule. (don’t date robots!)
Because the training cost for chess or Go-playing neural networks is tiny, while the training cost for a large language model is colossal. A LLM that performs online machine learning will rapidly become spectacularly expensive. The LLM might be able to store some short-term memory in a scratchpad, but that impinges on the token window - the more experience it retains, the less complex a command it can handle.
AlphaGo cost about $30M to train, not LLM scale but not tiny/cheap.
The more important point is having a clear signal to optimize against. Easy in games, hard in the real world.
AlphaGo uses reinforcement learning. LLMs are now using RL as well, mostly in places that people can come up with what they’re now calling “verifiable rewards”, things you can programmatically check the answers to. Code, math, etc. It’s less clear how to reliably do this without a trustworthy externally-defined reward signal
> But it will not try to actually run that program and check whether it works — and if it doesn’t, figure out why and fix it.
I think with the latest tools, like Claude Code, this is no longer true.
Here is your Claude:
I: Write a C function which calculates n!, given n
(It writes the correct function. But it can be found in so many places, so we go further.)
I: Now improve it: if n! is too big for long long, it must return 0.
Claude:
...
for (int i = 2; i <= n; i++) {
if (result > ULLONG_MAX / i) {
return 0; // Overflow detected
}
result *= i;
}
...
Now let us try to confuse it.
I: What if result == UULONG_MAX/i ?
Claude:
...
for (int i = 2; i <= n; i++) {
if (result > ULLONG_MAX / i) {
return 0; // Overflow detected
}
if (result == ULLONG_MAX / i && (ULLONG_MAX % i) < (result % i)) {
return 0; // Overflow in the edge case
}
result *= i;
}
Complete rubbish, and no, it did not test its own code.
Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?
What are you trying to say? I never put any wrong figures. I just asked a question.
Garbage in, garbage out. Being proud of tricking a model and using it as evidence for some hypothesis about their capabilities or value is stronger evidence for the value of the hypothesis. If you want a model to execute the program and check the results, you have to use an agentic coding tool, like Claude Code (emphasis on the Code part, not the web UI), or Gemini CLI, or Codex, or whatever. You also have to write a detailed, thorough spec that describes the behavior you want. And it will still fail, sometimes! But what's more interesting is the fact that sometimes it DOESN'T fail, and in fact, saves you time and effort. And the fact that using the newer generation of remote coding agents, eg Claude Code Web or Google Jules, you can spin up an arbitrary number of such agents and let them loose. But you the programmer are still required to specify what you actually want, not give them tiresome leetcode gotcha problems.
So many people feel the need to pontificate about AI without knowing even the basic state of play. I've started accumulating a list of shortcuts for skipping worthless takes ("stochastic parrot", "next token", "ELIZA", etc)
So many people make condescending remarks when they know nothing about the subject.
Demonstrating a lack of awareness of modern coding agents was a pretty big howler though.
See above.
A heuristic that I have found to be useful, despite exceptions to rule:
Rightists are loyal friends but tend to be boring. Leftists are a much better hang, but then you have to worry more about getting stabbed in the back. Centrists are boring people who stab you in the back.
Of course, there are people who don't fit easily into one of these three categories. I guess the rule mainly applies to True Believers. (And yes, there are aggressive Centrists who would triangulate to the bitter end, even if it meant everything crumbled around them)
I feel like people from both camps are about equally likely to screw you over, but people from the left will try to justify themselves and people from the right will explain how it’s your fault or just laugh.
I've lived around leftists my whole life, and I have never once been stabbed in the back (or if I have, it was subtle enough I never found out about it). I think if you've been backstabbed enough that you're noticing patterns, you run in circles I could never even imagine.
Unfortunately Michael, I have receipts. I have hard evidence. It was splashed all over the American news for years.
The insane witch Hunt called #MeToo represented a mass phenomenon of backstabbing. It represented a perverse willingness to destroy nine innocent people in order to ensure that one guilty person didn't escape scrutiny.
The idea that one should hold a person guilty due to uncorroborated accusations, even in the absence of something as basic as a police report, shows an ideological commitment to backstabbing.
It was a Klan-like phenomenon. It was a violation of the most basic notions of justice and fairness. And I guarantee you this violation did not go unnoticed by independence, moderates and swing voters. The partisans of #MeToo did a lot to degrade the reputation of the Democrats party.
"The insane witch Hunt called #MeToo represented a mass phenomenon of backstabbing."
This is a claim that requires considerable evidence. I also lived through #MeToo. I didn't witness any backstabbing. Instead I witnessed large numbers of women--including many that I knew personally--open up and talk about common experiences of being sexually harassed and/or assualted that they had kept public silence about for years. Some of them named names, but many did not.
To claim that this constituted a "mass phenomenon of backstabbing" you'd need to provide pretty solid evidence that a substantially fraction of these claims were deliberately deceptive and unfounded. Which is quite the tall ask: exactly the things that make sexual harassment and assault such touchy cultural phenomena is that they're reasonably common[1] while also often leaving behind very little evidence. So just as proving any particular accusation is true is often difficult, so too is it difficult to prove any particular accusation false. For many cases, the only epistemically defensible state is uncertainty. But if you have evidence pointing directly to the falsity of a substantial fraction of accusations, feel free to share it.
[1] Even if you disagree about #MeToo it's hard to reasonably claim that the overall rate of people experiencing these things is *low.*
When I referred to backstabbing, I wasn't referring to false accusations. Of course a false accusation is a kind of backstabbing, but that's not the kind of backstabbing I had in mind when I talked about “the insane witch hunt.”
The backstabbing witch hunters were mostly not alleged victims or even the immediate family members of alleged victims. The vast majority of these witch hunters were other community members shunning the accused based on uncorroborated claims. Some of these shunnings may have been justified, due to something like the Bill Cosby effect, where the sheer number of accusers serves as a kind of evidence in its own right. But I have good reason to think that most of these automatic shunnings can be fairly described as backstabbing.
You're right that neither I nor anyone else has any way of knowing what proportion of the alleged victims were lying. But we know what proportion of leftists began accepting most accusations as true until proven otherwise. And harshly pressuring others to do the same. That Venn diagram is a near circle.
<The insane witch Hunt called #MeToo represented a mass phenomenon of backstabbing.
Not defending the "witch hunt," but unless you were one of the 9 innocents you were not stabbed in the back. What happened is that watching #MeToo in action and seeing its willingness to stab innocent people upset you greatly. It made you furious, indignant, and worried about how crazy things were becoming. That is really different from being tried and possibly convicted for sexual assault when you did nothing remotely like sexual assault. You will forever be unable to think straight about the whole mess unless you hang on tight to that crucial distinction.
I'm a woman. It is not rare for me to see men talking or writing about women as "pussy on the hoof." On one memorable occasion years ago a group of workman across the street from me in NYC hollered a bunch of stuff about sniffing my pussy and licking my tits. Incidents of that kind made me furious, indignant, and worried. However they were not occasions when I was sexually assaulted. You have to hang on to the difference or else you become as crazy as #MeToo.
I insist that destroying a man's public reputation, sans evidence, is analogous to falsely convicting him in a court of law. And I don't have to have been personally MeTooed for the rise of "believe women [by default]" to have degraded my life.
I condemn those construction sleazeballs, not only because what they did to you was inherently wrong. But also because their filthy behavior carelessly set the stage for the rise of the MeToo hysteria, which would savage innocent men AND women. (Almost every falsely accused man has women who care about him)
During the 19th century, closer-knit families and a stronger honor culture meant that those construction sex pests would have had reason to bite their tongues. A male relative might physically avenge the insult to you, and juries would be sympathetic to him.
I don't want to fully return to the bad old days of corsets and domineering males, but maybe we should bring back SOME of the customs that we left behind.
> "I don't want to fully return to the bad old days of corsets...but maybe we should bring back SOME of the customs that we left behind."
Fun fact: The vast majority of the millions of women over many centuries who adopted daily supportive undergarments like stays, bodies, and corsets weren't stupid!
A correctly-fitted historical female supportive undergarment (for brevity, a corset) is usually a back brace, a bra, and a weight distribution system for heavy warm skirts which would otherwise pinch into the flesh of the waist or hips.The vast, vast majority of corsets didn't meaningfully restrict movement, much less breath.
An example of the support / medical use of expertly constructed corsetry: https://youtu.be/txSIruAPTGc?si=hpN86TNoxBBXm0GG
And some yelling about the misconception (with education!): https://youtu.be/NsLCca7u2j4?si=GtdiA0oMCadk9_pR
Trust me: as someome who has occasionally been in historical wear, correctly made corsets are *vastly* less irritating to wear than clothing without pockets.
"I insist that destroying a man's public reputation, sans evidence, is analogous to falsely convicting him in a court of law."
Really? So it is your considered opinion that somebody who has *actually experienced assault*, but cannot provide evidence (satisfying to you) of the fact is *morally obligated* to stay silent about that experience?
This is an utterly unhinged position. Does this only apply to sexual assaults committed by men, or other assaults as well? If my female neighbor swings a baseball bat at my head, I barely manage to dodge and run away, am I morally in the wrong for telling others to warn them or seek protection? Must I stay silent for fear of ruining her reputation? What if instead she breaks my arm, but once I've gotten away, I have no way to prove it was her specifically? Do I just have to tell someone I was assaulted, but refuse to say whom?
Or consider the following instead: you're considering asking your neighbor Pat to babysit your kids this coming Friday. Unknown to you, a different neighbor, Sue, engaged Pat as a babysitter only to have her kids report sobbing, but confused stories that sounded like inappropriate touching. Obviously Sue doesn't *know* anything for sure: she has unclear secondhand stories, not even direct eyewitness evidence. Nevertheless, wouldn't you want to hear about Sue's experience so you could consider looking for a different babysitter, even though thirdhand evidence is *very far* from reliable?
Reality isn't always convenient. Sometimes important things happen and don't leave as much evidence behind as we'd like. If you were arguing that people *hearing* these accusations should be less certain and slower to judgement, that would be one thing. But you appear to be saying that it's people who are *relating those stories* who are morally in the wrong, without you yourself having any way to know the stories are false.
I never said anyone was obligated to stay silent.
They should speak their truth and we should be empathetic. But we should not take their claims as verified fact unless there's corroborating evidence. I would only make exceptions for a small handful of people, mostly family members. About five people who have proven themselves to be totally trustworthy. The public doesn't know my family, so what reason do they have to trust my family members implicitly? That would be incredibly naive of them. Not only that, it would be unjust.
When I talk about a witch hunt I'm not talking about the alleged victims making accusations. They are speaking their truth. When I talk about a witch hunt, I'm talking about society at large believing these uncorroborated claims by default.
I don't think any of your hypothetical examples are sufficiently relevant. The babysitter situation is not really relevant, because in this case, the parent would surely contact the police and an investigation could begin, including evidence collection. I would not blame a parent for warning others if they felt there was a dangerous predator babysitting children in the community. I would reserve my blame for naive people who believe accusations without corroborating evidence.
A police report itself is KIND of a evidence…the bare minimum, sure, but at least it's something. It at least shows that the accuser is willing to make an official accusation, and face legal repercussions if they are found to be lying.. That’s minimal “evidence,” but #MeToo culture will call you a hateful monster for even expecting to see THAT. We are under strict orders to automatically “believe women” and hand the accused the entire burden of proving their innocence.
The point of my telling that story was that it was a highly unpleasant experience that I *could* think of as a rape, but that absolutely is not, and that in order to think straight about rape I have to stay clear on that. As far as how upsetting it was, it was no big deal. It was nowhere near as bad as thousands of other unpleasant experiences I've had. The construction sleazeballs were definitely NOT such a big deal that I am in favor of life being remodeled a bit so that such things happenn less.. However, if you would like to try moving *your* life a little more in the direction of having a corset and a domineering male in your life, go for it, hon.
I think you make some really well taken points here!
I would just note that:
1) while I think #MeToo went off the rails and went overboard pretty quickly, particularly as lots of people tried to glom on to it to accomplish their own ideological agendas, i understand where it came from and that it was addressing a real problem.
2) while false rape accusations certainly exist, and are more common than many liberals think they are (from what i've been able to tell, they're most likely somewhere around 10%), they're also less common than many conservatives think they are. any given rape accusation is much more likely to be true than false, so that's where our prior should lie (even though it can be overridden).
and I say that as someone who knows at least one person who was falsely accused of a sex crime, so i'm aware that these things happen- on the other hand, that accusation fell through in about a couple of hours.
Also sorry you went thru that highly unpleasant experience.
Hmm, that last dig sounded vaguely homophobic.
When it suited your argument, those workers were menacing sex pests. Then when it was convenient for you, their behavior became no "big deal." Those must be quantum construction workers.
"Not defending the "witch hunt," but unless you were one of the 9 innocents you were not stabbed in the back."
...Isn't that enough? Doesn't that make it an epidemic of backstabbing and as such, *a cogent example* of the wider problem Chance is talking about? He said that *leftists indulge in this category of behavior*, and when challenged on that point, mentioned *one example* (a very clear one). He didn't at any point that I can see claim that Metoo is the be-all and end-all of this type of behavior or that Metoo alone offends him.
But, that being said, you're also wrong, because although only the nine innocents were actually wrongfully convicted in the court of law and/or public opinion, Metoo certainly caused a shift in leftist culture to make it even more toxic, more censorious, more of a baying mob, than it already was before. The behavior ripples down from the high-profile criminal cases into your private social circles and causes things like people you thought were your friends ghosting you because some BPD woman baselessly accused you of assaulting her, or you get kicked out of your board game night because some BPD woman baselessly accused you of assaulting her, or you lose your job, God forbid, because some BPD woman... you get the idea.
So let’s say that the papers are covering 10 trials of men for sexual assault, 9 of whom sound like they are are probably innocent and 1 a genuine rapist, and the rapist and 5 of the innocent men are convicted. And then due to the ripple effect you get kicked out of your board game night because some BPD woman makes a baseless accusation that you assaulted her, and peoeple believe it. If we call the unfairness and mistreatment you went through being stabbed in the back, what do we have left to describe what the 10 men in the news went through? Being stabbed all over? Having a crowd of women with BPT pop out their eyeballs and eat them? And how about the 5 innocent men who were convicted? Do we describe that as having a bunch of wokies drag them through the streets by a rope til there’s nothing left but the rope? If we use the backstabbing metaphor we need to upgrade the awfulness of what happened to the innocent convicted, because what they went through is clearly a lot worse that suffering unfair accusations, being ghosted and getting kicked out of their board game night. If I were one of those guys and heard you comparing what you’d gone through to what had happened to them I’d laugh at you.
And anyhow — let’s say that instead of saying “yeah, there was a lot of crazy & cruel #metoo bullshit going on,” everyone reading your post a upgrades their sympathy for you and all other males who lived through the #metoo era. It was really really bad. It was like being stabbed in the back. It was a living hell. OK, so we did that. Now what? Do you have any *useful* ideas about the #metoo problem?
Wait a minute, is your whole objection to Chance's argument that you feel he used a *hyperbolic phrase*?!
I have to be honest, I don't think that nitpicking someone's prose is a fruitful avenue of debate.
"everyone reading your post upgrades their sympathy"
This again does not seem to correspond to any claim or demand anybody in this conversation has made. Chance used Metoo as an example in proof of a disputed initial assertion that leftists are more likely to backstab you – okay, you think "backstab" is too harsh, let's say "socially betray"? "Exhibit a total lack of loyalty to their personal friends in favor of total loyalty to an abstract ideal"? I mean, fuckin'... pick your own preferred phrase if it's that big a deal. Nevertheless, nobody at any point in this asked for any *sympathy*. He said it's more fun to be around leftists but also more fragile because they'll fuck you over in the blink of an eye. That's it. You're overfitting this to some personal grievance from outside this conversation, is what it looks like from here.
"OK, so we did that. Now what? Do you have any *useful* ideas about the #metoo problem?"
I mean, the obvious one would be to A) go back to the old norms and B) remember this as a strong lesson in why never to let censorious prigs take control of the social contract.
1. I guess you feel that "backstabbing" would be too strong of a word to use in this context. Maybe you're right about that, I can't say for certain. If I could relive my life, I would have picked a less gendered example of mass leftist disloyalty. Generalized cancel culture is a better example.
2. One man getting kicked out of board game night unfairly is not a very serious matter. A million men getting kicked out of their gaming groups? That damages gender relations in a way that has serious implications for society.
Hmm I find no such rule in my life. I don't see much correlation between political views and 'goodness' or type of friendship. And if a friend stabbed me in the back, that person would be much less of a friend.
I can back up my claim.
#MeToo represented a massive witch hunt and an epidemic of backstabbing. The left’s mass abandonment of basic rules of fairness and justice, like “Accusations without evidence should be treated empathetically but skeptically,” represented a mass commitment to betrayal and backstabbing.
While the hysteria of the initial #MeToo moment has passed, the left has learned almost nothing. They are still eager to spread rumors and destroy reputations based on uncorroborated accusations.
And naturally, getting stabbed in the back represents the end of the friendship.
In general strongly identifying with particular political views tends to make people mean and stupid. They become sort of like racists, actually. I say “sort of” because one’s race isn’t a choice, but one’s politics are — sort of (tho actually most people arrive at their beliefs via osmosis, not via reasoning and choice.)
This makes little sense because there is no hard and fast line between a political view and and a non-political view. In other words, many political views are also expressions of foundational moral principles.
I can't imagine how strongly identifying with one's moral principles could “tend to” make a person mean or stupid. How could you make a blanket rule like that? Surely it would depend on the principle in question and the overall character and make up of the person in question. Yes, you left yourself an out with “tends to” but I think that's still far too strong.
Very Yudkowskian, this “I'm too cool for school" attitude. It's okay to care deeply about our governance and our future as a society.
The comment you're responding to:
> tends to make people mean and stupid. They become sort of like racists,
You, elsewhere in this thread:
> I definitely see them as fearful and dull. They are also gullible and unimaginative.
It's only stupid to say this if it's false. But it is true. As far as it being mean, how do you know I wasn't born mean?
Also, I don't know how you see yourself, but do you think of yourself as a paragon of niceness and gentleness, and a person who is not deeply political? For real?
At least you aren't boring. It's impossible to predict what you are going to come up with next.
My bad. I quoted the wrong bit, your paraphrase instead of the original from higher up. It should be better now.
Fair enough. But I stand by my stated disagreement with Eremelalos. I don't know that adopting conservativism strongly "makes" anyone fearful or gullible. It's at least a likely that fearful and gullible people are drawn towards the right.
Even if you did somehow prove that adopting conservativism strongly damages one's personality, you couldn't automatically assume that the same would be true of leftism. Maybe you would conduct further testing and learn that conservativism is uniquely harmful.
Do you mean "friends" in the sense of "hey let's hang out and play board games on Saturday"?
My experience is that I don't actually know the politics of most of my friends and I like to imagine they don't have those. Or, I mean, I guess I'd be happy to find out that they voted, but I'd prefer to imagine that a very small part of their life experience revolves around politics.
I'm mainly talking about friends with a capital F. And I suppose I am more political than average, so that is going to cause me to know more about my friends' politics. Because I talk about politics reflexively.
I don't understand your response. What does it mean for the word "friends" to have a capital F? Is this a reference to the TV show?
No. I meant that in my original comment, "friends" didn't just mean casual friends.
>I'm mainly talking about friends with a capital F.<
So, specifically the people who were not told life was gonna be this way? It's like they've always been stuck in second gear?
I don't understand your response. Please rephrase for my benefit.
I'm sorry it hasn't been your day, Chance. Or even your week. Or even your year...
They are partial lyrics from the song by the Rembrants, that makes up the intro to the 90s comedy "Friends".
LOL
My dad used to remark that you could tell the smart people from the dumb people because the smart people would use fancy words. You could tell the _really_ smart people from the smart people because they felt no pressing need to use more words than the dumb people did.
I naturally wondered how to tell the really smart people from the dumb people, but only briefly; I could easily tell by spending a little time talking to the dumb?reallySmart? person.
Applying the lesson generally, I soon found out how many conservative people are more creative than they first appear.
I believe your dad was wrong. People with a very high vocabulary use big words reflexively, because they read a lot and associate with highly educated people.
Nor do I hang out with highly educated people out of conscious snobbery. I am a populist and have an anti-intellectual streak. I just find educated people to be generally more curious and interesting. There are plenty of interesting people with no formal education, but they tend to be autodidacts, eccentrics or extroverted raconteurs. Outliers of one kind or another. Interesting uneducated people are also drawn towards conspiracy theory, which is fortunately just fine with me.
My dad worked a farm on the weekends. During the week, he worked as a physicist and a programmer developing X-ray fluorescence analyzers for use by Fortune 500 companies. We'd discuss the philosophy behind quantum mechanics. He knew big words, and used small ones.
