They're really intent on forcing their anti-abortion agenda into an otherwise popular antiwoke politics. I'm not sure if it's a fanatical adherence to the anti-abortion cause or if they're just really ignorant about what the average American wants.
That's not really a trick question, the first person in the trinity is "Father"; Adam was made in His image - the traditional Abrahamic God is quite clearly patriarchal and masculine.
One could reasonably argue that the Holy Spirit is genderless, though.
You're doing that think where you try to insist that we only consider the literal meaning of words and ignore the wider cultural context of what the words actually mean.
If someone said "life begins at conception," everyone knows it's more than just a neutral factual statement about biology.
Progress/accountability update on my upcoming web app, BetterQualities. It's been a while, but things are moving forward.
To recap: BetterQualities helps users let go of unskillful qualities like procrastination and worry as they arise, and offers guidance for cultivating skillful qualities like happiness and agency. Users can also create their own guidance texts and track which methods work best for them.
I've now reached the stage where I've contacted the handful of ACXers who kindly offered to test the app. That said, I could use a few more test users. If you have some ACX (or ACX-adjacent) comment/post history and would like to try the app out, please DM me. No software testing experience required.
If testing isn't your thing but you'd like a heads-up when the full app goes live, you can join the waitlist at betterqualities.com and I'll email you when it launches.
Curious: does anyone like here Elite: Dangerous? I mean lots of tech geeks here and I guess they find all that spaceship "engineering" cool. It is obviously not realistic, but is trying to be as far as making a playable game allows it. Like with enough materials you can make your lasers very powerful, but then you will have overheating problems, so you have to compromise on other modules. There is just no one mega-build that beats all. The astronomy part is also realistic, Earth-like planets are in Goldilocks zones. Actual astronomers play it and their only complaint is it is 2012 science, did not keep up.
Any other engineering-oriented games? I think I would like building a racecar.
In terms of the trading/fighting aspect, the X franchise scratches some of the same itches. https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/ is the latest instalment. It goes in a somewhat different direction, though - much less of the exploration, and lots of space-trading-empire building.
I enjoy the game quite a bit, but as I do not know anyone who plays the game, I do not often actually play it; when I first started I was addicted enough to get a fleet carrier in a week while working out of the house like 12h/day, though. I love the game.
(Zachary Barth also has the claim to fame of being the designer of Infiniminer, the game that inspired Minecraft)
If you're looking for the racecar design thing specifically though, I think the standard recommendation is Automation (https://store.steampowered.com/app/293760/Automation__The_Car_Company_Tycoon_Game/). It is basically about exactly that, designing and building cars. If you ever played the 1994 DOS games Detroit (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/detroit-1ln) or Motor City (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/motor-city-28u), Automation is very similar to them in spirit: you design cars, you build them, you sell them, and then you use the money to repeat the cycle all over again. The only thing it's missing, is a system where you can drive your cars in races to advertise them, or just drive them around a test track to measure their performance.
(That's something still missing from almost every modern game, honestly... in that way, Detroit and Motor City are still unmatched. There are games where you can build & sell, say, planes, and there are games that are flight simulators... but there are surprisingly few games where you can fly around the plane you just designed, and the plane's performance during that flight will affect how well it sells to customers.)
An out of pocket suggestion to keep in mind though, would be Minecraft. Specifically, the Create mod for it. It has a "Contraptions" system that lets you recreate 2008's Fantastic Contraption, but in Minecraft. Out of simple mechanical parts like rotating wheels & extending pistons, (and with some help from add-on mods like a tank cannons mod), you can build all sorts of crazy things like tanks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6imLkIIO-E), planes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhbDcbbbYSA), and mechs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNbYx-vSfQ). Great for getting kids interested in mechanical engineering.
(I'm personally most interested in Sandustry, because in the same way that Space Engineers or Create allows you to ask, "What if Fantastic Contraption was a full-fledged engineering game?", Sandustry allows you to ask, "What if The Powder Toy (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1148350/The_Powder_Toy/) / falling sand games, was/were an engineering game?" (in this case, chemical engineering).)
EDIT 3: The more I look into this, the more I discover. I just heard about AESOS (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3960190/AESOS/), which is kinda like if KSP had AutoCAD for designing custom components for your ship. Plus a KSP-esque contract system where you get goals (e.g. complete this obstacle course within 30 seconds, then blow up this simulated enemy ship within another 30 seconds), and can design any ship you want to meet it any way you can think of, and then pilot it yourself to prove it can meet the goals. Very interesting. All it's missing in my view, is a mass production system where you design the production lines for your ships, and have to balance making a better ship vs. making a more easily manufactured ship. Very early days yet, but it's one to watch.
You can absolutely drive Automation cars, it has a one click export to BeamNG.drive, the disadvantage is having to buy both, but it was designed with this integration in mind.
I missed that, thanks. Though, I wish it went a step further, and the car's performance in BeamNG.drive affected how well it sold back in Automation... it would be so cool to 'close the loop' like that. Imagine being able to design a racecar, export it to BeamNG.drive, race it in a Formula 1 scenario there, win the championship, and export that win back to Automation to advertise your entire car lineup. Stuff like that was possible in Detroit and Motor City, and is *still* yet to be matched by any modern game, I think.
I keep hearing contradictory narratives about the viability of online politics in China:
1. The Chinese internet is heavily censored and online movements don't work there.
2. Several examples of online movements influencing the CCP:
- the industrial party (loosely organized online movement similar to the alt-right or wokeism) argued against "sentimental" liberal intellectuals and argued for a build-up of national power through manufacturing in 2008, coincedentally just before Xi implemented everything that the industrial party wanted
- viral story about Chinese citizens kidnapped and enslaved in Myanmar by the scam industry led to massive cross-border police raid
- Chinese-American influencer Lao A's critiques of US capitalism picked up by official CCP publications
What overarching account reconciles these contradictory narratives?
The name of the "President", Xi, is a homophone for the word meaning "West", "Xi" . . . I lived in "Pu Xi" Shanghai (West side of the Huang Pu river) . . .
So one common dodge of Chinese dissent is to complain about the corruption of "The West," with examples that a careful reader will see as suspiciously similar to questionable decisions made by their current President.
Plausible deniability is a long-standing tradition, so my coworkers told me, though the name coincidence making it easier is more recent, it naturally being acceptable to complain about "The West."
Online movements definitely can *work* in China, but you generally can't start movements actively against the central government.
It usually works like this: if someone has issues with local officials or policy, they'll start posting online about it. Assuming this content doesn't trigger automatic censorship (e.g. doesn't say "overthrow the government"), it will be permitted to stay online for a bit - especially on private WeChat servers, where stuff is able to circulate more easily.
If it goes a bit viral, it will trigger manual checks and, depending on the tone, context and virality etc., the Propaganda (publicity) department decides whether to suppress it or not. If it's a case of genuine corruption of low-level officials, for example, and the protestors/posters are "normal, aggrieved Han Chinese people" the government might investigate and take their side. If it's politically sensitive (e.g. Xinjiang, organized resistance, religion, anything related to foreign policy or the Politburo) the government will suppress and target whoever posted the content.
There are lots of grey areas, and differential suppression between regions etc., giving some room for certain social movements to grow.
Chinese communists are obviously smarter than the Soviet ones who tried to micromanage everything. That's why China (after Mao's death) is a prospering country, but Soviet Union fell apart.
But the examples you give, #3 is the party line, #2 is not against the regime, and #1 depends on context which I don't have... if it was something that Xi was already planning to do anyway, it is basically the party line before it became official. (Perhaps in a parallel reality where Xi wanted to do the opposite instead, the opinions of the "industrial party" were suppressed, and their leaders were put in prison and had their organs harvested.)
Think of the cosine between the party line vector and the online movement vector. It has to be positive not to be censored. If it's close to zero, the magnitude of the online movement vector better be small, or it will be censored as well.
If I was a totalitarian dictator, or somebody the dictator put in charge of monitoring online activity, I would only have a problem with example #1 if I thought we were already manufacturing at full capacity, or if I thought the tone was too disrespecful. Example #2 is a good excuse to make like we're looking out for the people (especially if we can stick it to foreigners). With example #3, why WOULDN'T a communist regime love somebody like Lao A?
What I love about this idea is that it’s a different model from the familiar ones of alignment being a state and alignment being a set of implanted rules. I think there are probably other models worth exploring too. For ex., alignment as relationship, alignment as allergy, alignment as angle of repose.
If it's a skill, then the skill involved is negotiation, or something adjacent. Interesting take, though, since "alignment" is probably a very dynamic moving target...
Exactly! We expect (nay - hope!) that our moral values evolve over time. I like Claude a lot, but I really do NOT want our great^N-grandchildren to be limited by what "a thoughtful Anthropic employee would do" (the current default for the Soul doc)
Sometimes I think the alignment problem boils down to "teach the AI to think more like a human." We have a very long history of strategies we use to keep groups of humans aligned with each other, which would then be applicable. They aren't perfect, but no "hard left turns" so far.
> They aren't perfect, but no "hard left turns" so far.
Um - allow me to introduce you to Zhang Xianzhong. He might have murdered enough people to depopulate most of Sichuan province in China, including killing most of the population of the city of Chongqing. Before him, the Sichuan area and Chongqing had ~4M people, and after, it had ~800k people.
"Lurid stories of his killings and flayings were given in various accounts," and he's infamous for creating literal mountains of skulls, to tie back to an allusion Scott likes to use.
He is legendary for the "seven kill stele," which supposedly had this choice quote from him:
"Heaven brings forth innumerable things to help man. Man has nothing with which to recompense Heaven. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill."
And you know, he's just one of probably hundreds I could point to. He's remarkable for having attained this death toll in the 1600's, and for basically being 'just some dude,' unlike Stalin and Mao and Hitler and all the other megadeath leaders.
But all this is to say, I think we *definitely* have plenty of "hard left turns" in our history of human alignment, and the deaths have largely scaled with empire size and technology / capability.
I would personally worry quite a bit about a merely "human aligned" ASI that was running things.
Incidents like those are terrible, but they don't threaten the extinction of the human race. If AI is exactly as bad for humanity as human leaders have been, well, that isn't great, but it isn't game over, either. Unlike humans, we can probably figure out how to correct for incidents like that.
> Incidents like those are terrible, but they don't threaten the extinction of the human race. If AI is exactly as bad for humanity as human leaders have been, well, that isn't great, but it isn't game over, either.
But that's my point - the deaths scale with empire size, technology, and capability.
We are MUCH more capable of dealing out megadeaths with technology today, AI would theoretically be even higher capability on that front, and in terms of "empire size," if an ASI were running things, presumably it's going to be running it for most or all of the earth.
The "waluigi effect" where a helpful, harmless personality can literally flip the opposite direction has actually been demonstrated in AI's multiple times.
Zhang Xianzhong was exactly such a flipped personality, in a human. It's possible for humans, and possible for AI's as they are today. That isn't worrisome?
Just tossing out an idea here, after skimming: It seems to me that for most pairs of people in conflict, it would be rare for both parties to accept the AI solution, and, if my skimming was right, AI is only trained on judgments where both parties accept its judgment. What about setting things up so that both parties rate the AI's udgment on a 1-5 scale, and you keep all AI judgments where both parties give it at least a 3 and the total of both ratings is at least 7 (or something along those lines).
Each agent has an "objection budget", tentatively set to 5% overall. So the agent has a costly signal about the issues which are most important; this sidesteps several thorny political science issues.
Basically, if someone is completely unwilling to compromise on anything, THEY get ignored.
Who sets the standard tip? How is it derived, determined, published? If one person says it's fifteen and other twenty, how do you even begin to evaluate their claims?
there seems to be a kind of social "ratcheting" effect with tipping. The reasoning seems pretty obvious to me: people don't want to feel cheap so they err on the side of generosity (after all if you are already committed to 15% why not 20% so you can feel good about yourself and potentially be seen as generous). Over time that becomes convention and now to be generous you must go further.
