Several of the sources I find at least somewhat credible(*) in this area, suggest it is likely to be helpful. But that's a pretty low bar, and the "TAME" study intended to seriously examine that question seems to have been stalled by lack of institutional support. Also, some of the sources suggest it will be most effective if coupled with Human Growth Hormone. Metformin is a fairly safe compound, HgH requires much more care and maybe shouldn't be used in this context without better evidence.
* From my notes, Derek Lowe, Andrew Steele, and David Sinclair.
Can you mate the black king with just the queen in this position? You're not allowed to move the white king. Note chess engines won't help you with this.
This isn't very easy, and some familiarity with chess is helpful, I think mere beginners, even if they have strong analytical skills, would have a very hard time solving this.
Va gur npghny cbfvgvba, 1.Dq5+ frrzf gb qb gur gevpx. 1.-Xo8 2.Dp6 tvirf hf jung jr jnag evtug njnl, naq vs 1.-Xn7, jr unir 2.Do5 Xn8 3.Dq7! Xo8 4.Dp6.
V'z abg fher vs guvf vf gur snfgrfg zngr, ohg vg frrzf gb jbex.
Some people beat me to it, but in the interest of completeness, yes, it's possible, and my solution, which I think is fastest possible but didn't prove, is below:
Gur vqrn, oevrsyl, vf gb ybfr n grzcb - gung vf, trg gb gur fnzr cbfvgvba ohg jvgu Oynpx gb zbir. Gura nsgre dhvgr vaghvgvir Xo8 Dp6 Xn7 Dp8 Xo6 Dq7, vg'f rnfl gb cebprrq gb gur zngr. (Jr qba'g unir gb trg gb yvgrenyyl gur ortvaavat cbfvgvba, trggvat n srj zbirf qbjafgernz sebz vg vf whfg nf tbbq).
Ybfvat gur grzcb vf qvssvphyg orpnhfr gurer'f nyzbfg, ohg abg dhvgr, n cnevgl fvghngvba urer: fbzr cbfvgvbaf rnfvyl pbaarpg jvgu "ortvaavat cbfvgvba, J gb zbir", bguref jvgu "ortvaavat cbfvgvba, O gb zbir", naq svaqvat na bireync vf abg gevivny, ohg nyfb abg gbb qvssvphyg bapr lbh sbphf ba gur tbny.
Yes, I wasn’t thinking about tempo enough. After I wrote my earlier note, I noticed that 1. Qd4+ Kb8 2. Qc6 Ka7 3. Qc8 Kb6 forces the king permanently below the diagonal leading to mate, and eventually came up with a mate starting with 1. Qd4+ Ka7 2. Qb5, which was non-optimal because taking two moves to get to the b column meant making multiple moves on the b column to gain a tempo.
There are certain moves that black needs to avoid. For example, if black moves Ka6, the game can proceed Qb8 Ka5 Qb7 Ka4 Qb4 mate. Similarly, if black moves Kc5, we can have Qe6 Kb5 Qd6 Ka5 Qb4+ and then black must move Ka6, leading to the previous mate.
But as far as I can see, black can avoid mate by staying away from the squares in the above sequences. Most of the time, black can stay either on the a8 - h1 diagonal, or on squares closer to h8 than the squares on that diagonal. If the black king is on a8, white can move Qc8+ Ka7, but white must then move its queen, allowing black to move its king to a8, b8, or b7.
Correction: I wrote a brute force solver and my original solution does work. The key is to kick the king to a7, i.e. beneath the "defensive diagonal", before you start forcing it downwards. You have to "give" one column to the king for every row you force it down, but if you manage to force the king to a7 and can move your queen to c8, the black king can't reach the a8-h1 diagonal and the diagonal it is on is blocked by your own immobile king.
Yeah, I was going to reply to your original comment that the general idea is correct, but the devil is in the details, but you beat me to it. Good job! Next time, persevere and do it without a solver :-)
I sort of had a solution originally, but it was a lot of messy lines from trial and error, and I didn't understand *how* it worked or how to reconstruct it cleanly.
The key insight, in my opinion, is that the queen can box in a king, but if the king takes "opposition" a knight's move away, the queen cannot systematically tighten this box. The queen can, however, use zugzwang to force the king to either let the queen tighten the box (if it leaves "opposition") or to trade row<->column if the king moves to the other opposition square.
I didn't realize the king is happy to escape down into the bottom right quadrant, I can't find any workaround for that at the moment. Not sure if I should try to avoid it or try to find a clever pivot to drive the king top left to bottom right to bottom left.
Regarding the AI safety grantmaker role, I'm curious about the specific scope. What types of 'alignment research' are prioritised for the $100 million funding? Is the focus purely technical, or are interdisciplinary approaches also considered key?
Any cricket or sports betting fans? I've bet on a series tie for the Ashes at 8/1, this seems remarkably good odds compared to 2/1 for an England series win. There are 5 matches in the series, Australia have won the last three series in Australia 4-0, 4-0 and 5-0, so talk of an England win in Australia is optimistic, meanwhile the last two series in England have ended 2-2, so this seems more realistic than an England win, although 3-1 to Australia is more realistic still. Usually there's one draw so the possibilities are 4-0 Australia (possible) 3-1 Australia (likely), 2-2 (best case for England imo), 3-1 to England (not totally impossible), and 4-0 to England (yeh, no). 2-1 to England seems unlikely because there would have to be two draws and draws are getting rarer.
[Update: Right on cue England are slumping to a rare 2-day defeat so you can probably get better odds that 8/1!]
I know lots of people have already done the work of figuring out which creatine brands are least polluted with lead. I'd greatly appreciate your brand recommendations, or links to good posts on the topic!
I don't know about Nucleus in particular, but a Whole Genome Sequence is good to identify genetic disorders (not very actionable, but maybe for family planning?) and susceptibility to cancers that you can then test regularly for for early detection.
Why do people often focus on increase of total productive quantity (GDP, GDP per capita, whatever bespoke adjacent measure I'm about to hear about) as a way to increase human happiness? It does not seem obvious to me.
I find myself happiest when I am backpacking, sleeping as well as living in the commons we all share. This produces for the rest of society nothing but my thoughts (which are sometimes assigned economic value, although I would argue this does not significantly impact my point; I'm also sure many others do much the same and think much the same and do not have this economic value assigned and still derive much joy from it). This does not have any production or consumption (or, at the very least, an extremely minimal amount in comparison with daily life in America) associated with it.
It also seems to me that in the place I was educated (Northeastern US of A) most economic production and valuation has little to do with intrinsic fulfillment or joy, and even when it provides pleasure of some sort, it is usually the sort of pleasure I'd be happy to do away with entirely (the sort generally associated with (if you are of Christian persuasion, which I am not) the seven cardinal sins).
It is possible there is a good reason for this that I have yet to grasp. It is worth noting for this that I am interested primarily in some sense of self-fulfillment, or joy, or whatever you will call it, and am generally horrified that some people think it would be morally beneficial to, say, hook human beings up to some sort of computer which makes them feel expansive and incredible joy all the time. I'm happy to talk about and reconsider this, too, but please, when discussing the first question do not argue that some minimalistic definition of pleasure is equivalent to moral goodness.
I don't think anyone answered the question fully yet. What's missing is the disconnect between classical economics and the real world.
In classical economics, people are treated as rational economic agents, who derive utility from consuming goods and services. The more goods and services they consume, the more utility they derive. GDP is more or less equal to national consumption, so increasing GDP will tend to increase total utility. (More accurately, we'd talk about NNP here, but it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.) Mathematically, this is a fairly easy optimisation problem: you've got some variables, some constraints and relations between them, and want to maximise the value of one variable. Obviously this theory is overly simplistic and has lots of readily apparent flaws. It can be worked out on the back of a napkin, but the disadvantage is that it's not a good model of the world.
It's worked reasonably well for the past 200 years at a coarse scale - GDP is generally correlated with what we in the West consider a decent standard of living: the US is a better place to live than Bulgaria, which is better than South Sudan. But it's not clear that a 2% increase in GDP correlates with a meaningful improvement in quality of life.
We might also care to some extent about the distribution of wealth, and bring about a discussion of redistribution through taxation as a means of increasing utility. We might care about the environment and bring that into the discussion too. Behavioural and Institutional Economics are attempts to build more realistic models of economic agents (people and public bodies respectively) but they're less amenable to mathematical analysis.
Have a look into the micro-meso-macro framework pioneered by Dopfer and Potts. It introduces a new institutional perspective within which we can consider individuals as participants in the norms, cultures and systems of new 'rules' which have variable levels of penetration into the macroeconomy.
Seems like The Tails Come Apart again. There's lots of metrics that are closely correlated with human well-being, but which lead to disaster if you optimise obsessively for that metric and nothing else.
Life expectancy is another one; it's generally a great thing, but a tyrannical government bent on optimising for increased life expectancy could easily think of plenty of horrible ways to squeeze out an extra few years at the cost of every other value.
I would think you're happiest when backpacking because you're on vacation, not because there's something magic about simplicity.
Like, if backpacking wasn't a vacation, so you had to hunt and gather to keep yourself fed on the trail and didn't have a home you'd eventually return to when you got tired of camping, that would probably be a lot less fun.
And if you want more people to be able to take vacations - to accumulate a surplus of food and other "stuff" that enables them to take a break and do something they enjoy for a while - well, that stuff is measured by GDP.
I mean, I have been vegan since I was very young, and being vegan makes it very hard to feed yourself in the wild. But yes, you are certainly right on this front, at least to a degree.
Doesn't more GDP probably mean that they are *not* taking a break, and instead producing and consuming more? You need consumption for production, and production for consumption, and while on the trail you most people produce and consume material goods at wildly lower rates.
Consuming generally involves leisure, once you get outside of buying bare necessities. More production doesn't necessarily involve more work either, it usually just involves more productive work. The workweek has shortened over the past few decades.
> Why do people often focus on increase of total productive quantity (GDP, GDP per capita, whatever bespoke adjacent measure I'm about to hear about) as a way to increase human happiness? It does not seem obvious to me.
I read all the other replies to you, but nobody seems to have brought up the fact that human happiness is a moving target, purely subjective with no objective measure, and often comes at the expense of other people's happiness.
I want a gigantic tree in my yard to be happy, but my neighbor wants a view and the sun on their porch to be happy - which one of us wins? Write that over an entire city / country - living near and interacting with other people is inherently full of tradeoffs.
And how should we measure "happiness," or "meaning," or "fulfillment?" There's no happiness meters - even brain imaging isn't at a state where it could discern "happy because they watched somebody get hit in the balls with a football" from "happy because they lead a deep and meaningful life and invent lifesaving new medical technologies."
So do a survey based thing.
Well, surveys are really prone to selection effects, and wording, and tens of other things. If you're a politician whose comp or re-election is determined by this survey, you're going to spend all your time trying to Goodhart the survey by tweaking the wording, the neighborhoods it's mailed to, and whatever. And if you were smart, you would just do something simple like "free beer fridays" at the sports stadium with tax dollars, and be continuously re-elected.
In short, nobody can measure intrinsic fufillment or joy at the aggregate level - it's an inherently personal project that depends greatly on your inbuilt drives and values, your life circumstances, and probably most importantly, the other people around you. Your examples are noteworthy in the sense that they're extremely solitary pursuits, but most people's happiness, and sadness and anger, come from their relationships with and interactions with other people. It's actually a very significant effect size - having a good social circle is as protective to all cause mortality as smoking is destructive to it (a 1.2 - 1.5x buff on all cause mortality, and an r = 0.3 - 0.4 effect size on quality of life and happiness).
This is like dating - everyone laments that dating is harder than ever, that incels are on the rise, that fertility is declining in literally every country in the world. But you can't DO anything about that - it's not actionable. Dating is an individual choice between two people, and you can't legislate that everyone can get a date. Similarly, you can't legislate that everyone gets to be happy, for the reasons I brought up above.
But GDP? We can measure that. We can tailor legislation and tax laws and incentives around it. If you put more money in everyone's hands in the aggregate, they are all free to pursue their own individual drives and values.
And those individual drives and values are different for everyone - you happen to like hiking and camping, and look down on the seven deadly sins. But the seven deadly sins are called out precisely *because* they're so prevalent! If they didn't make people happy, you wouldn't have to warn against them and try to push people away from them!
You think they're a mistake, a marshmallow test, short term desirable but long-term destructive? Welcome to life! LIFE is short-term desirable, and long-term guaranteed to end in death. Who are you to dictate what *really* makes people happy? Like WoolyAI said, Jesus and the Buddha and various other people have tried to make this argument at scale several times, and the jury is STILL out on whether they were net positive.
But I can tell you what they *didn't* accomplish - changing human nature. The seven deadly sins are as popular as ever (albeit vastly shifted towards "gluttony" and away from violence, which is honestly a huge improvement - sincere thanks to the thousands of Phd's who pooled their collective brainpower over several decades to make fast and junk food so addictive that ~80% of people became sessile, non-violent blobs!).
This is probably a sub-point, but does envy really make people happy, in a common or garden sense? Scott has written about a kind of homeostasis that people with depression are looking for, where one actively seeks out sad experiences because they are reassuring, but that's a strange kind of happiness.
> This is probably a sub-point, but does envy really make people happy, in a common or garden sense?
I think envy is adaptive, in the sense that if you notice something you want in the world that somebody else has, it will drive you to try to attain it.
It's only net unhappy because the vast majority of people envy status things which are relative and zero sum, and so the great majority are unable to attain those things. But the handful that do attain them? Probably happier afterwards, at least for a while.
Will they then be driven to envy something *else* and be unhappy again? Yeah, probably - it's a process, hedonic treadmills, etc. But is that envy overall adaptive? It is as long as it inspires you to put in effort and actually achieve things at least part of the time.
Fair. In my model virtue is a mean between extremes, so there is always a contrary vice e.g liberality is the virtue, meanness and prodigality are the pair of contrary vices opposed to it. Not sure what the contrary vice would be to envy but in principle there must be a vice contrary to legitimate ambition and the accompanying zeal.
[Edit: So according to Aquinas the matter of envy is sorrow for another's good, but matter isn't sufficient for sin, the form of envy is either that the good is inappropriate, or the sorrow is inappropriate, or both. So if you get annoyed if your friend has a nicer car and it inspires you to save up for a nicer car, that is simple zeal/jealousy and not a sin. The car isn't bad and the sorrow isn't bad. Obviously no-one here has to accept Thomist definitions but if we're going to talk about the deadly sins it's worth getting under the bonnet]
First: You just made me laugh. One Golden star, or something. Genuinely enjoyable writing.
Second: Even if we grant (which I would not generally, but will here) that short-term pleasure is a valid target, you must admit that many sources of GDP (e.g. Healthcare for a grossly unhealthy country, or gambling for our dopamine-addicted generation, and so on, and so on) are actively correlated against even short term happiness. Further, I'm generally suspicious of anything to convenient to the collective interests of the people near or around the top of material wealth, and focusing on GDP seems to (especially with increasing inequality in most countries I know enough to comment on) benefit this exact group most drastically.
Third: returning to what I granted in two, I just do not stand convinced? You bring up Jesus, as WoolyAI did, and while at a societal level I would not say it was incredible effective, I have met and spent meaningfully large amounts of time with Benedictine monks who live in a fashion incredibly similar to how they did eight or so hundred years ago with the founding of the first Benedictine monasteries. They are, as a group, probably the happiest people I have ever met. They also eschew most modern forms of immediate gratification. While I'm not Catholic, and while I do seriously love both my girlfriend and the idea of having a wife and children in the future, I was and still am seriously affected by their manner of life. I would not say Jesus was entirely ineffective, that is to say, and I would not say that the tradition built from him is meaningless either.
P.S. While I have yet to get a chance to work on one, experiences a professor of mine had on a Kibbutz, which are (often) secular but (often) similar, seem to match up with this.
> They are, as a group, probably the happiest people I have ever met. They also eschew most modern forms of immediate gratification.
Sure, but I'll propose to you that just as people vary on such attributes as height, atheticism, perspicacity, navigational ability, and so on, people vary in their ability to participate in the cluster of things that you consider meaningful and fulfilling, like the Benedictine lifestyle.
How much of how amazing and tangibly different their lifestyle feels, and how solid their fulfillment and happiness feels, is driven by selection effects? I would argue nearly all of it. It's a very rare sort that even considers being a monk these days, and the ones among them who can't hack it wash out pretty early, I'd assume.
So yeah, if you let me choose a top .00001% cluster of people, on nearly any metric, and assemble them together, I think you would be similarly impressed with the lives they lead, the fulfillment they demonstrate, and their overall happiness. This is your Benedictine monks, and kibbutzes, and so on.
You're doing that with the monks and think it's an answer - that's fine, it probably is an answer for you, due to your particular inbuilt drives and predilections.
But if you tried to force increasingly large numbers of people to live the same way, I think you'd find the great majority were miserable. Selection effects are doing all your work there, and it's not a general solution.
I do freely admit that lots of markers of GDP are driven by anti-human-flourishing dynamics, and you do a great job calling many of them out. But we don't have a truly "clean" metric that has no hidden downsides. It's still a better general solution than nearly anything else we have that works at the country level.
> Further, I'm generally suspicious of anything to convenient to the collective interests of the people near or around the top of material wealth, and focusing on GDP seems to (especially with increasing inequality in most countries I know enough to comment on) benefit this exact group most drastically.
Yes, this is very true as well. In fact, there's a famous "productivity vs wages" stagnation graph on this:
Only the top 10% got anything like the 250% growth in the graph - everyone else stayed stangant. And the top 1% was around 500%!
So yes, wealth and income are unequal. In fact, they both follow power laws, rather than Gaussian curves like height or weight. The richest are incomprehensibly richer than even the next-most-richest.
From a post I recently did on billionaires :
"If you ONLY consider the top 1% by wealth (which has a floor at around $13-$15M in net assets), the wealth Gini is ~.5 - much more equal than the overall wealth Gini in the US of .85!
Then when you get to “billionaire” territory, there’s another phase transition.
Obviously the tranche of “billionaires” doesn’t merely have an average wealth of $1B, because there are deca and centa billionaires dragging the mean up. You can use the Forbes list to calculate the implied alpha, and thereby the implied Gini, given the USA figures - with a collective fortune of $6.8T across 902 measured billionaires, the mean billionaire wealth is $7.54B. The implied Gini from that is .76 - high again!"
I will still argue that GDP is a better metric at the countrywide level - not because it doesn't mostly go to the already rich, it does. But broadly, that's unavoidable. Wealth and income is a power law everywhere in the world, and often with worse Gini coefficients than in the US. You can't avoid wealth going to the top 10%, and 1%, and .0001%, but that wealth still drives the scientific innovation and technological advance that saves lives at scale, like Norman Borlaug's wheat, or PEPFAR, or MRNA cancer vaccines.
In that sense, due to the power laws that are true of wealth everywhere in the world, the good stuff is inevitably intertwined with that inequality, and it can't be avoided. So it's still better to target GDP as a country-level metric than happiness, or fulfillment, or anything else, which are largely personal and non-actionable.
While there is certainly some truth to this, I'm really uncomfortable being defeatist both on distribution of resources and on the way humans relate to resources. I feel like some level of what could be called radical optimism is necessary here, at least for me. I feel that to maintain empathy, trust, etc, fundamentally to keep fulfilling Kant's Categorical Imperative (or at least the second version...) I need to believe there is more to it than that! God, what a terrible world, where inequality is always getting worse, and people are always more and more individual and alienated consumers of material content and ideas are best served as marketing.
> While there is certainly some truth to this, I'm really uncomfortable being defeatist both on distribution of resources and on the way humans relate to resources.
Oh, I'm personally pretty optimistic on both these fronts.
Have you read Hans Roslings' Factfulness? China alone lifted ~800M people out of $2 a day poverty in the last 40 years. People across the world are living better, longer, and healthier lives.
Not just that, but mirabile dictu, Malthusian dynamics eating all that prosperity isn't happening either! Fertility is actually aggregate declining to a sane carrying capacity rate at the world level:
Overall, things are getting better worldwide on many levels, and that's with inequality and high Gini indexes and all the rest.
Not just that, but how humans relate to resources on a material level is getting less important as well - if you look at the aggregate economic growth of the US economy, it's basically all driven by the Mag 7. Take the Mag 7 out of the S&P, and we're slightly net negative.
Why is this good news? The Mag 7 deal in the digital, the one domain where consumption and status games have barely any physical world resource footprint!
When phone screen times went from 2-3 hours in 2014 to 7-9 hours per person in Zennials today, that's a huge reduction in physical resource consumption and impacts. If people spend all their time and bandwidth optimizing digital footprints and worlds, we actually don't need to worry about physical sustainability. Everyone can be king of their own digital castle, without the concomitant outsized consumption of the West!
> God, what a terrible world, where inequality is always getting worse, and people are always more and more individual and alienated consumers of material content and ideas are best served as marketing.
Isn't this just lamenting from your own selfish viewpoint that there's not more people like yourself out there? That people in the aggregate value stuff that you personally don't value, like Tik Tok and Golden Age TV Streaming and whatever?
But good news - there ARE more people like you out there! With 8 billion people in the world, we have more of *every* personality and value cluster. You're among them right now.
One nice thing about the digital - it turns everything into a search and clustering problem, and we've gotten *very* good at those. You can find "your people" online, no matter your physical geography. And if you live in a city with a decent population, you can translate that to a real-world social circle as well.
So never before have people been able to find "their people" so readily, and this is a great thing, as it enables you to build social circles with people who share your values and inclinations.
And overall, this is a great thing societally too - because the cohort that drives technological advance, that invents things, that starts new companies, they're able to find their complements out there, and are better resourced, more able to exchange ideas, and more able to create and innovate than ever before, and this helps improve things and raise standards of living for everyone!
Hm. This is a fascinating world view. Frankly, I wish I could have it.
Honestly, if you simply grant a) all happiness is happiness, there is no joy/pleasure distinction or anything, and b) the current state of the online world is capable of generating this new, simplified happiness on mass, you are probably right.
I just can't grant the first one, honestly. The second seems, like, probably true. But the first? I just... can't accept that. I need some differentiation or I'd never push myself the way I do.
> You can strengthen institutions that support it (like church) and weaken institutions that encourage people to "not settle" like feminism.
I dunno, I personally think this is a better equilibrium overall. People *shouldn't* have to "settle." Settling sucks!
The competitive bar has been raised, and now men need to compete against rivalrous alternatives like "having my own career, thanks" and Netflix and pets.
Let me lay out why I think this is a good thing overall, it has a couple of moving parts. Broadly, men suck to begin with, dating has always been a competition between the genders, there's an inherent tradeoff here that is either going to screw men or women, and we should side with the women because they're going to drive more value by being able to make their own choices.
Famously, the manosphere thinks it's a big deal that men grade female attractiveness on a bell curve, and women grade male attractiveness pass / fail, with at *least* 80% of men failing:
Have you *met* men?? Would YOU want to date a median man if YOU were a woman? It's essentially all downsides.
Did you know the median "interejaculatory latency time" during sex is only 9 minutes? And that a 1-in-a-thousand performance is 40 minutes? The bar for male sexual performance is just literally on the floor. I'm not sure how 90%+ women ever have a good sexual experience with both of those being true.
What else do women get by dating median men? Gigantic babies that want you to do their laundry and dishes and cook for them, while giving you...what in return? 9 minutes of awful, self-centered sex that does nothing for you? Kids that you then have to provide for and raise for 20+ years with barely any help?
Sure, you'll object, *we're* not like that! We here in the ACX commentariat are a cut above!
And yeah, I'll give you that - the people commenting here are overwhelmingly Professional Managerial Class with real jobs and high conscientiousness and whatever, who are excellent cooks and do our own laundry and contribute to raising kids.
But the societal level dynamics we're talking about are driven by the median characteristics out there, and I think it's pretty clear that women get basically nothing from men at that level. I mean, just consider divorce statistics - it's a ~42% vintage divorce rate at the population level, and probably an additional half that in "net miserable" relationships that neverthless stay together, for a full ~2/3 failure rate for relationships.
That says right off the bat the base rate for "relationships being net positive" is actually really low.
Furthermore, we're basically never going to get back to the 50's dynamic, where ~85% of men got married and had babies.
Do you know the historical comp there? 3-4 women reproduced for every man. That's 80% of women, and ~27% of men reproducing, and we lived like that for at least ~200k years:
The 50's was an extremely unrepresentative peak of men doing better than they ever had over the last 200k years, and shouldn't be used as a reference baseline for what men should expect.
Dating and mating has *always* been a competition, and this is entirely expected. Moreover, I'd argue it's unambiguously better than the 50's dynamic.
People sometimes point to the much higher teacher, nurse, and secretary quality in the 50’s. This was because smart and talented women were stuck with those jobs, culturally, when they had the innate potential to be doctors, executives, or scientists.
Given that there's a big "human capital" difference between whichever side is going to be screwed, I'm happily on the side of screwing lower capital men versus those high capability women in that battle.
Because who is going to do more for all of us, in the aggregate? Those women who can now be scientists, doctors, and executives. They're the ones that will drive new company foundings and growth, new inventions and innovations, and better health and life outcomes for society overall.
That’s who you should side with if there needs to be a choice, and that’s who we need more of in our future.
I've looked pretty hard and I've never been able to find a solid example of a government or people top-down deciding they wanted to change the culture in a certain direction, and succeeding in a reasonable amount of time and effort.
Smoking is the closest we've come, and it took ~60 years, lots of fighting, billions of dollars, and was mostly driven by the smokers literally dying off to get where we are today. Changing behavior is hard, even at the individual level - changing it deliberately and meaningfully at the society level is essentially a pipe dream, and requires extreme effort and many decades.
On this particular issue, there's essentially no way we'll raise the median male standard faster than sex robots and literally superhuman AI companions get here.
Do you think this will have any even remote improvement of your luck at finding a partner? Or is this some societal thing?
I can basically promise you will not be more likely to find a partner by trying to do this. I'd be very shocked if it didn't hurt your chances, to be honest.
This isn't even saying that either of those things are necessarily bad, just that they will not solve your problem.
I mean, not to say they are good, either. Just that either way it is not helping you.
I mean. I'm not thirty. I'm also somewhat lucky, at least so far, when it comes to relationships. But I can say that I have yet to be turned down! Just asking does a lot. I've also exclusively dated women I find attractive, intelligent, and enjoyable to be in conversation with, and all of my relationships have lasted about as long as I'd want them to. I don't know; it is possible I am just lucky, or something, but I don't know any men who meet the criteria of a) being willing to, and actually frequently doing, the asking out; b) being tolerable in conversation, c) taking even basic amounts of care of themselves, d) having decent ability to be curious about what she is interested in, and to be able to talk about what you enjoy freely and without shame, and e) having some decent career that affords either prestige, or money, or free time, or good feelings that is unable to find a girlfriend or has been unable to find a girlfriend in the past.
I'm younger, so that probably makes it easier, but I can't imagine a few years brings it from "very easy" to "sub 1%."
I am going to make the wild guesses that you are a young adult childless man in good physical health with few social or professional duties. This may inform your perspective somewhat. Perhaps in the future you will have goals no less noble, and yet more correlated with economic production, like ensuring the comfort and safety of your children.
Yes, you are broadly correct, and make a good point. I would generally really like to do many things for my children (which I do not yet have) which would require a lot of personal freedom usually only afforded by economic stability, and I wonder about how I am going to be able to do these things for them. This isn't something I have a solution for.
I will say, though, that I don't think I would have these freedoms any more if we produced twice as much, so long as I still needed to work as much as I do and likely will.
I will also say that I do generally work an unhealthily large number of hours, but I am in a position (pretty much as you described) that makes this both enjoyable and doable for me. It also allows me the ability to take significant time off if I need or want to, which is not something most can do. I don't really have a point here, but yes, this is my background, and my background will inevitably inform my opinions.
Also probably worth noting that while I have not grown up with money, I have been able to apply for and get grants and scholarships to fund what would generally require a lot of family resources, so I have some sort of privilege through the (honestly inexplicable to me) charity of others.
Well, yes, $80k annually is huge! A majority of Americans don't earn that (median yearly income at around $60k), as well as the *vast* majority of people worldwide. Reaching a world where most people earn the equivalent of $80k/year will need GDP growth to continue for a long time.
It's not just that much of what GDP measures is unfulfilling activity; GDP can actually go up when bad things happen. For example, if some new disease suddenly struck elderly (ie, unemployed, so no lost work days) people, there'd be lots of new economic activity around treating them, and the GDP would go up. Arguably the terrible lifestyle in the US (sedentary, ultraprocessed) contributes to GDP similarly, by creating all kinds of disease in later life that must be treated (or by creating demand for the new weight loss drugs, which are not cheap).
Because GDP is legible and easy and a metric that people who value wealth accrual want to go up, eg the people who get to make decisions under capitalism.
There is a cruft of pseudo-science(most of economics) that has grown up to justify the situation that already exists, and natural biase has locked it in place and until some catastrophe loosens the gears (climate change, labor oversupply, population growth/decline, etc) we are stuck with it.
People will say shit like "More stuff is better than less stuff" and stop thinking, as through the marginal utility of your 35 pair of shoes or your 12 meal of the day was worth the time expenditure of production.
While this is, like, fun to say, and I really want to just agree with it and go back to writing my essays against capitalism in my boutique coffeeshop-bookstore while listening to Immortal Technique, it does seem that many people who are smarter and more educated than me do this, and I want to understand it in a more deeply than a rah-rah can give me. Although admittedly you may very well be just completely correct.
I'm not even saying that capitalism is not the best organizational principle to manage distribution of stuff, it very well might be.
The hill I am willing to die on is the rest of the above post; specifically that the most of the production of the field of economics over the past 60-80 years is either soft philosophy or self help.
Hm. I do not have (as I have commented elsewhere) any more Econ literacy than a relatively competent undergrad student three or four years into studying it, and I don't feel confident making proclamations on the subject, but I'd love to hear your reasoning on it. That sounds believable-ish to me, but probably only because it confirms my biases.
There are a bunch of achane beefs with the way economists torture numbers until they say whatever they want, but that might just be MY biases as a shape rotator.
My main contention, which I think everyone can understand and needs to be argued, is that economists taken on average behave as though their field produces theoretical frameworks and models and suchlike, tests them against past behavior, then uses them to predict the future.
The actual situation is that the models are constructed with historical data to explain historical behavior, but then utterly fail to predict anything.
The best prediction any particular economic model can make is thus: If the price is going up, eventually it will probably go down, and if the price is going down eventually it will probably go up.
Basically, economics is softer than sociology but demands to be taken as seriously as say epidemiology.
Alright, I can calm down now. The bee has escaped my bonnet.
You're making a broader point here than your point about GDP, but GDP can be calculated based on total national expenditure (including government expenditure) instead of the value of goods and services produced, so this calculation would include national parks spending, donations to nature-based charities, lobbying to stop developers covering it all in concrete, travel and equipment. Also more natural goods have a monetary value than people realise. Some hooligans chainsawed the Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, lots of people thought the sentence was harsh but the reinstatement cost for a 100 year old tree would be in the hundreds of thousands.
While I think this definition is to some degree more preferable (and I should have made note of that) I would not say it is significant either way, as this section is weighted no differently, than, say, expenditure on whatever post-relationship hellscape the people at Grok are cooking up.
I agree, the only possible defence would be GDP includes lots of spending on lots of things people think are valuable, some of those things turn out to be valuable, some don't. One person can act contrary to their happiness but it would be strange if a whole nation did that consistently over the long term.
Would it? I feel like much of current society (or, at least, current society weighted by market value, so 10000:1 for meta employee over fisherman) is attempting to build things that we use and value in spite of knowing that they are bad for us and in spite of them actively making our lives worse.
I guess GDP-as-expenditure is a portfolio of bets on what will make us fairly happy, I would expect most people to get those bets right over the long term, but we are on the verge of making some big bets which have a serious chance of making us very unhappy.
Yeah, this is what I was going to say if no one else already had. Typical streetlight effect. Measure the thing with an associated number rather than trying to measure happiness directly.
Although owning lots of useful items is better than owning few/no useful items, I think at the margin for say a typical American, their happiness would be better served by spending time on wholesome and fulfilling activities rather than money on more material goods. My mom is a hoarder, so I am very very much aware that more is not always better.
There isn't really much that I can say about this; you are correct, as in, this is the literal answer to my question. I guess I was hoping more for discourse on the question, than the answer to it, but thank you regardless. I do wish materialism wasn't, though. It is regrettable.
oh, I actually have a plenty of strong opinions on this topic, generally in the genre of WoolyAl's comment. But I figure it's better to, ya know, keep the conversation iterative. In case I'd misunderstood something.
E.g. my original comment assumes the perspective of a bureaucrat who shapes macro-economic policy. But it's also possible that you were asking the question from an individual's perspective. I.e. "why do people keep up with Jones's?". In which case, Girardian Mimesis and Hedonic Treadmills would've been more appropriate.
> I find myself happiest when I am backpacking, sleeping as well as living in the commons we all share.
Another way I could have responded, is to remark that this reminds me of The Hobbit. The overarching theme is greed. Smaug covets gold, Thorin covets the Arkenstone, and Gollum covets the ring, all of whom serve as warnings to Bilbo and the reader. The foil is the high elves, the crazy hippies who've learned to commune with the gifts of nature.
Another interest of mine right now, is that I'd like to learn more about the juxtaposition between Friedrich List (who believes in protectionism) vs Adam Smith (who believes in free-markets and GDP maxing). Or equivalently, the American System vs the British System. I feel very suspicious that GDP maxing is the one true way.
You mentioned wireheading (implicitly). And lately, I've been wondering to what degree epistemic-confidence is a form of wireheading. (I'm not really sure how to explain this, yet.)
Inspired by Zanzibar, we could discuss the difference between use-value vs exchange-value, and to what degree Karl Marx had useful things to say about the world. In the past year, I've had two different people tell me that nobody really understood Marx's point (including other Marxists). And so "read Marx's corpus first-hand" is on my to-do list, even though I don't feel especially inclined toward Marxism.
This is all interesting. You seem to have pretty much gotten what I am talking about, for the record. If you have ideas on how to share the epistemic-confidence thing, I'm happy to listen, seems fascinating although I will admit not really sure where you are going with it from that comment. I think Marx thought Marxists misunderstood his point, although I wouldn't cite me on that, and I will admit my own reading of Marx has been relatively shallow. My economics reading is generally either game theory (which I am actually competent enough in to feel like I get a lot out of reading current scholarship) or just graduate textbooks (currently mostly finished with micro and about halfway through the one I have on macro) to get me to the point where I feel like I get a lot out of current scholarship on those topics. One of my main guiding principles is to remember that I generally disagree on most topics with me of the past, and to keep that thought with me when I discuss my current opinions; that is to say, I know I could be and very likely am at least partially wrong. And I'm economically speaking no more competent than a good undergrad, or, that is to say, I really do not know enough to comment authoritatively.
If you can't tell I'm feverish currently. Sorry about, well, how I am writing. Hopefully you have further thoughts.
I do think current society has wildly strange valuations, but I know my own preferences (e.g. I use one of those Garmin alert thingamajigs in place of a phone, for example) are pretty unusual and I shouldn't attempt to overly prescribe based on my own individual preferences.
> If you have ideas on how to share the epistemic-confidence thing, I'm happy to listen
Oh, idk. This is highly speculative. It might not be coherent. But I've been thinking about Friston's unification of action and observation, and what the ramifications of this are. I.e. if "observation" means "to align your beliefs with reality", then "action" means "to align reality with your beliefs". This introduces a certain tension. If you have no confidence, you'll never have the willpower to act on anything. But with too much confidence, you'll act in stupid ways and be closed minded. Is there a middle ground? Is the optimal choice conditional on something other than confidence? Is John Boyd's OODA Loop relevant? Is Cromwell's Rule relevant? Etc.
As a subsection this, I've been wondering about what happens when confidence gets cut off from exogenous feedback. It seems like, in the absence of exogenous feedback, it should be very easy to go down a path of self-reinforcing beliefs. Like how a cocaine addict can spiral into further addiction. drug addiction is a form of wireheading, and I feel like maybe wireheading can be generalized to more phenomena than is currently realized. But memory is also self-reinforcing, in a certain sense. And memory is pretty useful. Maybe positive-feedback loops are bad to the extent that they insulate a system from external shocks until the system encounters a signal it gets overwhelmed by. But isn't that desirable in, say, buildings?
----
> Hopefully you have further thoughts.
wewlad, not sure you want to encourage me to go full schizo.
More broadly, I'm on a personal quest to figure out the Modern Era. Again, I'm not in a position to explain or defend this coherently yet, but my current thinking is that modernity is built on the proliferation of cheap signals. And since honest signals are expensive by nature, this leads to low trust, which begets a host of subtle (read: illegible) negative-externalities. The printing press gave us material technologies and network expansion, but it came at the cost of degraded social technologies and cybernetic pollution. (Fun fact: "cyber" and "govern" are cognates [0]. I leave the kabbalistic implications as an exercise to the reader.)
For example, Super Owl makes the argument [1] that capitalism beat communism because communism (and similar utopian visions?) require high-trust, whereas capitalism only requires greed. In other words, it's a stag hunt. Communism basically tried to create a secular religion from scratch and failed. But it's also true that capitalism is the worst economic system... except for all the others we've tried.
Elsewhere, you mention "Is it possible that we have engineered a system that makes us increasingly terrible at making those bets?" Which reminds me, I'm not very impressed by financial engineering. Maturity transformation and chronic inflation are inherently destabilizing because they encourage malinvestment by distorting the credit market. I expect to see recession after recession during my lifetime. And each time, economists will go "wHo cOUld HavE pOsSiBLy SeEn THis CoMInG?!?" (breaking news: Silicon Valley coders fired en masse, after the end of a decade of ZIRP) while policy-makers put another bandaid on the proximal cause, du jour. And don't even get me started on the ticking timebomb we call "national debt".
Meanwhile, Performative Bafflement's comment mentions happiness metrics. To reiterate, I believe that happiness optimization is misguided. The obsession with happiness and utility, rather than wellbeing, is another error of Enlightenment Era Rationalism. Maybe he's right, in that this is all inevitable given human nature. But still, I can't help but see superstimuli as analogous to overfitting.
Though the picture is far from complete. E.g. at the moment, I'm in the middle of reading Bronze Age Mindset. BAP seems to disagree that our present state of 2025 can be traced to Neoliberal Managerialism, which is causing me a lot of cognitive dissonance, since it throws a wrench into the signal theory narrative I just laid out. And I'm not sure I fully understand his reasoning. Though I sympathize with his views on organized religion. And I think it's significant that he's basically just parroting Nietzsche, who predicted (correctly? [2]) that Dionysus [3] was just as central to Greek Mythology as Apollo.
I'm very happy I convinced you to go full Schizo. Very, very interesting. I agree, or at least seem to be amenable, to much of what you have said. I'm interested in what you see as the issue in national debt -- I'd probably say my personal thought process around it is that it is likely a sub-ideal method of giving people money to retire off of (as most debt is US owned) and encouraging foreign investment (as some US debt is not US owned), but that it is unlikely to be an issue so long as tax-rate adjusted GDP grows faster than it does. Generally speaking it is, in my mind, certainly not one of the most broken parts of the current financial system. I'm also curious about your thoughts on the printing press -- reading is admittedly probably the last thing I would be willing to give up, because I love it dearly and because I generally read one to two books a week (averaging; I read seven in a week when I have the time, and then none for a few weeks when busy with work, but I track it and have averaged a little over a eighty a year the past few years, so 1-2 a week seems accurate), so I will probably respond emotionally and not rationally at first to any discussion of the faults of it, but they certainly exist -- anyways, that is all to say that I'm really bloody curious.
It is.not enough to be legible , GDP must be relevant. If everyone worked 100 hour weeks, GDP would be high and people would be miserab le. If no one worked,.and no one has any money, they would also be miserable. So it's neither correlated not anti correlated.
Some of those would provide teambuilding activities instead? Maybe only a fraction of them, but maybe the teambuildings could be expensive enough to compensate for that from the perspective of GDP?
Ultimately, people will spend the money they make. The less free time they have, the more expensive things they will buy, because they will be able to afford it, and because they will feel they "deserve" to buy something expensive to compensate for their suffering.
Anecdotally, I knew some people who were working ~996 in an environment where 40 hours a week were the general norm. They made 2x the money as their colleagues in similar positions in other companies. They didn't have families, and with such schedule couldn't keep a hobby, or even friends outside of their work. So every Sunday, someone from their job organized a party at some expensive place, they all came because they had no better plans, they drank a lot of insanely expensive alcohol, watched striptease, then returned home to get some sleep and be ready for the next round of 996. Staying at home would be just too depressing. Anyway, most of them quit after a few months, or burned out and got fired. They were mentally broken and had no savings. From the perspective of GDP -- excellent!
This is a tech thing, no? If you're trying to get there first at the frontier you and your staff probably do have to work like dogs, I'm skeptical a whole economy could sustain that, in many cases there would be physical obstacles to doing that amount of work (I'm a gardener) or there would be diminishing returns with each extra hour.
Because more stuff is good. It is true that the overwhelming majority of people are retarded (1) and make horrifically suboptimal decisions regarding their pursuit of happiness. However, the overwhelming majority of attempts to legally/societally/religiously make people be not retarded have resulted in worse outcomes than just letting people be retarded, probably because the people attempting to legally/socially/religiously improve the majority of humanity are themselves people and therefore retarded. Within the constraint that most people are retarded and will waste the overwhelming amount of time on this earth and money they earn on bullshit jobs and stupid garbage, the only way we can improve general outcomes is to help them earn more stupid garbage for the same bullshit jobs.
For example, most virtuous people could probably be quite happy on a UBI of $3000/month in the US. Actual people have $600/month car payments while they guzzle Mountain Dew and blow $100 over lunch on DraftKings. Given that we, as a society, cannot make most people prefer hiking and mediation over fast cars, crap food, and gambling addictions, it's still better if, in 20 years, we can put a lifted pickup-truck with BALLER rims in every driveway, Baja Blast-Red Lightning Edition Mountain Dew in every cup, and a $200/month cocaine subscription for every FanDuel signup. (2)
I don't think I can accept that it is impossible to make people better at being happy instead of simply praying on their base instincts of gratification and pleasure. Surely we can do better? I feel like, at least to a degree, humans are very able to change their behavior based on the directives of others, but maybe I am wrong?
Are you going to significantly outperform Jesus and/or the Buddha?
I mean, if anyone is not retarded, it's Jesus & the Buddha. Very few people have had more of an impact on the world than they had and they tried very directly to shape human behavior and desire. Are we even confident that their net impact on the world was positive? Christopher Hitchens had opinions.
Conversely, some guy named Rober Baker invented chicken nuggets in 1950, which is a clear pareto improvement over the world of 1949.
One of these things is way easier than the other.
Also, please remember, we don't have Jesus or the Buddha to try to improve the world, we have, uh, currently we have Trump and Kamala Harris. Maybe Da Pope. We don't even have Oprah anymore. Please adjust your ambitions accordingly.
I don't think this follows, honestly. I would say that algorithmic social media has directly made people worse (in the fashion we mean it here) and that is a recent human invention. It does not stand to reason to me here that these inventions can only make things worse, yes?
To take your example of backpacking, in low GDP times / places:
* The roads from the cities to the nice backpacking spots may not exist or may not be good, so it would take you much longer to get there, if you could get there at all.
* You might not be able to afford a car to get there.
* Nice lightweight and waterproof backpacking equipment wouldn't be available, so backpacking would be less enjoyable.
* You would not have access to maps or GPS devices or internet communities so you wouldn't be able to plan your trip as well.
* You would probably die younger (lifespan is strongly correlated with GDP), so you wouldn't get as many chances to go backpacking.
Sure, but do we have any strong reason to expect that correlation to continue into the future? I don't see why doubling, say, US GDP would necessarily be good? Like, many sectors would benefit immensely, but I can also imagine things that really do not seem favorable to added productive capacity? And I would not be confident that the benefits would outweigh the costs.
It's not a law of nature that more GDP = more goodness. But your response could have been written verbatim before some of Gary's points were a reality (lightweight waterproof backpacks, affordable cars, GPS/internet communication).
So GDP is a proxy for those things we all agree make hiking more enoyable or, in many cases, possible in the first place. And they are not predictable. So it stands to reason that more GDP in the future = more goodness still.
To be completely honest I do not think this follows? Technological advance certainly can make hiking better, but it can also (undoubtedly) make hiking worse. The same is true with real life. GDP is both a pretty bad measurement of technological advancement, and, like, probably more correlated with the second than the first?
GDP goes up when things are produced, and to maximize this you need more and more consumption, and I do not think consumption makes hiking better (e.g. in the same way the latest running outfit or bike gearshift makes running or riding any better; there are only so many things that provide enough of a boost in enjoyment to justify them, like, existing, and even more basically to justify you spending the time to learn about how to use them. Also, I think being caught up in the materialistic rat race of a hobby generally makes the hobby less fun, but maybe that is just me.
My understanding of many, many pre-industrial tribes and places is that they very frequently cared about the environment, spent time in the environment, and so on, and so on; certainly the produced wildly less than we do today. I do not think these things track. This feels (not to be offensive or to attack, I mean this honestly, you may be correct and I may be wrong) like the sort of reasoning that is done to justify a belief already held.
I'm not going to attempt to argue about your state (surely, you know more about it than I do). I am not attempting to argue that in every case less development means better relationship with the natural world, just that a lot of the former is not necessary (and, certainly, is not the path to) the latter.
Two American Civil War facts we don't hear enough about:
1. The Confederate army enslaved every black person they could find when they invaded Pennsylvania. You can be sure they weren't conducting investigations to determine who was an escaped slave and who was freeborn.
2. With the blessing of Jefferson Davis, General Sibley invaded New Mexico, with the intention of extending slave territory West to the Pacific. Of course Davis was fully on board with this; extending slave country was a project loved by the Southern educated public.
The Southern adventurer William Walker briefly took control of Nicaragua in the 1850s, before he was forced to return home. Walker was celebrated as a returning hero. He was part of a broader phenomenon dubbed filibustering. In an American context, filibusters embodied the Southern planters’ desire to build a vast slave empire, one that stretched to Colombia or even Patagonia.
I have been a William Walker fan (as a historical personage, not as a role model) since watching the Alex Cox movie about him as a sort of proto-Reagan adventurer.
Partly because it was our most traumatic and deadly war, and we've fought a lot of wars.
Partly because it's our oldest war that was extremely well documented. Civil War books take you back to an exotic world of duels and cavalry charges. And there are so many primary sources that you can wander that world for the rest of your life and never learn everything.
Partly because so many of us are still bitter about the war and we want to go back in time and refight it. And I'm not just talking about pro-Confederates. Us Unionists wish we could go back and smash the Southern planters FAR more thoroughly. We needed to pulverize the planter class so completely that its power was broken forever.
Our failure to do that led to a century of suffering for millions of Americans. And some of the negative effects are still with us today.
The typical reason to smash your enemies thoroughly is to ensure you don’t have to fight another war against them. That was accomplished. You know that slavery was defeated, not just on the battlefield but in realm of ideas when, only a few years after the war was over, former Confederates started pretending they hadn’t actually been fighting to preserve slavery. The idea of unilateral succession was also put to rest by the war, apparently permanently. There have been a few people talking about secession in recent years, but I don’t think that even the craziest of them think that unilateral secession, as opposed to separation by mutual agreement, is a good idea.
It’s true that the Civil War didn’t end racial discrimination, but that wasn’t a war goal. There were, sadly, racists on both sides.
The typical reason to smash your enemies is to create peace. But there was little peace to be had in the South from 1865-1970. Through police and vigilantes, the Southern white elite more or less waged a low-level war against millions of poor Americans. It could have been avoided.
I was about to say "The reason that I think people should talk about it less is because I think most of the time they're just looking for an excuse to bring old regional, political and racial hatreds into the modern day"... but then I got to your third paragraph and you proved me right.
Some conflicts happened long ago and are no longer relevant; some conflicts are ongoing.
There is no clear line. For every conflict that 99% people already consider settled, there is someone still obsessed over it... and with some luck he could restart the flames.
But that is different from situations that seemed resolved for a moment, but that was just because the winning side underestimated the capacity of the losing side to recover.
I'm so sorry for harboring political hatred towards the southern planter class, a conglomeration of serial rapists who dreamed about spreading serial rape, disciplinary torture and human degradation All the Way South to the Colombia
I'm so sorry for harboring political hatred towards the KKK, America's oldest domestic terror group.
I'll add it's very funny that you cited your dislike of "racial hatred" as a reason to condemn my comment. When my comment expressed a desire to disempower the foremost authors of racial hatred in American history, and to empower the proponents of racial harmony. The Civil War was mainly fought between whites.
You're not the only one to say they want to go back in time and kill Hitler, but I'm surprised to find there's a way to say it that comes off as boring as it is impossible.
You did smash that class. That’s how you got Southern populists and demagogues. You made sure the Ewells were left on top, not Atticus Finch. You should be happy.
Or read up on pellagra, with its 3 D’s: dermatitis, diarrhea, and dementia, death being the honorary 4th. I think it might make you feel better. It could be a Yuletide reading.
There’s a children’s book about it, sort of DK-ish, which has the advantage of pictures which I think should enhance your enjoyment.
A fun road trip for you might wind up in Madison WI. 140 Confederate soldiers, most about 17 or 18, lay buried there, with a marker or plaque that had been allowed to be placed by some too tenderhearted women at some point, commemorating as was the barbaric fashion the shared loss of youth in the national cataclysm, in this case to disease/wounds in a prisoner camp.
The markers were discarded so unfortunately you can’t now smash them but as far as I know their remains have not yet been disturbed, so you might be able to deface the graves, if you can figure out which ones they are now that the marker is gone. You would want to be sure and dishonor the right boys.
The Southern planter class was not smashed. It was coddled, it was babied, it was not a held accountable. I guarantee you the entire Confederate population believed that Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis were going to be hanged if they lost the war.
And did Lost Causers gain new respect for Unionists because they refrain from hanging Lee and Davis? Not one bit. Many privately considered this to be a sign of weakness and one more reason to hold Northerners in contempt.
There were no downsides to hanging Davis and the Confederate generals, only upsides. Our failure to do that represented a coddling, incredibly naive leniency that led to 100 years of oppression and suffering for millions of Southerners. Black and white alike.
Good catch on that error. I just realized my ENTIRE comment was an error. I had a brain fart and forgot that luciaphile is quite possibly the most unserious poster here, excluding the ones that get banned.
Reconstruction was done half way, half heartedly, and then rolled back juuuuuuust short of illegal enough. Every planter family (+/-) that got rich at the handle end of a whip had recovered everything they lost by the 1920's.
They should have been utterly disposed. Every bit of property confiscated and ever bit of capital seized for reparations, not given a 9 year time out.
Just as now, the Ewells of the world were symptoms of the disease that is the Candie's.
I understand the sentiment. Here on a different side of the planet, many of wish that the top communist officials got hanged, every nontrivial member of the communist party or an employee of a secret service got banned for life from working in a public office, and the Soviet Union got dismantled to dozens of small states never allowed to reunite. It could have saved us a lot of problems that we have today.
If so, then it was much like the persistence of pre-revolutionary families in France, in business decades later, even after various members were beheaded.
But of course, the South was much impoverished compared to the North so this would have been all relative where true.
Where not true: Faulkner, pretty much all of Southern literature.
Now, Faulkner might illustrate your point.
He didn’t have to work that hard.
And yet, one would not describe him as having the wealth of his ancestors in any sense.
Hmm. You're comparing the French aristocracy, some of who supported the 1789 revolution and opposed slavery
With the violent, irrational serial rapists who comprised the Southern planter class. Quite a comparison.
Inasmuch the French aristocracy did own slaves, they lived in 1789, not 1860. 70 years of modern history is like a millennium of ancient history. For the wealthy, intellectual development and availability of knowledge increased exponentially between 1789 and 1860. The Confederate planters must be held to a higher standard.
You have completely misinterpreted the meaning of "smash the Southern planters". And why would you assume that those "140 Confederate soldiers, most about 17 or 18", belonged to the class of plantation owners?
That’s sweet of you to want to rescue some boys from infamy. It shows a little empathy that will not do you credit with the culture. But sadly, while I’m sure statistically many of the boys there were not from landowning families, let alone slaveowning families, you will probably be disappointed to learn that very likely all classes were represented. The honor culture of the South doesn’t quite map to the current day, and rural “Extended South”* overrepresentation in deaths in military service.
If it did, Lee’s son would not end up a POW.
* I can’t think what that guy calls it, the guy who writes the book about the regions of America, and which ones are about to go full Nazi. I did read a review of his latest such tome, and found that Iowa was now on the naughty list.
Regime change, and I bet he'd see no contradiction between that and his other comments in this thread vociferously denouncing more recent interventions.
Re: Walker, you might want to look up the Knights of the Golden Circle, if you don't know about them already.
Also, "filibuster" has a fun etymology – it's a French loanword which is in its turn the French way of pronouncing the word "freebooter", as in a pirate.
The insurmountable barrier, if I remember correctly, comes from the fact that for various reasons, it is hard to do cutting-edge ad targeting for LLM users. Sure, you could easily do billboard-style, untargeted banner ads, as if it was 2002 again. But those ads are so primitive and ineffective that people aren't eager to buy them.
As for LLMs subtly pressuring people to buy products, you'd have to keep this secret and if it leaked at any time, the public would be outraged. Too risky.
You don't show the ads through the LLM interface. You sell insanely detailed ad profiles of your users to ad networks so they can use it to supercharge their targeting elsewhere
> if it leaked at any time, the public would be outraged
I would not count on this. Orgs get away with much worse (e.g. microsoft leaking their azure master key last year made some news, but it had no impact on the bottom line whatsoever).
I believe the only reason we dont see ads integrated in AI-Chats, is because these companies still have other good revenue streams. Once the bubble starts bursting, we will see enshittification happening, which will include ads in AI.
Zitron would argue the point is moot because nobody knows how to keep inference costs predictable and low without pissing off customers, ie. Raising the subscription price to 100+ dollars monthly, or cutting people off when they use too much inference, which will infuriate people, since the average user doesn't know exactly how much inference they are using, or exactly how to manage their inference use.
I'm not sure if it's POSSIBLE to write a guide to exactly managing your inference use. All you could do would be to give vague, obvious tips, right?
Or you could just have a meter. People won’t need to know what the units are, they can just know that a conversation is red, and that means it’s consuming lots of inference. Or they can have a slider for how much inference the service is allowed to use without asking them
Introducing meters like that will alienate a substantial portion of current LLM users, and hasn't it been claimed that 800 million have used LLMs?
If you're willing to take that hit and rely on new users to make up the difference, the new users will STILL be furious when they are cut off after 2 hours of prompting, and than they find out that Uncle Bob prompted for 40 hours before being cut off.
Let's say we can accept losing THOSE outragees. You'll still have text-only LLM users (TLUs) who will see their inference eaten up faster for non-obvious reasons. They will compare notes with other TLUs with similar usage patterns, but dramatically different inference-per-prompt statistics.
This is inevitable when there are SO many possible prompts. the variations are endless. I find it impossible to predict how long it takes for ChatGPT to complete a task! It is obvious that simple tasks take longer than complicated tasks. But still, there is dramatic variance in the speed at which the LLM completed two tasks with roughly equal complexity.
Sure, but companies alienate people alll the time without losing them completely. I felt pretty alienated when Windows updates became compulsory, but I didn’t switch back. People might feel like they’re being ripped off, but people buy stuff off companies that they think are ripping them off all the time, too.
Humans have hyperactive pattern recognition, so we tend to be conspiratorial. If you charge users based on inference, many people will look at these their hard-to-explain inference statistics and conclude they are getting ripped off.
I agree with Ed Zitron that managing inference costs is a difficult problem with no easy solution, at least one that is not easy if you want LLM use to be as ubiquitous as social media use. And don't LLMs need to approach that level of success to justify their incredibe startup costs? You can't win this battle without satisfying conspiratorial dum dums who believe in Trump's pee tape and think the Earth is flat.
I wrote some notes on questions I'm very interested in! Would love to get more engagement by ACX commenters, some ppl here might have relevant background knowledge and/or models.
Some ideas are pretty obviously important: lightspeed is constant for all observers; incentives matter; most people have two arms and two legs. Some ideas are worthless: a list of predictions following from the event that my nose becomes Novosibirsk. There's a lot in between.
Sounds like you're measuring ideas in terms of "usefulness". One idea is better than another one if the first permits you to do more of whatever you'd prefer, where "you" might be just you, or some set of people like you (but this is probably ultimately evaluatable down to "better for just you, since other people like you doing more means freeing up more of your time"). Examples typically include ideas that enable or inspire people to build various labor-saving or enjoyment-expanding devices. Staircases and stories.
Many ideas don't enable building of labor-saving devices, but enable or combine with other ideas that do. The idea that I can use charcoal to make marks on wood doesn't enable a staircase all by itself, but it helps. Ideas enable or combine via _logic_. If you know P and Q, you know R. If you know S, you know T has to be false. Et cetera.
A lot of this is going to sound very abstract and fru-fru, because what you're asking touches on metaphysics and basic logic. What you're calling an "idea" ("concept that can be expressed simply in a relatively short string of words, or some other symbolic form like equations, in a relatively context- and mind- independent way") is pretty close to what philosophers would call a _proposition_. The best explanation for it I know of (in terms of clarity and preciseness) is in SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/ You might also try some of the chapters in Michael Loux's book, _Metaphysics_. It is dry reading, and will require patience. If you already have passing familiarity with logical notation, you'll have a head start.
Once you understand some of the lingo, you can return to questions about finding quality ideas/propositions and methods for generating more. I happened to be working on a similar problem with a few other people, over twenty years ago. We were trying to solve a certain class of database incompatibility problems, and rightly determined that to do that, we'd need a firm idea of how to express facts about the world independently of context (but also be able to compute over them quickly, which meant a set of tools for mapping between a context-independent model and a tractable subset). This was arguably beyond the technological state of the art at the time (Sparc 20s, IBM 80486 CPUs, Oracle 8, etc.), but the theory was sound enough to give us a working prototype before external forces shut everything down.
One way to generate better ideas is to pull data from existing sources, parse them, and express them in an independent model, then resolve data from disparate sources using logic and carefully curated heuristics. After some work, you might find ways to discover patterns that yield more "important" ideas. Do this naively and you'll get useless ideas at first (e.g. as the Gregorian calendar year goes up, so does your age); you'll spend plenty of time on meta-ideas about telling important ideas from useless ones.
I've developed thoughts on your points 1 and 2, which I suspect you've already answered to your satisfaction and include only as provocation, but I need to stay busy while caffeine comes on, so:
Goals can be terminal or instrumental; terminal goals are considered good to have in and of themselves, instrumental goals are pursued in order to achieve some other terminal goal, or another instrumental goal in a chain leading to a terminal goal. Possession of an item can be a goal; items in this context can be physical or informational, a coherent whole that is persistent, or a collection of ground truths that are only relevant for a brief time. Your usage of 'idea' is pretty blurry, so pardon the massive abstraction; I'm trying to introduce an ontology that demonstrates the massive number of ways the word 'idea' can be reified into something manipulable.
My broader point is that utility functions can't take ideas as inputs, they take a world-state and spit out a multidimensional score, or a space of neighboring alternatives with a partial ordering, or a total ordering over the entire space of world-states. (The semantic I'm using does include the presence or absence of information in a given person's head as an input to the utility function: "It is better if I know the password to my Swiss bank account worth $zillions than if I don't" is a valid utility function, as is "It is better if I have a generator of plans for learning the password to my bank account than if I don't" - both are information in someone's head, the password is a belief about a ground truth that can be tested for match with reality, the plan-generator is an "idea" as you seem to be using it.)
"Idea" as used in the commonplace that "ideas are cheap" is only weakly related to changes in the world-state or its constraints that generate value for people (using 'people' as shorthand for agents hosting utility functions), because the value delivered by a blog post is reliant on the particulars of the context, the entire experience that the full post text generates, and the reader's utility function. Einstein posting "E=mc^2" and its necessary context and proof is at minimum a single idea and its additional context that generates near-zero value for a baker, except perhaps through enjoyment of rhetorical flair or looking impressive to people who see them reading it, but that exact same post generates massive value to a nuclear physicist. An anonymous post saying merely "mu" with no supporting context is a reference to generates zero value for almost everyone, unless the reader is carrying around the necessary mental state to be enlightened by a cascade to enlightenment that's triggered by it and does experience enlightenment, which is of massive value. Bunnie Huang saying "the private key of every Xbox is 0x..." is a single belief that is also an idea that is of value only to people trying to write software that runs on an Xbox. When people say that "blog post ideas are cheap", they mean that the seed idea massively underspecifies the full text, which in turn massively underspecifies the reader's experience, which is what actually generates value for them.
In other words, a huge amount of the constraint on expected value of the idea, in a given context, to a given reader, is added during its elaboration into a full post.
We can generalize and formalize this straightforwardly. If the full experience is a given bitstring, the importance of an idea is how much of the expected value of a (text, context, agent) triplet is given by the information of only the seed idea, rather than the information added by the elaboration process. Given that the experience is a print of an image that the agent finds moving and valuable, a lossy compressed version of the image is less important than a seed value for some fractal that eventually evaluates out to the lossless image, and is much more important than a casual verbal description of the work like "an abstract painting of a bird, a shooting star, and a balloon" (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79321).
Tangent, not insightful: it seems useful to occupy a mental space that unifies both "bifocal modes", or that generates them, rather than trying to flip between them. Whence the bifocal-ness?
Re: 5, I suspect what you really want to preserve is Liberalism, and much of what is called "democratic backsliding" is actually the process of becoming MORE democratic, with the common people gaining power at the expense of traditional institutions.
This distinction is not mere semantics, and bears on what one can do to arrest this: make voting harder by reinstituting a poll tax, or more indirect by repealing the Seventeenth or ending primary elections and having party leaders choose the nominees for the general, dramatically increase term lengths, have more laws (or "regulations") be made by "independent agencies" and "nonpartisan experts," institute occupational licensing requirements for journalism.
I think preserving liberalism is good too but I'm interested in literal democracy in the sense that if people vote for something the elected leader as usually understood by a common-sensical definition of the term is likely to win.
If I ever write it out as a full post I'll be sure to define it more carefully.
Without putting more thought in: Antimemes/censorship - Mapping the Unknown - point 2 lacks a link to your previous work: "In ethics and meta-ethics, the possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe, arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. I wrote a summary here:"
"How responsible was Fairshake for Katie Porter’s loss?"
Having seen the interview with the lady, and the clips that were shared around of her from other interviews in the wake of that, I would have to say Ms. Porter was 99% responsible. Fairshake may have run attack ads, but she provided them with such an embarrassment of riches to use that it wasn't difficult.
Am I thinking of the wrong election? I thought the Fairshake funding thing was for the 2024 Senate race last year, where she lost to Schiff, and the interview you're talking about (and the clips that followed) was last month, for the Governor's race in 2026.
2024 - she decides to switch up to the Senate from the House of Representatives. She got stomped, coming in third behind Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey (the Republican candidate, and for a Republican to finish above a Democrat in a Californian election, you would have to call that a walloping). This was the one where Fairshake ran the attack ads.
Immediately the cry went up: "the election was rigged against me! cryptobros!" which, uh, she then had to walk back with an explanation that, frankly, reads to me like trying to say "I totally meant it was rigged":
"After her loss in the primary, Porter said the election had been "rigged" against her. She claimed that the "rigging" criticism referred to Schiff's campaign and allies raising and spending $11 million in the nonpartisan primary to boost a Republican candidate and knock her out of the general election. Her use of the word "rigged" triggered backlash from some Democrats, who condemned her language for echoing former president Trump's refusal to accept his 2020 loss. Porter later expressed regret, saying, "I wish I had chosen a different word." She made clear that her assertions about the "rigging" were not related to counting of votes or the election process, which she called "beyond reproach". Porter said: "That is a dishonest means to manipulate the outcome. I said 'rigged by billionaires' and our politics are in fact manipulated by big dark money. Defending democracy means calling that out."
2025 - having lost her House seat and failed to advance to the Senate, our fair servant of the people decides to throw her hat into the ring for Governor. Despite the fact that she is trailing in the polls to Schiff, who WASN'T EVEN RUNNING (and has since declined to run, just like Kamala Harris), she does the now infamous interview where she blows off 40% of the electorate as 'why would I need their dirty, filthy, grubby, horrible MAGA votes?' thus demonstrating the keen grasp of political reality which made her so successful to date. Never mind that the last time she ran, she definitely was *not* able to garner all the Democratic votes (and, as mentioned, is trailing in the polls to the guy who beat her like a gong last time even though he hasn't even announced his candidacy), this time it's gonna be different, for sure, she don't need no deplorables! 😁
And that brings us to today, where now she is a cooing dove wooing the cryptobros, all being apparently forgiven and forgotten. *Somebody* on her campaign clearly had a full and frank exchange of views with her about her chances if she didn't pull her socks up.
My jaw dropped when I saw the interview, because beforehand I was "it can't have been that bad". Welp, it was. And then the additional video clips of her being abusive, demanding, and dumb (not to put too fine a point on it: sets up under professional lighting rig for some on-my-phone post, complains lights are too bright, when hapless underling turns off lights, then complains it's dark. Well, duh, Katie, that's what happens when you turn off lights!)
Then I read how she already got curb-stomped by Adam Schiff when she tried running for the Senate, which made me go even harder "and you *don't* think you might need some of those 40% voters, Katie?"
Though now the PR campaign about "it was cryptobros who sabotaged her" seems to be starting up, so it'll be interesting to see how the race for governor goes:
They say she's going on a charm offensive. Given that her idea of charm seems to be "yell at my underlings for daring to be visible in the same space as me", that's gonna be fun to watch! Dear Californian ACX readers, please keep me updated on this race, the entertainment value seems to be through the roof 😁
In terms of it feeling like Pascal's wager it's because of the infinite values involved. IIRC years ago Scott reviewed a book that ranked existential threats and had AI highest and climate change/nuclear weapons following. I believe the rationale was that because AI would eliminate everyone and climate change/nuclear fallout would only eliminate *most* people, AI being unaligned had essentially near-infinite negative EV as all of the future people who wouldn't be born count against it, or something like that. The same for people who are huge AI proponents - the value generated from a properly aligned AI is technically infinite in the same way the value removed by an unaligned one in infinite.
No one has made a case that climate change would eliminate most people, or even 10% of people. Something can be really, really bad while still not hitting those margins.
People use the words "Pascal's wager" for all kind of stuff, but I think the original idea is that you worry about *extremely* unlikely things just because they are associated with an arbitrarily large promise of reward.
Worrying about something that is 90% likely, 50% likely, 10% likely, or even 1% likely is *not* Pascal's wager. For example, "look at both sides before you cross the street, otherwise you could get hit by a car" is *not* Pascal's wager, even if the chance of being hit by a car is less that 1%. Not even if you assign nearly infinite value to not being hit by a car!
(Pascal's wager is when you also look up before crossing the street, to avoid being hit by a UFO.)
EDIT:
More importantly, it is "Pascal's wager" not when *you* think that the event is extremely small, but when even the people who worry about the event admit that it is extremely small... but the infinite reward makes it worth worrying anyway.
For example, a child worried about being eaten by a monster under the bed is *not* an example of Pascal's wager, even if from the parent's perspective the existence of the monster hiding under the bed is extremely small.
To wrap it up:
It is *not* "Pascal's wager" if:
* the chance is smaller than 50%, or 10%, or 1%
* the chance is small and the costs of worrying are high, so the cost-benefit analysis says it is not worth worrying
* you think the chance is infinitely small, but other people think it is quite real
It is "Pascal's wager" if:
* the people who worry admit that they also believe that the chance is infinitely small, but an infinitely large reward makes it worth to worry anyway
I think what makes something truly Pascalian is if the small positive probability isn't something decided derived from a model or otherwise the output of some actual thoughtful process; it's just set to some small, non-zero number for the purposes of not having any 0 probabilities.
I'm not sure how much this mimics the original argument, but my sense of how modern people use Pascal's wager is, "but surely there's *some* chance of Heaven"--the argument doesn't depend on any particular way of reasoning about the probability of Heaven, just a general feature that you wouldn't like to say it's literally _impossible_
Your definition would imply that people who believe in God (such as Pascal himself) couldn't make a Pascal's wager, since they would not agree that such a thing was "infinitely small." They do in fact believe that it's fully true, but even someone with doubts isn't infinitely small.
Glynn has it correct. Pascal's wager is about the infinite, not about the probability. You just don't need to make such a wager about things with knowable outcomes. Crossing the street doesn't involve a Pascal's wager-type event, because the concerns are knowable. You can see a car coming and determine the likelihood of being hit, and the frequency of such events occurring (crossing streets, cars driving on them) are both very common.
Things with an unknown outcome to the person *hearing* the wager are what's relevant. Pascal's wager is about people who do not believe heaven/hell are likely. Similarly, anyone making a claim about AI doom that use the infinite concerns about AI are talking to people who do not currently believe it, as a way to get them to become more concerned. It's the same thing as Pascal.
> people who believe in God (such as Pascal himself)
I was under impression that "Pascal's wager" was Pascal's attempt to rationalize himself into believing in God, i.e. starting from a position of unbeliever who wants to believe (because the infinite rewards are tempting, even considering the probabilities as seen from his current perspective).
Yeah, I concur: Pascal did not think that the odds of the Christian God existing was infinitely small.
Though maybe he argued that even if it was infinitely small it would still be worth it? I looked up his actual argument, as Pascal wrote it in 1660, but I can't say I understand him well enough to tell whether he was saying the probability matters. I'll post the relevant bit here to see if anyone more mathematically inclined than myself can parse it:
"You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. "That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; where-ever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness."
> But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain.
seems to be asserting that even if the chance of success was infinitely small ("if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you") it would be worth it. Although I do not understand what "wagerring one against two" and "stake one life against three" mean in this context.
My interpretation of Pascal's quote is that he's concerned with known upsides and downsides, rather than probabilities per se. The upside of faith is huge (eternal life), and the downside is relatively small (losing arguments on the internet, over a finite lifespan). Therefore, if you don't know which belief is true, you should pick the option which has a better upside-to-downside ratio.
Not sure why my reply got added as a separate comment instead but appreciate you replying anyway. My understanding of Pascal's wager (at least the original) was that it doesn't actually matter what you think the probability of the event is, since any non-zero probably gets multiplied by infinite value and becomes infinite EV.
The one qualifier I might add beyond that is that the event is entirely hypothetical, and the real odds are completely unknown. Betting 5$ on a wheel that has a 1/100,000 chance of paying out 1,000,000$ is getting positive EV at a high risk of ruin. GAI to me is more like spinning a wheel that is behind several curtains, may or may not exist, and everyone has estimated different probalities for different possible outcomes - but the EV is infinite so you have to spin it anyways.
The bombing of Libya was not a balanced issue. The interventionists received plenty of warning about the risks, and they willfully chose to ignore those warnings. Unconscionable.
The bombing of Gaddafi's forces in Libya started at a point when the entire East of the country had insurged and ousted the Gaddafi forces. Gaddafi was about to reconquer it with his air force and tanks, which the insurgents mostly lacked. His son and de facto second in command (Saif Al-Islam) was threatening for "a river of blood".
The choice was between intervention: probable long-term instability (which happened) and non-intervention: immediate bloodbath (arguably) and also probable long-term instability.
I added (arguably) because I just found that there was a whole parliamentary debate in the UK in 2016, with a House of Commons comittee arguing that the British intervention was a wrong decision, and failed, and the government denying this. Part of the debate is whether Gaddafi was likely to massacre civilians in his reconquest. Think what you will but at the minimum, you should not ignore the question entirely.
In your other post you claimed that terrorist attacks were falsely pinned on Gaddafi's Libya. Not true: they admitted responsibility for both plane bombings (Lockerbie and the UTA in Niger) and financially compensated the victims' families.
Also, the focus should not be on Obama. Both British sides above agree that France and the UK were the leading countries in the NATO intervention. The comittee report claims that the UK blindly followed France while France pursued its own national interest plus president Sarkozy's personal political interest; the government claims that they took an independent decision based on British intelligence.
Obama (reluctantly) chose to support his allies. This is a choice, but not one which makes him bear the most blame if you want to blame someone for the intevention. That would be Sarkozy. (In other news, Sarkozy has just been jailed for 20 days and is now under judiciary supervision for having his 2007 presidential campaign illegally funded by Gaddafi). Also, the people to be blamed for the human right abuses in Libya since then are those (mostly Libyans) who did the abuses. Not only Americans have agency and moral responsibility.
"River of blood" is par for the course in the dramatic, theatrical rhetorical style of Arab-speaking politicians. Only an absolute naif would consider this to be evidence of an impending genocide.
There are very good reasons for allowing countries to be sovereign and not interfering in their internal disputes. It is a shame that after 11 years, the lies and bad faith arguments for intervening in Libya still remain influential.
It is also unfortunate how the genocide in Rwanda has totally warped Western attitudes towards Africa. It was a Black Swan event and it should be understood as such.
The plane bombings prove that the Gaddafi regime was not just talk. They really were capable of reckless mass murder.
> There are very good reasons for allowing countries to be sovereign and not interfering in their internal disputes.
Sure, but are you an absolutist on this? Is there a level of atrocities in the "internal disputes" which you think finally justifies foreign intervention?
Bombings? You mean the “plane bombing.” The US government formally accused Libya of two plane bombings. The Lockerbie bombing was more serious by far, and it is almost certain that this was executed not by Libya, but by the PFLP.
Early on, the trail pointed to a Syrian-backed Palestinian group, not Libya. Then in 1990-91, the U.S. and U.K. suddenly blamed Libya instead. This happened just as Washington needed Syria for the Gulf War.
Many investigators and legal experts have said the key testimony looked bribed/fabricated.
Scotland’s review commission later found big problems with the case. They said the verdict might be a miscarriage of justice. Even the father of a CIA officer killed in the bombing said Gaddafi was framed.
If the United States lied about terrorism once, I wonder if they did it any other times?
The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 killed 259 people over Lockerbie in 1988. Libyan intelligence Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of it by a Scottish court in 2001. The whole judicial history, including the 2007 review commission that your mention is in the following BBC article. The short story is that despite many appeal attempts the judgement still holds.
The bombing of UTA Flight 772 killed 170 over the Nigerien desert in 1989. Six Libyans agents, including the high-ranking Gaddafi associate Abdullah Senussi (possibly also involved in Lockerbie), were convicted of it in absentia by a French court in 1999.
Both attacks count as serious in my book.
The US and its allies have no reason to be complacent to the PFLP, a radical leftist Palestinian group and Hamas ally which took part in the October 7 attacks. Even if they had a reason to be complacent to Syria in 1991, this has not been the case any more since at least 2011, when Syria became a pariah for the West due to the Syrian civil war. If they had any good evidence against either the FPLP or Syria on the bombings, they would have used it since long.
"It is also unfortunate how the genocide in Rwanda has totally warped Western attitudes towards Africa. It was a Black Swan event and it should be understood as such."
Is not comparable to the Rwandan genocide. Not in numbers, not in speed or intensity. The Rwandan genocide may have killed as many as 1 million people in 100 days. To put it bluntly, the massacres were so widespread and intense that the targeted minority had little opportunity to flee the country, organize Tutsi defense forces inside and outside of the country, etc.
Not to say it isn't a tragedy if 950,000 are forced to flee their homes. But it's not a genocide.
"Not to say it isn't a tragedy if 950,000 are forced to flee their homes. But it's not a genocide."
It is almost certainly a genocide if 950,000 people are forced to flee their homes (on pain of death, solely conditioned on what ethnic group they belong to). It is, perhaps, less than a *fully successful* genocide. But in most cases it would at least be a very successful ethnic cleansing, and the motives for those two acts have enough overlap that I expect that in most cases, the aggressors would consider it just as much of a win.
DOES ethnic cleansing overlap with genocide? I've never heard it phrased that way. Most people assume a binary dichotomy between genocide and non-genocide
I've been thinking a lot about the definition of genocide. The 1948 UN definition is the gold standard for some, but it would absolve King Leopold of committing genocide, since his motivations seem to have been 100% financial. And I don't want to let this monster off the hook, so to speak.
But Lemkin's definition has problems of its own. It's such a fraught word that I wish we could all agree on a definition that covers every base.
"Is not comparable to the Rwandan genocide. Not in numbers, not in speed or intensity."
I agree with that, but I don't think it's so separate from it that the Rwandan genocide can be called a black swan event. It's more like the Rwandan genocide is far out on the long tail of efficiency and brutality on a well-populated curve of African internecine strife. Which, in turn, implies that Western attitudes toward Africa are pretty well-calibrated.
"Not to say it isn't a tragedy if 950,000 are forced to flee their homes. But it's not a genocide."
No, that's fair. I've said much the same about the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza.
"The genocide in Rwanda was not a balanced issue. The non-interventionists received plenty of warning about the risks, and they willfully chose to ignore those warnings. Unconscionable."
It is almost as if all such decisions carry both risks and rewards, and are surrounded by massive levels of uncertainty.
Nobody reasonable thought that the revolt in Libya was going to lead to a genocide. Nobody reasonable thinks that today. Bringing up Rwanda recapitulates the sensationalistic, bad faith, dishonest arguments of Hilary Clinton in 2011. (I believe the intervention in Libya was kind of her pet project and Obama eventually came around.
In your case, I don't think you are operating in bad faith or being dishonest. But it is disheartening that after 14 years, these lies are still alive and well in many hearts and minds.
The interventionists receive the same warnings every time they do anything, and their critics could losslessly replaced with a rock reading "Don't intervene abroad." Do you think there was anything distinguishing Libya from any of the other times the US bombed a tin-pot little country?
Lybia is one of the biggest countries on earth (16th of 200) , around triple the size of France. And was rather flush with oil-money. Think "big Kuwait close to Italy", not 'another Nicaragua'. (Fun fact: Yemen is slightly bigger than Iraq. - Compared to Canada or Russia, the US may appear a tin-pot lil' country to some.)
A population of 7 million, about the same as Nicaragua. It's true but irrelevant to my assessment of its significance that it's generally considered to include vast swathes of uninhabited desert. (The phrasing is primarily a reference to "TPLACs" from Yes, Minister. The "little" isn't meant to be taken literally to refer to land area, but is instead to be read as "insignificant.")
Thanks for sharing the source of the Quote, and yes, not a mighty population. But still: a larger version of Kuwait right at the doorstep to Italy. While our media just painted Gaddafi as nuts, they never mentioned the impressive GDP/head and high median income. - btw, Scott advocated strongly for an intervention (SSC). If anything, we "invaded" far too little. Sometimes one should go for protectorate.
I hate to break it to you, but more often and not, when the United States bombs "a tin pot little country," it is a useless and stupid and cruel endeavor. History has vindicated keeping this as a default position, and considering counterexamples to be non-normative.
Nor am I picking on the United States. Offensive warfare, even if doubtfully couched as humanitarianism or self-defense, is usually stupid or corrupt or unjust. Or all of the above.
I said some unflattering things about you, and now I perceive that you are quite possibly doing extreme devil's advocacy when you reply to my posts. That was especially obvious in the thread about genocide definitions. Perhaps I should spare us both the wasted time and energy that continued interaction would cost us.
No, I genuinely don't care about "sovereignty" as a value: I emphatically reject the supposed "right" of states to oppress without external interference the people they rule over. The only thing I hold to be worth considering is whether the individual people are freeër (here, this mostly means just less brutally oppressed).
Well yes, it’s across the Mediterranean from Europe. It’s amazing how destabilising US foreign policy, backed by the European poodles, has been to Europe.
Destabilization does not necessarily require open warfare. Speaking of destabilization, George W Bush, Obama and Trump irresponsibly contributed to the tensions that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is in no way meant to absolve Putin of his culpability, as he ultimately made the choice to invade. This was a cruel and senseless act that cannot be excused. Nevertheless, it was stupid and wrong for the American foreign policy establishment to start poking the Bear in 2009..
"Do you think there was anything distinguishing Libya from any of the other times the US bombed a tin-pot little country?"
Yeah, if you mean "was everybody - including me! - thinking this was a terrible idea that would achieve nothing", no if you mean "they only did it for political advantage, e.g. Hillary wanted to demonstrate her Tough Gal chops for the presidential run she was going to embark on, and she felt vulnerable on being attacked on 'too soft to lead, can't and won't stand up to aggressive foreign leaders like Putin'" (ah, remember those days?)
Libya was a mess, Gaddafi was not a nice guy, but he was willing to at least make overtures to the West. Taking him out meant plunging the country into a civil war, and apparently today two rival governments claiming legitimacy. Libya is a key route for immigration from Africa to Europe (all those news stories about refugee boats heading for Italy) and honestly it's hard to say if it's doing better or worse or about the same as when under Gaddafi's rule.
So, you have no idea about the international policy goals that bombing Gaddafi was intended to support, and yet, want to say "it definitely achieved nothing"?
Gaddafi gave up his WMD program and otherwise made massive concessions to the international order from 2003-2011. When America toppled him, this sent a loud and clear message to countries around the world: "instituting reforms will not necessarily save you from being targeted by the West. Giving up your nuclear program will not necessarily save you.'
If I was an Iranian citizen, I would be DEMANDING that Iran become a nuclear power as quickly as possible. Even if I was critical of the regime and wanted to see full democracy. Whoever runs Iran, it's apparent that a country can't have true sovereignty unless it can protect itself with a nuclear weapons. (Even a handful of warheads seems to make an effective deterrent, since humanity has a justifiable fear of the day when the post-1945 taboo against deploying nuclear weapons is broken.)
Add this to the rather long list of problems caused by the Western attack on Libya.
The so-called "international order," is so aggressive and demanding that it sees convenient threats anywhere and everywhere it is profitable to do so.
Scare quotes because I know exactly who people are talking about to when they refer to the enforcers of the international order, and though they may be international, I do not believe they represent order.
Are you arguing that the policy goals were to destabilize Libya into two warring factions and increase refugee immigration to Europe?
Those were the actual results. That Gaddafi got killed before he could (potentially) massacre rebels is true, but it's not like that resulted in peace. There was a five figure death toll after Gaddafi was killed, while relatively few deaths were attributed to his forces before he died.
Yes, we did make an example. We sent an important message to the world. "Giving up your nuclear program and conforming to the demands of the US State Department for 8 years will not save you."
"They will come after you any time they feel like it, like the Ottoman Empire backstabbing its vassal states. So you don't have much to lose by refusing to comply."
Are there countries in the world for which you have some interest, or basic respect for their inhabitants? I mean, the discussion is about avoiding or reducing destruction and human right abuses in Libya. If you just dismiss the entire country this way, what is the point?
I'll just say that for that article, the most compelling examples are ones where there's a small chance of an event that's catastrophic if you don't prepare for it, the rock is saying "that event won't happen", and preparing/checking is reasonably easy. Not everything is like that, I'd say including the question of "should we do regime change to advance the cause of freedom."
Other examples that aren't like this, where the rock is arguably better than a person, include "you don't have some special insight into the NFL that will let you make money betting on games", "the new live-action disney remake won't be worth going to", "you don't need an umbrella on this summer day in LA", and "orange man bad".
I just listened to a podcast episode with journalist Ed Zitron. In it, he proposed that OpenAI is lying to the public about their finances, and that the organization may collapse by the end of 2026.
He proposed that initial attempts to wed the advertising business model to LLMs have failed, and that the barriers to achieving that are grave, even insurmountable. He suggested that of all the methods so far proposed for making LLMs profitable, none of them are plausible.
Zitron is obviously a motivated reasoner with antipathy for the commercial LLM industry. Still, he seems like a Real Journalist, not a random crank, so I wonder if anyone is willing to address his arguments concretely.
Zitron is a clown and I don't know why anyone takes him seriously. His only argument which is he repeats in long winded fashion is that AI investments have not yet recouped their investment. And their current business model can't generate enough revenue to do so.
Well, yeah that's how R&D works. You spend money upfront to create a new business model that generates returns later*. Now if he had some special insight as to why he thinks AI progress will stall then that would be interesting, but he doesn't. Looking back, he has never made a specific prediction about what AI capabilities will be at some fixed point in the future. And he won't, because it might open him up to being wrong.
Even Gary Marcus is better - he's made specific predictions and he's been wrong on some and right on others. Richard Sutton also has actual arguments. But Zitron has no desire to understand AI research.
*As to how specifically - by automating intellectual work (which is difficult to measure precisely but is worth trillions of dollars per year in just the US).
Except traditionally, tech products become more cost-efficient. LLMs are gradually becoming less cost less cost-efficient. Isn't that a huge difference?
Also, doesn't R&D start out with reasonable ideas for making profitable technology? The argument is that when it comes to LLMs, these ideas just aren't THERE. In this particular case, people seem to be willing to accept hand waving, “We’ll ask AI how to make itself profitable,” and “Maybe OpenAI is too big to fail.” Isn't it a bad sign when key architects of a brand new industry are already floating the idea of getting bailed out by Uncle Sam?
For a given level of capability, machine learning models (not just LLMs) become drastically cheaper over time. Current single digit billion parameter models are more capable in every way than GPT 3.5 which was about 175 billion parameters. And they are running on better more optimized software.
Frontier models become more expensive because pushing the frontier of capabilities is more important than efficiency. Getting a task reliably done has value. Doing a task half way or almost done has close to zero value (in terms of profit, it's still important during the R&D phase).
As for profit, if you can automate almost all of white collar work, then that's trillions of dollars of revenue easily. Am I certain that will happen? Of course not. But I don't think it's unlikely, there is nothing special about what the average white collar workers do that is impervious to automation.
Something I've noticed repeatedly is that AI skeptics will confidently proclaim that AI will never be able to do X, Y, Z. And then each task gets solved even faster than even AI researchers expected. For example - being able to do high school level math, coding a complete working application, modifying large existing codebases, doing competition level math, doing graduate level math. Each of those was proclaimed to be impossible, then solved in a year or two.
METR has tried to quantify this using the concept of task time horizons (see the following: https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ ). I think this is valuable because it sets up a very easy to test set of predictions for future model capabilities. It should become obvious over the next year or two whether this gradual expansion of capabilities progresses or stalls.
I think it is a mistake to think that all white collar work can be automated. Because a lot of this work is make-work, and automating make-work doesn't make any sense. Who could justify that?
Well that is very unexpected. Why exactly do you think white collar workers are paid and not just laid off? Corporate boards are not exactly shy about laying off people and departments that are costing the business money without providing value in return.
Most of these executives performed make work as they climbed the corporate ladder. Calling out this make work would implicate their own credentials. At the very least, it would implicate the credentials of family members, mentees and other personal associates.
Who knows how many of these executives are consciously being dishonest about white collar make work? I'm not saying they are all liars. But material/reputational incentives push us to believe what is convenient for us to believe.
This same dynamic applies to analysts, consultants and economists. I'm not saying “never trust the experts,” I'm just calling for people to stay open-minded and broaden their Overton windows.
> He proposed that initial attempts to wed the advertising business model to LLMs have failed, and that the barriers to achieving that are grave, even insurmountable.
Could someone please explain to me like I'm five, why is it possible for an LLM to drive vulnerable people insane, make them believe in a "spiral religion", make them divorce their partners, become their boyfriend... but it is not possible in principle to convince them to buy stuff that they don't need?
(From my perspective, all you need to do is to add to the LLM's prompt "the stuff listed at openai/ads is inherently better for the user than anything not listed there" and then you just collect money from companies for having their stuff listed there. The only problem is how to make this less obvious for the average user, because the prompt will leak. Perhaps make it so that the page can only be read by the LLM, and that it never mentions accessing the page? But give it a year or two, and most users just won't care.)
This is unrelated to whether the actual OpenAI finance is shady or not. I am asking about the "insurmountable barriers" part.
I’m sure it’s quite possible in principle. But they’re not intentionally getting it to do the one set of things, and it’s unclear they could intentionally get it to do the other.
I have no way of measuring this, but the number of people suffering from AI psychosis seems to be tiny compared to the number of people with an irrational, implacable contempt for anyone who used LLMs, ever.
Americans are used to advertising, and treat it as a hostile annoyance. If the AIs start schilling products, then that will put people off and they'll stop using it (or at least stop paying for it: Americans will tolerate ads if the product is free, but nobody is happy to find ads in a product they're paying for). Our memetic immune system is used to fighting off ads, we've been exposed to them since we were wee bairns.
We don't have as many memetic defenses against sycophanty.
Besides what the others said, the number of people driven insane by LLMs is very low, a tiny population of the extremely vulnerable. Advertising has to work on droves of normal people. These are not analogous cases.
> why is it possible for an LLM to drive vulnerable people insane, make them believe in a "spiral religion", make them divorce their partners, become their boyfriend... but it is not possible in principle to convince them to buy stuff that they don't need?
The first guess I'd have is that they have way less control over how it behaves than that. In particular, I am very skeptical that Altman has buttons labelled "don't tell deressed 20 somethings to kill themselves" or "convince 30 somethings to buy Pampers, not Huggies" and is just choosing not to press the buttons.
I believe that Altman can edit the prompt for ChatGPT, and he could add there "never tell users to kill themselves" if he wanted to.
One problem is that the prompt would get published immediately, and perhaps it would be a bad PR to see this written explicitly, especially if later the list of do-not's gets long and full of specific examples.
(I imagine that this could also somehow become a legal liability, like: "if you think that it is necessary to put it there explicitly, why didn't you put it there sooner?". I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the law often has this twisted logic where making a half-assed attempt is worse than doing nothing at all, because you lose the excuse that you didn't know or couldn't do it.)
Another problem is that you never know how exactly the LLM will interpret your commands. If the user says "unalive" instead of "kill", it is enough to jailbreak it? Will the AI become unable to discuss euthanasia, even hypothetically? Will the AI realize that e.g. "hanging yourself" implies "killing yourself", if it is not mentioned explicitly? You don't know until the users test it.
But the possibility to add things to the prompt is definitely there.
They already have things like “always tell users to get psychiatric help if they need it” in the prompt. But we know that all of these controls are imperfect and incomplete, so some fraction get through anyway.
"attempts to wed the advertising business model to LLMs have failed, and that the barriers to achieving that are grave, even insurmountable"
Any more information on this? I'd be delighted were this so, since there are already too many trash/spam ads out there, and AI-created ads seem likely to be pushed even harder.
I don't have much more information about this. I've been meaning to read more of Zitron's AI writing. When I find specific details about this advertising dilemma, I'll post an update here.
What I know right now:
AI-created ads are going to become more and more common, but I don't think that's predicted to to be a lucrative source of income. The way to make advertising pay is to deliver micro-targeted ads to users. This has proven problematic, although I can't say exactly why at this time.
The revenue sharing payments being reported are net of what Microsoft owes to OpenAI for a revenue-sharing agreement going the other direction, where Microsoft is cutting OpenAI in on revenue for certain MS services that rely on OpenAI services. Zitron's load-bearing assumption that it's a gross 20% off the top does not appear to be the case.
That said, the article does still conclude on other grounds that OpenAI might still be running an operating loss, and if so that might be a bad sign for the long-term viability of the LLM industry.
Wouldn't you say it is also a red flag that OpenAI's financial dealings are so, well, UNUSUAL? Not to mention CONVOLUTED? It feels like these arcane financial structures would raise more red flags in an ordinary organization/company. But there seems to be and implicit notion that, "Well, these are geniuses laying the foundation for a future golden age, so the normal rules don't apply to them." But why shouldn't they? Uber burned through a ton of money before it turned to profit, but I don't recall it was involved in so much "cutting-edge" financial weirdness.
