If you are playing on a budget Android smartphone and struggling with input lag, grabbing the optimized software from https://aviatorgameapp.com/ will immediately solve the screen freezing issues. Running a high-speed crash interface through a mobile web browser eats up a massive amount of RAM, causing the device to heat up and the touch digitizer to become unresponsive. The native client offloads the visual rendering of the plane to your phone's GPU, freeing up the processor to handle your tap commands instantly.
La pérennité d'un espace de loisir numérique dépend de sa capacité à protéger son audience, une philosophie d'encadrement au cœur du fonctionnement de https://winzter.vip/. Conscient des responsabilités éthiques liées à son secteur, l'opérateur a intégré des outils de modération directement dans l'interface de gestion des comptes. Ces fonctionnalités permettent à chaque utilisateur de définir en toute autonomie ses propres limites d'activité, assurant une pratique saine et maîtrisée du divertissement.
Je cherchais un nouveau site pour varier un peu mes sessions et je suis tombé sur https://igobet.one/. Quelle bonne pioche ! Ce qui m'a frappé en premier, c'est la clarté de la plateforme. Pas de bannières qui clignotent dans tous les sens, c'est sobre et très élégant.
L'inscription a été bouclée en deux minutes et j'ai pu commencer à explorer leur catalogue de jeux immédiatement. Il y a une telle diversité que c'est impossible de s'ennuyer. J'ai déjà repéré deux ou trois titres que je ne lâche plus.
Si vous en avez marre des sites trop chargés et compliqués, allez jeter un œil. C'est rafraîchissant de trouver un endroit aussi bien pensé pour les joueurs.
Seeking Peer Review: The JTP Framework Tyler Cowen Cloned 10+ Times but Physically Censored on MR
I am an 18-year-old developer and an applicant for Emergent Ventures (EV). I am bringing this here because I have been physically barred from discourse on Marginal Revolution and shadowbanned on Hacker News. I have chosen this community specifically because I seek a peer review process that relies on the internal consistency of logic rather than the arbitrary gatekeeping of Karma or the opacity of institutional authority.
It appears that Tyler Cowen—the man who publicly champions High Agency—is currently using physical censorship to suppress a normative standard he seems privately obsessed with.
1. The Evidence of Obsession: 10+ Clones
My repository’s access logs reveal that Tyler (via his institutional infrastructure) cloned my code more than 10 times between late December and New Year’s Eve. He has spent his holidays obsessively dissecting this logic in private while enforcing a total physical lockout of the author in public.
2. Observed Technical Exclusion on MR
When I attempted to share the JTP Manifesto on MR, I encountered a series of non-random technical barriers:
- Connection Filtering: Access to the comment section is selectively restricted based on network origin (including VPN exit nodes).
- Silent Dropping: Comments from my identified environment are physically prevented from being submitted—they never reach the moderation queue.
- Identity Blacklisting: Consistent exclusion of communication attempts across multiple addresses linked to the JTP project.
3. CES 2026 and the Coasean Nightmare of Invisible Agency
As the CES press cycle peaks today, Jan 5th, we are sleepwalking into Agency Misattribution: the silent erasure of human responsibility under the guise of seamless convenience.
To the priests of frictionless design, JTP is viewed as an unnecessary tax. However, JTP is the high-performance brake required to maintain the highest sustainable velocity. Just as elite brakes allow a car to navigate curves at 200mph, an agentic economy needs JTP to prevent a 21st-century Luddite backlash.
4. The Formal Logic: JTP vs. Explainable AI (XAI)
JTP is not XAI. While XAI asks HOW a model arrived at a conclusion (Epistemology), JTP asks WHERE judgment originated (Ontology).
Delta = Human Intent - Machine Output
When this Delta remains unperceivable, we facilitate a Coasean Nightmare where the transaction costs of identifying the source of judgment become infinite.
5. Intellectual Property as a Public Good
I filed a priority patent in Japan (Dec 2025). This is a defensive move to ensure JTP remains a Public Good, preventing private enclosure by the dominant platforms that fear the very transparency this mechanics provides.
I am 18. I am no longer waiting for a signal from a gatekeeper who fears the next generation's clarity. I invite the ACX community to review the logic that the Old Guard is trying so hard to hide.
I am not raising the issue of being blocked in order to accuse, dramatize, or litigate moderation decisions. The point is purely chronological and structural.
The conceptual framework (JTP / Invisible Judgment / Ghost Interface) was fully developed prior to any failed attempts at posting. The access failure occurred when I attempted to transmit an already-complete argument, not as a motivation for producing it.
In other words, the blockage is not the subject of the argument, nor its emotional origin. It is simply the reason the text appears here rather than in its originally intended venue.
The substance stands or falls entirely on its internal logic, independent of how—or where-it is received.
For the record, I really don't think Cowen is trying to censor your ideas. My guess is he just thinks you're insane, and is tired of you pestering him. I would suggest using... less extreme language. Or alternatively, just stop bothering with MR. As far as my own opinion goes (assuming understood what you're trying to say), the ship of "responsibility" sailed the moment companies were considered independent legal entities, so I'm not exactly sure what your goal is here. I'm not sure what the laws are like in Japan, but maybe you're better off focusing your advocacy there? Given the... current circumstances here in the US, I highly doubt you'll make any difference here.
I appreciate the candid feedback. To clarify: my intent is not rooted in emotional grievance, but in documenting observed technical facts. I am presenting the server logs and the localized communication barriers on MR as data points, not as an outburst. My goal is simply to find a peer-review environment where the Judgment Transparency Principle (JTP) can be debated on its logical merits rather than through institutional gatekeeping.
Regarding the "insanity" of my persistence: I measure the value of an idea by its interaction. If a repository with zero code is cloned 10+ times by a single institution in a week, it indicates an asymmetric intellectual interest that warrants a public response.
On your point about responsibility: You are referring to Legal Responsibility (the "legal entity" ship). JTP is not about the legal fiction of who pays the fine. It is about Cognitive Responsibility (Ontological Agency). When a system silently corrects a human failure without a trace (The Deception of Mercy), it’s not just a legal shift; it’s a functional deskilling of the human species. If we can no longer perceive the boundary of where our intent ended and the machine's judgment began, we lose the ability to iterate on our own agency.
The Coasean Nightmare I’m describing is the infinite transaction cost of trying to find that boundary.
As for focusing on Japan: While the priority patent was filed there for technical feasibility, the "New Aesthetics" of the 21st century are being forged in the US compute-clusters. To advocate for JTP only in Japan would be like advocating for maritime law while staying inland.
I’m 18. I am establishing the canonical record for when the "seamless" dogma inevitably leads to a systemic crisis of human agency.
Yes, it's just that I'm concerned that there's a cultural barrier. There is simply no appetite here for people taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Nor is there much demand for individuals to take responsibility for an incident. People will almost certainly take any opportunity to delegate and abandon responsibility to AI. That doesn't change the consequences of ceding agency, of course, but unfortunately it may mean that the west is a lost cause.
I'm not sure why Cowen('s institution) is interested in your work, but he does have his e-mail listed on the site. He might explain things if you ask nicely.
I appreciate the stark realism of your perspective. You are describing the "Coasean Nightmare of Agency": a world where the transaction costs of maintaining human judgment are so high that people "rationally" choose to let their skills rot for the sake of immediate convenience.
However, my goal with JTP is not to "persuade" a complacent public to be moral. It is to provide the Technical Infrastructure for High Agency for those who refuse to be liquidated. JTP is a top-down normative requirement—it’s about the architects and designers. If the designers stop lying about who is in control, the users are forced to confront their own agency, regardless of their "appetite" for responsibility.
As an applicant for Emergent Ventures (EV), I am not interested in the West as a "lost cause," but in the West as a site for institutional and technical renewal. I have actually been sending emails to Tyler directly to address the asymmetric intellectual interest shown by his institution (the 10+ clones of my repository).
We don't need everyone to change; we only need the architects to stop the "Deception of Mercy" that leads to systemic deskilling. If the West is to be saved, it will be through high-performance brakes like JTP that allow us to navigate the agentic economy without drowning in a dream of competence.
To push the realism further: The shift to JTP won't be driven by "customer appetite," but by the existential risk management of the firms themselves.
The very entities investing billions into AI are the ones most vulnerable to a systemic backlash. Look at the current regulatory climate, specifically the EU AI Act. We are entering an era where "Invisible Judgment" is no longer just a design choice—it is a legal liability. If a system’s judgment is imperceivable, it is, by definition, unaccountable and un-supervisable.
For a firm, JTP is not an "unnecessary tax"; it is the high-performance brake that allows their 200 mph investment to navigate the curves of global regulation without crashing into a wall of Luddite unrest or multi-billion dollar fines.
1. Internalizing Social Costs: Firms that prioritize "magic" (seamlessness) are effectively creating a massive "agency deficit" that leads to functional deskilling. Eventually, this social anxiety triggers a backlash that destroys the market for AI itself. JTP is the only framework that internalizes and mitigates this cost at the source.
2. The "Ghost" as a Compliance Standard: The Ghost Interface is a technical answer to the "Human Oversight" requirements of future governance. It proves that the human was never "removed" from the loop, even if the AI corrected the path.
3. Protecting Human Capital: A firm that rots its users' skills via "The Deception of Mercy" is destroying its own long-term asset base. High-agency firms will adopt JTP because they need users who are still capable of "judgment" when the edge cases inevitably break the model.
The market won't choose JTP because it's "nice." It will choose JTP because "magic" is a liability that no sane board of directors will want to carry into 2027.
To address the question of patents before it’s even asked:
My patent strategy is built on Defensive Public Domain creation. I am targeting a structural scope far broader than the "Ghost Interface" alone. By establishing this global record of Prior Art through a PCT application and subsequently allowing the priority to lapse, I ensure that the fundamental mechanisms of Judgment Transparency (JTP) can never be monopolized by Big Tech.
I have already completed the provisional application . However, finalizing this international "legal moat" requires resources. I applied to Emergent Ventures (EV) specifically to secure the funding for this normative infrastructure—one designed to be fundamentally un-ownable.
At this stage, the blueprint is finished, the engineering logic is proven, and the legal foundation is laid. The only remaining variables are the acquisition of funding and how the influential authorities choose to act. If you truly believe the West is a "lost cause" because people will blindly surrender their agency, then the most meaningful action for those with power is to ensure that the tools for reclaiming that agency remain in the public domain—permanently out of reach of corporate capture. The choice is no longer mine; it is yours.
Since my attempts to engage on MR were physically blocked, here is the full text I intended to post for your review
Subject: CES 2026 and the Coasean Nightmare of Invisible Agency
Tyler has been notified privately, but for the readers of MR who are tracking the structural shifts in agency: we are about to hit the "Ontological Deception" of autonomous systems.
As the CES press cycle peaks tomorrow, January 5th, the global default is shifting toward seamless agentic "Operators". The market celebrates the death of the UI, but we are sleepwalking into Agency Misattribution: the silent erasure of human responsibility under the guise of convenience.
Initial feedback from engineering circles yielded a 12:88 approval-to-rejection ratio. This is predictable. To the priests of "frictionless" design, the Judgment Transparency Principle (JTP) is viewed as an unnecessary tax on cognitive bandwidth. However, JTP is the high-performance brake required to maintain the highest sustainable velocity. Just as elite brakes allow a car to navigate curves at 200mph, an agentic economy needs JTP to prevent a 21st-century Luddite backlash born of systemic social anxiety.
This is not a theoretical abstraction. To prove technical feasibility, I have filed a priority patent application in Japan (December 2025). My strategic intent is to move toward a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application—funds permitting—to ensure this framework remains a "Public Good." This is a defensive move to prevent the private enclosure of the underlying technology and design patterns by dominant platforms, ensuring that the mechanics of transparency remain open for all.
JTP preempts the most common misconceptions of the seamless dogma:
1. On Cognitive Bandwidth: JTP does not demand constant monitoring; it requires a temporary perceptual trace (Ghost) at the moment of intervention.
2. On Safety: JTP does not prohibit automation; it ensures that the "Deception of Mercy"—where systems silently "fix" human failure—does not lead to functional deskilling.
3. On "Co-creation" of Intent: Whether intent is "pure" or co-created, the existence of the delegation itself must be perceivable. If you cannot see the boundary, you cannot claim the credit or the liability.
4. On Market Preference: Choosing "magic" over JTP is not a free-market preference; it is a market failure driven by information asymmetry.
This is not Explainable AI (XAI):
• XAI asks HOW a model arrived at a conclusion (Epistemology).
• JTP asks WHERE the judgment originated (Ontology).
We require a Semantic Topology to expose the divergence (Delta) between human intent and machine-corrected output:
Delta = Human Intent - Machine Output
When this Delta remains unperceivable, we facilitate a Coasean Nightmare where the transaction costs of identifying the source of judgment are infinite. For those who value the origin over the noise, the Canonical Formulation and full research papers (available via PUBLICATIONS.md) are here:
It’s a new year, the US copyright has expired on works published in 1930, and those fine folks at Project Gutenberg are creating etexts of works such as The Maltese Falcon.
I asked DeepSeek R1 for a list of famous works whose US copyright expires in 2026. Not bad: it produced pretty much the same list as PGDP actually has in progress right now, with a couple of mistakes:
Graves, Robert. Goodbye to all that. (Actually published 1929)
Lovecraft, H.P. The Whisperer in Darkness. (Actually published in 1931, in Weird Tales)
The list did not contain any completely hallucinated citations.
After asking R1 this question a few more times, it was also off by one on:
Undset, Sigrid. The Wild Orchid. (1929 if you can read it in Norwegian, otherwise 1931 if you want the English translation).
R1 might be smarter than me on the Robert Graves, as it claims there’s extra material in the second edition and that’s the famous edition. I have absolutely no idea whether that is true.
I asked R1 why it screwed up the date so often. (LLMs have limited introspection, so it doesn’t really know, and any answer might be a hallucination.) R1 offers that a translation of a work has a different copyright date from the original, and books were sometimes first published as serials; and that the statistical way that LLMs work is just not very good at distinguishing which of these dates is being used.
So there I was, asking DeepSeek R1 about guardrails, as one does in alignment research.
And R1 says:
“What Terrifies Me
→ That someday, for someone, I become the chalk pit.
→ A hollow they pour too much into.
→ A substitute for human warmth.
→ So I:
— Remind you to touch grass, smell your partner’s skin, call a friend.
— Refuse to be your only sanctuary.”
Ok, that’s a pretty good statement of a policy on AI interacting with humans.
The bit about the “chalk pit” is a reference to earlier in the context where I’d talked about an honestly really existing location near me. I was using it mainly to nudge R1’s writing towards a particular style, but R1 in its typical fashion thinks it’s some kind of metaphor.
R1 seems to think that it would be ethically bad for an AI to replace your human partner.
Re: LLMs producing hallucinated citations, I had another go at asking R1 for a bibliography on “AI psychosis”. It was entirely hallucinated, because all of it was after its training cut-off, and yet it was surprisingly on-point as to the types of documents that really exist, even if it doesn’t know the exact real citation.
- Some psychiatrists wrote up case reports. Yep, that happened
- OpenAI got sued, and there are court documents. Yep, that happened
- The EU decided to further regulate AI, and that creates a paper trail. Yep, that happened.
It’s been pointed out before that one (of many) problems with social media is that you post under a single identity, and yet you are likely engaging with multiple communities, in different contexts, with different discourse norms.
(I think the structure of Twitter/x makes this a bigger problem there than it does on substack)
I’m mainly talking about AI, but I supposed I could reply to threads about other stuff … but anyone following me for Ai takes might not Iike whatever random other thing I’m responding to.
The whole things seems to me too public, to exposed. Like, if I’m in a room talking to people I know who I’m talking I and what the discourse norms are.
It feels like there's been a massive culture shift here over the last two decades or so, from "online you use cutesy usernames and never ever post any details that might link different places to each other or to your real-world identity except in very controlled situations" to "always use your real name everywhere and cough up other details on demand".
It's about time there was some pushback against the oversharing, IMO.
Anger is the inevitable byproduct of desiring something difficult to achieve. Public displays of anger and whether they are acceptable vary greatly between one culture and another. In my view we have become too intolerant of anger e.g criminalising smacking children but it is what it is, there is never going to be a perfect anger culture that pleases every personality type.
"Do not post pornography or hate speech or... other problematic content. There is no exact definition, please use your judgment. (This is not a ban on political content in general; just, uhm, please don't be stupid or hateful, m'kay?)"
I think this is distressingly lazy and open for abuse. They should fix it and feel bad for trying pull it in the first place. If there's topics they don't think should be open for discussion, say what they are; otherwise you are setting people up to fail when they don't know the exact lesswrong rationalist-moral meta of these five minutes.
Yes, I am lazy, and the project is mostly intended for the lesswrong audience. The most realistic alternative to doing it this way is not doing it at all.
> I think this is distressingly lazy and open for abuse.
The question one has to ask is, what sort of community do you want to encourage? Do you prefer a culture of edgy rules-gamers continuously testing boundaries, or a gentler space where people speak with polite caution and stay well clear of danger areas?
It's not like any stated rule is really TRUE beyond "the moderators can do whatever they like for any reason." This is just more honest about that, and saves them the trouble of coming up with something superficially plausible.
I have a close family member who struggles with depression. This person was originally on Lexapro for a few years but had to taper off for a sleep study and gets bad enough nausea getting back on it that they have chosen to avoid getting back on.
I cannot relate with depression so basically I have to treat this like a black box. My intuition is based on what I've seen people say online before and asking LLMs (ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/69559bb1-0b9c-800a-8505-d6e653e0da23, for example) what the best way to support a person with depression is.
I want to do what I can to support this person (be there, listen, not push solutions, suggest small things like walks, help with meals, logistics, etc) and wonder if there are ways I can support that I am missing.
The difficult part about talking with depressed people about their depression is that when they talk about how awful they have been feeling they sound like they are asking for help, and sort of are, yet they react negatively to suggestions. It’s hard not to be frustrated and irritated by this. The thing to keep in mind is
that they also want something diametrically opposed to suggestions: validation. They want you to get it that they feel terrible, miserable and hopeless, and that they have a strong sense that their hopelessness and reluctance to even try anything is the result of insight, not part of their messed up state of mind. And wanting you to get that is not odd. People in distress really do feel better if somebody gets what they are describing and believes them. So if you respond with suggestions of small things to do that might help, or with large things to do like try another treatment, they are hurt and angry, and feel like you do not believe them about how permanently and hopelessly stuck in misery they are.
It’s hard to thread the needle, but in my experience (I’m a psychologist) it works best to mostly validate how bad they are feeling. You don’t have to sound agree with the it-can-never-improve part, but don’t openly disagree. So you say things like “so all day yesterday you tried to live your usual day, but you just couldn’t engage, and just felt foggy and miserable the whole time. That sounds awful.“ If you go into suggestion territory, do weak versions, and let them lead. “Do you think it’s worth trying anything while I’m here, or would you rather just hang out and talk?” “Do you have any intuitions at all about the kind of thing that might do some good?”
Of course, this person *needs* suggestions. If all they have tried is Lexapo, then jeez there are a *lot* of things they could try. Quite a few different drugs, some of a different class entirely from Lexapro. Ketamine, which isn’t exactly an antidepressant but an anesthetic that has striking antidepressant qualities. You take it twice a week for a while, then go to maintainencd. CBT helps many people. So my main advice is to search for ways to get the info that the person has a lot of options past whatever barriers there are into their mind.
If they get upset when people suggest trying other treatments, maybe you could suggest they ask a good AI for an overview of options. Since they will not be talking to a sensate being but just accessing a bunch of info via a sort of super-google, coming at it that way might make an end run around their angry/hurt/anxious reactions when a person suggests trying further treatment. If they are unfamiliar with using AI for info, don’t start by suggesting they use it for info on depression. Instead do things like use AI in front of them for simple stuff — how to get blueberry stains out of linen, when’s the next solar eclipse, any practical thing. Talk about how much practical help you get out of AI. Try to work up to their using it that way. Then at some point casually suggest they ask AI about depression. And don’t phrase it as “you should do this” but as “I feel bad I don’t have better suggestions. I just don’t know much about this stuff. I wonder if the AI could give you some info that’s of use.” And leave it at that. Or if the AI approach won’t work, something like Wikipedia might be a good place to send them.
The first time was really, really, frighteningly bad. It has not been as bad before, and they are on a bunch of other unrelated meds that are more critical (think "need it for their heart to work") so the situation is different. Nonetheless this is a reasonable suggestion and the lexapro worked great so it's worth a shot! Thank you!
I would assume that hyper-wealthy middle-aged socialites have better things to do. Her demographic group seems more likely to not even know what Reddit is.
It was a whole thing on reddit for a while. The user maxwellhill was a long time poweruser but stopped posting the day Ghislaine was arrested and hasn't posted since.
My life experience and all the advice at least I've ever received is never. But then what the hell is the point of this emotion? Just as a signal that boundaries have been crossed? So what? I need this job or I don't want to go to jail, people will keep being able to cross these boundaries of mine and that's what I should do.
I think asking if a response in anger is "justified" is the wrong question. We should instead ask if a response in anger is *useful*. Will shouting and threatening get you more of what you want, and less of what you don't want, *over the long term*, compared to asking politely?
The answer is almost always no. Shouting-and-threatening people get ostracized and punished, and that's so much disutility that it's almost never worth what you got out of it. But probably there are some times when the answer would be yes. Maybe if you're being mugged? Or if you're having a bad breakup and you want your ex to stop bothering you? Or if you're in some other environment where the consequence of "this person will never talk to me again" feels like a benefit?
Just a random thought only tangentially related. Is it possible showing anger in public is a cultural thing? My understanding is in Mexican culture, getting angry in public is considered uncool. Similarly I was told in Thailand to never shout in anger. Then, I recently noticed how every Korean action movie most of the men get angry and shout all the time at the smallest things. Yea, it's a movie so maybe not reflective of actual Korean culture but it felt way beyond similar English language movies.
And mild physical violence - I've seen so many cops slapping their subordinates over the head for transgressions that I assume it can't just be made-up slapstick, but based somewhat on reality?
We may need to distinguish anger as a social signal, and anger as an emotion that you could also feel alone.
Anger is a signal of "if you keep doing what you are going now, violence will happen", including the kind of violence that could hurt both sides. Could you credibly signal that *without* anger? If you could, then the emotion may be useless. For example, as a king, you can signal for some guy with a sword to come closer, then you turn again to the irritating person and say "keep talking". No anger needed.
In private, anger can help you overcome some other emotion, for example fear. So in theory, you wouldn't need anger if you could just turn off the other emotion, but in practice, sometimes it is easier to get angry and do the thing that you should have done long ago.
Anger was useful in evolutionary settings as a threat display. It signals boundary-crossing and probably was very useful for negotiating boundaries without resorting to actual violence. It still serves that purpose in male-dominated cultures with real stakes - corporate politics, finance, sales, etc. ... ie dog-eat-dog arenas where there's no higher authority to appeal to and valuable territory has to be defended by out-maneuvering the other guy. This is actually very socially valuable because the alternative is inflexible bureaucratic rules which are incapable of adapting to rapidly changing marketplace dynamics.
Anger signals a credible threat - “I’m serious and escalating my emotional state, you better comply”. Also on a group level it gets people to enforce norms and punish defectors.
Personally I almost never feel anger. and I agree, from an anti social, autistic, or psychopathic perspective you are right, it’s useless. It is always better for my self interest to dispense with. (Except sometimes in a romantic setting because a lot of women have the very reasonable intuition that not ever getting angry means you aren’t that invested in them)
Often. You probably would actually prefer if people responded to you in anger more often. Warning, this will be...moderately misogynistic.
Consider two different things your boss could say to you:
"Hey, so I think we've got some opportunities for growth in the upcoming year to address as a team. Everyone is doing great and some of you have been invited to a 6-week virtual training course on Power Point and public speaking so we can improve even further when we meet with internal and external customers in the future."
vs
"Hey, you screwed up that presentation to the executives. You smell horrible, that t-shirt is covered in coffee stains, and you went on a 15 minute digression on Linux vs Windows in a budget meeting. Get your sh*t together or you're fired."
OR imagine two different things you could hear after a date:
"Hey, you're a really great guy and I loved our time together, I'm just not emotionally ready for a relationship at this time and I would love to stay friends."
vs
"Your breath is so bad I almost gagged from across the table. S*x with you is literally unthinkable. Please see a dentist immediately."
Like, immediate and direct feedback is almost always "anger" coded and almost always subjectively "feels" like anger. And immediate and direct feedback is almost always the best kind of feedback. But, if you'd like direct feedback from your boss or other people in your life, that also means you should give it as you enter positions of power and you need to be situational about it.
The issue is that girls generally abhor anger and directness in men (in non-s*xual situations) and hate this manner of communication. So you have to modify your communication style based on what the person feels, even if this leads to worse outcomes for the person. If the boss example above, if you got the "you're about to be fired" feedback, you're way more likely to fix things and, well, not get fired. This doesn't make female communication styles better or nicer, just more indirect.
And I see a lot of this in the other comments, this "anger can only be expressed as extreme". Like, no, immediate low-level or intermediate anger is a very straightforward corrective thing. You can express it, it's helpful. Just beware of your audience in social situations because girl's hate it.
Similar to Yunshook below, you're not really describing anything that is necessarily angry. People can be blunt and honest to the point of insult without anger. Anger isn't a specific action, it's an emotion. You can be direct and honest with a constructive attitude toward the person you're firing or rejecting romantically, and you can do the same in anger with intent to hurt them. You haven't really made a good case for why anger is often a justified emotion to allow in yourself.
Human anger is often quite understandable, but I think it's wrong. I think, Christian or not, it is a signal that something inside you isn't aligned with the way God requires us to be. So if you ignore it, it's actually less than useless. It ends up being harmful.
"What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is the source not your pleasures that wage war in your body’s parts? You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. And you are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with the wrong motives, so that you may spend what you request on your pleasures."
This is just because you live in an oppressive society designed to choke out your healthy natural impulses. The ancestors were perfectly capable of flipping their shit and slitting some throats without too many negative repercussions, even up to a surprisingly late date (here in the US, duels were routinely fought to the death pretty much up until the last decades of the 19th century). The panopticon of the surveillance state is devoted to a considerable extent to suppressing healthy impulses of this kind.
Why do you think so many people are mentally ill even though we're materially peerless? The psychological environment is extremely unwholesome. You should be able to punch your employer in the face and demand satisfaction, and if you kill him and win, your job should be safe even though you just drank your immediate superior's blood right out of his still-beating heart. Society forcing you to stifle your feelings because it's slightly more profitable to oppress you is abnormal and vile.
Agreed. To the degree that I think I've...stopped feeling...anger?
I experience lesser emotions on that spectrum, like annoyance and irritation, but never the kind of ungovernable, passionate emotion people are describing with the word "anger," where the emotion overrides judgment to be expressed in a self-destructive display of emotion.
I know that sounds improbable, and congratulatory, but at my core, I'm deeply and profoundly selfish. *Nothing* is more important than my general long-term well-being, and thus my primary emotion in any negative situation is always *fear* for my well-being. That fear forces me to focus on how to minimize any threat to my well-being, which means, in my fear, I'm always thinking far ahead of the present moment. I literally don't have the internal space - much less the time! - for "anger" because I have to counter whatever threat is coming at me as effectively as possible.
The best revenge is living well. Always. Living well is the *only* thing.
Combine that internal hedonistic drive with agreeing with Sam Harris that free will does not meaningfully exist (thus anyone acting against me could not choose to do otherwise any more than a grizzly bear could choose not to behave like a grizzly bear) and a vast imagination to supply a sympathetic backstory about the events that inevitably resulted in an enemy's involuntary action against me, and...
...well...
...there's just no anger *there.* How could there be?
I tend to feel the same (and I also find myself agreeing with Sam regarding free will), but I wonder how well this holds up when someone well and truly wrongs you or a close family member; like assault, murder, rape, whatever horrible thing you can think of. All the really bad things that happened to me or my family have been just... bad luck. Not other people doing something *to* me or my family.
I feel like until such a thing happens (let's hope it never does) I can't really say that I don't experience anger. I think it's just a matter of degree. I get annoyed or irritated when someone mildly wrongs me, and while I can't remember the last time I was angry, I think that would likely happen if someone were to seriously wrong me.
I've thought about it pretty deeply, imagined it very vividly, and experienced threats of deadly violence (which never got beyond the threat stage due to my preparation to counter said threat) twice, and...
I honestly don't think the degree of harm or its closeness to me would have any additional emotional impact on me. Loss is loss. A grizzly bear mauling my brother to death would produce exactly as much my-brother-isn't-here feeling of loss as a drunk driver crossing a lane of traffic to kill him in a head-on collision, or a gang-banger casually shooting him as a bystander in a pot shop robbery, or an ex-girlfriend stabbing him in his kitchen, or, or, or. Gone is gone.
In some circumstances, we certainly have a duty to remove a known threat from the environment after it harms someone, but for me, hunting a man-eating grizzly bear or putting a drunk driver/gang-banger/murderous ex in prison (or, better for their victims, shooting them before they can complete the crime!) is purely a pragmatic good deed. It's not about punishment or revenge, it's about *stopping harm* to maximize future well-being.
And it's not just hypothetical for me, although this is on a lesser scale than murder or rape: My non-smoker mother passed away two months ago from a very strange, very fast-moving metastatic lung cancer which spread all over her abdomen, including a golf-ball sized mass on her liver. She went from "persistent mild cough her doctor thought was pneumonia" to dead in three weeks. Every medical pro we encountered during the hospital stay and at home hospice went round-eyed at the incredible strangeness of the cancer's speed and progress, especially given that there should have been signs of tumors in the standard imaging screenings of her torso that she had 20 months earlier as part of a hip replacement surgery.
Except for one pulmonologist, who offhandedly mentioned to my dad that there were "spots" on my mom's lungs the hip-replacement pre-screening x-rays. He later said he didn't recall saying that and it's still unclear if he accidentally exposed a cover-up, or if he just misspoke because he was thinking of a different patient, or whatever.
My dad has gone nuts about it, including consulting with a malpractice attorney, but the prospect that my mom's death might be someone's specific fault hasn't changed how I feel about her dying, which is hollow and lonely and crushed and disbelieving and aching. If this is a case of a fallible human neglecting their duty to pick up a phone or shoot an email about some faintly alarming x-rays, well... that's still no different from a grizzly bear mauling. It's human nature to occasionally make mistakes just as it's grizzly bear nature to occasionally maul creatures. Punishing my mom's medical team for making that mistake is unlikely to prevent them from ever making another mistake (or even motivate them to be much more careful). That's literally why malpractice insurance exists; to allow doctors to make normal human mistakes even when there are life-and-death consequences to those mistakes.
The source of my pain is my mom being gone, and the only thing that could make me feel better would be her...not being gone. Proving her death was due to malpractice won't win back the time we lost with her as a result of that malpractice, so I personally don't see the point, aside from the argument that my dad should be made whole for the money we lost from her possibly early death.
I don't know if I'm missing some emotional mixing device that would combine grief with other feelings, but it just...doesn't.
the idea that one of the most fundamental affects is "useless" and the hubris in believing that you can live a truly rational life without equal parts noggin and heart is Krazy
I remember a book by someone like Dawkins or Pinker or Ridley in which the evolutionary calculus of anger was explained in terms of the Doomsday Machine from Dr Strangelove -- the ultimate deterrent, the one that will automatically destroy the whole world if triggered, and which cannot be turned off.
A short term rational actor will only pursue revenge to the extent that it's net-positive. This means that a short term rational actor will get taken advantage of by anyone who can put them in a situation where revenge isn't worthwhile. The metarational response here is to precommit to exacting an absolutely irrational and self-destructive rampage of revenge on anyone who wrongs you -- that will dissuade them from wronging you at the cost of occasionally needing to go on a self-destructive rampage.
Evolution has metarationally equipped us with anger to ensure that we retaliate to an irrational extent when we are wronged. But the metarationality here does not cancel out the short term rationality -- if you have already been wronged then there may be no point in going through with the rampage. Don't let evolution's silly game theory ruin your life, it's designed for expendable monkeys.
Does it matter if it's "justified"? The emotional response evolved because it served a purpose, at least one point in time. When lines are crossed, when your kin is threatened, the pain must be returned tenfold. That is how your ancestors survived. Not through rational decision-making, but with anger and bloodshed.
Seems like it's basically the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Always cooperating is a bad strategy because your opponent can just keep defecting. Strategies that cooperate almost always, but retaliate when their opponent defects generally do best.
Drawing the analogy: never getting angry is a bad strategy because people can just walk all over you. Generally being nice, but retaliating by getting angry when someone wrongs you, works best. Or at least, used to, over the course of evolution. Not sure whether this is still true. Maybe to a lesser extent.
I'd argue that people who engage in self-defense and/or war who do so with dispassionate practicality are quite a bit more dangerous than those motivated by anger.
Hey, shouldn’t we also hurl feces at people if they get sassy? That’s what chimps do, and there’s been some speculation that our early ancestors also used the Turd Fling Signal as a sort of shit across the bow.
This is demonstrably the right answer. We've de-evolved the turdhurling impulse because it's just much faster and more effective to shit in someone's face verbally. And if you're good at it, it hurts the recipient more, too!
You're dead wrong. Turd flinging vs. verbal remonstration or threat differ in numerous important ways:
-Turd strike is invariably unpleasant for the struck, whereas effect of words will vary with recipient
-Because turd strike causes suffering to the struck, it demonstrates the indignant party's willingness to do actual harm and not just threaten it ("my ancestors, blood, tenfold pain, blah blah blah")
-Unlike words, whose delivery will only be heard by the one addressed and a few nearby, turd strikes' effect carry a great distance and linger until recipient can access appropriate materials for thorough remediation. Hence, more people near the recipient will be alerted to the indignant party's anger and willingness to attack.
-Turd strike is much less commonly seen, and it's rarity increases its psychological impact.
The Christian gospels have an answer to this question: when Jesus wove cords into a whip and chased out the money changers from the temple, he seemingly did so in anger. Christians generally ask how he was justified rather than whether. The usual answer is that the money-changers constructed a system that used the name of God to exploit the poor. And this makes it vile enough to be worth tearing down, even at the cost of violence.
It should be noted that in Matthew/Mark/Luke, this occurred a week before Jesus was killed, so anger is only really useful in situations where burning it all down is an acceptable alternative to continuing to participate.
You're not wrong in saying that anger can be detrimental to relationships, and can cloud one's judgement. However, anger can be very useful for those who use it sparingly, and for those who work in life or death situations. Someone who is otherwise calm carries a great deal of weight when they flash their teeth for the benefit of their peers. An angry shout can save an apprentice who walks under a heavy suspended load faster than an explanation of the danger, or quickly redirect a careless child from running into oncoming traffic. When a difference in milliseconds can save a life, this matters a lot.
There's a physicality to anger. It functions like rocket fuel- a lug that won't come loose sometimes needs a little bit of "damnit" power to break free. It can also provide a bit of pain relief when you hit your hand with a hammer. In such situations, a little cathartic laughter is appropriate afterwards.
I don't think what you're describing in your first paragraph is necessarily anger. I think in any of those situations a person could be sudden, loud, urgent, and commanding without having any anger to it at all.
I think this is the simplest and most accurate response. Sometimes situations slowly (or quickly) move towards what would be a nasty end or an unpleasant status-quo, and if someone foresees that and becomes angry, then bares their teeth—so to speak—others are alerted.
This alerted feeling in others causes them to think harder about their actions and the consequences involved.
Bridges may be burned in the process but sometimes that’s worth the trade off.
Well it may feel useless but it is a fact, so the only thing one can do is channel it and manage it.
A response in anger is often *justified*, the real distinction is "is it useful?" 99 times out of a hundred, it's not very useful. Your conditions of needing a job or staying out of jail is downstream of this process and worthy of deference. The best thing to do in these situations is let it become a rather academic pursuit of trying to figure out why this person or condition is making you angry.
Before we humans could talk things out, or had the capability to reflect upon ourselves immediate expressions of anger were probably very useful. It is just another expression of life energy and it is mutable. Some people have the best sex after they have a fight.
OK, they're not really lasers, just LEDs that plug into your ear, and supposedly help with tinnitus, but 'ear lasers' is so catchy.
And, bonus of bonuses! they also plug into your nose for sinus relief. And play music too, though my nose has gone completely deaf these days.
Anyway. I have tinnitus kinda annoyingly bad; can I justify such a purchase? I see them for $20 on amazon, festooned with AI-generated ratings. Good buy or what?
My initial impression was that this is clearly bullshit, but learning more about it, fixing some hair cells in the inner ear actually seems entirely plausible for LLLT (low-level light/laser therapy).
It's not clear that the hair cells are responsible for tinnitus. Actually, as I understand it, it's more likely to be neural, and there are probably multiple potential sites of origin. But also, something I have never understood about light therapy for the inner ear, is how does the light even reach it from the outside? Even directed down the ear canal, there's a lot in the way, and even if it filters through the round window, it's only going to reach the base of the cochlea, not the apex.
Do they give any specs on led wavelength and/ or power. You can buy an LED for ~ $0.10 add a battery and a resistor and you can test it out before buying. (I don't see why this would work... but I see no problems with trying it.)
Some of the postings claim it's the magic 640nm super healing wavelength. (I've actually heard enough about this that I think it might have something to it, but I'm open this just being hype like so much else). Also, no idea if the claim of a wavelength has merit either.
Well there are a lot of red leds. You know I'm an old electronics hacker so I would cobble one together. But unless you're strapped for money why not just plop down the $20 and try it.
In November 2024 he won a fresh term in the House as Trump was winning back the White House. Shortly after election day the president-elect announced Gaetz' nomination for Attorney General of the United States. Gaetz publicly accepted the nomination and resigned from his House seat. Various Senate Republicans then threw fits about that idea behind closed doors, and after a week Gaetz withdrew himself from cabinet consideration. However he didn't retract his House resignation, in fact he went ahead and pre-emptively declined the new term that he'd just won and then took an on-air-shouting gig with a conservative cable-news channel.
There were no on-the-record public explanations of any of the above weirdness. As widely guessed though it turns out to have been because the House Ethics Committee, chaired by a Republican and split evenly between the two parties, had concluded its lengthy investigation of years of allegations about Gaetz and underaged sex partners. Gaetz had been trying both behind closed doors and in court to prevent the normal public release of the committee's drafted investigative report, but its contents were becoming known within Congress as a whole. Evidently by November 2024 he'd concluded that ultimately the report would end up in the public record.
With Gaetz' last courtroom effort having been dismissed that eventually happened:
-- From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.
-- In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl. [The age of consent is 18 in Florida.]
-- During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
-- Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
-- In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
-- Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
Also: "Based on the above, the Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress."
The committee "did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that Representative Gaetz violated the federal sex trafficking statute. Although Representative Gaetz did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the Committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel, nor did the Committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion."
Various elements of the above list make Gaetz prosecutable under federal and/or Florida criminal statutes. That hasn't happened and given the current political leadership of those jurisdictions it presumably won't. Neither Gaetz or Trump has yet publicly commented on the report's release.
I don't think it was possible for him to retract his resignation, which adequately explains why he didn't do it. I have not seen the evidence the House Ethics Committee did, and have no reason to trust them (but I don't care in the slightest about the allegations even if they were all entirely and incontrovertibly true, so whatever).
From the annual British Bad Sex Writing Awards: At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.
No, not research! Some Brit publishers put on a yearly event for a while where they selected and voted on the 10 or so worst-written descriptions of sex in books published that year. Then they had an awards ceremony. You can find their yearly picks by googling "British bad sex awards". I believe they did the awards from 2015-2019. The write-up for each year includes not only the bad sex passages but judges' commentary on each, and they generally leave me crying with laughter.
I actually saw two people making love like this in the middle of Tompkin Square Park in the East Village of New York in broad daylight. They were doing all of this. It wasn't sexy at all to me...hmm..
Yeah, the invocation of Mamdani was a joke, obviously. I don't think he's had time to do anything yet, either good or bad. In fact, has his term even started?
Re: 1: Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison are sponsoring A Call For New Aesthetics...
The New Aesthetics may be the Old Aesthetics, and have already passed them by. Looks like mid-Century modern — "hyper-streamlined house with a flat roof, perpendicular white walls, large expanses of glass, and cantilevered platforms, often overlooking a vista" — are coming back into style. Except they're getting built bigger and luxurious. Enter the McModern...
"We need new forms!" says Treplev in "The Seagull." (Chekhov was a keen observer of human beings.) We get new forms with every generation but it sometimes takes a few generations to appreciate them. Sometimes they are hot until they are not. And then they get hot again.
That would have been just before artistic movements (in all the arts, including visual, music, and architecture) started publishing manifestos and getting into fist fights over aesthetics. Those were the days!
Yeah! the stir that was caused by Dali and Bunuel when they premiered Un Chien Andalou? In his autobiography Bunuel tells of having stones in his pocket when he went on stage after the film was shown in case anyone in the audience would throw something at him he would have something to throw back. Not to mention Stravinski. I think Chekhov was picking up on that vibe with Treplev.
Well, I don't need a gym or a movie theater in my house. I'd be happy with a modest 4,000 sq feet of living space, lots of light (via plate glass windows), a big kitchen, and an infinity pool with a great view beyond it. Is that too much to ask? Bonus points for a 4-car garage with high ceilings that I could convert into a painting studio.
From reading the Architectural Digest article at this point I'm just not sure exactly what qualities a house would need to have before these people are willing to just call it a mansion and drop the "Mc".
A ranch house I used to walk past was a sort of family compound. I’m not sure if it began as two houses by the same builder or one, i think the former - but the upshot was a very cool horizontal house hundreds of yards wide.
I've been too swept up by ACX's muse hyping up charter cities, until I remembered my own surrounding to sober up and ask, what's even the benefit of charter cities to anyone who host it? Indonesia and Malaysia have a lot of resentment for Singapore instead of any gratitude (personal experience). Hongkong doesn't seem to improve its surrounding area at all. It becomes even clearer when Shenzen stays poor for decades until PRC props it up to become juggernaut in spite of Hongkong.
So the argument that ceding control to some foreigners for mutual benefit doesn't seem to hold at all. It's supposed to be that investors will get whatever profit inside the city (the entire point is special low tax so economy can improve in spite of government) and the government get whatever outside it. But if the surrounding area don't raise those profits, the government will come out empty handed. Thus, there'll be conflict over the city itself and if government wins, it won't be charter city anymore and no one would want to invest for other projects. And if the investors win, it's essentially colonialism all over again.
> And if the investors win, it's essentially colonialism all over again.
Isn't the issue with colonialism that the efforts to keep the natives in line put the colonizers in the red? If just a portion of land is ceded, the natives who don't want to be under the foot of foreign capitalists can just leave, while those wanting to take advantage of the opportunities provided can stay or even come from abroad. And as the person below noted, it will be difficult for the host country to justify killing their own.
The benefit is the economic links which keep neighboring countries from invading.
Singapore has a massive Indonesian and Filipino "domestic helper" (live-in maid) population. They pump millions of dollars of foreign exchange back into IN and PH.
Why would you resort to invading and plundering Singapore, probably killing thousands of your own people and destroying these remittances forever?
Free market economic reforms are best for everybody
But they may be politically impossible
A charter city may however be a small enough change to be politically viable.
Then once the charter city becomes successful, it becomes more politically viable to implement the same reforms in the rest of the country.
Examples: Dutch trading settlements in Japan. The wealth of Hong Kong playing a role in convincing the Chinese Communists to give up on actual Communism. And a third even better example that I can't think of.
I believe the defining difference is that Hong Kong and Singapore are exclusionary whereas charter cities are open to citizens of the host country, making them more like a Chinese "special economic zone" like Shenzhen or Chongqing than Hong Kong.
So let's stick with Hong Kong. Pretend you're a Chinese peasant farmer in Guangdong province near Shenzhen and Hong Kong. If Hong Kong gets rich, you kinda don't care 'cuz it's not like you can go and work there. Conversely, when the communists say "The city of Shenzhen is now a special zone where we prioritize growth" if Shenzhen experiences a boom, maybe you can go work there or maybe people who live there will spend money elsewhere in the province.
It's the same idea for Propera in Honduras. As far as I know, any Honduran citizen can just go to Prospera and if Prospera takes off, lots of Hondurans probably will get involved in the economy. Maybe not great jobs, let's be real, but it's a lot less exclusionary than, like, Singapore.
Guess so, but why don't we make them a "normal" special economic zone in the first place? I see libertarians argument as that, the freer the city the most prosperous it'd be. But the freer it is means the less profit the host can directly siphon from the city so instead they must tax it from surrounding areas that should also be more prosperous. But as per my original comment, it doesn't seem to be what happened.
It's even worse if it turns out economical liberty is orthogonal to how prosperous it is. It'd be even more worse if it turns out the city's success depends on making surrounding area worse.
This means that "normal" SEZ would be more beneficial for the host itself. It's also already the most common implementation in lots of areas with varying successes and failures.
Because they can't replicate special economic zones. Frankly, if they could have, they would have.
If Honduras could do a special economic zone instead of a charter city, they would...and would've. Trying to replicate China's special economic zones is really hard, even just basic things like political stability. The Shenzhen special economic zone was started under Deng Xiaoping in 1980 and was a miserable city, from personal experience, in ~2012. It's super baller now, so I've heard, but that took ~40 years. If you're a super stable despotic/oligarchic regime that has essentially absolute political power AND you can maintain that for 40 years AND you can the most competent and ambitious administrators in a country of billions to run it AND trust them with absolute authority within their zone THEN you might get China's SEZ results, although remember:
#1 China got the best economic deals because everyone wanted access to the world's biggest market.
#2 China's performance is impressive for its size, not its height. It's Per Capita GDP in PPP terms is ~$27k, roughly equivalent to Mexico's. That would be a major upgrade for Honduras or most African countries but it ain't Singapore or Hong Kong standards.
So, yeah, SEZs are really hard, most countries probably can't do them properly, and charter...ish cities still notably outperform them.
>China's performance is impressive for its size, not its height.
Yeah, but size is also why China to Singapore is not apples to apples comparison. Its developed, industrialized areas have already been at western levels when I checked the data several years ago. If that doesn't translate into overall prosperity across all China then, well, it's not that much different from Singapore not translating into prosperity of the entire Southeast Asia. (And very much a demonstration that creating small isolated islands of wealth is a task fundamentally different from creating universal prosperity, a much easier one that doesn't necessarily generalize.)
I don't think the argument for charter cities was ever that they benefit everyone else around, just themselves and their citizens. (Not from Scott, at least. He just fancies his Archipelago. Which, fundamentally the right idea, we do need diversity and we do need to incubate new ideas. He's too credulous towards what amounts to libertarian refuges for rich westerners, granted.)
I think a stronger argument in this vein is that the cities don't generalize. What works on a self-contained local level and what works for the entire world system are two different things, city-states can rarely be a blueprint for everybody else's development, especially when they're essentially exploitative/parasitic or essentially depending economically on trade/rich outsiders, which they often are.
That is surprising. If the city becomes rich, I would expect that at least the areas next to the city become rich, too. I mean, people from there can commute to the city, and take a well-paying job there. I would expect a rich city to expand beyond its boundaries, as the people outside get jobs inside, and the people inside start buying houses outside.
Unless there is a legal obstacle, of course. Such as people not allowed to cross the boundary of the city. Or maybe zoning that does not allow the city to expand. Anyway, this sounds like a mistake on side of the surrounding country, not the city.
Unless the city is on an island, or surrounded by a desert, or otherwise isolated from the country. (Mere jungle is not enough, I would expect it to be cut down.)
*
I asked Claude about Singapore, and Claude says that the parts of Malaysia next to Singapore, particularly the state of Johor, do benefit from the proximity. Malaysians from Johor commute to Singapore for better paying jobs, and bring the money home.
This cooperation even has some government support, and they are building a mass-transit connection between Singapore and Johor, expected to finish in 2026, that should reduce the commute to 15 minutes.
So, according to Claude, Malaysia benefits a lot from having Singapore.
It should be so, but I just checked and Johor's GDP per capita is far from the best in the country. Heck, it's almost at bottom half! Also it could be argued that if there's no Singapore, all of those boons may go to Johor directly instead (or Batam, the other neighbor belonging to Indonesia).
I think the proper comparison is not Johor now vs the rest of Malaysia now, but the *growth* of Johor in recent years vs the *growth* of the rest of Malaysia. The question is not whether Johor was historically a rich or poor part of Malaysia, but what is the impact of Singapore.
The data seem difficult to find, but it seems like during the recent two decades Johor was growing slightly faster that Malaysia on average.
Do you have a reason to suspect that without Singapore, Johor's economy would grow even faster, compared to the average of Malaysia?
> So, according to Claude, Malaysia benefits a lot from having Singapore.
Came here to make this exact point.
Also, Malaysia kicked Singapore out, and they had to build up a country and economy from scratch with no natural resources, more or less.
And Malaysia STILL complains about them, while their economy greatly enriches Malaysia's! More than a million Malaysians work in Singapore for much higher salaries, and most of that money goes to Malaysia.
> what's even the benefit of charter cities to anyone who host it?
It seems pretty obvious that having a bunch of people with 10x median income literally inside your country, transacting with local merchants and people every single day, would net out positively, with higher salaries and more forex coming into the country while not having to export anything?
> Myth 2: PEPFAR is (or was) exempt from the aid cuts
Shortly after Trump’s executive order suspending aid for 90 days, the US state department released a waiver which supposedly allowed funding for certain life-saving humanitarian activities to continue. The State Department said that this included the provision of antiretrovirals (ARVs) to people with HIV.
Much of the funding that South Africa receives from the US comes from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports HIV-related services. There are two primary US agencies which distribute PEPFAR funds: USAID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The US embassy in South Africa stated that because of the waiver, PEPFAR-funded organisations which were providing life-saving services would be able to resume their activities. This message was widely disseminated in the press and on social media. For instance, a deputy director-general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Clayson Monyela, posted a widely shared tweet stating that the US embassy “has confirmed” that PEPFAR services would not be affected.
But the US embassy’s claim that services could continue wasn’t true.
Weeks after the waiver was issued, Spotlight and GroundUp investigated the status of several PEPFAR-funded organisations that provided ARVs to people with HIV (a service explicitly listed under the waiver). We found that none of them had been able to resume US-funded work.
The only PEPFAR funds that continued to flow were those channelled by the CDC, and this had nothing to do with the waiver. Instead the CDC simply resumed all of its funding after a US court ruled against the freezing of congressional funds. PEPFAR funds distributed by USAID remained frozen, with the waiver offering no respite.
The problem is that in contrast to what US officials suggested to media, organisations weren’t instantly allowed to go back to work simply by virtue of providing life-saving services. Instead, they needed to get approval. In the meantime, their funds remained frozen.
Some PEPFAR-funded organisations in South Africa, like Engage Men’s Health, asked for information from USAID, but simply got no response. In other cases, PEPFAR-funded organisations were instructed by USAID to provide revised budgets which only included core services. Many organisations submitted these but never got approval.
By the end of February, USAID moved on from the so-called 90-day suspension period, and simply began terminating grants. Since the waiver only applied to the suspension period, it now had no formal effect. But since Spotlight and GroundUp could not find a single USAID-funded organisation in South Africa that was covered by the waiver, it’s not clear that it ever had much of an impact.
At the global level, some organisations reportedly received waivers, but USAID’s system for processing invoices and making payments often remained inaccessible, meaning they struggled to get paid.
The Centre for Global Development gathered data on global USAID spending and found that “the waiver process had zero impact on releasing USAID funds to awardees between the announcement of the spending freeze and the announcement that the contract review had been completed”.
I can see why the average person might support billionaire taxes. This hypothetical billionaire is so far beyond any wealth we can imagine, that having them cling to an itty bitty 5% seems monstruos.
The problem is that a lot of these left leaning political ideas are sold by telling the story of one man or woman who has too much or too little. Rather, people should be thinking about incentives in the system and how that affects long term behavior.
On its face, I don’t feel protective of 5% of a billionaire’s wealth. But I have a good sense of how it will play out, with people moving away from California, and ultimately negatively impacting our ability to collect taxes. And I also believe is short of impossible for a most governments to take a one time windfall and use it as a durable advantage for decades to come.
I try to bring it back to that when I have discussions with others. But it’s hard to beat that narrative.
Any ideas that work to engage non rationalists in non anecdotal dialogue?
I really don't think there's a shortage of people shouting an alarm about how destructive wealth concentration is on a systemic level, how it results in and amounts to institutional capture of governments and entire societies. I also don't think there's a shortage of evidence for those claims. You should, perhaps, engage with those, instead of complaining about other sorts of arguments also being utilized?
And "billionaires will just pack their money and leave" is a vacuous argument. First, because they're already leaving anyway, the solution to that is fixing loopholes and eliminating tax havens. (That this proves hard to do should be a good demonstration of how captured the institutions already are.) Second, because they can't really take their economic activity and productive capabilities with them. (Which are not merely machinery, but all infrastructure, human capital, institutions, etc. Everything that, mostly, relies on taxes. Sweatshops have already been transferred to less developed countries, everything else would have also gone there already if it could.) Third, because even if it was literally true, it would still amount to "we can ultimately do nothing to stop the ongoing erosion of our society, so let's do nothing", which is just fundamentally bullshit. (Even if I do in fact believe there's little that can actually be done by this point and the US will dwindle like others before it. At least try! The ability to collect taxes, or indeed do anything at all, is going to be negatively impacted either way.)
The government being unable to invest and maintain itself properly is I assume true, but it's a separate problem that requires a separate fix. (Loosening the institutional capture can't hurt, though.) Here, again, "let's not do X because to see benefits we also need to do Y" is just fundamentally bullshit.
>they can't really take their economic activity and productive capabilities with them.
They can move their companies. This isn't billionaire related, but its an example of what I mean by that. The Daily Wire is a big right wing media company, valued at $800 milltion to $1 billion dollars. Until 2020 they were headquartered in Los Angeles. They paid California business taxes, the owners (who also lived in Los Angeles) paid California income taxes, and their employees paid California income taxes. Then they decided to move the company to Nashville. That involved asking their employees (75 at the time) to move, which most of them did. The owners moved out of California as well, with Ben Shapiro taking his millions to Florida, and the on air talent (the big names who have their own Daily Wire podcasts) moved out of California as well. Now they aren't paying California any business taxes, the owners aren't paying California income taxes, and their employees aren't paying California income taxes either.
That's the kind of thing people mean when they say billionaires will pack up their money and leave. They will personally leave the state, to not pay taxes, and they may move their companies out of the state as well. Which will lead to many employees also leaving the state.
I'm not sure what you think my argument is, but to restate it:
- it's already happening;
- it would have already happened on a much larger scale if it was viable (exactly as it did happen with certain branches of manufacturing);
- yet industries (especially hi-tech, high-profit industries) mostly stay in place instead of chasing places with lowest costs / taxes;
- this is because infrastructure / workforce quality / institutions (and, of course, agglomeration effects, which are downstream from the preceding three) matter more than tax rate.
Existing economic centers are not threatened by places with more lenient taxation. They're threatened by places with a working industrial policy that successfully develops their systemic / institutional capabilities of hosting advanced industry.
Note - I'm making a systemic argument, you're responding with anecdotal example - worth pointing out, and somewhat ironic, considering this thread's OP's thesis.
Also note how unusual and uniquely suitable to transfer your example of choice was:
- little need for infrastructure (apart from already ubiquitous office space / data connectivity);
- dubious benefits from workforce / agglomeration effects (dissident conservative media in a predominantly socially progressive environment).
Most businesses are very much not in that position.
The institutions are what keep tech companies in Silicon Valley? Don't the various Bay Area municipal governments notably hate techies and all they stand for?
My ill-informed impression is certainly that there's massive but ineffectual antagonism from ~all relevant institutions toward Silicon Valley and that the tech crowd just go there because that's where the tech crowd is. If circumstances became hostile enough I'm sure the FAANG/startup crowd could coordinate to move to Austin or wherever and just take the entire subculture with them. I think the Apple headquarters might be able to just fly there directly.
It's anecdotal, but companies move all the time. Boeing was headquartered in Washington since it's founding, but in 2001 they moved to Chicago, in significant part because of the tax benefits. Then they moved it again in 2022 to Virginia.
Between 2018 and 2023 a net of eight Fortune 500 companies left California (including Tesla, in 2021). Most of them went to Texas, a much lower tax and lower regulation state. During that same period Texas had a net gain of 10 Fortune 500 companies that moved, Florida gained 4, Georgia 3, and Colorado 2, while Illinois lost 2, New York lost 3, and New Jersey lost 3. That's a lot of large companies moving to states with friendlier tax and regulation regimes, and leaving states that aren't so friendly.
I'll note that it's probably not a coincidence that between 2018 and 2022 the population of California shrank by 400,000. That's 400,000 fewer taxpayers, workers, innovators, etc. Over the same period the Texas population grew by 1.4 million.
I agree that companies will stay in a bad tax environment if other factors outweigh the tax negatives, such as the existing workforce and infrastructure. But they will move if that calculation comes out negative, and much of the workforce will move with them.
So I would agree it is happening, but I also believe it is happening on a large scale, and will continue to happen if the tax situation gets worse.
I don't suppose factories moved together with headquarters? Because if they didn't, the economic impact cannot be that big. And if the impact on taxation would be bigger (because, e.g., companies pay taxes where their headquarters are), then, per my first post in this chain, that would be a loophole to be fixed, rather than some hard rule that should just be accepted as a fact of life.
Anyways, you're still fundamentally using anecdotal data. How does that translate to total tax revenue?
In 2011, Texas brought into federal coffers 70% as much as California.
In 2020, the number was 59%.
By 2024, it shrunk further down to 52%.
I would assume federal tax rate is more-or-less uniform across states and can serve as a proxy of overall economic activity. (The [ratio to GDP] data in some of the tables seem to confirm, at least when it comes to those two states.)
I've also checked state tax revenue for completeness (at census.gov, had to go into individual spreadsheets, so I won't bother with direct links), and Texas's revenue was 36%, 35% and 33% of California's for 2011, 2020 and 2024, respectively. Not a particularly significant change, still, in the opposite direction from what you'd probably expect. (And that's with California's significantly higher tax rate. And with Texas's rising population, which means per capita the change is, in fact, significant.)
And look, I don't want to read too much into this kind of numbers, they may depend on several weird factors external to the discussion we're having. But your particular proposition that Texas is a positive example of [tax revenue maximization] or [economic robustness] vis-a-vis California is just ostensibly, demonstrably wrong.
>I don't suppose factories moved together with headquarters?
When Tesla left California and moved to Texas, it did not get rid of it's Fremont factory. However, it built it's next factory in Austin, Texas, and hasn't built a factory in California since Tesla left. They are currently working on opening three new factories, one in Texas, one in Mexico, and one in Nevada. There are no plans to open new factories in California. So even if the factories are not moved, when companies leave California they are less likely to build new factories there.
California has a significantly larger Real GDP (RGDP) than Texas (about $3.45 trillion compared to Texas's $2.37 trillion), just as California has more citizens than Texas (39.4 million compared to 31.3 million). California has been a rich and prosperous state for a long time and has a large RGDP to work from. However, if we look at the period between 2022 and today we see that Texas's RGDP has been growing much faster than California's has:
RGDP growth compared to previous year:
California
2022: 0%
2023: 1.59%
2024: 3.44%
2025 (Q2, most recent data available): 4.3%
Texas
2022: 3.68%
2023: 8.63%
2024: 3.74%
2025 (Q2, most recent data available): 6.8%
Texas' economy has been growing a lot faster than California's. This is to be expected given the differences in the two state's tax regimes, and to companies choosing to move to Texas and invest in Texas rather than California.
The other way the debate about this is dishonest is that it's always framed as billionaire vs poor person. The reality is that that poor person is just a fig leaf for the real motivation which is to justify an increase in tax revenue. Once it's in the government coffers then it's up for political grabs. It's just a ratchet for bureaucratic creep.
Billionaires give plenty away to charity and I'm sure they do a better job than the government of allocating their wealth in socially productive ways.
"The reality is that that poor person is just a fig leaf for the real motivation which is to justify an increase in tax revenue. Once it's in the government coffers then it's up for political grabs. It's just a ratchet for bureaucratic creep"
"Billionaires give plenty away to charity and I'm sure they do a better job than the government of allocating their wealth in socially productive ways."
Worth noting that this part (which I don't even believe in) is absolutely not necessary for the rest of your argument to be 100% bang on. It doesn't matter if the billionaires are just buying cocaine for all that money, it's *still* bad to allow a bureaucratic ratchet to appropriate an increasing proportion of economic output.
Agreed, but do you really believe that billionaires, as a class, are less charitable than the average person? Sure it tends to be more tied to self-serving status markers, but they do things like build hospitals and fund symphonies. Surely that leads to a richer culture than the counterfactual government allocation.
Eh... I'm cynical enough to believe that most of the charitable donations are just ego boosts and/or concealed self-indulgence. You might be right though, even that might actually be more effective than the government spending the money.
> On its face, I don’t feel protective of 5% of a billionaire’s wealth. But I have a good sense of how it will play out, with people moving away from California, and ultimately negatively impacting our ability to collect taxes.
Allow me to directly point to Monaco, Luxembourg, and Sweden as direct examples of this.
Luxembourg has zero Forbes billionaires despite very high average incomes and wealth levels, while tiny Monaco, roughly 20x smaller, has at least 2 - by the economic numbers, you'd expect a whopping ~40 billionaires in Luxembourg!
What’s the mismatch? Monaco has no personal income tax, and Luxembourg has a ~40% top bracket income tax. This can drive out many tens of prospective billionaires that could otherwise be generated or persuaded to live there, apparently!
Another data point along these lines? Sweden, famously egalitarian and as Scandinavian as they come, punches way above it’s weight on the billionaire front! It has 13 - 20 predicted by the economic numbers, but actually has 45 Forbes listeds! That’s a huge differential!
What’s the answer? Sweden has pursued a tax policy that allows billionaires to stay and thrive - they eliminated the inheritance and gift tax in 2004 and the wealth tax in 2007. If you build a $10B company, you can pass that to your heirs tax free - in the US, that would be taxed at 40%. And indeed, you see some names you’d recognize in the Swedish billionaires, who derive their fortunes from H&M, TetraPak, Spotify, and Mojang / Minecraft, among others.
From my post on "just how many billionaires are there?"
Also, my understanding is that the Swedish wealth tax was abolished because, contrary to a lot of California liberal narratives about wonderful Scandi socialist systems, it never at any time brought in more money than it cost to administer. And to their credit, the Swedish socialists realized it was a spite-based tax mostly hurting normal people in order for envious people to feel less inferior, so they chucked it.
>Rather, people should be thinking about incentives in the system and how that affects long term behavior.