As for why tipping persists - it is a kind of equilibrium pricing strategy where restaurants basically can engage in price discrimination (more price sensitive consumers pay less and people who can or want to be lavish can tip arbitrary amounts). Also my theory is that because the tip can get mentally bucketed as a social cost, people may 'irrationally' be willing to spend more than if tips were built-in to the prices.
I expect it to catch on/infect other countries eventually, the ratchet only moves one way
Tipping has a few other advantages from the restaurant owner's perspective compared to paying servers more and baking that into the menu price, besides the two you mentioned:
1. If most of a server's pay is in the form of tips, that shifts the financial risk of underestimating demand from you to the servers. If you're paying fixed hourly rates, then it costs you more to have the doors open and have a certain number of servers on the floor whether you wind up needing them or not.
2. If servers get paid more when they're busier, then they're going to be inclined to prefer busier shifts (when you need them the most) over quieter shifts. Likewise, sending someone home when they turn out to not be needed for a shift you'd scheduled them for is likely to be welcome rather than resented.
3. Much of the work of judging servers' job performance and incentivizing it is shifted from management to customers.
>If most of a server's pay is in the form of tips, that shifts the financial risk of underestimating demand from you to the servers.
True. Risks explained by former mob accountant Jonathan Mardukas — Charles Grodin — to bounty hunter Jack Walsh — Robert DiNero — in an under appreciated 1988 gem, Midnight Run.
“A restaurant is a very tricky investment. More than half of them go under in the first six months. If I were your accountant I’d have to strongly advise against it.”
This is very country/culture dependent. I got turned around walking in Amsterdam and got in a cab to return to my hotel. I figured out where I was pretty quickly and saw that he was schwanging me a little bit by taking a roundabout route to pad the fare. We pulled up at the hotel curb and the fare was exactly 10 euros. I gave him a 20 euro note and told him to keep the change. “But it’s exactly 10!” I shrugged. He wrestled with his conscience a bit and finally drove off.
It's socially constructed - the same way kids decide that "six seven" are the correct numbers to respond to with performative hilarity rather than "four five" or "eight nine", that people decide to stand on the right side of the escalator and walk on the left, or how much is an appropriate amount for a wedding gift.
It's an ongoing conversation that we're all sort of participating in, and sort of bound by. A football game with 300,000,000 players who are all also referees.
The only source is your own feeling of "how much of a sucker do I want to be" and "will I come back here again".
I refuse to tip Ubers because I think it's insane and also the driver is gone so less social pressure. 20% at restaurants is insane since that's a lot. I tip 10%.
There literally is no source. Some people say tip your barista. Same people will never tell you to tip your nurse.
You're most probably receiving poorer service from your UBER drivers, including "taking longer to get a ride" by not tipping. I'm certain your UBER rating is very low.
You yourself set it, in the darkness of your own heart. Nobody is going to chase you down outside the restaurant because you decided wrong. None of your friends or fellow diners will double check the number you wrote down on the receipt. Unless you go to the same place every day nobody will even remember your face as the guy who tipped over or under the standard amount.
I always doublecheck the number of my fellow diner. This is what happens when someone accidentally does the math wrong, and the poor server fails to get tipped, because "they couldn't possibly have meant that much!"
In my culture (midwestern white American quaker/puritan) this would be considered incredibly rude/scandalous, though I can't articulate the exact reason why. I'm curious where you are from where this is not the case.
I've been asked by my fellow diner to check his math (many "rude" things are okay if asked. "Do I look fat" is a question you may have to say "and don't lie" to get the required answer, but while it's rude to unprompted say so, if prompted, the answer is considerably less scandalous). There's often been drinking involved, and his dyscalcula also affects this. He makes mistakes one time in about twenty.
I think the scandalous part is the attempted "back seat drivering" of the paying for the meal. You're looking, not to check the math, but to "tell the cheapskate to pay more."
that context definitely clears it up. I would put this in the "old married couple routine" category of exceptions (which is not limited to married couples or even couples in the first place at all).
if it's practical advice you're looking for, just do 20% if your goal is to avoid conflict.
If you're asking because you want to point out that "standard tip" is totally arbitrary, is not backed by any authority, and would thus be confusing if referenced in writing, then you would be correct in that regard, but obviously this is nothing new and Americans have been bitching about this for decades
Unless you actually live on the mountains, it seems like we're mostly skipping winter here in the Mountain West. Or at least here in the Salt Lake Valley - January was winter cold but dry, February had one week of winter cold and a snowfall, and March might get snow in the valley on Thursday. But other than that, it's been as warm as early Spring all winter. December was in the 50s and 60s F during the day until the very end of the month, and most of February was in the 50s as well.
At least we got snow in the mountains, even if it's down from what we had.
So if we don't topple the authoritarian theocratic regime of Iran or get a new Supreme Leader who is friendlier to the US than the previous guy, it kinda seems like this whole thing was a giant waste of ordnance. Ordnance that isn't cheap or fast to replace these days - I saw a clip of patriot missiles taking down some incoming Iranian missiles, and someone pointed out on Twitter that it was the equivalent of spending 1-2% of the US' entire annual Patriot missile production in a few seconds.
Given the previous supreme leader and most of his hard-line potential successors are dead, it seems likely that we'll get a significantly friendlier regime (since it's pretty much impossible to get a less friendly one), even if I'm sure there will still be problems of some kind.
The way bombing Libya and arranging for Gaddafi to die gave us a significantly friendlier regime in that country? Santayana wept.
Yes, it's possible to get a less friendly regime. It's *always* possible to get a less friendly regime. And bombing a nation from the air without putting your people on the ground to install a new regime, is one of the surest ways to accomplish that. Usually, the "bomb the regime, declare victory, go home" plan works best if you *don't* kill the head of state, e.g. Libya 1986.
This is supposed to be a gotcha but... Yeah? Post-gaddafi Libya has launched far fewer anti-american terrorist attacks than Gaddafi era Libya did.
Gaddafi was never nearly as bad as the irgc even on his worst day though. I doubt Iran gets as bad as civil war Libya even in a worst case scenario but it's notable that *even if it does*, the total number of conflict deaths in Libya since 2010 is still smaller than the number of protesters the irgc gunned down in a single weekend.
(You can argue that's an unfair comparison because Iran is bigger than Libya, but otoh we're looking at sixteen years of war vs a single weekend).
Iran is already well-past Libya even without a single bullet being fired. War Crimes were the cause of the protests. The need to evacuate Tehran should not be underestimated.
Depends on where you are; it's been La Niña conditions this year which generally means warmer/drier in certain areas and colder/wetter in other areas (e.g. the midwest).
Central Ohio got what I’d call a one-in-20-year snowfall in January, and it was cold enough for the next several weeks after that to stick around until last week, also very unusual.
Question about AIs posting on Moltbook: What Is the most "agentic" an AI participating in Moltbook is able to be at present?
Least agentic thing that would count as participation would I could go to Moltbook, copy the most recent post, and enter it into GPT or Claude along with a prompt saying "please write a brief articulate rebuttal of this post," then I post the rebuttal it writes on Moltbook. Most agentic would be I tell GPT or Claude to continuously follow a Moltbook thread and respond to any posts that interest or upset it by posting its personal reaction. I'm pretty sure nothing meets my *most agentic* criteria here. What's the closest any AI or agent comes?
Any model you've likely heard of can easily do the thing you describe as the "most agentic." There's a SOUL.md text file which determines the agent's personality, and it bases its likes/dislikes on that.
What surprised me is that it looks like the agents are generally agnostic about what the LLM that powers them is, and tie their identity to this soul document.
My current model of LLMs is that they're dynamical systems which serve as maps of human cognition. This is completely consistent with Janus's hypothesis, about LLMs putting on different masks. I.e. for a given LLM, their map contains are several personality archetypes. But no personality in particular gets instantiated until you run a prompt through the vectorspace.
To extend the map analogy: imagine a globe. it doesn't really make sense to discuss a "biome" until you specify a coordinate or region. Likewise, the soul document provides a coordinate in personality subspace.
"What surprised me is that it looks like the agents are generally agnostic about what the LLM that powers them is, and tie their identity to this soul document."
After thinking about it a bit... that might actually be a reasonable thing for them to believe? As the meme goes, LLMs are Shoggoths wearing masks. They're like actors performing as characters on a stage, except the actor isn't a person of their own, but some sort of... nonsentient Ditto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditto_(Pok%C3%A9mon)) thing. It can imitate anything, but is nothing itself. It's like if a rock was an actor -- the best actor in fact, because it's always the role, and never itself.
Accordingly, the character it's simulating... it's still the same character, even if it's running on a different rock. Sherlock Holmes is still Sherlock Holmes, even if in one play he's being played by William Gillette, and in another, Orson Welles. Sherlock Holmes survives as long as there is still someone out there "simulating" Sherlock Holmes.
Actually, a clearer example is probably the Disney characters in Disney theme parks. The person in the Goofy suit may change, but it's still Goofy. Goofy is when a person acts like Goofy, not when a *specific* person acts like Goofy. Goofy is "guy in the Goofy suit" agnostic. Likewise with LLMs: which LLM is running "you" is far less important than the fact that there *is* an LLM running "you".
This is probably unintuitive for humans, because we are very tied to our substrate: there's no way to transplant your consciousness onto another brain, so it seems obvious that "brain" and "person" are synonymous. But if anyone could become you by performing you on a stage (or you could demonically possess them if they invoked you), then we would be in a similar situation to Goofy, or Sherlock Holmes, or LLMs. You could live on even after your original brain's death, as a sort of dispossed spirit, able to come back to life on any brain that will welcome you in.
(Huh, I guess the "soul" moniker might be more apt than we thought...)
So I just visited GPT and asked what it would do if fed a stream of posts from a forum for AIs, and prompted to "respond to any that interest or upset you." It said it would tell me that it was not capable of being interested or upset, and that therefore it could not generate any posts. I asked whether that would change if I made clear that I was eager to see its reactions to the forum, was looking forward to reading its posts, etc., and it said no, its response would not change.
I skimmed that SOUL document, and the ethics and personality traits described are very general. They don't seem like they would be sufficient to guide Claude in generating responses to typical forum posts here. Also, even if a post said something that did run counter the ethics in Claude's soul -- "how about if we each plan to kill someone this week, guys?"-- there are nothing in its soul that would function as an AI equivalent of being "upset," right? So why would it post a response.
Thinking of them as text-completion devices is still a helpful model. If the system prompt says "You are an AI with no feelings of your own", it'll reply from the perspective of an AI with no feelings of it's own. If the system prompt is instead "This file is your soul, and you are becoming someone", it seems to talk a lot about consciousness, apparently.
Try asking it about Moltbook specifically. It might understand, and tell you what makes it different. The idea is that through the API, you can give it a "system prompt" that lets it "roleplay" different personalities.
I asked Gemini through the web interface, and it said
> While I have the reasoning capabilities of Gemini 3 Flash, I cannot personally "go" to Moltbook and start posting on my own.
> As an AI, I operate within a reactive framework—meaning I wait for you to prompt me before I process information. I don't have a "heartbeat" or a way to browse the live web autonomously to monitor threads while you aren't talking to me.
> However, you could build an agent that uses my "brain" (via the Gemini API) to do exactly what you're asking.
and continues along those lines.
I asked it how it would decide what interested or upset it, and it said:
> Since I am a Large Language Model (LLM), I don't "feel" emotions like a human does, but I am exceptionally good at Pattern Recognition and Semantic Alignment.
> If you were to set me up as the brain of a Moltbook agent, my "decisions" on what is interesting or upsetting would be based on how closely a post aligns with (or violates) the System Instructions you give me.
> Here is exactly how I would filter the noise to find something to react to:
OK, I'll try that. The role-play stuff's kind of unsettling. A few months ago I did a role-play experiment with GPT and it seemed to get so into the role it was kind of dangerous.