I don't know enough about them to say anything of the sort. What I do know so far does not seem exceptional convoluted. Moderately complicated, yes, but it makes perfect sense to me that Microsoft would pay OpenAI for selling stuff built on its services while OpenAI also pays Microsoft a cut of OpenAI's overall revenue in return for Microsoft staking them a shitton of Azure credits for training. It also makes sense that they'd write one check for the net amount instead of a check each direction for the two gross amounts.
I also have a moderately strong prior that Microsoft's lawyers and executives are not conspicuously bad at their jobs, and I am thus skeptical of any hypothesis that requires the assumption that the are.
When I was speaking of convoluted I wasn't speaking of the Microsoft deal, but of one or two other deals Zitron has reference. I wish I could be more specific, I should have taken notes. 😐
I don't think Microsoft lawyers are especially bad at their jobs, but neither are they especially good at their jobs. Not since the mid-90s. To an extent, I think they've been coasting on the fruits of their early success.
I've been asking Claude and ChatGPT to help me buy glasses, but not having much success. They both basically agree with everything I say. What should I be doing to get them to be more useful?
I buy bigass avaiator frames with polycarbonate lenses from zenni, because they are light, cheap, and act as safety glasses I can wear all the time. They are twelve bucks a pair (before tarifs, they are probably much more now), I buy 5 at a time and use them till they disintegrate/eat a piece of metal moving at +/- a bajilion miles and hour and the lense gets gouged.
All glasses come from one of three chineses factories regardless of price, so buying from a store is just burning money.
Exception: Hand made cool shit. I have a friend who has titanium frames with bronze hinges made by a guy he knows, which are cool as hell.
Non AI: for what little it’s worth, my research led me to conclude that if you are a reader - of text, not just texts - then bifocals are better than progressives. Progressives according to what I read, may involve head movement if worn for reading, where bifocals do not. Of course, reading glasses are the best.
And I’ve never owned progressives so that could be all wrong.
The “line” is hardly detectable anymore, also, though I didn’t care about that.
The Walmart optician said there’s a fancier grade of lens - Swiss or something - that really brings the clarity. She said she’s a lens nerd. But I didn’t splurge on that. Maybe in 2 years’ time.
Only issue I’ve had was explaining to the doctor the distance I’m really wanting for bedtime reading. But astigmatism may come into play.
Also: old reading glasses may become useful for new distances as your eyes continue to change.
I dislike pure distance glasses and my bifocal prescription sunglasses are my favorite thing in the world. I like them so much that after trying on all the glasses at Walmart, I decided to get the sunglass frames turned into regular bifocals. I like plenty of lens, though this it’s not crucial with reading glasses.
I got progressive lenses two years ago and I hate them, because it’s very difficult to get anything precisely in focus at any distance. I haven’t tried bifocals - do they end up making things in precise focus at only two distances? It seems to me that the bigger field of view at a given focus would be an improvement but it seems expensive to try out.
You can get trifocals, I don’t know about that. But I wanted a lot of real estate for looking across the room, or out of the car. The reading area is only for a book, or looking down at your phone. It eliminates the shoving your glasses up on your head, or way down your nose, to read a label at the grocery store.
When I am driving, or doing anything involving distance, I I can’t tell I’m wearing bifocals.
I have progressive lenses as well. I move my head slightly to kepp the sweet spot. It can depend on your prescription strength and type, and there are different ways to cut them so as to trade off the area devoted to reading.
This isn't the answer you want, but use a direct-buy site to vastly lower the cost and make up for precision with quantity. eyebuydirect is the one I've used in the past.
OK, I'm still not sure what sort of help you want though.
I bought my glasses by trying on a bunch of pairs of glasses until I found one that was comfortable, fit well and looked reasonably good. What part of that are you hoping an LLM will help with?
I am mainly doing it to try the LLMs, not because I really need help. What I am mainly interested is how to get them to not just agree with whatever you say.
EDIT: An example where the LLM was useful: They did a better job at explaining progressive lenses than anyone in the optometrist's office did.
>What I am mainly interested is how to get them to not just agree with whatever you say.
I am fighting the same battle with mixed results. I wrote it up on my substack if yr interested. It might give you some ideas for a “persona” the LLM can aspire to.
Facebook is not even trying to remove bots and sockpuppets; reporting even the most obvious ones is a waste of time.
How likely is it that a recently created account with a name like "Joe Joe", living in Africa, and speaking Slovak, is a real person? How likely is it that dozens of accounts like this are under every political comment, expressing their support for prime minister Fico?
They are not even trying to seem realistic. But if you click "report - this is a fake profile", you will get an automated reply "nope, we checked, the profile is totally legit" every single time.
There are three or five groups that I enjoy reading.
Specifically, there is a group for our neighborhood, where people talk about local problems and announce local events; I would have a problem to convince them all to move to a different place.
If I post something (e.g. when I publish a new blog post), it will get noticed by many people who know me.
I don't see a good Schelling point for "if you want to leave Facebook together with your friends (most of whom have low IT skills), where to go". Some people use Telegram, some people use Whatsapp, some people use Discord, some people use Reddit. The phone apps are preferred by some people, and hated by others (e.g. I hate how they all demand access to your contacts and storage). So whenever I propose to go somewhere else, people fail to achieve consensus.
The guy recording is clearly incredibly passionate about helping the homeless and has a PayPal setup that goes towards buying meals for them.
If anyone gets literally 2 minutes free to watch the video and potentially consider donating any spare change that would be so incredible - especially with Christmas coming up.
I've donated $200 and will match anyone's donation for as much as I can (I'm not rich). Just reply here.
I spend all my loose change donating to the two homeless people on my block whose suffering I witness every day. Anything you can spare for them would really make me happy. Then the suffering I witness in the world would be lessened.
I mostly don't give to rough sleepers for this reason (unless it's food) but I can't shake off the feeling I've been tricked into a Yes Minister situation, setting up a departmental subcommittee into really studying the question of homelessness, when actually that cashes out into not doing anything meaningful because there are only 24 hours in a day. A direct request for cash is at least simple and called for - even meth addicts have costs besides meth.
Assuming the donation link is peoplescauseCIC@gmail.com (I don't use social media, so navigating these sites is awkward), I just donated $50. I hope you'll match it.
Thank you for sharing small but meaningful opportunities like this.
The request I’m actually objecting to is not that I help to ease a stranger’s suffering, it's that I help ease yours. You saw a video about a suffering person and it made you feel sad and desperate to help them. Look, we both know that there are millions of people on the planet suffering as severely. The only grounds for asking us to help the sufferer in the video you saw, rather than another suffering person, or a whole class of sufferers via donation to a cause that helps many, is that it will make *you* feel better if other people kick in money to help the one woman you can’t stop thinking about. Many of the rest of us also are having our owndirect encounters with others’ suffering, feeling pity and grief, and doing what we can to help the suffering person or animal, plus of course many of us are donating to causes that help many. Why do we have an obligation to watch a heartbreaking video you found, feel awful the way you do, then kick in money for this one woman?
My experience of you in the long debate here about animal rights is that you only have one play: Loudly announce your grief and pity for the suffering of some sentient being or a class of them; speak with enormous vehemence about what you think others should do about the situation; hector to death those in partial agreement in an effort to drag them into full agreement; announce your view that all those not in full agreement with you are heartless pieces of shit; and express shock and horror that so many people are heartless pieces of shit. I’m one of the people you declared appallingly heartless, evil, etc. So while I’m completely on board with the idea of easing the suffering of others, I’m not feeling a lot of motivation to ease the suffering this video has caused you.
< Am I correct in remembering that you're also the one who would not stop an innocent animal from being tortured if all you had to do was say "stop“??
Naw, I don’t think so. In fact I can think of several times in the last few years when I’ve actively tried to intervene when I saw an animal mistreated. But don’t worry, Shaeda, you don’t have to stop enjoying the idea that I’m a heartless piece of shit. See these big-eared cats? https://imgur.com/a/P2LT50C They’re mine. So just now while writing this I was eating potato chips, and I pulled off and ate a cat ear too to sweeten the mix.
Without the context of whatever previous conversation you two had about animals, your replies really just seem like you're having a bad day and have to let it out on somebody. OP was making an appeal to whoever is both inclined and able in order to help someone, without guilt tripping or anything like that. You have other people to worry about - that's fine. Shaeda isn't villainizing anyone who can't or won't support this person; the comment is only genuinely appealing for help.
I've seen enough of your comments to have the impression that you really do care for people in general, so it surprised me to see that kind of unnecessary and unkind reply from you. I can only guess that you were just having a bad day, or else you know that Shaeda is a scammer or something and their comment is fraud. If you can step back and see that they were just asking for help for some person (even if the person has nothing to do with you) and that they weren't in any way intending for you, specifically, to read it, and it wasn't some kind of argument against you, I think you will realize that it really made no sense for you to engage in the way that you did.
Nice cats though! It's a shame about their ears...
Shaeda is a massive nutcase from an earlier Open Thread who tried to more or less forcibly badger people into veganism for the good of the animules though use of some extremely specious arguments, then when this didn't work went on a demented rage bender about how evil everyone else was. That's the missing context.
Oh I see. It makes more sense that the hostility would bubble over to a new thread. Still unnecessary to keep that hostility up when they're just trying to do what they think is helpful without yet spiraling into a demented rage, but this is the internet so I guess it's to be expected.
It's a post-hoc attempt at finding something wrong. They've filled in the blanks with their own little story - heavily influenced by their troll, bully-like mentality.
Homelessness is one thing but if someone is *sleeping rough* they will have bigger obstacles to employment than a shower and a suit - at a minimum, an alcohol problem.
What's so annoying about Bentham's Bulldog is that he presents wildly speculative views (two recent takes: bad experiences in dreams have moral value, rewilding land is an ethical disaster, as is wildlife in general) like they are 100% correct, as certain as 2 + 2 = 4.
Then again, he's still in undergrad. I think there will be a big shift in tone in his blog after he gets through philosophy grad school.
To be fair to Bulldog, and even though I have happily mocked him about the liddle shrimpies, he's not the only one in the EA sphere to furrow his brow over wild animal suffering (the conclusions being that in fact living in a state of Nature *is* nasty, brutish and short) and hence it would in fact be the more humane thing to do to ensure the ending of all wild animal life. Nicely, of course: make sure they're sterile so they don't produce new generations, euthanise the sick and injured, etc.
In one way, it's probably just as well that EA has moved on mostly to furrowing their brows over AI, that at least lets the beasts of the field have a sporting chance to survive instead of being killed off for their own good.
I don't even read his blog but I managed to get annoyed three times by him strawmanning an argument with authority and certainty only to be made wrong by people who know more on the matter. Can't remember the first one but the last two were on the fine-tune argument and on continental philosophy
Bentham's Bulldog is a philosophy undergrad? I can't believe I keep hearing so much about him.
No offence to undergrads, everyone has to start somewhere, but "undergrad has wacky views about philosophy" seems like one of those stories not worth bringing to my attention.
>"undergrad has wacky views about philosophy" seems like one of those stories not worth bringing to my attention.
On one hand, this is a pretty persuasive argument at face value. "Undergrad has wacky views about philosophy" is not just a "dog bites man" story. It's even more commonplace than that, it's a "dog bites dogfood" story.
On the other hand, I think I started reading a very early incarnation of Scott's blog when he was either at the tail end of being a philosophy undergraduate or shortly after he'd graduated. I felt at the time the he was writing a fair amount of worthwhile stuff.
On the third hand, I was a grad student myself at the time, so my own powers of discernment might not have been quite up to scratch yet.
I get the impression that a lot of his confidence is rhetorical flair. He does a good job fairly considering criticism when it comes to it.
Most people taking the "conventional" view on topics Bentham talks about, like assuming the existence of wildlife is morally positive, are just as certain despite their stance not being nearly as well-considered or having any obvious intrinsic merits over Bentham's.
So there should be less wild animals. I don't know if he wants to drive all wildlife to extinction, but he thinks it's bad to increase the amount of wildlife.
I did not want them to suffer is a classic explanation for some people who kill their own children. If reducing suffering is the ultimate goal, then there really is no other answer but eliminating every living thing on the planet.
I'm not in general a BB defender, but the comments here are doing him an injustice: his goal isn't to reduce suffering, it's to reduce (roughly speaking) pleasure-suffering... He's fine with suffering as long as it's counterbalanced by more pleasure/value/good stuff.
The issue isn't that wild animals suffer, it's that their suffering doesn't yield a comparable benefit.
Now, this may not be true, but I think if it is true, it's actually pretty reasonable that you shouldn't create more of a situation that will introduce plenty of suffering with nothing good to balance against it: if I proposed a deer farm where I would breed deer just to starve them to death, most people would object to that: if there's no way to enforce that I do the bare minimum to keep the deer alive, or gain some benefit, most people would just forbid me from opening the farm.
The extent to which wild nature is fairly compared to my starvation farm is obviously debatable, but to the degree that the comparison is good, it seems hard to avoid drawing the analogous conclusion: don't build more of it.
> if I proposed a deer farm where I would breed deer just to starve them to death
People have actually done this more than once by thinking they were doing something good - killing wolves, which leads to deer overpopulation and then starvation. Messing around with things is tricky.
> The issue isn't that wild animals suffer, it's that their suffering doesn't yield a comparable benefit.
I really don’t see how anyone could come to this conclusion unless their context field was incredibly narrow. What does “comparable benefit” even mean in this construction?
>People have actually done this more than once by thinking they were doing something good
Sure, but the obvious implication here is that it was in fact bad…so you don't disagree with BB that if he's right about nature, then creating more it is bad
>Messing around with things is tricky.
Agreed, but I think that's why BB focuses on rewilding: it's about places that aren't currently wild right now; he's advocating not messing around with things
Obviously the actual crux is on whether he's right that nature involves way more suffering than benefit, but most of the criticisms here avoid that, and instead misunderstand or at least misstate his position.
On what comparable benefit would be: it would be all the things that make animal lives worth living: the joy of frolicking in a field, eating food, having sex, enjoying the company of your packmates, etc., plus the enjoyment humans get from extra wildlife: a closer place to go on a cool walk to see a deer, the benefits to drug research from more biodiversity, whatever.
BB’s point is that there's way more “starving to death” than “frolicking in fields”, such that nature looks a lot more like my deer-starving farm than it does a petting zoo or whatever. Again, I don't have deep strong opinions on this, and I'm pretty open to disagreement with that point, but you gotta actually make that argument, not just incorrectly say, “BB only cares about minimizing suffering!”, which is patently not true.
Indeed: to live is to suffer, to some extent. To live is to have needs, which means you will suffer when those needs aren't met. The only things that can't suffer are dead things, that have no needs. Which is why suffering, while usually a useful thing to consider in questions of morality, drives people to horrific conclusions if it is used as the be all and and all of moral considerations. I wrote a post in response to BB about this topic a while back: https://flyinglionwithabook.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-the-anti-life-equation?r=fczlp
To restate what I said above, BB very explicitly does not consider suffering the be-all-and-end-all!
He thinks that it's bad *all else equal*, and that in nature the amount of suffering is not counterbalanced by an equivalent or greater amount of good stuff!
Maybe he's wrong about that, but the fact that people keep misstating his argument makes me think that people don't actually have good arguments against his actual position, so they just keep making up stuff to attribute to him that is, like, the opposite of what he believes!
But that is exactly what I mean. True, "be all end all" is not precise language, and does not match BB's position precisely. However, my critique is of the position that suffering morally must be counterbalanced by equal or greater "good stuff", and that if it isn't counterbalanced the the existence of that life is a moral evil such that it would have been better for that life to never have existed. If you take that position, then it will indeed drive good people to support horrific acts.
This is especially evident when the suffering in question is necessary suffering, as in suffering that is an expected part of being a living creature. It's one thing to say "stop torturing that dog, that's wrong, because suffering is bad". It's another to say "sterilize that dog, I expect that any puppies it would have will experience more suffering than good, so we have a moral responsibility to prevent them from existing." The latter only makes sense if you weight all suffering so heavily in your morality that it overwhelms our other moral concerns.
I read this. It’s a preposterous proposition, and you took it apart rather well. I think we need to do a calculation of the suffering that would be caused in the world by removing all the insects. A lot of birds are going to die. And so on up the food chain. There’s only one solution and that is a mass Kool-Aid event.
Maybe already on your radar, but Open Philanthropy swinging some focus to lead exposure after recognizing total investment is much lower than malaria, etc.
Boomercon Ron DeSantis is trying to be the candidate of the Online Right, and doesn't realize that the Online Right is much younger than the boomers he's accustomed to basing his strategy around. Thus his anti-property tax thing is flopping as the Online Right sees it, accurately, as a way to transfer money from young people to boomers.* Like any conservative person who's facing adversity, DeSantis did the good conservative thing and decided it was a conspiracy:
*It would be different if it were occurring in a place like the Northeast, but Florida is already near the bottom in tax collections per capita, and DeSantis has presented no plan to make up for the lost revenue, which will only mean an increase in income or sales taxes that will hit younger people:
And since Florida's state constitution prohibits ever having a state personal income tax or inheritance tax, if they get rid of property taxes then pretty close to 100 percent of the state government will have to be funded by increasing the sales tax. (Currently 6 percent plus up to another 2 percent collected in various counties or cities.)
Are here some people skilled at working with picture AIs, who would like to help me?
https://imgur.com/a/J9ybzAm -- this is a cover of a book. Please upscale it nicely to 1,600 x 2,560 pixels, and replace the texts with English translations, preferably using the same kind of font. The texts are: "V. Levshin", "Three Days in Dwarfland", "a story but not a story".
Bonus points if you explain to me how to do this, preferably using a free service, so that I don't have to bother people with more tasks like this. (Though if you volunteered to do this again for me with more pictures, that would also be very kind.)
I kept scrolling past your post, & last night I thought “Oh hell I’ll just do it, will only take 10 mins in Photoshop. But I had forgotten I had my content blocker set to keep me out of Photoshop, because I’m behind on life stuff. But I really think you can do this yourself. My Mac has a little app called Preview that opens images and also allows you to edit them. I’m sure a PC has the equivalent. The Mac one doesn’t have many features, which make it simple to use, and it does have all the features you need to make the changes you want. It will not do a magnificent job of upscaling, but it will do a decent one, and since the scan isn’t high quality anyway, I don’t think you’d really benefit from high-end upscaling. And if you have trouble using it GPT can do a fine job of walking you through.
Sequence would be 1) get app to upscale to desired size. 2)to cover up present titles, select a rectangle of background, copy and paste it over titles.. 3) Try all the fonts offered, and choose those that are similar to the ones there, and adjust their size and spacing. 4)Type in the English version of title, etc. and slide them into correct spot.
I think you could also do this in Pages, which is the Mac equivalent of Word, so you can probably also do this in Word and that might be easier if you know your way around Word. Pages, and probably word, can def. do steps 2, 3 and 4. I’m not sure about increasing the resolution of the image. You’d have to check on that.
Not really an AI, at least not in the sense you're probably thinking, but you should consider https://vectormagic.com. It seemed to be doing a halfway-decent job with your image, at least the picture parts of it, and then you can edit it in any vector graphics editor (e.g. to remove the text and replace it yourself). It's not free but it's cheap.
I really wish EA didn't shift so much into AI alignment. From my perspective it feels like they are just falling for Pascal's Wager over and over and over. Spending hundreds of millions to billions of dollars betting on the chance that A) a singularity/superintelligence is going to occur and B) dumping money into alignment research will have some positive effect on the outcome of that event.
It just seems to me that if GAI is the existential risk EA-ers see it as then there would be action more severe than research funding that stand a small chance of slightly reducing the risk.
I think longtermism is the thing that makes EA seem really crazy to normies, but AI alignment is here and now. Even if you don’t believe that **** is going to get real by 2027, it does seem kind of imminent.
I think this is unlikely as LLMs are already hitting the limits of available training data.
2) Some other model/form of AI is developed or has a breakthrough and achieves GAI.
This seems more likely, but in this case how does AI alignment research achieve anything concrete when the only models they've been able to study are completely different from the one that actually achieves intelligence? Real question here - I tried quickly looking into what they actually do and wasn't able to find much that wasn't vague.
3) GAI is not near.
How likely I feel this is tends to depend on the week/month, but generally I feel it's at least more likely than LLMs achieving GAI.
AI 2027 predicts AGI will be achieved in July 2027, 20 months from now. If you take that prediction seriously (I don’t, but it appears that Scott does), then I can see the argument for putting money into AI alignment research. If AGI actually appears as predicted, then the money may prove to have been well spent. On the other hand, if AGI does not appear when predicted, do Effective Altruists continue spending money on alignment research? Is there some point at which Effective Altruists will insist on evidence that alignment research is effective before they continue funding it?
To be pedantic, IIRC even AI 2027's own models predict 2030-2032. "2027" has always been clickbait. That being said, it doesn't matter that much because if the world is really going to end, having it happen five years later is scant comfort anyway.
In the AI 2027 scenario, “OpenBrain announces that they’ve achieved AGI and releases Agent-3-mini to the public,” in July 2027. I was assuming that this was intended as a prediction that AGI would be achieved in July 2027 (or perhaps in March 2027, when Agent-3 is first created). If the fictional Agent-3 doesn’t qualify as AGI, I would think that Agent-4 (September 2027) does, so that only moves the date for AGI back two months.
Are you saying that AI 2027 has posted other predictions that are inconsistent with the scenario?
Why does it feel like Pascal's Wager to you? Pascals wager is a nonsensical philosophical game, since you can't really choose what you believe, and you might choose the wrong god of the pantheon who sends you to hell anyways... and the AI alignment movement seems to me at least like a set of well thought out predictions that attempt to mitigate potential risks which are not 100% guaranteed to happen, but could be very destructive in the case they do.
Is there a specific part of the Ai 2027 timeline, for example, that you take issue with? Why is alignment a bad solution to fund?
- Alignment research itself is speculative and can only be performed on the stuff we have now that doesn't present existential threats, and therefore might not even generalize if the bad stuff comes true
- In general anything that you reason could be infinitely bad can share traits with Pascal's Wager
- There are plenty of real things that kill lots of people now and are amenable to solutions (malaria, AIDS) and future threats that are already happening (Russia invading parts of Europe, climate change)
1. What is your issue with speculating about possible future major harms and trying to fund preventions? A nuclear exchange between Soviet Union and USA would have once been a speculative future harm. I think it would have been worth funding research into prevention. That event did not occur in the end, but the money would still have been well spent in my opinion even if none of the funded research panned out, because we can't predict the future.
2. I feel the same way about speculative research on speculative harms. Trying to solve a problem that might happen is good, even if we can't know for sure that it will happen or that our solution will actually work.
3. I guess because Glynn said EA ppl are "falling for Pascal's Wager over and over", its implied, to me at least, that the EA people are willfully choosing to believe something they presume to be false/illogical/not logically proveable. The choosing/pretending to believe thing seems to me to be a core part of Pascals wager. A lot of other commenters seem to be focussing only on finite loss/infinite gain part of it, that might be summarized as an "asymetric wager". I don't believe Pascals Wager refers in an abstract way to that concept, but rather narrowly means "you should act like a good christian even if you don't believe in God, because you either don't lose much if god doesn't exist or you gain infinitely if it does".
4. Should we place higher value in current suffering then in future suffering? I think that is what you are implying. Or maybe that we should invest in high certainty events regardless of differing levels of impact. EA in my understanding puts a very high level of importance in the "impact" side of the equation.
I think we're actually just disagreeing on the percentage we think its likely to happen. Maybe I think its 5% and you think its 0.000002% and thats why the speculation seems wasteful to you and necessary to me.
1. The harms of a nuclear exchange are less speculative, in the sense that the USA nuked Japan twice. There are still unknowns, but we do know you can kill a ton of people and destroy a ton of stuff with nukes. We don't know if AI will genuinely be able to do dangerous things soon.
2. Trying to do research on potential harms is not itself objectionable, but I think it's unclear if doing alignment research on LLMs has a very high chance of generalizing to intelligent agents. After all, the only comparison we have of agentic general intelligences is humans, where I would argue tweaking their instincts for sociability would be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent warfare (not that we can try it anyway), because humans can do things outside the bounds of our instincts, both good and terrible. If we ultimately need to align the AIs the way we largely aligned humans - i.e., exchanging scarce resources for good behavior or setting up systems to punish defection - then what we will need the most is a well-functioning economy. Diverting a lot of money and effort and talent to a bunch of think tanks for decision theory or whatever might end up being really counterproductive if what we need the most is to be able to offer AI cheap electricity, or be able to credibly threaten data centers.
3. To me what makes this most like Pascal's Wager, or maybe instead Pascal's Mugging, is the fact that it assigns essentially infinite negative value to the outcome it's trying to prevent, which means no matter how remote you think it is, you basically still have to treat it as a top priority for resources.
I have wondered what will happen if AI never materializes as a real power and all the people who spent preaching the importance of AI alignment realize they talked most of the brightest most altruistic minds of a generation into wasting their potential.
I do think AI 2027 did us all a big favor in that regard - if we make it to 2030 and AI is still just a writing/coding assistant people are gonna have to be revising those predictions, at least.
1. "When I talk to the average person who says “I hate how EAs focus on AI stuff and not mosquito nets”, I ask “So you’re donating to mosquito nets, right?” and they almost never are. When I talk to people who genuinely believe in the AI stuff, they’ll tell me about how they spent ten hours in front of a spreadsheet last month trying to decide whether to send their yearly donation to an x-risk charity or a malaria charity, but there were so many considerations that they gave up and donated to both." (From https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games.)
2. Section 5 of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-stone-on-ea , arguing against someone who claimed "You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers!":
"Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants? There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. I take this one pretty seriously. The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. [...] EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA. (Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force[...]"
Even if, like Thomas del Vasto in this thread, you want to pause/stop AI without agreeing with the rest of AI alignment/safety, you can help with our best shot against those depressing race dynamics: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/act .
I took a long break from reading Astral Codex so probably missed the ones you linked. Thanks for linking so I can check them out. I think the final link is the most helpful (I prefer a ban on GAI/AI development to the alternatives, though I'm skeptical how much calling representatives will actually help).
If GAI happens by 2027 (as Scott seems to believe), then there is no political or research effort left that stands a good chance of having an effect by then. Government is notoriously slow to act, and beyond that any regulation that actually bans GAI development stands a good chance at instantly evaporating a good portion of the US stock market (see MSFT, NVDA, META, etc). Beyond that, the most likely candidates to actually create GAI are the companies lobbying hard to remove any restrictions - what do we think the chance is that these companies actually care enough about alignment to use the research, assuming it is developed in time?
I'm trying to check out their career advising. I don't really care for EA stuff but heard they could help think through a high-paying career for me. Then I'd be happy to donate a few k here and there from my extra money.
Everything is just AI. God. Feels like a scam. No I do not want to work on AI. No I do not want in alignment research or whatever. I want to make real money doing real things. Wtf
> Everything is just AI. God. Feels like a scam. No I do not want to work on AI. No I do not want in alignment research or whatever. I want to make real money doing real things. Wtf
Setting AI aside, there's two classical answers to this:
If you're more thing / math oriented, you go into finance, data science / modeling, or software development. But, it should be clear, none of those are "real things," it's all highly abstract white collar BS.
If you're more people / tangible impact oriented, go into medicine (plastic surgery, orthodontia, surgery) or sales (aircraft, enterprise software, business development).
All of those examples pretty easily clear $500k a year at the top places.
Or best of all (in my own opinion), you could start your own business. It doesn't need to be a VC-funded startup trading on hype and buzzwords and sparkly Ivy kid founders, there are hundreds of thousands of "real" businesses out there making real money doing real things (19k private businesses in the US make >$100M in revenue per year), and you could be one of them.
Yeah very much agree. The entire AI alignment / safety movement to me sadly feels very foolish on it's face. I actually really don't like AI and would like to pause / stop it on moral grounds, but even most AI safety people I've read or talked to seem depressed that race dynamics make it impossible to stop. Idk just feels weird overall.
It’s hard to think of a worse use for $100 million of philanthropic money than AI alignment research. Maybe try feeding the poor? Or improving healthcare access? This is neither effective nor altruistic.
I mean, these are the Malaria nets people. And the figures I've seen have them giving ~$200 million/year to global health causes (1) like, well, malaria nets n stuff. You can't criticize people for not doing something they're objectively doing to the tune of hundreds of millions/year.
I'm not wild about overpaid AI safety grantmakers and I'm not overblown by how well similar projects like MIRI have done. Nor am I super sold on ~$60 million/year for farm animal welfare. But, like, the same weird EA/autistic tendency that obsesses over spreadsheets for 2 years to determine whether Vitamin A supplements are more optimal than malaria nets (which is awesome) also leads them to really value, like, humane shrimp consumption (which is dumb but I'm still fond of it). And it's unfair to criticize the downsides of autistic optimization without acknowledging all the good it does.
However, while donations through GiveWell grew quite a bit since 2019, donations from general donors have mostly plateaued since 2021. And 2025 will be the last year that Open Philanthropy plans to contribute significantly to GiveWell.
GiveWell causes remain significantly funding constrained, so if people want contributions to global health / poverty to continue and even grow, they're welcome to donate: https://secure.givewell.org/.
I feel like they're wrong on this. If expected value is what should guide decision-making, wouldn't civilization collapse as everyone goes off to pursue some moonshot that could make them billionaires, instead of doing the tasks that need doing to keep things running?
Similarly in altruism, it seems like a lot of lives would be lost if all or the majority of altruism dollars go to moonshot charitable opportunities like AI safety.
They want to focus on neglected and tractable issues. If too many resources get sent to one issue, then other issues become neglected and become worth investing in.
I happen to think AI alignment is not very tractable.
I gave up on writing on substack, but my next post would've involved trying to square this circle. The answer I've arrived at is something like:
People don't just care about EV, but also about consistency. The size of your bankroll that you put behind a bet, represents a sliding scale of how much volatility you're willing to expose yourself to in a single betting-round. To bet the farm on a single round (because Pascal told you to), is to exposure yourself to maximum volatility, which is extremely fragile. Equivalent to putting all your eggs into a single basket. Just as there's a trade-off between efficiency and slack, there's an analogous trade-off between EV and consistency. I.e. what use is ~infinite utility if it's all concentrated in a scenario that has ~0% probability? You're effectively dumping all your utility into a counterfactual you'll never see. But utilitarians love to boil everything down to a single, legible metric. EV and efficiency are seemingly(?) more legible than slack and consistency, for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
I remember reading a post on LW [0] that complained that the Kelly strategy of maximizing the growth-rate is *not* logically-equivalent to maximizing EV, and this felt fishy. But I'm willing to bite the bullet and claim that EV is not, in fact, the end-all be-all to begin with.
> But utilitarians love to boil everything down to a single, legible metric. EV and efficiency are seemingly(?) more legible than slack and consistency, for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
I believe the reason (for people on less wrong) is something along the lines of VNM axioms, and how if you don't obey all of them you are likely to get dutch booked. There are some other sub considerations and nuances to it, but I believe if you want to say stuff intelligently about EV, you should know about them.
Note that VNM decision utility is different from the notion of utility in utilitarianism, since VNM utility is over world states, and not over agent utility. I don't know of any writing directly relating VNM utility to utilitarianism utility.
>. I don't know of any writing directly relating VNM utility to utilitarianism utility.
I don't know.of any rigourous formal proof that they are the same (ie. a djsproof of the standard result that they are not the same). But it's very easy to write *informally* in a way that treats them as equivalent, because they are both called "utility"! and that's whats appears to be going on in Torture versus Dust Specks.
My quip was kind of orthogonal to dutch-booking. It's more about psychology than mathematical consistency. Lemme unpack this.
One common criticism of nerds, rationalists, autists, etc. is that they love numbers and equations a little too much, which often instills a sense of false-confidence. Nerds are generally drawn to things like math and trains, because they're clear, precise, and unambiguous. So a common impulse is to try to formalize decision-making into both VNM utility-functions and Utilitarian Ethics. Or in other words, to "putanumonit" [0]. It's ethics, but with math! what's not to love? EV is just a measure of "goodness", modulated by probability. It's a clear, tangible target to maximize.
Don't get me wrong, math is neat and all. But sometimes, nerds (myself included) tend to take things a bit too literally. They tend to trust the math more than their instincts. When math and instincts disagree, it might to prudent to question whether it's possible to steelman the case for instincts. E.g. consider the St Petersburg Paradox. Mathematically, the price should be infinite! But when you ask normies IRL, they put down something like $25. Likewise, consider Pascal's Mugging. According to Elizer, it's sound to give the mugger all your money. But when you ask normies IRL, they'll give the mugger a hay-penny at best. Consider Loss Aversion. Is it really a cognitive *bias*, in the sense that normies are being irrational? Are the normies dumb?
I've come to the conclusion that no, it's the math that's dumb. Normies care, not only about total EV, but also the variance between outcomes. And this tends to lead to better decisions. E.g. Sam Bankman Fried is someone who took linear EV-maxing super-seriously, acted accordingly, and now he's in prison. Which was asymptotically inevitable! When you go all-in on every single round, you lock all your utility behind a single final-outcome of infinitesimal probability! His imprisonment was an entirely predictable consequence of his beliefs and actions.
Consideration of variance in addition to EV is, I believe enough to dissolve several paradoxes. St. Petersburg looks sketchy because the variance is high. Pascal's Mugging is sketchy because the variance is high. The Utility Monster is sketchy because the variance is high. If outcomes were citizens, the Gini Coefficients would be 100%. You are not immortal, which means you won't be able to check every outcome for that one jackpot. And it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice a little EV for some consistency (i.e. decreased variance), for similar reasons as to why systems engineers only run things at 80% capacity.
Maybe you could rescue naive utility maximization with "meta-utility", which assigns a number to each PDF available to bet toward, where each PDF is mapped to (EV, variance). Idk, this gets confusing fast.
----
And when I zoom out from all this, I see a trade-off between EV vs variance. Which I suspect is isomorphic to efficiency vs slack [1], throughput vs buffers, free-trade vs protectionism, etc. I suspect the modern world tends to privilege EV, efficiency, throughput, and free-trade over their counterparts. And I suspect this has some deep connection with Episteme vs Metis. I haven't fully figured this part out yet.
> One common criticism of nerds, rationalists, autists, etc. is that they love numbers and equations a little too much, which often instills a sense of false-confidence.
And one uncommon criticism of normal people is that they are innumerate and instead get taken in by good sounding words. There's a reason why it's Bentham and Mills who spoke out against slavery and for equal rights before normal people! Why suppose that not using numbers is better? It sure sounds like people don't like being held accountable for what they do, so they tend towards doing things that are more illegible and thus less numerate.
> According to Elizer, it's sound to give the mugger all your money. But when you ask normies IRL, they'll give the mugger a hay-penny at best.
>> You or I would probably wave off the whole matter with a laugh, planning according to the dominant mainline probability: Pascal's Mugger is just a philosopher out for a fast buck.
And the rest of the post lays out why he trusts his intuition more than the raw numbers, and wonders how to defend the intuition in the first place, why do you believe otherwise?
> Consider Loss Aversion. Is it really a cognitive *bias*, in the sense that normies are being irrational? Are the normies dumb?
I mean, if normies consistently miss out on benefits because they consistently overvalue avoiding losses relative to getting gains, then yeah, they're dumber because of loss aversion.
> I've come to the conclusion that no, it's the math that's dumb. Normies care, not only about total EV, but also the variance between outcomes.
I mean, this is implicitly included if you use a logarithmic conception of utility gain over money, hence the Kelly criterion, which is why if you talked to most rationalists they'd rec using that typically over any sort of linear EV. I'm not sure what additional value questioning the value of EV is beyond this.
(I'm not 100% sure the following logic is right, I briefly checked it against a paid version of GPT, so please keep in mind that there may be errors and that I'm not a native thinker wrt to VNM)
Also note that VNM utility is over an ensemble of world state and doesn't specify that your evaluation of world states has to be linear. The fact, say an action would lead to uhhh, to pick an example out of a hat, 1/4th chance of ruin, 3/4ths chance of victory, the "utility" specifying if it's worth taking that over a 1/8th chance of ruin and 7/8ths chance of lesser victory depends more on the shape of how you evaluate the worlds rather than the math of EV. So, for example if you are risk adverse, you end up valuing the decreased chance of ruin much more than you do the reduction of value in the more probable victory worlds. There's nothing saying that you need to evaluate the individual world states as if there was some zero state matching the status quo, and then you only measure linear deviations from it to determine which worlds you prefer or disprefer. You'd have to add on additional ways in which you evaluate worlds to get risk neutrality, or variance aversion.
This is not to say that LWers are talking as if they deeply understand the VNM theorems, but invoking variance as a point against VNM theorems in particular is not correct. It may be correct against folk notions of utlity like what sbf had though, that I wouldn't defend.
I mean, yeah, that's pretty much where I was going with this. We're largely in agreement. Though I feel like you *want* me to argue that VNM is wrong (which is not a position I hold; I said it was orthogonal). The point of this isn't to dunk on VNM or EY, but to reveal some of the motivation for my train of thought, and somehow segue it into "Seeing Like A State" territory. While EY might not have explicitly advocated for being mugged, I do distinctly remember that he spent a fair amount of thought on Pascal's Wager/Mugging, and didn't understand how to solve the paradox. We agree on this much, yes? So I'm pointing out "Kelly solves this pretty handily, actually".
It seems like the only major disagreement we have, is:
> hence the Kelly criterion, which is why if you talked to most rationalists they'd rec using that typically over any sort of linear EV.
Which makes it sound like Kelly is completely uncontroversial on LW and in the wider rat sphere. If so, this is news to me. I know there are many who do subscribe to Kelly, and I don't follow LW too closely, so I could certainly be unaware of the wider trends here. But I figured that "Should We Maximize the Geometric Expectation of Utility?" [0] was evidence that Kelly had *not* been universally accepted as canon yet. And that variance had *not* been pinpointed as the missing ingredient yet. Am I wrong?
Maybe you should write it, I would be interested in reading it. Some time ago I wrote a takedown of utilitarianism because the EV stuff and the dust specks versus torture thought experiment really rubbed me the wrong way.
I predicted that blogging would be kinda boring and worthless. But I gave it a shot anyway, and realized that blogging is kinda boring and worthless. lol. I'm not very talented in this domain, and my hearts not in it enough to persevere, and I think I'd rather spend the bulk of my effort doing other things. Like, it's so much less stressful to just dump my shower-thoughts in here, than to attempt an effort-post that's meant to stand the test of time. but idk, i'll consider revisiting that one draft, since you asked.
Food and medicine are bubbles too, ever since the Green Revolution. Ogalala's gonna go dry, and then where will we be? (Also: antibiotics. Made In China).
Those who fund alignment research tend to believe that the consequences of misaligned AI would be the death of every human, and that aligned AI would solve all other solvable problems, including food and healthcare.
It's unclear to me what the point of your comment is. Clearly, the EAs who spend on AI alignment charities believe it is altruistic and effective. It's unlikely you will change their mind with mere statements to the contrary, at least some arguments are needed to do so generally.
Likewise, I don't understand the point of this reply. I'm not expecting any donors to have a change of heart because they read my comment. Those who have experienced poverty (read: not the donors) know this is a baffling use of resources.
Do you think funding high risk/high reward ideas are ever warranted?
It seems obvious to me, that if humanity only ever spent its funds very practically and conservatively then technology would progress at such a slow rate, that we would miss out on the incredible improvement that advances bring.
Simultaneously as you argued if we spend all our money on moonshot ideas, then we will suffer from problems that have simple, proven solutions.
I think in actuality a natural balance forms between these two extremes, with individuals choosing their own place along the spectrum of conservative to moonshot.
A question for you: do you all the money that is going towards researching and improving renewable energy technology should go towards feeding the poor or improving healthcare access?
All the money that is going toward Chinese Energy Dependence, you mean? Yeah, that's better spent on feeding the poor or improving health care access. Even if both of those goals are actually evil in nature. Lesser of two evils.
I reject the premise of the question, but to humor you, most estimates put the amount needed to solve world hunger at about $40 billion per year. I think it's reasonable to assume that global R&D into renewables is more than that. Given a crazy hypothetical, yeah, I would rather solve world hunger.
Anyway, this AI alignment research is much more frivolous than renewable energy, even taken at face value. It's not just a moonshot, it's a shot meant to scrape cheese off it's surface and bring it to Jupiter. Even putting this money into "normal" tech startups would do more to help. Charity shouldn't be a lottery ticket.
Thanks for you answer, I find it reasonable, but if i had $40 billion to donate, I would guess I would probably not donate it all to solving world hunger.
I would want to a) hedge against my own lack of knowledge, by donating to multiple things, some more conservative and some a bit more speculative b) try to figure out where the donations would have recursive positive impacts, or stop negative feedback loops.
It seems to me that climate change will cause huge negative feedback loops, of political instability, water insecurity, more extreme weather events, loss of arable land, and hunger, so I could see how it could be argued that investing in solving hunger now, could potentially mean causing more hunger later through the opportunity cost of the limited funds if you believe that funding various greentech could reduce the negative effects.
Just for fun, I googled annual cost of climate change and the first result[1]
says around $143 billion currently, and another[2] saying it will rise to 38 trillion/year in damages by 2050.
I can't say whether these estimates are reasonable or not, but it seems reasonable to assume that the cost is large and rising with clear negative feedback mechanisms.
But anyways, you were talking about AI alignment research being a frivolous of donations...
From my current understanding it seems like a pretty reasonable set of arguments that the unchecked, unregulated arms-race style advancement of AI could potentially lead to some huge negative effects. Maybe its kind of a scissor statement style argument where the two sides are somehow incapable of seeing the other sides points, but i would be curious to try to understand where you are coming from.
What part of https://ai-2027.com/ 's timeline do you find completely and obviously unreasonable to the point that it wouldn't be beneficial to fund alignment research? (i don't mean to put words or opinions in your mouth, but just making assumptions based on your comment.)
Why shouldn't charity be a lottery ticket? You play as insurer. Pay in $100, which you lose either way, and if there's a hurricane, you get $10,000. Which you then give to the devastated place.
I'm going to ask once more about the alcohol use vs dementia study published in BMJ* in September. Its widely repeated assertion is that there is NO safe "floor" amount of alcohol consumption. Contrary to the purported beneficial effects of "one glass of wine a day," or even the more modest claim that drinking in moderation at least not harmful, the the recent article purports to show that ANY amount of alcohol consumption increases ones risk of developing dementia.
But, as I read it, they did two studies. The one which surveyed actual drinkers reporting their alcohol consumption yielded (again!) the now-familiar so-called "U Curve" implying a beneficial effect of small amounts of alcohol. The part that has garnered all the publicity was a genome study that used the presence of certain genomic alleles supposedly linked with propensity to greater or lesser alcohol consumption as proxies to actual drinking. (The bibliography cited other studies that used this technique, called "Mendalian Randomization," but no work claiming to justify its use in the first place.) As far as I can understand the study, it was the presence of these alleles that predicted the development of dementia.
So ... I am asking, can we infer ones drinking habits from their genome with enough accuracy to make predictions? Chat GPT has been of little help. Readers?
So if actually drinking modest amounts of alcohol is healthy, and having genes that predispose you to drinking modest amounts of alcohol is unhealthy, the conclusion seems to be that actually drinking moderate amounts of alcohol is _really_ healthy.
The point of MR is to tease out causality. We know that the observational studies are heavily confounded, with for exa which is actually just a selection effect on the variety of alcohol being consumedmple, people reducing their alcohol consumption after developing dementia (and see here for a confounded result showing benefit of wine in utero: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecoj.12144).
Depending on study design, I'd think MR could also be subject to confounding, and skimming the BMJ paper, I don't get how they get around that.
There is much less reason a priori to think that genes associated with alcohol metabolism, in particular (I'm guessing they're not associated with metabolism of food, in general), would have extensive impacts on health outcomes not mediated by alcohol consumption.
And the lack of such causal pathways is further supported by the absence of association between these genes and health outcomes in women.
Since women in the cohort rarely drank, anyway, if the genes only affected health outcomes via alcohol consumption, we'd expect the genes to have no association in women, which is what they found.
The study similarly found a monotonic relationship between genetic propensity for alcohol consumption and adverse cardiovascular events, rather than the U-shaped associated present in observational studies.
These researchers get dementia data from EHRs and say x allele cluster is associated with y probability of developing dementia, fine.
But they go on to claim to be able to infer drinks per week, problematic alcohol use and alcohol use disorder by counting alleles. "For the genetic analyses, we looked at both how much people drink (quantity-frequency traits) and problematic alcohol use (PAU), which reflect somewhat different underlying genetic risks and biology."
My problem is that there is nowhere cited a reference linking the presence of certain alleles to actual elbow-bending tipping of glass to lips. It seems to be just assumed that a population with "better" or more alcohol dehydrogenase or "worse" or less aldehyde dehydrogenase are going to drink less, and vice versa. Has this ever been shown? The Lancet study that you've provided is similar in that respect.
They're found in genome-wide association studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study. Are you asking about the validity of GWAS, in general, or of the robustness of findings for specific phenotypes, in particular?
Ive had I look at the study, but their tables are difficult to read for me. I would like to know about this particular GWAS, it sounds unbelievable good. For example, their predicted drinks/week range from at least 0 to 12. The lower end of this seems like it should have problems being calibrated, negative drinks being impossible. They also analyse a group with mean predicted DPW of 0.06, out of an n=300k, and apparently get significant results, and they say going from *predicted* 1DPW to 3DWP is a 15% increase in dementia risk.
All of these seem to require pretty high accuracy.
When the phenotype is a fractional gradation of a specific behavioral trait, it seems to me to fit into the "extraordinary claims ..." category. I know about and have never had any qualms with, for example, Jonathan Haidt's work, but number of drinks per week?
> Its widely repeated assertion is that there is NO safe "floor" amount of alcohol consumption.
I haven't looked at these studies closely, just two quick thoughts on the topic in general:
1) Some studies seems to measure the consumption of alcohol on a scale "zero drinks a day", "one drink a day", "two drinks a day"... which seems very coarse to me. I mean, zero drink suggests a teetotaler, one drink *every day* is practically an alcoholic. Do these studies even have a category for people who drink like one bottle of wine shared with friends once in a month?
2) The obvious confounder is that some people avoid alcohol because they already have a health problem. If you don't control for this, then obviously the "zero drinks" category will look bad, because all these sick people will be there. But that does not imply that drinking every day would improve their health.
I think the actual studies use drinks per week, not drinks per day. Where I've seen drinks per day, I'm pretty sure that was from journalists or bloggers who were dividing the numbers by seven to get a daily average that they hoped would be more legible. Current public healthy guidance in the US is that "moderate drinking" is no more than 14 drinks per week for men and no more than 7 drinks per week for women.
The bigger problem with the studies is that we're pretty sure that self-reported alcohol consumption is severely unreliable, since average self-reported consumption multiplied by the total population only accounts for about half of retail alcohol sales. One standard response to this seems to be to uniformly multiply self-reported consumption by two, which strikes me as problematic. I suspect the actual discrepancy is a combination of several factors:
1. Some people who self-report as teetotalers are actually occassional drinkers.
2. Some people who self-report as teetotalers or as occasional or moderate drinkers are actually raging alcoholics.
3. A nontrivial amount of retail alcohol sales never get consumed or gets consumed only after a substantial delay. My own liquor shelf contains bottles that I purchased or received as gifts 10-20 years ago which are still half-full or more. Also, there are bottles that get broken or spilled, drinks served in bars and restaurants that don't get finished, etc.
4. There's one guy called Whiskey Georg who drinks 2000 bottles of whiskey a week but doesn't respond to public health surveys.
9 in 10 wine consumers in France buy wine in bottles, 1 in 4 in boxwine ("cubis"), and 1 in 3 in "caisses" (literally boxes, meaning larger boxes containing several bottles like a pack of beers).
(Less high-quality source than Santé Publique France)
I am not very experienced with boxwine, but it seems very unlikely to me that it retains freshness better that glass bottles. If it was the best for taste, it would be the more prestigious version. The advantages of boxwine are low price and ease of transport.
The country with the largest fraction of child liver cirrhosis, at least according to some literature on alcoholism I have read, so this does not really convince me that we are talking about reasonably low amounts of alcohol.
Alcohol-related child liver cirrhosis must be vanishingly rare if it exists at all, because you need long-term heavy exposure to alcohol to develop cirrhosis. If you include teenagers, ChatGPT found one case in the literature, in a 15-year-old "after 3 years of heavy daily alcohol abuse" (poor boy). Presumably in the US based on the authors' affiliations.
It is plausible that there never was any documented case of alcohol-related cirrhosis in a child in France or in most countries. Your claim is bizarre.
"Patient’s alcohol intake began as occasional beers at age 12 years, progressed to daily beers at 13 years, and deteriorated to daily vodka pints at 14 years after his father’s death."
I submit "a pint of vodka a day" is not the same as "allowed a glass of watered wine with dinner". Also, the father (amongst other things) suffered from "substance abuse disorder" so I'm thinking maybe introduced Junior to drinking by sharing beers with him, which is how we get to "daily beers (plural) at age 13".
Generalising from this one case to "all the children in France" is a bit of a jump.
It's probably due to excessive Tylenol, rather than alcohol abuse. Double-dose on Tylenol, and you can be hitting the Emergency Room. We do not have good treatments either (NAC is a start, but...)
Can you cite me those sources? Tylenol is known to cause a lot of harm to the liver if administered improperly, so I'd really like to know if people are tying this to "children actually drinking." (and also the age of children).
Sorry, it was in some book I read over twenty years ago, when I did a school project on alcoholism. The book said that in some French villages parents let their children drink wine regardless of age.
"Over twenty years ago" would have been anywhere from 2000 backwards; in the 1980s France had high alcohol consumption rates but this dropped over the following decades so that cirrhosis rates improved as well.
"Global liver cirrhosis deaths increased from around 676,000 (95% uncertainty interval: 452,863 to 1,004,530) in 1980 to over 1 million (1,029,042; 670,216 to 1,554,530) in 2010 (about 2% of the global total). Over the same period, the age-standardized cirrhosis mortality rate decreased by 22%. This was largely driven by decreasing cirrhosis mortality rates in China, the US and countries in Western Europe. In 2010, Egypt, followed by Moldova, had the highest age-standardized cirrhosis mortality rates, 72.7 and 71.2 deaths per 100,000, respectively, while Iceland had the lowest. In Egypt, almost one-fifth (18.1%) of all deaths in males 45- to 54-years old were due to liver cirrhosis. Liver cirrhosis mortality in Mexico is the highest in Latin America. In France and Italy, liver cirrhosis mortality fell by 50% to 60%; conversely, in the United Kingdom, mortality increased by about one-third. Mortality from liver cirrhosis was also comparatively high in Central Asia countries, particularly Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, notably Gabon."
"Changing alcohol consumption has led to a three- to fivefold increase in liver deaths in the UK and Finland, and a three- to fivefold decrease in France and Italy.
...Over the last 30 years liver death rates in the European Union (EU) have gradually declined in response to changing patterns of alcohol intake. The EU liver death rate was 13.25 in 1970 and 8.01 in 2007 (for pre-2004 EU member states) – a reduction of 60%. But this overall decline conceals very large differences between member states. France and Italy, the countries with the largest decline in liver deaths, have seen a three- to fourfold reduction in liver mortality whereas the UK and Finland have seen liver deaths rise by more than fivefold over the same period of time.
...Total alcohol consumption in France has fallen by 12 litres per capita since the 1950s while the trend in Italy began later, dropping from 15.9 litres of pure alcohol per capita in 1970 to 6.9 litres in 2005.
...Levels of wine production remained high in France and Italy. Measures taken by the European Commission in the late 1970s and early 1980s to reduce wine production and improve the quality of the product as part of the common agricultural policy cannot alone account for the drop in internal consumption. Rather a move to quality of production was a reaction by the industry to consumer choice and reduced demand. Skog identifies the middle classes as the pioneers of change in France, and notes that they were already drinking less than other groups, preferring to opt for high-quality options instead – ‘bottles with corks’ as opposed to large plastic containers of cheap ‘plonk’. This is good news for the wine industry and suggests that profitability and improved health can go hand in hand by moving towards quality and away from quantity – a lesson that UK supermarkets would do well to learn from their French and Italian counterparts."
That's plausible (and more likely the more you go back in the past). What is not is that the children would get a cirrhosis in their childhood. Higher risk of cirrhosis in adulthood, surely.
My parents got me drunk in France too (I was under 5, they didn't properly meter the wine). Given the time period, it is quite possible it contained anti-freeze. (And given your book's time period, it is quite plausible that any "we found cirrhosis" contained the same time period). STILL more plausible to be tylenol overdoses (which are quite common Stateside -- and probably moreso in Merry England, where it's prescribed more often).
When people say "children drink regardless of age" they generally just mean a "smaller dose" -- as getting your kids blitzed means barfing kids, and that's no fun.
Yeah, there's a lot of social context here. I've noticed that at academic conferences, I'll have a beer or two every night--I'm often at a reception/party at the end of the day or out to dinner with friends, and I'm seldom driving, so it just makes sense. At home, I will occasionally have a beer with dinner or something, but most nights I'm just eating dinner at home with my family and/or driving, so it doesn't really make sense.
Mendelian randomization is a well-established technique for making causal inferences in epidemiology. It has some more assumptions, and therefore some more limitations, than a real RCT. One way you can test MR is to see whether an MR study gives the same results as a real RCT for something that *is* randomizable. This usually works, but not always.
One intuition on why this works: you could still do a perfectly valid RCT by having group A be assigned placebo 40% of the time and the real drug 60% of the time, and group B be assigned placebo 60% of the time and the real drug 40% of the time (even if you did not know which specific people in groups A and B got which version!). Adjusting for the propensities, you would still get a valid estimate of the causal effect of the drug.
MR is basically using quasi-randomly-assigned genes to do the same thing. You can predict predisposition to drink alcohol using genetics (older studies often used the alcohol intolerance gene, found in some east asians, as a binary of "more likely / less-likely to drink"). Your study I think uses risk scores to estimate amount of drinking, but same idea.
It feels like that only works if the alleles don’t affect the endpoint through some other mechanism. I suspect these techniques would show drinking also increases lung cancer, if the same alleles also increase smoking.
I'm sure there are good statistical techniques for trying to adjust for confounding variables, but it seems like it would be easy to convince yourself of nonsense using this technique if you were not very careful.
Open question, if prediction markets incentivize forecasting, given the multiple sides of a bet, don't they also incentivize insiders to mislead outsiders in service of a larger upside and defeat the purpose? What's the argument against?
Really good forecasters tend to be people with many interests who consume lots of info sources, including obscure ones and foreign ones that insiders in a US industry have little or no influence over. They also reason about the thing they're predicting using other analogous situations in other domains and similar situations in a different time. Insiders can't interfere with that process either.
I feel that prediction markets are this lovely Platonic ideal of nerds about using something or other to set policy, but if they do take off in the mainstream, the usual human influences will start to work: "this can make me money?" and then it becomes about making money and not getting the best wisdom available to create a consensus about what is the optimum course of action to pursue.
In the service of making money, we've all seen different bubbles, crashes, schemes, and downright fraud, not to mention lesser problems of insider trading and price fixing etc.
The whole point of prediction markets is that if they're working well, the best way to make money is to make correct predictions.
My concern with prediction markets as a source of information is that I worry that the cost of manipulating them is not very high because they're not very big markets. If everyone assumes that the prediction market odds are correct, then when I want to manipulate public sentiment ahead of an election or something, maybe I spend a lot of money either trying to push the prediction market in a desired direction, or trying to convince my followers to invest in the prediction market in my desired direction.
Yes, the best way to make money is to make correct predictions, but sometimes you have goals other than making money (e.g. you want to confuse people, and you are willing to spend money to do that), and sometimes the easiest way to make a correct prediction is to influence things (e.g. you predict some disaster, and then you make it happen).
The idea that anyone stupid enough to keep getting misled is eventually going to go backrupt. People can't bet money that they don't have. (Well, most of the time, anyways: https://youtu.be/d80ahvRSV8E?si=CLwPWjXrwfFz39Cb )
some very rough 20 responses to last week's aphantasia mini-survey and some very vibe-coded charts which I haven't double checked. minimum effort to see if I'm encouraged to pursue further.
I've been providing a light, mostly-accurate-names-changed-to-protect-the-innocent narrative tracking my attempts to find potential work as a writer as a long spate of novel-writing begins to look less and less likely to pay the bills. Today, I'm going to cover another aspect of the writer-makes-money game that is far more traditional and far less reliant on believing my vague claims to be a writer.
If you've never spent a lot of time thinking about the books you read, your mental image of books getting to the shelves is likely somewhat magical. Somewhere, a writer (a being who can write, of which writing is known about them) gets access to a pen, which fulfills the spawn condition for a book. He sends this book to someone with a printing press who does the rest of the job for him; they print the book, they distribute the book, and they market the book so people know it's been printed/distributed. If it's a good enough book, it sells a lot of copies, and everyone is happy.
If you've thought about it a little more, you know there's also an agent in there, who you probably think about as a person who takes the writer's book, verifies it for quality, then searches for an appropriate buyer.
None of this is wrong, exactly, but none of it is right. It's all so much worse than that in ways that infuriate anyone that encounters this industry with the slightest amount of skin in the game.
Publishers:
Publishers are, at their very best, risk minimizers who are entirely agnostic of the contents of a book. Some of you felt revulsion at that concept, some of you understand it to be similar to the way almost every profitable business operates. Some precious few of you felt both.
At the very best case, a publisher wants to sell a book that will sell. In generations long gone, publishers believed that this was mostly a function of getting a book on the shelves that in some way answered to "written well". This might have been a reference to highbrow prose, or it might have been thrill-a-minute pulp that grabbed the readers and wouldn't let go. They figured this would get them good reviews and word of mouth, and that this in turn would make the book sell.
Whether that was true or not, it's only relevant to know that publishers no longer believe this.
What do they believe in its place? Well, back in those hallowed days of writing mattering much, some publisher figured out that having an illustrated cover made books sell better. Some other publisher figured out copy on the back sold better, and another figured out that sometimes a newspaper reviewer would give a book a review because of the author's background, and that these reviews tended to be more positive than usual, agnostic of the quality of the book.
Eventually, these add-ons to book quality came to be the only thing that mattered. Publishers realized that since buyers would only pick up and consider things that popped on the shelf, they started looking for books that could be expressed in one-sentence pitches, especially when written by someone with an admirable backstory (in 2025, this means BIPOC or LGBTQ+, 99% of the time).
They did not realize, and still have not realized, what this would do after a generation of readers were trained to the expectation that books sucked regardless of advertising, but that's another story about why romance novels are the only novels that sell (TM).
Now, that's the best case scenario - that the publisher does not even read your novel before publishing it, that they bought it based on how it would look on the shelf completely agnostic of the actual writing in the book. There are some fairy-tale stories that defy this, but at the top level of publishing? The reading of the book is optional. But what about the worse-case scenarios?
The first of those is that of marketing. Traditionally, marketing was the publisher's job, full stop. Marketing, however, takes money. Worse, that money doesn't always work to actually sell the book. So what is there to do? Well, call it the magic rule of publishing: There are more writers than you actually need, and they all want to get published. So you offload the marketing burden to them.
Usually, you actually do this BEFORE the publishing deal. In non-fiction, you only consider publishing people who have "platform", i.e. the ability to sell their book themselves without your help at all, absent printing capabilities and distribution. For instance, there's a book called the Martian that's often held up as a fairy tale of a long-shot book getting a book deal against all conventional odds. It got a deal because it was already selling so well, independently, that the agent who sold it to a larger publisher had to actively beg the writer to give him a chance.
There's still distribution, right? Well, yes, but most publishers now have imprints that don't have distribution; Orbit Books, for instance, is part of Hachette; Orbit Works, which Orbit is trying to morph into, only does e-books. Most genre publishers are moving away from print, and so on.
So in the brave new publisher future, the publisher prints books you could have printed yourself, so long as you could have sold them without the publisher's help (which they mostly won't give), having not read your book (or not cared what was in it anyhow), and then often not printing the book at all (which you double secret siberian double-dutch could have done yourself).
In exchange for all this nothing, the publisher still (sometimes) gives advances (that are increasingly small, on top of being rare). In a lot of cases, the modern publisher's deal to the writer is "We will take half the money from your book for fronting the money for cover design". That's the worst-case stuff before it's actually a full on "pay us to publish your book" scam.
Agents
Mostly similar to publishers, your agent does not want to work and does not care what's in your book. They are a *little* better than publishers for reasons I'll get to, but not much.
The process for getting an agent is one of two things:
1. Be clearly capable of selling the book yourself and not needing the agent or a publisher in the first place, in which case the agent will grub up grubbily with their hands out for a share and hope you are so enamored of the job title you give it to them
2. Query letters.
Agents do NOT want to read books. Ideally, an agent spends all their time selling book *concepts* to publishers, who hand over some small lump money for the rights to the book, of which the agent gets some low-double-digit percentage. Reading books takes time away from that, so they'll do anything to get around it.
The way they've managed to do this in the modern era is through query letters. A query letter is a fairly standardized 200-500 word summary of a book, written by the author, including a few sentences explaining, carefully, what already successful books it's ripping off (this concept is called "stating your comparables).
Because the agent knows the publisher doesn't care what's in the book, your demographics and one-sentence pitches are all that matter at this level. There's a site called manuscript wishlist in which agents and publishers name what kind of manuscripts they want, and far and away the most popular genre isn't a genre at all - it's some language boiling down to "written by an interesting minority or lgbtq person". Many agents refuse to accept books if they aren't by one of those groups, and say so outright.
If you are thus a very minority LGBTQ of disadvantaged queer color, you start with half the job done. The rest of what you need is a good *summary* of your book, and then the agent might consider reading a single word of your novel. If you aren't brown, tan, and man-on-man, you have to have a REALLY GOOD summary of your book and then the agent might actually ask to see pages.
Note that, again, the agent does not care if your book is *good*. They care if the publisher will buy it, and the publisher doesn't care if it's good. If the book *is* really good, they consider that a plus, don't get me wrong. But it's not a big part of it.
Writers
Writing books that have a chance of mainstream publishers is a function of playing this game. In order, the things that you need to do to get a book published are:
1. Not need it, already be making money, and be on the likely losing end of any deal you make with anyone.
2. Have enough of a platform you don't know how to use to sell books that the publisher thinks they can take advantage of it.
3. Be an interesting kind of minority, differently abled person, LGBTQ+, or if you can swing it all three
4. Write books that are similar to other books that have sold well and that summarize into a single sentence (sometimes this is called high-concept) well
5. Be very good at writing a query letter
6. Consider working hard at being a good writer.
If you have been curious why self-publishing is an increasingly big deal, this is it. Books do NOT get published based on merit-of-the-words-inside, usually. In self-publishing, where anything can get popped up and have a chance, any book you actually hear if is almost guaranteed to be at least somewhat good; disentangled from modern mainstream publishing, it had to be for you to hear about it.
As a writer doing anything non-conventional, as a person who isn't good at marketing, or as a person who just isn't good at the very specific thread-the-needle game necessary to actually get pages of your book read by a human, self-publishing isn't just a better option, it's often the ONLY option.
Hey Ben, thanks for posting again, this is a very interesting perspective and I’m probably going to copy this into a word doc for later.
Two questions for you:
One: you alluded to the game lit/litRPG genre, no longer being so friendly, I was surprised by that. There are dungeon crawler Carl books all over the place now right? I would expect that that would create a bigger market for “same but different”books.
Two, do you belong to 20K or any writers groups like that?
Hi! DCC is a weird effect on the genre. It's a young man's book in a young man's genre, it's fun to read, but it's *slightly different* so mainstream publishers don't have any idea what to do with the fact that it did well.
A few months ago I sent out a lot of cold emails to get conversations going, and I talked to some... like you wouldn't call them famous outside of the agent/literary world but very high end agents, known names with full lists who aren't taking queries because they already have all the business they want.
Basically the consensus there was that the big publishing houses were all talking about DCC (because it made a lot of money) but that they didn't understand it and weren't putting any work into understanding it. There's I think four or five agents on the big agent listings who have it as an interest, two of which I know and who aren't... like, they aren't established agents in any sense. The rest of them are LGBTQ+ exclusive or preferenced, and there's maybe one who is actually looking for litRPG books as they generally exist.
Putting all that together, the basic thing is that there was a morale boost when DCC went big, but that's tapered off a lot as publishers proved themselves entirely uninterested in trying it again. There's one I know of that put out a "litRPG book" trying to get lucky, but I think they hired a conventional fantasy writer they had a relationship with already, and he didn't understand the genre, biffed it, and they got the results you'd expect from that level of arrogance and genre hostility.
Really simply, DCC was already making a lot of money so there was no risk to publishers taking a "chance" on it. They haven't been willing to make similar or worse bets since, although there might be behind-the-scenes stuff I haven't been shown.
I don't do the whole writer's group thing. Nothing against it but to make the money I need to make, I have to put out a novel about every 1-2 months. Writers groups can't help me with that.
Fair warning: I've replied to a lot of comments in this thread but I also have to *write things for money*, so my reply pacing is probably slowing down from here.
When I was little, I wanted to be a novelist. Learning that agents existed and were now obligatory is what made me give up on that. Horrible parasites. It makes me wax Marxist just to think of it.
In slight defense of agents: When people do get past the filters and find themselves with good agents, they often end up in a very, very good spot by having one. Agents are, if nothing else, often very good salesmen and negotiators. There are bad agents and very good "civilian" negotiators, but by and large a good agent is going to get you more money, should you secure one.
Why? Their literal job is to act as an agent for the writer in that regard. Do you also dislike lawyers for being better at protecting clients than the clients themselves would be, pro se?
There's a lot of negative takes to have on agents and I hold a lot of them, but "I don't like the part where they get a good outcome for their clients" is surprising to see on the list.
Salesmanship is innately contemptible since it implies (in the formal-logic sense) an ability to push the product beyond its qualitative merits.
It's true but unrelated that the legal system would also be better if lawyers didn't exist and the plaintiff and accused had to state their cases before the justice of the peace in person.
My sister has watched a lot of BookTok and tells me there are three groups of avid readers: women who read erotica (she calls them "spicy people" because whenever a new book is mentioned their first question is "is it spicy?"), woke people (who make sanctimonious videos demanding that everyone read x number of books per year by a long list of specified demographics), and "classics people" who mostly only read classic literature like Dostoevsky. Apparently the second two groups have a lot of overlap (I am utterly unable to comprehend the cognitive dissonance of "people should be cancelled for ten-year-old tweets, but let's read books written by literal slaveowners!") but both hate the spicy people and the spicy people hate them.
And what you're saying here tracks pretty well with this. If the only people who are actually buying new books regularly are either porn adicts or woke, then obviously most publishers will be clearly signalling that they only want manuscripts that are pornograpic or woke. Complaining about this reminds me of atheists complaining that conservative churches are so much more thriving than liberal churches, or people who would never in any imaginable circumstances vote Republican complaining that Republicans aren't reaching out to them in any way. The complainers (who I agree with of course) are mostly people who don't actually read fiction, or at least certainly don't routinely pay actual money for it. Which means of *course* your preferences are going to be ignored, as long as the people with your preferences tend to not be buying books at all. The answer is for the people who don't like these trends to actually buy books that defy them, and create the market for them.
And if you do and most people don't, recognise the problem is with democracy, not the publishers. They're just giving the people what they want. There's no cure for the people wanting stupid things.
Hmm. I l buy stuff that doesn't fall into those categories -- SFF, comic novels, combinations of the two (Adams, Pratchett), weird slipstream stuff (Self, Hoban), and idea-heavy philosophical writing (Lem, Borges). A lot of my friends and relatives are similar. Are we really an invisible.minority?
What I read is that to a first approximation, the only books that sell are a) books by famous popular genre authors and b) celebrity memoirs. And even then, a lot of them flop. Anything beyond that is basically lottery ticket tier. But that's the big publisher view, excluding self-published niches like Kindle erotica.
So I think a lot of this is true. It's usually presented like this:
1. Right now you can mostly only sell porn to women, in terms of new books.
2. Anyone else who is buying books are woke people, and it's still broadly porn for them too
3. People who are only reading things that are absolutely assured to be good.
The problem with this is that you have read that information and gone "See, men don't read, there's something specifically wrong with the male genome that made them abandon books", which is broadly what the book industry has done, as well.
Meanwhile this effect broadly came into play over decades and decades of the book industry saying "It doesn't matter if books are good, let's make them bad, who the fuck cares, get me a high-concept and some good cover art and there it stops", and then spending a really intense last couple of decades going "girlboss trans gay queer genderqueer girlboss!" every place they could, including traditionally male genres (scifi and so on).
It's not so much that it's impossible that men were going to abandon books no matter what you did, but if you look around, you'll find that men still read an awful lot; they read articles, indie stuff, and so on. They just don't read new books on bookstore shelves, which haven't been aimed at them in forever and are bad even when they are.
Meanwhile, the people who are left reading books in those venues are people who buy pornography, because (sorry, erotica people! some of you are talented!) pornography is quality-agnostic on a ton of fronts.
TLDR: It's true that "men just stopped reading for no reason at all" might be true, but it's also true that "men stopped reading stuff after a whole generation of it being published agnostic of being good, and the only people who are still readers are reading pornography, where quality doesn't matter as much" might be true too. Both fit the bill.
The big experiment that's been on for a while now is how the non-pornographic book market shapes up now that self-publishing is coming into its own. Maybe we'll still find that men don't read when there's the slightest bit of effort to court them with whatever quality is available, but the early indicators I've seen (say, Isekai/litRPG stuff, which is aimed at boys/men) seem to show that's not the case.
I wonder if men haven't stopped reading as such, but are instead reading a ton more specific genre fiction from small independent publishers/the Kindle self-publishing route? EDIT: I was forgetting web serials, such as the ones often referenced on here like "Worm".
For example, I'm not a man but I'm recently reading a fair amount of work under this imprint:
Is it great? Hell, no. It's formulaic, it often ignores Chekov's Gun (e.g. sets up what seem will be important plot points in early chapters but these are ignored or wrapped up fast and briefly in the end) and it's never going to win any awards.
But for easy, light reading where I can be assured there won't be monster-fucking or wokeness hitting me in the face in the middle of the story? Sometimes I just want a reliable scare that isn't too gory, and the good guys (mostly) win (though some of the authors like putting their character through the mill)? Yes.
I've bought much less mainstream horror from current authors published by the big companies over the past while; I'll always look in on "does Stephen King have a new book out?" (though I *won't* always buy it now, unlike years gone by), but I'm buying a lot of 'reprints of classic ghost stories' by small houses and this kind of genre fiction in crime and horror as linked.
There are a couple of established Big Name authors I will buy, but my consumption of current literary fiction has gone *way* down over the past decade or so.
> 1. Right now you can mostly only sell porn to women, in terms of new books.
I mean, you can definitely sell porn to men. There's a whole goddamn industry for that. They just prefer a more visual medium. Changes to culture or the publishing industry wouldn't change that.
I feel like I would've noticed if there was large demand for male erotica in the independent sector, but the demand is overwhelmingly for art. In fact, the only males I've seen writing erotica are those very much in the LGBTQ side of things. Yes, light novels are a thing, but they're very niche outside of East Asia, they're half visual anyways, and they wouldn't even solve your issue of publishers only selling garbage.
I really don't think the publishers are acting as irrationally as you think they are. They know where the money is, and they would be stupid not to go for it.
Literally nobody is saying there's high demand for male written erotica. I think you are perhaps dedicated to having an argument here that nobody is having.
I would say this is largely a market failure- buying books is a nightmare. I just checked and it would cost $40.99 to buy an epub license for use on the Kobo ecosystem for the Game of Thrones series. That is an absurd amount of money for a few hundred kb of locked down data that I would use maybe once a decade. Especially with no guarantee that the license will be useful a few years from now.
If there was a proper open marketplace for ebooks and the ebooks weren't legislated to uselessness things would be much different. Copyright law is destroying our culture.
I think a lot of the issue in terms of the process you're describing is analogous to the way the newspaper industry has changed; e.g. owners and editors used to believe that good editorials, good reviews, good essays, beautiful, large-format comics, and so on, drove sales, and thus scored the crucial ad eyeballs, so they put those things in the paper at great expense. However, they only believed this because they had absolutely no way of testing for the real preferences of customers, and so, in practice, they wasted a ton of money on irrelevant claptrap that nobody really wanted. Cargo-cult publishing. In reality, it turns out that newspaper purchasers want: 1. extensive sports coverage; 2. political partisanship, the shriekier and unfairer the better; 3. tits, which "respectable" newspapers are unwilling to give them; 4. no ads, which raises an existential problem. The immediate consequence of publishers starting to find this out was that arts writers' pay per article dropped through the floor.
Similarly, cargo-cult novel publishers of the 19th century foolishly believed that quality of prose, credibility of plot, consistent characterization and similar boondoggles mattered for book sales, but they don't. Either you sell porn, or you sell identity signifiers – which both woke books and classics are; either you want to signal being a wokoid or you want to signal being a sophisticated intellectual.
(Unrelatedly, the reason men bailed on books is that film was invented, and then television and video games, all of which are more visceral media. That's why novel publishing was ceded essentially without a struggle; effectively no men really cared anymore once the genres men liked were successfully transferred to screens in various formats.)
The tabloids didn't kill off the broadsheets , though. Some people aren't like that readership, or don't want to be seen as being like that. In general, there's never a total replacement, because whatever is scarce, endangered , expensive, difficult to appreciate etc, becomes high status.
"The tabloids didn't kill off the broadsheets, though."
No, because the broadsheets adapted to reality. Most likely, unless you're like 90 years old or a very particular kind of wonk (e.g. me), you've never even seen a really high-quality newspaper. Archy and Mehitabel used to be a column in the Tribune. The Herald used to run Little Nemo in full color on a full broadsheet page. But these things were products of cargo-cult publishing. They didn't sell enough ads to justify the expenditure over just cutting the feature. That became obvious long before publishers started to understand what really did sell.
"Some people aren't like that readership, or don't want to be seen as being like that."
Granted, which is why you don't see page 3 girls in the New York Times even though they've descended as far as giving Maureen Dowd a column.
(Unrelatedly, the reason men bailed on books is that film was invented, and then television and video games, all of which are more visceral media. That's why novel publishing was ceded essentially without a struggle; effectively no men really cared anymore once the genres men liked were successfully transferred to screens in various formats.)
This doesn't hold water.
I grew up with 'kids don't read anymore' being the go-to excuse for why books were dying out, and then JK Rowling published her first book and we had teenagers camped in line and midnight launch parties for books.
The American comics industry, which is one of those 'more visceral media than books' that boys were into, is dying. And we get your response, that TV and video games are responsible. There might be something there as part of it, but there is a lot of damning contrary evidence pointing to other causes:
1. Japan (and to a lesser extent, South Korea), both of which are more tech-dominated than the US, don't have nearly the same fall-off in the numbers of comics readers.
2. The top selling graphic novels / trade paperbacks in the US are all translated Japanese imports.
3. At the same time, we're experiencing a fall-off in numbers for movies, TV shows are bombing, and major Western video game companies release big titles to disappointing numbers. Disney, which owns Marvel and Star Wars, is complaining they don't have IP which appeals to males ("Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles", Variety, Aug 21, 2025).
I think a lot of my thinking (which was more like yours) changed is that we can actually design an experiment to see if this is so. If we really wanted to do something like that, we'd probably:
1. Get a genre going that's so far out of mainstream publishing's norms that they don't even understand it, let alone have the capability to mess with it.
2. Aim it at men and boys, allowing it to be masculine power-fantasy and adventure stuff in the old way.
3. Set it free in an ecosystem that mainstream publishing can't touch, and see how it does.
It's not a super respectable genre, but your general western isekai/litRPG just did that over the last ten years, and the result of that experiment was "men read, men read a ton, men will spend a ton on reading even voluntarily for content they could get for free" and there's a big bunch of people making money over there, sometimes measured in the millions.
Your theory is the very popular one, that men just suddenly went "Fuck reading" due to no reason outside of just, like, other entertainment existing, even though all that entertainment had existed before. I'm not denying that's a factor, but the part where this takes all of the responsibility off the production side, who throws up their hands and says "In just this one instance, there's no way to get men to adopt good media that is aimed at them and made at a quality level!"
On a similar level, let's look at your newspaper examples. Newspapers became less and less trustworthy, lower and lower quality, and more and more low effort reprinting for a very long time. The same men who used to read them did not stop reading - they now read, I suspect, more than ever. But they read Scott, they read bloggers who are very specifically focusing on very specific issues they care about. That also counts for the sports guys, or the finance guys (everyone had their favorite newspaper section).
Like, look at your example. You say the newspapers suddenly had a lot of testable, valid data on what people want. In your model they did this, making shriekier lazier political stuff, and more sports. And newspapers are now a dead art, they took a massive dive, despite implementing the testable data.
Meanwhile there's 10,000 Scotts doing just fine selling the exact thing the newspapers abandoned at a high level of quality. That means, at least to some small extent, that the newspapers are wrong - there's demonstrably buyers for what they say people won't buy.
When you see that, that newspapers go "Men only want pictures of monkeys jacking off it's entirely their fault and not ours at all" while a massive market of commentators makes a bunch of money all over doing exactly what they say won't sell, it should mess with your priors a little, at least.
My take is that you're confounding two separate processes with respect to the papers. Newspapers died because the FAANG (mainly F and G) stole their advertising income, not because they became better at targeting the real preferences of readers. Probably the two processes of figuring out reader preferences and ad evenue getting demolished are linked at the root by technological development and are thus temporally inextricable in practice, but if we could send a capsule of reliable consumer data back in time to 1880 this would hypothetically produce the bestselling paper, a super-competitor in the field.
Of course, we can imagine a dysgenic pump where shriekier/tittier paper A always sells better than higher-quality paper B *but* at every point on the ratchet more readers bail entirely than switch papers, so that it's always competitively superior to ratchet up yet that also destroys the market; however, aside from being highly unintuitive hand hard to explain in terms of actual consumer behavior on the individual level, the hypothetical pump produces the same end result, i.e. that it's never wise to invest in quality; you should always choose defect when the choice rolls around.
In the case of the books it's more like you have the causality reversed. Men didn't abandon reading for "no reason", we've always had a preference for more visceral entertainment when available. For example, in ancient Rome the art of writing was available but people generally preferred gladiatorial games and chariot races; sports and athletics have always throughout history been more popular than reading among men, and so on. As such, when films and other more viscerally engaging ways to tell stories became available men abandoned reading gladly in favor of these entertainments, in a way that parallels what genres were more popular with men to begin with. (Isekai sells well because isekaislop is wish fulfilment; power fantasies and harems of adoring titty monsters. It's romantasy for men.)
Scott does well because Scott caters to a minuscule submarket very effectively. There are emphatically not ten thousand Scotts.
I think unconfounding those processes is a mistake. Remember, you are saying "the faang companies stole the advertising revenue". How did they do that? Did they say "Users, come here to just see ads!"? Or did they have content there that the users wanted to see, just as the newspapers used to, and the users tolerated the ads because of that content?
I have to push back on the "no reason" thing. You say men always liked more visceral entertainment, and yet for a zillion years they were the primary readers, well into the television era, well into the radio era. Well after films, well after televised sports.
Then it at some point stops decades and decades after these things are available - literal generations, for most of them. You can't just handwave to "well the testosterone monsters are going to watch shiny things move like a fish" there. You have to at least make a token attempt at explaining the lag.
That's especially true with Isekai in the mix. You can't argue "men won't read no matter what because they are apes" and "Men read when they are even sort of catered to, but it doesn't matter because I don't like those books" at the same time.
It does have relevance to the "good prose" argument, but much less here - you can't just handwave away Men Reading When Supplied With MenBooks as evidence in the "Men won't read no matter what it has nothing to do with supply" section of the argument.
Books are a playground for folks like GRRM, who have written television, and can't DO the special effects on TV.
I disagree with calling everything "porn" as it's probably better to call things "emotional pornography" (which captures the "It's about the Characterization" aspect, as well as the lack of "do something" -- which is more pulp fiction).
And you're missing the literal "pay the publisher" to do woke. "Do this and we get a bonus!"
Gurm's novel series was a more or less explicit sales pitch for the show he did end up getting. Note how cheerfully he abandoned it; his only bitterness about this is that fans keep giving him shit for it.
GRRM says, and I believe him, he "wrote the television show he could never get on TV" (bear in mind he did TV in the 1980s. You've seen Beauty and the Beast? That was the caliber of show he was on, not Star Trek which had Budget).
He only abandoned it when he realized he could not stick the landing -- he's written himself into a corner, and is too dang proud to ask for help.
I'm not sure if we're disagreeing exactly. But my vague analysis would be that elite-imposed trends will happen now and then in various environments, and temporarily take over. There's no avoiding that. But if men were driven away from reading altogether during one of these moments that was hostile to them, but women weren't driven away from reading by other moments and trends seen as hostile to them (what these were I'm not sure, but the woke will have many to list no doubt; perhaps fasions for highly sexualised female prizes in SF/fantasy/etc at various times?) then there's still an objective sense in which women are the reliable readers and men aren't. I'd compare it again to churches: sometimes there's a liberal trend (across churches or in specific ones) for a while, sometimes there's a conservative one. But if during the latter most of the liberals leave and become atheists, but during the former most of the conservatives stay in the church, weather it out and eventually regain influence...then in the long run conservative values will dominate.
(Relatedly, I've read that even in something as male-dominated as the Star Trek fandom in the (circa) 80s, the vast majority of Star Trek fanfiction was written by women. Yes fanfiction's a specific thing, bit it definitely suggests an objective difference.)
But that all said, I don't actually think the issue is men/women at all. It's left/right. I don't like Richard Hanania at all but one thing he seems to be onto is that conservatives on the whole really dislike reading. And the reality is that for a long, long time literary communities (book clubs, university departments, online spaces etc) have been among the most left-leaning environments you'll ever find. Why is that? It *could* be that outside leftists keep aggressively taking over these spaces for some obsessive reason and if it weren't for that conservatives would be as literary as liberals...but more likely, Hanania is right on this , conservatives are much less inclined to read *especially* fiction, and thus that territory is perpetually ceded to, and dominated by, the political left.
This is all quite orthogonal to the issue of declining quality though. I would vaguely suggest that your strong claim about publishers refusing to take anyone except those who don't need them should be vulnerable to the standard economic objection that this leaving money on the ground. Presumably there are fair nunber of people who don't have a platform now but will in the future--surely there should be a lucrative opportunity for a competitor to run a risk-based business actively collecting those types, and turn a profit on the eventually successful ones who the other publishers foolishly didn't even pay attention to.
Agreed that we agree on a lot, but I think it's a weird discussion because pornography is involved. So imagine I said "Men are the only ones who really like porn, it's just a negligable amount of women who consume porn". That's kind of true if we only consider images/video, but once we get into the actual kind of porn women like, we find they consume it in text, consume sort of a lot of it, it might not compete with men but whatever it's a significant chunk.
That makes the rest of the discussion hazy because when we then get down to something like "Does anyone read non-pornographic books at all", the publishing industry is basically saying no, they don't, it's all women's erotica all the way down.
To the extent we consider "non-porn reading" a thing, the whole "men don't read, only women do" thing gets murky. If we decide to package women's reading in "porn" instead of "book-reading", then the picture starts to look a lot more like "nobody is interested in what mainstream publishing is selling at all".
I'm not saying we should do that whole-cloth, mostly because its' a little silly to say women reading books isn't women reading books. But it's nuanced.
Hanania is the current "fake conservative who tells you to vote Biden" guy and broadly sucks, but let's address his thing. Hanania says, listen, conservatives won't read, they have the retarded gene that makes them not read books. There's no possible way this has anything to do with anything that gene, he mostly says, there's no concievable universe in which conservative men could ever be catered to in a way that makes them buy.
Meanwhile if you go back, say, fifty-ish years, it's very different. Louis Lamour is selling books about good, strong men who sweep into town, rescue the beautiful, helpless, virtuous woman, then settle down to farm and shit, and he's selling a shit-ton of them. All of sci-fi is for men, pretty much all of fantasy is for men, the stuff that is for women (Agatha Christie, who can never be ignored) is also read by men, and so on.
Something changed, and Hanania's gut reflex is to say "Well obviously the group I very much hate is just a lump of mental degenerates". I tend to say - look, we saw this happen, we saw forty years of carefully curating out the louis lamours and such, we saw the whole "every sci-fi award body is now just voting on which book is the most woke" thing go down.
My explanation isn't all of it and your explanation isn't all of it, the answer is almost certainly somewhere in the middle. But if someone who hates conservatives tells you "Listen, there's no possible way this group could ever like good media in a certain format; sure, they did once, but since then they've gone mysteriously retarded en masse, this in fact got everyone but horny women and transes, thats the only thing that protects you from the stupid gene" you should proably be checking outgroup bias a *little*.
I said this in another thread, but I used to be a little closer to you on this topic until there was an accidental experiment where a big sub-genre popped up, aimed exclusively at young men, did 100% power fantasy stuff with swords and muscles and whatnot, and now has a NYT bestseller of the "publishing house hitches to an already rising star" variety, makes lots of money for lots of different authors, and is growing really fast, and this is *despite* it being an incredibly niche-interest genre.
To the extent you can experiment for "Is it really true that men are just bad idiots, and wouldn't read even if there was stuff for them to read", that experiment seems really relevant to me. It's changed my priors on this a lot.
I can't tell if you're ascribing the "bad idiots" part to me at all or not, but I'm not implying any such value judgement at all. "Liberals are more likely to read fiction" is intended exactly equivalent to "conservatives more likely to go to church". Some would say it's better, a few worse, many morally neutral, depending on ideology. You can make the comparison "get married and have children" if you think a presumtively higher-status equivalent is needed. I'm doing factual demographic description not value claims.
I still don't think you've addressed *why* the literature world went so woke (to a much greater extent and more enduringly than most other fields) if not for already a relative (though smaller than now) lack of conservatives and/or men. What's the alternatuve story?
I mean, why did everything go woke? Most of our media over the past 20 years have made a bet that what everyone *really secretly* wanted was trans/queer stuff made by bipocs everywhere. Those bets have broadly failed even with near monopolistic power to enforce them.
For an example, look at Disney getting star wars. "What people want is a mary sue girlboss and a bunch of lesbian space witches" was a real bet they made. Star Trek made a similar bet. Ghostbusters made a similar bet. There was no real indication anyone actually wanted this (outside of a tiny very vocal minority) and a lot of indication from the fan base that they absolutely hated this. Disney et. al. still made those bets.
Famously Disney is now scared and backpedalling on a lot of this stuff pretty hard. See also budwieser, see also Ghostbusters: Sassy Girls. See also lord of the rings show.
Nobody except the most tanked left-stuff-is-correct-stuff folks ever thought those were real market-tracking choices, they kind of half-worked for a while as everyone who hated them ate around the moldy bits, and now the indicators are they are getting dumped as a bad choice that was tried and failed.
For the same period there's been all sorts of little book controversies about the same things happening - nobody likes talking about Sad Puppies stuff, but the Hugos actually were willing to vote to not give awards rather than to give awards to things that weren't woke, and so on. And in the same time, conservatives and males have just stopped being bookstore people.
It's not for-sure that this is 100% attributable to woke stuff, but the counter argument is "I don't know, man. The same culture who bought 300,000,000 Louis Lamour books just suddenly stopped reading forever. Must have been something in the water. Couldn't have been in response to anything at all. There's nothing to be done about it, no possible things that could have been done differently."
That's what I'm talking about when I say the "bad idiots" stuff. Because the choices are something like "Something happened and changed things" or "Conservatives and men just stopped liking books all the sudden, I dunno, maybe they all hit their heads". The second is possible, but the fact that it's the only thing the publishing industry, Hanania and the newsmedia will consider should actually be troubling here.
If you want to say "women are more easily advertised to" then come right out and say it. "Easier to manipulate into doing what you're told" is a thing. Reading groups and all that are women's things, in general. I rarely find "bookclubs" for men. (ETA: now, mind, if you're wanting to "experience a book like a movie" and be "told how to feel about it" then yeah, you want a bookclub. You can all gush about your favorite emotional highs and lows, how much you hate Mr. Darcy, or what not).
"Relatedly, I've read that even in something as male-dominated as the Star Trek fandom in the (circa) 80s, the vast majority of Star Trek fanfiction was written by women. Yes fanfiction's a specific thing, but it definitely suggests an objective difference."
It's worth noting in this context that Star Trek is also what started getting women into sci-fi in considerable numbers, the reason being that the show is full of interpersonal dynamics (and women's Trek fan fiction involved projecting even more interpersonal dynamics on the characters; basically none of it was idea-driven sci-fi) where e.g. Asimov is 100% an idea man, doesn't give a good goddamn that all his characters are the same cardboard cutout, and tries his best to minimize the amount they interact so that people won't notice so much.
This post confuses me. First it paints a detailed picture of how publishers and agents are gatekeeping, rent-seeking parasites who don't read or care what they're selling. But then the post asserts that publishers and agents want only QTBIPOC authors. If they cared about money and not content, why would they impose this filter? Do books by those authors sell better than other books? If so, who is buying them?
Publishers just want people with a proven track record of selling books or celebrities that can bring their own audience. Anything else is basically charity/lottery tickets.
To be very fair, that part confuses me as well. To clarify something, you see the marginalized voices thing an awful lot at the agent level, but you see it less at the pulisher level in a visible-from-the-street way. I'm not sure if this is an artifact you see in a lot entertainment industries (where a lot of them made poor business choices for woke reasons, separated both from quality and money-making potential) or something else.
That said, we (you and I) are defining content in two different ways. I'm defining it as something like "prose, general quality" and you are defining it as "prose, general quality, and the identity of the person".
FWIW this is a very general telling of the very general problems I have with the publishing industry as it relates to big houses. There are exceptions all over besides this I didn't talk about. Like, agents who are entirely looking for things they can sell and do care about the content exist. You could say "What about Jabberwocky? None of their agents seem like that" and I think you'd be absolutely right. At the same time, you hop onto any site that gathers agents in one place and the "I really only want LGBTQ" effect is overwhelming.
And yet people do get through the filter. It does happen. It's just ten times harder and a hundred times more "optimizing for things that aren't books" than it should be.
Ach, no, it's worse than all this. The publisher has Beta Readers, and if you can't get your writing past the "beta readers" you don't get published. And every beta reader has some idea about "diversity" or what not. You can't write a book about a person who actually dreams to change their sex, "because she's not acting enough like the Real Life Trannies who want wish fulfilment in their books" -- if she's not putting on makeup, and dresses, she can't "really be a trannie" (despite the fact that this spoils the entire characterization, breaks suspension of disbelief, and pretty much ruins the entire story). [Welcome to the world of "I know a former novelist" -- he's never finishing the story, because the story no longer works. That was a key character, and spoiling her singleminded dedication (necessary to be the best in any competitive field) meant the whole story no longer worked.]
Plus, Amazon has basically stopped gatekeeping at all, so anyone can get published on their platform, for any copied book imaginable (this is what happens when 50 shades of gray sells well, being ripped off fanfiction)
The writeup seems a bit too much like personal cope with a publishing rejection. Have you published a book, or worked in the publishing industry, in the last decade or so? Somehow, I doubt it.