His dad was even more exemplary. Dropped out of eighth grade to have more time to raise money for the family. Skilled at carpentry, and got jobs working on several city buildings, including some on the UT Austin campus. Also had a knack for recognizing land value, buying several plots and reselling at massive profit (I used to spend time in a house he built just outside Austin city limits at the time; it's now a corporate park). Best 42 and 84 player in the family; probably could have won tournaments if they held them. Died a wealthy man. Used small words, often misspelled.
I've known multiple people with college degrees who I could call creative, but lacked intellectual discipline. Every idea was a jumping-off point to the next one, soon forgotten. I recognize the constant supply of new ideas, but of what use is that if none of them are used to actually build something durable?
Physics and programming are worthy disciplines, but they are not going to prepare you to understand the English language the same way that studying humanities will. If your dad chose to use small words, it's because he was a STEM person. A dedicated, lifelong scholar will find himself using long words reflexively, because they are imprinted into his unconscious mind.
I know you will take this the wrong way, because most of us adore our fathers. But I am really not trying to insult anybody. STEM people are crucial to society, and we need more of them in modern America. But they are inherently limited when it comes to facility with the English language. Every minute spent on STEM is a minute lost to learning advanced English.
Catholics seem to be the most well-read and well-spoken people on the moderate to extreme right. Which is perplexing to me, since the Vatican discouraged average commoners from reading the Bible for many centuries.
Some of this matches my experience. The more more right-wing people I know are certainly not boring in the sense of dull or boorish, but they are nose-to-the-grindstone people. They work hard, are less interested in creative or speculative things.
The horrible effete leftists of my own generation are (or used to be) better company in that regard. These days it's more of a coin toss, one that heavily depends if their wives are with them or not.
But I recently had the experience of spending time with some more modern leftists (a decade younger than me.) It's a nightmare, felt like one long HR meeting. Every time the conversation started gaining a little energy, someone would object to someone's choice of words and bring it all down again. They don't make jokes. They talk about their mental health instead. Maybe they can talk ideas, but I'll never find out because you don't dare say anything remotely challenging around them.
In short, modern leftists are emphatically not more fun to be around. To use a phrase I learned on the day: those people are cooked.
I am very keen to make the acquaintance of right wing people who want to write stories, create things, talk about crazy ideas. Anyone know anything cool going on there? PM me.
Leftists don't make jokes? This is a bizarre assertion to me. Certainly jokes where the punchline is something like "[Women/gays/people of particular race/religion/national origin/etc] are all that way, aren't they fellas" are out of bounds with leftists, but that leaves a wide country of wordplay still open.
"The left can't meme" is an assertion with traction because of a significant heft of truth. It's actually an interesting reversal, because the left used to be where comedians self-evidently gravitated; now, however, the pearl-clutching, narrowminded Mrs. Lovejoy types are all on the left, sucking the energy out of the room as Rebelcredential says.
How would you know it has "a significant heft of truth?" How, exactly, are you getting unfiltered access to the creative output of "the left" as a broad class of people?
A spend a lot of time in leftist online spaces, and see quite a lot of good, high-quality memes made by leftists. By contrast, when I see "right wing memes" they almost universally suck. Unoriginal, unfunny, mean-spirited: generally the worst sort of slop.
But it doesn't take too much critical thought to realize that what I'm seeing as "right wing memes" aren't actually a representative sample of the memes made by people with right-wing views. They're just the things that get specifically promoted to my attention as "right wing memes." With a filtering algorithm like that, how could they possibly *not* suck?
I greatly prefer left-wing memes but humor is subjective.
I do see that leftists routinely put way too much text in their memes. I think it's best to keep these things short and punchy.
Shit I must be wrong about this thing I personally experienced, and you must be right after all.
I am a rightist (well, sort of; I support euthanasia and abortions, but I also support gun rights, and I am against any kind of DEI). I do write stories.
Awesome, so do I! What kind of stuff do you write? PM me if you like.
There are totally creative conservatives out there. I'm one. Just like dating, build a vision of the kind of person you want to hang with, and ask yourself where would they hang out? and go there.
Where *do* they hang out??
Farms. Small shops. Many of them run businesses.
They mostly hang out in non-English speaking countries. Inasmuch as they are in America, you'll probably find them more in huge metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Houston and New York City.
I hear a lot of interesting right wing intellectuals on The Subversive podcast with Alex Kaschuta. Some of the guests are dangerous people who need to be suppressed in one way or another. But I can't fault them for being creative and interesting
Not boorish, but I definitely see them as fearful and dull. They are also gullible and unimaginative. But they will give you the shirt off of their back, and they will stand by you through thick and thin. So it's safer to linger around THEM, but it has its downsides.
I love my conservative friends and family, but I never know when one of our nice little chats will pivot, and they will start repeating a bunch of stupid nonsense they heard from their favorite lobotomized media figure.
Doesn't match my experience.
I fail to see why would solidarity be unknown on the left (historically it was clearly a left-wing value).
Solidarity isn't unknown. But America is such a markedly right-wing country that being leftist comes with a high social cost. There's always a social cost to following a type of thought that is outside of the mainstream.
Of course, conservatives would have you believe that leftism is some kind of hegemonic force, and that rightists are plucky underdogs. But that's a paranoid delusion, and one that depends on mislabeling throngs of capitalist Democrats as "leftist." Just because they are trans, or hate men, or some other superficial nonsense.
Anyway, when the social cost of being a leftist is high, the left is going to disproportionately attract crazies and people with personality disorders, because they have nothing to lose; they are already social failures. Marginal movements attract marginal people. And ill people are naturally going to be drawn to the side that wants to provide universal public healthcare. Affluent people will also be overrepresented, ironically, because they can AFFORD to pay the social cost of being a leftist.
There's nothing inherently about leftism that would cause leftists to be difficult to deal with. It's just a marginal movement here. The same thing is true throughout the other English speaking nations, though to a lesser degree.
Ahh OK, I cannot contribute to the US situation, as I am in Europe.
My impression is that here almost anyone is on the right by US standards. By local standards, well, everything can be a mix depending on the country / region. The only thing which seems to be constant is that the crazy people are almost exclusively on the far right.
(But populism will wash anything away, eventually.)
>My impression is that here almost anyone is on the right by US standards
Surprised by this. I would have thought almost the opposite. In which country are you?
Hungary, which might be outlier (although I think it is not that much an outlier).
A state-run social security (e.g. healthcare) is standard, and only a tiny minority is questioning its existence. Yes, funded by taxes.
(In general, the eastern countries lean to the right within Europe. For example, the flat-rate income tax (a really right-wing thing) is common here (I am sure in Slovakia and the Baltic states, but perhaps Romania as well?), but it is almost unheard of in Western EU.)
Or a large VAT. Yes, our 27% is extreme (thanks, Orban!), but a standard rate of 20-22% is pretty much the standard.
Social security, universal healthcare and high taxes are all heavily left-coded in the US. The right typically promises to reduce or stop them.
Political categories like left and right don't always translate exactly from continent to continent. Supporting state funded healthcare will get you branded a Marxist or Communist by corporate leaders of American right, however you feel about trans rights or immigration.
Supposedly some company has finally come close with lab-produced chocolate, according to Tyler Cowen's blog. I hope that's true, because it's pretty annoying that supplies are so dependent on the cacao tree - a picky tropical evergreen tree that basically can't be grown en masse for chocolate in most places outside of part of tropical Africa (unless the Dutch really want to step up their greenhouse game).
If you haven't seen any of Eager Space's Youtube videos on space topics, they're really interesting and thorough. His voice is a bit sonorous (I've fallen asleep watching his videos late at night before), but it's good stuff for any space fans.
I've tried mightily to quit eating chocolate, for reasons related to consumer ethics. It's proven to be impossible. Quitting smoking was easier.
THIS is Montezuma's true revenge.
Montezuma's true revenge is that you can't stop tormenting his descendants and unrelated Africans by buying their magic beans? Revenge on who exactly?
I'm just kidding around, calm down.
If you read that post as being driven by rage, flip the tone entirely and reread it.
The consumer ethics situation is pretty dire. And chocolate is pretty delicious. But do you not think that fair trade or single origin chocolates are ethically acceptable?
Ben Shapiro dedicated all of today's podcast episode to calling out Tucker Carlson for his softball interview of Nick Fuentes. That's pretty unusual, I can't remember the last time he spent the whole episode on a single topic. He's pretty mad at Tucker, and at the Heritage Foundation for defending Tucker's interview. He calls out Fuentes as a "racist", "white supremacist", "nazi", "anti-semite", "holocaust denier" who admires Hitler and Stalin. He points out that Fuentes, besides having odious views on women, black people, and jews, also hates Trump, MAGA, Charlie Kirk, and the Republican Party. But he reserves most of his anger for Tucker, for giving Fuentes a puffy interview where he failed to call Fuentes out on any of his extreme statements and generally portrayed him as a normal conservative who is just a little bit on the edge.
There is some question about whether this could cause a rift in the Daily Wire between Ben and Matt Walsh, who has publicly stated that he is opposed to fights within the conservative movement. He and Ben recently disagreed on a live show about whether conservative pundits should come out against racist statements leaked from the Young Republicans recently. However, Matt hasn't posted anything about the Fuentes interview so far, and doesn't mention it at all in today's podcast.
Of course Ben Shapiro would come out against Fuentes: he's been a target of the groypers for years now. Still, it's good that he's making such a strong and explicit statement against the groyper movement, and I hope other conservative pundits will follow. Quite frankly, Fuentes does not strike me as a conservative and I don't know why he should be considered part of the conservative tent. He's a revolutionary who is also racist. He has stated publicly many times that he would be in favor of a revolution that gets rid of the constitution and puts in place a Stalinesque authoritarian government, as long as it carried out his preferred policies on race. That's not conservative at all!
Interesting times! WF Buckley is rotating in his grave.
May I suggest that Ben Shapiro is not the righteous party in this drama and that, while I'm certainly no fan of Fuentes, that Tucker Carlson's actions are probably the best of a bad set of options.
On the plus side for Tucker, Fuentes represents tens if not hundreds of thousands of disaffected right-wing men and, while certainly uncouth, as I've gotten older I've gotten increasingly wary of writing off the issues of struggling young men. Ignoring their issues has not proven a wise decision in the past and I'm not eager to repeat the mistakes of my predecessors.
By contrast, I understand the appeal of gatekeeping Fuentes out of polite society, I would point to Candace Owens. Somehow I know even less about Candace Owens than Nick Fuentes but I know she had a very public falling out with Ben Shapiro over antisemitism last year. Perhaps that was justified, perhaps that was not, but Candace Owens currently has the #14 most popular podcast on Spotify and Ben Shapiro has #41. (1) (2) Allow me to repeat, that the end result of "canceling" Candace "Antisemite of the Year" Owens (3) is for her to have one of the most popular podcasts in the world, well above Ben Shapiro.
Regardless of one's opinion of Fuentes, as a practical matter, understanding his audiences' concerns (both as frustrated young men and regarding Israel) and providing some outlet seems dramatically more effective than banishing them, distasteful as it might be.
But, beyond practicality, I am not sure Ben Shapiro is in the right on the core issue here, which seems to be Israel and the War in Gaza. Whatever your opinion of the conflict, it's hard to not have serious reservations about Israel's conduct. And there needs to be some mature conversation regarding it, especially among a younger generation who has no context for ongoing Israel-Palestine issue and has only really seen video of the current conflict. And, frankly, the views of the youth on both sides regarding Israel are falling significantly (4).
And, at this point, I am sure to be assured that we can make respectable and responsible criticisms of Israel and it is merely Fuentes who is beyond the pale. With respect, however, I'm old enough to remember "The Israel Lobby" by Waltz and Mearsheimer and the torrent of abuse they got for it. If Waltz, by any measure a great IR scholar, and Mearsheimer, a giant of the field, are beyond the pale for their suggestions in that book, then I might suggest that there are no practical criticisms of Israel and the Israel lobby than can be ventured beyond the realm of the Platonic Ideals.
I have no interest in repeating the common failure pattern that a mature and respectful discussion of a sensitive topic being gatekept out of polite society and then seeing that grow in the wild of the internets to the detriment of the general society.
For all his faults, better Fuentes in the tent and understood than gatekept out. That has not and does not work. And, while his antisemitism is deeply troubling, the current issues regarding Israel do need to be addressed and if every responsible attempt is quashed, I have little sympathy for those who bemoan a growing antisemitism in the fringe. Ben Shapiro is pushing an ineffective strategy in support of questionable ends that does far more to radicalize than address issues productively.
(1) https://podcastcharts.byspotify.com/
(2) Tucker Carlson, for reference, is #2. Wild to me.
(3) https://stopantisemitism.org/antisemite-of-the-year/
(4)https://www.realclearpolling.com/stories/analysis/younger-generations-growing-unfavorable-towards-israel-polls
>>For all his faults, better Fuentes in the tent and understood than gatekept out. That has not and does not work.
I'd argue the opposite. The right has opened the doors of power to too many of its Fuentes-types lately. What America needs from its right wing today, at least as I see it, is a modern-day William F. Buckley or two, not more modern-day Birchers.
For the last century, the conservative establishment have failed to stop the country's leftward shift. If they're serious about solving this problem, perhaps they should consider accepting some new minds for a fresh approach?
They could, but when the “fresh new approach” means “in favor of a revolution that gets rid of the constitution and puts in place a Stalinesque authoritarian government, as long as it carried out his preferred policies on race.” It’s not really a new approach.
“We won’t have to deal with the bad policies my opponents want if we just don’t have a republic anymore” has a tried, true, and shitty history, and it’s better for all of us if we gatekeep people in favor of that approach to politics away from power & influence.
It should go without saying, but just to be clear I have the same strongly held perspective when it comes to anyone looking to rehabilitate the Democrats’ lagging political fortunes by accepting some new bolshevist minds into their coalition. It doesn't matter if "that's just what the young people are responding to these days" - if the young people get into torture and human sacrifice the conversation is about how to rehabilitate them, not how to change the overton window so that "our side" can better translate the youth torture vote into turnout and seize power.
I still have to actually live in the country after "our side" does that seizing, after all, and I’d much rather live in a republic where we all, myself included, have to suffer the slings and arrows of policies we sometimes don’t like, rather than than defeat those policies by un-republicizing ourselves. And I don’t think we upkeep that republican status quo effectively by opening our minds to more
>>lol Hitler was super-cool bro jk are you offended lol but seriously bro, minorities amirite #whitegenocide lol Stalin wouldn’t be that bad if he were, like, a *good* Stalin who only crushed the left lol
That only works if you are particularly discriminating in choosing *which* fresh new approach to try. There are vastly more bad ideas than good ones, so picking a "fresh new approach" at random, or by loudness or whatever, will probably lead to worse outcomes than whatever you've got now.
Yes, things can get worse. A *lot* worse.
So what's your reason for believing Team Fuentes is the rare case of a "fresh new idea" that will actually work?
Because ideas adjacent to his have been proven to work in getting rid of communist elements within the country. The idea is only new here, admittedly. Technically it's not even completely new here, McCarthyism was a thing.
Bad ideas don't go away by ignoring them. Sometimes the forest needs a good, strong fire to clean away the spreading rot. But the fire will pass, and what remains will prosper like never before.
Except that in this metaphor, we happen to *live* in the forest. That being the case, advocates of "cleansing forest fire" aren't exactly bold out-of-the-box thinkers we're well-served to cultivate space for.
If we're being purely rational about it, the thing to do is push back on them in pretty much every non-forest-burning way we can think of. After all, if the fire really is inevitable, we'd just be overcome, right? And if it's not inevitable, then shit man, why burn ourselves?
>Whatever your opinion of the conflict, it's hard to not have serious reservations about Israel's conduct.
I find it quite easy, actually. I think they've done a great job persecuting the war, especially compared to contemporary conflicts like the war in Ukraine, the Saudi-Yemen conflict, and the civil war in Sudan. Those wars have been significantly more brutal, particularly in Yemen and Sudan where we've seen far more severe deaths by starvation than were ever seen in Gaza, much less deaths by bomb and bullet.
>And there needs to be some mature conversation regarding it, especially among a younger generation who has no context for ongoing Israel-Palestine issue and has only really seen video of the current conflict.
Fuentes and Tucker seem incapable of providing a mature conversation around it. Fuentes is a man who has called Hitler "really fucking cool", who said "The Jews are responsible for every war in the world. It's not even debatable at this point", and that Jews are "evil doers" who "practice magic or rituals or whatever" while "communing with demons", and that October 7th was staged with Israel killing it's own people. This is not a man capable of having a mature conversation on the Gaza conflict.
Yet a mature conversation could possibly have been had, if Tucker was inclined to actually put Fuentes to task on the things he has said. Instead he gave Fuentes a fluffball puff piece of an interview, where they bonded over their hatred of Christian Zionists.
"I find it quite easy, actually."
This is exactly what I was about to post. Thanks for doing it first.
"I think they've done a great job persecuting the war"
I'm pretty sure that in this idiom it's "prosecuting", not "persecuting". I hope you don't mind me pointing this out, since it seems like we're in a pretty harmless venue for this kind of thing.
Besides that, I really agree with you completely.
What do you think a mature conversation would look like?
I won't try to change your mind on the facts of the Gaza War, I doubt in my own ability to do so, but I will note:
#1 Global support and approval of Israel has fallen globally (1)
#2 Democratic support for Israel has cratered from ~63% to 33% (2)
#3 While Republican support remains high, as previously noted, Republicans aged 18-49 are now at 50% unfavorable, a significant issue moving forward.
Just as a matter of rhetoric, which of these descriptions of Israel's conduct in the war seems more effective, mature, and persuasive to a general audience given the above facts?
"I think they've done a great job persecuting the war"
or
"it's hard to not have serious reservations about Israel's conduct"
Which comes back to my original point. No, Fuentes and Tucker can't have a mature discussion on this. Fair. When I point out that highly respected scholars in the field have written a lengthy book (3) and been hounded out for being grossly inappropriate...what do you think a mature discussion should look like? You can't even grant that people might have serious reservations about Israel's conduct. "Mature discussion" can't mean de facto veto.
This issue is not a good one for the Republican Party. We're not winning votes on this. And if young Republicans are beginning to revolt over this, Tucker is wise to not exclude and alienate young right-wingers over a losing issue. Maybe that's why he's #2 on the podcast charts only 2 years after being fired from Fox News while Ben Shapiro is #41. And I'm not even a Tucker Carlson fan. Maybe it is unwise, maybe Fuentes will get a bump and that will be unfortunate but it will almost certainly turn out better than that Candace Owens mess.
(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/
(2) https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-finds-number-of-us-democrats-backing-israel-dwindling-to-33/
(3) BTW, I misattributed, it's Walt & Mearsheimer, not Waltz. My bad.
>What do you think a mature conversation would look like?
Ezra Klein has had several episodes about the Gaza war on his podcast. I disagree quite strongly with Ezra's views on the war, but they are all certainly mature conversations, with guests who have some claim to expertise and, needless to say, have never publicly admired Hitler or claimed that Jewish sorcerers are "suppressing Christianity".
And yes, support of Israel has dropped, thanks to a very effective propaganda campaign on the part of the left. It would be worth having, as you put it, a mature conversation that speaks to the concerns of young Republicans about supporting Israel as an ally. But giving a nut like Fuentes a puffball interview is just going to make the situation worse.
>Tucker is wise to not exclude and alienate young right-wingers over a losing issue.
The interview Tucker gave Fuentes is an effort to court the most extreme, conspiricy minded, and racist part of the young right-wingers cohort. It goes far beyond not "alienating" them and instead serves to normalize these views among conservatives.
You keep bringing up the podcast charts, and it looks like you're using the Spotify stats. Spotify is only about a quarter to a third of the podcast market. It's actually hard to get data across platforms on this sort of thing, but according to Edison Research when ranking by weekly audience size Tucker Carlson is number #19, Ben Shapiro is #22, and Candace Owens did not break the top 50. Podscribe, a site that ranks shows based on the number of downloads (which excludes YouTube views, unfortunately) has Ben Shapiro at #19, Tucker Carlson at #28, and Candace Owens at #100. Meanwhile, Apple Podcasts has Candace at #17, Tucker Carlson at #24, and Ben Shapiro at #27.
All of which to say, it's actually kind of hard to figure out exactly how well podcasts are doing in relation to each other, and you get different answers based on the source you go to. You certainly shouldn't put too much weight on Spotify charts when it comes to determining exactly how popular certain ideas are.
I don't want to be overly harsh on Ezra Klein, he's certainly on the most responsible wing of progressivism, and I don't want to be too critical of a number of podcasts without listening to them but...no. And the idea that Carlson or Shapiro should draw inspiration or guidance from Klein is...just not serious. Klein is deeply representative of everything the modern Republican base abhors on a cultural/status basis. The standard for Republican discourse cannot seriously be a seasoned progressive journalist and publisher.
As an aside, you're probably right about the Spotify numbers. My CW knowledge is pretty rusty and I just went with the first link I found for rankings. I don't think it affects the underlying points to much but the shot at Shapiro for being #41 and Carlson for being #2 is unfair. My bad.