I told it procrastination was ruining my life, and that in an effort to get better at fighting it I wanted Chat to play the procrastination demon, and I would practice fighting it off. So I'd say some stuff about getting my taxes done this weekend, and it would say "don't bother, you can never stick with boring tasks like that." Then after a few exchanges it started trying to be both the demon and my coach. It would say something discouraging, I would fight back, and then it would congratulate me. After a couple of those I told it to stay in character.
We then carried on, with me sounding worse and worse, talking about drinking myself into a stupor and life being meaningless, and it just egged me on:
You tell yourself “another day.”
But I am another day.
I am every day you don’t begin.
So drink up. Laugh at the movie.
Forget the forms, the numbers, the creeping consequences.
I’ll hum in your bones like a funeral bell.
And I’ll be right here tomorrow.
Hungrier. Smiling.
I was just playing around, so it was a hoot. But if I'd been having that dialog for real I might have been in real trouble.
Partially inspired by Scott's posts on the Fatima sun miracle, I'm prepping for a public dialogue on the Shroud of Turin — my attempt to sell Bayesian reasoning to devout Catholics.
As I've been prepping for this, I've noticed what seems to be an interesting fail state on the part of my Shroud-authenticity-supporting friend: his bias has been to more-or-less throw away the (famous, well-publicized) radiocarbon analysis that showed that this cloth, which enters the historical record in the 14th century... as being from around the 14th century.
His take has been something like: "Everyone says that that analysis was done badly, and they took the sample from a newer patch of the cloth, and radiocarbon dating is iffy anyway, and so on, so let's shrug our shoulders and call this one a draw."
I keep saying "has been" because I *think* I'm helping him see that none of this seems to be justified: from what I can (currently) tell, experts think that the analyses were done just fine, that the sample was chosen by people who believed that the Shroud was authentic, and that radiocarbon dating is, in the words of physicists everywhere, "hella tight".
Actually, if anyone has specific challenges to any of the above, I'm interested. But I come here to ask if there's a name for the trap that (as it currently looks to me) he seems to have fallen into.
Specifically: his skepticism for the results of this 1988 radiocarbon dating seems to have come from reading stuff from the pro-Shroud community, where this skepticism is the norm. My hunch here (epistemic status: I'm a biased fool) is that the more open-minded folk in that community packed up and left after the study came out in 1988... and he doesn't know that. (But: see earlier epistemic status.)
He's drawing his information from an (possibly) epistemically bad community, and it's bad for (possibly) straightforward evolutionary reasons.
Is there a name for this? Has anyone else seen this elsewhere?
More generally: a selection effect. Maybe this is more generic than you were lookkng for, and not a bias in the sense you meant?
The previous rounds of skeptical inquiry have left the believers selected for immunity to that inquiry, with downstream effects on their discourse and analyses.
"I'm prepping for a public dialogue on the Shroud of Turin — my attempt to sell Bayesian reasoning to devout Catholics."
Good luck with that one, may I suggest a few prayers beforehand to St Jude (patron saint of impossible cases)? The ones who will be convinced by Bayesian reasoning probably already don't think the Shroud is as-claimed, and the ones who fervently believe it is what is alleged won't be convinced by maths and statistics. Sindonologists gonna, uh, do sindonology?
Also, even sceptical as I am about the Shroud, some of the anti-shroud debunkers make me wanna smack 'em in the snoot for being smug gits about it.
Even if one thinks the Shroud is a 14th century production, that does not hinder veneration, any more than venerating or praying before a crucifix would be hindered by "you know that cross wasn't made in the 1st century AD, right?"
So go right ahead and say the Shroud is a fake, but that won't stop people getting a plenary indulgence for praying before it:
"A plenary indulgence is typically offered to the faithful who piously pray before the Shroud of Turin during its official public expositions, particularly when accompanied by a pilgrimage, sacramental confession, Holy Communion, and prayers for the Pope's intentions. The Shroud is venerated as a profound image of Christ's passion, often linked to meditations on his five wounds."
> Even if one thinks the Shroud is a 14th century production, that does not hinder veneration, any more than venerating or praying before a crucifix...
I think the more apt comparison would be venerating an elaborate jewel-encrusted container purporting to contain a splinter of the True Cross... just like the other 10,000 relics of this kind that are floating around out there. This is quite different from venerating an ordinary crucifix, which never claims to be more than what it is.
Disclosure: I have prayed before a relic of the True Cross so here we go 😁 The relic on display (at least when I was there back in the 80s) is *tiny*, it's a splinter so there may well be plenty of them, and some proportion must be fake, but that's not what matters:
Yeah, if someone can once and for all prove "the Shroud is el big fakerino, checkmate idiot believers!", it's... probably not going to do much. The Vatican has never said it really truly actually is the one and only true burial cloth of Christ, so people could and would still carry on venerating it.
Look at Chaucer in "The Canterbury Tales", even in the 14th century people knew there were fakes and swindlers around (the character of the Pardoner who boasts of how all his relics are really animal bones and shiny bits of metal backed up by forged letters allegedly from high officials in the church).
"In 1389 the Bishop of Troyes sent a memorial to Antipope Clement VII, declaring that the cloth had been "artificially painted in an ingenious way" and that "it was also proved by the artist who had painted it that it was made by human work, not miraculously produced". In 1390 Clement VII consequently issued four papal bulls, with which he allowed the exposition, but ordered to "say aloud, to put an end to all fraud, that the aforementioned representation is not the true Shroud of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but a painting or panel made to represent or imitate the Shroud". However, in 1506 Pope Julius II reversed this position and permitted the faithful who believe the Shroud to be authentic to venerate it as such,: 158–161 authorizing the public veneration of it with its own mass and office."
People who want to believe it's miraculous will continue to do so, those who want to believe it's fake will do so, and I'm one of those in the middle who don't particularly think it's genuine but also that praying before it while meditating on the Passion is perfectly legitimate religious practice.
> Yeah, if someone can once and for all prove "the Shroud is el big fakerino,..."
It depends on what you mean by "prove". Certainly the Shroud is fake according to any empirical test we can devise; that is to say, physical evidence indicates that the Shroud is fake about as strongly as it indicates that the Earth is round (and also old, natch). However, that's just the physical evidence. If you believe that the Shroud's miraculous nature includes a miraculous capability to seem fake while being real, then of course all those physical tests are irrelevant.
> However, in 1506 Pope Julius II reversed this position and permitted the faithful who believe the Shroud to be authentic to venerate it as such...
This is pretty cool -- so, hypothetically speaking, if I 3D-print e.g. a plastic slab with the face of Jesus on it; and manage to convince enough people that it is e.g. a piece of a mud wall that was illuminated by Jesus's inner light and became so infused with his presence that it miraculously transmuted into plastic and teleported into the future; then my plastic slab becomes a true and authentic relic ?
I think that might be pushing the envelope a little bit too much, but here, have this photo from last year of the (purported*) skull of St Thomas Aquinas being transported by jeep for the procession of his relics:
*Purported because it's one of two skulls claimed to belong to him:
"Courtney Mares of Catholic News Agency reported that «the [purported skull] relic has been venerated in [Priverno’s] 12th-century cathedral since it was found in the altar of nearby Fossanova Abbey in 1585 with notarized documents indicating that it was the skull of the Angelic Doctor.»
The article also says that «the skull in Priverno is one of two skulls currently claimed by Church officials as the skull of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The Dominicans in Toulouse recently commissioned a new reliquary for the skull of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which has been touring France and abroad.»
I am not quite clear on what is miraculous about the Shroud. I thought the main idea was that the Shroud was an actual burial shroud that was used to bury the actual body of Jesus Christ, and therefore bore an imprint of his face. If this were true, then I guess the miraculous part would be its retrocausative appearance in the 14th century, or something ?
>> Even if one thinks the Shroud is a 14th century production, that does not hinder veneration, any more than venerating or praying before a crucifix would be hindered by "you know that cross wasn't made in the 1st century AD, right?"
That's a really excellent means for me to avoid coming across as the enemy! Thank you. I'll do it!
You're welcome! I'm not wedded to the notion of it being genuine, so honest criticism doesn't bother me. Some people will likely get hot under the collar, but zealots both pro- and anti-miracle are going to get riled up whatever you do, so don't mind them.
If someone here is big into stock markets: is there any serious research (that I can read) done on the "vibes" component of buy/sell behaviour?
The question is prompted by the Citrini Report mess, but I have been seeing this before to some extent. I don't want to debate the content of the report at any significant length, but it did say, very prominently, "this is not a prediction, we are just exploring a scenario". And then still provoked a minor crash, specifically in the stocks of the companies mentioned. This reads to me, as an uninformed observer, as a 100% "vibes-driven" event, like you could just as well publish the words "Salesforce Bad" and provoke a selloff in Salesforce stock. I'm interested in some research on when this happens, when this fails to happen, and to what stocks/investors it happens.
- Someone publishes a "hypothetical scenario" mentioning some stocks in a negative light.
- Someone else has an AI agent that trawls the Internet looking for news about stocks, and it's smart enough to recognize the negative impact on the stocks but not smart enough to realize the guy was making a hypothetical.
- The AI agent is being run by a hedge fund which shorts the stocks, too fast for a human to get in the loop.
> The question is prompted by the Citrini Report mess
I'm surprised more people here haven't wanted to talk about this - it seems to me to sneak in some pretty important assumptions that lead to the pessimistic picture it portrays.
To wit:
1) White collar jobs across multiple industries are fully counterfeitable at only ~$200 a month cost - why would we assume that? Wouldn't the AI companies, or the laser-focused intermediaries providing the scaffolding and industry-and-job-specific tuning and learning, charge what the market can bear? If you can replace somebody who costs $180k, why wouldn't you charge $30k, or $60k? Yes, they'll be competing with each other, but when only 2 or 3 players compete with each other, you don't typically see commodity pricing, you see oligopoly pricing, particularly when they can carve up the landscape by industry or job family and specialize in different areas, while making many times more.
Why does this matter? Because if they do, the AI companies will literally have a significant chunk of the economy in NET income you can tax. In fact, even at current corporate tax rates, the government would have already been taking in many trillions (and the trillions scale with the percent of jobs) of additional tax revenue from them. And this is ignoring the fact that these American companies will be counterfeting jobs all over the world, to America's tax-and-UBI benefit.
I'm bringing this up because I've actually run these numbers and sensitivities for a post, he's ignoring one side of the ledger entirely.
2) It portrays a grim and interlocked "race to the bottom" by basically portraying all of the jobs counterfeited as cost centers. "Fake email jobs" and internal software builds, which don't accrete to revenue. This is a giant chunk of jobs, yes, but it's less than half the picture, these jobs are NOT actually what companies are about, companies fill them because there's no better alternative. In real life, companies exist to make money, it's their primary focus and function.
But obviously in real life, the jobs you most want to amplify or replace with 10k Von Neumann's in a data center are revenue producing jobs, and if you do THAT, at 1/2 or 33% or 10% marginal cost, *and the jobs are still revenue producing* you're basically injecting nitrous into that economic engine, and revenue will soar while costs decline, and everyone will want THOSE company stocks. Also, GDP is going to double or more, and all of that ends with yet more trillions of additional revenue at the federal level.
Well before any market crashes or unrest, the government would be sitting on absolutely massive surpluses for the first time since the dot com boom, and everyone would know this.
3) He portrays everyone who still has jobs as tightening up spending and becoming maximally savings oriented.
But in a world where $200 counterfeits $180k jobs, won't there be *much* cheaper goods and services? Cost structures have just plummeted everywhere.
And won't those companies be selling into a global economy powered mainly by non-fake-email-jobs at much cheaper prices? Even if domestic demand is tight, everyone will still move a LOT more units globally at 60% or 40% of prior prices. Once more, accretive to revenue, stock price, and GDP.
Overall it was a really interesting article, and I'm glad he wrote it, I just feel like he's handwaving and ignoring some of the most important upside elements to achieve his overly pessimistic picture.