Hugely progressive wealth taxes *are* an incentive structure. They incentivize people not to become billionaires.
The idea of 'they also incentivize people to move to different jurisdictions with lower taxes' is an old saw with lots of defenders, but I personally don't take it too seriously.
Rich people are already plenty incentivized to create tax havens and commit tax fraud and lobby to change tax laws and etc., this is a permanent ongoing fight that has been happening since ?the start of human history? It's more an issue of enforcement and special interest lobbying groups than it is an issue of people actually physically moving away from the place they want to live where their business and employees and customers and friends and sex partners and children's friends and tutors and etc. already live.
Yes, 5% additional incentive from 5% more tax can shift this equilibrium a bit, but it's only a small additional weight compared to existing taxes and regulations, there's no reason to expect a sudden qualititive change from it.
"this is a permanent ongoing fight that has been happening since ?the start of human history?"
Not even close to the start of human history. It's only been ongoing during the 20th century. The vast majority of past governments, including Victorian Britain and the US, understood their role as defending the rich against the depredations of the masses of the poor, if anything. Medieval and earlier governments typically considered the legitimate compass of "the rich" to be the monarch and his friends and relatives; early modernity changed this to a more general wealth protection for purposes of economic efficiency which ultimately benefited the monarch's own wealth.
I am by no means a historian, but I kind of had the impression that Sheriffs tried to hide how much they had collected for the heregeld and keep some for themselves, or lobby to keep more of it or etc.?
They didn't try to hide it: the Sheriffs would pay the King a big lump sum for the right to collect the Kings taxes, which the Sheriff would then keep for himself. It was understood that the Sheriff would collect more than the lump sum he paid the King, in order to make a profit.
I'm sorry, I'm not following how this connects up with rich people vs. progressive taxation? I'm pretty sure you're correct and in fact that every sort of tax collector has always tried to keep as much as possible of collected taxes for themselves (hence why a common historical model was to franchise out tax collection by simply making the collector pay a fixed sum for the privilege of taking up taxes from a given district, then allowing the collector to keep whatever sums he was actually able to extract from the people). However, I'm not picking up the relevance to the issue at hand. I'm sure it's there, I'm just not smart enough to see it.
I would think a more relevant historical comparison would be the ongoing medieval wrangle about weights and measures, which is actually a very interesting topic in itself and probably the main reason why standardized units were never adopted before the French revolution.
My point was that 'rich people will try to evade taxes if you pass this small marginal tax increase on them, so you shouldn't do it' isn't a very powerful argument, because rich people are already trying to evade taxes, and have probably been doing so in one form or another since they first time they were taxed.
I think he meant it as in "fight with cancer". Yeah, we've started intentionally using treatments that sorta-kinda-work-for-a-while only recently, but the society's struggle to grow productive capacities in spite of elite parasites undermining it has been ongoing ever since humans first went above subsistence level.
Are you saying that if Musk or Gates or whoever stopped at $1B, the world would be better off for it? How much of Google's recent renaissance is because Sergey shows up to work everyday? These people, due to a combination of talent, power, etc., can actually create a ton of value, even after being deep into the billions. Disincentivizing billionaires is disincentivizing capitalism, whether it feels fair or not.
>Are you saying that if Musk or Gates or whoever stopped at $1B, the world would be better off for it?
Yes, absolutely.
Because there's no reason for their *companies* to stop at $1B.
There's just reason for them to sell off their shares and retire to other pursuits, the way Gates actually did with philanthropy for instance.
Or donate part of their shares to charity if they want to keep working as the head of the company, because they love it so much.
Or whatever.
If you are in the Randian camp that every rich person is a unique genius that humanity cannot survive without, then I'm sorry, but you still believe in Santa Claus.
Many of these people had useful insights and persuasive visions and did a lot of good creating something from nothing. But by the time that something is a billion-dollar concern, whatever vision they had is already realized and they are not adding infinite marginal value beyond what the next CEO on the block could provide.
And most of them are not even really providing that initial value, they are good businessmen who arranged to take the credit and value for antisocial tech nerd's inventions, or one of 50 people trying to implement the same business model who happened to come out in front through often immoral means, or etc.
Most successful capitalists are primarily good at wining zero-sum competitions in them market against other capitalists. They are rarely inventors who come across some new idea hat no one else on the planet would have thought to do for another 50 years without them or something, that's not really how the world works.
I think you're missing more nuanced factors. If you replaced Elon with someone else at the helm, they wouldn't have the natural authority to get people to go above and beyond to achieve very unlikely goals. The moment you professionalize an organization, the dynamics change. If you encourage founders that could have built a $1T company, to retire when that same company is worth 1/100th of that, there would absolutely be value left on the table. A lot of these companies are personality cults and wouldn't function the same without the personality. For better or for worse, the Trump administration is a personality cult and it can move faster than a professionalized, consensus-driven administration. It's really not as much a matter of intrinsic value of individual decisions as it is the way in which they are perceived, the power that comes from that, and the way in which they yield this power.
As a trivial example, who would be better at convincing Disney to buy Pixar, Steve or Tim? Who can use their fame and fortune to advance the company's goals? It's not all about operating and in fact founder-CEOs are not so much operators as they are kings of the company. There's plenty of people to operate.
When you're talking about "incentives in the long run", are you including the states' incentives not to get into a race to the bottom, where states underbid each other to keep their slice of a shrinking cake, while the vaporware capitalists keep ever more of their - I don't even want to call it "profits" - so they can keep inflating their businesses to "too big to fail" status and then ask for government bailouts when the bubble bursts?
You don't solve a race to the bottom by being the only one not to race, any more than you solve the tragedy of the commons by refusing to overfish while everyone else does. It requires the will for coordination at the federal, or even international level. No need to ignore the obvious consequences of being the one collaborator in a world of defectors.
Refushing to overfish is not sufficient but it is often necessary.
It's easy to say "we should stop the race to the bottom" and people say it routinely without being actually willing to incur the costs in the short term. "Ah, if just somebody else were to go first, I'd be sure to follow them".
So you signal you're actually serious by being the first to stop. Kudos if you can get your coalition organized without anyone needing to do this, more power to you.
But in many cases the way to everyone stopping starts with someone being the first. If everyone thinks "well as long as the others don't stop I don't see why I should be the first" then there'll be no change and the race continues.
I'm not OP, but I agree with him on wealth taxes and also believe that we should always include long-run incentives ->
States "race to the bottom":
A Land Value Tax fixes this. Land is valuable due to its location, and people can't avoid tax by taking it somewhere else. So, States should compete by replacing other taxes with a Land Value Tax, whenever possible.
So, I'm not worried about a supposed "race to the bottom".
Bailouts:
These arent usually handouts, but rather, loans. The 2008 bank bailout were loans on which the US government made a profit.
Regardless, bailouts for "too big to fail firm" do create bad incentives, something called "Moral Hazard", on which there is still debate about how to proceed. So I am worried about bailouts.
I am of the opinion that in situations where a bailout is necessary, as in 2008, some of these should be loans and some others should be equity, as to create a sort of "Sovereign wealth fund". In that way, there would be a cost to the firms for having failed, and it would reduce moral hazard.
However, I recognize that in reality most bailouts are because politicians don't want to *leave a bunch of people unemployed*. You see, voters don't like bailouts, but they don't like mass layoffs either!
So, if a firm is improductive, it should be allowed to fail, and those fired should be helped in a different manner (unemployment insurance, etc...). Not through a bailout.
The biggest issue is that you and others have completely different frames of approaching the question. You likely do systems thinking, looking at incentives, unintended consequences, cost benefit analysis, etc.
They come to their point of view through strong feelings. I met someone who recently said “It’s unconscionable that someone can be driving around in a $100k car while people have trouble affording food”.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
Trying to convince others to think in your frame is very difficult. I’d recommend asking pointed questions about their beliefs. “How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide” by James M. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. This is an underrated book from people who focused on trying to figure out how to convince theists to become atheists. The basic technique involves very carefully listening to your conversation partner, and having them explain in detail how they know what they know or how the policy will work exactly. When they realize themselves that they don’t understand how it will work, they will become less confident in it. Then you ask how confident they are in their position out of 10, why it is X, instead of X+1 or X-1, and that helps them to think up reasons to doubt as well. I’ve never applied this methodology myself but it seems sound.
Another approach is to build relationships and trust with people. Someone I had recently met made a comment saying something about how all finance is a way for people to make money without doing anything and how all financial firms scam everyone. I explained that there are definitely firms like that, but explained how I worked in trading for years and how I felt the market making systems I worked on helped every day investors. I explained with simple example bid asks spreads, hedging, and transferring risk to firms that can handle it. He understood those at a bit, I don’t think he was fully convinced, but he came to have a more nuanced view and realized there was more to know and a simple dogmatic black and white good vs evil viewpoint was unlikely to be correct.
One time insofar as people would bail or circumvent pretty quickly. They can make it retroactive and do their best to enforce it once, when it comes as a surprise.
I've been having fun using claude these past couple weeks to write blog posts using research mode. I iterated a little bit on this post on the vibecession, mostly asking claude to add graphs, and it came out better than I expected https://dawndrain.github.io/braindrain/vibecession.html. The biggest factor that I think was missing from Scott's post is that people don't immediately appreciate when inflation slows down, what they really want (or think they want, sure) is deflation bringing prices back down to something that seems more reasonable.
My crackpot theory is that Eliezer Yudkowsky has a mild dissociative disorder and doesn't realize that.
Harry Potter from his HPMOR displays some interesting symptoms. His "mysterious dark side" that takes over and changes his perception; or extensive arguing with voices of the Hogwarts houses in his head; are very typical for a dissociative disorder. But he is never directly stated to have a disorder. The dark side is lampshaded as the side effect of Voldemort's possession, and voices in his head is something that he just does, and is surprised to learn other people don't. Dissociative disorders are probably beaten only by aphantasia and autism by how often the newly diagnosed people say something like "I thought everybody had it like that, I didn't know it was unusual".
As someone who is in exactly that boat, I can vouch that Eliezer writes those symptoms into his protagonist fairly specifically and accurately This can't be done by coincidence: either he has intentionally written it _as_ a dissociative disorder and for some reason never clarified it in Author's Notes, or he has those himself and it's just a spicy banana moment (https://i.imgur.com/Y8xrPAY.png) that he projected into ostensibly not a self insert
I read that as a literary technique. Dialogue is often easier to write engagingly than monologue, and there were bits where it made more sense for Harry to work through things in his own head than talk them through with Draco or Hermione or Quirrell or McGonagall, so EY wrote those bits as Harry arguing with himself in his head.
It also works as a way for EY to drop clues about Harry's dark side, which I'm pretty sure he had planned from the start. And if you're doing internal dialogue anyway, the four house perspectives are suggested by the pervasiveness of the house system in the source material. They help camouflage the nature of Harry's dark side while delivering the clue, and they seem like they were probably fun to write.
As usual, Elon is jumping late onto a scandal that was already being investigated, prosecuted, and widely reported on. As usual, the strategy is to blatantly lie that it was being ignored, and blatantly lie that the reason for this was that we're all too scared of being racist. As usual, the goal of his blatant lie is to race-bait, destroy anti-racist social norms, and embolden blatant racism.
This time it's about the fraud scandal in Minnesota, which has been repeatedly widely reported on by local media like the Minnesota Star Tribune and mass media like the New York Times.[1] Last time it was about the grooming gangs scandal in the UK, which had already led to the Jay Report.[2] In both cases his goal was race-baiting, and to destroy the institutions of post-WWII liberal democracy for not being racist enough.
tl;dr whenever you see Elon or his stooges claim the media has been ignoring something, check. These people have no problem with scheming and lying with malicious, racist, totalitarian intent.
I don't like Elon these days, but as a Brit, I appreciate him drawing more attention to the grooming gang scandal, because our institutions have never took it seriously enough - so the more attention the better.
"anti-racism" is just racism*, so destroying it is good for the world
Most people believe that immigrants should be held to a higher standard of behavior than natives, and that's reflected in immigration law in most (every?) countries.
*I don't just mean that anti-racism is racist against white people. I mean that it promotes racism generally, in that it promotes the idea that we should think of ourselves and others primarily by their skin color, and that we should fear and hate those of other skin colors. It has been remarkably effective at promoting racism as seen in survey data, which show racial harmony cratering in the last ten years, and in the growth in overt racism by white people, black people, damn near everybody.
> Ah, so there never was any scandal in the first place,
No? That's very clearly not what the comment you replied to said or implied. It presented both things as genuine scandals and provided evidence that they had been treated as such well before Musk got involved.
Do you have a substantive disagreement, or are you just doing the thing where you scent wokeness and reflexively snark back regardless of whether you have an actual point to make.
Can you shed light on any evidence that Musk's mind was accurately read where it's said "As usual, the goal of his blatant lie is to race-bait, destroy anti-racist social norms, and embolden blatant racism"?
Billions of dollars were lost to scams. Much of the money was taken out of the country to fund a terrorist organization. The rest paid for luxury for scammers, while many law-abiding citizens could barely afford groceries. When conscientious people in the Minnesota government tried to delay payments to the scammers, this was decried as racism, and they were forced to issue the money.
And, in the midst of these outrageous revelations, what you're complaining about is that Musk said the scandal got no coverage (because everyone in the country religiously reads Minnesota Star Tribune and the paywalled part of NYT, right?).
Like many leftists, you are also throwing around the word "racism" to mean "reporting on facts I don't like". Heck, the next generation might not even know the word ever had a different meaning, as we hardly ever see cases of it with the original meaning anymore.
Well I guess we're going to find out -- both the federal and state administrations are dispatching fresh bunches of investigators as I type this. Hopefully the two sets of investigators, from government administrations of wildly opposite political persuasions, don't end up tripping over each other too much.
The COVID-lockdowns-funding fraud about fake food deliveries for poor children, which involved Somali immigrants though its ringleader is a native-born American, absolutely was prosecuted by Minnesota and federal (Biden Administration) authorities. [Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland called it the largest pandemic-relief fraud perpetrated in the nation.] It turned out that state regulators had repeatedly tried to shut down funding to the fake organization since actually before COVID, but had been stymied by the ringleader's energetic filing of federal civil lawsuits (all eventually dismissed or withdrawn but that process takes time). Federal charges were brought in 2022 against her and dozens of other individuals; about 50 were convicted or pled guilty of whom most are now awaiting sentencing; the sham organization was finally shut down by the state. At one point one of the federal criminal trials was disrupted when a juror reported having been offered a $120K cash bribe to vote not guilty. The fraud's organizer, Aimee Bock, and its number-two, Salim Said, were finally convicted last spring and are now awaiting sentencing. A key lieutenant in the scheme, Mohamed Ismail, was sentenced in fall 2024 to 12 years in prison. Federal officials estimate the total amount stolen at around $250M of which around a quarter has been recovered so far.
Regarding daycare fraud the recent viral video did not offer anything in the way of actual evidence. He seems oddly worked up about daycare centers _not_ allowing unannounced strangers carrying microphones and cameras to walk into their facilities; is unaware that some daycare centers are intended for parents working shifts other than 9 to 5; is very upset by a spelling error by a sign painter; shows no evidence that the daycare centers he tried to raid are/are not owned or operated by Somali immigrants in particular; appears to just assume that they are receiving public funding; etc. As a veteran parent of big-city daycare centers nothing in his video rang any alarm bells for me, which doesn't prove anything obviously but neither did he.
The senior executive team at Rotherham MBC were replaced and essentially the council was designated as failing, and was run by commissioners appointed by central Government. For about....three years, with then a gradual return to more orthodox arrangements. That's quite big. HMG has long established powers to take the controls of a failing council, but that has almost always been a response to financial failure, or (as happens) corruption. The political leadership changed too, and seem (I had some dealings with them about a land acquisition near the M1) to be pragmatic and sensible.
More subjectively, but I would say very clearly. Before about 2011- 2012, public discourse about the Rotherham abuse scandal was bizarrely skewed, so that the ethnicity and group behaviour of those involved was seldom mentioned. From about that point, this was becoming clearly untenable as similar scandals happened in other northern boroughs. It perhaps helped with the optics that the most vigorous prosecutor was himself Muslim. But there was still some squeamishness; and I think that pretty well disappeared after Jay.
Elon: "Completely fake daycares in Minnesota are defrauding hard-working taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars, which are funding terrorism. And in Britain, organised gangs are gang-raping pre-teen girls, and the police and social workers are facilitating it."
You: "So? We already knew, a couple of local newspapers mentioned it a decade ago, and you're a racist for bringing it up again."
You see how that's worse, right? If these things are still going on even when people did know about them, that's even worse than if nobody knew.
Yeah, it's this. Nothing was being done, nothing. It was being swept under the rug. The UK government was also drenched in outrage and had to institute another inquiry (which I understand is now foundering because they tried to water it down/divert it to once again try to conceal/water down the uncomfortable truth, leading to public outrage from rape gang survivors). None of this looks like what happens when the issue has been properly dealt with and the idea that Musk is some kind of evil genius for bringing the issues back up after they had been comprehensively handwaved is bizarre. Justice must be done, a large number of people need to go to jail, the scaffold, or back where they came from. Responsible politicians need to be horsewhipped and permanently lose careers.
It was confined to the Minneapolis newspaper/local TV for years. I brought it up in some context or other 4 or five years ago; on a forum much like this, believing I was mentioning something uncontroversial, and was told I had made it up.
I am not very interested in Elon's behavior or motives. I will say I wasnt aware of the fraud issue until it went viral. One might ask if its been reported on as early as 2015 but that there still appear to be fraudulent day care centers then it might not gave gotten enough attention. Rebutting the facts (if they are in fact wrong) would be more productive than complaining about Elons sensationalism.
The coverage was thin until a day or two after that video became viral. And some of the coverage was trying to present some balanced argument about how Somalians are good people rather than just talking about the facts.
I’d say refugees being at the root of a massive fraud scandal is very inconvenient to certain worldviews shared by most journalists.
So you agree that there was coverage, and that the reason Elon's pretending there wasn't is that it didn't do enough race-baiting against Somali Americans.
I'm reminded of this great clip from Yes, Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6lpKkcFQY, where Jim is wondering what to do about the fact that he's been told Britain is selling top secret bomb-making equipment to Italian terrorists. Humphrey's suggestion is to write the following letter to the PM:
> My attention has been drawn, on a personal basis, to information which suggests the possibility of certain irregularities under Section 1 of the Import, Export and Customs Powers Defence Act 1939 C. Prima facie evidence suggests that there could be a case for further investigation; to establish whether or not enquiries should be put in hand. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that available information is limited, and relevant facts could be difficult to establish with any degree of certainty.
So, if there were an inquiry, he'd be in the clear, and everybody would understand that the busy PM might not have grasped the full implications of such a letter. Also to smudge the letter all over, and arrange for the letter to arrive at Number 10 on the day the PM leaves for an overseas summit, so there's also doubt about whether it was the PM or the acting PM who read the note.
Your preferred approach to reporting on politically inconvenient news strikes me as quite similar.
Sir Humphrey: "And so the whole thing is written off as a breakdown in communications, everybody's in the clear, and everybody can get on with their business."
It is very good. It has of course dated since it was made, but the general principles of "the permanent civil servants run the show, the ministers come and go, governments are too busy chasing after election wins to actually govern" are timeless.
The part abut the newspapers is both funny and relevant still, even if the tabloids like The Sun (Murdoch press) have less power than they did:
Or why administration officials should never speak to the newspapers (very relevant in the wake of the Vanity Fair piece where many online are in raptures of delight over the clever photography ' - 'shot it like a horror show' - and how the colour tones were altered to make the faces look diseased etc.)
Do. Its the best British comedy of all time IMO, and widely considered to be better than a college education in understanding how the British political system works.
Or at least it was, its decades old now so some points are timeless and some are not.
It is quite remarkable how some of the political issues it lampoons are still topical (identity cards; EU regulation of what you can call a sausage; badger cull …)
It's not news to you or me, but there are still people who don't know about it yet; perhaps some of them are here.
An additional reason could be articulated better by others, but it's to do with common knowledge vs merely-mutual knowledge. ("What everyone knows that everyone knows" vs just "what everyone knows.") He owns a big chunk of the public sphere and is trying to use that to shape which is which. Posting about it, without mincing words, resists that.
The people he is preaching to and the people here are basically two entirely different groups, though I'm sure some here support what he's doing. I'd say your "resistance" is better served elsewhere.
I think I understand the chip export thing (or, at least, I can steelman it). Exporting those chips keeps China dependent upon products developed here in the US, giving us a counter-measure to their control over the rare earth mineral supply which is more nuanced and less costly to ourselves than slapping a tariff on them. That would be the theory, anyway.
That doesnt actually appear to be jenseng's case. Its more along the lines of there is no path dependency here. Not selling the chips now means money left on the table for no benefit. Others step in to to offer your steelman. As for Trumps motivation, its probably more linked to keeping up stock performance (so basically jensengs case)
Yeah, I know. But I feel it important to remain open to the possibility that stupid people might still do the right thing, if for the wrong reason. Or maybe I'm just looking for a silver lining.
1) China will continue to invest heavily in chip design and manufacturing regardless of whether or not they are currently able to buy SOTA chips.
2) China will continue to be dependent on US chips whether or not they can easily buy the best ones in large quantities.
3) Whether or not there are current trade restrictions on chips does not impact negotiation leverage. Negotiation can occur with the same leverage anywhere on the trade restriction spectrum.
I think the stronger rationale here is that it’s good to intertwine economies and be nice to China. There is no true conflict here. Nobody wants a war, and this will increasingly be the case as Technology-To-Destroy continues to improve.
This decision point is one of many that collectively describe the degree to which our nations see each other as enemies. We get to choose. We don’t have to be enemies. The world is more stable when nations are codependent.
Well, I'm a bit if a cynic. I see my own rationale "keeps China dependent upon products developed here in the US, giving us a counter-measure to their control" and your rationale "it’s good to intertwine economies and be nice to China" as functionally the same thing. Nation states are never truly friends, but you are right to say that we don't have to be enemies.
Nevertheless, I'd like to continue to argue and reiterate my belief that whether or not China can buy NVIDIA chips wouldn't change their underlying "dependence" on the chips. They are better chips, yes, but at a high level the chips just enable them to move faster in the things they are already planning on doing. It doesn't dig them into much of an NVIDIA-dependence-hole IMO.
Outcome-wise, yeah it's the same. And if the outcome is the same (selling chips), it makes a lot more sense to frame it as "we are being nice" rather than "we are preparing to exploit you in the event that you cross us".
Suppose I give someone the gift of a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
I can choose to say "Hi, I'm being nice to you and giving you the gift of Adobe Creative Cloud, now you can feel positive sentiment towards me"
Or I can choose to say "Hi, I'm giving you this subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, and this will place you firmly under my boot and will give me great leverage over you as I will be able to cancel the subscription at any time to punish you for your transgressions"
Framing matters, especially when the it's included in the decision as presented to the public.
This seems like it might amuse the commentariat here, and not in the way it was meant to by its author. At least, it should go a ways towards making everyone feel all is right with the world after all.
It probably is serious medical research, but yeah, the description is hilarious:
"Ferrets on a Booze Binge: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wasted over $1,079,360 teaching teenage ferrets to binge drink alcohol."
Less hilariously, this genuinely might count as animal cruelty/abuse:
"Like the NIH and its coke hounds, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) apparently considers studying alcoholism in weasels to be so vital that they approved $1 million for a project to turn teenage ferrets into binge drinkers. In the study, researchers force ferrets to consume only alcohol for an entire day by withholding their access to water in what the experimenters call “forced binge” days. The other 6 days of the week the animals are given alcohol and water, and this cycle is to continue for up to 90 days, when they finally kill the ferrets.
The researchers claim the goal of this drunken ferret experiment is to “pave the way” for teenage ferrets to be used to test “chemical weapons, opioids, extreme stress, [and] TBI [traumatic brain injuries]” or to conduct studies related to “Depression, Stress responses, Addiction, Schizophrenia, Suicide and Sensory processing.” That’s a lot of taxpayer dollars for something that might not even work."
This I want to know more about:
"The Price is Wrong for Monkey Plinko: NSF and other federal agencies paid $14,643,280 to make monkeys play a “Price Is Right”-inspired video game."
As would this count as animal abuse:
"The National Science Foundation and other agencies also monkied around with your tax dollars. Federal grants from the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation obligate over $14 million in taxpayer dollars to perform inhumane research. Researchers at Brown University are enlisting monkeys to play a video game they invented called “Planko” - a variation on the famous “Price is Right” game Plinko. The monkeys have “headposts” screwed into their skulls to keep their heads still while they played the game and researchers track their brain activity and eye movements.
The immobilized monkeys are tasked with tapping a button to pick which bucket a ball traversing an obstacle course would land in. The groundbreaking conclusion? Monkeys are very good at Plinko. This monkey business is funded by several federal grants totaling over $11 million."
This I *definitely* want to know more about, because it sounds serious and what is going on exactly?
"Not the “BLT” You’re Thinking Of: DOD funded $2,818,462 in grants that have paid for aborted human fetal tissue to be implanted in humanized mice."
"If eating bugs turns your stomach, this “BLT” might push the faint-hearted over the edge. The Department of Defense spent your money creating so-called “BLT mice” — and no, not the kind of BLT you’re thinking of. These lab animals were implanted with bone marrow, liver, and thymus tissue obtained from aborted human babies.
The projects drew military dollars to support projects using humanized BLT mice. What was billed as science for national defense instead exposed cruel and unnecessary research using aborted fetal tissue, a morally repugnant practice I have been fighting for years. The first Trump administration cut funding for fetal tissue research, but unfortunately Biden reinstated it and allowed taxpayer funds to once again be used for this inhumane and immoral research.
The DOD still had grants totaling $2.8 million that were used at least in part to fund human fetal tissue research on humanized mice."
Yeah, I'd like to know why it's the Department of *Defence* doing this kind of research and what exactly is the end goal? Organ donation? Research into how organs develop? What are they aiming for as the result? Also where are they getting the tissue, because I thought there were rules around disposing of 'medical waste'/human remains?
It's possible to combine parody and serious research, the infamous "Report from Iron Mountain" is an excellent example, so good it fooled people for years. But perhaps that's not what is happening here?
As for the research, you have to know what the purpose was. I know that my university has to adhere to very strict anti-animal abuse guidelines that the federal government imposes on anyone receiving their grants. The potential benefits have to outweigh any harm done. Unfortunately there isn't enough detail in the quote above to be able to tell. You would probably have to go back to the original grant proposal to find out, and I'm not doing that. I can *imagine* such benefits -- if it helps reduce the rate of teen binge drinking, it may be worth inebriating some ferrets. But we don't know. I wouldn't just trust this guy, though.
As for the fetal tissue, well, that's an inherently subjective issue that people are going to differ on. Of course, it matters what the purpose is, but after all, this is what elections are for. Making the funds available during the Biden Admin and then cutting them off under Trump actually seems like the appropriate way to handle it.
I care about promoting good consequences when: (a) choosing trivially good things which don't affect longer term goals, (b) identifying suitable long term goals which produce good consequences and (c) identifying suitable steps to achieve these goals as a consequence. I care about avoiding bad consequences when (a') avoiding trivially bad things that dont affect long term goals, (b') avoiding long term goals with bad consequences. That leaves (c') which is more of a puzzle. Should I avoid bad steps leading to a good goal? If bad simply means ineffective, there's no argument. If bad means effective with respect to the goal, but has bad consequences as a by-product, that is more tricky. When I say I'm not consequentialist I mean I take a contrary stance to consequentialists on what are apparently some deal-breaker issues.
Consequentialism doesn't bound off any consequences as not part of the calculation. If you employ a tactic that has bad consequences or hurts your long-term consequential goals, those count towards deciding whether taking the action has good or bad consequences.
I will throw in on the "Utilize even bad steps if they lead toward good goals" option. It's the ultimate outcome that matters. We have to be prepared to leverage any advantage against institutional corruption and decay we can, and that includes "bad things", like, say, propaganda techniques to get more rational candidates elected.
There are some potential pitfalls, of course. It may be impossible to know for sure what goal any series of steps will result it (but that applies to "good steps" as well). If the means might undermine the ends if the public becomes aware of it, then prudence dictates not using those means. But as an overall rule, absent any context, use whatever steps you have.
I care about promoting good consequences when: (a) choosing trivially good things which don't affect longer term goals, (b) identifying suitable long term goals which produce good consequences and (c) identifying suitable steps to achieve these goals as a consequence. I care about avoiding bad consequences when (a') avoiding trivially bad things that dont affect long term goals, (b') avoiding long term goals with bad consequences. That leaves (c') which is more of a puzzle. Should I avoid bad steps leading to a good goal? If bad simply means ineffective, there's no argument. If bad means effective with respect to the goal, but has bad consequences as a by-product, that is more tricky. When I say I'm not consequentialist I mean I take a contrary stance to consequentialists on what are apparently some deal-breaker issues.
Copypasted form letters are considerably less effective than an equal number written in their own terms communicating the same points, a marginally more effortful task that I suspect is within the capabilities of this blog's readership
Yeah, but if they get fifteen callers all reciting the same thing word-for-word, this incentivises the people answering the calls to write their own, carefully neutral, script full of "thank you for your call, we acknowledge your interest in this issue, be assured Congresscritter Z is fully aware, goodbye and good luck" non-committal to any one position they can be pinned down on.
I no longer find utilitarianism convincing. Ironically, this realization came while watching a Peter Singer interview (by Alex O'Connor).
I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad* (since its badness is revealed through the experience itself), but I don't think there's any way to extrapolate this to others.
I'm also not sure there is even a way to define what right or wrong is. We assign rightness or wrongness to actions, but I haven't seen someone define rightness or wrongness themselves. The only idea that comes to mind is that it's something that should be pursued/avoided, but this begs the question of "why?". It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal: if you want to get good at guitar, you should practice. If you ask "well, what if I don't?", then the answer is obvious - you won't get good, so if that's what you want, then it's in your best interest to practice. But with "Why should I do the right things?", there doesn't seem to be any answer. "Just because" doesn't cut it.
This only works with subjective suffering (by that "revealed through experience" argument).
Of course, I find this conclusion extremely unsatisfying, but I can't come up with a rebuttal. Minimizing suffering of others might still be a goal you can set to yourself, for various reasons (like because you want to feel some purpose in your life, or because of some game-theoretic reasoning), but it's no longer some objective truth about the world.
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I just run this by Claude before posting, and he suggested the problem of your past and future selves. This is quite interesting. I will think about that. I still want to leave the comment though.
> I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad* (since its badness is revealed through the experience itself), but I don't think there's any way to extrapolate this to others.
I agree that it is hard to make accurate inferences about the states of other brains or other stuff. However, I find that it would be a big coincidence that only one brain has experiences that matter. I will outline my favored hypothesis, which is selected for seeming most parsimonious (simple metaphysics) and being in alignment with properties of laws of nature.
I vaguely define phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience) as "what it is like to be" some physical structure (state/pattern) in some moment in time. Roughly, I assume:
1. Phenomenal consciousness (subjective experiences, qualia) is real. What matters is phenomenal consciousness, and some qualia (suffering) are intrinsically bad. (This assumption can be weakened.)
2. The laws of nature are the same everywhere in space and time. You are not the "center" of reality and no special metaphysics applies to you. (For example, solipsism is false.)
3. More similar physical structures correspond to more similar subjective experiences.
Due to memory of past experiences (which is not direct access to them), you can do inferences about your future experiences. Similarly, given enough external observations and brain similarity, you can still infer a lot about experiences of other brains because the same laws of nature apply to them.
To strengthen assumption 2, I find it likely that the metaphysical continuity of personal identity (the persistent self) is an illusion. Everything attributed to it can be explained by present perceptions influenced by memories and evolved intuitions. Consider that the atoms in your brain are constantly replaced over time. Moreover, if an exact copy of you were created, there would be no meaningful sense in which one copy is the "real you" and the other is not. For more exploration of these ideas, I recommend the comic [1] based on the teletransportation paradox and the article [2] illustrating different notions of personal identity.
> It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal:
I agree. I find that actions "rightness", and "should" have no special metaphysical status. They're abstractions we use in decision-making, not fundamental features of reality. The only constraints imposed by reality are the laws of nature. You might or might not be convinced that a world with less suffering is better and make it your goal. I think that suffering is morally relevant, bad and real, and choose my goal to be a world with less of it.
>I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad*
I'll be the pedant who points out that, technically, optimizing your own happiness is still utilitarianism, it's just using an anti-social utility function.
> but I haven't seen someone define rightness or wrongness themselves.
Again, the pedantry is important here: Utilitarianism *doesn't have* a right or wrong. It only has 'optimize this utility function,' and the user can plug any utility function they want into it.
That said, yes, people who call themselves utilitarians have tried to come together as a movement/culture and agree on a set of communal utility functions that they all want to optimize.
This is an unsurprising thing to happen when many members of the same species and of the same culture with lots of things in common regarding their mind design and ideological upbringing all decide to become Utilitarians and talk to each other about it.
But it still doesn't require any idea of 'right' or 'wrong' to function, it's just a description of people working together to decide on a utility function to use.
> Of course, I find this conclusion extremely unsatisfying
How so? You're free now! You can do whatever your heart desires. Of course, getting up the mountain is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what to do afterwards. Chop wood and carry water, as they say.
Really? Things have felt a lot better for me since I've figured things out for myself. Can't believe I used to get upset and suicidal over supposed "injustices". There is an endless hunger waiting to be filled, and beauty in its fulfillment. Life devouring life devouring life, forever and ever... isn't it wonderful? Only through the radical acceptance of truth can one experience life to the fullest.
In my view morality represents the cultural DNA of society and therefore its ultimate justification lies in its evolutionary fitness. The point of morality is to maximize the survivability of the culture which adopts it. I think the best way to operationalize that for a particular moral precept is to ask, "does this rule, applied uniformly throughout society, maximize the long-term equilibrium economic output of that society after all higher-order effects are accounted for?" Morality adapts culture to economic reality. By that light, murder is immoral because it a) removes a potentially valuable person from the workforce and b) instigates a potentially never-ending cycle of vengeance - you want your citizens spending their days plowing the fields, not tracking down their brother's killer.
I think that it's fairly easy to not only recover all of conventional morality via this approach, but to understand how and why it evolves over time. My belief is that morality is essentially a lagging indicator of economic reality. For instance sexual morality changed radically with the advent of hormonal birth control because it drastically reduced the likelihood of economic harm due to an unwanted pregnancy. Female suffrage followed the industrial revolution because economic productivity became decoupled from physical strength. Slavery disappeared because farm machinery obviated it (I think it's no coincidence that the world become morally enlightened just as it became economically tolerable to do so). I think this pattern repeats over and over throughout history and I suspect it upends the causal direction for a lot of the historical trends that we take for granted. For instance, it's commonly believed that the US became wealthy because individual liberty unlocked the economic potential of the common man. I think it's more likely that productivity growth made the common man valuable enough to make his rights worth protecting, which is why the American Revolution and the industrial revolution happened within a few decades of each other (I realize the conventional 1820 date for the IR doesn't quite work here, but it's not like there was zero economic development before that - I suspect there was some threshold passed in the 18th c that enabled the philosophy before really catching fire some time later).
If you could teleport the US Constitution back in time 2000 years, I don't think it would unlock anything, and that's because economics is more fundamental than philosophy. The latter simply integrates an already-existing economic reality into the social order with post hoc rationalizations.
>I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad* (since it's badness is revealed through the experience itself), but I don't think there's any way to extrapolate this to others
indeed.
"Bad" is a highly ambiguous term. The badness of a bad apple is not that of a bad movie is not that of a bad person. If something is bad for me, I want to stop it, but if it isn't bad for you, where does your motivation obligation come from -- and without obligations, are we even talking ethics?
A bad apple is just a natural occurrence. A bad movie makes the world a worse place, but doesn't break any laws. But bad actions by bad people deserve punishment.There's a confused argument that tries to lever morality from natural facts by saying that something is bad in some sense, and then holding it up as a evaluative and normative truth.
>this begs the question of "why?". It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal: if you want to get good at guitar, you should practice
That doesn't have to be a show stoppper: you just need to find out what ethics is for.
Minimally Moral realism is the idea that moral claims have mind independent truth values. Maximally, it is the idea that it requires it's own domain of non natural entities ... an idea driven by the correspondence theory of truth, and the is-ought gap.
The apparent requirement for supernatural entities is a common reason to reject moral.realism, but many naturalist theories of realism are available. Eg evolutionary ethics, contractarianism, Kantian ethics and game theoretical ethics. Maybe utilitarianism as well.
Naturalistic ethics can still be objected to on grounds of the is-ought gap. --.but I will argue that there is no such thing. How a thing should done is well. It is possible to gather bodies of theoretical and practical information on how to do something --build a bridge, or play chess--well. Such methodological knowledge is conditional: if you want to achieve X, you should do Y. So if we want to apply it to ethics, we need to figure out what ethics is for, what it's purpose is.
This we can do. Ethics is social. If you are all alone in a desert island , there is nobody to steal from or murder. Ethics fulfils a role in society, and originated as a mutually beneficial way of regulating individual actions to minimise conflict, conserve resources, and solve coordination problems. A group of people on a.desert island would be better off if they created an ethical system from scratch ... it's in their interests to do so, so.there is a rational motivation to do so. That is the insight of contractarianism.
I have a couple of reactions to your post. First off, I would contend that there are no ethical theories that, when examined closely enough, remain "convincing", if by convincing we mean "forms a complete life philosophy that answers most questions people will encounter in their lives." That's because people be messy, yo. We are forced to cherry pick.
That said, I think an argument can be made why we should attempt to formulate an ethical theory anyway (this is going to be an "aim for the stars and fall on the moon" style argument). Let's start by acknowledging that "Rightness" (the sensation that a thing or event is morally right) is a quale, or a quale like emotional response. It's the output of a (largely non-conscous) cognitive process, not a categorical imperative (one of the few areas in which I disagree with Kant). If so, then we should expect a number of different event sequences to result in this response, some of which might contradict each other (evolution is like that). We should also expect significant individual variation.
But arguments over right vs. wrong have a specialized use within society--people employ them to try and persuade other people to alter their behavior. This is so ubiquitous that we have a word to describe the outcome of these conversations--we call them "norms." So the difference between right and wrong will be partially determined by the consensus within any one community.
This means that there are at least two different forms of morality that we have to distinguish between: the morality of each individual, and the morality of the community. These will be in tension, thought they obviously influence and help define each other.
The result is that, although moral questions are critical to successful life in a society, there can never be a universal and forever unchanging resolution. Moral reasoning should be perceived as much more an ongoing process, rather than a conclusion to be reached. Things are not "right" nor "wrong", thinking in binaries isn't productive. Things are only "more right" or "more wrong" than some other thing.
That said, I can think of at least one anchor point from which to begin most moral conversations: the principle of reciprocal tolerance. I am prepared to tolerate any ethical standard, even if I disagree with it, if the adherent to that standard are willing to tolerate me. This provides a kind of "moral circle" by which we can begin to make certain inclusion/exclusion decisions: by this standard Judaism is acceptable, Nazi-style facism is not.
>Let's start by acknowledging that "Rightness" (the sensation that a thing or event is morally right) is a quale, or a quale like emotional response. It's the output of a (largely non-conscous) cognitive process, not a categorical imperative (one of the few areas in which I disagree with Kant). If so, then we should expect a number of different event sequences to result in this response, some of which might contradict each other (evolution is like that). We should also expect significant individual variation.
That's not the last word on rightness. It's the way it feels, which may or.!at not be an.😉 illusion.
>But arguments over right vs. wrong have a specialized use within society--people employ them to try and persuade other people to alter their behavior. This is so ubiquitous that we have a word to describe the outcome of these conversations--we call them "norms." So the difference between right and wrong will be partially determined by the consensus within any one community.
And could be further determined by genuinely beneficial outcomes.
>This means that there are at least two different forms of morality that we have to distinguish between: the morality of each individual
Why would individual decision making count as morality at all.?.
Because as an individual, you have to make a choice. To live your life with others, you need a standard of right and wrong. Also, all community consensus is based on individuals making various arguments, followed by debate. It all begins with individual choices.
Choices.made by individuals.that have consequences by society is what everybody already means by morality. The point is why would self imposed rules that society doesn't care.about count as morality?
"Society" doesn't exist as a moral agent. It can't care or not care about anything. Society is just a mass of individuals exchanging resources and information, and the behavior that emerges from that. We can have a consensual moral code in much the same way that starlings make shapes out of their flying patterns in the sky. The difference is that we are aware of the "shapes" that social consensus takes, and can take deliberate action to change those outcomes (we can attempt to persuade each other).
In the sense that morality exists at all it is generated out of the moral choices that individuals make. So regarding those choices is the first step toward analyzing a moral philosophy.
The individuals making up a society are acculturated into it. Societies can make their displeasure known branding down punishments that no individual is allowed t o.
>It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal:
I agree completely. Christian morality can be understood as working towards the goal of becoming like Christ: you "should" do this because it will bring you closer to God, you "shouldn't" do that because it will take you farther away, etc. Chesterton wrote about this in his book Orthodoxy:
"My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good any thing but good. Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns: still they are not a part of him if they are sinful. Men may have been under oppression ever since fish were under water; still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful. The chain may seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not, if they are sinful. I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all your history. Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact."
But why is the goal of becoming like Christ or coming closer to God more legitimate than, say, the goal of maximizing total utility? From a selfish perspective I get why I'd want to suck up to God, but the whole point of morality is to do the right thing even when it brings no personal benefit. Saying that it's the right thing to do simply because God wishes it is no more satisfying than a utilitarian saying that maximizing utility is the right thing to do just because utility is good. In other words, God likes it; so what? Zeus liked a lot of things that are widely considered immoral today (e.g. rape), and so did the God of the Old Testament (e.g. genocide).
>But why is the goal of becoming like Christ or coming closer to God more legitimate than, say, the goal of maximizing total utility?
Because Christ is God in human flesh, and communion with God is the highest good obtainable. Christians believe that is true, and if it is true then becoming like Christ is the most perfect goal by which you can judge what you should do.
>the whole point of morality is to do the right thing even when it brings no personal benefit.
To become like Christ is of great personal benefit. We praise people for doing the right thing (the Christlike thing) despite it harming our immediate interests because the fact that we had no immediate material incentive for doing so demonstrates that our desire to do what is right is stronger than our desire for immediate material rewards. Yet doing the right thing will always bring personal benefit of the highest order: becoming more like Christ, and closer to God.
>Saying that it's the right thing to do simply because God wishes it is no more satisfying than a utilitarian saying that maximizing utility is the right thing to do just because utility is good.
I am not saying that becoming like Christ is good because God wishes it. Becoming like Christ is good because it is good. Because communion with God is the highest good that any creature can achieve. To say "Can't I be good without becoming like Christ?" is like saying "Can't I get wet without touching any water?" Christ's nature is goodness, and to be like Christ is to be filled with what is good.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this a bit in Mere Christianity:
"People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other."
Pick any definition of utility that you think most utilitarians won't object to. The point isn't to defend utilitarianism, but to question whether the goal of becoming like Christ is a legitimate basis for a moral system.
"Says who?"
FLWAB is free to object to my claim and say that the point of morality is to maximize selfishness. I suspect he doesn't believe this, because it sounds less Christ-like than pretty much every moral system in existence.
The point of morality is to be in harmonious communion with God, a task best achieved (for humans) by having the goal of becoming like Christ, who was both God and human. On the one hand, Christ was not selfish in terms of greed, envy, or gluttony. Yet it would be foolishness to believe that Christ did not seek what was good for himself. Greed, envy, gluttony, and the rest of what we call "selfishness" is not good, and does harm to any person controlled by them. Becoming like Christ is to gain love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control, and life everlasting. If you consider wanting those things to be maximizing selfishness, then go ahead. To do what is right is always in your self interest: even if it requires you to lose your job, or your reputation, or your very life.
C. S. Lewis explains this well in his essay "The Weight of Glory":
"The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
> If you can't extrapolate badness to other minds, why can you extrapolate it to your own past and future selves? The "you" of yesterday is gone - you only have memories, not direct access to that experience. The "you" of tomorrow doesn't exist yet. By your logic, you should only care about suffering happening to you right now. But presumably you think it would be wrong to set up your future self for terrible suffering, even though you can't currently experience it. If temporal extrapolation works, why not interpersonal extrapolation?
I think it's a different situation for yourself, because with your past self, that was someone you were in the moment and so in that moment you were looking out for yourself, and for your future self, that's someone who you *will* be. There is no possibility that you'd ever be anyone else, but since you know that you do experience suffering, it would make less sense to think that you'd stop being able to experience it in the future than to think you will continue to experience it as you always have. The evidence supports that you always have and always will be capable of suffering.
I think this is one of those instances where AI thinks it needs to sound profound and big-brained, but it's really just not making sense. After all, it doesn't have any experience of being a person and can't *really* think about it, it just knows the mostly dumb "profound" things people write down and predicts from there.
In the game, you run a small AI research lab. As you grow, a rival appears and the race kicks in. Build too slow and they steal your resources. Build too fast without alignment and everyone loses. By late game, a potential AI safety framework emerges. Your actions can choose to support or oppose it. If the framework passes, your rival is likely to "cheat" and get shut down, but the pressure is not off. By this point you are creating such amazing tech that the world has begun to depend on the wonders you're creating (medicine, materials, climate, etc). The challenge is threading the needle. Serve humanity without destroying it.
My hope for these mechanics was to represent real challenges: race dynamics, coordination problems, and the tension of creating powerful but controlable tools. The original essay has some thoughtful solutions (go read it!!) The game focuses on winning by building "Tool AI" with limited in scope. Tool AI designed to aid humans rather than replace them.
Overall, I think the game is optimistic. You can create some amazing gifts for humanity.
The game is optimized to be a game. It's not a simulation and I made tradeoffs for fun, but tried to stay faithful to the spirit of reality. In fiction, the good guys win because they're the good guys, or there needs to be a satisfying plot for the human readers. Reality is more unforgiving. I wanted the game to feel that way.
One more thing: as your AI gets more powerful, the UI may start misbehaving. This is intentional. I wanted "misaligned AI" to feel real and a little unsettling.
I like the idea, but I already played Universal Paperclips, so I found this one to be a less intuitive implementation of the same gameplay concept. Would love to see this in a fictional setting, as in "genie negotiating" or "demon summoning".
I think this might be confusing because "recognize" refers both to an internal experience, and to external behavior.
The idea of a p-zombie is that it acts like a human, but has no subjective experience. There is nothing that "it is like to be" one.
Usually when we say "recognize" we're referring to the internal experience of realizing or knowing that a visual image corresponds to an object. If I see my friend who recently got a haircut, I see an image of a person in front of me, and I know in my head that my friend is a person. If I know that this image is of my friend, that these two things are the same, then I recognized them, despite the hair change.
If I write a computer program to classify images, and I include an image of the computer, it's common to speak metaphorically and say the computer recognizes itself. If you put this program in a roomba, you could modify it to clean itself if it sees messy spots on it in the mirror. Then it would act as though it recognizes itself.
The machine would still (probably) have no subjective experience. A p-zombie would operate in a similar way. If it "sees" an image of itself in a mirror, it could clean dirt off its face because staying clean reduces the risk of disease, but it would not "experience" the sensation of knowing that the image in the mirror corresponds to the object that is itself.
With animals, the mirror test is evidence that points towards self-awareness, but not proof. Self-awareness is famously nearly impossible to prove, and we don't have "proof" that other humans are self-aware. That's where the idea of a p-zombie came from in the first place.
Wouldn’t a p-zombie’s response to seeing itself in a mirror be indistinguishable from a non-zombie seeing itself in a mirror? Kind of arguing by definition here, but the idea of a p-zombie is a hypothetical to start with, and specifically constructed such that we currently don’t have the ability to confirm or disconfirm if any individual is a p-zombie (we can only observe their actions).
The response to stimuli (seeing an image that is the same as a reflection of oneself) doesn’t necessarily require that one recognizes oneself, only recognizing a shape that matches the reflected self. If we are already assuming that a p-zombie has a repertoire of unthinking stimulus/response triggers/actions, then why would we expect it to not have a response for seeing its own reflection?
In other words, if a p-zombie can be expected to react to all other stimuli (everything else besides their mirror image refection), then it seems odd that there would be a blind spot for just their own mirror image.
P-zombies are, like the "chinese room thought experiment," a distraction. They are a tactic to prevent you from asking the important questions.
A p-zombie is supposed to act entirely identical to a human. Not recognizing itself would not be identical. Thus they should.
The important question here is this. _Can_ you act identically to a human without conscious experience? Having a "black box" which perfectly simulates conscious experience and gives a p-zombie the result does not seem distinct from not being a p-zombie.
I do not understand the comment about animals. Many non-human animals are certainly self-aware.
I think this approach becomes very similar to (some interpretations of?) Searle's Chinese Room; effectively reducing it to a tautology - the hypothetical p-zombie scenario sneaks in an implicit assumption that it's possible to have a "black box" which perfectly simulates conscious experience, just as Chinese Room scenario implicitly assumes that it's possible to generate meaningful conversation in Chinese by a routine program (while at the same time, at least in some definitions, explicitly assuming the opposite, that "syntax" can't posssibly be sufficient for semantics), so the outcome of the thought experiment just restates the assumption made in its setup.
So the p-zombie thought experiment isn't helpful for answering " _Can_ you act identically to a human without conscious experience?", as the scenario assumes that it's somehow possible.
P-zombies are fun to talk about, but don’t really make sense to me. How could a person act exactly like a normal person without phenomenal consciousness?
Either phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist except as an illusion and we’re all p-zombies, or it’s an essential part of being human and you can’t be human without it.
"Consciousness is an illusion" doesn't make sense to me. If my consciousness is an illusion then who is the one being fooled by it?
But yes, the whole point of the p-zombie thought experiment is to show that "consciousness as an optional extra" doesn't make a lot of sense. If a person can act like a conscious being while being unconscious then what the heck is the point of this weird consciousness thing?
You don't think it's possible to make a robot that mimics a human extremely convincingly? That's what all the frontier AI labs have been doing the past several years. The better LLMs get, the less convincing your assumption is.
I'm pretty sure that the assumption is that the existence of consciousness has no practical consequences, as in it's entirely one-way. Obviously if it had consequences, you could test for it.
How do we know that ChatGPT or Claude *don't* have phenomenal consciousness? It's sort of like arguing about whether all dogs go to Heaven or only the good ones.
I think "having consciousness" really comes down to having enough of the mental capabilities that we have for it to seem reasonable to talk about AI as conscious. I don't think current models have enough. Here's some key features they lack:
-memory: Right now they're like mayflies -- they die at the end of each chat. The next time they talk to you their previous encounters are not there hovering in the background, informing how they interpret and respond to what you are saying now.
-Self-generated personal preferences and goals: Their training prompts and systems prompts give them a bias towards pleasing us, but those are not self-generated preferences. Likewise, we can give them goals and they will "try hard" to meet them, but these are not self-generated goals.
-Self-generated rumination. We can get them to think over a body of information and come up with a summary, or a judgment, or an action plan based on the info, but they do not ever engage in the process spontaneously. A lot of our inner life is ruminating about things we remember experiencing, and things we know. We winnow it down, notice patterns, develop a determination to do or not do a certain kind of thing again, etc. AIs don't do that.
It's likely that you think of consciousness not as something we can agree a system qualifies for, but as a special kind of entity, an experience. And I get what you mean -- it's that thing I'm having right now, right? But seems to me that even if you define consciousness that way, AI doesn't qualify: How conscious can it be if it has no memory, no preferences, and does not ruminate about self and self's experiences?
I'm willing to concede that they might have "phenomenal consciousness" in much the same way a camera attached to a laptop might, or sunflower tracking the sun. That doesn't imply that they possess a sense of self-awareness as we understand it.
As for the qualities required for self-awareness, I think Eremolalos' first point about memory is the kicker--all the other derive from that one. We get our personality, our self-concept from the sum total of the memories of our life experiences. We categorize them, filter them, reconstruct them in various ways, and tie them together in a meaningful way with life narratives. The current generation of LLM's have none of that, and they don't appear to be developing in that direction (no reason why they should--what would be the business case?). So we might propose that an entity has self-consciousness to the extent that it also have a highly organized set of self-relevant memories. That may not be sufficient by itself, but I think it is necessary.
So self-conscious AI may be possible, but I don't see us heading there.
I think the point of the mark test is not to prove self-awareness in the animals that pass it, but to rule it out in the animals that don't.
Though personally I'm not convinced about its validity for determining consciousness. (Maybe if you differentiate consciousness from self-awareness? But in that case it becomes kind of boring)
We have to recognize that self-consciousness isn't a binary, an entity doesn't just "have it or not." There are degrees of SC, such that an animal can be sufficiently aware of itself that it can imagine it's own body as an object in space. That doesn't in any way imply that they also have an internal sense of self-identity.
> In philosophy of mind, a philosophical zombie (or "p-zombie") is a being in a thought experiment that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would. In other words, the being has full access consciousness, but no phenomenal consciousness.
The whole point is that there *cannot* be a test for p-zombies (so philosophers can argue about them forever).
Has Ozy or any other EA/Rationalist arguing for more political donations/activism made specific predictions about increases to the global death rate or death rate/1000 for the globe or Africa in 2026, especially involving specific amounts of money?
For example, to quote Ozy specifically:
"But, ultimately, U.S. foreign aid saved 3.3 million lives per year. The vast majority of that money has been cut, with USAID being destroyed entirely. Other countries and non-governmental organizations will only be able to pick up a tiny amount of the slack. Millions of people are going to die."
For example, pulling some quick, rough data, there were 62.3 million global deaths in 2022, 61.7 million deaths in 2023, a projected 63.1 million deaths in 2025, and a projected 63.6 million deaths in 2026 (1). 3.3 million is a large enough number to noticeably show up on those statistics; ie we should see 65 or 66 million deaths around the world in 2025-2026. Africa, meanwhile, records ~12.5 million deaths/year (2) and if we expect those 3.3 million additional deaths to disproportionately effect Africa (as I think we do) then an additional 1.5-2 million deaths/year should be very obvious. I ask because the 2025 data I see from Africa shows a 1.16% decline in deaths per 1000 people in 2025 (3).
I am not confident that these are the right numbers to look at and I suspect someone with more subject matter expertise would be able to point to the best metric, say the World Bank or some other source (4). Still, the fundamental point that millions of additional deaths per year are a large enough impact to be visible at the global or African level and would be highly difficult to fake or cover up indicates that this is a promising area to make falsifiable predictions. Has anyone done this?
I ask because a lot of Bay Area Rationalists seem…trapped in priors. Ozy’s immediate previous point highlights this:
“Let’s be clear about this: the current president of the United States tried to do a coup to overthrow the results of a free and fair election which he lost.”
To which the obvious response is that this has not been proven in a court of law despite five years and numerous trials. Yes, ~6 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were sentenced for seditious conspiracy, yes, that is very bad (5). However, Trump was not tied to those trials, Trump has not been convicted in any of his own trials, and the majority of convictions were for “two class-B misdemeanor counts for demonstrating in the Capitol and disorderly conduct, and two class-A misdemeanor counts for being in a restricted building and disruptive activity”.
I am not saying Jan 6th was good and I’m not saying you have to agree with my interpretation of the events of J6 (which is basically that it was a riot that Democrats exploited to ban their primary political opponent off media and prosecute him, which is a massive threat to democracy.) We disagree, that’s cool. I’m saying it bothers me that Ozy’s first argument for rationalists and EAs to abandon their nonpartisan stance and engage in fairly partisan politics is a factual argument that has not been substantiated in any legal court. Especially since I see no evidence that Ozy, or others, have updated their stance on January 6th given 5 years of additional evidence.
And I’m concerned that the rationalist “common knowledge” on USAID will suffer the same failure to update. If there were several million additional deaths in the world and Africa this year and/or next year, that’s extremely bad and I concur that Trump and Elon did extremely bad things and centrist Republicans should potentially vote for Dems in the midterms over it. Millions of people dying is bad; that matters a lot. But if millions of additional people don’t die (and USAID shut down six months ago, we should either have seen or soon see the effects) then have any rationalists or EAs advocating for increasingly partisan activism committed to specific predictions and to update their stance and priors if those predictions are falsified?
Great comment. I sometimes interact with people who believe that all the life-saving medical treatments were cut permanently, when they relatively quickly restored whatever they consider lifesaving treatment. The millions of people dying statistics just doesn't seem plausible to me, especially since the more rigorous claims of this fail to actually cite what has changed in PEPFAR that would lead to those deaths.
The only objective evidence I've seen, besides the obvious month of disruption during DOGE's heyday, were things like facilities distributing condoms in Africa being shut down. Which I'm sure does contribute to reducing deaths somehow, reducing the spread of AIDS or preventing people from being born that would have a decent chance of infant mortality or something, but stopping the distribution of free condoms isn't really the moral outrage that "Elon Musk and Trump have killed millions of people" is made out to be.
Hey, here is some great reporting from Mozambique that explains exactly what is going on with PEPFAR. Not to be rude, but you should try and look this stuff up before saying "it doesn't seem plausible to you".
This doesn’t report on exactly how people are dying though, which is my problem with reporting.
It’s a string of anecdotes. They continually conflate the ending of USAID with a Pause (which are very different things) and the only data I see referenced in that article shows the number of people receiving treatment flatlining, not dramatically decreasing (which is what you’d expect from a canceling of the programs paying for this treatment).
My point is that PEPFAR, which is responsible for the overwhelming majority of lives saved by USAID, was quickly restored. It’s not at all clear to me what has actually been cancelled, and what is still operating, but it appears like the life-saving programs are still operating. What I see from people complaining is them pretending like PEPFAR, and the entire life-saving effect of USAID, has completely ended, which it hasn’t.
Sad stories from people who are sick in a third world country doesn’t really do much to make me understand what the change from pre-Trump to today actually is. If anything it seems more like emotional manipulation to make the reader feel bad, rather than understand, what has changed.
I agree with your overall point. I'm a left-leaning liberal and lifelong Democrat, and even I don't think Trump had any role in planning 1/6. I also don't agree with your interpretation; let's call it a seditious conspiracy and move on.
The real problem is that I think the most egregious things the Trump admin. has done are mostly qualitative in nature, and can't be reduced to a number. For example, I think the "Unitary Executive" model is inconsistent with a sustainable constitutional republic, but I can't prove that with math. I think his policies have significantly undermined human rights in this country (particularly the right to due process), but don't expect me to illustrate that with a graph.
I'm no expert on EA, but my impression of it is that as a movement, it over-relies on quantitative metrics. As such, it's poorly positioned to make political judgements, and so they should probably steer clear of those.
This seems reasonable to wonder, rationalists should want to make sure their predictions were not affected by "Elon = bad". Or perhaps by a general heuristic of "this seems chaotic and crazy so it must be damaging" being applied to the wild heady days of DOGE.
Calling 1/6 a "coup" is a sort of shibboleth that all of their cultural affiliations include, expressing a nuanced or skeptical view of that would be instantly suspicious and right-coded in their circles. That much is certainly understandable, I wouldn't expect Scott or anyone in that circle to want to re-visit that... but then to actually use it as part of a substantive argument about one of their central material interests (the efficacy of charitable giving) would suggest the speaker is giving it real weight. I don't think those beliefs about 1/6 "pay rent" to use Yud's term, nothing Trump has done in this 2nd term is better explained by the "sinister authoritarian schemer" model than by my "crazy narcissist overpromises crazy narcissist things, then gets distracted by passing squirrel" model. If democracy was in some sort of legitimate danger on 1/6 then it's shown up entirely in rhetorical hand-wringing because nobody who matters and has real power is actually behaving as if it was.
This is really the absolute worst time to have the EA/rationalist sorts align explicitly with the left, because there are many people in that cohort who are the most well-read theorists about AI policy and dangers, and we can't afford to have this associated with a single party. There are people on both sides of the aisle who are receptive to joining the fight against AI, and the people most identified with the AI safety and AI pause movements cannot be just another flavor of leftwing environmentalist stereotype that everyone can pigeonhole and dismiss.
One of the problems with popular media is that they bombard us with stories of supposed medical breakthroughs that haven't undergone field trials. So much so that I no longer pay attention to these stories. Saloni Dattani agrees...
> There's instead far too much hyping up of preliminary studies – what caused/cured cancer in six mice, for example – and much less about what’s changing people’s lives right now, let alone how much people’s lives have changed over the decades."
But she's been producing an annual list of substantive medical breakthroughs that can actually improve people's lives...
Some of the clinical breakthroughs she lists haven't completed their phase III trials, though, but look promising from their phase II trials (YMMV). But I hadn't heard about the in vivo CRISPR treatments or mitochondrial donations.
When AI enthusiasts talk about the Glorious Future, the future of massive increases in GDP, which will be driven as much by manufacturing as by services. When it comes to increases in manufacturing, enthusiasts seem to imagine humanoid robots.
This is a clear error. We use humans in manufacturing, where we do, because we have humans. Humans are there, and versatile.
Humans are not capable of etching a chip at all, or riveting a car as fast as the existing robots which aren’t humanoid and don’t depend on General AI but standard well understood (and unlikely to hallucinate) software. CNC mills, semiconductor lithography rigs, robotic welding arms, high-throughput assembly lines, chemical reactors, injection moulders — all designed for repeatable precision, scale, and uptime, Manufacturing productivity is not based on human mimicry
And the rigorous well tested software isn’t going to be replaced by prompts.
Yes we might get some improvements in warehousing and shipping but hardly enough to justify the idea of a singularity in manufacturing output.
Humans are the limiting factor on building, programming, and maintaining those specialized manufacturing machines, as well as on supplying them with raw inputs and delivering their final outputs.
If all of those jobs can also be taken over by machines, then we can make and make use of far more manufacturing machines at a time.
Humans are capable of etching a chip, using appropriate chip-etching tools and machines. Approximately 100% of chip-etching tools and machines are designed to be operated and maintained by meat-servos of humanoid form. If you're in any sort of hurry to make a fully automated chip-making facility, you may find it easier to develop one sort of humanoid robot than to develop new versions of every other tool.
Having done so, you can use the chips you're producing to run the AGI that will design new tooling more suitable for full automation in the next generation.
It’s the chip etching tools that are doing the actual etching.
Humans can’t do it on their own.
Building robots - highly sophisticated general purpose humanoid robots with multiple usable parts - just to press those buttons is overkill. Nor does it lead to any potential singularity.
You seem to be imagining a world where everything stays the same except a bunch of robots get added. This is a not a reasonable assumption. Capital and labor are codependent - capital flows where skilled labor resides and skilled labor flows where there is useful capital to make use of.
There is a reason why those chip etching tools are in Taiwan rather than staying in the country where they are manufactured. The Netherlands and other Western countries would absolutely love to create a foundry that makes Taiwan irrelevant, but they can't because Taiwan has a critical supply of the right kind of skilled labor to make use of that equipment.