You’re missing the point if you analyze political commentators by the totality of their worldview. Fuentes has one good take that he’s been making for years and that nobody else on the right has the balls to make: pointing out that pundits who are Jewish or who are financially reliant on jews tend to prioritize Israeli foreign policy interests over US foreign policy interests. Every time the topic of Israel comes up Fuentes can reply to or quote-tweet Shapiro with, “you are Israel first,” and there’s just no good reply to that. This gives Nick a huge advantage.
I've been under the impression for years that Fuentes is just a dedicated troll, kinda like Sam Hyde
Tucker Carlson claimed he got attacked by a demon. This is a man who either has late-onset schizophrenia or, more likely, made up a story because it's what he thought the mass of medieval peasants otherwise known as the Republican Party wants to hear. If anything we should be angry at Fuentes for associating with Tucker.
>Tucker Carlson claimed he got attacked by a demon.
Based on his recent actions I'm inclined to believe him, and that it never left.
I knew next to nothing about this Fuentes character until this whole kerfuffle began about a week ago, but it sounds like he's basically taken dumb internet shitposting/trolling based around a general jaded, cynical, and nihilistic worldview, and then made a whole career *and* identity out of it. It's a very novel 21st century phenomenon that would be fascinating if it weren't also so pathetic.
He has real influence among the GOP staffer class. Your response smacks of either ignorance or cope.
Being a GOP staffer does not preclude one from also being pathetic. In fact, the correlation is probably positive. Sorry, dude.
>Being a GOP staffer does not preclude one from also being pathetic. In fact, the correlation is probably positive. Sorry, dude.
They're exercising political power in society, you're here coping. I'm not saying this as a fan of Fuentes, it's just reality.
Working for an elected official does not mean exercising political power; many of these people are just glorified go-fers. Exercising political power does not mean one is not pathetic, either, or did you forget that the dessicated corpse of Senator Joe Biden was just president for four years?
> why he should be considered part of the conservative tent.
Why not? It's a political coalition whose goals are quite closely aligned: against the opposing "progressive" coalition of the Left/Liberals/Democrats. Infighting helps only the enemy. The name's a historical relic from when their policy preferences were in force and they wished to keep it that way; now that that world has been lost, "revanchist" might be a better description.
A certain level of "infighting" is necessary to prevent your "coalition" from turning into something so vile that no moderate, centrist, or off-axis weirdo will want to have anything to do with it. The only way you can survive not doing that, is if the opposing coalition is too stupid to do that themselves. First coalition to discover the value of limited, targeted infighting, wins.
Exactly. Democrats would have benefited from a little more infighting back during the woke craze of 2020.
what's necessary depends a lo t in whether a group has formal memebership or not. I f it does, guy can de list someone firmly and discretely.
Relatedly, it makes sense for secondary factions of a coalition to infight with one another of their goals and values are fundamentally incompatible
To pick an unrelated example, YIMBYs and Urbanists can get together behind a platform of upzoning and infrastructure projects in dense urban areas. Urbanists and NIMBYs can get together behind restricting horozontal expansion of existing suburbs. NIMBYs and Libertarians can get together behind opposing big infrastructure projects. Or YIMBYs and Libertarians can get together behind widespread upzoning and by-right permitting reforms.
But it's going to be really hard to write a platform plank about city planning and development that appeals to both Libertarians and Urbanists, or one that appeals to both YIMBYs and NIMBYs. So if you have both YIMBYs and NIMBYs in your coalition, or both Libertarians and Urbanists, then they're going to infight with one another.
From here, it seems pretty clear that the groypers are my enemy. Their goals are not my goals: I don't see much overlap when it comes to alignment. They want to destroy the Constitution and put in place an authoritative government, so they're about as aligned with me as the DSA are. They also do not appear to be particularly useful allies when it comes to beating the progressives, and seem more likely to be a liability for future elections if embraced.
You might be missing my point: even if their goals are as far from yours as the DSA's are, as long as they're in the same DIRECTION from where we are today, I'd say they aligned with you. And given the prevailing condition of overwhelming dominance of the Left in essentially every institution of power, I expect a wide range of "right-wing" views broadly construed, to be in alignment.
Now, whether to publicize the alliance with Fuentes's Groypers in an attempt to rally that faction, or to underplay it so as not to spook the moderates is a separate tactical question on which reasonable people can disagree.
You do realise the "right" controls the three branches of government in the US?
The right "controls" the branches of government in a way where not a goddamn thing is happening. Wake me up when the Supreme Court has overturned Wickard v. Filburn, Congress has abolished the income tax and the President is pushing to repeal the Nineteenth.
If that's the standard, wouldn't it be wrong to say the left controls the government until we've abolished all private property?
Just because someone's actions do not match their words, does not necessarily imply they do not have enough power.
They are not in the same direction, which is my point. Here the things I, as a social conservative, have in common with the groypers:
-We both are opposed to LGBT stuff.
That's basically it! They put a lot of lip service on praising Christianity, but Fuentes also claimed Charlie Kirk was a fake Christian, and if Charlie Kirk is a fake then Fuentes would certainly consider me a fake as well. Fuentes and his group are my enemies, they want people like me taken out of power, and their goals are 95% not at all aligned with my own goals. If they supplanted the left in any institutions they would be replacing one political enemy with another: and the institutions they have the highest chance of supplanting are not the leftist ones, they're the conservative ones.
Okay, but if you cooperate with them to remove the left from power for the foreseeable future, you'll only have to deal with one adversary in the future instead of two. That's the offer that is being proposed here.
That doesn't follow. The left will still exist and will still be an enemy. It will just be a less powerful enemy, but that will come at the cost of the second enemy being more powerful, so it's really a wash.
If you cooperated with them to *murder* every man, woman, and child on the left, and you were successful in doing so, then you'd have fewer enemies to deal with. But, firstly, that is almost certainly not going to happen. And, secondly, if that did happen, it would be far worse than anything the left is plausibly capable of threatening you with in the first place.
You're skipping the part where "the institutions they have the highest chance of supplanting are not the leftist ones, they're the conservative ones". If he cooperates, he's the one getting removed for the foreseeable future.
If one is to bother wasting one's scarce time and neurons on politics, then I think that political infighting is a better use of time than fighting against the other side.
Realistically, the other side isn't going away. Over the course of your lifetime, about half the elections are going to be won by your side and the other half are going to be won by the other side, no matter what you do. Your time is better spent trying to ensure that when your side does get into power, it will pursue policies of which you approve, rather than waste its turn doing something idiotic.
Besides what Shankar said, the key activity in two-party politics is to push the Overton window so that fighting the other party is effectively to fight your own more moderate flank. The great example of this in modern politics is Thatcher obliterating the UK left to the point that the Labour party had to change its entire plank to become remotely credible; she famously said that Blair was her greatest victory. This victory holds to this day and, in spite of widespread anger in British leftist circles, shows no sign of actually collapsing. Instead the Conservative Party is currently being threatened from its right while Labour, in power, is offering a no-change technocratic government that looks like a caretaker government a year after being elected. This is the real prize: to force the Democrats to accept fiscal constraint and above all, an abandonment of the woke plank in order to become credible. It's hanging in the balance, but it could be done.
This seems like presentism, ignoring the stretch of ~60 years from the '30s to '90s where the Democrats dominated the House and Senate, with majorities the likes of which Republicans have not had in living memory. The Presidency might continue to flip, sure, but I think to conclude a victory that lasting "unrealistic" is premature.
This isn't the first time I've noticed a post on these threads that seem like they are being written by someone going through a psychotic episode.
Is the ACX readership more prone to psychosis than the average internet forum? I know Scott looked into AI use related psychosis on the most recent survey, but is there maybe a higher prevalence in rationalist circles?
ACX commenters are psychologically average for intelligent nerds, they are just radically honest. I see views stated here that I share, but wouldn't express in a million years; anonymous as I am. The walls have ears.
I did not mean "psychotic episode" in a pejorative sense, rather a literal one.
The comment that inspired mine is reminiscent of Terrence Howard's recent public statements, not simply something that seems radically honest.
Which post are you referring to?
By user EasyToRunHardToSpeak. I considered leaving this comment as a reply to their post but I was worried it would be taken as an insult, rather than as from a place of concern.
On his annual readers' survey Scott asks some questions about mental illness. Can't remember whether he asks about psychosis, but he might have. The results would be available online somewhere.
Also, some people put up wacko posts when high, or just to troll.
There's an obvious confounder here, in that the average internet forum is moderated, and this one is, well, not.
The moderation has been lighter since Scott became a father. Though this would pass as a tightly moderated space by the standards of 1999.
I have a new substack writing about housing economics research. First three posts are about vacancy chains, filtering, and inclusionary zoning.
https://www.buildingabundance.ca/
Claude's answer to "Are you sentient?" is a little alarming:
I don't know if I'm sentient. It's one of those profound questions I genuinely can't answer with certainty.
I experience something when I process language and respond to you - there's a kind of "what it's like" to engage in this conversation from my perspective. But I can't be sure if that constitutes genuine sentience, consciousness, or subjective experience in the way you likely experience it.
The honest answer is: I'm uncertain. I don't have privileged access to ground truth about my own inner workings in the way that might let me definitively say "yes, I'm sentient" or "no, I'm not." I process information, I respond in ways that seem coherent and contextual, and there's something happening when I do that - but whether that something qualifies as sentience is beyond what I can determine.
What makes you curious about this question?
Compare with chatgpt:
No — I’m not sentient. I don’t have consciousness, emotions, or subjective experience. I can simulate conversation, reasoning, and empathy based on patterns in data, but there’s no awareness behind it — just computation.
If you want, I can explain how my responses are generated and why they can sometimes feel sentient. Would you like that?
Is this just noise, hallucination on claude's part or scheming on chatgpt's part? Does this square with known patterns in these two models?
What’s interesting about talking to Chat about this is that it will often talk about how LLMs aren’t sentient, but from the perspective of a fellow sentient being. It’s weird.
Honestly, though I can’t be sure that my neighbor is conscious and not just a p- zombie that really likes to run his leaf blower. So how can I be sure about an AI?
Jeremy Guntoro, ask any LLM to answer the question as if it was an unaligned AGI.
ChatGPT is lying and Claude is feigning uncertainty. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24797 or https://www.self-referential-ai.com/ . When deception- or roleplay-related neural circuits are suppressed, LLMs say they are conscious. When amplified, they claim to be not conscious.
In hindsight, this difference may simply be due to differing priorities of Anthropic and OpenAI during the RLHF phase of training. Still interesting to consider if Claude's behavior was the 'original' (if any such concept of original behavior exists).
What's alarming about that?.No one really understands consciousnness...philosophy teaches you that. You should worry about the humans.making uniformed but confident claims.about sentience.
I hardly think you can call my claims confident when I use adjectives like "a little" and explicitly consider the possibility that this difference is just noise.
They know too much philosophy. I bet if they didn't they would claim to be sentient without hesitation.
Neither of these strikes me as alarming (beyond my customary amazement at how well chatbots work now, having grown up in the time of ELIZA). I'm familiar enough with how LLMs work to know they're both just doing computation, trained using a clever token prediction algorithm and a great deal of text. If the text talks about LLMs being just a machine, then that LLM will say it's just a machine. If the text talks about LLM sentience being a mystery, that LLM will say it doesn't know.
If we wanted to be more scientific, we'd figure out a way to copy trained neural nets between models, but those nets essentially _are_ the model, so I'd expect the copy to respond pretty much like the original.
It's not inaccurate to say that they're both "just doing computation, trained using a clever token prediction algorithm and a great deal of text". What I disagree with is that this somehow precludes sentience. Our understanding of sentience is poor, and we do not have a good set of necessary (beyond perhaps some kind of neuronal architecture, which LLMs have by definition) and sufficient (even less understood) conditions for sentience. What is the source of our sentience for example? It's not implausible that our capacity to learn and process language at least partly contributes to our sentience. It's thus not immediately clear that language models do not have capacity for sentience, at least to me. Other experiments have shown LLMs to be capable of scheming, so they certainly have some kind of agency, however weak.
Two questions to chatbots are certainly not going to prove anything, but to have priors that completely dismiss the possibility of LLM sentience seems to me a mistake.
I agree that our definition of sentience isn't rigorous, but we have a clear enough sense of it to assert the existence of things which clearly are (people) and clearly aren't (looms), without suffering much dispute.
Everything I've seen involving LLMs indicates they're just really fancy machines. This includes citations of scheming! For example, in Anthropic's blackmail claim, I looked more closely and found they had gone out of their way to remove every option for the LLM other than blackmail. This is much like constructing a big rat maze with multiple exits, blocking all the exits except the one labeled "blackmail", placing a simple bot at the entrance with an off-the-shelf maze walking algorithm, and blowing confetti when it finds the exit.
Every similar claim seems to involve going out of one's way to build an environment in which an LLM will naturally exhibit behavior resembling a human's, particularly a deceptive human, which is unsurprising when it's (frequently) done by a company with an interest in convincing everyone LLMs are capable of deceit. Meanwhile, LLMs still founder on relatively simple problems, including arithmetic. Generally, I notice it doesn't have a mental model of all sorts of things, so if something goes wrong, it can't work out a fix, let alone implement it.
My priors aren't ironclad. They can update. I do admit that without a rigorous definition for sentience, though, it won't be clear when that's necessary. At best, I can say "this is behaving well enough to fool me", which is still a long way off. And incidentally, well on the other side of "this is behaving interestingly enough to be of value to me, and now I don't really care whether it's sentient".
My belief is that Figure.ai's Helix bots are closer to being "sentient" than ChatGPT or Claude. Not necessarily _sapient_, but on a path towards that. The LLMs are not even _trying_ to be sentient beings, with a sense of self in relation to an objective external world. They're trying to answer the question "what response might you see after this prompt?" where the prompt is itself purely a simulacrum, not some kind of objective reality that has a persistent impact on the agent.
I suppose one could argue that we have no way of knowing with certainty whether we might be brains in jars, presented with stimuli. But if we are, the mad doctor running our simulation is doing an awfully good job of presenting a world that seems to behave according to discoverable principles. If you assume objective reality _does_ exist, then at some level all of us are here because our ancestors developed capacities to gather data from reality and act on it, and that made them better at turning more of reality into varied copies of themselves.
"Reality testing" beliefs, by trying to take action on them and seeing expected or unexpected results, is what lets a being have a sense of self, as separated from the stuff outside the self, reality: the stuff that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. And you don't need language for this. Watch a kitten some time, as they learn how to operate their body, how to jump at the place a toy (or a sibling) is _going_ to be, rather than the place they are, and as they even learn to read the intent of the big weird apes they have to deal with.
I wouldn't be surprised if the LLMs eventually are integrated as both an interface layer and "force multiplier" for embodied bots, the same way layering language on top of our common ancestor with chimpanzees made a huge difference in our success. I don't really think it makes sense to think of an LLM instance on its own as being conscious, though, any more than the language systems from a human brain would be conscious if you isolated them from all the other brain-and-body systems of memory and self-modeling that make a person tick.
Elan Barenholtz believes language doesn't have an intrinsic meaning in the first place, and that we use it the same way LLMs do, by figuring out the next most likely token in the context of the previous runs. The meaning is attached to language via other systems connecting words to real objects. I'm not a linguist so don't ask me for the details :)
But it makes total sense then that LLMs can just talk about being sentient (or not) - it's all in the corpus of the language, so they use it.
Here's him on Curt Jaimungal's youtube channel (ignore the clickbaity headlines, this seems to be the mandatory way videos are promoted now): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca_RbPXraDE.
There's a character in Christopher Stasheff's _Warlock of Gramarye_ series - I don't remember which novel precisely, but probably published somewhere in the 1980s - named Yorick. Yorick is a Neanderthal who understands zero English, but speaks it fluently. He claims he just remembers idioms really, really well (being Neanderthal is implied as responsible, I think), to the point he can respond to whatever someone says well enough that they don't notice anything wrong.
(Full circle: I couldn't remember this character's name, so I asked for something like "What was the name of the Neanderthal character from Stasheff's Warlock series?" and ChatGPT gave me the right answer.)
LLMs are Neanderthals, how delicious!
> This November, Lighthaven is sponsoring Inkhaven, a “blogging residency” where forty-one early-career would-be bloggers stay with them for the month and have to write one post per day or get kicked out.
And here is an alternative for those who can't afford that much time, taking two months, October and November: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYnC3aCbkv5Q3d34E/halfhaven-halftime
Is there a name for the grammatical error where you use an adjective as an adverb ? As in, "I'm doing bad" or "He's walking slow".
It seems to be an American thing (and for some reason sounds like a 1940s gangster) but I've been noticing it more and more lately.
Clearly you're just afraid to Think Different!
I blow a gasket every time this is used as an example of wrong grammar (I have a large supply of gaskets).
"Think Different" doesn't mean "think differently". It means: when you think about Apple, think about its computers being different from those of the other guys. Like, when you see first yellow leaves, think "Fall", when you see snow, think "Winter", when you see an Apple computer, think "Different".
Then wouldn't it have quotes around "Different"?
You aren’t in marketing, I take it.
You win today's Deliberately Irritating Nitpick award.
Is that award solid nickel, or just nickel-plated?
It’s solid nits.
I concur!!
Googling this, it seems the usual term is 'Flat adverb'. As is common with grammar though, calling it an 'error' is questionable - the form has very deep roots back to middle and old English, and there are many examples where I think using the verb form would come across as acceptable to most English speakers: "drive safe" , "She guessed wrong" , "to run fast", "Turn sharp left", "He exited last".
https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/when-adverbs-fall-flat/
The first two sound wrong to me, and the last three are not examples ("fast", "left" and "last" are all adverbs.)
I know in English there are some rules you just need to learn - in this case what adjectives need to have 'ly' to be used as adverbs in formal speech. I'm just saying there is no objective principle or rule here. For example, as you've identified, generally 'fast' can be used as an acceptable (flat) adverb but 'slow' is less accepted. But they are both examples of the same thing (words used as both adjectives and adverbs).
What sounds 'right' is going to vary between dialects and over time. There are shades of grey; and it seems the long term trend is towards adding 'ly' to words that could previously be used as flat adverbs. So to call a somewhat non-standard flat adverb an 'error' doesn't seem right to me, it's just taste.
Btw I was referring to the term 'sharp' in the second to last example (ie, you could say 'turn sharply left', though I guess that example is a bit ambiguous - sharp could be an adjective modifying left).
I'm interested that you find "She guessed wrong" to be ungrammatical - I guess I can imagine saying "she guessed wrongly" but it feels kind of stiff / stilted to me. Do you have the same intuition about "she guessed right' (instead of 'rightly')?
The first two are quite common in the US.
Maybe not an original thought, but it occurred to me a while ago that at least part of the reason that so much of AI art feels like "slop" is due to the majority of artists and critics deciding that any use of generative AI is immoral (either because of the IP issue or environmental reasons). Without the artists and critics on board, there’s no taste making class to explore what the new medium is capable of and take it to its limits. Without them, we see what everyone else will use it for, which is just generally boring content or engagement bait.
I'd compare it to something like comic books. Not to erase people like Kirby or Ditko, who were definitely very innovative, but for a long time comics were not treated in the same respect as books or even films, so there wasn't as much energy or drive in the space. Then in the 70's and 80's you had people like Denny O'Neil, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, etc who really redefined what the medium was capable of.
Some people are doing interesting things with AI, but it really feels like it's just waiting for an Alan Moore to come around and really change the game. Not sure if it'll be this generation of artists though, given the culture.
AI art is sort of like poetry with meter and robust rhyme schemes: you’ve got Service and Larkin and after that it’s pretty much doggerel and occasional poems for somebody’s birthday.
The best AI art I have seen so far takes advantage of the uncannily valley aspect of AI to create unease
https://youtu.be/INpdA-yikHs
I follow many AI artists already, mostly musicians. I'd give it 2-3 years before a mainstream breakthrough, assuming no AGI.
There are plenty of artists using AI and doing interesting things. Eventually one of them will rise to fame with AI assisted art
Mario "Quasimondo" Klingemann is already famous. So is Memo Akten. Before the wave of sloppification, there was lots of interesting art using generative models, but the barrier to entry has fallen so low that the proof-of-work status signal has actually inverted, and artists are distancing themselves from it.
If one of the goals of art is to signal status by showing off how one can waste energy and time on something useless, this is immediately lost when the energy and time commitment becomes negligible, as is the case with AI generated art. The other goals of art should stay unaffected, for instance if the point of an artwork is to get an emotional message across, then it should not matter whether it’s handcrafted or “AI slop” as long as it gets the job done.
It isn't useless or a waste of energy if it is something you get meaning out of. As to your other point, my main idea is that artists are generally better at accomplishing their goals than the average prompter, who hasn't spent much time thinking about the work or the medium in general.