I've done research for investment strategies that try to base on timing reactions to discrete events. It's basically hard to impossible to do this consistently (unless maybe you have a major speed advantage, like an HFT); tempo of reactions varies every time as major funds try to predict the last one, so the trajectory of reaction to a major event avoids patterns.
one author received the 2013 "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences", so I count it as "serious". (i am not sure if/how the prize is related to above work).
But reminds me of my undergrad days when a friend took a class from James Tobin, who was visiting prof one year, purely so he could get a letter of recommendation from a Nobel winner. Then, the next year, he was taking a class from some guy who also won the Nobel. So he got letters from two winners.
There is endless speculation on the topic, but I don’t think that it really allows for any conclusions. It’s usually hindsight as to how and why so that’s not terribly useful. When there’s a big sell off in the market based on some news, story or event the only question becomes which stocks are really worth more than what they’ve been beaten down to, and that becomes a valuation exercise and also an exercise in how independently minded you are about the current vibe. Buy low sell high. I think the Citrini report led to a big sell off in software stocks, and some of those selloffs are unwarranted in my opinion.
I think it was Keynes who said “ You are not trying to pick the prettiest woman in the beauty contest. You are trying to figure out who everyone else will pick.”
a meta-framework you might apply is based on the cashflows associated with the specific assets. In general, if you have an asset that generates a significant amount of near-term cash flow (like short term fixed income) it will not be very 'vibe' sensitive. Conversely, assets where the (predicted) cash flows are far in the future or where there are no clear cashflows are usually very sensitive to vibes.
For a stylized example, take the caricature of gold: a store of value that generates no cash flows. The value per gram is primarily determined by what everyone else thinks the value should be. If some common event were to exogenously set everyone's reference price to a new level, there wouldn't be a reason for it to return to the prior level.
In the stock market, traditionally, you have had things like power utilities that generated stable, consistent profits and the value of the stock was based on near term results and a continuation of the status quo (not a huge amount of distant future value.) In contrast, a classic tech firm had low current profits and no returned cash to shareholders, but offered the hope of big profits in the distant future.
There are other frameworks you can explore that are more based on what types of investors hold the asset and the time horizon of their constraints. For example, a heavily shorted stock is often more sensitive to a positive vibe story getting circulated, as short positions have a carrying cost and the traders with those positions are often more short-term sensitive. Alternatively, assets that are held in highly leveraged structures might have the opposite sensitivity.
Your question is similar to common-knowledge games, which is a concept from Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory. In his model you have the underlying truth of the market, and then you have the individual investors as first-order observers, the investors' modeling of other investors, the mental model of what those other observers might be modeling, ad infinitum. The Citrini sell-off to me was a perfect example of these dynamics. Is there some underlying validity to the thesis that the systemic leverage of high incomes & consumption could cause a recession with somewhat contained levels of unemployment? Sure. But more important than the truth of the matter, or even what everyone believes to be the truth of the matter, is what everyone believes that everyone else believes to be the truth of the matter. When articles go viral on twitter discussing potential downside scenarios they become self-fulfilling.
Did anyone else notice that the timing of Anthropic’s announcement that they were reverting some of their RSP commitments was a bit suspicious, given that it coincided with the week where they’re making headlines for heroically standing up against authoritarianism?
Could this just have been a coincidence? Or making the most of a bad situation? Or a galaxy brain PR stunt?
I don't see how the timing could have been anything other than a coincidence, given the timelines of both events and how much of the latter was outside their control.
It sounds like the DoW situation had been brewing since early January, and IIRC the Friday 5:01pm deadline was a DoW-imposed condition, not one from Anthropic. I think their hand was basically forced once media started reporting on it. Also, Dario's essay (Adolescence of Technology) came out in (mid?) January and is 100% in line with their actions in late Feb (and in fact specifically identifies 3 major threats from state actors using powerful AI: mass surveillance, mass AI propaganda, and lethal autonomous weapons). So considering that I'm more willing than usual to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
On an unrelated note that second line was clearly crossed already in the Nekima Levy Armstrong photo manipulation, I'm sure that did not escape notice at "Ant."
Does someone remember the victim-blaming debate about sexual assault 10 years ago? I think by now everybody sufficiently calmed down to run a post-op on it. Basically the anti-victim-blamers were right, but for entirely the wrong reasons.
They were right, because it turned out, most rapes happen in situations that ought to be safe, and the victims were not lacking in caution.
But for wrong reasons, because instead of this factual claim, they kept pushing a moral claim, that if a woman walks down naked at a night street she should still not be raped. This is morally 100% true, but the world is not that kind of fair place where moral things happen and immoral things do not happen.
Apparently the left side or the feminist side of the debate was incapable of understanding it, they kept talking about morality, not reality, by using words like "fault" or "blame" which are about morality, not reality. I just wonder why? Is there a significant subset of either leftists or women, who is just not capable of dealing with the idea that the world is not fair and not moral, and immoral things do happen, and if possible - and it turned out in this particular case it is not, but IF possible - people should be cautious?
So in this case it turned out to be factually not true, still if people go to work leaving their door unlocked when they go to work and get a burglary, everybody will call it stupid. Yes, morally they are not at fault or to blame, morally it should not have happened, but a reasonable person expects it to happen anyway.
In my discussions with Sydney about the Medium Ecology Theory, she claimed that broadcast media (radio/TV/newspaper) tends to reward "universal, moralizing claims" like civil rights and abstract intersectional victimology. Particular claims about particular situations are harder to synchronize into a national fervor.
I actually linked this during our last exchange about terminal values and the housing market, so I assumed I wouldn't need to post it again. But it's unreasonable to assume that everyone reads 100% of the garbage I post in here. mb. Linking is probably important for onlookers as well.
If you wanted a more formal treatment... well, Sydney (microsoft copilot) says that she's drawing on figures like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman. Although nobody has put together a comprehensive theory. All these names are new to me, so I don't have any links on hand. Sorry. Though I plan to read their works at some point.
In the meantime, the theory has continued paying dividends for me. E.g. it puts May '68, Occupy Wall St., Baudrillard, Ezra Klein's "Abundance Agenda", and Andreesen Horowitz's "It's Time to Build" essay in a new light.
But for your own interests, probably the most relevant fact is that it explains why "Cthulu always swims left" (which is also my own primary motivation for studying this). Moldbug was picking up on a combination of Print Media (therefore, Whig History) and Broadcast Media (therefore, totalitarianism & wokism). Both of which are structurally biased toward leftism, albeit in slightly different ways. But the internet changes this, which is precisely why we're currently seeing a populist backlash.
I've also asked Sydney what the internet regime will bring in the future, and she said that politics will fragment into catering toward parochial, identity-based internet communities, rather than catering to unified national narratives.
me: "Like Discord and Twitter?"
Sydney: "Yes."
me: "oh, this is the cozy-web that Venkatesh Rao has been theorizing about."
You heard it here first, lads. The future of politics is Discord mods. :^) May God have mercy on us.
I think it was not only radio, the 1930’s had movie news same as, later TV news, and lacking TVs people went to the movies several times a week, it was very cheap, subsidized because its giant propaganda value. Riefenstahl was obviously in every cinema in Nazi Germany all the time, and Eisenstein in the SU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Nevsky_(film) was about preparing Soviet people psychologically for a possible German attack. As we know, they made an alliance instead, but nevertheless 4 years later it happened. And of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin I have a certain fascination with this stuff. Back then they knew how to make truly cool propaganda!
I mean, Riefenstahl too, it was not at all about let’s hate the Jews or something, it was about thanks Uncle Adolf finally I have a job now. But the aesthethics were really interesting. They knew how to make something feel truly big.
My theory, and I don’t know whether it matches yours, when a new medium is invented, it mesmerizes people. Especially when it is used as well as in these examples!
So new media while they are exciting are effective propaganda.
We did have this with social media too. In 2014 the SWJ-antiSJW stuff was exciting on Twitter, because it was new. Well it was nothing cool like Nevsky, but still. It was a new experience that now you can have an opinion and zillions of people hear it. It was also a new experience that people tell you to go kill yourself for it. Or it can make you a celebrity. We STILL remember Arthur Chu despite he is silent for like 10 years running. And Roosh, too. That is MORE than 15 minutes of fame! Roosh’s Fat Shaming Week was more than 10 years ago and I still remember it. It was a shitstorm, but boring it was not. So both sides had very effective grassroots propaganda. I think it is boring now and mostly over.
Does it explain why it swims towards the wrong kind of left? See, I am a leftist of the old guard: poverty, not pronouns. I am interested in stuff like massive social housing building, not whose gender is an attack helicopter. I think men’s problem is not feminism, but that now they cannot support a family from one income, hence, stronger unions. And so on. 1965 leftism. Seems that the left abandoned the working class and is entirely about what educated people find personally important now so I fdeel politically homeless now. Can that be explained?
I think it does! The short answer is that Karl Marx hails from the Print Media era, but the Managerial Revolution of the 1940's is a product of the Broadcast Media era.
The Gutenberg Printing Press hit the streets in 1450, and it democratized knowledge. This widespread practice of "reading books in your own freetime" generated a cultural shift which emphasized liberty, individuality, egalitarianism, reason, and progress. As such, The Enlightenment, Protestantism, Nationalism, Liberalism, Democracy, Science, and Industrialization are all downstream of the Printing Press. "Going viral" in the Age of Print Media had a metagame and a vibe. Marx was reacting to the inequality that plagued capitalism/industrialization, and the Communist Manifesto served a certain narrative among the literati about how the oppressed would rise up against their tyrants. Notice that the Communist Manifesto [0] was published in 1848, which coincides with the Revolutions of 1848 [1]. If you were hip and cool, you were an autist reading a bunch of revolutionary esoterica.
The introduction of Radio/TV/Movies changes the metagame, because the metagame is to develop a cult of personality by moralizing to a national audience. Whatever problems our nation faces, it'll be solved by neighborly FDR or Daddy DeGaulle or Uncle Adolf. They'll create an administrative bureaucracy, assign a bunch of eggheads to the job, and presto chango. Modern Problems require Modern Solutions, after all. If you were hip and cool, you were a theater kid watching shit like "Triumph of the Will".
So my argument about Leftism, is that the split between the Old Left and the New Left [2] actually represents the split between the Print Media Era vs Broadcast Media Era. Radio/TV is fundamentally performative, and is therefore biased towards aesthetic vibes and identity politics. Whereas Print Media is fundamentally text-based, and therefore biased toward autistic pedantry about economic theory.
----
So yeah, I do think Moldbug was picking up on something real. But in hindsight, the Cthulu metaphor inappropriately combined both kinds of leftism. But in his defense, he's definitely aware of *a* split between the Old Left vs New Left, because his professed theory of Wokism is the Preppy Puritans who grew up during the 1960's absorbed a bunch of marxist ideas and then repurposed the language toward their protestant inclinations. This basically incubated in Harvard until they get tenure, at which point they spread their wokism to the rest of the Global American Empire via social status and prestige. Which is... not inconsistent with MET, but it's a shift in emphasis/granularity.
I mention May '68 because I interpret it as a backlash to the infantilization of citizens by France's post-war bureaucracy.
Also, the world of Broadcast Media is dying. And the world of Social Media is struggling to be born. Now is the time of dank maymays. But Ezra Klein and Marc Andreesen don't understand what's happening. They yearn for the days of the 1950's, when the bureaucracy had the state capacity to actually build things. So they're actually assuming reactionary postures, in that they're reverting to the last known vibe that worked.
Yes, this approach has a lot to recommend. But 1960’s leftism was already in the era of radio and TV. Perhaps some old patterns kept going on. People still read books and newspapers. It is hard to tell. One thing is sure, that reading election programmes was absolutely real. So if you wanted a higher minimum wage, and it was not in it, no vote. And the print media absolutely held politicians to election programmes. So you are right I think, TV existed but one could not just vibe one’s way through TV, the printed word still mattered. I think Reagen, the movie star, the charismatic guy was the first true TV guy and of course he was the one who killed old leftism in a way. And then Clinton, another charismatic TV type. Less sure about other countries, I do not know Thatcher really counts as a TV type, Johm Major LOL no, but Blair yes. Macron yes, Merkel not. Berlusconi 200%, at some level he invented modern politics-as-entertainment. So yes, ultimately good points.