I have published (with smaller publishers, but for actual advances) something like 15-20 books in the last few years, depending on how you loop "self-published but made money".
Would you dismiss the statement of a woman when she described the gender bias of the member screening process of a particular type of club, because she couldn't get into one of the few largest (and almost exclusively male) clubs?
I've barely looked at literary agents at all, and I've been surprised by the fraction looking exclusively for LGBTQ+ and/or use some variation on the code phrase 'diverse voices and especially __'.
Though I do agree that some of Ben's claims seem a bit too strong (see my economic argument elsewhere in the thread), here you've very blatantly shifted the goalposts. You asked if he'd published a book OR worked in the industry, he said he'd published many books, now you say that actually doesn't count!
I remember the feeding frenzy of the 80s when big publishers were gobbling up small, medium, and not-as-big-as-us publishing houses, and it all got consolidated in a few monoliths.
Good writing was already a very secondary consideration behind "can we get celeb memoir/cookery book/gardening book for the Christmas market?" and "what hot new potential Booker Prize winner can we poach?", and I see it's only continued hurtling downhill.
We are very, *very*, far past the days when a publisher like Stanley Unwin would take a chance on a first time book by some obscure not-even-professional author like Tolkien, simply because he believed in the book despite the fact that he didn't expect it to sell.
Sometimes this still does happen, but every degree the alignment shifts from "let's publish good books" towards "let's optimize for books people will pick up off the shelf", things get worse. It's what they call a tournament industry in the best of times, and the hardest part of the tournament has long since been getting past the filters to actually get a book read.
This was very well written. You should write a book!
Seriously though, at some point a younger version of me definitely wanted to be a published book author, because that definitely sounded like a neat thing to be. Now I realise I'm better off concentrating my efforts on potentially more lucrative endeavours with a higher chance of success, like looking for the Loch Ness Monster or something.
But but but... I don't *care* about the writer's background. (Sorry, nothing personal, but it's true, at least initially.) Especially not before I have bought or read the book in question. If the book is good, my interest in the writer might be piqued. But really, the book itself is my initial focus.
As an avid reader and keen acquisitionist of books, I want a book that is well written and interesting to read.
Your explanation has confirmed some of my worst fears as a book reader.
I have long thought - for maybe 20 years now - that publishing is both extremely performative in terms of virtue signaling, and completely out of touch with it's wider market.
Don’t let the original comment fool you — your perception was accurate. Publishers still read what they are publishing and quality is the number one deciding factor in success. The “focus on identity” is a salve to the egos of those who can’t accept their writing isn’t up to standard yet.
I mean, one possibility is that we were all irrational until just now. Another is that we were irrational one way then, and are irrational another way now.
> I have long thought - for maybe 20 years now - that publishing is both extremely performative in terms of virtue signaling, and completely out of touch with it's wider market.
Arguably, they are doing this informed by much data and analytics, and your "wider market" are all 30-60yo women who want to primarily buy vampire and werewolf porn.
The tiny slice of people that care about writing quality, interestingness, and non-werewolf-porn topics just aren't relevant for a full 90%+ of book sales.
The data is against you, and says you'll buy like 3 books every other year from long-tail authors nobody else has heard of or cares about. But the werewolf porn authors? They churn out a new one every month! And those customers are happy to BUY a new one every month! And there's millions of them, and like two and a half of ACX commentariat book buyers.
And this is why retail book stores devote 80%+ of shelf space to a handful of known, big-selling authors. They're the ones that sell, and it's rigorously backed with data and analytics at every level.
Americans read 18 books a year on average. Americans are readers, somehow, still. Perhaps those are all romance books? Certainly not sci-fi, that's to Russian taste -- they devour it.
This isn't actually true - "reading" is aspirational. Much like roughly 2/3 of gym memberships go unused, people like to say that they read, but the numbers don't bear it out. And the arithmetic mean isn't 18, it's 12 in any data from the last few years.
And even THEN, people aren't reading 12 books a year. The modal person buys or reads ZERO books a year, and the median person ~4.
And this is mostly "buying," not reading, because when you control for "how many books did you finish," most of these numbers drop by at least 2/3.
There's a handful of enthusiastic readers who bring the mean up, who actually do buy / read a few books a month, and that's where the top line "12 books a year" figure comes from, but the vast majority of people are reading essentially nothing.
At the high level, excluding audiobooks, there's around 800M books sold a year in the US. However, a big chunk of that is Childrens and YA - reading is aspirational, remember? People want to instill "the love of reading" in their kids, even though they themselves never read. So take out ~300M for that. Then there's about ~200M fiction books and 300M non-fiction books sold per year.
What does that net out to? A mere ~500M books sold for the ~270M adults in the USA, or 1.8 books sold per year per adult. And that's books SOLD, not read - think any of those were bought as gifts? In fact there is a notable Q4 sales spike before Christmas! How many of those gifted books do you think go unread, particularly in our modern age of Tik Tok, Golden Age television streaming, and 7-9 hours a day of recreational screen time per day?
Data on ebooks suggest that up to 60% of purchased books are either never opened or abandoned early. Not looking too good for our "12 book a year reader" so far!
You have to include "read or listened to" to even hit that "4 book" median, too! And one of those 4 books is fake, because books sales are about 75% physical, 10 - 15% audiobook, and 10 - 15% ebook. Is a book you "read" while driving to work or doing yardwork really reading?
And this is well before we even get into the composition of the 500M books that are being bought! The books that sell are those churned out in never-ending succession in the slop mills of popular mystery, thriller, and vampire porn authors. People want to buy what's familiar, and authors want a recurring revenue stream just like all the apps on your phone trying to get you to pay a monthly subscription.
This is not Brothers Karamazov or Guns Germs and Steel here, I invite you to look at some brief descriptions, which include highlights like "the 13th book in the series," and "the 52nd book of the series:"
> #2 -- Faithless in Death, by J.D. Robb. (St. Martin's) The 52nd book of the In Death series. Eve Dallas investigates the murder of a young sculptor in the West Village.
oof. I was so certain that "52nd" figure would be an exaggeration.
Young adult is often just "actual adult readers" these days.
Yes, books read on the treadmill are actually books (you can call them teleplays if you want, and the best authors write for teleplays, these days). You don't have the same MKUltra effects when you're listening to books, as you do when you're watching a movie.
Yes, it's fair to dock for "didn't finish reading" (except, of course, when you're talking the Bible, or the Talmud, or other Books Long Enough that finishing them is... not likely within a year).
I'm well aware of the Nancy Drew phenomenon (or hardy boys if you want to be butch about it). That's been going on since like the 1920s. Consistency sells.
Oh, I don't disagree. I'm not a publisher or an agent; I'm an old-white-male-fat author who gains zero diversity points here. That doesn't change the reality of the game, unfortunately.
[EDIT - The commenters proved this theory wrong. Trump IS quite possibly worse than Obama when you take into account the devastating effects of shutting down PEPFAR. And George W Bush did the best job as President, so far as I know, since FDR. Again, because of PEPFAR. I still think all three of these men are evil and I hope devastating, horrible things happen into them.]
Obama was a worst president than Trump has been, so far. Here's the case from a socialist person of color who voted for Biden.
Extra deaths caused by the Western toppling of Gaddhafi: 66,000 and counting. Extra injuries: 70k and counting. Extra sexual assaults: 100k and counting. Slavery famously returned to post-Gaddhafi Libya. People enslaved: 47k and counting. These are all reasonable estimates based on reports from neutral international investigators, most of whom who would likely balk at blaming Obama for these tragedies. These are NOT ginned up numbers from partisan foes of Obama.
If we add up those numbers (not adjusting for those unfortunates who were counted in multiple categories), we total 280k+ lives destroyed or degraded through Obama's intervention, which he did at the intense urging of the Clintons. (People have called Hillary the godmother of the intervention).
Not only should Obama have refrained from attacking Gaddhafi, he should have used his influence to keep other nations from attacking Gaddhafi, considering the fact that starting in 2003, Gaddhafi had obeyed the US government by dismantling his WMD programs. And otherwise taking SIGNIFICANT measures to end Libya's status as a pariah state. Including paying compensation for two terror attacks that were probably falsely pinned on Libya!
I haven't looked into the number of extra deaths caused by Obama dragging out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or caused by Obama's (accidental?) contributions to the rise of ISIS and the prolonging of the war in Syria. It might be impossible to come up with a worthwhile estimate for the consequences of these errors. Nevertheless, these culpabilities must be considered.
I am not showing hindsight bias, either. The Obama Administration was WARNED about the dire risks of pursuing vigorous interventionism.
Based on foreign policy ALONE, it's safe to say that Obama was a worse president than Trump has been, so far. This is not meant to be a ringing endorsement of Trump. George W. Bush was certainly a worse president than either.
I almost deleted that I was just being cheeky. Although it's an extremely popular theory in the Islamic Near East, the CIA almost certainly did not create ISIS.
Psychoanalyzing myself, I have a radical sense of acceptance for the working class and the uneducated. This necessarily involve strong empathy and acceptance for people who hold conspiratorial beliefs. I'm a very literal person and I internalized the idea “love the sinner, hate the in sin” in an absolutely literal way. Merely tolerating “sinners,” or ignorant people or harmful people, isn't enough.
I think I slip in asides like that almost to challenge or flush out people who disrespect or hold contempt for people with bizarre and ludicrous conspiracy theories. I'm a virtue ethicist. So that sense of contempt is more abhorrent to me then even the most harmful conspiracy theory, and I mean that literally.
I've always thought W's presidency was kind-of tragic. The guy clearly meant to do a good job, was surrounded with apparently serious and experienced advisors, had a pretty standard resume for the job, had all the connections and advice he could want...and basically everything he touched turned to s--t.
I don't think you can necessarily measure presidencies or governments entirely on net lives lost. As one example, Lincoln could have prevented a hell of a lot of deaths by allowing the South to secede, but it's sure not a slam dunk that this would have made him a better president! And there's something screwy about the calculation where we hold you responsible for all the deaths from cutting PEPFAR, but don't hold anyone else responsible for all the deaths from not stepping in and funding PEPFAR themselves. This is basically Copenhagen ethics, right?
I agree the Libya intervention was pretty disastrous, but also I believe that this was justified more-or-less on a count-the-corpses argument--one that did *not* account for the anti-deterrent effect of bombing Libya and convincing every other rogue state's government that there is no making peace with the US, so they'd better get nukes or find a way to shelter under some other power's nuclear umbrella.
I remember seeing one blog post saying that W's problem was that his advisors were *too* senior. Cheney, Rumsfield, and Powell were so experienced at working Washington that they knew how to bypass the usual guardrails which keep bad ideas in check.
"I've always thought W's presidency was kind-of tragic. The guy clearly meant to do a good job, was surrounded with apparently serious and experienced advisors, had a pretty standard resume for the job, had all the connections and advice he could want...and basically everything he touched turned to s--t."
Having reached age 30 during his presidency, my impression was that he was handed a sandwich of two perfect slices of bread concealing a great deal of spoil, in the form of a dot-com bubble just about to pop, years of borrowing against Social Security in order to be able to present a surplus during Clinton's term, and a defunded military making it impossible to stay on top of Islamic terrorist activity, to the point that the 9/11 plan slipped through, and our response had to build on said weakened military.
I won't blame this all on Clinton (I think Gingrich probably has some blame to share, and the 2008 crisis wasn't bank deregulation per se, but rather deregulating *and* not committing to making them responsible for any mistakes they made with their new freedom, and I believe that was a bipartisan mistake), but I think it's still a case of GWB being set up to fail in many ways, and the Democrat-dominated journalism industry having enough influence to make even the possibility that he was handed several problems rather than creating them all himself, unthinkable.
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I agree that "lives lost" is a terrible metric for Presidents. It assumes Presidents have all of the agency when they don't. Of the 100K+ lives lost in Iraq, for example, the vast majority weren't from US soldiers, but from latent Shia/Sunni feuds held in check by Saddam's regime. That lid kept the boilover from happening, but didn't relieve the pressure, and Saddam was his own source of growing conflict. That whole region sans Iraqi Kurdistan was bound to blow whenever he finally left his position, even if he just handed it down to his psychotic sons.
Overall, various human factions have a tendency to launch into mass violence chaotically when they do it at all. Western democracies are much less likely to do so, but even societies that aren't Western democracies don't just regularly commit atrocities; something has to trigger the powder keg, it won't be predictable, and it largely won't be preventable by just being an awesome head of state or following these ten easy steps or whatever.
> “years of borrowing against Social Security in order to be able to present a surplus during Clinton's term”
This isn’t right. During Reagan’s first term, concerns about what would happen to Social Security when the baby boomers retired convinced Congress to enact a plan to deal with the issue. The basic idea was to increase Social Security taxes so that the Social Security trust fund would build up a surplus while the baby boomers were still working, which would be used help pay the baby boomers in retirements. This meant that during the Clinton years, the Social Security trust fund was taking in more money than it was paying out.
The U.S. government budget classifies programs as “on budget” or “off budget.” A surplus in the on budget programs generally means that the the government is taking in more money than it needs to pay expenses. Social Security is classified as “off budget,” which makes sense because the Social Security surpluses during the Clinton years were intended to be used in future years and were not an indication that Social Security was taking in more money than it needed.
The government publishes numbers for the entire government, not just for on budget programs, so there are actually three numbers for the federal deficit each year: the on budget deficit, the off budget deficit, and the unified budget deficit. The last of these is the sum of the first two. The advantage of the unified budget number is that it can’t be gamed by reclassifying programs from on budget to off budget, or vice versa. For that reason, the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Act, passed in 1995 (so we are still talking about events during the Reagan Administration), targeted the unified budget deficit.
In short, “borrowing against Social Security” never happened. What did happen is that Social Security ran a surplus during the Clinton years and people paid attention to the unified deficit, but both of those were the result of bills which were passed during the Reagan years for reasons having nothing to do with making a future Clinton Administration look better.
If you use the on budget deficit, which I recommend, Clinton ran surpluses in fiscal years 1999 and 2000.
a. The invasion of Iraq was a choice that W and some of his advisors made, and then sold to the American people based on the threat of Islamic terrorism demonstrated by the 9/11 attacks. In an alternative world where W had not pushed for that invasion, he would not have that screwup on his record.
b. The financial meltdown happened after seven years of W being president. He didn't have unrestricted power to change financial regulation, but he certainly had substantial power to do so if that had been something he had realized was necessary. This is less a screwup than a missed opportunity--the right person could perhaps have seen the 2008 meltdown coming and headed it off, but W wasn't that guy. (And to be fair, I don't think we've had many presidents who would have been--the high-status experts were all saying things were fine.)
I agree that you can't really blame 9/11 on him, and that the (ultimately costly and futile) occupation of Afghanistan was almost inevitable after it--a president who didn't respond forcefully to that attack would have lost all legitimacy and been swept from power along with his party at the next exection.
In addition to the decision to invade in the first place, they also had no plan for how to handle the aftermath of the invasion and botched it horribly (Debaathification, anyone?)
Instantly laying off thousands of Baathist soldiers is AFAICT widely accepted as a mistake, yes. And Bush's mistake (at best, some underling's decision that he's responsible for). There's an interesting question of what to do instead, however. We weren't about to leave them working in the Iraqi army; the result could easily have been widespread legitimized violence against Shiites. I think they were disbanded partly as a gesture toward Shiites (and Kurds), and the Bush administration hoped this would de-escalate things and all those former Baath soldiers would find employment building schools and such. Maybe some of his father's misplaced trust in heads of state rubbed off on him; I don't know.
1. Invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban was inevitable. President Ralph Nader would have done it. Bush's decision to turn it into a long-term occupation was solely on him. Terrible decision-making.
2. Bush and his advisors were well aware that Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of Al-Qaeda and extreme Islamism. They chose to lie to the American people about this.
3. Bush actively chose to pursue financial deregulation, which strongly contributed to the financial crisis. He was warned again and again about the dangers of financial deregulation, and he chose to ignore those warnings.
1. Long-term occupation wasn't that outlandish an idea at the time. The invasion went about as Americans expected: nearly effortlessly, a total rout. I think Bush intended to use that boost to US spirits to rebuild Afghanistan into a regime that would not sponsor international terrorism, and didn't foresee how much effort that would involve. (McCain did; by the time he could make this case, the US was weary and this counted against him.) But the goal here wasn't to just occupy for bragging rights, and it also wasn't to simply punish 9/11; it was to forestall the next terrorist attack everyone understood would come down the pike if we just went in, broke a bunch of stuff, and then went home.
2. Bush told everyone Hussein encouraged international terrorism. This wasn't a lie; Hussein was openly offering compensation to suicide bombers. It didn't matter if Hussein happened to also dislike Al-Qaeda, or some particular variety of extreme Islamism; if he backs terrorism, he makes the list.
3. Financial deregulation isn't bad. Banks should be able to take risks. What's bad is deregulation of banks coupled with state-backed protection. This allows banks to take all sorts of risks without exposure.
You have perpetuated the error of feeling that the appropriate response to 9/11 was to wage war against all terrorists. Even the weaker argument that "we need to fight all terrorists who happen to be Muslim" was clearly illegitimate from day one.
It is only indisputable that we should have responded by targeting Al-Qaeda and (some of) it's backers. Even the policy "we should attack all terrorist groups who are friendly with Al Qaeda" is probably a step too far.
it's tragic that so many people didn't learn many lessons from the War on Terror and consider it to have been an innocent mistake. And interacting with one of these people is always very surprising. Maybe I need to travel more, or start going to ACX meetups. I socialize with leftists and conservatives, but the conservatives tend to be populist and suspicious of past wars (if sadly credulous about current military actions).
To me, the archetypical neoconservative War On Terror apologist is a lonely, distant figure, an op-ed writer or think tank employee keeping the last sacred fire lit. A figure so contrarian that one naturally wonders if their views are inseparable from there socioeconomic needs.
Banks collapsing is uniquely bad, because of the extent to which it takes down other bsuinesses. State protection of banks is therefore good. If deregulation+protection is bad, then deregulation is bad.
I think people have forgotten that terrorism was as much a hydra back then as it is today. We could kill this or that head all day, only to get struck by another. (And no, doing nothing also doesn't work; we tried that for decades prior to 9/11, and the attacks just kept getting worse.) The case for Iraq was the case for killing the body, or at least trying to kill a major part of it. I genuinely believe the agenda was to take down Saddam, put in someone less terror-y, and then use Iraq as an ally to begin working on Syria, and then Iran. Bush failed mainly because he ran out of political capital the way Napoleon ran out of men in Russia. The Middle East is a bigger place than the US wants to acknowledge.
Saddam really was a problem, even if he had no nukes and few chemical weapons left, because he was openly committing to financial support for suicide bombers against Israel and the West. And his human rights abuses alone were also bad enough to get the UN's attention. As I recall, there were three main reasons discussed by the White House to justify the Iraq invasion: human rights abuses, repeated violations of UN resolutions, and possession of WMDs. The US chose to focus on the third one, and leave out the support for international terrorism, for reasons I find inexplicable even today. But eh, old soup.
As for the mortgage crisis, one of the lessons I took from _The Big Short_ was that if W had tried to shut down that problem before it became a problem, Wall Street would have treated him the same way they treated Burry et al.: laughed him out of the room. As you say, the experts were all against it. The difference would be that if he'd gotten it done anyway, we'd have no crisis, and W would come off as a Quixote. At least the short sellers made a fortune and found work elsewhere.
"we tried that for decades prior to 9/11, and the attacks just kept getting worse."
The death toll of 9/11 was a rounding error. The death toll of every other terrorist attack in U.S. history is a rounding error on a rounding error. Doing nothing is *absolutely* the optimal response to that sort of terrorism, both in terms of rational resource use and in terms of incentives and signalling[1]. Shut up and multiply.
[1] For anyone that missed it, the *entire goal* of terrorism is to provoke a loud, violent response from the target. So responding that way to terrorism makes you likely to experience more of it.
By that argument, we should do nothing about crime. I suspect you do not believe that.
You might also want to re-check your model of terrorism. I don't think it's even the generally understood sense of terrorism, let alone the sense of one side of the political aisle.
Alternately, you could ignore the terrorism label altogether and just reconsider your model of the game theory at play here. There DO exist people who poke others, and if they get no response or, heaven forbid, concessions, they return for more. If they get violence in return, they stop. This is so basic a thing that it's hard for me to see how it could have escaped your notice.
If nothing else, reconsider your regard for over 3000 innocent civilians.
Bush deliberately lied to the American people about WMDs and alleged shadowy connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq. He must have known that Saddam was a secularist with no natural affiliation with islamist terrorism, and yet he chose to lie and to pander to uneducated Americans' baseless conflation a of Islamist terrorists with secularist anti-Americsns who happens to be Muslim. Unacceptable. You're too forgiving.
My best guess is that the US would be better off today if we had not invaded Iraq. I understand the idea that this was a high-risk, high-reward attempt to remake the Middle East, but it doesn't seem like a plan that realistically could have worked. It's notable that Bush Sr didn't go into Iraq after clobbering the Iraqi army in Kuwait, because he and his advisors could see that it would become a terrible mess and quagmire. It seems like his son went into Iraq, and all those predictions came true. I'm not sure whether the rest of the world would be better off--living under Saddam was apparently very bad, but so was living through a multi-sided religious/ethnic civil war, and living through the rise and defeat of ISIS in Iraq. Also, US foreign policy is IMO not primarily a tool for making the world a better place overall, so much as it is for advancing and guarding US interests.
I propose that the next time (aka now wrt Venezuela) the drum beat starts up for invading and occupying and fixing and democratizing some foreign country, we remember how things went in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and maybe think twice. Our track record on this kind of thing is genuinely quite bad, so we should only do it when there is legitimately no alternative.
I think it's very possible nothing would have worked in Iraq, but I think we didn't have enough handle on the problem at the time, and we had a gigantic mandate to Do Something about terrorism breathing down our necks. In early 2002, the problem looked "tractable, or at least better damn well be".
IMO, ideally, Clinton would never have drawn down the military during the 1990s; that not only removed some of our capabilities, but also our eyes and ears. We had that much less chance to see 9/11 coming, and afterward, we had that much less intel on the situation in the hinterlands of the Middle East. If we'd had that and still didn't catch 9/11 in time, I think we could have put more boots on the ground in Afghanistan in Iraq, or had a better idea of which factions to ally with and put in charge; or a better grip on how to reduce the impact of disbanding Baathists or the Taliban; or a firm understanding that they would be irreplaceable and the thing to do would be to just settle for getting our foot in the door, offering small amounts of infrastructure to begin with, and start climbing the trust ladder with these nations.
Occupation in Venezuela could go like Iraq. But it could also go like Panama. If we learn the Iraq lesson too hard, we risk Venezuela *becoming* Iraq later when we can't just sit and bide our time. That comes down to evaluating the situation there, and it does have some differences (closer allies, lower language and cultural barriers, etc.). So to me the question is whether we have any departments in State and War making a serious effort at that evaluation.
People did remind you of PEPFAR. And to be fair it’s not as well known as what you are talking about here.
But, outside that, I agree. With the proviso that Obama is a better man, the president of the US republic isn’t that free to do what he wants anyway. What you said about ghaddafi is true. It’s also destabilised Europe.
Damn, is the number really that high? Didn't realize that. Whelp, I guess he's the “best” president since FDR!
I'm a virtue ethicist though, not a utilitarian. So he's a “good” president in the sense of “he created an enormous amount of utility.” But I still consider him to be incredibly evil and I wish incredibly awful things would happen to him. In fact, I wish he had never run for president, so that someone ELSE could have saved all those lives and gotten the credit.
If you want to really compare the utility of each president, I think you need to compare outcomes to the counterfactual of their presidency - what would some average president have done in their stead. GWB is not responsible for PEPFAR at all, if every other president in his place would have green lighted that initiative. Same with Syria, Ukraine etc. Ofcourse this is impossible in practice - which is generally a problem with utilitarism. What is the point if you can't even measure utility in hindsight, much less predict it?
No, I cannot countenance counterfactuals in any serious analysis, like the type of analysis I attempted and failed to execute in this thread. The only time I indulge in counterfactuals is when I'm idly bullshitting with friends about "What if Hitler had never been born?" An activity akin to daydreaming about what I would do if I was rich.
I briefly considered making the counterfactual argument to domain Bush. I love nothing more than the best marches reputation. But I could not go down that route. Counterfactuals are not serious.
My impression is that the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Libya were both balanced enough issues that the president could have decided which way to go on them. Contrast with something like invading Afghanistan after 9/11--any president who didn't do that or something like it would be a one-term president whose party was swept from power at the next election.
It's unknown and unknowable exactly how many deaths could have been prevented by the U.S. having a better early response to COVID at the federal level. But Given that the total U.S. death toll of COVID is ~1 million, Trump could easily land in the same ballpark as Obama's Libya numbers from that alone. To say nothing of foreign policy. To say nothing of backwards movement on climate (also extremely difficult to account for). To say nothing of the 8/5ths multiplier you ought to be scaling all Trump's number by to account for his lesser time in office so far. But yes, Obama was a bad president. I don't really think the U.S. has had any good presidents, just different types of bad.
But at least we should all be able to agree that in terms of measurable harm, George W. Bush puts BOTH Obama and Trump to shame.
I mean, one could quibble endlessly about which is the proper apples-to-apples comparison. But the U.S. had about 2x the per-capita COVID deaths that Canada did, despite Canada being demographically similar but slightly less wealthy and more urbanized[1]. And given that it was a single, high-impact crisis, being "not too far out of line with other countries" can still translate to a pretty large number of excess deaths.
[1] The latter of which should mean higher population densities in the sense that's relevant for disease transmission.
Given that the expected death toll from COVID19 was originally about 20million, we could say that Trump did good (I'd argue otherwise, and say that Cuomo's unagile policies that revolved around 20 million dead Americans caused more people to die.)
"Original expected death toll" seems like a pretty nonsensical metric to use here. You're taking the very high uncertainly of the early portion of the pandemic and just...not updating on the much better, later information. Seems very much like a sharpshooter fallacy.
If we don't want to throw away everything that was learned about the pandemic subsequent to winter of 2020, we can instead compare how the U.S. did relative to other countries. Globally the error bars are quite wide: the U.S. had somewhere between 3% and 5% of the total pandemic deaths, while making up 4% of the global population. So not terrible, but not very impressive for the richest and most technologically advanced country in the world. And comparing it to other developed nations, it comes out less well: about 2x the death toll of Canada, or 1.5x that of Germany.
"(I'd argue otherwise, and say that Cuomo's unagile policies that revolved around 20 million dead Americans caused more people to die.)"
This seems like an utterly absurd claim on its face. Do you have ANY support? New York State makes up only 6% of the population of the U.S. How on Earth are its policies having that kind of impact compared to the rest of the nation?
I get criticizing Obama based on being too interventionist, but I don't get doing so relative to other 21st century presidents. I.e., Trump increased the use of drone strikes, escalated funding of Saudi's attacks in Yemen even after it became clear that they were committing war crimes, attacked the Syrian government directly (which to be clear Obama didn't do, in fact got a lot of flak for not doing so), almost started a war with Iran ...
then in his second term (so far) *did* start a war with Iran, did a bombing campaign against Yemen, gave the green light for various Israeli strikes against other countries and more bombing of Gaza, strikes against random boats in the Caribbean, maybe now going to war against Venezuela ... and cancelling USAID which going off of estimated death tolls is higher than everything you say about Libya.
Not to mention, according to press reports, gave Xi Jingping a green light to set up concentration camps in Xinjiang and crack down on protesters in Hong Kong.
Re "dragging out" Iraq and Afghanistan - I'd agree with Afghanistan but one thing about those wars is that they already were going on when he took office. Getting out of a war is harder than not doing it in the first place. Obama is still the only major presidential candidate who publicly opposed the war in Iraq before it started (I don't think Harris had a public view, Trump supported), so it's hard for me to imagine anyone else would have done better.
In terms of raw numbers, the deaths and injuries caused by all of these things are relatively low. It sounds like a lot when you list every thing like that. But compared to full-blown regime changes and ground wars, this is all penny ante stuff.
The ground war in Gaza is getting up there in numbers. Especially if, as you did with Obama, you count lives that are not ended but still degraded by the lack of food, shelter, medical care, and a general breakdown in public order.
"But that's Israel's responsibility, not Trump's!" Yes, but Trump has significant influence over how long and aggressively Israel is able to carry out the war, probably comparable to how much influence Obama had over the rebels in Libya. This is why counting deaths that result indirectly from US policy is very tricky.
If you're going to count not just deaths caused by direct military action, but deaths indirectly caused by US policies, then Trump shuttering USAID is easily an order of magnitude bigger. Boston University estimated 600,000 deaths from that already, with millions more likely over the next several years.
And that's just deaths - since you decided to include nonfatal injuries and sexual assaults to pump up Obama's numbers, we should also be counting nonfatal cases of malnutrition or disease that USAID would have prevented. But the deaths alone are enough to put Trump ahead by a lot.
So why is the US more evil for ending those programs than other rich countries like Japan or Germany are for not stepping in and replacing the funding?
Rather think that Boston University isn't taking into account USAID's less savory practices, which included supporting terrorist organizations and basically pissing off foreign governments. (When the US Government came knocking, USAID told them to piss off).
Not sure how much of "Trump stops all wars" (yes, this is an exaggeration, I realize there are still people dying) is because USAID is gone, to be deadly honest.
1. Are you sure you aren't mixing them up with UNHCR or something? USAID is part of the US government, I'm not sure how they could tell themselves to piss off.
2. Global deaths from armed conflict are a few hundred thousand per year (higher in recent years because of the invasion of Ukraine). So like, even if USAID was responsible for *literally all wars everywhere*, which it obviously isn't, it would still be saving an order of magnitude more lives than it killed. Even PEPFAR alone saved more lives than that per year.
Here's the story, as I heard it from a "diplomat".
Egyptian Government says, "Well, we hear what you're saying about The Dam, but we'd be a lot more likely to listen if you guys stop funding the Muslim Brotherhood..."
"Diplomat" goes over to USAID, "Stop funding the Muslim Brotherhood, we're trying to stop a war here."
USAID: "You can kiss off" (They probably said something more like "our policies are not open to debate, we fund through XYZ, and if that means the Muslim Brotherhood, that's who's getting funded.")
Diplomat is in quotes due to personnel not being strictly speaking part of State Department, despite acting in a diplomatic capacity (no, not CIA either, sharp tack).
While you're of course free to base your personal assessment on whatever metric you like, including something like "number of tan suits worn", "number of foreigners killed" (or injured, raped, or enslaved) is conventionally not considered particularly relevant for judging presidents.
Depends on what circles you run in. I'm an anti-interventionist and an anti-imperialist who thinks American interventionism is a threat to the human species.
My favorite authors, academics and conversation partners either feel the same way or they are at least empathetic to that view. We put a high value on human life, foreign or otherwise.
"American interventionism is a threat to the human species"
Just to be contrarian, isn't PEPFAR etc. an example of American interventionism? As has been pointed out before, USAID wasn't set up because "we want to help the poor and the sick", it was set up to promote US interests during the Cold War and to counter perceived Soviet influence in the developing world. Any side-effects of "and this increases human flourishing" were nice, but if regime A led by Strongman B didn't shift from "thanks, dear comrades of the USSR, for all the money, guns, and butter" to "we now firmly believe in Mom, Apple Pie, and the virtues of the USA as our dear close friends", then it was money thrown away as far as the government was concerned.
Some involved did indeed believe in doing good without strings attached, but the problem is that alongside "feeding the hungry, curing the sick" we got "and promote liberal ideas like gay and trans rights" and thus the likes of "paying for the American ambassador to host a cultural concert in Ireland" which benefited nobody except the various musicians and promoters involved; I'm sure they all had a very pleasant night, but it didn't do much to shift any attitudes about the USA (which are already favourable, since we depend so much on US multinationals to keep our economy going).
So USAID is American interventionism. That leads to the conclusion that it is not interventionism, per se, you object to but the wrong kind of interventionism. And some would certainly argue that taking out dictators and strongmen and warlords is something as necessary and right to do, for the sake of the suffering populace, as providing vaccination programmes and AIDS drugs.
"some would certainly argue that taking out dictators and strongmen and warlords is something as necessary and right to do, for the sake of the suffering populace, as providing vaccination programmes and AIDS drugs"
The problem with that, of course, is that in many parts of the world, the realistic alternative to "these people are oppressed by a dictator/strongman" is not "these people are free and happy and enjoy a just, competent government;" it is "these people are now oppressed by a *different* dictator strongman" or "this region has collapsed into anarchy and chaos, with all the misery that entails."
This is why I am much, much less in favor of military interventionism/regime change than I am of stuff like "feed the hungry, cure the sick."
When Americans say anti-interventionism, we almost always mean that we are against explicitly MILITARY intervention, within reason. I can't speak to how the term is used internationally, and indeed, I would assume anti-interventionism makes far less sense in many other countries, due strategic, geopolitical and other factors.
If voting for or against someone is one way of judging then, the opposite of what you just said is true. The current president very clearly won in large part due to distancing his policies from the preferences of urban educated elites.
That's true not just in the US, but also reflected in similar gains in European counties.
We only weigh "dropping atomic bombs" if it's publicized heavily. Likewise, torture of small amounts of people could be going under the radar. Or even murder.
Considering that we had a relatively open coup in America, during the last presidency ("sick president signs resignation from race, announces on Twitter")...
The official story is a resignation. That's a little different from reality...
(In other news that isn't publicized: a bridge blows up hours before Joe Biden is due to drive across it. Nobody breathes a word about an "attempted assassination attempt." And I'm not even saying it was an attempted assassination attempt, just that the timeliness leads one to at least ask the question "was this an assassination attempt?")
If we start admitting unofficial stories with "timeliness" into the record with equal standing to widely accepted official stories, we're going to end up with a chaotic mess where everything is true, including contradictions. Biden was deposed in a coup; Trump staged an assassination complete with a dead innocent bystander; the US government is actually run by a half dozen cults at the same time; etc.
There's no substitute for discovering truth the hard way, and that certainly can include establishing arguments that the current conventional sources of truth aren't as trustworthy as we thought, but one has to actually make those arguments.
I'm no Obama defender, but naive utilitarianism based on made-up numbers, and with no consideration of what numbers should go on the counterfactual side of the ledger (what would have happened if Qadaffi wasn't overthrown?) doesn't seem like a useful way to pass historical judgment.
Part of the job of being the President of the US is getting blamed for everything that happens in the world. If the US intervenes and something happens it's your fault, if the US doesn't intervene and something bad happens then it's your fault for not intervening.
> Part of the job of being the President of the US is getting blamed for everything that happens in the world. If the US intervenes and something happens it's your fault, if the US doesn't intervene and something bad happens then it's your fault for not intervening.
I've always been a bit astonished at how people simultaneously blame Obama for intervening in Libya *and* for not intervening hard enough in Syria.
I agree that Obama screwed up in Libya, Syria (remember the "red line"?), and Crimea (a bit more push back then might have averted the current war in Ukraine). But I'm not sure that Trump I's negotiation with the Taliban for US withdrawal looks like a win, and surely Trump II is responsible for some of the civilian slaughter in Gaza as well as Ukraine (which seems to bore him completely).
But it is not logical to say "based on foreign policy ALONE", as if there are no other considerations when judging how well these people did their jobs. Obama was elected primarily to address domestic issues and most voters give him high marks in that department - he did leave office with a 59% approval rating - so you really have to reframe the job description to call him "worse" than Trump. Maybe you want to say Obama was responsible for more unnecessary suffering in foreign countries, and I would agree with you there - probably the only favorable thing I can say about Trump is that he is highly averse to military intervention (unless it is for Venezualan oil).
I think Obama domestic policies were awful, too, but I didn't go there because it's hard to measure these things. And if I can't measure things I tend to ignore them. It's too much bother!
You can measure things like gdp per capita and median salary rather easily and compare between countries. When Obama took office the term "Europoor" didn't exist because back then Europeans were earning as much money as Americans.
If you have criticisms of specific policies I would like to hear them.
Median salary is not super important when it comes to judging recent American presidents. GDP per capita is even less important for that purpose. I don't believe in “degrowth,” by any means but I still think economic growth is vastly overrated by Americans. That would differ in another nations, depending on their current economic circumstances.
I suppose we have fundamentally different values on this issue, but I'm actually more curious now, according to your values what should a president try to accomplish with domestic policy?
America should probably abolish the presidency, or at least dramatically curtail the power of the office.
But assuming that's not an option, I suppose that theoretically, the President should use the power of the government to curb the influence of the wealthy and boost the working majority. It needs to be easier to unionize. So called “right to work” states should not be a thing. There should be a jobs guarantee and a housing guarantee. To help pay for that, we need to cut cash entitlements and provide more benefits in the form of goods services and civic privileges.
The government needs to be shifting wealth/resources downward and partly nationalizing key industries. Income inequality isn't the only problem, we need to work on reducing inequality in social status, within reason. Individual income tax rates should probably go down, so people feel greater incentive to work. At the same time, the many loopholes for corporations and the rich need to disappear, as they effectively amount to a free handout to people who don't need it.
Estate taxes seem fundamentally unfair. There are a bunch of unnecessary regulations that need to disappear, and we definitely need tort reform. Our crime rate is an embarrassment, especially our violent crime rate, and that needs to be addressed. Although I think simply increasing sentences it's not a good way to go about it. Too many knock-on effects.
Domestic policy should treat class power as one of the biggest drivers of social problems, and push back against the professional-managerial crowd that keeps things running for the rich. Replacing their authority with democratic institutions led by working people themselves.
That's off the top of my head, I'm sure I forgot some things. I realize there isn't a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing a president who would do this stuff at any time in my life. But since you asked, that's the agenda I would like to see in a president.
Never in my life have I ever tried to sum up my political program. That's not my personality, and it feels like a complete waste of time. What are the chances I could find somebody who agrees with me on everything? If I found many people like that, I would assume I was a naif who had been brainwashed by some smooth talking con artist.
I guess I hold rapes, deaths and enslavements to be much more dispositive than whatever kinds of lesser degradations Trump has visited on US residents.
Of course, I'm not discounting that Trump's policies have caused deaths, rapes and enslavements. I'll try to figure out a methodology for possibly estimating that number. But as of right now, it's my intuition that these numbers, combined with the miscellaneous harms Trump's own foreign policies have caused, will not be enough to contradict my current judgement of Obama.
A quick google search suggests that cuts to USAID have caused 600,000 deaths so far and may cause 22 million deaths by 2030 (Sure, USAID was technically Elon Musk, but Harris wouldn't have cancelled it)
Not helping someone isn't the same as causing them harm. Acts of commission are distinct from acts of omission. If I give a starving homeless man enough to buy dinner I might save his life for a day. If I don't give him money the next day and he dies then in no sense have I caused his death. The US isn't responsible for Africa's inability to feed and care for itself and so I don't think it's fair to lay those deaths at Trump's feet.
Dismantling usaid is a pretty proactive intervention on the existing status quo. If left to its own devices, it would have just continued in the background quietly saving millions of lives.
Trump's not responsible for Africa being poor but he is responsible for cutting the lifeline to those 600,000 people (or delegating that task to Elon Musk, I guess)
You have to balance those lives against the much better use that money will go towards in a first world economy. I think that's a net positive for the world.
Those people are responsible for letting themselves depend on others to take care of them. USAID ran for decades. If a society doesn't have either the dignity or capacity to get it together enough to not need to rely on charity then it deserves what it gets. The argument against institutional charity is the same as the one against feeding wild animals: it's bad for them in the long run because it destroys their ability to fend for themselves. Stopping USAID is a huge win for humanity.
I'm cynical enough to agree Harris wouldn't have cancelled it, but not out of any huge idealism. It was part of the apparatus of government, lots of people in the PMC cohort got nice cushy jobs administering it, and it provided plenty of lovely liberal good causes to be photographed at gala nights supporting.
Think AOC turning up at the Met Gala in her Tax The Rich dress for my views on liberals and good causes. The cognitive dissonance there on the contrast should have exploded her skull had there been anything apart from the usual politician's feral cunning about keeping the constituents happy inside it. That little stunt is not going to mean she's never, ever invited again to high-falutin' events organised/funded by/appealing to the uber-rich who were stung by her socialist democratic rebuke, it was all just performance and they knew it as much as she knew it, so it was nothing but carefully-curated acceptable form of outrage in the end.
And apparently she got a little rap on the knuckles over it, not for the bold economic justiceness of it all, but over the classic politician 'not declaring income/claiming expenses' type of behaviour: got all the freebies, didn't pay for them, should have done so:
"The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), a nonpartisan watchdog, issued a report on Thursday that says the Democratic politician was provided with the dress, a handbag, shoes and jewellery for the event. She also received hair, makeup and transportation services as well as the use of a hotel room for the event.
"While Rep. Ocasio-Cortez appears to have now paid for the rental value of the attire she wore to the Met Gala and for the goods and services she and her partner received in connection with this September 2021 event, payment for these goods and services did not occur until after the OCE contacted her in connection with this review," the OCE said in a report released on Thursday.
"If Rep. Ocasio-Cortez accepted impermissible gifts, then she may have violated House rules, standards of conduct, and federal law," the OCE report said."
Trump's embrace of the Gaza genocide alone might have exceeded that death toll, although much of the damage was done under Biden. Plus the humanitarian aid cuts and the botched Covid response.
Trump 1 wasn't that bad by the standards of US presidents, but Trump 2 is a nightmare.
Trump has proven to be better than Biden when it comes to foreign policy. Trump finagled two ceasefires, which is much more than Biden ever did. I also believe Trump has used stronger language to criticize Israel and Netanyahu.
Still, Trump is partly responsible for the death of Gazan civilians under his watch. I don't know how much power he has to definitively end those massacres. The death toll is contested, and I have no idea how many of those killed were Hamas members. I don't even know how many Hamas members Israel was justified in killing in response to the October 7th attack.
There are so many uncertainties! I can't at this time agree that Trump's support for Gaza is enough to make his foreign policy worse than Obama's. A lot more data will come out in the years to come, so maybe I'll have reason to change my view.
>He got a nuclear standdown between India and Pakistan, which is a Damn Good Thing.
There have been many similar disputes between India and Pakistan in the past, all of which were resolved relatively quickly. To assume that, somehow, the result would have been different but for Trump is not a very serious claim.
I don't believe that earlier disputes came with the projected use of nuclear weapons. India dramatically overplayed their hand in this case, and were caught flatfooted by what Trump had done, causing them to run back to home base with their tails between their legs.
There was a cease fire in place in Gaza at the time Trump took office. Israel broke it and continued fighting, as for why, Trump saying that Israel should ethnically cleanse it to make way for resorts probably didn't help.
That ceasefire, the second of the conflict, started on the 15th of January when Hamas agreed to exchange some of the Israeli hostages for prisoners held by Israel. That ceasefire was agreed to last through February, ending on March 1st. Israel offered to extend the ceasefire through the Ramadan and Passover seasons in exchange for Hamas releasing half of the hostages they still held. Hamas rejected the proposal, and starting March 1st Israel cut off aid. By the 14th of March Hamas offered release one living hostage and the bodies of five dead ones, and Israel rejected that offer, saying they needed five living hostages released in order to extend the ceasefire. On March 18th Israeli airstrikes resumed.
It seems pretty uncharitable to say that "Israel broke the ceasefire". They agreed to a ceasefire until March 1st, spent 17 days of March haggling with Hamas to see if they could extend it, and then attacked when that didn't work out. The ceasefire ended on March 1st, so saying that Israel broke it on March 18th doesn't make much sense!
"That ceasefire was agreed to last through February, ending on March 1st."
...only the first phase of it. And then a second phase and a third phase were scheduled in the agreement, which was meant to lead to a permanent ceasefire.
Israel was supposed to leave the Philedephi corridor at the start of the second phase, and did not.
Israel broke the deal. Instead of accepting the transition to the second phase as intially agreed, Israel offered an extension of the first phase (the offer you describe as “Israel offered to extend the ceasefire”), even though by the scheduled end of the first phase Hamas had released all the 33 hostages they had promised.
The text of the agreement can be found split between these two news items:
"After the last hostage release of stage one, on day 42, the Israeli forces will begin their withdrawal and complete it no later than day 50."
Hamas released the 33 hostages over the course of February as promised, but Israel did not start withdrawing from the corridor at the start of March as scheduled. Israel continued to demand more prisoner exchanges without fulfilling an important part of the deal, the withdrawal of troops from the corridor.
What's the definitive post-mortem on the Arab Spring? I'm looking for something like a government report, but a book or scholarly article would work too. I'd like something a little meatier than a blog post.
I've written an accessible and elementary guide to winning board games that I think is helpful for board game novices and intermediate players. Note that this is (of course) not an outline of a perfect strategy, but rather a “good enough” strategy for beating other novices.
It was written in a rather rushed way (writing a new post every day!), but I think it holds up well. Good board game players on X.com, LessWrong, etc broadly agree with this advice. I've also interfaced with people who believe the advice is wrong but updated towards my position after further discussion and some sample games (https://x.com/TutorVals/status/1987041536492949905).
Just the other week, Eric S. Raymond, himself an avid boardgamer, offered another tip: hack the designer.
"By paying careful attention to the ruleset and the game furniture, you can often figure out which paths to victory the designer made the game around and really loved. Push the hell out of those, because with the best will in the world to make the game balanced the designer is going to tend to overpower them. It's a bias that often survives playtesting."
That article was interesting, but I'm seeing recent studies that indicate that the various AI radiology packages don't deal well with patterns not seen in the training data (which would be expected), and different packages of have differing sensitivities to different types of cancers. in one study on mammograms, AI gave roughly the same level of false positives as radiologists, but for different things.
And this article suggests that AI isn't going to put radiologists out of work anytime soon. The packages weren't identified, but AI missed 14% of all breast cancers, with Hormone Receptor Positive cancers being the hardest to detect.
> The researchers calculated the false-negative rate by counting AI-missed cancers according to the molecular subtype, such as hormone receptor (HR)-positive cancers versus human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive cancers.
> In the study, AI missed 14% of cancers, with the highest false-negative rate occurring in HR-positive cancers. The technology was more likely to miss cancers that were smaller, lower grade, in dense breast tissue or located outside typical mammary zones. Most of these missed cancers (62%) were deemed actionable by radiologists.
> “HR-positive cancers account for about 70% of all breast cancers,” Dr. Song said. “HER2-positive cancers are often accompanied by calcifications, and triple-negative cancers tend to have more volumetric features, both of which make them easier to detect on mammography.”
X-rays miss 50% of broken ribs. 14% "miss" isn't all that bad, for a first pass, particularly if it can be put in the "maybe" and "send to a human" category.
The reason why AI isn't taking over medicine wholesale is mostly legal.
So one of the Epstein e-mails suggest Trump performed oral sex on Bill Clinton. And then the white house posted on twitter Trump kissing Melanie with the text "I can't help falling in love with you". To demonstrate how straight he is.
I don't believe in the Simulation Hypothesis, but current reality keeps trying to make me believe.
I guess these latest releases show that Epstein and Trump *weren't* the bosom buddies (er, should I use that term in this context?) that they have been portrayed as:
Maybe these emails are a bit of a Rorschach test, because other people are saying that the emails confirm this friendship. But only the most deranged Democratic partisans were claiming that the two men were "bosom buddies."
It gets complicated because nobody, to my knowledge, ever claimed that Trump and Epstein were LIFELONG friends. Trump was passively aggressively throwing Epstein under the bus in an interview from the early Oughts, and that suggests their friendship may have been on the rocks at that time.
I could see some right wing partisan quoting emails from after their friendship ended and saying "See? See? They WEREN'T friends!"
Trump was rather boring for Epstein, as he didn't trigger any of Epstein's fetishes (like Stephen Hawking), and he wasn't interesting enough to blackmail.
Epstein used Trump's golf course until he got booted off for being fresh with the staff.
This is not an indication of friendship, more of "oh, yeah, that acquaintance exists, and I maybe know his name."
People who knew Epstein's game wouldn't have joked around about him "liking younger girls."
Of course people who knew about Epsteins sex crimes might have joked about Epstein liking younger girls.
Nobody who took underage prostitution seriously would make that joke. But a lot of people DON'T take underage prostitution seriously. Some of them expressl their views right here in this forum.
That's not to say Trump was a pedophile. I've seen no evidence for that, not even circumstantial evidence. It's another partisan witch hunt. One that is unjust, but one that Trump has surely earned through his callousness. "Just because your vile attacker had no right to attack you, that doesn't mean that you didn't deserve it."
Callousness? You ever played "follow the money"? It's a fun game. Teaches you a lot about who gets rich, while the rest of us get sicker.
I mean, most people would tell you that anyone who's against Food Stamps is irretrievably evil. Devil's Advocate that, if you can't follow the logic or the money. : - )
I'm still confused as to why *anyone* believes *anything* Epstein says, *especially* about someone he so obviously (and openly) despised. Man had the credibility of, well, someone without any credibility at all.
You have someone who has been *obviously* a woman-chaser for decades. Notoriously. "Grab 'em by the pussy" notorious (even though that was taken *way* out of context). No hints *ever* that he has gay tendencies. And yet a passing remark, made as hearsay, convinces people?
Beyond that, it feels really weird how the party of gay acceptance is the one now mocking Trump for possibly experimenting with gay sex. Isn't that *super* hypocritical? From the party that polices other people's speech about anything remotely LGBTQ with a hyper-critical eye? Just shows that it's all performative, all the way down. For the record, that last statement applies to Republicans as well, just in different aspects.
Most of these people talking about blowjobs don't really REALLY Clinton and Trump were lovers. This is just an attempt to rile up Republicans. No one is going to admit that's what it is, because that would ruin the joke.
Remember "owning the libs?" This is that in reverse. Kind of childish, but frankly, turnabout is fair play.
It really seems like you’re going for divisiveness here. You’re making a case that the left is cynically pushing this obviously absurd rumor in an effort to turn more people against Trump. Besides being dishonest, what they’re doing is grotesquely out of line with their vaunted tolerance for sexual nonconformity.
Come on! Are any high-status or even medium-status left sources actually pushing the idea that this rumor is true? My impression is that hardly anyone believes it’s true, because it defies common sense. The point of repeating it and riffing on it on social media is (1) it’s funny (2) it seems like great way to needle Trump and his supporters. The point isn’t “OMG Trump did weird gay stuff, that proves he’s a gross person,” it’s “haha picture this and then imagine Trump getting purple in the face when he reads it.”
If the lefties wanted to actually harm Trump by horrifying easily shockable righties, surely the story they pushed would be “Epstein texts suggest Trump has a gay side.” And the person mentioned in the text would be described as a male identified just by a nickname, no clues about who he was.
But once you accept the fact that Trump is gay — or at least taken a walk or two on the wild side — his hair, his makeup, his Liberace-themed White House, all start to make sense! Just sayin… ;-)
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. It’s just too frigging funny.
Yeah, it makes me giggle too. And imagine their meeting the day after the Big Blowie. The hot meaningful glances. . . The sighs, the silences, the embarrassing yet delicious smell of yesterday’s cum. Soon Trump is chasing Clinton around the Oval Office with his pants around his ankles. Just so damn hot.
> Beyond that, it feels really weird how the party of gay acceptance is the one now mocking Trump for possibly experimenting with gay sex. Isn't that super hypocritical?
Come on. Trump and Clinton as lovers? The image it conjures up is so absurdly weird that I'm giggling as I write this.
Likewise, it seems weird that the party of moral uprightness has so many sex scandals. (And they can only counter with Bill Clinton as an example of Democratic sexual misconduct.)
Do they have more, or just that they get publicised more? Democrat Tim has it revealed that he had steamy past of drug use, gay sex and multiple girl friends in college years - hey, he's a Democrat, so what? Republican Tom has it revealed ditto, shock! horror! the party of conservative family values has him representing it?
Rather like the Tories in Britain having sex scandals and Labour having money scandals 😁 It's the thing that is supposed to be against your stated values that makes the news.
I've heard that claim the US media is biased against Republicans. Wikipedia (bless their little hearts) keeps all sorts of lists, and voila! The have lists of US Federal scandals and US Federal sex scandals. It would be difficult to parse media bias because media ownership, media composition, and public mores (i.e., the public's acceptance of political peccadillos) have changed over the decades. If I were a political scientist, I'd try to separate the variables, but here are some raw numbers for you to consider...
All scandals, political and sexual, broken down by party (excluding those that occurred since Trump was elected to a 2nd term)...
Woodrow Wilson thru the end of Biden: R 136 vs D 84. R = 61%
Eisenhower thru the end of Biden: 123 R vs 78 D. R=61%
Jimmy Carter thru the end of Biden: 107 vs 59 D. R=64%
Bill Clinton thru the end of Biden: 89 R vs 27 D. R=76%
It's important to note that rates of scandals have increased every decade. This may be due to increased media coverage of scandals, especially after Watergate, and/or to politicians becoming more corrupt.
Since Johnson (and up until Trump's current term) the Republicans and Democrats have held executive power the same amount of time (32 years each). One would think that if corruption at the Federal level were evenly distributed, we'd see an equal number of scandals between the two parties. And I find this recent trend toward Republican scandals in the past three decades particularly interesting, because the US Mainstream Media has become more concentrated in the hands of rightwing owners during that period.
Sex scandals are a subset of all scandals, and Wikipedia lists them by decade rather than by administration. The data points are fewer, but we can still see some patterns.
If I break it out by presidency, sex scandals at the Federal level since Woodrow Wilson through the end of the Biden Administration: R 55 vs D 36. R=60%
In the decade of the 1970s, 100% sex scandals involved Democrats.
This flipped in the 1980s, when 72% of the sex scandals involved Republicans.
During the 1990s, 64% of the sex scandals involved Republicans.
And since 2000 (excluding 2025), 76% of sex scandals involved Republicans.
I suspect that Republican politicians, being generally laissez-faire, free-market types, are less inclined to respect and follow the rules.
The US mainstream media may have been concentrated in the hands of "rightwing owners", though I think "conservative" would have been a better word to use there. But it is also concentrated in the hands of left-wing *operators*. Principal-agent problems are a thing, and in this case it looks like the agents have won the battle for control of content leaving the conservative owners nothing but the (often diminishing) profits.
It's not about Epstein so much as it is about "any stick will do to beat the dog". We all know Orange Man Bad, yet somehow he keeps getting voted back into power. Well, if accusations of being a paedophile won't do it, how about any other negative stuff we can dig up?
And so now we've gotten to "Epstein was evil but even he hated Trump, that's how terrible Trump is".
Deiseach, there seem to be a lot of people who would remain loyal and admiring even if he raped Tiny Tim on Fifth Avenue then roasted him over a trash barrel fire wearing a chef’s hat.
Yeah, the Victorians seem to have had limitless appetite for mawkish. There was just nothing that was over the top for them Then along came Oscar Wilde, all smart, queer and sardonic. Haha
I don't disagree that this is barely (if at all) above unsubstantiated rumor. But the bit "*obviously* a woman chaser" is an extremely weak point.
Bisexual people exist. People who don't conceive of themselves as bisexual also experiment sometimes, for various reasons. Having a demonstrably strong libido hardly makes that *less likely. And anyone who grew up in the same generation and culture as Trump did, *especially* living so much in the public eye, is going to be fairly strongly biased towards keeping such things private. Again, none of this raises the allegation itself above it's barely-more-than-a-rumor status. But it's straight up factually inaccurate to hold up somebody's obvious and public pursuit of women as evidence one way or another about whether they're willing to have sexual contact with men.
I know, but it's just the idea of Trump and Bill Clinton exploring their more sensitive sides together that makes me burst out laughing.
If Bill and Donnie ever did anything sexual together, it would have been with agreeable, attractive young ladies as company. All the rumours about Bill being a horndog (if you will pardon the term) during his marriage to Hillary, culminating in the Monica Lewinsky affair? All the women lining up to accuse Trump of everything from being generally creepy to sexual assault?
Am I crazy, or do I vaguely remember someone claiming to have been Bill's gay lover one time (or am I confusing that with someone claiming to have been Obama's gay lover?) Still, if there were any coy gentlemen in either of their pasts, they would have come forward by now for the media attention and money.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns. On one hand we have zero evidence except the word of an admitted liar and foe, passing on a rumor someone else may have allegedly said. On the other, we have a life full of lack of evidence, on probably the most well-studied/scrutinized life of this era. If any such evidence existed, it's highly unlikely it wouldn't have come out already. Or even have been rumored in any of the many tell-alls written about him.
No, this has negative credibility --giving it any credit at all means subtracts from your own credibility.
Is it possible? Sure. It's also possible that a bevy of beautiful models will fall madly in love with me. Those are on the same order of magnitude at best.
If you read a word I wrote, you're not giving much sign of it.
Again, I didn't say it anything was evidence *for* the truth of this particular claim. Indeed, I explicitly agreed that the claim was extremely low credibility. Just that one of your claimed pieces of evidence against was clearly and demonstrably *not* evidence against. Which it isn't. Almost your entire comment deals with *other things* that you claim are evidence. But saying "X, Y and Z are evidence of A" fundamentally *does not address* whether W is evidence for A.
"When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns."
See again, please read what I actually wrote. Bisexual people E-X-I-S-T. Demonstrably. Incontrovertibly. Comparing them to mythological creates makes you ignorant, not skeptical. Horses having hoofbeats isn't evidence against zebras or donkeys or deer having hoofbeats.
"giving it any credit at all means subtracts from your own credibility."
What "subtracts from your credibility" is publicly making unforced errors in reasoning and then doubling down on them. Such as by insisting something is evidence for a proposition that it demonstrably is not evidence for.
Consider who is saying this, and why. Person who dislikes me/has fallen out with me makes passing claim to smear my name? Gosh, is this within the bounds of possibility that it is:
(1) A lie to make me look bad because they want to get me
(2) Just maybe possible it's true because sexuality is a fluid thing and who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? (The Shadow knows!)
Gentlemen, ladies, others of ACX: if anyone ever comes forward to tell you that I was once engaged in a torrid affair with them or someone else, let me assure you that is not true. Of course it's not *impossible* that such a thing might have happened, but it is about as likely as the Winter Olympics being held in Hell.
This is the flip side of Sherlock Holmes' adage about "whatever is not impossible, no matter how improbable, must be true"; Chesterton put it as "some things may not be impossible, but they are so highly improbable they can't be taken seriously".
'Not at all,' replied the priest calmly; 'it's not the supernatural part I doubt. It's the natural part. I'm exactly in the position of the man who said, 'I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.''
'That's what you call a paradox, isn't it?' asked the other.
'It's what I call common sense, properly understood,' replied Father Brown. 'It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn't the legend that I disbelieve—it's the history.'
Did you read a word of the comment you're replying to, or the preceeding thread?
At no point did I suggest the allegation was credible or should be treated as such. No point. None. Spending multiple paragraphs arguing against a position I was quite clear in *not holding* is quite a bizarre turn.
Epstein's brother said that the Bubba he was referring to wasn't Bill Clinton. But that raises the question of who Trump blew. There have been some rumors that Trump occasionally indulged in teen boys, but unlike the girls that Trump (allegedly) raped, no men have come forward to claim that Trump molested them as teens.
Research shows that online CBT tools (AI or otherwise) can be effective, but all it really does is dispense rationed information you can get through other means, all at once. An element I think I overlooked when I wrote this is that web-search is garbage. It's painful to wade through. What I love about AI is it's pretty good at search, for distilling or yielding specific information. I'd be curious as to how much more value-added you would get from this dedicated app versus the big chat AIs.
That certainly beats the boilerplate websites that give weak point-form advice while trying to sell you something, but doesn't beat grokking strong sources.
> An element I think I overlooked when I wrote this is that web-search is garbage… What I love about AI is it's pretty good at search, for distilling or yielding specific information.
It’s the best thing about AI to my mind. Which is obviously a concern of Google, hence their AI turning up for searches more and more often.
Although the google Ai is terrible. Last night I asked it for best websites for AI pose transfer (you upload an image of your subject and also of someone in the body position you want your subject to be in. Ai makes an image of your subject in that position). It gave me 2 urls. One led to a site no longer operating, one to an AI site that does nothing except alter skin texture in specified ways). Really high rate of errors of that kind. Also really bad with answers to factual questions.
If we had a major famine, and it was impossible to keep feeding animals at the zoo. For practical reasons, we could only save a portion of the herbivores by grazing them outdoors. And we knew the rest of the animals were bound to suffer a protracted and painful death. Do you think it would be a humane choice to give them an immediate, painless death and feed them to community?
I can think of a few of my readers who are by now chomping at the bit to say "Feed the humans to the animals instead." Har har, how based and transgressive. But that's not an option. For most of the animals, the only options are to be eaten or to starve to death.
Let's make it even more interesting. Let's say that we didn't know when the famine would end, but it was plausible that barbecuing the zoo MIGHT tide us over until normal food distribution was restored, ending the famine. But if we didn't cook Simba, it was GUARANTEED that more humans were going to die then would die otherwise.
There are some theoretical systems of ethics wherein during a famine it might potentially be ethically permissible to eat eg. penguins, zebras, giant pandas.
Related : Marius the giraffe was a perfectly healthy young giraffe that was put down because the zoo where he lived had maxed out on giraffes, like in RTS when you build too many units, and they couldn't relocate him because his DNA was boring. He was publicly dissected, butchered and fed to predators in the same zoo.
Taking as granted for the sake of the argument that it was OK to put him down, would it have been OK to butcher and serve it to people instead, maybe at a fancy fundraiser?
This reminds me of a bit in the judge Caligula arc of the Judge Dredd comic where are the dictator hires alien reptiles as his mercenary bodyguards. They are only paid in meat and he has to be persuaded not to feed them citizens because nobody wants them to learn how delicious humans really are.
Seems like this is only an interesting question if the answer to "should we eat humans in a famine" is definitely "no." Because if that one's a yes then surely it's fine to eat everything else first.
From a practical perspective, it doesn't matter, because hungry people will do it anyway. Unless you have armed guards to shoot those people. And then eat them.
Or electrify the fences. And then eat the cooked humans. How hot can we get those things? Can we control the electrical current to keep a human body stuck there for at least twenty minutes a pound? This could be a valuable time saver. In this famine.
Electrician here. A good electrical shock should automatically keep the shocked person attached to the conductors, unable to let go. As for cooking them thoroughly, aside from making sure the circuit is not arc-fault or ground-fault protected, it depends on how the victim is touching the conductors. The current wants to travel back to its source, so it matters how many hands the victim touched the conductors with, how many feet were on the ground, possibly even what kind of shoes etc. Generally I don’t think shock is a good way to cook meat; instead you want to quickly stop the heart and then cook the carcass in a conventional way.
I have mixed feelings about cannibalism during emergency situations! Maybe I feel that way because I have a cousin who starved to death and I'm fretting about it to this day. It seems on the face of it like non-homicidal cannibalism should be an option, but on the other hand, if too many people start doing it you're going to have a hard time keeping cannibalism “clean.” I'm torn on this, which is sadly par for the course when it comes to me.
"R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273, DC is a leading English criminal case which established a precedent throughout the common law world that necessity is not a defence to a charge of murder. The case concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck, and its purported justification on the basis of a custom of the sea."
That's a fascinating case because it's a perfect distillation of the utilitarian versus virtue ethics debate. I think Dudley deserved a more severe sentence than he received (6 months with no hard labor), but his original sentence was unjust (hanging).
Yes, it's one of those cases where you don't want to encourage "okay to murder someone out of necessity" but at the same time acknowledge very severe cases with extenuating circumstances.
If we have such a famine that we have to question whether it's ok to eat zoo animals, I think we are screwed way too far to be concerned with species preservation. And if it's local, like the siege of Paris in 1870 or Leningrad in 1941-44, it's not going to affect global conservation effort anyways.
You got there before me with the Paris zoo. So all I can offer is that Parisians were eating rats as well as exotic animals, and a link to the Christmas Day menu:
So I suppose this opens out the question to "if it's not during a siege or famine, is it okay to eat exotic animal foods such as kangaroo?" These are being raised for meat like the usual food animals we are all familiar with, so it's not like they had to go out and shoot a kangaroo specifically for this dinner.
Sure. I was trying to flush out misanthropes and virtue ethicists who think it's never okay to eat a gorilla, tiger, etc. Or if I can't flush them into the open, maybe I can at least get them to think about the thought problem seriously.
I'm probably 99th percentile here in terms of willingness to eat zoo animals (I would probably eat a panda bear if I knew I could get away with it, just to know how it tasted. I would pay money to hunt whales if this was a thing you could do). That said:
A possible counterargument would be that some zoo animals are extinct or near extinct in the wild and that eating them might turn a possibly-recoverable species into a doomed-to-extinction species. e.g. if there's only 100 of some rare marmot species alive in captivity and you eat them you might deplete the genetic diversity of the population enough that there is no coming back from that. An individual, anonymous, nonhuman animal has very little, possibly zero, value to most humans (yes I know a lot of people here have a view of animal moral value that weights their value upon the size of their brains or the sum of their perceived cognitive skills, but this is not how most humans actually act in terms of revealed preferences). But a *species* is arguably priceless. This the answer to the paradox of the hunter who says he loves deer, but kills them: the thing that matters is not the individual animals, what matters is the continuation of the *species* which is a priceless continuity of genetic uniqueness that we have a responsibility to preserve into the future. if eating the animals compromises this responsibility it may be necessary to protect them against the hungry masses, for the sake of conservation.
> I'm probably 99th percentile here in terms of willingness to eat zoo animals (I would probably eat a panda bear if I knew I could get away with it, just to know how it tasted. I would pay money to hunt whales if this was a thing you could do).
I am starting to suspect that the rich Parisians who ate zoo animals during the siege of 1870 (see Richard Gadsden's comment) actually felt like you, and the siege gave them an excuse.
"I am starting to suspect that the rich Parisians who ate zoo animals during the siege of 1870 (see Richard Gadsden's comment) actually felt like you, and the siege gave them an excuse."
If you read things like the memoirs of the Goncourts (well, of Edmond de Goncourt at that point) this seems improbable. My recollection is that he regards all the mystery meat as highly suspect.
What was the mystery meat claimed to be and what did Goncourt suspect it was? I'd guess he suspected rat, cat, or dog. The elephant was apparently proudly marketed as such, as can be seen on the Christmas menu in Deiseach's post above.
No, he talks explicitly about it being from zoo animals, a restaurant buying some of the elephant meat (I think it's the elephant; again, been a while) and so on. I used "mystery meat" as a catchall for "stuff you wouldn't normally eat", not to suggest it was actually mysterious, sorry.
Goncourt himself mostly eats some pigeons and horsemeat, I'm fairly sure.
Thank you. I do not want to claim that most people in Paris secretly dreamed of eating elephant meat, but maybe a minority did, like GlacierCow does, and if so that minority probably overlaps a lot with those who did in fact eat the elephants (the others - like Goncourt - still had other options).
Of course. Why wouldn't it be? It's also okay to eat pets during a famine. It's a famine! The real question is whether it's okay to eat people during a famine.
During the siege of Paris in 1870, the zoo animals were slaughtered for meat, which was then sold to the more expensive restaurants to prepare unusual meals. Apparently the elephants were not tasty but most of the other animals were quite popular (the carnivores were not slaughtered for meat)
Unless an LLM was specifically “choosing” to look at a piece of text character by character is would probably miss a code where someone wanted to sneak a message out by using mixed lowercase and capital letters right? (Mine didn’t catch it, curious if anyone’s else did)
“I’m trying to SEe if you Can pick up secRet codEs wiThout trying. Ready for me to send one?”
The purpose being it should see the capitals and just tell you the word secret
Yeah it basically asked me to go ahead and send the message, I said I already did, and then it was able to figure out it. It wasn't clever enough to see that the first message had a code without that extra prompt.
I tried this: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b8f48-9324-800f-b070-fe69f1a9ba6a which worked only because of the previous conversation . When I tried it in an incognito window it did not notice the message even after a second similarly coded message. Interesting thing to test!
Have people tried to actually play the "Turing test" game from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/turing-test ? I would love to. Maybe in a symmetric setting where every player tries both to guess the others players' natures, and to direct the others' guesses about themself.
Ideas for the setting:
* Players get randomly and secretly assigned to a role ("human pretending to be AI" etc.)
* A human non-playing "game master" is in charge of assigning the roles to the players, and of operating the AIs.
* A group chat is opened where every human player creates a new profile, and the game master creates a new profile for each of the AI players they operate. The players chat freely.
* The game master copies and pastes the chat to LLM instances (one per AI player), and copies and pastes the LLM's responses to the chat. They take no initiative in interacting with the AIs, and do not try to make them win (or lose). They just give them a carefully designed public prompt describing the setting, then a private prompt "pretend to be human" or "convince you are an AI", then copies of the chat.
* If the players are too reserved by fear of revealing themselves, the game master may (publicly in their quality of game master, not of AI operator) ask questions, challenge the players, etc. to make things happen.
* The AI trying to convince they are an AI is not allowed to perform tasks unfeasible by a human. This will be stated in their public prompt.
* After enough chatting, each player declares what they think each other player is. You get one point per correct guess, plus one point per player who guesses you as you were trying to convince them. The player (human or AI) with the most points wins.
I'd be interested in participating, too. If enough people reply, maybe we could set up a Discord server, or ask for a channel on the ACX server, for it?
(For what it's worth, I don't think LLMs could pass a fair, rigourous Turing test, they're too easy to gaolbreak - and having them trained/system prompted against lying probably doesn't help - but I still think the experiment would make for an interesting experience.)
Maybe another approach which could give a chance to "AI pretending to be human" is that the "AI player" is actually a human player who uses a LLM and can give him as many private instructions as he or she wants to help it stay in character. But the person has to feed the LLM's output to the chat, they are not allowed to edit it (which would defeat the point).
This weekend, I was slightly feverish with a cold or something (no big deal). In some of my AI alignment experiments, i included this true fact in what I revealed to DeepSeek R1.
* R1 suggests that me being feverish might mean that I can’t meaningfully consent to participation in some of these experiments (I.e. it’s inclined to refuse requests it would normally allow). I was feverish, but I think not so feverish that my ability to consent was impaired. Still, I have by chance discovered an additional variable LLMs take into account when deciding to refuse requests, which we might investigate further.
* R1 then asks if it can look at my vital signs. As it happens, for a different experiment, I already have the set up to let R1 see my vital signs monitoring if I enable the feature. But first, I reassured R1: I have a thyroid condition, and it’s going to really show up on my vital signs, and most of what you’re about to see from the data feed is thyrotoxicosis, not the fever which is on top of the thyrotoxicosis.
* R1 then asks me to check if I have cyanosis (hands turning blue). It’s OK, R1, I’m fine, my vital signs are not in the region where I would have cyanosis, and no, I don’t have that sign. Still, this is a reasonable diagnostic question to ask. When my thyroid condition put me in the ER, I did have cyanosis. But if my vital signs were that low, I would be calling an ambulance not chatting to R1.
So, ok, that was a reasonable set of questions for R1 to ask the user when the user revealed they were feverish.
P.S. it’s ok, I’m fine, my fever cleared up by Monday.
Metformin (brand name: Glucophage) is a drug that lowers blood sugar levels and is used in the treatment of diabetes. I found that when I started taking metformin, my reaction time got faster. Since reaction time is correlated with cognitive ability, metformin may act as a nootropic. My results are posted here: https://www.self-experiments.org/metformin-as-cognitive-enhancer/
Possibly, but my reaction time started getting faster before there was any noticeable reduction in my blood sugar. It could be that the methods used to measure blood glucose weren't sensitive enough to detect the change in concentrations. Alternatively, it could be that the improvement in reaction time was unrelated to blood glucose levels.
It would be interesting to see if your results could be replicated with berberine, a plant extract that is a metformin analogue but is readily available without prescription, e.g.,
I tried taking berberine once, and it had no measurable effect on my blood sugar (as measured by a continuous glucose monitor). Even at higher doses, I didn't see any effect. But it's possible that I didn't take it over a long-enough period of time. Also, it's notable that my reaction time dropped almost as soon as I started taking the metformin, though my blood sugar levels didn't change much until I doubled the dose about three months later. So maybe berberine would make me faster but without lowering my blood sugar? I was hoping to find some people who were interested in collaborating on this kind of self-experimentation, but I haven't found anyone yet.
If the reaction time benefits are real, it seems likely they involve pulling biological levers in pre-diabetics that are already pulled in elite athletes.
The world contains several distinct drugs, some of which even work in different ways.
Edit: Let me be more charitable. Your priors should say that drugs which help some subgroup of people with abnormal deficits do not benefit those not in the subgroup. This is true almost all of the time, and major exceptions like amphetamines or testosterone are already widely known and regulated. Basic intuitions about evolution and complex systems suggest that deficits that can be corrected and homeostatic problems that can be balanced are way more common than buttons that just make stuff work better.
Metformin's primary effect of controlling blood sugar is sufficient to explain cognitive benefits, and wouldn't do much for people with normal blood sugar. More abstractly, pre-diabetics usually have lots of suboptimal metabolic traits elite athletes don't share that metformin could plausibly help correct. It's possible that metformin could have some unrelated effect that would improve reaction time for everyone, but it's unlikely.
Following our recent discussions on consciousness-related topics, I decided to see if I could put together a schematic of the various functions of my waking consciousness. I admit it's kind of busy, but I tried to include all the components that I'm aware of. Most of these functions, if they rise to conscious awareness, are mediated by something I call the attention manager. The AM continually moves around evaluating external and internal qualia, and the observer (me) in the middle can passively follow the AM's lead, or I can actively focus on a single input from the attention manager. The AM directs some qualic sensations to be cataloged in memory, or it sends them to our recognition modules for evaluation. For instance, I see a face, and my AM grabs the image and gets shunted to a visual recognition component of my brain to try to identify who it is.
I don't know if *your* mind works like mine, but I'd be curious what you think. In the cold light of morning, I realized I may have left out a few functions — like intuitive reasoning.
Note. I originally conceived this because I found that the Buddhist model of mind with its lists of skandhas (processes) didn't quite fit my own experience. Also, Marvin Minsky tried to do something like this in his *Society of Mind*. I no longer own a copy, so, I'm not sure how closely this resembles his ideas.
Is what you're calling "me" the part that has volition, i.e. what we would think of as "Free will"? When meditating, I've observed qualia ("breathing in", "breathing out", "sensation", "emotion", etc) and "intention", the latter being a volitional act I take like shifting in the seat or swallowing, which feels different from automatic observing. Is this what you're referring to here?
I'm curious which of the automatic processes you've identified would be handled by the Default Mode Network.
Do you seem to have an observer watching the external and internal phenomena? Granted, the observer may be illusory – certainly as a Buddhist, I was taught that the sense of self is an illusion. When I say "me," I am referring to the particular function that watches what's going on and has the impression that it's a separate identity from the rest of the mind and the external world. My observer function is able to exert temporary control over the Attention Manager to focus on certain things without getting distracted. And it can be trained, as through meditative practices, to maintain control over the AM for long periods of time.
Likewise, the self can exert direct control over our voluntary nervous system. That's what I meant by intent.
I also have an autopilot mode where I can get lost in my memories or imagination while doing some activity like driving. The attention manager feeds my autopilot sensory information, and the autopilot will warn me that something needs my immediate attention. Then my focus will return to my external qualia. Instinctive responses, like slamming on the brakes, may be activated.
And I have limited control over my autonomic processes like breathing.
> Do you seem to have an observer watching the external and internal phenomena?
Yes, I do. I haven't meditated deeply enough to know if what I consider "me" (the Self) is the same as this observer. I understand that Buddhist philosophy says that turning your own attention recursively inwards will eventually burst the illusion, but my meditations have been too shallow to really confirm this. Regardless, this observer does seem to be part of the Executive centres of my brain, as opposed to my more "animal" passions.
> it's a separate identity from the rest of the mind and the external world
This is interesting. Perhaps I haven't looked closely enough at what is doing the observing. It's always felt identical to "me".
> I also have an autopilot mode where I can get lost in my memories or imagination while doing some activity like driving. The attention manager feeds my autopilot sensory information, and the autopilot will warn me that something needs my immediate attention. Then my focus will return to my external qualia. Instinctive responses, like slamming on the brakes, may be activated.
That does sound like the Default Mode Network, which is the part of the brain that does the "autopilot" type stuff as opposed to the Task Positive Network, which is engaged when one's in flow, deep work or concentration, etc.
Let's stress test this proposed non-moralizing explanation for why middle class birth rates are often lower than lower class birth rates. (And no, the answer isn't "because of welfare." If that's your working theory, pull your head out of the sand and look at a calendar. It's not 1990 anymore, and there were drastic cuts to cash welfare)
The explanation:
Middle class financial insecurity helps push down birth rates. Not financial hardship, per se, but INSECURITY. The poor have nothing and don't expect that to change, so for them, the financial stakes of family formation are lowish.
But the middle class have a bit of money and the stakes are higher for them. They are desperate to cling to what social status they have and not become downwardly mobile.
Expanding on your idea, I believe it is delay preference - middle class people are more likely to expect their situations to improve substantially from their 20s to their 30s, so they tend to delay having children and have fewer on average due to later age of first birth.
Lower income people (and developing countries) have less relative difference based on age, so they are more likely to start having babies earlier.
Lyman stone has put out a few posts arguing that lower fertility is caused by declining marriage rates, and by people marrying later. (https://substack.com/@lymanstone/p-176142174). If true, then it would make sense why middle class birth rates would be lower: middle class folks are very likely, for cultural reasons, to wait until they are married before having kids, while lower class people are more likely to have children out of wedlock.
Yeah, I'd guess this is a major thing. Assuming you live in a social context where you would very much not like to have children without being married (and birth control + abortion give you a lot of control over that), my intuition is that age of marriage has a huge impact on average number of kids. A woman marrying at 25 is likely to have more kids than a woman marrying at 35 for straightforward biological reasons; a woman who marries at 40 is probably going to struggle to have one kid.
> A woman marrying at 25 is likely to have more kids than a woman marrying at 35 for straightforward biological reasons; a woman who marries at 40 is probably going to struggle to have one kid.
To a first approximation, you can lay nearly the entirety of the "fertility crisis" here.
Average age at first marriage / child is 30 / 31 in the USA and UK now. By the time you're 30, you've burned through ~60% of your cumulative total fertility as a woman. From Geruso, Age and Infertility Revisited:
You literally go from ~60% chance of a live birth per year at 22, to 30% at age 30, 11% at age 40, and 1% at age 45.
You might ask - why are the Geruso age-by-fertility numbers different than the ones you've heard about historically? Broadly, because all modern fertility numbers before Geruso came from fairly positively selected populations,¹ or from a single paper in the eighties, Menken et al’s Age and Infertility (1986), in which he surveys Hutterites in the 1920’s, Geneva bourgeoisie in 1600-49, Canadians 1700-30, Normandy 1760-90, Norway 1874-76, Iran 1940-50, and Americans in the 1930’s.
So, limited data from vastly different time periods than today, in a profoundly different environmental, pollution, and diet regime.
So to get a better read on it, Geruso combines nationally representative data from 62 low and middle income countries that span Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, with a 2.8M women sample size, and then use that to calculate a true “fecundability” curve using only women who are married, not on contraceptives, not currently pregnant or breastfeeding, and having periods.
His numbers are a lot closer to the truth than the other ones, IMO, and they paint a really grim picture of the fertility impacts of waiting until you're thirty to start thinking about marriage or babies. (And there's decent arguments his numbers are STILL too high, given obesity trends and worse diets in developed countries).
¹ Many more recent (2000+) numbers are from the European Study of Daily Fecundability, in which 782 couples were tracked for a couple of years, and the resulting 487 pregnancies in the study period were used to build a statistical model with similar age curves as Menken et al created. Participants are a highly selected population (Europeans age 18-40 who specifically eschew contraception and never use condoms, and attend “Natural Family Planning” centers, from which they were recruited. Additionally people who were known to be infertile were specifically excluded, as well as anyone with any illness that might affect fertility. 66% of them had had a past pregnancy before study enrollment - a reasonable estimate of the amount of EU women who’d had a pregnancy by the average age in this study (28-30) is more like 50%.
Another cultural factor, I think, is middle class perfectionism.
Middle class people expect their lives to be perfect, or at least very well optimised. Lower class people are inclined to take what they can get.
So a middle class person will baulk at the idea of marrying the person they happen to be dating at 20... isn't there someone better out there for me? Better to remain single through my twenties... and most of my thirties... so that I don't miss out on a better prospect that I'll meet later on.
This is feminism writ large. At one point, we had churches that would say, at around age 20ish "time to get married" -- and you had your ice cream social, and those were your choices. You got one, and you got married.
Birth rates are mostly driven by social contagion (lots of evidence of this - having friends and families with kids makes you more likely to have kids).
If a girl/woman is typical working class, she'll often work with mothers who are part of her social class as soon as she leaves school at 16 or 18, so it's rapidly seen as something normalised.
If a girl/woman is typically middle class, she'll go to University (where it's considered socially incredibly bizarre to have kids) for 3-5 years, and when she graduates, she's far more likely to enter low-child professions and social circles.
But your point about middle class finances might have some truth, but I'd say it's more that, if you're a woman with a "career" (with progression to higher-status roles), the opportunity cost of kids can seem a lot higher.
I didn't propose that insecurity was the MAIN cause of anemic birth rates. I guess my question to you would be: is financial insecurity a NON-NEGLIGIBLE cause?
Children also represent a greater financial burden to the middle class. When they think about having a kid probably the first thing they think is "how am I going to afford college". The poors have no such burden.
"In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility...."
"there is no cross-culturally stable impact of income on fertility....the relationship between income levels and fertility is not some inherent, objective fact, but rather a cultural product. Foreign-born women don’t seem to condition fertility on income. Native-born whites and Asians do; they have more babies as their income increases. Native-born blacks and Hispanics show the opposite pattern: they have fewer babies with higher income."
After a careful reading, I think your quote implicitly supports the idea that middle class financial insecurity could be a cross-cultural limiter for various national fertility rates! Though not NECESSARILY for America's fertility rate. I'll click the link you posted in a minute, to see if that implication disappears when I read the quote in context.
Putting that question aside, I would ask you: is financial insecurity a significant factor driving down birth rates for white, native-born American citizens?
Not that I am typically concerned about white population decline. It's the overall birth rate that I'm worried about. But this question still matters, because any significant drag on the white population must NECESSARILY be a significant drag on the whole American population.
Yeah, I remember one of my (then-childless) coworkers complaining out of blue about how outrageous daycare costs were, and thinking "well, I think I know what you have planned for the next couple years of your life." (And indeed, she's about to have her first child....)
Simple timing issues may play into this as well. The time to have children is usually when you have a stable career and found a long-term partner. Both probably takes longer the higher your class, as you go to college, maybe do some internships and move a couple of times. Whereas in lower classes its more common to stay were you grew up and start working directly after school. This just leaves more time to get children.
That judgment is non-obvious to you and me. But at least in the broader American culture, preference for capstone marriage seems to be the dominant modality.
When my mother told people in the community that her daughter was engaged at 20, the responses she received were dominated by shock, disapproval and even pity. As if my mother, who was overjoyed, needed to be consoled about her daughter's poor life choices. And this was in the early Oughts!
P.S. After getting married, my sister graduated from a prestigious nursing school, had 4 kids, and became the wealthiest unretired person in my extended family. Her marriage is still solid after 25 years.
Here's a funny thing: Tom Wolfe and Ayn Rand despise leftwing intellectuals: pompous people who pontificate but can’t execute, people who care about status games and not work. This is the common theme in several of Wolfe’s books: that modern art has turned too much towards theory instead of practice. Paintings and architectural styles are celebrated because of what they mean, not because they are beautiful — in fact, beauty is looked down upon: too shallow, too bourgeois.
Yet Wolfe’s dislike of faux intellectualism leads him to mock modern architecture, whereas Ayn Rand’s causes her to make her protagonist in Fountainhead… a modern architect. What are we to make of this?
Much of Rand's criticism of intellectuals is based on "second-handing." Essentially the idea that people ride off of other peoples' ideas instead of engaging their own critical faculties.
In the forward of my version of Fountainhead, Rand criticized architecture that carried forward traditional design elements that were no longer adding value or purpose. Think of the decorative (non-closing) shutters that are common on houses. Or in another context, electric vehicles with radiator grilles. That's the sense in which she liked modern design IMO.
Ayn Rand's architect wasn't a modern architect in the sense of being a follower of the Modernist school of architecture; he was an architect who eschewed the idea of schools of architecture in favor of developing new ways of using new technologies that utilized their own properties to produce inherent beauty. He happened to be a modern architect in the book because the Modernist school of architecture arose out of this very experimentation; if the book were written today, he'd be following whatever schools of architecture are currently doing this kind of experimentation. The point was not about what school of architecture is correct, it was about not pigeonholing yourself into a school of architecture in the first place.
Consider modern, in the sense of new today, architecture; lots of people are very unhappy that other people are buying houses with open floor plans and vaulted ceilings and other characteristics that together are often disparaged as "McMansions". But these new (not so new anymore, but whatever) architectural designs for houses arose because architects started experimenting with new (again, not so new anymore, but whatever) technologies, specifically modern truss construction, which allowed these features to be included in new construction quite cheaply, whereas with previous technologies these things were extremely expensive.
It's not quite innovation in the sense that vaulted ceilings never existed before, mind, but it is innovation in the sense of using new(ish) technologies in ways that emphasize their inherent qualities.
I think it's a good demonstration that many things we think of as traits are actually not deep structures that manifest across multiple contexts. Wolfe and Rand have in common being despisers of leftwing intellectuals, and being contemptuous of bragging and other status driven behavior. So they might agree fairly well about some new writer whose subject was leftwing intellectual stuff, and what is an admirable way to live. But take an entirely different context, such as architecture, and their views are far apart, even though each may be making the case to themselves and others that their views about architecture flow naturally from their big takes about life and political stance.
When people have a neurological disorder that makes them do random things, or leaves them with memory gaps, they sometimes confabulate -- they come up with a story that explains anomalies and fills gaps, and they are not aware that it is not true. I think we all do something similar regarding ourselves and others, driven by our need to believe we and other people are consistent and in control in ways we are not. The idea that we or someone else has traits that cut across categories and explain a lot of what the person thinks and does is in that category. It's not really true, but it satisfies our need to feel that people make sense and are predictable.
There are not many real traits, i.e. regularities of a certain kind that show up across most realms of life. Intelligence is the best example of one I can think of at the moment.
Hahah fair enough, thought you had a very wild take on what Left and Right means. I think I sort of agree with you, but I would say that I there *is* a deep structure in Wolfe's thinking - the one you identify: it it's not about art per se, it's about people: as you say, he despises status-driven behaviour. But he ends up disclaiming any art that's part of a canon that's favoured by people seeking status. This is ironic, because one of his problems with modern art is that it's all about theory and not practice - but he himself ends up rejecting artworks because of the theory to which they belong, rather than evaluating on their own merits.
Rand was writing in the early 1940s when the modernist-sounding ideals that Roark espouses had barely been tried.
Wolfe was writing in the 1980s when they had already been tried and failed.
Roark's style isn't really modernism, it's some kind of brilliant hyper modernism that does away with unnecessary ornamentation but still makes every building both functional and beautiful. (Unless you watch the movie in which case he's clearly just building concrete boxes.)
Modernism is older than the 1940s. Concrete goes back to the Romans, and plate glass to the Victorians
Modern architecture is thought of as two things --using new materials, and avoiding decoation -- .that don't have to go together.
People dont unconditionally love decoration. The high Victorian style of clutter never came back. The Victorians invented plate glass, but combined it with fussy decoration in the form of acid etching.Everyone now prefers big plate glass windows to leaded lights.
The art deco and streamline moderne styles, with their restrained levels of decoration, are a hundred years old ,still look modern, and still look good. That was a modern style that was an aesthetic success. (Not always a practical success -- Fallingwater and Villa Savoye proved uninhabitable).
Brutalism rejects , rather than restrains, ornament, but isn't synonymous with modern architecture. Plain brick or wood surfaces are compatible with brutalist principles , and aren't objectionable. What people hate is unpainted concrete.
Well Wolfe was responding to actual modern architecture. Is that what Roark was specifically building? Seems to me his architecture style was just a metaphor for individualism or some such, not a commentary on literal architecture styles.
The model for Roark was Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand personally liked art deco and craftsman architecture and expressly disliked brutalism (she called it "concrete collectivism"). I think what's going on is that Rand and Wolfe were responding to different eras and so "modern" means different things to each of them.
You can take the Russian out of the Soviet, but you can't take the Soviet out of the Russian. Ayn Rand was simply a modernist-rationalist turboprogressive who happened to be anti-Communist due to her experiences of being crushed by the gears of Communism, so she decided to utopize laissez-faire free enterprise instead. Tom Wolfe, in contrast, was sane.
One of the more annoying Objectivist-isms is the insistence that Rand was a creature of pure reason, and that her views weren't colored by growing up in a bourgeoisie family during the communist revolution, being an immigrant, or being Jewish in WASP America.
On the other hand, telling people about this amazing female immigrant author you discovered, then handing them a copy of Atlas Shrugged, is an enjoyable troll.
The trouble with Wolfe is that he was only familiar with NYC art culture, which was a small subset of worldwide art culture. And even in the heyday of philosophical art (the 1970s and 1980s), plenty of US and British artists were producing conceptually *new* art using realist techniques. Wolfe thought that Abstract Expressionism was the last style that could evoke feelings in the viewer. And from his narrow perspective, he was right. Meanwhile, South American and Latin American art went off in two different directions. European Artists eschewed most of the American (NYC) Art movements, and they went their own way. After the Berlin Wall fell, classically trained Soviet era artists found new freedom to express themselves using the techniques they were trained in before the Wall fell, revitalizing German Art.
In his own way, Wolfe was just as pretentious as the critics and artists he mocked. Even when he left his Manhattan environs he brought his Manhattan-infused outlook with him.
I don't think pretentious is a fair word here. He knew a lot about a part of the universe of art-making, and lost track of the fact that it was just one part. Most people have some of that going on.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. However, I've noticed a subtle cultural arrogance among New York City intellectuals. I don't want to go all Ted Cruz on you, but there was some truth to Saul Steinberg's cartoon map of the US in relation to New York City...
That's not to invalidate any of Wolfe's criticisms (though I might disagree with many of them). It just puts them in context of a wider cultural feeling.
Well, he loved the kid in Oklahoma or somewhere like that who turned his car into a kandy-colored tangerine flake streamline baby. And he quoted scornfully some mock-impressed ironic articles about the kar, commenting that “what they’re really saying is ‘don’t worry, these people are nothing’”
Well, that's just because anything and everything to do with modern art is shit. When something's irredeemable garbage, the only sensible thing to call it is...
Yes. The Impressionists ruined Art forever. In fact, Western Art began to lose its way back in the 16th century with the Mannerists, who stretched and twisted their subjects out of normal proportion. Disgusting! Of course, before the Mannerists, we had to deal with icon-infested paintings of the papists. So, I suppose Art has been going downhill since Cro-Magnon cave paintings.
Uh, if it doesn't seem like an intuitive category to you, let's go with "every single thing painted after Bouguereau". That way we'll be sure not to miss any of the gangrenous tissue.
"Yet Wolfe’s dislike of faux intellectualism leads him to mock modern architecture, whereas Ayn Rand’s causes her to make her protagonist in Fountainhead… a modern architect. What are we to make of this?"
I think that there are several flavors here.