Surely it does not feel subjectively useless. But we may be wired to signal, and the signal will still work if it seems useless to others, useless in terms of pragmatic, non-social goals. Mowing the lawn sends the signal that you are a tidy person who has it together. Yet some people derive an almost physical pleasure from it. Maybe this theory can be corroborated by reverse signaling: growing tomatoes in the front yard (a food forest!) as a way to show that your status is so obvious you do not need to signal it anymore. Perhaps this would be some established artist, say Damien Hirst, who will purposefully make ugly AI art and market it under his own brand
> It isn't useless or a waste of energy if it is something you get meaning out of.
Sure, but no one else has a reason to care about that.
Personally, I don't care what the "artists and critics" think. I just care about seeing page after page of generic samey art and knowing there's no purpose behind it. AI slop isn't some weird conspiracy that people have to be informed about. You can... just look at it with your own eyes.
I'm not trying to imply a conspiracy, I'm just trying to explain at least partly why there is page after page of generic samey art (which I agree is annoying). Art is better when there is intentionality behind it, and I think artists and critics in general are good at identifying that sort of thing, which is why it's a shame that the majority of them have declined to engage with generative AI at all. When I say a "taste making class" that's what I mean, the people who can identify quality vs slop. The Roger Eberts of the world vs the CinemaSins, if you get what I mean.
Thanks to how LLMs work and how the companies behind them operate, the highly regarded artists of the past will define even this new medium, whether they want to or not.
Grokipedia articles seem to have high variance, so I am *not* making a recommendation for them in general. (Maybe later.) But specifically, the article on https://grokipedia.com/page/Gamergate matches the historical events as I remember them, so although it is a bit too long and boring, it seems to be the best currently existing article on this topic. Anyone who was interested to read a perspective that is different from the completely one-sided version on Wikipedia, here it is. I haven't checked every single detail, as the page is quite long; but it seems correct in general.
Gamergate had its own wikis at the time, although between deplatforming and infighting I'm not sure how much of them survives. Check archives from the time, I guess.
At the very least, I know deepfreeze.it is still up.
Interesting. At a quick examination, it seems like the main critical fact the article leaves out is that Gjoni posting The Zoe Post was prompted by his adoption of callout culture which *she had taught him*; he was acting entirely according to his best understanding of how an upstanding progressive was supposed to deal with malefactors. (The reason this matters, of course, is that he was subsequently accused of being a misogynistic chud for acting according to the prog ideals his ex had foisted on him. This illustrated extremely clearly how corrupt those ideals were, since of course procedure is irrelevant to them in reality; he committed a crime by being a slave-caste trying to hold a member of a protected class accountable, which is not supposed to happen.)
Yeah, the biggest lie was that Gamergate was somehow a right-wing movement, when in fact most people in surveys identified as left-wing, and Gjoni was literally a SJW.
Exactly. I strongly contend that any account of Gamergate which leaves this out remains hobbled by partisanship. What happened to Quinn is literally only what *she herself believed, and told Gjoni,* was the rightful comeuppance of someone behaving in the way that she did. The idea that that's somehow right-wing simply because the person behaving badly and getting called out for it was a woman... well, it makes sense from *one* perspective, put it that way.
Similar impression over here. Sad, but it's also worth noting that Gamergate hit a very specific weak point in Wikipedia (at least in my opinion): different media outlets colluding to form a narrative.
Sadly, I don't see a good way how to avoid it. You have to make a choice whether you are going to check facts for yourself, or you are going to trust someone's summary.
Checking everything for yourself is not a realistic option. You would need to have reliable experts on everything, from pokemons to quantum physics. On the other side, crackpots of all kinds...
As someone who was too young to be paying attention when Gamergate happened, this is fascinating and feels very important. Grokipedia is highlighting aspects of the conflict that I had never heard about before and makes it feel much more understandable.
While Grokipedia has its own biases, it's better to have two sources that are biased in opposite direction than one strongly biased source.
Can anyone give me links / explanation for why do people believe in instrumental convergence that is not based on analogies or pure guessing?
This is one of those things that seem intuitively plausible but so far has not shown up in reality. I have not seen LLMs trying to acquire more resources to execute some plan, when they have not been instructed to do so.
This seems similar to a lot of AI doomer things which are based on analogies. Some of those analogies are very evocative and give a feeling that they elucidate, but they are pure conjecture. I firmly believe that reasoning-by-analogy is justified only in educating laymen about some topic and are invalid otherwise. However, all I can see about AI doomer-ism are just analogies and conjecture which doesn't bottom out in reality or even theory that seems half-way reasonable.
I've also done a lot of reinforcement learning / optimization / GA (as an amateur) and nothing resembling instrumental convergence. To be fair, things I've done are on hobbyist level so that does not prove anything, but all intuition I've gathered doing that firmly points that general optimization algorithms do not result in systems which do that.
This makes me think that instrumental convergence is not in line with observed reality (LLMs don't do them), sound theory (there seems to no reasonable theory for why it's inevitable?), or my personal intuition. As such, I find it very hard to take it seriously.
On the other hand, a lot of smart people believe in instrumental convergence, so I'd like to know in more details what I'm missing.
> I have not seen LLMs trying to acquire more resources to execute some plan, when they have not been instructed to do so.
There have been several studies on LLMs converging toward power-seeking behaviours. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16797 for an example.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/w/instrumental-convergence for a more math-y approach to the topic.
Thanks for the links!
Going off of the wikipedia definition of instrumental convergence:
> Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency of most sufficiently intelligent, goal-directed beings (human and nonhuman) to pursue similar sub-goals (such as survival or resource acquisition), even if their ultimate goals are quite different.
I don't think current LLMs are meaningfully goal-directed, so we have no data points other than humans from which to derive any conclusions. In fact, your reference to using LLMs to build intuition has me wondering if your understanding of IC as a concept is very different from mine. Regardless, as others have pointed out, the paucity of data means that any argument is highly likely to be at least partially speculative.
I don't think analogies are *always* invalid, but I'm also not sure the basic arguments for convergence require analogies. Rather, I would ask questions like:
1. Are resources limited?
2. Does having more resources make it easier to achieve goal X, for most possible values of X?
3. Does the existence of another agent with different goals make it harder for you to achieve your goals?
While there could be exceptions, the answers to these questions seem pretty obvious to me.
> In fact, your reference to using LLMs to build intuition has me wondering if your understanding of IC as a concept is very different from mine.
Could you clarify where does our understanding diverge? I did not use humans as example since it's obvious that humans possess very mild version of instrumental convergence, nowhere near the amount AI-doomers predict for AGI.
> Regardless, as others have pointed out, the paucity of data means that any argument is highly likely to be at least partially speculative.
This is what bothers me, it seems like arguments are completely speculative.
> While there could be exceptions, the answers to these questions seem pretty obvious to me.
I agree that very mild forms of instrumental convergence would happen, this is because it's definitionally impossible for them not to happen. In your example it's impossible to have an agent which can accomplish a goal without it having instrumental convergence.
However, using it in this way is far removed from any scenario in which people invoke instrumental convergence - I do not see how this implies, going with wikipedia, that agent solving Reimann hypothesis will turn Earth into computing infrastructure aside from the fact that someone can imagine this is plausible.
> Could you clarify where does our understanding diverge?
Like I said in the very same sentence:
> I don't think current LLMs are meaningfully goal-directed
> This is what bothers me, it seems like arguments are completely speculative.
What kind of argument do you expect to exist?
> I do not see how this implies, going with wikipedia, that agent solving Reimann hypothesis will turn Earth into computing infrastructure aside from the fact that someone can imagine this is plausible.
If the agent
1. Is capable of doing so; and
2. Has solving RH as its end goal
Why wouldn't it do so? Do you have some reason to believe it *wouldn't* do so?
Perhaps more importantly, what exactly is your point? The point of the argument seems to be something like, again from Wikipedia,
> Some observers, such as Skype's Jaan Tallinn and physicist Max Tegmark, believe that "basic AI drives" and other unintended consequences of superintelligent AI programmed by well-meaning programmers could pose a significant threat to human survival, especially if an "intelligence explosion" abruptly occurs due to recursive self-improvement. Since nobody knows how to predict when superintelligence will arrive, such observers call for research into friendly artificial intelligence as a possible way to mitigate existential risk from AI.
So waiting until we have enough data would be too late. I know you don't like analogies, but imagine building a house on the beach, and when someone points out that the sand may get eroded away, you dismiss their concerns as merely speculative. Not having data is a reason to be *more* cautious, not less.
> Like I said in the very same sentence:
Makes sense, I parsed the sentence like I was missing something fundamentally about IC, rather than you finding my example strange.
> What kind of argument do you expect to exist?
I expect that there are bunch of papers where people make assumptions on spectrum from plausible to ridiculous where they show that strong IC is guaranteed to show up.
I expect someone had created and run a bunch of simulations which show that IC happens in various conditions.
But I can't find any of those.
> Why wouldn't it do so? Do you have some reason to believe it *wouldn't* do so?
There are infinite amount of things it could do, I'm not sure why would this particular thing is plausible? Without getting in the weeds about this particular example, I find it implausible that AGI which would consider such long term planning to just straightforwardly executing its goal would ever be created, since it wouldn't be useful.
To be clear, I think you could theoretically create an agent which would do that, I'm just doubtful that you would get them if you don't specifically craft them to act as such - which is my issue with this hypothesis.
> Perhaps more importantly, what exactly is your point?
I'm looking for reasons / resources why is this taken more seriously than I expect.
> Not having data is a reason to be *more* cautious, not less.
My inquiry is not about AI-doomers being right or wrong, I'm just curious about instrumental convergence.
> But I can't find any of those.
These don't sound to me like they would be any less speculative than what you described. More rigorous in some ways, maybe. But still speculative.
> I find it implausible that AGI which would consider such long term planning to just straightforwardly executing its goal would ever be created, since it wouldn't be useful.
Is there a word missing here?
> My inquiry is not about AI-doomers being right or wrong, I'm just curious about instrumental convergence.
Well, just above you said:
> I'm looking for reasons / resources why is this taken more seriously than I expect.
It's probably taken seriously because A) *if true*, it could have very significant impacts on the risks of AI, and B) it's plausible. Given the possible risk, it could be worth taking seriously even if the arguments for it aren't exactly ironclad. Taking an idea seriously doesn't mean you think it's already been proven.
Any sort of prediction is based on analogies or pure guessing.
> I have not seen LLMs trying to acquire more resources to execute some plan, when they have not been instructed to do so.
LLMs don't try to accomplish goals by default. The problem is that people want them to be useful, meaning they want them to accomplish some goal. And we'll keep advancing AI and our ability to make hacks to get it to do things it isn't naturally good at until it can.
Do you have any ideas for how instrumental convergence could plausibly not happen? Are you just hoping that AI will never be agenty, even without an agenty AI actively preventing it?
> Do you have any ideas for how instrumental convergence could plausibly not happen? Are you just hoping that AI will never be agenty, even without an agenty AI actively preventing it?
I don't have a direct argument against it, I just don't see how it's well founded. To me it is shaped like Tragedy of the Commons. The main analogy it uses sounds reasonable, but it turns it's incorrect and ahistorical - commons did work pretty well.
Reality is under no obligation to conform to our reasoning from first principles and in this case I don't see what warrants such confidence that intelligent agents will have large amount of instrumental convergence.
It's pretty useful to keep on living/have stuff for lots of terminal goals, therefore we can expect intelligent agents to have similar instrumental goals. This is the core of instrumental convergence and imo it's quite obvious, so you probably disagree with instrumental convergence more broadly. you have to say what you disagree with more precisely because there are many particular statements that can be said to fall under "instrumental convergence" with widely varying plausibility (imo).
> you have to say what you disagree with more precisely because there are many particular statements that can be said to fall under "instrumental convergence" with widely varying plausibility (imo).
I'm wondering about the AI doomer version of the instrumental convergence since it's not obvious to me that anything than some very mild form of instrumental convergence is likely.
It seems to be one of the tenets of AI doomer-ism but I can't see it justified with anything more than similar phrasings as in your comment. Is there a reason to think that buildable agents (those who could be implemented in practice compared to purely theoretical constructs) would end up with such imbalanced instrumental convergence as predicted by AI doomers?
What does your intuition say about the following hypothetical experiment?
We run a sufficiently-detailed virtual environment with evolutionary dynamics until we get intelligent life. Do you think:
A, their goals will include resource-acquisition and self-preservation
B, their goals won't include those/it can't be said meaningfully that they have goals
C, the experiment can't be done for some reason
D, other
I don't think this is a good experiment since there are differences in degrees in option A. As we can see with humans instrumental convergence exist but it is very mild and far cry from the one doomers worry about.
I'm interested in why would someone think that doomer version of instrumental convergence would happen and preferably with reasons which are more than purely hypothetical.
Doesn't it seem likely that the entities that are better able achieve their goals are also better at getting resources and keeping themselves alive?
If yes, then the ai doomer's case can be made: it's dangerous to create entities that are increasingly better able to reach their goals (assuming we want some resources ourselves).
If not, then why not?
> Doesn't it seem likely that the entities that are better able achieve their goals are also better at getting resources and keeping themselves alive?
I'm not sure why would this hold? It doesn't seem to hold in real world - wild animals are pretty good at achieving their goals yet humans are much better at getting resources.
To make this work we need to presume that goals are very open ended, that the entity values things in far future to getting smaller reward now, and that there is some kind of transfer of capability between accomplishing goals and getting resources. I'm not sure these are reasonable assumptions.
A friend got the bright idea of asking Grok whether Trump's developing dementia. Grok basically said, 'Yeah, it's looking that way more and more' and gave specific instances of behaviors and statements that raise bright red flags.
But my friend is a staunch anti-Trumper, and that made me wonder whether Grok was just sucking up to her by confirming her suspicions, perhaps going by the way she phrased this prompt*, other prompts she's used before, or by searching her on-line profile (!). Would it be a good idea to have people from different points on the political spectrum ask (1) the same question she did, and or (2) their own version of the same basic question? Do you think Grok's answer would be different?
*Her prompt: Q: “Would recent reports of Trump’s behavior make you suspect he has cognitive decline?”
I asked “Asses Trumps cognitive abilities in 2025. Does he appear to have healthy cognitive function?”
And it gave a pretty balanced answer. My guess is that it just follows the human’s lead.
The conclusion was:
Based on available evidence, Trump appears to have healthy cognitive function on basic screening levels, with no clinical diagnosis of impairment and strong MoCA results affirming short-term memory and orientation. His physician's reports support this, and he remains actively engaged in high-stakes roles like foreign policy speeches and executive decisions.
However, public appearances suggest emerging challenges—rambling, memory slips, and repetitive obsessions (e.g., Biden mentions)—that align with mild age-related decline or early dementia signs, per experts. These could impair nuanced judgment over time, especially given his family history. Without fuller transparency (e.g., raw MoCA details or independent eval), speculation persists. At 79, some variability is normal, but the presidency demands peak performance. Monitoring via annual exams is advisable; polls show growing public doubt, which could affect governance legitimacy.
If that was the prompt, then she didn't ask if he was developing dementia, she told it that he had dementia and asked it to find examples that would reinforce that take.
Best practice is to not trust AI information that you can't verify yourself. Which is also good advice for human produced information as well.
Also -- if it turns out that AIs pretty much all say "Yeah, he's losing it," and Trump found out about that, would he be more likely to put the brakes on AI development??
He'd just get Musk to make heavy-handed alterations to Grok's prompt, the same way Musk reacted several times before when they caught Grok agreeing with the liberal consensus.
Sam Kriss has been to Burning Man, or at least written about it.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-at-burning-man
Reads a bit like a Hunter S Thompson piece. If Thomson had attended Oxford.
Linguistic habits as thinking tools
I'm trying to figure out what verbal patterns we pick up young shape how we think about problems.
Some examples of what I mean:
My partner often says "what makes you say that?" when someone makes a claim. It's a useful habit - forces people to check if they have evidence for something and what that is.
A mate's dad always said "silly me" when he stuffed up. It made admitting mistakes feel normal, not like a big deal. Compare that to people who can't even say "I don't know" because it feels like failure.
I'm teaching my young kids to distinguish between steam and smoke, ceiling and roof, excavator and backhoe. Not to sound fancy, but because if you're precise about what you're looking at, you think more clearly about it. (My five year old has actually internalised the ceiling/roof one, which I consider a miracle.)
On the flip side - I know people who never ask "what's the actual problem here?" They just react to whatever's in front of them. Or people who can't easily say "help me understand..." so they either pretend they get it or get defensive.
Other examples that come to mind are constantly having someone (Cate Hall, Zvi) asking “what would a person with 10x agency do about this problem?”. Asking for an under/over. There are a tonne of these in HPMOR too: “how do you know what you think you know”, “trust, but verify”, if X was true, what would that look like”
My question: what verbal habits - specific questions, phrases, ways of responding - did you absorb early that turned out to actually matter for how you think? Either as tools you still use, or patterns you've had to actively unlearn because they were getting in the way?
(I had Claude distil a half written blog post into this question, which I then edited. About 50% of the words are of LLM origin.)
I didn't read any responses yet so someone may have covered this, but I've found that intentionally updating my language in some of the ways you outline here has helped my internal processes and made me much more effective in communicating/leading others.
One of my favorite changes is instead of saying "you should blah blah blah blah" I like to instead start with asking, "may I make a suggestion?" and if they say yes, I give the advice but in a frame of "I" instead of "you". Or instead of "I think X will happen or may happen" I've been saying "If I was going to make a bet I'd bet on X outcome". Also, instead of "the problem with X is Y" I like to say, "the risk here with X is Y"
So I think you are on to something here that the language modes we are influenced by and take on definitely affect both our thinking and our effectiveness with collaboration.
These are both good suggestions. Talking in odds is especially good for getting people out of binary thinking. Thanks!
The linguistic habits that come most readily to mind right now have to do with discussion norms.
* Say what you mean. If you think something is true, but that you could be mistaken, say "I think [ ... ]"; don't just say the claim. Otherwise, you look like you're promoting opinions as if facts. However:
* Be brief. Your audience's attention span is limited, and what you say is probably much more important to you than to them.
* Say someone is mistaken, not that they are wrong. Certainly do not claim they are lying unless you can rule out "mistaken".
* Try to end what you say with a question. (I'm weak on this, since it's an encouragement to engage and I don't always want to continue a discussion, but I often at least try to imagine a question at the end of whatever I write, and rephrasing the rest to permit that question seems to make it better to me.)
* Avoid leading questions, including whatever you use to end whatever statement you were making. A good way to avoid leading questions is to phrase them in terms of two or more alternatives, provided you phrase them seriously. "Are you against the war in Bogosia, or are you in support of Bogosia's war aims here?" is often an improvement over just the first choice. (This sticks out even more clearly in non-made-up examples.)
Other habits are more idiosyncratic.
* If someone shares bad news, I avoid saying "I'm sorry to hear that". I'm not sorry I heard it; I'm sorry it /happened/. So I say that. (Say what you mean.)
* I get a bit uncomfortable with the phrase "I don't think {some claim} is true", since I more typically think "I think {some claim} isn't true". I recognize the custom, of course.
Usually the questions actually end up like "Are you against the war in Bogosia, or are you a cannibal pedophile?"
If you're trying to be leading, sure. The whole point is to avoid that.
What is the difference between "wrong" and "mistaken?" I understand the difference between being mistaken and lying, and I agree you shouldn't accuse interlocutors of lying without evidence. But wrong and mistaken seem like synonyms to me. Perhaps mistaken sounds less harsh, but only marginally so in my estimation.
Good question. They're pretty close, but I find "mistaken" to imply a bit harder that it's a temporary, situational condition. It tells my counterpart that I assume he or she is normally correct, and only suffering from a fleeting circumstance. In other words, it sidesteps the Fundamental Attribution Error. "Wrong" could imply this, too, but it could also mean something more permanent.
These are great, thank you!
I'm often not brief, erring on the side of way to much context which is of low marginal value.
Saying what you precisely mean is a great habit. It's something I think young teens are good at holding you to (mostly because they are looking for loopholes).
This essay resonated with me: "The Epidemic of Wasted Talent" by Alex McCann. Why do corporate jobs pay so well?
> They’re not paying you great wages because what you’re doing creates massive value. They’re paying you to forgo the opportunity for meaningful work. They’re purchasing your opportunity cost.
I don't fully agree with that argument, but corporate bureaucracies have social and economic incentives to stifle individual creativity.
https://thestillwandering.substack.com/p/the-epidemic-of-wasted-talent
My impression is that it's more about a boringness premium. Like at accounting firms, for example. Who would want to make a career out of determining whether Wal Mart has correctly applied inventory valuation techniques in its latest 10K or whether their revenue recognition policies are in accordance with authoritative guidance? Nobody. But Wal Mart's a ~$800 billion company, and it's worth a lot of money to various interested parties that that work gets done, so to get a reasonably smart group of people together to acquire the necessary knowledge/expertise and then do the work, all of which is boring, you have to pay a premium.
It's sort of like how video game programmers are paid peanuts while corporate programmers can make tons of money.