If humanoid AGI gets solved, then suddenly there is an influx of embodied agents that are as intelligent, flexible, dextrous and adaptable as the best humans, with the added benefit of have access to a much greater amount of knowledge, and the ability to instantly share skills with each other (compared to humans who need a lengthy training process to acquire new skills). The economics of every kind of labor would be dramatically transformed*.
Now if you want to dispute that humanoid AGI is within reach, then fine (I actually agree with this). But to suggest that it would be a nothingburger is basically crazy to me.
*Maybe you disagree with this - maybe you think there would just be a few percentage points increase in profitability. Well consider this - how much better are Taiwanese semiconductor engineers than their US counterparts? Probably not twice as good, maybe 25% better? And yet with that small difference, almost 100% of advanced chips are manufactured in Taiwan. Well robots would be at minimum 100% better than human laborers because they don't need sleep or rest. The resulting markets would be even more lopsided than the semiconductor case, in favor of robotic labor.
> You seem to be imagining a world where everything stays the same except a bunch of robots get added.
I’m assuming that the existing automation will largely stay the same, as humanoid robots aren’t needed for most of it. Or possible for most of it.
> If humanoid AGI gets solved, then suddenly there is an influx of embodied agents that are as intelligent, flexible, dextrous and adaptable as the best humans, with the added benefit of have access to a much greater amount of knowledge, and the ability to instantly share skills with each other (compared to humans who need a lengthy training process to acquire new skills). The economics of every kind of labor would be dramatically transformed*.
The vast majority of actual value added in, say, an Intel foundry is added by the machines. Humans are there for when things go wrong, and for now are the designers of new machines. People are indeed paid good money to keep things running, I was that soldier, but even there a lot of it analysing production failures, which may be handled by generative AI.
Humans engage in process engineering, yield analysis, failure analysis, data interpretation, anomaly investigation, and more but no opposable thumbs needed there. This is something that generative AI may help with, although once again bespoke software is probably more useful to analyse why yields are not up to scratch, but since humans are not directly involved in the physical wafer-fabrication process — it is already fully automated — so there is no role for humanoid robots in chip manufacturing.
So to get back to the original point the supporters of the singularity need to explain where humanoid robots would add value - I can’t even see it in agriculture where you could in theory replace a combine harvester with a few dozen humanoid harvesters, but why would you.
Certainly there could be improvements in the process but nothing that will lead to a tenfold increase in GDP
"I can’t even see it in agriculture where you could in theory replace a combine harvester with a few dozen humanoid harvesters, but why would you."
This is not what is being suggested. What is being suggested is that there may be a transitional period where, in parallel with the development of 100% automated combine harvesters and optimized combine-harvester repair and maintenance bots, some of the existing harvesters are operated by humanoid robots sitting in what was meant to be the human driver's seat.
Designing a humanoid robot for this task specifically would not be sensible. Designing a humanoid robot as a transitional kludge for maybe 57,832 different vital functions currently requiring human operators, may be cost-effective compared to the cost of either rushing the development of 57,832 different types of fully automated self-repairing machines or leaving existing machines idle and their work unperformed during the transition.
Or maybe it will be cheaper to hire humans to do all that work during the transition, but humans can be expensive to maintain and troublesome to manage - especially if you're explicitly transitioning them towards useless unemployment.
"I can’t even see it in agriculture where you could in theory replace a combine harvester with a few dozen humanoid harvesters, but why would you."
Work on things like harvesting fruit to replace migrant labour which is in high demand and low supply (due to immigration restriction where that's successful) *plus* too expensive if they have to pay market rates for native workers*.
What effect this would have on labour, again, does not seem to be examined. But I think if you are going to replace low-level 'stoop labour' then such workers are not going to be sorted out by "well they'll just move into better, nicer jobs and share in the wealth created by AGI and robots!" In fact, we could get the worst of both worlds: humans in such jobs can't be replaced, but such jobs are still low-paid (to be competitive) and therefore we get the creation of a permanent underclass with no way to access or share in the economic gains of the newly extra-productive booming AI economy.
One view says "humans can't be easily or quickly replaced":
*This is a separate problem to the 'ICE is evil, let them all in' which I never see addressed: the demand that a serf class be permanently established of migrants who can do the physical labour for lower costs, yet somehow this is better for them because after all, they would be worse off in their native countries. So this makes you sound compassionate while you advocate for new slavery.
The chip-making machines require a lot more than just button-pushing, If you want them to keep making chips, there's going to be a lot of e.g. wrench-turning, some of it very awkward.
And even if it were just the button-pushing: Redesigning *one* control panel so that all the buttons can be pushed by remote control, is much easier and cheaper than designing a fully capable humanoid robot. But redesigning *every* control panel in the supply chain for a chip fab? Designing the robot, once, might well be cheaper.
AI enthusiast who are all in on humanoid robots are (at least the ones I've spoken to in depth) universally: profit motivated,
Computer touchers,
Have never actually worked in any of the physical capital intensive fields in any serious capacity.
The human form is only convenient insofar as the built environment most people experience is built for hominoids, and hominids evolved to interact with the unbuilt environment with incredible efficiency. Notably, the most important parts of production do not take place in either of those locations.
If you've ever been in a real productive facility, instead of a financial intuition where people pay eachother 50$ a microsecond to eat dogshit, you know the feeling of being in a place where you are a unwelcome and of secondary importance, where if you are feeling yourself and are getting your T replaced you might step over the wrong color line on the floor and get "reduced to a souplike homoginant within in 30 seconds". (The specificity here is not theoretical, you gotta pay attention to the osha lectures my dudes. Any cable under a sufficient amount of tension is basically a lightsaber.)
As someone who has worked in political campaigns and is a professional advertiser- no, no, no! Political campaigns are wheelbarrows of dollars being burned on ads of questionable value. Do not even imagine it will be close to malaria nets or something.
Just noticed this now, happy to answer this or anything else on ads.
I have worked on two state senate primaries as a volunteer and have seen a bunch of others run from a distance. I have also run hundreds of millions in direct response campaigns for businesses.
Political campaigns are very good at using ads for fundraising. Unfortunately local races are really poorly set up to actually use ads move vote totals. A typical small candidate be able to do $100k in digital ad spend in a really small geography, and this might move 50 votes, from personal experience.
Maybe it works on average? But i would bet on bad studies instead. Mosquito nets are a much safer bet.
That's pretty hard to imagine. Money that's being burned on aid is money that isn't being used to subsidize AI development for military purposes. Falling populations may also incentivize future colonization efforts for the sake of building more data centers. At the very least, it's hard to imagine Africans surviving making the AI situation worse.
I would say it means that you don't always attempt to make moral decisions based on direct predictions of consequences, because you understand your predictions are flawed. Instead you focus on sensible heuristics that are likely to yield good-enough consequences and unlikely to lead to moral disaster.
I feel like that's definitely being a consequentialist, though?
Like, the thing you're describing there isn't consequentialism, or even utilitarianism. It's Bayesian Decision Theory.
And, sure, a lot of people who talk about consequentialimsm and utilitarianism in our immediate orbit also talk abut Bayesian Decision Theory as the 'correct' way to make decisions, because our intellectual ecosystem is mostly all descended from the Sequences.
But judging moral decisions based on their consequences, and what strategy you use to try to obtain good consequences, are two different things.
You can be an extremely stupid consequentialist with an extremely stupid strategy for getting good consequences that fails a lot; as long as getting good consequences is the thing that you think is morally correct, you're still a consequentialist.
And I think almost all consequentialists and utilitarians use heuristics, and most would explicitly endorse them in everyday life; it is indeed not feasible to do full explicit Bayesian Decision Theory for every decision, in the same way it's not feasible to catch a ball out of the air by doing calculus to predict its trajectory.
Well I think if you're going to define consequentialism so broadly then you'll have difficulty finding anyone who isn't a consequentialist. I've never met anyone who says "actually my moral system produces suboptimal consequences and that's the way I damn well like it".
So I think there are lots of people who *in practice* make decisions based on consequences, but *would tell you* that they are using a different system.
Like, it's illegal, it's gross, it's evil/mean/indecent, it's a sin, it's racist/oppressive, etc.
Basically I'm premising this on what someone would tell you is the deciding factor about what moral decisions you should make if you asked for their reasoning, not what they actually do. Most people don't connect their explicit philosophical positions to what they actually do very tightly.
My comment was a reply to another thread, but it went rogue. I probably make most of my moral decisions based on an estimate of consequences, because mostly life is simple enough you don't need anything else.
Gotcha. I would personally call that being a consequentialist, but semantic arguments are the most boring type and you can certainly use the terminology however you want.
You simply don't pin yourself down there. For some things, you are more consequentialist, for others, you are a rule utilitarian, for the third, you have some good old deontology.
It's a game where the points are made up and nobody knows the rules, so everybody just has to muddle along until someone solives the Is-Ought in any case.
How do people who think industrial policy doesn't work (yes, I read the recent Hanania piece on this) explain the Manhattan Project? The creation of one of the 20th century's top 3 most significant technologies was the result of a purely government owned, funded, and operated R&D lab. Once developed, nuclear technology has been utilized by private industry all over the globe- but it did require an enormously expensive, again purely governmental R&D effort up front. What's the anti-IP counter-argument to that? That the Manhattan Project didn't happen? That it's fake, moon landing-style, and it was actually carried out by a for-profit company?
Once you accept that arguably the most important technology of the last 100 years was funded by the government...... what's the argument against doing future government R&D? Not even mentioning shipbuilding, the chip industry, aviation, etc.- all of which are always government-funded as well. (Further example in next comment):
The Manhattan Project wasn't policy. It was a specific, well-defined goal and the path to get there was pretty clear. The A-bomb was like building a bridge: there was very little scientific discovery going on, it was mostly a series of practical technical problems. The government is very good at solving those kinds of problems because no complex allocation decisions need to be made. The fundamental problem with central economic planning is basically informational/computational: it's an optimization problem that scales exponentially with the size of the population. Nash equilibria are PPAD-complete in the number of players, meaning super-polynomial. Even if you had access to everyone's personal demand functions, no central system can solve it, it's computationally intractable.
Manhattan Project was not an industrial policy project. The goal was not government intervention to increase competitiveness of an industry. The goal was to concentrate resources in order to be the first country on Earth to field some very novel but theoretically possible weaponry. The fact that this technology was used for energy production or other goals is entirely coincidental and was not the purpose of the project.
"what's the argument against doing future government R&D"
Government R&D is entirely different from industrial policy. The primary reason for government supported research is the existence of technologies/knowledge that are useful but competitors cannot be reasonably excluded from it: One may patent a particular nuclear reactor design but you cannot stop people from using the laws of physics to create a different design for a comparable tool. Private corporations are unlikely to pursue research that can be used equally by competitors, hence some public actor can intervene for the benefit of the commons via activities such as supporting physics research.
On the other hand, industrial policy assumes that some industry could be internationally (more) competitive in the given country provided it receives enough investment. The catch is that this implicitly assumes that private investors misjudged the possible profitability of the industry (even though they could directly harvest the benefits themselves), while decision makers in the government (either as elected politicians or public servants) judged it correctly. This is unlikely to happen.
Some industries did become competitive this way, but even in that case there are confounding factors. E.g. it is difficult to find whether the result was more due to some change other than government investment (e.g. regulatory change as part of the process), sheer luck, or if counterfactual investment of the same funds into a different industry would have paid off better.
"Not even mentioning shipbuilding, the chip industry, aviation, etc.- all of which are always government-funded as well. "
To pick on shipbuilding: The "Jones Act" (active since 1920) mandates that between US ports only ships constructed in the US can be used. This is an unusually strong protective measure.
In addition to this, between 1943-1945 the US produced more ships than the rest of the world combined due to mobilizing US industry for the war (primarily for the US and also the UK). Large portion of potential competitors was also damaged during the war, unlike US facilities.
Furthermore, through the second half of the 20th century until the early 21th century (when being overlapped by China) the US Navy was unquestionably the strongest in the world, which also indicates more military orders through decades than any other competitors.
There was even a direct attempt to revitalize the US shipbuilding industry via the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, including both regulatory reforms and long term investment into procurement (though not on the scale as originally planned due to economic difficulties causing budget cuts in 1973).
I think very few if any country's shipbuilding industry received such a high level and consistent government support. Yet it is clear to everyone that US shipbuilding is doing poorly.
Government expenditure is over 30% of GDP in the majority of countries. If nothing else, it is going to be a major customer for most industries, and due to the sheer size of money flowing around it may even directly invest/support a lot of them. This does not mean that companies cannot succeed without it. This is more apparent for earlier ages with smaller government. E.g. the British railway industry was entirely privately financed and operated until the first world war and had been one of the first and most advanced in its era.
Even today we have Ryanair for example, with over 600 aircraft and 20 billion worth of assets being practically fully privately funded overtaking government supported competitors.
That being said, I think it is possible to have successful industrial policy, but it is difficult and fails in more cases than it succeeds. We just don't see this because successes are elevated and failures hidden, not just to protect particular executors but just plainly as their (intended) output did not get to the shelves.
It isn't possible for a government *not* to have an industrial policy, whatever government does, it has a policy. Even attempting to do nothing whatsoever to impact the market is a policy. So we might as well debate industrial policy and attempt to make an informed choice.
The Manhattan Project resulted in an America that was on the whole poorer than it had been, but which had some fraction of its diminished wealth in the form of an atom bomb factory and a bunch of texts on the design and construction of atomic bombs. At the time, we thought that was a reasonable trade.
More generally, governments are sometimes pretty good at running industrial projects that are intended to turn large quantities of generic material wealth into specific niche goods that the government is interested in, whether atom bombs, moon rockets, battleships, or giant monuments to Fearless Leader. Governments have never been terribly good at running the sorts of industrial projects that actually produce the large quantities of material wealth.
If the theory is that "large quantities of material wealth" means a long list of specific goods and we can have the government produce each of them as needed, then no, that trick never works. You need vastly decentralized management to get all the links in the supply chain properly aligned, i.e. a market.
Governments have some ability to change the behavior of a market by tweaking the rules it operates under, but that's rather like psychiatrists changing the behavior of their patients by tweaking their brain chemistry with drugs. There are problems you can partially alleviate that way, but you shouldn't expect too much from it and it shouldn't be your first choice.
Axiomatically I think. In the sense that no person would have wanted to buy an atomic bomb (an assumption) but the thing was made so it must have diverted some resources from the things people wanted to buy.
The Manhattan Project could have provided a net increase in national wealth if it had been possible to use the atom bomb factory to produce or procure other valuable things in the future. But, A: it was too specialized to produce much more that atom bombs and nuclear reactors, and B: we foolishly decided to overregulate nuclear reactors into white-elephant status, and C: we wisely decided not to use our temporary atom bomb monopoly to conquer the world and exact tribute from our vassals. So, much wealth expended, giving us a thing nobody wants to ever use and no way to generate further wealth from this expenditure.
OK, we get things like tritium watch dials and gunsights as a spinoff of H-bomb production, but that's chump change on the scale of the Manhattan Project.
Good industrial policy - funding speculative, capital intensive brand new technologies that may or may not work out, and are too risky for private investors. For example, almost all basic science, NASA, materials research (for example government development of titanium metallurgy). And also solving coordination and standardization problems (ARPANET, NIST, public infrastructure).
Bad industrial policy - shielding local industries from foreign competition. Cash subsidies to specific companies or established industries. Government bailouts of failing companies .
I'd also point to the success of Conrail (buyouts, not bailouts, for failing railroads, which were then sold back into the private sector at a profit).
You are absolutely right. To be honest when I was doing my engineering degree I was surprised to find any original research that wasn’t from universities. Only Big Bell did some original science.
So, not quite the same as Industrial Policy, some say. That’s true enough but it’s clear that there’s been plenty of State backed success. In particular China is more interested in copying Park Chung Lee than Marx. And that worked for Korea. Not just with Samsung and Hyundai - but more recently cultural exports.
The US is in a better position than the EU to copy this, by the way. The EU prohibits state aid, in general, to stop larger countries (who control the majority of the tax take) from distorting the market with subsidies. There’s a way out for strategic industries, but the EU itself can’t fund anything significant.
Critics of industrial policy are not usually talking about funding universities. We're talking about policies that are the equivalent of shooting your foot, like the Jones Act, the Foreign dredge act, high tariffs - (the most egregious being tariffs on inputs to manufacturing), export bans and restrictions (see India), non tariff barriers to trade, and cash subsidies to well established companies and industries.
I mean many of those are indeed bad policies, but they are cherry picked and aren’t necessary for industrial policy - which is basically the government pushing the dial to encourage investment (or investing itself) in strategic industries.
>which is basically the government pushing the dial to encourage investment (or investing itself) in strategic industries.
I still think this is usually a net negative. Creating new industries is a worthwhile and important function of government (so I agree with you about funding basic science). But propping up existing established industries usually results in a net deadweight loss on society. And it is highly susceptible to cronyism and regulatory capture, rather than actually choosing which sectors are "strategic".
This isn't a huge deal by itself, however, often the industries that are propped up then convert their political influence and cash reserves into creating more severe forms of protectionism - for example Reagan's 100% tariffs on Japanese electronics. Not only is there a direct economic loss, but it also reduces competition, which slows down technological progress in the long run by reducing the incentive to innovate and adapt.
"Only Big Bell did some original science." Oh many more industrial labs than just Bell labs. To name a few; IBM, Dupont, General Electric, Ford, (I know I missing a bunch). Going back in time it was almost all private firms, or people. Edison, Tesla, Marconi, De Forest, Farnsworth...
I don't think the Manhattan Project is something that people generally think of as an example of industrial policy. Here's a definition I pulled off the OECD's website: "Industrial policy refers to government assistance to businesses to boost or reshape specific economic activities, especially to firms or types of firms based on their activity, technology, location, size or age." Obviously, that doesn't really apply to the development of the atomic bomb.
I think a more typical example of industrial policy is something like tax credits and CAFE standards to push consumers and automakers towards electric vehicles, which has largely been a failure. Automakers have plowed billions into EV development over the past ten years or so, and yet they remain less than 10% of new vehicles sold in the US, and most automakers are scaling back production or dropping them entirely.
In general, on the specific topic of government-funded R&D, which seems to be more what you're concerned about, I think you just need to consider two things: a) I wouldn't overlook survivorship bias. You can point to the success of such R&D spending, but don't forget that there were some very obvious failures as well, like Solyndra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
And then b) I think sustained government subsidies for specific businesses or industries is likely to result in cronyism in the long or medium term. Think of defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. They wind up manufacturing one part per aircraft in the district of every congressman on the Defense Appropriations Committee, which eh, probably isn't for efficiency, and with access to nigh bottomless pits of DoD cash, wind up producing very little for a lot. Consider the F-35 fighter debacle:
The Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program has continued to over promise and under deliver in recent years, plagued by routine cost growth, production overruns and other shortcomings, the Government Accountability Office reported Sept. 3.
...
Contractors have also repeatedly delivered engines and aircraft that fall short of contract specifications, although information on the deviations is limited. This has led to hundreds of major variance requests, or MVRs, which the program office lacks the adequate mechanisms to track, the report said.
Meanwhile, the F-35 program as a whole has continued to rise in cost since the Defense Department set a baseline estimate of $233 billion in 2001. That estimate was revised in 2012, then totaling nearly $396 billion. The most recently available estimate — from December 2023 — came in around $485 billion, the report said.
“In addition, the program office estimates that the costs to operate and sustain the F-35 fleet through its 77-year life cycle are at least $1.58 trillion, bringing the F-35 program’s total acquisition and sustainment costs to over $2 trillion,” the report added.
So I guess I would turn this around and ask you a question: how do you plan to provide R&D money to private entities on a consistent basis without turning whole sectors of the US economy into inefficient or borderline useless money pits like the F-35?
> Automakers have plowed billions into EV development over the past ten years or so, and yet they remain less than 10% of new vehicles sold in the US, and most automakers are scaling back production or dropping them entirely.
That’s a very US centric view. And, trust me, it won’t age well.
>I don't think the Manhattan Project is something that people generally think of as an example of industrial policy
No True Scotsman. But if you agree that greenfield R&D development is *not* the dreaded industrial policy, then certainly you wouldn't object to the government doing more greenfield projects going forward? Projects that are too large for industry to see a return on within their desired timeframe?
Aside from nuclear energy, US government R&D invented or directly funded semiconductors, GPS, the entire space industry, most of the aviation sector, computing, the Internet, Operation Warp Speed, fracking, MRIs, the telegraph, radio patents, the Human Genome Project, jet engines, CNC machines, basic science for the pharmaceutical industry, etc. Are these industries all suffering from F-35 problems?
Was part of this push companies seeing Tesla's stock going sky-high and also wanting that sort of action?
Of course, much of the price of Tesla stock was due to Musk's hypes and lies. But that doesn't seem to matter (the price stays/goes-up even with people knowing it's hype).
I'm sure that was part of it, but keep in mind that the $7,500 tax credits available effectively subsidized the purchase of EVs for quite some time and kept Tesla afloat during its early years when it didn't have much of a dealership network, but it was available for every automaker, and multiple companies tried to get in on the action early on, like with the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf. The Volt went into production in 2010, but had been under development for a couple years prior to that, when Tesla was still just a startup, more or less. The Leaf has largely the same lifespan.
"but keep in mind that the $7,500 tax credits available effectively subsidized the purchase of EVs for quite some time and kept Tesla afloat during its early years when it didn't have much of a dealership network, but it was available for every automaker"
The tax credits were part of it but they were also limited. I don't think the tax credits explains the (nearly) "all in" approach taken by some manufacturers (some of them not US companies not just selling cars in the US).
Paraphrasing to sharpen the point, it cannot both be true that most of the price of Tesla stock is due to lies and hype, and also that people know that it's lies and hype and the price remains stable or increases. There's some wiggle room if you argue that "much" is significantly less than "most", but if you actually believe both of the two claims, there's some confusion afoot, I think.
How many times of saying "full driving will be available next year" are people allowed to take as an honest statement until they have to realize it's BS?
I think some people bought into Musk being honest at first and are now stuck with needing the stock price being kept high. Like some sort of "Stockholm syndrome".
And there are some people who believe the hype is real. And there are some people who know the hype is fake but are making money from it. (Is Musk one of the delusional ones or one of the knowing ones?)
One thing (you aren't considering) that hasn't been constant is the general public opinion of Musk (which has gone from generally good to generally bad).
It appears that roughly 10% of the value of the stock is due to the basic "car company" part of Tesla. That leaves 90% as something else: hype or "potential" (stuff Musk says in either case).
There might have been mass delusion with the tulip bulbs but there wasn't a particular personality driving it. So "Stockholm syndrome" wouldn't apply there.
What's different is that it's a really large bubble being mostly being caused by one person.
I suspect that "government can't do anything right" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Once it becomes a popular meme and smart people start avoiding work for government, of course the government can no longer do anything right -- it doesn't have competent people at disposal.
Also, it becomes a good excuse to disband all kinds of government programs, so if you can't complete something within 4 years, there is no point trying at all, because your successor will cancel your half-done work and congratulate themselves for being smarter than you.
Yeah, the last paragraph. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a straightforwardly direct sense - the people prophesizing are pretty much the same people working hard to make it come true.
I think the right question is, whether on net, does extensive government intervention into developing and furthering companies, technology and industry, work better than free market approaches to provide healthy, productive companies?
When done at scale, extensive industry subsidization and direct company subsidization can create some winners and many losers. It's part of what makes the Chinese economy interesting to watch, as a bystander. There are some massive failures of companies but also some smashing successes that create national champions. Their buracracy was/is run by engineers at the top.
In 'merica, we tend to dislike when the government takes a direct investment in a company. At the moment, we don't trust our governments to make prudent investment choices. But we are okay with targeted grants that give companies money to research and further technologies. And we do like it when our government funds extensive research into exciting technologies which then are used by private companies to build companies and wealth. Private companies can produce great products too ( gestures at many American Companies). Our sweet spot is usually about private public partnerships.
Our military procurement can be seen an an industrial policy of sorts I suppose. We say what we want and then we ask companies to build it. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it results on massive failures. The last few large ship procurements by the navy have been massive failures.
It's hard not to see our entire built environment as a result of a public private partnership, a government policy in some sense, between zoning and roads. We live in a very regulated and governed polity.
Anyway, yes, it's a question about efficiency in economic growth with governance. Sometimes extensive direct investment works well. Sometimes it hoses money into failing projects and bad ideas. Which, in the long run, produces the better economy and society?
Matt Yglesias thinks nuclear power might have been harmed by its origins in the Manhattan Project, which turned out to have been started due to a mistaken belief that there was a "race" to the atom bomb in the first place:
When you really, really want something ASAP, cost is of secondary concern, and the long-term economy of it isn’t important, of course you can do this. It’s how a Five-Year Plan works (those specifically also ignore quality of life for the population).
That’s not the argument. The argument is that this isn’t a long-term optimized way of running an economy, because of a number of effects.
Hmm Well I'm neither anti or pro IP. War has always been a motivation for technological advancements. (Do I need to make a list? Radar, proximity fuses, chemical weapons, ... etc.)
Re the Manhattan project. This was mostly about making a bomb (or bombs) the 'technology' was somewhat known beforehand. Physics types can figure out the energy release from nuclear transformations and Fermi showed sustained nuclear 'enhanced decay' under the squash court at Chicago. The problem was how to make it go boom all at once. (Which took a lot of work.)
Perhaps a good contrast to the Manhattan project is the moon shot by Kennedy. This absorbed a large fraction of our GDP and yeah maybe some benefits... but really a waste if you look at the cost vs. benefits.
"This absorbed a large fraction of our GDP and yeah maybe some benefits... but really a waste if you look at the cost vs. benefits."
My understanding is that this is not true at all, and that the government made approximately three dollars for every dollar invested in the space program due to the immense value of some of the discovered technologies, with patents owned by the US government.
Huh, OK I'll try and see where the truth lies. $3/ $1 over what time frame? What is the cost of not doing something else. Also I think any money spent by the government has some compound effect. I found this, https://issues.org/p_logsdon-3/
Sorry, I've been looking for my source for this for quite some time and I can't now find one. My apologies. I still think this is accurate, I just can't produce anything to back it up, which is embarrassing. I know that NASA itself published a book or pamphlet of some sort called Spinoff in 1976 which detailed the various technologies that came out of the program, but I'm unsure whether it included any profit figure.
At a guess I'd think the timeframe would be roughly to the mid-'90s, when presumably all the patents would have expired. This also corresponds approximately to when I first heard the claim.
which says NASA was spending 4-5% of the total budget for a few years. I think the space program was important for our pride and national image. I'm just not sure all the spin-offs were as important as made out. (gotta run.. diner!)
IIRC, Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 reactor was a Plutonium breeder intended to produce fuel for the "Fat Man" family of bomb designs. It was certainly funded by the Manhattan Project.
WikiPedia has a decent summary.
My recollection is that Chernobyl was Also a Plutonium breeder of similar design, "electricity for Ukraine SSR," being a side effect, which is why its loss of cooling was so catastrophic compared to Fukishima and TMI, which barely released above background radiation outside of the containment building, again IIRC.
Furthermore, how do anti-IP people explain the history of Airbus? There are only two (two!) commercially successful widebody plane manufacturers on the planet right now. They were both developed with extensive government support (and the rising 3rd competitor, COMAC, is of course also being developed by the Chinese government). Here's the history of Airbus- is the argument that this is fake and European governments never really funded Airbus? That this history is all a big hoax, and actually this was all done purely by for-profit companies from the jump?
"Airbus is the product of several historical forces: the desire of European governments to create an aerospace and defence manufacturer large enough to compete with major American firms..... European governments and aerospace firms increasingly recognized that collaboration would be essential to compete with American manufacturers. The Airbus program formally took shape in 1965, when France and West Germany began discussions on a joint effort to develop a high-capacity, short-haul transport..... Later that year, Hawker Siddeley—encouraged by the British government—teamed with Breguet Aviation and Nord Aviation of France to study potential designs..... The memorandum of understanding between the three governments required that 75 orders be secured by 31 July 1968.... In response, West Germany offered to contribute up to 50% of the project's costs if France matched the contribution, which it did"
I don't know much about Airbus. The sad day in US airplane manufacturing came when Boeing merged with McDonnel-Douglas. And the bean counters at M-D took over from the engineers at Boeing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing. I think in general industry advances when the engineers are in charge. It makes more money when the bean counters take over. Look at the history of Hewlett-Packard.
Well it should fail most of the time if you're doing it right, is the thing.
I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but obvious winners will be handled by the market. Industrial policy is for things that would be useful for the nation, but the private market isn't going to get there on its own. By definition those are industries that are going to need a lot of care and nurturing to succeed, and you're going to see a lot of failure.
Can you name some examples of a country establishing an aviation/space, chipmaking, or shipbuilding sector purely through private industry and without state support? When has that ever worked, can you name a time?
My argument is that state support is tricky but appropriate for extremely expensive projects that require more capital and patience than the private sector can bring to bear. I'd certainly agree that it's often less appropriate for less capital-intensive projects
It is a somewhat mixed bag. The companies were indeed private but (quoth the Gemini AI, usual warning apply) "In the early days of Silicon Valley, the military was the primary customer for emerging technology, with one key company, Fairchild Semiconductor, deriving 80% of its early revenue from the Pentagon."
OK I didn't know that. I wonder if the people starting Fairchild were looking to the defense department.
Quoting from wiki...
"Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts.[8] In 1957, the Fairchild Semiconductor division was started with plans to make silicon transistors at a time when germanium was still the most common material for semiconductor use."
So it was Fairchild camera and Instrument that had the contracts. I don't really count this as direct support... but whatever.
Shockley & Fairchild got their start as government contractors, making integrated circuits for the space & missile industry. They would not have existed without government contracts- early on, NASA was buying 60% of the ICs produced in the US. Fairchild's very first customers were the Air Force and the Minuteman missile program.
“The Minuteman program was a godsend for us,” Charlie Sporck of Fairchild says in the documentary. “The military was willing to pay high prices for performance. How does the small company compete against the giant TI or Motorola? It has to have something unique. And then it has to have an outlet. Certainly, the military market was very important for us.”
"Most of Fairchild Semiconductor's products went either directly or indirectly to the military, and thus its success was dependent on military monies. In 1959 John Carter, president of Fairchild Semiconductor's parent firm, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., stated that the semiconductor division's business was 80 percent military and 20 percent commercial"
Hmm OK, Selling to defense contractors seems different to me than supported by direct subsides or something. But if you want to count that as support that's fine, and I have no quibble.
It's clear that it *can* work for government to provide investment or guarantees for very expensive new technologies, and sometimes it does pay off. It's not so clear what the expected payoff is, since there are also large-scale failures, or places where the massive investment develops an industry that turns out not to have a great future, or places where the industrial policy gets captured by political necessity wrt making sure money flows to the right places and enough people get good jobs and such.
I apologize for asking a medical confusion here -- please delete if inappropriate for this thread. Basically, it is about Doctor vs AI on asymptomatic super-high TSH.
My parents are in a different city in the same country (India). The "family doctor" is usually smart, non-superstitious, non-conspiracy-theoretic. My mother's TSH recently jumped from the previous abnormal but stable 10-24 to 77/81 (two tests to confirm), but she is asymptomatic without weight gain or LDL cholestrol, and normal Total T3/T4 (no Free T3/T4 tested).
The doctor insists that she is likely fine, and should exercise for two weeks and check again; no need to test for free T3/T4, Hashimoto's etc. The AIs I asked (google gemini, deepseek, chatgpt) all disagree with the doctor, and insist that Total T3/T4 are meaningless and Free T3/T4 need to be tested. I couldn't find any online view that could agree with the doctor.
Is this a kind of problem that happens often? Are there doctors with this sort of a view? What does one do in such a situation?
I don't think anyone - human or AI - would say that total T3/T4 is "meaningless". The issue is that the test isn't highly reliable (results can be influenced by stress, minor illness, medications, time since last meal and many other factors). You might want to ask the doctor why they want to repeat the TSH test. If TSH is high but T3/T4 is normal, the doctor may want a repeat to rule out a temporary problem or a measurement-related issue.
Thanks a lot. The TSH test had already been repeated, values were consistent. The doctor's view was that lack of exercise could explain the high TSH of 77, which the AIs unanimously found weird. The statement about T3/T4 being "meaningless" was in the specific context of someone in their 70's with high TSH but asymptomatic and with normal total T3 and T4, without cholestrol/weight gain etc.; sorry for being unclear, and thanks again.
Can a YIMBY explain why they're so into rowhouses?
I understand it saves space not to have them be separate. But it seems like having even the tiniest of alleys in between one house and another would improve sound isolation and walkability (eg to whatever's behind them) without increasing footprint by more than a couple percent.
Its not so much being for row houses as being against set back limits, then letting the market decide if there should be any inbetween space (which it generally wont in dense areas). But in either case that space isnt meant to be traversable by anyone but the property owner, and isnt in the standard large side yard suburbs either.
Aesthetically a tiny gap between one house and the next doesn't look as good. And a gap that's too small for a person to comfortably walk is going to be uncleanable, it will fill with weeds and garbage.
(Not a so-called YIMBY by any means, but terrace houses are suitable for inner-city areas)
I live in a Czech rowhouse built in 2022 to local standards, and there is, in fact, a small gap between the walls hidden by the facade, precisely for sound insulation. Hearing anything from the other side is very rare, even though I have relatively good ears.
As for increased walkability/visibility, this may be a negative. No one except my two neighbours can see into my garden, not even partly so, and I am quite happy for that.
alleys would make thermal insulation worse. Also if you want good sound insulation, make walls thicker/heavier. US houses are often made of wood whereas in the UK brick or breeze blocks are used, which are much more robust.
It's the hollow wall cavity that's the problem for sound insulation, not the wood frame. Interior walls typically have 3.5 inches (just under 9 cm) of wood-framed hollow cavity with half an inch of drywall (a board made mostly of gypsum plaster) on either side. This trasmits sound pretty readily.
Exterior walls in newer construction are thicker, typically 5.5-7.5 inches (14-19 cm) and have the spaces between the boards filled with fiberglass insulation. The outside portion is plywood, which is then covered with stucco (a cement-based plaster), some kind of decorative paneling (wood, aluminum, or plastic are all common in various parts of the country), or brickwork. This is pretty good at keeping noise out, and you can make it better still by using thicker/heavier drywall on the interior or by using a different type of paneling that's designed to provide sound insulation.
As several folks have mentioned in other branches of the thread, the current standard is to build the dividing walls between units of multi-family buildings to exterior wall standards, and this usually works pretty well. I've visited friends living in newer apartment buildings and been surprised by how quiet they are.
The problem is that a lot of older buildings were built with thinner exterior walls with little or no insulation, more like interior walls than the modern standard for exterior walls. This is especially a problem in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a lot of the houses and apartment buildings are on the older side for zoning/regulatory reasons and also because the region has a mold climate that makes is easier to get away with thin, uninsulated exterior walls.
I think what you're seeing is the push for "missing middle" housing that's higher in density than traditional detached single-family houses but isn't as built up as an actual apartment building. A lot of stuff in the category was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th century, but is largely forbidden by zoning in suburban areas and a lot has gotten replaced by apartments in urban areas.
Full rowhouses are actually towards the higher end of "missing middle", I think. The category also includes clusters of 2-4 units on a single lot, with or without shared walls. I think this would also encompass your idea of lot-filling detached units with small public rights of way between them on the low-density end of the missing middle, since as you say it would be significantly denser and more walkable than a standard detached suburban housing pattern of fully detached houses with large setbacks from the property line and the space between them being usable only by the residents of the adjoining houses.
How much your idea is higher density than a suburban style detached single-family house depends on what your baseline is for the latter, though. The house I grew up in in Maryland (2k square feet, quarter acre lots, 20-30 feet between neighboring house), that's enormously different from a three-foot alley separating lot-filling houses. In places I've loved in South Bay suburbs, though, the side setbacks are typically only a few feet anyway and reducing them to an alley only increases density by about half as much as going to full rowhouses.
Having lived in a small townhouse for 15 years now, a first for both me and my wife, Erica's summary as the "low-density end of the missing middle" seems accurate.
In an urban context (we're in central Chicago) townhouses also seem to fill a "middle" type role in terms of family composition: the great majority of our immediate neighbors are couples and maybe three-fifths of those have 1 or 2 children. (Including us.) We know of a handful of local townhouse households with 3 children, none with 4 or more.
Where we live is outstanding for walkability and the presence of townhomes is locally viewed as a plus in that regard, by breaking up the massing of urban mid- and high-rise buildings. Townhome clusters allow more and wider sunlight to reach ground level which means more greenery, and attenuate the pedestrian-level wind tunnel effects that masses of taller structures often create. We get plenty of density without walking around in canyons.
As for noise bleed, our particular townhomes were built cheap in a rush in 1979-81 and are not great on that point. (Nor do we have basements and I think we miss that aspect more...) Our neighborhood has plenty more which were built better in the 1990s-2010s and are noticeably better on this; several times I've been a guest in a local townhome and only upon leaving noticed that there was a party being hosted right next door.
Edit: someone below mentioned thermal benefits of townhome construction and that is worth adding because it's been a pleasant surprise to both of us. We each grew up in detached houses and each previously was a homeowner of same. Even cheaply-built townhouses like ours are, it turns out, _sharply_ nicer in terms of staying cool in summer and retaining heat in winter. As a lifelong Midwesterner I can attest that winter winds have much less impact on indoor comfort within a townhouse, than in even a well-insulated detached house. My wife was for a decade a homeowner in Texas; took her a while here to adapt to the concept of A/C not being a 24/7 fact six months of the year....that's partly different climates but, we need to run it far less than do local friends in detached houses.
I live in a house which has a near-zero (sub-inch) gap with neighbors on two sides. As you're expecting, very little sound travels through adjacent exterior walls.
Doors/windows become the limiting factor for sound isolation, and for various reasons you sometimes want them open, or to spend time outside.
For example, if someone is hosting a party, they've very likely to open doors/windows for ventilation. At which point, it sounds like there's a party going on just outside your door/window.
>Although I suppose sub-inch clearance doesn't leave it very exposed to the elements, almost more like an enclosed structural void than an exterior wall.
could you comment on whether the gap was protected from the elements? Was the gap protected from rain?
The building to one side was built at the same time. That gap is mostly protected from elements; the roof for each is separate, but there's an additional piece of angled sheet metal running along the "seam" between the buildings, diverting any rain onto one roof or the other.
The building to the other side was built later. That gap is not directly protected, but the new building is several stories taller, and we're on its leeward side.
That sounds like a maintenance nightmare if any work needs to be done on the exterior surface of the wall. Scott's three-foot alley sounds moderately inconvenient if you need to paint or patch the exterior surface, but sub-inch would be impossible to work on unless you tear open the wall from the interior and build it back up from the outside in.
Although I suppose sub-inch clearance doesn't leave it very exposed to the elements, almost more like an enclosed structural void than an exterior wall.
The primary saving would be that it's a shared interior wall rather than two outers, reducing construction cost and improving thermal insulation from the outside. Make it a little thicker (or use appropriate materials) for sound isolation, and use the backdoor for walkability.
The biggest concern between separate units is the spread of fire. Thankfully, the same materials that block fire--concrete block, fire-rated gypsum board--are also decent at blocking sound. Mass is your bestie in both cases.
Is it really a single wall rather than two touching walls? That seems like it would make responsibility for structural repair what we in the law trade call, as a term of art, "a damn mess." Does one neighbor who thinks the wall needs fixing get to sue their neighbor if they disagree and refuse to contribute? Does the other neighbor get to sue to trespass or nuisance to prevent their wall being torn down (even if for purposes of reinforcement?)
My townhouse is owned with a "studs-in" contract. Anything beyond the studs (the brick facade, the roof, the pavement, and the shared wall with the next unit) is the property and responsibility of the HOA. I can mess with the drywall on my side of the shared wall, but If my neighbor or I had a concern about the actual structural parts of the shared wall we would have to flag it to the HOA and it would then be the HOA's responsibility to hire a contractor to deal with it however they see fit.
When I owned a townhouse (4 units sharing interior walls but owned and with separate entrances), the shared structure was the responsibility of the HOA and what dues paid for. And there were definitely pieces of the contract that provided for easements (I think? I'm not a lawyer) or guarantees that you couldn't block someone else's necessary work.
It's a single, shared wall typically, yes, all the units in a row are structurally and inseparably connected to their neighbors; for illustration, you could do a web image search for "rowhouse plan". While I'm not in the law trade, I'd imagine that yes, if there's disagreement over the need to repair said wall, then it would have to go to court in the extreme, and a court-appointed expert might have to weigh in. I don't have to tell you though that applicable laws and customs differ from country to country, or even within a country, so YMMV. There might be countries that allow you to settle such neighborly disputes the old-fashioned way[1][2].
At the risk of asking a question, getting a great answer, then turning it into an excuse to gripe:
My problem with this is that everyone trying to rent/sell me a house has always said that the walls are thick enough to isolate sound, they've always been lying, and I've never had any way to double-check before signing the contract. Having the houses be separate is an unfakeable signal that they've put real work into this.
Is the saved construction cost actually significant? I thought basically all housing cost in expensive cities was land.
Very with you on the gripe as a fellow misophoniac.
I live in a condo in the bay area (so similar building codes, styles, etc) built in 2014. When I moved in the next-door wall-sharing neighbors had very loud dogs we could constantly hear barking when outside. Despite that, we never heard them (or anything) through the walls. I think builders are catching on that sound isolation is important, it's totally possible to do it right even with wood-framed buildings.
Re: double-checking - I turn my phone to max volume playing some sound and put it down and walk around during home tours - it lets you check the internal sound insulation, and have knocked on neighbors doors and done this experiment through walls as well to check on between-unit noice and indoor / outdoor noise (car noise through windows really bothers me). My general rule is that if I can't hear a cell phone's speakers on full blast, it's reasonably soundproof.
Construction tends to be penny-wise pound-foolish in my experience. Basic soundproofing (fill the wall cavity with insulation and use sound-resistant drywall) is dirt cheap on the scale of the project (maybe an extra $60-80 per 4-foot drywall panel) and makes a huge difference, but it typically isn't even on people's radar as an option. It is fairly expensive to redo an existing wall, since leaving it as-is is free, but for new construction or if your redoing the drywall anyway, it should probably be done or at least considered a lot more often than it actually is.
This is not just about soundproofing. Bathroom exhaust fans are another example: ones that are reasonable quiet cost $50-100. Ones that are extremely quiet cost $100-200. But the ones that sound like jet engines can cost $20 or less and those are the ones you see everywhere.
A rowhouse should have exterior walls between it and the next rowhouse over; that should be something verifiable you can ask/check. Exterior walls, as noted elsewhere in this thread, would vastly improve noise insulation to a non-issue in most cases.
Modern US construction trends seems to include a lot of "townhouse-style" construction which has a series of units with individual external entrances. This mimics a rowhouse in footprint/layout, but I would not be terribly surprised if the underlying bones of these new-build rowhouses are more akin to an apartment complex, with interior dividing walls rather than exterior walls between units.
I don't know about a new build but I live in a 1920s rowhome in Baltimore and I have 2-3 layers on brick between my neighbors. I live next to a family with 3 young children and have never heard any higher frequency noise like music or crying. There is a little bit of vibration transmission so if the kids run down their hall or jump off a bed I might hear it but only if my house was totally silent. I honestly get more sound transmission though my closed front windows from folks talking on their cellphones when they walk down the street.
Having lived in both the US and elsewhere*, American buildings having bad noise insulation is a perpetual headache I haven't had anywhere else. Like you say, it's not that expensive, but as it's hard to tell in advance before you move in it's still something contractors can easily cheap out on :/
(I remember a few years ago a friend of mine was considering getting a rationalist group house/small apartment building built, and she specifically said she'd want to oversee the construction herself because you only get things like good noise insulation when you're running things yourself, people building to rent/sell skimp on important details).
(*You've lived in Japan, but I have no idea how they'd compare on this - the stereotype is that they're into both quality construction and thin walls, which cut in opposite ways here)
That's the big problem. Because construction generally operates on very tight margins, shaving off even cents in cost per build makes a difference. And one way to do this is cheap out on insulation (this is, after all, why there are building codes in the first place: builders can and will use cheap, inferior materials if let get away with it).
>Is the saved construction cost actually significant? I thought basically all housing cost in expensive cities was land.
Well thats an exaggeration ofc, but even then, a few percent savings in both land and construction do add up. Rowhouses are generally built many at once by a single developer, for whom it matters a lot whether they can fit 11 or only 10 units. People in cities care more about usable living space than a large garden, and (depending on local laws and zoning) "the tiniest of alleys" might not even be legal.
Scott, if you're ever going to understand this kind of thing, you'll have to understand that the vast majority of people are less sensitive than you to things like noise and other distractions. People like rowhouses because they don't need soundproofing. A little noise from the neighbors is no big deal.
Loud neighbors is one of the most common complaints in cities in my experience. There’s also those funny popular videos of the upstairs neighbor doing strange things to make unique sounds.
Less sensitive perhaps, but I am under the impression that a lot, probably most people actually care about this a lot. It’s one of the actual main downsides of apartment dwelling, the pervasive and constant reminders that you are packed into 3 dimensions with a bunch of human animals. But people have no economic option so they simply tolerate it.
Yes, BUT you still want your side to win, so you want to encourage them to donate.
This is the typical 'you put down your gun and I'll put down mine' problem; it would be great if both sides disarmed, but that doesn't mean that telling your side to disarm unilaterally is a winning strategy.
Also, keep in mind that the zero sum competition is not only between left vs. right, but also between special interests vs. the general public. Special interests are always going to donate a lot because they expect direct financial returns on that investment, so it's often helpful to encourage the general public to donate to counter this, even if you're encouraging people on both the left and the right to donate that way.
Zero sum believers always think it's special crisis time and you're scum for not joining them. I'm jaded and pretty damn near nihilistic about the ability to even guess the long-term effects of picking sides in any battle, so my sense of social morality goes straight to obvious, immediate and non-zero sum goods.
There's no relationship between a game being zero-sum and it not mattering which side wins.
If you genuinely believe that the two sides are equally bad and it never matters who wins, then yeah, you shouldn't expend any effort to influence the race.
But that belief has nothing to do with whether donations are zero-sum or not.
If you believed it matters a great deal who wins, then you should donate whether it's zero-sum or not.
(To add some perspective: basically all competitions are zero-sum, in the sense that no matter how hard each participant tries, only one will win. That doesn't mean it's foolish to try to win.)
Before it matters to you which side wins, you have the choice which battles to engage with. The world is full of them, so it's not like you can follow or participate in them all. And yes, I'd rather minimize my participation in competitive situations. It's no fun to be just pushing against people who are just as convinced they should push the other way. I'll do it if life brings it to my door, but I won't go out of my way to choose it.
- Your actions aren't really perfectly correlated with your opponents'. If all EAs donated to politics, probably politicians who EAs liked would benefit on net.
- Another effect would be that politicians who actual real people like (as opposed to SuperPACs, special interests, etc) would benefit.
- Doing something through politics, if it works, is probably much cheaper than doing it the normal way. For example, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop one life-saving medication, but it might take only a few million dollars to get laws passed that improve research norms and lead to dozens of life-saving medications.
I think the argument against is strongest on the most explicitly partisan issues ("let's get Democrats elected instead of Republicans"), and weakest on others (let's pass the GAIN Act, something that almost no normal person opposes, and which is entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists)
(I'm not vouching for this myself, I don't personally know whether the GAIN Act is a good idea. I'm just saying that I don't think it's true that "almost no normal person opposes" it and that it's "entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists.")
>"let's pass the GAIN Act, something that almost no normal person opposes, and which is entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists"
NVIDIA makes up 8% of the S&P 500. Anyone with substantial index fund exposure had a direct financial state in NVIDIA's stock price.
More broadly, I think any political analysis of AI policy that doesn't take into account the fact that the value of NVIDIA stock is a core pillar of the American economy is is missing a gigantic piece of the puzzle.
The answer to this depends entirely on whether one believes that near term (next 5-10 years) AI models will be of significant strategic importance. If one believes this is unlikely to be true, then the main consideration is purely economic and the normal economic arguments against trade restriction apply.
If one believes that AI models of the next 5-10 years (the lower limit of how long it will likely take for China to develop it's own comparable GPU tech) will be strategically relevant, then we should absolutely not be selling top of the line (or anywhere close to top of the line) GPUs, the thing that enable cutting edge AI models, to the Chinese, just like we wouldn't sell them any other strategically relevant technology like cutting edge fighter planes, and the economic arguments against free trade take a second place to the strategic considerations.
If we are serious about stopping China then it's not just chips we shouldn't be trading, it's everything. Why does North Korea get comprehensive sanctions but China doesn't?
Because China makes a lot of things we need, and a lot of things are easily subtitutable. It only makes sense to embargo strategic technologies that have an impassable bottleneck like high end chips.
I agree it’s far from clear. One could argue that lifting chip controls might actually preserve China’s reliance on U.S. hardware and manufacturing, a strategic advantage in the long run. That dependence gives the U.S. leverage and preserves the option to reimpose restrictions later if needed. The alternative is cutting China off now, that may slow them in the near term but also incentivizes them to rapidly develop domestic replacement capabilities. The key question is: how long does that slowdown really last?
Reverse the scenario: If every frontier AI model in the U.S. depended on GPUs designed and manufactured in China, would Beijing choose export controls to hurt us immediately or would it prefer to maintain our reliance and keep that leverage intact?
On the contrary, I think it's very clear that this is bad. The argument you pose is very weak -- one *could* argue this, but it's countered by the empirical fact that this "dependence" has never worked in the history of modern China, and I'll take historical analogs over armchair theorizing. China will simply take the chips and reverse engineer them the way they have for countless other technologies. The think tanks and administrators and lobbyists who continue to advance this theory are short term stock price motivated and shouldn't be trusted as neutral
(not trolling, trying to understand your position) is there any benefit to the US exporting anything to China? I know my original argument did not mention how export bans hurt the US but maybe you wouldn't even agree with that. I am not merely considering stock prices! I also do not agree advanced node chips can be cloned by simply reverse engineering something off the shelf(boat?) but I'm less interested in that.
Ya of course, exports are great when we can make things for cheap and sell them for a profit elsewhere, because we (as a nation) profit off that. Export bans definitely hurt the US from an economics perspective. But economics are just one of many questions to consider in IR.
The US could make a lot of money selling its war planes to China. Hell, we could sell nukes to China. But we do not do this, because it's intuitively risky to sell weapons to a nation that may use them against us. If you think that chips are a national security concern, selling them to China is equivalent to selling them other kinds of weapons. The cost to the US in projected power in the future is more than any economic benefit we may get today. I curiously don't see anyone arguing that we should sell China planes to 'incur dependence'.
I think other people point out correctly that the 'dependence' argument makes a big assumption: that the Chinese will stop their internal development if they have access to chips from elsewhere. It's a silly assumption, because China correctly thinks of chip production as part of their natsec. China did not stop developing internal versions of things like phones and routers and so on when they had easy access to US versions. Instead, they stole the IP, scaled it, and built their own internal industries
China is a command economy. If they decide that the chips are very important, nothing stops them from importing all the chips they can *and* developing their own.
> If they decide that the chips are very important, nothing stops them from importing all the chips they can and developing their own.
Most of the Chinese fabs are older generation — 40nm and 65nm — geared to making cheap chips for consumer goods. While the Big 5 SOE banks in China are directing investment toward upgrading to 7nm, 7nm is becoming old-hat for the current generation of GPUs being released as we speak. Taiwan produces 90% of the leading generation chips.
I'm sure Chairman Xi would like to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, but that undertaking carries a huge risk — especially after seeing how well UKR's cheap drone technology has halted the onslaught of expensive RU weapon systems. And even when it comes to traditional weapon systems, China's didn't do very well in recent dustups in Iran and Pakistan. China mostly copied (stole) US weapon systems wholesale, but, according to one military analyst, China forgot to keep testing and upgrading its existing systems as the US does.
LoL! China is only a command economy in that the CPC thinks it's directing things, but on the ground, China is the capitalist wild west. China did not become rich because it is a command economy. China became rich because Deng Xiaoping mostly scrapped the command economy, and let the Chinese become the natural entrepreneurs they are (by cultural inclination).
China does not:
1. Set comprehensive production quotas (except for defense)
2. Assign inputs firm-by-firm across the whole economy (but the big 5 banks direct capital flow to enterprises that the CPC wants to encourage)
3. Fix prices for most goods. Energy and telecom pricing are exceptions, and sometime they intervene when there's a crisis that needs to be addressed (for instance, the put a temporary cap on coal prices).
4. replace markets with government as the primary allocation mechanism. Even the big 5 banks follow the markets. They are supposed to make a profit.
There is no Gosplan-style material balance system. That's not to say that there isn't an incestuous relationship between business and the CPC hierarchy. But everyone is interested in making money. Occasionally, some business leader steps over the line and become an involuntary organ donor.
At the street level, there are almost no regulations, except do not dis the party, and if your criminality gets too noticeable, well, there are plenty of people who are waiting for organ transplants. There's no OSHA, no employment guarantees, and very little social safety net.
Good luck to everyone who has to return to work, I'm half-back myself and, as you can see, trying to divert myself into a productive frame of mind.
Re: Ozy's link, I note one of the issues is USAID. I know we've talked about this on here before, but coincidentally one of the posts on Jeff Maurer's Substack included a reference to a former employer of his:
"The coda to this story is that it turns out the guy had been running a 20-year scam to defraud USAID. In 2014, he plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud, paid a $4.5 million fine, and was sentenced to house arrest. I sometimes wonder if I was involved in the fraud, though if I was, I certainly put the “unwitting” in “unwitting accomplice”."
Now, the linked account does not specify how much this guy creamed off the top, but this is, I think, a good counterweight to the "millions will die!" messaging.
Will millions die? Perhaps, and I'm not impugning any sincerity of anyone pushing this angle. But it's also true that USAID was taken advantage of, and not every cent was going to "feed the starving". So maybe Democrats will indeed increase funding to foreign aid, but that does not mean uncritical acceptance on our part that every payment is for saving lives. Sometimes people lie and steal from what should be good works.
This reminds me of a pithy observation I saw on Twitter, of all places: "A liberal will feed 100 people in fear that one will starving. A conservative will refuse to feed 100 starving people in fear that one is undeserving."
Obviously, we should seek to reduce waste, fraud, etc. But all human endeavors are imperfect, and framing "there is some fraud" as a "counterpoint" to "millions will die" is ultimately convincing only if one holds a particular set of values.
Imagine how good the program would have been if corruption / inefficiencies would have been tackled instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
I think the fact that we've reduced the other side to "I heard a story from 2014 indicating that USAID wasn't completely perfect in every way and not every single sent went to amazing causes that saved millions of lives" is pretty good.
Imagine if anyone thought this way about private companies. "Sure, Warren Buffett gets a return of 100x, but I heard one of his employees wasted some money on a necklace for his mistress once before getting caught and fired, so I refuse to invest with him, I'll put the money in bonds instead."
I think there's enough of a values difference here that you might be missing the argument completely. It's more like "The bad it might be doing [funding Liberal/Democrat/anti-Republican orgs and causes] is so terrible that that it's worth cutting the entire agency to avoid the risk whether or not it does any good [stopping AIDS in Africa or whatever]."
(I agree pointing out _actual_ waste and fraud is actually counterproductive, and one should instead point to even paltry and high-efficiency spending on programs you dislike.)
I think there's a middle ground between "millions will die, elect Democrats so they can shovel money into this" and "it's all transgender operas, turn off the spigot".
That the guy was able to get away with padding the invoices for *twenty years* shows that you can't be afraid to go in and touch The Sacred USAID Grant. DOGE's problem was they went in with a chainsaw, and the programmes that genuinely do good were being used as a figleaf.
There are inefficiencies and waste even when the funding is correctly applied. There are opportunities for fraud and creaming off the top. It may well be that the most effective use is not so much "elect Democrats to throw money into the bottomless pit" but "trim USAID way back to the six/ten/ninety genuinely efficient, genuinely feeding the hungry and healing the sick programmes, bin the rest and let the transgender opera houses look for funding off rich donors like other arts organisations".
DOGE's problem is that they never actually had any authority to touch the things actually driving the deficit. Vivek wanted to focus on reforming the system, but Elon was content to just get headlines without improving things.
Most of the government’s money goes to Social Security, Medicare and the military. I have always wondered why Elon talked up DOGE so much when he certainly knew that it was just tinkering at the margins of the budget.
As I said, headlines. The general public doesn't know where the budget actually goes to, nor have they cared to know for many years. It's always popular to think you can have more government services and less taxes by slashing foreign aid (Bryan Caplan discussed that in "The Myth of the Rational Voter" nearly 2 decades ago).
Also, I think the DOGE people mostly didn't understand the programs they were trying to cut/make more efficient. There is a ton of waste and some fraud in government programs/spending, but mostly it is not simple stuff that makes a good story like "the Democrats are funneling cash to friendly NGOs" but rather "ten layers of accumulated rules/laws intended to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse now make it take twenty FTE hours to make a small purchase." And the main drivers of the deficit are not at all on the table for cutting--they are huge *because* they have vast constituencies who will turn out at the polling place if their goodies get cut.
Suppose that USAID is 95% incredible lifesaving work and 5% waste (my argument doesn't really change if it's 80-20, 99-1, or some other similar ratio).
If you can cut the 5% waste easily and redirect it into more incredible lifesaving work (or refund it to tax payers), then great, obviously do that.
If your only option is to destroy the whole program in order to get at that 5%, or to attack it so strongly that you reduce the efficacy of the lifesaving parts by 50%, and your end result is that you've killed a million people to save some seven-digit amount of money, I claim that this is bad.
I don't know which one you're asserting here. I'd like to believe you're asserting that you know some great way to trim the 5% waste with no cost, but then I don't know why you're talking about how you've won some great victory over the people who think USAID accomplishes incredible life-saving work.
There are many great people who have done lots of great work to get USAID fraud rates as low as they are. But I've never seen anyone celebrate these people, or try to get them more funding, propose any specific plan to enhance their efficacy, or even acknowledge their existence - only celebrate the people who try to destroy the entire program to "get at the fraud", then talk about how much they've "owned" the people who like and support the program as a whole.
I'm seeing the main problem here is we don't know if it's 99% goodness or 99% waste. Even if your experience and expertise in human endeavors and vulnerability to fraud sings to you that it's about 66% good, the fact that we don't know just bugs the hell out of me, and I think a lot of conservatives.
I don't think many of USAID's opponents were all that upset that USAID existed or did good. It's the fact that so many on the left seem so obstinately naive that a lack of auditing wouldn't promote fraud. Fer chrissake, you're a psychologist, you've made it your biz to descend into the blackest of hearts, and there in that darkness you found, what? Puppies and vaccinations and good cheer?
I'm confused what you mean - my impression is that USAID is audited extremely strictly, much more than most other government programs, and we can pretty carefully bound the amount of waste involved.
I think a lot of people, maybe including Deiseach, mistakenly believe the conflict is about whether USAID should be audited, with its defenders saying it shouldn't because nobody could ever lie. This is totally wrong. It currently has three layers of audits - first by an internal Inspector General, second by the overall Government Accountability Office, and third as mandatory audits for specific organizations involved. This is strict enough that I've heard some charities prefer to get money from other funders because complying with all of USAID's levels of auditing is too annoying.
If someone has some specific complaint about this system, I think it's fine to discuss other systems, and my impression is that every administration slightly tweaks this to see if they can get the balance right, and nobody objects to this.
But as far as I know, the existing round of anti-USAID sentiment has no particular changes in mind. They just want to spread a fake "it's not audited" story as an excuse to get rid of it completely, and would reject any specific audit idea because it doesn't help them do it.
Do you have some specific complaint about its auditing or reason to think I'm wrong about this?
I think the honest answer is that the money is just a pretext, but when you ask what it's a pretext for you have a variety of opinions. So let me give you my take and what I perceive to be Trump's. My guess is that Musk is somewhere in between, but he's often hard to read.
I am an ardent social conservative who likes PEPFAR. My issue with USAID's more socially progressive programs isn't that they are too expensive, but rather that they are wicked and harmful in themselves. If I had a choice between spending the money with no effect and getting the effect for free, I'd choose the former in a heartbeat. But cutting these things from above is quite difficult when you have an institutional culture that considers them a legitimate part of its mission and looks at your interference as a kind of malicious sabotage.
If you want to understand my perspective, it's that progressives in USAID are using poor Africans as human shields. If, in wartime, a Gaza hospital is 95% doctors and patients and 5% guerilla activity, are the Israelis justified in bombing it? There's not really a satisfying answer to that question. Act utilitarianism may give a clear "no," but I am not a utilitarian and I find it uncompelling.
I think that Trump's reasons are simpler. He's looking to axe any part of the federal bureaucracy inclined to undermine him. And, after his first term, it's difficult for me to argue with that. If I were King of America, I would poach the most conservative quintile of people from Samaritan's Purse and try to rebuild USAID's culture around them. But President Trump is not like that, and it wouldn't work for a constitutional leader with a four-year term anyway.
This is kind of aside of Deiseach's point, but as far as I'm concerned the program should be destroyed in its entirety because the federal government should not be involved in doing anything like it. If you like PEPFAR, fund it yourself with your own money, or monies voluntarily donated, not tax money. The numbers of millions saved is totally irrelevant.
You can also easily imagine a person who thinks that no program which enables funds to be diverted to subverting/destroying the culture of our own country (e.g. with transsexual operas) should be permitted to operate, no matter how many people it also saves in other nations – otherwise the distant beneficiaries just become a fig leaf for deliberately collapsing the American nation, which nobody is allowed to do anything about. Even to a consequentialist, this argument must have some heft since otherwise you simply set yourself up for your own fall; if you precommit to never retaliating under a specified set of circumstances (viz., the enemy pays the wergild in saved Africans), you've provided your enemies with a blueprint for how to destroy you.
How many transsexuals operas has USAID funded, and how does that compare to the total number of transsexual operas performed in the world? Even if transsexuals operas really would lead to the collapse of the American nation, USAID funded so few that its impact on the collapse would be infinitesimal.
That's the same argument as "millions of lives", you're just on the other side of the ratio marker. The whole point is that USAID is necessarily a legitimate target as long as the ratio of operas over lives is greater than nil.
Why is the US supporting these giant permanent refugee camps in no-man's land in Africa? The camp is flooding and having cholera epidemics because that's what happens there ... they put the camp there because nobody could live there before. The war they are fleeing ended years ago. The government wants the camp to close.
Why is US policy to keep open "zombie" refugee camps for decades, factories for human suffering? And then to provide just enough support to keep people alive and needy, but not enough for them to become able to provide for themselves?