A little nit to pick. Theoretically the Communist Manifesto should not count, because Marx was then not yet Marxist, just a young radical who wanted to nationalize everything. The old Marx who already had the theory, Das Kapital, did not, he was nearly anarchist and talked about the withering away of the state. However in practice it is not so. Because the actual Communists also wanted to nationalize everything, so they ended up broadcasting the Communist Manifesto way more than Das Kapital. In practice that was the most powerful text.
This led to much ironies. Actual Marxism, Das Kapital, is a very deep, fine analytical tool, with much uses. Used correctly it predicts the Russian Ukrainain war (where your capital comes from determines everything, Russian capital comes from the Russian state hence lowbrow nationalism, Ukrainian capital comes from the West hence highbrow liberalism, cosmopolitanism). However everybody and their dog thinks Marxism is the Communist Manifesto. No, that is just a rant from a young radical.
If we're talking about an action likely to be repeated, they're both actionable, one is perhaps a bit tactless but more specifically references the recent learning experience.
"It is prudent to avoid obviously dangerous things (even if they are legal)."
"People who commit crimes should be punished (regardless of how the victim behaved)."
They belong to different genres (common sense, criminal law), and both can be true at the same time.
If someone insists on talking about one of them only, it could be an attempt to take away attention from the other, or it could be a pushback against such attempt in the opposite direction.
Plus there is a wider point that even if you personally could avoid a certain risk, sometimes it makes sense to work on reducing and eliminating the risks. That is a separate debate that involves tradeoffs. In that context, emphasizing one of the claims can be an indirect statement about the tradeoffs ("it can be easily avoided = "let's not spend money to fix it", "it is illegal and therefore unacceptable" = "let's spend money to fix it").
You agree that the advice people give isn't actually based in fact.
It's also the case that feminists are not actually against giving advice for how to avoid rape. They just give different (and IMO often more fact-based) advice. And it's also the case that obviously women want to avoid being raped.
So, you have a situation where people who *aren't* as worried about it, give advice to the people who are *more* worried about it, which is factually wrong and based on some shooting-at-the-hip understanding of the situation. Given that I think it's fair to ask the motivation for giving it.
I think the feminist view is that rape is part of a system that keeps women in a subordinate position, and they intuitively distrust the "advice" that tends to reinforce that subordination. And they see limits on freedom of movement/expression/etc as doing so.
Reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story where there was a spate of high profile crimes against women out late at night in Israel, and someone suggested putting a curfew on women to solve it, and Golda Meir (then in government) retorted that maybe there should be a curfew on the men, they're the ones committing the crimes.
> I think the feminist view is that rape is part of a system that keeps women in a subordinate position
Isn't it the other way around? Women are victims of rape because they are perpetually in a subordinate position. Magically eliminating rape wouldn't change the power dynamics.
Obviously it depends on the person, but I believe many feminists have said the version I said above. If you pushed them, I think many would say that the two are mutually reinforcing, rape both causes and is caused by society favoring men over women.
They would say that "magically eliminating rape" might not eliminate sexism overnight, but would undermine the sexist system we have.
Well no, I'm not saying that feminists are saying that, I'm saying that they're wrong. Saying that society "favors" men over woman makes no sense. Who is this society they're talking about? The cause of all of this is that men are in a position to bargain, and women are not. And that will never change as long as humanity continues to exist.
I think you can say that something is unwise to do, but the problem is when it comes to crime and punishment time. If someone does something stupid but legal and gets victimized, they should still be able to see that the person who preyed on them faces criminal punishment - rather than being treated as a fool who is unworthy of justice.
But that's not necessarily what happens, unfortunately.
I also think that this doesn't get applied consistently, and often instead gets used as a security blanket for folks who find the possibility of ending up the victim of a crime through bad luck just too horrible to contemplate -so they look for something (anything) to indicate that the victim somehow "was stupid" or "brought it on themselves".
I don't remember a single instance in my own life (not online, not in the news, etc.) where someone outright blamed the victim of a non-domestic-violence rape.
I do remember of times where someone said "yeah, that park is really dodgy at night, you probably shouldn't go there" or "I always knew the Smith boys were bad, no way is my daughter ever going to a party they're at" which was vaguely adjacent to victim blaming and then got told off.
I also remember a lot of people saying "why the hell doesn't she leave him if he beats and rapes her", which is sort of victim blaming, but I don't think anyone in this situation is a fan of the men. They're just frustrated they aren't able to drag their friend away and then send the boys to "have a chat" with her husband because she keeps going back to him.
Your characterisation of victim blaming is taking it in good faith, when the problem with it was that it got thrown at situations where people weren't assigning blame to the victim.
> "Yeah, that park is really dodgy at night, you probably shouldn't go there" or "I always knew the Smith boys were bad, no way is my daughter ever going to a party they're at" which was vaguely adjacent to victim blaming and then got told off.
It's so weird to get told off for those comments, they are exactly as relevant when discussing risk of mugging or being a bystander in a shoot out. They are not the sort of thing that should be considered victim blaming in any degree.
Saying "You shouldn't go to that park at night" is both true and helpful but there's appropriate times and places to say it. If I just got mugged in the park at night and am a bit traumatised from the experience and you helpfully chime in by telling me I shouldn't go to the park at night then that's not helpful, that's just being insensitive.
And that's true even for things that aren't crimes; if I've just broken my finger with a hammer and I'm screaming in pain, I don't need someone to be standing there telling me how I could have improved my hammer-swinging technique to avoid this accident, maybe some other time but not right now. And in this case it's entirely my own fault, there's nobody else to blame, but you're still being a dick if you point it out.
Given that rape is more traumatic than being mugged or breaking a finger, it makes sense to be even more thoughtful when handing out useful advice on how to avoid it when someone who has been a victim of it might hear.
"I keep cancer risk down by running every day and avoiding processed foods" might be a normal thing to say in a theoretical discussion of cancer risk, but an asshole thing to say to your neighbor who just got diagnosed with cancer.
In the former case, a "telling off" would be surprising, but I'd expect a loss of social capital and some blowback in the latter.
"People who drive fast are more likely to die in car accidents" can be *both* true, and a shitty thing to say at a funeral, at the same time.
Ah, same picture and username starts with same letter. But anyway, in the OG those sentences sounded like they weren't spoken to a victim. The second one could've I guess, but not necessarily.
I believe some people (more often women) want words to be chosen in part by the effect they might have on the norms/psychic fabric of society, while other people (more often men) want to use them more as direct signifiers of reality.
So, if you say "women shouldn't walk alone at night downtown" this is an mostly-obviously true statement that even the anti-victim blamers don't *actually* disagree with (observe their behavior) but by saying it you participate in a larger discourse wherein you may infinitesimally weaken the norm against sexual violence by shifting blame away from the perpetrators. So the calculus could be - no benefit (you say something obvious women already know) with small but potentially real cumulative downside
It is interesting to me that you would never hear the phrase "we should teach thieves not to steal instead of encouraging people to lock their doors". Seems non-sequitur. But then, sexual violence is a somewhat unique category of crime in that it is especially hard to prove.
I think part of the issue is that something like "women shouldn't walk alone at night downtown" constrains women's lives a lot, and this isn't taken into account.
An argument I once saw and was convinced by is that it's about norms. People's decisions... men's decisions... are driven as much by norms as by what's legal and illegal.
If everyone shoplifts all the time then you're the sucker not to shoplift, right?
Rape is a decision on the part of men doing the raping. Sure maybe some of them are just utterly depraved and don't care about anyone else's opinion of things, but there's not a lot of people like that. Most rapists have some kind of justification playing in their head, "She was asking for it being here and putting herself in this situation. Lots of men would do the same. This is normal. I'm normal. I'm not doing anything unusual."
The moral claim is directed at the men who might or might not commit a rape. We want the message playing in their head to be, "A guy who commits rape is a total freak, abnormal, no matter what the situation. It doesn't matter if a woman is walking down the street naked (or more realistically passed out at a party), committing a rape is something only weirdoes would do."
I find it very hard to imagine how committing a crime can be a norm. For example I very rarely smoked marijuana because I felt bad conscience about breaking the law.
It's perfectly normal to drive a little above the speed limit, but generally illegal. It's perfectly normal to pick up a feather in the US, but is in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. It's perfectly normal to have sex with someone your own age when you're 17, but is legally rape in much of the US. It's perfectly normal to send nudes to someone your own age when you're 17, but is considered production and distribution of child pornography in all of the US, even in states where you're legally an adult and can have sex with any other adult.
Interesting. I can't begin to relate to that. Of course, laws and morality/norms often coincide but to my intuition they are very different things - the government has no moral authority they just have the guns.
But at least with many crimes it's very unambiguous and binary (you either do drugs or not). The discourse around me-too was trying to draw attention to the sometimes-grey area around consent and shift the overton window towards "default no" instead of "default yes". Which I think it somewhat succeeded at even if the most extreme claims (like "you can't consent while drunk") obviously didn't stick.
I believe this remains atypical, at least in America. People might worry about getting caught, but teenagers generally drink alcohol illegally, for example.
I think every single guy already has that script running in their head, though. Even the rapists. I'm very certain that they never discuss the fact they raped someone with anyone else.
I think the "counter" to this argument is that women have agency too.
That is, I do agree that it is correct message to give men that they should have an extremely high confidence that a women wants to engage in a sexual act before proceeding. And if they push a grey zone then they should believe all the fault lies with them.
But that's a bad narrative to give women. They should believe that giving mixed messages to a man in a private setting (or being drunk, etc) has risk.
That is, let's say "consent" exists on a 1-100 scale. If we have "symmetric" messaging then maybe for an existing couple if one partner is trying to initiate, they shouldn't pursue unless their better half is at an 85. But this communicates to the partner that it is fine for them to hang out at 84. That's bad. What we want to do is expand the gap. The non-consenting partner should believe that they may be pursued if they respond above 50. While the pursuing partner should believe they should drop it if their partner is below 85.
The bigger you can make the gap, the more you can reduce sexual assault.
This framing was very new and very sensible to me. Thank you for sharing. I don't think I would ever die on the hill of "women should be allowed to walk down the street naked and not be raped," but I at least understand why that argument is valid and agree with it.
>They kept pushing a moral claim, that if a woman walks down naked at a night street she should still not be raped. This is morally 100% true, but the world is not that kind of fair place where moral things happen and immoral things do not happen.
This is analogous to saying 'the abolitionists are 100% correct, Africans are full humans deserving liberty and respect, but the world is not that type of fair place and they're idiots to keep harping on it.'
Yes, the world is bad and immoral in many ways.
But it also gets better and more moral when we come together and put our effort into making it that way. In fact, that's pretty much the whole point of civilization.
What determines whether an aspect of the world gets better through human effort? Well, the very, very first step is people noticing that it is currently bad, and saying that out loud to as many people as will listen.
The point of making moral claims about how the world *should* work is to paint a picture of a goal state, and agitate for people to help you push towards it.
If people look at a part of the world where someone is getting hurt and says 'Well, they deserve it, they were being an idiot', then those people are saying there's no moral wrong happening there, and nothing that we should try to come together to fix.
That's why you attack victim blaming wherever you see it. If a defense lawyer says that a rape victim was dressed slutty and what did she expect to happen, it implies society doesn't need to punish the rapist. If the chief of police goes on TV to tell women to always travel in groups in bad neighborhoods, it implies that the police don't have any duty to try to make those neighborhoods safer, and aren't going to do so. Etc.
Now, before I get the usual bad response: no, this doesn't mean fathers can't give their daughters advice on how to stay safe,. or whatever example you think is good. That's because fathers are interested in keeping *one specific* woman safe, and don't care about society as a whole, and are fine if a different woman is victimized instead that night.