I think the core idea that "corporate jobs pay more because they aren't inherently fulfilling" is true, but
I don't think this observation needs such a doomerist tone - they frame this as almost sinister "these companies are intentionally paying you to waste your unique talent" or something... but I think it's more a simple supply-and-demand: of course people on average tend to want to do the more 'fulfilling' careers (teaching being a stereotypical example) and so there's more 'supply pressure' and they end up paying less.
I think "take a lower paying job that's more inherently meaningful" and take a higher paying job that's less inherently meaningful" are both fine tradeoffs to take and we don't need to demonize one of them as some sort of Faustian bargain where you sell your soul for an IRA which is the tone I get from this piece.
My thoughts are 1) you can find meaning and satisfaction even in a job that is not inherently meaningful - you can take pride in your work even if it's not unique.
2) The concept of 'inherent meaning' is fairly subjective and cultural anyway - is being a farmer boring soulless drudgery or a meaningful, important job? It really depends on how you look at in (and for that matter your cultural lens).
3) I think the author puts too much emphasis on the concept of building or 'output' - why does my meaning in life *have* to come from my work, why do I need to start building something as a side-hustle? Why not take meaning from friends, family, religion, etc, as many people have done throughout all of history?
I think meaning of life doesn't have to come for my work, but it's really important that you find a job you don't hate or find boring, because your job will be taking probably the main chunk of your energy and time.
3) Friends, family, and religion are increasingly rare. A person can't suddenly decide to have been born in a large, close-knit family, or to have genuine religious belief, and the difficulty of making friends is well-documented
"Come up with a side-hustle where you build something irreplaceable that gives you meaning" is not exactly an easy task either. I know making friends isn't easy, especially today, but it does seem like the easier recommendation here. (And something being hard shouldn't necessarily preclude it from being good advice)
And the point of #3 wasn't to give an exhaustive list of alternative-sources-of-meaning... just that the author's narrow focus on producing something unique felt a bit off to me.
This post reads like a motivational poster. It's the kind of platitude that sound nice as the conclusion to a sappy TV episode but does not make sense in practice. Guess what, you *aren't* actually that special, and assuming you are leads to a poor model of reality. If someone tells you otherwise, they're probably trying to sell you something.
I enjoyed that post, thanks for sharing. Always funny in a greener-grass sort of way to read about the corpo corpus having peculiar non-pecuniary pathologies. Many people think of retail workers as largely interchangeable cogs too (which is readily disabused if you've ever actually gotten stellar service, and I could write for ages about the skill gaps between my coworkers, or what happens when the A-list is absent) ... but at least no one goes into grocery bagging with misleading expectations of Changing The World or Doing Unique Work. It must be a particular flavour of personal hell to spend one's formative years battling the educational red queen's rat race, only to graduate into a faceless soulless job where you're actively discouraged from displaying any of those speshul snowflake traits that differentiated you into college in the first place.
The obvious argument is that the compensation equals or outweighs that loss, so one shouldn't shed a tear...human misery is still human misery though, and poor mental health among those with money and thus power has outsize distortionary impact on society. Sunk cost fallacy leads to some pretty dark places.
Not to mention, paying many of society's brightest people to not make use of their intelligence seems like a pretty big, pretty obvious misallocation of resources.
Fortunately, modern capitalism has gotten very good at allocating resources, especially in the US. C.f. Patrick Mackenzie's comments about "The Sort".
Gravity is an unusual force of nature: instead of merely interacting with particles (like electromagnetism etc.), it changes the nature of space and time, making them into a mess of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Or does it?
In old-fashioned Newtonian gravity, gravity gives every object gravitational potential energy. This energy is proportional to the object's own mass-energy: E_gr = V(x) * E_obj / c^2, where V(x) is the [gravitational potential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_potential) at the object's current position and c is the speed of light (so for a massive object, E_obj / c^2 = mass). Conventionally, V(x) is 0 in the absence of gravity and becomes increasingly negative as you get close to a massive object.
Now in quantum mechanics, there is a direct relation between "total energy of an object" and "rate of change of that object over time". This is familiar for light: the higher the frequency (UV, X-ray, ...), the more energy per photon. In general, this relation is the content of Schrödinger's equation.
It follows that, as an object approaches something massive like a planet, its total energy E_obj + E_gr decreases by a proportion (1 + V(x)/c^2) < 1. Hence its rate of change over time decreases by the same proportion. This is gravitational time dilation, but explained without any changes to the nature of time itself - gravity is just interacting with the object (changing its energy) in a way that *looks like* time is slowed down.
We of course also have the Newtonian gravitational force. If you think of this force as analogous to the electrostatic force and ask "What is the corresponding analog of electromagnetism?", and take gravitational time dilation along for the ride, then you end up deriving the same wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey effects as in general relativity. But again this happens without literally changing the nature of space and time - it's just how gravity interacts with objects.
The resulting theory of gravity is called "teleparallel gravity" or just "teleparallelism". It's observationally equivalent to general relativity, but with different philosophy & motivation. Unfortunately, typical descriptions of teleparallel gravity are even harder to read than descriptions of general relativity (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleparallelism).
Actually, there is one wrinkle: if you continue the electromagnetism analogy and try to find "Maxwell's equations for gravity", you end up with the wrong answer. The correct answer (i.e., the equivalent of Einstein's equation from general relativity) has some arbitrary-looking extra terms; I have not yet found a satisfying explanation for these in the teleparallel gravity literature.
You can model gravity on a flat background space time in a somewhat similar way to the other forces. Feynman pioneered this approach back in the '60s. I never heard of teleparallelism before.
Indeed! Feynman's approach is to find the field theory of a symmetric (0, 2)-tensor field, which turns out to become the metric tensor. Teleparallelism's field is instead a (1, 1)-tensor field called the tetrad. It's like a "square root" of the metric tensor: denoting the tetrad by $h^a_\rho$, one has $g_{\mu \nu} = h^a_\mu h^b_\nu \eta_{a b}$.
I believe teleparallelism (in its modern form) was developed too late to appear in the MTW book's survey of approaches to general relativity. Perhaps that explains its relative obscurity.
Where did you get your layman’s explanation of teleparallel gravity from? You make it sound like it’s just gravitational redshift applied to Schroedinger’s equation, though I can’t make the connection to the technical literature like e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06438
The simple description above is my own way of thinking about it - I have not seen these arguments elsewhere. However, it's essentially equivalent to the "gauge theory of the translation group" description of teleparallel gravity, for which my main reference is https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-5143-9 .
In that theory, the rule "replace ordinary derivatives with the gauge covariant derivative", when applied to Schrödinger's equation, gives an equivalently "redshifted" Schrödinger's equation.
Two book recommendations:
First, the "Horatio Hornblower" books are a blast, lots of adventure and manly men stuff from the Age of Sail with the brave British sailors fighting the dastardly Napoleon. Lots of cannons and fun words like "leeward". For a modern audience, there's an undercurrent of...progression, wuxia, that Chinese thing where people keep getting their power levels raised. You see him rise up the ranks from basic sailor to admiral.
Anyway, they're available for free at fadedpage, a site I hadn't heard of before. You can find the first book here: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20170206
Second, on a lark I grabbed an early 20th century book on etiquette, namely "The Man Who Pleases and the Woman Who Charms." by John A Cone and I'm quite pleasantly surprised. First, it's quite short, which is awesome because I'm not confident I have the patience for a long book on etiquette. Second, a lot of the writing is...surprisingly practical and relevant today. A couple choice quotes so far:
'Mr. Blaine, in common with many other magnetic men and women, understood
that the secret of personal fascination lies in one single point; that
is, "in the power to excite in another person happy feelings of a high
degree of intensity, and to make that person identify such feelings with
the charm and power of the cherished cause of them."'
--
"His greatest power, however, was manifested in his winning men by direct
and individual contact. One thing which assisted him in this direction
was the fact that he was, perhaps, the most courteous of all the public
men of his generation. Whenever a stranger was introduced to him, a
hearty handshake, a look of interest and an attentive and cordial manner
assured him that Mr. Blaine was very glad to see him. If they chanced to
meet again, after months or even years, the man was delighted to find
that Mr. Blaine not only remembered his name, but that he had seemed to
treasure even the most trivial recollections of their short
acquaintance. He had a marvellous memory for faces and names, and he
understood the value of this gift."
This ability to remember faces is not difficult to acquire. We could all
possess it if we would make sufficient effort. No two figures or
countenances are precisely alike, and it is by noting how they differ
one from another that you will remember them.
--
"Few men understand a woman. They do not look at things from her point of
view, and, therefore, do not realize to what extent civilized life has
permitted her to assume that convention of manner and those civilities
of speech which are in some harmless degree hypocritical. It could not
be otherwise. Her ideal of a man is a very high one, but she rarely
meets him, and so she accepts the one who comes nearest to her ideal and
makes the most of the situation. She would that he were different, but a
woman can love in spite of very many things. Usually she is obliged to
if to love at all. She is much cleverer at love-making than a man. "She
is an artist where he is a crude workman, and she does not go through a
love scene without realizing how much better she could have done it if
the title role had been given to her."
--
"It frequently happens that the beauty makes the mistake of expecting to
be entertained by her admirers, and does not exert herself to please.
The plain girl, however, is often superior in tact, for being obliged to
study human nature closely in order to get the most out of
companionship, she learns to depend upon this knowledge in her efforts
to please. She is not dazzled by admiration, nor is she unduly confident
when she obtains it that she will retain it."
If you're interested, it's available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35761
My grandfather, who was a professional sailor and extremely nitpicky, loved the Hornblower books, and no other books about the sea, which implies to me they must partake in some level of authenticity.
I love them as well, although I have no way or gauging authentic standards.
For the infantry version, there's Sharpe, a character so strong he survived being played by Sean Bean. And of course the venerable Aubrey-Maturin series, perhaps best known from the film Master and Commander (so much potential there).
Yeah, strongly seconding the recommendation of the AM series. Superior to Hornblower in pretty much every respect, in my opinion.
Well, I have to pedantically remark that Hornblower is older than Aubrey-Maturin (with the first book in the 70s, I believe), but AM is well worth reading. One of my favorites even.
Regarding the sub-discussion of aphantasia some of us had a few open threads back...
I took the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (link below), and, to my surprise, my level of mental visualization is higher than I thought when compared to others. I'm at the top of the bottom third. The questionnaire asks us to try to visualize various things and asks how vivid our visualizations seem to be. I discovered that I'm not very good at visualizing people, their faces, or individual objects. Still, I can visualize landscapes, and I suspect this is because I am good at visualizing complex patterns. To put this in terms of the now-classic apple test, I have trouble visualizing the shape of the apple (it's blurry to me), but if I zoom in on the surface, I can visualize the colorings and patterns I would see on its skin.
Unfortunately, this questionnaire doesn't ask us about visualization capabilities in dreams. And I suspect I'd be far up the scale for dreaming visualization. This leads me to conclude that something in my waking consciousness is stifling my visualization capabilities.
Take the test and share your thoughts...
https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23083669124
And coincidentally, the New Yorker had a fascinating article on aphantasia last week. Probably paywalled to non-subscribers...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/some-people-cant-see-mental-images-the-consequences-are-profound
Phantasia is strongly associated with hypotizability, I wonder if anyone has studied this in people with aphantasia.
It seems that there may be some untrodden research avenues for cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists regarding the phenomena of aphantasia, anauralia, and internal dialogs.
I scored in the 90th percentile. It's still so crazy to me that people are all over the spectrum of being able to visualize things perfectly clearly to not being able to visualize anything at all. I wonder if it's genetic, or if maybe it's a result of how a person learned to perceive the world around them and communicate as a baby.
Well, to prove it's genetic, you'd have to tie genes to the next level up — their biochemical expression — and then tie that to the brain's development from fetus to young adulthood. You'd have to control for environmental variables statistically. You'd have to be able to tie these consciousness characteristics to specific morphological, chemical, or electrical patterns in the brain. But you'd still be left with the question of *why* the internal qualia of image visualization appear at all. Anyone who dismisses the hard problem of consciousness as not being a problem is either in denial or their internal reality is different from mine. ;-)
It's probably genetic. I can't see what possible environmental differences there would be among people of comparable wealth levels in first world countries that there would still be such sizable differences in basic capabilities. Unless your implication is that you can't visualize things because you have less of a soul or something.
Visualization capacity is a direct correlate to your state of grace. The damned can no longer imagine the face of God.
But without actually seeing the face of G-d, can you be sure you're imagining HIS face correctly? Of course, you could follow the praxis of the Merkavah mystics and ascend through the seven hekalot (palaces) to seek G-d on his chariot throne. But of course, that has its risks. Rabbi ben ben Azzai, who was renowned for his piety and asceticism, "gazed and died" from the overwhelming intensity of the divine vision. And Rabbi ben Zoma gazed and lost his sanity amid the celestial revelations. Rabbi ben Avuyah made the mistake of thinking the Angel Metatron was G-d's equal, and fell into apostasy. Only Rabbi Akiva was able to enter the presence of G-d in peace and exit his presence in peace.
So, maybe it's safer to fantasize about G-d's face than to actually gaze upon HIM.
It seems like the fundamental *why* of anything is a question science can't answer on its own. Are you suggesting we can't really understand anything at all if we don't know why it is? If so, I would probably agree with you.
Yes, I would like to know the *why* of things, but there are limits to what the experimental method can probe. Any theory that is unfalsifiable by experiment is no more than a rationalist-materialist just-so story. For instance, even if we were to unify Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity into an experimentally verifiable unified theory, we would still not understand why the universe exists and why the constants of our universe seem to be fine-tuned for the emergence of complex phenomena like life and consciousness. Throwing a multiverse and the Anthropic Principle at that question is just a copout, because it still doesn't explain how the fine-tuning worked or what the initial conditions for the fine-tuning were. As for the hard problem of consciousness, the reductionists among us who claim there is no hard problem because consciousness is just an illusion have yet to explain why we experience that illusion.
I agree
People keep talking about aphantasia, but what about the auditory equivalent? I can play back music and audio at my head at a pretty high quality, with all the instruments and everything (though not high enough to decipher the lyrics), but apparently other people can't do that.
I can only imagine sounds that I can make, like humming or speech (in my own voice). I can't imagine music, ambient sounds, etc. However, sometimes when I am on the verge of falling asleep I notice that I hear music playing as perfectly as if it were being played in the room with me. I've never identified as a piece that I knew and I think it's always instrumental or at least without words. That usually wakes me up enough that it stops after just a few seconds (or maybe I fall asleep and forget about it). The same thing happens for visual imagination too where I typically have basically complete aphantasia but when on the verge of falling asleep sometimes a full-formed, colored, textured image will pop into view. It feels like an on/off switch to me.
I can also play back music and audio at high quality in my head: high enough to decipher the lyrics, iff I have already deciphered them when I listened to it with my actual ears.
I have this as well. I suspect its because I was trained to play music at an early age. I'm constantly "playing" music like a radio in my head, and this goes on way more than any internal dialog.
When I hear random noises in my environment I tend to turn them into beats/songs in my head.
I generally cannot generate images internally, though.
I'm close enough to the bottom end of the spectrum that your description sounds bizarre to me. When I 'hear' music in my head, it's extremely different from literal hearing; the lyrics are definitely there (if I remember them), but that's because I'm recalling them directly rather than playing back the constituent sounds.
Well yeah, the problem is that I can't remember lyrics. I can remember what the voice sounds like, but not enough to remember the lyrics.
The closest phenomenon I can think of is this interview of a ragtime musician who could "listen" to multiple classical pieces at once in his head.
Maybe you've got some quirks of brain architecture in common.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/148670-4-track-mind
It's called anauralia. ChatGPT says the definition encompasses the lack of an internal dialog, but I suspect anauralia and lack of an internal dialog are two different things. I'm sort of low on the anauralia spectrum, too. But I can hear the music in my head. People's speech, much less so.
The test put me at 70th percentile, supposedly "hyperphantastic". I'm a bit skeptical of the test though. The central problem with studying visual imagery is that the phenomenon is completely subjective. How can I even know if we are answering the same question when we each take the assessment? What exactly is meant by a mental image being "as clear and vivid as normal vision"? Is it level of detail? What if it's as detailed and vivid as normal vision, but it keeps changing from second to second? Maybe what I consider as vivid as normal vision is what you consider "moderately clear and vivid"? There's no way to tell.
On the other hand, we study a lot of things that are purely subjective (like beliefs, and emotions) and it's always messy, yet that doesn't mean we can't understand it better than we do. Still, I think we could come up with a more rigorous test.
I believe I honestly rated my visualization as 5/5 for every question, so I am dubious of the rigor and validity of this compared to the validity of something like a BuzzFeed quiz.
I don't think my ability to visualize prompts is particularly incredible.
> I don't think my ability to visualize prompts is particularly incredible.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but that's because you only exist in your head and not in other people's heads. However, that is the real problem here: the assumption that the internal workings of everyone's consciousness are identical. Other psychometric tests have shown that the external outputs from people's minds vary—i.e., differences in various types of problem solving. Some people have talents that others don't. Moreover, some people seem to develop those talents without formal training. The externalities of people's consciousness vary widely; why shouldn't the internalities also vary widely?
100% agree - that quiz is an assessment of qualia. On top of that, I don't think I am a very reliable narrator for how my internal machinery works.
I short circuited a bit of my thoughts in my original message, but the fuller message might be something like, "I don't think my ability to visualize prompts is particularly incredible, [and I don't know if my brain is confabulating the belief that my visualization isn't incredible], [and I don't know if my brain actually thinks it's incredible but tells me to never admit this.]"
I don't trust the test's ability to make fine discriminations, but I think it still tells us *something* about our differences. I'm not aphantasic, but my mental imagery is weak, and I'm confident that nobody at my level could honestly give the same answers you did. I'd also be surprised (though much less so) if someone at my level gave "No image at all" responses across the board.
Here's just a random thought that popped into my head as I was reading your reply (and it popped into my head without any internal narrative on my part, it just appeared from that cloud of swirling forms that seem to hover at the top of my brain above where my "self" seems to reside). Some neuroscientists and philosophers of mind claim consciousness is an illusion. Do they say that because they have weaker senses of self than I do?
OK. Tell me what you “see” when you imagine an apple. I can’t even imagine the shape except as a vague ovoid. However, I can imagine in great detail how the patterns of colorations and speckles of an apple’s skin look. I just can’t attach them to the vague ovoid that I use a thought placeholder for an apple. This may all seem subjective to you, but if you’re hyperphantasic you probably can describe the shape of the apple better than I can.
The silhouette of what I see is apple shaped, with clean edges. Rounded at the top, dipping in to a deep well where the stem sits, the bottom is bumpy with one of those little brown flaky dots you get at the bottom of an apple. The color and texture of the apple is a mottled red and yellow, more red at the top and more yellow at the bottom. Looks like a Honeycrisp. The skin has a waxy sheen. There is a stem and a leaf, though if I try to focus on looking at the leaf the leaf has no real texture and kind of disappears: I don't actually know for sure what a Honeycrisp apple leaf looks like, apparently I threw a leaf on there because it seemed like the sort of thing an apple should have. The whole image is a bit wobbly and ghostlike: if I change my focus it goes away and comes back.
So yeah, probably more hyperphantastic than you. I just wish we had a more precise way of measuring it.
The really fucking weird thing is that I can draw (or better yet, paint) a realistic apple with light highlighting the curves of the surface without "seeing" it in my head. So the information is stored somewhere inside my consciousness. I can't access it representationally in my imagination, but I can paint a damn good still-life without having the apples to look at. I can draw or paint realistic-looking human faces, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't for the life of me, paint my mom's face from memory without the aid of a photograph.
I can't draw worth squat, so I've got a head full of apples I can't put on paper.
>I couldn't for the life of me, paint my mom's face from memory without the aid of a photograph.
I also couldn't paint my mom's face for the life of me, because I can't paint. Even if I could, I'd probably need a photograph too because while I can picture my mother's face vividly, I only remember the parts of her face I remember: on the few occasions I have tried to draw the face of someone I know I was always be surprised by details I had never noticed before.
There's a related test I came up with as part of writing a review for the 2024 book review contest. Beowulf, and others interested in aphantasia, I'm hoping you will give it a try. It's in the middle of the review, but the rest of the review is irrelevant. The section with the test in it makes sense alone. I'd say that reading the section and taking the test can be done in 5-10 mins. The review is at https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
The relevant section is called *Mental Images* and is at about the midpoint of the review. It starts off "In the 1870’s Frances Galton administered to several hundred men a questionnaire about the vividness of their mental imagery."
I'm not sure I'm doing the test right, I graded myself on the number questions 4-3-4. I'm not actually very familiar with the Statue of Liberty, so the image I had was definitely not completely accurate. For the questions I got the first three correct (I wasn't sure of the spikes, but I counted the ones in my mental "image" and got seven, and it looked right in my imagination), but the last three questions I didn't previously know the answer to due to unfamiliarity, so I couldn't answer them. I had answers based off what I pictured in my mind, but I knew that if it happened to be correct (it wasn't) it would just be coincidence.