Focusing on Ayn Rand I believe (?) that:
*) She would have disliked Art Nouveau
*) She did like Art Deco (e.g. Empire State Building)
*) She would have disliked Brutalism (e.g. Soviet Block Housing)
Did Wolfe dislike both Art Deco *and* Brutalism, just Brutalism or something else?
That's what I remember, too. It's been a very, very long time since I tried to read Fountainhead, but I recall Roark's buildings being described as sleek, functional, devoid of useless decorative aspects, and feeling like natural extensions of the landscape. I've heard interpretations that Rand was describing something very much like Frank Lloyd Wright's style, which seems to fit from what I recall of the descriptions.
The issue is complicated by the fact that Anglophone conservatives traditionally had affinity with WASP culture, even if they were atheist. And Protestants traditionally valued plainness and simplicity.
At least online, it seems the most passionate proponents of "Make Architecture Great Again" are Catholics. A cynic might speculate that they are truthfully concerned less with aesthetics, and more with perpetuating a 500 year old grudge. And with providing (thin) justification for the Vatican's unbiblical opulence and luxury.
Well it could be cultural Catholics or even anglicans who prefer a cathedral to a Protestant barn. Actually scrap that - the whole world does. Visitors to Europe from Asia aren’t rushing to see the Korean Protestant church building in Malmö.
I don’t think Anglos are as hostile to ornamentation as all that either. The Republic was a blip.
I'm not entirely sure how tongue-in-cheek that last part is, but it just makes me even more triumphant that the Plain Protestant Bible-Only simplicity of the Crystal Cathedral has fallen into the hands of the Ornate Papist Hispanics and Vietnamese of Orange County, Darn Them! 😁
Not tongue-in-cheek at all. I don't feel inclined to change my view based on learning about the Crystal Cathedral. I've been to a Protestant cathedral before and of course they are highly ornate, how could a cathedral be otherwise? But there few cathedrals in the non-Anglican Protestant world. I'm still inclined to think that Protestant churches are less ornamented on average.
Nah. Anglicans might have gotten over it, to a large extent. But just compare your average Protestant church to your average Catholic church in terms of ornamentation.
The two things of his I've read were "The Right Stuff" and "A Man in Full". From those at least, I definitely see both strong areas of agreement and disagreement between him and Rand.
Wolfe and Rand both seem to hero-worship extremes of individual talent and skill as well as physical and moral courage, and both of them admire accomplishments that stem from combinations of these while despising or disdaining people whom they see as coasting parasitically on the virtues and efforts of others. Both of them also have strong normative themes about how people should take responsibility for their own lives and not expect the world to owe them anything.
The big area of disagreement is, as you say, Rand being a minarchist counterrevolutionary while Wolfe is merely temperamentally conservative. If Rand had written The Right Stuff, it would have been a morality tale about the evils and folly of tax-funded megascience, probably focused on the Apollo 1 disaster instead of the successful Mercury program.
If she did A Man in Full, the changes would have been more subtle but also more fundamental: the bankruptcy plot might have been driven by government oppression (probably tied in with the Atlanta politics plot in a very different way than how Wolfe wrote it) rather than Croker's bad luck and moral failings, Conrad would have discovered Objectivism rather than Stoicism in prison, and the ending would have been framed as leaving the looters and moochers to clean up their own mess rather than as a flawed man standing up and accepting the consequences of his own mistakes.
Thank you for that. It's been a while since I've read any of her essays, and I'd forgotten how much more nuance she was capable of in short-form writings at least than she's usually given credit for. From what I recall, I mostly preferred Nathaniel Brandon's essays to Rand's in the essay collection books I'd read ("Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" and "The Virtue of Selfishness"), but Rand also had her moments especially when talking more about object-level issues than when trying to articulate grand philosophical concepts in the abstract.
My first instinct for how she'd handle writing something like The Right Stuff was pretty much the notes she actually hit in that essay: lauding the triumph of human endeavors, the skill of the engineers and the courage of the astronauts, while also intensely disliking that it was a government project decreed by politicians and paid for by coercively taxation. But then I second-guessed myself while thinking mostly of what I remember of her novels that I've read (Atlas Shrugged and the first half of Fountainhead, although it has also been many, many years since I read those).
I think Rand's polestar was human accomplishment, and putting a human on the Moon with 1960s-era technology was an absolutely incredible achievement. She might have preferred a different funding model or a different management structure, but the accomplishment was still amazing.
It's like you can be amazed at the accomplishment of building the Taj Mahal or the Sistine Chapel even without loving the underlying religious or social beliefs of the people who built them.
Agreed, and it was also a major introduction to Stoicism for me. I was familiar with very basic concepts of Stoicism before, from Roman history and from some of Harry Turtledove's novels, but A Man in Full explored it in quite a bit more depth. I'd first picked up the book expecting high-finance intrigue, based on a blog I read posting a long excerpt from the "saddlebags" scene, and was surprised but not disappointed to find the book covering more philosophical themes as its primary focus.
This tracks. At least I know that "The Bonfire of the Vanities" didn't feature any apparent structural critiques of our society. What it did lampoon was rap lyrics and liberal race baiters, along with entitled rich people.
Is there some sort of forum, group, etc. that collects individual experiences from healthcare systems across the world? I read a lot about the American one here, but I realize I do not know much about the ones in other countries.
I feel like having some knowledge about what works and what doesn't, and what people are actually struggling with in their daily lives, would go a long way to inform one's opinion of healthcare systems.
A too common opinion is "burn it all to the ground and rebuild it". But seeing how other places do things can be helpful to find alternative and avoid pitfalls.
As an example, I have been having some knee problems, and it went like this:
* My GP prescribed me an MRI and some bloodwork to check for potential problems.
* I got an appointment with an MRI center. I chose one next to my place. They had same-day availability but they are allowed to charge a supplement on top of the "social security price" of the exam. Places without a supplement have a longer waiting time.
* The day before, they sent me a message with some instructions and a price range depending on the exact exam (€150 to €162).
* On arrival, they gave me a quote: €150 (about €50 covered by the socialized healthcare and about €100 of supplement, reimbursed by my private health insurance I have through my work).
* After the exam was done, I paid and they gave me the forms I had to send to the social security agency to be reimbursed (it is less and less common; most of the time it is done automatically).
* On my way back, I stopped by a lab and showed them my bloodwork prescription. They told me it could be done now. This time, I didn't have to pay upfront, as they are connected to the system and are directly paid by the public healthcare and my health insurance.
* I received my results by email a few days later.
* I went to see my GP again. She prescribed me some physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medication, and paracetamol.
* I went to the pharmacy, gave them my prescription, and got the paracetamol and anti-inflammatory. As long as I accept the generic version, I pay nothing (I would have to pay if I wanted the brand name).
* -> CURRENT STEP: I have an appointment with a physical therapist.
you could look at digital nomad-communities (e.g. r/digitalnomad/ ). They talk about cities all over the world and they compare quality of life there, though I am not sure they have much information on healthcare specifically. But you can definitely ask your question there, and people in different parts of the world will answer.
I hadn't thought about that ! I'm pretty sure discussion about healthcare would come up frequently as it would be a common concern when moving into a new country.
However, I was most interested in the "typical experience", and being an expat would be too much of an edge case to truly represent how the healthcare "feels like" in a given country.
>Is there some sort of forum, group, etc. that collects individual experiences from healthcare systems across the world?
American here. Such a thing would be of interest to me as well.
Thank you for the example of your own experience. Which country were you in, and what does "Social Security" mean there? Here, Social Security is our federal system of tax-funded pensions for retirees and disabled people. I'm vaguely aware that in Britain, Social Security is some kind of program for unemployed people. The way you're using the term, it sounds like in your country it's part of the health care system?
That made me curious, so I went and tried to compare :
* US : "In the United States, Social Security is the commonly used term for the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI)"
* UK : "it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers."
* Italy : " The national Institute for Social Security (Italian: Istituto nazionale della previdenza sociale, INPS) is the main public entity and authority of the Italian public retirement system"
* Germany : "Social security in Germany is codified on the Sozialgesetzbuch contains 12 main parts, including the following, Unemployment insurance, health insurance, old age, widow's/widower's, orphans and disability pension insurance, invalidity insurance, child support, social care"
* France : "Social security (French: sécurité sociale) is divided by the French government into five branches: illness; old age/retirement; family; work accident; and occupational disease."
It seems indeed that the term "social security" has a very different meaning in different countries. Personally, I had the french/german meaning in mind : "collective solidarity with the people who need it". In that sense, both pensions and healthcare fall under the term "social security".
The post itself mostly covers how the various systems work at large, but the comments do indeed give a long of insights into "how it feels" inside the system. Thanks
Ultimately all medical systems are the same. You get shuttled around from waiting room to waiting room, occasionally seeing a medical professional. Sometimes you get to make a choice, like which doctor to see. Sometimes you have to pay some money.
The only differences between all the medical systems of the reasonably-developed world are the points at which you get to wait, choose, or pay.
Alan R's anecdote probably looks exactly the same in another country except in these details.
Well, maybe the treatment side is similar in most countries, but dealing with the system can be a very different experience in various places.
The comments in the linked post do provide a lot of insights.
Examples :
* Having the price of an exam posted on the door vs not knowing the price until after the exam is done (including being explained why it is "impossible" to have a price beforehand)
* Fighting with your private insurance who tries to argue that an exam is not "medical necessity" vs the medical necessity being assumed when prescribed by your GP (but then the system has to find another way to avoid uneccesary exams?)
* Two-tier system vs equal access to everyone (lots of heated discussion in the comments about that)
People say office vacancies are an issue and advocate for office to residential conversions lately.
But! office space still rents for roughly ten times (in $ per square foot) what residential space does (even in the same location)! It seems like this implies (a) there's more of a shortage of office space than there is of residential space and (b) doing residential to office conversions would raise GDP. It seems like, if we didn't have zoning regulations, there should be residential to office conversions until the converge.
Is this wrong? You can argue that residential space has positive externalities that aren't captured in GDP (although a 10x factor seems really hard to overcome). Would increasing office space downtown really help that much? The number of available workers is already limited by the residential space within commute distance, so arguably it'd just increase commute length/traffic and reduce utility (although if it replaced offices further out of downtown maybe it'd net reduce commutes since location became more centralized). Are there companies that struggle to afford office rent that would be saved by this, allowing them to pay employees more? What would the practical effects be? I am Confused.
First, a mistaken premise: your median office does not rent 10x (!) per sqft vs a comparable apartment of “equivalent” quality in the same location (block, building). It would be very hard to do a direct comparison here but if you just take national medians and compare naively without considering gross or NNN for the office terms, office rents are 1.3-1.5x residential per sqft (not 10x). Capex is a factor, lease lengths are different (res much more liquid), and you should not compare naively w/o understanding terms.
In areas where the juice is worth the squeeze and it’s permitted, such conversions are done. But the rest of your argument/question seems to be based on ignorance of the market.
I was looking specifically in Manhattan, which has been doing office to residential conversions lately. Sounds right that this is reversed in some areas though
You really have to look at the type of real estate.
NYC has had an explosion of office to residential conversions recently, and has had record high office vacancy. Class A office space (newer with nicer amenities) has low vacancy and high rents, whereas class B and C has much higher vacancy rates. All those older buildings are the ones being converted to residential when they’re due for a complete remodel anyway.
Residential to office conversions just wouldn’t happen, since you wouldn’t really be creating class A office space, but sort of a weird class of oddly designed space as a result of its residential legacy. You’d end up with really high vacancy rates almost immediately.
Office to residential conversions work (at least in this market) because even with strange layouts you will fill the residential units instantly.
The square foot of residential isn’t 1:1 comparable with office either. With residential to office conversions usually resulting in 1.5-2x the rentable space. This is due to weird ways that office often counts square feet compared to residential, not actual increases is sqft available.
Your NYC description is exactly the situation underway in Chicago's Loop. Several such conversions have been completed in the past couple of years (one is across the street from where I'm typing this and it filled within weeks of completion). A dozen or so more are in different stages of implementation, another dozen proposed are in the approvals process. All are 50- to 100-year-old class B or C buildings of locally-medium size (25 to 45 stories, converting to 150 to 400 dwelling units each).
The class A buildings, which are larger and younger, are sticking with the office uses for which they were designed and built. Google is doing the only sizeable office renovation/overhaul for business uses that I'm aware of in the Loop. _New_ residential construction meanwhile is booming mostly surrounding the old Loop business district proper [which depending on whose definition you like is roughly 4/5ths of a square mile].
The above is part of why Chicago's "Central Area" as defined by the city planning department [an area of about 6 square miles not counting its public spaces] has gone from around 80,000 residents in 2005 to 185,000 now and the planners project 300,000+ by 2045. It's also obviously a big part of the city as a whole's per-household median income, in constant 2023 dollars, rising from about $62K in 2013 to about $76K now.
Yeah, besides NYC, Chicago is the place I would imagine this to a growing thing. Maybe Toronto or Philadelphia too.
You need growing cities with high residential rents that have had skyscrapers for ~70+ years with a lot of new Class A office space. The old office space that would be due to a remodel anyways can't possibly hope to compete with the newer developments, so converting to residential, where people will pay a premium for location becomes a good idea.
I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on a massive redevelopment (I think the biggest in the world) in FiDi which had some really impressive amenities for what it is. The CEO of the company that led the development has been doing conversions for years, and he was telling us that it was a relatively small business until like ~8 years ago. Now everyone was lauding him for his foresight, but he was really humble about how he had no idea the demand was going to increase so much.
There have been a couple of good sized examples of this as part of Detroit’s downtown revival as well.
Until just a couple years ago I was hearing plenty of skepticism of this ever working at any kind of scale, because those office buildings of course were not built with the plumbing or layouts suitable for residences. Anybody who’s been through any sort of home remodel knows what an expensive headache plumbing changes in particular can be so looking at a 40-story 1920s building…yikes. Also those early-20th-century buildings tend to have more unmovable interior elements (columns etc).
It does now look though like the few such as the guy you spoke with were correct that those challenges can be overcome at plausible cost, cause it’s happening.
It doesn't have to be cheap, it just has to be (a) cheaper than building a new apartment tower, and (b) in a location where there's demand for apartment towers.
I'm not an expert but I've rented commercial office space. It seems that the vast majority of landlords would rather have space sit empty than decrease the price, because somehow the terms of their loans are tied to the price per square foot rather than actual leasing revenue. Instead when supply and demand want a lower price you get arrangements that transfer some value back to the customer without changing the price per square foot: free rent, buildout costs (these can be enormous; residential renters don't usually basically rebuild their apartment), etc. But you also see empty space.
The key takeaway from the article is: "The short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it."
That was interesting. So it is both in the interests of the building owner and the bank to pretend that the building is able to generate more income (i.e. is worth more) than it actually is.
While I am sure that there are many situations where it is in one market participant's interests to distort the market, I am very skeptical that there exists a situation where that will be in the best interest of everyone. Basically, balance fraud is never a victimless crime, there is always someone who risks losing if things turn out badly, and typically that someone is not even aware of the fraud.
Here, that someone would be the other customers of the bank. On top of that, not letting the market determine the effective allocation of resources will let to a poorer allocation of resources -- businesses paying more rent than they should while office space is rotting empty.
Personally, I would question if we need banks in the real estate investment market at all. I can get a home owner wanting to finance their home. I have a lot less understanding why someone who founds a company renting office space would need a bank loan. After all, few people would look at the real estate market in cities and say that the main problem is a lack of liquidity.
So if you want to buy a 20M$ office building, but only have 4M$, the obvious solution is to pool your money with other investors and buy 4M$ worth of shares in some company which holds the office building. The share price is defined by the market, if you announce that the rents you collected are only 500k$ instead of 1M$ last year the market will adjust the price of the company, and it will be in your interests to lower the rents enough to get high occupancy. Capitalism as it should work.
If you want higher profits than that, you can just leverage your investment. Find a bigger office space company (say 100M$ market cap), and find some bank which is willing to lend you 16M$ against 20M$ worth of shares. If your shares drop to 16M$, the bank will just sell them for you to secure their loan, and you will be fresh out of 4M$. As it should be.
--
My other idea on how to solve this is that this weird market behavior is a consequence of the lack elasticity of land.
If instead of investing in real estate, you had used your 4+16M$ to buy some other business, say a restaurant, then you would not want to to pay interest on a business which is unprofitable for decades, because your frying pans will depreciate on that time frame, if they do not pay for themselves in ten years, they will never pay for themselves. So instead you declare bankruptcy as soon as you are convinced that you can not turn it around rather than pumping in money to keep it afloat forever.
But with land, it seems always likely that you can sell it for a decent amount if you just wait long enough. So even if your office building is never going to turn a profit, it will also not be a complete write-off.
The solution here is of course a Georgist land value tax. If all the gains from the unimproved land are taxed at 100%, then the price of unimproved land should go to zero. If it is common knowledge that this price is zero, and will remain zero, then rents are the only reliable way to turn a profit from real estate. Granted, a building will probably depreciate slower than a frying pan, but if it you can not earn its price from rents in a few decades, then you overpaid.
>"While I am sure that there are many situations where it is in one market participant's interests to distort the market, I am very skeptical that there exists a situation where that will be in the best interest of everyone."
Skimming the article above, it looks to me like the building operator & the bank are collaborating to avoid regulatory thresholds that would force greater realized losses than the unrealized losses they're collectively sitting on.
If so, then without the regulatory requirements we'd probably see more intuitive behavior in commercial real estate.
Book recommendation, “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us” by Carole Hooven. I finished this book a few days ago. This book is profound, I keep coming back to it. It might be the most important book on human sexuality that I’ve read ever. (I said might.) The author has a voice that appeals to me, frank and funny. As a male the book is about T, testosterone. The hormone that has set the tone of my life, and I kinda wonder what life would be like if I wasn’t getting a hit of T every 100 minutes or so. What is life like on the other side? Anyway it’s a book I’d like more people to read so we can talk about it.
I'm going to read this, based on your recommendation.
It's horribly obvious what a pronounced effect hormones have on us; as I get older and their effects weaken their vice-like grip a bit, it becomes more and more obvious to me just how much sway they have over our choices and our lives.
Best to get at least a little bit educated on the matter!
Some of the most interesting stories are near the end of the book where she talks about people who have transitioned, going on and off testosterone. But read the whole thing, it's fascinating.
Haven't read this book so I can't comment on its quality, but as a general note I recommend taking pop-sci books with a grain of salt.
If you want to find out what it's like to not have the acute effects of testosterone, it is safe enough to take something to suppress it for a day. You probably won't notice any differences, though.
Pop-sci is science targeted at a general audience. Pop-sci books have an unenviable track record for accuracy.
It's not often the author's fault, more so that research in biology (and other fields) rarely lends itself to stories that sell, so some compromises between accuracy and a coherent narrative are inevitable. Holes are papered over, uncertainty is downplayed, just-so stories are told. Well-written pop-sci can be educational to a general audience, but at risk of elitism, most people in this forum seeking to seriously understand a topic can do better.
Once again, I'm not familiar with this book or its author, so I make no specific criticisms. But I've read enough pop-sci to know "I read this book a few days ago and it transformed my understanding of [topic as massive as sexuality]" is a red flag. Pop-sci is really good at making you feel like you've read something incredibly profound, regardless of how well its claims hold up under scrutiny. That's what it's optimized to do. I'd recommend looking up some criticisms of the book to get a more even picture.
(And maybe you'll think it through and come to the conclusion that Hooven is 100% right about everything and a total genius, I don't know, and I have no horse in this race. Just chill out a bit first, I've gone through this cycle too often when I was younger).
Whatever dude, the last 1/3 of the book are references for what she writes in the chapters. No one is 100% correct and Carroll does a decent job of telling you where she sees holes in how she understands things. I guess I would just suggest you gain a little more knowledge yourself before you criticize wildly. You should take the book as it is, not in regards to my opinion of it. But please don't read it.
Have there been any updates? Did the costs continue to increase at roughly the same rates or has it gotten better/worse? Are the reasons better understood now?
I cannot find links now, but tuition in the US has gone down in real terms compared to a few years ago, mostly due to weaker demand, as there are fewer 18-years-olds and the wage premium has decreased. I believe this trend started before Trump's crackdown on immigration and universities.
Many, MANY people confound the "sticker price" with the "actual price" of tuition. Basically, there are discounts for being smart or poor, only people who are dumb and rich are paying full price. Harvard's _actual_ price is ~$15k/year
"Many, MANY people confound the "sticker price" with the "actual price" of tuition."
True, and important, though also not nearly so simple. My spouse being a full-time consultant to families on this, deploying her decades of high-level experience in college admissions, I've gained by osmosis an updated data-driven understanding of the topic.
Harvard's example is roughly illustrative of how it works at most of most-difficult-to-get-into colleges. Harvard's current all-in sticker price is currently around $82K/year.
The actual cost of attending Harvard varies drastically. It is zero for students coming from households with incomes under [as of this school year] $100K/year.
For families with household incomes in the 100K to 200K range the actual cost is anywhere from one-sixth to one-third of sticker price.
For families of 200K to 500K household income it is between half and two-thirds of the sticker price.
For households above that, and all international students, the cost is basically 100 percent of sticker price with some extremely-niche exceptions.
So while it's accurate that a simple averaging of the current student body puts the cost of attending Harvard College at around $20K/year/student, a simple averaging doesn't very well describe the picture.
Worth noting that Harvard, like hundreds of other US colleges, has become much more transparent about this question: they all now have online "net-price calculators" which anyone can use to get a pretty-good estimate of actual net cost if you get in. Then can come some negotiation though in this specific example likely not, as the Harvards/Yales/Stanfords for obvious reasons will negotiate only with a very-tiny minority of the most-unique admittees. Starting not far down the college food chain though there is more negotiation than I'd ever known or than most parents assume.
[Also my wife would insist I note that none of the above applies to any level of graduate school at the elite institutions as she knows firsthand.]
I honestly think it's amazing that we HAVE GOTTEN the world we wanted, in which the rich subsidize the poor and/or smart... and yet everyone whines about it
In my experience, elite schools, don’t typically offer merit scholarships because they don’t have to. There is a rather large contingent of students who are too rich to be poor, but not rich enough that their parents can easily pay the massive tuition bill.
And again I'll note that none of this is being treated as a trade secret any more. The list of colleges that have put a "net price calculator" on their websites continues to grow and now includes lots of large public universities. Here is the running list for the best-established version of that function (there are others):
Right, I was just providing direct evidence to counter "that seems unlikely"... it might be unlikely, but it's empirically correct.
It's just one of those extremely common misconceptions that I feel obliged to correct, since such a huge chunk of national discourse is so horribly mistaken about it.
WE DID IT! THE RICH ARE SUBSIDIZING THE POOR! We should be shouting this from the rooftops, instead of whining about "astronomical costs" (lol)
My first was pretty straightforward: unable to make out most of the lyrics of Seven Nation Army, I interpreted the line "taking their time right behind my back" to mean the singer was at the vanguard of the titular army, and that "they're gonna rip it off" was a threat.
One of my coworkers was playing Creedence Clearwater Revival, which led to a discussion in which I learned that I am not the only one who mishears the chorus of Bad Moon Rising--though I was the only one to hear "there's a baboon on the rice" instead of the apparently ubiquitous "there's a bathroom on the right". Mine is a nearer match to the actual lyrics, so I count this as a point for Brenton versus the world.
While playing SSX, my brother and I greatly enjoyed Houdini by Foster the People, which clearly ends in the refrain "get 'em get 'em with a wompa stick".
Say My Name by Odesza has a poignant chorus: "No one knows you better than the girl in the corner with the scarlet letter\you think it doesn't matter, that no one loves you"--
But it's actually much more one-sided than that. I think this interpretation and the Seven Nation Army one are the most telling.
More recently, Take Me to Church is a genuinely dark pop song about a couple going around committing ritual murder, with the chorus "Take me to church [something something] time of your life\so I can tell you my fears and you can show me your knife"--
No, wait, it's just another pop song about oral sex, with the chorus beginning "I worship like a dog at the shrine of delight"--
But really it isn't either of those things.
Finally, we all know Puff the Magic Dragon is a poignant story about loss of innocence, but before that, we get to hear about their adventures: "Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sails\Jackie kept a lookout, perched on Puff's gigantic tail\noble kings and princes would bow wheree'er they came\iron ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name".
A mighty dragon indeed to make even an iron ship turn away! And how delightful to hear the word pronounced "EYE-run" instead of "EYE-urn"--
Except the actual phrase is "pirate ships would lower their flags", which I will admit makes more sense.
Finally, a non-song example, my father and I were very fond of the silly Series of Unfortunate Events film adaptation. "Does Anyone Know You Are Coming This Way", "Is that clock correct?", &c., but most especially the scene in which Captain Sham runs into Aunt Josephine and utters the singular Irish/Newfie "Lard tunderin', jumped-up Jehovah! You don't know how sohrry aye is fer runnin' into yer sister der like none!"
"Like none" in particular struck us as a particularly evocative turn of phrase--there's no one and nothing in the world as sorry as he is--
So of course it's the only part of the sentence we misheard. Our disappointment was immeasurable when, upon watching the film again years later with the subtitles on, we discovered the actual phrase is "like dat".
If you like the Series of Unfortunate Events movie, you'd probably very much enjoy the show on netflix, it's very funny and good. My wife and I watched it for a second time this past winter.
You're already hearing a lot more lyrics from these songs than I am. I never got anything from Seven Nation Army except that the guy is going to Wichita, cannot be held back by a multinational force, and something about the Queen of England and the Gates of Hell. Everything else is a mumble to me.
Three people in the car once heard Stevie Nicks singing about a dove; one of us heard "white", one heard "wide", and one heard "one". (The actual lyric, of course, is "a wah-winged dove.")
There was also a song on at the grocery store one time (and only one time); I couldn't understand a word of it, but it had a repeating lyric that I'm sure was "Do the Flip, Do the Gender Flip": an interpretation only strengthened by the male rapper getting replaced by a female vocalist during the chorus.
I can't find the song, but there was a song I heard when I was growing up that used the phrase Wishful thinking, and I had just been to a town in the U.P. of Michigan called Ishpeming, I thought the singer was saying the name of the town for some reason.
I have so many of these there's a good chance there's one for nearly every song I've heard. But just a few off the top of my head:
The Beatles' Michelle--I could have sworn "play piano song" was in the lyrics, I was amazed to search up the phrase and get not a link to the name of the song but to the TVTropes Mondegreen page; apparently the full misheard line is "some day monkey won't play piano song".
O-Zone's Dragonstea Din Tei--there are videos with all the commonly heard lyrics and I had a lot of them myself: "raise the pleasure" "keep her down she's a rather slutty date" "you be the man who mashed the feta cheese".
Okay those two are very common, and also both not in English. More unique to me (I think?):
Bon Jovi's Livin On A Prayer--heard the first line as "tell me you still want coloured ducks"...or something.
A minor one but I thought a line in Alphaville's Forever Young was "so many advantages could have today" (interpreted as Yoda-speak: today could have so many advantages) which I think is more philosophical and poetic and I'm annoyed it's not the actual line.
Another minor one--a thought a line in Abba's The Winner Takes It All was "it's simple and explained, why should I complain?" instead of "simple and it's plain" and I think the first one makes a lot more sense, and fits the metaphor of the song a lot better.
This isn't technically a Mondegreen but: I heard the Black Eyed Peas' Imma Be and I genuinely thought it was about a bee partying and clubbing etc. Kind of weird but no weirder than lot of other thinhs they've done. Was quite shocked to learn it's not actually about that.
The best of these is The Unforgiven by Metallica, listened to by French ears, in which case one clearly hears: "nous battons les œufs, et cui-cui ils sont durs"
Which means: "we beat the eggs, and pronto they are firm"
😆
But more sinister, a generation of French grew up hearing KRS-ones "Sound of da police" in La Haine. But they heard "Assassin de la Police" 😬
For a while I thought the end of the first verse of Hallelujah spoke of 'the barefoot king' rather than 'the baffled king'. While I defer to Mr Cohen's superior poetic understanding I still personally prefer my version of the epithet.
I can't just tell you A Good Band Name. What kind of band? Who are the members? What's your sound? Are you focused on studio recordings, live performances, merch?
The Tentacle Experience would work great for a spiritual successor to Phish (99% of concert attendees never go inside because they're just in it to huff nitrous in the parking lot, but their T-shirts are incredible); you can see how that would be different from Associated Sensations, Certified Destruction, or Beaver Vigil.
Not my particular Modegreen (and I was today years old when I learned that word, thank you) and maybe a misinterpretation and not a Modegreen ; but Bob Marley’s No woman, no cry is trying to comfort a woman not support male celibacy.
And now I'm learning that it's NOT about comforting a woman. What's the point of being The Guy with the Weed if you're not also making sure everybody's fed and taken care of?
I replied too quickly. The intended meaning is "Woman, don't cry" not "if you don't have a woman, you won't cry"--which the Wikipedia article notes is a common misunderstanding outside Jamaica.
"Maladaptive openness" is a good phrase. I've generally called myself gullible (something which improved greatly after moving to a city and immersing myself in an initially-hostile community), but I think we're struggling with the same thing. Far too easy to say "Yeah, sure, why not?" at times.
In the case of Mondegreens, I sort of cultivated the tendency with a habit my father and I had: whenever we thought we'd misheard the other, we'd repeat whatever nonsense our brains had filled in--a sort of bastardized three-way communication protocol. Anyway, my version is usually better (I don't know what Foster the People are saying, but I doubt it will bring more joy than "get 'em get 'em with a wompa stick").
This should not have surprised anyone, but even I was surprised by the margin the statement was approved by, 216-5! Along with the recent revelations that Jeffrey Epstein was a resistlib, this is just more evidence that people who have a lot of accomplishments in life, from ditzy Hollywood celebrities to Catholic bishops to PhD physicists to Wall Street financiers to Richard Spencer, do not like Donald Trump and his message that everything should revolve around what sounds good to some 92 IQ Iowa trucker.
It should not be surprising that the US branch of an international religious organization, especially a religious organization extremely popular in the countries many immigrants are coming from, is condemning Trump on immigration.
Although I'm in agreement on this, I wouldn't draw any broader conclusions.
Yeah. And the USCCB is *notoriously* to the left of most Catholics *even in the US*, let alone internationally. And the Catholic church, in general, has taken a strong stance in favor of taking care of refugees--it's not alone in that. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (as an example I'm personally familiar with, not as an attempt at cherry-picking, there are likely many more) is, and has been, *strongly* in favor of increased immigration and especially taking in refugees.
Alexander Turok, The best seller on the NYT non fiction list is a plausible tale of our immanent demise at the hands of an Alien intelligence we are spending trillions around the world inventing. If that does not finish us off then we will invent something else that does.
Perhaps Trump has a point, if the educated class has led us into the present quagmire while blaming everyone but themselves, then the truckers and the bricklayers could hardly do worse.
Isn't that the key to Donald Trump's electoral success: the realization that there are more of latter, and appealing to them at the expense of the support of all the former groups is still worth it?
There's more to it than that. He was able to get through elite gatekeeping systems, such as political parties, that would otherwise keep out a candidate like that. Partly this was good timing (or you could call it luck), partly this was a matter of being excellent at manipulating the media, perhaps his wealth gave him some level of elite credibility, probably some other factors as well.
For what it's worth, I have slowly came to admire the views/actions of the Catholic church, compared to other religious groups (At least in the last century).
Catholic priests, in my experience, have a noticeably lower chance of being *absolutely insane*, compared to your average evangelical.
Of course, I might just be good at dodging the people/history that would make me hate them too.
"Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" [0] is probably my favorite LW post.
TL;DR European-Enlightenment Rationalism is memetically equivalent to AIDS, because it strips people of common sense, which transforms them into religious fundies who take scripture too literally, which makes them go bonkers. In the case of Christianity, this mostly applies to Protestants. But it also noticeably applies to Jihadists. And it dovetails with that one entry's (from the 2024 book-review-contest) observation [1] about how Jihadists take their religion surprisingly seriously. In contrast, there's plenty of Muslims in South East Asia [2] [3], but you generally don't see them blowing up buildings. I also have some similar feelings about e.g. utilitarians/effective-altruists, although the diagnosis isn't quite as bad in these cases.
Here's the key LW passage [0], regarding Jihadism:
> I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam. Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college. (Only 9% had attended madrassas.) A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education. When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they're not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up. But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and comes back with Enlightenment ideas about reason and seeking logical closure over beliefs, and applies them to the Koran, then you have troubles. They have lost their cultural immunity.
Terrorism is just one salient example of many. In my estimation, the craziest stances of both sides of the U.S. political aisle are primarily motivated by Protestantism. E.g. it's been theorized that Wokism is just secularized Calvinism, but I also view Young Earth Creationists (typically rightwing Evangelicals) as also being completely bonkers. The thesis of "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" is that rationality doesn't *guarantee* insanity, but it does remove the guardrails that more-traditional religious denominations had acquired over centuries of memetic adaption. Metaphorically like how AIDS removes antibodies. When Facts & Logic removes Chesterton's Guardrails, anything can happen.
There are plenty of religious groups that aren't bonkers, but they don't tend to be newsworthy. As for the Roman Catholics (can't speak to the others) they're a mixed bag. Many of them seem to be relatively sane and humane, but there are the others. And both are constrained by official church policy.
There are some clear indications that on average less educated tend to vote for Trump and some less clear indications of cognitive capabilities supporting more left-wing and liberal political beliefs
That might have a lot to do with the fact that the left openly disdains the less-educated, while Trump has said that he "love[s] the poorly educated", to much mockery from the left. Also the left likes policies that involve giving free money to highly-educated people.
It seems quite reductive to take a wide trend and connect it to one phrase and a feeling that is not uniformly and clearly expressed the way you represen it.
One could argue that the left disdains the less-educated who want their opinion to be given precedence over the ones of those who know more on the topic.
In many cases this might be regardless of education level but based on field attinence, a greek literature professor who boasts that they should build a nuclear reactor to his specification instead of the nuclear engineer might get the same scorn, even though he is doubtlessly educated, and viceversa.
Going back to Scott's priesthood discourse, I have the subjective impression that the left hates those who ridicule the priesthood without proposing an alternative path, a criticism that can be excessive.
On one side not relying on priesthood (academic knowledge) is impossible, on the other hand it's a severe comunication failure from the priesthood being in a situation where the trust has eroded to sharply. Trump capitalizes on this erosion of trust, but he only worsened it, not created it.
And no the current leftist policies in the US seem to push more towards giving money to the less educated (more precisely the poor but the two groups tend to overlap).
Trump's tax cuts overwhelmingly benefitted the wealthier part of the population, the medicaid cuts will also harm the poorer and least educated parts of society.
Trump might claim to "love the poorly educated" but his policies substantially harm this part of the population. If it's anything resembling love then it's an extremly selfish love.
I think this is the nearest you're likely to come to say something nice about Catholic bishops (they have a lot of accomplishments in life) so thank you, Alexander 😀
Does Christian Weston Chandler have a lot of accomplishments because there's so much documentation about him on places like Kiwifarms or Encyclopedia Dramatica?
The main idea is to have AI judge people's answers to questions and declare a winner. I'm aware that this method of judging has attack vectors.
Anyway there are currently two game variants I care about your feedback on:
1. Quick match -- 1v1 rapid-fire question and answer game with random discussion topics
2. Open Question -- User created questions, many people answer, AI judges all answers in a tournament style algorithm to ultimately arrive at the 'best' answer.
Like I said game is still very much in development, will get a UI/UX overhaul soon as well. And please DM me if you're interested in working on this together, our team is growing quickly.
When I click on that link, I see a login/signup box with no other info or context. Any chance of people being able to, oh, maybe trial a game before making them decide whether they want to start an ongoing relationship with the site?
Updated!! You can look around the site a bit without an account. You'll still need an account if you want to 'play' the game but like I said you can use a dummy email for now if you don't want to use your actual information
Apologies! Any dummy email will work for now as we're not doing email verification yet but will try to push an update shortly to fix this , you're right to complain about this
I've noted before how wokists promise blacks and women jobs in politics, medicine, academia, and the law, while "nationalists" are focused on hooking up their followers with jobs picking crops, hauling equipment, unloading boxes, and digging ditches in the rain. This is a typical example of the genre:
The successor to Charlie Kirk should go around college campuses promising students the opportunity to wash dishes for minimum wage. While most of this stuff is depressingly routine, a few of these accounts are more intelligent and creative in their dedication to promising you the worst jobs imaginable. Take the account "Roman Helmet Guy" who demands an end to the H1B visa so that you can have the opportunity to work as an English teacher in the 93% black Jackson Public School District:
It would be fitting if the GOP, which rose on people's desire to not get stabbed in those kinds of school districts, died based on its desire to get its voters stabbed in those kinds of school districts. Thankfully, President Trump is pushing back against the freaks.
Like other "Roman" accounts on X, Roman helmet guy doesn't have anything like the morality of the real Roman aristocrat, who tolerated homosexuality, had Singerian views on abortion and infanticide, viewed sex with prostitutes as perfectly moral, disdained Judaism and Christianity, and had an aristocratic contempt for manual labor.* In the sophomoric mind on the Roman statue accounts, everyone who lived before 1950 had the same cultural views as Ned Flanders, so the Roman aristocrat is Ned Flanders with big muscles.
*That last thing was bad, to be clear, and may have contributed to the lack of an industrial revolution in ancient Rome. But right-wing poverty fetishists go way too far in the other direction.
>you can have the opportunity to work as an English teacher in the 93% black Jackson Public School District: ... desire to get its voters stabbed in those kinds of school districts.
This is so deeply ignorant that I don't know why you aren't ashamed to say it. Teaching in a 93% black school is challenging, but I know many teachers who do it successfully, and the students there do not go around stabbing people, let alone teachers.
Jackson Mississippi has a homicide rate of 77.24, more than ten times the national rate. I would be very leery about working in a school in a place like that.
Perhaps I could have phrased my comment better, the point I was trying to make was that the GOP rose on appealing to white people's desire to not be in environments like that, and it would be ironic if it shifted its messaging to "I'll put you in environments like that."
>I would be very leery about working in a school in a place like that.
You'd be fine. The greatest danger you would face would be getting in a car accident on the way to work. Schools simply are not that dangerous (in part because the worst actors tend to drop out, but also because even relatively problematic actors tend to act differently at school than on the streets).
Classic fallacy. You clearly only know the 7% of teachers who escape the stabbings. The multitudes of the stabbed cannot stand up and bear witness until the angels wind their trumpets.
> real Roman aristocrat, who tolerated homosexuality, had Singerian views on abortion and infanticide, viewed sex with prostitutes as perfectly moral, disdained Judaism and Christianity, and had an aristocratic contempt for manual labor.
As a Singarian, I would thank you not to use that term for Romans, patrician or otherwise. As someone who is okay with non-coercive sex work, I would also ask that you do not claim that my position is somehow similar to that of ancient Rome.
My understanding is that brothels in Rome were generally staffed by enslaved people. Whatever divergent modern Western civilization holds on sex work, I think that our consensus on abhorring forced sex work bad is very robust.
Likewise infanticide. For Singer, this is mostly a theoretical point he grants to his opponents, that his arguments for abortion would equally apply to newborns. In practice, it is very much not an issue. Pregnancies are not easily transferable, so the main bottleneck is if a given woman is willing to go through the trouble of spending another eight months and go through a somewhat grueling process to give birth to a potential baby. Once the baby is born, that bottleneck is past, and a large fraction of humanity can take care of a baby. Luckily, in the first world, demand for adoption of newborns outstrips supply, so the problem of having too many babies and not enough food in the orphanage simply does not appear.
Contrast with Rome, again. I think the median infanticide also occurred in the context of brothels. Buying new slaves captured in military conquests is expensive, so the sustainable way to get more enslaved sex workers is to let the enslaved women carry their pregnancies to term. The only problem being that about half of the babies will not make good enslaved sex workers. Sure, some Romans would certainly pay to fuck little boys, but overall the demand for sex workers is very much leaning towards females. So rather than spending the resources to raise male children born to enslaved sex workers, the economic incentives of the owner were to kill these kids after birth and hope for better luck in the next pregnancy. Naturally, it can be assumed that their mothers were consenting even less to their fate than they were consenting to anything else which was happening to them.
In short, the median case of infanticide in Rome was likely some brothel owner snapping the neck of a baby of an enslaved mother over her desperate pleas while telling her to try harder to give birth to a girl next time instead of wasting his resources.
Again, I think that I speak for the central 98% of the Western political spectrum when I say that is this is seriously fucked up.
In short, the past is a foreign country, and as a atheist liberal I would pick the most fundamentalist puritans over ancient Rome any day of the week.
"You're a dog owner, Hitler was a dog owner, therefore you're like Hitler" is a stupid argument and the way to counter it is to point out how stupid it is, not to tell people not to share factually accurate information about Hitler.
My impression of the median case of infanticide in ancient Rome is different, it was a peasant couple who killed their infant because there wasn't enough food to feed all their children. In ancient Rome this was regarded as a private family matter, a much better attitude than that of Ned Flanders who'd have demanded the starving family pray instead.
The Ned Flanders types benefit from the perception that their ideas are "natural," the "human default" before feminism/the Frankfurt school/etc came along in the 20th century and ruined it. Modern liberals who express a universal abhorrence for the past play into their hands, allowing them to make an exclusive claim on all of Western civilization up to 1940 or thereabouts. As a Nietzschean classical liberal, (not to be confused with the David French types) I think we should point out many classical liberal ideas have a long pedigree, that they're not some new innovation cooked up by a woman's studies professor named Goldbergstein, they're just the natural way of looking at and interacting with the world when you're not hitting yourself over the head with a Bible.
Curious to hear your take on how contempt for manual labour may have partly prevented an industrial revolution. Is there a sense in which the Romans had more contempt than the English?
Is every single comment you write just the same two points (Trump supporters are low class! Abortion is the best thing ever!) slightly rephrased in ten thousand different ways?
I mean, I agree with one of those, but...doesn't it bother you that instead of doing the high-IQ high-class thing (making a philosophical argument for your positions) you do the low-IQ low-class thing (low effort X and reddit links, rants about terminally online drama, rants about the last day's culture war news feed) over and over and over while praising IQ and class? Is there some intended layer of irony here that I'm missing?
>low effort X and reddit links, rants about terminally online drama, rants about the last day's culture war news feed
As I pointed out to Sol Hando below, "Roman Helmet Guy" is getting into arguments with DeSantis and Musk. This is not "terminally online drama," this is how politics works today. As to "culture war" it's what people want, I've done more high-status writing but it doesn't get as much attention:
"who demands an end to the H1B visa so that you can have the opportunity to work as an English teacher in the 93% black Jackson Public School District:"
Yeah, I don't think many H1B visa holders are working in high schools. When I look up the education field, it's all universities:
Maybe cool your jets about abortion and the lower classes reproducing too highly when they should all be sterilised so the middle-class and aspirant middle-class can get those fancy jobs instead of the minorities? You are starting to get a little hot under the collar there, Alexander.
Maybe reading posts from insignificant accounts you don’t like isn’t a good way to spend your time? Trump derangement syndrome makes sense because he’s the president, but caring Roman Helmet Guy is pointless because he has an insignificant amount of followers.
For autoadmit he has a few thousand followers, which is like a few hundred real people.
There has to be some sort of fallacy where just because someone important interacted with someone once (to disagree with them) that doesn’t make their other views relevant.
I can agree with the idea that nationalists romanticize manual labor, but pointing to tweets from accounts that don’t really have much, if any, following doesn’t really tell me anything about the sentiment.
I don't understand the point of Epstein's Island. His victims and preferences seemed to be girls ~15-18, with the youngest known victim being 14 IIRC.
16 is the age of consent in several US states, 15 and even 14 in many European countries. It seems... not that hard to just be a creep and have sex with that age range completely legally, in a far more discrete way? Why buy an island and make a whole community around it? I'd understand it if it was children pre teenage, an actual pedo ring would've made sense. But even if it was the coercion or rape that turned these people on, it seems like there would've been far easier ways to do that.
The the underage girls were one of Epstein's hobbies, not his business. His business (and his other hobbies) required him to be in someplace like the Virgin Islands, even if e.g. a mansion in rural Georgia were a safer place for illicit nookie.
The man wanted to A: make lots of money by managing other peoples' money, B: schmooze with the rich and famous so he would become famous and respected instead of just boringly rich, C: enjoy the lifestyle of the rich and famous, D: throw lots of lavish but sleazy parties, and oh year E: surround himself with compliant young hotties. Partly because he enjoyed having sex with them, but also because he thought they were his competitive edge in the "get rich and famous people to come to my parties" game. And note that the parties don't seem to have played a major role in recruiting clients for his business; they also were basically a hobby.
The Virgin Islands, unlike Georgia, gave him an extremely favorable tax status while still allowing full access to US financial markets. "Caribbean" spells "tropical paradise" and thus "place for rich people to kick back and have fun", in a way that Georgia doesn't. And "private island" spells "global elite", where the mansion in rural Georgia would mark one as a big fish in a small pond. Also, "private island" spells *private*. He could develop it the way he wanted, without having to worry about unsightly hoi polloi or low-rent districts just outside the gates. And he could make sure nobody intruded on his elite guests as they kicked back and partied hardy. The Virgin Islands had everything he needed, while Georgia had none of it.
Georgia (or wherever) wouldn't even have offered a safe haven for the illicit nookie. Epstein may have wanted to have sex with 17-year-old hotties, but approximately no 17-year-old wants to have sex with a forty-something Jeffrey Epstein unless they're paid or coerced. Oh, there'd be a few who would do it just for the lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-famous bit, but they'd be hard to sort out from the mercenaries and if he did find one they'd almost certainly have defected to one of his richer and much more famous party guests at the first opportunity.
So, coercion and/or payment. No where in the civilized world, can one legally coerce women into sex, and that's particularly true with minors. And no where in the civilized world can you pay seventeen-year-olds for sex; that's pretty much always limited to legal adults even if the age of consent for nonprofessional sex is younger. If he were willing to limit himself to adult women he'd have more options, but prostitution is illegal throughout the US except for maybe rural Nevada, completely unsuitable for Epstein's purposes, and his financial expertise was tailored to US markets.
I think the best explanation is that Epstein was essentially working for Mossad. Israel is absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of its own self-interest (and fair play to them) and getting blackmail material on rich and powerful US elites is definitely in its self-interest. I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist but I think it's reasonably likely that Epstein was killed by Mossad.
Unless you're going to say that the DC Madam was also working for the Mossad, I think the last statement doesn't follow from the earlier ones. Given Epstein as blackmail artist, he'd have a lot of people gunning for him.
Israel very recently had someone flee an underage prostitution rap in Las Vegas (the John, not the girl). Israel will not extradite.
One man's taboo is another man's fetish for that very reason. If the Aborigines before Westernization had had access to pornhub, I would bet that mother-in-law porn would have been their most searched category.
I think that the product which Epstein was selling his visitors was "We are rich and powerful. We are beyond the laws and morals binding lesser men. Unlike ordinary deviants, we can celebrate our crimes in the open because we are beyond the reach of any AG."
I mean, any millionaire can hire an 18yo escort pretending to be a 15yo school girl getting raped. Or probably even get away with the real thing if he is careful. But the Epstein class thought they could just take the Lolita Express to Pedophile Island because they are untouchable.
Also, underage sex is something the median man can probably be persuaded to partake in if there are peers around who likewise do so. Contrast, for example, with ritual murder, which would make an even better shared secret. But most powerful men just do not have an innate drive to stab some innocent with a dagger, so outside a full-blown cult context, you would have a very hard time to persuade the odd British royal to play along.
Of course, it seems also plausible that Epstein's motive was not to throw very edgy parties for his guests but that what he was really into was blackmailing his guests with video evidence of their misdeeds or something.
I think my comment got deleted before I could complete my thought. But the Mann Act — It is illegal to knowingly transport someone under 18 in interstate (or foreign) commerce if the intent is that they engage in:
• prostitution, or
• “any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”
Taking a 17 yo girl from FL (where age of consent is 17) to the USVI, where it’s illegal to have sex with 16 or 17 yo teens if one is 5 years older than the teen. So,that would be a Mann Act violation. Also, even though the teens were technically not prostitutes, I believe that current interpretations of US human trafficking laws (I didn’t bother to look up the case law on this though).
Seems like a ridiculous law. So if you drive a woman to Nevada when she is going to take a job at a perfectly legal brothel, now you are a "sex trafficker." Makes about as much sense as the people on the sex offender registry for public urination.
This all goes back to the Mann Act of the early 20th Century. Back then there was a popular perception that white women and girls were being kidnapped and sold in white slavery (and the kidnappers were usually portrayed as coming from darker-skinned ethnic groups). Focused on interstate transportation for “immoral purposes,” and not originally focused on coercion or exploitation, the offense was actually to *travel* across state lines for "immoral purposes." I had thought the Mann Act statutes were still on the books in a modified form, but it was superseded by the current Human Trafficking laws, which aim to prevent exploitation, coercion, and forced prostitution, especially of minors.
Seems these are good laws. Why do you think they're ridiculous?
A commercial sex act "means any sex act, on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person." So if Epstein or someone else received anything of value, it could be human trafficking, even if the teens were not paid.
Not to hear all the people who support our intervention in the Ukraine tell it.
(Underage prostitution in the Ukraine is done with kids as young as eleven. It's pretty brutal. If there's one thing Moscow would say no to, it's child prostitution... they're much more into soldier prostitution).
He seems to have established residency in the US Virgin Islands for tax purposes, and then made the most of owning his own island(s), as well as making useful friends amongst the establishment there:
"In 1996, Epstein changed the name of his firm to the Financial Trust Company and, for tax advantages, based it on the island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. By relocating to the US Virgin Islands, Epstein was able to reduce federal income taxes by 90 percent. The US Virgin Islands acted as an offshore tax haven, while at the same time offering the advantages of being part of the United States banking system.
...Epstein owned two islands in the US Virgin Islands: Little Saint James, a private island near Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands purchased in 1998 which includes a mansion and guest houses, and the neighboring island of Great Saint James purchased in 2016.
...In 2023, Attorney-General of the US Virgin Islands Denise George was fired from her job by Governor Albert Bryan Jr. days after she filed charges against JP MorganChase over Epstein and his Southern Trust, which she characterized as a criminal enterprise. The wife of the Democratic governor of the USVI from 2007 to 2015, John de Jongh, was employed by the Southern Trust, in addition to being on the board of directors of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation."
"16 is the age of consent in several US states, 15 and even 14 in many European countries. It seems... not that hard to just be a creep and have sex with that age range completely legally, in a far more discrete way?"
16 is the age of consent in the UK. Allegedly when Virginia Giuffre had sex with Prince Andrew, she was 17. He denies this happened but did settle a lawsuit with her.
That "but she was legal here" doesn't matter, as you may see from the stripping of his titles etc. due to the scandal around Epstein.
Does that help answer your question about "why would a guy who liked 'em young have his own private island/resort"?
Apart from the fact that he was making himself out to be wealthy (more wealthy than he seemingly was) and important and influential, so "I have my own private island" was the sort of cachet he needed in those circles.
"(more wealthy than he seemingly was)" - is it a settled matter how wealthy he was? That seems to be one of the elephants in the room that hardly anyone talks about. Apparently the man played with massive amounts of money, but no one knows where they came from, and how, and no one with the authority to subpoena bank records has bothered to look into it. Funny, no?
Per Forbes. and wikipedia and other sources, Epstein's net worth at the time of his death was ~$600 million. This is consistent with his lifestyle, e.g. the private island and New York mansion, the fancy jets, the lavish parties, etc. If there's any hidden fortune beyond that, nobody has been able to find it. And it would be quite out of character for Epstein, who preferred showing off his wealth to hiding it.
It came from his career managing money for people richer than himself who wanted to outsource that. Initially as a trader and later partner at Bear Sterns, then on his own account, and with the large majority of his wealth coming from Les Wexler and Leon Black. This career and these relationships were forged well before Epstein was in any position to become an elite flesh-peddler, and Wexler in particular had little need of any flesh-peddling services. Epstein was quite demonstrably capable of making big money by managing rich people's money for them, straight up. It's not what he was famous for, but it is what he was good at.
The harem of underage hotties, and the lavish parties and whatnot, were not how he *made* his money, they were how he *spent* his money. Being legit talented, is no bar to being a total sleazebag.
It's difficult to make out. Based off what's in Wikipedia, he was really lucky in that he managed to charm his way into a private school even though he wasn't particularly qualified (more of his charisma/able to handle influential older guys) and before he was let go (allegedly for being a bit too hands-on with the girl students) made a *ton* of well-connected contacts amongst the parents.
These contacts got him a job in Bears Stern which seems to have, again, really helped him when he was looking for other work after being, again, let go for reasons (I guess having that name on his CV was very useful). He set up his own consulting firm and made valuable contacts again (and seems to have started on his career of claiming to be some kind of International Man of Mystery) and during this period met Robert Maxwell (which as you can guess, will be important later).
He then worked for/with another guy in some kind of firm which eventually imploded "when it was exposed as one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in American history, losing over US$450 million of its investors' money (equivalent to $1 billion in 2024)." Epstein managed to wiggle out of that one and while working there he had also founded his own financial management company.
Here is where it gets really interesting and rather murky. He managed only one client, really: a billionaire who was probably closeted gay and was once again charmed by Epstein into letting him manage all his affairs. Epstein does seem to have done a competent job here, but now he was directly getting his hands on hundreds of millions and made millions in fees simply from doing this, plus getting to swan around in private jets and hob-nob with Victoria's Secret models (one of billionaire guy's companies).
Now Epstein was moving in real VIP circles, and now (via the Victoria's Secret connection) he was able to tell ambitious young women that sure, he could set them up with a modelling career.
"According to Forbes in 2025, the great majority of Epstein's wealth between 1999 and 2018 came from $490 million in fees, (most of that from two billionaires, Leslie Wexner, $200 million, and Leon Black, $170 million) with the remaining $310 million reported as income during that period by his companies as being from investment returns, and was worth $600 million when he died."
So he was rich, but not mega-rich, *but* he was closely connected to/networked with the really rich and influential, and could claim all sorts of contacts, true or not, with governments etc. as well as the jet-set lifestyle.
"In 1996, Epstein changed the name of his firm to the Financial Trust Company and, for tax advantages, based it on the island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. By relocating to the US Virgin Islands, Epstein was able to reduce federal income taxes by 90 percent. The US Virgin Islands acted as an offshore tax haven, while at the same time offering the advantages of being part of the United States banking system; Epstein, who capitalized on his relation with Jes Staley while the latter was employed by JP Morgan, maintained close relations with that bank's subsidiary in the USVI.
...Epstein owned two islands in the US Virgin Islands: Little Saint James, a private island near Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands purchased in 1998 which includes a mansion and guest houses, and the neighboring island of Great Saint James purchased in 2016."
Yeh. He was actually rich. Nobody handed him the largest house in Manhattan and the island and all the rest, he bought those. But where the money came from is unknown, and un-investigated.
The money, connections, and shadiness always make me think of intelligence services and/or organized crime. But who knows there may be a lot of similarly creepy rich guys out there that don’t seek out the spotlight like he did.
Some of it seems to be legitimately from fees for financial management of billionaire client(s), some from the rather dodgy investment firms he founded (he seems to have been adjacent to, if not active in, schemes and funds that were rocky).
Was he skimming off the top when managing the wealthy clients' fortunes? Possibly. He does seem to have been able to use his relationships there to get sweetheart deals (e.g. buying a New York townhouse, buying the jet, off Wexner at bargain prices).
This just seems like more of a logistical problem than anything else. Epstein trafficked girls from those countries you mentioned, but he probably had to base himself in America to maintain business and intelligence contacts. Remember, he has no actual skills. All of his money comes from wealthy donors who also wanted to traffic kids. Also we don't know how young the youngest victims were, <9 year olds are not known to have perfect memories. And now there is evidence that he has some interest in girls that young as well, with the new email dossier (maybe there was evidence before, too, i dont follow it that closely).
It's also worth pointing out that sex trafficking is illegal no matter how old the person is and no matter where you live. He didn't just want to have a relationship, he wanted to pay them for a continued exploitative relationship and lease them out to other wealthy men.
>It's also worth pointing out that sex trafficking is illegal no matter how old the person is and no matter where you live. He didn't just want to have a relationship, he wanted to pay them for a continued exploitative relationship
Prostitution is legal in many places. Even where prostitution is illegal, like most of the U.S., transactional relationships are not so long as both partners are savy enough to never explicitly exchange money for sex acts. Had Epstein kept his sights on girls 18+, he'd probably be just another sleazy rich-guy with gold-digging younger girlfriends.
None of those "wealthy donors" has been criminally charged. Ted Frank has pointed out that there have been enough lawsuits over this that the only remaining people to be charged (to "make the rubble bounce", as he said) would be the girls/women themselves, for recruiting others. And none of them were "< 9 year olds".
I'm sorry, do you have a list of every single one of Epstein's victims? If not, I'm allowed to speculate based on his own statements.
That the wealthy donors have not been criminally charged does not mean they were not criminally involved. I'll remind you that the president of America has taken great leaps to cover his own involvement.
None of the identified victims are, in fact, under 14. That's not speculation. There may be more, currently unidentified, victims, but speaking conclusively to existing evidence is more authoritative than speculating about evidence that has yet to surface. For example I feel comfortable asserting that Bigfoot doesn't exist even though evidence for it may someday be produced.
It's absolutely relevant to this quote from you: "I'll remind you that the president of America has taken great leaps to cover his own involvement." People were foolishly expecting some big difference in outcome based on who was president, but whether Trump or Biden was in office made no difference because there weren't more people to be charged based on the Epstein files.
There’s nobody who could have been in doubt post his plea bargain in 2008 of what was going on on that island, so all visitors must be guilty of that knowledge at least.
2008 was the Florida conviction, not anything about his Virgin Islands island. He got very lenient treatment with that, and after serving his time (which, frankly, was a joke) he used his contacts to get rehabbed back into high society:
"After his 2008 incarceration, Epstein was shunned by some acquaintances. Hollywood hostess Peggy Siegal helped facilitate his return to elite company through dinner parties at Herbert Straus house, and allowing his attendance at Oscar parties. Siegal, who was Epstein's connection to the entertainment world, was quoted: "He said he'd served his time and assured me that he changed his ways."
...As socialite Anne Hearst said, if Siegal's "personally P.R.'ing you as a friend, you'll wind up at the right hand of God." Weeks after Epstein's release, Siegal got Epstein an invitation to a screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in a Southampton NY mansion where he met with old friend Leon Black, then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Rudy Giuliani. Siegal tempted Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, Chelsea Handler, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn to attend a dinner organised in 2011 by Epstein for Prince Andrew; Stephanopoulos now says it was a mistake.
...Brockman did not end his friendship with Epstein after the latter's conviction. Brockman's literary dinners, often held during the TED Conference, were, for several years after Epstein's conviction, funded by Epstein as documented in tax filings. This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires."
Who is John Brockman? A Big Cheese in NY literary/artistic circles, seemingly:
"As BuzzFeed News and others have investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to leaders in science and technology in the wake of his July arrest on sex trafficking charges, one name has stood out as Epstein’s intellectual enabler: John Brockman, the New York literary agent who ran Edge, billed as an elite salon of thinkers “redefining who and what we are.”
...Epstein, who killed himself in federal custody in August, wasn’t merely associated with Edge. He was by far its largest financial donor, and his association with Edge gave him access to leading scientists and figures in the tech industry.
...Epstein was a regular attendee at Edge events. He was shown at the 1999 and 2000 billionaires’ dinners, in photographs on pages that have recently been deleted from the Edge website, and was also mentioned in a write-up of the 2004 dinner. Epstein was also present at Edge events in 2011, after his 2008 conviction for sex crimes, BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month.
...In 2002, Brockman, his wife and business partner Katinka Matson, and the leading scientists Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett were pictured on Epstein’s jet flying to TED in Monterey, California — the multiday technology, entertainment, and design conference that the billionaires’ dinners were held during. The caption to this picture was recently altered to remove mention of Epstein. His Edge profile, describing him as a “financier and science philanthropist,” has also been removed.
...There are no recorded donations from Epstein to Edge from 2006 to 2008, during the original investigation for sex offenses involving underage girls and the start of his subsequent imprisonment. But from 2009, he again began contributing, donating at least $50,000 a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011.
As Epstein strived to rehabilitate his reputation after his release from jail, Edge gave him access to elite circles in science and the tech industry. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News reported that Epstein was at the 2011 billionaires’ dinner, held in Long Beach, California, also attended by tech titans including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sergey Brin of Google, and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, plus a “master class” on the science of human nature, held at a winery in St. Helena, California.
But Brockman’s networking for Epstein ran deeper than Edge’s events. Last month, Morozov revealed email correspondence from 2013 in which Brockman tried to arrange a meeting between Morozov and Epstein. Brockman mentioned Epstein’s “beautiful young assistant from Belarus” and described the financier, incorrectly, as a “billionaire who owns Victoria’s Secret plus a modelling agency.”
...“He also got into trouble and spent a year in jail in Florida,” Brockman added. Morozov declined the invitation.
Epstein’s last recorded contribution to the Edge Foundation was a donation of $30,000 in 2015, after which the group’s total fundraising stalled. In 2016 and 2017, the foundation received just $5,477 from a single donor. The billionaires’ dinners died with Epstein’s donations: The last one was held in March 2015."
"In March 2011, a group of technology executives gathered in a private dining room at an upscale Italian restaurant in downtown Long Beach, California, for a meal and some conversation. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and others were all in town for TED, the annual conference with the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” They were among friends at an annual event called the “billionaires’ dinner,” without a retinue of handlers and hangers-on.
Yet when the event was later immortalized online, at least one infamous individual was missing from the names of the masters of the universe who had gathered for the evening: the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
This elite dinner, and another similarly select gathering that Epstein attended later that year, were both organized by the New York literary agent John Brockman, whose exclusive intellectual club, called Edge, seems to have played a role in Epstein’s efforts to regain credibility and influence in circles of the rich and powerful. At the time, he was less than two years removed from finishing a 13-month prison term in a Florida state jail for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
A leaked email obtained by BuzzFeed News also suggests that Epstein separately pursued ties with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
The months following Epstein’s release from prison would be crucial for the disgraced financier as he began his reacclimation to the upper-crust social circles he had occupied before his arrest. In late 2010, Epstein reportedly hosted a dinner for celebrities and Prince Andrew at his Upper East Side mansion, and by the next year he was once again mingling with Brockman, an über networker among the elite of tech, science, and Wall Street."
Honestly, i can see how someone in 2008 just wouldn't know about that. The world wasn't as connected back then. But i can also see how they would know about it and not care.
The police investigation in Florida delt with his crimes in Florida. The island sounded better to the media when they were creating the mythologized Epstein story.
There are so many loose ends to this sprawling story that I'd be willing to entertain a conspiracy theory like that as a possible hypothesis. If I were investigating this, it wouldn't be my primary hypothesis, but rather an alternative hypothesis that I'd try to rule out. Putting on my tinfoil hat here...
1. We still don't know how Epstein acquired his wealth.
2. Virginia Guiffre said he secretly videotaped both his and his guests' encounters with the girls. Pam & Cash said that the FBI had thousands of videos, but they couldn't release them to protect the minors involved. Then they changed their tune. Nothing to see here. Move along, please.
3. According to the first link below, twenty-two people involved in this case have died (not including Robert Maxwell's mysterious death). Many by natural causes. But a bunch by suicide and accidents. I'd be interested in taking a closer look at the coroner reports. Just sayin.
4. How did Epstein get passports for all these underage girls? USVI requires a passport to visit it. At least 60 women have come forward that they were trafficed down to his island — and that may be the tip of the iceberg. Did Epstein and Maxwell have help from someone in the US State Department? Or did they somehow convince (induce? pay?) parents to acquire passports for their minor children? Of course, the USVI authorities seemed to have been swamped with gifts and perqs from Epstein, and they weren't inclined to take a closer look at what was going on at Pedo Island.
This is what ChatGPT says (below). Functionally, minors would need either a gov issued RealID or a notarized birth certificate to get into the BVI. So, Passports would be easier than BCs for minors w/o RealId drivers licenses.
And according to many of the girls who visited the island they claimed their passports were taken away.
While a passport isn’t required, you do need to show proof of U.S. citizenship when traveling (for example, a raised-seal birth certificate + government-issued photo ID). 
• Starting May 7, 2025, for air travel, you need a REAL ID–compliant driver’s license or other accepted ID (like a passport) to clear TSA. 
• When leaving the USVI to return to the U.S. mainland, you may be required to show proof of citizenship. 
We've had a thread about this a while ago. While formally the "age of consent" may be as low as 14 in some European states, that usually comes with some serious limitations - like, the partner must be of approximately the same age, no pressure due to positions of authority, money etc., no prostitution or pimping - all of which would be obstacles to a middle-aged rich creep who wants to do degenerate things to underage girls and provide access to those girls to his rich, powerful buddies.
ETA: Andrew and Tristan Tate basically tried this in Romania, and eventually the police intervened.
>While formally the "age of consent" may be as low as 14 in some European states, that usually comes with some serious limitations - like, the partner must be of approximately the same age
Well if true this terminology is completely meaingless because then the age of consent is 15, 14, 12 etc in many US states. I don't know why so many people are so careless about getting details to do with law and legal matters correct. But it makes it really hard to follow everyone's arguments and claims when they can't consistently use the same term for the same kind of thing.
Nope. No state in the US has a General Age of Consent below 16, and most states have “close-in-age” provisions and partner authority limitations. Of course, many states allow teenagers below the age of consent to have sex with other teens if the age gap isn't too great. So, you might hear the claim that a state like CT has pegged the age of consent at 13 — but that's only if the partner is no older than 16.
You should really research these things before you post opinions that contain wrong information. LLMs and Wikipedia are great resources. :-)
I don't understand this reply at all. The above commenter said that although the age of consent might be 14 or 15 in some European countries, this can come with limitations like the partners being close in age. I pointed out that *according to that definition of "age of consent"* then many US states have a low age of consent. Of course, on the normal definition, it being legal for similar age partners to have sex at 14 does not make the age of consent 14...on which the above commenter's statement is incoherent. *I'm* saying people need to use a consistent definition, and not say nonsense like "the age of consent is at least 16 across the US but in some other countries it's lower but only for similar age partners". (Not that anyone said those words exactly, but that inconsistent definition is clearly implied by many comments, inclyding the one I replied to).
I thought you were agreeing with the commenter rather than contradicting the commenter. So, I guess we agree — and, for the purpose of the Epstein discussion, age of consent means the *minimum* age of the girl with whom *Epstein* could have had consensual sex with. Apologies for the confusion. :-)
IIRC, in the thread being discussed, it turns out that the ages of consent being discussed, yes even down to 14 or 15, are the ages at which it would be legal for Jeffrey Epstein (or the Andrew formerly known as Prince, or Donald Trump) to have sex with, so long as they weren't paying her. Or raping her, obviously. The "partner must be of approximately the same age" thing was a red herring.
Idk about 14 but in Denmark where I grew up and live, it is 15. No Romeo and Juliet laws, partner could be 120. Pretty sure prostitution is only legal from 18 though. Also literal child marriage is legal in 34 US states, ~75% of those occurring between a minor girl and an adult man (Wikipedia).
Still I find it strange. I didn't look *that* different at 16 vs 18. Just seem like a strange preference to base such a life project around instead of just being a creep to 18 year old girls. I always thought something with young children had got to be behind Epstein's whole thing, but nothing has come out yet.
But I am skeptical that statutory rape counts. The cited statute refers to "a sexual act (as defined in section 2246) with a person under 18 years of age that would be in violation of chapter 109A if the sexual act occurred in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States;"
Given that the statute does not say "any sexual act with a person under 18 years of age" but rather only a subset thereof, and given that any ambiguity in a penal statute is resolved in favor of the defendant, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/rule_of_lenity, I would think that that person would be in the clear.
This is complete bullshit. Those laws always have exceptions for when the partner is close in age. And if you can consent to that sex, you can consent to sex with anyone you want. It's just a legal fiction we use because we want to ban certain people from having sex regardless of consent, but also tell ourselves that we aren't banning consensual sex.
This is not a conversation about what people do or do not want the law to be, or whether it is right that the law says what it does. It is merely a conversation about what the law today actually says.
Yes, that is the rationale behind statutory rape laws. But, again, given that the statute does not refer to all sex with persons under 18, and given the rule of lenity, it is very, very, very unlikely that the reference in the other statute re consent would be interpreted in that manner and imported into the extraterritorial jurisdiction statute.
I firmly believe the impact of AI agents "taking jobs away" from future graduates should be more presciently explained to them. Any university that isn't preparing their students for this is doing them a disservice, even if it partially comes across as a devaluation of their degree. An implementable way to do this would be to incentivize taking on internships in the real world as early as possible, across as many companies as possible, with a focus on relationship building. Soon enough, human relationships will be among the rare things that hiring managers still value over complete automation. When the job pool shrinks, those with existing relationships will have an even larger advantage over the others than they have today. It's worth thinking about if you have kids at uni or if you're at uni yourself.
Better plan: the maximum amount of federal funding should depend on the default rate of the student loans of the attendees. Then the universities start trying to solve the problem themselves.
Who said anything about curriculum changes? They could change their pricing, their admissions practices, anything... but the end result would be far fewer students left with unmanageable debt.
If the primary value of universities is encouraging students to get internships then why go to university at all when you can go straight to an internship? I think this hints at the notion that the only actual value colleges have is that they're legally allowed to discriminate on the basis of IQ (via the SAT). The better solution there is to remove that prohibition from the economy at large and just allow every company to use IQ testing in its hiring process.
If you take seriously the notion that AI will lead to something like persistent 30% unemployment then I think it's foolish to go to college at all. That world will be so different from this one that it's probably a mistake to make a large up-front investment that could potentially be worthless in 5 years.
I think this overestimates the degree to which jobs will be automated.
Also, universities should always be a place for learning first and foremost. Anyone who is studying a degree just to get a job will live a depressing life at best, or drop out at worst.
It’s a problem that most people who go to a university are there for a reason that the university doesn’t accept as a real reason - though the university administrations have gone along with the rest of society and pretended that university education is primarily about a job.
Of course they were. Universities were always primarily for learning and then later on they became for research and learning. Some status creation and networking came along with this, but that was never the majority of the purpose.
"naapuriseura.fi" is a small fringe publication by old lefties. I wouldn't trust their analysis farther than I could throw them.
There are indeed numerous people in Europe, including in high positions, that would prefer an end to this war where Russia collapses and a bunch of autonomous republics gain independence, but that's different from there being any sort of a concrete plan by Europe to achieve this, let alone one that would mean the Europe's economic plan is to "loot Russia".
The Danes are the ones trying to bring "Chat Control" to the EU, so I think you've got the relationship between high social trust and dictatorship backwards.
There are a lot of out-of-the-Overton-window ideas being brought up in these comment sections, which is great because we can discuss them on their merits. But from time to time, there're straight up retarded takes like your's, which no amount of steelmanning can save.
You got it backwards. Europe has taken Russia's cash and Russia has lost the war and become a Chinese vassal. America looks foolish these days, everyone is looking to China. Peace in Ukraine is now in Europe's interest so they can get closer to China - right now China is telling Putin to pack it in and everyone is playing Trump like a fiddle.
The west doesn't exist. Maybe it is in America's interest, but America is now acting in the interests of people who have a lot of money to make from China. Europe's interest is to move away from America and get closer to China. They don't have any problem with them and have a lot to gain. Russia as a Chinese vassal + Europe-China alliance solves all their problems.
Should you take Metformin as part of an optimal anti-ageing regimen?
Several of the sources I find at least somewhat credible(*) in this area, suggest it is likely to be helpful. But that's a pretty low bar, and the "TAME" study intended to seriously examine that question seems to have been stalled by lack of institutional support. Also, some of the sources suggest it will be most effective if coupled with Human Growth Hormone. Metformin is a fairly safe compound, HgH requires much more care and maybe shouldn't be used in this context without better evidence.
* From my notes, Derek Lowe, Andrew Steele, and David Sinclair.
https://lichess.org/analysis/k7/3Q4/8/8/8/2K5/8/8_w_-_-_0_1?color=white
Can you mate the black king with just the queen in this position? You're not allowed to move the white king. Note chess engines won't help you with this.
This isn't very easy, and some familiarity with chess is helpful, I think mere beginners, even if they have strong analytical skills, would have a very hard time solving this.
Nice, this was tough!
Rot13:
V guvax gur xrl vf gb ernyvmr gung vs gur oynpx Xvat jnf ba o8, jr’q unir n eryngviryl fgenvtugsbejneq jva jvgu 1.Dp6!
Sbe vafgnapr, 1.-Xn7 2.Dp8 Xo6 3.Dq7 Xp5 4.Dr6 Xo5 5.Dq6 Xn5 6.Do4+ Xn6 7.Do8 Xn5 8.Do7 naq vg'f zngr arkg zbir. (V guvax nygreangvirf sbe Oynpx ybfr rira snfgre)
Va gur npghny cbfvgvba, 1.Dq5+ frrzf gb qb gur gevpx. 1.-Xo8 2.Dp6 tvirf hf jung jr jnag evtug njnl, naq vs 1.-Xn7, jr unir 2.Do5 Xn8 3.Dq7! Xo8 4.Dp6.
V'z abg fher vs guvf vf gur snfgrfg zngr, ohg vg frrzf gb jbex.
Yup, not the fastest, but almost, and it does work. Congrats!
I’m looking forward to the reveal here. At this point i think you might just be messing with us. ;)
Some people beat me to it, but in the interest of completeness, yes, it's possible, and my solution, which I think is fastest possible but didn't prove, is below:
Gur vqrn, oevrsyl, vf gb ybfr n grzcb - gung vf, trg gb gur fnzr cbfvgvba ohg jvgu Oynpx gb zbir. Gura nsgre dhvgr vaghvgvir Xo8 Dp6 Xn7 Dp8 Xo6 Dq7, vg'f rnfl gb cebprrq gb gur zngr. (Jr qba'g unir gb trg gb yvgrenyyl gur ortvaavat cbfvgvba, trggvat n srj zbirf qbjafgernz sebz vg vf whfg nf tbbq).
Ybfvat gur grzcb vf qvssvphyg orpnhfr gurer'f nyzbfg, ohg abg dhvgr, n cnevgl fvghngvba urer: fbzr cbfvgvbaf rnfvyl pbaarpg jvgu "ortvaavat cbfvgvba, J gb zbir", bguref jvgu "ortvaavat cbfvgvba, O gb zbir", naq svaqvat na bireync vf abg gevivny, ohg nyfb abg gbb qvssvphyg bapr lbh sbphf ba gur tbny.
Svefg tbny: zbir gur oynpx xvat gb o6, dhrra erznvaf ng q7, oynpx gb zbir. Ubj gb trg gurer: 1. Do5 Xn7 2. Dq5, abj guerr inevnagf: Xo6 Dq7 qverpgyl, be Xn6 Dp6+ Xn7 (abg Xn5 Do7 naq zngr) Dp8 Xo6 Dq7, naq svanyyl Xo8 Dp6 Xn7 Dp8 rgp.
Frpbaq tbny: xvat ba o5, Dhrra ba q6, oynpx gb zbir. Nsgre gur svefg tbny, oynpx tbrf Xp5 Dr6, be Xn6 Dp7, naq va rvgure pnfr, Xo5 Dq6. Nygreangvir Xn5 yrnqf gb zngr nsgre Do7.
Svanyyl, ng gur frpbaq tbny, jr cebprrq Xn5 Do4+_Xn6 Do8 Xn5 Do7 Xn4 naq bar bs gur gjb zngrf, juvpurire lbh guvax cerggvre (V yvxr n6 zber guna o4).
Yes, I wasn’t thinking about tempo enough. After I wrote my earlier note, I noticed that 1. Qd4+ Kb8 2. Qc6 Ka7 3. Qc8 Kb6 forces the king permanently below the diagonal leading to mate, and eventually came up with a mate starting with 1. Qd4+ Ka7 2. Qb5, which was non-optimal because taking two moves to get to the b column meant making multiple moves on the b column to gain a tempo.
That’s pretty cool. Thank you kindly.
I think the answer is no.
There are certain moves that black needs to avoid. For example, if black moves Ka6, the game can proceed Qb8 Ka5 Qb7 Ka4 Qb4 mate. Similarly, if black moves Kc5, we can have Qe6 Kb5 Qd6 Ka5 Qb4+ and then black must move Ka6, leading to the previous mate.
But as far as I can see, black can avoid mate by staying away from the squares in the above sequences. Most of the time, black can stay either on the a8 - h1 diagonal, or on squares closer to h8 than the squares on that diagonal. If the black king is on a8, white can move Qc8+ Ka7, but white must then move its queen, allowing black to move its king to a8, b8, or b7.
Correction: I wrote a brute force solver and my original solution does work. The key is to kick the king to a7, i.e. beneath the "defensive diagonal", before you start forcing it downwards. You have to "give" one column to the king for every row you force it down, but if you manage to force the king to a7 and can move your queen to c8, the black king can't reach the a8-h1 diagonal and the diagonal it is on is blocked by your own immobile king.
Yeah, I was going to reply to your original comment that the general idea is correct, but the devil is in the details, but you beat me to it. Good job! Next time, persevere and do it without a solver :-)
I sort of had a solution originally, but it was a lot of messy lines from trial and error, and I didn't understand *how* it worked or how to reconstruct it cleanly.
The key insight, in my opinion, is that the queen can box in a king, but if the king takes "opposition" a knight's move away, the queen cannot systematically tighten this box. The queen can, however, use zugzwang to force the king to either let the queen tighten the box (if it leaves "opposition") or to trade row<->column if the king moves to the other opposition square.
Writing a solver was its own reward. :)
Pasteable PGN with both key lines:
[Variant "From Position"]
[FEN "k7/3Q4/8/8/8/2K5/8/8 w - - 0 1"]
1. Qb5 Ka7 2. Qd5 Kb8 3. Qc6 Ka7 4. Qc8 Kb6 5. Qd7 Ka6 (5... Kc5 6. Qe6 Kb5 7. Qd6 Ka5 8. Qb4+) 6. Qc7 Kb5 7. Qd6 Ka5 8. Qb4+ Ka6 9. Qb8 Ka5 10. Qb7 Ka4 11. Qb4#
I didn't realize the king is happy to escape down into the bottom right quadrant, I can't find any workaround for that at the moment. Not sure if I should try to avoid it or try to find a clever pivot to drive the king top left to bottom right to bottom left.
Rot13 (not a chess player):
Jvgu gur erfgevpgvba bs bayl zbivat gur dhrra, gur zngvat cbfvgvba frrzf gb erdhver sbepvat gur oynpx xvat gb gur yrsg rqtr pybfr gb lbhe xvat, jurer lbh pna qb fbzrguvat fvzvyne gb gur pynffvp xvat naq ebbx zngr. V'z abg pbzcyrgryl fher V'z abg bireybbxvat fbzr qrsrafvir xvat'f zbirf, ohg vg frrzf qbnoyr ol sbepvat gur xvat qbjajneqf, yrggvat vg fgrc bhg gb gur o svyr gb onfvpnyyl cnff n ghea, naq gura chfuvat vg shegure qbja ntnva. Riraghnyyl, lbh trg gb cvibg gb purpxvat gur n5 xvat sebz o4, hfvat lbhe bja xvat'f cebgrpgvba.
Guvf frrzf gb ybfr lbhe cebterff jura gur oynpx xvat rfpncrf hcjneqf, ohg vg yrgf lbh tnva n cbfvgvba va gur o svyr gjb enaxf nobir gur oynpx xvat, sebz jurer lbh pna whfg ureq vg qbja gur n svyr naq gura purpx vg jura vgf pybfr gb lbhe xvat.
Regarding the AI safety grantmaker role, I'm curious about the specific scope. What types of 'alignment research' are prioritised for the $100 million funding? Is the focus purely technical, or are interdisciplinary approaches also considered key?
Any cricket or sports betting fans? I've bet on a series tie for the Ashes at 8/1, this seems remarkably good odds compared to 2/1 for an England series win. There are 5 matches in the series, Australia have won the last three series in Australia 4-0, 4-0 and 5-0, so talk of an England win in Australia is optimistic, meanwhile the last two series in England have ended 2-2, so this seems more realistic than an England win, although 3-1 to Australia is more realistic still. Usually there's one draw so the possibilities are 4-0 Australia (possible) 3-1 Australia (likely), 2-2 (best case for England imo), 3-1 to England (not totally impossible), and 4-0 to England (yeh, no). 2-1 to England seems unlikely because there would have to be two draws and draws are getting rarer.
[Update: Right on cue England are slumping to a rare 2-day defeat so you can probably get better odds that 8/1!]
Can any lawyers comment on whether JPMorgan Chase would have a libel case against Senator Ron Wyden for this tweet?
https://x.com/RonWyden/status/1991527268251046315
These banks fell over and played dead when the Epstein victims sued them, I don't know that they will do the same when it's a U.S. Senator.
Trumpist GOP - is so low-class the spacetime continuum bends under the enormous weight of the lack of class.
Dems - "how can we be even less attractive to big business than that? The only thing I can think of is to accuse them of complicity in pedophilia."
Wait, that's a Democrat?! Talk about interrupting your enemy making a mistake.
I think both parties are approximately the same level of bad, so I encourage both to be less retarded.
I know lots of people have already done the work of figuring out which creatine brands are least polluted with lead. I'd greatly appreciate your brand recommendations, or links to good posts on the topic!
Consumer Labs has a good summary of test results and recommends brands.
Anyone have an informed opinion on Nucleus (https://mynucleus.com/health) or other whole genome sequencing products?
I want actionable insights based on credible science, not just the genomic data.
I did 23andme and I think their product is in the right ballpark of what I want, but it's not whole genome.
I don't know about Nucleus in particular, but a Whole Genome Sequence is good to identify genetic disorders (not very actionable, but maybe for family planning?) and susceptibility to cancers that you can then test regularly for for early detection.
Why do people often focus on increase of total productive quantity (GDP, GDP per capita, whatever bespoke adjacent measure I'm about to hear about) as a way to increase human happiness? It does not seem obvious to me.
I find myself happiest when I am backpacking, sleeping as well as living in the commons we all share. This produces for the rest of society nothing but my thoughts (which are sometimes assigned economic value, although I would argue this does not significantly impact my point; I'm also sure many others do much the same and think much the same and do not have this economic value assigned and still derive much joy from it). This does not have any production or consumption (or, at the very least, an extremely minimal amount in comparison with daily life in America) associated with it.
It also seems to me that in the place I was educated (Northeastern US of A) most economic production and valuation has little to do with intrinsic fulfillment or joy, and even when it provides pleasure of some sort, it is usually the sort of pleasure I'd be happy to do away with entirely (the sort generally associated with (if you are of Christian persuasion, which I am not) the seven cardinal sins).
It is possible there is a good reason for this that I have yet to grasp. It is worth noting for this that I am interested primarily in some sense of self-fulfillment, or joy, or whatever you will call it, and am generally horrified that some people think it would be morally beneficial to, say, hook human beings up to some sort of computer which makes them feel expansive and incredible joy all the time. I'm happy to talk about and reconsider this, too, but please, when discussing the first question do not argue that some minimalistic definition of pleasure is equivalent to moral goodness.
I don't think anyone answered the question fully yet. What's missing is the disconnect between classical economics and the real world.
In classical economics, people are treated as rational economic agents, who derive utility from consuming goods and services. The more goods and services they consume, the more utility they derive. GDP is more or less equal to national consumption, so increasing GDP will tend to increase total utility. (More accurately, we'd talk about NNP here, but it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.) Mathematically, this is a fairly easy optimisation problem: you've got some variables, some constraints and relations between them, and want to maximise the value of one variable. Obviously this theory is overly simplistic and has lots of readily apparent flaws. It can be worked out on the back of a napkin, but the disadvantage is that it's not a good model of the world.
It's worked reasonably well for the past 200 years at a coarse scale - GDP is generally correlated with what we in the West consider a decent standard of living: the US is a better place to live than Bulgaria, which is better than South Sudan. But it's not clear that a 2% increase in GDP correlates with a meaningful improvement in quality of life.
We might also care to some extent about the distribution of wealth, and bring about a discussion of redistribution through taxation as a means of increasing utility. We might care about the environment and bring that into the discussion too. Behavioural and Institutional Economics are attempts to build more realistic models of economic agents (people and public bodies respectively) but they're less amenable to mathematical analysis.
Have a look into the micro-meso-macro framework pioneered by Dopfer and Potts. It introduces a new institutional perspective within which we can consider individuals as participants in the norms, cultures and systems of new 'rules' which have variable levels of penetration into the macroeconomy.
DOI: 10.1007/s00191-004-0193-0
Seems like The Tails Come Apart again. There's lots of metrics that are closely correlated with human well-being, but which lead to disaster if you optimise obsessively for that metric and nothing else.
Life expectancy is another one; it's generally a great thing, but a tyrannical government bent on optimising for increased life expectancy could easily think of plenty of horrible ways to squeeze out an extra few years at the cost of every other value.
I would think you're happiest when backpacking because you're on vacation, not because there's something magic about simplicity.
Like, if backpacking wasn't a vacation, so you had to hunt and gather to keep yourself fed on the trail and didn't have a home you'd eventually return to when you got tired of camping, that would probably be a lot less fun.
And if you want more people to be able to take vacations - to accumulate a surplus of food and other "stuff" that enables them to take a break and do something they enjoy for a while - well, that stuff is measured by GDP.
I mean, I have been vegan since I was very young, and being vegan makes it very hard to feed yourself in the wild. But yes, you are certainly right on this front, at least to a degree.
Doesn't more GDP probably mean that they are *not* taking a break, and instead producing and consuming more? You need consumption for production, and production for consumption, and while on the trail you most people produce and consume material goods at wildly lower rates.
Consuming generally involves leisure, once you get outside of buying bare necessities. More production doesn't necessarily involve more work either, it usually just involves more productive work. The workweek has shortened over the past few decades.
> Why do people often focus on increase of total productive quantity (GDP, GDP per capita, whatever bespoke adjacent measure I'm about to hear about) as a way to increase human happiness? It does not seem obvious to me.
I read all the other replies to you, but nobody seems to have brought up the fact that human happiness is a moving target, purely subjective with no objective measure, and often comes at the expense of other people's happiness.
I want a gigantic tree in my yard to be happy, but my neighbor wants a view and the sun on their porch to be happy - which one of us wins? Write that over an entire city / country - living near and interacting with other people is inherently full of tradeoffs.
And how should we measure "happiness," or "meaning," or "fulfillment?" There's no happiness meters - even brain imaging isn't at a state where it could discern "happy because they watched somebody get hit in the balls with a football" from "happy because they lead a deep and meaningful life and invent lifesaving new medical technologies."
So do a survey based thing.
Well, surveys are really prone to selection effects, and wording, and tens of other things. If you're a politician whose comp or re-election is determined by this survey, you're going to spend all your time trying to Goodhart the survey by tweaking the wording, the neighborhoods it's mailed to, and whatever. And if you were smart, you would just do something simple like "free beer fridays" at the sports stadium with tax dollars, and be continuously re-elected.
In short, nobody can measure intrinsic fufillment or joy at the aggregate level - it's an inherently personal project that depends greatly on your inbuilt drives and values, your life circumstances, and probably most importantly, the other people around you. Your examples are noteworthy in the sense that they're extremely solitary pursuits, but most people's happiness, and sadness and anger, come from their relationships with and interactions with other people. It's actually a very significant effect size - having a good social circle is as protective to all cause mortality as smoking is destructive to it (a 1.2 - 1.5x buff on all cause mortality, and an r = 0.3 - 0.4 effect size on quality of life and happiness).
This is like dating - everyone laments that dating is harder than ever, that incels are on the rise, that fertility is declining in literally every country in the world. But you can't DO anything about that - it's not actionable. Dating is an individual choice between two people, and you can't legislate that everyone can get a date. Similarly, you can't legislate that everyone gets to be happy, for the reasons I brought up above.
But GDP? We can measure that. We can tailor legislation and tax laws and incentives around it. If you put more money in everyone's hands in the aggregate, they are all free to pursue their own individual drives and values.
And those individual drives and values are different for everyone - you happen to like hiking and camping, and look down on the seven deadly sins. But the seven deadly sins are called out precisely *because* they're so prevalent! If they didn't make people happy, you wouldn't have to warn against them and try to push people away from them!
You think they're a mistake, a marshmallow test, short term desirable but long-term destructive? Welcome to life! LIFE is short-term desirable, and long-term guaranteed to end in death. Who are you to dictate what *really* makes people happy? Like WoolyAI said, Jesus and the Buddha and various other people have tried to make this argument at scale several times, and the jury is STILL out on whether they were net positive.
But I can tell you what they *didn't* accomplish - changing human nature. The seven deadly sins are as popular as ever (albeit vastly shifted towards "gluttony" and away from violence, which is honestly a huge improvement - sincere thanks to the thousands of Phd's who pooled their collective brainpower over several decades to make fast and junk food so addictive that ~80% of people became sessile, non-violent blobs!).
This is probably a sub-point, but does envy really make people happy, in a common or garden sense? Scott has written about a kind of homeostasis that people with depression are looking for, where one actively seeks out sad experiences because they are reassuring, but that's a strange kind of happiness.
> This is probably a sub-point, but does envy really make people happy, in a common or garden sense?
I think envy is adaptive, in the sense that if you notice something you want in the world that somebody else has, it will drive you to try to attain it.
It's only net unhappy because the vast majority of people envy status things which are relative and zero sum, and so the great majority are unable to attain those things. But the handful that do attain them? Probably happier afterwards, at least for a while.
Will they then be driven to envy something *else* and be unhappy again? Yeah, probably - it's a process, hedonic treadmills, etc. But is that envy overall adaptive? It is as long as it inspires you to put in effort and actually achieve things at least part of the time.
Fair. In my model virtue is a mean between extremes, so there is always a contrary vice e.g liberality is the virtue, meanness and prodigality are the pair of contrary vices opposed to it. Not sure what the contrary vice would be to envy but in principle there must be a vice contrary to legitimate ambition and the accompanying zeal.
[Edit: So according to Aquinas the matter of envy is sorrow for another's good, but matter isn't sufficient for sin, the form of envy is either that the good is inappropriate, or the sorrow is inappropriate, or both. So if you get annoyed if your friend has a nicer car and it inspires you to save up for a nicer car, that is simple zeal/jealousy and not a sin. The car isn't bad and the sorrow isn't bad. Obviously no-one here has to accept Thomist definitions but if we're going to talk about the deadly sins it's worth getting under the bonnet]
First: You just made me laugh. One Golden star, or something. Genuinely enjoyable writing.
Second: Even if we grant (which I would not generally, but will here) that short-term pleasure is a valid target, you must admit that many sources of GDP (e.g. Healthcare for a grossly unhealthy country, or gambling for our dopamine-addicted generation, and so on, and so on) are actively correlated against even short term happiness. Further, I'm generally suspicious of anything to convenient to the collective interests of the people near or around the top of material wealth, and focusing on GDP seems to (especially with increasing inequality in most countries I know enough to comment on) benefit this exact group most drastically.
Third: returning to what I granted in two, I just do not stand convinced? You bring up Jesus, as WoolyAI did, and while at a societal level I would not say it was incredible effective, I have met and spent meaningfully large amounts of time with Benedictine monks who live in a fashion incredibly similar to how they did eight or so hundred years ago with the founding of the first Benedictine monasteries. They are, as a group, probably the happiest people I have ever met. They also eschew most modern forms of immediate gratification. While I'm not Catholic, and while I do seriously love both my girlfriend and the idea of having a wife and children in the future, I was and still am seriously affected by their manner of life. I would not say Jesus was entirely ineffective, that is to say, and I would not say that the tradition built from him is meaningless either.