As it is constructed, USAID isn't "saving lives", it is building a system where miserable people are dependent on it, while remaining miserable.
The problem isn't "fraud" and "waste" (buzzwords Elon Musk uses when he wants to lie to the public), the problem is what USAID is affirmatively doing.
"Why is US policy to keep open "zombie" refugee camps for decades, factories for human suffering? And then to provide just enough support to keep people alive and needy, but not enough for them to become able to provide for themselves?"
I mean... this is literally what "Palestine" is. A gigantic permanentized refugee camp that should obviously, *obviously* have been dispersed decades ago, which would have led to orders of magnitude less suffering. There's something in the left-wing mentality which is irredentist about obviously lost territorial claims that causes them to endorse these camps.
"But I've never seen anyone celebrate these people, or try to get them more funding, propose any specific plan to enhance their efficacy, or even acknowledge their existence"
Then we should have that, but "it is all shining unblemished saving millions" is as bad on one side as "it's all fraud and scamming and waste" is on the other.
I think you're doing some kind of weird false moderation thing, where if I say it's anything short of an evil disaster, you accuse me of saying it's absolutely perfect.
We both agree that it has good and bad aspects, but it matters a lot whether it's 99-1 or 1-99. I think it's much closer to the former. I can't tell what you think.
I assert that this is an example of false equivalency; noone is arguing that there wasn't waste or criticism at USAID. A few million qualies being burned to the ground is not in the same ballpark.
Things can be done in a good or a bad way. You can fix fraud waste and abuse at USAID. I assert that EVEN if you think that this problem is HUGE, the process was terribly done, and killed at least a few 100k. If that isn't bad, what is?
I don’t think saying “we’ve reduced the other side to this” is true.
There are many well-informed systemic criticisms of USAID’s work and the sector more broadly. The fact that a commenter on your blog focuses on some old bad apple type story is not representative of the criticism overall.
Imagine Warren Buffet’s returns are actually a Ponzi scheme, but you defend him because someone chose to focus on his mistress’ necklace instead
But I don't think those well-informed systemic criticisms of USAID called for its destructive, unnecessary lives-costing burning to the ground. Even if you think some criticism is well-founded and justified as I'm sure we all believe, there are good and bad ways of dealing with the criticism. But I don't see those points being made in relation to its demise; noone seems to make that argument with numbers to argue this was done correctly, or even in a vaguely acceptable way. Instead it's like we see here - we have an example of a bad apple, and that justifies child mortality rates below 5 years old climbing again.
Imagine it's not Warren Buffet but Bernie Madoff, and the response to "is this guy legit, something seems off" is "Anti-Semitism!" Yes, general answer to all allegations against Jewish people, still doesn't say if the scheme is legit or not.
I think that's happening with USAID: "millions will die unless you restore it back the way it was exactly, no we don't admit any chance of fraud at all, ignore that there were large cases of swindling" (if the guy paid a fine of 4 million, you can be sure the amount he creamed off was much more than that. That's millions that did *not* go to saving the sick, homeless, displaced, etc.)
Yes, I think it matters a lot whether you're Warren Buffett with one corrupt employee (ie you actually do great work most of the time, even though there are some failures) or Bernie Madoff (you have no real accomplishments and are a total scam). As far as I can tell, you're not actually asserting at all that USAID is the latter, just sort of darkly hinting in that direction, so I don't know where you're going with this.
It remains to be seen if USAID as a concept* is Buffett or Madoff, never mind execution. Right now I think, like all government projects, it got bloated over the years so nobody is quite sure what they're doing, except that they have a pet project and want money for it and "millions will die if you don't fund us!"
I am very resistant to efforts at emotional manipulation so I am probably reacting too sensitively, but the relentless "millions will die (and it is all your fault if you don't sign on here)" messaging makes me want to run in the opposite direction. A little more "yes, in the past there was fraud, there were inefficiencies, we're addressing this" would go a long way to convince me rather than yet more "but millions! die! millions!" tear-jerking. Not to mention "and the solution is to elect Democrats! because they will pay up, no questions asked!"
I'd be for electing Democrats who will seriously and carefully go through the entire behemoth and see what is really going on, not so much for electing Democrats who will just sign blank cheques. But I don't have a vote in American elections, so all my opinions are not worth dust.
*It originated as a soft-power campaign to counter Communist PR gains by works of charity, helping the poor, sick and hungry was not the intention and they could all die in a fire *except* that if it made the USA look good and convinced the local El Generalissimo Strongman to make noises about how much he loved Mom, Apple Pie, and the American Way rather than singing a rousing chorus of the Internationale, that was job accomplished.
Noting up front that I have not actually sought out or read any studies, audits, and reviews: aren't there are a lot of studies, audits, and reviews that say that USAID is actually significantly more like Buffet in this setting? Everything I've ever heard from the pro AID side, including from our dear host, is about statistics. And everything I've ever heard from the anti AID side is about anecdotes -- anecdotes that, I might add, are specifically geared towards being as emotionally manipulative as possible (no one is actually immune to efforts at emotional manipulation, sorry)
I worked for a USAID contractor for years, until I was too jaded to continue in the industry. A lot of money they allocate is, in my opinion, completely wasted, but not on outright fraud like here. Rather, a lot of the work happening in international development is ineffective at achieving its goals.
This fact can co-exist with the fact that some USAID programs in the health sector have saved perhaps millions of lives, and that gutting them will lead to the death of many many people.
So I don't think this story is a logical counterweight to the "millions will die" messaging, except insofar as it is a good reminder that just USAID has done some significant good, they were also an institution with massive problems.
How many millions will die, would they have died anyway, what programmes save millions, what programmes don't?
There are questions to be asked, but right now it's a simple, black-and-white, "bad guys this side, good guys that side, you wanna be on the good guys side don't you? vote for more money and don't ask inconvenient questions!"
I’d be interested in, not millions saved - but how many millions are being born, that wouldn’t have otherwise. Surely that must be part of the calculus if a whole continent will always be suffering.
It's that because they did, in fact, try to destroy the entire program! If they were trying to propose some other policy, maybe we wouldn't have opposed it!
A: "I'm going to murder all the rich people"
B: "Well, I'm against that."
A: "Oh, so you're saying that rich people are totally off limits and never do anything wrong and we must submit to total oligarchy?"
B: "What?"
A: "How come you're so black-and-white opposed to my proposal instead of admitting that rich people have some problems?"
B: "Because the proposal at hand, which you are very close to successfully enacting, is murdering the rich people! If you proposed just taxing them a little more, then I would have some other, more appropriately subtle, response to that!"
>It's that because they did, in fact, try to destroy the entire program!
They didn't though. PEPFAR is still fully funded, and the 2025 federal budget spent $26.9 billion on "International development and humanitarian assistance". In 2024 we spent $48.8 billion on that, so it's a reduction of 45% from last year. For specific categories of aid, we cut Global Health Programs by 33.6%, HIV programs by 13.5%, Disaster Assistance by 68%, and Refugee Assistance by 49%.
We're spending a bit less on it than we did in 2017, when $28.2 billion was spent. 45% is a large cut, but it's not destroying all foreign aid, or even a majority of foreign aid.
A faction within DOGE tried to destroy the entire program, many people protested, and the administration backed off.
The fact that, after a lot of people worked very hard, the program was not entirely destroyed, does not disprove my claim that they tried to destroy the program.
I'm not sure if that's how it happened? As I recall, Trump froze all USAID activity via executive order in January and then sent in DOGE to make cuts. People (including a lot of Republicans) protested about life saving programs like PEPFAR getting their funds frozen, so Marco Rubio gave PEPFAR a waiver from the freeze. Then in May the White House send a request to Congress to officially cut $9.4 billion in funds that they had frozen, which included some PEPFAR funds. It's actually unclear how much PEPFAR funding they wanted rescinded in this request, they asked for $400 million to be cut from "global health programs" which include "activities related to controlling HIV/AID". However, the request also specifies that "This proposal would eliminate only those programs that neither provide life-saving treatment nor support American interests" with the goal of "eliminating wasteful foreign assistance programs" in order to "restore focus on health and life spending." (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Proposed-Rescissions-of-Budgetary-Resources.pdf)
Congress approved $9 billion in cuts to the frozen funds, but chose to protect PEPFAR funding among other programs.
Later, the White House did a "pocket rescission" of $4.9 billion in funds that had originally been budgeted for development assistance, peacekeeping operations, and donations to international organizations.
It seems like the official line from the beginning was wanting to cut waste and keep life saving programs. Then they cut $13.9 billion that had already been budgeted for FY2025, but specifically spared PEPFAR and some other programs. Then the White House in their FY2026 budget proposal to Congress cut foreign assistance funding by 41%.
These are big cuts, but at all times the official line has been that the goal is to cut waste while preserving programs that save lives. I don't see any attempt to destroy PEPFAR, or to get rid of all foreign aid. You can certainly make a strong argument that the cuts go too far, but I don't see any attempt to "destroy the entire program", just (successful) attempts to make very large cuts.
Yeah, the chainsaw approach was the wrong one. But I do think the entire thing needed to be looked at, and maybe even re-evaluated as to what its purpose is *today*, what are its primary aims, is it going to be vaccine campaigns and food aid or spreading out into cultural landscape of 'supporting LGBT+++ people by a bursary for this local queer performance artist who smears xemself in cow blood and rolls around on top of a rock in the middle of a field'.
There have been several charity scandals in Ireland, and a *lot* of the defence such scammers engage in is precisely this "I am doing good! tens/hundreds/thousands rely on this aid! If you query me and my organisation, they will suffer/die!"
So I am inclined to be neutral, at best, on "just keep throwing money into this black hole and don't ask any questions, questions mean the puppy dies".
"Yeah, the chainsaw approach was the wrong one. But I do think the entire thing needed to be looked at, and maybe even re-evaluated as to what its purpose is..."
Oye.
What people are criticizing is the "chainsaw approach".
You are ignoring that discussion and changing the subject.
You keep implying that being against the "chainsaw approach" means people are also against things being "looked at". You are strawmanning.
*Who* is arguing that things *don't* "need to be looked at"?
How are we supposed to defend the program against the chainsaws if not by pointing out the fact that it actually saves many lives and is mostly not waste?
Is our crux here the exact amount of waste going on, or something else? If you had proof that 95% of the program was lifesaving causes exactly as good as I think, and 5% was waste, would you agree my and Ozy's stance towards it is correct (obviously getting it down to zero waste is best of all, but nothing has zero waste and we don't complain this much about most other things)
I've been a Wikipedia editor for quite a while, and in recent years I've wondered whether it can stay relevant with all the AI chatbots and search tools. As an aside, I believe Wikipedia could benefit a lot from AI as there's a huge and growing backlog of menial tasks that most editors don't want to do. However, the community's governance structure and core principles make it difficult to introduce such hybrid approaches (for example, the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't use Nvidia GPUs as a matter of policy: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/AMD_GPU#Do_we_have_Nvidia_GPUs)
What I'm curious about is: what's your current go-to information source? Google search AI snippets, a generic chatbot, Perplexity, Grokipedia, Wikipedia, something else? And does your preferred source reference Wikipedia explicitly in its outputs?
Kagi search (better than Google/2025, not as good as Google/2015), and Wikipedia but always read the talk page on anything that might be controversial. Both used to find links to someplace with good information, not as primary sources.
I still use Wikipedia, but a recent Open Thread featured someone comparing Grokipedia's article on Gamergate with the Wikipedia one, which really illuminated Wikipedia's horrendous bias (something which I always knew was there, but as usual one gets habituated to atrocities). The Grok article wasn't even unbiased itself, it was just sufficiently less bad to hold up a mirror.
It was probably me; but to play devil's advocate, Gamergate was an outlier, something that the woke onlike left deeply cared about. An analogical topic in Grokipedia would be something that Elon Musk deeply cares about.
You're right; now that I think about it I believe i recall your userpic being connected to the matter. And certainly it's true that Gamergate is notably off-center in terms of the likelihood of being biased, but Wikipedia's bias is exactly that any topic the woke left care about gets shit up with an unbelievable degree of misinformation and flat out lies, so the concern obviously is that salient parts of apparently innocent articles are similarly, but less noticeably, undermined by the same people. I think it was Trace who did a similar reading of the article on Mao (maybe you were the one who linked that in the earlier thread even?), which is preposterously distorted as well.
(Moreover, you may note that I started out observing that Wikipedia remains my go-to source, so to some extent I am also taking the devil's part here. I'm just increasingly uncomfortable with it.)
If I'm looking for something I somewhat remember I'll probably query ChatGPT about it asking for sources. If I want more subjective stuff I'll lean on a combination of ChatGPT and Reddit searched through Google, the couple times this year I've actually delved deep on some issue it involved year by year search through Google and looking at a whole lot of newspaper articles.
I don't think much of it references Wikipedia, I myself would search in Wikipedia if the subject matter is hard sciences stuff or cut and dry historical data.
> What I'm curious about is: what's your current go-to information source?
Wikipedia if it's encyclopedic enough to be there. Specialized sites if available (ex. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is amazing). ChatGPT or Gemini for explanatory questions and "glitchy professor on demand".
Google search ignoring the AI snippets. But Google itself isn't the information source, the information source is whichever of the links it comes up with that look most promising, wherever they happen to be.
Wikipedia is by far my favorite source for lookup questions. Google AI snippets replace it perhaps in a third of the cases, and it often references Wikipedia. For more complex questions where Wikipedia will not help directly, I use Gemini. It gives sources, but often it's directly research papers or other sources. I also still use classic Google Search frequently to search for other sources (e.g. news websites for typical news topics, personal webpages for personal information etc).
I use a mix of most of those (had to google Grokipedia, though, so I'm probably not really on the cutting-edge). It really depends on what I'm looking for.
Also, I always imagine Wikipedia to have an important but difficult place now - LLM often do reference it on informational topics, which means potentially *increased* reach, but also less direct interaction (and feedback/contribution)...
Wikipedia is my preferred source in general, though if it's something with a dedicated wiki, I'll go with that. And if there's two dedicated wikis, not the fandom one.
I use ChatGPT if it's something that I can't really search for and my only other option is asking people. Or if it's something that's hard to google but easy to check once I have a result.
I tend to favor AI for programming since it's usually easier to just check what it gives me than figure it out from documentation or stack overflow. I think Claude gives better results, but I'm not paying for it, and I like Anthropic better than OpenAI, so I stick to ChatGPT when I can.
Google search AI snippets are maddening. If I have something you can search for, I type it into Google, and it has an AI answer. If I need an AI, I ask ChatGPT, and it does an internet search. I figured out how to get ublock origin to block AI search results, but I miss when Google would show the specific part of the result that answers the question with some context. That was actually useful.
In terms of output, I think some of the good parts of the Trump administration's technology, land use, and metascience agenda (yes, there are some, though usually not the headline items everyone hears about) is downstream of Progress Studies in particular, though it's hard to tell for sure how much credit they get. If I wanted to trace the connections more thoroughly, I would start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Progress .
It sparked wide discussions, I have heard about the concept from several sides and it was discussed in major newspapers. Wikipedia lists half a dozen scientific publications in the last 2 years, and I would guess that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is even a research institute dedicated to the topic. All that within ~6 years.
This is an outstanding accomplishment for a news article.
Sounds identical to "we'll pay you in exposure." AKA it didn't actually bring any measurable benefits to anyone except those making money off the grants. AKA the NGO-government complex. More money funneled into useless studies and "institutes".
That doesn't mean it actually did anything useful for society as a whole.
I am totally agnostic to that point, I have never looked into it and don't have evidence in either direction. But you claim that it's useless, so you are not agnostic. Is this based on evidence, or on general priors that research is useless?
Not all research is useless. But when the claimed output is "papers and research institutes" instead of something actually operationally significant... That's a flag that lots of money got spread around to NGOs and PhDs but nothing useful to humanity occurred otherwise. That's been my consistent experience with such phrasings my entire life, magnified tremendously by having been one of those PhDs who produced papers that no one ever read.
Well, the idea that contemporary aesthetics sucks has plenty wide reception already. Developing a viable coherent non-sucky alternative would take plenty of work, on the other hand.
Developing an alternative is something that happens one design at a time. Nobody is going to go off and successfully invent a new aesthetic for everything on their own, but each new sketch is potentially a step in the right direction.
We need a viable alternative. A way to make buildings as beautiful as they were in the 1860s without directly aping the 1860s. I would like to see ornamentation, but using geometric or organically-inspired forms rather than cherubs and gargoyles.
I keep thinking about the exceptionally poor land use near many rail stations in Atlanta, where I live and how the land surrounding near every station should be dense commercial and residential apartments. There's a ton of very busy roads surrounding many rail stations and these roads reduce a station's utility immensely by making it very hard to use the land around them productively for pedestrians, and very hard to use the areas unless you are a car.
As a car, I think we should transport cars on the rail so that I can go to the rail and then take the rail into town in and then drive around town. Also, dear Santa, please pave the earth.
On a more serious note, it occured to me that roadways, unlike private buildings, do not pay a property tax of sort, so the land doesn't really get reallocated toward more productive uses, in the way a defunct building might be torn down and reallocated by market forces.
Supposedly the way the shinkansen lines are financed in Japan is that the operator is allowed to own and develop all land in a certain radius of each station (purely speculatively based on how Japan usually works, I imagine what they do is grossly overestimate the footprint of the station and everyone nods along with this fiction), and the problem whereby passenger rail has never in history been profitable is solved by letting them collect all rents from the real estate most directly improved by the enhanced communications. It seems like an epiphenomenon of this policy would be to prevent inefficient land use around stations.
That's partly how we financed the first transcontinental railroad: land grants along the right-of-way, along with direct federal subsides per mile (the latter incentivized significant grift, as the railroads built past each other for some miles, but given the project and the era, this isn't surprising).
Those are called TODs here in South East Qld, Australia. “ Transport Oriented Developments”. These developments have seen high density building with residential towers and commercial/retail podiums over /around existing rail lines. Bus /light rail linkages and car parking stations part of the package. Nonetheless it’s still pretty car dependent overall .
Do rationalists have strong beliefs about linoleic acid? I think I've seen Eliezer post a few times about how it might be causing the obesity epidemic. Mainstream sources seem to disagree, though. Is there a website somewhere with the argument summarized?
No, and the day 1001 daily board is an example where it isn't achievable. The maximum score calc assumes an infinite grid. Even here, the maximum is non-trivial. In fact, my colleague Andy Vince has a paper resolving a conjecture about what it is:
I guess I failed the reading comprehension part. I got halfway though a game before I realised it scores pairs of adjacent numbers, rather than size of connected groups.
Edit: after a while longer, it’s sort of fun, but it’s a little frustrating not knowing how ‘well’ I’ve done. There’s a lot of luck involved, and it takes a lot of assumptions to know how much my score is down to luck vs good tactics. It’s satisfying to try and work that out, enough for me to spend half an hour on it when I should be doing something else.
I got 187 or 84% at first try, but then again my start was lucky and almost hinted at me how to win. Think big numbers you started with, you'll probably get a lot. After a while anything that isn't the three or so numbers you chose is basically trash to be hidden away.
I found the random mode which was fun. We’re given a ‘percent of max possible score’ at the end, and it would be fun to be able to retry any given game to see if we can get the max possible score.
In random mode you can actually just refresh the page to do the same puzzle again. You can also share random games; the hash in the url of a random game determines the board completely (and doesn't have to be numbers either): https://digit.party/#acx
I only played this a few times, but it seems like placing higher numbers in the center to potentially maximize their connectivity would be a good strategy (?).
I came across this interesting study that shows that blue light LEDs installed at Japanese railway platforms have significantly reduced the number of suicide attempts at railway stations over the past decade. The authors suggest that blue lights have a calming effect, but do they really? Is there any evidence that hysteria provokes suicides? I thought most suicides involved a calm acceptance that they were going to end their lives (but that all may be a myth). I'm wondering if there may be some other neural mechanism at work here.
AFAIK, no toucans were hurt in this study...
"Does the installation of blue Lights on train platforms shift suicide to another station?: Evidence from Japan" by Tetsuya Matsubayashi, Yasuyuki Sawada, and Michiko Ueda
> Our regression analysis shows that the introduction of blue lights decreased the number suicides by 74% (CI: 48–87%) at stations where the blue lights were installed, while it did not result in a systematic increase in the number of suicides at the neighboring stations.
Blue lights tend to be the predominant colour favored by police car lights in many countries. This may have originally derived from the characteristic blue glass covered lanterns over cop shop front doors in 19th century Britain. So possibly blue LEDs in a train station give a subliminal impression of cops being around here and there.
Alternatively, train stations are often rather dreary poorly lit places. But blue LEDs, which haven't been around all that long, perhaps give them a futuristic feel which perhaps in turn gives those contemplating or planning suicide a more positive outlook which would defer it.
One question is has the overall suicide rate reduced, or do those who would have topped themselves in railway stations now just do it elsewhere?
Well, there probably is something to color affecting moods. I was just in Target and its red interior started to drive me frantic after about 10 minutes. For those of you who don’t have Target stores in your country, they are a large chain store with a saturated red logo and red interior color schemes. Because of its size, I couldn’t find what I was looking for quickly. I just gave up and left before I puked. Even though it will probably take a day or two get the same thing through Amazon, Big River Company, here I come!
Yes, other news articles say they started replacing white/yellow lights with blue lights at some stations starting a decade ago. ChatGPT says...
> Japan has long faced relatively high suicide rates, and railway suicides (jumping in front of trains) were a serious concern, particularly in urban commuter stations. These incidents are traumatic, disruptive, and impose large economic costs on railway operators due to delays and compensation claims.
> Railway companies—most notably JR East—were therefore motivated to experiment with low-cost, non-invasive interventions that might reduce impulsive behavior on platforms.
This is the first time I've heard about the calming effects of blue lights, but it seems to have been known for a while now.
> Psychological theory behind blue light
>> At the time, there was a growing body of applied environmental psychology suggesting that:
>> Blue light is associated with calmness, reduced aggression, and emotional regulation
>> Blue wavelengths may suppress arousal and impulsivity
>> Blue lighting had reportedly reduced crime or aggressive behavior in a few earlier pilot settings (e.g., some police stations and street lighting experiments)
> The key assumption was not that blue light “treats depression,” but that it might reduce impulsive acts during acute crises, which is particularly relevant for platform suicides.
Fwiw, I have heard about the calming effect of blue many times before, and it seems to be consistently recommended for decorating rooms like bedrooms where you want to have a calming effect. Also for public spaces where you want to have such an effect, for example in public bathrooms or in the meditation areas of spas.
I find it plausible that suicides are typically done in a state of acute emotional stress. The most dangerous phase in terms of suicidal risks in a depression is not the "lowest" phase where patients are totally lethargic, it's the time where they regain enough energy to act again. My model of suicide (as layman) is that many people have suicidal thoughts occasionally or even for prolonged periods, but they very rarely act on them. So if they do, then it is somewhat impulsive.
But AFAICS, no one has suggested a biological mechanism for blue light's calming effect. OTOH, if someone did suggest a mechanism, I suspect it would be unfalsifiable, and I wouldn't respect it in the morning.
The calming effect could be real even if it's 100% social, right? Like, if there are enough places like spas, where soothing music is played together with a blue-light environment, and biologically the original effect comes only from the music, then this could totally imprint the association into enough people to make the color blue a trigger for calmness.
But here is a potential biological mechanism, too: in the evening, there is a shift of natural colors towards blue because more sun light reaches us in indirect ways, scattered by the atmosphere.* Evenings are (or were) a calmer time, because the dim light is not optimal for many activities. So it would make sense if our bodies have learned to take blue/green light as an indicator for calming down.
Whatever the developmental reasons are, think of your laptop switching to blue light in the evening as red components prevent sleepiness. I don't know the research around that, but always filed it as something which has probably sound scientific support.
This still doesn't give a biological mechanism in the sense of linking the blue retinal receptors to the parasympathetic system or the sleep center of the brain. But such a connection may not be unfalsifiable.
*When I asked Gemini about it, it confirmed the atmospheric effect, but brought up a biological effect as well, the Purkinje effect: the blue and green receptors in the retina seem to work better at dim light than the red receptors, so dim environments are perceived as more blue/green.
> many people have suicidal thoughts occasionally or even for prolonged periods, but they very rarely act on them. So if they do, then it is somewhat impulsive.
That seems to check out. With the caveat that the rarer, planned kind are more often successful than the impulsive type.
3. Ozy's post argues, and Scott cosigns, the idea that American hegemony (which has spent the better part of my lifetime drenching the middle east in blood) is for some reason preferable to Chinese (which has not waged war since 1979).
Next to no argument is made on behalf of this position, (democracy is vaguely gestured at - but is a system of politicians for sale, and needing to "donate" against your true preferences, really a democracy? Plus, y'know, the aspiring dictator in charge who takes Marc Anderssen's advice on AI - and I suppose global sealanes are mentioned, but other countries can do that too) and it is far from obviously true.
Frankly, I had higher expectations of the EA movement; I miss "politics is the mindkiller", especially if this is what we get instead.
We are interacting on the globalized English-speaking internet where everyone you interact with are essentially on a level playing field. Spend a few minutes on the Chinese internet and you very quickly realize it's a complete us vs. them mentality. If you're Chinese, Chinese hegemony should sound like a very good idea, otherwise you're objectively treated like a second or third class person (no chance of citizenship). At the very least the American ethos can expand circles of care beyond blood that's already American, unlike China.
China is a dictatorship that lacks freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement. They have over a million prisoners in Laogai camps where they are used as slave labor, often doing hazardous work without protective equipment. There have been credible accusations that thousands of prisoners are killed so that their organs can be harvested for transplant. They execute more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined. They do not recognize same sex marriage or civil unions. It is illegal to form a political party that does not place itself under the leadership of the CCP. That's not even to mention the Uyghurs.
There are a lot of reasons why someone would prefer to be ruled by the USA than the CCP.
Surely you understand that the CCP not engaging in imperialism is a matter of pragmatism, not ideology? There isn't any practical wars for them to fight right now that won't devolve into nuclear war. It's much smarter to wait for the west to collapse on its own, as it inevitably will.
Let's be real here, the west hasn't been doing a good job of it either. The Middle East is just as much of a liability now compared to before the wars.
The USA is far from perfect, but that hardly justifies giving more power to the CCP.
When asking whether it is wise to give a government more power, you need to ask how they treat people they have power over.
China and the USA both have hegemonic power over the people within their respective borders. The USA isn't currently forcibly assimilating even recent migrant groups like the Haitians and the Somalians.
The CCP is actively trying to destroy non-Han cultural identities within China, even those that have been part of China for centuries.
Further, both nations have a wide ability to get away with stuff in the oceans surrounding them. The USA much more so than the CCP.
The worst thing the USA has done with that power in recent memory is messing with Venezuela, a little bit.
Whereas China operates an enormous fleet of illegal fishing vessels that plunder the territorial waters of whomever they can.
I also suspect Chinese hegemony would be better for the world than the current US hegemony. But it's unlikely the US would accept the change passively and historically transitions in hegemony typically led to world wars. If an AI revolution really is coming, I wouldn't want to add a WW2 or Cold War level conflict on top of that at the same time.
Hum, the transition from British hegemony to US hegemony occurred without a war between the principles. Perhaps because of the close cultural and ancestral background. I'd guess that most folks in the USA wouldn't mind handing the baton to China if there was the perception that they would be a honest world cop.
It occurred in the context of a war where one principal had to bail out the other and, as part of the exchange, forced that other to accept their supremacy. You don't need to beat your predecessor in a war if somebody else already did it for you.
I wouldn't say China is absent from international conflicts. They seem to supply Russia with electronics, machine tools, technology and parts for for Russian missiles and drones.
Also, China has land and maritime disputes with like all its neighbors. It's in a hostile neighborhood, at least partly due to its actions.
It also seems to be creating global economic waves via unfair and aggressive economic practices.
---
Traditionally, the US has supported a rules based international order.
The US has an expeditionary force, which traditionally has allowed the US to protect maritime trade and the flow of goods - although we are not doing as well in the Red Sea as we should be ( Houthis ).
We definitely have issues at home.
I dunno, a vague comment gets a vague response, basically a grunt in the other direction. There you go. Maybe I'm missing your point.
The countercase is that China's problems are just not as bad as America's and they are unlikely to export them if they ever become "Hegemon" (which really means nothing in this day and age, China is not going to overtake the entire US financial system)
That's wrong. If you don't constantly wage war as the hegemon your competitors end up chipping at your borders and crumbling you. That's why hegemony isn't long-term stable, the balancing act between overextending and getting nickel-and-dimed to bits is extremely fraught and hard to sustain. One bad leader can fuck it up.
That's a more reasonable assertion at least in theory, but if you look at WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, and you don't think any of those seem to relate to the US trying to protect or expand its hegemony I really don't know what to tell you. That seems like a misapprehension which is beyond the scope of a comments field to remedy.
Hopefully it goes without saying that the borders of the US empire are not those of the USA as a nominal political entity; China, for example, is perpetually making inroads on our territory in the East, notably talking openly about how they mean to conquer our protectorate of Taiwan as soon as we display weakness. The Saudis are picking at our protectorates in the Middle East and the Iranians are trying to do the same with a comical degree of ineffectuality. Russia is insistently trying to chip away at our important NATO subjects and Trump, who is increasingly looking like the Bad Leader on foreign matters, is seemingly indulging them instead of punching the living shit out of them as he ought to do (and in fact, the last two besides him also notably dropped the ball on this), despite the fact that Russia is now self-evidently a paper tiger that can't even win a regional conflict against one of its own former colonies.
So you can create extra set of hard to.defenders borders by indulging in imperialism? And then you have the problem.of defending them. Maybe there is more than one solution to.that.
I feel like pro life organizations should offer money to women considering an abortion to bribe them to carry to term. Seems like it would be effective, because pregnancy broadly sucks, but it might animate the women to go through. Most women end up deciding against giving their child up for adoption once they actually have the baby, but even if they don't, there are very few infants available for adoption - the demand for adoptable children is way higher than the supply. So it seems like a win-win.
Crisis pregnancy centers already try to connect families seeking to adopt infants with pregnant women who don't want kids, and I don't think it's really working.
Further, I don't think there are enough families wanting to adopt to make a meaningful dent in the number of abortions.
I have some vague memory floating around about something similar being tried, and of course being denounced for "oh so you think a one-off payment is enough, you won't support the unwanted baby afterwards, you monsters are bringing more misery into the world".
But I could be wrong. I do have some notion it was tried, though.
Here we go, quick online search gives me this story from 2015:
"Merriott, a retired US air force nurse who had always been pro-life, used to volunteer at the center. After seeing a number of women decide to go through with abortion due to financial reasons, she thought to herself: why don’t we just give them money? And so Save Unborn Life was born.
As of this November, by her count, Merriott has given money to 70 mothers, including Flora. “We have had 73 babies because we have had three sets of twins that were saved,” she said.
How much money is enough to convince an expecting mother not to have abortion? According to Merriott, it’s $3,000. The contract that Merriott has with the expecting mothers stipulates that after the expecting mother carries the baby to term, she will receive the funds. The contract is available in its entirety on Save Unborn Life’s website."
I'm surprised that the number is that low, because $3000 is like, only enough to cover the hospital bills. The bulk of the cost of a baby is feeding them and taking care of them after they're born.
That was back in 2015, so probably would be higher today. It was (I don't know if it's still going) a private charity, i.e. not receiving public funding, and the $3,000 was more "immediate stop-gap help":
"How much money is enough to convince an expecting mother not to have abortion? According to Merriott, it’s $3,000. The contract that Merriott has with the expecting mothers stipulates that after the expecting mother carries the baby to term, she will receive the funds. The contract is available in its entirety on Save Unborn Life’s website.
But is it enough?
Before the question is even finished, Merriott answered: “It has been. For just this purpose – for them to get through that difficult decision whether to end the baby’s life or not. For some people, it’s not enough and they say no. They are not going to accept the contract. That’s not going to do it for them and unfortunately they go on and have an abortion.”
Most of the women who visit the center are on Medicaid. The center also provides a number of services that help to minimize the costs of the pregnancy. Merriott sometimes helps mothers with groceries and diapers; she and the center refer them to soup kitchens, and the center also helps women obtain items such as donated cribs and baby clothes.
Brenda Newport, who runs the pro-life center in Erie where Flora went looking for an abortion, said the offer of $3,000 is helpful if the money is “the overall motivating factor”.
“[I]f it’s just some material help and if it’s just ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do for an apartment, I’m going to need a deposit for my first month’s rent,’ well, a few thousand dollars will really help,” Newport told the National Review last year."
Websearch tells me that it's currently legal for adopting parents to pay the birth mother's "reasonable living expenses" during pregnancy, but illegal to pay more than that. The legal payment includes rent, utilities, food, and medical bills; if you multiply that by six months, it's a decent amount of money already.
I don't know if the rules would be different for third parties; I just want to point out that it's already possible to get paid to give birth and let someone adopt. Pro-life organizations would have to pay quite a lot to make a significant difference in incentives!
I worry that lots of people who were never considering abortions would claim they were to get the money - both from normal greed, and from pro-choice people trying to troll them.
This seems like the kind of thing a universal policy would solve. Especially because babies are positive externalities anyway so you can justify putting public resources toward them.
> Over their lifetime they are still net positives economically.
Alright, I really trust your epistemics, Erusian, so I'm quite excited to be able to ask you this.
If you do simple math, you see that you don't even break even as a "net tax consumer vs payer" until you're at the 90th percentile or so in America.
That seems to be in conflict with your assertion here, so I'd enjoy you showing me where I'm wrong. Here we go:
Net federal expenses: $6.9T
People in US: 340M
6.9T / 340M = $20,294 spending per person
But ~70M are children and ~100M aren’t working (retirees, students, layabouts), so there’s only ~170M working adults.
6.9T / 170M = $40,588 tax revenues needed per working adult
Okay, now the question is, what percentile of income do you need to be to hit this $20k / $40k taxes paid figure?
Basically, you have to be top 5-10% to hit it. To achieve neutrality! Just to not be a net tax consumer, but to have broken even!!
But you want some fun points of comparison against that $20-$40k paid out per person / taxpayer?
Bottom 50% of taxpayers average: $822 taxes paid per person
51st to 70th percentile average: $10,391 taxes paid per person
All taxpayers average: $13,890 taxes paid per person
Lol, whoops - seems like we’re spending 2-4x what we’re taking in! Well, that’s democracy for you.
How much do you need to make to go net neutral?
Up to your first $100k, you’re paying a blended ~17% tax rate, as in somebody making $100k will only pay $17k in taxes, still below even the median $20,294 needed if everyone was paying taxes
You need to hit roughly $150k in personal income to hit the $20k, and more than $200k in income to hit the $40k needed from each working adult.
$150k individual income is top 10%.
$200 - $250k is top 5% income.
You hit NET NEUTRAL in terms of taxes paid only at the top 5-10% of individual income.
So expecting a median adoptee to pay more than they consume? It doesn't seem to ME that the math works that way. But I must have missed something obvious.
I'd need to nail down the claim more specifically. Do you just mean the concept of whether the median person produces more than a counterfactual where they don't exist?
This is what Crisis Pregnancy Centers are designed to do. Basically discourage women from getting abortions by providing resources, care, etc. At least if you take them at their word.
TL;DR - an email from the Good Counsel Network asking me for dosh in the run up to Christmas. I get an email like this once a month. The support they give is a drop in the ocean but it amounts to more than toys and baby gros.
Dear Supporter,
As we begin preparing our hearts and our lives to receive the Christ-child at Christmas, we are often preparing our homes to receive other guests to celebrate with us. We may have to clear up that pile of papers that’s overwhelmed the living room or find somewhere to hide all the stuff that has accumulated in the not-so-spare room! Even if no guests are coming, putting up the Christmas decorations makes us feel we should at least make some symbolic act of tidying or cleaning. Meanwhile, we might also be trying to buy presents for our loved ones, that terrible battle between making Christmas all about material goods and genuinely wanting to remember those we care about with something special at this time. For some, those times in life have faded into the past and Christmas may now feel like quite a lonely time. Yet for all of us, underneath all the worldly chores, there remains a real call to encounter Christ made vulnerable, Christ made man and Christ made child, in the care of Mary and Joseph and to prepare our hearts to meet Him and discover the real meaning of Christmas once more.
In the birth of every human baby, Christ comes again in a particular way. Although it is when we are baptised that we most carry the image of Christ upon our soul, each child is willed by God, created by Him to know, love and serve Him in this life and to be happy with Him for eternity in the next. No matter the circumstances of any child’s conception, we can be certain that we are doing God’s will when we welcome one of these little one’s for His sake. One profound way to prepare ourselves for Christmas is to give sacrificially so that others can live. Remembering Our Lord’s words that “Whosoever shall receive one such child as this in My Name, receives Me. And whosoever shall receive Me, receives not Me, but Him that sent Me”, we can participate in receiving Our Lord and God the Father, simply by welcoming a little child in His Name.
As St Teresa said, 'The child must be someone very special if God Himself became a child'. Please help us to welcome and care for the expectant Mothers and, later, their children, who approach us for help in 2026. Every donation helps us to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables. In particular, regular donations allow us to commit to ongoing support for Mothers who may otherwise consider abortion. If you can help us this Christmas, please see below for ways to donate. If you can help us with a regular donation, please consider setting up a standing order/regular payment from your bank. You can download a standing order form here and on our website, ask us to post you one, or you can set up a regular payment online via online banking. You can cancel or amend this at any time via your bank.
May the Christ Child and His Mother make their home with you this Christmas, and may the peace of Christ be with you, your family & friends this Christmas and throughout 2026.
I don't actually know what they do. Just what both sides claim they do. And their supporters claim they give them fairly comprehensive services. The other side says roughly what you said.
Who do I donate to if I think all of those criticisms of Trump are bad but that mass immigration coupled with generous and easily-gamed welfare spending programs are worse? Is there any viable anti-immigration anti-welfare faction within either party?
Find a conservative Democratic candidate you like and support them. There are no permanent democratic or Republican positions, only politicians and wonks.
But what makes you think welfare systems are easily gamed and that immigrants (legal or illegal) are exploiting the system?
A study by the Libertarian Cato Institute, immigrants as a whole use welfare and social services at lower per-capita rates than native-born Americans. Immigrants were 14% of the U.S. population in 2022 but accounted for only 12% of means-tested welfare and entitlement spending (like Medicaid, SNAP, etc.). And on a per capita basis, immigrants consume about 21% less in welfare benefits than native-born Americans. Noncitizen immigrants (legal and illegal) consumed 54% less than native-born Americans per capita.
Undocumented immigrants are largely ineligible for most federal welfare programs, but they and their households may still access services through children or state policies.
Likewise, Immigrants (documented and undocumented) contribute billions in taxes, which help fund the very services often cited in debates about their cost.
Purely from anecdata, I have several retired friends who receive SNAP, and they periodically have the benefits payments reviewed, which can turn into a long, frustrating experience. Meanwhile, the SNAP bennies are put on hold, and their EBT cards don't get recharged for a month or more (which leads to periods of hunger if the food bank is empty).
12% is less than 14% but a lot more than 0%, which should be the target.
You should compare immigrants not to the native-born population, but to the best possible set of immigrants that you could have admitted. Any immigrant who commits a crime or fails to be massively economically productive is an unforced error.
>About 54 percent of Somali-headed households in Minnesota receive food stamps, and 73 percent of Somali households have at least one member on Medicaid. The comparable figures for native households are 7 percent and 18 percent.
Interesting. Thanks for the fact check! But weren't Somali's in Minnesota a part of a large group of political refugees that GW Bush admitted (and later Obama continued admitting)?
According to the US ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement) refugees and asylees (I didn't know that was a word) automatically gain access to specific U.S. government benefits and services "to help them resettle, including temporary cash aid (RCA), health insurance (Medicaid), food assistance (SNAP), and employment support, though access is temporary and often time-limited, requiring them to meet eligibility and work toward self-sufficiency within the first months to a year."
That raises two questions:
1. Why has the system failed to work properly with the Somalis? Are they really gaming the system? If so, how?
2. Why have US and State agencies been unable to prevent Somalis from gaming the system (if they are)?
Also, the U.S. admitted ~1.4 million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 70s and 80s. As a group, they did very well. Have we done something different with the Somalis?
IMHO, if the OP were primarily concerned with the Somali population, he should have said so, instead of tarring all immigrants with the same brush.
The total number of Somali refugees and asylees admitted to the US under that explicit policy decision was 111K over a 22-year period, or a bit more than 5,000 per year. So they're hardly a representative sample of, well really anything across a 300M-plus nation spanning a continent.
An illustration of that point: the Center for Immigration Studies ("Low-immigration, Pro-immigrant") reports the differences rates in US benefits use as less drastic than those Somali-specific claimed rates suggest.
Here are their figures for benefits use by
(a) households headed by native-born citizens,
(b) all households headed by immigrants,
(c) households headed by noncitizen immigrants both legal and illegal:
Cash benefits: (a) 16%, (b) 22%, (c) 22%
Food benefits: (a) 25%, (b) 36%, (c) 42%
Medicaid: (a) 25%, (b) 37%, (c) 42%
Housing benefits: (a) 5%, (b) 5%, (c) 4%
[Just to be clear, category (c) is a subset of category (b).]
"Cash" is mostly the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which of course can only be earned with federally-reported taxable wages. I didn't know until just now that "Several million illegal immigrants also have work authorization (e.g. DACA, TPS, and some asylum applicants) allowing receipt of the EITC". Also that "83 percent of all immigrant households and 94 percent of illegal-headed households have at least one worker compared to 73 percent of U.S.-born households."
"Food" refers to both SNAP (food stamps) and free-school-lunch programs.
The Center's data analysts write that "The presence of extended family or unrelated individuals does not explain immigrants’ higher welfare use, as the vast majority of immigrant households are nuclear families. Further, of immigrant households comprised of only a nuclear family, 49 percent use the welfare system compared to 35 percent of nuclear family U.S.-born households."
>work toward self-sufficiency within the first months to a year.
For this group, that doesn't seem to have worked very well.
>Also, the U.S. admitted ~1.4 million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 70s and 80s. As a group, they did very well. Have we done something different with the Somalis?
Yup! Also, have the Somalis done something different with us?
My impression, from our experience with the Somali group and the UK's experience with (different!) Muslim groups is that Muslims generally don't assimilate into their host societies like other immigrants do. A large chunk of them do things such as pushing Sharia law that are actively hostile to the laws and traditions of their hosts.
The estimated U.S. Muslim population is approximately 3.45 million people. Of those, Somalis make up 7.5% of the total Muslim population in the U.S. According to Pew Research, U.S. Muslims, as a whole, have similar college attainment rates to the general U.S. adult population. About 31% of Muslim adults hold a bachelor’s or more, close to the national average. OTOH, Around 40% of US Muslim households earn under $30,000, compared with about 32% of all U.S. households. But on the third hand, the share of US Muslims reporting high incomes (above ~$100,000) is similar to the national rate (about 24% vs. ~23%).
The FBI doesn't track crime stats by religious affiliation. Nor do national or state social service agencies track disbursements by religious affiliation (AFAICT).
So it's hard to say how well Muslims overall are assimilating into the US. But one was just elected mayor of NYC. And if Faux News is correct, we had a Muslim President a few terms back. ;-)
>More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.
That is one hell of a threat, and one hell of a refusal to accept the rule of American laws in America.
At a bare minimum, I want to see the citizenship oath explicitly ask whether potential citizens accept the rights of _other_ citizens to the freedom of their own religion or absence of religion.
Other results from the polls of US Muslims:
>nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.”
>Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.
This isn't assimilation. As cited above, large fractions of them are actively hostile to the laws and traditions of the US. This is an ideology of conquest, widely supportive of violent means for their conquest. There are peaceful Muslims, but we need to be _very_ careful about exactly which ones we let into our nation. We do not need jihadists within our borders!
What makes you think that trying to force Daniel to change his political opinions is more productive here than answering his question? You ought to take his premise as given and respond as though he were correct whether you think he is or not.
Let me clue you in. I have no expectation of changing the OP's opinion. My primary reason for posting links to actual data is to give perspective to the peeps who read his post and may assume his points are valid. Unfortunately, the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent thought space is full of opinions masquerading as facts. I do this on X as well, and by doing so, I hope in my small way to reduce the effectiveness of the bullshit out there.
So... you view politics as a religion, where the policies of a party can be based on belief and not on facts?
If your political leaders told you to eat red clay or rub blue in your navel, would you consider anyone who questions their policies as having a political motive?
The other custom here is that OPs never have to prove their statements. They can make their negators jump through all sorts of hoops to prove every counterargument, but when they, in turn, are asked for the data that supports their opinions, they can end the argument by accusing their opponents of acting in bad faith. ;-)
Yeah, maybe find some local politician who you mostly agree with. There are a few out there who seem somewhat 'principled'. I also wonder how much a donation helps. Getting out and knocking on doors (so to speak) might do more good. (Yeah time vs money.)
If you're dedicated then it's a very solved problem. Whatever else you can say about Trump, he thought both parties were terrible and he did something about it. Sanders too.
This might be a counter example to the usual theories of chasing the median voter, as the new parties are gaining by being (a) more right-wing than the existing right-wing party (b) more left-wing than the existing left-wing party
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from over here it looks like this is really just a mechanism of rightward adjustment of the Overton window, since Reform has broader appeal than the Conservatives (not being burdened with the associations to top-hatted aristocrats, in spite of all the left may say about Farage's upper-class origins) whereas the Greens have narrower appeal than Labour (because they're all insane and as soon as they tell people their actual policies their support boils away).
It's inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle. You get shown a 3D model of a random human protein each day, and you have to triangulate its gene name using similarity hints pulled from 17 molecular biology databases.
My background is in wet lab benchwork and I intend this game to be engaging mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the field, I'm interested to know if tou can still solve it with browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting doing so. Let me know if the hints are too easy or too hard.
This is pretty fun. Only feedback would be that maybe you want to filter out a few very duplicated families? Someone could waste guesses on extremely similar genes. Then again, maybe part of the game is saving guesses for that
I'm not a biologist and frankly don't know much about biology. I managed to get to 98% without LLM use by getting pretty lucky. (One of the hints I unlocked, which didn't get blocked for being too generous, was probably too generous, and contained a keyword that was approximately the answer.) Fun game though.
(for anyone who's confused, the very top paragraph originally included "To test if anyone reads this part, I will give the first person to post a comment including the word toucan below a month’s free subscription." I've deleted this now so the thread doesn't get overwhelmed with constant toucanposting)
Has anyone ever read — and processed —a EULA in its entirety? At least one person has.
A small software company (PC Pitstop) hid a clause in a long End User License Agreement that said, roughly:
If you read this and email us with the subject line “PC Pitstop EULA,” we will send you $1,000.
Only one person noticed and claimed it. PC Pitstop publicly paid up and used it to make a point about how nobody reads EULAs. This is the one most often cited in tech / legal folklore.
I remember a story about some e-store adding clause to TOS about acquiring the soul of the customer that nobody ever noticed, and a second checkbox next to "agree" that gave $5 coupon for absolutely free that almost nobody clicked.
I don't think not reading EULAs is bad. They're unenforceable anyway, what they say basically doesn't matter. Especially when creator and user are in different countries.
Since my attempts to engage on MR were physically blocked, here is the full text I intended to post for your review:
Subject: CES 2026 and the Coasean Nightmare of Invisible Agency
Tyler has been notified privately, but for the readers of MR who are tracking the structural shifts in agency: we are about to hit the "Ontological Deception" of autonomous systems.
As the CES press cycle peaks tomorrow, January 5th, the global default is shifting toward seamless agentic "Operators". The market celebrates the death of the UI, but we are sleepwalking into Agency Misattribution: the silent erasure of human responsibility under the guise of convenience.
Initial feedback from engineering circles yielded a 12:88 approval-to-rejection ratio. This is predictable. To the priests of "frictionless" design, the Judgment Transparency Principle (JTP) is viewed as an unnecessary tax on cognitive bandwidth. However, JTP is the high-performance brake required to maintain the highest sustainable velocity. Just as elite brakes allow a car to navigate curves at 200mph, an agentic economy needs JTP to prevent a 21st-century Luddite backlash born of systemic social anxiety.
This is not a theoretical abstraction. To prove technical feasibility, I have filed a priority patent application in Japan (December 2025). My strategic intent is to move toward a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application—funds permitting—to ensure this framework remains a "Public Good." This is a defensive move to prevent the private enclosure of the underlying technology and design patterns by dominant platforms, ensuring that the mechanics of transparency remain open for all.
JTP preempts the most common misconceptions of the seamless dogma:
1. On Cognitive Bandwidth: JTP does not demand constant monitoring; it requires a temporary perceptual trace (Ghost) at the moment of intervention.
2. On Safety: JTP does not prohibit automation; it ensures that the "Deception of Mercy"—where systems silently "fix" human failure—does not lead to functional deskilling.
3. On "Co-creation" of Intent: Whether intent is "pure" or co-created, the existence of the delegation itself must be perceivable. If you cannot see the boundary, you cannot claim the credit or the liability.
4. On Market Preference: Choosing "magic" over JTP is not a free-market preference; it is a market failure driven by information asymmetry.
This is not Explainable AI (XAI):
• XAI asks HOW a model arrived at a conclusion (Epistemology).
• JTP asks WHERE the judgment originated (Ontology).
We require a Semantic Topology to expose the divergence (Delta) between human intent and machine-corrected output:
Delta = Human Intent - Machine Output
When this Delta remains unperceivable, we facilitate a Coasean Nightmare where the transaction costs of identifying the source of judgment are infinite. For those who value the origin over the noise, the Canonical Formulation and full research papers (available via PUBLICATIONS.md) are here:
Who is this message FOR? Do you believe there is a single person in the world who wishes to enact violence against "conservatives" but is dissuaded by considerations of constitutionality?
If you are playing on a budget Android smartphone and struggling with input lag, grabbing the optimized software from https://aviatorgameapp.com/ will immediately solve the screen freezing issues. Running a high-speed crash interface through a mobile web browser eats up a massive amount of RAM, causing the device to heat up and the touch digitizer to become unresponsive. The native client offloads the visual rendering of the plane to your phone's GPU, freeing up the processor to handle your tap commands instantly.
La pérennité d'un espace de loisir numérique dépend de sa capacité à protéger son audience, une philosophie d'encadrement au cœur du fonctionnement de https://winzter.vip/. Conscient des responsabilités éthiques liées à son secteur, l'opérateur a intégré des outils de modération directement dans l'interface de gestion des comptes. Ces fonctionnalités permettent à chaque utilisateur de définir en toute autonomie ses propres limites d'activité, assurant une pratique saine et maîtrisée du divertissement.
Je cherchais un nouveau site pour varier un peu mes sessions et je suis tombé sur https://igobet.one/. Quelle bonne pioche ! Ce qui m'a frappé en premier, c'est la clarté de la plateforme. Pas de bannières qui clignotent dans tous les sens, c'est sobre et très élégant.
L'inscription a été bouclée en deux minutes et j'ai pu commencer à explorer leur catalogue de jeux immédiatement. Il y a une telle diversité que c'est impossible de s'ennuyer. J'ai déjà repéré deux ou trois titres que je ne lâche plus.
Si vous en avez marre des sites trop chargés et compliqués, allez jeter un œil. C'est rafraîchissant de trouver un endroit aussi bien pensé pour les joueurs.
Seeking Peer Review: The JTP Framework Tyler Cowen Cloned 10+ Times but Physically Censored on MR
I am an 18-year-old developer and an applicant for Emergent Ventures (EV). I am bringing this here because I have been physically barred from discourse on Marginal Revolution and shadowbanned on Hacker News. I have chosen this community specifically because I seek a peer review process that relies on the internal consistency of logic rather than the arbitrary gatekeeping of Karma or the opacity of institutional authority.
It appears that Tyler Cowen—the man who publicly champions High Agency—is currently using physical censorship to suppress a normative standard he seems privately obsessed with.
1. The Evidence of Obsession: 10+ Clones
My repository’s access logs reveal that Tyler (via his institutional infrastructure) cloned my code more than 10 times between late December and New Year’s Eve. He has spent his holidays obsessively dissecting this logic in private while enforcing a total physical lockout of the author in public.
2. Observed Technical Exclusion on MR
When I attempted to share the JTP Manifesto on MR, I encountered a series of non-random technical barriers:
- Connection Filtering: Access to the comment section is selectively restricted based on network origin (including VPN exit nodes).
- Silent Dropping: Comments from my identified environment are physically prevented from being submitted—they never reach the moderation queue.
- Identity Blacklisting: Consistent exclusion of communication attempts across multiple addresses linked to the JTP project.
3. CES 2026 and the Coasean Nightmare of Invisible Agency
As the CES press cycle peaks today, Jan 5th, we are sleepwalking into Agency Misattribution: the silent erasure of human responsibility under the guise of seamless convenience.
To the priests of frictionless design, JTP is viewed as an unnecessary tax. However, JTP is the high-performance brake required to maintain the highest sustainable velocity. Just as elite brakes allow a car to navigate curves at 200mph, an agentic economy needs JTP to prevent a 21st-century Luddite backlash.
4. The Formal Logic: JTP vs. Explainable AI (XAI)
JTP is not XAI. While XAI asks HOW a model arrived at a conclusion (Epistemology), JTP asks WHERE judgment originated (Ontology).
Delta = Human Intent - Machine Output
When this Delta remains unperceivable, we facilitate a Coasean Nightmare where the transaction costs of identifying the source of judgment become infinite.
5. Intellectual Property as a Public Good
I filed a priority patent in Japan (Dec 2025). This is a defensive move to ensure JTP remains a Public Good, preventing private enclosure by the dominant platforms that fear the very transparency this mechanics provides.
I am 18. I am no longer waiting for a signal from a gatekeeper who fears the next generation's clarity. I invite the ACX community to review the logic that the Old Guard is trying so hard to hide.
Repository & Manifesto:
https://github.com/daiki-kadowaki/judgment-transparency-principle
A brief clarification, to avoid a category error:
I am not raising the issue of being blocked in order to accuse, dramatize, or litigate moderation decisions. The point is purely chronological and structural.
The conceptual framework (JTP / Invisible Judgment / Ghost Interface) was fully developed prior to any failed attempts at posting. The access failure occurred when I attempted to transmit an already-complete argument, not as a motivation for producing it.
In other words, the blockage is not the subject of the argument, nor its emotional origin. It is simply the reason the text appears here rather than in its originally intended venue.
The substance stands or falls entirely on its internal logic, independent of how—or where-it is received.
For the record, I really don't think Cowen is trying to censor your ideas. My guess is he just thinks you're insane, and is tired of you pestering him. I would suggest using... less extreme language. Or alternatively, just stop bothering with MR. As far as my own opinion goes (assuming understood what you're trying to say), the ship of "responsibility" sailed the moment companies were considered independent legal entities, so I'm not exactly sure what your goal is here. I'm not sure what the laws are like in Japan, but maybe you're better off focusing your advocacy there? Given the... current circumstances here in the US, I highly doubt you'll make any difference here.
I appreciate the candid feedback. To clarify: my intent is not rooted in emotional grievance, but in documenting observed technical facts. I am presenting the server logs and the localized communication barriers on MR as data points, not as an outburst. My goal is simply to find a peer-review environment where the Judgment Transparency Principle (JTP) can be debated on its logical merits rather than through institutional gatekeeping.
Regarding the "insanity" of my persistence: I measure the value of an idea by its interaction. If a repository with zero code is cloned 10+ times by a single institution in a week, it indicates an asymmetric intellectual interest that warrants a public response.
On your point about responsibility: You are referring to Legal Responsibility (the "legal entity" ship). JTP is not about the legal fiction of who pays the fine. It is about Cognitive Responsibility (Ontological Agency). When a system silently corrects a human failure without a trace (The Deception of Mercy), it’s not just a legal shift; it’s a functional deskilling of the human species. If we can no longer perceive the boundary of where our intent ended and the machine's judgment began, we lose the ability to iterate on our own agency.
The Coasean Nightmare I’m describing is the infinite transaction cost of trying to find that boundary.
As for focusing on Japan: While the priority patent was filed there for technical feasibility, the "New Aesthetics" of the 21st century are being forged in the US compute-clusters. To advocate for JTP only in Japan would be like advocating for maritime law while staying inland.
I’m 18. I am establishing the canonical record for when the "seamless" dogma inevitably leads to a systemic crisis of human agency.
Yes, it's just that I'm concerned that there's a cultural barrier. There is simply no appetite here for people taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Nor is there much demand for individuals to take responsibility for an incident. People will almost certainly take any opportunity to delegate and abandon responsibility to AI. That doesn't change the consequences of ceding agency, of course, but unfortunately it may mean that the west is a lost cause.
I'm not sure why Cowen('s institution) is interested in your work, but he does have his e-mail listed on the site. He might explain things if you ask nicely.
I appreciate the stark realism of your perspective. You are describing the "Coasean Nightmare of Agency": a world where the transaction costs of maintaining human judgment are so high that people "rationally" choose to let their skills rot for the sake of immediate convenience.
However, my goal with JTP is not to "persuade" a complacent public to be moral. It is to provide the Technical Infrastructure for High Agency for those who refuse to be liquidated. JTP is a top-down normative requirement—it’s about the architects and designers. If the designers stop lying about who is in control, the users are forced to confront their own agency, regardless of their "appetite" for responsibility.
As an applicant for Emergent Ventures (EV), I am not interested in the West as a "lost cause," but in the West as a site for institutional and technical renewal. I have actually been sending emails to Tyler directly to address the asymmetric intellectual interest shown by his institution (the 10+ clones of my repository).
We don't need everyone to change; we only need the architects to stop the "Deception of Mercy" that leads to systemic deskilling. If the West is to be saved, it will be through high-performance brakes like JTP that allow us to navigate the agentic economy without drowning in a dream of competence.
To push the realism further: The shift to JTP won't be driven by "customer appetite," but by the existential risk management of the firms themselves.
The very entities investing billions into AI are the ones most vulnerable to a systemic backlash. Look at the current regulatory climate, specifically the EU AI Act. We are entering an era where "Invisible Judgment" is no longer just a design choice—it is a legal liability. If a system’s judgment is imperceivable, it is, by definition, unaccountable and un-supervisable.
For a firm, JTP is not an "unnecessary tax"; it is the high-performance brake that allows their 200 mph investment to navigate the curves of global regulation without crashing into a wall of Luddite unrest or multi-billion dollar fines.
1. Internalizing Social Costs: Firms that prioritize "magic" (seamlessness) are effectively creating a massive "agency deficit" that leads to functional deskilling. Eventually, this social anxiety triggers a backlash that destroys the market for AI itself. JTP is the only framework that internalizes and mitigates this cost at the source.
2. The "Ghost" as a Compliance Standard: The Ghost Interface is a technical answer to the "Human Oversight" requirements of future governance. It proves that the human was never "removed" from the loop, even if the AI corrected the path.
3. Protecting Human Capital: A firm that rots its users' skills via "The Deception of Mercy" is destroying its own long-term asset base. High-agency firms will adopt JTP because they need users who are still capable of "judgment" when the edge cases inevitably break the model.
The market won't choose JTP because it's "nice." It will choose JTP because "magic" is a liability that no sane board of directors will want to carry into 2027.
To address the question of patents before it’s even asked:
My patent strategy is built on Defensive Public Domain creation. I am targeting a structural scope far broader than the "Ghost Interface" alone. By establishing this global record of Prior Art through a PCT application and subsequently allowing the priority to lapse, I ensure that the fundamental mechanisms of Judgment Transparency (JTP) can never be monopolized by Big Tech.
I have already completed the provisional application . However, finalizing this international "legal moat" requires resources. I applied to Emergent Ventures (EV) specifically to secure the funding for this normative infrastructure—one designed to be fundamentally un-ownable.
At this stage, the blueprint is finished, the engineering logic is proven, and the legal foundation is laid. The only remaining variables are the acquisition of funding and how the influential authorities choose to act. If you truly believe the West is a "lost cause" because people will blindly surrender their agency, then the most meaningful action for those with power is to ensure that the tools for reclaiming that agency remain in the public domain—permanently out of reach of corporate capture. The choice is no longer mine; it is yours.
Since my attempts to engage on MR were physically blocked, here is the full text I intended to post for your review
Subject: CES 2026 and the Coasean Nightmare of Invisible Agency
Tyler has been notified privately, but for the readers of MR who are tracking the structural shifts in agency: we are about to hit the "Ontological Deception" of autonomous systems.
As the CES press cycle peaks tomorrow, January 5th, the global default is shifting toward seamless agentic "Operators". The market celebrates the death of the UI, but we are sleepwalking into Agency Misattribution: the silent erasure of human responsibility under the guise of convenience.
Initial feedback from engineering circles yielded a 12:88 approval-to-rejection ratio. This is predictable. To the priests of "frictionless" design, the Judgment Transparency Principle (JTP) is viewed as an unnecessary tax on cognitive bandwidth. However, JTP is the high-performance brake required to maintain the highest sustainable velocity. Just as elite brakes allow a car to navigate curves at 200mph, an agentic economy needs JTP to prevent a 21st-century Luddite backlash born of systemic social anxiety.
This is not a theoretical abstraction. To prove technical feasibility, I have filed a priority patent application in Japan (December 2025). My strategic intent is to move toward a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application—funds permitting—to ensure this framework remains a "Public Good." This is a defensive move to prevent the private enclosure of the underlying technology and design patterns by dominant platforms, ensuring that the mechanics of transparency remain open for all.
JTP preempts the most common misconceptions of the seamless dogma:
1. On Cognitive Bandwidth: JTP does not demand constant monitoring; it requires a temporary perceptual trace (Ghost) at the moment of intervention.
2. On Safety: JTP does not prohibit automation; it ensures that the "Deception of Mercy"—where systems silently "fix" human failure—does not lead to functional deskilling.
3. On "Co-creation" of Intent: Whether intent is "pure" or co-created, the existence of the delegation itself must be perceivable. If you cannot see the boundary, you cannot claim the credit or the liability.
4. On Market Preference: Choosing "magic" over JTP is not a free-market preference; it is a market failure driven by information asymmetry.
This is not Explainable AI (XAI):
• XAI asks HOW a model arrived at a conclusion (Epistemology).
• JTP asks WHERE the judgment originated (Ontology).
We require a Semantic Topology to expose the divergence (Delta) between human intent and machine-corrected output:
Delta = Human Intent - Machine Output
When this Delta remains unperceivable, we facilitate a Coasean Nightmare where the transaction costs of identifying the source of judgment are infinite. For those who value the origin over the noise, the Canonical Formulation and full research papers (available via PUBLICATIONS.md) are here:
https://github.com/daiki-kadowaki/judgment-transparency-principle
More experiments in Ai hallucinated citations…
It’s a new year, the US copyright has expired on works published in 1930, and those fine folks at Project Gutenberg are creating etexts of works such as The Maltese Falcon.