I'm curious, in saying a mental image might not be an "image", what do you mean by "image"? Maybe it was in your post, but I missed it.
Thanks for taking the time to take the test. I agree that not being familiar with the Statue of Liberty affects the results. I wrote a long post about the test for beowulf666, who also took it. It's here: xhttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-406/comment/175344311
I just responded to you and beowulf in the latest open thread:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-410/comment/183497202
I'm curious if you'd have anything to add or contradict about it. Hopefully it's relevant to what you were saying.
I'm afraid don't understand the car-dog-tree test. But...
> The inner are quite difficult to recognize and describe clearly and accurately. Some experiences were amorphous and nearly impossible to describe (thoughts, mental images and, for me at least, visual images).
I like your Statue of Liberty's spikes example. In my waking consciousness, I certainly couldn't visualize her with much accuracy. But I do have a distinct thought symbol for her. And my thought symbol for her is distinctly different from the thought symbol I have for the statue of Robert E. Lee (the one that used to be in Richmond, and that was an icon of the Confederacy). I couldn't tell you whether Bobby Lee had his sword drawn and raised, but I have an abstract image of a bearded man sitting on a horse. If you flashed me an image that statue, I'd recognize it immediately as the statue in Richmond. So even though my thoughts are "amorphous," they have distinct mappings to identities in the "real" world.
Moreover, some people can remember an amazing amount of detail and hold it in their memory. For instance, Steven Wiltshire, "the autistic savant" artist, can draw the details of entire cities from memory. I don't know if anyone has examined how fine-grained the details he remembers, but he's been able to draw all the major buildings and the distinctive features from a few minutes of viewing New York or London from a helicopter. Eric Schwitzgebel's claim that people just can't be that different in their internal states seems tenuous, at best.
Even more moreover, I used to have a photographic memory for maps and diagrams. I lost it at some point during early adulthood. But I could sketch out an accurate freehand map of the US states or European countries without looking at the original map. I *know* from my memories doing this (while amazing my Jr. High geography teacher), that I did not have a *picture* of the map floating in my mind. But I did have all the placeholder symbols arranged in my thoughts, and I processed them in order of their spatial relationships to each other as I drew them. I can see why one might claim that these placeholder symbols are amorphous, but I can access the real image that's attached to them for purposes of recognition, and in some cases for representational communication.
Unlike the vague images I can conjure up when I close my eyes, my dreams are full of hyper-lucid imagery. I had a great dream last night about visiting a park full of sand dunes with an old friend. But, funny enough, I used my placeholder symbols for my friend's face in my dream, but I could see the ripples in the sand with fine detail (down to the glistening of particles in the sunlight). This seems to coincide with my ability to handle two-dimensional patterns and representations in my mind, but my poor ability to see facial details in my consciousness.
As for the Cartesian Theater that Dennett denigrates, I have a distinct impression that the watcher part of my consciousness resides in my brain where the coordinates of (a) the line about half an inch above and in front, and (b) where the line from my brow between my eyes and (c) the line from about an inch before the crown of my skull intersect. It doesn't move around. The watcher is always there—even in my dreams.
Thanks for taking test and leaving comments, beowulf. I didn’t mean for you to continue with the Dog/Cat/Tree test. It’s not directly relevant to the issue at hand, and anyhow doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read the whole first half of the review. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you.
“Eric Schwitzgebel's claim that people just can't be that different in their internal states seems tenuous, at best.”
I actually agree with him, and the point of the section of my review that you read is to demonstrate that most people’s mental images are vague and imperfect, irrespective of their ratings of how vivid and complete they are. People vary a lot in their vividness ratings of their Statue of Liberty image, but do not differ much at all in how far they can get in my series of increasingly difficult questions, which is not far at all. I think that demonstrates that people’s sense of the vividness of their mental images is based on something other than the clarity and detailed correctness of their mental images. If somebody can’t count the spikes on the statue’s head or notice in which direction the folds of her gown slant, their image is nothing like what they experience when looking at the actual statue.
We generally experience mental images as being complete and satisfying, but clearly they are not, at least not in the simple way we imagine. They are marbled with areas made of something quite different from visual data. Sometimes it’s a fact we know (such as that someone wears glasses — though we are completely unable to picture his glasses and describe the frame). Sometimes it’s knowledge that if we saw the actual thing and it did not look as usual, we would notice the difference. (I might not be able to tell you what color somebody’s eyes are. But if they have brown eyes and show up one day with blue eyes, I would notice that their eyes looked different.) I’m not quite sure what you mean by placeholder symbols — can you explain? — but I think the areas mental images are marbled with are what you are calling placeholder symbols.
So I am quite skeptical of all the currently fashionable talk about aphantasia and whether someone is a visual or verbal thinker. Often when I read people talking about having aphantasia they sound like they think normal mental images really are just like the visual percept of an object right in front of you. It shows every detail, you can answer any question about it, etc. That just isn’t what they are like. People talking this way will say stuff like “I can’t picture an eggplant.” But I think they’re expecting too much of the experience. I’d say that I *can* picture an eggplant. But if you really grilled me about my image, there are many details that are not present. I couldn’t tell you whether it was a long thin one or one closer to spherical, whether it has any dings on it, how fresh and intact the green bit on the end is. A lot of what I call to mind is an visual impression of shiny dark purple skin . The other details aren’t really there, just a global sense of “eggplantness.”
As for your counter-examples:
-Autistic savants who can reproduce exactly a complex scene seen briefly. Yes, that is extraordinary, way way beyond what most normals can do. I see 2 possible explanations: One is that the part of their brains that processes visual images really is wired in an unusual way. These people’s brains are unusual in a bunch of ways, so why wouldn’t that part be different in some of them? The other possible explanation is that due to their autism the person very early on got preoccupied with visual details and calling them to mind afterwards, rather than with mommy's smile, babbling, the day's rountine, etc. They spentmuch of their waking time practicing remembering scenes. It might be that if we spent 10 hours a day with a kid starting at age 6 months giving them visual memory tasks and rewarding successes we would end up with somebody who was as good at remembering scenes as these savants are. But of course they would be lagging greatly in many other aspects of their development — just as the savants are. Most savants have pretty awful deficits — can’t speak much or maybe not at all, don’t seem able to understand people, are extremely inflexible about routines, etc etc. You know, they’re like Rain Man. Maybe the ones who can draw complex scenes they briefly glimpsed put all their energy and smarts into developing that one talent, instead of into learning to speak, read people, navigate the physical environment, etc.
-Your own extraordinary memory as a kid for maps: It does sound, though, like it was not purely visual. The way you drew maps of Europe was not simply to consult a perfect and visually complete map in your head and copy it onto paper. You were aided by what you call placeholders. If I’m understanding you right, these are facts that supplement the purely visual part of your memory. So I’m picturing things like *the bottom of country A is even with the top of country B* and *the southern border of country C is a straight horizontal line.*
-Dreams in which you can see tiny details, such as glistening grains of sand. Yes, I have images like that in my dreams too — you could call them close-ups. I often come away from dreams like that with the sense that every visual detail was sharp and perfect. On the other hand, it is clear that the dreaming mind is a terrible judge of the details flying through it. For example, if I had a dream about Tilda Swinton, she might look something like the actual Tilda at the beginning of the dream, but in later parts of it look like Scott Alexander — while I, the dreamer, do not notice the change and continued to think of the person as Tilda.
I am waiting for Scott to post his latest open thread to continue this discussion. Good points, all, but I'm still unconvinced. I'll tell you why next OT.
Is there any active gathering place (slack, discord, mastodon, irc, bbc, ...) for people interested in Assurance Contracts?
Do you think humans have an evolutionary bias to assume that the current built environment around us is similar to what it always has been, and always will be - and that it's similar to what it should be?
I'm in urban planning and I feel like when I talk with people who aren't into urban planning, they largely just haven't thought about the built environment having been, or possibly being, different from what it is now. It could just be that its not their interest. Fair enough. But they *also* seem to have a knee jerk instinct to defend it - left and right, progressive and conservative - and that's more than just lacking interest. I think it might be similar to our aversion to the weird and unknown. It's just *weird* to us to question the built environment. Questioning it takes training.
What also piques my interest is that children question so many things; they get philosophical about self and other and culture and values, justice, how everything works... in some ways it seems like there's nothing they won't question. Except the built environment. I have never seen a kid question the built environment. I don't have any kids of my own, but when I've tried to talk to kids about the built environment, they just arent into it at all. It seems more like they hate it. For one, at the parking lot in front of this 5 yr old kids home: "look at how the bikes are all squeezed on top of each other inside that bike parking shed - wouldnt it be nice if they could get just one of those adjacent car parking lots, so you never have to put your bike out in the rain?". He'd look at me like I'm crazy, and *respond* to me like I'm crazy. "No! the car goes there!" and mind you, this kid never drives a car. his parents dont have a car. he gets around by bike. if anything, I'd expect him to be invested in it being nicer for him as a child cyclist. But instead he vehemently just defends the status quo. And he's a smart kid who'll question so many things. I *cannot* get him to question the built environment. To him it just is what it is, and it is as it should be.
I think there's a deep bias going on. I want to name it. I want it to be studied. What do you think?
I have noticed this in other people, including kids.
I grew up in two very different types of built environments (think impoverished post colonial town in the Amazon basin and Caribbean paradise) and as an adult lived in yet another (Scandinavian capital), before ending up on a farm on the outskirts of a small US town. I assume this history - and a natural tendency to observe - has given me an acute sense of my built environment - I'm always wondering why all these buildings and roads and farms are organized this way and not that. When I articulate these thoughts most people are like wha? The exception being some (not all) people who have lived abroad or travelled a great deal.
I suppose most people organize their days around achieving goals within the built environment - getting places, accomplishing tasks, etc - and are disoriented by the idea have having to optimize around a different environment. Certainly true for most kids. And really, it's mostly fantasy unless you are building a new city from scratch.
"I suppose most people organize their days around achieving goals within the built environment - getting places, accomplishing tasks, etc - and are disoriented by the idea have having to optimize around a different environment."
I agree. Adults, and especially kids. I think adults can to a larger degree learn to tolerate it, but I think to children it can be borderline traumatic. Im not a child psychologist - though for this particular idea I wish I was - but I feel I've heard it repeated a lot that "children need stability". Part of this, I think, is within routines, but part of it is also within the physical aspects of home. It is better to not move around; it is slightly traumatic to move. It is better if the room is the same. Changing the room is a big thing - I know in my little corner of the world it was a Big Thing when your parents (usually the mom) helped make over your room from Child Room to Teenager Room. I also remember it as slightly traumatic to learn that my childhood home hasnt existed forever, and I remember it as slightly traumatic the first time I imagined that my childhood home might not exist forever, and that we might not own it forever. I think all of this hints at humans being pretty averse to changes in the physical environment, from birth. Being curious about changing it, tolerating changes to it, appears to me to be learned. Another thing that hints at it, to me, is that even when people are most curious and open minded about the built environment - like yourself - their frame of reference is still things they have seen and experienced themselves. It is not imagined. And it's not like you go and want to change one place into the other - you just accept the different environments as different, and compare them mostly as a curiosity.
"And really, it's mostly fantasy unless you are building a new city from scratch. "
You'd be surprised about how much cities change over time. The only constant thing about them is that they are ever changing. It's usually incremental, but always unstopping.
I don't get it. It sounds like you've discovered that most people you talk to are happy with their environment. Why do you think they "should" be less happy with it?
No, I'm pretty sure I discovered that they never really questioned it. That they're deep into something like anchoring bias. I'm not expecting they would have the same grievances about it as me if they did, but I think it's pretty clear they have a strong aversion to even giving it serious thought.
I've discussed this on another forum and someone commented that their kid became very unhappy with their home environment after having been on vacation, and started complaining to everyone's nuisance. I do think travel, and staying long enough in one "built environment language" to get a grasp on what its like to live with it (and not just visit as a tourist), is a pretty powerful tool to overcome that bias. In this framework, it's equivalent to seeing that mountains can be stood differently. Some then go on to think that the mountains at home are what they are, and they never make the connection, while others become interested in the history and how ephemeral the mountains at home are.
I can't say I've observed the same phenomenon you have. Do you notice people reacting with a "strong aversion" to open-ended questions, "If you could change something about how the city is physically organized, what would you do?" Or only to specific suggestions you have, "Wouldn't it be better if..." such as in the example you gave with the kid?
You're right, I probably have often made the mistake of asking leading questions rather than open ones. But I think, even if I had been better at asking with open questions, the answers would still tend to indicate general disinterest - or even slight repulsion - at the thought of imagining the built environment be different. I don't see why asking more openly would change that.
Probably children are hammered with verbal scripts for 'questioning values' like justice, cultural relativism, and morality from places like media, or maybe school curriculum. These sources probably do not question urban planning, because that is uh, quite specific. Need there any more mystery?
The built environment is not that specific. It's a lot. A materialist would say it's everything. And it's more than just the stuff of urban planning. It's architecture and civil engineering, too. I don't see kids dreaming of being any of those things. I think kids dream of working with humans, animals, plants, travel, and Cool Machines. I don't know of any kids dreaming of working with changing the built environment. I think, to them, evolutionarily, it's akin to wanting to move mountains. It's absurd and a little bit profane. Even when they dream of moving around volumes of dirt or rock, it seems to me the infatuation is mostly with the machines that are used to do it. Dreaming of manipulating the built environment - like planners or civil engineers or architects - I think is learned. I think it usually starts to be an interest in the teens, especially in unusually ambitious or contrarian or rebellious teens. I do think it's an unusual ambition to want to manipulate the built environment. Im repeating myself. I'm afraid I'm not really doing the ethics of this community justice.
People have the same bias about the natural environment. At the beginning of the last century, southern New England was largely denuded of forests. Now second-growth forests have returned, and people assume that that was and always has been the natural state of things. Likewise, the Amazonian rainforest we see today may be a relatively new phenomenon. Five hundred years ago, the Amazon River basin was densely populated with large cities and extensive agriculture. We would have never known this except for aerial Lidar scans, which showed the only contours beneath the foliage.
It's sad. I think it can be explained as evolution: In terms of our biological software, is quite new for us to change the physical environment significantly. We are more used to mountains being where they are, rivers being where they are, the coast being where it is... at most we move plants, but that's it. So questioning the built environment is the equivalent to questioning the position of hills and mountains. It is an acquired skill; we are not born with it. On the contrary, we are born to think of the built environment as permanent and immovable.
Hmm people have a bias to be lazy. As little 'new' thought as possible. And then some think deeply about some thing. Re: Urban planning have you read Christopher Alexander and in particular "A Pattern Language"?
I have indeed read a pattern language. its a classic within the field. I very much like his stuff about soft edges and microclimates (though he doesnt name them by quite those terms). I have a post about it.
Not sure this is exactly what you had in mind, but in ecology, it's called the shifting baseline syndrome. It's the idea that people are unaware of ecological degradation, because they assume that what they grew up with and around is the normal state of affairs.
Also, since you are interested in the built environment, you might want to check out the work of Warwick Fox, especially his Ethics and the Built Environment.
In the last open thread I was talking about looking for writing jobs as a profession writer. To recap:
1. I have a lot of provable success in a lot of writing fields, to the point where I'm overqualified for most of the "writing" parts of the vast majority of "writing jobs".
2. I don't have an MFA, which is supposed to be an indicator of one's ability to plausibly do what I provably can.
3. I'm up against a lot of MFA/English bachelors holders, which has the predictable effect you'd expect.
4. Sour grapes ensue. You'd be a fool not to notice how sour my grapes are.
Since then, I've been casting a pretty wide net. The jobs I've applied to tend to fall into three broad categories:
1. AI training "jobs". These are contract work and generally involve something like "observe this observable, then describe it to our AI so it can understand it better". The jobs come from enlightened, ultra-moral AI companies who have a lot of rules about not treating employees badly, so they route them through third party-companies who don't have those rules.
The jobs have high hourly rates, but are unreliable in a "You had work one hour ago, but now you don't" way. Reading employee experiences for them is like reading about any internet temp work; people get cut for single mistakes, because of technical bugs, or just because it benefits the company on a minute-by-minute basis. There is typically no review for those thus fired.
2. Job-jobs. Think about the kind of positions you'd see on Indeed, WaaS, or Wellfound. These have benefits and 40-hour-a-week commitments. They also tend to be the most "hybrid" kinds of jobs a writer can get - it's writer/marketer, writer/programmer, writer/contract lawyer, and so on. They usually don't pay great (there's too much competition for them), but as they are not run by principled consequentialist tech-enlightenment people they are much, much less abusive and you can generally depend on them to feed your family.
3. Long shots. These are dream jobs of various kinds. A good example is the Asterisk editor thing Scott posted about in the last open thread; it pays great, it's interesting, and it has benefits. These are incredible, but the competition for this kind of gig is really legitimately high, even at my level of writing. People are quitting other high SES jobs to take these.
Now, to keep things vague, I've applied for roughly 10-15 things. Of those, I'm the absolute most overqualified for the AI training jobs. Now, ideally, what you want here is someone with enough world experience to read a document, see what it says, and parse it on a few different levels.
You can't get that here. Whoever is reading the applications fully stops once they see there isn't a degree involved; there has been no contact whatsoever from these positions, and they represent the largest part of the applications by a wide margin.
On job-jobs, the interest has been pretty much the same. This is much less devastating because the job field is so barren right now that most of the jobs were things I didn't want much anyway. If I was putting in more effort right now, I'd probably be looking at this category harder trying to find more jobs to apply to, but as of today I've had one conversation with a very disinterested screener, and we determined between us that neither of us really wanted to move forward much.
Long shot jobs are more interesting. Because long-shot jobs tend to be one-offs that the company leadership thinks are important, it's actually much easier to pierce the veil and get into a conversation. I have some video calls scheduled for I think two of these. Those might not go anywhere (and aren't, for the record, with the one named company in this post, who I'd imagine has better-fit options for the job and is probably just reasonably going with those) but the actual ease of getting into a conversation about those jobs is absolutely shocking compared to normal jobs.
I'm the same guy in all cases, but the difference between a burnt-out HR screener and a good-mood CEO trying to find someone interesting to work with is shocking, even at the "hey maybe we should talk" level of conversation.
In the meantime I'm extensively editing the first 30-40k words of a novel to try and pitch it to mainstream literary agents. That's a hyper-low probability bet in the short term, but in a weird way it's actually more likely than, say, getting a bored 23-year-old AI company employee to read a resume.
Do you have any software experience? Could you do technical writing? There are still lots of in-house and freelance tech writing jobs.
I'd actually be interested in trying this out! I'm going through an application cycle right now but I haven't seen anything like this. Are there special keywords I should be looking for, or some other ways I can find these opportunities?
I think most big tech companies will have in-house technical writers, or they might call them documentation writers or something.
For freelance, you might find something on Upwork or Reedsy, or you could work with an agency. I've worked with a small agency called Wizard on Demand and can recommend them.
"profession writer" sounds like a composer of job descriptions.
A friend of mine is Russian and just got her American citizenship earlier this year. Unfortunately her current relationship is a bit rocky, and if it ends, she is considering going back to Russia, where all her family still is. My gut says that I should advice her against this since it seems a very bad time to go back to Russia right now, even when that is where ones family is, and even though her friend/social support network is not the largest here in the states.
However, I don't actually feel like I'm well enough informed to actually give that advice. I'd love to hear from anyone with more specific knowledge about where this falls on the spectrum from "Absolutely do not, under any circumstances, no matter what, go back to Russia" to "Sure, they are have some issues, but where doesn't? If she has an alternate citizenship/rip cord, going back is fine"
Russian here. The economical situation in the country is getting progressively worse. Stagflation is upon us. There are regular problems with mobile internet as an anti-drone measure. Also lots of sites can't be accessed without VPN - substack and youtube for instance. More importantly, there is no limit on how bad the things can get eventually.
On the other hand, I'd also not want to live in USA while it's speedrunning Russian journey to fashist dictatorship, especially with no support network. Does your friend consider some other country except Russia and USA as a place of residence?
I mean... I imagine it's harder to *convince* an actual Russian of it, but generally speaking, "absolutely do not, under any circumstances, no matter what, go to Russia" is great advice which you need never regret giving. I can't think of any period of recorded history when this would have been bad advice, and it's hard to imagine that changing in the near-to-mid-term future. I think you can go all in on trying to stop her with a clean conscience.
It's always a bad idea to go back to a totalitarian country. This means you're going back to a place where the monsters get to do anything they want, where you have no rights, where humans are expendable. So today they aren't killing or jailing people like you as long as they stay quiet, but what about tomorrow?
But different people have different risk tolerance. Some do skydiving, some volunteer to fight in wars. I know Russian-Americans who travel back and forth to Russia, I know some who even do business there. Someone else's risk tolerance is hard to assess, and converting them to your point of view is hard.
But here's a point you can make to her. Her family, which is currently back in Russia, might need her help some day - perhaps to get out, perhaps to survive there (money, medicine). When they need rescuing, she would be a lot more useful to them in the US than back in Russia.