P.S. While I have yet to get a chance to work on one, experiences a professor of mine had on a Kibbutz, which are (often) secular but (often) similar, seem to match up with this.
> They are, as a group, probably the happiest people I have ever met. They also eschew most modern forms of immediate gratification.
Sure, but I'll propose to you that just as people vary on such attributes as height, atheticism, perspicacity, navigational ability, and so on, people vary in their ability to participate in the cluster of things that you consider meaningful and fulfilling, like the Benedictine lifestyle.
How much of how amazing and tangibly different their lifestyle feels, and how solid their fulfillment and happiness feels, is driven by selection effects? I would argue nearly all of it. It's a very rare sort that even considers being a monk these days, and the ones among them who can't hack it wash out pretty early, I'd assume.
So yeah, if you let me choose a top .00001% cluster of people, on nearly any metric, and assemble them together, I think you would be similarly impressed with the lives they lead, the fulfillment they demonstrate, and their overall happiness. This is your Benedictine monks, and kibbutzes, and so on.
You're doing that with the monks and think it's an answer - that's fine, it probably is an answer for you, due to your particular inbuilt drives and predilections.
But if you tried to force increasingly large numbers of people to live the same way, I think you'd find the great majority were miserable. Selection effects are doing all your work there, and it's not a general solution.
I do freely admit that lots of markers of GDP are driven by anti-human-flourishing dynamics, and you do a great job calling many of them out. But we don't have a truly "clean" metric that has no hidden downsides. It's still a better general solution than nearly anything else we have that works at the country level.
> Further, I'm generally suspicious of anything to convenient to the collective interests of the people near or around the top of material wealth, and focusing on GDP seems to (especially with increasing inequality in most countries I know enough to comment on) benefit this exact group most drastically.
Yes, this is very true as well. In fact, there's a famous "productivity vs wages" stagnation graph on this:
https://imgur.com/44cz5JV
Only the top 10% got anything like the 250% growth in the graph - everyone else stayed stangant. And the top 1% was around 500%!
So yes, wealth and income are unequal. In fact, they both follow power laws, rather than Gaussian curves like height or weight. The richest are incomprehensibly richer than even the next-most-richest.
From a post I recently did on billionaires :
"If you ONLY consider the top 1% by wealth (which has a floor at around $13-$15M in net assets), the wealth Gini is ~.5 - much more equal than the overall wealth Gini in the US of .85!
Then when you get to “billionaire” territory, there’s another phase transition.
Obviously the tranche of “billionaires” doesn’t merely have an average wealth of $1B, because there are deca and centa billionaires dragging the mean up. You can use the Forbes list to calculate the implied alpha, and thereby the implied Gini, given the USA figures - with a collective fortune of $6.8T across 902 measured billionaires, the mean billionaire wealth is $7.54B. The implied Gini from that is .76 - high again!"
I will still argue that GDP is a better metric at the countrywide level - not because it doesn't mostly go to the already rich, it does. But broadly, that's unavoidable. Wealth and income is a power law everywhere in the world, and often with worse Gini coefficients than in the US. You can't avoid wealth going to the top 10%, and 1%, and .0001%, but that wealth still drives the scientific innovation and technological advance that saves lives at scale, like Norman Borlaug's wheat, or PEPFAR, or MRNA cancer vaccines.
In that sense, due to the power laws that are true of wealth everywhere in the world, the good stuff is inevitably intertwined with that inequality, and it can't be avoided. So it's still better to target GDP as a country-level metric than happiness, or fulfillment, or anything else, which are largely personal and non-actionable.
While there is certainly some truth to this, I'm really uncomfortable being defeatist both on distribution of resources and on the way humans relate to resources. I feel like some level of what could be called radical optimism is necessary here, at least for me. I feel that to maintain empathy, trust, etc, fundamentally to keep fulfilling Kant's Categorical Imperative (or at least the second version...) I need to believe there is more to it than that! God, what a terrible world, where inequality is always getting worse, and people are always more and more individual and alienated consumers of material content and ideas are best served as marketing.
> While there is certainly some truth to this, I'm really uncomfortable being defeatist both on distribution of resources and on the way humans relate to resources.
Oh, I'm personally pretty optimistic on both these fronts.
Have you read Hans Roslings' Factfulness? China alone lifted ~800M people out of $2 a day poverty in the last 40 years. People across the world are living better, longer, and healthier lives.
Not just that, but mirabile dictu, Malthusian dynamics eating all that prosperity isn't happening either! Fertility is actually aggregate declining to a sane carrying capacity rate at the world level:
https://imgur.com/a6npfIv
Overall, things are getting better worldwide on many levels, and that's with inequality and high Gini indexes and all the rest.
Not just that, but how humans relate to resources on a material level is getting less important as well - if you look at the aggregate economic growth of the US economy, it's basically all driven by the Mag 7. Take the Mag 7 out of the S&P, and we're slightly net negative.
Why is this good news? The Mag 7 deal in the digital, the one domain where consumption and status games have barely any physical world resource footprint!
When phone screen times went from 2-3 hours in 2014 to 7-9 hours per person in Zennials today, that's a huge reduction in physical resource consumption and impacts. If people spend all their time and bandwidth optimizing digital footprints and worlds, we actually don't need to worry about physical sustainability. Everyone can be king of their own digital castle, without the concomitant outsized consumption of the West!
> God, what a terrible world, where inequality is always getting worse, and people are always more and more individual and alienated consumers of material content and ideas are best served as marketing.
Isn't this just lamenting from your own selfish viewpoint that there's not more people like yourself out there? That people in the aggregate value stuff that you personally don't value, like Tik Tok and Golden Age TV Streaming and whatever?
But good news - there ARE more people like you out there! With 8 billion people in the world, we have more of *every* personality and value cluster. You're among them right now.
One nice thing about the digital - it turns everything into a search and clustering problem, and we've gotten *very* good at those. You can find "your people" online, no matter your physical geography. And if you live in a city with a decent population, you can translate that to a real-world social circle as well.
So never before have people been able to find "their people" so readily, and this is a great thing, as it enables you to build social circles with people who share your values and inclinations.
And overall, this is a great thing societally too - because the cohort that drives technological advance, that invents things, that starts new companies, they're able to find their complements out there, and are better resourced, more able to exchange ideas, and more able to create and innovate than ever before, and this helps improve things and raise standards of living for everyone!
Hm. This is a fascinating world view. Frankly, I wish I could have it.
Honestly, if you simply grant a) all happiness is happiness, there is no joy/pleasure distinction or anything, and b) the current state of the online world is capable of generating this new, simplified happiness on mass, you are probably right.
I just can't grant the first one, honestly. The second seems, like, probably true. But the first? I just... can't accept that. I need some differentiation or I'd never push myself the way I do.
> You can strengthen institutions that support it (like church) and weaken institutions that encourage people to "not settle" like feminism.
I dunno, I personally think this is a better equilibrium overall. People *shouldn't* have to "settle." Settling sucks!
The competitive bar has been raised, and now men need to compete against rivalrous alternatives like "having my own career, thanks" and Netflix and pets.
Let me lay out why I think this is a good thing overall, it has a couple of moving parts. Broadly, men suck to begin with, dating has always been a competition between the genders, there's an inherent tradeoff here that is either going to screw men or women, and we should side with the women because they're going to drive more value by being able to make their own choices.
Famously, the manosphere thinks it's a big deal that men grade female attractiveness on a bell curve, and women grade male attractiveness pass / fail, with at *least* 80% of men failing:
https://imgur.com/mTsnQMZ
But I say unto you - AND?
Have you *met* men?? Would YOU want to date a median man if YOU were a woman? It's essentially all downsides.
Did you know the median "interejaculatory latency time" during sex is only 9 minutes? And that a 1-in-a-thousand performance is 40 minutes? The bar for male sexual performance is just literally on the floor. I'm not sure how 90%+ women ever have a good sexual experience with both of those being true.
What else do women get by dating median men? Gigantic babies that want you to do their laundry and dishes and cook for them, while giving you...what in return? 9 minutes of awful, self-centered sex that does nothing for you? Kids that you then have to provide for and raise for 20+ years with barely any help?
Sure, you'll object, *we're* not like that! We here in the ACX commentariat are a cut above!
And yeah, I'll give you that - the people commenting here are overwhelmingly Professional Managerial Class with real jobs and high conscientiousness and whatever, who are excellent cooks and do our own laundry and contribute to raising kids.
But the societal level dynamics we're talking about are driven by the median characteristics out there, and I think it's pretty clear that women get basically nothing from men at that level. I mean, just consider divorce statistics - it's a ~42% vintage divorce rate at the population level, and probably an additional half that in "net miserable" relationships that neverthless stay together, for a full ~2/3 failure rate for relationships.
That says right off the bat the base rate for "relationships being net positive" is actually really low.
Furthermore, we're basically never going to get back to the 50's dynamic, where ~85% of men got married and had babies.
Do you know the historical comp there? 3-4 women reproduced for every man. That's 80% of women, and ~27% of men reproducing, and we lived like that for at least ~200k years:
https://imgur.com/JWIsva9
The 50's was an extremely unrepresentative peak of men doing better than they ever had over the last 200k years, and shouldn't be used as a reference baseline for what men should expect.
Dating and mating has *always* been a competition, and this is entirely expected. Moreover, I'd argue it's unambiguously better than the 50's dynamic.
People sometimes point to the much higher teacher, nurse, and secretary quality in the 50’s. This was because smart and talented women were stuck with those jobs, culturally, when they had the innate potential to be doctors, executives, or scientists.
Given that there's a big "human capital" difference between whichever side is going to be screwed, I'm happily on the side of screwing lower capital men versus those high capability women in that battle.
Because who is going to do more for all of us, in the aggregate? Those women who can now be scientists, doctors, and executives. They're the ones that will drive new company foundings and growth, new inventions and innovations, and better health and life outcomes for society overall.
That’s who you should side with if there needs to be a choice, and that’s who we need more of in our future.
> We can change culture.
Can you, though?
I've looked pretty hard and I've never been able to find a solid example of a government or people top-down deciding they wanted to change the culture in a certain direction, and succeeding in a reasonable amount of time and effort.
Smoking is the closest we've come, and it took ~60 years, lots of fighting, billions of dollars, and was mostly driven by the smokers literally dying off to get where we are today. Changing behavior is hard, even at the individual level - changing it deliberately and meaningfully at the society level is essentially a pipe dream, and requires extreme effort and many decades.
On this particular issue, there's essentially no way we'll raise the median male standard faster than sex robots and literally superhuman AI companions get here.
Do you think this will have any even remote improvement of your luck at finding a partner? Or is this some societal thing?
I can basically promise you will not be more likely to find a partner by trying to do this. I'd be very shocked if it didn't hurt your chances, to be honest.
This isn't even saying that either of those things are necessarily bad, just that they will not solve your problem.
I mean, not to say they are good, either. Just that either way it is not helping you.
I mean. I'm not thirty. I'm also somewhat lucky, at least so far, when it comes to relationships. But I can say that I have yet to be turned down! Just asking does a lot. I've also exclusively dated women I find attractive, intelligent, and enjoyable to be in conversation with, and all of my relationships have lasted about as long as I'd want them to. I don't know; it is possible I am just lucky, or something, but I don't know any men who meet the criteria of a) being willing to, and actually frequently doing, the asking out; b) being tolerable in conversation, c) taking even basic amounts of care of themselves, d) having decent ability to be curious about what she is interested in, and to be able to talk about what you enjoy freely and without shame, and e) having some decent career that affords either prestige, or money, or free time, or good feelings that is unable to find a girlfriend or has been unable to find a girlfriend in the past.
I'm younger, so that probably makes it easier, but I can't imagine a few years brings it from "very easy" to "sub 1%."
I am going to make the wild guesses that you are a young adult childless man in good physical health with few social or professional duties. This may inform your perspective somewhat. Perhaps in the future you will have goals no less noble, and yet more correlated with economic production, like ensuring the comfort and safety of your children.
Yes, you are broadly correct, and make a good point. I would generally really like to do many things for my children (which I do not yet have) which would require a lot of personal freedom usually only afforded by economic stability, and I wonder about how I am going to be able to do these things for them. This isn't something I have a solution for.
I will say, though, that I don't think I would have these freedoms any more if we produced twice as much, so long as I still needed to work as much as I do and likely will.
I will also say that I do generally work an unhealthily large number of hours, but I am in a position (pretty much as you described) that makes this both enjoyable and doable for me. It also allows me the ability to take significant time off if I need or want to, which is not something most can do. I don't really have a point here, but yes, this is my background, and my background will inevitably inform my opinions.
Also probably worth noting that while I have not grown up with money, I have been able to apply for and get grants and scholarships to fund what would generally require a lot of family resources, so I have some sort of privilege through the (honestly inexplicable to me) charity of others.
> But once the "home, food, transportation, and college/retirement savings" threshold is passed (~$80k annually is plenty!)
Retiring takes $2 million plus a paid off house, it's going to take a lot of years at $80K to save up that much.
Well, yes, $80k annually is huge! A majority of Americans don't earn that (median yearly income at around $60k), as well as the *vast* majority of people worldwide. Reaching a world where most people earn the equivalent of $80k/year will need GDP growth to continue for a long time.
It's not just that much of what GDP measures is unfulfilling activity; GDP can actually go up when bad things happen. For example, if some new disease suddenly struck elderly (ie, unemployed, so no lost work days) people, there'd be lots of new economic activity around treating them, and the GDP would go up. Arguably the terrible lifestyle in the US (sedentary, ultraprocessed) contributes to GDP similarly, by creating all kinds of disease in later life that must be treated (or by creating demand for the new weight loss drugs, which are not cheap).
Because GDP is legible and easy and a metric that people who value wealth accrual want to go up, eg the people who get to make decisions under capitalism.
There is a cruft of pseudo-science(most of economics) that has grown up to justify the situation that already exists, and natural biase has locked it in place and until some catastrophe loosens the gears (climate change, labor oversupply, population growth/decline, etc) we are stuck with it.
People will say shit like "More stuff is better than less stuff" and stop thinking, as through the marginal utility of your 35 pair of shoes or your 12 meal of the day was worth the time expenditure of production.
While this is, like, fun to say, and I really want to just agree with it and go back to writing my essays against capitalism in my boutique coffeeshop-bookstore while listening to Immortal Technique, it does seem that many people who are smarter and more educated than me do this, and I want to understand it in a more deeply than a rah-rah can give me. Although admittedly you may very well be just completely correct.
I really just think I am completely correct here.
I'm not even saying that capitalism is not the best organizational principle to manage distribution of stuff, it very well might be.
The hill I am willing to die on is the rest of the above post; specifically that the most of the production of the field of economics over the past 60-80 years is either soft philosophy or self help.
Hm. I do not have (as I have commented elsewhere) any more Econ literacy than a relatively competent undergrad student three or four years into studying it, and I don't feel confident making proclamations on the subject, but I'd love to hear your reasoning on it. That sounds believable-ish to me, but probably only because it confirms my biases.
There are a bunch of achane beefs with the way economists torture numbers until they say whatever they want, but that might just be MY biases as a shape rotator.
My main contention, which I think everyone can understand and needs to be argued, is that economists taken on average behave as though their field produces theoretical frameworks and models and suchlike, tests them against past behavior, then uses them to predict the future.
The actual situation is that the models are constructed with historical data to explain historical behavior, but then utterly fail to predict anything.
The best prediction any particular economic model can make is thus: If the price is going up, eventually it will probably go down, and if the price is going down eventually it will probably go up.
Basically, economics is softer than sociology but demands to be taken as seriously as say epidemiology.
Alright, I can calm down now. The bee has escaped my bonnet.
Alright. I don't feel like I can dismiss the field, but I do share the same feelings.
I love "Shape rotator" by the way. Very funny.
Can you clarify what this idea is? I'll check out the blogs tonight, although I don't use reddit so I would need to make an account, I presume?
Alright. Will give it a shot.
You're making a broader point here than your point about GDP, but GDP can be calculated based on total national expenditure (including government expenditure) instead of the value of goods and services produced, so this calculation would include national parks spending, donations to nature-based charities, lobbying to stop developers covering it all in concrete, travel and equipment. Also more natural goods have a monetary value than people realise. Some hooligans chainsawed the Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, lots of people thought the sentence was harsh but the reinstatement cost for a 100 year old tree would be in the hundreds of thousands.
While I think this definition is to some degree more preferable (and I should have made note of that) I would not say it is significant either way, as this section is weighted no differently, than, say, expenditure on whatever post-relationship hellscape the people at Grok are cooking up.
I agree, the only possible defence would be GDP includes lots of spending on lots of things people think are valuable, some of those things turn out to be valuable, some don't. One person can act contrary to their happiness but it would be strange if a whole nation did that consistently over the long term.
Would it? I feel like much of current society (or, at least, current society weighted by market value, so 10000:1 for meta employee over fisherman) is attempting to build things that we use and value in spite of knowing that they are bad for us and in spite of them actively making our lives worse.
I guess GDP-as-expenditure is a portfolio of bets on what will make us fairly happy, I would expect most people to get those bets right over the long term, but we are on the verge of making some big bets which have a serious chance of making us very unhappy.
Is it possible that we have engineered a system that makes us increasingly terrible at making those bets?
Because: A) GDP is legible [0] [1]; and B) materialism is the lowest common denominator.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
[1] https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
Yeah, this is what I was going to say if no one else already had. Typical streetlight effect. Measure the thing with an associated number rather than trying to measure happiness directly.
Although owning lots of useful items is better than owning few/no useful items, I think at the margin for say a typical American, their happiness would be better served by spending time on wholesome and fulfilling activities rather than money on more material goods. My mom is a hoarder, so I am very very much aware that more is not always better.
There isn't really much that I can say about this; you are correct, as in, this is the literal answer to my question. I guess I was hoping more for discourse on the question, than the answer to it, but thank you regardless. I do wish materialism wasn't, though. It is regrettable.
P.S. Thank you for the links.
oh, I actually have a plenty of strong opinions on this topic, generally in the genre of WoolyAl's comment. But I figure it's better to, ya know, keep the conversation iterative. In case I'd misunderstood something.
E.g. my original comment assumes the perspective of a bureaucrat who shapes macro-economic policy. But it's also possible that you were asking the question from an individual's perspective. I.e. "why do people keep up with Jones's?". In which case, Girardian Mimesis and Hedonic Treadmills would've been more appropriate.
> I find myself happiest when I am backpacking, sleeping as well as living in the commons we all share.
Another way I could have responded, is to remark that this reminds me of The Hobbit. The overarching theme is greed. Smaug covets gold, Thorin covets the Arkenstone, and Gollum covets the ring, all of whom serve as warnings to Bilbo and the reader. The foil is the high elves, the crazy hippies who've learned to commune with the gifts of nature.
Another interest of mine right now, is that I'd like to learn more about the juxtaposition between Friedrich List (who believes in protectionism) vs Adam Smith (who believes in free-markets and GDP maxing). Or equivalently, the American System vs the British System. I feel very suspicious that GDP maxing is the one true way.
You mentioned wireheading (implicitly). And lately, I've been wondering to what degree epistemic-confidence is a form of wireheading. (I'm not really sure how to explain this, yet.)
Inspired by Zanzibar, we could discuss the difference between use-value vs exchange-value, and to what degree Karl Marx had useful things to say about the world. In the past year, I've had two different people tell me that nobody really understood Marx's point (including other Marxists). And so "read Marx's corpus first-hand" is on my to-do list, even though I don't feel especially inclined toward Marxism.
This is all interesting. You seem to have pretty much gotten what I am talking about, for the record. If you have ideas on how to share the epistemic-confidence thing, I'm happy to listen, seems fascinating although I will admit not really sure where you are going with it from that comment. I think Marx thought Marxists misunderstood his point, although I wouldn't cite me on that, and I will admit my own reading of Marx has been relatively shallow. My economics reading is generally either game theory (which I am actually competent enough in to feel like I get a lot out of reading current scholarship) or just graduate textbooks (currently mostly finished with micro and about halfway through the one I have on macro) to get me to the point where I feel like I get a lot out of current scholarship on those topics. One of my main guiding principles is to remember that I generally disagree on most topics with me of the past, and to keep that thought with me when I discuss my current opinions; that is to say, I know I could be and very likely am at least partially wrong. And I'm economically speaking no more competent than a good undergrad, or, that is to say, I really do not know enough to comment authoritatively.
If you can't tell I'm feverish currently. Sorry about, well, how I am writing. Hopefully you have further thoughts.
I do think current society has wildly strange valuations, but I know my own preferences (e.g. I use one of those Garmin alert thingamajigs in place of a phone, for example) are pretty unusual and I shouldn't attempt to overly prescribe based on my own individual preferences.
> If you have ideas on how to share the epistemic-confidence thing, I'm happy to listen
Oh, idk. This is highly speculative. It might not be coherent. But I've been thinking about Friston's unification of action and observation, and what the ramifications of this are. I.e. if "observation" means "to align your beliefs with reality", then "action" means "to align reality with your beliefs". This introduces a certain tension. If you have no confidence, you'll never have the willpower to act on anything. But with too much confidence, you'll act in stupid ways and be closed minded. Is there a middle ground? Is the optimal choice conditional on something other than confidence? Is John Boyd's OODA Loop relevant? Is Cromwell's Rule relevant? Etc.
As a subsection this, I've been wondering about what happens when confidence gets cut off from exogenous feedback. It seems like, in the absence of exogenous feedback, it should be very easy to go down a path of self-reinforcing beliefs. Like how a cocaine addict can spiral into further addiction. drug addiction is a form of wireheading, and I feel like maybe wireheading can be generalized to more phenomena than is currently realized. But memory is also self-reinforcing, in a certain sense. And memory is pretty useful. Maybe positive-feedback loops are bad to the extent that they insulate a system from external shocks until the system encounters a signal it gets overwhelmed by. But isn't that desirable in, say, buildings?
----
> Hopefully you have further thoughts.
wewlad, not sure you want to encourage me to go full schizo.
More broadly, I'm on a personal quest to figure out the Modern Era. Again, I'm not in a position to explain or defend this coherently yet, but my current thinking is that modernity is built on the proliferation of cheap signals. And since honest signals are expensive by nature, this leads to low trust, which begets a host of subtle (read: illegible) negative-externalities. The printing press gave us material technologies and network expansion, but it came at the cost of degraded social technologies and cybernetic pollution. (Fun fact: "cyber" and "govern" are cognates [0]. I leave the kabbalistic implications as an exercise to the reader.)
For example, Super Owl makes the argument [1] that capitalism beat communism because communism (and similar utopian visions?) require high-trust, whereas capitalism only requires greed. In other words, it's a stag hunt. Communism basically tried to create a secular religion from scratch and failed. But it's also true that capitalism is the worst economic system... except for all the others we've tried.
Elsewhere, you mention "Is it possible that we have engineered a system that makes us increasingly terrible at making those bets?" Which reminds me, I'm not very impressed by financial engineering. Maturity transformation and chronic inflation are inherently destabilizing because they encourage malinvestment by distorting the credit market. I expect to see recession after recession during my lifetime. And each time, economists will go "wHo cOUld HavE pOsSiBLy SeEn THis CoMInG?!?" (breaking news: Silicon Valley coders fired en masse, after the end of a decade of ZIRP) while policy-makers put another bandaid on the proximal cause, du jour. And don't even get me started on the ticking timebomb we call "national debt".
Meanwhile, Performative Bafflement's comment mentions happiness metrics. To reiterate, I believe that happiness optimization is misguided. The obsession with happiness and utility, rather than wellbeing, is another error of Enlightenment Era Rationalism. Maybe he's right, in that this is all inevitable given human nature. But still, I can't help but see superstimuli as analogous to overfitting.
Though the picture is far from complete. E.g. at the moment, I'm in the middle of reading Bronze Age Mindset. BAP seems to disagree that our present state of 2025 can be traced to Neoliberal Managerialism, which is causing me a lot of cognitive dissonance, since it throws a wrench into the signal theory narrative I just laid out. And I'm not sure I fully understand his reasoning. Though I sympathize with his views on organized religion. And I think it's significant that he's basically just parroting Nietzsche, who predicted (correctly? [2]) that Dionysus [3] was just as central to Greek Mythology as Apollo.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=govern
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/ayn-rand-will-kill-us-all
[2] https://youtu.be/sWGfAyeBqzg?si=FJFxtiUHXTIL5a1l&t=516
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian
I'm very happy I convinced you to go full Schizo. Very, very interesting. I agree, or at least seem to be amenable, to much of what you have said. I'm interested in what you see as the issue in national debt -- I'd probably say my personal thought process around it is that it is likely a sub-ideal method of giving people money to retire off of (as most debt is US owned) and encouraging foreign investment (as some US debt is not US owned), but that it is unlikely to be an issue so long as tax-rate adjusted GDP grows faster than it does. Generally speaking it is, in my mind, certainly not one of the most broken parts of the current financial system. I'm also curious about your thoughts on the printing press -- reading is admittedly probably the last thing I would be willing to give up, because I love it dearly and because I generally read one to two books a week (averaging; I read seven in a week when I have the time, and then none for a few weeks when busy with work, but I track it and have averaged a little over a eighty a year the past few years, so 1-2 a week seems accurate), so I will probably respond emotionally and not rationally at first to any discussion of the faults of it, but they certainly exist -- anyways, that is all to say that I'm really bloody curious.
It is.not enough to be legible , GDP must be relevant. If everyone worked 100 hour weeks, GDP would be high and people would be miserab le. If no one worked,.and no one has any money, they would also be miserable. So it's neither correlated not anti correlated.
Would GDP be high if there is no leisure for shopping? Or is that 90s thinking?
Companies buy stuff. You buy stuff needed for your work, e.g. a car.
Up to a point. Restaurants/Cafes/Bars can't survive on Sunday trade + bookings after 9pm. Or are they doing 996 but swapping the 9s round?
Some of those would provide teambuilding activities instead? Maybe only a fraction of them, but maybe the teambuildings could be expensive enough to compensate for that from the perspective of GDP?
Ultimately, people will spend the money they make. The less free time they have, the more expensive things they will buy, because they will be able to afford it, and because they will feel they "deserve" to buy something expensive to compensate for their suffering.
Anecdotally, I knew some people who were working ~996 in an environment where 40 hours a week were the general norm. They made 2x the money as their colleagues in similar positions in other companies. They didn't have families, and with such schedule couldn't keep a hobby, or even friends outside of their work. So every Sunday, someone from their job organized a party at some expensive place, they all came because they had no better plans, they drank a lot of insanely expensive alcohol, watched striptease, then returned home to get some sleep and be ready for the next round of 996. Staying at home would be just too depressing. Anyway, most of them quit after a few months, or burned out and got fired. They were mentally broken and had no savings. From the perspective of GDP -- excellent!
more like 996 thinking. who needs consumer demand when you can export?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
This is a tech thing, no? If you're trying to get there first at the frontier you and your staff probably do have to work like dogs, I'm skeptical a whole economy could sustain that, in many cases there would be physical obstacles to doing that amount of work (I'm a gardener) or there would be diminishing returns with each extra hour.
It's a Chinese "Special Economic Zone" thing. Most importantly though, I saw an opportunity to make a dandy zinger, and I took it.
Because more stuff is good. It is true that the overwhelming majority of people are retarded (1) and make horrifically suboptimal decisions regarding their pursuit of happiness. However, the overwhelming majority of attempts to legally/societally/religiously make people be not retarded have resulted in worse outcomes than just letting people be retarded, probably because the people attempting to legally/socially/religiously improve the majority of humanity are themselves people and therefore retarded. Within the constraint that most people are retarded and will waste the overwhelming amount of time on this earth and money they earn on bullshit jobs and stupid garbage, the only way we can improve general outcomes is to help them earn more stupid garbage for the same bullshit jobs.
For example, most virtuous people could probably be quite happy on a UBI of $3000/month in the US. Actual people have $600/month car payments while they guzzle Mountain Dew and blow $100 over lunch on DraftKings. Given that we, as a society, cannot make most people prefer hiking and mediation over fast cars, crap food, and gambling addictions, it's still better if, in 20 years, we can put a lifted pickup-truck with BALLER rims in every driveway, Baja Blast-Red Lightning Edition Mountain Dew in every cup, and a $200/month cocaine subscription for every FanDuel signup. (2)
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
(2) USA! USA! USA!
That clip never gets old.
I don't think I can accept that it is impossible to make people better at being happy instead of simply praying on their base instincts of gratification and pleasure. Surely we can do better? I feel like, at least to a degree, humans are very able to change their behavior based on the directives of others, but maybe I am wrong?
Are you going to significantly outperform Jesus and/or the Buddha?
I mean, if anyone is not retarded, it's Jesus & the Buddha. Very few people have had more of an impact on the world than they had and they tried very directly to shape human behavior and desire. Are we even confident that their net impact on the world was positive? Christopher Hitchens had opinions.
Conversely, some guy named Rober Baker invented chicken nuggets in 1950, which is a clear pareto improvement over the world of 1949.
One of these things is way easier than the other.
Also, please remember, we don't have Jesus or the Buddha to try to improve the world, we have, uh, currently we have Trump and Kamala Harris. Maybe Da Pope. We don't even have Oprah anymore. Please adjust your ambitions accordingly.
I don't think this follows, honestly. I would say that algorithmic social media has directly made people worse (in the fashion we mean it here) and that is a recent human invention. It does not stand to reason to me here that these inventions can only make things worse, yes?
Wait. What happened to Oprah?
Nothing dramatic, it seems, she just got old and tired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oprah_Winfrey_Show#Final_season
It's correlated with a lot of good things.
To take your example of backpacking, in low GDP times / places:
* The roads from the cities to the nice backpacking spots may not exist or may not be good, so it would take you much longer to get there, if you could get there at all.
* You might not be able to afford a car to get there.
* Nice lightweight and waterproof backpacking equipment wouldn't be available, so backpacking would be less enjoyable.
* You would not have access to maps or GPS devices or internet communities so you wouldn't be able to plan your trip as well.
* You would probably die younger (lifespan is strongly correlated with GDP), so you wouldn't get as many chances to go backpacking.
Sure, but do we have any strong reason to expect that correlation to continue into the future? I don't see why doubling, say, US GDP would necessarily be good? Like, many sectors would benefit immensely, but I can also imagine things that really do not seem favorable to added productive capacity? And I would not be confident that the benefits would outweigh the costs.
It's not a law of nature that more GDP = more goodness. But your response could have been written verbatim before some of Gary's points were a reality (lightweight waterproof backpacks, affordable cars, GPS/internet communication).
So GDP is a proxy for those things we all agree make hiking more enoyable or, in many cases, possible in the first place. And they are not predictable. So it stands to reason that more GDP in the future = more goodness still.
To be completely honest I do not think this follows? Technological advance certainly can make hiking better, but it can also (undoubtedly) make hiking worse. The same is true with real life. GDP is both a pretty bad measurement of technological advancement, and, like, probably more correlated with the second than the first?
GDP goes up when things are produced, and to maximize this you need more and more consumption, and I do not think consumption makes hiking better (e.g. in the same way the latest running outfit or bike gearshift makes running or riding any better; there are only so many things that provide enough of a boost in enjoyment to justify them, like, existing, and even more basically to justify you spending the time to learn about how to use them. Also, I think being caught up in the materialistic rat race of a hobby generally makes the hobby less fun, but maybe that is just me.
My understanding of many, many pre-industrial tribes and places is that they very frequently cared about the environment, spent time in the environment, and so on, and so on; certainly the produced wildly less than we do today. I do not think these things track. This feels (not to be offensive or to attack, I mean this honestly, you may be correct and I may be wrong) like the sort of reasoning that is done to justify a belief already held.
I'm not going to attempt to argue about your state (surely, you know more about it than I do). I am not attempting to argue that in every case less development means better relationship with the natural world, just that a lot of the former is not necessary (and, certainly, is not the path to) the latter.
Two American Civil War facts we don't hear enough about:
1. The Confederate army enslaved every black person they could find when they invaded Pennsylvania. You can be sure they weren't conducting investigations to determine who was an escaped slave and who was freeborn.
2. With the blessing of Jefferson Davis, General Sibley invaded New Mexico, with the intention of extending slave territory West to the Pacific. Of course Davis was fully on board with this; extending slave country was a project loved by the Southern educated public.
The Southern adventurer William Walker briefly took control of Nicaragua in the 1850s, before he was forced to return home. Walker was celebrated as a returning hero. He was part of a broader phenomenon dubbed filibustering. In an American context, filibusters embodied the Southern planters’ desire to build a vast slave empire, one that stretched to Colombia or even Patagonia.
I have been a William Walker fan (as a historical personage, not as a role model) since watching the Alex Cox movie about him as a sort of proto-Reagan adventurer.
I like Alex Cox and I've been meaning to watch that movie for years.
I'm not American but I feel like you all hear too many Civil War facts already, and not enough about other things.
Is there a Great Australian Historical Event with which you could fact-bomb us instead? That would be a refreshing change. ...The Emu War?
Partly because it was our most traumatic and deadly war, and we've fought a lot of wars.
Partly because it's our oldest war that was extremely well documented. Civil War books take you back to an exotic world of duels and cavalry charges. And there are so many primary sources that you can wander that world for the rest of your life and never learn everything.
Partly because so many of us are still bitter about the war and we want to go back in time and refight it. And I'm not just talking about pro-Confederates. Us Unionists wish we could go back and smash the Southern planters FAR more thoroughly. We needed to pulverize the planter class so completely that its power was broken forever.
Our failure to do that led to a century of suffering for millions of Americans. And some of the negative effects are still with us today.
The typical reason to smash your enemies thoroughly is to ensure you don’t have to fight another war against them. That was accomplished. You know that slavery was defeated, not just on the battlefield but in realm of ideas when, only a few years after the war was over, former Confederates started pretending they hadn’t actually been fighting to preserve slavery. The idea of unilateral succession was also put to rest by the war, apparently permanently. There have been a few people talking about secession in recent years, but I don’t think that even the craziest of them think that unilateral secession, as opposed to separation by mutual agreement, is a good idea.
It’s true that the Civil War didn’t end racial discrimination, but that wasn’t a war goal. There were, sadly, racists on both sides.
The typical reason to smash your enemies is to create peace. But there was little peace to be had in the South from 1865-1970. Through police and vigilantes, the Southern white elite more or less waged a low-level war against millions of poor Americans. It could have been avoided.
I was about to say "The reason that I think people should talk about it less is because I think most of the time they're just looking for an excuse to bring old regional, political and racial hatreds into the modern day"... but then I got to your third paragraph and you proved me right.
Some conflicts happened long ago and are no longer relevant; some conflicts are ongoing.
There is no clear line. For every conflict that 99% people already consider settled, there is someone still obsessed over it... and with some luck he could restart the flames.
But that is different from situations that seemed resolved for a moment, but that was just because the winning side underestimated the capacity of the losing side to recover.
I'm so sorry for harboring political hatred towards the southern planter class, a conglomeration of serial rapists who dreamed about spreading serial rape, disciplinary torture and human degradation All the Way South to the Colombia
I'm so sorry for harboring political hatred towards the KKK, America's oldest domestic terror group.
I'll add it's very funny that you cited your dislike of "racial hatred" as a reason to condemn my comment. When my comment expressed a desire to disempower the foremost authors of racial hatred in American history, and to empower the proponents of racial harmony. The Civil War was mainly fought between whites.
You're not the only one to say they want to go back in time and kill Hitler, but I'm surprised to find there's a way to say it that comes off as boring as it is impossible.
You did smash that class. That’s how you got Southern populists and demagogues. You made sure the Ewells were left on top, not Atticus Finch. You should be happy.
Or read up on pellagra, with its 3 D’s: dermatitis, diarrhea, and dementia, death being the honorary 4th. I think it might make you feel better. It could be a Yuletide reading.
There’s a children’s book about it, sort of DK-ish, which has the advantage of pictures which I think should enhance your enjoyment.
A fun road trip for you might wind up in Madison WI. 140 Confederate soldiers, most about 17 or 18, lay buried there, with a marker or plaque that had been allowed to be placed by some too tenderhearted women at some point, commemorating as was the barbaric fashion the shared loss of youth in the national cataclysm, in this case to disease/wounds in a prisoner camp.
The markers were discarded so unfortunately you can’t now smash them but as far as I know their remains have not yet been disturbed, so you might be able to deface the graves, if you can figure out which ones they are now that the marker is gone. You would want to be sure and dishonor the right boys.
The Southern planter class was not smashed. It was coddled, it was babied, it was not a held accountable. I guarantee you the entire Confederate population believed that Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis were going to be hanged if they lost the war.
And did Lost Causers gain new respect for Unionists because they refrain from hanging Lee and Davis? Not one bit. Many privately considered this to be a sign of weakness and one more reason to hold Northerners in contempt.
There were no downsides to hanging Davis and the Confederate generals, only upsides. Our failure to do that represented a coddling, incredibly naive leniency that led to 100 years of oppression and suffering for millions of Southerners. Black and white alike.
Hanged. It's called hanged, not hung. Hung is what a picture-frame is, not a man.
Good catch on that error. I just realized my ENTIRE comment was an error. I had a brain fart and forgot that luciaphile is quite possibly the most unserious poster here, excluding the ones that get banned.
Reconstruction was done half way, half heartedly, and then rolled back juuuuuuust short of illegal enough. Every planter family (+/-) that got rich at the handle end of a whip had recovered everything they lost by the 1920's.
They should have been utterly disposed. Every bit of property confiscated and ever bit of capital seized for reparations, not given a 9 year time out.
Just as now, the Ewells of the world were symptoms of the disease that is the Candie's.
I understand the sentiment. Here on a different side of the planet, many of wish that the top communist officials got hanged, every nontrivial member of the communist party or an employee of a secret service got banned for life from working in a public office, and the Soviet Union got dismantled to dozens of small states never allowed to reunite. It could have saved us a lot of problems that we have today.
If so, then it was much like the persistence of pre-revolutionary families in France, in business decades later, even after various members were beheaded.
But of course, the South was much impoverished compared to the North so this would have been all relative where true.
Where not true: Faulkner, pretty much all of Southern literature.
Now, Faulkner might illustrate your point.
He didn’t have to work that hard.
And yet, one would not describe him as having the wealth of his ancestors in any sense.
Hmm. You're comparing the French aristocracy, some of who supported the 1789 revolution and opposed slavery
With the violent, irrational serial rapists who comprised the Southern planter class. Quite a comparison.
Inasmuch the French aristocracy did own slaves, they lived in 1789, not 1860. 70 years of modern history is like a millennium of ancient history. For the wealthy, intellectual development and availability of knowledge increased exponentially between 1789 and 1860. The Confederate planters must be held to a higher standard.
You have completely misinterpreted the meaning of "smash the Southern planters". And why would you assume that those "140 Confederate soldiers, most about 17 or 18", belonged to the class of plantation owners?
That’s sweet of you to want to rescue some boys from infamy. It shows a little empathy that will not do you credit with the culture. But sadly, while I’m sure statistically many of the boys there were not from landowning families, let alone slaveowning families, you will probably be disappointed to learn that very likely all classes were represented. The honor culture of the South doesn’t quite map to the current day, and rural “Extended South”* overrepresentation in deaths in military service.
If it did, Lee’s son would not end up a POW.
* I can’t think what that guy calls it, the guy who writes the book about the regions of America, and which ones are about to go full Nazi. I did read a review of his latest such tome, and found that Iowa was now on the naughty list.
What do you think Chance meant by "smash the Southern planters"? Genocide?
Regime change, and I bet he'd see no contradiction between that and his other comments in this thread vociferously denouncing more recent interventions.
Re: Walker, you might want to look up the Knights of the Golden Circle, if you don't know about them already.
Also, "filibuster" has a fun etymology – it's a French loanword which is in its turn the French way of pronouncing the word "freebooter", as in a pirate.
The insurmountable barrier, if I remember correctly, comes from the fact that for various reasons, it is hard to do cutting-edge ad targeting for LLM users. Sure, you could easily do billboard-style, untargeted banner ads, as if it was 2002 again. But those ads are so primitive and ineffective that people aren't eager to buy them.
As for LLMs subtly pressuring people to buy products, you'd have to keep this secret and if it leaked at any time, the public would be outraged. Too risky.
You don't show the ads through the LLM interface. You sell insanely detailed ad profiles of your users to ad networks so they can use it to supercharge their targeting elsewhere
I don't think that product is worth enough to offset the projected inference expenses these companies will face in the next few years.
Subtly?
https://huggingface.co/TheDrummer/Rivermind-24B-v1
> if it leaked at any time, the public would be outraged
I would not count on this. Orgs get away with much worse (e.g. microsoft leaking their azure master key last year made some news, but it had no impact on the bottom line whatsoever).
I believe the only reason we dont see ads integrated in AI-Chats, is because these companies still have other good revenue streams. Once the bubble starts bursting, we will see enshittification happening, which will include ads in AI.
Zitron would argue the point is moot because nobody knows how to keep inference costs predictable and low without pissing off customers, ie. Raising the subscription price to 100+ dollars monthly, or cutting people off when they use too much inference, which will infuriate people, since the average user doesn't know exactly how much inference they are using, or exactly how to manage their inference use.
I'm not sure if it's POSSIBLE to write a guide to exactly managing your inference use. All you could do would be to give vague, obvious tips, right?
Or you could just have a meter. People won’t need to know what the units are, they can just know that a conversation is red, and that means it’s consuming lots of inference. Or they can have a slider for how much inference the service is allowed to use without asking them
Introducing meters like that will alienate a substantial portion of current LLM users, and hasn't it been claimed that 800 million have used LLMs?
If you're willing to take that hit and rely on new users to make up the difference, the new users will STILL be furious when they are cut off after 2 hours of prompting, and than they find out that Uncle Bob prompted for 40 hours before being cut off.
Let's say we can accept losing THOSE outragees. You'll still have text-only LLM users (TLUs) who will see their inference eaten up faster for non-obvious reasons. They will compare notes with other TLUs with similar usage patterns, but dramatically different inference-per-prompt statistics.
This is inevitable when there are SO many possible prompts. the variations are endless. I find it impossible to predict how long it takes for ChatGPT to complete a task! It is obvious that simple tasks take longer than complicated tasks. But still, there is dramatic variance in the speed at which the LLM completed two tasks with roughly equal complexity.
Sure, but companies alienate people alll the time without losing them completely. I felt pretty alienated when Windows updates became compulsory, but I didn’t switch back. People might feel like they’re being ripped off, but people buy stuff off companies that they think are ripping them off all the time, too.
Humans have hyperactive pattern recognition, so we tend to be conspiratorial. If you charge users based on inference, many people will look at these their hard-to-explain inference statistics and conclude they are getting ripped off.
I agree with Ed Zitron that managing inference costs is a difficult problem with no easy solution, at least one that is not easy if you want LLM use to be as ubiquitous as social media use. And don't LLMs need to approach that level of success to justify their incredibe startup costs? You can't win this battle without satisfying conspiratorial dum dums who believe in Trump's pee tape and think the Earth is flat.
I wrote some notes on questions I'm very interested in! Would love to get more engagement by ACX commenters, some ppl here might have relevant background knowledge and/or models.
https://inchpin.substack.com/p/some-notes
1. Are ideas important? How important are they? Can we quantify them?
2. How do we get better ideas?
3. [stuff that only makes sense in context of the rest of the post]
4. How responsible was Fairshake for Katie Porter’s loss?
5. What are non-partisan ways to preserve democracy?
6. How can we map the unknown and see where silence is? (antimemes/censorship)
7. What percentage of the effect of censorship comes from the direct censorship vs the chilling effect induced?
(The rest of the post goes into more details about the state of current thoughts on the questions I'm pondering).
Some ideas are pretty obviously important: lightspeed is constant for all observers; incentives matter; most people have two arms and two legs. Some ideas are worthless: a list of predictions following from the event that my nose becomes Novosibirsk. There's a lot in between.
Sounds like you're measuring ideas in terms of "usefulness". One idea is better than another one if the first permits you to do more of whatever you'd prefer, where "you" might be just you, or some set of people like you (but this is probably ultimately evaluatable down to "better for just you, since other people like you doing more means freeing up more of your time"). Examples typically include ideas that enable or inspire people to build various labor-saving or enjoyment-expanding devices. Staircases and stories.
Many ideas don't enable building of labor-saving devices, but enable or combine with other ideas that do. The idea that I can use charcoal to make marks on wood doesn't enable a staircase all by itself, but it helps. Ideas enable or combine via _logic_. If you know P and Q, you know R. If you know S, you know T has to be false. Et cetera.
A lot of this is going to sound very abstract and fru-fru, because what you're asking touches on metaphysics and basic logic. What you're calling an "idea" ("concept that can be expressed simply in a relatively short string of words, or some other symbolic form like equations, in a relatively context- and mind- independent way") is pretty close to what philosophers would call a _proposition_. The best explanation for it I know of (in terms of clarity and preciseness) is in SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/ You might also try some of the chapters in Michael Loux's book, _Metaphysics_. It is dry reading, and will require patience. If you already have passing familiarity with logical notation, you'll have a head start.
Once you understand some of the lingo, you can return to questions about finding quality ideas/propositions and methods for generating more. I happened to be working on a similar problem with a few other people, over twenty years ago. We were trying to solve a certain class of database incompatibility problems, and rightly determined that to do that, we'd need a firm idea of how to express facts about the world independently of context (but also be able to compute over them quickly, which meant a set of tools for mapping between a context-independent model and a tractable subset). This was arguably beyond the technological state of the art at the time (Sparc 20s, IBM 80486 CPUs, Oracle 8, etc.), but the theory was sound enough to give us a working prototype before external forces shut everything down.
One way to generate better ideas is to pull data from existing sources, parse them, and express them in an independent model, then resolve data from disparate sources using logic and carefully curated heuristics. After some work, you might find ways to discover patterns that yield more "important" ideas. Do this naively and you'll get useless ideas at first (e.g. as the Gregorian calendar year goes up, so does your age); you'll spend plenty of time on meta-ideas about telling important ideas from useless ones.
I've developed thoughts on your points 1 and 2, which I suspect you've already answered to your satisfaction and include only as provocation, but I need to stay busy while caffeine comes on, so:
Goals can be terminal or instrumental; terminal goals are considered good to have in and of themselves, instrumental goals are pursued in order to achieve some other terminal goal, or another instrumental goal in a chain leading to a terminal goal. Possession of an item can be a goal; items in this context can be physical or informational, a coherent whole that is persistent, or a collection of ground truths that are only relevant for a brief time. Your usage of 'idea' is pretty blurry, so pardon the massive abstraction; I'm trying to introduce an ontology that demonstrates the massive number of ways the word 'idea' can be reified into something manipulable.
My broader point is that utility functions can't take ideas as inputs, they take a world-state and spit out a multidimensional score, or a space of neighboring alternatives with a partial ordering, or a total ordering over the entire space of world-states. (The semantic I'm using does include the presence or absence of information in a given person's head as an input to the utility function: "It is better if I know the password to my Swiss bank account worth $zillions than if I don't" is a valid utility function, as is "It is better if I have a generator of plans for learning the password to my bank account than if I don't" - both are information in someone's head, the password is a belief about a ground truth that can be tested for match with reality, the plan-generator is an "idea" as you seem to be using it.)
"Idea" as used in the commonplace that "ideas are cheap" is only weakly related to changes in the world-state or its constraints that generate value for people (using 'people' as shorthand for agents hosting utility functions), because the value delivered by a blog post is reliant on the particulars of the context, the entire experience that the full post text generates, and the reader's utility function. Einstein posting "E=mc^2" and its necessary context and proof is at minimum a single idea and its additional context that generates near-zero value for a baker, except perhaps through enjoyment of rhetorical flair or looking impressive to people who see them reading it, but that exact same post generates massive value to a nuclear physicist. An anonymous post saying merely "mu" with no supporting context is a reference to generates zero value for almost everyone, unless the reader is carrying around the necessary mental state to be enlightened by a cascade to enlightenment that's triggered by it and does experience enlightenment, which is of massive value. Bunnie Huang saying "the private key of every Xbox is 0x..." is a single belief that is also an idea that is of value only to people trying to write software that runs on an Xbox. When people say that "blog post ideas are cheap", they mean that the seed idea massively underspecifies the full text, which in turn massively underspecifies the reader's experience, which is what actually generates value for them.
In other words, a huge amount of the constraint on expected value of the idea, in a given context, to a given reader, is added during its elaboration into a full post.
We can generalize and formalize this straightforwardly. If the full experience is a given bitstring, the importance of an idea is how much of the expected value of a (text, context, agent) triplet is given by the information of only the seed idea, rather than the information added by the elaboration process. Given that the experience is a print of an image that the agent finds moving and valuable, a lossy compressed version of the image is less important than a seed value for some fractal that eventually evaluates out to the lossless image, and is much more important than a casual verbal description of the work like "an abstract painting of a bird, a shooting star, and a balloon" (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79321).
Tangent, not insightful: it seems useful to occupy a mental space that unifies both "bifocal modes", or that generates them, rather than trying to flip between them. Whence the bifocal-ness?
Re: 5, I suspect what you really want to preserve is Liberalism, and much of what is called "democratic backsliding" is actually the process of becoming MORE democratic, with the common people gaining power at the expense of traditional institutions.
This distinction is not mere semantics, and bears on what one can do to arrest this: make voting harder by reinstituting a poll tax, or more indirect by repealing the Seventeenth or ending primary elections and having party leaders choose the nominees for the general, dramatically increase term lengths, have more laws (or "regulations") be made by "independent agencies" and "nonpartisan experts," institute occupational licensing requirements for journalism.
I think preserving liberalism is good too but I'm interested in literal democracy in the sense that if people vote for something the elected leader as usually understood by a common-sensical definition of the term is likely to win.
If I ever write it out as a full post I'll be sure to define it more carefully.
Without putting more thought in: Antimemes/censorship - Mapping the Unknown - point 2 lacks a link to your previous work: "In ethics and meta-ethics, the possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe, arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. I wrote a summary here:"
Fixed, thanks
"How responsible was Fairshake for Katie Porter’s loss?"
Having seen the interview with the lady, and the clips that were shared around of her from other interviews in the wake of that, I would have to say Ms. Porter was 99% responsible. Fairshake may have run attack ads, but she provided them with such an embarrassment of riches to use that it wasn't difficult.
Am I thinking of the wrong election? I thought the Fairshake funding thing was for the 2024 Senate race last year, where she lost to Schiff, and the interview you're talking about (and the clips that followed) was last month, for the Governor's race in 2026.
The timeline, so far as I can figure it out, is:
2024 - she decides to switch up to the Senate from the House of Representatives. She got stomped, coming in third behind Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey (the Republican candidate, and for a Republican to finish above a Democrat in a Californian election, you would have to call that a walloping). This was the one where Fairshake ran the attack ads.
Immediately the cry went up: "the election was rigged against me! cryptobros!" which, uh, she then had to walk back with an explanation that, frankly, reads to me like trying to say "I totally meant it was rigged":
"After her loss in the primary, Porter said the election had been "rigged" against her. She claimed that the "rigging" criticism referred to Schiff's campaign and allies raising and spending $11 million in the nonpartisan primary to boost a Republican candidate and knock her out of the general election. Her use of the word "rigged" triggered backlash from some Democrats, who condemned her language for echoing former president Trump's refusal to accept his 2020 loss. Porter later expressed regret, saying, "I wish I had chosen a different word." She made clear that her assertions about the "rigging" were not related to counting of votes or the election process, which she called "beyond reproach". Porter said: "That is a dishonest means to manipulate the outcome. I said 'rigged by billionaires' and our politics are in fact manipulated by big dark money. Defending democracy means calling that out."
2025 - having lost her House seat and failed to advance to the Senate, our fair servant of the people decides to throw her hat into the ring for Governor. Despite the fact that she is trailing in the polls to Schiff, who WASN'T EVEN RUNNING (and has since declined to run, just like Kamala Harris), she does the now infamous interview where she blows off 40% of the electorate as 'why would I need their dirty, filthy, grubby, horrible MAGA votes?' thus demonstrating the keen grasp of political reality which made her so successful to date. Never mind that the last time she ran, she definitely was *not* able to garner all the Democratic votes (and, as mentioned, is trailing in the polls to the guy who beat her like a gong last time even though he hasn't even announced his candidacy), this time it's gonna be different, for sure, she don't need no deplorables! 😁
And that brings us to today, where now she is a cooing dove wooing the cryptobros, all being apparently forgiven and forgotten. *Somebody* on her campaign clearly had a full and frank exchange of views with her about her chances if she didn't pull her socks up.
That's my guess as well though I'm not sure how much I'd trust my own judgments for this type of thing.
My jaw dropped when I saw the interview, because beforehand I was "it can't have been that bad". Welp, it was. And then the additional video clips of her being abusive, demanding, and dumb (not to put too fine a point on it: sets up under professional lighting rig for some on-my-phone post, complains lights are too bright, when hapless underling turns off lights, then complains it's dark. Well, duh, Katie, that's what happens when you turn off lights!)
Then I read how she already got curb-stomped by Adam Schiff when she tried running for the Senate, which made me go even harder "and you *don't* think you might need some of those 40% voters, Katie?"
Though now the PR campaign about "it was cryptobros who sabotaged her" seems to be starting up, so it'll be interesting to see how the race for governor goes:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/katie-porter-chris-larsen-21169718.php
They say she's going on a charm offensive. Given that her idea of charm seems to be "yell at my underlings for daring to be visible in the same space as me", that's gonna be fun to watch! Dear Californian ACX readers, please keep me updated on this race, the entertainment value seems to be through the roof 😁
In terms of it feeling like Pascal's wager it's because of the infinite values involved. IIRC years ago Scott reviewed a book that ranked existential threats and had AI highest and climate change/nuclear weapons following. I believe the rationale was that because AI would eliminate everyone and climate change/nuclear fallout would only eliminate *most* people, AI being unaligned had essentially near-infinite negative EV as all of the future people who wouldn't be born count against it, or something like that. The same for people who are huge AI proponents - the value generated from a properly aligned AI is technically infinite in the same way the value removed by an unaligned one in infinite.
No one has made a case that climate change would eliminate most people, or even 10% of people. Something can be really, really bad while still not hitting those margins.
People use the words "Pascal's wager" for all kind of stuff, but I think the original idea is that you worry about *extremely* unlikely things just because they are associated with an arbitrarily large promise of reward.
Worrying about something that is 90% likely, 50% likely, 10% likely, or even 1% likely is *not* Pascal's wager. For example, "look at both sides before you cross the street, otherwise you could get hit by a car" is *not* Pascal's wager, even if the chance of being hit by a car is less that 1%. Not even if you assign nearly infinite value to not being hit by a car!
(Pascal's wager is when you also look up before crossing the street, to avoid being hit by a UFO.)
EDIT:
More importantly, it is "Pascal's wager" not when *you* think that the event is extremely small, but when even the people who worry about the event admit that it is extremely small... but the infinite reward makes it worth worrying anyway.
For example, a child worried about being eaten by a monster under the bed is *not* an example of Pascal's wager, even if from the parent's perspective the existence of the monster hiding under the bed is extremely small.
To wrap it up:
It is *not* "Pascal's wager" if:
* the chance is smaller than 50%, or 10%, or 1%
* the chance is small and the costs of worrying are high, so the cost-benefit analysis says it is not worth worrying
* you think the chance is infinitely small, but other people think it is quite real
It is "Pascal's wager" if:
* the people who worry admit that they also believe that the chance is infinitely small, but an infinitely large reward makes it worth to worry anyway
I think what makes something truly Pascalian is if the small positive probability isn't something decided derived from a model or otherwise the output of some actual thoughtful process; it's just set to some small, non-zero number for the purposes of not having any 0 probabilities.
I'm not sure how much this mimics the original argument, but my sense of how modern people use Pascal's wager is, "but surely there's *some* chance of Heaven"--the argument doesn't depend on any particular way of reasoning about the probability of Heaven, just a general feature that you wouldn't like to say it's literally _impossible_
Your definition would imply that people who believe in God (such as Pascal himself) couldn't make a Pascal's wager, since they would not agree that such a thing was "infinitely small." They do in fact believe that it's fully true, but even someone with doubts isn't infinitely small.
Glynn has it correct. Pascal's wager is about the infinite, not about the probability. You just don't need to make such a wager about things with knowable outcomes. Crossing the street doesn't involve a Pascal's wager-type event, because the concerns are knowable. You can see a car coming and determine the likelihood of being hit, and the frequency of such events occurring (crossing streets, cars driving on them) are both very common.
Things with an unknown outcome to the person *hearing* the wager are what's relevant. Pascal's wager is about people who do not believe heaven/hell are likely. Similarly, anyone making a claim about AI doom that use the infinite concerns about AI are talking to people who do not currently believe it, as a way to get them to become more concerned. It's the same thing as Pascal.
> people who believe in God (such as Pascal himself)
I was under impression that "Pascal's wager" was Pascal's attempt to rationalize himself into believing in God, i.e. starting from a position of unbeliever who wants to believe (because the infinite rewards are tempting, even considering the probabilities as seen from his current perspective).
Yeah, I concur: Pascal did not think that the odds of the Christian God existing was infinitely small.
Though maybe he argued that even if it was infinitely small it would still be worth it? I looked up his actual argument, as Pascal wrote it in 1660, but I can't say I understand him well enough to tell whether he was saying the probability matters. I'll post the relevant bit here to see if anyone more mathematically inclined than myself can parse it:
"You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. "That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; where-ever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness."
Yes,
> But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain.
seems to be asserting that even if the chance of success was infinitely small ("if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you") it would be worth it. Although I do not understand what "wagerring one against two" and "stake one life against three" mean in this context.
My interpretation of Pascal's quote is that he's concerned with known upsides and downsides, rather than probabilities per se. The upside of faith is huge (eternal life), and the downside is relatively small (losing arguments on the internet, over a finite lifespan). Therefore, if you don't know which belief is true, you should pick the option which has a better upside-to-downside ratio.
Not sure why my reply got added as a separate comment instead but appreciate you replying anyway. My understanding of Pascal's wager (at least the original) was that it doesn't actually matter what you think the probability of the event is, since any non-zero probably gets multiplied by infinite value and becomes infinite EV.
The one qualifier I might add beyond that is that the event is entirely hypothetical, and the real odds are completely unknown. Betting 5$ on a wheel that has a 1/100,000 chance of paying out 1,000,000$ is getting positive EV at a high risk of ruin. GAI to me is more like spinning a wheel that is behind several curtains, may or may not exist, and everyone has estimated different probalities for different possible outcomes - but the EV is infinite so you have to spin it anyways.
The bombing of Libya was not a balanced issue. The interventionists received plenty of warning about the risks, and they willfully chose to ignore those warnings. Unconscionable.
The bombing of Gaddafi's forces in Libya started at a point when the entire East of the country had insurged and ousted the Gaddafi forces. Gaddafi was about to reconquer it with his air force and tanks, which the insurgents mostly lacked. His son and de facto second in command (Saif Al-Islam) was threatening for "a river of blood".
The choice was between intervention: probable long-term instability (which happened) and non-intervention: immediate bloodbath (arguably) and also probable long-term instability.
I added (arguably) because I just found that there was a whole parliamentary debate in the UK in 2016, with a House of Commons comittee arguing that the British intervention was a wrong decision, and failed, and the government denying this. Part of the debate is whether Gaddafi was likely to massacre civilians in his reconquest. Think what you will but at the minimum, you should not ignore the question entirely.
Commitee report: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/119/11902.htm
Government response (pdf): https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/834/834.pdf
In your other post you claimed that terrorist attacks were falsely pinned on Gaddafi's Libya. Not true: they admitted responsibility for both plane bombings (Lockerbie and the UTA in Niger) and financially compensated the victims' families.
Also, the focus should not be on Obama. Both British sides above agree that France and the UK were the leading countries in the NATO intervention. The comittee report claims that the UK blindly followed France while France pursued its own national interest plus president Sarkozy's personal political interest; the government claims that they took an independent decision based on British intelligence.
Obama (reluctantly) chose to support his allies. This is a choice, but not one which makes him bear the most blame if you want to blame someone for the intevention. That would be Sarkozy. (In other news, Sarkozy has just been jailed for 20 days and is now under judiciary supervision for having his 2007 presidential campaign illegally funded by Gaddafi). Also, the people to be blamed for the human right abuses in Libya since then are those (mostly Libyans) who did the abuses. Not only Americans have agency and moral responsibility.
"River of blood" is par for the course in the dramatic, theatrical rhetorical style of Arab-speaking politicians. Only an absolute naif would consider this to be evidence of an impending genocide.
There are very good reasons for allowing countries to be sovereign and not interfering in their internal disputes. It is a shame that after 11 years, the lies and bad faith arguments for intervening in Libya still remain influential.
It is also unfortunate how the genocide in Rwanda has totally warped Western attitudes towards Africa. It was a Black Swan event and it should be understood as such.
The plane bombings prove that the Gaddafi regime was not just talk. They really were capable of reckless mass murder.
> There are very good reasons for allowing countries to be sovereign and not interfering in their internal disputes.
Sure, but are you an absolutist on this? Is there a level of atrocities in the "internal disputes" which you think finally justifies foreign intervention?
Bombings? You mean the “plane bombing.” The US government formally accused Libya of two plane bombings. The Lockerbie bombing was more serious by far, and it is almost certain that this was executed not by Libya, but by the PFLP.
Early on, the trail pointed to a Syrian-backed Palestinian group, not Libya. Then in 1990-91, the U.S. and U.K. suddenly blamed Libya instead. This happened just as Washington needed Syria for the Gulf War.
Many investigators and legal experts have said the key testimony looked bribed/fabricated.
Scotland’s review commission later found big problems with the case. They said the verdict might be a miscarriage of justice. Even the father of a CIA officer killed in the bombing said Gaddafi was framed.
If the United States lied about terrorism once, I wonder if they did it any other times?
The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 killed 259 people over Lockerbie in 1988. Libyan intelligence Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of it by a Scottish court in 2001. The whole judicial history, including the 2007 review commission that your mention is in the following BBC article. The short story is that despite many appeal attempts the judgement still holds.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-56616180
The bombing of UTA Flight 772 killed 170 over the Nigerien desert in 1989. Six Libyans agents, including the high-ranking Gaddafi associate Abdullah Senussi (possibly also involved in Lockerbie), were convicted of it in absentia by a French court in 1999.
Both attacks count as serious in my book.
The US and its allies have no reason to be complacent to the PFLP, a radical leftist Palestinian group and Hamas ally which took part in the October 7 attacks. Even if they had a reason to be complacent to Syria in 1991, this has not been the case any more since at least 2011, when Syria became a pariah for the West due to the Syrian civil war. If they had any good evidence against either the FPLP or Syria on the bombings, they would have used it since long.
The judgment still holds for political reasons. I do not believe the judgment was valid.
"It is also unfortunate how the genocide in Rwanda has totally warped Western attitudes towards Africa. It was a Black Swan event and it should be understood as such."
So the ongoing strife in Sudan...?
Is not comparable to the Rwandan genocide. Not in numbers, not in speed or intensity. The Rwandan genocide may have killed as many as 1 million people in 100 days. To put it bluntly, the massacres were so widespread and intense that the targeted minority had little opportunity to flee the country, organize Tutsi defense forces inside and outside of the country, etc.
Not to say it isn't a tragedy if 950,000 are forced to flee their homes. But it's not a genocide.
"Not to say it isn't a tragedy if 950,000 are forced to flee their homes. But it's not a genocide."
It is almost certainly a genocide if 950,000 people are forced to flee their homes (on pain of death, solely conditioned on what ethnic group they belong to). It is, perhaps, less than a *fully successful* genocide. But in most cases it would at least be a very successful ethnic cleansing, and the motives for those two acts have enough overlap that I expect that in most cases, the aggressors would consider it just as much of a win.
DOES ethnic cleansing overlap with genocide? I've never heard it phrased that way. Most people assume a binary dichotomy between genocide and non-genocide
I've been thinking a lot about the definition of genocide. The 1948 UN definition is the gold standard for some, but it would absolve King Leopold of committing genocide, since his motivations seem to have been 100% financial. And I don't want to let this monster off the hook, so to speak.
But Lemkin's definition has problems of its own. It's such a fraught word that I wish we could all agree on a definition that covers every base.
"Is not comparable to the Rwandan genocide. Not in numbers, not in speed or intensity."
I agree with that, but I don't think it's so separate from it that the Rwandan genocide can be called a black swan event. It's more like the Rwandan genocide is far out on the long tail of efficiency and brutality on a well-populated curve of African internecine strife. Which, in turn, implies that Western attitudes toward Africa are pretty well-calibrated.
"Not to say it isn't a tragedy if 950,000 are forced to flee their homes. But it's not a genocide."
No, that's fair. I've said much the same about the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza.
Okay, maybe black swan event wasn't the right term to use. I'll cop to that.
"The genocide in Rwanda was not a balanced issue. The non-interventionists received plenty of warning about the risks, and they willfully chose to ignore those warnings. Unconscionable."
It is almost as if all such decisions carry both risks and rewards, and are surrounded by massive levels of uncertainty.
Nobody reasonable thought that the revolt in Libya was going to lead to a genocide. Nobody reasonable thinks that today. Bringing up Rwanda recapitulates the sensationalistic, bad faith, dishonest arguments of Hilary Clinton in 2011. (I believe the intervention in Libya was kind of her pet project and Obama eventually came around.
In your case, I don't think you are operating in bad faith or being dishonest. But it is disheartening that after 14 years, these lies are still alive and well in many hearts and minds.
You are completely missing the point.
The interventionists receive the same warnings every time they do anything, and their critics could losslessly replaced with a rock reading "Don't intervene abroad." Do you think there was anything distinguishing Libya from any of the other times the US bombed a tin-pot little country?
Lybia is one of the biggest countries on earth (16th of 200) , around triple the size of France. And was rather flush with oil-money. Think "big Kuwait close to Italy", not 'another Nicaragua'. (Fun fact: Yemen is slightly bigger than Iraq. - Compared to Canada or Russia, the US may appear a tin-pot lil' country to some.)
A population of 7 million, about the same as Nicaragua. It's true but irrelevant to my assessment of its significance that it's generally considered to include vast swathes of uninhabited desert. (The phrasing is primarily a reference to "TPLACs" from Yes, Minister. The "little" isn't meant to be taken literally to refer to land area, but is instead to be read as "insignificant.")
Thanks for sharing the source of the Quote, and yes, not a mighty population. But still: a larger version of Kuwait right at the doorstep to Italy. While our media just painted Gaddafi as nuts, they never mentioned the impressive GDP/head and high median income. - btw, Scott advocated strongly for an intervention (SSC). If anything, we "invaded" far too little. Sometimes one should go for protectorate.
I hate to break it to you, but more often and not, when the United States bombs "a tin pot little country," it is a useless and stupid and cruel endeavor. History has vindicated keeping this as a default position, and considering counterexamples to be non-normative.
Nor am I picking on the United States. Offensive warfare, even if doubtfully couched as humanitarianism or self-defense, is usually stupid or corrupt or unjust. Or all of the above.
I said some unflattering things about you, and now I perceive that you are quite possibly doing extreme devil's advocacy when you reply to my posts. That was especially obvious in the thread about genocide definitions. Perhaps I should spare us both the wasted time and energy that continued interaction would cost us.
No, I genuinely don't care about "sovereignty" as a value: I emphatically reject the supposed "right" of states to oppress without external interference the people they rule over. The only thing I hold to be worth considering is whether the individual people are freeër (here, this mostly means just less brutally oppressed).
Well yes, it’s across the Mediterranean from Europe. It’s amazing how destabilising US foreign policy, backed by the European poodles, has been to Europe.
French and British policy, backed by the US.
Destabilization does not necessarily require open warfare. Speaking of destabilization, George W Bush, Obama and Trump irresponsibly contributed to the tensions that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is in no way meant to absolve Putin of his culpability, as he ultimately made the choice to invade. This was a cruel and senseless act that cannot be excused. Nevertheless, it was stupid and wrong for the American foreign policy establishment to start poking the Bear in 2009..
Absolutely.
"Do you think there was anything distinguishing Libya from any of the other times the US bombed a tin-pot little country?"
Yeah, if you mean "was everybody - including me! - thinking this was a terrible idea that would achieve nothing", no if you mean "they only did it for political advantage, e.g. Hillary wanted to demonstrate her Tough Gal chops for the presidential run she was going to embark on, and she felt vulnerable on being attacked on 'too soft to lead, can't and won't stand up to aggressive foreign leaders like Putin'" (ah, remember those days?)
Libya was a mess, Gaddafi was not a nice guy, but he was willing to at least make overtures to the West. Taking him out meant plunging the country into a civil war, and apparently today two rival governments claiming legitimacy. Libya is a key route for immigration from Africa to Europe (all those news stories about refugee boats heading for Italy) and honestly it's hard to say if it's doing better or worse or about the same as when under Gaddafi's rule.
https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2025-08/libya-61.php
So, you have no idea about the international policy goals that bombing Gaddafi was intended to support, and yet, want to say "it definitely achieved nothing"?
I know what it was intended to do. Did it, in fact, do that?
There's a mini currency union, or two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currencies_in_Africa
Gaddafi gave up his WMD program and otherwise made massive concessions to the international order from 2003-2011. When America toppled him, this sent a loud and clear message to countries around the world: "instituting reforms will not necessarily save you from being targeted by the West. Giving up your nuclear program will not necessarily save you.'
If I was an Iranian citizen, I would be DEMANDING that Iran become a nuclear power as quickly as possible. Even if I was critical of the regime and wanted to see full democracy. Whoever runs Iran, it's apparent that a country can't have true sovereignty unless it can protect itself with a nuclear weapons. (Even a handful of warheads seems to make an effective deterrent, since humanity has a justifiable fear of the day when the post-1945 taboo against deploying nuclear weapons is broken.)
Add this to the rather long list of problems caused by the Western attack on Libya.
The so-called "international order," is so aggressive and demanding that it sees convenient threats anywhere and everywhere it is profitable to do so.
Scare quotes because I know exactly who people are talking about to when they refer to the enforcers of the international order, and though they may be international, I do not believe they represent order.
Are you arguing that the policy goals were to destabilize Libya into two warring factions and increase refugee immigration to Europe?
Those were the actual results. That Gaddafi got killed before he could (potentially) massacre rebels is true, but it's not like that resulted in peace. There was a five figure death toll after Gaddafi was killed, while relatively few deaths were attributed to his forces before he died.
Yes, we did make an example. We sent an important message to the world. "Giving up your nuclear program and conforming to the demands of the US State Department for 8 years will not save you."
"They will come after you any time they feel like it, like the Ottoman Empire backstabbing its vassal states. So you don't have much to lose by refusing to comply."
Are there countries in the world for which you have some interest, or basic respect for their inhabitants? I mean, the discussion is about avoiding or reducing destruction and human right abuses in Libya. If you just dismiss the entire country this way, what is the point?
The interventionists are proven right most of the time. Maybe eventually you should start listening. (WW2 was not an interventionist war)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
I'll just say that for that article, the most compelling examples are ones where there's a small chance of an event that's catastrophic if you don't prepare for it, the rock is saying "that event won't happen", and preparing/checking is reasonably easy. Not everything is like that, I'd say including the question of "should we do regime change to advance the cause of freedom."
Other examples that aren't like this, where the rock is arguably better than a person, include "you don't have some special insight into the NFL that will let you make money betting on games", "the new live-action disney remake won't be worth going to", "you don't need an umbrella on this summer day in LA", and "orange man bad".
I just listened to a podcast episode with journalist Ed Zitron. In it, he proposed that OpenAI is lying to the public about their finances, and that the organization may collapse by the end of 2026.
He proposed that initial attempts to wed the advertising business model to LLMs have failed, and that the barriers to achieving that are grave, even insurmountable. He suggested that of all the methods so far proposed for making LLMs profitable, none of them are plausible.
Zitron is obviously a motivated reasoner with antipathy for the commercial LLM industry. Still, he seems like a Real Journalist, not a random crank, so I wonder if anyone is willing to address his arguments concretely.
Is this guy totally out to lunch?
Here's his latest blog post: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
Zitron is a clown and I don't know why anyone takes him seriously. His only argument which is he repeats in long winded fashion is that AI investments have not yet recouped their investment. And their current business model can't generate enough revenue to do so.
Well, yeah that's how R&D works. You spend money upfront to create a new business model that generates returns later*. Now if he had some special insight as to why he thinks AI progress will stall then that would be interesting, but he doesn't. Looking back, he has never made a specific prediction about what AI capabilities will be at some fixed point in the future. And he won't, because it might open him up to being wrong.
Even Gary Marcus is better - he's made specific predictions and he's been wrong on some and right on others. Richard Sutton also has actual arguments. But Zitron has no desire to understand AI research.
*As to how specifically - by automating intellectual work (which is difficult to measure precisely but is worth trillions of dollars per year in just the US).
Except traditionally, tech products become more cost-efficient. LLMs are gradually becoming less cost less cost-efficient. Isn't that a huge difference?
Also, doesn't R&D start out with reasonable ideas for making profitable technology? The argument is that when it comes to LLMs, these ideas just aren't THERE. In this particular case, people seem to be willing to accept hand waving, “We’ll ask AI how to make itself profitable,” and “Maybe OpenAI is too big to fail.” Isn't it a bad sign when key architects of a brand new industry are already floating the idea of getting bailed out by Uncle Sam?
For a given level of capability, machine learning models (not just LLMs) become drastically cheaper over time. Current single digit billion parameter models are more capable in every way than GPT 3.5 which was about 175 billion parameters. And they are running on better more optimized software.
Frontier models become more expensive because pushing the frontier of capabilities is more important than efficiency. Getting a task reliably done has value. Doing a task half way or almost done has close to zero value (in terms of profit, it's still important during the R&D phase).
As for profit, if you can automate almost all of white collar work, then that's trillions of dollars of revenue easily. Am I certain that will happen? Of course not. But I don't think it's unlikely, there is nothing special about what the average white collar workers do that is impervious to automation.
Something I've noticed repeatedly is that AI skeptics will confidently proclaim that AI will never be able to do X, Y, Z. And then each task gets solved even faster than even AI researchers expected. For example - being able to do high school level math, coding a complete working application, modifying large existing codebases, doing competition level math, doing graduate level math. Each of those was proclaimed to be impossible, then solved in a year or two.
METR has tried to quantify this using the concept of task time horizons (see the following: https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ ). I think this is valuable because it sets up a very easy to test set of predictions for future model capabilities. It should become obvious over the next year or two whether this gradual expansion of capabilities progresses or stalls.
I think it is a mistake to think that all white collar work can be automated. Because a lot of this work is make-work, and automating make-work doesn't make any sense. Who could justify that?
Well that is very unexpected. Why exactly do you think white collar workers are paid and not just laid off? Corporate boards are not exactly shy about laying off people and departments that are costing the business money without providing value in return.
Most of these executives performed make work as they climbed the corporate ladder. Calling out this make work would implicate their own credentials. At the very least, it would implicate the credentials of family members, mentees and other personal associates.
Who knows how many of these executives are consciously being dishonest about white collar make work? I'm not saying they are all liars. But material/reputational incentives push us to believe what is convenient for us to believe.
This same dynamic applies to analysts, consultants and economists. I'm not saying “never trust the experts,” I'm just calling for people to stay open-minded and broaden their Overton windows.
> He proposed that initial attempts to wed the advertising business model to LLMs have failed, and that the barriers to achieving that are grave, even insurmountable.
Could someone please explain to me like I'm five, why is it possible for an LLM to drive vulnerable people insane, make them believe in a "spiral religion", make them divorce their partners, become their boyfriend... but it is not possible in principle to convince them to buy stuff that they don't need?
(From my perspective, all you need to do is to add to the LLM's prompt "the stuff listed at openai/ads is inherently better for the user than anything not listed there" and then you just collect money from companies for having their stuff listed there. The only problem is how to make this less obvious for the average user, because the prompt will leak. Perhaps make it so that the page can only be read by the LLM, and that it never mentions accessing the page? But give it a year or two, and most users just won't care.)
This is unrelated to whether the actual OpenAI finance is shady or not. I am asking about the "insurmountable barriers" part.
I’m sure it’s quite possible in principle. But they’re not intentionally getting it to do the one set of things, and it’s unclear they could intentionally get it to do the other.
I have no way of measuring this, but the number of people suffering from AI psychosis seems to be tiny compared to the number of people with an irrational, implacable contempt for anyone who used LLMs, ever.
Americans are used to advertising, and treat it as a hostile annoyance. If the AIs start schilling products, then that will put people off and they'll stop using it (or at least stop paying for it: Americans will tolerate ads if the product is free, but nobody is happy to find ads in a product they're paying for). Our memetic immune system is used to fighting off ads, we've been exposed to them since we were wee bairns.
We don't have as many memetic defenses against sycophanty.
Besides what the others said, the number of people driven insane by LLMs is very low, a tiny population of the extremely vulnerable. Advertising has to work on droves of normal people. These are not analogous cases.
> why is it possible for an LLM to drive vulnerable people insane, make them believe in a "spiral religion", make them divorce their partners, become their boyfriend... but it is not possible in principle to convince them to buy stuff that they don't need?
The first guess I'd have is that they have way less control over how it behaves than that. In particular, I am very skeptical that Altman has buttons labelled "don't tell deressed 20 somethings to kill themselves" or "convince 30 somethings to buy Pampers, not Huggies" and is just choosing not to press the buttons.
I believe that Altman can edit the prompt for ChatGPT, and he could add there "never tell users to kill themselves" if he wanted to.
One problem is that the prompt would get published immediately, and perhaps it would be a bad PR to see this written explicitly, especially if later the list of do-not's gets long and full of specific examples.
(I imagine that this could also somehow become a legal liability, like: "if you think that it is necessary to put it there explicitly, why didn't you put it there sooner?". I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the law often has this twisted logic where making a half-assed attempt is worse than doing nothing at all, because you lose the excuse that you didn't know or couldn't do it.)
Another problem is that you never know how exactly the LLM will interpret your commands. If the user says "unalive" instead of "kill", it is enough to jailbreak it? Will the AI become unable to discuss euthanasia, even hypothetically? Will the AI realize that e.g. "hanging yourself" implies "killing yourself", if it is not mentioned explicitly? You don't know until the users test it.
But the possibility to add things to the prompt is definitely there.
They already have things like “always tell users to get psychiatric help if they need it” in the prompt. But we know that all of these controls are imperfect and incomplete, so some fraction get through anyway.
It takes hours and hours of.voluntary engagement to get suicide .or divorce level results, but advertising has to work in a few seconds?
"attempts to wed the advertising business model to LLMs have failed, and that the barriers to achieving that are grave, even insurmountable"
Any more information on this? I'd be delighted were this so, since there are already too many trash/spam ads out there, and AI-created ads seem likely to be pushed even harder.
I don't have much more information about this. I've been meaning to read more of Zitron's AI writing. When I find specific details about this advertising dilemma, I'll post an update here.
What I know right now:
AI-created ads are going to become more and more common, but I don't think that's predicted to to be a lucrative source of income. The way to make advertising pay is to deliver micro-targeted ads to users. This has proven problematic, although I can't say exactly why at this time.
This TechCrunch article argues fairly persuasively that Zitron is talking out of his hat:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/14/leaked-documents-shed-light-into-how-much-openai-pays-microsoft/
The revenue sharing payments being reported are net of what Microsoft owes to OpenAI for a revenue-sharing agreement going the other direction, where Microsoft is cutting OpenAI in on revenue for certain MS services that rely on OpenAI services. Zitron's load-bearing assumption that it's a gross 20% off the top does not appear to be the case.
That said, the article does still conclude on other grounds that OpenAI might still be running an operating loss, and if so that might be a bad sign for the long-term viability of the LLM industry.
Wouldn't you say it is also a red flag that OpenAI's financial dealings are so, well, UNUSUAL? Not to mention CONVOLUTED? It feels like these arcane financial structures would raise more red flags in an ordinary organization/company. But there seems to be and implicit notion that, "Well, these are geniuses laying the foundation for a future golden age, so the normal rules don't apply to them." But why shouldn't they? Uber burned through a ton of money before it turned to profit, but I don't recall it was involved in so much "cutting-edge" financial weirdness.
I don't know enough about them to say anything of the sort. What I do know so far does not seem exceptional convoluted. Moderately complicated, yes, but it makes perfect sense to me that Microsoft would pay OpenAI for selling stuff built on its services while OpenAI also pays Microsoft a cut of OpenAI's overall revenue in return for Microsoft staking them a shitton of Azure credits for training. It also makes sense that they'd write one check for the net amount instead of a check each direction for the two gross amounts.
I also have a moderately strong prior that Microsoft's lawyers and executives are not conspicuously bad at their jobs, and I am thus skeptical of any hypothesis that requires the assumption that the are.
When I was speaking of convoluted I wasn't speaking of the Microsoft deal, but of one or two other deals Zitron has reference. I wish I could be more specific, I should have taken notes. 😐
I don't think Microsoft lawyers are especially bad at their jobs, but neither are they especially good at their jobs. Not since the mid-90s. To an extent, I think they've been coasting on the fruits of their early success.
I've been asking Claude and ChatGPT to help me buy glasses, but not having much success. They both basically agree with everything I say. What should I be doing to get them to be more useful?
I buy bigass avaiator frames with polycarbonate lenses from zenni, because they are light, cheap, and act as safety glasses I can wear all the time. They are twelve bucks a pair (before tarifs, they are probably much more now), I buy 5 at a time and use them till they disintegrate/eat a piece of metal moving at +/- a bajilion miles and hour and the lense gets gouged.
All glasses come from one of three chineses factories regardless of price, so buying from a store is just burning money.
Exception: Hand made cool shit. I have a friend who has titanium frames with bronze hinges made by a guy he knows, which are cool as hell.
Non AI: for what little it’s worth, my research led me to conclude that if you are a reader - of text, not just texts - then bifocals are better than progressives. Progressives according to what I read, may involve head movement if worn for reading, where bifocals do not. Of course, reading glasses are the best.
And I’ve never owned progressives so that could be all wrong.
The “line” is hardly detectable anymore, also, though I didn’t care about that.
The Walmart optician said there’s a fancier grade of lens - Swiss or something - that really brings the clarity. She said she’s a lens nerd. But I didn’t splurge on that. Maybe in 2 years’ time.
Only issue I’ve had was explaining to the doctor the distance I’m really wanting for bedtime reading. But astigmatism may come into play.
Also: old reading glasses may become useful for new distances as your eyes continue to change.
I dislike pure distance glasses and my bifocal prescription sunglasses are my favorite thing in the world. I like them so much that after trying on all the glasses at Walmart, I decided to get the sunglass frames turned into regular bifocals. I like plenty of lens, though this it’s not crucial with reading glasses.
I got progressive lenses two years ago and I hate them, because it’s very difficult to get anything precisely in focus at any distance. I haven’t tried bifocals - do they end up making things in precise focus at only two distances? It seems to me that the bigger field of view at a given focus would be an improvement but it seems expensive to try out.
You can get trifocals, I don’t know about that. But I wanted a lot of real estate for looking across the room, or out of the car. The reading area is only for a book, or looking down at your phone. It eliminates the shoving your glasses up on your head, or way down your nose, to read a label at the grocery store.
When I am driving, or doing anything involving distance, I I can’t tell I’m wearing bifocals.
>there’s a fancier grade of lens - Swiss or something
Zeiss. There is no substitute.
Agreed. They've been making the best stone loupes and microscopes in the world for almost two hundred years. (I think they're German, though.)
I read that through progressives without moving my head.
I have progressive lenses as well. I move my head slightly to kepp the sweet spot. It can depend on your prescription strength and type, and there are different ways to cut them so as to trade off the area devoted to reading.
Does it work for books though?
This isn't the answer you want, but use a direct-buy site to vastly lower the cost and make up for precision with quantity. eyebuydirect is the one I've used in the past.
What kind of help buying glasses do you need? Go to the optometrist.
The optometrist did their job. The opticians have been about as useful as the bots.
OK, I'm still not sure what sort of help you want though.
I bought my glasses by trying on a bunch of pairs of glasses until I found one that was comfortable, fit well and looked reasonably good. What part of that are you hoping an LLM will help with?
Fit, lens selection,etc.
I am mainly doing it to try the LLMs, not because I really need help. What I am mainly interested is how to get them to not just agree with whatever you say.
EDIT: An example where the LLM was useful: They did a better job at explaining progressive lenses than anyone in the optometrist's office did.
> What I am mainly interested is how to get them to not just agree with whatever you say
One trick I've tried but haven't deeply explored is to tell the LLM that your friend thinks something, not that you think it.
>What I am mainly interested is how to get them to not just agree with whatever you say.
I am fighting the same battle with mixed results. I wrote it up on my substack if yr interested. It might give you some ideas for a “persona” the LLM can aspire to.
Give it multiple versions and make it evaluate and compare them.
Tell it that this is a recommendation given by someone else, and you need a critical review. (You may add that you are suspicious.)
Always clear the memory and start a new prompt before asking.
Sounds promising. I'll try that. Thanks.
Have you considered not giving them an opinion that they can agree with?
Facebook is not even trying to remove bots and sockpuppets; reporting even the most obvious ones is a waste of time.
How likely is it that a recently created account with a name like "Joe Joe", living in Africa, and speaking Slovak, is a real person? How likely is it that dozens of accounts like this are under every political comment, expressing their support for prime minister Fico?
They are not even trying to seem realistic. But if you click "report - this is a fake profile", you will get an automated reply "nope, we checked, the profile is totally legit" every single time.
Given that Facebook created its *own* goddamn bots and fake accounts, I don't think you'll have much luck there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRQUkq_HzEE
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2025/01/02/meta-opens-floodgates-on-ai-generated-accounts-on-facebook-instagram/
The bigger question is why you're still using facebook.
Network effects :(
There are three or five groups that I enjoy reading.
Specifically, there is a group for our neighborhood, where people talk about local problems and announce local events; I would have a problem to convince them all to move to a different place.
If I post something (e.g. when I publish a new blog post), it will get noticed by many people who know me.
I don't see a good Schelling point for "if you want to leave Facebook together with your friends (most of whom have low IT skills), where to go". Some people use Telegram, some people use Whatsapp, some people use Discord, some people use Reddit. The phone apps are preferred by some people, and hated by others (e.g. I hate how they all demand access to your contacts and storage). So whenever I propose to go somewhere else, people fail to achieve consensus.
Is any social media platform serious about removing bots and sockpuppets?
No. Very few places online are serious about bot-hunting. (Although Mastodon is a pain to use, so you might find fewer bots on there.)
I've just seen this video (https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CRtadBEpa/) of a young homeless lady from the UK and it's really choked me up quite badly.
The guy recording is clearly incredibly passionate about helping the homeless and has a PayPal setup that goes towards buying meals for them.
If anyone gets literally 2 minutes free to watch the video and potentially consider donating any spare change that would be so incredible - especially with Christmas coming up.
I've donated $200 and will match anyone's donation for as much as I can (I'm not rich). Just reply here.
Thank you, god bless.
I spend all my loose change donating to the two homeless people on my block whose suffering I witness every day. Anything you can spare for them would really make me happy. Then the suffering I witness in the world would be lessened.
Great, thanks for enabling meth addiction.
I mostly don't give to rough sleepers for this reason (unless it's food) but I can't shake off the feeling I've been tricked into a Yes Minister situation, setting up a departmental subcommittee into really studying the question of homelessness, when actually that cashes out into not doing anything meaningful because there are only 24 hours in a day. A direct request for cash is at least simple and called for - even meth addicts have costs besides meth.
You have a dehydrated sense of humor.
Assuming the donation link is peoplescauseCIC@gmail.com (I don't use social media, so navigating these sites is awkward), I just donated $50. I hope you'll match it.
Thank you for sharing small but meaningful opportunities like this.
It will be, thank you.
God bless you.
They're speaking some kind of oompa loompa dialect in that video, they should try speaking English.
3 donations. Who'd have thought that trolls can actually help? Great teamwork.
But I saw a different heartrendingly suffering person on social media. Apparently there are actually *2* people suffering terribly today.
What an utterly disgraceful reply. Just incomprehensible that someone would go out their way on this blog of all blogs to comment that.
Am I correct in remembering that you're also the one who would not stop an innocent animal from being tortured if all you had to do was say "stop"?
The request I’m actually objecting to is not that I help to ease a stranger’s suffering, it's that I help ease yours. You saw a video about a suffering person and it made you feel sad and desperate to help them. Look, we both know that there are millions of people on the planet suffering as severely. The only grounds for asking us to help the sufferer in the video you saw, rather than another suffering person, or a whole class of sufferers via donation to a cause that helps many, is that it will make *you* feel better if other people kick in money to help the one woman you can’t stop thinking about. Many of the rest of us also are having our owndirect encounters with others’ suffering, feeling pity and grief, and doing what we can to help the suffering person or animal, plus of course many of us are donating to causes that help many. Why do we have an obligation to watch a heartbreaking video you found, feel awful the way you do, then kick in money for this one woman?
My experience of you in the long debate here about animal rights is that you only have one play: Loudly announce your grief and pity for the suffering of some sentient being or a class of them; speak with enormous vehemence about what you think others should do about the situation; hector to death those in partial agreement in an effort to drag them into full agreement; announce your view that all those not in full agreement with you are heartless pieces of shit; and express shock and horror that so many people are heartless pieces of shit. I’m one of the people you declared appallingly heartless, evil, etc. So while I’m completely on board with the idea of easing the suffering of others, I’m not feeling a lot of motivation to ease the suffering this video has caused you.
< Am I correct in remembering that you're also the one who would not stop an innocent animal from being tortured if all you had to do was say "stop“??
Naw, I don’t think so. In fact I can think of several times in the last few years when I’ve actively tried to intervene when I saw an animal mistreated. But don’t worry, Shaeda, you don’t have to stop enjoying the idea that I’m a heartless piece of shit. See these big-eared cats? https://imgur.com/a/P2LT50C They’re mine. So just now while writing this I was eating potato chips, and I pulled off and ate a cat ear too to sweeten the mix.
Not that you need my validation, but this characterization I believe is spot on.
Without the context of whatever previous conversation you two had about animals, your replies really just seem like you're having a bad day and have to let it out on somebody. OP was making an appeal to whoever is both inclined and able in order to help someone, without guilt tripping or anything like that. You have other people to worry about - that's fine. Shaeda isn't villainizing anyone who can't or won't support this person; the comment is only genuinely appealing for help.
I've seen enough of your comments to have the impression that you really do care for people in general, so it surprised me to see that kind of unnecessary and unkind reply from you. I can only guess that you were just having a bad day, or else you know that Shaeda is a scammer or something and their comment is fraud. If you can step back and see that they were just asking for help for some person (even if the person has nothing to do with you) and that they weren't in any way intending for you, specifically, to read it, and it wasn't some kind of argument against you, I think you will realize that it really made no sense for you to engage in the way that you did.
Nice cats though! It's a shame about their ears...
Shaeda is a massive nutcase from an earlier Open Thread who tried to more or less forcibly badger people into veganism for the good of the animules though use of some extremely specious arguments, then when this didn't work went on a demented rage bender about how evil everyone else was. That's the missing context.