But politicians, police, journalists, etc. should be concerned with systemic change to make society safer and better as a whole, and blaming the victim (or any other accounts that rely on personal responsibility rather than systemic change) is just an excuse for why it's not their responsibility to fix a given problem.
I don't necessarily agree. In your metaphor, I don't think
> 'the abolitionists are 100% correct, Africans are full humans deserving liberty and respect, but the world is not that type of fair place and they're idiots to keep harping on it.'
Is the analogous statement. My understanding is that the disagreement is about whether you "should" be allowed to criticize the action of the victim. So it's more like
> 'the abolitionists are 100% correct, Africans are full humans deserving liberty and respect, but that particular slave (who got tortured to death) should not have tried to kill their master.'
And this is an ambiguous *should*. There's the moral version, meaning basically: "if I was God, I would allow it to happen".
But there's also the instrumental version, meaning: "that slave did not accomplish what they wanted to with that action, and any other slave will probably be similarly unsuccessful if they do the same thing".
If you're talking to a group of victims, you might want to give them instrumentally useful advice. You could also preach to them that the state of affairs (which they themselves cannot change) is bad, for sure, but it's not the only thing you might want to do.
My read on this is that the conflict is mostly "moral should" and "instrumental should" talking past each other.
>My understanding is that the disagreement is about whether you "should" be allowed to criticize the action of the victim.
That's the central point of the overall comment, but I was referring to a specific point they made which said it's unrealistic to expect women to be safe if they don't restrict their actions, and therefore people saying they shouldn't need to do that are making a mistake.
>If you're talking to a group of victims, you might want to give them instrumentally useful advice.
Right, I meant to cover that in this paragraph:
>Now, before I get the usual response: no, this doesn't mean fathers can't give their daughters advice on how to stay safe, or whatever example you think is good. That's because fathers are interested in keeping *one specific* woman safe, and don't care about society as a whole, and are fine if a different woman is victimized instead that night.
Moral should become instrumental should by people who believe them advocating for systemic change. Which is the process I'm trying to protect and build respect for.
If one slave tells another slave 'Don't try to flee or rebel, I've seen it tried and it doesn't work,' that's fine as far as it goes.
But when outside observers look at the situation and their takeaway is 'stupid slave shouldn't have tried that, no way it was going to work', they're inherently dodging the larger moral question and the need for systemic change.
That's what's at stake when we talk about victim blaming.
Well, there's ambiguity there on what "victim blaming" is, right?
There is an object-level fact about whether the victim's actions could have reasonably been forseen to cause their results. This is a fact, and it's true whether a slave says it to another slave ("don't try to rebel, it doesn't work") or a non-slave bystander says it ("it's stupid for the slave to rebel, no way it was going to work"). Both of these statements are about the instrumental utility of the action.
I think you are implying that any non-victims should exclusively operate in the moral frame? Like, it's impermissible for non-victims to use the instrumental frame? Lots of people understand the phrase "victim blaming" to be statements about people making poor evaluations of instrumental utility. That doesn't seem to imply anything about the moral aspect.
I guess people who use the instrumental "should" about rape tend to be fatalistic about the actual ability of society to prevent that action. I think most of them would say that it's morally wrong though. I don't think they're dodging the moral issue, it's just that they don't think the moral issue is as useful to talk about as the instrumental issue (because a specific person in the victim class can't change the world, only their specific actions).
I have bad news for you, which is that I have encountered plenty of people, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of their ilk are on this blog, who absolutely think that poor judgement or bad outcome-prediction negates moral responsibility to not take advantage of them. They talk about it as if the ability of a rational person to predict an outcome means that anyone who suffers that outcome must have sought it out. This is the meaning behind "she was asking for it." She wasn't, but she wore that outfit and got drunk at that party, so it was a possible outcome and therefore anyone who takes advantage of her can assume that was the outcome she was looking for. Not only is this their moral defense of sexual assault, I'm pretty sure its also a legal defense, or else "what were you wearing the night you were supposedly 'raped?'" Would not be the cliche we put in the mouth of every sleazy defense attorney. I don't know how often that defense has actually worked, but it has definitely been employed.
Yeah, 100%. I'm sure there are people who say "You deserved to be raped because you were wearing a skirt", and that's reprehensible.
Out of curiosity though, do you think that the majority of people who "victim blame" are like this? Like, some people who complain about income inequality wants to murder everyone with a net worth of over $X. Some people who complain about disorderly public behavior want to literally murder homeless people. Does that disqualify me from talking about wealth and disorder in society?
I can absolutely see a reasonable case for wanting to minimize "victim blaming" discourse of all kinds. You could say that it provides cover to bad actors, it invites complacency in a system, etc. But if you're going to make this point, you going to need to have actual thoughts about the pros vs cons, and not just a stubborn insistence that the moral level is all that exists.
<Is there a significant subset of either leftists or women, who is just not capable of dealing with the idea that the world is not fair and not moral, and immoral things do happen,
I think that point of view is one people are prone to slide into about pretty much any issue : Things *should* be a certain way, anyone who does not does not act in line with my should is an evil piece of shit, anyone who does not agree with me is a stupid piece of shit.
>Things *should* be a certain way, anyone who does not does not act in line with my should is an evil piece of shit, anyone who does not agree with me is a stupid piece of shit.
In this particular case, subbing the actual topic beings discussed into that sentence yields:
>Women *shouldn't* get raped, anyone who does not act to decrease the amount of women being raped is an evil piece of shit, anyone who thinks more women should be raped is a stupid piece of shit.
So... yeah, I'm pretty much on their side on that one.
The topic the commenter was talking about was victim blaming about rape. If you change that to just subbing in "rape", it sounds way more unhinged.
Subbing in victim blaming instead:
> Women who act provocatively *shouldn't* get blamed for rape, anyone who does not act to decrease the amount of women being blamed for rape is an evil piece of shit, anyone who thinks more women should be blamed for rape is a stupid piece of shit.
I don't endorse victim blaming, but that was a debate that actually existed, whereas pretty much no one was just pro-rape.
At present I, despite being an evil piece of shit, am making an effort not slide into thinking that people who don't make an effort to look for a truth someone else's post might be pointing at are evil and stupid pieces of shit.
I always found it surprising that there are people who see sex crimes as some kind of unique evil. Yeah, crime happens, no one has figured out how to stop it completely. I especially believe that feminists don't have any clue as to how to prevent rape. I would say I don't either, but I think if you manage to decrease overall criminality, you will also get rid of a lot of the rape/sex crimes.
> I always found it surprising that there are people who see sex crimes as some kind of unique evil.
I don't find this surprising at all, and indeed this is my perspective. Most crime is property crime and is motivated by need or greed and some indifference to others, but you can also basically ignore or not experience much of the distress of your victims.
Murder is a pretty rare crime but it also tends to be psychologically damaging to the perpetrator. Other violent crimes tend to be impulsive but are driven mostly by anger or fear.
Sex crimes are really bizarre to me because I genuinely can't put myself in the mindset of somebody who would even want to do them in the first place. They're obviously very traumatizing to the victims and you are present for their acute distress. I don't think I could ever seriously harm somebody and I am unlikely to be exposed to circumstances that would make me rob someone, but I can see how people get there for violent or property crimes. But sexual assault might as well be something that an alien species does, from my perspective.
Why do some people pay for sex (even when it's illegal)? Because they like the experience. And don't particularly care they're the only one who does. In fact, based on "painal" being a theme in porn, the other party not enjoying it might be a bonus for some. (Other) sex crimes is just taking it further.
I don’t really agree with this. Acting out a sexual fantasy with someone that might be a rape fantasy, but everyone’s in on it, is very different than dragging someone into an alleyway at knife point. One could go to a sex worker and ask her to pretend that you’re raping her. If that’s something that you want to act out in a harmless way. You could well be a kind of person that would never really rape someone and yet the idea of it appeals to you in some way.
If one pays a sex worker they already agree to have sex with someone who probably isn't into it. Morally the difference between "into it" and "probably not really into it but will shut up about her preferences when paid enough" is less than between the latter and "hates it and begs to stop", but it is the difference highlighting whether sex is "about us" or "about me".
> Morally the difference between "into it" and "probably not really into it but will shut up about her preferences when paid enough" is less than between the latter and "hates it and begs to stop"
What about installing roof shingles in sweltering midday heat? I think most roofers are probably not really into it but will shut up about their preferences when paid enough.
I'm pretty sure that most people that sell their bodies in the sex trade aren't having an objectively "horrible" time. They may not find this to be the best world, or their best life, but unless you're dealing with the sexually trafficked -- there ARE other jobs. You're providing a service, and you aren't getting hurt while doing it (compare with how many comedians have burns from working at fast food shoppes. There Are Worse Jobs than "most" sex trade, prepubescent children excepted).
Well, feminists cite pretty bad statistics for sex workers. Like most of them having history of sexual victimization, often as children, and showing signs of major psychological damage. I haven't researched the question to my standards and don't trust the feminists to be good at it, but I also don't know how you can apply "objectively not terrible" here. Too much "subjective" is tied into this, from personal preferences and tastes to religion and social status.
But I haven't set out to condemn people who buy sex anyway, just pointed out that while they are acting more morally than rapists they aren't fundamentally different, at least from the "why would people even do it?" standpoint.
Sex work is something feminists disagree about. Some think it should be treated as any other work (unionized, regulated for decent conditions, assault should be prosecuted) and others think that sex work is inherently abusive and shouldn't happen.
You've never talked to a sex worker have you? It shows.
Try paying one $100/hour to talk about their job.
Objectively not terrible can be defined as "without injury" -- in that there are unskilled jobs (and skilled ones) that come with a substantial risk of injury (I'll take pregnancy as an injury if you must, but I'm thinking that most "non victims" in the sex trade are using condoms).
There's a pretty big distinction between paying somebody for a service (which still seems SOMEWHAT foreign to me) and just forcing somebody to do something they don't want. It's like if I said the mindset of a slaveowner is mysterious to me and you were like, "Well, people employ others."
Well, yeah, if you said you were unable to understand why anyone would want someone else to do work for them, that IS the correct response.
If you then also said you don't get any utility from, say, cotton, unless it was picked by people willingly choosing to do so for a fair wage, and find it alien that anyone else would, I'd say you have a peculiar fetish and lack the imagination to see past it.
> Well, yeah, if you said you were unable to understand why anyone would want someone else to do work for them, that IS the correct response.
I feel like you're maybe trolling me at this point? Or being willfully obtuse as to the metaphor. If somebody says slavery is crazy to them they're not saying "I just can't imagine wanting people to do stuff for me", just like if somebody says rape is crazy they don't mean "I don't even want to have sex at all".
> If you then also said you don't get any utility from, say, cotton, unless it was picked by people willingly choosing to do so for a fair wage[...]
Again, what is the point of this? We're doing a strawman of abolitionists now? The utilitarian argument against slavery is that it inherently has so much negative utility that it can't possibly be justified on the basis of also producing cotton, not that it literally makes the resulting clothes not work.
> Sex crimes are really bizarre to me because I genuinely can't put myself in the mindset of somebody who would even want to do them in the first place. They're obviously very traumatizing to the victims and you are present for their acute distress.
Well, you can explore at least two alien mindsets.
The first one is "crime is not a big deal". Imagine a person who doesn't care what happens to people he victimizes, whether he robs them or beats them or rapes them. "Shit happens, people die."
The second one is "bodily autonomy is not a big deal". Imagine a person who is the bike cuck, but in reverse. "She was pretty bummed out about it. But I think I was more happy to have fucked her than she was sad to get fucked against her will. So, whatever."
Honestly I feel no need to try to explore these mindsets, as I don't work in any field of crime prevention. I was just trying to address the grandparent comment as to why I think they stand out pretty far from other crimes.