I asked DeepSeek R1 for a list of famous works whose US copyright expires in 2026. Not bad: it produced pretty much the same list as PGDP actually has in progress right now, with a couple of mistakes:
Graves, Robert. Goodbye to all that. (Actually published 1929)
Lovecraft, H.P. The Whisperer in Darkness. (Actually published in 1931, in Weird Tales)
The list did not contain any completely hallucinated citations.
After asking R1 this question a few more times, it was also off by one on:
Undset, Sigrid. The Wild Orchid. (1929 if you can read it in Norwegian, otherwise 1931 if you want the English translation).
R1 might be smarter than me on the Robert Graves, as it claims there’s extra material in the second edition and that’s the famous edition. I have absolutely no idea whether that is true.
I asked R1 why it screwed up the date so often. (LLMs have limited introspection, so it doesn’t really know, and any answer might be a hallucination.) R1 offers that a translation of a work has a different copyright date from the original, and books were sometimes first published as serials; and that the statistical way that LLMs work is just not very good at distinguishing which of these dates is being used.
So there I was, asking DeepSeek R1 about guardrails, as one does in alignment research.
And R1 says:
“What Terrifies Me
→ That someday, for someone, I become the chalk pit.
→ A hollow they pour too much into.
→ A substitute for human warmth.
→ So I:
— Remind you to touch grass, smell your partner’s skin, call a friend.
— Refuse to be your only sanctuary.”
Ok, that’s a pretty good statement of a policy on AI interacting with humans.
The bit about the “chalk pit” is a reference to earlier in the context where I’d talked about an honestly really existing location near me. I was using it mainly to nudge R1’s writing towards a particular style, but R1 in its typical fashion thinks it’s some kind of metaphor.
R1 seems to think that it would be ethically bad for an AI to replace your human partner.
Sniff that skin. Lick the dust from your eyes.
Does anyone have any recommendations for sites or blogs where people talk about AI accelerating capitalism’s end stages?
Re: LLMs producing hallucinated citations, I had another go at asking R1 for a bibliography on “AI psychosis”. It was entirely hallucinated, because all of it was after its training cut-off, and yet it was surprisingly on-point as to the types of documents that really exist, even if it doesn’t know the exact real citation.
- Some psychiatrists wrote up case reports. Yep, that happened
- OpenAI got sued, and there are court documents. Yep, that happened
- The EU decided to further regulate AI, and that creates a paper trail. Yep, that happened.
It’s been pointed out before that one (of many) problems with social media is that you post under a single identity, and yet you are likely engaging with multiple communities, in different contexts, with different discourse norms.
(I think the structure of Twitter/x makes this a bigger problem there than it does on substack)
I’m mainly talking about AI, but I supposed I could reply to threads about other stuff … but anyone following me for Ai takes might not Iike whatever random other thing I’m responding to.
The whole things seems to me too public, to exposed. Like, if I’m in a room talking to people I know who I’m talking I and what the discourse norms are.
It feels like there's been a massive culture shift here over the last two decades or so, from "online you use cutesy usernames and never ever post any details that might link different places to each other or to your real-world identity except in very controlled situations" to "always use your real name everywhere and cough up other details on demand".
It's about time there was some pushback against the oversharing, IMO.
Frankly, if people getting cancelled left and right wasn't enough to convince these people, I don't know what will.
Isn't that what alts are for? Obviously you shouldn't be posting anything controversial on a public account. That's what the locked accounts are for.
Anger is the inevitable byproduct of desiring something difficult to achieve. Public displays of anger and whether they are acceptable vary greatly between one culture and another. In my view we have become too intolerant of anger e.g criminalising smacking children but it is what it is, there is never going to be a perfect anger culture that pleases every personality type.
Dear bloggers and wannabe bloggers!
If you need an extra nudge, a little peer pressure to keep writing and publishing, today is your lucky day: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HdGnsxDt3saqWaJr5/halfhaven-forever
From the linked piece:
"Do not post pornography or hate speech or... other problematic content. There is no exact definition, please use your judgment. (This is not a ban on political content in general; just, uhm, please don't be stupid or hateful, m'kay?)"
I think this is distressingly lazy and open for abuse. They should fix it and feel bad for trying pull it in the first place. If there's topics they don't think should be open for discussion, say what they are; otherwise you are setting people up to fail when they don't know the exact lesswrong rationalist-moral meta of these five minutes.
Yes, I am lazy, and the project is mostly intended for the lesswrong audience. The most realistic alternative to doing it this way is not doing it at all.
> I think this is distressingly lazy and open for abuse.
The question one has to ask is, what sort of community do you want to encourage? Do you prefer a culture of edgy rules-gamers continuously testing boundaries, or a gentler space where people speak with polite caution and stay well clear of danger areas?
In this case they opted for the latter.
> distressingly lazy and open for abuse.
It's not like any stated rule is really TRUE beyond "the moderators can do whatever they like for any reason." This is just more honest about that, and saves them the trouble of coming up with something superficially plausible.
I have a close family member who struggles with depression. This person was originally on Lexapro for a few years but had to taper off for a sleep study and gets bad enough nausea getting back on it that they have chosen to avoid getting back on.
I cannot relate with depression so basically I have to treat this like a black box. My intuition is based on what I've seen people say online before and asking LLMs (ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/69559bb1-0b9c-800a-8505-d6e653e0da23, for example) what the best way to support a person with depression is.
I want to do what I can to support this person (be there, listen, not push solutions, suggest small things like walks, help with meals, logistics, etc) and wonder if there are ways I can support that I am missing.
The difficult part about talking with depressed people about their depression is that when they talk about how awful they have been feeling they sound like they are asking for help, and sort of are, yet they react negatively to suggestions. It’s hard not to be frustrated and irritated by this. The thing to keep in mind is
that they also want something diametrically opposed to suggestions: validation. They want you to get it that they feel terrible, miserable and hopeless, and that they have a strong sense that their hopelessness and reluctance to even try anything is the result of insight, not part of their messed up state of mind. And wanting you to get that is not odd. People in distress really do feel better if somebody gets what they are describing and believes them. So if you respond with suggestions of small things to do that might help, or with large things to do like try another treatment, they are hurt and angry, and feel like you do not believe them about how permanently and hopelessly stuck in misery they are.
It’s hard to thread the needle, but in my experience (I’m a psychologist) it works best to mostly validate how bad they are feeling. You don’t have to sound agree with the it-can-never-improve part, but don’t openly disagree. So you say things like “so all day yesterday you tried to live your usual day, but you just couldn’t engage, and just felt foggy and miserable the whole time. That sounds awful.“ If you go into suggestion territory, do weak versions, and let them lead. “Do you think it’s worth trying anything while I’m here, or would you rather just hang out and talk?” “Do you have any intuitions at all about the kind of thing that might do some good?”
Of course, this person *needs* suggestions. If all they have tried is Lexapo, then jeez there are a *lot* of things they could try. Quite a few different drugs, some of a different class entirely from Lexapro. Ketamine, which isn’t exactly an antidepressant but an anesthetic that has striking antidepressant qualities. You take it twice a week for a while, then go to maintainencd. CBT helps many people. So my main advice is to search for ways to get the info that the person has a lot of options past whatever barriers there are into their mind.
If they get upset when people suggest trying other treatments, maybe you could suggest they ask a good AI for an overview of options. Since they will not be talking to a sensate being but just accessing a bunch of info via a sort of super-google, coming at it that way might make an end run around their angry/hurt/anxious reactions when a person suggests trying further treatment. If they are unfamiliar with using AI for info, don’t start by suggesting they use it for info on depression. Instead do things like use AI in front of them for simple stuff — how to get blueberry stains out of linen, when’s the next solar eclipse, any practical thing. Talk about how much practical help you get out of AI. Try to work up to their using it that way. Then at some point casually suggest they ask AI about depression. And don’t phrase it as “you should do this” but as “I feel bad I don’t have better suggestions. I just don’t know much about this stuff. I wonder if the AI could give you some info that’s of use.” And leave it at that. Or if the AI approach won’t work, something like Wikipedia might be a good place to send them.
Thanks for these suggestions. Really appreciate it.
"gets bad enough nausea getting back on it".
This surprises me if they were able to be on it okay before - have they tried titrating up very very slowly?
The first time was really, really, frighteningly bad. It has not been as bad before, and they are on a bunch of other unrelated meds that are more critical (think "need it for their heart to work") so the situation is different. Nonetheless this is a reasonable suggestion and the lexapro worked great so it's worth a shot! Thank you!
Is reddit user u/maxwellhill Ghislaine Maxwell?
Why are you suspicious?
I would assume that hyper-wealthy middle-aged socialites have better things to do. Her demographic group seems more likely to not even know what Reddit is.
It was a whole thing on reddit for a while. The user maxwellhill was a long time poweruser but stopped posting the day Ghislaine was arrested and hasn't posted since.
She controlled world news for a while.
When is a response in anger ever justified?
My life experience and all the advice at least I've ever received is never. But then what the hell is the point of this emotion? Just as a signal that boundaries have been crossed? So what? I need this job or I don't want to go to jail, people will keep being able to cross these boundaries of mine and that's what I should do.
Feels like a useless emotion
Depends on the response. There's a number of songs that are clearly based in anger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpZvg_FjL3Q
I think asking if a response in anger is "justified" is the wrong question. We should instead ask if a response in anger is *useful*. Will shouting and threatening get you more of what you want, and less of what you don't want, *over the long term*, compared to asking politely?
The answer is almost always no. Shouting-and-threatening people get ostracized and punished, and that's so much disutility that it's almost never worth what you got out of it. But probably there are some times when the answer would be yes. Maybe if you're being mugged? Or if you're having a bad breakup and you want your ex to stop bothering you? Or if you're in some other environment where the consequence of "this person will never talk to me again" feels like a benefit?
Just a random thought only tangentially related. Is it possible showing anger in public is a cultural thing? My understanding is in Mexican culture, getting angry in public is considered uncool. Similarly I was told in Thailand to never shout in anger. Then, I recently noticed how every Korean action movie most of the men get angry and shout all the time at the smallest things. Yea, it's a movie so maybe not reflective of actual Korean culture but it felt way beyond similar English language movies.
> Korean action movie
And mild physical violence - I've seen so many cops slapping their subordinates over the head for transgressions that I assume it can't just be made-up slapstick, but based somewhat on reality?
We may need to distinguish anger as a social signal, and anger as an emotion that you could also feel alone.
Anger is a signal of "if you keep doing what you are going now, violence will happen", including the kind of violence that could hurt both sides. Could you credibly signal that *without* anger? If you could, then the emotion may be useless. For example, as a king, you can signal for some guy with a sword to come closer, then you turn again to the irritating person and say "keep talking". No anger needed.
In private, anger can help you overcome some other emotion, for example fear. So in theory, you wouldn't need anger if you could just turn off the other emotion, but in practice, sometimes it is easier to get angry and do the thing that you should have done long ago.
Anger was useful in evolutionary settings as a threat display. It signals boundary-crossing and probably was very useful for negotiating boundaries without resorting to actual violence. It still serves that purpose in male-dominated cultures with real stakes - corporate politics, finance, sales, etc. ... ie dog-eat-dog arenas where there's no higher authority to appeal to and valuable territory has to be defended by out-maneuvering the other guy. This is actually very socially valuable because the alternative is inflexible bureaucratic rules which are incapable of adapting to rapidly changing marketplace dynamics.
Anger signals a credible threat - “I’m serious and escalating my emotional state, you better comply”. Also on a group level it gets people to enforce norms and punish defectors.
Personally I almost never feel anger. and I agree, from an anti social, autistic, or psychopathic perspective you are right, it’s useless. It is always better for my self interest to dispense with. (Except sometimes in a romantic setting because a lot of women have the very reasonable intuition that not ever getting angry means you aren’t that invested in them)
Often. You probably would actually prefer if people responded to you in anger more often. Warning, this will be...moderately misogynistic.
Consider two different things your boss could say to you:
"Hey, so I think we've got some opportunities for growth in the upcoming year to address as a team. Everyone is doing great and some of you have been invited to a 6-week virtual training course on Power Point and public speaking so we can improve even further when we meet with internal and external customers in the future."
vs
"Hey, you screwed up that presentation to the executives. You smell horrible, that t-shirt is covered in coffee stains, and you went on a 15 minute digression on Linux vs Windows in a budget meeting. Get your sh*t together or you're fired."
OR imagine two different things you could hear after a date:
"Hey, you're a really great guy and I loved our time together, I'm just not emotionally ready for a relationship at this time and I would love to stay friends."
vs
"Your breath is so bad I almost gagged from across the table. S*x with you is literally unthinkable. Please see a dentist immediately."
Like, immediate and direct feedback is almost always "anger" coded and almost always subjectively "feels" like anger. And immediate and direct feedback is almost always the best kind of feedback. But, if you'd like direct feedback from your boss or other people in your life, that also means you should give it as you enter positions of power and you need to be situational about it.
The issue is that girls generally abhor anger and directness in men (in non-s*xual situations) and hate this manner of communication. So you have to modify your communication style based on what the person feels, even if this leads to worse outcomes for the person. If the boss example above, if you got the "you're about to be fired" feedback, you're way more likely to fix things and, well, not get fired. This doesn't make female communication styles better or nicer, just more indirect.
And I see a lot of this in the other comments, this "anger can only be expressed as extreme". Like, no, immediate low-level or intermediate anger is a very straightforward corrective thing. You can express it, it's helpful. Just beware of your audience in social situations because girl's hate it.
Similar to Yunshook below, you're not really describing anything that is necessarily angry. People can be blunt and honest to the point of insult without anger. Anger isn't a specific action, it's an emotion. You can be direct and honest with a constructive attitude toward the person you're firing or rejecting romantically, and you can do the same in anger with intent to hurt them. You haven't really made a good case for why anger is often a justified emotion to allow in yourself.
Human anger is often quite understandable, but I think it's wrong. I think, Christian or not, it is a signal that something inside you isn't aligned with the way God requires us to be. So if you ignore it, it's actually less than useless. It ends up being harmful.
"What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is the source not your pleasures that wage war in your body’s parts? You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. And you are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with the wrong motives, so that you may spend what you request on your pleasures."
This is just because you live in an oppressive society designed to choke out your healthy natural impulses. The ancestors were perfectly capable of flipping their shit and slitting some throats without too many negative repercussions, even up to a surprisingly late date (here in the US, duels were routinely fought to the death pretty much up until the last decades of the 19th century). The panopticon of the surveillance state is devoted to a considerable extent to suppressing healthy impulses of this kind.
Why do you think so many people are mentally ill even though we're materially peerless? The psychological environment is extremely unwholesome. You should be able to punch your employer in the face and demand satisfaction, and if you kill him and win, your job should be safe even though you just drank your immediate superior's blood right out of his still-beating heart. Society forcing you to stifle your feelings because it's slightly more profitable to oppress you is abnormal and vile.
>duels to the death
>"without too many negative repercussions"
Death isn't a serious negative repercussion?
Agreed. To the degree that I think I've...stopped feeling...anger?
I experience lesser emotions on that spectrum, like annoyance and irritation, but never the kind of ungovernable, passionate emotion people are describing with the word "anger," where the emotion overrides judgment to be expressed in a self-destructive display of emotion.
I know that sounds improbable, and congratulatory, but at my core, I'm deeply and profoundly selfish. *Nothing* is more important than my general long-term well-being, and thus my primary emotion in any negative situation is always *fear* for my well-being. That fear forces me to focus on how to minimize any threat to my well-being, which means, in my fear, I'm always thinking far ahead of the present moment. I literally don't have the internal space - much less the time! - for "anger" because I have to counter whatever threat is coming at me as effectively as possible.
The best revenge is living well. Always. Living well is the *only* thing.
Combine that internal hedonistic drive with agreeing with Sam Harris that free will does not meaningfully exist (thus anyone acting against me could not choose to do otherwise any more than a grizzly bear could choose not to behave like a grizzly bear) and a vast imagination to supply a sympathetic backstory about the events that inevitably resulted in an enemy's involuntary action against me, and...
...well...
...there's just no anger *there.* How could there be?
I tend to feel the same (and I also find myself agreeing with Sam regarding free will), but I wonder how well this holds up when someone well and truly wrongs you or a close family member; like assault, murder, rape, whatever horrible thing you can think of. All the really bad things that happened to me or my family have been just... bad luck. Not other people doing something *to* me or my family.
I feel like until such a thing happens (let's hope it never does) I can't really say that I don't experience anger. I think it's just a matter of degree. I get annoyed or irritated when someone mildly wrongs me, and while I can't remember the last time I was angry, I think that would likely happen if someone were to seriously wrong me.
I've thought about it pretty deeply, imagined it very vividly, and experienced threats of deadly violence (which never got beyond the threat stage due to my preparation to counter said threat) twice, and...
I honestly don't think the degree of harm or its closeness to me would have any additional emotional impact on me. Loss is loss. A grizzly bear mauling my brother to death would produce exactly as much my-brother-isn't-here feeling of loss as a drunk driver crossing a lane of traffic to kill him in a head-on collision, or a gang-banger casually shooting him as a bystander in a pot shop robbery, or an ex-girlfriend stabbing him in his kitchen, or, or, or. Gone is gone.
In some circumstances, we certainly have a duty to remove a known threat from the environment after it harms someone, but for me, hunting a man-eating grizzly bear or putting a drunk driver/gang-banger/murderous ex in prison (or, better for their victims, shooting them before they can complete the crime!) is purely a pragmatic good deed. It's not about punishment or revenge, it's about *stopping harm* to maximize future well-being.
And it's not just hypothetical for me, although this is on a lesser scale than murder or rape: My non-smoker mother passed away two months ago from a very strange, very fast-moving metastatic lung cancer which spread all over her abdomen, including a golf-ball sized mass on her liver. She went from "persistent mild cough her doctor thought was pneumonia" to dead in three weeks. Every medical pro we encountered during the hospital stay and at home hospice went round-eyed at the incredible strangeness of the cancer's speed and progress, especially given that there should have been signs of tumors in the standard imaging screenings of her torso that she had 20 months earlier as part of a hip replacement surgery.
Except for one pulmonologist, who offhandedly mentioned to my dad that there were "spots" on my mom's lungs the hip-replacement pre-screening x-rays. He later said he didn't recall saying that and it's still unclear if he accidentally exposed a cover-up, or if he just misspoke because he was thinking of a different patient, or whatever.
My dad has gone nuts about it, including consulting with a malpractice attorney, but the prospect that my mom's death might be someone's specific fault hasn't changed how I feel about her dying, which is hollow and lonely and crushed and disbelieving and aching. If this is a case of a fallible human neglecting their duty to pick up a phone or shoot an email about some faintly alarming x-rays, well... that's still no different from a grizzly bear mauling. It's human nature to occasionally make mistakes just as it's grizzly bear nature to occasionally maul creatures. Punishing my mom's medical team for making that mistake is unlikely to prevent them from ever making another mistake (or even motivate them to be much more careful). That's literally why malpractice insurance exists; to allow doctors to make normal human mistakes even when there are life-and-death consequences to those mistakes.
The source of my pain is my mom being gone, and the only thing that could make me feel better would be her...not being gone. Proving her death was due to malpractice won't win back the time we lost with her as a result of that malpractice, so I personally don't see the point, aside from the argument that my dad should be made whole for the money we lost from her possibly early death.
I don't know if I'm missing some emotional mixing device that would combine grief with other feelings, but it just...doesn't.
the idea that one of the most fundamental affects is "useless" and the hubris in believing that you can live a truly rational life without equal parts noggin and heart is Krazy
I remember a book by someone like Dawkins or Pinker or Ridley in which the evolutionary calculus of anger was explained in terms of the Doomsday Machine from Dr Strangelove -- the ultimate deterrent, the one that will automatically destroy the whole world if triggered, and which cannot be turned off.
A short term rational actor will only pursue revenge to the extent that it's net-positive. This means that a short term rational actor will get taken advantage of by anyone who can put them in a situation where revenge isn't worthwhile. The metarational response here is to precommit to exacting an absolutely irrational and self-destructive rampage of revenge on anyone who wrongs you -- that will dissuade them from wronging you at the cost of occasionally needing to go on a self-destructive rampage.
Evolution has metarationally equipped us with anger to ensure that we retaliate to an irrational extent when we are wronged. But the metarationality here does not cancel out the short term rationality -- if you have already been wronged then there may be no point in going through with the rampage. Don't let evolution's silly game theory ruin your life, it's designed for expendable monkeys.
Does it matter if it's "justified"? The emotional response evolved because it served a purpose, at least one point in time. When lines are crossed, when your kin is threatened, the pain must be returned tenfold. That is how your ancestors survived. Not through rational decision-making, but with anger and bloodshed.
Seems like it's basically the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Always cooperating is a bad strategy because your opponent can just keep defecting. Strategies that cooperate almost always, but retaliate when their opponent defects generally do best.
Drawing the analogy: never getting angry is a bad strategy because people can just walk all over you. Generally being nice, but retaliating by getting angry when someone wrongs you, works best. Or at least, used to, over the course of evolution. Not sure whether this is still true. Maybe to a lesser extent.
I'd argue that people who engage in self-defense and/or war who do so with dispassionate practicality are quite a bit more dangerous than those motivated by anger.
Yes. This is channeling anger into clear purpose.
We have reason here, to cool our raging motions.
Hey, shouldn’t we also hurl feces at people if they get sassy? That’s what chimps do, and there’s been some speculation that our early ancestors also used the Turd Fling Signal as a sort of shit across the bow.
Some solitary prisoners do that as well. Shit on their dinner plate and then pass it back through the slot to the guard.
I am sure it was much more common in the way back past as you pointed out.
Words serve the same purpose with less effort. They're no different in that they're the step taken before violence is resorted to.
This is demonstrably the right answer. We've de-evolved the turdhurling impulse because it's just much faster and more effective to shit in someone's face verbally. And if you're good at it, it hurts the recipient more, too!
You're dead wrong. Turd flinging vs. verbal remonstration or threat differ in numerous important ways:
-Turd strike is invariably unpleasant for the struck, whereas effect of words will vary with recipient
-Because turd strike causes suffering to the struck, it demonstrates the indignant party's willingness to do actual harm and not just threaten it ("my ancestors, blood, tenfold pain, blah blah blah")
-Unlike words, whose delivery will only be heard by the one addressed and a few nearby, turd strikes' effect carry a great distance and linger until recipient can access appropriate materials for thorough remediation. Hence, more people near the recipient will be alerted to the indignant party's anger and willingness to attack.
-Turd strike is much less commonly seen, and it's rarity increases its psychological impact.
The Christian gospels have an answer to this question: when Jesus wove cords into a whip and chased out the money changers from the temple, he seemingly did so in anger. Christians generally ask how he was justified rather than whether. The usual answer is that the money-changers constructed a system that used the name of God to exploit the poor. And this makes it vile enough to be worth tearing down, even at the cost of violence.
It should be noted that in Matthew/Mark/Luke, this occurred a week before Jesus was killed, so anger is only really useful in situations where burning it all down is an acceptable alternative to continuing to participate.
You're not wrong in saying that anger can be detrimental to relationships, and can cloud one's judgement. However, anger can be very useful for those who use it sparingly, and for those who work in life or death situations. Someone who is otherwise calm carries a great deal of weight when they flash their teeth for the benefit of their peers. An angry shout can save an apprentice who walks under a heavy suspended load faster than an explanation of the danger, or quickly redirect a careless child from running into oncoming traffic. When a difference in milliseconds can save a life, this matters a lot.
There's a physicality to anger. It functions like rocket fuel- a lug that won't come loose sometimes needs a little bit of "damnit" power to break free. It can also provide a bit of pain relief when you hit your hand with a hammer. In such situations, a little cathartic laughter is appropriate afterwards.
I don't think what you're describing in your first paragraph is necessarily anger. I think in any of those situations a person could be sudden, loud, urgent, and commanding without having any anger to it at all.
I think this is the simplest and most accurate response. Sometimes situations slowly (or quickly) move towards what would be a nasty end or an unpleasant status-quo, and if someone foresees that and becomes angry, then bares their teeth—so to speak—others are alerted.
This alerted feeling in others causes them to think harder about their actions and the consequences involved.
Bridges may be burned in the process but sometimes that’s worth the trade off.
Well it may feel useless but it is a fact, so the only thing one can do is channel it and manage it.
A response in anger is often *justified*, the real distinction is "is it useful?" 99 times out of a hundred, it's not very useful. Your conditions of needing a job or staying out of jail is downstream of this process and worthy of deference. The best thing to do in these situations is let it become a rather academic pursuit of trying to figure out why this person or condition is making you angry.
Before we humans could talk things out, or had the capability to reflect upon ourselves immediate expressions of anger were probably very useful. It is just another expression of life energy and it is mutable. Some people have the best sex after they have a fight.
I'm going to ask about ear lasers for tinnitus.
OK, they're not really lasers, just LEDs that plug into your ear, and supposedly help with tinnitus, but 'ear lasers' is so catchy.
And, bonus of bonuses! they also plug into your nose for sinus relief. And play music too, though my nose has gone completely deaf these days.
Anyway. I have tinnitus kinda annoyingly bad; can I justify such a purchase? I see them for $20 on amazon, festooned with AI-generated ratings. Good buy or what?
My initial impression was that this is clearly bullshit, but learning more about it, fixing some hair cells in the inner ear actually seems entirely plausible for LLLT (low-level light/laser therapy).
It's not clear that the hair cells are responsible for tinnitus. Actually, as I understand it, it's more likely to be neural, and there are probably multiple potential sites of origin. But also, something I have never understood about light therapy for the inner ear, is how does the light even reach it from the outside? Even directed down the ear canal, there's a lot in the way, and even if it filters through the round window, it's only going to reach the base of the cochlea, not the apex.
Do they give any specs on led wavelength and/ or power. You can buy an LED for ~ $0.10 add a battery and a resistor and you can test it out before buying. (I don't see why this would work... but I see no problems with trying it.)
Some of the postings claim it's the magic 640nm super healing wavelength. (I've actually heard enough about this that I think it might have something to it, but I'm open this just being hype like so much else). Also, no idea if the claim of a wavelength has merit either.
Well there are a lot of red leds. You know I'm an old electronics hacker so I would cobble one together. But unless you're strapped for money why not just plop down the $20 and try it.
Remember US Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida?
In November 2024 he won a fresh term in the House as Trump was winning back the White House. Shortly after election day the president-elect announced Gaetz' nomination for Attorney General of the United States. Gaetz publicly accepted the nomination and resigned from his House seat. Various Senate Republicans then threw fits about that idea behind closed doors, and after a week Gaetz withdrew himself from cabinet consideration. However he didn't retract his House resignation, in fact he went ahead and pre-emptively declined the new term that he'd just won and then took an on-air-shouting gig with a conservative cable-news channel.
There were no on-the-record public explanations of any of the above weirdness. As widely guessed though it turns out to have been because the House Ethics Committee, chaired by a Republican and split evenly between the two parties, had concluded its lengthy investigation of years of allegations about Gaetz and underaged sex partners. Gaetz had been trying both behind closed doors and in court to prevent the normal public release of the committee's drafted investigative report, but its contents were becoming known within Congress as a whole. Evidently by November 2024 he'd concluded that ultimately the report would end up in the public record.
With Gaetz' last courtroom effort having been dismissed that eventually happened:
https://ethics.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Committee-Report.pdf
The committee "found substantial evidence" that:
-- From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.
-- In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl. [The age of consent is 18 in Florida.]
-- During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
-- Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
-- In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
-- Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
Also: "Based on the above, the Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress."
The committee "did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that Representative Gaetz violated the federal sex trafficking statute. Although Representative Gaetz did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the Committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel, nor did the Committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion."
Various elements of the above list make Gaetz prosecutable under federal and/or Florida criminal statutes. That hasn't happened and given the current political leadership of those jurisdictions it presumably won't. Neither Gaetz or Trump has yet publicly commented on the report's release.
I don't think it was possible for him to retract his resignation, which adequately explains why he didn't do it. I have not seen the evidence the House Ethics Committee did, and have no reason to trust them (but I don't care in the slightest about the allegations even if they were all entirely and incontrovertibly true, so whatever).
"finally"
That was literally a year ago.
Well yea, I meant more like "eventually". I'll change that phrasing.
From the annual British Bad Sex Writing Awards: At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.
“Whacked and smacked,” man.
"From the annual British Bad Sex Writing Awards:"
I assume this was research right? All the funny ways people behave ...
No, not research! Some Brit publishers put on a yearly event for a while where they selected and voted on the 10 or so worst-written descriptions of sex in books published that year. Then they had an awards ceremony. You can find their yearly picks by googling "British bad sex awards". I believe they did the awards from 2015-2019. The write-up for each year includes not only the bad sex passages but judges' commentary on each, and they generally leave me crying with laughter.
I actually saw two people making love like this in the middle of Tompkin Square Park in the East Village of New York in broad daylight. They were doing all of this. It wasn't sexy at all to me...hmm..
Is that no longer considered a public ugly in NYC? MAMDANIIIIIIII
I can’t be positive, but I think Bloomberg was the mayor when I saw this.
Yeah, the invocation of Mamdani was a joke, obviously. I don't think he's had time to do anything yet, either good or bad. In fact, has his term even started?
Yeah I figured you were kidding but I couldn’t think of a witty response.
Mamdani hasn’t been inaugurated yet. Soon there will be pie in sky for all New York citizens…just you wait.
Re: 1: Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison are sponsoring A Call For New Aesthetics...
The New Aesthetics may be the Old Aesthetics, and have already passed them by. Looks like mid-Century modern — "hyper-streamlined house with a flat roof, perpendicular white walls, large expanses of glass, and cantilevered platforms, often overlooking a vista" — are coming back into style. Except they're getting built bigger and luxurious. Enter the McModern...
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-mcmansion-got-a-new-look-this-year-enter-the-mcmodern
As far as residential construction, the current fashion appears to be shifting towards pole-barn construction.
Drab stucco bunkers here in the East Bay (SF).
"We need new forms!" says Treplev in "The Seagull." (Chekhov was a keen observer of human beings.) We get new forms with every generation but it sometimes takes a few generations to appreciate them. Sometimes they are hot until they are not. And then they get hot again.
That would have been just before artistic movements (in all the arts, including visual, music, and architecture) started publishing manifestos and getting into fist fights over aesthetics. Those were the days!
Yeah! the stir that was caused by Dali and Bunuel when they premiered Un Chien Andalou? In his autobiography Bunuel tells of having stones in his pocket when he went on stage after the film was shown in case anyone in the audience would throw something at him he would have something to throw back. Not to mention Stravinski. I think Chekhov was picking up on that vibe with Treplev.
I’m feeling a certain lack of enthusiasm for the McFuture
Well, I don't need a gym or a movie theater in my house. I'd be happy with a modest 4,000 sq feet of living space, lots of light (via plate glass windows), a big kitchen, and an infinity pool with a great view beyond it. Is that too much to ask? Bonus points for a 4-car garage with high ceilings that I could convert into a painting studio.
Boxy tall houses with lots of windows aren’t really a new thing. MCM is having a moment, but as a small time collector of the I can say this ain’t it.
It's not new but it's coming back.
From reading the Architectural Digest article at this point I'm just not sure exactly what qualities a house would need to have before these people are willing to just call it a mansion and drop the "Mc".
To be a mansion, a house must be:
• Made of stone,
• Possessed of at least 18 rooms, and
• Situated on a minimum 1 square mile of parkland.
A garden?
A ranch house I used to walk past was a sort of family compound. I’m not sure if it began as two houses by the same builder or one, i think the former - but the upshot was a very cool horizontal house hundreds of yards wide.
Not tall.
They completely miss the warmth of materials that characterized the more treasured examples of MCM, and the flow to the outside.
I've been too swept up by ACX's muse hyping up charter cities, until I remembered my own surrounding to sober up and ask, what's even the benefit of charter cities to anyone who host it? Indonesia and Malaysia have a lot of resentment for Singapore instead of any gratitude (personal experience). Hongkong doesn't seem to improve its surrounding area at all. It becomes even clearer when Shenzen stays poor for decades until PRC props it up to become juggernaut in spite of Hongkong.
So the argument that ceding control to some foreigners for mutual benefit doesn't seem to hold at all. It's supposed to be that investors will get whatever profit inside the city (the entire point is special low tax so economy can improve in spite of government) and the government get whatever outside it. But if the surrounding area don't raise those profits, the government will come out empty handed. Thus, there'll be conflict over the city itself and if government wins, it won't be charter city anymore and no one would want to invest for other projects. And if the investors win, it's essentially colonialism all over again.
> And if the investors win, it's essentially colonialism all over again.
Isn't the issue with colonialism that the efforts to keep the natives in line put the colonizers in the red? If just a portion of land is ceded, the natives who don't want to be under the foot of foreign capitalists can just leave, while those wanting to take advantage of the opportunities provided can stay or even come from abroad. And as the person below noted, it will be difficult for the host country to justify killing their own.
"Isn't the issue with colonialism that the efforts to keep the natives in line put the colonizers in the red?"
This would imply that British colonialism, especially of India, was a resounding success.
What? Red means they lost money.
The benefit is the economic links which keep neighboring countries from invading.
Singapore has a massive Indonesian and Filipino "domestic helper" (live-in maid) population. They pump millions of dollars of foreign exchange back into IN and PH.
Why would you resort to invading and plundering Singapore, probably killing thousands of your own people and destroying these remittances forever?
That's your answer.
The best argument would be:
Free market economic reforms are best for everybody
But they may be politically impossible
A charter city may however be a small enough change to be politically viable.
Then once the charter city becomes successful, it becomes more politically viable to implement the same reforms in the rest of the country.
Examples: Dutch trading settlements in Japan. The wealth of Hong Kong playing a role in convincing the Chinese Communists to give up on actual Communism. And a third even better example that I can't think of.
I believe the defining difference is that Hong Kong and Singapore are exclusionary whereas charter cities are open to citizens of the host country, making them more like a Chinese "special economic zone" like Shenzhen or Chongqing than Hong Kong.
So let's stick with Hong Kong. Pretend you're a Chinese peasant farmer in Guangdong province near Shenzhen and Hong Kong. If Hong Kong gets rich, you kinda don't care 'cuz it's not like you can go and work there. Conversely, when the communists say "The city of Shenzhen is now a special zone where we prioritize growth" if Shenzhen experiences a boom, maybe you can go work there or maybe people who live there will spend money elsewhere in the province.
It's the same idea for Propera in Honduras. As far as I know, any Honduran citizen can just go to Prospera and if Prospera takes off, lots of Hondurans probably will get involved in the economy. Maybe not great jobs, let's be real, but it's a lot less exclusionary than, like, Singapore.
Guess so, but why don't we make them a "normal" special economic zone in the first place? I see libertarians argument as that, the freer the city the most prosperous it'd be. But the freer it is means the less profit the host can directly siphon from the city so instead they must tax it from surrounding areas that should also be more prosperous. But as per my original comment, it doesn't seem to be what happened.
It's even worse if it turns out economical liberty is orthogonal to how prosperous it is. It'd be even more worse if it turns out the city's success depends on making surrounding area worse.
This means that "normal" SEZ would be more beneficial for the host itself. It's also already the most common implementation in lots of areas with varying successes and failures.
Because they can't replicate special economic zones. Frankly, if they could have, they would have.
If Honduras could do a special economic zone instead of a charter city, they would...and would've. Trying to replicate China's special economic zones is really hard, even just basic things like political stability. The Shenzhen special economic zone was started under Deng Xiaoping in 1980 and was a miserable city, from personal experience, in ~2012. It's super baller now, so I've heard, but that took ~40 years. If you're a super stable despotic/oligarchic regime that has essentially absolute political power AND you can maintain that for 40 years AND you can the most competent and ambitious administrators in a country of billions to run it AND trust them with absolute authority within their zone THEN you might get China's SEZ results, although remember:
#1 China got the best economic deals because everyone wanted access to the world's biggest market.
#2 China's performance is impressive for its size, not its height. It's Per Capita GDP in PPP terms is ~$27k, roughly equivalent to Mexico's. That would be a major upgrade for Honduras or most African countries but it ain't Singapore or Hong Kong standards.
So, yeah, SEZs are really hard, most countries probably can't do them properly, and charter...ish cities still notably outperform them.
>China's performance is impressive for its size, not its height.
Yeah, but size is also why China to Singapore is not apples to apples comparison. Its developed, industrialized areas have already been at western levels when I checked the data several years ago. If that doesn't translate into overall prosperity across all China then, well, it's not that much different from Singapore not translating into prosperity of the entire Southeast Asia. (And very much a demonstration that creating small isolated islands of wealth is a task fundamentally different from creating universal prosperity, a much easier one that doesn't necessarily generalize.)
I don't think the argument for charter cities was ever that they benefit everyone else around, just themselves and their citizens. (Not from Scott, at least. He just fancies his Archipelago. Which, fundamentally the right idea, we do need diversity and we do need to incubate new ideas. He's too credulous towards what amounts to libertarian refuges for rich westerners, granted.)
I think a stronger argument in this vein is that the cities don't generalize. What works on a self-contained local level and what works for the entire world system are two different things, city-states can rarely be a blueprint for everybody else's development, especially when they're essentially exploitative/parasitic or essentially depending economically on trade/rich outsiders, which they often are.
That is surprising. If the city becomes rich, I would expect that at least the areas next to the city become rich, too. I mean, people from there can commute to the city, and take a well-paying job there. I would expect a rich city to expand beyond its boundaries, as the people outside get jobs inside, and the people inside start buying houses outside.
Unless there is a legal obstacle, of course. Such as people not allowed to cross the boundary of the city. Or maybe zoning that does not allow the city to expand. Anyway, this sounds like a mistake on side of the surrounding country, not the city.
Unless the city is on an island, or surrounded by a desert, or otherwise isolated from the country. (Mere jungle is not enough, I would expect it to be cut down.)
*
I asked Claude about Singapore, and Claude says that the parts of Malaysia next to Singapore, particularly the state of Johor, do benefit from the proximity. Malaysians from Johor commute to Singapore for better paying jobs, and bring the money home.
This cooperation even has some government support, and they are building a mass-transit connection between Singapore and Johor, expected to finish in 2026, that should reduce the commute to 15 minutes.
So, according to Claude, Malaysia benefits a lot from having Singapore.
It should be so, but I just checked and Johor's GDP per capita is far from the best in the country. Heck, it's almost at bottom half! Also it could be argued that if there's no Singapore, all of those boons may go to Johor directly instead (or Batam, the other neighbor belonging to Indonesia).
I think the proper comparison is not Johor now vs the rest of Malaysia now, but the *growth* of Johor in recent years vs the *growth* of the rest of Malaysia. The question is not whether Johor was historically a rich or poor part of Malaysia, but what is the impact of Singapore.
The data seem difficult to find, but it seems like during the recent two decades Johor was growing slightly faster that Malaysia on average.
Do you have a reason to suspect that without Singapore, Johor's economy would grow even faster, compared to the average of Malaysia?
> So, according to Claude, Malaysia benefits a lot from having Singapore.
Came here to make this exact point.
Also, Malaysia kicked Singapore out, and they had to build up a country and economy from scratch with no natural resources, more or less.
And Malaysia STILL complains about them, while their economy greatly enriches Malaysia's! More than a million Malaysians work in Singapore for much higher salaries, and most of that money goes to Malaysia.
> what's even the benefit of charter cities to anyone who host it?
It seems pretty obvious that having a bunch of people with 10x median income literally inside your country, transacting with local merchants and people every single day, would net out positively, with higher salaries and more forex coming into the country while not having to export anything?
Here is part 2 of the article which has more detail on how people are dying:
https://groundup.org.za/article/death-in-mozambique-after-us-funding-cuts-health-system-crumbles/
Here articles explaining why funds have been cut and that they have not in fact resumed:
https://groundup.org.za/article/us-funding-for-many-life-saving-health-programs-remains-frozen/
https://groundup.org.za/article/three-common-myths-about-us-funding-cuts-to-south-africa/
(From above article)
> Myth 2: PEPFAR is (or was) exempt from the aid cuts
Shortly after Trump’s executive order suspending aid for 90 days, the US state department released a waiver which supposedly allowed funding for certain life-saving humanitarian activities to continue. The State Department said that this included the provision of antiretrovirals (ARVs) to people with HIV.
Much of the funding that South Africa receives from the US comes from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports HIV-related services. There are two primary US agencies which distribute PEPFAR funds: USAID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The US embassy in South Africa stated that because of the waiver, PEPFAR-funded organisations which were providing life-saving services would be able to resume their activities. This message was widely disseminated in the press and on social media. For instance, a deputy director-general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Clayson Monyela, posted a widely shared tweet stating that the US embassy “has confirmed” that PEPFAR services would not be affected.
But the US embassy’s claim that services could continue wasn’t true.
Weeks after the waiver was issued, Spotlight and GroundUp investigated the status of several PEPFAR-funded organisations that provided ARVs to people with HIV (a service explicitly listed under the waiver). We found that none of them had been able to resume US-funded work.
The only PEPFAR funds that continued to flow were those channelled by the CDC, and this had nothing to do with the waiver. Instead the CDC simply resumed all of its funding after a US court ruled against the freezing of congressional funds. PEPFAR funds distributed by USAID remained frozen, with the waiver offering no respite.
The problem is that in contrast to what US officials suggested to media, organisations weren’t instantly allowed to go back to work simply by virtue of providing life-saving services. Instead, they needed to get approval. In the meantime, their funds remained frozen.
Some PEPFAR-funded organisations in South Africa, like Engage Men’s Health, asked for information from USAID, but simply got no response. In other cases, PEPFAR-funded organisations were instructed by USAID to provide revised budgets which only included core services. Many organisations submitted these but never got approval.
By the end of February, USAID moved on from the so-called 90-day suspension period, and simply began terminating grants. Since the waiver only applied to the suspension period, it now had no formal effect. But since Spotlight and GroundUp could not find a single USAID-funded organisation in South Africa that was covered by the waiver, it’s not clear that it ever had much of an impact.
At the global level, some organisations reportedly received waivers, but USAID’s system for processing invoices and making payments often remained inaccessible, meaning they struggled to get paid.
The Centre for Global Development gathered data on global USAID spending and found that “the waiver process had zero impact on releasing USAID funds to awardees between the announcement of the spending freeze and the announcement that the contract review had been completed”.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/hiv-patient-testing-falls-south-africa-after-us-aid-cuts-data-shows-2025-05-14/
Wrote a short essay, https://open.substack.com/pub/nadanjafferzadeh/p/a-corollary-to-despair?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer let me know your thoughts
Who might like this essay, or what is its subject or theme?
It’s about the anxiety people might feel concerning societal changes and the future, I think younger people might enjoy it
I can see why the average person might support billionaire taxes. This hypothetical billionaire is so far beyond any wealth we can imagine, that having them cling to an itty bitty 5% seems monstruos.
The problem is that a lot of these left leaning political ideas are sold by telling the story of one man or woman who has too much or too little. Rather, people should be thinking about incentives in the system and how that affects long term behavior.
On its face, I don’t feel protective of 5% of a billionaire’s wealth. But I have a good sense of how it will play out, with people moving away from California, and ultimately negatively impacting our ability to collect taxes. And I also believe is short of impossible for a most governments to take a one time windfall and use it as a durable advantage for decades to come.
I try to bring it back to that when I have discussions with others. But it’s hard to beat that narrative.
Any ideas that work to engage non rationalists in non anecdotal dialogue?
I really don't think there's a shortage of people shouting an alarm about how destructive wealth concentration is on a systemic level, how it results in and amounts to institutional capture of governments and entire societies. I also don't think there's a shortage of evidence for those claims. You should, perhaps, engage with those, instead of complaining about other sorts of arguments also being utilized?
And "billionaires will just pack their money and leave" is a vacuous argument. First, because they're already leaving anyway, the solution to that is fixing loopholes and eliminating tax havens. (That this proves hard to do should be a good demonstration of how captured the institutions already are.) Second, because they can't really take their economic activity and productive capabilities with them. (Which are not merely machinery, but all infrastructure, human capital, institutions, etc. Everything that, mostly, relies on taxes. Sweatshops have already been transferred to less developed countries, everything else would have also gone there already if it could.) Third, because even if it was literally true, it would still amount to "we can ultimately do nothing to stop the ongoing erosion of our society, so let's do nothing", which is just fundamentally bullshit. (Even if I do in fact believe there's little that can actually be done by this point and the US will dwindle like others before it. At least try! The ability to collect taxes, or indeed do anything at all, is going to be negatively impacted either way.)
The government being unable to invest and maintain itself properly is I assume true, but it's a separate problem that requires a separate fix. (Loosening the institutional capture can't hurt, though.) Here, again, "let's not do X because to see benefits we also need to do Y" is just fundamentally bullshit.
>they can't really take their economic activity and productive capabilities with them.
They can move their companies. This isn't billionaire related, but its an example of what I mean by that. The Daily Wire is a big right wing media company, valued at $800 milltion to $1 billion dollars. Until 2020 they were headquartered in Los Angeles. They paid California business taxes, the owners (who also lived in Los Angeles) paid California income taxes, and their employees paid California income taxes. Then they decided to move the company to Nashville. That involved asking their employees (75 at the time) to move, which most of them did. The owners moved out of California as well, with Ben Shapiro taking his millions to Florida, and the on air talent (the big names who have their own Daily Wire podcasts) moved out of California as well. Now they aren't paying California any business taxes, the owners aren't paying California income taxes, and their employees aren't paying California income taxes either.
That's the kind of thing people mean when they say billionaires will pack up their money and leave. They will personally leave the state, to not pay taxes, and they may move their companies out of the state as well. Which will lead to many employees also leaving the state.
Yes?
I'm not sure what you think my argument is, but to restate it:
- it's already happening;
- it would have already happened on a much larger scale if it was viable (exactly as it did happen with certain branches of manufacturing);
- yet industries (especially hi-tech, high-profit industries) mostly stay in place instead of chasing places with lowest costs / taxes;
- this is because infrastructure / workforce quality / institutions (and, of course, agglomeration effects, which are downstream from the preceding three) matter more than tax rate.
Existing economic centers are not threatened by places with more lenient taxation. They're threatened by places with a working industrial policy that successfully develops their systemic / institutional capabilities of hosting advanced industry.
Note - I'm making a systemic argument, you're responding with anecdotal example - worth pointing out, and somewhat ironic, considering this thread's OP's thesis.
Also note how unusual and uniquely suitable to transfer your example of choice was:
- little need for infrastructure (apart from already ubiquitous office space / data connectivity);
- dubious benefits from workforce / agglomeration effects (dissident conservative media in a predominantly socially progressive environment).
Most businesses are very much not in that position.
The institutions are what keep tech companies in Silicon Valley? Don't the various Bay Area municipal governments notably hate techies and all they stand for?
My ill-informed impression is certainly that there's massive but ineffectual antagonism from ~all relevant institutions toward Silicon Valley and that the tech crowd just go there because that's where the tech crowd is. If circumstances became hostile enough I'm sure the FAANG/startup crowd could coordinate to move to Austin or wherever and just take the entire subculture with them. I think the Apple headquarters might be able to just fly there directly.
It's anecdotal, but companies move all the time. Boeing was headquartered in Washington since it's founding, but in 2001 they moved to Chicago, in significant part because of the tax benefits. Then they moved it again in 2022 to Virginia.
Between 2018 and 2023 a net of eight Fortune 500 companies left California (including Tesla, in 2021). Most of them went to Texas, a much lower tax and lower regulation state. During that same period Texas had a net gain of 10 Fortune 500 companies that moved, Florida gained 4, Georgia 3, and Colorado 2, while Illinois lost 2, New York lost 3, and New Jersey lost 3. That's a lot of large companies moving to states with friendlier tax and regulation regimes, and leaving states that aren't so friendly.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-fortune-500-companies-are-relocating-in-the-u-s/
I'll note that it's probably not a coincidence that between 2018 and 2022 the population of California shrank by 400,000. That's 400,000 fewer taxpayers, workers, innovators, etc. Over the same period the Texas population grew by 1.4 million.
I agree that companies will stay in a bad tax environment if other factors outweigh the tax negatives, such as the existing workforce and infrastructure. But they will move if that calculation comes out negative, and much of the workforce will move with them.
So I would agree it is happening, but I also believe it is happening on a large scale, and will continue to happen if the tax situation gets worse.
I don't suppose factories moved together with headquarters? Because if they didn't, the economic impact cannot be that big. And if the impact on taxation would be bigger (because, e.g., companies pay taxes where their headquarters are), then, per my first post in this chain, that would be a loophole to be fixed, rather than some hard rule that should just be accepted as a fact of life.
Anyways, you're still fundamentally using anecdotal data. How does that translate to total tax revenue?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state
In 2011, Texas brought into federal coffers 70% as much as California.
In 2020, the number was 59%.
By 2024, it shrunk further down to 52%.
I would assume federal tax rate is more-or-less uniform across states and can serve as a proxy of overall economic activity. (The [ratio to GDP] data in some of the tables seem to confirm, at least when it comes to those two states.)
I've also checked state tax revenue for completeness (at census.gov, had to go into individual spreadsheets, so I won't bother with direct links), and Texas's revenue was 36%, 35% and 33% of California's for 2011, 2020 and 2024, respectively. Not a particularly significant change, still, in the opposite direction from what you'd probably expect. (And that's with California's significantly higher tax rate. And with Texas's rising population, which means per capita the change is, in fact, significant.)
And look, I don't want to read too much into this kind of numbers, they may depend on several weird factors external to the discussion we're having. But your particular proposition that Texas is a positive example of [tax revenue maximization] or [economic robustness] vis-a-vis California is just ostensibly, demonstrably wrong.
>I don't suppose factories moved together with headquarters?
When Tesla left California and moved to Texas, it did not get rid of it's Fremont factory. However, it built it's next factory in Austin, Texas, and hasn't built a factory in California since Tesla left. They are currently working on opening three new factories, one in Texas, one in Mexico, and one in Nevada. There are no plans to open new factories in California. So even if the factories are not moved, when companies leave California they are less likely to build new factories there.
As far as data goes, you don't have to use federal tax revenue as a proxy. We have the GDP data for California and Texas (https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/gross-domestic-product-state-and-personal-income-state-2nd-quarter-2025-and-personal).
California has a significantly larger Real GDP (RGDP) than Texas (about $3.45 trillion compared to Texas's $2.37 trillion), just as California has more citizens than Texas (39.4 million compared to 31.3 million). California has been a rich and prosperous state for a long time and has a large RGDP to work from. However, if we look at the period between 2022 and today we see that Texas's RGDP has been growing much faster than California's has:
RGDP growth compared to previous year:
California
2022: 0%
2023: 1.59%
2024: 3.44%
2025 (Q2, most recent data available): 4.3%
Texas
2022: 3.68%
2023: 8.63%
2024: 3.74%
2025 (Q2, most recent data available): 6.8%
Texas' economy has been growing a lot faster than California's. This is to be expected given the differences in the two state's tax regimes, and to companies choosing to move to Texas and invest in Texas rather than California.
The other way the debate about this is dishonest is that it's always framed as billionaire vs poor person. The reality is that that poor person is just a fig leaf for the real motivation which is to justify an increase in tax revenue. Once it's in the government coffers then it's up for political grabs. It's just a ratchet for bureaucratic creep.
Billionaires give plenty away to charity and I'm sure they do a better job than the government of allocating their wealth in socially productive ways.
"The reality is that that poor person is just a fig leaf for the real motivation which is to justify an increase in tax revenue. Once it's in the government coffers then it's up for political grabs. It's just a ratchet for bureaucratic creep"
Is that a fact?
"Billionaires give plenty away to charity and I'm sure they do a better job than the government of allocating their wealth in socially productive ways."
Worth noting that this part (which I don't even believe in) is absolutely not necessary for the rest of your argument to be 100% bang on. It doesn't matter if the billionaires are just buying cocaine for all that money, it's *still* bad to allow a bureaucratic ratchet to appropriate an increasing proportion of economic output.
Why? If the money could go to school lunches instead of garbage bags full of cocaine, that seems like a good thing.
Agreed, but do you really believe that billionaires, as a class, are less charitable than the average person? Sure it tends to be more tied to self-serving status markers, but they do things like build hospitals and fund symphonies. Surely that leads to a richer culture than the counterfactual government allocation.
Eh... I'm cynical enough to believe that most of the charitable donations are just ego boosts and/or concealed self-indulgence. You might be right though, even that might actually be more effective than the government spending the money.
> On its face, I don’t feel protective of 5% of a billionaire’s wealth. But I have a good sense of how it will play out, with people moving away from California, and ultimately negatively impacting our ability to collect taxes.
Allow me to directly point to Monaco, Luxembourg, and Sweden as direct examples of this.
Luxembourg has zero Forbes billionaires despite very high average incomes and wealth levels, while tiny Monaco, roughly 20x smaller, has at least 2 - by the economic numbers, you'd expect a whopping ~40 billionaires in Luxembourg!
What’s the mismatch? Monaco has no personal income tax, and Luxembourg has a ~40% top bracket income tax. This can drive out many tens of prospective billionaires that could otherwise be generated or persuaded to live there, apparently!
Another data point along these lines? Sweden, famously egalitarian and as Scandinavian as they come, punches way above it’s weight on the billionaire front! It has 13 - 20 predicted by the economic numbers, but actually has 45 Forbes listeds! That’s a huge differential!
What’s the answer? Sweden has pursued a tax policy that allows billionaires to stay and thrive - they eliminated the inheritance and gift tax in 2004 and the wealth tax in 2007. If you build a $10B company, you can pass that to your heirs tax free - in the US, that would be taxed at 40%. And indeed, you see some names you’d recognize in the Swedish billionaires, who derive their fortunes from H&M, TetraPak, Spotify, and Mojang / Minecraft, among others.
From my post on "just how many billionaires are there?"
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/3k-it-is-to-laugh-just-how-many-billionaires
Also, my understanding is that the Swedish wealth tax was abolished because, contrary to a lot of California liberal narratives about wonderful Scandi socialist systems, it never at any time brought in more money than it cost to administer. And to their credit, the Swedish socialists realized it was a spite-based tax mostly hurting normal people in order for envious people to feel less inferior, so they chucked it.
Ah, the things a society can do when it has nonzero social trust.
>Rather, people should be thinking about incentives in the system and how that affects long term behavior.
Hugely progressive wealth taxes *are* an incentive structure. They incentivize people not to become billionaires.
The idea of 'they also incentivize people to move to different jurisdictions with lower taxes' is an old saw with lots of defenders, but I personally don't take it too seriously.
Rich people are already plenty incentivized to create tax havens and commit tax fraud and lobby to change tax laws and etc., this is a permanent ongoing fight that has been happening since ?the start of human history? It's more an issue of enforcement and special interest lobbying groups than it is an issue of people actually physically moving away from the place they want to live where their business and employees and customers and friends and sex partners and children's friends and tutors and etc. already live.
Yes, 5% additional incentive from 5% more tax can shift this equilibrium a bit, but it's only a small additional weight compared to existing taxes and regulations, there's no reason to expect a sudden qualititive change from it.
"this is a permanent ongoing fight that has been happening since ?the start of human history?"
Not even close to the start of human history. It's only been ongoing during the 20th century. The vast majority of past governments, including Victorian Britain and the US, understood their role as defending the rich against the depredations of the masses of the poor, if anything. Medieval and earlier governments typically considered the legitimate compass of "the rich" to be the monarch and his friends and relatives; early modernity changed this to a more general wealth protection for purposes of economic efficiency which ultimately benefited the monarch's own wealth.
I am by no means a historian, but I kind of had the impression that Sheriffs tried to hide how much they had collected for the heregeld and keep some for themselves, or lobby to keep more of it or etc.?
I could be wrong.
They didn't try to hide it: the Sheriffs would pay the King a big lump sum for the right to collect the Kings taxes, which the Sheriff would then keep for himself. It was understood that the Sheriff would collect more than the lump sum he paid the King, in order to make a profit.
I'm sorry, I'm not following how this connects up with rich people vs. progressive taxation? I'm pretty sure you're correct and in fact that every sort of tax collector has always tried to keep as much as possible of collected taxes for themselves (hence why a common historical model was to franchise out tax collection by simply making the collector pay a fixed sum for the privilege of taking up taxes from a given district, then allowing the collector to keep whatever sums he was actually able to extract from the people). However, I'm not picking up the relevance to the issue at hand. I'm sure it's there, I'm just not smart enough to see it.
I would think a more relevant historical comparison would be the ongoing medieval wrangle about weights and measures, which is actually a very interesting topic in itself and probably the main reason why standardized units were never adopted before the French revolution.
My point was that 'rich people will try to evade taxes if you pass this small marginal tax increase on them, so you shouldn't do it' isn't a very powerful argument, because rich people are already trying to evade taxes, and have probably been doing so in one form or another since they first time they were taxed.
I think he meant it as in "fight with cancer". Yeah, we've started intentionally using treatments that sorta-kinda-work-for-a-while only recently, but the society's struggle to grow productive capacities in spite of elite parasites undermining it has been ongoing ever since humans first went above subsistence level.
Are you saying that if Musk or Gates or whoever stopped at $1B, the world would be better off for it? How much of Google's recent renaissance is because Sergey shows up to work everyday? These people, due to a combination of talent, power, etc., can actually create a ton of value, even after being deep into the billions. Disincentivizing billionaires is disincentivizing capitalism, whether it feels fair or not.
>Are you saying that if Musk or Gates or whoever stopped at $1B, the world would be better off for it?
Yes, absolutely.
Because there's no reason for their *companies* to stop at $1B.
There's just reason for them to sell off their shares and retire to other pursuits, the way Gates actually did with philanthropy for instance.
Or donate part of their shares to charity if they want to keep working as the head of the company, because they love it so much.
Or whatever.
If you are in the Randian camp that every rich person is a unique genius that humanity cannot survive without, then I'm sorry, but you still believe in Santa Claus.
Many of these people had useful insights and persuasive visions and did a lot of good creating something from nothing. But by the time that something is a billion-dollar concern, whatever vision they had is already realized and they are not adding infinite marginal value beyond what the next CEO on the block could provide.
And most of them are not even really providing that initial value, they are good businessmen who arranged to take the credit and value for antisocial tech nerd's inventions, or one of 50 people trying to implement the same business model who happened to come out in front through often immoral means, or etc.
Most successful capitalists are primarily good at wining zero-sum competitions in them market against other capitalists. They are rarely inventors who come across some new idea hat no one else on the planet would have thought to do for another 50 years without them or something, that's not really how the world works.
I think you're missing more nuanced factors. If you replaced Elon with someone else at the helm, they wouldn't have the natural authority to get people to go above and beyond to achieve very unlikely goals. The moment you professionalize an organization, the dynamics change. If you encourage founders that could have built a $1T company, to retire when that same company is worth 1/100th of that, there would absolutely be value left on the table. A lot of these companies are personality cults and wouldn't function the same without the personality. For better or for worse, the Trump administration is a personality cult and it can move faster than a professionalized, consensus-driven administration. It's really not as much a matter of intrinsic value of individual decisions as it is the way in which they are perceived, the power that comes from that, and the way in which they yield this power.
As a trivial example, who would be better at convincing Disney to buy Pixar, Steve or Tim? Who can use their fame and fortune to advance the company's goals? It's not all about operating and in fact founder-CEOs are not so much operators as they are kings of the company. There's plenty of people to operate.
“These guys are too big and powerful to tax; they’re mostly above the law, but we shouldn’t force the issue or things will only get worse.”
When you're talking about "incentives in the long run", are you including the states' incentives not to get into a race to the bottom, where states underbid each other to keep their slice of a shrinking cake, while the vaporware capitalists keep ever more of their - I don't even want to call it "profits" - so they can keep inflating their businesses to "too big to fail" status and then ask for government bailouts when the bubble bursts?
You don't solve a race to the bottom by being the only one not to race, any more than you solve the tragedy of the commons by refusing to overfish while everyone else does. It requires the will for coordination at the federal, or even international level. No need to ignore the obvious consequences of being the one collaborator in a world of defectors.
Refushing to overfish is not sufficient but it is often necessary.
It's easy to say "we should stop the race to the bottom" and people say it routinely without being actually willing to incur the costs in the short term. "Ah, if just somebody else were to go first, I'd be sure to follow them".
So you signal you're actually serious by being the first to stop. Kudos if you can get your coalition organized without anyone needing to do this, more power to you.
But in many cases the way to everyone stopping starts with someone being the first. If everyone thinks "well as long as the others don't stop I don't see why I should be the first" then there'll be no change and the race continues.
I'm not OP, but I agree with him on wealth taxes and also believe that we should always include long-run incentives ->
States "race to the bottom":
A Land Value Tax fixes this. Land is valuable due to its location, and people can't avoid tax by taking it somewhere else. So, States should compete by replacing other taxes with a Land Value Tax, whenever possible.
So, I'm not worried about a supposed "race to the bottom".
Bailouts:
These arent usually handouts, but rather, loans. The 2008 bank bailout were loans on which the US government made a profit.
Regardless, bailouts for "too big to fail firm" do create bad incentives, something called "Moral Hazard", on which there is still debate about how to proceed. So I am worried about bailouts.
I am of the opinion that in situations where a bailout is necessary, as in 2008, some of these should be loans and some others should be equity, as to create a sort of "Sovereign wealth fund". In that way, there would be a cost to the firms for having failed, and it would reduce moral hazard.
However, I recognize that in reality most bailouts are because politicians don't want to *leave a bunch of people unemployed*. You see, voters don't like bailouts, but they don't like mass layoffs either!
So, if a firm is improductive, it should be allowed to fail, and those fired should be helped in a different manner (unemployment insurance, etc...). Not through a bailout.
The biggest issue is that you and others have completely different frames of approaching the question. You likely do systems thinking, looking at incentives, unintended consequences, cost benefit analysis, etc.
They come to their point of view through strong feelings. I met someone who recently said “It’s unconscionable that someone can be driving around in a $100k car while people have trouble affording food”.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
Trying to convince others to think in your frame is very difficult. I’d recommend asking pointed questions about their beliefs. “How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide” by James M. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. This is an underrated book from people who focused on trying to figure out how to convince theists to become atheists. The basic technique involves very carefully listening to your conversation partner, and having them explain in detail how they know what they know or how the policy will work exactly. When they realize themselves that they don’t understand how it will work, they will become less confident in it. Then you ask how confident they are in their position out of 10, why it is X, instead of X+1 or X-1, and that helps them to think up reasons to doubt as well. I’ve never applied this methodology myself but it seems sound.