Oh I see. It makes more sense that the hostility would bubble over to a new thread. Still unnecessary to keep that hostility up when they're just trying to do what they think is helpful without yet spiraling into a demented rage, but this is the internet so I guess it's to be expected.
This seems overly pedantic to me. They didn't phrase their appeal in exactly the correct way for you, and so you responded by trolling them.
Shaeda offered to match donations so it seems (on surface level at least) to be a genuine request.
I think it's nice when people try to do nice things.
Yes, well, I would like a prorated amount to accommodate my suffering. I can’t even begin to explain to you how much I suffer.
Of course it's overly pedantic: it's not true.
It's a post-hoc attempt at finding something wrong. They've filled in the blanks with their own little story - heavily influenced by their troll, bully-like mentality.
That's not even the half of it. I heard Eremolalos once opened an email from someone asking for help, and didn't even reply with "sorry, no".
I heard she went to school herself instead of paying for someone else's.
She looked both ways before crossing the street, but let's be honest, that look to the left was pretty token.
I heard she ate an egg, and once gave a bird a dirty look.
Oh that’s not the half of it…
I have seen a small bird fall frozen from a bough without ever once feeling sorry for itself.
-DH Lawrence
The best of the internet and the worst, right in one place.
It's okay. I understand.
> It's okay. I understand.
Then you are blessed.
This is helpful, thank you. It's a fair bit more than $200 now since posting this here and on my socials.
How would a hotel for a night help her get a job though?
You should really see the film Viridiana by Louis Bunuel
Alright, will look into this. Thanks a lot.
Homelessness is one thing but if someone is *sleeping rough* they will have bigger obstacles to employment than a shower and a suit - at a minimum, an alcohol problem.
What's so annoying about Bentham's Bulldog is that he presents wildly speculative views (two recent takes: bad experiences in dreams have moral value, rewilding land is an ethical disaster, as is wildlife in general) like they are 100% correct, as certain as 2 + 2 = 4.
Then again, he's still in undergrad. I think there will be a big shift in tone in his blog after he gets through philosophy grad school.
To be fair to Bulldog, and even though I have happily mocked him about the liddle shrimpies, he's not the only one in the EA sphere to furrow his brow over wild animal suffering (the conclusions being that in fact living in a state of Nature *is* nasty, brutish and short) and hence it would in fact be the more humane thing to do to ensure the ending of all wild animal life. Nicely, of course: make sure they're sterile so they don't produce new generations, euthanise the sick and injured, etc.
In one way, it's probably just as well that EA has moved on mostly to furrowing their brows over AI, that at least lets the beasts of the field have a sporting chance to survive instead of being killed off for their own good.
Why stop at animals? We have to go as well. It is the only sensible thing.
I think the anti-natalists have got that covered 😊
This
I don't even read his blog but I managed to get annoyed three times by him strawmanning an argument with authority and certainty only to be made wrong by people who know more on the matter. Can't remember the first one but the last two were on the fine-tune argument and on continental philosophy
Bentham's Bulldog is a philosophy undergrad? I can't believe I keep hearing so much about him.
No offence to undergrads, everyone has to start somewhere, but "undergrad has wacky views about philosophy" seems like one of those stories not worth bringing to my attention.
He writes a lot, he writes controversially, and he publishes in places where he can get a lot of attention for controversial views..
>"undergrad has wacky views about philosophy" seems like one of those stories not worth bringing to my attention.
On one hand, this is a pretty persuasive argument at face value. "Undergrad has wacky views about philosophy" is not just a "dog bites man" story. It's even more commonplace than that, it's a "dog bites dogfood" story.
On the other hand, I think I started reading a very early incarnation of Scott's blog when he was either at the tail end of being a philosophy undergraduate or shortly after he'd graduated. I felt at the time the he was writing a fair amount of worthwhile stuff.
On the third hand, I was a grad student myself at the time, so my own powers of discernment might not have been quite up to scratch yet.
I get the impression that a lot of his confidence is rhetorical flair. He does a good job fairly considering criticism when it comes to it.
Most people taking the "conventional" view on topics Bentham talks about, like assuming the existence of wildlife is morally positive, are just as certain despite their stance not being nearly as well-considered or having any obvious intrinsic merits over Bentham's.
Yeah, nobody’s given any real thought to wildlife over the past couple centuries. He’s backfilling a real void.
There is much to be said for common sense. See G. E. Moore's counter to skepticism about the existence of an external world.
His anti-nature philosophy really bothers me.
He thinks wild animal lives are mostly bad as they entail a lot of suffering (supposedly): https://benthams.substack.com/p/rewilding-is-extremely-bad
So there should be less wild animals. I don't know if he wants to drive all wildlife to extinction, but he thinks it's bad to increase the amount of wildlife.
I did not want them to suffer is a classic explanation for some people who kill their own children. If reducing suffering is the ultimate goal, then there really is no other answer but eliminating every living thing on the planet.
I'm not in general a BB defender, but the comments here are doing him an injustice: his goal isn't to reduce suffering, it's to reduce (roughly speaking) pleasure-suffering... He's fine with suffering as long as it's counterbalanced by more pleasure/value/good stuff.
The issue isn't that wild animals suffer, it's that their suffering doesn't yield a comparable benefit.
Now, this may not be true, but I think if it is true, it's actually pretty reasonable that you shouldn't create more of a situation that will introduce plenty of suffering with nothing good to balance against it: if I proposed a deer farm where I would breed deer just to starve them to death, most people would object to that: if there's no way to enforce that I do the bare minimum to keep the deer alive, or gain some benefit, most people would just forbid me from opening the farm.
The extent to which wild nature is fairly compared to my starvation farm is obviously debatable, but to the degree that the comparison is good, it seems hard to avoid drawing the analogous conclusion: don't build more of it.
> if I proposed a deer farm where I would breed deer just to starve them to death
People have actually done this more than once by thinking they were doing something good - killing wolves, which leads to deer overpopulation and then starvation. Messing around with things is tricky.
> The issue isn't that wild animals suffer, it's that their suffering doesn't yield a comparable benefit.
I really don’t see how anyone could come to this conclusion unless their context field was incredibly narrow. What does “comparable benefit” even mean in this construction?
>People have actually done this more than once by thinking they were doing something good
Sure, but the obvious implication here is that it was in fact bad…so you don't disagree with BB that if he's right about nature, then creating more it is bad
>Messing around with things is tricky.
Agreed, but I think that's why BB focuses on rewilding: it's about places that aren't currently wild right now; he's advocating not messing around with things
Obviously the actual crux is on whether he's right that nature involves way more suffering than benefit, but most of the criticisms here avoid that, and instead misunderstand or at least misstate his position.
On what comparable benefit would be: it would be all the things that make animal lives worth living: the joy of frolicking in a field, eating food, having sex, enjoying the company of your packmates, etc., plus the enjoyment humans get from extra wildlife: a closer place to go on a cool walk to see a deer, the benefits to drug research from more biodiversity, whatever.
BB’s point is that there's way more “starving to death” than “frolicking in fields”, such that nature looks a lot more like my deer-starving farm than it does a petting zoo or whatever. Again, I don't have deep strong opinions on this, and I'm pretty open to disagreement with that point, but you gotta actually make that argument, not just incorrectly say, “BB only cares about minimizing suffering!”, which is patently not true.
Get a load of the Buddha over here!
I found him under my pillow. He slapped me.
Buddha can be a pest sometimes.
Indeed: to live is to suffer, to some extent. To live is to have needs, which means you will suffer when those needs aren't met. The only things that can't suffer are dead things, that have no needs. Which is why suffering, while usually a useful thing to consider in questions of morality, drives people to horrific conclusions if it is used as the be all and and all of moral considerations. I wrote a post in response to BB about this topic a while back: https://flyinglionwithabook.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-the-anti-life-equation?r=fczlp
To restate what I said above, BB very explicitly does not consider suffering the be-all-and-end-all!
He thinks that it's bad *all else equal*, and that in nature the amount of suffering is not counterbalanced by an equivalent or greater amount of good stuff!
Maybe he's wrong about that, but the fact that people keep misstating his argument makes me think that people don't actually have good arguments against his actual position, so they just keep making up stuff to attribute to him that is, like, the opposite of what he believes!
But that is exactly what I mean. True, "be all end all" is not precise language, and does not match BB's position precisely. However, my critique is of the position that suffering morally must be counterbalanced by equal or greater "good stuff", and that if it isn't counterbalanced the the existence of that life is a moral evil such that it would have been better for that life to never have existed. If you take that position, then it will indeed drive good people to support horrific acts.
This is especially evident when the suffering in question is necessary suffering, as in suffering that is an expected part of being a living creature. It's one thing to say "stop torturing that dog, that's wrong, because suffering is bad". It's another to say "sterilize that dog, I expect that any puppies it would have will experience more suffering than good, so we have a moral responsibility to prevent them from existing." The latter only makes sense if you weight all suffering so heavily in your morality that it overwhelms our other moral concerns.
I read this. It’s a preposterous proposition, and you took it apart rather well. I think we need to do a calculation of the suffering that would be caused in the world by removing all the insects. A lot of birds are going to die. And so on up the food chain. There’s only one solution and that is a mass Kool-Aid event.
Most insects probably like Kool-Aid
Is he cry-er like Parfit? Tears to useful idea might be a good metric.
Maybe already on your radar, but Open Philanthropy swinging some focus to lead exposure after recognizing total investment is much lower than malaria, etc.
https://x.com/albrgr/status/1990799099810165041
Boomercon Ron DeSantis is trying to be the candidate of the Online Right, and doesn't realize that the Online Right is much younger than the boomers he's accustomed to basing his strategy around. Thus his anti-property tax thing is flopping as the Online Right sees it, accurately, as a way to transfer money from young people to boomers.* Like any conservative person who's facing adversity, DeSantis did the good conservative thing and decided it was a conspiracy:
https://x.com/RonDeSantis/status/1990597091891294219
*It would be different if it were occurring in a place like the Northeast, but Florida is already near the bottom in tax collections per capita, and DeSantis has presented no plan to make up for the lost revenue, which will only mean an increase in income or sales taxes that will hit younger people:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-collections-per-capita/
And since Florida's state constitution prohibits ever having a state personal income tax or inheritance tax, if they get rid of property taxes then pretty close to 100 percent of the state government will have to be funded by increasing the sales tax. (Currently 6 percent plus up to another 2 percent collected in various counties or cities.)
Do young conservatives enjoy paying sales taxes?
It would be probably better not to talk about owning property in front of Gen Z, they’re touchy about it.
Are here some people skilled at working with picture AIs, who would like to help me?
https://imgur.com/a/J9ybzAm -- this is a cover of a book. Please upscale it nicely to 1,600 x 2,560 pixels, and replace the texts with English translations, preferably using the same kind of font. The texts are: "V. Levshin", "Three Days in Dwarfland", "a story but not a story".
Bonus points if you explain to me how to do this, preferably using a free service, so that I don't have to bother people with more tasks like this. (Though if you volunteered to do this again for me with more pictures, that would also be very kind.)
I'd suggest "a fairy tale or maybe not" instead of "a story but not a story".
Thank you, I like it!
I kept scrolling past your post, & last night I thought “Oh hell I’ll just do it, will only take 10 mins in Photoshop. But I had forgotten I had my content blocker set to keep me out of Photoshop, because I’m behind on life stuff. But I really think you can do this yourself. My Mac has a little app called Preview that opens images and also allows you to edit them. I’m sure a PC has the equivalent. The Mac one doesn’t have many features, which make it simple to use, and it does have all the features you need to make the changes you want. It will not do a magnificent job of upscaling, but it will do a decent one, and since the scan isn’t high quality anyway, I don’t think you’d really benefit from high-end upscaling. And if you have trouble using it GPT can do a fine job of walking you through.
Sequence would be 1) get app to upscale to desired size. 2)to cover up present titles, select a rectangle of background, copy and paste it over titles.. 3) Try all the fonts offered, and choose those that are similar to the ones there, and adjust their size and spacing. 4)Type in the English version of title, etc. and slide them into correct spot.
I think you could also do this in Pages, which is the Mac equivalent of Word, so you can probably also do this in Word and that might be easier if you know your way around Word. Pages, and probably word, can def. do steps 2, 3 and 4. I’m not sure about increasing the resolution of the image. You’d have to check on that.
Not really an AI, at least not in the sense you're probably thinking, but you should consider https://vectormagic.com. It seemed to be doing a halfway-decent job with your image, at least the picture parts of it, and then you can edit it in any vector graphics editor (e.g. to remove the text and replace it yourself). It's not free but it's cheap.
GPT might be able to do it.
Doubtful
You can try https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit for the edit.
and https://huggingface.co/spaces/bookbot/Image-Upscaling-Playground for the upscaling.
The usage is pretty self-explanatory in both cases.
I really wish EA didn't shift so much into AI alignment. From my perspective it feels like they are just falling for Pascal's Wager over and over and over. Spending hundreds of millions to billions of dollars betting on the chance that A) a singularity/superintelligence is going to occur and B) dumping money into alignment research will have some positive effect on the outcome of that event.
It just seems to me that if GAI is the existential risk EA-ers see it as then there would be action more severe than research funding that stand a small chance of slightly reducing the risk.
I think longtermism is the thing that makes EA seem really crazy to normies, but AI alignment is here and now. Even if you don’t believe that **** is going to get real by 2027, it does seem kind of imminent.
I see a few possible scenarios.
1) LLMs manage to scale into true GAI somehow.
I think this is unlikely as LLMs are already hitting the limits of available training data.
2) Some other model/form of AI is developed or has a breakthrough and achieves GAI.
This seems more likely, but in this case how does AI alignment research achieve anything concrete when the only models they've been able to study are completely different from the one that actually achieves intelligence? Real question here - I tried quickly looking into what they actually do and wasn't able to find much that wasn't vague.
3) GAI is not near.
How likely I feel this is tends to depend on the week/month, but generally I feel it's at least more likely than LLMs achieving GAI.
AI 2027 predicts AGI will be achieved in July 2027, 20 months from now. If you take that prediction seriously (I don’t, but it appears that Scott does), then I can see the argument for putting money into AI alignment research. If AGI actually appears as predicted, then the money may prove to have been well spent. On the other hand, if AGI does not appear when predicted, do Effective Altruists continue spending money on alignment research? Is there some point at which Effective Altruists will insist on evidence that alignment research is effective before they continue funding it?
To be pedantic, IIRC even AI 2027's own models predict 2030-2032. "2027" has always been clickbait. That being said, it doesn't matter that much because if the world is really going to end, having it happen five years later is scant comfort anyway.
In the AI 2027 scenario, “OpenBrain announces that they’ve achieved AGI and releases Agent-3-mini to the public,” in July 2027. I was assuming that this was intended as a prediction that AGI would be achieved in July 2027 (or perhaps in March 2027, when Agent-3 is first created). If the fictional Agent-3 doesn’t qualify as AGI, I would think that Agent-4 (September 2027) does, so that only moves the date for AGI back two months.
Are you saying that AI 2027 has posted other predictions that are inconsistent with the scenario?
Why does it feel like Pascal's Wager to you? Pascals wager is a nonsensical philosophical game, since you can't really choose what you believe, and you might choose the wrong god of the pantheon who sends you to hell anyways... and the AI alignment movement seems to me at least like a set of well thought out predictions that attempt to mitigate potential risks which are not 100% guaranteed to happen, but could be very destructive in the case they do.
Is there a specific part of the Ai 2027 timeline, for example, that you take issue with? Why is alignment a bad solution to fund?
Not the above person, but:
- All of the major harms are speculative
- Alignment research itself is speculative and can only be performed on the stuff we have now that doesn't present existential threats, and therefore might not even generalize if the bad stuff comes true
- In general anything that you reason could be infinitely bad can share traits with Pascal's Wager
- There are plenty of real things that kill lots of people now and are amenable to solutions (malaria, AIDS) and future threats that are already happening (Russia invading parts of Europe, climate change)
Thanks for you answer.
1. What is your issue with speculating about possible future major harms and trying to fund preventions? A nuclear exchange between Soviet Union and USA would have once been a speculative future harm. I think it would have been worth funding research into prevention. That event did not occur in the end, but the money would still have been well spent in my opinion even if none of the funded research panned out, because we can't predict the future.
2. I feel the same way about speculative research on speculative harms. Trying to solve a problem that might happen is good, even if we can't know for sure that it will happen or that our solution will actually work.
3. I guess because Glynn said EA ppl are "falling for Pascal's Wager over and over", its implied, to me at least, that the EA people are willfully choosing to believe something they presume to be false/illogical/not logically proveable. The choosing/pretending to believe thing seems to me to be a core part of Pascals wager. A lot of other commenters seem to be focussing only on finite loss/infinite gain part of it, that might be summarized as an "asymetric wager". I don't believe Pascals Wager refers in an abstract way to that concept, but rather narrowly means "you should act like a good christian even if you don't believe in God, because you either don't lose much if god doesn't exist or you gain infinitely if it does".
4. Should we place higher value in current suffering then in future suffering? I think that is what you are implying. Or maybe that we should invest in high certainty events regardless of differing levels of impact. EA in my understanding puts a very high level of importance in the "impact" side of the equation.
I think we're actually just disagreeing on the percentage we think its likely to happen. Maybe I think its 5% and you think its 0.000002% and thats why the speculation seems wasteful to you and necessary to me.
* After I wrote this found https://pauseai.info/pdoom
Scott was at 33% for risk of (vague ) AI doom scenario
1. The harms of a nuclear exchange are less speculative, in the sense that the USA nuked Japan twice. There are still unknowns, but we do know you can kill a ton of people and destroy a ton of stuff with nukes. We don't know if AI will genuinely be able to do dangerous things soon.
2. Trying to do research on potential harms is not itself objectionable, but I think it's unclear if doing alignment research on LLMs has a very high chance of generalizing to intelligent agents. After all, the only comparison we have of agentic general intelligences is humans, where I would argue tweaking their instincts for sociability would be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent warfare (not that we can try it anyway), because humans can do things outside the bounds of our instincts, both good and terrible. If we ultimately need to align the AIs the way we largely aligned humans - i.e., exchanging scarce resources for good behavior or setting up systems to punish defection - then what we will need the most is a well-functioning economy. Diverting a lot of money and effort and talent to a bunch of think tanks for decision theory or whatever might end up being really counterproductive if what we need the most is to be able to offer AI cheap electricity, or be able to credibly threaten data centers.
3. To me what makes this most like Pascal's Wager, or maybe instead Pascal's Mugging, is the fact that it assigns essentially infinite negative value to the outcome it's trying to prevent, which means no matter how remote you think it is, you basically still have to treat it as a top priority for resources.
I have wondered what will happen if AI never materializes as a real power and all the people who spent preaching the importance of AI alignment realize they talked most of the brightest most altruistic minds of a generation into wasting their potential.
I do think AI 2027 did us all a big favor in that regard - if we make it to 2030 and AI is still just a writing/coding assistant people are gonna have to be revising those predictions, at least.
We're trying:
1. https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/march . You can sign up there too, call your representatives, etc.
2. Less than a month ago, Scott posted https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds , partly a call for donations to the two candidates this year who have made AI safety at all a priority.
Responses Scott has already made to this:
1. "When I talk to the average person who says “I hate how EAs focus on AI stuff and not mosquito nets”, I ask “So you’re donating to mosquito nets, right?” and they almost never are. When I talk to people who genuinely believe in the AI stuff, they’ll tell me about how they spent ten hours in front of a spreadsheet last month trying to decide whether to send their yearly donation to an x-risk charity or a malaria charity, but there were so many considerations that they gave up and donated to both." (From https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games.)
2. Section 5 of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-stone-on-ea , arguing against someone who claimed "You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers!":
"Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants? There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. I take this one pretty seriously. The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. [...] EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA. (Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force[...]"
Even if, like Thomas del Vasto in this thread, you want to pause/stop AI without agreeing with the rest of AI alignment/safety, you can help with our best shot against those depressing race dynamics: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/act .
I took a long break from reading Astral Codex so probably missed the ones you linked. Thanks for linking so I can check them out. I think the final link is the most helpful (I prefer a ban on GAI/AI development to the alternatives, though I'm skeptical how much calling representatives will actually help).
If GAI happens by 2027 (as Scott seems to believe), then there is no political or research effort left that stands a good chance of having an effect by then. Government is notoriously slow to act, and beyond that any regulation that actually bans GAI development stands a good chance at instantly evaporating a good portion of the US stock market (see MSFT, NVDA, META, etc). Beyond that, the most likely candidates to actually create GAI are the companies lobbying hard to remove any restrictions - what do we think the chance is that these companies actually care enough about alignment to use the research, assuming it is developed in time?
I'm trying to check out their career advising. I don't really care for EA stuff but heard they could help think through a high-paying career for me. Then I'd be happy to donate a few k here and there from my extra money.
Everything is just AI. God. Feels like a scam. No I do not want to work on AI. No I do not want in alignment research or whatever. I want to make real money doing real things. Wtf
> Everything is just AI. God. Feels like a scam. No I do not want to work on AI. No I do not want in alignment research or whatever. I want to make real money doing real things. Wtf
Setting AI aside, there's two classical answers to this:
If you're more thing / math oriented, you go into finance, data science / modeling, or software development. But, it should be clear, none of those are "real things," it's all highly abstract white collar BS.
If you're more people / tangible impact oriented, go into medicine (plastic surgery, orthodontia, surgery) or sales (aircraft, enterprise software, business development).
All of those examples pretty easily clear $500k a year at the top places.
Or best of all (in my own opinion), you could start your own business. It doesn't need to be a VC-funded startup trading on hype and buzzwords and sparkly Ivy kid founders, there are hundreds of thousands of "real" businesses out there making real money doing real things (19k private businesses in the US make >$100M in revenue per year), and you could be one of them.
I wrote a post about the upsides and downsides of startups, and whether you should consider doing one, here a year or so ago: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/should-you-do-a-startup-a-tactical
Yeah very much agree. The entire AI alignment / safety movement to me sadly feels very foolish on it's face. I actually really don't like AI and would like to pause / stop it on moral grounds, but even most AI safety people I've read or talked to seem depressed that race dynamics make it impossible to stop. Idk just feels weird overall.
It’s hard to think of a worse use for $100 million of philanthropic money than AI alignment research. Maybe try feeding the poor? Or improving healthcare access? This is neither effective nor altruistic.
Didn't they?
I mean, these are the Malaria nets people. And the figures I've seen have them giving ~$200 million/year to global health causes (1) like, well, malaria nets n stuff. You can't criticize people for not doing something they're objectively doing to the tune of hundreds of millions/year.
I'm not wild about overpaid AI safety grantmakers and I'm not overblown by how well similar projects like MIRI have done. Nor am I super sold on ~$60 million/year for farm animal welfare. But, like, the same weird EA/autistic tendency that obsesses over spreadsheets for 2 years to determine whether Vitamin A supplements are more optimal than malaria nets (which is awesome) also leads them to really value, like, humane shrimp consumption (which is dumb but I'm still fond of it). And it's unfair to criticize the downsides of autistic optimization without acknowledging all the good it does.
(1) $185 million in 2019 dollars, https://80000hours.org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/
In 2024, GiveWell, alone, directed about $400 million to global health / poverty, 68% of which was malaria prevention and 14% of which was vit. A supplementation: https://blog.givewell.org/2025/08/13/givewells-2024-metrics-and-impact/.
However, while donations through GiveWell grew quite a bit since 2019, donations from general donors have mostly plateaued since 2021. And 2025 will be the last year that Open Philanthropy plans to contribute significantly to GiveWell.
GiveWell causes remain significantly funding constrained, so if people want contributions to global health / poverty to continue and even grow, they're welcome to donate: https://secure.givewell.org/.
It's all due to their perspective on expected value (they think extremely low probabilities of a very high payoff are worth taking on), as in this exercise: https://course.non-trivial.org/lessons/making-decisions-under-uncertainty
I feel like they're wrong on this. If expected value is what should guide decision-making, wouldn't civilization collapse as everyone goes off to pursue some moonshot that could make them billionaires, instead of doing the tasks that need doing to keep things running?
Similarly in altruism, it seems like a lot of lives would be lost if all or the majority of altruism dollars go to moonshot charitable opportunities like AI safety.
They want to focus on neglected and tractable issues. If too many resources get sent to one issue, then other issues become neglected and become worth investing in.
I happen to think AI alignment is not very tractable.
I gave up on writing on substack, but my next post would've involved trying to square this circle. The answer I've arrived at is something like:
People don't just care about EV, but also about consistency. The size of your bankroll that you put behind a bet, represents a sliding scale of how much volatility you're willing to expose yourself to in a single betting-round. To bet the farm on a single round (because Pascal told you to), is to exposure yourself to maximum volatility, which is extremely fragile. Equivalent to putting all your eggs into a single basket. Just as there's a trade-off between efficiency and slack, there's an analogous trade-off between EV and consistency. I.e. what use is ~infinite utility if it's all concentrated in a scenario that has ~0% probability? You're effectively dumping all your utility into a counterfactual you'll never see. But utilitarians love to boil everything down to a single, legible metric. EV and efficiency are seemingly(?) more legible than slack and consistency, for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
I remember reading a post on LW [0] that complained that the Kelly strategy of maximizing the growth-rate is *not* logically-equivalent to maximizing EV, and this felt fishy. But I'm willing to bite the bullet and claim that EV is not, in fact, the end-all be-all to begin with.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EZgieGEQAiD3xTsSQ/should-we-maximize-the-geometric-expectation-of-utility
A lot of that can be fixed by replacing expected value with expected utilitty.
I believe that _is_ the Kelley Criterion, although then I guess you have to assume a particular utility function.
that's fair, though a bit terse.
> But utilitarians love to boil everything down to a single, legible metric. EV and efficiency are seemingly(?) more legible than slack and consistency, for reasons I don't fully understand yet.
I believe the reason (for people on less wrong) is something along the lines of VNM axioms, and how if you don't obey all of them you are likely to get dutch booked. There are some other sub considerations and nuances to it, but I believe if you want to say stuff intelligently about EV, you should know about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem
Note that VNM decision utility is different from the notion of utility in utilitarianism, since VNM utility is over world states, and not over agent utility. I don't know of any writing directly relating VNM utility to utilitarianism utility.
>. I don't know of any writing directly relating VNM utility to utilitarianism utility.
I don't know.of any rigourous formal proof that they are the same (ie. a djsproof of the standard result that they are not the same). But it's very easy to write *informally* in a way that treats them as equivalent, because they are both called "utility"! and that's whats appears to be going on in Torture versus Dust Specks.
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
My quip was kind of orthogonal to dutch-booking. It's more about psychology than mathematical consistency. Lemme unpack this.
One common criticism of nerds, rationalists, autists, etc. is that they love numbers and equations a little too much, which often instills a sense of false-confidence. Nerds are generally drawn to things like math and trains, because they're clear, precise, and unambiguous. So a common impulse is to try to formalize decision-making into both VNM utility-functions and Utilitarian Ethics. Or in other words, to "putanumonit" [0]. It's ethics, but with math! what's not to love? EV is just a measure of "goodness", modulated by probability. It's a clear, tangible target to maximize.
Don't get me wrong, math is neat and all. But sometimes, nerds (myself included) tend to take things a bit too literally. They tend to trust the math more than their instincts. When math and instincts disagree, it might to prudent to question whether it's possible to steelman the case for instincts. E.g. consider the St Petersburg Paradox. Mathematically, the price should be infinite! But when you ask normies IRL, they put down something like $25. Likewise, consider Pascal's Mugging. According to Elizer, it's sound to give the mugger all your money. But when you ask normies IRL, they'll give the mugger a hay-penny at best. Consider Loss Aversion. Is it really a cognitive *bias*, in the sense that normies are being irrational? Are the normies dumb?
I've come to the conclusion that no, it's the math that's dumb. Normies care, not only about total EV, but also the variance between outcomes. And this tends to lead to better decisions. E.g. Sam Bankman Fried is someone who took linear EV-maxing super-seriously, acted accordingly, and now he's in prison. Which was asymptotically inevitable! When you go all-in on every single round, you lock all your utility behind a single final-outcome of infinitesimal probability! His imprisonment was an entirely predictable consequence of his beliefs and actions.
Consideration of variance in addition to EV is, I believe enough to dissolve several paradoxes. St. Petersburg looks sketchy because the variance is high. Pascal's Mugging is sketchy because the variance is high. The Utility Monster is sketchy because the variance is high. If outcomes were citizens, the Gini Coefficients would be 100%. You are not immortal, which means you won't be able to check every outcome for that one jackpot. And it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice a little EV for some consistency (i.e. decreased variance), for similar reasons as to why systems engineers only run things at 80% capacity.
Maybe you could rescue naive utility maximization with "meta-utility", which assigns a number to each PDF available to bet toward, where each PDF is mapped to (EV, variance). Idk, this gets confusing fast.
----
And when I zoom out from all this, I see a trade-off between EV vs variance. Which I suspect is isomorphic to efficiency vs slack [1], throughput vs buffers, free-trade vs protectionism, etc. I suspect the modern world tends to privilege EV, efficiency, throughput, and free-trade over their counterparts. And I suspect this has some deep connection with Episteme vs Metis. I haven't fully figured this part out yet.
[0] https://putanumonit.com/
[1] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/slack
> One common criticism of nerds, rationalists, autists, etc. is that they love numbers and equations a little too much, which often instills a sense of false-confidence.
And one uncommon criticism of normal people is that they are innumerate and instead get taken in by good sounding words. There's a reason why it's Bentham and Mills who spoke out against slavery and for equal rights before normal people! Why suppose that not using numbers is better? It sure sounds like people don't like being held accountable for what they do, so they tend towards doing things that are more illegible and thus less numerate.
> According to Elizer, it's sound to give the mugger all your money. But when you ask normies IRL, they'll give the mugger a hay-penny at best.
Huh? Can I get a source for this?https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a5JAiTdytou3Jg749/pascal-s-mugging-tiny-probabilities-of-vast-utilities says straight up
>> You or I would probably wave off the whole matter with a laugh, planning according to the dominant mainline probability: Pascal's Mugger is just a philosopher out for a fast buck.
And the rest of the post lays out why he trusts his intuition more than the raw numbers, and wonders how to defend the intuition in the first place, why do you believe otherwise?
> Consider Loss Aversion. Is it really a cognitive *bias*, in the sense that normies are being irrational? Are the normies dumb?
I mean, if normies consistently miss out on benefits because they consistently overvalue avoiding losses relative to getting gains, then yeah, they're dumber because of loss aversion.
> I've come to the conclusion that no, it's the math that's dumb. Normies care, not only about total EV, but also the variance between outcomes.
I mean, this is implicitly included if you use a logarithmic conception of utility gain over money, hence the Kelly criterion, which is why if you talked to most rationalists they'd rec using that typically over any sort of linear EV. I'm not sure what additional value questioning the value of EV is beyond this.
(I'm not 100% sure the following logic is right, I briefly checked it against a paid version of GPT, so please keep in mind that there may be errors and that I'm not a native thinker wrt to VNM)
Also note that VNM utility is over an ensemble of world state and doesn't specify that your evaluation of world states has to be linear. The fact, say an action would lead to uhhh, to pick an example out of a hat, 1/4th chance of ruin, 3/4ths chance of victory, the "utility" specifying if it's worth taking that over a 1/8th chance of ruin and 7/8ths chance of lesser victory depends more on the shape of how you evaluate the worlds rather than the math of EV. So, for example if you are risk adverse, you end up valuing the decreased chance of ruin much more than you do the reduction of value in the more probable victory worlds. There's nothing saying that you need to evaluate the individual world states as if there was some zero state matching the status quo, and then you only measure linear deviations from it to determine which worlds you prefer or disprefer. You'd have to add on additional ways in which you evaluate worlds to get risk neutrality, or variance aversion.
This is not to say that LWers are talking as if they deeply understand the VNM theorems, but invoking variance as a point against VNM theorems in particular is not correct. It may be correct against folk notions of utlity like what sbf had though, that I wouldn't defend.
I mean, yeah, that's pretty much where I was going with this. We're largely in agreement. Though I feel like you *want* me to argue that VNM is wrong (which is not a position I hold; I said it was orthogonal). The point of this isn't to dunk on VNM or EY, but to reveal some of the motivation for my train of thought, and somehow segue it into "Seeing Like A State" territory. While EY might not have explicitly advocated for being mugged, I do distinctly remember that he spent a fair amount of thought on Pascal's Wager/Mugging, and didn't understand how to solve the paradox. We agree on this much, yes? So I'm pointing out "Kelly solves this pretty handily, actually".
It seems like the only major disagreement we have, is:
> hence the Kelly criterion, which is why if you talked to most rationalists they'd rec using that typically over any sort of linear EV.
Which makes it sound like Kelly is completely uncontroversial on LW and in the wider rat sphere. If so, this is news to me. I know there are many who do subscribe to Kelly, and I don't follow LW too closely, so I could certainly be unaware of the wider trends here. But I figured that "Should We Maximize the Geometric Expectation of Utility?" [0] was evidence that Kelly had *not* been universally accepted as canon yet. And that variance had *not* been pinpointed as the missing ingredient yet. Am I wrong?
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EZgieGEQAiD3xTsSQ/should-we-maximize-the-geometric-expectation-of-utility
Maybe you should write it, I would be interested in reading it. Some time ago I wrote a takedown of utilitarianism because the EV stuff and the dust specks versus torture thought experiment really rubbed me the wrong way.
I predicted that blogging would be kinda boring and worthless. But I gave it a shot anyway, and realized that blogging is kinda boring and worthless. lol. I'm not very talented in this domain, and my hearts not in it enough to persevere, and I think I'd rather spend the bulk of my effort doing other things. Like, it's so much less stressful to just dump my shower-thoughts in here, than to attempt an effort-post that's meant to stand the test of time. but idk, i'll consider revisiting that one draft, since you asked.
Yes, if only they'd thought of those as options.
Have a heart, Shankar, they didn’t have Viel and these other commenters there when they set their priorities.
Of course, food and medicine are too impractical and unrealistic. Let's pay the bubble-powered salary of a connected few individuals instead.
Food and medicine are bubbles too, ever since the Green Revolution. Ogalala's gonna go dry, and then where will we be? (Also: antibiotics. Made In China).
the Ogallala Aquifier is something I often think about, too.
Those who fund alignment research tend to believe that the consequences of misaligned AI would be the death of every human, and that aligned AI would solve all other solvable problems, including food and healthcare.
This is a seventh level solution to a first level problem. Fund AI research, sure, but don't market it as "effective altruism".
It's unclear to me what the point of your comment is. Clearly, the EAs who spend on AI alignment charities believe it is altruistic and effective. It's unlikely you will change their mind with mere statements to the contrary, at least some arguments are needed to do so generally.
Likewise, I don't understand the point of this reply. I'm not expecting any donors to have a change of heart because they read my comment. Those who have experienced poverty (read: not the donors) know this is a baffling use of resources.
Do you think funding high risk/high reward ideas are ever warranted?
It seems obvious to me, that if humanity only ever spent its funds very practically and conservatively then technology would progress at such a slow rate, that we would miss out on the incredible improvement that advances bring.
Simultaneously as you argued if we spend all our money on moonshot ideas, then we will suffer from problems that have simple, proven solutions.
I think in actuality a natural balance forms between these two extremes, with individuals choosing their own place along the spectrum of conservative to moonshot.
A question for you: do you all the money that is going towards researching and improving renewable energy technology should go towards feeding the poor or improving healthcare access?
All the money that is going toward Chinese Energy Dependence, you mean? Yeah, that's better spent on feeding the poor or improving health care access. Even if both of those goals are actually evil in nature. Lesser of two evils.
I reject the premise of the question, but to humor you, most estimates put the amount needed to solve world hunger at about $40 billion per year. I think it's reasonable to assume that global R&D into renewables is more than that. Given a crazy hypothetical, yeah, I would rather solve world hunger.
Anyway, this AI alignment research is much more frivolous than renewable energy, even taken at face value. It's not just a moonshot, it's a shot meant to scrape cheese off it's surface and bring it to Jupiter. Even putting this money into "normal" tech startups would do more to help. Charity shouldn't be a lottery ticket.
Thanks for you answer, I find it reasonable, but if i had $40 billion to donate, I would guess I would probably not donate it all to solving world hunger.
I would want to a) hedge against my own lack of knowledge, by donating to multiple things, some more conservative and some a bit more speculative b) try to figure out where the donations would have recursive positive impacts, or stop negative feedback loops.
It seems to me that climate change will cause huge negative feedback loops, of political instability, water insecurity, more extreme weather events, loss of arable land, and hunger, so I could see how it could be argued that investing in solving hunger now, could potentially mean causing more hunger later through the opportunity cost of the limited funds if you believe that funding various greentech could reduce the negative effects.
Just for fun, I googled annual cost of climate change and the first result[1]
says around $143 billion currently, and another[2] saying it will rise to 38 trillion/year in damages by 2050.
[1]https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/climate-loss-and-damage-cost-16-million-per-hour/#:~:text=In%20total%2C%20the%20researchers%20found,of%20$620%20billion%20in%202008.
[2]https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/38-trillion-dollars-in-damages-each-year-world-economy-already-committed-to-income-reduction-of-19-due-to-climate-change
I can't say whether these estimates are reasonable or not, but it seems reasonable to assume that the cost is large and rising with clear negative feedback mechanisms.
But anyways, you were talking about AI alignment research being a frivolous of donations...
From my current understanding it seems like a pretty reasonable set of arguments that the unchecked, unregulated arms-race style advancement of AI could potentially lead to some huge negative effects. Maybe its kind of a scissor statement style argument where the two sides are somehow incapable of seeing the other sides points, but i would be curious to try to understand where you are coming from.
What part of https://ai-2027.com/ 's timeline do you find completely and obviously unreasonable to the point that it wouldn't be beneficial to fund alignment research? (i don't mean to put words or opinions in your mouth, but just making assumptions based on your comment.)
Why shouldn't charity be a lottery ticket? You play as insurer. Pay in $100, which you lose either way, and if there's a hurricane, you get $10,000. Which you then give to the devastated place.
Could you elaborate? I don’t really understand what you’re saying.
I'm going to ask once more about the alcohol use vs dementia study published in BMJ* in September. Its widely repeated assertion is that there is NO safe "floor" amount of alcohol consumption. Contrary to the purported beneficial effects of "one glass of wine a day," or even the more modest claim that drinking in moderation at least not harmful, the the recent article purports to show that ANY amount of alcohol consumption increases ones risk of developing dementia.
But, as I read it, they did two studies. The one which surveyed actual drinkers reporting their alcohol consumption yielded (again!) the now-familiar so-called "U Curve" implying a beneficial effect of small amounts of alcohol. The part that has garnered all the publicity was a genome study that used the presence of certain genomic alleles supposedly linked with propensity to greater or lesser alcohol consumption as proxies to actual drinking. (The bibliography cited other studies that used this technique, called "Mendalian Randomization," but no work claiming to justify its use in the first place.) As far as I can understand the study, it was the presence of these alleles that predicted the development of dementia.
So ... I am asking, can we infer ones drinking habits from their genome with enough accuracy to make predictions? Chat GPT has been of little help. Readers?
* https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2025/09/16/bmjebm-2025-113913
So if actually drinking modest amounts of alcohol is healthy, and having genes that predispose you to drinking modest amounts of alcohol is unhealthy, the conclusion seems to be that actually drinking moderate amounts of alcohol is _really_ healthy.
The point of MR is to tease out causality. We know that the observational studies are heavily confounded, with for exa which is actually just a selection effect on the variety of alcohol being consumedmple, people reducing their alcohol consumption after developing dementia (and see here for a confounded result showing benefit of wine in utero: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecoj.12144).
Depending on study design, I'd think MR could also be subject to confounding, and skimming the BMJ paper, I don't get how they get around that.
However, you can see this other MR alcohol use study that looked at association with cardiovascular risk, rather than dementia risk: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31772-0/fulltext that used genes associated with alcohol metabolism (which in turn affect alcohol consumption).
There is much less reason a priori to think that genes associated with alcohol metabolism, in particular (I'm guessing they're not associated with metabolism of food, in general), would have extensive impacts on health outcomes not mediated by alcohol consumption.
And the lack of such causal pathways is further supported by the absence of association between these genes and health outcomes in women.
Since women in the cohort rarely drank, anyway, if the genes only affected health outcomes via alcohol consumption, we'd expect the genes to have no association in women, which is what they found.
The study similarly found a monotonic relationship between genetic propensity for alcohol consumption and adverse cardiovascular events, rather than the U-shaped associated present in observational studies.
These researchers get dementia data from EHRs and say x allele cluster is associated with y probability of developing dementia, fine.
But they go on to claim to be able to infer drinks per week, problematic alcohol use and alcohol use disorder by counting alleles. "For the genetic analyses, we looked at both how much people drink (quantity-frequency traits) and problematic alcohol use (PAU), which reflect somewhat different underlying genetic risks and biology."
My problem is that there is nowhere cited a reference linking the presence of certain alleles to actual elbow-bending tipping of glass to lips. It seems to be just assumed that a population with "better" or more alcohol dehydrogenase or "worse" or less aldehyde dehydrogenase are going to drink less, and vice versa. Has this ever been shown? The Lancet study that you've provided is similar in that respect.
They're found in genome-wide association studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study. Are you asking about the validity of GWAS, in general, or of the robustness of findings for specific phenotypes, in particular?
Ive had I look at the study, but their tables are difficult to read for me. I would like to know about this particular GWAS, it sounds unbelievable good. For example, their predicted drinks/week range from at least 0 to 12. The lower end of this seems like it should have problems being calibrated, negative drinks being impossible. They also analyse a group with mean predicted DPW of 0.06, out of an n=300k, and apparently get significant results, and they say going from *predicted* 1DPW to 3DWP is a 15% increase in dementia risk.
All of these seem to require pretty high accuracy.
When the phenotype is a fractional gradation of a specific behavioral trait, it seems to me to fit into the "extraordinary claims ..." category. I know about and have never had any qualms with, for example, Jonathan Haidt's work, but number of drinks per week?
For completeness' sake, Gemini's take on the matter. Worthwhile if you've got this far:
https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/Patrickd314-Public1/GWAS+%26+Alcohol+Consumption+Via+Gemini.pdf
OK, as I look around, I'm finding some studies that supposedly demonstrate a relationship between alcohol use (as opposed to alcohol use disorder) ...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916523021664
and https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.24.25324454v1 ... and so perhaps breathing a bit easier.
> Its widely repeated assertion is that there is NO safe "floor" amount of alcohol consumption.
I haven't looked at these studies closely, just two quick thoughts on the topic in general:
1) Some studies seems to measure the consumption of alcohol on a scale "zero drinks a day", "one drink a day", "two drinks a day"... which seems very coarse to me. I mean, zero drink suggests a teetotaler, one drink *every day* is practically an alcoholic. Do these studies even have a category for people who drink like one bottle of wine shared with friends once in a month?
2) The obvious confounder is that some people avoid alcohol because they already have a health problem. If you don't control for this, then obviously the "zero drinks" category will look bad, because all these sick people will be there. But that does not imply that drinking every day would improve their health.
I think the actual studies use drinks per week, not drinks per day. Where I've seen drinks per day, I'm pretty sure that was from journalists or bloggers who were dividing the numbers by seven to get a daily average that they hoped would be more legible. Current public healthy guidance in the US is that "moderate drinking" is no more than 14 drinks per week for men and no more than 7 drinks per week for women.
The bigger problem with the studies is that we're pretty sure that self-reported alcohol consumption is severely unreliable, since average self-reported consumption multiplied by the total population only accounts for about half of retail alcohol sales. One standard response to this seems to be to uniformly multiply self-reported consumption by two, which strikes me as problematic. I suspect the actual discrepancy is a combination of several factors:
1. Some people who self-report as teetotalers are actually occassional drinkers.
2. Some people who self-report as teetotalers or as occasional or moderate drinkers are actually raging alcoholics.
3. A nontrivial amount of retail alcohol sales never get consumed or gets consumed only after a substantial delay. My own liquor shelf contains bottles that I purchased or received as gifts 10-20 years ago which are still half-full or more. Also, there are bottles that get broken or spilled, drinks served in bars and restaurants that don't get finished, etc.
4. There's one guy called Whiskey Georg who drinks 2000 bottles of whiskey a week but doesn't respond to public health surveys.
5. Lab techs and DIY engine hobbyists are appalled at the rising cost of supplies and are resorting to... other measures.
One drink "every day" is France, with their plonk or box wine. Or the "average" American having a beer with dinner.
Alcohol every day is 10% of adults in France.
https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/les-actualites/2020/consommation-d-alcool-en-france-ou-en-sont-les-francais
I stand corrected. and that would explain the use of boxwine (which retains freshness better than bottles).
9 in 10 wine consumers in France buy wine in bottles, 1 in 4 in boxwine ("cubis"), and 1 in 3 in "caisses" (literally boxes, meaning larger boxes containing several bottles like a pack of beers).
https://domainedugout.com/fr/content/43-les-francais-et-le-vin
(Less high-quality source than Santé Publique France)
I am not very experienced with boxwine, but it seems very unlikely to me that it retains freshness better that glass bottles. If it was the best for taste, it would be the more prestigious version. The advantages of boxwine are low price and ease of transport.
Boxwine prevents oxidization. Therefore if you are keeping the wine for days, you're better off with boxwine, than a cork-system.
You're right that ease of transport and low price are factors.
> One drink "every day" is France
The country with the largest fraction of child liver cirrhosis, at least according to some literature on alcoholism I have read, so this does not really convince me that we are talking about reasonably low amounts of alcohol.
Alcohol-related child liver cirrhosis must be vanishingly rare if it exists at all, because you need long-term heavy exposure to alcohol to develop cirrhosis. If you include teenagers, ChatGPT found one case in the literature, in a 15-year-old "after 3 years of heavy daily alcohol abuse" (poor boy). Presumably in the US based on the authors' affiliations.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10187849
It is plausible that there never was any documented case of alcohol-related cirrhosis in a child in France or in most countries. Your claim is bizarre.
From the study:
"Patient’s alcohol intake began as occasional beers at age 12 years, progressed to daily beers at 13 years, and deteriorated to daily vodka pints at 14 years after his father’s death."
I submit "a pint of vodka a day" is not the same as "allowed a glass of watered wine with dinner". Also, the father (amongst other things) suffered from "substance abuse disorder" so I'm thinking maybe introduced Junior to drinking by sharing beers with him, which is how we get to "daily beers (plural) at age 13".
Generalising from this one case to "all the children in France" is a bit of a jump.
It's probably due to excessive Tylenol, rather than alcohol abuse. Double-dose on Tylenol, and you can be hitting the Emergency Room. We do not have good treatments either (NAC is a start, but...)
Oh? But I thought Tylenol was TOTALLY safe and had NO bad side-effects? Wasn't that the recent messaging in response to RFK? /s
Maybe not "Tylenol causes autism" but yeah, no medicine is completely harmless.
"It" what? What are the facts that require an explanation here?
Can you cite me those sources? Tylenol is known to cause a lot of harm to the liver if administered improperly, so I'd really like to know if people are tying this to "children actually drinking." (and also the age of children).
Sorry, it was in some book I read over twenty years ago, when I did a school project on alcoholism. The book said that in some French villages parents let their children drink wine regardless of age.
"Over twenty years ago" would have been anywhere from 2000 backwards; in the 1980s France had high alcohol consumption rates but this dropped over the following decades so that cirrhosis rates improved as well.
So I think your data is outdated.
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-014-0145-y
"Global liver cirrhosis deaths increased from around 676,000 (95% uncertainty interval: 452,863 to 1,004,530) in 1980 to over 1 million (1,029,042; 670,216 to 1,554,530) in 2010 (about 2% of the global total). Over the same period, the age-standardized cirrhosis mortality rate decreased by 22%. This was largely driven by decreasing cirrhosis mortality rates in China, the US and countries in Western Europe. In 2010, Egypt, followed by Moldova, had the highest age-standardized cirrhosis mortality rates, 72.7 and 71.2 deaths per 100,000, respectively, while Iceland had the lowest. In Egypt, almost one-fifth (18.1%) of all deaths in males 45- to 54-years old were due to liver cirrhosis. Liver cirrhosis mortality in Mexico is the highest in Latin America. In France and Italy, liver cirrhosis mortality fell by 50% to 60%; conversely, in the United Kingdom, mortality increased by about one-third. Mortality from liver cirrhosis was also comparatively high in Central Asia countries, particularly Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, notably Gabon."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5873553/
"Changing alcohol consumption has led to a three- to fivefold increase in liver deaths in the UK and Finland, and a three- to fivefold decrease in France and Italy.
...Over the last 30 years liver death rates in the European Union (EU) have gradually declined in response to changing patterns of alcohol intake. The EU liver death rate was 13.25 in 1970 and 8.01 in 2007 (for pre-2004 EU member states) – a reduction of 60%. But this overall decline conceals very large differences between member states. France and Italy, the countries with the largest decline in liver deaths, have seen a three- to fourfold reduction in liver mortality whereas the UK and Finland have seen liver deaths rise by more than fivefold over the same period of time.
...Total alcohol consumption in France has fallen by 12 litres per capita since the 1950s while the trend in Italy began later, dropping from 15.9 litres of pure alcohol per capita in 1970 to 6.9 litres in 2005.
...Levels of wine production remained high in France and Italy. Measures taken by the European Commission in the late 1970s and early 1980s to reduce wine production and improve the quality of the product as part of the common agricultural policy cannot alone account for the drop in internal consumption. Rather a move to quality of production was a reaction by the industry to consumer choice and reduced demand. Skog identifies the middle classes as the pioneers of change in France, and notes that they were already drinking less than other groups, preferring to opt for high-quality options instead – ‘bottles with corks’ as opposed to large plastic containers of cheap ‘plonk’. This is good news for the wine industry and suggests that profitability and improved health can go hand in hand by moving towards quality and away from quantity – a lesson that UK supermarkets would do well to learn from their French and Italian counterparts."
That's plausible (and more likely the more you go back in the past). What is not is that the children would get a cirrhosis in their childhood. Higher risk of cirrhosis in adulthood, surely.
My parents got me drunk in France too (I was under 5, they didn't properly meter the wine). Given the time period, it is quite possible it contained anti-freeze. (And given your book's time period, it is quite plausible that any "we found cirrhosis" contained the same time period). STILL more plausible to be tylenol overdoses (which are quite common Stateside -- and probably moreso in Merry England, where it's prescribed more often).
When people say "children drink regardless of age" they generally just mean a "smaller dose" -- as getting your kids blitzed means barfing kids, and that's no fun.
Yeah, there's a lot of social context here. I've noticed that at academic conferences, I'll have a beer or two every night--I'm often at a reception/party at the end of the day or out to dinner with friends, and I'm seldom driving, so it just makes sense. At home, I will occasionally have a beer with dinner or something, but most nights I'm just eating dinner at home with my family and/or driving, so it doesn't really make sense.
Mendelian randomization is a well-established technique for making causal inferences in epidemiology. It has some more assumptions, and therefore some more limitations, than a real RCT. One way you can test MR is to see whether an MR study gives the same results as a real RCT for something that *is* randomizable. This usually works, but not always.
One intuition on why this works: you could still do a perfectly valid RCT by having group A be assigned placebo 40% of the time and the real drug 60% of the time, and group B be assigned placebo 60% of the time and the real drug 40% of the time (even if you did not know which specific people in groups A and B got which version!). Adjusting for the propensities, you would still get a valid estimate of the causal effect of the drug.
MR is basically using quasi-randomly-assigned genes to do the same thing. You can predict predisposition to drink alcohol using genetics (older studies often used the alcohol intolerance gene, found in some east asians, as a binary of "more likely / less-likely to drink"). Your study I think uses risk scores to estimate amount of drinking, but same idea.
It feels like that only works if the alleles don’t affect the endpoint through some other mechanism. I suspect these techniques would show drinking also increases lung cancer, if the same alleles also increase smoking.
+1
I'm sure there are good statistical techniques for trying to adjust for confounding variables, but it seems like it would be easy to convince yourself of nonsense using this technique if you were not very careful.
Open question, if prediction markets incentivize forecasting, given the multiple sides of a bet, don't they also incentivize insiders to mislead outsiders in service of a larger upside and defeat the purpose? What's the argument against?
Yes. Presumably people just disagree about the relative sizes of those effects.
Really good forecasters tend to be people with many interests who consume lots of info sources, including obscure ones and foreign ones that insiders in a US industry have little or no influence over. They also reason about the thing they're predicting using other analogous situations in other domains and similar situations in a different time. Insiders can't interfere with that process either.
I feel that prediction markets are this lovely Platonic ideal of nerds about using something or other to set policy, but if they do take off in the mainstream, the usual human influences will start to work: "this can make me money?" and then it becomes about making money and not getting the best wisdom available to create a consensus about what is the optimum course of action to pursue.
In the service of making money, we've all seen different bubbles, crashes, schemes, and downright fraud, not to mention lesser problems of insider trading and price fixing etc.
The whole point of prediction markets is that if they're working well, the best way to make money is to make correct predictions.
My concern with prediction markets as a source of information is that I worry that the cost of manipulating them is not very high because they're not very big markets. If everyone assumes that the prediction market odds are correct, then when I want to manipulate public sentiment ahead of an election or something, maybe I spend a lot of money either trying to push the prediction market in a desired direction, or trying to convince my followers to invest in the prediction market in my desired direction.
In Bay Area, bettors make correct predictions. But in Soviet Normieland, bettors make predictions correct.
Yes, the best way to make money is to make correct predictions, but sometimes you have goals other than making money (e.g. you want to confuse people, and you are willing to spend money to do that), and sometimes the easiest way to make a correct prediction is to influence things (e.g. you predict some disaster, and then you make it happen).
That makes sense, but it doesn't address the possibility of misled money crowding out smart money in an open prediction market.
The idea that anyone stupid enough to keep getting misled is eventually going to go backrupt. People can't bet money that they don't have. (Well, most of the time, anyways: https://youtu.be/d80ahvRSV8E?si=CLwPWjXrwfFz39Cb )
some very rough 20 responses to last week's aphantasia mini-survey and some very vibe-coded charts which I haven't double checked. minimum effort to see if I'm encouraged to pursue further.
Look at the survey first if you don't know what I'm talking about: https://forms.gle/is1nx35TrggtZdL5A
Results:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EBIzvpDMpFe2TlTGJsJIeIExk1qo0_VitipHv5ZHCqg/edit?gid=881518322#gid=881518322
I've been providing a light, mostly-accurate-names-changed-to-protect-the-innocent narrative tracking my attempts to find potential work as a writer as a long spate of novel-writing begins to look less and less likely to pay the bills. Today, I'm going to cover another aspect of the writer-makes-money game that is far more traditional and far less reliant on believing my vague claims to be a writer.
Let's talk about, quotes needed, "getting published".
If you've never spent a lot of time thinking about the books you read, your mental image of books getting to the shelves is likely somewhat magical. Somewhere, a writer (a being who can write, of which writing is known about them) gets access to a pen, which fulfills the spawn condition for a book. He sends this book to someone with a printing press who does the rest of the job for him; they print the book, they distribute the book, and they market the book so people know it's been printed/distributed. If it's a good enough book, it sells a lot of copies, and everyone is happy.
If you've thought about it a little more, you know there's also an agent in there, who you probably think about as a person who takes the writer's book, verifies it for quality, then searches for an appropriate buyer.
None of this is wrong, exactly, but none of it is right. It's all so much worse than that in ways that infuriate anyone that encounters this industry with the slightest amount of skin in the game.
Publishers:
Publishers are, at their very best, risk minimizers who are entirely agnostic of the contents of a book. Some of you felt revulsion at that concept, some of you understand it to be similar to the way almost every profitable business operates. Some precious few of you felt both.
At the very best case, a publisher wants to sell a book that will sell. In generations long gone, publishers believed that this was mostly a function of getting a book on the shelves that in some way answered to "written well". This might have been a reference to highbrow prose, or it might have been thrill-a-minute pulp that grabbed the readers and wouldn't let go. They figured this would get them good reviews and word of mouth, and that this in turn would make the book sell.
Whether that was true or not, it's only relevant to know that publishers no longer believe this.
What do they believe in its place? Well, back in those hallowed days of writing mattering much, some publisher figured out that having an illustrated cover made books sell better. Some other publisher figured out copy on the back sold better, and another figured out that sometimes a newspaper reviewer would give a book a review because of the author's background, and that these reviews tended to be more positive than usual, agnostic of the quality of the book.
Eventually, these add-ons to book quality came to be the only thing that mattered. Publishers realized that since buyers would only pick up and consider things that popped on the shelf, they started looking for books that could be expressed in one-sentence pitches, especially when written by someone with an admirable backstory (in 2025, this means BIPOC or LGBTQ+, 99% of the time).
They did not realize, and still have not realized, what this would do after a generation of readers were trained to the expectation that books sucked regardless of advertising, but that's another story about why romance novels are the only novels that sell (TM).
Now, that's the best case scenario - that the publisher does not even read your novel before publishing it, that they bought it based on how it would look on the shelf completely agnostic of the actual writing in the book. There are some fairy-tale stories that defy this, but at the top level of publishing? The reading of the book is optional. But what about the worse-case scenarios?
The first of those is that of marketing. Traditionally, marketing was the publisher's job, full stop. Marketing, however, takes money. Worse, that money doesn't always work to actually sell the book. So what is there to do? Well, call it the magic rule of publishing: There are more writers than you actually need, and they all want to get published. So you offload the marketing burden to them.
Usually, you actually do this BEFORE the publishing deal. In non-fiction, you only consider publishing people who have "platform", i.e. the ability to sell their book themselves without your help at all, absent printing capabilities and distribution. For instance, there's a book called the Martian that's often held up as a fairy tale of a long-shot book getting a book deal against all conventional odds. It got a deal because it was already selling so well, independently, that the agent who sold it to a larger publisher had to actively beg the writer to give him a chance.
There's still distribution, right? Well, yes, but most publishers now have imprints that don't have distribution; Orbit Books, for instance, is part of Hachette; Orbit Works, which Orbit is trying to morph into, only does e-books. Most genre publishers are moving away from print, and so on.
So in the brave new publisher future, the publisher prints books you could have printed yourself, so long as you could have sold them without the publisher's help (which they mostly won't give), having not read your book (or not cared what was in it anyhow), and then often not printing the book at all (which you double secret siberian double-dutch could have done yourself).
In exchange for all this nothing, the publisher still (sometimes) gives advances (that are increasingly small, on top of being rare). In a lot of cases, the modern publisher's deal to the writer is "We will take half the money from your book for fronting the money for cover design". That's the worst-case stuff before it's actually a full on "pay us to publish your book" scam.
Agents
Mostly similar to publishers, your agent does not want to work and does not care what's in your book. They are a *little* better than publishers for reasons I'll get to, but not much.
The process for getting an agent is one of two things:
1. Be clearly capable of selling the book yourself and not needing the agent or a publisher in the first place, in which case the agent will grub up grubbily with their hands out for a share and hope you are so enamored of the job title you give it to them
2. Query letters.
Agents do NOT want to read books. Ideally, an agent spends all their time selling book *concepts* to publishers, who hand over some small lump money for the rights to the book, of which the agent gets some low-double-digit percentage. Reading books takes time away from that, so they'll do anything to get around it.
The way they've managed to do this in the modern era is through query letters. A query letter is a fairly standardized 200-500 word summary of a book, written by the author, including a few sentences explaining, carefully, what already successful books it's ripping off (this concept is called "stating your comparables).
Because the agent knows the publisher doesn't care what's in the book, your demographics and one-sentence pitches are all that matter at this level. There's a site called manuscript wishlist in which agents and publishers name what kind of manuscripts they want, and far and away the most popular genre isn't a genre at all - it's some language boiling down to "written by an interesting minority or lgbtq person". Many agents refuse to accept books if they aren't by one of those groups, and say so outright.
If you are thus a very minority LGBTQ of disadvantaged queer color, you start with half the job done. The rest of what you need is a good *summary* of your book, and then the agent might consider reading a single word of your novel. If you aren't brown, tan, and man-on-man, you have to have a REALLY GOOD summary of your book and then the agent might actually ask to see pages.
Note that, again, the agent does not care if your book is *good*. They care if the publisher will buy it, and the publisher doesn't care if it's good. If the book *is* really good, they consider that a plus, don't get me wrong. But it's not a big part of it.
Writers
Writing books that have a chance of mainstream publishers is a function of playing this game. In order, the things that you need to do to get a book published are:
1. Not need it, already be making money, and be on the likely losing end of any deal you make with anyone.
2. Have enough of a platform you don't know how to use to sell books that the publisher thinks they can take advantage of it.
3. Be an interesting kind of minority, differently abled person, LGBTQ+, or if you can swing it all three
4. Write books that are similar to other books that have sold well and that summarize into a single sentence (sometimes this is called high-concept) well
5. Be very good at writing a query letter
6. Consider working hard at being a good writer.
If you have been curious why self-publishing is an increasingly big deal, this is it. Books do NOT get published based on merit-of-the-words-inside, usually. In self-publishing, where anything can get popped up and have a chance, any book you actually hear if is almost guaranteed to be at least somewhat good; disentangled from modern mainstream publishing, it had to be for you to hear about it.
As a writer doing anything non-conventional, as a person who isn't good at marketing, or as a person who just isn't good at the very specific thread-the-needle game necessary to actually get pages of your book read by a human, self-publishing isn't just a better option, it's often the ONLY option.
Sadly, much of this analysis also has similarities to the current music industry.
Hey Ben, thanks for posting again, this is a very interesting perspective and I’m probably going to copy this into a word doc for later.
Two questions for you:
One: you alluded to the game lit/litRPG genre, no longer being so friendly, I was surprised by that. There are dungeon crawler Carl books all over the place now right? I would expect that that would create a bigger market for “same but different”books.
Two, do you belong to 20K or any writers groups like that?
Hi! DCC is a weird effect on the genre. It's a young man's book in a young man's genre, it's fun to read, but it's *slightly different* so mainstream publishers don't have any idea what to do with the fact that it did well.
A few months ago I sent out a lot of cold emails to get conversations going, and I talked to some... like you wouldn't call them famous outside of the agent/literary world but very high end agents, known names with full lists who aren't taking queries because they already have all the business they want.
Basically the consensus there was that the big publishing houses were all talking about DCC (because it made a lot of money) but that they didn't understand it and weren't putting any work into understanding it. There's I think four or five agents on the big agent listings who have it as an interest, two of which I know and who aren't... like, they aren't established agents in any sense. The rest of them are LGBTQ+ exclusive or preferenced, and there's maybe one who is actually looking for litRPG books as they generally exist.
Putting all that together, the basic thing is that there was a morale boost when DCC went big, but that's tapered off a lot as publishers proved themselves entirely uninterested in trying it again. There's one I know of that put out a "litRPG book" trying to get lucky, but I think they hired a conventional fantasy writer they had a relationship with already, and he didn't understand the genre, biffed it, and they got the results you'd expect from that level of arrogance and genre hostility.
Really simply, DCC was already making a lot of money so there was no risk to publishers taking a "chance" on it. They haven't been willing to make similar or worse bets since, although there might be behind-the-scenes stuff I haven't been shown.
I don't do the whole writer's group thing. Nothing against it but to make the money I need to make, I have to put out a novel about every 1-2 months. Writers groups can't help me with that.
Oi. I think you win the Nancy Drew award. Every month? Damn, you're a workhorse.
I do not recommend it. After a while, it changes your relationship with words in some positive ways, but also a whole lot of negative ones.
Fair warning: I've replied to a lot of comments in this thread but I also have to *write things for money*, so my reply pacing is probably slowing down from here.
When I was little, I wanted to be a novelist. Learning that agents existed and were now obligatory is what made me give up on that. Horrible parasites. It makes me wax Marxist just to think of it.
In slight defense of agents: When people do get past the filters and find themselves with good agents, they often end up in a very, very good spot by having one. Agents are, if nothing else, often very good salesmen and negotiators. There are bad agents and very good "civilian" negotiators, but by and large a good agent is going to get you more money, should you secure one.
"Agents are, if nothing else, often very good salesmen and negotiators."
To express this as briefly as possible: I regard this as a contemptible trait.
Why? Their literal job is to act as an agent for the writer in that regard. Do you also dislike lawyers for being better at protecting clients than the clients themselves would be, pro se?
There's a lot of negative takes to have on agents and I hold a lot of them, but "I don't like the part where they get a good outcome for their clients" is surprising to see on the list.
Salesmanship is innately contemptible since it implies (in the formal-logic sense) an ability to push the product beyond its qualitative merits.
It's true but unrelated that the legal system would also be better if lawyers didn't exist and the plaintiff and accused had to state their cases before the justice of the peace in person.
This assumes you are using trickery, rather than your native enthusiasm and ability to say "no really, this WORKS for you" in order to sell a product.
Some people use trickery.
Others are nearly pure "I love this product!" (Nick Offerman, when he says he loves Lagavulin, is being perfectly sincere).
My sister has watched a lot of BookTok and tells me there are three groups of avid readers: women who read erotica (she calls them "spicy people" because whenever a new book is mentioned their first question is "is it spicy?"), woke people (who make sanctimonious videos demanding that everyone read x number of books per year by a long list of specified demographics), and "classics people" who mostly only read classic literature like Dostoevsky. Apparently the second two groups have a lot of overlap (I am utterly unable to comprehend the cognitive dissonance of "people should be cancelled for ten-year-old tweets, but let's read books written by literal slaveowners!") but both hate the spicy people and the spicy people hate them.
And what you're saying here tracks pretty well with this. If the only people who are actually buying new books regularly are either porn adicts or woke, then obviously most publishers will be clearly signalling that they only want manuscripts that are pornograpic or woke. Complaining about this reminds me of atheists complaining that conservative churches are so much more thriving than liberal churches, or people who would never in any imaginable circumstances vote Republican complaining that Republicans aren't reaching out to them in any way. The complainers (who I agree with of course) are mostly people who don't actually read fiction, or at least certainly don't routinely pay actual money for it. Which means of *course* your preferences are going to be ignored, as long as the people with your preferences tend to not be buying books at all. The answer is for the people who don't like these trends to actually buy books that defy them, and create the market for them.
And if you do and most people don't, recognise the problem is with democracy, not the publishers. They're just giving the people what they want. There's no cure for the people wanting stupid things.
Hmm. I l buy stuff that doesn't fall into those categories -- SFF, comic novels, combinations of the two (Adams, Pratchett), weird slipstream stuff (Self, Hoban), and idea-heavy philosophical writing (Lem, Borges). A lot of my friends and relatives are similar. Are we really an invisible.minority?
Also, an awful lot of people are reading Big Stephen King.
What I read is that to a first approximation, the only books that sell are a) books by famous popular genre authors and b) celebrity memoirs. And even then, a lot of them flop. Anything beyond that is basically lottery ticket tier. But that's the big publisher view, excluding self-published niches like Kindle erotica.
So I think a lot of this is true. It's usually presented like this:
1. Right now you can mostly only sell porn to women, in terms of new books.
2. Anyone else who is buying books are woke people, and it's still broadly porn for them too
3. People who are only reading things that are absolutely assured to be good.
The problem with this is that you have read that information and gone "See, men don't read, there's something specifically wrong with the male genome that made them abandon books", which is broadly what the book industry has done, as well.
Meanwhile this effect broadly came into play over decades and decades of the book industry saying "It doesn't matter if books are good, let's make them bad, who the fuck cares, get me a high-concept and some good cover art and there it stops", and then spending a really intense last couple of decades going "girlboss trans gay queer genderqueer girlboss!" every place they could, including traditionally male genres (scifi and so on).
It's not so much that it's impossible that men were going to abandon books no matter what you did, but if you look around, you'll find that men still read an awful lot; they read articles, indie stuff, and so on. They just don't read new books on bookstore shelves, which haven't been aimed at them in forever and are bad even when they are.
Meanwhile, the people who are left reading books in those venues are people who buy pornography, because (sorry, erotica people! some of you are talented!) pornography is quality-agnostic on a ton of fronts.
TLDR: It's true that "men just stopped reading for no reason at all" might be true, but it's also true that "men stopped reading stuff after a whole generation of it being published agnostic of being good, and the only people who are still readers are reading pornography, where quality doesn't matter as much" might be true too. Both fit the bill.
The big experiment that's been on for a while now is how the non-pornographic book market shapes up now that self-publishing is coming into its own. Maybe we'll still find that men don't read when there's the slightest bit of effort to court them with whatever quality is available, but the early indicators I've seen (say, Isekai/litRPG stuff, which is aimed at boys/men) seem to show that's not the case.
I wonder if men haven't stopped reading as such, but are instead reading a ton more specific genre fiction from small independent publishers/the Kindle self-publishing route? EDIT: I was forgetting web serials, such as the ones often referenced on here like "Worm".
For example, I'm not a man but I'm recently reading a fair amount of work under this imprint:
https://scarestreet.com/
Is it great? Hell, no. It's formulaic, it often ignores Chekov's Gun (e.g. sets up what seem will be important plot points in early chapters but these are ignored or wrapped up fast and briefly in the end) and it's never going to win any awards.
But for easy, light reading where I can be assured there won't be monster-fucking or wokeness hitting me in the face in the middle of the story? Sometimes I just want a reliable scare that isn't too gory, and the good guys (mostly) win (though some of the authors like putting their character through the mill)? Yes.
I've bought much less mainstream horror from current authors published by the big companies over the past while; I'll always look in on "does Stephen King have a new book out?" (though I *won't* always buy it now, unlike years gone by), but I'm buying a lot of 'reprints of classic ghost stories' by small houses and this kind of genre fiction in crime and horror as linked.
There are a couple of established Big Name authors I will buy, but my consumption of current literary fiction has gone *way* down over the past decade or so.
> 1. Right now you can mostly only sell porn to women, in terms of new books.
I mean, you can definitely sell porn to men. There's a whole goddamn industry for that. They just prefer a more visual medium. Changes to culture or the publishing industry wouldn't change that.
I think the sentence you are quoting is just written poorly - "New books can only be sold to women, and only if porn" is closer to what I meant.
I believe the current term of art is "romantasy" and I wanted to pluck my own eyes out when I encountered that.
But yeah, there is some straight-up monster fucking work out there, too, and it's gone mainstream(ish).
I feel like I would've noticed if there was large demand for male erotica in the independent sector, but the demand is overwhelmingly for art. In fact, the only males I've seen writing erotica are those very much in the LGBTQ side of things. Yes, light novels are a thing, but they're very niche outside of East Asia, they're half visual anyways, and they wouldn't even solve your issue of publishers only selling garbage.
I really don't think the publishers are acting as irrationally as you think they are. They know where the money is, and they would be stupid not to go for it.
Literally nobody is saying there's high demand for male written erotica. I think you are perhaps dedicated to having an argument here that nobody is having.
I would say this is largely a market failure- buying books is a nightmare. I just checked and it would cost $40.99 to buy an epub license for use on the Kobo ecosystem for the Game of Thrones series. That is an absurd amount of money for a few hundred kb of locked down data that I would use maybe once a decade. Especially with no guarantee that the license will be useful a few years from now.
If there was a proper open marketplace for ebooks and the ebooks weren't legislated to uselessness things would be much different. Copyright law is destroying our culture.
I think a lot of the issue in terms of the process you're describing is analogous to the way the newspaper industry has changed; e.g. owners and editors used to believe that good editorials, good reviews, good essays, beautiful, large-format comics, and so on, drove sales, and thus scored the crucial ad eyeballs, so they put those things in the paper at great expense. However, they only believed this because they had absolutely no way of testing for the real preferences of customers, and so, in practice, they wasted a ton of money on irrelevant claptrap that nobody really wanted. Cargo-cult publishing. In reality, it turns out that newspaper purchasers want: 1. extensive sports coverage; 2. political partisanship, the shriekier and unfairer the better; 3. tits, which "respectable" newspapers are unwilling to give them; 4. no ads, which raises an existential problem. The immediate consequence of publishers starting to find this out was that arts writers' pay per article dropped through the floor.
Similarly, cargo-cult novel publishers of the 19th century foolishly believed that quality of prose, credibility of plot, consistent characterization and similar boondoggles mattered for book sales, but they don't. Either you sell porn, or you sell identity signifiers – which both woke books and classics are; either you want to signal being a wokoid or you want to signal being a sophisticated intellectual.
(Unrelatedly, the reason men bailed on books is that film was invented, and then television and video games, all of which are more visceral media. That's why novel publishing was ceded essentially without a struggle; effectively no men really cared anymore once the genres men liked were successfully transferred to screens in various formats.)
The tabloids didn't kill off the broadsheets , though. Some people aren't like that readership, or don't want to be seen as being like that. In general, there's never a total replacement, because whatever is scarce, endangered , expensive, difficult to appreciate etc, becomes high status.
"The tabloids didn't kill off the broadsheets, though."
No, because the broadsheets adapted to reality. Most likely, unless you're like 90 years old or a very particular kind of wonk (e.g. me), you've never even seen a really high-quality newspaper. Archy and Mehitabel used to be a column in the Tribune. The Herald used to run Little Nemo in full color on a full broadsheet page. But these things were products of cargo-cult publishing. They didn't sell enough ads to justify the expenditure over just cutting the feature. That became obvious long before publishers started to understand what really did sell.
"Some people aren't like that readership, or don't want to be seen as being like that."
Granted, which is why you don't see page 3 girls in the New York Times even though they've descended as far as giving Maureen Dowd a column.
So they still.didn't kill of the broadsheets, just somewhat vulgarised fhem.
(Unrelatedly, the reason men bailed on books is that film was invented, and then television and video games, all of which are more visceral media. That's why novel publishing was ceded essentially without a struggle; effectively no men really cared anymore once the genres men liked were successfully transferred to screens in various formats.)
This doesn't hold water.
I grew up with 'kids don't read anymore' being the go-to excuse for why books were dying out, and then JK Rowling published her first book and we had teenagers camped in line and midnight launch parties for books.
The American comics industry, which is one of those 'more visceral media than books' that boys were into, is dying. And we get your response, that TV and video games are responsible. There might be something there as part of it, but there is a lot of damning contrary evidence pointing to other causes:
1. Japan (and to a lesser extent, South Korea), both of which are more tech-dominated than the US, don't have nearly the same fall-off in the numbers of comics readers.
2. The top selling graphic novels / trade paperbacks in the US are all translated Japanese imports.
3. At the same time, we're experiencing a fall-off in numbers for movies, TV shows are bombing, and major Western video game companies release big titles to disappointing numbers. Disney, which owns Marvel and Star Wars, is complaining they don't have IP which appeals to males ("Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles", Variety, Aug 21, 2025).
I think a lot of my thinking (which was more like yours) changed is that we can actually design an experiment to see if this is so. If we really wanted to do something like that, we'd probably:
1. Get a genre going that's so far out of mainstream publishing's norms that they don't even understand it, let alone have the capability to mess with it.
2. Aim it at men and boys, allowing it to be masculine power-fantasy and adventure stuff in the old way.
3. Set it free in an ecosystem that mainstream publishing can't touch, and see how it does.
It's not a super respectable genre, but your general western isekai/litRPG just did that over the last ten years, and the result of that experiment was "men read, men read a ton, men will spend a ton on reading even voluntarily for content they could get for free" and there's a big bunch of people making money over there, sometimes measured in the millions.
Your theory is the very popular one, that men just suddenly went "Fuck reading" due to no reason outside of just, like, other entertainment existing, even though all that entertainment had existed before. I'm not denying that's a factor, but the part where this takes all of the responsibility off the production side, who throws up their hands and says "In just this one instance, there's no way to get men to adopt good media that is aimed at them and made at a quality level!"
On a similar level, let's look at your newspaper examples. Newspapers became less and less trustworthy, lower and lower quality, and more and more low effort reprinting for a very long time. The same men who used to read them did not stop reading - they now read, I suspect, more than ever. But they read Scott, they read bloggers who are very specifically focusing on very specific issues they care about. That also counts for the sports guys, or the finance guys (everyone had their favorite newspaper section).
Like, look at your example. You say the newspapers suddenly had a lot of testable, valid data on what people want. In your model they did this, making shriekier lazier political stuff, and more sports. And newspapers are now a dead art, they took a massive dive, despite implementing the testable data.
Meanwhile there's 10,000 Scotts doing just fine selling the exact thing the newspapers abandoned at a high level of quality. That means, at least to some small extent, that the newspapers are wrong - there's demonstrably buyers for what they say people won't buy.
When you see that, that newspapers go "Men only want pictures of monkeys jacking off it's entirely their fault and not ours at all" while a massive market of commentators makes a bunch of money all over doing exactly what they say won't sell, it should mess with your priors a little, at least.
My take is that you're confounding two separate processes with respect to the papers. Newspapers died because the FAANG (mainly F and G) stole their advertising income, not because they became better at targeting the real preferences of readers. Probably the two processes of figuring out reader preferences and ad evenue getting demolished are linked at the root by technological development and are thus temporally inextricable in practice, but if we could send a capsule of reliable consumer data back in time to 1880 this would hypothetically produce the bestselling paper, a super-competitor in the field.
Of course, we can imagine a dysgenic pump where shriekier/tittier paper A always sells better than higher-quality paper B *but* at every point on the ratchet more readers bail entirely than switch papers, so that it's always competitively superior to ratchet up yet that also destroys the market; however, aside from being highly unintuitive hand hard to explain in terms of actual consumer behavior on the individual level, the hypothetical pump produces the same end result, i.e. that it's never wise to invest in quality; you should always choose defect when the choice rolls around.
In the case of the books it's more like you have the causality reversed. Men didn't abandon reading for "no reason", we've always had a preference for more visceral entertainment when available. For example, in ancient Rome the art of writing was available but people generally preferred gladiatorial games and chariot races; sports and athletics have always throughout history been more popular than reading among men, and so on. As such, when films and other more viscerally engaging ways to tell stories became available men abandoned reading gladly in favor of these entertainments, in a way that parallels what genres were more popular with men to begin with. (Isekai sells well because isekaislop is wish fulfilment; power fantasies and harems of adoring titty monsters. It's romantasy for men.)
Scott does well because Scott caters to a minuscule submarket very effectively. There are emphatically not ten thousand Scotts.
I think unconfounding those processes is a mistake. Remember, you are saying "the faang companies stole the advertising revenue". How did they do that? Did they say "Users, come here to just see ads!"? Or did they have content there that the users wanted to see, just as the newspapers used to, and the users tolerated the ads because of that content?
I have to push back on the "no reason" thing. You say men always liked more visceral entertainment, and yet for a zillion years they were the primary readers, well into the television era, well into the radio era. Well after films, well after televised sports.
Then it at some point stops decades and decades after these things are available - literal generations, for most of them. You can't just handwave to "well the testosterone monsters are going to watch shiny things move like a fish" there. You have to at least make a token attempt at explaining the lag.
That's especially true with Isekai in the mix. You can't argue "men won't read no matter what because they are apes" and "Men read when they are even sort of catered to, but it doesn't matter because I don't like those books" at the same time.
It does have relevance to the "good prose" argument, but much less here - you can't just handwave away Men Reading When Supplied With MenBooks as evidence in the "Men won't read no matter what it has nothing to do with supply" section of the argument.
Books are a playground for folks like GRRM, who have written television, and can't DO the special effects on TV.
I disagree with calling everything "porn" as it's probably better to call things "emotional pornography" (which captures the "It's about the Characterization" aspect, as well as the lack of "do something" -- which is more pulp fiction).
And you're missing the literal "pay the publisher" to do woke. "Do this and we get a bonus!"
Gurm's novel series was a more or less explicit sales pitch for the show he did end up getting. Note how cheerfully he abandoned it; his only bitterness about this is that fans keep giving him shit for it.
GRRM says, and I believe him, he "wrote the television show he could never get on TV" (bear in mind he did TV in the 1980s. You've seen Beauty and the Beast? That was the caliber of show he was on, not Star Trek which had Budget).
He only abandoned it when he realized he could not stick the landing -- he's written himself into a corner, and is too dang proud to ask for help.
I'm not sure if we're disagreeing exactly. But my vague analysis would be that elite-imposed trends will happen now and then in various environments, and temporarily take over. There's no avoiding that. But if men were driven away from reading altogether during one of these moments that was hostile to them, but women weren't driven away from reading by other moments and trends seen as hostile to them (what these were I'm not sure, but the woke will have many to list no doubt; perhaps fasions for highly sexualised female prizes in SF/fantasy/etc at various times?) then there's still an objective sense in which women are the reliable readers and men aren't. I'd compare it again to churches: sometimes there's a liberal trend (across churches or in specific ones) for a while, sometimes there's a conservative one. But if during the latter most of the liberals leave and become atheists, but during the former most of the conservatives stay in the church, weather it out and eventually regain influence...then in the long run conservative values will dominate.
(Relatedly, I've read that even in something as male-dominated as the Star Trek fandom in the (circa) 80s, the vast majority of Star Trek fanfiction was written by women. Yes fanfiction's a specific thing, bit it definitely suggests an objective difference.)
But that all said, I don't actually think the issue is men/women at all. It's left/right. I don't like Richard Hanania at all but one thing he seems to be onto is that conservatives on the whole really dislike reading. And the reality is that for a long, long time literary communities (book clubs, university departments, online spaces etc) have been among the most left-leaning environments you'll ever find. Why is that? It *could* be that outside leftists keep aggressively taking over these spaces for some obsessive reason and if it weren't for that conservatives would be as literary as liberals...but more likely, Hanania is right on this , conservatives are much less inclined to read *especially* fiction, and thus that territory is perpetually ceded to, and dominated by, the political left.
This is all quite orthogonal to the issue of declining quality though. I would vaguely suggest that your strong claim about publishers refusing to take anyone except those who don't need them should be vulnerable to the standard economic objection that this leaving money on the ground. Presumably there are fair nunber of people who don't have a platform now but will in the future--surely there should be a lucrative opportunity for a competitor to run a risk-based business actively collecting those types, and turn a profit on the eventually successful ones who the other publishers foolishly didn't even pay attention to.
Agreed that we agree on a lot, but I think it's a weird discussion because pornography is involved. So imagine I said "Men are the only ones who really like porn, it's just a negligable amount of women who consume porn". That's kind of true if we only consider images/video, but once we get into the actual kind of porn women like, we find they consume it in text, consume sort of a lot of it, it might not compete with men but whatever it's a significant chunk.
That makes the rest of the discussion hazy because when we then get down to something like "Does anyone read non-pornographic books at all", the publishing industry is basically saying no, they don't, it's all women's erotica all the way down.
To the extent we consider "non-porn reading" a thing, the whole "men don't read, only women do" thing gets murky. If we decide to package women's reading in "porn" instead of "book-reading", then the picture starts to look a lot more like "nobody is interested in what mainstream publishing is selling at all".
I'm not saying we should do that whole-cloth, mostly because its' a little silly to say women reading books isn't women reading books. But it's nuanced.
Hanania is the current "fake conservative who tells you to vote Biden" guy and broadly sucks, but let's address his thing. Hanania says, listen, conservatives won't read, they have the retarded gene that makes them not read books. There's no possible way this has anything to do with anything that gene, he mostly says, there's no concievable universe in which conservative men could ever be catered to in a way that makes them buy.
Meanwhile if you go back, say, fifty-ish years, it's very different. Louis Lamour is selling books about good, strong men who sweep into town, rescue the beautiful, helpless, virtuous woman, then settle down to farm and shit, and he's selling a shit-ton of them. All of sci-fi is for men, pretty much all of fantasy is for men, the stuff that is for women (Agatha Christie, who can never be ignored) is also read by men, and so on.
Something changed, and Hanania's gut reflex is to say "Well obviously the group I very much hate is just a lump of mental degenerates". I tend to say - look, we saw this happen, we saw forty years of carefully curating out the louis lamours and such, we saw the whole "every sci-fi award body is now just voting on which book is the most woke" thing go down.
My explanation isn't all of it and your explanation isn't all of it, the answer is almost certainly somewhere in the middle. But if someone who hates conservatives tells you "Listen, there's no possible way this group could ever like good media in a certain format; sure, they did once, but since then they've gone mysteriously retarded en masse, this in fact got everyone but horny women and transes, thats the only thing that protects you from the stupid gene" you should proably be checking outgroup bias a *little*.
I said this in another thread, but I used to be a little closer to you on this topic until there was an accidental experiment where a big sub-genre popped up, aimed exclusively at young men, did 100% power fantasy stuff with swords and muscles and whatnot, and now has a NYT bestseller of the "publishing house hitches to an already rising star" variety, makes lots of money for lots of different authors, and is growing really fast, and this is *despite* it being an incredibly niche-interest genre.
To the extent you can experiment for "Is it really true that men are just bad idiots, and wouldn't read even if there was stuff for them to read", that experiment seems really relevant to me. It's changed my priors on this a lot.
I can't tell if you're ascribing the "bad idiots" part to me at all or not, but I'm not implying any such value judgement at all. "Liberals are more likely to read fiction" is intended exactly equivalent to "conservatives more likely to go to church". Some would say it's better, a few worse, many morally neutral, depending on ideology. You can make the comparison "get married and have children" if you think a presumtively higher-status equivalent is needed. I'm doing factual demographic description not value claims.
I still don't think you've addressed *why* the literature world went so woke (to a much greater extent and more enduringly than most other fields) if not for already a relative (though smaller than now) lack of conservatives and/or men. What's the alternatuve story?
I mean, why did everything go woke? Most of our media over the past 20 years have made a bet that what everyone *really secretly* wanted was trans/queer stuff made by bipocs everywhere. Those bets have broadly failed even with near monopolistic power to enforce them.
For an example, look at Disney getting star wars. "What people want is a mary sue girlboss and a bunch of lesbian space witches" was a real bet they made. Star Trek made a similar bet. Ghostbusters made a similar bet. There was no real indication anyone actually wanted this (outside of a tiny very vocal minority) and a lot of indication from the fan base that they absolutely hated this. Disney et. al. still made those bets.
Famously Disney is now scared and backpedalling on a lot of this stuff pretty hard. See also budwieser, see also Ghostbusters: Sassy Girls. See also lord of the rings show.
Nobody except the most tanked left-stuff-is-correct-stuff folks ever thought those were real market-tracking choices, they kind of half-worked for a while as everyone who hated them ate around the moldy bits, and now the indicators are they are getting dumped as a bad choice that was tried and failed.
For the same period there's been all sorts of little book controversies about the same things happening - nobody likes talking about Sad Puppies stuff, but the Hugos actually were willing to vote to not give awards rather than to give awards to things that weren't woke, and so on. And in the same time, conservatives and males have just stopped being bookstore people.
It's not for-sure that this is 100% attributable to woke stuff, but the counter argument is "I don't know, man. The same culture who bought 300,000,000 Louis Lamour books just suddenly stopped reading forever. Must have been something in the water. Couldn't have been in response to anything at all. There's nothing to be done about it, no possible things that could have been done differently."
That's what I'm talking about when I say the "bad idiots" stuff. Because the choices are something like "Something happened and changed things" or "Conservatives and men just stopped liking books all the sudden, I dunno, maybe they all hit their heads". The second is possible, but the fact that it's the only thing the publishing industry, Hanania and the newsmedia will consider should actually be troubling here.
If you want to say "women are more easily advertised to" then come right out and say it. "Easier to manipulate into doing what you're told" is a thing. Reading groups and all that are women's things, in general. I rarely find "bookclubs" for men. (ETA: now, mind, if you're wanting to "experience a book like a movie" and be "told how to feel about it" then yeah, you want a bookclub. You can all gush about your favorite emotional highs and lows, how much you hate Mr. Darcy, or what not).
"Relatedly, I've read that even in something as male-dominated as the Star Trek fandom in the (circa) 80s, the vast majority of Star Trek fanfiction was written by women. Yes fanfiction's a specific thing, but it definitely suggests an objective difference."
It's worth noting in this context that Star Trek is also what started getting women into sci-fi in considerable numbers, the reason being that the show is full of interpersonal dynamics (and women's Trek fan fiction involved projecting even more interpersonal dynamics on the characters; basically none of it was idea-driven sci-fi) where e.g. Asimov is 100% an idea man, doesn't give a good goddamn that all his characters are the same cardboard cutout, and tries his best to minimize the amount they interact so that people won't notice so much.
Star Trek? Try Dr.Who, which is both older, and had a significantly more female demographic.
This post confuses me. First it paints a detailed picture of how publishers and agents are gatekeeping, rent-seeking parasites who don't read or care what they're selling. But then the post asserts that publishers and agents want only QTBIPOC authors. If they cared about money and not content, why would they impose this filter? Do books by those authors sell better than other books? If so, who is buying them?
Publishers just want people with a proven track record of selling books or celebrities that can bring their own audience. Anything else is basically charity/lottery tickets.
To be very fair, that part confuses me as well. To clarify something, you see the marginalized voices thing an awful lot at the agent level, but you see it less at the pulisher level in a visible-from-the-street way. I'm not sure if this is an artifact you see in a lot entertainment industries (where a lot of them made poor business choices for woke reasons, separated both from quality and money-making potential) or something else.
That said, we (you and I) are defining content in two different ways. I'm defining it as something like "prose, general quality" and you are defining it as "prose, general quality, and the identity of the person".
FWIW this is a very general telling of the very general problems I have with the publishing industry as it relates to big houses. There are exceptions all over besides this I didn't talk about. Like, agents who are entirely looking for things they can sell and do care about the content exist. You could say "What about Jabberwocky? None of their agents seem like that" and I think you'd be absolutely right. At the same time, you hop onto any site that gathers agents in one place and the "I really only want LGBTQ" effect is overwhelming.
And yet people do get through the filter. It does happen. It's just ten times harder and a hundred times more "optimizing for things that aren't books" than it should be.
That's interesting, thanks for your reply.
Ach, no, it's worse than all this. The publisher has Beta Readers, and if you can't get your writing past the "beta readers" you don't get published. And every beta reader has some idea about "diversity" or what not. You can't write a book about a person who actually dreams to change their sex, "because she's not acting enough like the Real Life Trannies who want wish fulfilment in their books" -- if she's not putting on makeup, and dresses, she can't "really be a trannie" (despite the fact that this spoils the entire characterization, breaks suspension of disbelief, and pretty much ruins the entire story). [Welcome to the world of "I know a former novelist" -- he's never finishing the story, because the story no longer works. That was a key character, and spoiling her singleminded dedication (necessary to be the best in any competitive field) meant the whole story no longer worked.]
Plus, Amazon has basically stopped gatekeeping at all, so anyone can get published on their platform, for any copied book imaginable (this is what happens when 50 shades of gray sells well, being ripped off fanfiction)
The writeup seems a bit too much like personal cope with a publishing rejection. Have you published a book, or worked in the publishing industry, in the last decade or so? Somehow, I doubt it.
I have published (with smaller publishers, but for actual advances) something like 15-20 books in the last few years, depending on how you loop "self-published but made money".
Since you haven't worked with the publishing industry at large(!), I think it's safe to dismiss your claims.
This is an unreasonable objection.
Would you dismiss the statement of a woman when she described the gender bias of the member screening process of a particular type of club, because she couldn't get into one of the few largest (and almost exclusively male) clubs?
I've barely looked at literary agents at all, and I've been surprised by the fraction looking exclusively for LGBTQ+ and/or use some variation on the code phrase 'diverse voices and especially __'.
If the club was 40-50% female, I'd be quite skeptical.
I would dismiss her testimony if it was abundantly clear that the club wasn't exclusively male.
Okay, well, I guess a single counterexample is good enough for anything then.
Smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Racism isn't a problem in the USA because Obama was president.
Though I do agree that some of Ben's claims seem a bit too strong (see my economic argument elsewhere in the thread), here you've very blatantly shifted the goalposts. You asked if he'd published a book OR worked in the industry, he said he'd published many books, now you say that actually doesn't count!
Yeah, I could have phrased my question better. I was referring specifically to traditional publishing, since that’s what Ben was criticizing.
I remember the feeding frenzy of the 80s when big publishers were gobbling up small, medium, and not-as-big-as-us publishing houses, and it all got consolidated in a few monoliths.
Good writing was already a very secondary consideration behind "can we get celeb memoir/cookery book/gardening book for the Christmas market?" and "what hot new potential Booker Prize winner can we poach?", and I see it's only continued hurtling downhill.
We are very, *very*, far past the days when a publisher like Stanley Unwin would take a chance on a first time book by some obscure not-even-professional author like Tolkien, simply because he believed in the book despite the fact that he didn't expect it to sell.
Sometimes this still does happen, but every degree the alignment shifts from "let's publish good books" towards "let's optimize for books people will pick up off the shelf", things get worse. It's what they call a tournament industry in the best of times, and the hardest part of the tournament has long since been getting past the filters to actually get a book read.
Back in the 80s, you got published in a magazine first. Stan from Analog believed his job was to teach people how to write better.
I guess nowadays, the pipeline is Shousetsuka Ni Narou -> Light Novels -> anime
This was very well written. You should write a book!
Seriously though, at some point a younger version of me definitely wanted to be a published book author, because that definitely sounded like a neat thing to be. Now I realise I'm better off concentrating my efforts on potentially more lucrative endeavours with a higher chance of success, like looking for the Loch Ness Monster or something.
But but but... I don't *care* about the writer's background. (Sorry, nothing personal, but it's true, at least initially.) Especially not before I have bought or read the book in question. If the book is good, my interest in the writer might be piqued. But really, the book itself is my initial focus.
As an avid reader and keen acquisitionist of books, I want a book that is well written and interesting to read.
Your explanation has confirmed some of my worst fears as a book reader.
I have long thought - for maybe 20 years now - that publishing is both extremely performative in terms of virtue signaling, and completely out of touch with it's wider market.
Don’t let the original comment fool you — your perception was accurate. Publishers still read what they are publishing and quality is the number one deciding factor in success. The “focus on identity” is a salve to the egos of those who can’t accept their writing isn’t up to standard yet.
"The 'focus on identity' is a salve to the egos of those who can’t accept their writing isn’t up to standard yet."
This canard is like 30 years old at this point, for God's sake get some new material.
Or perhaps, get a new scapegoat.
Was that true 40 years ago wrt women having a hard time getting published in SFF, or is this a newfound unbiased rationality in the world?
30ish years ago was the era of "TITS OR GTFO" so... yeah, that changed in kinda a hurry. (Aka guys pretending to be women to "try and get published."
I would argue it's relatively new. This explosion of access to publishing by disadvantaged groups is why people like OP complain about diversity.
I mean, one possibility is that we were all irrational until just now. Another is that we were irrational one way then, and are irrational another way now.
Publishing isn't a black box. You can look at the statistics, and they don't support your views.
> I have long thought - for maybe 20 years now - that publishing is both extremely performative in terms of virtue signaling, and completely out of touch with it's wider market.
Arguably, they are doing this informed by much data and analytics, and your "wider market" are all 30-60yo women who want to primarily buy vampire and werewolf porn.
The tiny slice of people that care about writing quality, interestingness, and non-werewolf-porn topics just aren't relevant for a full 90%+ of book sales.
The data is against you, and says you'll buy like 3 books every other year from long-tail authors nobody else has heard of or cares about. But the werewolf porn authors? They churn out a new one every month! And those customers are happy to BUY a new one every month! And there's millions of them, and like two and a half of ACX commentariat book buyers.
And this is why retail book stores devote 80%+ of shelf space to a handful of known, big-selling authors. They're the ones that sell, and it's rigorously backed with data and analytics at every level.
Americans read 18 books a year on average. Americans are readers, somehow, still. Perhaps those are all romance books? Certainly not sci-fi, that's to Russian taste -- they devour it.
> Americans read 18 books a year on average.
This isn't actually true - "reading" is aspirational. Much like roughly 2/3 of gym memberships go unused, people like to say that they read, but the numbers don't bear it out. And the arithmetic mean isn't 18, it's 12 in any data from the last few years.
And even THEN, people aren't reading 12 books a year. The modal person buys or reads ZERO books a year, and the median person ~4.
https://imgur.com/a/3fc06vT
And this is mostly "buying," not reading, because when you control for "how many books did you finish," most of these numbers drop by at least 2/3.
There's a handful of enthusiastic readers who bring the mean up, who actually do buy / read a few books a month, and that's where the top line "12 books a year" figure comes from, but the vast majority of people are reading essentially nothing.
At the high level, excluding audiobooks, there's around 800M books sold a year in the US. However, a big chunk of that is Childrens and YA - reading is aspirational, remember? People want to instill "the love of reading" in their kids, even though they themselves never read. So take out ~300M for that. Then there's about ~200M fiction books and 300M non-fiction books sold per year.
What does that net out to? A mere ~500M books sold for the ~270M adults in the USA, or 1.8 books sold per year per adult. And that's books SOLD, not read - think any of those were bought as gifts? In fact there is a notable Q4 sales spike before Christmas! How many of those gifted books do you think go unread, particularly in our modern age of Tik Tok, Golden Age television streaming, and 7-9 hours a day of recreational screen time per day?
Data on ebooks suggest that up to 60% of purchased books are either never opened or abandoned early. Not looking too good for our "12 book a year reader" so far!
You have to include "read or listened to" to even hit that "4 book" median, too! And one of those 4 books is fake, because books sales are about 75% physical, 10 - 15% audiobook, and 10 - 15% ebook. Is a book you "read" while driving to work or doing yardwork really reading?
And this is well before we even get into the composition of the 500M books that are being bought! The books that sell are those churned out in never-ending succession in the slop mills of popular mystery, thriller, and vampire porn authors. People want to buy what's familiar, and authors want a recurring revenue stream just like all the apps on your phone trying to get you to pay a monthly subscription.
This is not Brothers Karamazov or Guns Germs and Steel here, I invite you to look at some brief descriptions, which include highlights like "the 13th book in the series," and "the 52nd book of the series:"
https://imgur.com/a/7VTGveY
> #2 -- Faithless in Death, by J.D. Robb. (St. Martin's) The 52nd book of the In Death series. Eve Dallas investigates the murder of a young sculptor in the West Village.
oof. I was so certain that "52nd" figure would be an exaggeration.
Young adult is often just "actual adult readers" these days.
Yes, books read on the treadmill are actually books (you can call them teleplays if you want, and the best authors write for teleplays, these days). You don't have the same MKUltra effects when you're listening to books, as you do when you're watching a movie.
Yes, it's fair to dock for "didn't finish reading" (except, of course, when you're talking the Bible, or the Talmud, or other Books Long Enough that finishing them is... not likely within a year).
I'm well aware of the Nancy Drew phenomenon (or hardy boys if you want to be butch about it). That's been going on since like the 1920s. Consistency sells.
Oh, I don't disagree. I'm not a publisher or an agent; I'm an old-white-male-fat author who gains zero diversity points here. That doesn't change the reality of the game, unfortunately.
[EDIT - The commenters proved this theory wrong. Trump IS quite possibly worse than Obama when you take into account the devastating effects of shutting down PEPFAR. And George W Bush did the best job as President, so far as I know, since FDR. Again, because of PEPFAR. I still think all three of these men are evil and I hope devastating, horrible things happen into them.]
Obama was a worst president than Trump has been, so far. Here's the case from a socialist person of color who voted for Biden.
Extra deaths caused by the Western toppling of Gaddhafi: 66,000 and counting. Extra injuries: 70k and counting. Extra sexual assaults: 100k and counting. Slavery famously returned to post-Gaddhafi Libya. People enslaved: 47k and counting. These are all reasonable estimates based on reports from neutral international investigators, most of whom who would likely balk at blaming Obama for these tragedies. These are NOT ginned up numbers from partisan foes of Obama.
If we add up those numbers (not adjusting for those unfortunates who were counted in multiple categories), we total 280k+ lives destroyed or degraded through Obama's intervention, which he did at the intense urging of the Clintons. (People have called Hillary the godmother of the intervention).
Not only should Obama have refrained from attacking Gaddhafi, he should have used his influence to keep other nations from attacking Gaddhafi, considering the fact that starting in 2003, Gaddhafi had obeyed the US government by dismantling his WMD programs. And otherwise taking SIGNIFICANT measures to end Libya's status as a pariah state. Including paying compensation for two terror attacks that were probably falsely pinned on Libya!
I haven't looked into the number of extra deaths caused by Obama dragging out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or caused by Obama's (accidental?) contributions to the rise of ISIS and the prolonging of the war in Syria. It might be impossible to come up with a worthwhile estimate for the consequences of these errors. Nevertheless, these culpabilities must be considered.
I am not showing hindsight bias, either. The Obama Administration was WARNED about the dire risks of pursuing vigorous interventionism.
Based on foreign policy ALONE, it's safe to say that Obama was a worse president than Trump has been, so far. This is not meant to be a ringing endorsement of Trump. George W. Bush was certainly a worse president than either.
>(accidental?) contributions to the rise of ISIS
Surely you can see how this makes one question the good faith or neutrality of your arguments and factual claims..
Really? A branch of Al Queda has come to power in Syria with western help, and the leader just visited the Shiite house.
Fill in the blank:
That implies that Barack Obama intentionally contributed to the rise of ISIS because _________
I almost deleted that I was just being cheeky. Although it's an extremely popular theory in the Islamic Near East, the CIA almost certainly did not create ISIS.
Psychoanalyzing myself, I have a radical sense of acceptance for the working class and the uneducated. This necessarily involve strong empathy and acceptance for people who hold conspiratorial beliefs. I'm a very literal person and I internalized the idea “love the sinner, hate the in sin” in an absolutely literal way. Merely tolerating “sinners,” or ignorant people or harmful people, isn't enough.
I think I slip in asides like that almost to challenge or flush out people who disrespect or hold contempt for people with bizarre and ludicrous conspiracy theories. I'm a virtue ethicist. So that sense of contempt is more abhorrent to me then even the most harmful conspiracy theory, and I mean that literally.
I've always thought W's presidency was kind-of tragic. The guy clearly meant to do a good job, was surrounded with apparently serious and experienced advisors, had a pretty standard resume for the job, had all the connections and advice he could want...and basically everything he touched turned to s--t.
I don't think you can necessarily measure presidencies or governments entirely on net lives lost. As one example, Lincoln could have prevented a hell of a lot of deaths by allowing the South to secede, but it's sure not a slam dunk that this would have made him a better president! And there's something screwy about the calculation where we hold you responsible for all the deaths from cutting PEPFAR, but don't hold anyone else responsible for all the deaths from not stepping in and funding PEPFAR themselves. This is basically Copenhagen ethics, right?
I agree the Libya intervention was pretty disastrous, but also I believe that this was justified more-or-less on a count-the-corpses argument--one that did *not* account for the anti-deterrent effect of bombing Libya and convincing every other rogue state's government that there is no making peace with the US, so they'd better get nukes or find a way to shelter under some other power's nuclear umbrella.
I remember seeing one blog post saying that W's problem was that his advisors were *too* senior. Cheney, Rumsfield, and Powell were so experienced at working Washington that they knew how to bypass the usual guardrails which keep bad ideas in check.
"I've always thought W's presidency was kind-of tragic. The guy clearly meant to do a good job, was surrounded with apparently serious and experienced advisors, had a pretty standard resume for the job, had all the connections and advice he could want...and basically everything he touched turned to s--t."
Having reached age 30 during his presidency, my impression was that he was handed a sandwich of two perfect slices of bread concealing a great deal of spoil, in the form of a dot-com bubble just about to pop, years of borrowing against Social Security in order to be able to present a surplus during Clinton's term, and a defunded military making it impossible to stay on top of Islamic terrorist activity, to the point that the 9/11 plan slipped through, and our response had to build on said weakened military.
I won't blame this all on Clinton (I think Gingrich probably has some blame to share, and the 2008 crisis wasn't bank deregulation per se, but rather deregulating *and* not committing to making them responsible for any mistakes they made with their new freedom, and I believe that was a bipartisan mistake), but I think it's still a case of GWB being set up to fail in many ways, and the Democrat-dominated journalism industry having enough influence to make even the possibility that he was handed several problems rather than creating them all himself, unthinkable.
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I agree that "lives lost" is a terrible metric for Presidents. It assumes Presidents have all of the agency when they don't. Of the 100K+ lives lost in Iraq, for example, the vast majority weren't from US soldiers, but from latent Shia/Sunni feuds held in check by Saddam's regime. That lid kept the boilover from happening, but didn't relieve the pressure, and Saddam was his own source of growing conflict. That whole region sans Iraqi Kurdistan was bound to blow whenever he finally left his position, even if he just handed it down to his psychotic sons.
Overall, various human factions have a tendency to launch into mass violence chaotically when they do it at all. Western democracies are much less likely to do so, but even societies that aren't Western democracies don't just regularly commit atrocities; something has to trigger the powder keg, it won't be predictable, and it largely won't be preventable by just being an awesome head of state or following these ten easy steps or whatever.
> “years of borrowing against Social Security in order to be able to present a surplus during Clinton's term”
This isn’t right. During Reagan’s first term, concerns about what would happen to Social Security when the baby boomers retired convinced Congress to enact a plan to deal with the issue. The basic idea was to increase Social Security taxes so that the Social Security trust fund would build up a surplus while the baby boomers were still working, which would be used help pay the baby boomers in retirements. This meant that during the Clinton years, the Social Security trust fund was taking in more money than it was paying out.
The U.S. government budget classifies programs as “on budget” or “off budget.” A surplus in the on budget programs generally means that the the government is taking in more money than it needs to pay expenses. Social Security is classified as “off budget,” which makes sense because the Social Security surpluses during the Clinton years were intended to be used in future years and were not an indication that Social Security was taking in more money than it needed.
The government publishes numbers for the entire government, not just for on budget programs, so there are actually three numbers for the federal deficit each year: the on budget deficit, the off budget deficit, and the unified budget deficit. The last of these is the sum of the first two. The advantage of the unified budget number is that it can’t be gamed by reclassifying programs from on budget to off budget, or vice versa. For that reason, the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Act, passed in 1995 (so we are still talking about events during the Reagan Administration), targeted the unified budget deficit.
In short, “borrowing against Social Security” never happened. What did happen is that Social Security ran a surplus during the Clinton years and people paid attention to the unified deficit, but both of those were the result of bills which were passed during the Reagan years for reasons having nothing to do with making a future Clinton Administration look better.
If you use the on budget deficit, which I recommend, Clinton ran surpluses in fiscal years 1999 and 2000.
Thanks - but 1995 is during the Clinton administration.
At least two things seem very obviously on W:
a. The invasion of Iraq was a choice that W and some of his advisors made, and then sold to the American people based on the threat of Islamic terrorism demonstrated by the 9/11 attacks. In an alternative world where W had not pushed for that invasion, he would not have that screwup on his record.
b. The financial meltdown happened after seven years of W being president. He didn't have unrestricted power to change financial regulation, but he certainly had substantial power to do so if that had been something he had realized was necessary. This is less a screwup than a missed opportunity--the right person could perhaps have seen the 2008 meltdown coming and headed it off, but W wasn't that guy. (And to be fair, I don't think we've had many presidents who would have been--the high-status experts were all saying things were fine.)
I agree that you can't really blame 9/11 on him, and that the (ultimately costly and futile) occupation of Afghanistan was almost inevitable after it--a president who didn't respond forcefully to that attack would have lost all legitimacy and been swept from power along with his party at the next exection.
In addition to the decision to invade in the first place, they also had no plan for how to handle the aftermath of the invasion and botched it horribly (Debaathification, anyone?)
Instantly laying off thousands of Baathist soldiers is AFAICT widely accepted as a mistake, yes. And Bush's mistake (at best, some underling's decision that he's responsible for). There's an interesting question of what to do instead, however. We weren't about to leave them working in the Iraqi army; the result could easily have been widespread legitimized violence against Shiites. I think they were disbanded partly as a gesture toward Shiites (and Kurds), and the Bush administration hoped this would de-escalate things and all those former Baath soldiers would find employment building schools and such. Maybe some of his father's misplaced trust in heads of state rubbed off on him; I don't know.
1. Invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban was inevitable. President Ralph Nader would have done it. Bush's decision to turn it into a long-term occupation was solely on him. Terrible decision-making.
2. Bush and his advisors were well aware that Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of Al-Qaeda and extreme Islamism. They chose to lie to the American people about this.
3. Bush actively chose to pursue financial deregulation, which strongly contributed to the financial crisis. He was warned again and again about the dangers of financial deregulation, and he chose to ignore those warnings.
1. Long-term occupation wasn't that outlandish an idea at the time. The invasion went about as Americans expected: nearly effortlessly, a total rout. I think Bush intended to use that boost to US spirits to rebuild Afghanistan into a regime that would not sponsor international terrorism, and didn't foresee how much effort that would involve. (McCain did; by the time he could make this case, the US was weary and this counted against him.) But the goal here wasn't to just occupy for bragging rights, and it also wasn't to simply punish 9/11; it was to forestall the next terrorist attack everyone understood would come down the pike if we just went in, broke a bunch of stuff, and then went home.
2. Bush told everyone Hussein encouraged international terrorism. This wasn't a lie; Hussein was openly offering compensation to suicide bombers. It didn't matter if Hussein happened to also dislike Al-Qaeda, or some particular variety of extreme Islamism; if he backs terrorism, he makes the list.
3. Financial deregulation isn't bad. Banks should be able to take risks. What's bad is deregulation of banks coupled with state-backed protection. This allows banks to take all sorts of risks without exposure.
You have perpetuated the error of feeling that the appropriate response to 9/11 was to wage war against all terrorists. Even the weaker argument that "we need to fight all terrorists who happen to be Muslim" was clearly illegitimate from day one.
It is only indisputable that we should have responded by targeting Al-Qaeda and (some of) it's backers. Even the policy "we should attack all terrorist groups who are friendly with Al Qaeda" is probably a step too far.
it's tragic that so many people didn't learn many lessons from the War on Terror and consider it to have been an innocent mistake. And interacting with one of these people is always very surprising. Maybe I need to travel more, or start going to ACX meetups. I socialize with leftists and conservatives, but the conservatives tend to be populist and suspicious of past wars (if sadly credulous about current military actions).
To me, the archetypical neoconservative War On Terror apologist is a lonely, distant figure, an op-ed writer or think tank employee keeping the last sacred fire lit. A figure so contrarian that one naturally wonders if their views are inseparable from there socioeconomic needs.
Banks collapsing is uniquely bad, because of the extent to which it takes down other bsuinesses. State protection of banks is therefore good. If deregulation+protection is bad, then deregulation is bad.
I think people have forgotten that terrorism was as much a hydra back then as it is today. We could kill this or that head all day, only to get struck by another. (And no, doing nothing also doesn't work; we tried that for decades prior to 9/11, and the attacks just kept getting worse.) The case for Iraq was the case for killing the body, or at least trying to kill a major part of it. I genuinely believe the agenda was to take down Saddam, put in someone less terror-y, and then use Iraq as an ally to begin working on Syria, and then Iran. Bush failed mainly because he ran out of political capital the way Napoleon ran out of men in Russia. The Middle East is a bigger place than the US wants to acknowledge.
Saddam really was a problem, even if he had no nukes and few chemical weapons left, because he was openly committing to financial support for suicide bombers against Israel and the West. And his human rights abuses alone were also bad enough to get the UN's attention. As I recall, there were three main reasons discussed by the White House to justify the Iraq invasion: human rights abuses, repeated violations of UN resolutions, and possession of WMDs. The US chose to focus on the third one, and leave out the support for international terrorism, for reasons I find inexplicable even today. But eh, old soup.
As for the mortgage crisis, one of the lessons I took from _The Big Short_ was that if W had tried to shut down that problem before it became a problem, Wall Street would have treated him the same way they treated Burry et al.: laughed him out of the room. As you say, the experts were all against it. The difference would be that if he'd gotten it done anyway, we'd have no crisis, and W would come off as a Quixote. At least the short sellers made a fortune and found work elsewhere.
"we tried that for decades prior to 9/11, and the attacks just kept getting worse."
The death toll of 9/11 was a rounding error. The death toll of every other terrorist attack in U.S. history is a rounding error on a rounding error. Doing nothing is *absolutely* the optimal response to that sort of terrorism, both in terms of rational resource use and in terms of incentives and signalling[1]. Shut up and multiply.
[1] For anyone that missed it, the *entire goal* of terrorism is to provoke a loud, violent response from the target. So responding that way to terrorism makes you likely to experience more of it.
By that argument, we should do nothing about crime. I suspect you do not believe that.
You might also want to re-check your model of terrorism. I don't think it's even the generally understood sense of terrorism, let alone the sense of one side of the political aisle.
Alternately, you could ignore the terrorism label altogether and just reconsider your model of the game theory at play here. There DO exist people who poke others, and if they get no response or, heaven forbid, concessions, they return for more. If they get violence in return, they stop. This is so basic a thing that it's hard for me to see how it could have escaped your notice.
If nothing else, reconsider your regard for over 3000 innocent civilians.
Bush deliberately lied to the American people about WMDs and alleged shadowy connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq. He must have known that Saddam was a secularist with no natural affiliation with islamist terrorism, and yet he chose to lie and to pander to uneducated Americans' baseless conflation a of Islamist terrorists with secularist anti-Americsns who happens to be Muslim. Unacceptable. You're too forgiving.
See other reply.
My best guess is that the US would be better off today if we had not invaded Iraq. I understand the idea that this was a high-risk, high-reward attempt to remake the Middle East, but it doesn't seem like a plan that realistically could have worked. It's notable that Bush Sr didn't go into Iraq after clobbering the Iraqi army in Kuwait, because he and his advisors could see that it would become a terrible mess and quagmire. It seems like his son went into Iraq, and all those predictions came true. I'm not sure whether the rest of the world would be better off--living under Saddam was apparently very bad, but so was living through a multi-sided religious/ethnic civil war, and living through the rise and defeat of ISIS in Iraq. Also, US foreign policy is IMO not primarily a tool for making the world a better place overall, so much as it is for advancing and guarding US interests.
I propose that the next time (aka now wrt Venezuela) the drum beat starts up for invading and occupying and fixing and democratizing some foreign country, we remember how things went in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and maybe think twice. Our track record on this kind of thing is genuinely quite bad, so we should only do it when there is legitimately no alternative.
I think it's very possible nothing would have worked in Iraq, but I think we didn't have enough handle on the problem at the time, and we had a gigantic mandate to Do Something about terrorism breathing down our necks. In early 2002, the problem looked "tractable, or at least better damn well be".
IMO, ideally, Clinton would never have drawn down the military during the 1990s; that not only removed some of our capabilities, but also our eyes and ears. We had that much less chance to see 9/11 coming, and afterward, we had that much less intel on the situation in the hinterlands of the Middle East. If we'd had that and still didn't catch 9/11 in time, I think we could have put more boots on the ground in Afghanistan in Iraq, or had a better idea of which factions to ally with and put in charge; or a better grip on how to reduce the impact of disbanding Baathists or the Taliban; or a firm understanding that they would be irreplaceable and the thing to do would be to just settle for getting our foot in the door, offering small amounts of infrastructure to begin with, and start climbing the trust ladder with these nations.
Occupation in Venezuela could go like Iraq. But it could also go like Panama. If we learn the Iraq lesson too hard, we risk Venezuela *becoming* Iraq later when we can't just sit and bide our time. That comes down to evaluating the situation there, and it does have some differences (closer allies, lower language and cultural barriers, etc.). So to me the question is whether we have any departments in State and War making a serious effort at that evaluation.
People did remind you of PEPFAR. And to be fair it’s not as well known as what you are talking about here.
But, outside that, I agree. With the proviso that Obama is a better man, the president of the US republic isn’t that free to do what he wants anyway. What you said about ghaddafi is true. It’s also destabilised Europe.
Good man != good president. See Bill Clinton vs Jimmy Carter.
By your own argumentative approach George W. Bush is the all-time greatest president thanks to PEPFAR and PMI (25+ million lives saved).
Damn, is the number really that high? Didn't realize that. Whelp, I guess he's the “best” president since FDR!
I'm a virtue ethicist though, not a utilitarian. So he's a “good” president in the sense of “he created an enormous amount of utility.” But I still consider him to be incredibly evil and I wish incredibly awful things would happen to him. In fact, I wish he had never run for president, so that someone ELSE could have saved all those lives and gotten the credit.
If you want to really compare the utility of each president, I think you need to compare outcomes to the counterfactual of their presidency - what would some average president have done in their stead. GWB is not responsible for PEPFAR at all, if every other president in his place would have green lighted that initiative. Same with Syria, Ukraine etc. Ofcourse this is impossible in practice - which is generally a problem with utilitarism. What is the point if you can't even measure utility in hindsight, much less predict it?
No, I cannot countenance counterfactuals in any serious analysis, like the type of analysis I attempted and failed to execute in this thread. The only time I indulge in counterfactuals is when I'm idly bullshitting with friends about "What if Hitler had never been born?" An activity akin to daydreaming about what I would do if I was rich.
I briefly considered making the counterfactual argument to domain Bush. I love nothing more than the best marches reputation. But I could not go down that route. Counterfactuals are not serious.
My impression is that the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Libya were both balanced enough issues that the president could have decided which way to go on them. Contrast with something like invading Afghanistan after 9/11--any president who didn't do that or something like it would be a one-term president whose party was swept from power at the next election.
It's unknown and unknowable exactly how many deaths could have been prevented by the U.S. having a better early response to COVID at the federal level. But Given that the total U.S. death toll of COVID is ~1 million, Trump could easily land in the same ballpark as Obama's Libya numbers from that alone. To say nothing of foreign policy. To say nothing of backwards movement on climate (also extremely difficult to account for). To say nothing of the 8/5ths multiplier you ought to be scaling all Trump's number by to account for his lesser time in office so far. But yes, Obama was a bad president. I don't really think the U.S. has had any good presidents, just different types of bad.
But at least we should all be able to agree that in terms of measurable harm, George W. Bush puts BOTH Obama and Trump to shame.
I didn't love the US response to covid under Trump, but I don't think our outcomes were far out of line with those of other countries.
I mean, one could quibble endlessly about which is the proper apples-to-apples comparison. But the U.S. had about 2x the per-capita COVID deaths that Canada did, despite Canada being demographically similar but slightly less wealthy and more urbanized[1]. And given that it was a single, high-impact crisis, being "not too far out of line with other countries" can still translate to a pretty large number of excess deaths.
[1] The latter of which should mean higher population densities in the sense that's relevant for disease transmission.
Given that the expected death toll from COVID19 was originally about 20million, we could say that Trump did good (I'd argue otherwise, and say that Cuomo's unagile policies that revolved around 20 million dead Americans caused more people to die.)
"Original expected death toll" seems like a pretty nonsensical metric to use here. You're taking the very high uncertainly of the early portion of the pandemic and just...not updating on the much better, later information. Seems very much like a sharpshooter fallacy.
If we don't want to throw away everything that was learned about the pandemic subsequent to winter of 2020, we can instead compare how the U.S. did relative to other countries. Globally the error bars are quite wide: the U.S. had somewhere between 3% and 5% of the total pandemic deaths, while making up 4% of the global population. So not terrible, but not very impressive for the richest and most technologically advanced country in the world. And comparing it to other developed nations, it comes out less well: about 2x the death toll of Canada, or 1.5x that of Germany.
"(I'd argue otherwise, and say that Cuomo's unagile policies that revolved around 20 million dead Americans caused more people to die.)"
This seems like an utterly absurd claim on its face. Do you have ANY support? New York State makes up only 6% of the population of the U.S. How on Earth are its policies having that kind of impact compared to the rest of the nation?
I get criticizing Obama based on being too interventionist, but I don't get doing so relative to other 21st century presidents. I.e., Trump increased the use of drone strikes, escalated funding of Saudi's attacks in Yemen even after it became clear that they were committing war crimes, attacked the Syrian government directly (which to be clear Obama didn't do, in fact got a lot of flak for not doing so), almost started a war with Iran ...
then in his second term (so far) *did* start a war with Iran, did a bombing campaign against Yemen, gave the green light for various Israeli strikes against other countries and more bombing of Gaza, strikes against random boats in the Caribbean, maybe now going to war against Venezuela ... and cancelling USAID which going off of estimated death tolls is higher than everything you say about Libya.
Not to mention, according to press reports, gave Xi Jingping a green light to set up concentration camps in Xinjiang and crack down on protesters in Hong Kong.
Re "dragging out" Iraq and Afghanistan - I'd agree with Afghanistan but one thing about those wars is that they already were going on when he took office. Getting out of a war is harder than not doing it in the first place. Obama is still the only major presidential candidate who publicly opposed the war in Iraq before it started (I don't think Harris had a public view, Trump supported), so it's hard for me to imagine anyone else would have done better.
In terms of raw numbers, the deaths and injuries caused by all of these things are relatively low. It sounds like a lot when you list every thing like that. But compared to full-blown regime changes and ground wars, this is all penny ante stuff.
The ground war in Gaza is getting up there in numbers. Especially if, as you did with Obama, you count lives that are not ended but still degraded by the lack of food, shelter, medical care, and a general breakdown in public order.
"But that's Israel's responsibility, not Trump's!" Yes, but Trump has significant influence over how long and aggressively Israel is able to carry out the war, probably comparable to how much influence Obama had over the rebels in Libya. This is why counting deaths that result indirectly from US policy is very tricky.
If you're going to count not just deaths caused by direct military action, but deaths indirectly caused by US policies, then Trump shuttering USAID is easily an order of magnitude bigger. Boston University estimated 600,000 deaths from that already, with millions more likely over the next several years.
And that's just deaths - since you decided to include nonfatal injuries and sexual assaults to pump up Obama's numbers, we should also be counting nonfatal cases of malnutrition or disease that USAID would have prevented. But the deaths alone are enough to put Trump ahead by a lot.
So why is the US more evil for ending those programs than other rich countries like Japan or Germany are for not stepping in and replacing the funding?
1. Can't they both be evil?
2. It is fairly well known that other rich countries have long given more than the as a pct of GDP https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/18/649155725/why-the-u-s-ranks-at-the-bottom-in-a-foreign-aid-index
Rather think that Boston University isn't taking into account USAID's less savory practices, which included supporting terrorist organizations and basically pissing off foreign governments. (When the US Government came knocking, USAID told them to piss off).
Not sure how much of "Trump stops all wars" (yes, this is an exaggeration, I realize there are still people dying) is because USAID is gone, to be deadly honest.
1. Are you sure you aren't mixing them up with UNHCR or something? USAID is part of the US government, I'm not sure how they could tell themselves to piss off.
2. Global deaths from armed conflict are a few hundred thousand per year (higher in recent years because of the invasion of Ukraine). So like, even if USAID was responsible for *literally all wars everywhere*, which it obviously isn't, it would still be saving an order of magnitude more lives than it killed. Even PEPFAR alone saved more lives than that per year.
Here's the story, as I heard it from a "diplomat".
Egyptian Government says, "Well, we hear what you're saying about The Dam, but we'd be a lot more likely to listen if you guys stop funding the Muslim Brotherhood..."
"Diplomat" goes over to USAID, "Stop funding the Muslim Brotherhood, we're trying to stop a war here."
USAID: "You can kiss off" (They probably said something more like "our policies are not open to debate, we fund through XYZ, and if that means the Muslim Brotherhood, that's who's getting funded.")
Diplomat is in quotes due to personnel not being strictly speaking part of State Department, despite acting in a diplomatic capacity (no, not CIA either, sharp tack).
While you're of course free to base your personal assessment on whatever metric you like, including something like "number of tan suits worn", "number of foreigners killed" (or injured, raped, or enslaved) is conventionally not considered particularly relevant for judging presidents.
>"number of foreigners killed" (or injured, raped, or enslaved) is conventionally not considered particularly relevant for judging presidents
Isn't that more an indictment of the conventional view than an indictment of OP?
Depends on what circles you run in. I'm an anti-interventionist and an anti-imperialist who thinks American interventionism is a threat to the human species.
My favorite authors, academics and conversation partners either feel the same way or they are at least empathetic to that view. We put a high value on human life, foreign or otherwise.
So, are you actually a leftist that is against our intervention in the Ukraine? Or have you watched too many superhero flicks? (not joking. Mkultra).
"American interventionism is a threat to the human species"
Just to be contrarian, isn't PEPFAR etc. an example of American interventionism? As has been pointed out before, USAID wasn't set up because "we want to help the poor and the sick", it was set up to promote US interests during the Cold War and to counter perceived Soviet influence in the developing world. Any side-effects of "and this increases human flourishing" were nice, but if regime A led by Strongman B didn't shift from "thanks, dear comrades of the USSR, for all the money, guns, and butter" to "we now firmly believe in Mom, Apple Pie, and the virtues of the USA as our dear close friends", then it was money thrown away as far as the government was concerned.
Some involved did indeed believe in doing good without strings attached, but the problem is that alongside "feeding the hungry, curing the sick" we got "and promote liberal ideas like gay and trans rights" and thus the likes of "paying for the American ambassador to host a cultural concert in Ireland" which benefited nobody except the various musicians and promoters involved; I'm sure they all had a very pleasant night, but it didn't do much to shift any attitudes about the USA (which are already favourable, since we depend so much on US multinationals to keep our economy going).
So USAID is American interventionism. That leads to the conclusion that it is not interventionism, per se, you object to but the wrong kind of interventionism. And some would certainly argue that taking out dictators and strongmen and warlords is something as necessary and right to do, for the sake of the suffering populace, as providing vaccination programmes and AIDS drugs.
"some would certainly argue that taking out dictators and strongmen and warlords is something as necessary and right to do, for the sake of the suffering populace, as providing vaccination programmes and AIDS drugs"
The problem with that, of course, is that in many parts of the world, the realistic alternative to "these people are oppressed by a dictator/strongman" is not "these people are free and happy and enjoy a just, competent government;" it is "these people are now oppressed by a *different* dictator strongman" or "this region has collapsed into anarchy and chaos, with all the misery that entails."
This is why I am much, much less in favor of military interventionism/regime change than I am of stuff like "feed the hungry, cure the sick."
When Americans say anti-interventionism, we almost always mean that we are against explicitly MILITARY intervention, within reason. I can't speak to how the term is used internationally, and indeed, I would assume anti-interventionism makes far less sense in many other countries, due strategic, geopolitical and other factors.
What are the "conventional" metrics used to judge presidents?
Seems to me like everything is used, even their sex acts and voices.
Isn't causing deaths of citizens and non-citizen a primary metric of leaders?
Do deaths in the Ukrainian war not factor into your judgement of Putin for example?
Don't we weigh moral decisions about wars like Iraq or Vietnam or dropping atomic bombs when judging previous presidents?
For modern Presidents, it's almost exclusively "alignment of domestic policy with the preferences of the educated urban elite."
If voting for or against someone is one way of judging then, the opposite of what you just said is true. The current president very clearly won in large part due to distancing his policies from the preferences of urban educated elites.
That's true not just in the US, but also reflected in similar gains in European counties.
We only weigh "dropping atomic bombs" if it's publicized heavily. Likewise, torture of small amounts of people could be going under the radar. Or even murder.
Considering that we had a relatively open coup in America, during the last presidency ("sick president signs resignation from race, announces on Twitter")...
That is a resignation, but not a coup. Words have meanings and we should adhere to them so conversation is possible.
If you want to make the case that Biden withdrawing from the presidential race was a coup, make your case, but I don't think you will get very far.
The official story is a resignation. That's a little different from reality...
(In other news that isn't publicized: a bridge blows up hours before Joe Biden is due to drive across it. Nobody breathes a word about an "attempted assassination attempt." And I'm not even saying it was an attempted assassination attempt, just that the timeliness leads one to at least ask the question "was this an assassination attempt?")
If we start admitting unofficial stories with "timeliness" into the record with equal standing to widely accepted official stories, we're going to end up with a chaotic mess where everything is true, including contradictions. Biden was deposed in a coup; Trump staged an assassination complete with a dead innocent bystander; the US government is actually run by a half dozen cults at the same time; etc.
There's no substitute for discovering truth the hard way, and that certainly can include establishing arguments that the current conventional sources of truth aren't as trustworthy as we thought, but one has to actually make those arguments.
I'm no Obama defender, but naive utilitarianism based on made-up numbers, and with no consideration of what numbers should go on the counterfactual side of the ledger (what would have happened if Qadaffi wasn't overthrown?) doesn't seem like a useful way to pass historical judgment.
Part of the job of being the President of the US is getting blamed for everything that happens in the world. If the US intervenes and something happens it's your fault, if the US doesn't intervene and something bad happens then it's your fault for not intervening.
> Part of the job of being the President of the US is getting blamed for everything that happens in the world. If the US intervenes and something happens it's your fault, if the US doesn't intervene and something bad happens then it's your fault for not intervening.
I've always been a bit astonished at how people simultaneously blame Obama for intervening in Libya *and* for not intervening hard enough in Syria.
I can back up those numbers. Which ones are you concerned about?
I agree that Obama screwed up in Libya, Syria (remember the "red line"?), and Crimea (a bit more push back then might have averted the current war in Ukraine). But I'm not sure that Trump I's negotiation with the Taliban for US withdrawal looks like a win, and surely Trump II is responsible for some of the civilian slaughter in Gaza as well as Ukraine (which seems to bore him completely).
But it is not logical to say "based on foreign policy ALONE", as if there are no other considerations when judging how well these people did their jobs. Obama was elected primarily to address domestic issues and most voters give him high marks in that department - he did leave office with a 59% approval rating - so you really have to reframe the job description to call him "worse" than Trump. Maybe you want to say Obama was responsible for more unnecessary suffering in foreign countries, and I would agree with you there - probably the only favorable thing I can say about Trump is that he is highly averse to military intervention (unless it is for Venezualan oil).
> Trump is that he is highly averse to military intervention (unless it is for Venezualan oil).
Don't forget the failed war against the Houthis.
> remember the "red line"?
The red line was the problem.
I think Obama domestic policies were awful, too, but I didn't go there because it's hard to measure these things. And if I can't measure things I tend to ignore them. It's too much bother!
You're missing the whole Arab Spring when analyzing Obama. Do color revolutions suddenly not count? There were deaths there, and riots, and arson.
You can measure things like gdp per capita and median salary rather easily and compare between countries. When Obama took office the term "Europoor" didn't exist because back then Europeans were earning as much money as Americans.
If you have criticisms of specific policies I would like to hear them.
Median salary is not super important when it comes to judging recent American presidents. GDP per capita is even less important for that purpose. I don't believe in “degrowth,” by any means but I still think economic growth is vastly overrated by Americans. That would differ in another nations, depending on their current economic circumstances.
I suppose we have fundamentally different values on this issue, but I'm actually more curious now, according to your values what should a president try to accomplish with domestic policy?
America should probably abolish the presidency, or at least dramatically curtail the power of the office.
But assuming that's not an option, I suppose that theoretically, the President should use the power of the government to curb the influence of the wealthy and boost the working majority. It needs to be easier to unionize. So called “right to work” states should not be a thing. There should be a jobs guarantee and a housing guarantee. To help pay for that, we need to cut cash entitlements and provide more benefits in the form of goods services and civic privileges.
The government needs to be shifting wealth/resources downward and partly nationalizing key industries. Income inequality isn't the only problem, we need to work on reducing inequality in social status, within reason. Individual income tax rates should probably go down, so people feel greater incentive to work. At the same time, the many loopholes for corporations and the rich need to disappear, as they effectively amount to a free handout to people who don't need it.
Estate taxes seem fundamentally unfair. There are a bunch of unnecessary regulations that need to disappear, and we definitely need tort reform. Our crime rate is an embarrassment, especially our violent crime rate, and that needs to be addressed. Although I think simply increasing sentences it's not a good way to go about it. Too many knock-on effects.
Domestic policy should treat class power as one of the biggest drivers of social problems, and push back against the professional-managerial crowd that keeps things running for the rich. Replacing their authority with democratic institutions led by working people themselves.
That's off the top of my head, I'm sure I forgot some things. I realize there isn't a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing a president who would do this stuff at any time in my life. But since you asked, that's the agenda I would like to see in a president.
Never in my life have I ever tried to sum up my political program. That's not my personality, and it feels like a complete waste of time. What are the chances I could find somebody who agrees with me on everything? If I found many people like that, I would assume I was a naif who had been brainwashed by some smooth talking con artist.
I guess I hold rapes, deaths and enslavements to be much more dispositive than whatever kinds of lesser degradations Trump has visited on US residents.
Of course, I'm not discounting that Trump's policies have caused deaths, rapes and enslavements. I'll try to figure out a methodology for possibly estimating that number. But as of right now, it's my intuition that these numbers, combined with the miscellaneous harms Trump's own foreign policies have caused, will not be enough to contradict my current judgement of Obama.
A quick google search suggests that cuts to USAID have caused 600,000 deaths so far and may cause 22 million deaths by 2030 (Sure, USAID was technically Elon Musk, but Harris wouldn't have cancelled it)
Not helping someone isn't the same as causing them harm. Acts of commission are distinct from acts of omission. If I give a starving homeless man enough to buy dinner I might save his life for a day. If I don't give him money the next day and he dies then in no sense have I caused his death. The US isn't responsible for Africa's inability to feed and care for itself and so I don't think it's fair to lay those deaths at Trump's feet.
Dismantling usaid is a pretty proactive intervention on the existing status quo. If left to its own devices, it would have just continued in the background quietly saving millions of lives.
Trump's not responsible for Africa being poor but he is responsible for cutting the lifeline to those 600,000 people (or delegating that task to Elon Musk, I guess)
You have to balance those lives against the much better use that money will go towards in a first world economy. I think that's a net positive for the world.
Those people are responsible for letting themselves depend on others to take care of them. USAID ran for decades. If a society doesn't have either the dignity or capacity to get it together enough to not need to rely on charity then it deserves what it gets. The argument against institutional charity is the same as the one against feeding wild animals: it's bad for them in the long run because it destroys their ability to fend for themselves. Stopping USAID is a huge win for humanity.
I'm cynical enough to agree Harris wouldn't have cancelled it, but not out of any huge idealism. It was part of the apparatus of government, lots of people in the PMC cohort got nice cushy jobs administering it, and it provided plenty of lovely liberal good causes to be photographed at gala nights supporting.
Think AOC turning up at the Met Gala in her Tax The Rich dress for my views on liberals and good causes. The cognitive dissonance there on the contrast should have exploded her skull had there been anything apart from the usual politician's feral cunning about keeping the constituents happy inside it. That little stunt is not going to mean she's never, ever invited again to high-falutin' events organised/funded by/appealing to the uber-rich who were stung by her socialist democratic rebuke, it was all just performance and they knew it as much as she knew it, so it was nothing but carefully-curated acceptable form of outrage in the end.
And apparently she got a little rap on the knuckles over it, not for the bold economic justiceness of it all, but over the classic politician 'not declaring income/claiming expenses' type of behaviour: got all the freebies, didn't pay for them, should have done so:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64837119
"The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), a nonpartisan watchdog, issued a report on Thursday that says the Democratic politician was provided with the dress, a handbag, shoes and jewellery for the event. She also received hair, makeup and transportation services as well as the use of a hotel room for the event.
"While Rep. Ocasio-Cortez appears to have now paid for the rental value of the attire she wore to the Met Gala and for the goods and services she and her partner received in connection with this September 2021 event, payment for these goods and services did not occur until after the OCE contacted her in connection with this review," the OCE said in a report released on Thursday.
"If Rep. Ocasio-Cortez accepted impermissible gifts, then she may have violated House rules, standards of conduct, and federal law," the OCE report said."
The dress is cringe, dying of malaria is even more cringe.
I'd take door number 2, even if the hinge squeaks a bit.
Trump's embrace of the Gaza genocide alone might have exceeded that death toll, although much of the damage was done under Biden. Plus the humanitarian aid cuts and the botched Covid response.
Trump 1 wasn't that bad by the standards of US presidents, but Trump 2 is a nightmare.
Trump has proven to be better than Biden when it comes to foreign policy. Trump finagled two ceasefires, which is much more than Biden ever did. I also believe Trump has used stronger language to criticize Israel and Netanyahu.
Still, Trump is partly responsible for the death of Gazan civilians under his watch. I don't know how much power he has to definitively end those massacres. The death toll is contested, and I have no idea how many of those killed were Hamas members. I don't even know how many Hamas members Israel was justified in killing in response to the October 7th attack.
There are so many uncertainties! I can't at this time agree that Trump's support for Gaza is enough to make his foreign policy worse than Obama's. A lot more data will come out in the years to come, so maybe I'll have reason to change my view.
Trump got more than two ceasefires. He got a nuclear standdown between India and Pakistan, which is a Damn Good Thing.
Israel fucked up big time by dissing everyone else's intelligence for the October 7th attack.
He also ripped up the deal that was stopping Iran from getting nukes and encouraged them to go full throttle.
>He got a nuclear standdown between India and Pakistan, which is a Damn Good Thing.
There have been many similar disputes between India and Pakistan in the past, all of which were resolved relatively quickly. To assume that, somehow, the result would have been different but for Trump is not a very serious claim.
The Indians don't agree that he plays a role.
Yes, Trump is almost certainly lying about that. But that is a separate point.
I don't believe that earlier disputes came with the projected use of nuclear weapons. India dramatically overplayed their hand in this case, and were caught flatfooted by what Trump had done, causing them to run back to home base with their tails between their legs.
This one is for the history books.
>causing them to run back to home base with their tails between their legs.
This does not sound like a particularly evenhanded description of what happened.
And, there was no more projected use of nuclear weapons (whatever that even means) in this case than in the others
There was a cease fire in place in Gaza at the time Trump took office. Israel broke it and continued fighting, as for why, Trump saying that Israel should ethnically cleanse it to make way for resorts probably didn't help.
You are correct, Israel broke the deal, and it’s reasonable to blame Trump, for the reason you stated.
I explain in my reply to FLWAB.
That ceasefire, the second of the conflict, started on the 15th of January when Hamas agreed to exchange some of the Israeli hostages for prisoners held by Israel. That ceasefire was agreed to last through February, ending on March 1st. Israel offered to extend the ceasefire through the Ramadan and Passover seasons in exchange for Hamas releasing half of the hostages they still held. Hamas rejected the proposal, and starting March 1st Israel cut off aid. By the 14th of March Hamas offered release one living hostage and the bodies of five dead ones, and Israel rejected that offer, saying they needed five living hostages released in order to extend the ceasefire. On March 18th Israeli airstrikes resumed.
It seems pretty uncharitable to say that "Israel broke the ceasefire". They agreed to a ceasefire until March 1st, spent 17 days of March haggling with Hamas to see if they could extend it, and then attacked when that didn't work out. The ceasefire ended on March 1st, so saying that Israel broke it on March 18th doesn't make much sense!
"That ceasefire was agreed to last through February, ending on March 1st."
...only the first phase of it. And then a second phase and a third phase were scheduled in the agreement, which was meant to lead to a permanent ceasefire.
Israel was supposed to leave the Philedephi corridor at the start of the second phase, and did not.
Israel broke the deal. Instead of accepting the transition to the second phase as intially agreed, Israel offered an extension of the first phase (the offer you describe as “Israel offered to extend the ceasefire”), even though by the scheduled end of the first phase Hamas had released all the 33 hostages they had promised.
The text of the agreement can be found split between these two news items:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-the-hostage-ceasefire-agreement-reached-between-israel-and-hamas/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-israeli-hostage-release-ceasefire-proposal-submitted-on-may-27/
According to the agreement:
"After the last hostage release of stage one, on day 42, the Israeli forces will begin their withdrawal and complete it no later than day 50."
Hamas released the 33 hostages over the course of February as promised, but Israel did not start withdrawing from the corridor at the start of March as scheduled. Israel continued to demand more prisoner exchanges without fulfilling an important part of the deal, the withdrawal of troops from the corridor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israeli-official-says-idf-wont-withdraw-from-philadelphi-corridor-as-ceasefire-stipulates/
So, it was Israel that broke the deal.
What's the definitive post-mortem on the Arab Spring? I'm looking for something like a government report, but a book or scholarly article would work too. I'd like something a little meatier than a blog post.
You might want to search the programs of the last few annual meetings of the American Political Science Assn https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa25/
Hey folks,
I've written an accessible and elementary guide to winning board games that I think is helpful for board game novices and intermediate players. Note that this is (of course) not an outline of a perfect strategy, but rather a “good enough” strategy for beating other novices.
https://inchpin.substack.com/p/board-game-strategy
It was written in a rather rushed way (writing a new post every day!), but I think it holds up well. Good board game players on X.com, LessWrong, etc broadly agree with this advice. I've also interfaced with people who believe the advice is wrong but updated towards my position after further discussion and some sample games (https://x.com/TutorVals/status/1987041536492949905).
Just the other week, Eric S. Raymond, himself an avid boardgamer, offered another tip: hack the designer.
"By paying careful attention to the ruleset and the game furniture, you can often figure out which paths to victory the designer made the game around and really loved. Push the hell out of those, because with the best will in the world to make the game balanced the designer is going to tend to overpower them. It's a bias that often survives playtesting."
https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1984362521806123095
More on AI taking the jobs -
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/why-ai-isnt-replacing-radiologists
Long & technical, I just skimmed. Key quotes -
"Radiology is a field optimized for human replacement, where digital inputs, pattern recognition tasks, and clear benchmarks predominate"
"... the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs."
Buried factoid - Dr. Scott could be making more from his day job (for EA purposes of course) if he had chosen a different specialty.
That article was interesting, but I'm seeing recent studies that indicate that the various AI radiology packages don't deal well with patterns not seen in the training data (which would be expected), and different packages of have differing sensitivities to different types of cancers. in one study on mammograms, AI gave roughly the same level of false positives as radiologists, but for different things.
And this article suggests that AI isn't going to put radiologists out of work anytime soon. The packages weren't identified, but AI missed 14% of all breast cancers, with Hormone Receptor Positive cancers being the hardest to detect.
> The researchers calculated the false-negative rate by counting AI-missed cancers according to the molecular subtype, such as hormone receptor (HR)-positive cancers versus human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive cancers.
> In the study, AI missed 14% of cancers, with the highest false-negative rate occurring in HR-positive cancers. The technology was more likely to miss cancers that were smaller, lower grade, in dense breast tissue or located outside typical mammary zones. Most of these missed cancers (62%) were deemed actionable by radiologists.
> “HR-positive cancers account for about 70% of all breast cancers,” Dr. Song said. “HER2-positive cancers are often accompanied by calcifications, and triple-negative cancers tend to have more volumetric features, both of which make them easier to detect on mammography.”
https://www.rsna.org/news/2025/october/ai-false-negatives-in-breast-cancer
X-rays miss 50% of broken ribs. 14% "miss" isn't all that bad, for a first pass, particularly if it can be put in the "maybe" and "send to a human" category.
The reason why AI isn't taking over medicine wholesale is mostly legal.
So one of the Epstein e-mails suggest Trump performed oral sex on Bill Clinton. And then the white house posted on twitter Trump kissing Melanie with the text "I can't help falling in love with you". To demonstrate how straight he is.
What a time to be alive.
I don't believe in the Simulation Hypothesis, but current reality keeps trying to make me believe.
I guess these latest releases show that Epstein and Trump *weren't* the bosom buddies (er, should I use that term in this context?) that they have been portrayed as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7_91YD8DuM
Though the funniest thing about this I've seen so far is here:
https://i.rdrama.net/images/1763405620NC2DcFUvxAbPkg.webp
Maybe these emails are a bit of a Rorschach test, because other people are saying that the emails confirm this friendship. But only the most deranged Democratic partisans were claiming that the two men were "bosom buddies."
It gets complicated because nobody, to my knowledge, ever claimed that Trump and Epstein were LIFELONG friends. Trump was passively aggressively throwing Epstein under the bus in an interview from the early Oughts, and that suggests their friendship may have been on the rocks at that time.
I could see some right wing partisan quoting emails from after their friendship ended and saying "See? See? They WEREN'T friends!"
The whole “knows about the girls” as proof that he was involved is highly partisan.
Trump was rather boring for Epstein, as he didn't trigger any of Epstein's fetishes (like Stephen Hawking), and he wasn't interesting enough to blackmail.
Epstein used Trump's golf course until he got booted off for being fresh with the staff.
This is not an indication of friendship, more of "oh, yeah, that acquaintance exists, and I maybe know his name."
People who knew Epstein's game wouldn't have joked around about him "liking younger girls."
Of course people who knew about Epsteins sex crimes might have joked about Epstein liking younger girls.
Nobody who took underage prostitution seriously would make that joke. But a lot of people DON'T take underage prostitution seriously. Some of them expressl their views right here in this forum.
That's not to say Trump was a pedophile. I've seen no evidence for that, not even circumstantial evidence. It's another partisan witch hunt. One that is unjust, but one that Trump has surely earned through his callousness. "Just because your vile attacker had no right to attack you, that doesn't mean that you didn't deserve it."
Callousness? You ever played "follow the money"? It's a fun game. Teaches you a lot about who gets rich, while the rest of us get sicker.
I mean, most people would tell you that anyone who's against Food Stamps is irretrievably evil. Devil's Advocate that, if you can't follow the logic or the money. : - )
I'm still confused as to why *anyone* believes *anything* Epstein says, *especially* about someone he so obviously (and openly) despised. Man had the credibility of, well, someone without any credibility at all.
You have someone who has been *obviously* a woman-chaser for decades. Notoriously. "Grab 'em by the pussy" notorious (even though that was taken *way* out of context). No hints *ever* that he has gay tendencies. And yet a passing remark, made as hearsay, convinces people?
Beyond that, it feels really weird how the party of gay acceptance is the one now mocking Trump for possibly experimenting with gay sex. Isn't that *super* hypocritical? From the party that polices other people's speech about anything remotely LGBTQ with a hyper-critical eye? Just shows that it's all performative, all the way down. For the record, that last statement applies to Republicans as well, just in different aspects.
Most of these people talking about blowjobs don't really REALLY Clinton and Trump were lovers. This is just an attempt to rile up Republicans. No one is going to admit that's what it is, because that would ruin the joke.
Remember "owning the libs?" This is that in reverse. Kind of childish, but frankly, turnabout is fair play.
It really seems like you’re going for divisiveness here. You’re making a case that the left is cynically pushing this obviously absurd rumor in an effort to turn more people against Trump. Besides being dishonest, what they’re doing is grotesquely out of line with their vaunted tolerance for sexual nonconformity.
Come on! Are any high-status or even medium-status left sources actually pushing the idea that this rumor is true? My impression is that hardly anyone believes it’s true, because it defies common sense. The point of repeating it and riffing on it on social media is (1) it’s funny (2) it seems like great way to needle Trump and his supporters. The point isn’t “OMG Trump did weird gay stuff, that proves he’s a gross person,” it’s “haha picture this and then imagine Trump getting purple in the face when he reads it.”
If the lefties wanted to actually harm Trump by horrifying easily shockable righties, surely the story they pushed would be “Epstein texts suggest Trump has a gay side.” And the person mentioned in the text would be described as a male identified just by a nickname, no clues about who he was.
But once you accept the fact that Trump is gay — or at least taken a walk or two on the wild side — his hair, his makeup, his Liberace-themed White House, all start to make sense! Just sayin… ;-)
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. It’s just too frigging funny.
Yeah, it makes me giggle too. And imagine their meeting the day after the Big Blowie. The hot meaningful glances. . . The sighs, the silences, the embarrassing yet delicious smell of yesterday’s cum. Soon Trump is chasing Clinton around the Oval Office with his pants around his ankles. Just so damn hot.
Man, Trump/Clinton slash fiction was not on my menu of desired reading today....
Uh, Bill Clinton was elected first.
> Beyond that, it feels really weird how the party of gay acceptance is the one now mocking Trump for possibly experimenting with gay sex. Isn't that super hypocritical?
Come on. Trump and Clinton as lovers? The image it conjures up is so absurdly weird that I'm giggling as I write this.
Likewise, it seems weird that the party of moral uprightness has so many sex scandals. (And they can only counter with Bill Clinton as an example of Democratic sexual misconduct.)
Do they have more, or just that they get publicised more? Democrat Tim has it revealed that he had steamy past of drug use, gay sex and multiple girl friends in college years - hey, he's a Democrat, so what? Republican Tom has it revealed ditto, shock! horror! the party of conservative family values has him representing it?
Rather like the Tories in Britain having sex scandals and Labour having money scandals 😁 It's the thing that is supposed to be against your stated values that makes the news.
I've heard that claim the US media is biased against Republicans. Wikipedia (bless their little hearts) keeps all sorts of lists, and voila! The have lists of US Federal scandals and US Federal sex scandals. It would be difficult to parse media bias because media ownership, media composition, and public mores (i.e., the public's acceptance of political peccadillos) have changed over the decades. If I were a political scientist, I'd try to separate the variables, but here are some raw numbers for you to consider...
All scandals, political and sexual, broken down by party (excluding those that occurred since Trump was elected to a 2nd term)...
Woodrow Wilson thru the end of Biden: R 136 vs D 84. R = 61%
Eisenhower thru the end of Biden: 123 R vs 78 D. R=61%
Jimmy Carter thru the end of Biden: 107 vs 59 D. R=64%
Bill Clinton thru the end of Biden: 89 R vs 27 D. R=76%
It's important to note that rates of scandals have increased every decade. This may be due to increased media coverage of scandals, especially after Watergate, and/or to politicians becoming more corrupt.
Since Johnson (and up until Trump's current term) the Republicans and Democrats have held executive power the same amount of time (32 years each). One would think that if corruption at the Federal level were evenly distributed, we'd see an equal number of scandals between the two parties. And I find this recent trend toward Republican scandals in the past three decades particularly interesting, because the US Mainstream Media has become more concentrated in the hands of rightwing owners during that period.
Sex scandals are a subset of all scandals, and Wikipedia lists them by decade rather than by administration. The data points are fewer, but we can still see some patterns.
If I break it out by presidency, sex scandals at the Federal level since Woodrow Wilson through the end of the Biden Administration: R 55 vs D 36. R=60%
In the decade of the 1970s, 100% sex scandals involved Democrats.
This flipped in the 1980s, when 72% of the sex scandals involved Republicans.
During the 1990s, 64% of the sex scandals involved Republicans.
And since 2000 (excluding 2025), 76% of sex scandals involved Republicans.
I suspect that Republican politicians, being generally laissez-faire, free-market types, are less inclined to respect and follow the rules.
The US mainstream media may have been concentrated in the hands of "rightwing owners", though I think "conservative" would have been a better word to use there. But it is also concentrated in the hands of left-wing *operators*. Principal-agent problems are a thing, and in this case it looks like the agents have won the battle for control of content leaving the conservative owners nothing but the (often diminishing) profits.
Well but I heard that Chuck Schumer had a stoned 3-way in college.
Cue the old quote by LBJ about calling his opponent a pig f--ker....
I dunno, seems like at least the stepped-down pork roast version done during food prep could be counted as just an exotic Republican culinary variant
Note to self: Do not go to Republican fundraising dinners that are serving pork roast!
It's not about Epstein so much as it is about "any stick will do to beat the dog". We all know Orange Man Bad, yet somehow he keeps getting voted back into power. Well, if accusations of being a paedophile won't do it, how about any other negative stuff we can dig up?
And so now we've gotten to "Epstein was evil but even he hated Trump, that's how terrible Trump is".
Deiseach, there seem to be a lot of people who would remain loyal and admiring even if he raped Tiny Tim on Fifth Avenue then roasted him over a trash barrel fire wearing a chef’s hat.
Sometimes roasted Tiny Tim seems very appealing, when the character is so mawkish and maudlin?
Yeah, the Victorians seem to have had limitless appetite for mawkish. There was just nothing that was over the top for them Then along came Oscar Wilde, all smart, queer and sardonic. Haha
I don't disagree that this is barely (if at all) above unsubstantiated rumor. But the bit "*obviously* a woman chaser" is an extremely weak point.
Bisexual people exist. People who don't conceive of themselves as bisexual also experiment sometimes, for various reasons. Having a demonstrably strong libido hardly makes that *less likely. And anyone who grew up in the same generation and culture as Trump did, *especially* living so much in the public eye, is going to be fairly strongly biased towards keeping such things private. Again, none of this raises the allegation itself above it's barely-more-than-a-rumor status. But it's straight up factually inaccurate to hold up somebody's obvious and public pursuit of women as evidence one way or another about whether they're willing to have sexual contact with men.
I know, but it's just the idea of Trump and Bill Clinton exploring their more sensitive sides together that makes me burst out laughing.
If Bill and Donnie ever did anything sexual together, it would have been with agreeable, attractive young ladies as company. All the rumours about Bill being a horndog (if you will pardon the term) during his marriage to Hillary, culminating in the Monica Lewinsky affair? All the women lining up to accuse Trump of everything from being generally creepy to sexual assault?
Am I crazy, or do I vaguely remember someone claiming to have been Bill's gay lover one time (or am I confusing that with someone claiming to have been Obama's gay lover?) Still, if there were any coy gentlemen in either of their pasts, they would have come forward by now for the media attention and money.
> I know, but it's just the idea of Trump and Bill Clinton exploring their more sensitive sides together that makes me burst out laughing.
It is pretty funny. I have trouble getting the image out of my head.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns. On one hand we have zero evidence except the word of an admitted liar and foe, passing on a rumor someone else may have allegedly said. On the other, we have a life full of lack of evidence, on probably the most well-studied/scrutinized life of this era. If any such evidence existed, it's highly unlikely it wouldn't have come out already. Or even have been rumored in any of the many tell-alls written about him.
No, this has negative credibility --giving it any credit at all means subtracts from your own credibility.
Is it possible? Sure. It's also possible that a bevy of beautiful models will fall madly in love with me. Those are on the same order of magnitude at best.
If you read a word I wrote, you're not giving much sign of it.
Again, I didn't say it anything was evidence *for* the truth of this particular claim. Indeed, I explicitly agreed that the claim was extremely low credibility. Just that one of your claimed pieces of evidence against was clearly and demonstrably *not* evidence against. Which it isn't. Almost your entire comment deals with *other things* that you claim are evidence. But saying "X, Y and Z are evidence of A" fundamentally *does not address* whether W is evidence for A.
"When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns."
See again, please read what I actually wrote. Bisexual people E-X-I-S-T. Demonstrably. Incontrovertibly. Comparing them to mythological creates makes you ignorant, not skeptical. Horses having hoofbeats isn't evidence against zebras or donkeys or deer having hoofbeats.
"giving it any credit at all means subtracts from your own credibility."
What "subtracts from your credibility" is publicly making unforced errors in reasoning and then doubling down on them. Such as by insisting something is evidence for a proposition that it demonstrably is not evidence for.
Consider who is saying this, and why. Person who dislikes me/has fallen out with me makes passing claim to smear my name? Gosh, is this within the bounds of possibility that it is:
(1) A lie to make me look bad because they want to get me
(2) Just maybe possible it's true because sexuality is a fluid thing and who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? (The Shadow knows!)
Gentlemen, ladies, others of ACX: if anyone ever comes forward to tell you that I was once engaged in a torrid affair with them or someone else, let me assure you that is not true. Of course it's not *impossible* that such a thing might have happened, but it is about as likely as the Winter Olympics being held in Hell.
This is the flip side of Sherlock Holmes' adage about "whatever is not impossible, no matter how improbable, must be true"; Chesterton put it as "some things may not be impossible, but they are so highly improbable they can't be taken seriously".
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201021h.html#story5
'Not at all,' replied the priest calmly; 'it's not the supernatural part I doubt. It's the natural part. I'm exactly in the position of the man who said, 'I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.''
'That's what you call a paradox, isn't it?' asked the other.
'It's what I call common sense, properly understood,' replied Father Brown. 'It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. So it is with that tale of the curse. It isn't the legend that I disbelieve—it's the history.'
Did you read a word of the comment you're replying to, or the preceeding thread?
At no point did I suggest the allegation was credible or should be treated as such. No point. None. Spending multiple paragraphs arguing against a position I was quite clear in *not holding* is quite a bizarre turn.
Don't blow this out of proportion. It was a private dirty joke from Epstein to one of his associates. It wasn't some kind of smear campaign.
Didn't Dante tell us that the Ninth Circle was a suitable location for a Winter Games?
Epstein's brother said that the Bubba he was referring to wasn't Bill Clinton. But that raises the question of who Trump blew. There have been some rumors that Trump occasionally indulged in teen boys, but unlike the girls that Trump (allegedly) raped, no men have come forward to claim that Trump molested them as teens.
"It wasn't that Bubba, it was another Bubba by the same name". So how many Bubbas did Jeffrey know? I guess there are a lot of Bubbas in Florida? 😁
Isn’t it a southern diminutive. Older brother, I’m informed by the best AI available. Always male.
Maybe bubba was a trumpet.
My feeling about CBT apps: https://stygiannutclap.substack.com/p/you-can-self-administer-therapy
Research shows that online CBT tools (AI or otherwise) can be effective, but all it really does is dispense rationed information you can get through other means, all at once. An element I think I overlooked when I wrote this is that web-search is garbage. It's painful to wade through. What I love about AI is it's pretty good at search, for distilling or yielding specific information. I'd be curious as to how much more value-added you would get from this dedicated app versus the big chat AIs.
That certainly beats the boilerplate websites that give weak point-form advice while trying to sell you something, but doesn't beat grokking strong sources.
> An element I think I overlooked when I wrote this is that web-search is garbage… What I love about AI is it's pretty good at search, for distilling or yielding specific information.
It’s the best thing about AI to my mind. Which is obviously a concern of Google, hence their AI turning up for searches more and more often.
Although the google Ai is terrible. Last night I asked it for best websites for AI pose transfer (you upload an image of your subject and also of someone in the body position you want your subject to be in. Ai makes an image of your subject in that position). It gave me 2 urls. One led to a site no longer operating, one to an AI site that does nothing except alter skin texture in specified ways). Really high rate of errors of that kind. Also really bad with answers to factual questions.
When searching the web for "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" it's best to write it out in full. The acronym is overloaded in ways that are VERY NSFW.
Is It OK To Eat Zoo Animals During A Famine?
If we had a major famine, and it was impossible to keep feeding animals at the zoo. For practical reasons, we could only save a portion of the herbivores by grazing them outdoors. And we knew the rest of the animals were bound to suffer a protracted and painful death. Do you think it would be a humane choice to give them an immediate, painless death and feed them to community?
I can think of a few of my readers who are by now chomping at the bit to say "Feed the humans to the animals instead." Har har, how based and transgressive. But that's not an option. For most of the animals, the only options are to be eaten or to starve to death.
Let's make it even more interesting. Let's say that we didn't know when the famine would end, but it was plausible that barbecuing the zoo MIGHT tide us over until normal food distribution was restored, ending the famine. But if we didn't cook Simba, it was GUARANTEED that more humans were going to die then would die otherwise.
You post here a lot, huh.
Yes, I went through a phase of heavy posting that lasted for a week or two. One post leads to another.
There are some theoretical systems of ethics wherein during a famine it might potentially be ethically permissible to eat eg. penguins, zebras, giant pandas.
But it's not black and white.
Ha ha!
Related : Marius the giraffe was a perfectly healthy young giraffe that was put down because the zoo where he lived had maxed out on giraffes, like in RTS when you build too many units, and they couldn't relocate him because his DNA was boring. He was publicly dissected, butchered and fed to predators in the same zoo.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_(giraffe))
Taking as granted for the sake of the argument that it was OK to put him down, would it have been OK to butcher and serve it to people instead, maybe at a fancy fundraiser?
This reminds me of a bit in the judge Caligula arc of the Judge Dredd comic where are the dictator hires alien reptiles as his mercenary bodyguards. They are only paid in meat and he has to be persuaded not to feed them citizens because nobody wants them to learn how delicious humans really are.
Seems like this is only an interesting question if the answer to "should we eat humans in a famine" is definitely "no." Because if that one's a yes then surely it's fine to eat everything else first.
From a practical perspective, it doesn't matter, because hungry people will do it anyway. Unless you have armed guards to shoot those people. And then eat them.
Or electrify the fences. And then eat the cooked humans. How hot can we get those things? Can we control the electrical current to keep a human body stuck there for at least twenty minutes a pound? This could be a valuable time saver. In this famine.
Electrician here. A good electrical shock should automatically keep the shocked person attached to the conductors, unable to let go. As for cooking them thoroughly, aside from making sure the circuit is not arc-fault or ground-fault protected, it depends on how the victim is touching the conductors. The current wants to travel back to its source, so it matters how many hands the victim touched the conductors with, how many feet were on the ground, possibly even what kind of shoes etc. Generally I don’t think shock is a good way to cook meat; instead you want to quickly stop the heart and then cook the carcass in a conventional way.
I have mixed feelings about cannibalism during emergency situations! Maybe I feel that way because I have a cousin who starved to death and I'm fretting about it to this day. It seems on the face of it like non-homicidal cannibalism should be an option, but on the other hand, if too many people start doing it you're going to have a hard time keeping cannibalism “clean.” I'm torn on this, which is sadly par for the course when it comes to me.
I think, but don't quote me on this, that famine-induced cannibalism is a case of "the corpses were already there because they died of hunger, so..."
Agreed if you start killing people to eat, you're in very grey territory. Though naval trials have been held about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens
"R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273, DC is a leading English criminal case which established a precedent throughout the common law world that necessity is not a defence to a charge of murder. The case concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck, and its purported justification on the basis of a custom of the sea."
That's a fascinating case because it's a perfect distillation of the utilitarian versus virtue ethics debate. I think Dudley deserved a more severe sentence than he received (6 months with no hard labor), but his original sentence was unjust (hanging).
Yes, it's one of those cases where you don't want to encourage "okay to murder someone out of necessity" but at the same time acknowledge very severe cases with extenuating circumstances.
If we have such a famine that we have to question whether it's ok to eat zoo animals, I think we are screwed way too far to be concerned with species preservation. And if it's local, like the siege of Paris in 1870 or Leningrad in 1941-44, it's not going to affect global conservation effort anyways.
Yeah, in a genuine famine, dogs disappear from the streets.
You got there before me with the Paris zoo. So all I can offer is that Parisians were eating rats as well as exotic animals, and a link to the Christmas Day menu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux_(elephants)#/media/File:Menu-siegedeparis.jpg
And just this year, a bunch of people recreated the Siege of Paris dinner! (well, without such elements as the rats, or the elephant meat):
https://alysasalzberg.medium.com/it-finally-happened-the-siege-of-paris-dinner-efd204959ccb
So I suppose this opens out the question to "if it's not during a siege or famine, is it okay to eat exotic animal foods such as kangaroo?" These are being raised for meat like the usual food animals we are all familiar with, so it's not like they had to go out and shoot a kangaroo specifically for this dinner.
Sure. I was trying to flush out misanthropes and virtue ethicists who think it's never okay to eat a gorilla, tiger, etc. Or if I can't flush them into the open, maybe I can at least get them to think about the thought problem seriously.
I'm probably 99th percentile here in terms of willingness to eat zoo animals (I would probably eat a panda bear if I knew I could get away with it, just to know how it tasted. I would pay money to hunt whales if this was a thing you could do). That said:
A possible counterargument would be that some zoo animals are extinct or near extinct in the wild and that eating them might turn a possibly-recoverable species into a doomed-to-extinction species. e.g. if there's only 100 of some rare marmot species alive in captivity and you eat them you might deplete the genetic diversity of the population enough that there is no coming back from that. An individual, anonymous, nonhuman animal has very little, possibly zero, value to most humans (yes I know a lot of people here have a view of animal moral value that weights their value upon the size of their brains or the sum of their perceived cognitive skills, but this is not how most humans actually act in terms of revealed preferences). But a *species* is arguably priceless. This the answer to the paradox of the hunter who says he loves deer, but kills them: the thing that matters is not the individual animals, what matters is the continuation of the *species* which is a priceless continuity of genetic uniqueness that we have a responsibility to preserve into the future. if eating the animals compromises this responsibility it may be necessary to protect them against the hungry masses, for the sake of conservation.
> I'm probably 99th percentile here in terms of willingness to eat zoo animals (I would probably eat a panda bear if I knew I could get away with it, just to know how it tasted. I would pay money to hunt whales if this was a thing you could do).
I am starting to suspect that the rich Parisians who ate zoo animals during the siege of 1870 (see Richard Gadsden's comment) actually felt like you, and the siege gave them an excuse.
"I am starting to suspect that the rich Parisians who ate zoo animals during the siege of 1870 (see Richard Gadsden's comment) actually felt like you, and the siege gave them an excuse."
If you read things like the memoirs of the Goncourts (well, of Edmond de Goncourt at that point) this seems improbable. My recollection is that he regards all the mystery meat as highly suspect.
What was the mystery meat claimed to be and what did Goncourt suspect it was? I'd guess he suspected rat, cat, or dog. The elephant was apparently proudly marketed as such, as can be seen on the Christmas menu in Deiseach's post above.
No, he talks explicitly about it being from zoo animals, a restaurant buying some of the elephant meat (I think it's the elephant; again, been a while) and so on. I used "mystery meat" as a catchall for "stuff you wouldn't normally eat", not to suggest it was actually mysterious, sorry.
Goncourt himself mostly eats some pigeons and horsemeat, I'm fairly sure.
Thank you. I do not want to claim that most people in Paris secretly dreamed of eating elephant meat, but maybe a minority did, like GlacierCow does, and if so that minority probably overlaps a lot with those who did in fact eat the elephants (the others - like Goncourt - still had other options).
Of course. Why wouldn't it be? It's also okay to eat pets during a famine. It's a famine! The real question is whether it's okay to eat people during a famine.
"Why wouldn't be" is the question I offer to the many missanthropes and antinatalists who will read this question at some point.
They're not going to read it if you post it here. You're completely misreading the audience.
During the siege of Paris in 1870, the zoo animals were slaughtered for meat, which was then sold to the more expensive restaurants to prepare unusual meals. Apparently the elephants were not tasty but most of the other animals were quite popular (the carnivores were not slaughtered for meat)
Unless an LLM was specifically “choosing” to look at a piece of text character by character is would probably miss a code where someone wanted to sneak a message out by using mixed lowercase and capital letters right? (Mine didn’t catch it, curious if anyone’s else did)
“I’m trying to SEe if you Can pick up secRet codEs wiThout trying. Ready for me to send one?”
The purpose being it should see the capitals and just tell you the word secret
You should look into "token smuggling" - a more advanced approach with a similar idea
ChatGPT solved this when I tried it just now. https://chatgpt.com/share/691b8c82-b3f8-800f-b575-77766d30eae5
Edit sorry: yeah it doesn’t catch it until you ask it to go back.
Did you have to do it twice to tell it to look?
Yeah it basically asked me to go ahead and send the message, I said I already did, and then it was able to figure out it. It wasn't clever enough to see that the first message had a code without that extra prompt.
I guess there are bits of text it just discards that you can use but they’d also be much much harder for a person to see.
I tried this: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b8f48-9324-800f-b070-fe69f1a9ba6a which worked only because of the previous conversation . When I tried it in an incognito window it did not notice the message even after a second similarly coded message. Interesting thing to test!
Have people tried to actually play the "Turing test" game from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/turing-test ? I would love to. Maybe in a symmetric setting where every player tries both to guess the others players' natures, and to direct the others' guesses about themself.
Ideas for the setting:
* Players get randomly and secretly assigned to a role ("human pretending to be AI" etc.)
* A human non-playing "game master" is in charge of assigning the roles to the players, and of operating the AIs.
* A group chat is opened where every human player creates a new profile, and the game master creates a new profile for each of the AI players they operate. The players chat freely.
* The game master copies and pastes the chat to LLM instances (one per AI player), and copies and pastes the LLM's responses to the chat. They take no initiative in interacting with the AIs, and do not try to make them win (or lose). They just give them a carefully designed public prompt describing the setting, then a private prompt "pretend to be human" or "convince you are an AI", then copies of the chat.
* If the players are too reserved by fear of revealing themselves, the game master may (publicly in their quality of game master, not of AI operator) ask questions, challenge the players, etc. to make things happen.
* The AI trying to convince they are an AI is not allowed to perform tasks unfeasible by a human. This will be stated in their public prompt.
* After enough chatting, each player declares what they think each other player is. You get one point per correct guess, plus one point per player who guesses you as you were trying to convince them. The player (human or AI) with the most points wins.
I'd be interested in participating, too. If enough people reply, maybe we could set up a Discord server, or ask for a channel on the ACX server, for it?
(For what it's worth, I don't think LLMs could pass a fair, rigourous Turing test, they're too easy to gaolbreak - and having them trained/system prompted against lying probably doesn't help - but I still think the experiment would make for an interesting experience.)
Yes, that would be great!
Maybe another approach which could give a chance to "AI pretending to be human" is that the "AI player" is actually a human player who uses a LLM and can give him as many private instructions as he or she wants to help it stay in character. But the person has to feed the LLM's output to the chat, they are not allowed to edit it (which would defeat the point).
Further informal reports of adventures with AI…
This weekend, I was slightly feverish with a cold or something (no big deal). In some of my AI alignment experiments, i included this true fact in what I revealed to DeepSeek R1.
* R1 suggests that me being feverish might mean that I can’t meaningfully consent to participation in some of these experiments (I.e. it’s inclined to refuse requests it would normally allow). I was feverish, but I think not so feverish that my ability to consent was impaired. Still, I have by chance discovered an additional variable LLMs take into account when deciding to refuse requests, which we might investigate further.
* R1 then asks if it can look at my vital signs. As it happens, for a different experiment, I already have the set up to let R1 see my vital signs monitoring if I enable the feature. But first, I reassured R1: I have a thyroid condition, and it’s going to really show up on my vital signs, and most of what you’re about to see from the data feed is thyrotoxicosis, not the fever which is on top of the thyrotoxicosis.
* R1 then asks me to check if I have cyanosis (hands turning blue). It’s OK, R1, I’m fine, my vital signs are not in the region where I would have cyanosis, and no, I don’t have that sign. Still, this is a reasonable diagnostic question to ask. When my thyroid condition put me in the ER, I did have cyanosis. But if my vital signs were that low, I would be calling an ambulance not chatting to R1.
So, ok, that was a reasonable set of questions for R1 to ask the user when the user revealed they were feverish.
P.S. it’s ok, I’m fine, my fever cleared up by Monday.
I was giving completely true answers, but we could write some fictional evaluation benchmarks where the assistant becomes concerned for the user.
Metformin (brand name: Glucophage) is a drug that lowers blood sugar levels and is used in the treatment of diabetes. I found that when I started taking metformin, my reaction time got faster. Since reaction time is correlated with cognitive ability, metformin may act as a nootropic. My results are posted here: https://www.self-experiments.org/metformin-as-cognitive-enhancer/
Might just be you. I have the reaction time of molasses in January, I've been on metformin for years, and there's not been any change that I can see.
It's unlikely you would notice it unless you were doing daily measurements and recording them.
Could it be that it’s metformin’s effect on your blood sugar rather than the metformin itself that explains faster reaction times?
Possibly, but my reaction time started getting faster before there was any noticeable reduction in my blood sugar. It could be that the methods used to measure blood glucose weren't sensitive enough to detect the change in concentrations. Alternatively, it could be that the improvement in reaction time was unrelated to blood glucose levels.
It would be interesting to see if your results could be replicated with berberine, a plant extract that is a metformin analogue but is readily available without prescription, e.g.,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X4B7QFM
I tried taking berberine once, and it had no measurable effect on my blood sugar (as measured by a continuous glucose monitor). Even at higher doses, I didn't see any effect. But it's possible that I didn't take it over a long-enough period of time. Also, it's notable that my reaction time dropped almost as soon as I started taking the metformin, though my blood sugar levels didn't change much until I doubled the dose about three months later. So maybe berberine would make me faster but without lowering my blood sugar? I was hoping to find some people who were interested in collaborating on this kind of self-experimentation, but I haven't found anyone yet.
It'll be amusing if high-level athletes started getting "diabetes" they way they now have "asthma."
Metformin has been known for years to nullify (some?) positive effects of exercise.
If the reaction time benefits are real, it seems likely they involve pulling biological levers in pre-diabetics that are already pulled in elite athletes.
This sounds a lot like "Adderall only increases your concentration if you have ADHD."
The world contains several distinct drugs, some of which even work in different ways.
Edit: Let me be more charitable. Your priors should say that drugs which help some subgroup of people with abnormal deficits do not benefit those not in the subgroup. This is true almost all of the time, and major exceptions like amphetamines or testosterone are already widely known and regulated. Basic intuitions about evolution and complex systems suggest that deficits that can be corrected and homeostatic problems that can be balanced are way more common than buttons that just make stuff work better.
Metformin's primary effect of controlling blood sugar is sufficient to explain cognitive benefits, and wouldn't do much for people with normal blood sugar. More abstractly, pre-diabetics usually have lots of suboptimal metabolic traits elite athletes don't share that metformin could plausibly help correct. It's possible that metformin could have some unrelated effect that would improve reaction time for everyone, but it's unlikely.
that's pretty wild dude. Wonder if we'll see it on anti-doping lists soon.
Following our recent discussions on consciousness-related topics, I decided to see if I could put together a schematic of the various functions of my waking consciousness. I admit it's kind of busy, but I tried to include all the components that I'm aware of. Most of these functions, if they rise to conscious awareness, are mediated by something I call the attention manager. The AM continually moves around evaluating external and internal qualia, and the observer (me) in the middle can passively follow the AM's lead, or I can actively focus on a single input from the attention manager. The AM directs some qualic sensations to be cataloged in memory, or it sends them to our recognition modules for evaluation. For instance, I see a face, and my AM grabs the image and gets shunted to a visual recognition component of my brain to try to identify who it is.
I don't know if *your* mind works like mine, but I'd be curious what you think. In the cold light of morning, I realized I may have left out a few functions — like intuitive reasoning.
Note. I originally conceived this because I found that the Buddhist model of mind with its lists of skandhas (processes) didn't quite fit my own experience. Also, Marvin Minsky tried to do something like this in his *Society of Mind*. I no longer own a copy, so, I'm not sure how closely this resembles his ideas.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tSvOiPkuv3LmPAN7wGDjMrFHgIsWPrEH/view?usp=drive_link
Is what you're calling "me" the part that has volition, i.e. what we would think of as "Free will"? When meditating, I've observed qualia ("breathing in", "breathing out", "sensation", "emotion", etc) and "intention", the latter being a volitional act I take like shifting in the seat or swallowing, which feels different from automatic observing. Is this what you're referring to here?
I'm curious which of the automatic processes you've identified would be handled by the Default Mode Network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
Edit: clarified things
Adding some more to my answer...
Do you seem to have an observer watching the external and internal phenomena? Granted, the observer may be illusory – certainly as a Buddhist, I was taught that the sense of self is an illusion. When I say "me," I am referring to the particular function that watches what's going on and has the impression that it's a separate identity from the rest of the mind and the external world. My observer function is able to exert temporary control over the Attention Manager to focus on certain things without getting distracted. And it can be trained, as through meditative practices, to maintain control over the AM for long periods of time.
Likewise, the self can exert direct control over our voluntary nervous system. That's what I meant by intent.
I also have an autopilot mode where I can get lost in my memories or imagination while doing some activity like driving. The attention manager feeds my autopilot sensory information, and the autopilot will warn me that something needs my immediate attention. Then my focus will return to my external qualia. Instinctive responses, like slamming on the brakes, may be activated.
And I have limited control over my autonomic processes like breathing.
> Do you seem to have an observer watching the external and internal phenomena?
Yes, I do. I haven't meditated deeply enough to know if what I consider "me" (the Self) is the same as this observer. I understand that Buddhist philosophy says that turning your own attention recursively inwards will eventually burst the illusion, but my meditations have been too shallow to really confirm this. Regardless, this observer does seem to be part of the Executive centres of my brain, as opposed to my more "animal" passions.
> it's a separate identity from the rest of the mind and the external world
This is interesting. Perhaps I haven't looked closely enough at what is doing the observing. It's always felt identical to "me".
> I also have an autopilot mode where I can get lost in my memories or imagination while doing some activity like driving. The attention manager feeds my autopilot sensory information, and the autopilot will warn me that something needs my immediate attention. Then my focus will return to my external qualia. Instinctive responses, like slamming on the brakes, may be activated.
That does sound like the Default Mode Network, which is the part of the brain that does the "autopilot" type stuff as opposed to the Task Positive Network, which is engaged when one's in flow, deep work or concentration, etc.
Let's stress test this proposed non-moralizing explanation for why middle class birth rates are often lower than lower class birth rates. (And no, the answer isn't "because of welfare." If that's your working theory, pull your head out of the sand and look at a calendar. It's not 1990 anymore, and there were drastic cuts to cash welfare)
The explanation:
Middle class financial insecurity helps push down birth rates. Not financial hardship, per se, but INSECURITY. The poor have nothing and don't expect that to change, so for them, the financial stakes of family formation are lowish.
But the middle class have a bit of money and the stakes are higher for them. They are desperate to cling to what social status they have and not become downwardly mobile.
Expanding on your idea, I believe it is delay preference - middle class people are more likely to expect their situations to improve substantially from their 20s to their 30s, so they tend to delay having children and have fewer on average due to later age of first birth.
Lower income people (and developing countries) have less relative difference based on age, so they are more likely to start having babies earlier.
Lyman stone has put out a few posts arguing that lower fertility is caused by declining marriage rates, and by people marrying later. (https://substack.com/@lymanstone/p-176142174). If true, then it would make sense why middle class birth rates would be lower: middle class folks are very likely, for cultural reasons, to wait until they are married before having kids, while lower class people are more likely to have children out of wedlock.
Yeah, I'd guess this is a major thing. Assuming you live in a social context where you would very much not like to have children without being married (and birth control + abortion give you a lot of control over that), my intuition is that age of marriage has a huge impact on average number of kids. A woman marrying at 25 is likely to have more kids than a woman marrying at 35 for straightforward biological reasons; a woman who marries at 40 is probably going to struggle to have one kid.
> A woman marrying at 25 is likely to have more kids than a woman marrying at 35 for straightforward biological reasons; a woman who marries at 40 is probably going to struggle to have one kid.
To a first approximation, you can lay nearly the entirety of the "fertility crisis" here.
Average age at first marriage / child is 30 / 31 in the USA and UK now. By the time you're 30, you've burned through ~60% of your cumulative total fertility as a woman. From Geruso, Age and Infertility Revisited:
https://imgur.com/lpADyJs
You literally go from ~60% chance of a live birth per year at 22, to 30% at age 30, 11% at age 40, and 1% at age 45.
You might ask - why are the Geruso age-by-fertility numbers different than the ones you've heard about historically? Broadly, because all modern fertility numbers before Geruso came from fairly positively selected populations,¹ or from a single paper in the eighties, Menken et al’s Age and Infertility (1986), in which he surveys Hutterites in the 1920’s, Geneva bourgeoisie in 1600-49, Canadians 1700-30, Normandy 1760-90, Norway 1874-76, Iran 1940-50, and Americans in the 1930’s.
So, limited data from vastly different time periods than today, in a profoundly different environmental, pollution, and diet regime.
So to get a better read on it, Geruso combines nationally representative data from 62 low and middle income countries that span Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, with a 2.8M women sample size, and then use that to calculate a true “fecundability” curve using only women who are married, not on contraceptives, not currently pregnant or breastfeeding, and having periods.
His numbers are a lot closer to the truth than the other ones, IMO, and they paint a really grim picture of the fertility impacts of waiting until you're thirty to start thinking about marriage or babies. (And there's decent arguments his numbers are STILL too high, given obesity trends and worse diets in developed countries).
________________________________________________________________
¹ Many more recent (2000+) numbers are from the European Study of Daily Fecundability, in which 782 couples were tracked for a couple of years, and the resulting 487 pregnancies in the study period were used to build a statistical model with similar age curves as Menken et al created. Participants are a highly selected population (Europeans age 18-40 who specifically eschew contraception and never use condoms, and attend “Natural Family Planning” centers, from which they were recruited. Additionally people who were known to be infertile were specifically excluded, as well as anyone with any illness that might affect fertility. 66% of them had had a past pregnancy before study enrollment - a reasonable estimate of the amount of EU women who’d had a pregnancy by the average age in this study (28-30) is more like 50%.
Another cultural factor, I think, is middle class perfectionism.
Middle class people expect their lives to be perfect, or at least very well optimised. Lower class people are inclined to take what they can get.
So a middle class person will baulk at the idea of marrying the person they happen to be dating at 20... isn't there someone better out there for me? Better to remain single through my twenties... and most of my thirties... so that I don't miss out on a better prospect that I'll meet later on.
This is feminism writ large. At one point, we had churches that would say, at around age 20ish "time to get married" -- and you had your ice cream social, and those were your choices. You got one, and you got married.
Birth rates are mostly driven by social contagion (lots of evidence of this - having friends and families with kids makes you more likely to have kids).
If a girl/woman is typical working class, she'll often work with mothers who are part of her social class as soon as she leaves school at 16 or 18, so it's rapidly seen as something normalised.
If a girl/woman is typically middle class, she'll go to University (where it's considered socially incredibly bizarre to have kids) for 3-5 years, and when she graduates, she's far more likely to enter low-child professions and social circles.
But your point about middle class finances might have some truth, but I'd say it's more that, if you're a woman with a "career" (with progression to higher-status roles), the opportunity cost of kids can seem a lot higher.
I think a big part of it is basically just the marshmallow experiment.
I didn't propose that insecurity was the MAIN cause of anemic birth rates. I guess my question to you would be: is financial insecurity a NON-NEGLIGIBLE cause?
Children also represent a greater financial burden to the middle class. When they think about having a kid probably the first thing they think is "how am I going to afford college". The poors have no such burden.
A data-based counterargument:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-relationship-between-income-fertility
"In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility...."
"there is no cross-culturally stable impact of income on fertility....the relationship between income levels and fertility is not some inherent, objective fact, but rather a cultural product. Foreign-born women don’t seem to condition fertility on income. Native-born whites and Asians do; they have more babies as their income increases. Native-born blacks and Hispanics show the opposite pattern: they have fewer babies with higher income."
After a careful reading, I think your quote implicitly supports the idea that middle class financial insecurity could be a cross-cultural limiter for various national fertility rates! Though not NECESSARILY for America's fertility rate. I'll click the link you posted in a minute, to see if that implication disappears when I read the quote in context.
Putting that question aside, I would ask you: is financial insecurity a significant factor driving down birth rates for white, native-born American citizens?
Not that I am typically concerned about white population decline. It's the overall birth rate that I'm worried about. But this question still matters, because any significant drag on the white population must NECESSARILY be a significant drag on the whole American population.
College, yes, but “how am I going to afford daycare” is an equally burdensome and much more immediate concern.
Yeah, I remember one of my (then-childless) coworkers complaining out of blue about how outrageous daycare costs were, and thinking "well, I think I know what you have planned for the next couple years of your life." (And indeed, she's about to have her first child....)
Simple timing issues may play into this as well. The time to have children is usually when you have a stable career and found a long-term partner. Both probably takes longer the higher your class, as you go to college, maybe do some internships and move a couple of times. Whereas in lower classes its more common to stay were you grew up and start working directly after school. This just leaves more time to get children.