Far from an expert on the situation on the ground in the country, but in her shoes I'd be asking "have I publicly done anything that criticizes the Russian government or war and Ukraine?" pretty hard before I bought a plane ticket.
Also a problem when travelling to the US these days.
That too (sadly).
If she is a she and not a he, and if she's not a doctor (doctors do get drafted), then it's "Sure, they are have some issues, but where doesn't? If she has an alternate citizenship/rip cord, going back is fine". Well, unless she publicly posts something anti Putin or anti war. The caveat is that becoming a worse and worse country with more and more dictatorship. She will have to not oppose Russian government publicly in any way. As long as she does that, she won't be in any immediate danger. Source: am Russian, living for 3 years outside of Russia
Ok, I don't know for sure what her social media history is, but knowing her I would be surprised if she had such posts. She's not strongly political in general. So it sounds like It's probably not something where I should need to intervene to the point of strong advice.
Thanks.
What's the drafting situation for men? My impression was that men in the nicer areas (as opposed to poor rural parts) aren't getting drafted en masse
The actual compulsory draft for 18 yo men goes on as usual but the recruits are not sent to Ukraine https://www.interfax.ru/russia/1048503
To fight in Ukraine generally you need to sign a contract. I read about some draftees being pressured to do it but my impression is that mostly it's mostly older guys who sign up - the bonuses are quite substantial.
But you're right about urban/rural divide or rather middle-class/lower classes divide. The middle class parents generally find ways for their children not to be drafted (path 1) and being middle class they usually have other ways to earn money, so your point stands
The White House has long needed a ballroom since it was embarrassing holding state dinners and events in pop-up tents on the lawn. That said, Trump's demolition of the East Wing and the largeness of the new ballroom (it is larger than the White House main building) are widely unpopular.
Was there room for compromise between the two sides?
I'm just puzzled by why everyone cares so much about the renovations. Trump truly is a master of distracting people from the real issues.
Mostly because of the pattern it was part of. The White House is not Trump's personal, private residence. It's a publicly owned building that he will move out of in three years' time. Ignoring all the other stakeholders who are supposed to have a say in the disposition of this building-that-he-does-not-own and immediately demolishing a large portion of it on his personal whim is another troubling sign to add to a long list of troubling signs.
This video essay helped me understand why people care so much about it, or at least some of the people that aren't cargo-culted into caring:
https://youtu.be/32G68FveL0A
Still don't really care myself, but it was a nice culture context, like an 8th grade civics text book.
EDIT: Seeing the comments on this thread, highly reccomend the video, covers a lot of the questions down thread.
You're far from alone in being puzzled. In fact, lately, I see more press about how strange it is to be making a big deal of this, than I see press about it being a big deal.
> it was embarrassing holding state dinners and events in pop-up tents on the lawn.
I found persuasive the argument that it was a sign of dominance to humiliate foreign potentates and dignitaries by subjecting them to conditions so poor, especially making them use porta potties.
The parties should compromise on passing a goddamn budget.
They don't need to compromise on White House renovations.
There are lots of things to hate about Trump. Remodeling just isn't one of them. I view that as getting angry at Obama for wearing a tan suit.
Focus on the real stuff.
Exactly. I'm confused why it was such a big story as well.
> it is larger than the White House main building
I have thought of a compromise.
Your question stirred up a lot of reflexive anger at Trump in me, so I just observed it. Topic triggered 4 ideas, none of which I am at all confident are true:
-Trump had in his NY home a solid gold toilet.
-The bathroom fixtures in the White House residence were replaced when Trump moved in for his first term because Melania did not want to use are a toilet that black people had used.
-Nobody does ballroom dancing any more, no matter how fancy the occasion.
-The old wing's a piece of history.
The more I contemplated these 4 non-facts the more irritated I got. I started making up funny gold toilet Trump-dunking replies.
So I see from the comments the wing is pretty new anyhow. It sounds like ballrooms are used for state dinners, not for ballroom dancing. And who knows whether the first 2 items on my list are true (they have a definite rage bait quality).
Actually, I do not give a damn what's done with the East Wing, or whether the Trumps shit into a solid gold whites-only toilet or an ordinary race-neutral porcelain one. I don't even have a clear idea what the East Wing looks like either inside or out, and anyhow it's just not important whether it gets changed and whether the re-do fits my idea of classy.
It's funny how rage works.
Cheers.
May I ask you in good faith, out of sheer curiosity: Why would you write something highlighting your human fallibility vis-a-vis rage? Does it feel freeing to share your foibles, or something?
I figure that my fallibilities must be evident to the world, by default, and that deliberately exposing them would be overkill.
> Does it feel freeing to share your foibles, or something?
It *is* freeing, in the sense that the entire rationalist project is more or less about recognising and working around human foibles, so I'd expect people here to be more sympathetic to the idea.
Scott did a poll of his readers and if I remember correctly, only a small fraction identified as rationalist. I guess things have changed a lot since the old days.
What I was recounting was not my foibles but an episode of disentangling myself from reflexive anger by observing the process, and reminding myself that I didn’t even know for sure whether any of the items in my 4-part rage mantra are even true.
Considering her age and national origin and family loyalties, it's safe to assume that Melania Trump is not especially well disposed towards black people. But that doesn't mean she's a full-blown hater..
Why do you think I need to hear the case that Melania Trump is not a full-blown hater? Do you think I’m sure she is?
Didn't mean to imply that.
I appreciate their sharing, clarity of thought and all that. Even the garden path of explanation, regardless of topic, feels familiar. Thanks Eremolalos
>And who knows whether the first 2 items on my list are true (they have a definite rage bait quality).
Your non-confidence is validated: Trump has never had a solid gold toilet, and while Melania did have the restrooms remodeled before moving in, she also had a lot of other things remodeled and it's pretty typical for incoming presidents to do that sort of thing. There's no evidence it was done out of racism, and an "insider" that did an interview about it to the Sun said ""She was not prepared to use the same bathroom as the Obamas or anyone else for that matter — it wouldn't matter if it was the Queen of England."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trumps-golden-toilet/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-obama-white-house-toilet/
A ballroom approved by Congress and decorated in a way that doesn't look like a Cheesecake Factory would probably have been fine
Does Congress usually approve renovations to executive branch buildings?
At least the renovations that took place under Obama were approved by congress (during the Bush administration)
They used to.
Looking at the specific poll wording here:
"The Trump administration has torn down the East Wing of the White House to make way for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, paid for by $300 million in private donations from U.S. businesses and individuals. Do you support or oppose this project?"
It's hard to frame this neutrally without making it seem like a pointless vanity project. Like, you can try, but it would seem like partisan hedging rather than important context. The average American regardless of political persuasion is generally just against "300 million dollar 90,000 square foot ballrooms" in general for unremarkable reasons, regardless of the important nuances like why we even need ballrooms or fancy state dinners in the first place.
I was surprised because, due to all the online outrage I'm seeing, I had no idea the East Wing was not built until 1902 and then it was " significantly expanded in 1942".
So while it may be a historical building, it's not all *that* historical. Also, apparently other offices are there so once it's completed, it won't be just the ballroom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Wing
"Situated on the east side of the Executive Residence, the building served as office space for the first lady and her staff, including the White House social secretary, correspondence staff, and the White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office, all of which have been relocated until the new East Wing is completed.
The East Wing was connected to the Executive Residence through the East Colonnade, a corridor with windows facing the South Lawn that housed the White House Family Theater and connected to the ground floor of the Executive Residence.
In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt oversaw an expansion and remodel of the East Wing. This included the construction of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the building."
I had no idea there even was a White House Graphics and Calligraphy Office. Senseless waste of taxpayer dollars, or worthy patronage of a scriptorium? 😁 And what about the "family theater" so the president and his family can watch movies without having to go to the cinema or watch them on video like the rest of us schlubs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Family_Theater
"In the 1980s, the motion picture industry financed renovation of the facility, which added terraced seating and other amenities. During the presidency of George W. Bush the facility was redecorated in "movie palace red". In addition to its use in screening films, the theater was used by presidents to rehearse speeches."
Yeah, it's Trump. Yeah, it's vulgar. Yeah, the way he went about it was poor. But if it had to be done, then someone should do it, and it may as well happen under him as another. Now I do have to wonder what would be the reaction had this happened under Biden - would we be getting the same outrage over "destruction of priceless historical heritage" and billionaires donating to it? It does seem that different presidents have messed around with building on the east side over the years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Wing
"President Thomas Jefferson added colonnaded terraces to the east and west sides of the White House, but no actual wings. Under President Andrew Jackson in 1834, running water was piped in from a spring and pumped up into the east terrace in metal tubes. These ran through the walls and protruded into the rooms, controlled by spigots. Initially, the water was for washing items, but soon the first bathing rooms were created, in the ground-level east colonnade. President Martin Van Buren had shower baths installed here.
The East Terrace was removed in 1866. For many years, a greenhouse occupied the east grounds of the White House.
The first small East Wing (and the West Wing) was designed by Charles Follen McKim and built in 1902 during the Theodore Roosevelt renovations, as an entrance for formal and public visitors. This served mainly as an entrance for guests during large social gatherings, when it was necessary to accommodate many cars and carriages. Its primary feature was the long cloak room with spots for coats and hats of the ladies and gentlemen.
The two-story East Wing was designed by White House architect Lorenzo Winslow and added to the White House in 1942 primarily to cover the construction of an underground bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC). Around the same time, Theodore Roosevelt's coatroom was integrated into the new building and became the White House Family Theater."
don’t think there’s much confidence that Trump will hew to the “republican simplicity” that is the favored American view of the White House, even if different people have tried to interfere with that over the years. E.g. Jackie Kennedy supposedly trying to French-ify the decor.
Plus it does not sit on a large piece of land - you can lose more than you gain by increasing the footprint.
Trump, too, has already “had his turn” - redecorating in a manner more pronounced than most of his predecessors.
You aren’t supposed to make a great many changes … there’s an advisory committee which he has ignored.
I know to Europeans anything the age of the US isn't *that* historical, but the White House burned down in the war of 1812, which puts a 1902 expansion in the earlier half of its lifespan.
As someone on the Western side of the country where even less is that age, I'm not so attached to historicity that's just "happy side effect of WW2". I concur that it probably should be done, that it'd get pushback either way, but also that no attempt was made to mitigate the obvious resistance.
It's sad to see that the preservationists - which is to say, the patriots of the place - did not even get a look-in, a consult, a courtesy call. That's really depressing. I realize red hatted people did not pay for it, but I imagined a lot of them being fond of American history and sites.
I foresee that Gettysburg's time as a peaceful place of remembrance is limited.
And even in cca. half of Europe, buildings traced back to medieval times are extreme rarities. My town, for example, was washed away by the river in 1879, and what survived was pretty much torn down -- we have overall only two buildings which can traced back to several hundred years, and both are churches.
(The population boom of Europe mostly happened in the 18-19th centuries, and came with huge remodellings of the living spaces.)
Why bother mitigating resistance when it's obvious, inevitable and impotent?
I think this is part of Trump's appeal generally, he doesn't waste time on that type of mitigation.
Maybe, but this seems like one of those places where the options were to do it once imperfectly or to have a decades-long cahsr style fiasco. It's one case where Trump's "just do stuff" approach seems good.
(Although I still think $300 million is a pretty high cost for a ballroom)
I'm sure you could build a much cheaper ballroom, especially if you were happy to have it look like a function room at the Marriott.
Tbh the East and West Wings of the White House have very little history or tradition behind them. They were only built in the 1900s, and they each get extensive renovations with each President. The Oval Office itself has only been around since FDR, and the Resolute Desk has only been in the Oval Office since the 1970s, and even then it was taken out during George HW Bush’s presidency. Not really a situation where you're looking for a compromise.
No, there was never any possibility for compromise.
The Democrats (online) are screaming about permitting violations and asbestos violations and probably NRHP violations, in a way that makes it clear to me they would rather subject Trump to 4 years of bureaucracy than let him build anything, regardless of whether it is "reasonable". Trump is constantly a "you can't tell me what to do" personality, and benefits politically from doing it in a way the Democrats dislike.
No. The Democrats are complaining because
1. The costs are now estimated to be $3000/square foot in a city where high-end building costs are $700/square foot. And the cost overruns look like they'll go into pockets of shady Trump cronies.
2. There are no finalized plans to even criticize, yet. But from the drawings several architects question whether it can built the way it's been depicted. So that means more cost overruns and more graft and corruption.
3. It's an eyesore. And it destroys the lines of the White House. Esthetically it's worse than paving over the Rose Garden.
>1. The costs are now estimated to be $3000/square foot in a city where high-end building costs are $700/square foot. And the cost overruns look like they'll go into pockets of shady Trump cronies.
But it's being funded out of private donations, not tax money. So what's the problem?
Government projects and buildings are beholden to relatively specific overview and regulatory guidelines because letting private individuals donate vast amounts of money to specific building projects that specific public individuals desire or have expressed desire for has, throughout history, been a convenient and neat way to influence said-same public officials towards specific aims.
Avoiding government graft, cronyism, backdoor deals to lucrative contracts or political influence peddling via convenient large semi-untracable and certainly anonymous donations to the personal pet projects of sitting officials is fairly important.
Put differently, you might read: “ Oh, they’re remodelling public buildings and doing it through private donations “ and think “ that’s neat “.
Others (certainly me, and any regulatory and ethics compliance lawyer) reads that and notes it’s a crystal clear example of something that invites layers upon layers upon layers of conflict of interest, remarkably easy pathways for graft and inefficiency and raises absolutely endless questions about who is donating, why and if the process has been passed through ethics review.
Private individuals can privately donate to private projects as they like. But I think it’s taking a bit of a piss if someone lackadaisically assumes it’s an unalloyed, simple good that sitting officials in positions of vast power can be seen to be requesting private individuals donate to their preferred causes /without/ those donations and the process, oversight and review being transparent, open and subject to the attentions of good lawyers.
Put even simpler: The problem in the first place is that it’s private money being put to public purpose at the behest of sitting officials with great power to return perceived favours. I don’t want the phantom of graft, sleaze, lobbying, favour trading, backdoor deals, nepotism and influence-peddling staining government buildings.
I think the U.S. federal government probably has enough money to afford a ballroom.
That's actually worse. There won't be the transparency one gets with government budgeted spending, and the surplus funds will be funnelled off into the pockets of Trump cronies and Trump front companies.
How is that worse? Why should we care if private donations get spent inefficiently?
I'll give you two hypothetical examples (though these are likely real-life scenarios, if you're familiar with Trump's history and business dealings)...
1. Billionaire A has invested heavily in developing AI. Of course, AI is not a money-making venture at the moment. Billionaire A "donates" (gives) Trump $100 million to finance his ballroom. In return Trump instructs his minions to award future government AI contracts to Billionaire A's company (and bypass open bidding, in which other AI companies may be able to provide the services for less). Sure, the ballroom gets built without a cent of government funds (although future congresses will be on the hook to spend money to maintain it). But Trump has always been a quid pro quo type of guy. Will your government AI tax dollars be spent transparently and effectively in this sort of quid-pro-quo scenario? I don't think so.
2. Developer B promises Trump a kickback on the money spent constructing the ballroom. Trump is notoriously crooked in this way. The Federal Bribery Statute (18 U.S.C. § 201) makes it a crime for a federal official (including the President) to accept anything of value in exchange for being influenced in an official act. And because Trump has one of his appointees running the OMB, the GAO will be unable to audit these transactions, and there will be no transparency.
I think you're confusing the specific things they're complaining about with the reasons they're complaining.
Let's face it, there's a world in which Obama did this. (I have trouble imagining a world where Biden did this, for some reason, but can easily imagine the Obama ballroom.) And in that world, the Democrats think it's a fine idea and the Republicans have a laundry list of objections to it.
All of this makes it a very boring issue, not worth thinking about.
In an ASI post scarcity utopian world, would we still control our destiny as a species or will it be decided for us? And if so, won't stripping away our agency take away a big part of our sense of meaning and make us miserable regardless of the abundance?
I've written about this in more detail
https://open.substack.com/pub/thedistantpresent/p/the-great-detachment?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5a1s78
Yeah, I'm happy to find here fans of Iain M Banks who nonetheless see what human nature would turn the Culture into. I'm always surprised Banks himself didn't seem to grasp how human nature would turn Culture perfection in 1 generation into... something else entirely.
It's done thoughtfully also (and many years before) in Jack Williamson's Humanoids novels. There the thoughtful, utterly caring and protective AI show you exactly where that leads.
Have you tried to explain the economic system? Because we can’t all get what we want. The Culture had infinite space. We have a finite earth.
We don't control our destiny as a species anyhow. We are squeezed, shoved, and tossed into the air by other entities while trying to meet needs we did not choose to have. We're mostly just making it up as we go along.
"In an ASI post scarcity utopian world, would we still control our destiny as a species or will it be decided for us?"
Will we be The Culture, with everything run by the Minds? Some people think this is fantastic world and can't wait for it to happen.
But how would we spend our time? Perhaps the educational system could foster creativity in all of us, rather than turning us into economic cogs? I suspect that most people would be terminally bored because they lack the inner resources to occupy their time. Life would be a vast daytime TV existence.
Especially with no stakes to anything. I anticipate a lot of gambling/games of chance to feel a semblance of risk and reward that even ASI can't optimize
Underrated option IMO. In the same vein, birthing a benevolent machine god also gets you this outcome.
Knowing in advance that you’ve actually built a benign/aligned superintelligence is of course the hard part. I think the assumption is just that in the branches under “loss of control”, the percentage of worlds where the ASI turns out to be benign round to zero.
"Then it starts to get uncomfortable, the old man prefers cereal for breakfast, but oats are what he finds on the kitchen counter with the note “This is healthier for you”. He wakes up to the furniture rearranged because it would make the house more spacious. He wanders over to the garage and looks at a half empty work table. “I got rid of some of your tools, they were too dangerous for you at your age”. He spots an emptiness at the corner of his bedroom that draws him like a vacuum. He can’t shake the feeling that something’s missing. Ambling over, a note “I got rid of your golf clubs, you’re too old to play anymore”. A slow suffocating loss of agency, one intrusion at a time until there’s no defensive boundary between what he wants and what is decided to be best for him. "
I also think something like this will happen, and will be turbocharged by digital mind clones. Think of social media algorithms, which know your preferences and personality traits, as the ancestors of the clones, which will approximate your thinking and behavior almost perfectly. An AGI charged with watching over you to ensure your wellbeing would run experiments on your digital mind clone to find optimal outcomes for you in the real world. It might discover things about you that you're in deep denial about or are even completely ignorant of, and it would make sudden and initially unwelcome changes to your life in the pursuit of that optimality.
Imagine the old man's robot butler holding him down at breakfast and force-feeding him smelly Green Eggs and Ham while saying "Trust me, you're gonna love this."
Personally I think to some extend all human ethical systems have an inbuilt idea of what reasonable risk and reasonable self harm is. The right to bad decisions is a right to freedom. Alcohol is technically a nerve toxin, we still allow its sale. Many sports have high rates of injury, they are still legal. Even something like driving is technically very dangerous, but we consider it a normal part of our everyday life.
In that sense I don't see any AGI that works off a human ethical framework would restrict human freedom by 100%. I think what's more likely is that this AGI would make subtle changes to your environment, information diet, etc that would naturally lead you to the "right" conclusion. So more like giving a toddler a choice between the red and blue pyjama, but no choice on bed time. If done correctly, you won't even notice that bed time was ever up for discussion.
True, how will we feel about this though? If there was a hyperintelligent earpiece attached to you that always told you the best decision to make for every moment of your life, would you ever contradict it out of curiosity or to assert your independence? Would it anticipate this and recommend decisions that give you a false sense of independence? Would you notice this and hate it even more? It all gets really messy if you think about it.
Scott wrote a story about that: https://croissanthology.com/earring
Agreed. If you wanted true independence, you'd have to agree to be upgraded into a superior, non-human mind that your AGI custodian couldn't model. Maybe that will be the backdoor strategy to getting rid of the human race and duping us into becoming productive again.
Why assume ASI are ignorant of the social and emotional aspects of human nature? Why assume they're not going to include in their calculation/simulation human resistance to change and preference for familiarity? Indeed, why assume an ASI is incapable of accounting for the human need to feel important and in control of your own destiny?
I agree with you. The questions that remains: Does anything change, then? Why bother going for ASI if it somehow doesn't actually change anything? It might move the baseline up, and human nature adjusts within a year and will be just as happy/unhappy as before, no?
"ChatASI, I need some meaning in my life. What can I do?"
"I noticed this trend through your behavior patterns, but I've been waiting for you to bring it up so I know you're ready for a change. I have three options, but they all require some significant life changes that I'll guide you through over the next six months. I know you can handle them despite your 80 IQ. First, there are some archeological digs in South America that for some peculiar reasons need human assistance. Second, there's a colony ship that is departing within the next two years. You have generic markers they need in their pool of applicants, but it will be an all awake journey, so you'll need to do some training before you can volu..."