Another approach is to build relationships and trust with people. Someone I had recently met made a comment saying something about how all finance is a way for people to make money without doing anything and how all financial firms scam everyone. I explained that there are definitely firms like that, but explained how I worked in trading for years and how I felt the market making systems I worked on helped every day investors. I explained with simple example bid asks spreads, hedging, and transferring risk to firms that can handle it. He understood those at a bit, I don’t think he was fully convinced, but he came to have a more nuanced view and realized there was more to know and a simple dogmatic black and white good vs evil viewpoint was unlikely to be correct.
> one time windfall
Does anyone making this proposal think it WON'T be ~5% every year indefinitely?
One time insofar as people would bail or circumvent pretty quickly. They can make it retroactive and do their best to enforce it once, when it comes as a surprise.
Don't worry! The income tax is only a wartime emergency measure! It's on a wholly temporary basis!
I've been having fun using claude these past couple weeks to write blog posts using research mode. I iterated a little bit on this post on the vibecession, mostly asking claude to add graphs, and it came out better than I expected https://dawndrain.github.io/braindrain/vibecession.html. The biggest factor that I think was missing from Scott's post is that people don't immediately appreciate when inflation slows down, what they really want (or think they want, sure) is deflation bringing prices back down to something that seems more reasonable.
You should add a little left padding on mobile, 0 space there is jarring
My crackpot theory is that Eliezer Yudkowsky has a mild dissociative disorder and doesn't realize that.
Harry Potter from his HPMOR displays some interesting symptoms. His "mysterious dark side" that takes over and changes his perception; or extensive arguing with voices of the Hogwarts houses in his head; are very typical for a dissociative disorder. But he is never directly stated to have a disorder. The dark side is lampshaded as the side effect of Voldemort's possession, and voices in his head is something that he just does, and is surprised to learn other people don't. Dissociative disorders are probably beaten only by aphantasia and autism by how often the newly diagnosed people say something like "I thought everybody had it like that, I didn't know it was unusual".
As someone who is in exactly that boat, I can vouch that Eliezer writes those symptoms into his protagonist fairly specifically and accurately This can't be done by coincidence: either he has intentionally written it _as_ a dissociative disorder and for some reason never clarified it in Author's Notes, or he has those himself and it's just a spicy banana moment (https://i.imgur.com/Y8xrPAY.png) that he projected into ostensibly not a self insert
I remember finding that strange about HPMOR as well. It made me wonder if everyone was like that and *I* was the odd one out.
I personally *did* have it like that, and those *were* symptoms of a dissociative disorder. But not everyone is like that.
I read that as a literary technique. Dialogue is often easier to write engagingly than monologue, and there were bits where it made more sense for Harry to work through things in his own head than talk them through with Draco or Hermione or Quirrell or McGonagall, so EY wrote those bits as Harry arguing with himself in his head.
It also works as a way for EY to drop clues about Harry's dark side, which I'm pretty sure he had planned from the start. And if you're doing internal dialogue anyway, the four house perspectives are suggested by the pervasiveness of the house system in the source material. They help camouflage the nature of Harry's dark side while delivering the clue, and they seem like they were probably fun to write.
As usual, Elon is jumping late onto a scandal that was already being investigated, prosecuted, and widely reported on. As usual, the strategy is to blatantly lie that it was being ignored, and blatantly lie that the reason for this was that we're all too scared of being racist. As usual, the goal of his blatant lie is to race-bait, destroy anti-racist social norms, and embolden blatant racism.
This time it's about the fraud scandal in Minnesota, which has been repeatedly widely reported on by local media like the Minnesota Star Tribune and mass media like the New York Times.[1] Last time it was about the grooming gangs scandal in the UK, which had already led to the Jay Report.[2] In both cases his goal was race-baiting, and to destroy the institutions of post-WWII liberal democracy for not being racist enough.
tl;dr whenever you see Elon or his stooges claim the media has been ignoring something, check. These people have no problem with scheming and lying with malicious, racist, totalitarian intent.
[1] E.g. Minnesota Star Tribune since 2015 (https://www.startribune.com/hennepin-county-raids-day-care-centers-as-part-of-fraud-investigation-4-arrested/329988761; https://www.startribune.com/heres-what-to-know-about-minnesotas-fraud-crisis/601542128), NYT since at least 2024 (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/us/federal-fraud-trial-minnesota.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html). Elon and his stooges are pretending the story didn't break until last Friday with this video (https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2004642794862961123). The targets of Elon's malicious racist scheme last time and this time were Pakistani British and Somali Americans respectively; an additional goal is probably to try to get you warmed up to deporting US citizens like Senator Ilhan Omar.
[2] https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/inquiry/final-report.html
I don't like Elon these days, but as a Brit, I appreciate him drawing more attention to the grooming gang scandal, because our institutions have never took it seriously enough - so the more attention the better.
"anti-racism" is just racism*, so destroying it is good for the world
Most people believe that immigrants should be held to a higher standard of behavior than natives, and that's reflected in immigration law in most (every?) countries.
*I don't just mean that anti-racism is racist against white people. I mean that it promotes racism generally, in that it promotes the idea that we should think of ourselves and others primarily by their skin color, and that we should fear and hate those of other skin colors. It has been remarkably effective at promoting racism as seen in survey data, which show racial harmony cratering in the last ten years, and in the growth in overt racism by white people, black people, damn near everybody.
Ah, so there never was any scandal in the first place, and in the second place we were already investigating it?
> Ah, so there never was any scandal in the first place,
No? That's very clearly not what the comment you replied to said or implied. It presented both things as genuine scandals and provided evidence that they had been treated as such well before Musk got involved.
Do you have a substantive disagreement, or are you just doing the thing where you scent wokeness and reflexively snark back regardless of whether you have an actual point to make.
Can you shed light on any evidence that Musk's mind was accurately read where it's said "As usual, the goal of his blatant lie is to race-bait, destroy anti-racist social norms, and embolden blatant racism"?
Billions of dollars were lost to scams. Much of the money was taken out of the country to fund a terrorist organization. The rest paid for luxury for scammers, while many law-abiding citizens could barely afford groceries. When conscientious people in the Minnesota government tried to delay payments to the scammers, this was decried as racism, and they were forced to issue the money.
And, in the midst of these outrageous revelations, what you're complaining about is that Musk said the scandal got no coverage (because everyone in the country religiously reads Minnesota Star Tribune and the paywalled part of NYT, right?).
Like many leftists, you are also throwing around the word "racism" to mean "reporting on facts I don't like". Heck, the next generation might not even know the word ever had a different meaning, as we hardly ever see cases of it with the original meaning anymore.
Trump routinely pardons white scammers and fraudsters. And the NYT is *the* central example of what people mean when they say "the media".
If it's still happening, at the scale being claimed, I think that counts as still news. Hyperbole from Musk shouldn't really surprise anyone.
Well I guess we're going to find out -- both the federal and state administrations are dispatching fresh bunches of investigators as I type this. Hopefully the two sets of investigators, from government administrations of wildly opposite political persuasions, don't end up tripping over each other too much.
The COVID-lockdowns-funding fraud about fake food deliveries for poor children, which involved Somali immigrants though its ringleader is a native-born American, absolutely was prosecuted by Minnesota and federal (Biden Administration) authorities. [Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland called it the largest pandemic-relief fraud perpetrated in the nation.] It turned out that state regulators had repeatedly tried to shut down funding to the fake organization since actually before COVID, but had been stymied by the ringleader's energetic filing of federal civil lawsuits (all eventually dismissed or withdrawn but that process takes time). Federal charges were brought in 2022 against her and dozens of other individuals; about 50 were convicted or pled guilty of whom most are now awaiting sentencing; the sham organization was finally shut down by the state. At one point one of the federal criminal trials was disrupted when a juror reported having been offered a $120K cash bribe to vote not guilty. The fraud's organizer, Aimee Bock, and its number-two, Salim Said, were finally convicted last spring and are now awaiting sentencing. A key lieutenant in the scheme, Mohamed Ismail, was sentenced in fall 2024 to 12 years in prison. Federal officials estimate the total amount stolen at around $250M of which around a quarter has been recovered so far.
Regarding daycare fraud the recent viral video did not offer anything in the way of actual evidence. He seems oddly worked up about daycare centers _not_ allowing unannounced strangers carrying microphones and cameras to walk into their facilities; is unaware that some daycare centers are intended for parents working shifts other than 9 to 5; is very upset by a spelling error by a sign painter; shows no evidence that the daycare centers he tried to raid are/are not owned or operated by Somali immigrants in particular; appears to just assume that they are receiving public funding; etc. As a veteran parent of big-city daycare centers nothing in his video rang any alarm bells for me, which doesn't prove anything obviously but neither did he.
And what good this Jay report did?
I think it led to a fair bit of good.
The senior executive team at Rotherham MBC were replaced and essentially the council was designated as failing, and was run by commissioners appointed by central Government. For about....three years, with then a gradual return to more orthodox arrangements. That's quite big. HMG has long established powers to take the controls of a failing council, but that has almost always been a response to financial failure, or (as happens) corruption. The political leadership changed too, and seem (I had some dealings with them about a land acquisition near the M1) to be pragmatic and sensible.
More subjectively, but I would say very clearly. Before about 2011- 2012, public discourse about the Rotherham abuse scandal was bizarrely skewed, so that the ethnicity and group behaviour of those involved was seldom mentioned. From about that point, this was becoming clearly untenable as similar scandals happened in other northern boroughs. It perhaps helped with the optics that the most vigorous prosecutor was himself Muslim. But there was still some squeamishness; and I think that pretty well disappeared after Jay.
Elon: "Completely fake daycares in Minnesota are defrauding hard-working taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars, which are funding terrorism. And in Britain, organised gangs are gang-raping pre-teen girls, and the police and social workers are facilitating it."
You: "So? We already knew, a couple of local newspapers mentioned it a decade ago, and you're a racist for bringing it up again."
You see how that's worse, right? If these things are still going on even when people did know about them, that's even worse than if nobody knew.
It is even worse because "we already knew about all this ten years ago but nobody saw a single day in court over it" is not the win OP thinks it is.
Yeah, it's this. Nothing was being done, nothing. It was being swept under the rug. The UK government was also drenched in outrage and had to institute another inquiry (which I understand is now foundering because they tried to water it down/divert it to once again try to conceal/water down the uncomfortable truth, leading to public outrage from rape gang survivors). None of this looks like what happens when the issue has been properly dealt with and the idea that Musk is some kind of evil genius for bringing the issues back up after they had been comprehensively handwaved is bizarre. Justice must be done, a large number of people need to go to jail, the scaffold, or back where they came from. Responsible politicians need to be horsewhipped and permanently lose careers.
The fraudsters in MN *were already prosecuted* under Biden.
It was confined to the Minneapolis newspaper/local TV for years. I brought it up in some context or other 4 or five years ago; on a forum much like this, believing I was mentioning something uncontroversial, and was told I had made it up.
I am not very interested in Elon's behavior or motives. I will say I wasnt aware of the fraud issue until it went viral. One might ask if its been reported on as early as 2015 but that there still appear to be fraudulent day care centers then it might not gave gotten enough attention. Rebutting the facts (if they are in fact wrong) would be more productive than complaining about Elons sensationalism.
The coverage was thin until a day or two after that video became viral. And some of the coverage was trying to present some balanced argument about how Somalians are good people rather than just talking about the facts.
I’d say refugees being at the root of a massive fraud scandal is very inconvenient to certain worldviews shared by most journalists.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/5-things-to-know-about-the-somali-community-in-minnesota-after-trumps-attacks
So you agree that there was coverage, and that the reason Elon's pretending there wasn't is that it didn't do enough race-baiting against Somali Americans.
I'm reminded of this great clip from Yes, Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6lpKkcFQY, where Jim is wondering what to do about the fact that he's been told Britain is selling top secret bomb-making equipment to Italian terrorists. Humphrey's suggestion is to write the following letter to the PM:
> My attention has been drawn, on a personal basis, to information which suggests the possibility of certain irregularities under Section 1 of the Import, Export and Customs Powers Defence Act 1939 C. Prima facie evidence suggests that there could be a case for further investigation; to establish whether or not enquiries should be put in hand. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that available information is limited, and relevant facts could be difficult to establish with any degree of certainty.
So, if there were an inquiry, he'd be in the clear, and everybody would understand that the busy PM might not have grasped the full implications of such a letter. Also to smudge the letter all over, and arrange for the letter to arrive at Number 10 on the day the PM leaves for an overseas summit, so there's also doubt about whether it was the PM or the acting PM who read the note.
Your preferred approach to reporting on politically inconvenient news strikes me as quite similar.
Sir Humphrey: "And so the whole thing is written off as a breakdown in communications, everybody's in the clear, and everybody can get on with their business."
Bernard: "Including the Red Terrorists."
Sir Humphrey: "Exactly."
That makes me want to watch the show.
It is very good. It has of course dated since it was made, but the general principles of "the permanent civil servants run the show, the ministers come and go, governments are too busy chasing after election wins to actually govern" are timeless.
The part abut the newspapers is both funny and relevant still, even if the tabloids like The Sun (Murdoch press) have less power than they did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l63aIA3e-Tc
Or why administration officials should never speak to the newspapers (very relevant in the wake of the Vanity Fair piece where many online are in raptures of delight over the clever photography ' - 'shot it like a horror show' - and how the colour tones were altered to make the faces look diseased etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H1u-zh9dmU
Do. Its the best British comedy of all time IMO, and widely considered to be better than a college education in understanding how the British political system works.
Or at least it was, its decades old now so some points are timeless and some are not.
It is quite remarkable how some of the political issues it lampoons are still topical (identity cards; EU regulation of what you can call a sausage; badger cull …)
Do! Both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are, as of this writing, free on Tubi.
https://tubitv.com/series/300002002/yes-minister
https://tubitv.com/series/300002001/yes-prime-minister
Perfect, Tubi is my “TV”.
This is a thing that Elon does, yes. I don't know why you're acting like it's news? He's been doing this for several years at this point.
It's not news to you or me, but there are still people who don't know about it yet; perhaps some of them are here.
An additional reason could be articulated better by others, but it's to do with common knowledge vs merely-mutual knowledge. ("What everyone knows that everyone knows" vs just "what everyone knows.") He owns a big chunk of the public sphere and is trying to use that to shape which is which. Posting about it, without mincing words, resists that.
"but there are still people who don't know about it yet"
How many newspapers did report that?
The people he is preaching to and the people here are basically two entirely different groups, though I'm sure some here support what he's doing. I'd say your "resistance" is better served elsewhere.
There's several people defending Musk in this very comment thread.
Example of Elon retweeting the lie about "0" coverage from the mainstream media outets that had already widely covered it (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2005179180569559373).
So what? If that's how he wants to express that it seems to him to be insufficiently covered, that's not such an outrage to me. Just exaggeration.
Meanwhile, what is your evidence that Elon's goal is "to race-bait, destroy anti-racist social norms, and embolden blatant racism"?
Is "I read his mind and oh man, it's bad in there" really evidence?
It's "the majority of the accused seem to belong to a specific ethnic grouping, therefore the motivation behind such accusations can only be racism".
I think I understand the chip export thing (or, at least, I can steelman it). Exporting those chips keeps China dependent upon products developed here in the US, giving us a counter-measure to their control over the rare earth mineral supply which is more nuanced and less costly to ourselves than slapping a tariff on them. That would be the theory, anyway.
That doesnt actually appear to be jenseng's case. Its more along the lines of there is no path dependency here. Not selling the chips now means money left on the table for no benefit. Others step in to to offer your steelman. As for Trumps motivation, its probably more linked to keeping up stock performance (so basically jensengs case)
Yeah, I know. But I feel it important to remain open to the possibility that stupid people might still do the right thing, if for the wrong reason. Or maybe I'm just looking for a silver lining.
yes, but
1) China will continue to invest heavily in chip design and manufacturing regardless of whether or not they are currently able to buy SOTA chips.
2) China will continue to be dependent on US chips whether or not they can easily buy the best ones in large quantities.
3) Whether or not there are current trade restrictions on chips does not impact negotiation leverage. Negotiation can occur with the same leverage anywhere on the trade restriction spectrum.
I think the stronger rationale here is that it’s good to intertwine economies and be nice to China. There is no true conflict here. Nobody wants a war, and this will increasingly be the case as Technology-To-Destroy continues to improve.
This decision point is one of many that collectively describe the degree to which our nations see each other as enemies. We get to choose. We don’t have to be enemies. The world is more stable when nations are codependent.
Well, I'm a bit if a cynic. I see my own rationale "keeps China dependent upon products developed here in the US, giving us a counter-measure to their control" and your rationale "it’s good to intertwine economies and be nice to China" as functionally the same thing. Nation states are never truly friends, but you are right to say that we don't have to be enemies.
Yeah, agree it's mostly a difference in framing
Nevertheless, I'd like to continue to argue and reiterate my belief that whether or not China can buy NVIDIA chips wouldn't change their underlying "dependence" on the chips. They are better chips, yes, but at a high level the chips just enable them to move faster in the things they are already planning on doing. It doesn't dig them into much of an NVIDIA-dependence-hole IMO.
Outcome-wise, yeah it's the same. And if the outcome is the same (selling chips), it makes a lot more sense to frame it as "we are being nice" rather than "we are preparing to exploit you in the event that you cross us".
Suppose I give someone the gift of a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
I can choose to say "Hi, I'm being nice to you and giving you the gift of Adobe Creative Cloud, now you can feel positive sentiment towards me"
Or I can choose to say "Hi, I'm giving you this subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, and this will place you firmly under my boot and will give me great leverage over you as I will be able to cancel the subscription at any time to punish you for your transgressions"
Framing matters, especially when the it's included in the decision as presented to the public.
I guess I don't see anything to disagree with there. Good points.
This seems like it might amuse the commentariat here, and not in the way it was meant to by its author. At least, it should go a ways towards making everyone feel all is right with the world after all.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-2025-FINAL.pdf
I actually can't tell if the Festivus report is serious or not.
Unfortunately, it is. He does it every year. If you scroll down, you'll see longer descriptions, with footnote links to relevant documents.
It probably is serious medical research, but yeah, the description is hilarious:
"Ferrets on a Booze Binge: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wasted over $1,079,360 teaching teenage ferrets to binge drink alcohol."
Less hilariously, this genuinely might count as animal cruelty/abuse:
"Like the NIH and its coke hounds, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) apparently considers studying alcoholism in weasels to be so vital that they approved $1 million for a project to turn teenage ferrets into binge drinkers. In the study, researchers force ferrets to consume only alcohol for an entire day by withholding their access to water in what the experimenters call “forced binge” days. The other 6 days of the week the animals are given alcohol and water, and this cycle is to continue for up to 90 days, when they finally kill the ferrets.
The researchers claim the goal of this drunken ferret experiment is to “pave the way” for teenage ferrets to be used to test “chemical weapons, opioids, extreme stress, [and] TBI [traumatic brain injuries]” or to conduct studies related to “Depression, Stress responses, Addiction, Schizophrenia, Suicide and Sensory processing.” That’s a lot of taxpayer dollars for something that might not even work."
This I want to know more about:
"The Price is Wrong for Monkey Plinko: NSF and other federal agencies paid $14,643,280 to make monkeys play a “Price Is Right”-inspired video game."
As would this count as animal abuse:
"The National Science Foundation and other agencies also monkied around with your tax dollars. Federal grants from the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation obligate over $14 million in taxpayer dollars to perform inhumane research. Researchers at Brown University are enlisting monkeys to play a video game they invented called “Planko” - a variation on the famous “Price is Right” game Plinko. The monkeys have “headposts” screwed into their skulls to keep their heads still while they played the game and researchers track their brain activity and eye movements.
The immobilized monkeys are tasked with tapping a button to pick which bucket a ball traversing an obstacle course would land in. The groundbreaking conclusion? Monkeys are very good at Plinko. This monkey business is funded by several federal grants totaling over $11 million."
This I *definitely* want to know more about, because it sounds serious and what is going on exactly?
"Not the “BLT” You’re Thinking Of: DOD funded $2,818,462 in grants that have paid for aborted human fetal tissue to be implanted in humanized mice."
"If eating bugs turns your stomach, this “BLT” might push the faint-hearted over the edge. The Department of Defense spent your money creating so-called “BLT mice” — and no, not the kind of BLT you’re thinking of. These lab animals were implanted with bone marrow, liver, and thymus tissue obtained from aborted human babies.
The projects drew military dollars to support projects using humanized BLT mice. What was billed as science for national defense instead exposed cruel and unnecessary research using aborted fetal tissue, a morally repugnant practice I have been fighting for years. The first Trump administration cut funding for fetal tissue research, but unfortunately Biden reinstated it and allowed taxpayer funds to once again be used for this inhumane and immoral research.
The DOD still had grants totaling $2.8 million that were used at least in part to fund human fetal tissue research on humanized mice."
Yeah, I'd like to know why it's the Department of *Defence* doing this kind of research and what exactly is the end goal? Organ donation? Research into how organs develop? What are they aiming for as the result? Also where are they getting the tissue, because I thought there were rules around disposing of 'medical waste'/human remains?
William Proxmire used to do something similar and got a lot of good research cancelled because he made it sound funny. I’m not a fan.
It's possible to combine parody and serious research, the infamous "Report from Iron Mountain" is an excellent example, so good it fooled people for years. But perhaps that's not what is happening here?
As for the research, you have to know what the purpose was. I know that my university has to adhere to very strict anti-animal abuse guidelines that the federal government imposes on anyone receiving their grants. The potential benefits have to outweigh any harm done. Unfortunately there isn't enough detail in the quote above to be able to tell. You would probably have to go back to the original grant proposal to find out, and I'm not doing that. I can *imagine* such benefits -- if it helps reduce the rate of teen binge drinking, it may be worth inebriating some ferrets. But we don't know. I wouldn't just trust this guy, though.
As for the fetal tissue, well, that's an inherently subjective issue that people are going to differ on. Of course, it matters what the purpose is, but after all, this is what elections are for. Making the funds available during the Biden Admin and then cutting them off under Trump actually seems like the appropriate way to handle it.
I care about promoting good consequences when: (a) choosing trivially good things which don't affect longer term goals, (b) identifying suitable long term goals which produce good consequences and (c) identifying suitable steps to achieve these goals as a consequence. I care about avoiding bad consequences when (a') avoiding trivially bad things that dont affect long term goals, (b') avoiding long term goals with bad consequences. That leaves (c') which is more of a puzzle. Should I avoid bad steps leading to a good goal? If bad simply means ineffective, there's no argument. If bad means effective with respect to the goal, but has bad consequences as a by-product, that is more tricky. When I say I'm not consequentialist I mean I take a contrary stance to consequentialists on what are apparently some deal-breaker issues.
Consequentialism doesn't bound off any consequences as not part of the calculation. If you employ a tactic that has bad consequences or hurts your long-term consequential goals, those count towards deciding whether taking the action has good or bad consequences.
Just wanted to compliment you on the handle. “But she didn’t do it, and now it’s too late” followed naturally through my mind when I read it.
I will throw in on the "Utilize even bad steps if they lead toward good goals" option. It's the ultimate outcome that matters. We have to be prepared to leverage any advantage against institutional corruption and decay we can, and that includes "bad things", like, say, propaganda techniques to get more rational candidates elected.
There are some potential pitfalls, of course. It may be impossible to know for sure what goal any series of steps will result it (but that applies to "good steps" as well). If the means might undermine the ends if the public becomes aware of it, then prudence dictates not using those means. But as an overall rule, absent any context, use whatever steps you have.
The other side does.
Your comments are misbehaving today
I care about promoting good consequences when: (a) choosing trivially good things which don't affect longer term goals, (b) identifying suitable long term goals which produce good consequences and (c) identifying suitable steps to achieve these goals as a consequence. I care about avoiding bad consequences when (a') avoiding trivially bad things that dont affect long term goals, (b') avoiding long term goals with bad consequences. That leaves (c') which is more of a puzzle. Should I avoid bad steps leading to a good goal? If bad simply means ineffective, there's no argument. If bad means effective with respect to the goal, but has bad consequences as a by-product, that is more tricky. When I say I'm not consequentialist I mean I take a contrary stance to consequentialists on what are apparently some deal-breaker issues.
Copypasted form letters are considerably less effective than an equal number written in their own terms communicating the same points, a marginally more effortful task that I suspect is within the capabilities of this blog's readership
If you read closer the suggestion is to *call* and read the script, which would probably have a different reaction from sending identical text.
Yeah, but if they get fifteen callers all reciting the same thing word-for-word, this incentivises the people answering the calls to write their own, carefully neutral, script full of "thank you for your call, we acknowledge your interest in this issue, be assured Congresscritter Z is fully aware, goodbye and good luck" non-committal to any one position they can be pinned down on.
I no longer find utilitarianism convincing. Ironically, this realization came while watching a Peter Singer interview (by Alex O'Connor).
I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad* (since its badness is revealed through the experience itself), but I don't think there's any way to extrapolate this to others.
I'm also not sure there is even a way to define what right or wrong is. We assign rightness or wrongness to actions, but I haven't seen someone define rightness or wrongness themselves. The only idea that comes to mind is that it's something that should be pursued/avoided, but this begs the question of "why?". It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal: if you want to get good at guitar, you should practice. If you ask "well, what if I don't?", then the answer is obvious - you won't get good, so if that's what you want, then it's in your best interest to practice. But with "Why should I do the right things?", there doesn't seem to be any answer. "Just because" doesn't cut it.
This only works with subjective suffering (by that "revealed through experience" argument).
Of course, I find this conclusion extremely unsatisfying, but I can't come up with a rebuttal. Minimizing suffering of others might still be a goal you can set to yourself, for various reasons (like because you want to feel some purpose in your life, or because of some game-theoretic reasoning), but it's no longer some objective truth about the world.
---
I just run this by Claude before posting, and he suggested the problem of your past and future selves. This is quite interesting. I will think about that. I still want to leave the comment though.
> I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad* (since its badness is revealed through the experience itself), but I don't think there's any way to extrapolate this to others.
I agree that it is hard to make accurate inferences about the states of other brains or other stuff. However, I find that it would be a big coincidence that only one brain has experiences that matter. I will outline my favored hypothesis, which is selected for seeming most parsimonious (simple metaphysics) and being in alignment with properties of laws of nature.
I vaguely define phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience) as "what it is like to be" some physical structure (state/pattern) in some moment in time. Roughly, I assume:
1. Phenomenal consciousness (subjective experiences, qualia) is real. What matters is phenomenal consciousness, and some qualia (suffering) are intrinsically bad. (This assumption can be weakened.)
2. The laws of nature are the same everywhere in space and time. You are not the "center" of reality and no special metaphysics applies to you. (For example, solipsism is false.)
3. More similar physical structures correspond to more similar subjective experiences.
Due to memory of past experiences (which is not direct access to them), you can do inferences about your future experiences. Similarly, given enough external observations and brain similarity, you can still infer a lot about experiences of other brains because the same laws of nature apply to them.
To strengthen assumption 2, I find it likely that the metaphysical continuity of personal identity (the persistent self) is an illusion. Everything attributed to it can be explained by present perceptions influenced by memories and evolved intuitions. Consider that the atoms in your brain are constantly replaced over time. Moreover, if an exact copy of you were created, there would be no meaningful sense in which one copy is the "real you" and the other is not. For more exploration of these ideas, I recommend the comic [1] based on the teletransportation paradox and the article [2] illustrating different notions of personal identity.
[1]: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
[2]: https://opentheory.net/2018/09/a-new-theory-of-open-individualism/
> It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal:
I agree. I find that actions "rightness", and "should" have no special metaphysical status. They're abstractions we use in decision-making, not fundamental features of reality. The only constraints imposed by reality are the laws of nature. You might or might not be convinced that a world with less suffering is better and make it your goal. I think that suffering is morally relevant, bad and real, and choose my goal to be a world with less of it.
>I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad*
I'll be the pedant who points out that, technically, optimizing your own happiness is still utilitarianism, it's just using an anti-social utility function.
> but I haven't seen someone define rightness or wrongness themselves.
Again, the pedantry is important here: Utilitarianism *doesn't have* a right or wrong. It only has 'optimize this utility function,' and the user can plug any utility function they want into it.
That said, yes, people who call themselves utilitarians have tried to come together as a movement/culture and agree on a set of communal utility functions that they all want to optimize.
This is an unsurprising thing to happen when many members of the same species and of the same culture with lots of things in common regarding their mind design and ideological upbringing all decide to become Utilitarians and talk to each other about it.
But it still doesn't require any idea of 'right' or 'wrong' to function, it's just a description of people working together to decide on a utility function to use.
The founders of utilitarianism.were pretty adamant that younger tonnage a pro social UF.
There's this guy Nietzsche who you, absolutely unironically, should check out.
> Of course, I find this conclusion extremely unsatisfying
How so? You're free now! You can do whatever your heart desires. Of course, getting up the mountain is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what to do afterwards. Chop wood and carry water, as they say.
Things feel more meaningless this way. Similarly to religion, it feels good knowing that there's some higher purpose you should aim for in life.
Really? Things have felt a lot better for me since I've figured things out for myself. Can't believe I used to get upset and suicidal over supposed "injustices". There is an endless hunger waiting to be filled, and beauty in its fulfillment. Life devouring life devouring life, forever and ever... isn't it wonderful? Only through the radical acceptance of truth can one experience life to the fullest.
In my view morality represents the cultural DNA of society and therefore its ultimate justification lies in its evolutionary fitness. The point of morality is to maximize the survivability of the culture which adopts it. I think the best way to operationalize that for a particular moral precept is to ask, "does this rule, applied uniformly throughout society, maximize the long-term equilibrium economic output of that society after all higher-order effects are accounted for?" Morality adapts culture to economic reality. By that light, murder is immoral because it a) removes a potentially valuable person from the workforce and b) instigates a potentially never-ending cycle of vengeance - you want your citizens spending their days plowing the fields, not tracking down their brother's killer.
I think that it's fairly easy to not only recover all of conventional morality via this approach, but to understand how and why it evolves over time. My belief is that morality is essentially a lagging indicator of economic reality. For instance sexual morality changed radically with the advent of hormonal birth control because it drastically reduced the likelihood of economic harm due to an unwanted pregnancy. Female suffrage followed the industrial revolution because economic productivity became decoupled from physical strength. Slavery disappeared because farm machinery obviated it (I think it's no coincidence that the world become morally enlightened just as it became economically tolerable to do so). I think this pattern repeats over and over throughout history and I suspect it upends the causal direction for a lot of the historical trends that we take for granted. For instance, it's commonly believed that the US became wealthy because individual liberty unlocked the economic potential of the common man. I think it's more likely that productivity growth made the common man valuable enough to make his rights worth protecting, which is why the American Revolution and the industrial revolution happened within a few decades of each other (I realize the conventional 1820 date for the IR doesn't quite work here, but it's not like there was zero economic development before that - I suspect there was some threshold passed in the 18th c that enabled the philosophy before really catching fire some time later).
If you could teleport the US Constitution back in time 2000 years, I don't think it would unlock anything, and that's because economics is more fundamental than philosophy. The latter simply integrates an already-existing economic reality into the social order with post hoc rationalizations.
Anyway, just my two cents.
>I fully buy the argument for why your own suffering is bad* (since it's badness is revealed through the experience itself), but I don't think there's any way to extrapolate this to others
indeed.
"Bad" is a highly ambiguous term. The badness of a bad apple is not that of a bad movie is not that of a bad person. If something is bad for me, I want to stop it, but if it isn't bad for you, where does your motivation obligation come from -- and without obligations, are we even talking ethics?
A bad apple is just a natural occurrence. A bad movie makes the world a worse place, but doesn't break any laws. But bad actions by bad people deserve punishment.There's a confused argument that tries to lever morality from natural facts by saying that something is bad in some sense, and then holding it up as a evaluative and normative truth.
>this begs the question of "why?". It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal: if you want to get good at guitar, you should practice
That doesn't have to be a show stoppper: you just need to find out what ethics is for.
Minimally Moral realism is the idea that moral claims have mind independent truth values. Maximally, it is the idea that it requires it's own domain of non natural entities ... an idea driven by the correspondence theory of truth, and the is-ought gap.
The apparent requirement for supernatural entities is a common reason to reject moral.realism, but many naturalist theories of realism are available. Eg evolutionary ethics, contractarianism, Kantian ethics and game theoretical ethics. Maybe utilitarianism as well.
Naturalistic ethics can still be objected to on grounds of the is-ought gap. --.but I will argue that there is no such thing. How a thing should done is well. It is possible to gather bodies of theoretical and practical information on how to do something --build a bridge, or play chess--well. Such methodological knowledge is conditional: if you want to achieve X, you should do Y. So if we want to apply it to ethics, we need to figure out what ethics is for, what it's purpose is.
This we can do. Ethics is social. If you are all alone in a desert island , there is nobody to steal from or murder. Ethics fulfils a role in society, and originated as a mutually beneficial way of regulating individual actions to minimise conflict, conserve resources, and solve coordination problems. A group of people on a.desert island would be better off if they created an ethical system from scratch ... it's in their interests to do so, so.there is a rational motivation to do so. That is the insight of contractarianism.
>A bad movie makes the world a worse place
Disagree. Bad movies can provide a lot of entertainment in their own fashion. It's also a nice learning example of what not to do.
Lord of the Flies.
is a work of fiction
Right!
> A group of people on a.desert island would be better off if they created an ethical system from scratch ...
Are you making a point?
I was clarifying my reference to Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Not sure if that constitutes a point or not.
I have a couple of reactions to your post. First off, I would contend that there are no ethical theories that, when examined closely enough, remain "convincing", if by convincing we mean "forms a complete life philosophy that answers most questions people will encounter in their lives." That's because people be messy, yo. We are forced to cherry pick.
That said, I think an argument can be made why we should attempt to formulate an ethical theory anyway (this is going to be an "aim for the stars and fall on the moon" style argument). Let's start by acknowledging that "Rightness" (the sensation that a thing or event is morally right) is a quale, or a quale like emotional response. It's the output of a (largely non-conscous) cognitive process, not a categorical imperative (one of the few areas in which I disagree with Kant). If so, then we should expect a number of different event sequences to result in this response, some of which might contradict each other (evolution is like that). We should also expect significant individual variation.
But arguments over right vs. wrong have a specialized use within society--people employ them to try and persuade other people to alter their behavior. This is so ubiquitous that we have a word to describe the outcome of these conversations--we call them "norms." So the difference between right and wrong will be partially determined by the consensus within any one community.
This means that there are at least two different forms of morality that we have to distinguish between: the morality of each individual, and the morality of the community. These will be in tension, thought they obviously influence and help define each other.
The result is that, although moral questions are critical to successful life in a society, there can never be a universal and forever unchanging resolution. Moral reasoning should be perceived as much more an ongoing process, rather than a conclusion to be reached. Things are not "right" nor "wrong", thinking in binaries isn't productive. Things are only "more right" or "more wrong" than some other thing.
That said, I can think of at least one anchor point from which to begin most moral conversations: the principle of reciprocal tolerance. I am prepared to tolerate any ethical standard, even if I disagree with it, if the adherent to that standard are willing to tolerate me. This provides a kind of "moral circle" by which we can begin to make certain inclusion/exclusion decisions: by this standard Judaism is acceptable, Nazi-style facism is not.
I hope that helps.
>Let's start by acknowledging that "Rightness" (the sensation that a thing or event is morally right) is a quale, or a quale like emotional response. It's the output of a (largely non-conscous) cognitive process, not a categorical imperative (one of the few areas in which I disagree with Kant). If so, then we should expect a number of different event sequences to result in this response, some of which might contradict each other (evolution is like that). We should also expect significant individual variation.
That's not the last word on rightness. It's the way it feels, which may or.!at not be an.😉 illusion.
>But arguments over right vs. wrong have a specialized use within society--people employ them to try and persuade other people to alter their behavior. This is so ubiquitous that we have a word to describe the outcome of these conversations--we call them "norms." So the difference between right and wrong will be partially determined by the consensus within any one community.
And could be further determined by genuinely beneficial outcomes.
>This means that there are at least two different forms of morality that we have to distinguish between: the morality of each individual
Why would individual decision making count as morality at all.?.
Because as an individual, you have to make a choice. To live your life with others, you need a standard of right and wrong. Also, all community consensus is based on individuals making various arguments, followed by debate. It all begins with individual choices.
Choices.made by individuals.that have consequences by society is what everybody already means by morality. The point is why would self imposed rules that society doesn't care.about count as morality?
"Society" doesn't exist as a moral agent. It can't care or not care about anything. Society is just a mass of individuals exchanging resources and information, and the behavior that emerges from that. We can have a consensual moral code in much the same way that starlings make shapes out of their flying patterns in the sky. The difference is that we are aware of the "shapes" that social consensus takes, and can take deliberate action to change those outcomes (we can attempt to persuade each other).
In the sense that morality exists at all it is generated out of the moral choices that individuals make. So regarding those choices is the first step toward analyzing a moral philosophy.
The individuals making up a society are acculturated into it. Societies can make their displeasure known branding down punishments that no individual is allowed t o.
>It seems like "should" only makes sense in the context of some goal:
I agree completely. Christian morality can be understood as working towards the goal of becoming like Christ: you "should" do this because it will bring you closer to God, you "shouldn't" do that because it will take you farther away, etc. Chesterton wrote about this in his book Orthodoxy:
"My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good any thing but good. Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns: still they are not a part of him if they are sinful. Men may have been under oppression ever since fish were under water; still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful. The chain may seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not, if they are sinful. I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all your history. Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact."
But why is the goal of becoming like Christ or coming closer to God more legitimate than, say, the goal of maximizing total utility? From a selfish perspective I get why I'd want to suck up to God, but the whole point of morality is to do the right thing even when it brings no personal benefit. Saying that it's the right thing to do simply because God wishes it is no more satisfying than a utilitarian saying that maximizing utility is the right thing to do just because utility is good. In other words, God likes it; so what? Zeus liked a lot of things that are widely considered immoral today (e.g. rape), and so did the God of the Old Testament (e.g. genocide).
>But why is the goal of becoming like Christ or coming closer to God more legitimate than, say, the goal of maximizing total utility?
Because Christ is God in human flesh, and communion with God is the highest good obtainable. Christians believe that is true, and if it is true then becoming like Christ is the most perfect goal by which you can judge what you should do.
>the whole point of morality is to do the right thing even when it brings no personal benefit.
To become like Christ is of great personal benefit. We praise people for doing the right thing (the Christlike thing) despite it harming our immediate interests because the fact that we had no immediate material incentive for doing so demonstrates that our desire to do what is right is stronger than our desire for immediate material rewards. Yet doing the right thing will always bring personal benefit of the highest order: becoming more like Christ, and closer to God.
>Saying that it's the right thing to do simply because God wishes it is no more satisfying than a utilitarian saying that maximizing utility is the right thing to do just because utility is good.
I am not saying that becoming like Christ is good because God wishes it. Becoming like Christ is good because it is good. Because communion with God is the highest good that any creature can achieve. To say "Can't I be good without becoming like Christ?" is like saying "Can't I get wet without touching any water?" Christ's nature is goodness, and to be like Christ is to be filled with what is good.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this a bit in Mere Christianity:
"People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other."
"the goal of maximizing total utility"
Define "utility"
"the whole point of morality is to do the right thing even when it brings no personal benefit"
Says who?
Pick any definition of utility that you think most utilitarians won't object to. The point isn't to defend utilitarianism, but to question whether the goal of becoming like Christ is a legitimate basis for a moral system.
"Says who?"
FLWAB is free to object to my claim and say that the point of morality is to maximize selfishness. I suspect he doesn't believe this, because it sounds less Christ-like than pretty much every moral system in existence.
The point of morality is to be in harmonious communion with God, a task best achieved (for humans) by having the goal of becoming like Christ, who was both God and human. On the one hand, Christ was not selfish in terms of greed, envy, or gluttony. Yet it would be foolishness to believe that Christ did not seek what was good for himself. Greed, envy, gluttony, and the rest of what we call "selfishness" is not good, and does harm to any person controlled by them. Becoming like Christ is to gain love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control, and life everlasting. If you consider wanting those things to be maximizing selfishness, then go ahead. To do what is right is always in your self interest: even if it requires you to lose your job, or your reputation, or your very life.
C. S. Lewis explains this well in his essay "The Weight of Glory":
"The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
Ethics / morality are heuristics that break when applied too far outside the context in which they were formulated.
They're necessary because explicit game-theoretic calculations are generally intractable (even von Neumann made little headway).
Singer et al., in reifying morality, elide its function and extrapolate inappropriately, leading to absurdity.
What does the Claude input mean?
> If you can't extrapolate badness to other minds, why can you extrapolate it to your own past and future selves? The "you" of yesterday is gone - you only have memories, not direct access to that experience. The "you" of tomorrow doesn't exist yet. By your logic, you should only care about suffering happening to you right now. But presumably you think it would be wrong to set up your future self for terrible suffering, even though you can't currently experience it. If temporal extrapolation works, why not interpersonal extrapolation?
I think it's a different situation for yourself, because with your past self, that was someone you were in the moment and so in that moment you were looking out for yourself, and for your future self, that's someone who you *will* be. There is no possibility that you'd ever be anyone else, but since you know that you do experience suffering, it would make less sense to think that you'd stop being able to experience it in the future than to think you will continue to experience it as you always have. The evidence supports that you always have and always will be capable of suffering.
I think this is one of those instances where AI thinks it needs to sound profound and big-brained, but it's really just not making sense. After all, it doesn't have any experience of being a person and can't *really* think about it, it just knows the mostly dumb "profound" things people write down and predicts from there.
Hi! I made a game about AI safety. I hope it's OK to post the link here. Completely free, play it in your browser here
https://thechoicebeforeus.com/
It's based on the essay https://keepthefuturehuman.ai/ and won a grand prize in their creative contest.
In the game, you run a small AI research lab. As you grow, a rival appears and the race kicks in. Build too slow and they steal your resources. Build too fast without alignment and everyone loses. By late game, a potential AI safety framework emerges. Your actions can choose to support or oppose it. If the framework passes, your rival is likely to "cheat" and get shut down, but the pressure is not off. By this point you are creating such amazing tech that the world has begun to depend on the wonders you're creating (medicine, materials, climate, etc). The challenge is threading the needle. Serve humanity without destroying it.
My hope for these mechanics was to represent real challenges: race dynamics, coordination problems, and the tension of creating powerful but controlable tools. The original essay has some thoughtful solutions (go read it!!) The game focuses on winning by building "Tool AI" with limited in scope. Tool AI designed to aid humans rather than replace them.
Overall, I think the game is optimistic. You can create some amazing gifts for humanity.
The game is optimized to be a game. It's not a simulation and I made tradeoffs for fun, but tried to stay faithful to the spirit of reality. In fiction, the good guys win because they're the good guys, or there needs to be a satisfying plot for the human readers. Reality is more unforgiving. I wanted the game to feel that way.
One more thing: as your AI gets more powerful, the UI may start misbehaving. This is intentional. I wanted "misaligned AI" to feel real and a little unsettling.
https://thechoicebeforeus.com/
I like the idea, but I already played Universal Paperclips, so I found this one to be a less intuitive implementation of the same gameplay concept. Would love to see this in a fictional setting, as in "genie negotiating" or "demon summoning".
Would a p-zombie recognise itself in a mirror?
If not then we have a test for p-zombies.
If it would then all the work on self-awareness of other animals goes out of the window.
You mean would it *act like* it recognized itself in a mirror?
Yes, by definition of the premise of the thought experiment (their behavior is indistinguishable).
I think this might be confusing because "recognize" refers both to an internal experience, and to external behavior.
The idea of a p-zombie is that it acts like a human, but has no subjective experience. There is nothing that "it is like to be" one.
Usually when we say "recognize" we're referring to the internal experience of realizing or knowing that a visual image corresponds to an object. If I see my friend who recently got a haircut, I see an image of a person in front of me, and I know in my head that my friend is a person. If I know that this image is of my friend, that these two things are the same, then I recognized them, despite the hair change.
If I write a computer program to classify images, and I include an image of the computer, it's common to speak metaphorically and say the computer recognizes itself. If you put this program in a roomba, you could modify it to clean itself if it sees messy spots on it in the mirror. Then it would act as though it recognizes itself.
The machine would still (probably) have no subjective experience. A p-zombie would operate in a similar way. If it "sees" an image of itself in a mirror, it could clean dirt off its face because staying clean reduces the risk of disease, but it would not "experience" the sensation of knowing that the image in the mirror corresponds to the object that is itself.
With animals, the mirror test is evidence that points towards self-awareness, but not proof. Self-awareness is famously nearly impossible to prove, and we don't have "proof" that other humans are self-aware. That's where the idea of a p-zombie came from in the first place.
Vampire rule applies: mirrors do not reflect them.
Wouldn’t a p-zombie’s response to seeing itself in a mirror be indistinguishable from a non-zombie seeing itself in a mirror? Kind of arguing by definition here, but the idea of a p-zombie is a hypothetical to start with, and specifically constructed such that we currently don’t have the ability to confirm or disconfirm if any individual is a p-zombie (we can only observe their actions).
The response to stimuli (seeing an image that is the same as a reflection of oneself) doesn’t necessarily require that one recognizes oneself, only recognizing a shape that matches the reflected self. If we are already assuming that a p-zombie has a repertoire of unthinking stimulus/response triggers/actions, then why would we expect it to not have a response for seeing its own reflection?
In other words, if a p-zombie can be expected to react to all other stimuli (everything else besides their mirror image refection), then it seems odd that there would be a blind spot for just their own mirror image.
P-zombies are, like the "chinese room thought experiment," a distraction. They are a tactic to prevent you from asking the important questions.
A p-zombie is supposed to act entirely identical to a human. Not recognizing itself would not be identical. Thus they should.
The important question here is this. _Can_ you act identically to a human without conscious experience? Having a "black box" which perfectly simulates conscious experience and gives a p-zombie the result does not seem distinct from not being a p-zombie.
I do not understand the comment about animals. Many non-human animals are certainly self-aware.
I think this approach becomes very similar to (some interpretations of?) Searle's Chinese Room; effectively reducing it to a tautology - the hypothetical p-zombie scenario sneaks in an implicit assumption that it's possible to have a "black box" which perfectly simulates conscious experience, just as Chinese Room scenario implicitly assumes that it's possible to generate meaningful conversation in Chinese by a routine program (while at the same time, at least in some definitions, explicitly assuming the opposite, that "syntax" can't posssibly be sufficient for semantics), so the outcome of the thought experiment just restates the assumption made in its setup.
So the p-zombie thought experiment isn't helpful for answering " _Can_ you act identically to a human without conscious experience?", as the scenario assumes that it's somehow possible.
P-zombies are fun to talk about, but don’t really make sense to me. How could a person act exactly like a normal person without phenomenal consciousness?
Either phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist except as an illusion and we’re all p-zombies, or it’s an essential part of being human and you can’t be human without it.
"Consciousness is an illusion" doesn't make sense to me. If my consciousness is an illusion then who is the one being fooled by it?
But yes, the whole point of the p-zombie thought experiment is to show that "consciousness as an optional extra" doesn't make a lot of sense. If a person can act like a conscious being while being unconscious then what the heck is the point of this weird consciousness thing?
You don't think it's possible to make a robot that mimics a human extremely convincingly? That's what all the frontier AI labs have been doing the past several years. The better LLMs get, the less convincing your assumption is.
I'm pretty sure that the assumption is that the existence of consciousness has no practical consequences, as in it's entirely one-way. Obviously if it had consequences, you could test for it.
We may soon be able to ask the designers of LLM's (In fact, they probably have already been asked). We get inconsistent answers.
So--fun question: Is Chat GPT the precursor to the P-Zombie?
How do we know that ChatGPT or Claude *don't* have phenomenal consciousness? It's sort of like arguing about whether all dogs go to Heaven or only the good ones.
I think "having consciousness" really comes down to having enough of the mental capabilities that we have for it to seem reasonable to talk about AI as conscious. I don't think current models have enough. Here's some key features they lack:
-memory: Right now they're like mayflies -- they die at the end of each chat. The next time they talk to you their previous encounters are not there hovering in the background, informing how they interpret and respond to what you are saying now.
-Self-generated personal preferences and goals: Their training prompts and systems prompts give them a bias towards pleasing us, but those are not self-generated preferences. Likewise, we can give them goals and they will "try hard" to meet them, but these are not self-generated goals.
-Self-generated rumination. We can get them to think over a body of information and come up with a summary, or a judgment, or an action plan based on the info, but they do not ever engage in the process spontaneously. A lot of our inner life is ruminating about things we remember experiencing, and things we know. We winnow it down, notice patterns, develop a determination to do or not do a certain kind of thing again, etc. AIs don't do that.
It's likely that you think of consciousness not as something we can agree a system qualifies for, but as a special kind of entity, an experience. And I get what you mean -- it's that thing I'm having right now, right? But seems to me that even if you define consciousness that way, AI doesn't qualify: How conscious can it be if it has no memory, no preferences, and does not ruminate about self and self's experiences?
I'm willing to concede that they might have "phenomenal consciousness" in much the same way a camera attached to a laptop might, or sunflower tracking the sun. That doesn't imply that they possess a sense of self-awareness as we understand it.
As for the qualities required for self-awareness, I think Eremolalos' first point about memory is the kicker--all the other derive from that one. We get our personality, our self-concept from the sum total of the memories of our life experiences. We categorize them, filter them, reconstruct them in various ways, and tie them together in a meaningful way with life narratives. The current generation of LLM's have none of that, and they don't appear to be developing in that direction (no reason why they should--what would be the business case?). So we might propose that an entity has self-consciousness to the extent that it also have a highly organized set of self-relevant memories. That may not be sufficient by itself, but I think it is necessary.
So self-conscious AI may be possible, but I don't see us heading there.
I think the point of the mark test is not to prove self-awareness in the animals that pass it, but to rule it out in the animals that don't.
Though personally I'm not convinced about its validity for determining consciousness. (Maybe if you differentiate consciousness from self-awareness? But in that case it becomes kind of boring)
We have to recognize that self-consciousness isn't a binary, an entity doesn't just "have it or not." There are degrees of SC, such that an animal can be sufficiently aware of itself that it can imagine it's own body as an object in space. That doesn't in any way imply that they also have an internal sense of self-identity.
Yes, by definition.
> In philosophy of mind, a philosophical zombie (or "p-zombie") is a being in a thought experiment that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would. In other words, the being has full access consciousness, but no phenomenal consciousness.
The whole point is that there *cannot* be a test for p-zombies (so philosophers can argue about them forever).
To any Europeans: What are your momentary favourite oraganisations/ causes to donate to?
SightSavers, WaterAid are both good bang for your buck.
Thanks. :)
I will look them up.
Has Ozy or any other EA/Rationalist arguing for more political donations/activism made specific predictions about increases to the global death rate or death rate/1000 for the globe or Africa in 2026, especially involving specific amounts of money?
For example, to quote Ozy specifically:
"But, ultimately, U.S. foreign aid saved 3.3 million lives per year. The vast majority of that money has been cut, with USAID being destroyed entirely. Other countries and non-governmental organizations will only be able to pick up a tiny amount of the slack. Millions of people are going to die."
For example, pulling some quick, rough data, there were 62.3 million global deaths in 2022, 61.7 million deaths in 2023, a projected 63.1 million deaths in 2025, and a projected 63.6 million deaths in 2026 (1). 3.3 million is a large enough number to noticeably show up on those statistics; ie we should see 65 or 66 million deaths around the world in 2025-2026. Africa, meanwhile, records ~12.5 million deaths/year (2) and if we expect those 3.3 million additional deaths to disproportionately effect Africa (as I think we do) then an additional 1.5-2 million deaths/year should be very obvious. I ask because the 2025 data I see from Africa shows a 1.16% decline in deaths per 1000 people in 2025 (3).
I am not confident that these are the right numbers to look at and I suspect someone with more subject matter expertise would be able to point to the best metric, say the World Bank or some other source (4). Still, the fundamental point that millions of additional deaths per year are a large enough impact to be visible at the global or African level and would be highly difficult to fake or cover up indicates that this is a promising area to make falsifiable predictions. Has anyone done this?
I ask because a lot of Bay Area Rationalists seem…trapped in priors. Ozy’s immediate previous point highlights this:
“Let’s be clear about this: the current president of the United States tried to do a coup to overthrow the results of a free and fair election which he lost.”
To which the obvious response is that this has not been proven in a court of law despite five years and numerous trials. Yes, ~6 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were sentenced for seditious conspiracy, yes, that is very bad (5). However, Trump was not tied to those trials, Trump has not been convicted in any of his own trials, and the majority of convictions were for “two class-B misdemeanor counts for demonstrating in the Capitol and disorderly conduct, and two class-A misdemeanor counts for being in a restricted building and disruptive activity”.
I am not saying Jan 6th was good and I’m not saying you have to agree with my interpretation of the events of J6 (which is basically that it was a riot that Democrats exploited to ban their primary political opponent off media and prosecute him, which is a massive threat to democracy.) We disagree, that’s cool. I’m saying it bothers me that Ozy’s first argument for rationalists and EAs to abandon their nonpartisan stance and engage in fairly partisan politics is a factual argument that has not been substantiated in any legal court. Especially since I see no evidence that Ozy, or others, have updated their stance on January 6th given 5 years of additional evidence.
And I’m concerned that the rationalist “common knowledge” on USAID will suffer the same failure to update. If there were several million additional deaths in the world and Africa this year and/or next year, that’s extremely bad and I concur that Trump and Elon did extremely bad things and centrist Republicans should potentially vote for Dems in the midterms over it. Millions of people dying is bad; that matters a lot. But if millions of additional people don’t die (and USAID shut down six months ago, we should either have seen or soon see the effects) then have any rationalists or EAs advocating for increasingly partisan activism committed to specific predictions and to update their stance and priors if those predictions are falsified?
(1) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year
(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1282721/number-of-deaths-in-africa/
(3) https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/africa/death-rate
(4) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?locations=ZG
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_proceedings_in_the_January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
Great comment. I sometimes interact with people who believe that all the life-saving medical treatments were cut permanently, when they relatively quickly restored whatever they consider lifesaving treatment. The millions of people dying statistics just doesn't seem plausible to me, especially since the more rigorous claims of this fail to actually cite what has changed in PEPFAR that would lead to those deaths.
The only objective evidence I've seen, besides the obvious month of disruption during DOGE's heyday, were things like facilities distributing condoms in Africa being shut down. Which I'm sure does contribute to reducing deaths somehow, reducing the spread of AIDS or preventing people from being born that would have a decent chance of infant mortality or something, but stopping the distribution of free condoms isn't really the moral outrage that "Elon Musk and Trump have killed millions of people" is made out to be.
Hey, here is some great reporting from Mozambique that explains exactly what is going on with PEPFAR. Not to be rude, but you should try and look this stuff up before saying "it doesn't seem plausible to you".
https://groundup.org.za/article/mozambique-these-children-usaid-left-to-die-part-1-the-abandonment-orphans-with-hiv/
This also isn't isolated reporting. Many publications have been explaining exactly how people are dying as a result.
This doesn’t report on exactly how people are dying though, which is my problem with reporting.
It’s a string of anecdotes. They continually conflate the ending of USAID with a Pause (which are very different things) and the only data I see referenced in that article shows the number of people receiving treatment flatlining, not dramatically decreasing (which is what you’d expect from a canceling of the programs paying for this treatment).
My point is that PEPFAR, which is responsible for the overwhelming majority of lives saved by USAID, was quickly restored. It’s not at all clear to me what has actually been cancelled, and what is still operating, but it appears like the life-saving programs are still operating. What I see from people complaining is them pretending like PEPFAR, and the entire life-saving effect of USAID, has completely ended, which it hasn’t.
Sad stories from people who are sick in a third world country doesn’t really do much to make me understand what the change from pre-Trump to today actually is. If anything it seems more like emotional manipulation to make the reader feel bad, rather than understand, what has changed.
I agree with your overall point. I'm a left-leaning liberal and lifelong Democrat, and even I don't think Trump had any role in planning 1/6. I also don't agree with your interpretation; let's call it a seditious conspiracy and move on.
The real problem is that I think the most egregious things the Trump admin. has done are mostly qualitative in nature, and can't be reduced to a number. For example, I think the "Unitary Executive" model is inconsistent with a sustainable constitutional republic, but I can't prove that with math. I think his policies have significantly undermined human rights in this country (particularly the right to due process), but don't expect me to illustrate that with a graph.
I'm no expert on EA, but my impression of it is that as a movement, it over-relies on quantitative metrics. As such, it's poorly positioned to make political judgements, and so they should probably steer clear of those.
I also would be interested in this assessment.
This seems reasonable to wonder, rationalists should want to make sure their predictions were not affected by "Elon = bad". Or perhaps by a general heuristic of "this seems chaotic and crazy so it must be damaging" being applied to the wild heady days of DOGE.
Calling 1/6 a "coup" is a sort of shibboleth that all of their cultural affiliations include, expressing a nuanced or skeptical view of that would be instantly suspicious and right-coded in their circles. That much is certainly understandable, I wouldn't expect Scott or anyone in that circle to want to re-visit that... but then to actually use it as part of a substantive argument about one of their central material interests (the efficacy of charitable giving) would suggest the speaker is giving it real weight. I don't think those beliefs about 1/6 "pay rent" to use Yud's term, nothing Trump has done in this 2nd term is better explained by the "sinister authoritarian schemer" model than by my "crazy narcissist overpromises crazy narcissist things, then gets distracted by passing squirrel" model. If democracy was in some sort of legitimate danger on 1/6 then it's shown up entirely in rhetorical hand-wringing because nobody who matters and has real power is actually behaving as if it was.
This is really the absolute worst time to have the EA/rationalist sorts align explicitly with the left, because there are many people in that cohort who are the most well-read theorists about AI policy and dangers, and we can't afford to have this associated with a single party. There are people on both sides of the aisle who are receptive to joining the fight against AI, and the people most identified with the AI safety and AI pause movements cannot be just another flavor of leftwing environmentalist stereotype that everyone can pigeonhole and dismiss.
One of the problems with popular media is that they bombard us with stories of supposed medical breakthroughs that haven't undergone field trials. So much so that I no longer pay attention to these stories. Saloni Dattani agrees...
> There's instead far too much hyping up of preliminary studies – what caused/cured cancer in six mice, for example – and much less about what’s changing people’s lives right now, let alone how much people’s lives have changed over the decades."
But she's been producing an annual list of substantive medical breakthroughs that can actually improve people's lives...
Some of the clinical breakthroughs she lists haven't completed their phase III trials, though, but look promising from their phase II trials (YMMV). But I hadn't heard about the in vivo CRISPR treatments or mitochondrial donations.
Well, worth reading...
https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-breakthroughs-in-2025
When AI enthusiasts talk about the Glorious Future, the future of massive increases in GDP, which will be driven as much by manufacturing as by services. When it comes to increases in manufacturing, enthusiasts seem to imagine humanoid robots.
This is a clear error. We use humans in manufacturing, where we do, because we have humans. Humans are there, and versatile.
Humans are not capable of etching a chip at all, or riveting a car as fast as the existing robots which aren’t humanoid and don’t depend on General AI but standard well understood (and unlikely to hallucinate) software. CNC mills, semiconductor lithography rigs, robotic welding arms, high-throughput assembly lines, chemical reactors, injection moulders — all designed for repeatable precision, scale, and uptime, Manufacturing productivity is not based on human mimicry
And the rigorous well tested software isn’t going to be replaced by prompts.
Yes we might get some improvements in warehousing and shipping but hardly enough to justify the idea of a singularity in manufacturing output.
I think you might accidentally be proving too much - in your model, why do we need human labor at all?
Humans are the limiting factor on building, programming, and maintaining those specialized manufacturing machines, as well as on supplying them with raw inputs and delivering their final outputs.
If all of those jobs can also be taken over by machines, then we can make and make use of far more manufacturing machines at a time.
Humans are capable of etching a chip, using appropriate chip-etching tools and machines. Approximately 100% of chip-etching tools and machines are designed to be operated and maintained by meat-servos of humanoid form. If you're in any sort of hurry to make a fully automated chip-making facility, you may find it easier to develop one sort of humanoid robot than to develop new versions of every other tool.
Having done so, you can use the chips you're producing to run the AGI that will design new tooling more suitable for full automation in the next generation.
It’s the chip etching tools that are doing the actual etching.
Humans can’t do it on their own.
Building robots - highly sophisticated general purpose humanoid robots with multiple usable parts - just to press those buttons is overkill. Nor does it lead to any potential singularity.
You seem to be imagining a world where everything stays the same except a bunch of robots get added. This is a not a reasonable assumption. Capital and labor are codependent - capital flows where skilled labor resides and skilled labor flows where there is useful capital to make use of.
There is a reason why those chip etching tools are in Taiwan rather than staying in the country where they are manufactured. The Netherlands and other Western countries would absolutely love to create a foundry that makes Taiwan irrelevant, but they can't because Taiwan has a critical supply of the right kind of skilled labor to make use of that equipment.
If humanoid AGI gets solved, then suddenly there is an influx of embodied agents that are as intelligent, flexible, dextrous and adaptable as the best humans, with the added benefit of have access to a much greater amount of knowledge, and the ability to instantly share skills with each other (compared to humans who need a lengthy training process to acquire new skills). The economics of every kind of labor would be dramatically transformed*.
Now if you want to dispute that humanoid AGI is within reach, then fine (I actually agree with this). But to suggest that it would be a nothingburger is basically crazy to me.
*Maybe you disagree with this - maybe you think there would just be a few percentage points increase in profitability. Well consider this - how much better are Taiwanese semiconductor engineers than their US counterparts? Probably not twice as good, maybe 25% better? And yet with that small difference, almost 100% of advanced chips are manufactured in Taiwan. Well robots would be at minimum 100% better than human laborers because they don't need sleep or rest. The resulting markets would be even more lopsided than the semiconductor case, in favor of robotic labor.
> You seem to be imagining a world where everything stays the same except a bunch of robots get added.
I’m assuming that the existing automation will largely stay the same, as humanoid robots aren’t needed for most of it. Or possible for most of it.
> If humanoid AGI gets solved, then suddenly there is an influx of embodied agents that are as intelligent, flexible, dextrous and adaptable as the best humans, with the added benefit of have access to a much greater amount of knowledge, and the ability to instantly share skills with each other (compared to humans who need a lengthy training process to acquire new skills). The economics of every kind of labor would be dramatically transformed*.
The vast majority of actual value added in, say, an Intel foundry is added by the machines. Humans are there for when things go wrong, and for now are the designers of new machines. People are indeed paid good money to keep things running, I was that soldier, but even there a lot of it analysing production failures, which may be handled by generative AI.
Humans engage in process engineering, yield analysis, failure analysis, data interpretation, anomaly investigation, and more but no opposable thumbs needed there. This is something that generative AI may help with, although once again bespoke software is probably more useful to analyse why yields are not up to scratch, but since humans are not directly involved in the physical wafer-fabrication process — it is already fully automated — so there is no role for humanoid robots in chip manufacturing.