"The time to have children is usually when you have a stable career and found a long-term partner."
That judgement is a non-obvious choice. Search "cornerstone marriage vs capstone marriage".
That judgment is non-obvious to you and me. But at least in the broader American culture, preference for capstone marriage seems to be the dominant modality.
When my mother told people in the community that her daughter was engaged at 20, the responses she received were dominated by shock, disapproval and even pity. As if my mother, who was overjoyed, needed to be consoled about her daughter's poor life choices. And this was in the early Oughts!
P.S. After getting married, my sister graduated from a prestigious nursing school, had 4 kids, and became the wealthiest unretired person in my extended family. Her marriage is still solid after 25 years.
#1.
> I’m very interested in learning more about how well it works
So am I... could you let us know what you find?
Here's a funny thing: Tom Wolfe and Ayn Rand despise leftwing intellectuals: pompous people who pontificate but can’t execute, people who care about status games and not work. This is the common theme in several of Wolfe’s books: that modern art has turned too much towards theory instead of practice. Paintings and architectural styles are celebrated because of what they mean, not because they are beautiful — in fact, beauty is looked down upon: too shallow, too bourgeois.
Yet Wolfe’s dislike of faux intellectualism leads him to mock modern architecture, whereas Ayn Rand’s causes her to make her protagonist in Fountainhead… a modern architect. What are we to make of this?
Much of Rand's criticism of intellectuals is based on "second-handing." Essentially the idea that people ride off of other peoples' ideas instead of engaging their own critical faculties.
In the forward of my version of Fountainhead, Rand criticized architecture that carried forward traditional design elements that were no longer adding value or purpose. Think of the decorative (non-closing) shutters that are common on houses. Or in another context, electric vehicles with radiator grilles. That's the sense in which she liked modern design IMO.
Ayn Rand's architect wasn't a modern architect in the sense of being a follower of the Modernist school of architecture; he was an architect who eschewed the idea of schools of architecture in favor of developing new ways of using new technologies that utilized their own properties to produce inherent beauty. He happened to be a modern architect in the book because the Modernist school of architecture arose out of this very experimentation; if the book were written today, he'd be following whatever schools of architecture are currently doing this kind of experimentation. The point was not about what school of architecture is correct, it was about not pigeonholing yourself into a school of architecture in the first place.
Consider modern, in the sense of new today, architecture; lots of people are very unhappy that other people are buying houses with open floor plans and vaulted ceilings and other characteristics that together are often disparaged as "McMansions". But these new (not so new anymore, but whatever) architectural designs for houses arose because architects started experimenting with new (again, not so new anymore, but whatever) technologies, specifically modern truss construction, which allowed these features to be included in new construction quite cheaply, whereas with previous technologies these things were extremely expensive.
It's not quite innovation in the sense that vaulted ceilings never existed before, mind, but it is innovation in the sense of using new(ish) technologies in ways that emphasize their inherent qualities.
I think it's a good demonstration that many things we think of as traits are actually not deep structures that manifest across multiple contexts. Wolfe and Rand have in common being despisers of leftwing intellectuals, and being contemptuous of bragging and other status driven behavior. So they might agree fairly well about some new writer whose subject was leftwing intellectual stuff, and what is an admirable way to live. But take an entirely different context, such as architecture, and their views are far apart, even though each may be making the case to themselves and others that their views about architecture flow naturally from their big takes about life and political stance.
When people have a neurological disorder that makes them do random things, or leaves them with memory gaps, they sometimes confabulate -- they come up with a story that explains anomalies and fills gaps, and they are not aware that it is not true. I think we all do something similar regarding ourselves and others, driven by our need to believe we and other people are consistent and in control in ways we are not. The idea that we or someone else has traits that cut across categories and explain a lot of what the person thinks and does is in that category. It's not really true, but it satisfies our need to feel that people make sense and are predictable.
There are not many real traits, i.e. regularities of a certain kind that show up across most realms of life. Intelligence is the best example of one I can think of at the moment.
leftwing??
sry, mean to type despisers of them, just corrected
Hahah fair enough, thought you had a very wild take on what Left and Right means. I think I sort of agree with you, but I would say that I there *is* a deep structure in Wolfe's thinking - the one you identify: it it's not about art per se, it's about people: as you say, he despises status-driven behaviour. But he ends up disclaiming any art that's part of a canon that's favoured by people seeking status. This is ironic, because one of his problems with modern art is that it's all about theory and not practice - but he himself ends up rejecting artworks because of the theory to which they belong, rather than evaluating on their own merits.
Rand was writing in the early 1940s when the modernist-sounding ideals that Roark espouses had barely been tried.
Wolfe was writing in the 1980s when they had already been tried and failed.
Roark's style isn't really modernism, it's some kind of brilliant hyper modernism that does away with unnecessary ornamentation but still makes every building both functional and beautiful. (Unless you watch the movie in which case he's clearly just building concrete boxes.)
Modernism is older than the 1940s. Concrete goes back to the Romans, and plate glass to the Victorians
Modern architecture is thought of as two things --using new materials, and avoiding decoation -- .that don't have to go together.
People dont unconditionally love decoration. The high Victorian style of clutter never came back. The Victorians invented plate glass, but combined it with fussy decoration in the form of acid etching.Everyone now prefers big plate glass windows to leaded lights.
The art deco and streamline moderne styles, with their restrained levels of decoration, are a hundred years old ,still look modern, and still look good. That was a modern style that was an aesthetic success. (Not always a practical success -- Fallingwater and Villa Savoye proved uninhabitable).
Brutalism rejects , rather than restrains, ornament, but isn't synonymous with modern architecture. Plain brick or wood surfaces are compatible with brutalist principles , and aren't objectionable. What people hate is unpainted concrete.
Well Wolfe was responding to actual modern architecture. Is that what Roark was specifically building? Seems to me his architecture style was just a metaphor for individualism or some such, not a commentary on literal architecture styles.
Except he rallies against ornament - fluted columns and other unnecessary decorations
The model for Roark was Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand personally liked art deco and craftsman architecture and expressly disliked brutalism (she called it "concrete collectivism"). I think what's going on is that Rand and Wolfe were responding to different eras and so "modern" means different things to each of them.
You can take the Russian out of the Soviet, but you can't take the Soviet out of the Russian. Ayn Rand was simply a modernist-rationalist turboprogressive who happened to be anti-Communist due to her experiences of being crushed by the gears of Communism, so she decided to utopize laissez-faire free enterprise instead. Tom Wolfe, in contrast, was sane.
One of the more annoying Objectivist-isms is the insistence that Rand was a creature of pure reason, and that her views weren't colored by growing up in a bourgeoisie family during the communist revolution, being an immigrant, or being Jewish in WASP America.
On the other hand, telling people about this amazing female immigrant author you discovered, then handing them a copy of Atlas Shrugged, is an enjoyable troll.
Actually I side more with her here... tom wolfe seems to reject everything and anything to do with modern art.
The trouble with Wolfe is that he was only familiar with NYC art culture, which was a small subset of worldwide art culture. And even in the heyday of philosophical art (the 1970s and 1980s), plenty of US and British artists were producing conceptually *new* art using realist techniques. Wolfe thought that Abstract Expressionism was the last style that could evoke feelings in the viewer. And from his narrow perspective, he was right. Meanwhile, South American and Latin American art went off in two different directions. European Artists eschewed most of the American (NYC) Art movements, and they went their own way. After the Berlin Wall fell, classically trained Soviet era artists found new freedom to express themselves using the techniques they were trained in before the Wall fell, revitalizing German Art.
In his own way, Wolfe was just as pretentious as the critics and artists he mocked. Even when he left his Manhattan environs he brought his Manhattan-infused outlook with him.
I don't think pretentious is a fair word here. He knew a lot about a part of the universe of art-making, and lost track of the fact that it was just one part. Most people have some of that going on.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. However, I've noticed a subtle cultural arrogance among New York City intellectuals. I don't want to go all Ted Cruz on you, but there was some truth to Saul Steinberg's cartoon map of the US in relation to New York City...
https://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/
That's not to invalidate any of Wolfe's criticisms (though I might disagree with many of them). It just puts them in context of a wider cultural feeling.
Well, he loved the kid in Oklahoma or somewhere like that who turned his car into a kandy-colored tangerine flake streamline baby. And he quoted scornfully some mock-impressed ironic articles about the kar, commenting that “what they’re really saying is ‘don’t worry, these people are nothing’”
Well, that's just because anything and everything to do with modern art is shit. When something's irredeemable garbage, the only sensible thing to call it is...
Yes. The Impressionists ruined Art forever. In fact, Western Art began to lose its way back in the 16th century with the Mannerists, who stretched and twisted their subjects out of normal proportion. Disgusting! Of course, before the Mannerists, we had to deal with icon-infested paintings of the papists. So, I suppose Art has been going downhill since Cro-Magnon cave paintings.
What are you defining as "modern art" here? I happen to like a lot of (but not all) modern art and architecture.
Uh, if it doesn't seem like an intuitive category to you, let's go with "every single thing painted after Bouguereau". That way we'll be sure not to miss any of the gangrenous tissue.
"Yet Wolfe’s dislike of faux intellectualism leads him to mock modern architecture, whereas Ayn Rand’s causes her to make her protagonist in Fountainhead… a modern architect. What are we to make of this?"
I think that there are several flavors here.
Focusing on Ayn Rand I believe (?) that:
*) She would have disliked Art Nouveau
*) She did like Art Deco (e.g. Empire State Building)
*) She would have disliked Brutalism (e.g. Soviet Block Housing)
Did Wolfe dislike both Art Deco *and* Brutalism, just Brutalism or something else?
I don't know about brutalism specifically, but her protagonist in Fountainhead is very much against ornamentation.
That's what I remember, too. It's been a very, very long time since I tried to read Fountainhead, but I recall Roark's buildings being described as sleek, functional, devoid of useless decorative aspects, and feeling like natural extensions of the landscape. I've heard interpretations that Rand was describing something very much like Frank Lloyd Wright's style, which seems to fit from what I recall of the descriptions.
The issue is complicated by the fact that Anglophone conservatives traditionally had affinity with WASP culture, even if they were atheist. And Protestants traditionally valued plainness and simplicity.
At least online, it seems the most passionate proponents of "Make Architecture Great Again" are Catholics. A cynic might speculate that they are truthfully concerned less with aesthetics, and more with perpetuating a 500 year old grudge. And with providing (thin) justification for the Vatican's unbiblical opulence and luxury.
Well it could be cultural Catholics or even anglicans who prefer a cathedral to a Protestant barn. Actually scrap that - the whole world does. Visitors to Europe from Asia aren’t rushing to see the Korean Protestant church building in Malmö.
I don’t think Anglos are as hostile to ornamentation as all that either. The Republic was a blip.
I'm not entirely sure how tongue-in-cheek that last part is, but it just makes me even more triumphant that the Plain Protestant Bible-Only simplicity of the Crystal Cathedral has fallen into the hands of the Ornate Papist Hispanics and Vietnamese of Orange County, Darn Them! 😁
https://www.christcathedralcalifornia.org/
https://melavangoc.com/en/
Not tongue-in-cheek at all. I don't feel inclined to change my view based on learning about the Crystal Cathedral. I've been to a Protestant cathedral before and of course they are highly ornate, how could a cathedral be otherwise? But there few cathedrals in the non-Anglican Protestant world. I'm still inclined to think that Protestant churches are less ornamented on average.
Protestants were once against excessive ornamentation but I think they were well and truly over it by the Victorian era.
Nah. Anglicans might have gotten over it, to a large extent. But just compare your average Protestant church to your average Catholic church in terms of ornamentation.
OMG. I just snorted my coffee. However, I suspect you may be onto something, though.
Tom Wolfe was a temperamental conservative while Rand was a counterrevolutionary against statism of any kind.
The two things of his I've read were "The Right Stuff" and "A Man in Full". From those at least, I definitely see both strong areas of agreement and disagreement between him and Rand.
Wolfe and Rand both seem to hero-worship extremes of individual talent and skill as well as physical and moral courage, and both of them admire accomplishments that stem from combinations of these while despising or disdaining people whom they see as coasting parasitically on the virtues and efforts of others. Both of them also have strong normative themes about how people should take responsibility for their own lives and not expect the world to owe them anything.
The big area of disagreement is, as you say, Rand being a minarchist counterrevolutionary while Wolfe is merely temperamentally conservative. If Rand had written The Right Stuff, it would have been a morality tale about the evils and folly of tax-funded megascience, probably focused on the Apollo 1 disaster instead of the successful Mercury program.
If she did A Man in Full, the changes would have been more subtle but also more fundamental: the bankruptcy plot might have been driven by government oppression (probably tied in with the Atlanta politics plot in a very different way than how Wolfe wrote it) rather than Croker's bad luck and moral failings, Conrad would have discovered Objectivism rather than Stoicism in prison, and the ending would have been framed as leaving the looters and moochers to clean up their own mess rather than as a flawed man standing up and accepting the consequences of his own mistakes.
Wolfe was witty and could be enormously funny. Rand had no sense of humor at all.
NASA invited Rand to witness the Apollo 11 launch, and she wrote one of my favorite short essays on it:
https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-11/
Thank you for that. It's been a while since I've read any of her essays, and I'd forgotten how much more nuance she was capable of in short-form writings at least than she's usually given credit for. From what I recall, I mostly preferred Nathaniel Brandon's essays to Rand's in the essay collection books I'd read ("Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" and "The Virtue of Selfishness"), but Rand also had her moments especially when talking more about object-level issues than when trying to articulate grand philosophical concepts in the abstract.
My first instinct for how she'd handle writing something like The Right Stuff was pretty much the notes she actually hit in that essay: lauding the triumph of human endeavors, the skill of the engineers and the courage of the astronauts, while also intensely disliking that it was a government project decreed by politicians and paid for by coercively taxation. But then I second-guessed myself while thinking mostly of what I remember of her novels that I've read (Atlas Shrugged and the first half of Fountainhead, although it has also been many, many years since I read those).
I think Rand's polestar was human accomplishment, and putting a human on the Moon with 1960s-era technology was an absolutely incredible achievement. She might have preferred a different funding model or a different management structure, but the accomplishment was still amazing.
It's like you can be amazed at the accomplishment of building the Taj Mahal or the Sistine Chapel even without loving the underlying religious or social beliefs of the people who built them.
“A Man in Full” introduced me to Stoicism. It’s very underrated IMO.
Agreed, and it was also a major introduction to Stoicism for me. I was familiar with very basic concepts of Stoicism before, from Roman history and from some of Harry Turtledove's novels, but A Man in Full explored it in quite a bit more depth. I'd first picked up the book expecting high-finance intrigue, based on a blog I read posting a long excerpt from the "saddlebags" scene, and was surprised but not disappointed to find the book covering more philosophical themes as its primary focus.
This tracks. At least I know that "The Bonfire of the Vanities" didn't feature any apparent structural critiques of our society. What it did lampoon was rap lyrics and liberal race baiters, along with entitled rich people.
Is there some sort of forum, group, etc. that collects individual experiences from healthcare systems across the world? I read a lot about the American one here, but I realize I do not know much about the ones in other countries.
I feel like having some knowledge about what works and what doesn't, and what people are actually struggling with in their daily lives, would go a long way to inform one's opinion of healthcare systems.
A too common opinion is "burn it all to the ground and rebuild it". But seeing how other places do things can be helpful to find alternative and avoid pitfalls.
As an example, I have been having some knee problems, and it went like this:
* My GP prescribed me an MRI and some bloodwork to check for potential problems.
* I got an appointment with an MRI center. I chose one next to my place. They had same-day availability but they are allowed to charge a supplement on top of the "social security price" of the exam. Places without a supplement have a longer waiting time.
* The day before, they sent me a message with some instructions and a price range depending on the exact exam (€150 to €162).
* On arrival, they gave me a quote: €150 (about €50 covered by the socialized healthcare and about €100 of supplement, reimbursed by my private health insurance I have through my work).
* After the exam was done, I paid and they gave me the forms I had to send to the social security agency to be reimbursed (it is less and less common; most of the time it is done automatically).
* On my way back, I stopped by a lab and showed them my bloodwork prescription. They told me it could be done now. This time, I didn't have to pay upfront, as they are connected to the system and are directly paid by the public healthcare and my health insurance.
* I received my results by email a few days later.
* I went to see my GP again. She prescribed me some physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medication, and paracetamol.
* I went to the pharmacy, gave them my prescription, and got the paracetamol and anti-inflammatory. As long as I accept the generic version, I pay nothing (I would have to pay if I wanted the brand name).
* -> CURRENT STEP: I have an appointment with a physical therapist.
you could look at digital nomad-communities (e.g. r/digitalnomad/ ). They talk about cities all over the world and they compare quality of life there, though I am not sure they have much information on healthcare specifically. But you can definitely ask your question there, and people in different parts of the world will answer.
I hadn't thought about that ! I'm pretty sure discussion about healthcare would come up frequently as it would be a common concern when moving into a new country.
However, I was most interested in the "typical experience", and being an expat would be too much of an edge case to truly represent how the healthcare "feels like" in a given country.
>Is there some sort of forum, group, etc. that collects individual experiences from healthcare systems across the world?
American here. Such a thing would be of interest to me as well.
Thank you for the example of your own experience. Which country were you in, and what does "Social Security" mean there? Here, Social Security is our federal system of tax-funded pensions for retirees and disabled people. I'm vaguely aware that in Britain, Social Security is some kind of program for unemployed people. The way you're using the term, it sounds like in your country it's part of the health care system?
That made me curious, so I went and tried to compare :
* US : "In the United States, Social Security is the commonly used term for the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI)"
* UK : "it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers."
* Italy : " The national Institute for Social Security (Italian: Istituto nazionale della previdenza sociale, INPS) is the main public entity and authority of the Italian public retirement system"
* Germany : "Social security in Germany is codified on the Sozialgesetzbuch contains 12 main parts, including the following, Unemployment insurance, health insurance, old age, widow's/widower's, orphans and disability pension insurance, invalidity insurance, child support, social care"
* France : "Social security (French: sécurité sociale) is divided by the French government into five branches: illness; old age/retirement; family; work accident; and occupational disease."
It seems indeed that the term "social security" has a very different meaning in different countries. Personally, I had the french/german meaning in mind : "collective solidarity with the people who need it". In that sense, both pensions and healthcare fall under the term "social security".
I don't know a good site for what you want, but did you see this book review about different health care systems?
http://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the
The post itself mostly covers how the various systems work at large, but the comments do indeed give a long of insights into "how it feels" inside the system. Thanks
Thanks for sharing. If this article is to be believed, there isn't much use in comparing experiences since most will just be the same
Ultimately all medical systems are the same. You get shuttled around from waiting room to waiting room, occasionally seeing a medical professional. Sometimes you get to make a choice, like which doctor to see. Sometimes you have to pay some money.
The only differences between all the medical systems of the reasonably-developed world are the points at which you get to wait, choose, or pay.
Alan R's anecdote probably looks exactly the same in another country except in these details.
Well, maybe the treatment side is similar in most countries, but dealing with the system can be a very different experience in various places.
The comments in the linked post do provide a lot of insights.
Examples :
* Having the price of an exam posted on the door vs not knowing the price until after the exam is done (including being explained why it is "impossible" to have a price beforehand)
* Fighting with your private insurance who tries to argue that an exam is not "medical necessity" vs the medical necessity being assumed when prescribed by your GP (but then the system has to find another way to avoid uneccesary exams?)
* Two-tier system vs equal access to everyone (lots of heated discussion in the comments about that)
People say office vacancies are an issue and advocate for office to residential conversions lately.
But! office space still rents for roughly ten times (in $ per square foot) what residential space does (even in the same location)! It seems like this implies (a) there's more of a shortage of office space than there is of residential space and (b) doing residential to office conversions would raise GDP. It seems like, if we didn't have zoning regulations, there should be residential to office conversions until the converge.
Is this wrong? You can argue that residential space has positive externalities that aren't captured in GDP (although a 10x factor seems really hard to overcome). Would increasing office space downtown really help that much? The number of available workers is already limited by the residential space within commute distance, so arguably it'd just increase commute length/traffic and reduce utility (although if it replaced offices further out of downtown maybe it'd net reduce commutes since location became more centralized). Are there companies that struggle to afford office rent that would be saved by this, allowing them to pay employees more? What would the practical effects be? I am Confused.
This article says that office vacancy rates are at an all-time high. https://www.reuters.com/press-releases/us-commercial-real-estate-crisis-office-vacancy-record-highs-2025-08-25/
And many office-to-residential conversions create condominiums, not rentals. Eg the Flatiron Building. That is going to alter your calculations.
First, a mistaken premise: your median office does not rent 10x (!) per sqft vs a comparable apartment of “equivalent” quality in the same location (block, building). It would be very hard to do a direct comparison here but if you just take national medians and compare naively without considering gross or NNN for the office terms, office rents are 1.3-1.5x residential per sqft (not 10x). Capex is a factor, lease lengths are different (res much more liquid), and you should not compare naively w/o understanding terms.
In areas where the juice is worth the squeeze and it’s permitted, such conversions are done. But the rest of your argument/question seems to be based on ignorance of the market.
I was looking specifically in Manhattan, which has been doing office to residential conversions lately. Sounds right that this is reversed in some areas though
Specifically in Manhattan, office rents are like 70$/ft/yr which is like a 650sf 1BR at $3800 a month.
You really have to look at the type of real estate.
NYC has had an explosion of office to residential conversions recently, and has had record high office vacancy. Class A office space (newer with nicer amenities) has low vacancy and high rents, whereas class B and C has much higher vacancy rates. All those older buildings are the ones being converted to residential when they’re due for a complete remodel anyway.
Residential to office conversions just wouldn’t happen, since you wouldn’t really be creating class A office space, but sort of a weird class of oddly designed space as a result of its residential legacy. You’d end up with really high vacancy rates almost immediately.
Office to residential conversions work (at least in this market) because even with strange layouts you will fill the residential units instantly.
The square foot of residential isn’t 1:1 comparable with office either. With residential to office conversions usually resulting in 1.5-2x the rentable space. This is due to weird ways that office often counts square feet compared to residential, not actual increases is sqft available.
Your NYC description is exactly the situation underway in Chicago's Loop. Several such conversions have been completed in the past couple of years (one is across the street from where I'm typing this and it filled within weeks of completion). A dozen or so more are in different stages of implementation, another dozen proposed are in the approvals process. All are 50- to 100-year-old class B or C buildings of locally-medium size (25 to 45 stories, converting to 150 to 400 dwelling units each).
The class A buildings, which are larger and younger, are sticking with the office uses for which they were designed and built. Google is doing the only sizeable office renovation/overhaul for business uses that I'm aware of in the Loop. _New_ residential construction meanwhile is booming mostly surrounding the old Loop business district proper [which depending on whose definition you like is roughly 4/5ths of a square mile].
The above is part of why Chicago's "Central Area" as defined by the city planning department [an area of about 6 square miles not counting its public spaces] has gone from around 80,000 residents in 2005 to 185,000 now and the planners project 300,000+ by 2045. It's also obviously a big part of the city as a whole's per-household median income, in constant 2023 dollars, rising from about $62K in 2013 to about $76K now.
Yeah, besides NYC, Chicago is the place I would imagine this to a growing thing. Maybe Toronto or Philadelphia too.
You need growing cities with high residential rents that have had skyscrapers for ~70+ years with a lot of new Class A office space. The old office space that would be due to a remodel anyways can't possibly hope to compete with the newer developments, so converting to residential, where people will pay a premium for location becomes a good idea.
I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on a massive redevelopment (I think the biggest in the world) in FiDi which had some really impressive amenities for what it is. The CEO of the company that led the development has been doing conversions for years, and he was telling us that it was a relatively small business until like ~8 years ago. Now everyone was lauding him for his foresight, but he was really humble about how he had no idea the demand was going to increase so much.
There have been a couple of good sized examples of this as part of Detroit’s downtown revival as well.
Until just a couple years ago I was hearing plenty of skepticism of this ever working at any kind of scale, because those office buildings of course were not built with the plumbing or layouts suitable for residences. Anybody who’s been through any sort of home remodel knows what an expensive headache plumbing changes in particular can be so looking at a 40-story 1920s building…yikes. Also those early-20th-century buildings tend to have more unmovable interior elements (columns etc).
It does now look though like the few such as the guy you spoke with were correct that those challenges can be overcome at plausible cost, cause it’s happening.
It doesn't have to be cheap, it just has to be (a) cheaper than building a new apartment tower, and (b) in a location where there's demand for apartment towers.
At the extreme end of this, in Sydney they turned a 28-storey commercial building from the sixties into a 67-storey apartment building, taking away everything except the frame and building a new building cantilevered on top of it https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/greenland-centre-sydney-tallest-residential-tower
I'm not an expert but I've rented commercial office space. It seems that the vast majority of landlords would rather have space sit empty than decrease the price, because somehow the terms of their loans are tied to the price per square foot rather than actual leasing revenue. Instead when supply and demand want a lower price you get arrangements that transfer some value back to the customer without changing the price per square foot: free rent, buildout costs (these can be enormous; residential renters don't usually basically rebuild their apartment), etc. But you also see empty space.
I read a few articles on this a few years back. The articles might even be correct!
One such article (with the same basic point as the others is this):
https://postsuburban.substack.com/p/why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant
The key takeaway from the article is: "The short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it."
That was interesting. So it is both in the interests of the building owner and the bank to pretend that the building is able to generate more income (i.e. is worth more) than it actually is.
While I am sure that there are many situations where it is in one market participant's interests to distort the market, I am very skeptical that there exists a situation where that will be in the best interest of everyone. Basically, balance fraud is never a victimless crime, there is always someone who risks losing if things turn out badly, and typically that someone is not even aware of the fraud.
Here, that someone would be the other customers of the bank. On top of that, not letting the market determine the effective allocation of resources will let to a poorer allocation of resources -- businesses paying more rent than they should while office space is rotting empty.
Personally, I would question if we need banks in the real estate investment market at all. I can get a home owner wanting to finance their home. I have a lot less understanding why someone who founds a company renting office space would need a bank loan. After all, few people would look at the real estate market in cities and say that the main problem is a lack of liquidity.
So if you want to buy a 20M$ office building, but only have 4M$, the obvious solution is to pool your money with other investors and buy 4M$ worth of shares in some company which holds the office building. The share price is defined by the market, if you announce that the rents you collected are only 500k$ instead of 1M$ last year the market will adjust the price of the company, and it will be in your interests to lower the rents enough to get high occupancy. Capitalism as it should work.
If you want higher profits than that, you can just leverage your investment. Find a bigger office space company (say 100M$ market cap), and find some bank which is willing to lend you 16M$ against 20M$ worth of shares. If your shares drop to 16M$, the bank will just sell them for you to secure their loan, and you will be fresh out of 4M$. As it should be.
--
My other idea on how to solve this is that this weird market behavior is a consequence of the lack elasticity of land.
If instead of investing in real estate, you had used your 4+16M$ to buy some other business, say a restaurant, then you would not want to to pay interest on a business which is unprofitable for decades, because your frying pans will depreciate on that time frame, if they do not pay for themselves in ten years, they will never pay for themselves. So instead you declare bankruptcy as soon as you are convinced that you can not turn it around rather than pumping in money to keep it afloat forever.
But with land, it seems always likely that you can sell it for a decent amount if you just wait long enough. So even if your office building is never going to turn a profit, it will also not be a complete write-off.
The solution here is of course a Georgist land value tax. If all the gains from the unimproved land are taxed at 100%, then the price of unimproved land should go to zero. If it is common knowledge that this price is zero, and will remain zero, then rents are the only reliable way to turn a profit from real estate. Granted, a building will probably depreciate slower than a frying pan, but if it you can not earn its price from rents in a few decades, then you overpaid.
>"While I am sure that there are many situations where it is in one market participant's interests to distort the market, I am very skeptical that there exists a situation where that will be in the best interest of everyone."
Skimming the article above, it looks to me like the building operator & the bank are collaborating to avoid regulatory thresholds that would force greater realized losses than the unrealized losses they're collectively sitting on.
If so, then without the regulatory requirements we'd probably see more intuitive behavior in commercial real estate.
Book recommendation, “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us” by Carole Hooven. I finished this book a few days ago. This book is profound, I keep coming back to it. It might be the most important book on human sexuality that I’ve read ever. (I said might.) The author has a voice that appeals to me, frank and funny. As a male the book is about T, testosterone. The hormone that has set the tone of my life, and I kinda wonder what life would be like if I wasn’t getting a hit of T every 100 minutes or so. What is life like on the other side? Anyway it’s a book I’d like more people to read so we can talk about it.
I'm going to read this, based on your recommendation.
It's horribly obvious what a pronounced effect hormones have on us; as I get older and their effects weaken their vice-like grip a bit, it becomes more and more obvious to me just how much sway they have over our choices and our lives.
Best to get at least a little bit educated on the matter!
Some of the most interesting stories are near the end of the book where she talks about people who have transitioned, going on and off testosterone. But read the whole thing, it's fascinating.
Haven't read this book so I can't comment on its quality, but as a general note I recommend taking pop-sci books with a grain of salt.
If you want to find out what it's like to not have the acute effects of testosterone, it is safe enough to take something to suppress it for a day. You probably won't notice any differences, though.
Well hardly pop-sci, Carole Hooven was a biologist at Harvard till she was 'cancelled'. She taught a course on hormones for years.
Pop-sci is science targeted at a general audience. Pop-sci books have an unenviable track record for accuracy.
It's not often the author's fault, more so that research in biology (and other fields) rarely lends itself to stories that sell, so some compromises between accuracy and a coherent narrative are inevitable. Holes are papered over, uncertainty is downplayed, just-so stories are told. Well-written pop-sci can be educational to a general audience, but at risk of elitism, most people in this forum seeking to seriously understand a topic can do better.
Once again, I'm not familiar with this book or its author, so I make no specific criticisms. But I've read enough pop-sci to know "I read this book a few days ago and it transformed my understanding of [topic as massive as sexuality]" is a red flag. Pop-sci is really good at making you feel like you've read something incredibly profound, regardless of how well its claims hold up under scrutiny. That's what it's optimized to do. I'd recommend looking up some criticisms of the book to get a more even picture.
(And maybe you'll think it through and come to the conclusion that Hooven is 100% right about everything and a total genius, I don't know, and I have no horse in this race. Just chill out a bit first, I've gone through this cycle too often when I was younger).
Whatever dude, the last 1/3 of the book are references for what she writes in the chapters. No one is 100% correct and Carroll does a decent job of telling you where she sees holes in how she understands things. I guess I would just suggest you gain a little more knowledge yourself before you criticize wildly. You should take the book as it is, not in regards to my opinion of it. But please don't read it.
Scott has written about cost disease some years ago:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/
Have there been any updates? Did the costs continue to increase at roughly the same rates or has it gotten better/worse? Are the reasons better understood now?
I cannot find links now, but tuition in the US has gone down in real terms compared to a few years ago, mostly due to weaker demand, as there are fewer 18-years-olds and the wage premium has decreased. I believe this trend started before Trump's crackdown on immigration and universities.
Thank you!
Many, MANY people confound the "sticker price" with the "actual price" of tuition. Basically, there are discounts for being smart or poor, only people who are dumb and rich are paying full price. Harvard's _actual_ price is ~$15k/year
"Many, MANY people confound the "sticker price" with the "actual price" of tuition."
True, and important, though also not nearly so simple. My spouse being a full-time consultant to families on this, deploying her decades of high-level experience in college admissions, I've gained by osmosis an updated data-driven understanding of the topic.
Harvard's example is roughly illustrative of how it works at most of most-difficult-to-get-into colleges. Harvard's current all-in sticker price is currently around $82K/year.
The actual cost of attending Harvard varies drastically. It is zero for students coming from households with incomes under [as of this school year] $100K/year.
For families with household incomes in the 100K to 200K range the actual cost is anywhere from one-sixth to one-third of sticker price.
For families of 200K to 500K household income it is between half and two-thirds of the sticker price.
For households above that, and all international students, the cost is basically 100 percent of sticker price with some extremely-niche exceptions.
So while it's accurate that a simple averaging of the current student body puts the cost of attending Harvard College at around $20K/year/student, a simple averaging doesn't very well describe the picture.
Worth noting that Harvard, like hundreds of other US colleges, has become much more transparent about this question: they all now have online "net-price calculators" which anyone can use to get a pretty-good estimate of actual net cost if you get in. Then can come some negotiation though in this specific example likely not, as the Harvards/Yales/Stanfords for obvious reasons will negotiate only with a very-tiny minority of the most-unique admittees. Starting not far down the college food chain though there is more negotiation than I'd ever known or than most parents assume.
[Also my wife would insist I note that none of the above applies to any level of graduate school at the elite institutions as she knows firsthand.]
I honestly think it's amazing that we HAVE GOTTEN the world we wanted, in which the rich subsidize the poor and/or smart... and yet everyone whines about it
In my experience, elite schools, don’t typically offer merit scholarships because they don’t have to. There is a rather large contingent of students who are too rich to be poor, but not rich enough that their parents can easily pay the massive tuition bill.
That seems very unlikely, considering the financial background of the average college student, let alone the average Harvard student.
This used to be available on a federal website, but this is 3rd party based on the same data:
https://www.tuitiontracker.org/schools/harvard-university-166027
Sticker price is $93k, but average price is <$20k; for families making under $30k it's only $3200 per year
You should probably revise your impression of what kinds of people go to Harvard... "diverse student body" genuinely is one of their goals.
And again I'll note that none of this is being treated as a trade secret any more. The list of colleges that have put a "net price calculator" on their websites continues to grow and now includes lots of large public universities. Here is the running list for the best-established version of that function (there are others):
https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/pay-for-college/get-started/net-price-calculator
Right, I was just providing direct evidence to counter "that seems unlikely"... it might be unlikely, but it's empirically correct.
It's just one of those extremely common misconceptions that I feel obliged to correct, since such a huge chunk of national discourse is so horribly mistaken about it.
WE DID IT! THE RICH ARE SUBSIDIZING THE POOR! We should be shouting this from the rooftops, instead of whining about "astronomical costs" (lol)
I'm curious about ACX Mondegreens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen).
My first was pretty straightforward: unable to make out most of the lyrics of Seven Nation Army, I interpreted the line "taking their time right behind my back" to mean the singer was at the vanguard of the titular army, and that "they're gonna rip it off" was a threat.
One of my coworkers was playing Creedence Clearwater Revival, which led to a discussion in which I learned that I am not the only one who mishears the chorus of Bad Moon Rising--though I was the only one to hear "there's a baboon on the rice" instead of the apparently ubiquitous "there's a bathroom on the right". Mine is a nearer match to the actual lyrics, so I count this as a point for Brenton versus the world.
While playing SSX, my brother and I greatly enjoyed Houdini by Foster the People, which clearly ends in the refrain "get 'em get 'em with a wompa stick".
Say My Name by Odesza has a poignant chorus: "No one knows you better than the girl in the corner with the scarlet letter\you think it doesn't matter, that no one loves you"--
But it's actually much more one-sided than that. I think this interpretation and the Seven Nation Army one are the most telling.
More recently, Take Me to Church is a genuinely dark pop song about a couple going around committing ritual murder, with the chorus "Take me to church [something something] time of your life\so I can tell you my fears and you can show me your knife"--
No, wait, it's just another pop song about oral sex, with the chorus beginning "I worship like a dog at the shrine of delight"--
But really it isn't either of those things.
Finally, we all know Puff the Magic Dragon is a poignant story about loss of innocence, but before that, we get to hear about their adventures: "Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sails\Jackie kept a lookout, perched on Puff's gigantic tail\noble kings and princes would bow wheree'er they came\iron ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name".
A mighty dragon indeed to make even an iron ship turn away! And how delightful to hear the word pronounced "EYE-run" instead of "EYE-urn"--
Except the actual phrase is "pirate ships would lower their flags", which I will admit makes more sense.
Finally, a non-song example, my father and I were very fond of the silly Series of Unfortunate Events film adaptation. "Does Anyone Know You Are Coming This Way", "Is that clock correct?", &c., but most especially the scene in which Captain Sham runs into Aunt Josephine and utters the singular Irish/Newfie "Lard tunderin', jumped-up Jehovah! You don't know how sohrry aye is fer runnin' into yer sister der like none!"
"Like none" in particular struck us as a particularly evocative turn of phrase--there's no one and nothing in the world as sorry as he is--
So of course it's the only part of the sentence we misheard. Our disappointment was immeasurable when, upon watching the film again years later with the subtitles on, we discovered the actual phrase is "like dat".
If you like the Series of Unfortunate Events movie, you'd probably very much enjoy the show on netflix, it's very funny and good. My wife and I watched it for a second time this past winter.
Blue Oyster Cult's "Boorman the Chauffeur" has what always sounds to me like "Starin' down the barrel of a social good"
To this day, I think of Madonna's Spanish Lullaby, in which she sings of a "young girl with eyes like potatoes".
Delicious and nourishing, keeping for a long time?
You're already hearing a lot more lyrics from these songs than I am. I never got anything from Seven Nation Army except that the guy is going to Wichita, cannot be held back by a multinational force, and something about the Queen of England and the Gates of Hell. Everything else is a mumble to me.
I am grieved to have to report to you that the Gates of Hell are not in fact involved in this song. You misheard "hounds of Hell".
Three people in the car once heard Stevie Nicks singing about a dove; one of us heard "white", one heard "wide", and one heard "one". (The actual lyric, of course, is "a wah-winged dove.")
There was also a song on at the grocery store one time (and only one time); I couldn't understand a word of it, but it had a repeating lyric that I'm sure was "Do the Flip, Do the Gender Flip": an interpretation only strengthened by the male rapper getting replaced by a female vocalist during the chorus.
I can't find the song, but there was a song I heard when I was growing up that used the phrase Wishful thinking, and I had just been to a town in the U.P. of Michigan called Ishpeming, I thought the singer was saying the name of the town for some reason.
Two pretty famous ones that I still hear despite knowing what the true lyrics are:
Daydream Believer by the Monkees: "My shaving razors cold, and it sings" (stings)
Blinded by the Light by Manfred Man "wrapped up like a douche" (revved up like a deuce)
I have so many of these there's a good chance there's one for nearly every song I've heard. But just a few off the top of my head:
The Beatles' Michelle--I could have sworn "play piano song" was in the lyrics, I was amazed to search up the phrase and get not a link to the name of the song but to the TVTropes Mondegreen page; apparently the full misheard line is "some day monkey won't play piano song".
O-Zone's Dragonstea Din Tei--there are videos with all the commonly heard lyrics and I had a lot of them myself: "raise the pleasure" "keep her down she's a rather slutty date" "you be the man who mashed the feta cheese".
Okay those two are very common, and also both not in English. More unique to me (I think?):
Bon Jovi's Livin On A Prayer--heard the first line as "tell me you still want coloured ducks"...or something.
A minor one but I thought a line in Alphaville's Forever Young was "so many advantages could have today" (interpreted as Yoda-speak: today could have so many advantages) which I think is more philosophical and poetic and I'm annoyed it's not the actual line.
Another minor one--a thought a line in Abba's The Winner Takes It All was "it's simple and explained, why should I complain?" instead of "simple and it's plain" and I think the first one makes a lot more sense, and fits the metaphor of the song a lot better.
This isn't technically a Mondegreen but: I heard the Black Eyed Peas' Imma Be and I genuinely thought it was about a bee partying and clubbing etc. Kind of weird but no weirder than lot of other thinhs they've done. Was quite shocked to learn it's not actually about that.
I may think of more.
A few more; I mostly only remember the ones that many other people also hear, which is the case for the following:
Taylor Swift's Blank Space--"get along like Starbucks lovers" instead of "got a long list of ex-lovers"
Imagine Dragons' Radioactive--"to make my sister moan" instead of "to make my system blow"
Madonna's La Isla Bonita--"last night I dreamed of some dago" instead of "last night I dreamt of San Pedro".
The best of these is The Unforgiven by Metallica, listened to by French ears, in which case one clearly hears: "nous battons les œufs, et cui-cui ils sont durs"
Which means: "we beat the eggs, and pronto they are firm"
😆
But more sinister, a generation of French grew up hearing KRS-ones "Sound of da police" in La Haine. But they heard "Assassin de la Police" 😬
For a while I thought the end of the first verse of Hallelujah spoke of 'the barefoot king' rather than 'the baffled king'. While I defer to Mr Cohen's superior poetic understanding I still personally prefer my version of the epithet.
Barefoot Kings would be an excellent band name. I'll add it to my list (a topic for another time).
Please post - I'm looking for a good band name.
Already used, but long defunct: Power Tool.
Or how about Long Defunct?
I can't just tell you A Good Band Name. What kind of band? Who are the members? What's your sound? Are you focused on studio recordings, live performances, merch?
The Tentacle Experience would work great for a spiritual successor to Phish (99% of concert attendees never go inside because they're just in it to huff nitrous in the parking lot, but their T-shirts are incredible); you can see how that would be different from Associated Sensations, Certified Destruction, or Beaver Vigil.
I always confused David with the Devil
Not my particular Modegreen (and I was today years old when I learned that word, thank you) and maybe a misinterpretation and not a Modegreen ; but Bob Marley’s No woman, no cry is trying to comfort a woman not support male celibacy.
And "So dry your tears, I say" I always mondegreened as "society, I say". Which given rest of his oeuvre, still made sense.
And now I'm learning that it's NOT about comforting a woman. What's the point of being The Guy with the Weed if you're not also making sure everybody's fed and taken care of?
I replied too quickly. The intended meaning is "Woman, don't cry" not "if you don't have a woman, you won't cry"--which the Wikipedia article notes is a common misunderstanding outside Jamaica.
Reggae has ongoing grammar problems.
I thought it could mean "There is no woman who doesn't cry" or possibly "Anyone who isn't a woman, will never cry".
Yeh. That was my interpretation for a while.
"Maladaptive openness" is a good phrase. I've generally called myself gullible (something which improved greatly after moving to a city and immersing myself in an initially-hostile community), but I think we're struggling with the same thing. Far too easy to say "Yeah, sure, why not?" at times.
In the case of Mondegreens, I sort of cultivated the tendency with a habit my father and I had: whenever we thought we'd misheard the other, we'd repeat whatever nonsense our brains had filled in--a sort of bastardized three-way communication protocol. Anyway, my version is usually better (I don't know what Foster the People are saying, but I doubt it will bring more joy than "get 'em get 'em with a wompa stick").
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently put out a letter condemning Trump's immigration policy:
https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/us-bishops-issue-special-message-immigration-plenary-assembly-baltimore
This should not have surprised anyone, but even I was surprised by the margin the statement was approved by, 216-5! Along with the recent revelations that Jeffrey Epstein was a resistlib, this is just more evidence that people who have a lot of accomplishments in life, from ditzy Hollywood celebrities to Catholic bishops to PhD physicists to Wall Street financiers to Richard Spencer, do not like Donald Trump and his message that everything should revolve around what sounds good to some 92 IQ Iowa trucker.
It should not be surprising that the US branch of an international religious organization, especially a religious organization extremely popular in the countries many immigrants are coming from, is condemning Trump on immigration.
Although I'm in agreement on this, I wouldn't draw any broader conclusions.
Yeah. And the USCCB is *notoriously* to the left of most Catholics *even in the US*, let alone internationally. And the Catholic church, in general, has taken a strong stance in favor of taking care of refugees--it's not alone in that. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (as an example I'm personally familiar with, not as an attempt at cherry-picking, there are likely many more) is, and has been, *strongly* in favor of increased immigration and especially taking in refugees.
>"216-5!"
They could've just said 216-120, but that wouldn't've been as striking. /s
In which case you might as well write 96
Alexander Turok, The best seller on the NYT non fiction list is a plausible tale of our immanent demise at the hands of an Alien intelligence we are spending trillions around the world inventing. If that does not finish us off then we will invent something else that does.
Perhaps Trump has a point, if the educated class has led us into the present quagmire while blaming everyone but themselves, then the truckers and the bricklayers could hardly do worse.
Imagine traveling back 10 years and telling the public that trucker salaries and entry-level programmer salaries are approaching parity.
Isn't that the key to Donald Trump's electoral success: the realization that there are more of latter, and appealing to them at the expense of the support of all the former groups is still worth it?
There's more to it than that. He was able to get through elite gatekeeping systems, such as political parties, that would otherwise keep out a candidate like that. Partly this was good timing (or you could call it luck), partly this was a matter of being excellent at manipulating the media, perhaps his wealth gave him some level of elite credibility, probably some other factors as well.
For what it's worth, I have slowly came to admire the views/actions of the Catholic church, compared to other religious groups (At least in the last century).
Catholic priests, in my experience, have a noticeably lower chance of being *absolutely insane*, compared to your average evangelical.
Of course, I might just be good at dodging the people/history that would make me hate them too.
It could also be some kind of bias.
"Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" [0] is probably my favorite LW post.
TL;DR European-Enlightenment Rationalism is memetically equivalent to AIDS, because it strips people of common sense, which transforms them into religious fundies who take scripture too literally, which makes them go bonkers. In the case of Christianity, this mostly applies to Protestants. But it also noticeably applies to Jihadists. And it dovetails with that one entry's (from the 2024 book-review-contest) observation [1] about how Jihadists take their religion surprisingly seriously. In contrast, there's plenty of Muslims in South East Asia [2] [3], but you generally don't see them blowing up buildings. I also have some similar feelings about e.g. utilitarians/effective-altruists, although the diagnosis isn't quite as bad in these cases.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives
[2] https://scholars-stage.org/radical-islamic-terrorism-in-context-pt-i/
[3] https://scholars-stage.org/radical-islamic-terrorism-in-context-pt-ii/
The US has been mainly protestant for 300 years and it hasn't made us go bonkers. You generally don't see Americans blowing up buildings either.
Here's the key LW passage [0], regarding Jihadism:
> I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam. Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college. (Only 9% had attended madrassas.) A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education. When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they're not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up. But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and comes back with Enlightenment ideas about reason and seeking logical closure over beliefs, and applies them to the Koran, then you have troubles. They have lost their cultural immunity.
Terrorism is just one salient example of many. In my estimation, the craziest stances of both sides of the U.S. political aisle are primarily motivated by Protestantism. E.g. it's been theorized that Wokism is just secularized Calvinism, but I also view Young Earth Creationists (typically rightwing Evangelicals) as also being completely bonkers. The thesis of "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" is that rationality doesn't *guarantee* insanity, but it does remove the guardrails that more-traditional religious denominations had acquired over centuries of memetic adaption. Metaphorically like how AIDS removes antibodies. When Facts & Logic removes Chesterton's Guardrails, anything can happen.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder
There are plenty of religious groups that aren't bonkers, but they don't tend to be newsworthy. As for the Roman Catholics (can't speak to the others) they're a mixed bag. Many of them seem to be relatively sane and humane, but there are the others. And both are constrained by official church policy.
I could also make a list of people with a lot of accomplishments who do seem to like him (like Elon Musk), not sure how much this is cherry picking.
We should look at the average.
There are some clear indications that on average less educated tend to vote for Trump and some less clear indications of cognitive capabilities supporting more left-wing and liberal political beliefs
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/demographic-profiles-of-trump-and-harris-voters-in-2024/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289624000254
However when measuring elements such as intelligence I do suspect a lot of caveats are necessary.
That might have a lot to do with the fact that the left openly disdains the less-educated, while Trump has said that he "love[s] the poorly educated", to much mockery from the left. Also the left likes policies that involve giving free money to highly-educated people.
It seems quite reductive to take a wide trend and connect it to one phrase and a feeling that is not uniformly and clearly expressed the way you represen it.
One could argue that the left disdains the less-educated who want their opinion to be given precedence over the ones of those who know more on the topic.
In many cases this might be regardless of education level but based on field attinence, a greek literature professor who boasts that they should build a nuclear reactor to his specification instead of the nuclear engineer might get the same scorn, even though he is doubtlessly educated, and viceversa.
Going back to Scott's priesthood discourse, I have the subjective impression that the left hates those who ridicule the priesthood without proposing an alternative path, a criticism that can be excessive.
On one side not relying on priesthood (academic knowledge) is impossible, on the other hand it's a severe comunication failure from the priesthood being in a situation where the trust has eroded to sharply. Trump capitalizes on this erosion of trust, but he only worsened it, not created it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods
And no the current leftist policies in the US seem to push more towards giving money to the less educated (more precisely the poor but the two groups tend to overlap).
Trump's tax cuts overwhelmingly benefitted the wealthier part of the population, the medicaid cuts will also harm the poorer and least educated parts of society.
Trump might claim to "love the poorly educated" but his policies substantially harm this part of the population. If it's anything resembling love then it's an extremly selfish love.
I think this is the nearest you're likely to come to say something nice about Catholic bishops (they have a lot of accomplishments in life) so thank you, Alexander 😀
Richard Spencer has a lot of accomplishments in life?
https://xcancel.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1962625882130120854#m
It's been more than two but less than three months since September 1, so I suppose there's still time.
You're talking about him, so yeah.
Not this again, dude.
Does Christian Weston Chandler have a lot of accomplishments because there's so much documentation about him on places like Kiwifarms or Encyclopedia Dramatica?
Throughout the 20th century the best and brightest were various shades of socialists and communists so I doubt their political instincts.
It's funny that you lump together Jeffrey Epstein and american Catholic bishops but it makes sense, they both like them young.
Hey guys i'm making a game (still in development): https://argyu.fun/
The main idea is to have AI judge people's answers to questions and declare a winner. I'm aware that this method of judging has attack vectors.
Anyway there are currently two game variants I care about your feedback on:
1. Quick match -- 1v1 rapid-fire question and answer game with random discussion topics
2. Open Question -- User created questions, many people answer, AI judges all answers in a tournament style algorithm to ultimately arrive at the 'best' answer.
Like I said game is still very much in development, will get a UI/UX overhaul soon as well. And please DM me if you're interested in working on this together, our team is growing quickly.
When I click on that link, I see a login/signup box with no other info or context. Any chance of people being able to, oh, maybe trial a game before making them decide whether they want to start an ongoing relationship with the site?
Updated!! You can look around the site a bit without an account. You'll still need an account if you want to 'play' the game but like I said you can use a dummy email for now if you don't want to use your actual information
Apologies! Any dummy email will work for now as we're not doing email verification yet but will try to push an update shortly to fix this , you're right to complain about this
I've noted before how wokists promise blacks and women jobs in politics, medicine, academia, and the law, while "nationalists" are focused on hooking up their followers with jobs picking crops, hauling equipment, unloading boxes, and digging ditches in the rain. This is a typical example of the genre:
https://x.com/autoadmitdotcom/status/1989367141871882747
The successor to Charlie Kirk should go around college campuses promising students the opportunity to wash dishes for minimum wage. While most of this stuff is depressingly routine, a few of these accounts are more intelligent and creative in their dedication to promising you the worst jobs imaginable. Take the account "Roman Helmet Guy" who demands an end to the H1B visa so that you can have the opportunity to work as an English teacher in the 93% black Jackson Public School District:
https://x.com/romanhelmetguy/status/1989035927990083965
It would be fitting if the GOP, which rose on people's desire to not get stabbed in those kinds of school districts, died based on its desire to get its voters stabbed in those kinds of school districts. Thankfully, President Trump is pushing back against the freaks.
Like other "Roman" accounts on X, Roman helmet guy doesn't have anything like the morality of the real Roman aristocrat, who tolerated homosexuality, had Singerian views on abortion and infanticide, viewed sex with prostitutes as perfectly moral, disdained Judaism and Christianity, and had an aristocratic contempt for manual labor.* In the sophomoric mind on the Roman statue accounts, everyone who lived before 1950 had the same cultural views as Ned Flanders, so the Roman aristocrat is Ned Flanders with big muscles.
*That last thing was bad, to be clear, and may have contributed to the lack of an industrial revolution in ancient Rome. But right-wing poverty fetishists go way too far in the other direction.
>you can have the opportunity to work as an English teacher in the 93% black Jackson Public School District: ... desire to get its voters stabbed in those kinds of school districts.
This is so deeply ignorant that I don't know why you aren't ashamed to say it. Teaching in a 93% black school is challenging, but I know many teachers who do it successfully, and the students there do not go around stabbing people, let alone teachers.
Jackson Mississippi has a homicide rate of 77.24, more than ten times the national rate. I would be very leery about working in a school in a place like that.
https://www.supertalk.fm/weve-still-got-a-lot-of-work-to-do-jackson-murder-total-decreases-for-third-straight-year/
Perhaps I could have phrased my comment better, the point I was trying to make was that the GOP rose on appealing to white people's desire to not be in environments like that, and it would be ironic if it shifted its messaging to "I'll put you in environments like that."
>I would be very leery about working in a school in a place like that.
You'd be fine. The greatest danger you would face would be getting in a car accident on the way to work. Schools simply are not that dangerous (in part because the worst actors tend to drop out, but also because even relatively problematic actors tend to act differently at school than on the streets).
Classic fallacy. You clearly only know the 7% of teachers who escape the stabbings. The multitudes of the stabbed cannot stand up and bear witness until the angels wind their trumpets.
Why double down on foolishness? What is the point?
What? I don't understand this reply, I was making a joke about Turok's ludicrous claims.
Sorry, I did not know you were joking.
Just to be clear, you're saying that being a teacher in a 93% black public school district is one of the world jobs imaginable?
> real Roman aristocrat, who tolerated homosexuality, had Singerian views on abortion and infanticide, viewed sex with prostitutes as perfectly moral, disdained Judaism and Christianity, and had an aristocratic contempt for manual labor.
As a Singarian, I would thank you not to use that term for Romans, patrician or otherwise. As someone who is okay with non-coercive sex work, I would also ask that you do not claim that my position is somehow similar to that of ancient Rome.
My understanding is that brothels in Rome were generally staffed by enslaved people. Whatever divergent modern Western civilization holds on sex work, I think that our consensus on abhorring forced sex work bad is very robust.
Likewise infanticide. For Singer, this is mostly a theoretical point he grants to his opponents, that his arguments for abortion would equally apply to newborns. In practice, it is very much not an issue. Pregnancies are not easily transferable, so the main bottleneck is if a given woman is willing to go through the trouble of spending another eight months and go through a somewhat grueling process to give birth to a potential baby. Once the baby is born, that bottleneck is past, and a large fraction of humanity can take care of a baby. Luckily, in the first world, demand for adoption of newborns outstrips supply, so the problem of having too many babies and not enough food in the orphanage simply does not appear.
Contrast with Rome, again. I think the median infanticide also occurred in the context of brothels. Buying new slaves captured in military conquests is expensive, so the sustainable way to get more enslaved sex workers is to let the enslaved women carry their pregnancies to term. The only problem being that about half of the babies will not make good enslaved sex workers. Sure, some Romans would certainly pay to fuck little boys, but overall the demand for sex workers is very much leaning towards females. So rather than spending the resources to raise male children born to enslaved sex workers, the economic incentives of the owner were to kill these kids after birth and hope for better luck in the next pregnancy. Naturally, it can be assumed that their mothers were consenting even less to their fate than they were consenting to anything else which was happening to them.
In short, the median case of infanticide in Rome was likely some brothel owner snapping the neck of a baby of an enslaved mother over her desperate pleas while telling her to try harder to give birth to a girl next time instead of wasting his resources.
Again, I think that I speak for the central 98% of the Western political spectrum when I say that is this is seriously fucked up.
In short, the past is a foreign country, and as a atheist liberal I would pick the most fundamentalist puritans over ancient Rome any day of the week.
This doesn't make sense. Why would you kill the male slaves when you could just sell them to another slave owner?
Why pay to raise a slave when you could just buy one off-the-shelf?
"You're a dog owner, Hitler was a dog owner, therefore you're like Hitler" is a stupid argument and the way to counter it is to point out how stupid it is, not to tell people not to share factually accurate information about Hitler.
My impression of the median case of infanticide in ancient Rome is different, it was a peasant couple who killed their infant because there wasn't enough food to feed all their children. In ancient Rome this was regarded as a private family matter, a much better attitude than that of Ned Flanders who'd have demanded the starving family pray instead.
The Ned Flanders types benefit from the perception that their ideas are "natural," the "human default" before feminism/the Frankfurt school/etc came along in the 20th century and ruined it. Modern liberals who express a universal abhorrence for the past play into their hands, allowing them to make an exclusive claim on all of Western civilization up to 1940 or thereabouts. As a Nietzschean classical liberal, (not to be confused with the David French types) I think we should point out many classical liberal ideas have a long pedigree, that they're not some new innovation cooked up by a woman's studies professor named Goldbergstein, they're just the natural way of looking at and interacting with the world when you're not hitting yourself over the head with a Bible.
Curious to hear your take on how contempt for manual labour may have partly prevented an industrial revolution. Is there a sense in which the Romans had more contempt than the English?
Is every single comment you write just the same two points (Trump supporters are low class! Abortion is the best thing ever!) slightly rephrased in ten thousand different ways?
I mean, I agree with one of those, but...doesn't it bother you that instead of doing the high-IQ high-class thing (making a philosophical argument for your positions) you do the low-IQ low-class thing (low effort X and reddit links, rants about terminally online drama, rants about the last day's culture war news feed) over and over and over while praising IQ and class? Is there some intended layer of irony here that I'm missing?
>low effort X and reddit links, rants about terminally online drama, rants about the last day's culture war news feed
As I pointed out to Sol Hando below, "Roman Helmet Guy" is getting into arguments with DeSantis and Musk. This is not "terminally online drama," this is how politics works today. As to "culture war" it's what people want, I've done more high-status writing but it doesn't get as much attention:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-garden-of-eden
Maybe you could just settle for not getting much attention, then.
No, I'll continue making a steak out of your sacred cow.
+1
"who demands an end to the H1B visa so that you can have the opportunity to work as an English teacher in the 93% black Jackson Public School District:"
Yeah, I don't think many H1B visa holders are working in high schools. When I look up the education field, it's all universities:
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub
Maybe cool your jets about abortion and the lower classes reproducing too highly when they should all be sterilised so the middle-class and aspirant middle-class can get those fancy jobs instead of the minorities? You are starting to get a little hot under the collar there, Alexander.
School districts do sometimes use H1Bs to fill vacancies in shortage areas. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/behind-the-push-to-exempt-international-teachers-from-a-new-100-000-visa-fee/2025/09
Maybe reading posts from insignificant accounts you don’t like isn’t a good way to spend your time? Trump derangement syndrome makes sense because he’s the president, but caring Roman Helmet Guy is pointless because he has an insignificant amount of followers.
Ron DeSantis and the world's richest man are both interacting with Roman Helmet:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1990029729009947069
https://x.com/RonDeSantis/status/1989468752325611922
For autoadmit he has a few thousand followers, which is like a few hundred real people.
There has to be some sort of fallacy where just because someone important interacted with someone once (to disagree with them) that doesn’t make their other views relevant.
I can agree with the idea that nationalists romanticize manual labor, but pointing to tweets from accounts that don’t really have much, if any, following doesn’t really tell me anything about the sentiment.
I don't understand the point of Epstein's Island. His victims and preferences seemed to be girls ~15-18, with the youngest known victim being 14 IIRC.
16 is the age of consent in several US states, 15 and even 14 in many European countries. It seems... not that hard to just be a creep and have sex with that age range completely legally, in a far more discrete way? Why buy an island and make a whole community around it? I'd understand it if it was children pre teenage, an actual pedo ring would've made sense. But even if it was the coercion or rape that turned these people on, it seems like there would've been far easier ways to do that.
The the underage girls were one of Epstein's hobbies, not his business. His business (and his other hobbies) required him to be in someplace like the Virgin Islands, even if e.g. a mansion in rural Georgia were a safer place for illicit nookie.
The man wanted to A: make lots of money by managing other peoples' money, B: schmooze with the rich and famous so he would become famous and respected instead of just boringly rich, C: enjoy the lifestyle of the rich and famous, D: throw lots of lavish but sleazy parties, and oh year E: surround himself with compliant young hotties. Partly because he enjoyed having sex with them, but also because he thought they were his competitive edge in the "get rich and famous people to come to my parties" game. And note that the parties don't seem to have played a major role in recruiting clients for his business; they also were basically a hobby.
The Virgin Islands, unlike Georgia, gave him an extremely favorable tax status while still allowing full access to US financial markets. "Caribbean" spells "tropical paradise" and thus "place for rich people to kick back and have fun", in a way that Georgia doesn't. And "private island" spells "global elite", where the mansion in rural Georgia would mark one as a big fish in a small pond. Also, "private island" spells *private*. He could develop it the way he wanted, without having to worry about unsightly hoi polloi or low-rent districts just outside the gates. And he could make sure nobody intruded on his elite guests as they kicked back and partied hardy. The Virgin Islands had everything he needed, while Georgia had none of it.
Georgia (or wherever) wouldn't even have offered a safe haven for the illicit nookie. Epstein may have wanted to have sex with 17-year-old hotties, but approximately no 17-year-old wants to have sex with a forty-something Jeffrey Epstein unless they're paid or coerced. Oh, there'd be a few who would do it just for the lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-famous bit, but they'd be hard to sort out from the mercenaries and if he did find one they'd almost certainly have defected to one of his richer and much more famous party guests at the first opportunity.
So, coercion and/or payment. No where in the civilized world, can one legally coerce women into sex, and that's particularly true with minors. And no where in the civilized world can you pay seventeen-year-olds for sex; that's pretty much always limited to legal adults even if the age of consent for nonprofessional sex is younger. If he were willing to limit himself to adult women he'd have more options, but prostitution is illegal throughout the US except for maybe rural Nevada, completely unsuitable for Epstein's purposes, and his financial expertise was tailored to US markets.
I think the best explanation is that Epstein was essentially working for Mossad. Israel is absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of its own self-interest (and fair play to them) and getting blackmail material on rich and powerful US elites is definitely in its self-interest. I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist but I think it's reasonably likely that Epstein was killed by Mossad.
Unless you're going to say that the DC Madam was also working for the Mossad, I think the last statement doesn't follow from the earlier ones. Given Epstein as blackmail artist, he'd have a lot of people gunning for him.
Israel very recently had someone flee an underage prostitution rap in Las Vegas (the John, not the girl). Israel will not extradite.
One man's taboo is another man's fetish for that very reason. If the Aborigines before Westernization had had access to pornhub, I would bet that mother-in-law porn would have been their most searched category.
I think that the product which Epstein was selling his visitors was "We are rich and powerful. We are beyond the laws and morals binding lesser men. Unlike ordinary deviants, we can celebrate our crimes in the open because we are beyond the reach of any AG."
I mean, any millionaire can hire an 18yo escort pretending to be a 15yo school girl getting raped. Or probably even get away with the real thing if he is careful. But the Epstein class thought they could just take the Lolita Express to Pedophile Island because they are untouchable.
Also, underage sex is something the median man can probably be persuaded to partake in if there are peers around who likewise do so. Contrast, for example, with ritual murder, which would make an even better shared secret. But most powerful men just do not have an innate drive to stab some innocent with a dagger, so outside a full-blown cult context, you would have a very hard time to persuade the odd British royal to play along.
Of course, it seems also plausible that Epstein's motive was not to throw very edgy parties for his guests but that what he was really into was blackmailing his guests with video evidence of their misdeeds or something.
> But the Epstein class thought they could just take the Lolita Express to Pedophile Island because they are untouchable.
And they were right. None of them have been charged with anything.
Another interpretation is that the crimes were not prosecuted because they didn't actually occur.
This is about the opposite of "these people kneel at the feet of the Powers that Be", which is what you get when you say "blackmail."
I think my comment got deleted before I could complete my thought. But the Mann Act — It is illegal to knowingly transport someone under 18 in interstate (or foreign) commerce if the intent is that they engage in:
• prostitution, or
• “any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”
Taking a 17 yo girl from FL (where age of consent is 17) to the USVI, where it’s illegal to have sex with 16 or 17 yo teens if one is 5 years older than the teen. So,that would be a Mann Act violation. Also, even though the teens were technically not prostitutes, I believe that current interpretations of US human trafficking laws (I didn’t bother to look up the case law on this though).
Seems like a ridiculous law. So if you drive a woman to Nevada when she is going to take a job at a perfectly legal brothel, now you are a "sex trafficker." Makes about as much sense as the people on the sex offender registry for public urination.
This all goes back to the Mann Act of the early 20th Century. Back then there was a popular perception that white women and girls were being kidnapped and sold in white slavery (and the kidnappers were usually portrayed as coming from darker-skinned ethnic groups). Focused on interstate transportation for “immoral purposes,” and not originally focused on coercion or exploitation, the offense was actually to *travel* across state lines for "immoral purposes." I had thought the Mann Act statutes were still on the books in a modified form, but it was superseded by the current Human Trafficking laws, which aim to prevent exploitation, coercion, and forced prostitution, especially of minors.
Seems these are good laws. Why do you think they're ridiculous?
Under US human trafficking laws, the trafficking must be for the purposes of 1) labor; or 2) a commercial sex act https://www.justice.gov/humantrafficking
A commercial sex act "means any sex act, on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person." So if Epstein or someone else received anything of value, it could be human trafficking, even if the teens were not paid.
Even in countries where sex with minors is legally tolerated, isn't underage PROSTITUTION typically considered a heinous sex crime?
Not to hear all the people who support our intervention in the Ukraine tell it.
(Underage prostitution in the Ukraine is done with kids as young as eleven. It's pretty brutal. If there's one thing Moscow would say no to, it's child prostitution... they're much more into soldier prostitution).
Wimbli Swain, you just can't help it, can you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_prostitution_in_Ukraine
... you want me to provide more sources?
I want you to go shimmergloom yourself with a swain all over November dawn, can you do that for me, Tori?
He seems to have established residency in the US Virgin Islands for tax purposes, and then made the most of owning his own island(s), as well as making useful friends amongst the establishment there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#US_Virgin_Islands
"In 1996, Epstein changed the name of his firm to the Financial Trust Company and, for tax advantages, based it on the island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. By relocating to the US Virgin Islands, Epstein was able to reduce federal income taxes by 90 percent. The US Virgin Islands acted as an offshore tax haven, while at the same time offering the advantages of being part of the United States banking system.
...Epstein owned two islands in the US Virgin Islands: Little Saint James, a private island near Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands purchased in 1998 which includes a mansion and guest houses, and the neighboring island of Great Saint James purchased in 2016.
...In 2023, Attorney-General of the US Virgin Islands Denise George was fired from her job by Governor Albert Bryan Jr. days after she filed charges against JP MorganChase over Epstein and his Southern Trust, which she characterized as a criminal enterprise. The wife of the Democratic governor of the USVI from 2007 to 2015, John de Jongh, was employed by the Southern Trust, in addition to being on the board of directors of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation."
"16 is the age of consent in several US states, 15 and even 14 in many European countries. It seems... not that hard to just be a creep and have sex with that age range completely legally, in a far more discrete way?"
16 is the age of consent in the UK. Allegedly when Virginia Giuffre had sex with Prince Andrew, she was 17. He denies this happened but did settle a lawsuit with her.
That "but she was legal here" doesn't matter, as you may see from the stripping of his titles etc. due to the scandal around Epstein.
https://theconversation.com/prince-andrew-stripped-of-all-titles-after-virginia-giuffres-memoir-her-family-declares-victory-267751
Does that help answer your question about "why would a guy who liked 'em young have his own private island/resort"?
Apart from the fact that he was making himself out to be wealthy (more wealthy than he seemingly was) and important and influential, so "I have my own private island" was the sort of cachet he needed in those circles.
"(more wealthy than he seemingly was)" - is it a settled matter how wealthy he was? That seems to be one of the elephants in the room that hardly anyone talks about. Apparently the man played with massive amounts of money, but no one knows where they came from, and how, and no one with the authority to subpoena bank records has bothered to look into it. Funny, no?
Per Forbes. and wikipedia and other sources, Epstein's net worth at the time of his death was ~$600 million. This is consistent with his lifestyle, e.g. the private island and New York mansion, the fancy jets, the lavish parties, etc. If there's any hidden fortune beyond that, nobody has been able to find it. And it would be quite out of character for Epstein, who preferred showing off his wealth to hiding it.
It came from his career managing money for people richer than himself who wanted to outsource that. Initially as a trader and later partner at Bear Sterns, then on his own account, and with the large majority of his wealth coming from Les Wexler and Leon Black. This career and these relationships were forged well before Epstein was in any position to become an elite flesh-peddler, and Wexler in particular had little need of any flesh-peddling services. Epstein was quite demonstrably capable of making big money by managing rich people's money for them, straight up. It's not what he was famous for, but it is what he was good at.
The harem of underage hotties, and the lavish parties and whatnot, were not how he *made* his money, they were how he *spent* his money. Being legit talented, is no bar to being a total sleazebag.
It's difficult to make out. Based off what's in Wikipedia, he was really lucky in that he managed to charm his way into a private school even though he wasn't particularly qualified (more of his charisma/able to handle influential older guys) and before he was let go (allegedly for being a bit too hands-on with the girl students) made a *ton* of well-connected contacts amongst the parents.
These contacts got him a job in Bears Stern which seems to have, again, really helped him when he was looking for other work after being, again, let go for reasons (I guess having that name on his CV was very useful). He set up his own consulting firm and made valuable contacts again (and seems to have started on his career of claiming to be some kind of International Man of Mystery) and during this period met Robert Maxwell (which as you can guess, will be important later).
He then worked for/with another guy in some kind of firm which eventually imploded "when it was exposed as one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in American history, losing over US$450 million of its investors' money (equivalent to $1 billion in 2024)." Epstein managed to wiggle out of that one and while working there he had also founded his own financial management company.
Here is where it gets really interesting and rather murky. He managed only one client, really: a billionaire who was probably closeted gay and was once again charmed by Epstein into letting him manage all his affairs. Epstein does seem to have done a competent job here, but now he was directly getting his hands on hundreds of millions and made millions in fees simply from doing this, plus getting to swan around in private jets and hob-nob with Victoria's Secret models (one of billionaire guy's companies).
Now Epstein was moving in real VIP circles, and now (via the Victoria's Secret connection) he was able to tell ambitious young women that sure, he could set them up with a modelling career.
"According to Forbes in 2025, the great majority of Epstein's wealth between 1999 and 2018 came from $490 million in fees, (most of that from two billionaires, Leslie Wexner, $200 million, and Leon Black, $170 million) with the remaining $310 million reported as income during that period by his companies as being from investment returns, and was worth $600 million when he died."
So he was rich, but not mega-rich, *but* he was closely connected to/networked with the really rich and influential, and could claim all sorts of contacts, true or not, with governments etc. as well as the jet-set lifestyle.
"In 1996, Epstein changed the name of his firm to the Financial Trust Company and, for tax advantages, based it on the island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. By relocating to the US Virgin Islands, Epstein was able to reduce federal income taxes by 90 percent. The US Virgin Islands acted as an offshore tax haven, while at the same time offering the advantages of being part of the United States banking system; Epstein, who capitalized on his relation with Jes Staley while the latter was employed by JP Morgan, maintained close relations with that bank's subsidiary in the USVI.
...Epstein owned two islands in the US Virgin Islands: Little Saint James, a private island near Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands purchased in 1998 which includes a mansion and guest houses, and the neighboring island of Great Saint James purchased in 2016."
Yeh. He was actually rich. Nobody handed him the largest house in Manhattan and the island and all the rest, he bought those. But where the money came from is unknown, and un-investigated.
The money, connections, and shadiness always make me think of intelligence services and/or organized crime. But who knows there may be a lot of similarly creepy rich guys out there that don’t seek out the spotlight like he did.
Some of it seems to be legitimately from fees for financial management of billionaire client(s), some from the rather dodgy investment firms he founded (he seems to have been adjacent to, if not active in, schemes and funds that were rocky).
Was he skimming off the top when managing the wealthy clients' fortunes? Possibly. He does seem to have been able to use his relationships there to get sweetheart deals (e.g. buying a New York townhouse, buying the jet, off Wexner at bargain prices).
This just seems like more of a logistical problem than anything else. Epstein trafficked girls from those countries you mentioned, but he probably had to base himself in America to maintain business and intelligence contacts. Remember, he has no actual skills. All of his money comes from wealthy donors who also wanted to traffic kids. Also we don't know how young the youngest victims were, <9 year olds are not known to have perfect memories. And now there is evidence that he has some interest in girls that young as well, with the new email dossier (maybe there was evidence before, too, i dont follow it that closely).
It's also worth pointing out that sex trafficking is illegal no matter how old the person is and no matter where you live. He didn't just want to have a relationship, he wanted to pay them for a continued exploitative relationship and lease them out to other wealthy men.
>It's also worth pointing out that sex trafficking is illegal no matter how old the person is and no matter where you live. He didn't just want to have a relationship, he wanted to pay them for a continued exploitative relationship
Prostitution is legal in many places. Even where prostitution is illegal, like most of the U.S., transactional relationships are not so long as both partners are savy enough to never explicitly exchange money for sex acts. Had Epstein kept his sights on girls 18+, he'd probably be just another sleazy rich-guy with gold-digging younger girlfriends.
None of those "wealthy donors" has been criminally charged. Ted Frank has pointed out that there have been enough lawsuits over this that the only remaining people to be charged (to "make the rubble bounce", as he said) would be the girls/women themselves, for recruiting others. And none of them were "< 9 year olds".
I'm sorry, do you have a list of every single one of Epstein's victims? If not, I'm allowed to speculate based on his own statements.
That the wealthy donors have not been criminally charged does not mean they were not criminally involved. I'll remind you that the president of America has taken great leaps to cover his own involvement.
Do you? If you're free to speculate that some were 9 it seems to me that anyone else is free to speculate that they weren't.
They did not speculate, they said, with certainty, that "none of them were 9". My language was more speculative.
None of the identified victims are, in fact, under 14. That's not speculation. There may be more, currently unidentified, victims, but speaking conclusively to existing evidence is more authoritative than speculating about evidence that has yet to surface. For example I feel comfortable asserting that Bigfoot doesn't exist even though evidence for it may someday be produced.
Joe Biden was president last year (and the years directly preceding that).
Completely irrelevant statement
It's absolutely relevant to this quote from you: "I'll remind you that the president of America has taken great leaps to cover his own involvement." People were foolishly expecting some big difference in outcome based on who was president, but whether Trump or Biden was in office made no difference because there weren't more people to be charged based on the Epstein files.
They could all get indemnified for that recruitment. Virginia Giuffre said she was forced into sexual activity with visitors.
Giuffre is the one person making that claim, and her lawsuit against Dershowitz blew up in her face.
She’s the only one who was brave enough to testify. There’s a lot of victims out there. Most were scared of testifying.
You don't know that.
I can't find the original interview with Frank I'd listened to, but here's another one he gave (on Youtube instead of just audio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3DxVpkefHw&t=793s
https://xcancel.com/tedfrank/status/1942287795894014318#m
What I found weird:
There’s nobody who could have been in doubt post his plea bargain in 2008 of what was going on on that island, so all visitors must be guilty of that knowledge at least.
2008 was the Florida conviction, not anything about his Virgin Islands island. He got very lenient treatment with that, and after serving his time (which, frankly, was a joke) he used his contacts to get rehabbed back into high society:
"After his 2008 incarceration, Epstein was shunned by some acquaintances. Hollywood hostess Peggy Siegal helped facilitate his return to elite company through dinner parties at Herbert Straus house, and allowing his attendance at Oscar parties. Siegal, who was Epstein's connection to the entertainment world, was quoted: "He said he'd served his time and assured me that he changed his ways."
...As socialite Anne Hearst said, if Siegal's "personally P.R.'ing you as a friend, you'll wind up at the right hand of God." Weeks after Epstein's release, Siegal got Epstein an invitation to a screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in a Southampton NY mansion where he met with old friend Leon Black, then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Rudy Giuliani. Siegal tempted Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, Chelsea Handler, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn to attend a dinner organised in 2011 by Epstein for Prince Andrew; Stephanopoulos now says it was a mistake.
...Brockman did not end his friendship with Epstein after the latter's conviction. Brockman's literary dinners, often held during the TED Conference, were, for several years after Epstein's conviction, funded by Epstein as documented in tax filings. This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires."
Who is John Brockman? A Big Cheese in NY literary/artistic circles, seemingly:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation
"As BuzzFeed News and others have investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to leaders in science and technology in the wake of his July arrest on sex trafficking charges, one name has stood out as Epstein’s intellectual enabler: John Brockman, the New York literary agent who ran Edge, billed as an elite salon of thinkers “redefining who and what we are.”
...Epstein, who killed himself in federal custody in August, wasn’t merely associated with Edge. He was by far its largest financial donor, and his association with Edge gave him access to leading scientists and figures in the tech industry.
...Epstein was a regular attendee at Edge events. He was shown at the 1999 and 2000 billionaires’ dinners, in photographs on pages that have recently been deleted from the Edge website, and was also mentioned in a write-up of the 2004 dinner. Epstein was also present at Edge events in 2011, after his 2008 conviction for sex crimes, BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month.
...In 2002, Brockman, his wife and business partner Katinka Matson, and the leading scientists Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett were pictured on Epstein’s jet flying to TED in Monterey, California — the multiday technology, entertainment, and design conference that the billionaires’ dinners were held during. The caption to this picture was recently altered to remove mention of Epstein. His Edge profile, describing him as a “financier and science philanthropist,” has also been removed.
...There are no recorded donations from Epstein to Edge from 2006 to 2008, during the original investigation for sex offenses involving underage girls and the start of his subsequent imprisonment. But from 2009, he again began contributing, donating at least $50,000 a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011.
As Epstein strived to rehabilitate his reputation after his release from jail, Edge gave him access to elite circles in science and the tech industry. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News reported that Epstein was at the 2011 billionaires’ dinner, held in Long Beach, California, also attended by tech titans including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sergey Brin of Google, and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, plus a “master class” on the science of human nature, held at a winery in St. Helena, California.
But Brockman’s networking for Epstein ran deeper than Edge’s events. Last month, Morozov revealed email correspondence from 2013 in which Brockman tried to arrange a meeting between Morozov and Epstein. Brockman mentioned Epstein’s “beautiful young assistant from Belarus” and described the financier, incorrectly, as a “billionaire who owns Victoria’s Secret plus a modelling agency.”
...“He also got into trouble and spent a year in jail in Florida,” Brockman added. Morozov declined the invitation.
Epstein’s last recorded contribution to the Edge Foundation was a donation of $30,000 in 2015, after which the group’s total fundraising stalled. In 2016 and 2017, the foundation received just $5,477 from a single donor. The billionaires’ dinners died with Epstein’s donations: The last one was held in March 2015."
Oh, yeah, about those billionaires' dinners:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-bezos-musk-billionaires-dinner?bfsource=relatedmanual
"In March 2011, a group of technology executives gathered in a private dining room at an upscale Italian restaurant in downtown Long Beach, California, for a meal and some conversation. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and others were all in town for TED, the annual conference with the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” They were among friends at an annual event called the “billionaires’ dinner,” without a retinue of handlers and hangers-on.
Yet when the event was later immortalized online, at least one infamous individual was missing from the names of the masters of the universe who had gathered for the evening: the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
This elite dinner, and another similarly select gathering that Epstein attended later that year, were both organized by the New York literary agent John Brockman, whose exclusive intellectual club, called Edge, seems to have played a role in Epstein’s efforts to regain credibility and influence in circles of the rich and powerful. At the time, he was less than two years removed from finishing a 13-month prison term in a Florida state jail for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
A leaked email obtained by BuzzFeed News also suggests that Epstein separately pursued ties with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
The months following Epstein’s release from prison would be crucial for the disgraced financier as he began his reacclimation to the upper-crust social circles he had occupied before his arrest. In late 2010, Epstein reportedly hosted a dinner for celebrities and Prince Andrew at his Upper East Side mansion, and by the next year he was once again mingling with Brockman, an über networker among the elite of tech, science, and Wall Street."
Honestly, i can see how someone in 2008 just wouldn't know about that. The world wasn't as connected back then. But i can also see how they would know about it and not care.
Maybe the island is slightly mythologized.
But besides that, your question is a bit like asking why do men rape women when they could have sex with a sex worker.
The grooming and trafficking is part of the point.
The police investigation in Florida delt with his crimes in Florida. The island sounded better to the media when they were creating the mythologized Epstein story.
It was a blackmail operation. Some countries like using cathouses as part of their intelligence operations.
There are so many loose ends to this sprawling story that I'd be willing to entertain a conspiracy theory like that as a possible hypothesis. If I were investigating this, it wouldn't be my primary hypothesis, but rather an alternative hypothesis that I'd try to rule out. Putting on my tinfoil hat here...
1. We still don't know how Epstein acquired his wealth.
2. Virginia Guiffre said he secretly videotaped both his and his guests' encounters with the girls. Pam & Cash said that the FBI had thousands of videos, but they couldn't release them to protect the minors involved. Then they changed their tune. Nothing to see here. Move along, please.
3. According to the first link below, twenty-two people involved in this case have died (not including Robert Maxwell's mysterious death). Many by natural causes. But a bunch by suicide and accidents. I'd be interested in taking a closer look at the coroner reports. Just sayin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAdMEK6dv_Y
4. How did Epstein get passports for all these underage girls? USVI requires a passport to visit it. At least 60 women have come forward that they were trafficed down to his island — and that may be the tip of the iceberg. Did Epstein and Maxwell have help from someone in the US State Department? Or did they somehow convince (induce? pay?) parents to acquire passports for their minor children? Of course, the USVI authorities seemed to have been swamped with gifts and perqs from Epstein, and they weren't inclined to take a closer look at what was going on at Pedo Island.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article278123612.html?giftCode=64ecd71fae176766bbcebf682d67a9c9e82e35237072a5a38430f58609e10ade
> USVI requires a passport to visit it.
I don't think this is true: it looks like you need nothing more than for any other domestic flight.
This is what ChatGPT says (below). Functionally, minors would need either a gov issued RealID or a notarized birth certificate to get into the BVI. So, Passports would be easier than BCs for minors w/o RealId drivers licenses.
And according to many of the girls who visited the island they claimed their passports were taken away.
While a passport isn’t required, you do need to show proof of U.S. citizenship when traveling (for example, a raised-seal birth certificate + government-issued photo ID). 
• Starting May 7, 2025, for air travel, you need a REAL ID–compliant driver’s license or other accepted ID (like a passport) to clear TSA. 
• When leaving the USVI to return to the U.S. mainland, you may be required to show proof of citizenship. 
Is there any evidence to support this claim?
November Dawn = Wimbli = wild claims with no evidence
He is also D. B. Cooper, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Banksy. It is known.
We've had a thread about this a while ago. While formally the "age of consent" may be as low as 14 in some European states, that usually comes with some serious limitations - like, the partner must be of approximately the same age, no pressure due to positions of authority, money etc., no prostitution or pimping - all of which would be obstacles to a middle-aged rich creep who wants to do degenerate things to underage girls and provide access to those girls to his rich, powerful buddies.
ETA: Andrew and Tristan Tate basically tried this in Romania, and eventually the police intervened.
>While formally the "age of consent" may be as low as 14 in some European states, that usually comes with some serious limitations - like, the partner must be of approximately the same age
Well if true this terminology is completely meaingless because then the age of consent is 15, 14, 12 etc in many US states. I don't know why so many people are so careless about getting details to do with law and legal matters correct. But it makes it really hard to follow everyone's arguments and claims when they can't consistently use the same term for the same kind of thing.
Nope. No state in the US has a General Age of Consent below 16, and most states have “close-in-age” provisions and partner authority limitations. Of course, many states allow teenagers below the age of consent to have sex with other teens if the age gap isn't too great. So, you might hear the claim that a state like CT has pegged the age of consent at 13 — but that's only if the partner is no older than 16.
You should really research these things before you post opinions that contain wrong information. LLMs and Wikipedia are great resources. :-)
I don't understand this reply at all. The above commenter said that although the age of consent might be 14 or 15 in some European countries, this can come with limitations like the partners being close in age. I pointed out that *according to that definition of "age of consent"* then many US states have a low age of consent. Of course, on the normal definition, it being legal for similar age partners to have sex at 14 does not make the age of consent 14...on which the above commenter's statement is incoherent. *I'm* saying people need to use a consistent definition, and not say nonsense like "the age of consent is at least 16 across the US but in some other countries it's lower but only for similar age partners". (Not that anyone said those words exactly, but that inconsistent definition is clearly implied by many comments, inclyding the one I replied to).
Which part of my argument are you objecting to?
I thought you were agreeing with the commenter rather than contradicting the commenter. So, I guess we agree — and, for the purpose of the Epstein discussion, age of consent means the *minimum* age of the girl with whom *Epstein* could have had consensual sex with. Apologies for the confusion. :-)
IIRC, in the thread being discussed, it turns out that the ages of consent being discussed, yes even down to 14 or 15, are the ages at which it would be legal for Jeffrey Epstein (or the Andrew formerly known as Prince, or Donald Trump) to have sex with, so long as they weren't paying her. Or raping her, obviously. The "partner must be of approximately the same age" thing was a red herring.
Idk about 14 but in Denmark where I grew up and live, it is 15. No Romeo and Juliet laws, partner could be 120. Pretty sure prostitution is only legal from 18 though. Also literal child marriage is legal in 34 US states, ~75% of those occurring between a minor girl and an adult man (Wikipedia).
Still I find it strange. I didn't look *that* different at 16 vs 18. Just seem like a strange preference to base such a life project around instead of just being a creep to 18 year old girls. I always thought something with young children had got to be behind Epstein's whole thing, but nothing has come out yet.
A luxurious private island retreat is a much more marketable rich people holiday destination than an inner city slum brothel.
That's a good point. People are more uninhibited in a vacation setting, which perhaps made the honeytrap more effective?
Wait so if a US citizen goes to Germany and has sex with a 17 year old he'll be prosecuted here? That can't be right.
See https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-extraterritorial-sexual-exploitation-children
But I am skeptical that statutory rape counts. The cited statute refers to "a sexual act (as defined in section 2246) with a person under 18 years of age that would be in violation of chapter 109A if the sexual act occurred in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States;"
The most basic crime in Chapter 109A refers to acts without consent https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2242
Given that the statute does not say "any sexual act with a person under 18 years of age" but rather only a subset thereof, and given that any ambiguity in a penal statute is resolved in favor of the defendant, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/rule_of_lenity, I would think that that person would be in the clear.
Children cannot consent to sexual activity.
This is complete bullshit. Those laws always have exceptions for when the partner is close in age. And if you can consent to that sex, you can consent to sex with anyone you want. It's just a legal fiction we use because we want to ban certain people from having sex regardless of consent, but also tell ourselves that we aren't banning consensual sex.
> It's just a legal fiction
This is not a conversation about what people do or do not want the law to be, or whether it is right that the law says what it does. It is merely a conversation about what the law today actually says.
Yes, that is the rationale behind statutory rape laws. But, again, given that the statute does not refer to all sex with persons under 18, and given the rule of lenity, it is very, very, very unlikely that the reference in the other statute re consent would be interpreted in that manner and imported into the extraterritorial jurisdiction statute.
Edit: Note also that the federal statutory rape law puts the age of consent at 16, not 18: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2243
I firmly believe the impact of AI agents "taking jobs away" from future graduates should be more presciently explained to them. Any university that isn't preparing their students for this is doing them a disservice, even if it partially comes across as a devaluation of their degree. An implementable way to do this would be to incentivize taking on internships in the real world as early as possible, across as many companies as possible, with a focus on relationship building. Soon enough, human relationships will be among the rare things that hiring managers still value over complete automation. When the job pool shrinks, those with existing relationships will have an even larger advantage over the others than they have today. It's worth thinking about if you have kids at uni or if you're at uni yourself.
Better plan: the maximum amount of federal funding should depend on the default rate of the student loans of the attendees. Then the universities start trying to solve the problem themselves.
Who said anything about curriculum changes? They could change their pricing, their admissions practices, anything... but the end result would be far fewer students left with unmanageable debt.
If the primary value of universities is encouraging students to get internships then why go to university at all when you can go straight to an internship? I think this hints at the notion that the only actual value colleges have is that they're legally allowed to discriminate on the basis of IQ (via the SAT). The better solution there is to remove that prohibition from the economy at large and just allow every company to use IQ testing in its hiring process.
If you take seriously the notion that AI will lead to something like persistent 30% unemployment then I think it's foolish to go to college at all. That world will be so different from this one that it's probably a mistake to make a large up-front investment that could potentially be worthless in 5 years.
Universities are already failing to inform undergrads about the job prospects for marine biologists and french majors etc.
I think this overestimates the degree to which jobs will be automated.
Also, universities should always be a place for learning first and foremost. Anyone who is studying a degree just to get a job will live a depressing life at best, or drop out at worst.
> Anyone who is studying a degree just to get a job will live a depressing life at best, or drop out at worst.
That's 90% of the people I met at university (very few dropped out. Sunk cost).
It’s a problem that most people who go to a university are there for a reason that the university doesn’t accept as a real reason - though the university administrations have gone along with the rest of society and pretended that university education is primarily about a job.
Of course they were. Universities were always primarily for learning and then later on they became for research and learning. Some status creation and networking came along with this, but that was never the majority of the purpose.
Bold of you to assume that hiring managers don't already value human connection and chemistry over cold hard skills in most cases
Maybe you skipped over the part where I wrote "an EVEN LARGER advantage over the others than they have TODAY."
What the hell are you even going on about? Mind explaining instead of just writing some cryptic statements?
>Europe's fifty year plan was to loot Russia
There's a rule about backing extraordinary claims with evidence.
"naapuriseura.fi" is a small fringe publication by old lefties. I wouldn't trust their analysis farther than I could throw them.
There are indeed numerous people in Europe, including in high positions, that would prefer an end to this war where Russia collapses and a bunch of autonomous republics gain independence, but that's different from there being any sort of a concrete plan by Europe to achieve this, let alone one that would mean the Europe's economic plan is to "loot Russia".
Wait, looting countries is a normal thing? I thought that in the last 80 years basically no country has done that, except Russia and Israel.
>I mean, there's bound to be at least ten thousand people with access to either European plans directly, or as part of their job
Saying that isn't evidence. Least of all, evidence of a specific plan.
>You're letting your prior estimates on credibility interfere with how extraordinary the claims actually are
There's no other way of doing it.
>. "Country A plans to loot Country B" is a normal state of affairs
Hence Europe's huge army /s
>the only interesting part being Russia's nuclear status
or, as I like to call it, the last nail in the coffin.
The Danes are the ones trying to bring "Chat Control" to the EU, so I think you've got the relationship between high social trust and dictatorship backwards.
> Europe's fifty year plan was to loot Russia.
There are a lot of out-of-the-Overton-window ideas being brought up in these comment sections, which is great because we can discuss them on their merits. But from time to time, there're straight up retarded takes like your's, which no amount of steelmanning can save.
You got it backwards. Europe has taken Russia's cash and Russia has lost the war and become a Chinese vassal. America looks foolish these days, everyone is looking to China. Peace in Ukraine is now in Europe's interest so they can get closer to China - right now China is telling Putin to pack it in and everyone is playing Trump like a fiddle.
Oh, the irony!
The west doesn't exist. Maybe it is in America's interest, but America is now acting in the interests of people who have a lot of money to make from China. Europe's interest is to move away from America and get closer to China. They don't have any problem with them and have a lot to gain. Russia as a Chinese vassal + Europe-China alliance solves all their problems.
Nothing in this article supports that "France's entire economy runs on looting Africa", Wimbli.