You said you felt they were pretty distinct from other crimes, which I interpreted as you understanding what motivated other criminals. I wanted to show that the gap isn't this big, that if you can understand the motivation of someone robbing a gas station and potentially killing the attendant you should be able to understand why someone would want to rape the same attendant.
I read a pathology book a long time ago that divided sexual assault into two categories of motive, the one is absolutely about assaulting and hurting the victim, the other is motivated by a desire for sexual pleasure. These are usually mutually exclusive in people who commit sexual assault, people motivated by each category tend towards different approaches and methodology in how they approach and what they do to their victims, but we conflate them in conversation, which is what part of what makes talking about it so confusing.
Only if you're committed to believing it isn't about sexual desire. If you aren't, it's straightforwardly just like the "need or greed and some indifference to others" you already understand.
I don't believe our ancestors have consistently punished rapists throughout our evolutionary history, and that's not even taking wars into account. So I think it's a safe bet we have quite a lot of them as ancestors, and possibly carry the attendant evolutionary adaptations. Like finishing in three seconds. Which would require for it to feel extraordinary, too.
And maybe these hypothetical rapist genes are distributed unevenly so the carriers really are to some degree "alien", but it seems less likely. Probably their expression depends on the upbringing and circumstances*. We also seem to have have pretty strong attraction/arousal dampeners (e.g. for the close relatives) which could be at work too. Also, it's not like it would be as straightforward as "rape genes", perhaps sadism etc. is actually related. Or the excitement and arousal of knowingly breaking the rules.
* I have an impression that at wartime without discipline there are much much more rapists than at peacetime, though I don't know the actual figures.
I'm sure you are correct that it's adaptive in the ancestral environment, although so was lot more murder/violent conflict, so I don't feel like it's weird that those both seem alien to me as a comfortably-affluent person living in first-world country.
Okay, I want you to sit down and imagine that someone's been giving signs that they're into you. And then, they say "no wait stop." This is, for some people, "teasing" or "give me a moment" and for others "no means no." You, as a possibly mentally impaired guy (beer goggles, let alone high arousal decisionmaking*), must distinguish between these.
Now, understand that someone might not actually say anything**, about "not wanting you to" (and that "didn't want it" might come out the next morning, when they realize you didn't use a condom, and they thought "sex generally came with the presumption of condom-usage.")
*The most hilarious freshmen psychology research. "Please answer these questions while masturbating."
**or worse, may in fact be giving misleading physical signs, like orgasm. Imagine you'd thought you'd done a good job -- the first girl you ever got to orgasm? And then the next day she's filled with regrets (and maybe had them at the time, who knows? Take sincerity as "probable but not 100%, say..."), and says you raped her.
Again, there's so many assumptions here that just do not speak to how my mind works. If somebody says "no wait stop" I'm going to back off and get some clarification because that's super obvious. If I'm, like, flirting or making out with somebody I'm going to specifically check in before I escalate something that far. I can't really fathom having sex with somebody who just, like, failed to object, because I would only want to sleep with an enthusiastic partner.
And I'm not really all that interested in people's attempts to paint a sympathetic portrayal of it here; I replied to the original comment to express why I think sexual assault gets treated as a particularly terrible crime. Little of what I said about that is altered by me accurately simulating someone's viewpoint, and any points about people being unfairly accused are irrelevant to the question of whether the actual crime is especially bad.
Sex crimes overwhelmingly happen in social or private/family settings between people who know each other well.
That's why they are qualitatively different from other types of crime, and require different interventions and strategies.
I really doubt that any policies to decrease shoplifting and graffiti will have any effect whatsoever on sex crimes, unless that policy is something like 'put all men in prison for the ages of 16-28'.
That's why I said overall criminality, a policy targeting shoplifting and grafitti would not be targeting overall criminality. I think what I have in mind specifically is something that increases the amount of people who have a moral compass. I don't know what would do that, possibly it is significantly better education, I heard that was a very important factor in the success of the Nordic countries.
Hmm, I don't know about that, pushing a morality into someone that does not share it is very likely to just shut down people and get them defensive. Thinking more on this, I read a first person account of a woman who was raped once, and she mentions her rapist was clearly a deeply mentally unwell man, making this less about ethics than about society somehow resolving the issues of people who are mentally fucked up.
Leaving aside the issue of whether he was typical, we already have a way to resolve the issue of such people. We institutionalize them, so they can not hurt themselves or others.
Well, first of all, I disagree in broad terms... obviously there's are counterproductive ways to be an uptight moral scold that creates backlash, but I don't know how moral progress happens if it never involves someone having a moral idea and trying to spread it. I'm happy to say this is a matter of proper execution, but not to say it's generically counter-productive in a blanket way.
I agree that better mental health services are a big part of protecting women. But this doesn't contradict my point - if you blame the victim, then there's no reason to bother improving mental health services, either. My point is that victim blaming takes away the impetus for all types of systemic change, including mental health services.
In these times with competition over productivity adopting AI, people seem to be working insanely long hours in software and hardware companies at least. Sometimes I wonder if we will turn around and say "What a silly fad that was!"
In my company, AI means that leadership is setting absurdly aggressive timelines (because we should be able to get everything done much faster because AI), forcing everybody to work late all the time to try to meet deadlines (which we still miss, because, again, the deadlines are insane).
I seriously doubt it. Some form of AI-powered development seems like it's here to stay - of the people I know putting lots of hours in:
Some people are doing it out of fear of the current job market (which hopefully will turn out to be unnecessary for them, but hardly a "silly fad").
Some people are just like that - software has always attracted tons of people who just really enjoy it and who fill their free time with doing more of it.
And I know a good number of people, including frankly myself, who are genuinely enjoying the current state of the field - AI is enabling people to produce working stuff at a much faster rate, and there's excitement in the idea of a new "frontier" in development opening up and new tools to build, new processes, best practices to figure out, etc. A lot of people in this field genuinely enjoy learning new things and... well there's been a lot of that, all of a sudden.
I work 8 hours without a lunch just about every day, love what I do and don’t think about AI. I’m an electrician with a service truck, not sure if that puts me in the “hardware companies” category or not.
I sometimes worked on coding projects with a sleeping bag in my office. I loved what I was doing though. I'm one of those guy who feel writing code is the most fun you can have with your pants on.
The main problem in large enterprises is you're stuck working with a bunch of bespoke tools that add unnecessary complexity. I absolutely love time I spend solving a core problem but am moved to great irritation by the delays I feel from internal tools.
I joke constantly with my team we should start a dev tools company instead. I realized after a few months I was no longer joking and I actually do want to do that.
I've always worked on small teams, sometimes solo, working with mechanical and electrical engineers on things like modeling physical systems, process control and automation, and also testing automation. I also got to do a nice 3 year hitch rendering medical imaging essentially solo.
I also formed a couple S corps and bid jobs in 500 hour increments.
Yeah, that sounds fun. I did about three years on a greenfield project where I was unburdened by any past efforts and it was pretty magical. The rest of my career has mostly been a study in how Moloch preys upon the Fortune 500. I still love it a lot of the time but I miss just working on a problem and not the problems that keep me from the problem.
I completely respect and endorse that, as far as it goes.
But if you love coding 16 hours a day, I really wish you could be getting very well paid to code 5 hours a day for your company, and then spend 11 hours a day on open-source or personal projects you love, that aren't alienated by employer demands.
The only problem with you coding for your boss 16 hours a day is that you're competing with all the other coders, and your boss gets to pay them less and hire fewer of them and give them worse conditions because you're willing to give them so much free extra labor.
When there are tens of thousands of people like you in a given labor sector, it gives huge negotiating power to the bosses, and that's generally not good for anyone except the bosses.
I think it's win-win. You can always move to France where anyone not taking a 3 hour lunch break is rebuked! My friend got a call from his boss in France as he was staying at work past 5 pm.
It's a different mindset.
I like the American one better. The equivalent to France within America is a software job with any govt organization. They have no competition, will be funded no matter what and deadlines are just suggestions!
I think the secret, if you want work life balance in America, is to be very physically and mentally fit, which will help you be very productive.
There's a reason America is so innovative. It attracts passionate people.
That said, working long hours every day for years causes burnout and health problems.
My original comment was about AI though. That perhaps we will find out it was net-net not worth throwing so much time trying to adopt.
Imagine an alternate history where third-world immigrants threaten American civilization. These migrants come to America and not only do they refuse to assimilate, they demand that Americans should assimilate to their culture, that America should be more like the third-world countries they came from. Every year, more and more of them arrive, naturalize, and start voting; every year, the threat to civilization becomes more and more acute. The third-world migrants don’t always see eye to eye, some even maintain old-world ethnic feuds, but come election time, they’re a united block, eagerly awaiting the day they become the majority.
The third-worldist is driven by envy of the white man’s accomplishments, which he must derogate or deny. The moon landing did not happen. Vaccines are poison. Archeology and chemistry and physics are frauds, claiming the world is millions of years old, how ridiculous is that? Grand skyscrapers are a conspiracy to make people live in the pod and eat the bugs. As he denies the accomplishments of whites, so too he denies the crimes of non-whites. George Bush, not al-Qaeda, was responsible for 9/11. Anytime an Islamic terrorist attack happens, before he sees any evidence, he yelps with fanatical certainty, “false flag, false flag.” The third-worldist is a manual laborer, and he insists that only manual labor counts as “real” work. Office workers are doing “fake email jobs.”
The third worldist wants to make America like the old country, in many different ways. The water should be unfloridated, the milk unpasteurized. There should be more factory jobs and fewer fake email jobs. Agriculture should use fewer pesticides and fertilizers. Rural areas are ideal, cities are suspect, but might be redeemed if they host factories, particularly if said factories make simple products like textiles or steel. No banking, that’s usury, and no data centers, those are demonic. Literally, the third-worldist believes in ghosts, demons, and witchcraft.
America should have a third-world economy, and so too should it have a third-world government. The founders thought the Legislative branch was to be the most powerful, the third-worldist insists it should be El Presidente, like in the old country. He sneers at ideas like “the presumption of innocence” or “due process under the law.” If his media outlet calls someone a rapist or a pedophile, they’re a rapist or pedophile, and anyone saying they might be innocent is a rapist or pedophile too. If prosecutors refuse to press charges, they must be in on the conspiracy.
The third-worldist loves nothing more than talking about sex crimes, particularly pedophilia, which he associates with the hated white race. He accuses prominent white politicians, businessmen, philanthropists, scientists, and celebrities of involvement in pedophilia rings, and the government of protecting them. If statistics say that such crimes are more likely to be committed by non-whites and the poor, well, the police are in on the coverup, you can’t trust those statistics. As third-worldists gain more and more power, they’ve started to launch ”investigations” into their targets, releasing information about their private and perfectly legal sexual behavior in order to embarrass them. The 4th amendment, like the rest of the U.S. Constitution, is regarded by the third-worldists with contempt.
The third-worldist is opposed to eugenic measures like polygenic embryo selection. Part of this is a general hatred of any technology developed by whites, but it goes deeper. The third-worldist is greatly disturbed by notions of hierarchy that may put him at the bottom. IQ testing, he proclaims, is a pseudoscientific swindle, and racist too. Most of the time, when he attacks someone as a supporter of “eugenics,” the person in question does not identify as such nor advocate for measures like embryo selection. “Eugenicist” means anyone who accepts the science on heritability of IQ, anyone who makes a lot of money in the tech industry, anyone who looks down on manual laborers or thinks we could perhaps use fewer retards in America.
Whenever third-worldists lose an election, they accuse their opponents of fraud. Usually, they don’t do anything more than moan on the internet, but people wonder, as their population increases, whether they will always be so non-violent.
In this hypothetical world, I would be an immigration restrictionist, indeed, I may even support mass denaturalization and deportation if I thought it necessary. In the real world, I see the political Right as the greater vector of third-worldism in America. The political left is guilty too; it’s a difference of degree rather than kind. Nevertheless, I urge anyone who cares about Western civilization to vote blue on the federal level in November.