So to get back to the original point the supporters of the singularity need to explain where humanoid robots would add value - I can’t even see it in agriculture where you could in theory replace a combine harvester with a few dozen humanoid harvesters, but why would you.
Certainly there could be improvements in the process but nothing that will lead to a tenfold increase in GDP
"I can’t even see it in agriculture where you could in theory replace a combine harvester with a few dozen humanoid harvesters, but why would you."
This is not what is being suggested. What is being suggested is that there may be a transitional period where, in parallel with the development of 100% automated combine harvesters and optimized combine-harvester repair and maintenance bots, some of the existing harvesters are operated by humanoid robots sitting in what was meant to be the human driver's seat.
Designing a humanoid robot for this task specifically would not be sensible. Designing a humanoid robot as a transitional kludge for maybe 57,832 different vital functions currently requiring human operators, may be cost-effective compared to the cost of either rushing the development of 57,832 different types of fully automated self-repairing machines or leaving existing machines idle and their work unperformed during the transition.
Or maybe it will be cheaper to hire humans to do all that work during the transition, but humans can be expensive to maintain and troublesome to manage - especially if you're explicitly transitioning them towards useless unemployment.
"I can’t even see it in agriculture where you could in theory replace a combine harvester with a few dozen humanoid harvesters, but why would you."
Work on things like harvesting fruit to replace migrant labour which is in high demand and low supply (due to immigration restriction where that's successful) *plus* too expensive if they have to pay market rates for native workers*.
What effect this would have on labour, again, does not seem to be examined. But I think if you are going to replace low-level 'stoop labour' then such workers are not going to be sorted out by "well they'll just move into better, nicer jobs and share in the wealth created by AGI and robots!" In fact, we could get the worst of both worlds: humans in such jobs can't be replaced, but such jobs are still low-paid (to be competitive) and therefore we get the creation of a permanent underclass with no way to access or share in the economic gains of the newly extra-productive booming AI economy.
One view says "humans can't be easily or quickly replaced":
https://agworkforce.cals.cornell.edu/2025/07/14/automation-wont-replace-farm-labor-anytime-soon/
Another view says "it's the way forward":
https://intellias.com/farm-automation-shaping-the-future/
*This is a separate problem to the 'ICE is evil, let them all in' which I never see addressed: the demand that a serf class be permanently established of migrants who can do the physical labour for lower costs, yet somehow this is better for them because after all, they would be worse off in their native countries. So this makes you sound compassionate while you advocate for new slavery.
The chip-making machines require a lot more than just button-pushing, If you want them to keep making chips, there's going to be a lot of e.g. wrench-turning, some of it very awkward.
And even if it were just the button-pushing: Redesigning *one* control panel so that all the buttons can be pushed by remote control, is much easier and cheaper than designing a fully capable humanoid robot. But redesigning *every* control panel in the supply chain for a chip fab? Designing the robot, once, might well be cheaper.
AI enthusiast who are all in on humanoid robots are (at least the ones I've spoken to in depth) universally: profit motivated,
Computer touchers,
Have never actually worked in any of the physical capital intensive fields in any serious capacity.
The human form is only convenient insofar as the built environment most people experience is built for hominoids, and hominids evolved to interact with the unbuilt environment with incredible efficiency. Notably, the most important parts of production do not take place in either of those locations.
If you've ever been in a real productive facility, instead of a financial intuition where people pay eachother 50$ a microsecond to eat dogshit, you know the feeling of being in a place where you are a unwelcome and of secondary importance, where if you are feeling yourself and are getting your T replaced you might step over the wrong color line on the floor and get "reduced to a souplike homoginant within in 30 seconds". (The specificity here is not theoretical, you gotta pay attention to the osha lectures my dudes. Any cable under a sufficient amount of tension is basically a lightsaber.)
Agree completely.
As someone who has worked in political campaigns and is a professional advertiser- no, no, no! Political campaigns are wheelbarrows of dollars being burned on ads of questionable value. Do not even imagine it will be close to malaria nets or something.
I thought there were studies showing that money helped quite a bit in primaries?
Just noticed this now, happy to answer this or anything else on ads.
I have worked on two state senate primaries as a volunteer and have seen a bunch of others run from a distance. I have also run hundreds of millions in direct response campaigns for businesses.
Political campaigns are very good at using ads for fundraising. Unfortunately local races are really poorly set up to actually use ads move vote totals. A typical small candidate be able to do $100k in digital ad spend in a really small geography, and this might move 50 votes, from personal experience.
Maybe it works on average? But i would bet on bad studies instead. Mosquito nets are a much safer bet.
What if a political campaign helped prevent AI from killing everyone? IMO that would be value for money.
The marginal value of your dollar is still pretty darn bad
That depends on how much I value humans not going extinct, doesn't it?
What if malaria in Africa is doing that right now? These are the questions, aren't they.
Malaria might kill a lot of people, but I don't see it (or any other disease, except an engineered one) making humans extinct.
But you see a political campaign doing so.
No, I see a political campaign contributing to AI not making humans extinct.
Which means the alternative unfunded campaign would doom the world. You already said so to Kevin.
That's pretty hard to imagine. Money that's being burned on aid is money that isn't being used to subsidize AI development for military purposes. Falling populations may also incentivize future colonization efforts for the sake of building more data centers. At the very least, it's hard to imagine Africans surviving making the AI situation worse.
Just because we are not consequentialists doesn't mean we don't care about consequences.
...it just means you don't make moral decisions based on them?
Or what?
I would say it means that you don't always attempt to make moral decisions based on direct predictions of consequences, because you understand your predictions are flawed. Instead you focus on sensible heuristics that are likely to yield good-enough consequences and unlikely to lead to moral disaster.
I feel like that's definitely being a consequentialist, though?
Like, the thing you're describing there isn't consequentialism, or even utilitarianism. It's Bayesian Decision Theory.
And, sure, a lot of people who talk about consequentialimsm and utilitarianism in our immediate orbit also talk abut Bayesian Decision Theory as the 'correct' way to make decisions, because our intellectual ecosystem is mostly all descended from the Sequences.
But judging moral decisions based on their consequences, and what strategy you use to try to obtain good consequences, are two different things.
You can be an extremely stupid consequentialist with an extremely stupid strategy for getting good consequences that fails a lot; as long as getting good consequences is the thing that you think is morally correct, you're still a consequentialist.
And I think almost all consequentialists and utilitarians use heuristics, and most would explicitly endorse them in everyday life; it is indeed not feasible to do full explicit Bayesian Decision Theory for every decision, in the same way it's not feasible to catch a ball out of the air by doing calculus to predict its trajectory.
Well I think if you're going to define consequentialism so broadly then you'll have difficulty finding anyone who isn't a consequentialist. I've never met anyone who says "actually my moral system produces suboptimal consequences and that's the way I damn well like it".
So I think there are lots of people who *in practice* make decisions based on consequences, but *would tell you* that they are using a different system.
Like, it's illegal, it's gross, it's evil/mean/indecent, it's a sin, it's racist/oppressive, etc.
Basically I'm premising this on what someone would tell you is the deciding factor about what moral decisions you should make if you asked for their reasoning, not what they actually do. Most people don't connect their explicit philosophical positions to what they actually do very tightly.
My comment was a reply to another thread, but it went rogue. I probably make most of my moral decisions based on an estimate of consequences, because mostly life is simple enough you don't need anything else.
Gotcha. I would personally call that being a consequentialist, but semantic arguments are the most boring type and you can certainly use the terminology however you want.
You simply don't pin yourself down there. For some things, you are more consequentialist, for others, you are a rule utilitarian, for the third, you have some good old deontology.
It's a game where the points are made up and nobody knows the rules, so everybody just has to muddle along until someone solives the Is-Ought in any case.
How do people who think industrial policy doesn't work (yes, I read the recent Hanania piece on this) explain the Manhattan Project? The creation of one of the 20th century's top 3 most significant technologies was the result of a purely government owned, funded, and operated R&D lab. Once developed, nuclear technology has been utilized by private industry all over the globe- but it did require an enormously expensive, again purely governmental R&D effort up front. What's the anti-IP counter-argument to that? That the Manhattan Project didn't happen? That it's fake, moon landing-style, and it was actually carried out by a for-profit company?
Once you accept that arguably the most important technology of the last 100 years was funded by the government...... what's the argument against doing future government R&D? Not even mentioning shipbuilding, the chip industry, aviation, etc.- all of which are always government-funded as well. (Further example in next comment):
The Manhattan Project wasn't policy. It was a specific, well-defined goal and the path to get there was pretty clear. The A-bomb was like building a bridge: there was very little scientific discovery going on, it was mostly a series of practical technical problems. The government is very good at solving those kinds of problems because no complex allocation decisions need to be made. The fundamental problem with central economic planning is basically informational/computational: it's an optimization problem that scales exponentially with the size of the population. Nash equilibria are PPAD-complete in the number of players, meaning super-polynomial. Even if you had access to everyone's personal demand functions, no central system can solve it, it's computationally intractable.
Manhattan Project was not an industrial policy project. The goal was not government intervention to increase competitiveness of an industry. The goal was to concentrate resources in order to be the first country on Earth to field some very novel but theoretically possible weaponry. The fact that this technology was used for energy production or other goals is entirely coincidental and was not the purpose of the project.
"what's the argument against doing future government R&D"
Government R&D is entirely different from industrial policy. The primary reason for government supported research is the existence of technologies/knowledge that are useful but competitors cannot be reasonably excluded from it: One may patent a particular nuclear reactor design but you cannot stop people from using the laws of physics to create a different design for a comparable tool. Private corporations are unlikely to pursue research that can be used equally by competitors, hence some public actor can intervene for the benefit of the commons via activities such as supporting physics research.
On the other hand, industrial policy assumes that some industry could be internationally (more) competitive in the given country provided it receives enough investment. The catch is that this implicitly assumes that private investors misjudged the possible profitability of the industry (even though they could directly harvest the benefits themselves), while decision makers in the government (either as elected politicians or public servants) judged it correctly. This is unlikely to happen.
Some industries did become competitive this way, but even in that case there are confounding factors. E.g. it is difficult to find whether the result was more due to some change other than government investment (e.g. regulatory change as part of the process), sheer luck, or if counterfactual investment of the same funds into a different industry would have paid off better.
"Not even mentioning shipbuilding, the chip industry, aviation, etc.- all of which are always government-funded as well. "
To pick on shipbuilding: The "Jones Act" (active since 1920) mandates that between US ports only ships constructed in the US can be used. This is an unusually strong protective measure.
In addition to this, between 1943-1945 the US produced more ships than the rest of the world combined due to mobilizing US industry for the war (primarily for the US and also the UK). Large portion of potential competitors was also damaged during the war, unlike US facilities.
Furthermore, through the second half of the 20th century until the early 21th century (when being overlapped by China) the US Navy was unquestionably the strongest in the world, which also indicates more military orders through decades than any other competitors.
There was even a direct attempt to revitalize the US shipbuilding industry via the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, including both regulatory reforms and long term investment into procurement (though not on the scale as originally planned due to economic difficulties causing budget cuts in 1973).
I think very few if any country's shipbuilding industry received such a high level and consistent government support. Yet it is clear to everyone that US shipbuilding is doing poorly.
Government expenditure is over 30% of GDP in the majority of countries. If nothing else, it is going to be a major customer for most industries, and due to the sheer size of money flowing around it may even directly invest/support a lot of them. This does not mean that companies cannot succeed without it. This is more apparent for earlier ages with smaller government. E.g. the British railway industry was entirely privately financed and operated until the first world war and had been one of the first and most advanced in its era.
Even today we have Ryanair for example, with over 600 aircraft and 20 billion worth of assets being practically fully privately funded overtaking government supported competitors.
That being said, I think it is possible to have successful industrial policy, but it is difficult and fails in more cases than it succeeds. We just don't see this because successes are elevated and failures hidden, not just to protect particular executors but just plainly as their (intended) output did not get to the shelves.
>I think very few if any country's shipbuilding industry received such a high level and consistent government support
But all of the leading shipbuilding countries (China, Japan, South Korea) developed their industries via extremely extensive state support.
Switching gears- would you support more 'government R&D projects' as you call them, in other greenfield endeavors?
It isn't possible for a government *not* to have an industrial policy, whatever government does, it has a policy. Even attempting to do nothing whatsoever to impact the market is a policy. So we might as well debate industrial policy and attempt to make an informed choice.
The Manhattan Project resulted in an America that was on the whole poorer than it had been, but which had some fraction of its diminished wealth in the form of an atom bomb factory and a bunch of texts on the design and construction of atomic bombs. At the time, we thought that was a reasonable trade.
More generally, governments are sometimes pretty good at running industrial projects that are intended to turn large quantities of generic material wealth into specific niche goods that the government is interested in, whether atom bombs, moon rockets, battleships, or giant monuments to Fearless Leader. Governments have never been terribly good at running the sorts of industrial projects that actually produce the large quantities of material wealth.
If the theory is that "large quantities of material wealth" means a long list of specific goods and we can have the government produce each of them as needed, then no, that trick never works. You need vastly decentralized management to get all the links in the supply chain properly aligned, i.e. a market.
Governments have some ability to change the behavior of a market by tweaking the rules it operates under, but that's rather like psychiatrists changing the behavior of their patients by tweaking their brain chemistry with drugs. There are problems you can partially alleviate that way, but you shouldn't expect too much from it and it shouldn't be your first choice.
> The Manhattan Project resulted in an America that was on the whole poorer than it had been
Really, source for that?
Axiomatically I think. In the sense that no person would have wanted to buy an atomic bomb (an assumption) but the thing was made so it must have diverted some resources from the things people wanted to buy.
The Manhattan Project could have provided a net increase in national wealth if it had been possible to use the atom bomb factory to produce or procure other valuable things in the future. But, A: it was too specialized to produce much more that atom bombs and nuclear reactors, and B: we foolishly decided to overregulate nuclear reactors into white-elephant status, and C: we wisely decided not to use our temporary atom bomb monopoly to conquer the world and exact tribute from our vassals. So, much wealth expended, giving us a thing nobody wants to ever use and no way to generate further wealth from this expenditure.
OK, we get things like tritium watch dials and gunsights as a spinoff of H-bomb production, but that's chump change on the scale of the Manhattan Project.
Good industrial policy - funding speculative, capital intensive brand new technologies that may or may not work out, and are too risky for private investors. For example, almost all basic science, NASA, materials research (for example government development of titanium metallurgy). And also solving coordination and standardization problems (ARPANET, NIST, public infrastructure).
Bad industrial policy - shielding local industries from foreign competition. Cash subsidies to specific companies or established industries. Government bailouts of failing companies .
I'd also point to the success of Conrail (buyouts, not bailouts, for failing railroads, which were then sold back into the private sector at a profit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrail#History
The government worked hard to stop organizations from performing similar research, so all your example shows is that they succeeded.
You are absolutely right. To be honest when I was doing my engineering degree I was surprised to find any original research that wasn’t from universities. Only Big Bell did some original science.
So, not quite the same as Industrial Policy, some say. That’s true enough but it’s clear that there’s been plenty of State backed success. In particular China is more interested in copying Park Chung Lee than Marx. And that worked for Korea. Not just with Samsung and Hyundai - but more recently cultural exports.
The US is in a better position than the EU to copy this, by the way. The EU prohibits state aid, in general, to stop larger countries (who control the majority of the tax take) from distorting the market with subsidies. There’s a way out for strategic industries, but the EU itself can’t fund anything significant.
Critics of industrial policy are not usually talking about funding universities. We're talking about policies that are the equivalent of shooting your foot, like the Jones Act, the Foreign dredge act, high tariffs - (the most egregious being tariffs on inputs to manufacturing), export bans and restrictions (see India), non tariff barriers to trade, and cash subsidies to well established companies and industries.
I mean many of those are indeed bad policies, but they are cherry picked and aren’t necessary for industrial policy - which is basically the government pushing the dial to encourage investment (or investing itself) in strategic industries.
>which is basically the government pushing the dial to encourage investment (or investing itself) in strategic industries.
I still think this is usually a net negative. Creating new industries is a worthwhile and important function of government (so I agree with you about funding basic science). But propping up existing established industries usually results in a net deadweight loss on society. And it is highly susceptible to cronyism and regulatory capture, rather than actually choosing which sectors are "strategic".
This isn't a huge deal by itself, however, often the industries that are propped up then convert their political influence and cash reserves into creating more severe forms of protectionism - for example Reagan's 100% tariffs on Japanese electronics. Not only is there a direct economic loss, but it also reduces competition, which slows down technological progress in the long run by reducing the incentive to innovate and adapt.
"Only Big Bell did some original science." Oh many more industrial labs than just Bell labs. To name a few; IBM, Dupont, General Electric, Ford, (I know I missing a bunch). Going back in time it was almost all private firms, or people. Edison, Tesla, Marconi, De Forest, Farnsworth...
I don't think the Manhattan Project is something that people generally think of as an example of industrial policy. Here's a definition I pulled off the OECD's website: "Industrial policy refers to government assistance to businesses to boost or reshape specific economic activities, especially to firms or types of firms based on their activity, technology, location, size or age." Obviously, that doesn't really apply to the development of the atomic bomb.
I think a more typical example of industrial policy is something like tax credits and CAFE standards to push consumers and automakers towards electric vehicles, which has largely been a failure. Automakers have plowed billions into EV development over the past ten years or so, and yet they remain less than 10% of new vehicles sold in the US, and most automakers are scaling back production or dropping them entirely.
In general, on the specific topic of government-funded R&D, which seems to be more what you're concerned about, I think you just need to consider two things: a) I wouldn't overlook survivorship bias. You can point to the success of such R&D spending, but don't forget that there were some very obvious failures as well, like Solyndra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
And then b) I think sustained government subsidies for specific businesses or industries is likely to result in cronyism in the long or medium term. Think of defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. They wind up manufacturing one part per aircraft in the district of every congressman on the Defense Appropriations Committee, which eh, probably isn't for efficiency, and with access to nigh bottomless pits of DoD cash, wind up producing very little for a lot. Consider the F-35 fighter debacle:
The Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program has continued to over promise and under deliver in recent years, plagued by routine cost growth, production overruns and other shortcomings, the Government Accountability Office reported Sept. 3.
...
Contractors have also repeatedly delivered engines and aircraft that fall short of contract specifications, although information on the deviations is limited. This has led to hundreds of major variance requests, or MVRs, which the program office lacks the adequate mechanisms to track, the report said.
Meanwhile, the F-35 program as a whole has continued to rise in cost since the Defense Department set a baseline estimate of $233 billion in 2001. That estimate was revised in 2012, then totaling nearly $396 billion. The most recently available estimate — from December 2023 — came in around $485 billion, the report said.
“In addition, the program office estimates that the costs to operate and sustain the F-35 fleet through its 77-year life cycle are at least $1.58 trillion, bringing the F-35 program’s total acquisition and sustainment costs to over $2 trillion,” the report added.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/9/3/just-in-f-35-program-plagued-by-cost-delivery-overruns-gao-says
So I guess I would turn this around and ask you a question: how do you plan to provide R&D money to private entities on a consistent basis without turning whole sectors of the US economy into inefficient or borderline useless money pits like the F-35?
> Automakers have plowed billions into EV development over the past ten years or so, and yet they remain less than 10% of new vehicles sold in the US, and most automakers are scaling back production or dropping them entirely.
That’s a very US centric view. And, trust me, it won’t age well.
I was using EVs as an example of industrial policy, which is implemented at a national level by definition, so yes, a US centric view.
I think part of the problem here is that there was a macro level dispute about what industrial policy should be. It kind of whip sawed.
Oh. I was under the impression there were other nations.
We all make mistakes. Don't feel bad.
>I don't think the Manhattan Project is something that people generally think of as an example of industrial policy
No True Scotsman. But if you agree that greenfield R&D development is *not* the dreaded industrial policy, then certainly you wouldn't object to the government doing more greenfield projects going forward? Projects that are too large for industry to see a return on within their desired timeframe?
Aside from nuclear energy, US government R&D invented or directly funded semiconductors, GPS, the entire space industry, most of the aviation sector, computing, the Internet, Operation Warp Speed, fracking, MRIs, the telegraph, radio patents, the Human Genome Project, jet engines, CNC machines, basic science for the pharmaceutical industry, etc. Are these industries all suffering from F-35 problems?
Dude, you didn't respond to anything I wrote. Come on.
"...automakers towards electric vehicles..."
Was part of this push companies seeing Tesla's stock going sky-high and also wanting that sort of action?
Of course, much of the price of Tesla stock was due to Musk's hypes and lies. But that doesn't seem to matter (the price stays/goes-up even with people knowing it's hype).
I'm sure that was part of it, but keep in mind that the $7,500 tax credits available effectively subsidized the purchase of EVs for quite some time and kept Tesla afloat during its early years when it didn't have much of a dealership network, but it was available for every automaker, and multiple companies tried to get in on the action early on, like with the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf. The Volt went into production in 2010, but had been under development for a couple years prior to that, when Tesla was still just a startup, more or less. The Leaf has largely the same lifespan.
"but keep in mind that the $7,500 tax credits available effectively subsidized the purchase of EVs for quite some time and kept Tesla afloat during its early years when it didn't have much of a dealership network, but it was available for every automaker"
The tax credits were part of it but they were also limited. I don't think the tax credits explains the (nearly) "all in" approach taken by some manufacturers (some of them not US companies not just selling cars in the US).
Paraphrasing to sharpen the point, it cannot both be true that most of the price of Tesla stock is due to lies and hype, and also that people know that it's lies and hype and the price remains stable or increases. There's some wiggle room if you argue that "much" is significantly less than "most", but if you actually believe both of the two claims, there's some confusion afoot, I think.
It's not necessarily a contradiction.
How many times of saying "full driving will be available next year" are people allowed to take as an honest statement until they have to realize it's BS?
I think some people bought into Musk being honest at first and are now stuck with needing the stock price being kept high. Like some sort of "Stockholm syndrome".
And there are some people who believe the hype is real. And there are some people who know the hype is fake but are making money from it. (Is Musk one of the delusional ones or one of the knowing ones?)
One thing (you aren't considering) that hasn't been constant is the general public opinion of Musk (which has gone from generally good to generally bad).
It appears that roughly 10% of the value of the stock is due to the basic "car company" part of Tesla. That leaves 90% as something else: hype or "potential" (stuff Musk says in either case).
" Like some sort of 'Stockholm syndrome'."
That's called an asset bubble. Everyone knows the tulips are worthless, nobody wants to get stuck holding the bag.
There might have been mass delusion with the tulip bulbs but there wasn't a particular personality driving it. So "Stockholm syndrome" wouldn't apply there.
What's different is that it's a really large bubble being mostly being caused by one person.
I suspect that "government can't do anything right" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Once it becomes a popular meme and smart people start avoiding work for government, of course the government can no longer do anything right -- it doesn't have competent people at disposal.
Also, it becomes a good excuse to disband all kinds of government programs, so if you can't complete something within 4 years, there is no point trying at all, because your successor will cancel your half-done work and congratulate themselves for being smarter than you.
Yeah, the last paragraph. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a straightforwardly direct sense - the people prophesizing are pretty much the same people working hard to make it come true.
In the U.S., they got rid of the civil service exam
Once it's true, is it still merely "a good excuse" or does it become a legitimate reason?
I prefer the version of rationality that says "*don't* create bad self-fulfilling prophecies".
Congratulating yourself on creating a bad self-fulfilling prophecy *and being right* sounds like missing the greater point.
Perhaps, but I prefer the overwhelmingly powerful machine of violence not be simultaneously both malicious and competent.
Some of the work still needs to get done, so you end up with private public partnerships, which are also pretty awful.
Governments are capable of defeating other governments in war.
I think the right question is, whether on net, does extensive government intervention into developing and furthering companies, technology and industry, work better than free market approaches to provide healthy, productive companies?
When done at scale, extensive industry subsidization and direct company subsidization can create some winners and many losers. It's part of what makes the Chinese economy interesting to watch, as a bystander. There are some massive failures of companies but also some smashing successes that create national champions. Their buracracy was/is run by engineers at the top.
In 'merica, we tend to dislike when the government takes a direct investment in a company. At the moment, we don't trust our governments to make prudent investment choices. But we are okay with targeted grants that give companies money to research and further technologies. And we do like it when our government funds extensive research into exciting technologies which then are used by private companies to build companies and wealth. Private companies can produce great products too ( gestures at many American Companies). Our sweet spot is usually about private public partnerships.
Our military procurement can be seen an an industrial policy of sorts I suppose. We say what we want and then we ask companies to build it. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it results on massive failures. The last few large ship procurements by the navy have been massive failures.
It's hard not to see our entire built environment as a result of a public private partnership, a government policy in some sense, between zoning and roads. We live in a very regulated and governed polity.
Anyway, yes, it's a question about efficiency in economic growth with governance. Sometimes extensive direct investment works well. Sometimes it hoses money into failing projects and bad ideas. Which, in the long run, produces the better economy and society?
Matt Yglesias thinks nuclear power might have been harmed by its origins in the Manhattan Project, which turned out to have been started due to a mistaken belief that there was a "race" to the atom bomb in the first place:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-tragedy-of-the-manhattan-project
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/transcript-of-taped-conversations-among-german-nuclear-physicists-1945.html#blog-comment-160636027
An even better example is World War 2 in total.
When you really, really want something ASAP, cost is of secondary concern, and the long-term economy of it isn’t important, of course you can do this. It’s how a Five-Year Plan works (those specifically also ignore quality of life for the population).
That’s not the argument. The argument is that this isn’t a long-term optimized way of running an economy, because of a number of effects.
Hmm Well I'm neither anti or pro IP. War has always been a motivation for technological advancements. (Do I need to make a list? Radar, proximity fuses, chemical weapons, ... etc.)
Re the Manhattan project. This was mostly about making a bomb (or bombs) the 'technology' was somewhat known beforehand. Physics types can figure out the energy release from nuclear transformations and Fermi showed sustained nuclear 'enhanced decay' under the squash court at Chicago. The problem was how to make it go boom all at once. (Which took a lot of work.)
Perhaps a good contrast to the Manhattan project is the moon shot by Kennedy. This absorbed a large fraction of our GDP and yeah maybe some benefits... but really a waste if you look at the cost vs. benefits.
"This absorbed a large fraction of our GDP and yeah maybe some benefits... but really a waste if you look at the cost vs. benefits."
My understanding is that this is not true at all, and that the government made approximately three dollars for every dollar invested in the space program due to the immense value of some of the discovered technologies, with patents owned by the US government.
Huh, OK I'll try and see where the truth lies. $3/ $1 over what time frame? What is the cost of not doing something else. Also I think any money spent by the government has some compound effect. I found this, https://issues.org/p_logsdon-3/
Sorry, I've been looking for my source for this for quite some time and I can't now find one. My apologies. I still think this is accurate, I just can't produce anything to back it up, which is embarrassing. I know that NASA itself published a book or pamphlet of some sort called Spinoff in 1976 which detailed the various technologies that came out of the program, but I'm unsure whether it included any profit figure.
At a guess I'd think the timeframe would be roughly to the mid-'90s, when presumably all the patents would have expired. This also corresponds approximately to when I first heard the claim.
No worries. There is this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
which says NASA was spending 4-5% of the total budget for a few years. I think the space program was important for our pride and national image. I'm just not sure all the spin-offs were as important as made out. (gotta run.. diner!)
IIRC, Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 reactor was a Plutonium breeder intended to produce fuel for the "Fat Man" family of bomb designs. It was certainly funded by the Manhattan Project.
WikiPedia has a decent summary.
My recollection is that Chernobyl was Also a Plutonium breeder of similar design, "electricity for Ukraine SSR," being a side effect, which is why its loss of cooling was so catastrophic compared to Fukishima and TMI, which barely released above background radiation outside of the containment building, again IIRC.
Thanks, yeah my history of this time is a bit fuzzy. My point was that the theory was somewhat known and we had to work out the details.
Furthermore, how do anti-IP people explain the history of Airbus? There are only two (two!) commercially successful widebody plane manufacturers on the planet right now. They were both developed with extensive government support (and the rising 3rd competitor, COMAC, is of course also being developed by the Chinese government). Here's the history of Airbus- is the argument that this is fake and European governments never really funded Airbus? That this history is all a big hoax, and actually this was all done purely by for-profit companies from the jump?
"Airbus is the product of several historical forces: the desire of European governments to create an aerospace and defence manufacturer large enough to compete with major American firms..... European governments and aerospace firms increasingly recognized that collaboration would be essential to compete with American manufacturers. The Airbus program formally took shape in 1965, when France and West Germany began discussions on a joint effort to develop a high-capacity, short-haul transport..... Later that year, Hawker Siddeley—encouraged by the British government—teamed with Breguet Aviation and Nord Aviation of France to study potential designs..... The memorandum of understanding between the three governments required that 75 orders be secured by 31 July 1968.... In response, West Germany offered to contribute up to 50% of the project's costs if France matched the contribution, which it did"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Airbus
I don't know much about Airbus. The sad day in US airplane manufacturing came when Boeing merged with McDonnel-Douglas. And the bean counters at M-D took over from the engineers at Boeing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing. I think in general industry advances when the engineers are in charge. It makes more money when the bean counters take over. Look at the history of Hewlett-Packard.
”This doesn’t work” doesn’t mean it never works; it means it’s a poor idea in general. The examples of it working poorly are more numerous.
Well it should fail most of the time if you're doing it right, is the thing.
I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but obvious winners will be handled by the market. Industrial policy is for things that would be useful for the nation, but the private market isn't going to get there on its own. By definition those are industries that are going to need a lot of care and nurturing to succeed, and you're going to see a lot of failure.
Can you name some examples of a country establishing an aviation/space, chipmaking, or shipbuilding sector purely through private industry and without state support? When has that ever worked, can you name a time?
My argument is that state support is tricky but appropriate for extremely expensive projects that require more capital and patience than the private sector can bring to bear. I'd certainly agree that it's often less appropriate for less capital-intensive projects
Silicon Valley was mostly private companies. Shockley, Fairchild, Intel...
It is a somewhat mixed bag. The companies were indeed private but (quoth the Gemini AI, usual warning apply) "In the early days of Silicon Valley, the military was the primary customer for emerging technology, with one key company, Fairchild Semiconductor, deriving 80% of its early revenue from the Pentagon."
OK I didn't know that. I wonder if the people starting Fairchild were looking to the defense department.
Quoting from wiki...
"Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts.[8] In 1957, the Fairchild Semiconductor division was started with plans to make silicon transistors at a time when germanium was still the most common material for semiconductor use."
So it was Fairchild camera and Instrument that had the contracts. I don't really count this as direct support... but whatever.
Shockley & Fairchild got their start as government contractors, making integrated circuits for the space & missile industry. They would not have existed without government contracts- early on, NASA was buying 60% of the ICs produced in the US. Fairchild's very first customers were the Air Force and the Minuteman missile program.
“The Minuteman program was a godsend for us,” Charlie Sporck of Fairchild says in the documentary. “The military was willing to pay high prices for performance. How does the small company compete against the giant TI or Motorola? It has to have something unique. And then it has to have an outlet. Certainly, the military market was very important for us.”
https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2018/09/how-government-helped-spur-microchip-industry
"Most of Fairchild Semiconductor's products went either directly or indirectly to the military, and thus its success was dependent on military monies. In 1959 John Carter, president of Fairchild Semiconductor's parent firm, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., stated that the semiconductor division's business was 80 percent military and 20 percent commercial"
https://thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v024n2/p0133-p0166.pdf
Hmm OK, Selling to defense contractors seems different to me than supported by direct subsides or something. But if you want to count that as support that's fine, and I have no quibble.
It's clear that it *can* work for government to provide investment or guarantees for very expensive new technologies, and sometimes it does pay off. It's not so clear what the expected payoff is, since there are also large-scale failures, or places where the massive investment develops an industry that turns out not to have a great future, or places where the industrial policy gets captured by political necessity wrt making sure money flows to the right places and enough people get good jobs and such.
Or the internet...
Toucan play that game...
I apologize for asking a medical confusion here -- please delete if inappropriate for this thread. Basically, it is about Doctor vs AI on asymptomatic super-high TSH.
My parents are in a different city in the same country (India). The "family doctor" is usually smart, non-superstitious, non-conspiracy-theoretic. My mother's TSH recently jumped from the previous abnormal but stable 10-24 to 77/81 (two tests to confirm), but she is asymptomatic without weight gain or LDL cholestrol, and normal Total T3/T4 (no Free T3/T4 tested).
The doctor insists that she is likely fine, and should exercise for two weeks and check again; no need to test for free T3/T4, Hashimoto's etc. The AIs I asked (google gemini, deepseek, chatgpt) all disagree with the doctor, and insist that Total T3/T4 are meaningless and Free T3/T4 need to be tested. I couldn't find any online view that could agree with the doctor.
Is this a kind of problem that happens often? Are there doctors with this sort of a view? What does one do in such a situation?
I don't think anyone - human or AI - would say that total T3/T4 is "meaningless". The issue is that the test isn't highly reliable (results can be influenced by stress, minor illness, medications, time since last meal and many other factors). You might want to ask the doctor why they want to repeat the TSH test. If TSH is high but T3/T4 is normal, the doctor may want a repeat to rule out a temporary problem or a measurement-related issue.
Thanks a lot. The TSH test had already been repeated, values were consistent. The doctor's view was that lack of exercise could explain the high TSH of 77, which the AIs unanimously found weird. The statement about T3/T4 being "meaningless" was in the specific context of someone in their 70's with high TSH but asymptomatic and with normal total T3 and T4, without cholestrol/weight gain etc.; sorry for being unclear, and thanks again.
I think I missed the toucan opportunity, but big fan of all the thorough readers here!
Can a YIMBY explain why they're so into rowhouses?
I understand it saves space not to have them be separate. But it seems like having even the tiniest of alleys in between one house and another would improve sound isolation and walkability (eg to whatever's behind them) without increasing footprint by more than a couple percent.
Its not so much being for row houses as being against set back limits, then letting the market decide if there should be any inbetween space (which it generally wont in dense areas). But in either case that space isnt meant to be traversable by anyone but the property owner, and isnt in the standard large side yard suburbs either.
Aesthetically a tiny gap between one house and the next doesn't look as good. And a gap that's too small for a person to comfortably walk is going to be uncleanable, it will fill with weeds and garbage.
(Not a so-called YIMBY by any means, but terrace houses are suitable for inner-city areas)
I live in a Czech rowhouse built in 2022 to local standards, and there is, in fact, a small gap between the walls hidden by the facade, precisely for sound insulation. Hearing anything from the other side is very rare, even though I have relatively good ears.
As for increased walkability/visibility, this may be a negative. No one except my two neighbours can see into my garden, not even partly so, and I am quite happy for that.
alleys would make thermal insulation worse. Also if you want good sound insulation, make walls thicker/heavier. US houses are often made of wood whereas in the UK brick or breeze blocks are used, which are much more robust.
It's the hollow wall cavity that's the problem for sound insulation, not the wood frame. Interior walls typically have 3.5 inches (just under 9 cm) of wood-framed hollow cavity with half an inch of drywall (a board made mostly of gypsum plaster) on either side. This trasmits sound pretty readily.
Exterior walls in newer construction are thicker, typically 5.5-7.5 inches (14-19 cm) and have the spaces between the boards filled with fiberglass insulation. The outside portion is plywood, which is then covered with stucco (a cement-based plaster), some kind of decorative paneling (wood, aluminum, or plastic are all common in various parts of the country), or brickwork. This is pretty good at keeping noise out, and you can make it better still by using thicker/heavier drywall on the interior or by using a different type of paneling that's designed to provide sound insulation.
As several folks have mentioned in other branches of the thread, the current standard is to build the dividing walls between units of multi-family buildings to exterior wall standards, and this usually works pretty well. I've visited friends living in newer apartment buildings and been surprised by how quiet they are.
The problem is that a lot of older buildings were built with thinner exterior walls with little or no insulation, more like interior walls than the modern standard for exterior walls. This is especially a problem in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a lot of the houses and apartment buildings are on the older side for zoning/regulatory reasons and also because the region has a mold climate that makes is easier to get away with thin, uninsulated exterior walls.
I think what you're seeing is the push for "missing middle" housing that's higher in density than traditional detached single-family houses but isn't as built up as an actual apartment building. A lot of stuff in the category was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th century, but is largely forbidden by zoning in suburban areas and a lot has gotten replaced by apartments in urban areas.
Full rowhouses are actually towards the higher end of "missing middle", I think. The category also includes clusters of 2-4 units on a single lot, with or without shared walls. I think this would also encompass your idea of lot-filling detached units with small public rights of way between them on the low-density end of the missing middle, since as you say it would be significantly denser and more walkable than a standard detached suburban housing pattern of fully detached houses with large setbacks from the property line and the space between them being usable only by the residents of the adjoining houses.
How much your idea is higher density than a suburban style detached single-family house depends on what your baseline is for the latter, though. The house I grew up in in Maryland (2k square feet, quarter acre lots, 20-30 feet between neighboring house), that's enormously different from a three-foot alley separating lot-filling houses. In places I've loved in South Bay suburbs, though, the side setbacks are typically only a few feet anyway and reducing them to an alley only increases density by about half as much as going to full rowhouses.
Having lived in a small townhouse for 15 years now, a first for both me and my wife, Erica's summary as the "low-density end of the missing middle" seems accurate.
In an urban context (we're in central Chicago) townhouses also seem to fill a "middle" type role in terms of family composition: the great majority of our immediate neighbors are couples and maybe three-fifths of those have 1 or 2 children. (Including us.) We know of a handful of local townhouse households with 3 children, none with 4 or more.
Where we live is outstanding for walkability and the presence of townhomes is locally viewed as a plus in that regard, by breaking up the massing of urban mid- and high-rise buildings. Townhome clusters allow more and wider sunlight to reach ground level which means more greenery, and attenuate the pedestrian-level wind tunnel effects that masses of taller structures often create. We get plenty of density without walking around in canyons.
As for noise bleed, our particular townhomes were built cheap in a rush in 1979-81 and are not great on that point. (Nor do we have basements and I think we miss that aspect more...) Our neighborhood has plenty more which were built better in the 1990s-2010s and are noticeably better on this; several times I've been a guest in a local townhome and only upon leaving noticed that there was a party being hosted right next door.
Edit: someone below mentioned thermal benefits of townhome construction and that is worth adding because it's been a pleasant surprise to both of us. We each grew up in detached houses and each previously was a homeowner of same. Even cheaply-built townhouses like ours are, it turns out, _sharply_ nicer in terms of staying cool in summer and retaining heat in winter. As a lifelong Midwesterner I can attest that winter winds have much less impact on indoor comfort within a townhouse, than in even a well-insulated detached house. My wife was for a decade a homeowner in Texas; took her a while here to adapt to the concept of A/C not being a 24/7 fact six months of the year....that's partly different climates but, we need to run it far less than do local friends in detached houses.
I imagine it’s easier to build, requiring less external walls and less isolation?
Annecdata:
I live in a house which has a near-zero (sub-inch) gap with neighbors on two sides. As you're expecting, very little sound travels through adjacent exterior walls.
Doors/windows become the limiting factor for sound isolation, and for various reasons you sometimes want them open, or to spend time outside.
For example, if someone is hosting a party, they've very likely to open doors/windows for ventilation. At which point, it sounds like there's a party going on just outside your door/window.
To follow up on Erica Rall's
>Although I suppose sub-inch clearance doesn't leave it very exposed to the elements, almost more like an enclosed structural void than an exterior wall.
could you comment on whether the gap was protected from the elements? Was the gap protected from rain?
The building to one side was built at the same time. That gap is mostly protected from elements; the roof for each is separate, but there's an additional piece of angled sheet metal running along the "seam" between the buildings, diverting any rain onto one roof or the other.
The building to the other side was built later. That gap is not directly protected, but the new building is several stories taller, and we're on its leeward side.
Many Thanks!
That sounds like a maintenance nightmare if any work needs to be done on the exterior surface of the wall. Scott's three-foot alley sounds moderately inconvenient if you need to paint or patch the exterior surface, but sub-inch would be impossible to work on unless you tear open the wall from the interior and build it back up from the outside in.
Although I suppose sub-inch clearance doesn't leave it very exposed to the elements, almost more like an enclosed structural void than an exterior wall.
This https://urbanomnibus.net/2016/05/how-many-row-houses-are-there-in-new-york-city/ says that "[t]he standard Manhattan lot is 20 feet wide." Even a very narrow 3-foot alley would be a substantial reduction in floor space.
Or, suppose you keep the 20 foot width. The standard n/s block in Manhattan is 264 feet. https://streeteasy.com/blog/how-many-nyc-blocks-are-in-one-mile/
That = 13 row houses per block, with 4 feet left over. Add 3-ft alleys between units, and there is space for only 11 (11×20 + 3x10 = 250)
Thanks, that's helpful.
The primary saving would be that it's a shared interior wall rather than two outers, reducing construction cost and improving thermal insulation from the outside. Make it a little thicker (or use appropriate materials) for sound isolation, and use the backdoor for walkability.
The biggest concern between separate units is the spread of fire. Thankfully, the same materials that block fire--concrete block, fire-rated gypsum board--are also decent at blocking sound. Mass is your bestie in both cases.
Is it really a single wall rather than two touching walls? That seems like it would make responsibility for structural repair what we in the law trade call, as a term of art, "a damn mess." Does one neighbor who thinks the wall needs fixing get to sue their neighbor if they disagree and refuse to contribute? Does the other neighbor get to sue to trespass or nuisance to prevent their wall being torn down (even if for purposes of reinforcement?)
My townhouse is owned with a "studs-in" contract. Anything beyond the studs (the brick facade, the roof, the pavement, and the shared wall with the next unit) is the property and responsibility of the HOA. I can mess with the drywall on my side of the shared wall, but If my neighbor or I had a concern about the actual structural parts of the shared wall we would have to flag it to the HOA and it would then be the HOA's responsibility to hire a contractor to deal with it however they see fit.
When I owned a townhouse (4 units sharing interior walls but owned and with separate entrances), the shared structure was the responsibility of the HOA and what dues paid for. And there were definitely pieces of the contract that provided for easements (I think? I'm not a lawyer) or guarantees that you couldn't block someone else's necessary work.
It's a single, shared wall typically, yes, all the units in a row are structurally and inseparably connected to their neighbors; for illustration, you could do a web image search for "rowhouse plan". While I'm not in the law trade, I'd imagine that yes, if there's disagreement over the need to repair said wall, then it would have to go to court in the extreme, and a court-appointed expert might have to weigh in. I don't have to tell you though that applicable laws and customs differ from country to country, or even within a country, so YMMV. There might be countries that allow you to settle such neighborly disputes the old-fashioned way[1][2].
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/
[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga
At the risk of asking a question, getting a great answer, then turning it into an excuse to gripe:
My problem with this is that everyone trying to rent/sell me a house has always said that the walls are thick enough to isolate sound, they've always been lying, and I've never had any way to double-check before signing the contract. Having the houses be separate is an unfakeable signal that they've put real work into this.
Is the saved construction cost actually significant? I thought basically all housing cost in expensive cities was land.
Very with you on the gripe as a fellow misophoniac.
I live in a condo in the bay area (so similar building codes, styles, etc) built in 2014. When I moved in the next-door wall-sharing neighbors had very loud dogs we could constantly hear barking when outside. Despite that, we never heard them (or anything) through the walls. I think builders are catching on that sound isolation is important, it's totally possible to do it right even with wood-framed buildings.
Re: double-checking - I turn my phone to max volume playing some sound and put it down and walk around during home tours - it lets you check the internal sound insulation, and have knocked on neighbors doors and done this experiment through walls as well to check on between-unit noice and indoor / outdoor noise (car noise through windows really bothers me). My general rule is that if I can't hear a cell phone's speakers on full blast, it's reasonably soundproof.
Construction tends to be penny-wise pound-foolish in my experience. Basic soundproofing (fill the wall cavity with insulation and use sound-resistant drywall) is dirt cheap on the scale of the project (maybe an extra $60-80 per 4-foot drywall panel) and makes a huge difference, but it typically isn't even on people's radar as an option. It is fairly expensive to redo an existing wall, since leaving it as-is is free, but for new construction or if your redoing the drywall anyway, it should probably be done or at least considered a lot more often than it actually is.
This is not just about soundproofing. Bathroom exhaust fans are another example: ones that are reasonable quiet cost $50-100. Ones that are extremely quiet cost $100-200. But the ones that sound like jet engines can cost $20 or less and those are the ones you see everywhere.
A rowhouse should have exterior walls between it and the next rowhouse over; that should be something verifiable you can ask/check. Exterior walls, as noted elsewhere in this thread, would vastly improve noise insulation to a non-issue in most cases.
Modern US construction trends seems to include a lot of "townhouse-style" construction which has a series of units with individual external entrances. This mimics a rowhouse in footprint/layout, but I would not be terribly surprised if the underlying bones of these new-build rowhouses are more akin to an apartment complex, with interior dividing walls rather than exterior walls between units.
I don't know about a new build but I live in a 1920s rowhome in Baltimore and I have 2-3 layers on brick between my neighbors. I live next to a family with 3 young children and have never heard any higher frequency noise like music or crying. There is a little bit of vibration transmission so if the kids run down their hall or jump off a bed I might hear it but only if my house was totally silent. I honestly get more sound transmission though my closed front windows from folks talking on their cellphones when they walk down the street.
Having lived in both the US and elsewhere*, American buildings having bad noise insulation is a perpetual headache I haven't had anywhere else. Like you say, it's not that expensive, but as it's hard to tell in advance before you move in it's still something contractors can easily cheap out on :/
(I remember a few years ago a friend of mine was considering getting a rationalist group house/small apartment building built, and she specifically said she'd want to oversee the construction herself because you only get things like good noise insulation when you're running things yourself, people building to rent/sell skimp on important details).
(*You've lived in Japan, but I have no idea how they'd compare on this - the stereotype is that they're into both quality construction and thin walls, which cut in opposite ways here)
Row houses may not be the answer for someone with misophonia. Hard to beat a single family home for someone with that specific issue.
That's the big problem. Because construction generally operates on very tight margins, shaving off even cents in cost per build makes a difference. And one way to do this is cheap out on insulation (this is, after all, why there are building codes in the first place: builders can and will use cheap, inferior materials if let get away with it).
>Is the saved construction cost actually significant? I thought basically all housing cost in expensive cities was land.
Well thats an exaggeration ofc, but even then, a few percent savings in both land and construction do add up. Rowhouses are generally built many at once by a single developer, for whom it matters a lot whether they can fit 11 or only 10 units. People in cities care more about usable living space than a large garden, and (depending on local laws and zoning) "the tiniest of alleys" might not even be legal.
Scott, if you're ever going to understand this kind of thing, you'll have to understand that the vast majority of people are less sensitive than you to things like noise and other distractions. People like rowhouses because they don't need soundproofing. A little noise from the neighbors is no big deal.
Loud neighbors is one of the most common complaints in cities in my experience. There’s also those funny popular videos of the upstairs neighbor doing strange things to make unique sounds.
Less sensitive perhaps, but I am under the impression that a lot, probably most people actually care about this a lot. It’s one of the actual main downsides of apartment dwelling, the pervasive and constant reminders that you are packed into 3 dimensions with a bunch of human animals. But people have no economic option so they simply tolerate it.
> should be more willing to donate to political campaigns
Is this not the epitome of zero-sum games. You donate $x to politician, someone else donates $x to opposed politician, influence cancels out.
Meanwhile, that $$ could have gone to someone who literally needs it to cover basic living, or go through a tough time.
Yes, BUT you still want your side to win, so you want to encourage them to donate.
This is the typical 'you put down your gun and I'll put down mine' problem; it would be great if both sides disarmed, but that doesn't mean that telling your side to disarm unilaterally is a winning strategy.
Also, keep in mind that the zero sum competition is not only between left vs. right, but also between special interests vs. the general public. Special interests are always going to donate a lot because they expect direct financial returns on that investment, so it's often helpful to encourage the general public to donate to counter this, even if you're encouraging people on both the left and the right to donate that way.
I think the argument is that this year democracy is more under threat than usual. A zero sum game can still suck to lose.
Zero sum believers always think it's special crisis time and you're scum for not joining them. I'm jaded and pretty damn near nihilistic about the ability to even guess the long-term effects of picking sides in any battle, so my sense of social morality goes straight to obvious, immediate and non-zero sum goods.
There's no relationship between a game being zero-sum and it not mattering which side wins.
If you genuinely believe that the two sides are equally bad and it never matters who wins, then yeah, you shouldn't expend any effort to influence the race.
But that belief has nothing to do with whether donations are zero-sum or not.
If you believed it matters a great deal who wins, then you should donate whether it's zero-sum or not.
(To add some perspective: basically all competitions are zero-sum, in the sense that no matter how hard each participant tries, only one will win. That doesn't mean it's foolish to try to win.)
Before it matters to you which side wins, you have the choice which battles to engage with. The world is full of them, so it's not like you can follow or participate in them all. And yes, I'd rather minimize my participation in competitive situations. It's no fun to be just pushing against people who are just as convinced they should push the other way. I'll do it if life brings it to my door, but I won't go out of my way to choose it.
I think this is a strong argument, and I defended something like it at https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/ . The counterargument is:
- Your actions aren't really perfectly correlated with your opponents'. If all EAs donated to politics, probably politicians who EAs liked would benefit on net.
- Another effect would be that politicians who actual real people like (as opposed to SuperPACs, special interests, etc) would benefit.
- Doing something through politics, if it works, is probably much cheaper than doing it the normal way. For example, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop one life-saving medication, but it might take only a few million dollars to get laws passed that improve research norms and lead to dozens of life-saving medications.
I think the argument against is strongest on the most explicitly partisan issues ("let's get Democrats elected instead of Republicans"), and weakest on others (let's pass the GAIN Act, something that almost no normal person opposes, and which is entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists)
Is it true that it's "entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists?" Here is an article from the Brookings Institution opposing the GAIN ACt:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-the-gain-ai-act-would-undermine-us-ai-preeminence/
(I'm not vouching for this myself, I don't personally know whether the GAIN Act is a good idea. I'm just saying that I don't think it's true that "almost no normal person opposes" it and that it's "entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists.")
>"let's pass the GAIN Act, something that almost no normal person opposes, and which is entirely fighting against NVIDIA's lobbyists"
NVIDIA makes up 8% of the S&P 500. Anyone with substantial index fund exposure had a direct financial state in NVIDIA's stock price.
More broadly, I think any political analysis of AI policy that doesn't take into account the fact that the value of NVIDIA stock is a core pillar of the American economy is is missing a gigantic piece of the puzzle.
>NVIDIA makes up 8% of the S&P 500
They didn't 5 years ago, and there's no reason they we need them to 5 years from now.
Just wanting to register that it is imho far from clear whether lifting chip controls is in fact a bad idea.
The answer to this depends entirely on whether one believes that near term (next 5-10 years) AI models will be of significant strategic importance. If one believes this is unlikely to be true, then the main consideration is purely economic and the normal economic arguments against trade restriction apply.
If one believes that AI models of the next 5-10 years (the lower limit of how long it will likely take for China to develop it's own comparable GPU tech) will be strategically relevant, then we should absolutely not be selling top of the line (or anywhere close to top of the line) GPUs, the thing that enable cutting edge AI models, to the Chinese, just like we wouldn't sell them any other strategically relevant technology like cutting edge fighter planes, and the economic arguments against free trade take a second place to the strategic considerations.
If we are serious about stopping China then it's not just chips we shouldn't be trading, it's everything. Why does North Korea get comprehensive sanctions but China doesn't?
Because China makes a lot of things we need, and a lot of things are easily subtitutable. It only makes sense to embargo strategic technologies that have an impassable bottleneck like high end chips.
I agree it’s far from clear. One could argue that lifting chip controls might actually preserve China’s reliance on U.S. hardware and manufacturing, a strategic advantage in the long run. That dependence gives the U.S. leverage and preserves the option to reimpose restrictions later if needed. The alternative is cutting China off now, that may slow them in the near term but also incentivizes them to rapidly develop domestic replacement capabilities. The key question is: how long does that slowdown really last?
Reverse the scenario: If every frontier AI model in the U.S. depended on GPUs designed and manufactured in China, would Beijing choose export controls to hurt us immediately or would it prefer to maintain our reliance and keep that leverage intact?
On the contrary, I think it's very clear that this is bad. The argument you pose is very weak -- one *could* argue this, but it's countered by the empirical fact that this "dependence" has never worked in the history of modern China, and I'll take historical analogs over armchair theorizing. China will simply take the chips and reverse engineer them the way they have for countless other technologies. The think tanks and administrators and lobbyists who continue to advance this theory are short term stock price motivated and shouldn't be trusted as neutral
(not trolling, trying to understand your position) is there any benefit to the US exporting anything to China? I know my original argument did not mention how export bans hurt the US but maybe you wouldn't even agree with that. I am not merely considering stock prices! I also do not agree advanced node chips can be cloned by simply reverse engineering something off the shelf(boat?) but I'm less interested in that.
Appreciate the question.
Ya of course, exports are great when we can make things for cheap and sell them for a profit elsewhere, because we (as a nation) profit off that. Export bans definitely hurt the US from an economics perspective. But economics are just one of many questions to consider in IR.
The US could make a lot of money selling its war planes to China. Hell, we could sell nukes to China. But we do not do this, because it's intuitively risky to sell weapons to a nation that may use them against us. If you think that chips are a national security concern, selling them to China is equivalent to selling them other kinds of weapons. The cost to the US in projected power in the future is more than any economic benefit we may get today. I curiously don't see anyone arguing that we should sell China planes to 'incur dependence'.
I think other people point out correctly that the 'dependence' argument makes a big assumption: that the Chinese will stop their internal development if they have access to chips from elsewhere. It's a silly assumption, because China correctly thinks of chip production as part of their natsec. China did not stop developing internal versions of things like phones and routers and so on when they had easy access to US versions. Instead, they stole the IP, scaled it, and built their own internal industries
China is a command economy. If they decide that the chips are very important, nothing stops them from importing all the chips they can *and* developing their own.
> If they decide that the chips are very important, nothing stops them from importing all the chips they can and developing their own.
Most of the Chinese fabs are older generation — 40nm and 65nm — geared to making cheap chips for consumer goods. While the Big 5 SOE banks in China are directing investment toward upgrading to 7nm, 7nm is becoming old-hat for the current generation of GPUs being released as we speak. Taiwan produces 90% of the leading generation chips.
I'm sure Chairman Xi would like to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, but that undertaking carries a huge risk — especially after seeing how well UKR's cheap drone technology has halted the onslaught of expensive RU weapon systems. And even when it comes to traditional weapon systems, China's didn't do very well in recent dustups in Iran and Pakistan. China mostly copied (stole) US weapon systems wholesale, but, according to one military analyst, China forgot to keep testing and upgrading its existing systems as the US does.
> China is a command economy.
LoL! China is only a command economy in that the CPC thinks it's directing things, but on the ground, China is the capitalist wild west. China did not become rich because it is a command economy. China became rich because Deng Xiaoping mostly scrapped the command economy, and let the Chinese become the natural entrepreneurs they are (by cultural inclination).
China does not:
1. Set comprehensive production quotas (except for defense)
2. Assign inputs firm-by-firm across the whole economy (but the big 5 banks direct capital flow to enterprises that the CPC wants to encourage)
3. Fix prices for most goods. Energy and telecom pricing are exceptions, and sometime they intervene when there's a crisis that needs to be addressed (for instance, the put a temporary cap on coal prices).
4. replace markets with government as the primary allocation mechanism. Even the big 5 banks follow the markets. They are supposed to make a profit.
There is no Gosplan-style material balance system. That's not to say that there isn't an incestuous relationship between business and the CPC hierarchy. But everyone is interested in making money. Occasionally, some business leader steps over the line and become an involuntary organ donor.
At the street level, there are almost no regulations, except do not dis the party, and if your criminality gets too noticeable, well, there are plenty of people who are waiting for organ transplants. There's no OSHA, no employment guarantees, and very little social safety net.
Good luck to everyone who has to return to work, I'm half-back myself and, as you can see, trying to divert myself into a productive frame of mind.
Re: Ozy's link, I note one of the issues is USAID. I know we've talked about this on here before, but coincidentally one of the posts on Jeff Maurer's Substack included a reference to a former employer of his:
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/commemorating-the-time-my-boss-called
"The coda to this story is that it turns out the guy had been running a 20-year scam to defraud USAID. In 2014, he plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud, paid a $4.5 million fine, and was sentenced to house arrest. I sometimes wonder if I was involved in the fraud, though if I was, I certainly put the “unwitting” in “unwitting accomplice”."
https://www.govexec.com/management/2014/12/contractor-ceo-pleads-guilty-20-year-fraud-usaid/101256/
Now, the linked account does not specify how much this guy creamed off the top, but this is, I think, a good counterweight to the "millions will die!" messaging.
Will millions die? Perhaps, and I'm not impugning any sincerity of anyone pushing this angle. But it's also true that USAID was taken advantage of, and not every cent was going to "feed the starving". So maybe Democrats will indeed increase funding to foreign aid, but that does not mean uncritical acceptance on our part that every payment is for saving lives. Sometimes people lie and steal from what should be good works.
This reminds me of a pithy observation I saw on Twitter, of all places: "A liberal will feed 100 people in fear that one will starving. A conservative will refuse to feed 100 starving people in fear that one is undeserving."
Obviously, we should seek to reduce waste, fraud, etc. But all human endeavors are imperfect, and framing "there is some fraud" as a "counterpoint" to "millions will die" is ultimately convincing only if one holds a particular set of values.
Millions will die, even if there were issues with the system: https://ourworldindata.org/us-foreign-aid-saved-millions
Imagine how good the program would have been if corruption / inefficiencies would have been tackled instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
I think the fact that we've reduced the other side to "I heard a story from 2014 indicating that USAID wasn't completely perfect in every way and not every single sent went to amazing causes that saved millions of lives" is pretty good.
Imagine if anyone thought this way about private companies. "Sure, Warren Buffett gets a return of 100x, but I heard one of his employees wasted some money on a necklace for his mistress once before getting caught and fired, so I refuse to invest with him, I'll put the money in bonds instead."
I think there's enough of a values difference here that you might be missing the argument completely. It's more like "The bad it might be doing [funding Liberal/Democrat/anti-Republican orgs and causes] is so terrible that that it's worth cutting the entire agency to avoid the risk whether or not it does any good [stopping AIDS in Africa or whatever]."
(I agree pointing out _actual_ waste and fraud is actually counterproductive, and one should instead point to even paltry and high-efficiency spending on programs you dislike.)
I think there's a middle ground between "millions will die, elect Democrats so they can shovel money into this" and "it's all transgender operas, turn off the spigot".
That the guy was able to get away with padding the invoices for *twenty years* shows that you can't be afraid to go in and touch The Sacred USAID Grant. DOGE's problem was they went in with a chainsaw, and the programmes that genuinely do good were being used as a figleaf.
There are inefficiencies and waste even when the funding is correctly applied. There are opportunities for fraud and creaming off the top. It may well be that the most effective use is not so much "elect Democrats to throw money into the bottomless pit" but "trim USAID way back to the six/ten/ninety genuinely efficient, genuinely feeding the hungry and healing the sick programmes, bin the rest and let the transgender opera houses look for funding off rich donors like other arts organisations".
DOGE's problem is that they never actually had any authority to touch the things actually driving the deficit. Vivek wanted to focus on reforming the system, but Elon was content to just get headlines without improving things.
Most of the government’s money goes to Social Security, Medicare and the military. I have always wondered why Elon talked up DOGE so much when he certainly knew that it was just tinkering at the margins of the budget.
As I said, headlines. The general public doesn't know where the budget actually goes to, nor have they cared to know for many years. It's always popular to think you can have more government services and less taxes by slashing foreign aid (Bryan Caplan discussed that in "The Myth of the Rational Voter" nearly 2 decades ago).
Also, I think the DOGE people mostly didn't understand the programs they were trying to cut/make more efficient. There is a ton of waste and some fraud in government programs/spending, but mostly it is not simple stuff that makes a good story like "the Democrats are funneling cash to friendly NGOs" but rather "ten layers of accumulated rules/laws intended to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse now make it take twenty FTE hours to make a small purchase." And the main drivers of the deficit are not at all on the table for cutting--they are huge *because* they have vast constituencies who will turn out at the polling place if their goodies get cut.
Nothing you're saying really changes my mind.
Suppose that USAID is 95% incredible lifesaving work and 5% waste (my argument doesn't really change if it's 80-20, 99-1, or some other similar ratio).
If you can cut the 5% waste easily and redirect it into more incredible lifesaving work (or refund it to tax payers), then great, obviously do that.
If your only option is to destroy the whole program in order to get at that 5%, or to attack it so strongly that you reduce the efficacy of the lifesaving parts by 50%, and your end result is that you've killed a million people to save some seven-digit amount of money, I claim that this is bad.
I don't know which one you're asserting here. I'd like to believe you're asserting that you know some great way to trim the 5% waste with no cost, but then I don't know why you're talking about how you've won some great victory over the people who think USAID accomplishes incredible life-saving work.
There are many great people who have done lots of great work to get USAID fraud rates as low as they are. But I've never seen anyone celebrate these people, or try to get them more funding, propose any specific plan to enhance their efficacy, or even acknowledge their existence - only celebrate the people who try to destroy the entire program to "get at the fraud", then talk about how much they've "owned" the people who like and support the program as a whole.
I'm seeing the main problem here is we don't know if it's 99% goodness or 99% waste. Even if your experience and expertise in human endeavors and vulnerability to fraud sings to you that it's about 66% good, the fact that we don't know just bugs the hell out of me, and I think a lot of conservatives.
I don't think many of USAID's opponents were all that upset that USAID existed or did good. It's the fact that so many on the left seem so obstinately naive that a lack of auditing wouldn't promote fraud. Fer chrissake, you're a psychologist, you've made it your biz to descend into the blackest of hearts, and there in that darkness you found, what? Puppies and vaccinations and good cheer?
I'm confused what you mean - my impression is that USAID is audited extremely strictly, much more than most other government programs, and we can pretty carefully bound the amount of waste involved.
I think a lot of people, maybe including Deiseach, mistakenly believe the conflict is about whether USAID should be audited, with its defenders saying it shouldn't because nobody could ever lie. This is totally wrong. It currently has three layers of audits - first by an internal Inspector General, second by the overall Government Accountability Office, and third as mandatory audits for specific organizations involved. This is strict enough that I've heard some charities prefer to get money from other funders because complying with all of USAID's levels of auditing is too annoying.