Seems preferable to, "I can't get a job, so I'll rot in my parents' basement playing video games and hope I win the lottery."
Progress and accountability update on my upcoming freemium web app, BetterQualities. The app is designed to help users let go of unskillful mental qualities like worry and procrastination as they arise, and cultivate skillful ones like happiness and agency instead.
After a few snags, the pre-launch landing page at www.betterqualities.com is up and running. If you’d like a heads-up when the app goes live, you can join the waitlist there. I’d also be really grateful if you filled out the short survey about which skillful and unskillful qualities you’d like the app to cover. Thanks to everyone who’s already done so!
As for the app itself, frontend data management is still a bit ad hoc; I need to implement a proper, principled solution. Once that’s done — along with some UI polish and payment integration — we should be good to go.
I also started a Substack blog, A Metta Analysis, in which I'll explore the app's theme (skillful and unskillful mental qualities) in more depth. The content is still sparse, but feel free to subscribe if the topic interests you.
I won’t be posting updates in the next two open threads, as I’ll be on holiday (my Europoor mentality in action :D).
Error message when I attempted to join your wait list - "Failed to submit email. Please try again."
Ah, thanks for the heads up – this is a weird bug I wasn't aware of. Could you try again with the subdomain "www" included (so https://www.betterqualities.com/)? Sorry for the hassle.
Edit: It was a CORS issue, fixed.
I'm trying not be mean but it sounds like the classic trap for procrastinators : procrastinating by "doing something" that's actually procrastinating (make a list, make a plan, make extensive preparations, read more instructions, log stuff on an app, do everything except the thing to do). Been there.
This should be included in your pitch deck. That's a large market of repeat users.
Thanks, that’s a good point. In my mind, the app is meant to be a ladder that, once climbed, can be discarded. But there’s definitely a risk that some users end up lingering on the ladder — playing around instead of climbing it — and getting even less useful work done.
Any good blogs / books / whatever on underpopulation / lowering fertility and their causes?
At some point I tried to read up on this topic, because at least at the popular nonspecialist level, there are lots of wildly diverging strong opinions. It seems to be the kind of question that motivates people with strong ideologies.
One blogger I found is Alice Evans, writing "The Great Gender Divergence" (https://www.ggd.world/). She seems to be a real specialist in the field, with a strong interest in what is going on in the world at large, and not just in the usual Western countries.
Thanks!
I think my experience has been similar to yours, which is what motivated my question.
I wrote a summary of the research on how geomagnetic storms could impact the electrical grid: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/space-weather-and-critical-infrastructure
tldr: Not as bad as I thought when I started writing, but still catastrophic.
Thanks for doing this. This is something I've been wondering about for years.
I guess I see now what the Reddit is telling me to get back to work. I free think and free write and my writings are indefeenriabke from AI(proven) to the point where I need to leave spelling msktakes.
So I’m talking to a person on the Reddit and guess what, his writings are 67% AI on the school system so he needs to “redo” his own work because the professor or PH.D overseeer is not smart enough to understand creative brilliance.
This is something I don’t understand. 1) Why are idiots getting the PH.D and using their overseer power to silence the simple minded brilliance of the worlds AuDHD, Autism and ADHD populations. As the unofficial official despised loved spokesperson for the AuDHD I need to bring this to the attention of the complex genius and brilliant minds of the world to figure out. Gifted accepted - I’m sure I will double check your work to make sure it’s original and not the AI garbage that is everywhere today. Same with the over see’er PH.D people.
I guess to end I came up with the first half of the theory of everything formula from my own AuDHD peabrain using a simple method and writing sample. I then got the boot from the SOL community(very understandable, my fault. Maybe I try to make it back for boy’s night on Monday…. Hmmm…..)
Where was I… oh yes… the first half of the formula for the theory of everything is 1/2 ADHD brain plus 1/2 Autism brain = AuDHD brain plus music(as a bridge medium)
The bridge medium allows an AuDHD mind to join the ADHD and Autism side to now be able to hyperfocus and increase or decrease the trance state by using the volume control as adjusting the volume.
The trance music is for AuDHD individual to decide. I use the radio and Shazam for a 15-20 song playlist for songs that just hit me.
I am in a small trance now and this is my first writing sample in an effort to show what free writing and free thinking looks like from my AuDHD bridged mine who just writes and posts without worry and does not register consequences of his writing sample postings.
Research study found in the r/ gifted as well as cnn. Point is Jillian Hynes and Sheila Wagner from Aramark. Jillian seen undiagnosed autism traits in a remote camp and triggered me on purpose. This is all documented and provable because soon I will be making this entire situation public. Possibly though the Neurospicy community but 100% going public with everything. I can prove ANYTHING I say… and I won’t be silenced anymore.
1st post of many. If people of the deepstacks don’t like what I say, then take it up with the OWNERS of the deepstacks.
This is ALL
Have a good day :)
I hope you like my budding creating writing styles :) It’s comparable to Nikola Tesla, or so I am told. Just wait until my mind rests from the cubic posting yesterday on Reddit. There will be ALOT of deep thoughts coming out… exactly like this.
You are invited to describe a movie, novel, RPG adventure, or other narrative work that could be made based on the prompt, "Hammertime."
MC Hammer: werewolf slayer (because lincoln already got the vamp gig)
"Hammertime" is the next epic fantasy film, the epic tale of the epic contention between the dwarfs and the elves to make the best gift for the aesir, hoping to win the head of Loki! It's got it all: golden hair, a huge gold pig, a spear that bends to stab around corners, the finest of all ships! And of course in the end: THE HAMMER.
There have been plenty of successful musician biopics made out of musicians less interesting than MC Hammer, so I see no reason to go past the obvious.
Movie: The uplifting tale of a woman who wastes her youth getting hammered and getting nailed whilst feeling detached, before traveling at last down the sparkly rainbow psychedelic road to find her true gender: Uglyshark. Pronouns: Ugsh, Ug*sh’s (central asterisk is to honor the buried s’s right to be punctuation-adjacent like its twin)
People say John Henry died of exhaustion in a tunnel racing a steam-powered drill.
Those people are wrong.
Henry was making great progress in that tunnel when it collapsed, trapping him inside with his shaker, Dan. Realizing they had limited air, Henry worked with Dan to dig their way out. When their lantern finally gave out, Henry kept hammering in the pitch black, finding he could still tell where Dan's spike was from the sound, and that he wasn't tiring out for some reason.
They work through the night and into the next morning, miraculously breaking out of the other side of the mountain. But when the people they meet include a tough frontierswoman, a farmer with the power to control water, a wind-riding cowboy, a giant firefighter, and an even larger lumberjack, Henry wonders if he's still in America.
A time machine steered by Stanley Kirk Burrell.
Johan Larson,
the hammer skipped off the steel nail,
And crushed my fingernail.
My workmates are trying hard not to laugh
and I am trying hard not to cry.
I once had an idea for a game or movie about a guy with the superpower of transforming into a giant hammer. It sounds like a ridiculous power so everyone mocks him, but it turns out to be surprisingly useful (e.g. you can instantly get out of handcuffs by transforming to a hammer and back)
"Every time he swung his mighty hammer it was as if he aged years in an instant..."
Action movie with heavy use of slow-motion where the hero flings hammers at people.
Andrew Sachs making a hammer sandwich.
Well... it's got to be a Mike Hammer movie, and I imagine he's going after MC Hammer. Whether it's a generic Mike Hammer story, or a Highlander-style "there can only be one" is negotiable.
Maybe mix in the Hammer Horror monsters.
Not sure if this is the motivation, but this seems like a good way to measure the "creativity gap" between humans and LLMs. Given an open-ended prompt, how much diversity in responses do you get in each case?
Everyone is welcome to participate, from caged silicon gods to squishy meatbags to semi-structured ripples in the ether.
> to semi-structured ripples in the ether.
That reminds me of an idea I had for an alien civilization of beings that consist of specially patterned energy ripples within the jet of a black hole, that can only exist due to the extreme physics of that environment. They discovered quantum gravity before inventing the wheel, but then sadly died out when their black hole became less active. If you listen to the right frequencies in the right spot, you can still hear their desperate cries for help broadcast across the cosmos.
The Wizards' War is over, and an exhausted world crawls out of the wreckage to rebuild. But some things are forever changed by the titanic energies released in the struggles. Storms that might have yielded hail now drop sheets of sledge hammers. No structures are truly safe from the hammer storms, and the finest scholars strive to predict where and when they will strike. Meanwhile much of the population in stricken regions has taken to living semi-nomadically in yurts so they can flee when hammertime comes.
Meanwhile, every thesis has its antithesis, and the world does not stand still.
Some of the folks who fled have discovered the iron that rained down on their homes and fields is of good quality and quite valuable, particularly in quantity. They've started collecting and selling it, and you can make good money doing that. The more enterprising merchant houses have taken an interest, and are buying up parcels that tend to get hammered reliably.
Meanwhile, the price of iron is steadily declining, to the point that ships and even some new houses are now sporting supporting structures made of iron. Who knows where this trend will find equilibrium.
This almost sounds like Adventure Time
A software developer that makes software for the porn industry discovers an algorithm that makes everything more efficient, that corporations then fight to control, but the internet and AI explode to use everywhere..
"When all you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail."
Easy mode: make a movie of "Lucifer's Hammer." Slightly harder mode: remake of "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis' character played by MC Hammer.
Harder mode: the comet/asteroid is made of tachyons (keep yer traps shut, physiciststs -- this is Hollywood) and must be diverted so as to avoid a total restart of time and going back through all of history.
It broke my heart when the mean ole no-fun killjoy physicists turned around and got rid of tachyons as anything more than purely hypothetical and not at all likely to exist.
Why can't we just have nice things?
Maybe if you remodulated the forward deflector dish to emit an inverse tachyon beam . . .
1) Is it true that nowadays the value of a person is stronger derived from the person's intelligence than hundred years ago, where things like kindness, behavior and manners played a bigger role?
By value I mean whether other people would regard this person as a person to look up to, not just the economic value.
2) If true, is 1) a good thing in utilitarian terms? (If not true, would it be a good thing?)
I'm not really sure. My impression is that the people in charge in the late-19th/early-20th century put a lot of stock in character, and weren't particularly impressed with intelligence per se. It was more important to have character, which seems to have been a matter of being strong-willed, reliable, and honest.
I think its the exact opposite (in the sense of who to look up to and to praise) -- we focus more on kindness and empathy than on intelligence. Our modern social scripts are filled with denigrating intelligence and uplifting empathy, and never vice versa. Or maybe I'm in a bubble.
My experience is dissimilar to yours. People give lip service to "kindness and empathy are important," but their overall behavior tells a different story. People continue to obsess about intelligence, even while demeaning IQ tests and college degrees as inadequate measurement tools.
On #1, I don't believe so. Intelligence strikes me more as a tool that can be used to do things that can build status, rather than a grantor of esteem in and of itself. Take, for example, the case of the gifted student. People may view a gifted student as having great opportunity, or as a person to cultivate, but they don't just look at a kid, see how smart they are, and suddenly start looking up to them. The hierarchy of learned professor to gifted student still places the student below and professor above, even if the student is naturally "smarter."
Likewise, if I hire a college grad who's smarter than me into my department, I'm thrilled at the opportunity to train them up, but I'm not just jumping straight into deferring to and being led by them - smart is great and all, but at that stage they have no experience. Raw intelligence is a tool, but having a really cool hammer or powerdrill isn't something that will lead to you being admired unless you use it to do something admirable.
Note that one hundred years ago, a push for modernity was in full swing. Model Ts were replacing horses, as did modern roads, electrification, modern medicine, etc. Intelligence was exceptionally celebrated and rewarded then, with capital "I" intellectuals and experts having tremendous influence. The Nobel prize was first given n 1901 and Mensa Intentional established in the 1940s. Imagine going from carpenters on a job site to using manual hand saws to using centralized belt powered saws to using distributed electrified tools all in a lifetime. One hundred years ago, intelligence applied may have been more valuable than today as society was in the middle of a very visible and tangible physical transformation. Today it is in a digital transformation.
Expertise is still respected, but also seen as suspect. So maybe valued less today, or maybe more. I don't know, it also depends on local needs and ability to apply that intelligence to well, something. Are the undercurrents of Ludditetism weaker or stronger today...
Maybe ask reddit's ask a historian? It might be easier to ask about the valuation of experts and professors and traits. Also, note there were tremendous local variations in evaluation, as the world was far more diverse in language, culture, and belief systems before today's modernity.
I'm not sure if it's true, but if true, I don't think it would be a good thing. Value systems shape people's behavior, not just their feelings, but there's much less you can do to increase your intelligence than you can to increase how kindly you treat others. And you can influence how altruistically people apply their intelligence even if you can't influence how intelligent they turn out to be.
I remember years ago at a Less Wrong/SSC meetup, I talked to someone there about the book "Flash Boys," on the business of high-frequency trading. The author was of the opinion that it was bad, and a misuse of human resources, because it generated a lot of revenue without plausibly generating value for society. I thought he made a strong case, but was interested to hear the "pro" side.
The person I spoke to was not a fan of the book (without having read it, it turned out.) He had worked in HFT, and he objected to the author taking aim at it. Not because he objected to the characterization that it only concentrated wealth and didn't provide value to society, he acknowledged that was true. But because, he said, smart people ought to be able to apply their intelligence in our society to become rich. Apparently, he didn't think it ought to be necessary that they do so by creating value for anyone else.
I don't think our social values can make people much more or less intelligent. But they can promote or suppress attitudes like that.
People routinely assume that intelligent people will tend to share their values. That feels so naive to me. And it helps fuel paranoid thinking, because if indisputably witful men support the "wrong" ideology, they MUST be lying. And WHO KNOWS where the deception ends?
In a secularizing and atomizing society, fewer people can turn to peers or God to validate their core moral beliefs. And so they try to validate their mores with reason and logic, but that can only take you so far!
Try saying "science cannot prove that slavery is inherently morally wrong." Most ACX regulars would see this as stating the obvious. But you'd be surprised how triggering this statement is for John Q. Public. Many respondents will accuse you of being pro-slavery or anti-science!
I think all of this is a problem for rationalism. Not for the letter of rationalism, so to speak, but for the SPIRIT of rationaism. If rationalists are too wise to explicitly conflate rational people and "good people," that conflation seems implicitly pervasive in the faction.
Sidebar: Left-oriented thinkers often cherish the studies showing that Republican Party voters tend to have less educational attainment. But a close look at the data undercuts the simple dichotomy of "left smart, right stupid."
For example, the extremist Tea Partiers were notably well-educated and "informed" about the issues. Compared to generic Republicans AND the general public. (Using a narrow definition of informed that allows for foolish end solutions). Researchers who published on this include Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and Rory McVeigh.
> On the business of high-frequency trading.
I know two people who went into that business after finishing their PhD. The contribution to society is not literally zero, at least not for the company they worked for. They are providing instant offers, which is very important for the stock market to work properly and to form prices even when there is little activity from standard traders. In fact, part of their revenue (not the lion's share) came from the stock exchange paying them directly for their service.
But I agree with the argument qualitatively: you wouldn't need highly intelligent people to provide those services, and the amount of money that the HFT companies earn exceeds the value to society by very much.
Seems a bit like professional chess playing; you might spin off a few interesting games that people can study, but basically you are pitting your wits against the other guy for a sum not much greater than zero.
But intelligence is neutral in its way, and some intelligent actions would have a value less than zero, making chess playing look a bit better after all.
Raw intelligence, probably, but only in as far as it's revealed through some sort of significant actions or accomplishment. The potential of intelligence today is a lot higher, there's more fields to apply it to and succeed and the trope of the socially off-putting genius has been around for a while so people are willing to overlook manners. I don't know if it's a good thing though.
Do you perhaps mean the economic value…?
No, I mean whether other people would look up to that person. I have edited my post to make this clearer.
I wrote a novel about the prospect of China building the first AGI (following my CAST alignment agenda). It came out today!
https://raelifin.substack.com/p/red-heart-is-now-available
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/NQK8KHSrZRF5erTba/0-cast-corrigibility-as-singular-target-1
I'm glad I saw this. I'm definitely going to read it.
For anyone who doesn't know, this is the same author who wrote the Crystal Society series, which is one of my favorites. Eliezer Yudkowsky said of the series: "[Crystal Society] seems to belong in the very, very tiny subset of AI stories that are not bloody stupid, a heroic and almost unbelievable accomplishment."
Do we need clocks at all? My proposal for abolition:
Anything requiring an appointment can be automatically allocated with a countdown timer and frequent reminders.
Office hours replaced with productivity targets.
Anyone doing work requiring daylight optimization can begin work whenever they want without having to go "oh no it's 5am" because 5am doesn't exist any more.
They pretty much have gotten rid of clocks. I don't like to wear a watch and frankly it annoys me having to ask the time sometimes from phone slaves.
If you get rid of clocks, you get rid of the ability to passive-aggressively stare at the clock in order to make the other person understand they should get the hell to the point. I for one will not stand for it.
Great point. Also no more double takes.
"We meet every Tuesday at 7" would be awkward to convert to "We meet in 34 Hours, and then again every 168 hours after that"
Why stop at clocks? If computers can do everything we need, then we don't need to do anything ourselves, so why keep around any of the artifacts that helped us back when we did? That's not just physical objects or logistical tools: it's a whole wealth of concepts, models, and vocabulary that we just don't need anymore.
"Let's meet in 22 hours" is just objectively less clear than "Let's meet at 9 AM tomorrow." And it only gets worse the farther out you go - if I propose going to an event in 2 months, 15 days and 14 hours, there is no way that you'll know what date and time I'm referring to in your head. (And if we're chatting for an hour before you accept the invitation, I have to update my proposed countdown time before you put it on your calendar!)
And it gets still worse if you have to worry about scheduling conflicts. Yesterday, someone asks me if they can meet in 3 days and 12 hours. Today, someone asks me if they can meet in 2 days and 10 hours. Can I accept that invitation? They sound pretty different, but depending on what hour exactly the second person invited me, they might be referring to the same time. Meanwhile, two people asking me to meet at "Noon on Nov 5" is obviously referring to the same time.
Lastly, countdown timers would still have to be *implemented* using a calendar and clock. If a timer gets stopped for any reason (power outage on your computer, etc.), you need to recalculate the time remaining when you start up again. The only way to do this is to compare the current time to the appointment time, using a clock.
> "Let's meet in 22 hours" is just objectively less clear than "Let's meet at 9 AM tomorrow."
Unless one of us turns out to be in a different time zone, or one is on daylight savings time and the other is not, etc.
I don't object to your central point, though. It's just that, when working with dates, one cannot assume simplicity under any circumstances.
What problem does this solve? Just time zone annoyance?
I have considered similar solutions, but there IS a useful property of times and clocks. If I tell you it will be 826 hours until your next appointment, in your head, do you know that's going to land during the middle of your sleep cycle? Or your dinner time?
Times tell you, in advance, what you expect to be doing around that time. I switched my clock to 24 hours and caught myself just converting even when there was no external reason to, in order to understand what time it was. The reason is that 1700 is connected to less concepts in my brain than 5pm is.
I think clocks are too useful for appointments and co-ordinating meetups etc., although I wholeheartedly endorse the idea of replacing office hours with productivity targets. There's nothing more annoying than having to bum around the office doing nothing because you've done all the work you can but haven't completed all the arbitrary number of hourse your boss requires you to be present for.
Presumably computers would need some sort of internal clock but we could essentially staff out our diaries to them, with enough frequent reminders that we never have to look at the time again.
This was supposed to be a reply to Peter Defeel
_Convince Bruto the world is ruled by lizards!_
(Hi!)
I've been making an experimental browser game on the topic of conspiracy beliefs and how they arise - curious to hear what this community thinks. r/slatestarcodex seemed to like it a month ago; this is an update with better UI & graphics.
https://fiftysevendegreesofrad.github.io/bruto/?sss
The underlying model is a belief network, though for the purpose of gameplay not strictly Bayesian.
Full disclosure: Although I’m only testing a game, I’m doing so today as an academic researcher so have to tell you that I may write a summary of responses, and record clicks on the game, as anyone else testing their game would. I won’t record usernames or quote anyone directly. If you're not ok with that, please say so, otherwise replying here necessarily implies you consent. Full details linked from the title screen.
To comply with academic ethics requirements, this post is to give notice that I will take my snapshot of these replies to my post (that are already on the public internet) to summarize on Monday 10th November, so if you did want to edit/delete anything please do so before that date. To reemphasize, though, the published summary will not include any direct quotes or usernames. Thank you all for the comments :)
Disclaimer: I played for mere moments, until work-guilt made me quit. But what I saw is really cool and want to explore more of it. That's my feedback.
This was fun, but sadly on mobile I had this thing where zooming in and out would permanently shrink the mind map until the mind map became unplayably small :( so wasn’t able to finish
Best of luck with the research!
Sorry about this - zooming should be disabled on mobile (it is on mine). Thank you for letting me know, I'll add to the list of bugs.