If someone has some specific complaint about this system, I think it's fine to discuss other systems, and my impression is that every administration slightly tweaks this to see if they can get the balance right, and nobody objects to this.
But as far as I know, the existing round of anti-USAID sentiment has no particular changes in mind. They just want to spread a fake "it's not audited" story as an excuse to get rid of it completely, and would reject any specific audit idea because it doesn't help them do it.
Do you have some specific complaint about its auditing or reason to think I'm wrong about this?
I think the honest answer is that the money is just a pretext, but when you ask what it's a pretext for you have a variety of opinions. So let me give you my take and what I perceive to be Trump's. My guess is that Musk is somewhere in between, but he's often hard to read.
I am an ardent social conservative who likes PEPFAR. My issue with USAID's more socially progressive programs isn't that they are too expensive, but rather that they are wicked and harmful in themselves. If I had a choice between spending the money with no effect and getting the effect for free, I'd choose the former in a heartbeat. But cutting these things from above is quite difficult when you have an institutional culture that considers them a legitimate part of its mission and looks at your interference as a kind of malicious sabotage.
If you want to understand my perspective, it's that progressives in USAID are using poor Africans as human shields. If, in wartime, a Gaza hospital is 95% doctors and patients and 5% guerilla activity, are the Israelis justified in bombing it? There's not really a satisfying answer to that question. Act utilitarianism may give a clear "no," but I am not a utilitarian and I find it uncompelling.
I think that Trump's reasons are simpler. He's looking to axe any part of the federal bureaucracy inclined to undermine him. And, after his first term, it's difficult for me to argue with that. If I were King of America, I would poach the most conservative quintile of people from Samaritan's Purse and try to rebuild USAID's culture around them. But President Trump is not like that, and it wouldn't work for a constitutional leader with a four-year term anyway.
This is kind of aside of Deiseach's point, but as far as I'm concerned the program should be destroyed in its entirety because the federal government should not be involved in doing anything like it. If you like PEPFAR, fund it yourself with your own money, or monies voluntarily donated, not tax money. The numbers of millions saved is totally irrelevant.
You can also easily imagine a person who thinks that no program which enables funds to be diverted to subverting/destroying the culture of our own country (e.g. with transsexual operas) should be permitted to operate, no matter how many people it also saves in other nations – otherwise the distant beneficiaries just become a fig leaf for deliberately collapsing the American nation, which nobody is allowed to do anything about. Even to a consequentialist, this argument must have some heft since otherwise you simply set yourself up for your own fall; if you precommit to never retaliating under a specified set of circumstances (viz., the enemy pays the wergild in saved Africans), you've provided your enemies with a blueprint for how to destroy you.
It never funded any transsexual operas! Not a single one! That was a lie!
I feel that this amply proves my point that it is perfectly possible for USAID not to fund transsexual operas :-D
How many transsexuals operas has USAID funded, and how does that compare to the total number of transsexual operas performed in the world? Even if transsexuals operas really would lead to the collapse of the American nation, USAID funded so few that its impact on the collapse would be infinitesimal.
That's the same argument as "millions of lives", you're just on the other side of the ratio marker. The whole point is that USAID is necessarily a legitimate target as long as the ratio of operas over lives is greater than nil.
I'm going to play devil's advocate. A few weeks ago, in the open thread, I linked to https://www.propublica.org/article/usaid-cholera-deaths-trump-humanitarian-aid-cuts-south-sudan .
Why is the US supporting these giant permanent refugee camps in no-man's land in Africa? The camp is flooding and having cholera epidemics because that's what happens there ... they put the camp there because nobody could live there before. The war they are fleeing ended years ago. The government wants the camp to close.
Why is US policy to keep open "zombie" refugee camps for decades, factories for human suffering? And then to provide just enough support to keep people alive and needy, but not enough for them to become able to provide for themselves?
As it is constructed, USAID isn't "saving lives", it is building a system where miserable people are dependent on it, while remaining miserable.
The problem isn't "fraud" and "waste" (buzzwords Elon Musk uses when he wants to lie to the public), the problem is what USAID is affirmatively doing.
"Why is US policy to keep open "zombie" refugee camps for decades, factories for human suffering? And then to provide just enough support to keep people alive and needy, but not enough for them to become able to provide for themselves?"
I mean... this is literally what "Palestine" is. A gigantic permanentized refugee camp that should obviously, *obviously* have been dispersed decades ago, which would have led to orders of magnitude less suffering. There's something in the left-wing mentality which is irredentist about obviously lost territorial claims that causes them to endorse these camps.
A-fucking-men
The UN treating them differently than the Volksdeutsch of eastern Europe does seem to have led to worse outcomes.
"But I've never seen anyone celebrate these people, or try to get them more funding, propose any specific plan to enhance their efficacy, or even acknowledge their existence"
Then we should have that, but "it is all shining unblemished saving millions" is as bad on one side as "it's all fraud and scamming and waste" is on the other.
"it is all shining unblemished saving millions"
Who is saying that?
I think you're doing some kind of weird false moderation thing, where if I say it's anything short of an evil disaster, you accuse me of saying it's absolutely perfect.
We both agree that it has good and bad aspects, but it matters a lot whether it's 99-1 or 1-99. I think it's much closer to the former. I can't tell what you think.
Any “good” system is going to be taken advantage of (nothing is perfect).
Pointing out anecdotal examples of this doesn’t invalidate the “good” system.
One also needs to know how common are (and the extent of) the abuses.
It’s a common tactic to list a couple of instances of abuse and let people assume they are common. It’s misleading (and sometimes intentionally so).
(One instance of this was Regan’s “welfare queen” stuff used to criticize welfare programs as a whole.)
I assert that this is an example of false equivalency; noone is arguing that there wasn't waste or criticism at USAID. A few million qualies being burned to the ground is not in the same ballpark.
Things can be done in a good or a bad way. You can fix fraud waste and abuse at USAID. I assert that EVEN if you think that this problem is HUGE, the process was terribly done, and killed at least a few 100k. If that isn't bad, what is?
I don’t think saying “we’ve reduced the other side to this” is true.
There are many well-informed systemic criticisms of USAID’s work and the sector more broadly. The fact that a commenter on your blog focuses on some old bad apple type story is not representative of the criticism overall.
Imagine Warren Buffet’s returns are actually a Ponzi scheme, but you defend him because someone chose to focus on his mistress’ necklace instead
But I don't think those well-informed systemic criticisms of USAID called for its destructive, unnecessary lives-costing burning to the ground. Even if you think some criticism is well-founded and justified as I'm sure we all believe, there are good and bad ways of dealing with the criticism. But I don't see those points being made in relation to its demise; noone seems to make that argument with numbers to argue this was done correctly, or even in a vaguely acceptable way. Instead it's like we see here - we have an example of a bad apple, and that justifies child mortality rates below 5 years old climbing again.
I agree with all of what you’re saying, and I don’t think I implied otherwise. I think the way they went about this is cruel, heartless, and ignorant.
Imagine it's not Warren Buffet but Bernie Madoff, and the response to "is this guy legit, something seems off" is "Anti-Semitism!" Yes, general answer to all allegations against Jewish people, still doesn't say if the scheme is legit or not.
I think that's happening with USAID: "millions will die unless you restore it back the way it was exactly, no we don't admit any chance of fraud at all, ignore that there were large cases of swindling" (if the guy paid a fine of 4 million, you can be sure the amount he creamed off was much more than that. That's millions that did *not* go to saving the sick, homeless, displaced, etc.)
Yes, I think it matters a lot whether you're Warren Buffett with one corrupt employee (ie you actually do great work most of the time, even though there are some failures) or Bernie Madoff (you have no real accomplishments and are a total scam). As far as I can tell, you're not actually asserting at all that USAID is the latter, just sort of darkly hinting in that direction, so I don't know where you're going with this.
It remains to be seen if USAID as a concept* is Buffett or Madoff, never mind execution. Right now I think, like all government projects, it got bloated over the years so nobody is quite sure what they're doing, except that they have a pet project and want money for it and "millions will die if you don't fund us!"
I am very resistant to efforts at emotional manipulation so I am probably reacting too sensitively, but the relentless "millions will die (and it is all your fault if you don't sign on here)" messaging makes me want to run in the opposite direction. A little more "yes, in the past there was fraud, there were inefficiencies, we're addressing this" would go a long way to convince me rather than yet more "but millions! die! millions!" tear-jerking. Not to mention "and the solution is to elect Democrats! because they will pay up, no questions asked!"
I'd be for electing Democrats who will seriously and carefully go through the entire behemoth and see what is really going on, not so much for electing Democrats who will just sign blank cheques. But I don't have a vote in American elections, so all my opinions are not worth dust.
*It originated as a soft-power campaign to counter Communist PR gains by works of charity, helping the poor, sick and hungry was not the intention and they could all die in a fire *except* that if it made the USA look good and convinced the local El Generalissimo Strongman to make noises about how much he loved Mom, Apple Pie, and the American Way rather than singing a rousing chorus of the Internationale, that was job accomplished.
Don't you live in Ireland? Whether Democrats or Republicans are elected in the US wouldn't seem to be your business.
Noting up front that I have not actually sought out or read any studies, audits, and reviews: aren't there are a lot of studies, audits, and reviews that say that USAID is actually significantly more like Buffet in this setting? Everything I've ever heard from the pro AID side, including from our dear host, is about statistics. And everything I've ever heard from the anti AID side is about anecdotes -- anecdotes that, I might add, are specifically geared towards being as emotionally manipulative as possible (no one is actually immune to efforts at emotional manipulation, sorry)
I worked for a USAID contractor for years, until I was too jaded to continue in the industry. A lot of money they allocate is, in my opinion, completely wasted, but not on outright fraud like here. Rather, a lot of the work happening in international development is ineffective at achieving its goals.
This fact can co-exist with the fact that some USAID programs in the health sector have saved perhaps millions of lives, and that gutting them will lead to the death of many many people.
So I don't think this story is a logical counterweight to the "millions will die" messaging, except insofar as it is a good reminder that just USAID has done some significant good, they were also an institution with massive problems.
How many millions will die, would they have died anyway, what programmes save millions, what programmes don't?
There are questions to be asked, but right now it's a simple, black-and-white, "bad guys this side, good guys that side, you wanna be on the good guys side don't you? vote for more money and don't ask inconvenient questions!"
I’d be interested in, not millions saved - but how many millions are being born, that wouldn’t have otherwise. Surely that must be part of the calculus if a whole continent will always be suffering.
It's that because they did, in fact, try to destroy the entire program! If they were trying to propose some other policy, maybe we wouldn't have opposed it!
A: "I'm going to murder all the rich people"
B: "Well, I'm against that."
A: "Oh, so you're saying that rich people are totally off limits and never do anything wrong and we must submit to total oligarchy?"
B: "What?"
A: "How come you're so black-and-white opposed to my proposal instead of admitting that rich people have some problems?"
B: "Because the proposal at hand, which you are very close to successfully enacting, is murdering the rich people! If you proposed just taxing them a little more, then I would have some other, more appropriately subtle, response to that!"
>It's that because they did, in fact, try to destroy the entire program!
They didn't though. PEPFAR is still fully funded, and the 2025 federal budget spent $26.9 billion on "International development and humanitarian assistance". In 2024 we spent $48.8 billion on that, so it's a reduction of 45% from last year. For specific categories of aid, we cut Global Health Programs by 33.6%, HIV programs by 13.5%, Disaster Assistance by 68%, and Refugee Assistance by 49%.
We're spending a bit less on it than we did in 2017, when $28.2 billion was spent. 45% is a large cut, but it's not destroying all foreign aid, or even a majority of foreign aid.
https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
A faction within DOGE tried to destroy the entire program, many people protested, and the administration backed off.
The fact that, after a lot of people worked very hard, the program was not entirely destroyed, does not disprove my claim that they tried to destroy the program.
I'm not sure if that's how it happened? As I recall, Trump froze all USAID activity via executive order in January and then sent in DOGE to make cuts. People (including a lot of Republicans) protested about life saving programs like PEPFAR getting their funds frozen, so Marco Rubio gave PEPFAR a waiver from the freeze. Then in May the White House send a request to Congress to officially cut $9.4 billion in funds that they had frozen, which included some PEPFAR funds. It's actually unclear how much PEPFAR funding they wanted rescinded in this request, they asked for $400 million to be cut from "global health programs" which include "activities related to controlling HIV/AID". However, the request also specifies that "This proposal would eliminate only those programs that neither provide life-saving treatment nor support American interests" with the goal of "eliminating wasteful foreign assistance programs" in order to "restore focus on health and life spending." (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Proposed-Rescissions-of-Budgetary-Resources.pdf)
Congress approved $9 billion in cuts to the frozen funds, but chose to protect PEPFAR funding among other programs.
Later, the White House did a "pocket rescission" of $4.9 billion in funds that had originally been budgeted for development assistance, peacekeeping operations, and donations to international organizations.
It seems like the official line from the beginning was wanting to cut waste and keep life saving programs. Then they cut $13.9 billion that had already been budgeted for FY2025, but specifically spared PEPFAR and some other programs. Then the White House in their FY2026 budget proposal to Congress cut foreign assistance funding by 41%.
These are big cuts, but at all times the official line has been that the goal is to cut waste while preserving programs that save lives. I don't see any attempt to destroy PEPFAR, or to get rid of all foreign aid. You can certainly make a strong argument that the cuts go too far, but I don't see any attempt to "destroy the entire program", just (successful) attempts to make very large cuts.
Yeah, the chainsaw approach was the wrong one. But I do think the entire thing needed to be looked at, and maybe even re-evaluated as to what its purpose is *today*, what are its primary aims, is it going to be vaccine campaigns and food aid or spreading out into cultural landscape of 'supporting LGBT+++ people by a bursary for this local queer performance artist who smears xemself in cow blood and rolls around on top of a rock in the middle of a field'.
There have been several charity scandals in Ireland, and a *lot* of the defence such scammers engage in is precisely this "I am doing good! tens/hundreds/thousands rely on this aid! If you query me and my organisation, they will suffer/die!"
https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2024/0222/1433824-console-inside-story/
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/directors-of-scandal-hit-bothar-insist-charity-has-turned-a-corner-1547532.html
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20408499.html
So I am inclined to be neutral, at best, on "just keep throwing money into this black hole and don't ask any questions, questions mean the puppy dies".
"Yeah, the chainsaw approach was the wrong one. But I do think the entire thing needed to be looked at, and maybe even re-evaluated as to what its purpose is..."
Oye.
What people are criticizing is the "chainsaw approach".
You are ignoring that discussion and changing the subject.
You keep implying that being against the "chainsaw approach" means people are also against things being "looked at". You are strawmanning.
*Who* is arguing that things *don't* "need to be looked at"?
How are we supposed to defend the program against the chainsaws if not by pointing out the fact that it actually saves many lives and is mostly not waste?
Is our crux here the exact amount of waste going on, or something else? If you had proof that 95% of the program was lifesaving causes exactly as good as I think, and 5% was waste, would you agree my and Ozy's stance towards it is correct (obviously getting it down to zero waste is best of all, but nothing has zero waste and we don't complain this much about most other things)
What you said here shouldn't need to be said.
Talking about anecdotal examples of waste *without* characterizing the frequency/extent is a basically dishonest argument.
Long shot, but does anyone know anyone who knows a lot about firing squads and/or Muskets?
I assume you already found the firing squad related story contained in this podcast on your own, but on the off chance you haven't, hope this is useful: https://pca.st/episode/d527b540-6259-0134-787d-4ffec63d9550
About the 30 minute mark
I know a medium amount about muskets, and could put you in touch with some enthusiasts who know a lot. No leads on firing squads though.
I don't, but this is the kind of question that makes me wish I did!
I'm reminded of being sent to the big-box store by my wife for:
- Contractor garbage bags
- Rope
- Lime (the rock, not the fruit)
Gardening, but when Best Beloved is a dinner theatre mystery actor, it makes a man think...
I've been a Wikipedia editor for quite a while, and in recent years I've wondered whether it can stay relevant with all the AI chatbots and search tools. As an aside, I believe Wikipedia could benefit a lot from AI as there's a huge and growing backlog of menial tasks that most editors don't want to do. However, the community's governance structure and core principles make it difficult to introduce such hybrid approaches (for example, the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't use Nvidia GPUs as a matter of policy: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/AMD_GPU#Do_we_have_Nvidia_GPUs)
What I'm curious about is: what's your current go-to information source? Google search AI snippets, a generic chatbot, Perplexity, Grokipedia, Wikipedia, something else? And does your preferred source reference Wikipedia explicitly in its outputs?
Kagi search (better than Google/2025, not as good as Google/2015), and Wikipedia but always read the talk page on anything that might be controversial. Both used to find links to someplace with good information, not as primary sources.
I still use Wikipedia, but a recent Open Thread featured someone comparing Grokipedia's article on Gamergate with the Wikipedia one, which really illuminated Wikipedia's horrendous bias (something which I always knew was there, but as usual one gets habituated to atrocities). The Grok article wasn't even unbiased itself, it was just sufficiently less bad to hold up a mirror.
This was probably Open Thread 406.
It was probably me; but to play devil's advocate, Gamergate was an outlier, something that the woke onlike left deeply cared about. An analogical topic in Grokipedia would be something that Elon Musk deeply cares about.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix-x-after-polls-show-high-support-for-ukraines-zelenskyy -- Elon Musk is always ready to "fix Grok" when its standard output happens to disagree with him, which is quite often.
You're right; now that I think about it I believe i recall your userpic being connected to the matter. And certainly it's true that Gamergate is notably off-center in terms of the likelihood of being biased, but Wikipedia's bias is exactly that any topic the woke left care about gets shit up with an unbelievable degree of misinformation and flat out lies, so the concern obviously is that salient parts of apparently innocent articles are similarly, but less noticeably, undermined by the same people. I think it was Trace who did a similar reading of the article on Mao (maybe you were the one who linked that in the earlier thread even?), which is preposterously distorted as well.
(Moreover, you may note that I started out observing that Wikipedia remains my go-to source, so to some extent I am also taking the devil's part here. I'm just increasingly uncomfortable with it.)
My understanding is the Twitter's Community Notes still frequently correct Musk, so we might expect Grok to continue disagreeing with him.
Depends a lot on what I'm looking for.
If I'm looking for something I somewhat remember I'll probably query ChatGPT about it asking for sources. If I want more subjective stuff I'll lean on a combination of ChatGPT and Reddit searched through Google, the couple times this year I've actually delved deep on some issue it involved year by year search through Google and looking at a whole lot of newspaper articles.
I don't think much of it references Wikipedia, I myself would search in Wikipedia if the subject matter is hard sciences stuff or cut and dry historical data.
I find that a LLM in research mode (where it has access to source material) can usually produce a better written summary than the Wikipedia page.
What I currently use: Wikipedia, often. I also ask LLMs questions, though I’m very aware of the need to do a cross-check that the answer is right.
> What I'm curious about is: what's your current go-to information source?
Wikipedia if it's encyclopedic enough to be there. Specialized sites if available (ex. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is amazing). ChatGPT or Gemini for explanatory questions and "glitchy professor on demand".
Google search ignoring the AI snippets. But Google itself isn't the information source, the information source is whichever of the links it comes up with that look most promising, wherever they happen to be.
Exactly.
Here. Second is Google Search but its usefulness has fallen off a rock.
Wikipedia is by far my favorite source for lookup questions. Google AI snippets replace it perhaps in a third of the cases, and it often references Wikipedia. For more complex questions where Wikipedia will not help directly, I use Gemini. It gives sources, but often it's directly research papers or other sources. I also still use classic Google Search frequently to search for other sources (e.g. news websites for typical news topics, personal webpages for personal information etc).
Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.
I use a mix of most of those (had to google Grokipedia, though, so I'm probably not really on the cutting-edge). It really depends on what I'm looking for.
Also, I always imagine Wikipedia to have an important but difficult place now - LLM often do reference it on informational topics, which means potentially *increased* reach, but also less direct interaction (and feedback/contribution)...
Wikipedia is my preferred source in general, though if it's something with a dedicated wiki, I'll go with that. And if there's two dedicated wikis, not the fandom one.
I use ChatGPT if it's something that I can't really search for and my only other option is asking people. Or if it's something that's hard to google but easy to check once I have a result.
I tend to favor AI for programming since it's usually easier to just check what it gives me than figure it out from documentation or stack overflow. I think Claude gives better results, but I'm not paying for it, and I like Anthropic better than OpenAI, so I stick to ChatGPT when I can.
Google search AI snippets are maddening. If I have something you can search for, I type it into Google, and it has an AI answer. If I need an AI, I ask ChatGPT, and it does an internet search. I figured out how to get ublock origin to block AI search results, but I miss when Google would show the specific part of the result that answers the question with some context. That was actually useful.
New aesthetics should definitely include toucans
Too late for the original request before it was edited out, so here's some toucans flying pints of Guinness into San Francisco:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/16/st-patricks-day-story-behind-guinness-toucan/429685002/
Obviously. I don't see how it could not.
>Seems crazy ambitious, but that’s what people said about Progress Studies, and that one worked
What are some outstanding accomplishments of that?
They have great conferences, books, organizations, research, etc, but I'll admit this is inputs rather than outputs. I discussed some of this further at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference .
In terms of output, I think some of the good parts of the Trump administration's technology, land use, and metascience agenda (yes, there are some, though usually not the headline items everyone hears about) is downstream of Progress Studies in particular, though it's hard to tell for sure how much credit they get. If I wanted to trace the connections more thoroughly, I would start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Progress .
It sparked wide discussions, I have heard about the concept from several sides and it was discussed in major newspapers. Wikipedia lists half a dozen scientific publications in the last 2 years, and I would guess that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is even a research institute dedicated to the topic. All that within ~6 years.
This is an outstanding accomplishment for a news article.
Sounds identical to "we'll pay you in exposure." AKA it didn't actually bring any measurable benefits to anyone except those making money off the grants. AKA the NGO-government complex. More money funneled into useless studies and "institutes".
That doesn't mean it actually did anything useful for society as a whole.
What makes you think that it is useless?
I am totally agnostic to that point, I have never looked into it and don't have evidence in either direction. But you claim that it's useless, so you are not agnostic. Is this based on evidence, or on general priors that research is useless?
Not all research is useless. But when the claimed output is "papers and research institutes" instead of something actually operationally significant... That's a flag that lots of money got spread around to NGOs and PhDs but nothing useful to humanity occurred otherwise. That's been my consistent experience with such phrasings my entire life, magnified tremendously by having been one of those PhDs who produced papers that no one ever read.
>an outstanding accomplishment for a news article
Sure, but my impression is that Scott meant that we got actual "Progress Studies" that worked, not just a widely-discussed idea thereof.
Hm, I can just say that my impression was different, and I related Scott's comment to the wide reception of their concept.
And for a new aesthetics, "it works" is not a goal, unless we mean that many people adopt it. So, the main goal is wide reception.
Well, the idea that contemporary aesthetics sucks has plenty wide reception already. Developing a viable coherent non-sucky alternative would take plenty of work, on the other hand.
Developing an alternative is something that happens one design at a time. Nobody is going to go off and successfully invent a new aesthetic for everything on their own, but each new sketch is potentially a step in the right direction.
We need a viable alternative. A way to make buildings as beautiful as they were in the 1860s without directly aping the 1860s. I would like to see ornamentation, but using geometric or organically-inspired forms rather than cherubs and gargoyles.
I keep thinking about the exceptionally poor land use near many rail stations in Atlanta, where I live and how the land surrounding near every station should be dense commercial and residential apartments. There's a ton of very busy roads surrounding many rail stations and these roads reduce a station's utility immensely by making it very hard to use the land around them productively for pedestrians, and very hard to use the areas unless you are a car.
As a car, I think we should transport cars on the rail so that I can go to the rail and then take the rail into town in and then drive around town. Also, dear Santa, please pave the earth.
On a more serious note, it occured to me that roadways, unlike private buildings, do not pay a property tax of sort, so the land doesn't really get reallocated toward more productive uses, in the way a defunct building might be torn down and reallocated by market forces.
If we privatized the roads and made them all pay-to-use, then they could pay property tax!
Supposedly the way the shinkansen lines are financed in Japan is that the operator is allowed to own and develop all land in a certain radius of each station (purely speculatively based on how Japan usually works, I imagine what they do is grossly overestimate the footprint of the station and everyone nods along with this fiction), and the problem whereby passenger rail has never in history been profitable is solved by letting them collect all rents from the real estate most directly improved by the enhanced communications. It seems like an epiphenomenon of this policy would be to prevent inefficient land use around stations.
That's partly how we financed the first transcontinental railroad: land grants along the right-of-way, along with direct federal subsides per mile (the latter incentivized significant grift, as the railroads built past each other for some miles, but given the project and the era, this isn't surprising).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroad#Land_grants
I think the Hong Kong MTR subway system works similarly.
Those are called TODs here in South East Qld, Australia. “ Transport Oriented Developments”. These developments have seen high density building with residential towers and commercial/retail podiums over /around existing rail lines. Bus /light rail linkages and car parking stations part of the package. Nonetheless it’s still pretty car dependent overall .
Do rationalists have strong beliefs about linoleic acid? I think I've seen Eliezer post a few times about how it might be causing the obesity epidemic. Mainstream sources seem to disagree, though. Is there a website somewhere with the argument summarized?
This guy seems like a good representative of the mainstream that doesn't buy it, with good arguments.
https://theedgeofepidemiology.substack.com/p/seed-oils-arent-killing-people-but
I think it's probably nothing. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ and https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/
In rationalist spaces this is also often linked: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DHkkL2GxhxoceLzua/thoughts-on-seed-oil
A couple years ago I made a browser version of a simple math(ish) puzzle game.
https://digit.party/
It just hit day 1001 and we redesigned it. Free, no login, works well on phone too.
Yay, that's very cool. Nice visual design too.
Is 100% of max always achievable?
No, and the day 1001 daily board is an example where it isn't achievable. The maximum score calc assumes an infinite grid. Even here, the maximum is non-trivial. In fact, my colleague Andy Vince has a paper resolving a conjecture about what it is:
https://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/view/v31i2p5
I guess I failed the reading comprehension part. I got halfway though a game before I realised it scores pairs of adjacent numbers, rather than size of connected groups.
Edit: after a while longer, it’s sort of fun, but it’s a little frustrating not knowing how ‘well’ I’ve done. There’s a lot of luck involved, and it takes a lot of assumptions to know how much my score is down to luck vs good tactics. It’s satisfying to try and work that out, enough for me to spend half an hour on it when I should be doing something else.
I got 187 or 84% at first try, but then again my start was lucky and almost hinted at me how to win. Think big numbers you started with, you'll probably get a lot. After a while anything that isn't the three or so numbers you chose is basically trash to be hidden away.
This is fun! I can’t find a button to easily reset to retry, which I would enjoy.
There's a daily puzzle you can only play once, but then random mode you could play forever, click the die.
I found the random mode which was fun. We’re given a ‘percent of max possible score’ at the end, and it would be fun to be able to retry any given game to see if we can get the max possible score.
In random mode you can actually just refresh the page to do the same puzzle again. You can also share random games; the hash in the url of a random game determines the board completely (and doesn't have to be numbers either): https://digit.party/#acx
I only played this a few times, but it seems like placing higher numbers in the center to potentially maximize their connectivity would be a good strategy (?).
Yeah, I try to reserve the corners for 9,8,7,6, but the numbers are random and sometimes you don't get enough of those.
I came across this interesting study that shows that blue light LEDs installed at Japanese railway platforms have significantly reduced the number of suicide attempts at railway stations over the past decade. The authors suggest that blue lights have a calming effect, but do they really? Is there any evidence that hysteria provokes suicides? I thought most suicides involved a calm acceptance that they were going to end their lives (but that all may be a myth). I'm wondering if there may be some other neural mechanism at work here.
AFAIK, no toucans were hurt in this study...
"Does the installation of blue Lights on train platforms shift suicide to another station?: Evidence from Japan" by Tetsuya Matsubayashi, Yasuyuki Sawada, and Michiko Ueda
> Our regression analysis shows that the introduction of blue lights decreased the number suicides by 74% (CI: 48–87%) at stations where the blue lights were installed, while it did not result in a systematic increase in the number of suicides at the neighboring stations.
Blue lights tend to be the predominant colour favored by police car lights in many countries. This may have originally derived from the characteristic blue glass covered lanterns over cop shop front doors in 19th century Britain. So possibly blue LEDs in a train station give a subliminal impression of cops being around here and there.
Alternatively, train stations are often rather dreary poorly lit places. But blue LEDs, which haven't been around all that long, perhaps give them a futuristic feel which perhaps in turn gives those contemplating or planning suicide a more positive outlook which would defer it.
One question is has the overall suicide rate reduced, or do those who would have topped themselves in railway stations now just do it elsewhere?
Well, there probably is something to color affecting moods. I was just in Target and its red interior started to drive me frantic after about 10 minutes. For those of you who don’t have Target stores in your country, they are a large chain store with a saturated red logo and red interior color schemes. Because of its size, I couldn’t find what I was looking for quickly. I just gave up and left before I puked. Even though it will probably take a day or two get the same thing through Amazon, Big River Company, here I come!
Did they replace existing lights, or install new ones in areas that were previously darker?
Yes, other news articles say they started replacing white/yellow lights with blue lights at some stations starting a decade ago. ChatGPT says...
> Japan has long faced relatively high suicide rates, and railway suicides (jumping in front of trains) were a serious concern, particularly in urban commuter stations. These incidents are traumatic, disruptive, and impose large economic costs on railway operators due to delays and compensation claims.
> Railway companies—most notably JR East—were therefore motivated to experiment with low-cost, non-invasive interventions that might reduce impulsive behavior on platforms.
This is the first time I've heard about the calming effects of blue lights, but it seems to have been known for a while now.
> Psychological theory behind blue light
>> At the time, there was a growing body of applied environmental psychology suggesting that:
>> Blue light is associated with calmness, reduced aggression, and emotional regulation
>> Blue wavelengths may suppress arousal and impulsivity
>> Blue lighting had reportedly reduced crime or aggressive behavior in a few earlier pilot settings (e.g., some police stations and street lighting experiments)
> The key assumption was not that blue light “treats depression,” but that it might reduce impulsive acts during acute crises, which is particularly relevant for platform suicides.
Fwiw, I have heard about the calming effect of blue many times before, and it seems to be consistently recommended for decorating rooms like bedrooms where you want to have a calming effect. Also for public spaces where you want to have such an effect, for example in public bathrooms or in the meditation areas of spas.
I find it plausible that suicides are typically done in a state of acute emotional stress. The most dangerous phase in terms of suicidal risks in a depression is not the "lowest" phase where patients are totally lethargic, it's the time where they regain enough energy to act again. My model of suicide (as layman) is that many people have suicidal thoughts occasionally or even for prolonged periods, but they very rarely act on them. So if they do, then it is somewhat impulsive.
But AFAICS, no one has suggested a biological mechanism for blue light's calming effect. OTOH, if someone did suggest a mechanism, I suspect it would be unfalsifiable, and I wouldn't respect it in the morning.
Oh, that is a fascinating point.
The calming effect could be real even if it's 100% social, right? Like, if there are enough places like spas, where soothing music is played together with a blue-light environment, and biologically the original effect comes only from the music, then this could totally imprint the association into enough people to make the color blue a trigger for calmness.
But here is a potential biological mechanism, too: in the evening, there is a shift of natural colors towards blue because more sun light reaches us in indirect ways, scattered by the atmosphere.* Evenings are (or were) a calmer time, because the dim light is not optimal for many activities. So it would make sense if our bodies have learned to take blue/green light as an indicator for calming down.
Whatever the developmental reasons are, think of your laptop switching to blue light in the evening as red components prevent sleepiness. I don't know the research around that, but always filed it as something which has probably sound scientific support.
This still doesn't give a biological mechanism in the sense of linking the blue retinal receptors to the parasympathetic system or the sleep center of the brain. But such a connection may not be unfalsifiable.
*When I asked Gemini about it, it confirmed the atmospheric effect, but brought up a biological effect as well, the Purkinje effect: the blue and green receptors in the retina seem to work better at dim light than the red receptors, so dim environments are perceived as more blue/green.
"Whatever the developmental reasons are, think of your laptop switching to blue light in the evening as red components prevent sleepiness."
I'm almost 100% certain this is backwards. If I activate night mode on my laptop the light emitted by the screen becomes yellower, not bluer.
> many people have suicidal thoughts occasionally or even for prolonged periods, but they very rarely act on them. So if they do, then it is somewhat impulsive.
That seems to check out. With the caveat that the rarer, planned kind are more often successful than the impulsive type.
3. Ozy's post argues, and Scott cosigns, the idea that American hegemony (which has spent the better part of my lifetime drenching the middle east in blood) is for some reason preferable to Chinese (which has not waged war since 1979).
Next to no argument is made on behalf of this position, (democracy is vaguely gestured at - but is a system of politicians for sale, and needing to "donate" against your true preferences, really a democracy? Plus, y'know, the aspiring dictator in charge who takes Marc Anderssen's advice on AI - and I suppose global sealanes are mentioned, but other countries can do that too) and it is far from obviously true.
Frankly, I had higher expectations of the EA movement; I miss "politics is the mindkiller", especially if this is what we get instead.
We are interacting on the globalized English-speaking internet where everyone you interact with are essentially on a level playing field. Spend a few minutes on the Chinese internet and you very quickly realize it's a complete us vs. them mentality. If you're Chinese, Chinese hegemony should sound like a very good idea, otherwise you're objectively treated like a second or third class person (no chance of citizenship). At the very least the American ethos can expand circles of care beyond blood that's already American, unlike China.
Same was true of Kaiser. Till 1914, he had not waged a war, save for a bit of colonial pacification.
Yet, for a hundred years we have read nothing but Prussian militarism.
China is a dictatorship that lacks freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement. They have over a million prisoners in Laogai camps where they are used as slave labor, often doing hazardous work without protective equipment. There have been credible accusations that thousands of prisoners are killed so that their organs can be harvested for transplant. They execute more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined. They do not recognize same sex marriage or civil unions. It is illegal to form a political party that does not place itself under the leadership of the CCP. That's not even to mention the Uyghurs.
There are a lot of reasons why someone would prefer to be ruled by the USA than the CCP.
Surely you understand that the CCP not engaging in imperialism is a matter of pragmatism, not ideology? There isn't any practical wars for them to fight right now that won't devolve into nuclear war. It's much smarter to wait for the west to collapse on its own, as it inevitably will.
Let's be real here, the west hasn't been doing a good job of it either. The Middle East is just as much of a liability now compared to before the wars.
I agree, they could be drenched in a lot more blood. I'm not seeing a lot of them drowning in it as of now.
The USA is far from perfect, but that hardly justifies giving more power to the CCP.
When asking whether it is wise to give a government more power, you need to ask how they treat people they have power over.
China and the USA both have hegemonic power over the people within their respective borders. The USA isn't currently forcibly assimilating even recent migrant groups like the Haitians and the Somalians.
The CCP is actively trying to destroy non-Han cultural identities within China, even those that have been part of China for centuries.
Further, both nations have a wide ability to get away with stuff in the oceans surrounding them. The USA much more so than the CCP.
The worst thing the USA has done with that power in recent memory is messing with Venezuela, a little bit.
Whereas China operates an enormous fleet of illegal fishing vessels that plunder the territorial waters of whomever they can.
Politics *is* the mindkiller and I don't enjoy ACX slowly turning increasingly into politics + AI.
That said, as a European I much prefer the influence of USian "freedom" than Chinese "harmony", however compromised both may be.
I also suspect Chinese hegemony would be better for the world than the current US hegemony. But it's unlikely the US would accept the change passively and historically transitions in hegemony typically led to world wars. If an AI revolution really is coming, I wouldn't want to add a WW2 or Cold War level conflict on top of that at the same time.
Hum, the transition from British hegemony to US hegemony occurred without a war between the principles. Perhaps because of the close cultural and ancestral background. I'd guess that most folks in the USA wouldn't mind handing the baton to China if there was the perception that they would be a honest world cop.
It occurred in the context of a war where one principal had to bail out the other and, as part of the exchange, forced that other to accept their supremacy. You don't need to beat your predecessor in a war if somebody else already did it for you.
I wouldn't say China is absent from international conflicts. They seem to supply Russia with electronics, machine tools, technology and parts for for Russian missiles and drones.
Also, China has land and maritime disputes with like all its neighbors. It's in a hostile neighborhood, at least partly due to its actions.
It also seems to be creating global economic waves via unfair and aggressive economic practices.
---
Traditionally, the US has supported a rules based international order.
The US has an expeditionary force, which traditionally has allowed the US to protect maritime trade and the flow of goods - although we are not doing as well in the Red Sea as we should be ( Houthis ).
We definitely have issues at home.
I dunno, a vague comment gets a vague response, basically a grunt in the other direction. There you go. Maybe I'm missing your point.
Can you make a countercase? Or is simply taking a side bad?
The countercase is that China's problems are just not as bad as America's and they are unlikely to export them if they ever become "Hegemon" (which really means nothing in this day and age, China is not going to overtake the entire US financial system)
The Uighur thing seems pretty bad. Also, it's easy to not wage war when you aren't the hegemon!
It's also easy to not wage war when you *are* the hegemon. And yet...
That's wrong. If you don't constantly wage war as the hegemon your competitors end up chipping at your borders and crumbling you. That's why hegemony isn't long-term stable, the balancing act between overextending and getting nickel-and-dimed to bits is extremely fraught and hard to sustain. One bad leader can fuck it up.
This does not explain why the US chose to wage the specific wars that it did, during its hegemony.
That's a more reasonable assertion at least in theory, but if you look at WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, and you don't think any of those seem to relate to the US trying to protect or expand its hegemony I really don't know what to tell you. That seems like a misapprehension which is beyond the scope of a comments field to remedy.
Or equivalently, you extend your borders outwards as far as you can and you stop only when them getting chipped away at balances out your expansion.
Who has been chipping at the US borders since the end of the Cold War?
Hopefully it goes without saying that the borders of the US empire are not those of the USA as a nominal political entity; China, for example, is perpetually making inroads on our territory in the East, notably talking openly about how they mean to conquer our protectorate of Taiwan as soon as we display weakness. The Saudis are picking at our protectorates in the Middle East and the Iranians are trying to do the same with a comical degree of ineffectuality. Russia is insistently trying to chip away at our important NATO subjects and Trump, who is increasingly looking like the Bad Leader on foreign matters, is seemingly indulging them instead of punching the living shit out of them as he ought to do (and in fact, the last two besides him also notably dropped the ball on this), despite the fact that Russia is now self-evidently a paper tiger that can't even win a regional conflict against one of its own former colonies.
China hasn't shipped any nukes to Cuba, nor does communism otherwise seem to be spreading in Latin America. Even Taiwan hasn't actually been invaded.
So you can create extra set of hard to.defenders borders by indulging in imperialism? And then you have the problem.of defending them. Maybe there is more than one solution to.that.
I disagree. The "important subjects" were getting restive, and a little Russian invasion nearby might help get them back in line.
I feel like pro life organizations should offer money to women considering an abortion to bribe them to carry to term. Seems like it would be effective, because pregnancy broadly sucks, but it might animate the women to go through. Most women end up deciding against giving their child up for adoption once they actually have the baby, but even if they don't, there are very few infants available for adoption - the demand for adoptable children is way higher than the supply. So it seems like a win-win.
Robin Hanson came to a similar conclusion, though he thinks governments should do this so they have future taxpayers to pay off their debt https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-babies-as-infrastructurehtml
Crisis pregnancy centers already try to connect families seeking to adopt infants with pregnant women who don't want kids, and I don't think it's really working.
Further, I don't think there are enough families wanting to adopt to make a meaningful dent in the number of abortions.
There's over a million families waiting to adopt, and not nearly enough babies to accommodate them all.
I have some vague memory floating around about something similar being tried, and of course being denounced for "oh so you think a one-off payment is enough, you won't support the unwanted baby afterwards, you monsters are bringing more misery into the world".
But I could be wrong. I do have some notion it was tried, though.
Here we go, quick online search gives me this story from 2015:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/nov/30/pro-life-activist-pays-to-stop-abortions-laura-merriott-financial-support
"Merriott, a retired US air force nurse who had always been pro-life, used to volunteer at the center. After seeing a number of women decide to go through with abortion due to financial reasons, she thought to herself: why don’t we just give them money? And so Save Unborn Life was born.
As of this November, by her count, Merriott has given money to 70 mothers, including Flora. “We have had 73 babies because we have had three sets of twins that were saved,” she said.
How much money is enough to convince an expecting mother not to have abortion? According to Merriott, it’s $3,000. The contract that Merriott has with the expecting mothers stipulates that after the expecting mother carries the baby to term, she will receive the funds. The contract is available in its entirety on Save Unborn Life’s website."
I'm surprised that the number is that low, because $3000 is like, only enough to cover the hospital bills. The bulk of the cost of a baby is feeding them and taking care of them after they're born.
That was back in 2015, so probably would be higher today. It was (I don't know if it's still going) a private charity, i.e. not receiving public funding, and the $3,000 was more "immediate stop-gap help":
"How much money is enough to convince an expecting mother not to have abortion? According to Merriott, it’s $3,000. The contract that Merriott has with the expecting mothers stipulates that after the expecting mother carries the baby to term, she will receive the funds. The contract is available in its entirety on Save Unborn Life’s website.
But is it enough?
Before the question is even finished, Merriott answered: “It has been. For just this purpose – for them to get through that difficult decision whether to end the baby’s life or not. For some people, it’s not enough and they say no. They are not going to accept the contract. That’s not going to do it for them and unfortunately they go on and have an abortion.”
Most of the women who visit the center are on Medicaid. The center also provides a number of services that help to minimize the costs of the pregnancy. Merriott sometimes helps mothers with groceries and diapers; she and the center refer them to soup kitchens, and the center also helps women obtain items such as donated cribs and baby clothes.
Brenda Newport, who runs the pro-life center in Erie where Flora went looking for an abortion, said the offer of $3,000 is helpful if the money is “the overall motivating factor”.
“[I]f it’s just some material help and if it’s just ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do for an apartment, I’m going to need a deposit for my first month’s rent,’ well, a few thousand dollars will really help,” Newport told the National Review last year."
Websearch tells me that it's currently legal for adopting parents to pay the birth mother's "reasonable living expenses" during pregnancy, but illegal to pay more than that. The legal payment includes rent, utilities, food, and medical bills; if you multiply that by six months, it's a decent amount of money already.
I don't know if the rules would be different for third parties; I just want to point out that it's already possible to get paid to give birth and let someone adopt. Pro-life organizations would have to pay quite a lot to make a significant difference in incentives!
It might work for pro-life organisations to link up pregnant women with prospective adoptive parents, then?
Making it so the pregnant woman doesn't have to actively seek out someone looking to adopt seems like it would have a positive effect.
I've heard of pro-life organizations doing this, not sure how common it is though.
I worry that lots of people who were never considering abortions would claim they were to get the money - both from normal greed, and from pro-choice people trying to troll them.
This seems like the kind of thing a universal policy would solve. Especially because babies are positive externalities anyway so you can justify putting public resources toward them.
That's even closer to Robin Hanson's proposal, which I linked above but I'll link here again since if you get here by clicking an email of my reply, you won't see that: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-babies-as-infrastructurehtml
Babies given up for adoption aren't positive externalities, they're an expensive problem.
Over their lifetime they are still net positives economically.
> Over their lifetime they are still net positives economically.
Alright, I really trust your epistemics, Erusian, so I'm quite excited to be able to ask you this.
If you do simple math, you see that you don't even break even as a "net tax consumer vs payer" until you're at the 90th percentile or so in America.
That seems to be in conflict with your assertion here, so I'd enjoy you showing me where I'm wrong. Here we go:
Net federal expenses: $6.9T
People in US: 340M
6.9T / 340M = $20,294 spending per person
But ~70M are children and ~100M aren’t working (retirees, students, layabouts), so there’s only ~170M working adults.
6.9T / 170M = $40,588 tax revenues needed per working adult
Okay, now the question is, what percentile of income do you need to be to hit this $20k / $40k taxes paid figure?
Basically, you have to be top 5-10% to hit it. To achieve neutrality! Just to not be a net tax consumer, but to have broken even!!
But you want some fun points of comparison against that $20-$40k paid out per person / taxpayer?
Bottom 50% of taxpayers average: $822 taxes paid per person
51st to 70th percentile average: $10,391 taxes paid per person
All taxpayers average: $13,890 taxes paid per person
Lol, whoops - seems like we’re spending 2-4x what we’re taking in! Well, that’s democracy for you.
How much do you need to make to go net neutral?
Up to your first $100k, you’re paying a blended ~17% tax rate, as in somebody making $100k will only pay $17k in taxes, still below even the median $20,294 needed if everyone was paying taxes
You need to hit roughly $150k in personal income to hit the $20k, and more than $200k in income to hit the $40k needed from each working adult.
$150k individual income is top 10%.
$200 - $250k is top 5% income.
You hit NET NEUTRAL in terms of taxes paid only at the top 5-10% of individual income.
So expecting a median adoptee to pay more than they consume? It doesn't seem to ME that the math works that way. But I must have missed something obvious.
Do you have any data to support this claim?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you sound very certain and I'd like to understand, why.
I'd need to nail down the claim more specifically. Do you just mean the concept of whether the median person produces more than a counterfactual where they don't exist?
This is what Crisis Pregnancy Centers are designed to do. Basically discourage women from getting abortions by providing resources, care, etc. At least if you take them at their word.
Sure, by giving them toys and baby onesies. I'm talking a check.
TL;DR - an email from the Good Counsel Network asking me for dosh in the run up to Christmas. I get an email like this once a month. The support they give is a drop in the ocean but it amounts to more than toys and baby gros.
Dear Supporter,
As we begin preparing our hearts and our lives to receive the Christ-child at Christmas, we are often preparing our homes to receive other guests to celebrate with us. We may have to clear up that pile of papers that’s overwhelmed the living room or find somewhere to hide all the stuff that has accumulated in the not-so-spare room! Even if no guests are coming, putting up the Christmas decorations makes us feel we should at least make some symbolic act of tidying or cleaning. Meanwhile, we might also be trying to buy presents for our loved ones, that terrible battle between making Christmas all about material goods and genuinely wanting to remember those we care about with something special at this time. For some, those times in life have faded into the past and Christmas may now feel like quite a lonely time. Yet for all of us, underneath all the worldly chores, there remains a real call to encounter Christ made vulnerable, Christ made man and Christ made child, in the care of Mary and Joseph and to prepare our hearts to meet Him and discover the real meaning of Christmas once more.
In the birth of every human baby, Christ comes again in a particular way. Although it is when we are baptised that we most carry the image of Christ upon our soul, each child is willed by God, created by Him to know, love and serve Him in this life and to be happy with Him for eternity in the next. No matter the circumstances of any child’s conception, we can be certain that we are doing God’s will when we welcome one of these little one’s for His sake. One profound way to prepare ourselves for Christmas is to give sacrificially so that others can live. Remembering Our Lord’s words that “Whosoever shall receive one such child as this in My Name, receives Me. And whosoever shall receive Me, receives not Me, but Him that sent Me”, we can participate in receiving Our Lord and God the Father, simply by welcoming a little child in His Name.
As St Teresa said, 'The child must be someone very special if God Himself became a child'. Please help us to welcome and care for the expectant Mothers and, later, their children, who approach us for help in 2026. Every donation helps us to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables. In particular, regular donations allow us to commit to ongoing support for Mothers who may otherwise consider abortion. If you can help us this Christmas, please see below for ways to donate. If you can help us with a regular donation, please consider setting up a standing order/regular payment from your bank. You can download a standing order form here and on our website, ask us to post you one, or you can set up a regular payment online via online banking. You can cancel or amend this at any time via your bank.
May the Christ Child and His Mother make their home with you this Christmas, and may the peace of Christ be with you, your family & friends this Christmas and throughout 2026.
With prayers and our very best wishes,
Clare & Stuart McCullough
Face
I don't actually know what they do. Just what both sides claim they do. And their supporters claim they give them fairly comprehensive services. The other side says roughly what you said.
Pro-life organizations aren't known for consequentialism. Paying people to not have abortions wouldn't appeal to most of them even if it worked.
Who do I donate to if I think all of those criticisms of Trump are bad but that mass immigration coupled with generous and easily-gamed welfare spending programs are worse? Is there any viable anti-immigration anti-welfare faction within either party?
Find a conservative Democratic candidate you like and support them. There are no permanent democratic or Republican positions, only politicians and wonks.
But what makes you think welfare systems are easily gamed and that immigrants (legal or illegal) are exploiting the system?
A study by the Libertarian Cato Institute, immigrants as a whole use welfare and social services at lower per-capita rates than native-born Americans. Immigrants were 14% of the U.S. population in 2022 but accounted for only 12% of means-tested welfare and entitlement spending (like Medicaid, SNAP, etc.). And on a per capita basis, immigrants consume about 21% less in welfare benefits than native-born Americans. Noncitizen immigrants (legal and illegal) consumed 54% less than native-born Americans per capita.
https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/immigrant-native-consumption-means-tested-welfare-entitlement-benefits-2022
Undocumented immigrants are largely ineligible for most federal welfare programs, but they and their households may still access services through children or state policies.
https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrants-and-USBorn
Likewise, Immigrants (documented and undocumented) contribute billions in taxes, which help fund the very services often cited in debates about their cost.
https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/
Purely from anecdata, I have several retired friends who receive SNAP, and they periodically have the benefits payments reviewed, which can turn into a long, frustrating experience. Meanwhile, the SNAP bennies are put on hold, and their EBT cards don't get recharged for a month or more (which leads to periods of hunger if the food bank is empty).
12% is less than 14% but a lot more than 0%, which should be the target.
You should compare immigrants not to the native-born population, but to the best possible set of immigrants that you could have admitted. Any immigrant who commits a crime or fails to be massively economically productive is an unforced error.
Many Thanks! There are some specific subgroups where the data goes the other way.
https://cis.org/Report/Somali-Immigrants-Minnesota notes:
>About 54 percent of Somali-headed households in Minnesota receive food stamps, and 73 percent of Somali households have at least one member on Medicaid. The comparable figures for native households are 7 percent and 18 percent.
Interesting. Thanks for the fact check! But weren't Somali's in Minnesota a part of a large group of political refugees that GW Bush admitted (and later Obama continued admitting)?
According to the US ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement) refugees and asylees (I didn't know that was a word) automatically gain access to specific U.S. government benefits and services "to help them resettle, including temporary cash aid (RCA), health insurance (Medicaid), food assistance (SNAP), and employment support, though access is temporary and often time-limited, requiring them to meet eligibility and work toward self-sufficiency within the first months to a year."
That raises two questions:
1. Why has the system failed to work properly with the Somalis? Are they really gaming the system? If so, how?
2. Why have US and State agencies been unable to prevent Somalis from gaming the system (if they are)?
Also, the U.S. admitted ~1.4 million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 70s and 80s. As a group, they did very well. Have we done something different with the Somalis?
IMHO, if the OP were primarily concerned with the Somali population, he should have said so, instead of tarring all immigrants with the same brush.
The total number of Somali refugees and asylees admitted to the US under that explicit policy decision was 111K over a 22-year period, or a bit more than 5,000 per year. So they're hardly a representative sample of, well really anything across a 300M-plus nation spanning a continent.
An illustration of that point: the Center for Immigration Studies ("Low-immigration, Pro-immigrant") reports the differences rates in US benefits use as less drastic than those Somali-specific claimed rates suggest.
Here are their figures for benefits use by
(a) households headed by native-born citizens,
(b) all households headed by immigrants,
(c) households headed by noncitizen immigrants both legal and illegal:
Cash benefits: (a) 16%, (b) 22%, (c) 22%
Food benefits: (a) 25%, (b) 36%, (c) 42%
Medicaid: (a) 25%, (b) 37%, (c) 42%
Housing benefits: (a) 5%, (b) 5%, (c) 4%
[Just to be clear, category (c) is a subset of category (b).]
"Cash" is mostly the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which of course can only be earned with federally-reported taxable wages. I didn't know until just now that "Several million illegal immigrants also have work authorization (e.g. DACA, TPS, and some asylum applicants) allowing receipt of the EITC". Also that "83 percent of all immigrant households and 94 percent of illegal-headed households have at least one worker compared to 73 percent of U.S.-born households."
"Food" refers to both SNAP (food stamps) and free-school-lunch programs.
The Center's data analysts write that "The presence of extended family or unrelated individuals does not explain immigrants’ higher welfare use, as the vast majority of immigrant households are nuclear families. Further, of immigrant households comprised of only a nuclear family, 49 percent use the welfare system compared to 35 percent of nuclear family U.S.-born households."
https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrants-and-USBorn
Many Thanks!
>work toward self-sufficiency within the first months to a year.
For this group, that doesn't seem to have worked very well.
>Also, the U.S. admitted ~1.4 million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 70s and 80s. As a group, they did very well. Have we done something different with the Somalis?
Yup! Also, have the Somalis done something different with us?
My impression, from our experience with the Somali group and the UK's experience with (different!) Muslim groups is that Muslims generally don't assimilate into their host societies like other immigrants do. A large chunk of them do things such as pushing Sharia law that are actively hostile to the laws and traditions of their hosts.
The estimated U.S. Muslim population is approximately 3.45 million people. Of those, Somalis make up 7.5% of the total Muslim population in the U.S. According to Pew Research, U.S. Muslims, as a whole, have similar college attainment rates to the general U.S. adult population. About 31% of Muslim adults hold a bachelor’s or more, close to the national average. OTOH, Around 40% of US Muslim households earn under $30,000, compared with about 32% of all U.S. households. But on the third hand, the share of US Muslims reporting high incomes (above ~$100,000) is similar to the national rate (about 24% vs. ~23%).
The FBI doesn't track crime stats by religious affiliation. Nor do national or state social service agencies track disbursements by religious affiliation (AFAICT).
So it's hard to say how well Muslims overall are assimilating into the US. But one was just elected mayor of NYC. And if Faux News is correct, we had a Muslim President a few terms back. ;-)
Many Thanks! Yes, the socioeconomic measures are part of the story.
They aren't the whole story. IN the UK's case, I've read of 40% of their Muslims supporting Sharia law rather than English law. In the US, https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/nationwide-poll-of-us-muslims-shows-thousands-support-shariah-jihad/ reports:
>More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.
That is one hell of a threat, and one hell of a refusal to accept the rule of American laws in America.
At a bare minimum, I want to see the citizenship oath explicitly ask whether potential citizens accept the rights of _other_ citizens to the freedom of their own religion or absence of religion.
Other results from the polls of US Muslims:
>nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.”
>Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.
This isn't assimilation. As cited above, large fractions of them are actively hostile to the laws and traditions of the US. This is an ideology of conquest, widely supportive of violent means for their conquest. There are peaceful Muslims, but we need to be _very_ careful about exactly which ones we let into our nation. We do not need jihadists within our borders!
What makes you think that trying to force Daniel to change his political opinions is more productive here than answering his question? You ought to take his premise as given and respond as though he were correct whether you think he is or not.
Let me clue you in. I have no expectation of changing the OP's opinion. My primary reason for posting links to actual data is to give perspective to the peeps who read his post and may assume his points are valid. Unfortunately, the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent thought space is full of opinions masquerading as facts. I do this on X as well, and by doing so, I hope in my small way to reduce the effectiveness of the bullshit out there.
So... your rationalist take is to undermine conversational norms in order to push your personal politics even in contexts where they're not relevant?
So... you view politics as a religion, where the policies of a party can be based on belief and not on facts?
If your political leaders told you to eat red clay or rub blue in your navel, would you consider anyone who questions their policies as having a political motive?
I didn't realize that "never challenge the assumptions the other person is making in their question" is a conversational norm around here.
The other custom here is that OPs never have to prove their statements. They can make their negators jump through all sorts of hoops to prove every counterargument, but when they, in turn, are asked for the data that supports their opinions, they can end the argument by accusing their opponents of acting in bad faith. ;-)
Yeah, maybe find some local politician who you mostly agree with. There are a few out there who seem somewhat 'principled'. I also wonder how much a donation helps. Getting out and knocking on doors (so to speak) might do more good. (Yeah time vs money.)
I agree "what do I do when both parties are terrible?" is an unsolved problem.
Seasteading!
If you're dedicated then it's a very solved problem. Whatever else you can say about Trump, he thought both parties were terrible and he did something about it. Sanders too.
We need a cartoon along the lines of
> thinks both parties are terrible
> creates new third party
> new third party is even worse
I mean, usually. But if it works one time out of every hundred then it's good news.
I mean, Parliamentarian systems are pretty well covered by the standards comic.
Situation: There are 14 competing left parties.
"Why do we have 14 competing left parties? We need one, big tent coalition party that synthesizes everyone's needs."
Situation: There are 15 competing left parties.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
If it results in the destruction of the existing parties, isn't that enough? US politics could use a reset.
Although in the UK, both Conservatives and Labour are set to get wiped out and replaced by Reform and the Greens.
This might be a counter example to the usual theories of chasing the median voter, as the new parties are gaining by being (a) more right-wing than the existing right-wing party (b) more left-wing than the existing left-wing party
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from over here it looks like this is really just a mechanism of rightward adjustment of the Overton window, since Reform has broader appeal than the Conservatives (not being burdened with the associations to top-hatted aristocrats, in spite of all the left may say about Farage's upper-class origins) whereas the Greens have narrower appeal than Labour (because they're all insane and as soon as they tell people their actual policies their support boils away).
I made a browser game for biologists, GeneGuessr.
https://geneguessr.brinedew.bio/
It's free, no log-in required.
It's inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle. You get shown a 3D model of a random human protein each day, and you have to triangulate its gene name using similarity hints pulled from 17 molecular biology databases.
My background is in wet lab benchwork and I intend this game to be engaging mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the field, I'm interested to know if tou can still solve it with browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting doing so. Let me know if the hints are too easy or too hard.
This is pretty fun. Only feedback would be that maybe you want to filter out a few very duplicated families? Someone could waste guesses on extremely similar genes. Then again, maybe part of the game is saving guesses for that
Oh you used quartz to build, that's nice
I'm not a biologist and frankly don't know much about biology. I managed to get to 98% without LLM use by getting pretty lucky. (One of the hints I unlocked, which didn't get blocked for being too generous, was probably too generous, and contained a keyword that was approximately the answer.) Fun game though.
Oh I’m ready to hammer out a new aesthetic for the 21st century — I’ll apply to that first thing.
We’re going to call it “Modernism, Again”
Toucan
Threecan.
You win, subscription given.
(for anyone who's confused, the very top paragraph originally included "To test if anyone reads this part, I will give the first person to post a comment including the word toucan below a month’s free subscription." I've deleted this now so the thread doesn't get overwhelmed with constant toucanposting)
Has anyone ever read — and processed —a EULA in its entirety? At least one person has.
A small software company (PC Pitstop) hid a clause in a long End User License Agreement that said, roughly:
If you read this and email us with the subject line “PC Pitstop EULA,” we will send you $1,000.
Only one person noticed and claimed it. PC Pitstop publicly paid up and used it to make a point about how nobody reads EULAs. This is the one most often cited in tech / legal folklore.
I remember a story about some e-store adding clause to TOS about acquiring the soul of the customer that nobody ever noticed, and a second checkbox next to "agree" that gave $5 coupon for absolutely free that almost nobody clicked.
I don't think not reading EULAs is bad. They're unenforceable anyway, what they say basically doesn't matter. Especially when creator and user are in different countries.
Aw, you deleted my "macaw."
Thanks, Scott.
Damn, beat me to it.
Since my attempts to engage on MR were physically blocked, here is the full text I intended to post for your review:
Subject: CES 2026 and the Coasean Nightmare of Invisible Agency
Tyler has been notified privately, but for the readers of MR who are tracking the structural shifts in agency: we are about to hit the "Ontological Deception" of autonomous systems.
As the CES press cycle peaks tomorrow, January 5th, the global default is shifting toward seamless agentic "Operators". The market celebrates the death of the UI, but we are sleepwalking into Agency Misattribution: the silent erasure of human responsibility under the guise of convenience.
Initial feedback from engineering circles yielded a 12:88 approval-to-rejection ratio. This is predictable. To the priests of "frictionless" design, the Judgment Transparency Principle (JTP) is viewed as an unnecessary tax on cognitive bandwidth. However, JTP is the high-performance brake required to maintain the highest sustainable velocity. Just as elite brakes allow a car to navigate curves at 200mph, an agentic economy needs JTP to prevent a 21st-century Luddite backlash born of systemic social anxiety.
This is not a theoretical abstraction. To prove technical feasibility, I have filed a priority patent application in Japan (December 2025). My strategic intent is to move toward a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application—funds permitting—to ensure this framework remains a "Public Good." This is a defensive move to prevent the private enclosure of the underlying technology and design patterns by dominant platforms, ensuring that the mechanics of transparency remain open for all.
JTP preempts the most common misconceptions of the seamless dogma:
1. On Cognitive Bandwidth: JTP does not demand constant monitoring; it requires a temporary perceptual trace (Ghost) at the moment of intervention.
2. On Safety: JTP does not prohibit automation; it ensures that the "Deception of Mercy"—where systems silently "fix" human failure—does not lead to functional deskilling.
3. On "Co-creation" of Intent: Whether intent is "pure" or co-created, the existence of the delegation itself must be perceivable. If you cannot see the boundary, you cannot claim the credit or the liability.
4. On Market Preference: Choosing "magic" over JTP is not a free-market preference; it is a market failure driven by information asymmetry.
This is not Explainable AI (XAI):
• XAI asks HOW a model arrived at a conclusion (Epistemology).
• JTP asks WHERE the judgment originated (Ontology).
We require a Semantic Topology to expose the divergence (Delta) between human intent and machine-corrected output:
Delta = Human Intent - Machine Output
When this Delta remains unperceivable, we facilitate a Coasean Nightmare where the transaction costs of identifying the source of judgment are infinite. For those who value the origin over the noise, the Canonical Formulation and full research papers (available via PUBLICATIONS.md) are here:
https://github.com/daiki-kadowaki/judgment-transparency-principle
Tyler, is this the end of the Great Stagnation, or the point where human agency is finally automated into a rounding error?
If everyone's kept busy with an all-out civil war, they can't go around performing unconstitutional regime changes abroad. /taps nose/
Who is this message FOR? Do you believe there is a single person in the world who wishes to enact violence against "conservatives" but is dissuaded by considerations of constitutionality?
For some imaginary people who will be impressed to death by it?
Liberals? Despite everything, they are hesitant about killing opposition. I still don't think they have the spine to be a threat, but who knows.
It’s for other people who aren’t very good at thinking. Possibly a bored 4chan nitwit having a little fun stirring the pot.
It’s not inconceivable that the commenter is a GRU sock puppet trying to keep Americans at each other’s throats.