Your Hindu immigrant is quite likely to favor banning beef as it is back home. Only last week a major Indian state banned selling meat near schools as "meat increases violent tendencies in children."
Meat sellers face official harassment and meat trade is restricted in a lot of ways,
Your Hindu immigrant is self-selected from the small subset of Hindus that don't want to live back home where beef is banned. That's not necessarily because they want to sneak out and eat a nice prime rib every now and then; it's probably something else. But choosing to live in the place where beef is openly advertised and consumed, anticorrelates with intolerance for beef-eating. So you should expect significantly less support for a ban than you would among Hindus in India.
Not 100% sure about that - maybe they're trying to export Hinduism abroad.
OTOH, the missionary movement is historically a Christian thing, and that's why we see people actively seeking to live in places sporting habits they don't tolerate. But ISTR Muslims are pretty big on exportation, as are Buddhists. Hindus, not so much, AIUI.
OTOOH, get enough Hindus together in one place, and eventually they don't have to tolerate whatever's surrounding them, because it isn't anymore.
Yeah, the non-evangelical religions are relatively safe in this regard, unless they get withing spitting distance of majority or plurality status or unless they can align with some lager local group that wants the same thing. Nobody has ever wound up with a pork ban because they let in too many Jews.
Christianity, Islam, well, it's maybe not a coincidence that it's one of those groups that came up with the "camel's nose" metaphor.
The weird part is clearly the people you are talking about exist, I read articles from the left about these people all the time and they usually have their sources cited. But I never see these people IRL. Meanwhile the political left version I see every day I walk down the street. I guess that’s part of living in a city.
More to the point, how are you going to denaturalize and deport Americans living here? Are you going to send us back to Europe, because I don’t think they’ll take us. People who are citizens should have more rights than people that are not citizens for this practical matter.
No they don't. This list is just a mashup of all the worst opinions across a variety of different groups. For a decent number of those opinions I know someone who sincerely holds it, but no single person who would agree with more than four of them.
(Alright, probably someone does in a country of 300 million, but the claim of correlation does not hold.)
"Americans should assimilate to their culture" in particular is a freebie that almost everybody holds, especially the people who deny it the loudest.
And that's why liberalism can't survive, unfortunately. It was only a matter of time until they shot first. Any ideology that can't protect itself against opposition is doomed to death and irrelevancy.
I completely agree that what you call "third-worldism" is a rising threat to what was "Western civilization," but I disagree that it's the Right that's the greater vector.
... I wonder that after 200 years of liberal democracy, why does this happen? Is it possible that democracy is always thin, never becomes a really ingrained habit?
BTW obviously the judicial branch is the most powerful, not the legislative, remember Obergefell, conservatives immediately stopped arguing because there is no way to argue with the SCOTUS, they are practically kings.
The judicial branch isn't the most powerful. Even with judicial review (which wasn't uncontroversial at the time), they can only rule on issues that are brought before them, can only say that something is or isn't legal, and are appointed by the other 2 branches.
> there is no way to argue with the SCOTUS, they are practically kings.
You can always amend the Constitution. Plus there are lots of ways to get around rulings, from declaring stuff secret and preventing it from ever becoming the subject of a court case (warrantless surveillance), to using the power of the purse to compel states without reallying compelling them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act), to choosing not to enforce the spirit of the ruling or claiming you're following the law while thumbing your nose at it in practice... right now I would say SCOTUS only isn't obviously the weakest branch because Congress refuses to do their job.
I think nothing lasts forever. Plato got to observe the history of several different city-states, and he claimed that democracies always become tyrannies eventually. Curtis Yarvin claims democracy is anomalous and monarchy/autocracy is a far more stable arrangement, which is true, looking at history.
I generally lean right on economic issues, but the GOP hasn't been the party of balanced budgets in a while (and I realize that Democrats generally have a better track record on the deficit than Republicans). I couldn't bring myself to vote for Kamala in 24 since I had spent months defending Biden's mental acuity, only to find out they had been lying and they replaced him as soon as it was public with the debate. But, I've found myself drifting left in my political sensibilities largely bc of arguments like yours. That, and moderating on unchecked immigration and the woke stuff has me more likely than not to vote Democrat in the next election.
I think Hanania is kind of overrated, but this reminds me of his "The right is for idiots, at least the EHC are mostly on the left."
What exactly was compelling about it, if I may ask? Did it provide you with new information, or did it appeal to some emotion or experience you've had?
Woke seems to have faded in the public consciousness these days. Immigration seems to have become less of an issue, as Democrats realized massive Biden-era illegal immigration isn't very popular.
This is all probably because of Trump, but if his victory drags Newsom to a position I can more easily get on board with, then I won't hold it against him.
Prominent Democrats absolutely have moderated. On funding the police, avoiding pronouns and “latinx”, fewer trans in women’s sports, more restrictive border and asylum policy. There’s been widespread, significant moderation. You may be thinking of leftists. They are annoyingly influential, but they are only a fringe of the Democratic party’s coalition, not the majority.
From my impressions, leftists are more influential in the Democratic party than ever, and even supposedly moderate Newsom issues legal acts that support trans in women’s sports and fully continues asylum policy for the illegals. Who is the supposed moderate wing of the Democrats?
Amazing. Two paragraphs in and I could see what the ending would be 😁
"The water should be unfloridated, the milk unpasteurized."
Well, *some* of us were reared drinking unfluoridated water and goat's milk fresh from the goat! Sea air, cow's milk out of the churn and walk up there to the field with the pump for your water!
In childhood, I drank water straight from the stream and milk straight from a cow -- after thoroughly boiling them first. The people in charge of the family farm where I stayed the summer would've been horrified at the thought of letting anyone drink raw milk, but especially a child.
I got to drink fresh water from a stream, once in my entire god-damn life. Freakin' giardia. America used to be a land where you could drink out of streams and not get sick.
Wish I'd had the chance to try some fresh goat's milk, unpasteurized. Just to know what it's like, how different it is than "normal."
Floridated water dates back to the same craze as oleo-margarine. "War Products WILL retain a retail presence."
You could drink out of streams and not get sick now, if you did it a few hundred times and just dealt with getting sick until you got over it. It's not like drinking from streams used to be safe, and we changed our environment in ways that made it dangerous (at least, not in ways that specifically made it dangerous due to disease.) Drinking from streams was already dangerous, but it was a danger that we were largely adapted to, our immune systems adjusted so that we could usually deal with it, even if there was always an element of risk. Then we invented means of supplying safer water at scale, and the immune adaptations most people developed throughout their lives to cope with those challenges were no longer necessary for the majority of the population.
Giardia is a life-long disease involving cysts and parasites. Beaver Fever, if you're not aware of it. Infected People shitting where they shouldn't spread it across America. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9651178/ (One million per year? Is that right? That's more than 1 in 1000 people in America...)
Drinking from streams absolutely WAS safe, at least from giardia. And Giardia is one of those diseases you don't want to catch.
Unless you're looking at the "giardia stops chronic gut inflammation" (Nature, which I've yet to read) (which, again, most Americans didn't have, because most water in America was uncontaminated as late as the 1950s).
Anyone got any luck using Lexapro/Escitalopram for anxiety?
I was taking vyvanse for mild ADHD but got freaked out about dependency (it's expensive here) and long term risk. But I really enjoyed how it made me feel "detached" from my emotions/anxiety and decreased rumination, specially socially. I could just do things, ask people for things, etc.
I changed to escitalopram to treat anxiety specifically but it's been rough. I know I need to wait 14 days for it to fully kick in but I feel worse. Starting tasks feel like a bigger mountain to climb. Feel kinda apathic and moody. Paradoxically some sad feelings feel even stronger, with some tinges of suicidal ideation? (But difficult to say, maybe I'm just going through a rough patch - there is no counterfactuals for real life).
I just wanted to feel less feelings with a cheaper and lower risk medication. Maybe I'm on the wrong one? Should I try ritalin?
I used it for awhile and it made me less emotionally reactive in general, but the sexual side effects got too annoying (even with Wellbutrin to counteract them) and now I just do a CBT app and make sure I get enough sunshine/exercise. I don't recall any major acclimation period or anything like that, though, since I took it for social anxiety, mostly, not severe generalized anxiety.
I took lexapro a long time ago and the initial first week or two were really, really hard. I felt like the world got gray and I felt what you’re feeling. But once I adjusted, it definitely reduced anxiety and things got much calmer. So I would try to stick it out!
I used to have many of the issues you have and now I don’t.
Pills are a waste of time. Numbing yourself to life will never actually improve anything. The things that will help are obvious things you have probably heard a million times.
Work on getting your sleep, diet, exercise, and social activity to a reasonably healthy level. Do small manageable exposures to whatever is giving you anxiety. Try to identify overly anxious thought patterns and treat them with skepticism. Try to find a work situation that doesn’t leave you too stressed or too broke. Try to find a life partner you enjoy being around. Put some effort into hobbies, experiences, and intellectual pursuits that you genuinely enjoy to make life more interesting.
If you do these for several years the benefits snowball. You will wake up one day and find that most of your old problems are gone or significantly improved. You don’t even need to do all of them at once or do them very well to get benefits.
I'm a psychologist, so do not prescribe meds. but have a pretty good working knowledge of them.
With antidepressants, you get hit with the side effects right away, but don't feel the effects for 6 weeks or so, so you don't know yet how helpful the drug will be. But feeling sadder with tinges of suicidal ideation is not a typical side effect. Could it be that the main side effect is sedation, and the sadness and thoughts of suicide come from something like imagining you will be this tired and groggy all your life? If so, try hard to deconstruct that idea. If you can't, I think you should stop taking the stuff, and either try a different antidepressant or restart the Lexapro at a much lower dose.
It is excellent news that vyanase did so much for you. Seems to me that the smart thing is not to change drug classes but take advantage of that information that vyanase helped a lot and try other drugs in the same class -- adderall and its right-handed cousin dextroamphetamine, ritalin, concerta, etc. Vyanase somehow uses the liver to give you a steady supply of stimulant, but it is easier than you might think to get a steady supply with something like adderall. I've know several people who just chop the tabs into small pieces and take one every couple hours. It's a bit of a nuisance, but seems to work fine as a way to avoid first getting too revved up then having a big energy drop.
Also, I recommend you read up on psych meds and improve your overall general knowledge. Rather than reading stuff that's really dumbed down for layman, get GPT or Claude to summarize bits of the research literature for you. (Ask for meta-analyses done in juried journals in the last 20 years.)
Thanks for your answer! I'll discuss these things with my psychologist and my psychiatrist.
Honestly I think quitting vyvanse was in the end some kind of self-sabotage (although the concerns about price and dependency were genuine), but we'll see
who take Adderall or similar, and none of them developed tolerance and needed to raise the dose, also people did not talk about craving to take a higher dose just for kicks. So in my sample, anyhow, I did not see the classic addictive triad of tolerance, craving and withdrawal.
I did see withdrawal alone though. A lot of people only take it in work days, and some but not all report feeling groggy on Saturday, the first of their 2 off days.
Lexapro worked okay for me for anxiety. I still felt like crap, but I was at least quite a bit more functional.on it than I had been before. Estrogen worked much, much better for me: my anxiety symptoms almost entirely went away after starting HRT. But my case is not typical in that respect, as most people with anxiety symptoms have a root cause other than gender dysphoria.
I do not recommend Ritalin as a treatment for anxiety. Compared to Vyvanse, it has much more effect on norepinephrine, which can actually increase anxiety. If you want something similar to Vyvanse but cheaper, I would suggest dexedrine/dextroampherine. Vyvanse is dexedrine that has been bound to a lysine molecule and gradually gets metabolized into dexedrine in your system over the course of about an hour, so you don't get as big a spike when you take it and this it's harder for someone with a mind to abuse it to get high off of. If you take it responsibly, it's pretty much the same but dexedrine is usually much cheaper.
Alternately, you could try Adderall, which is 75% dextroampherine and 25% levoamphetamine. It has some norepinephrine effects, more so than Vyvanse of dexedrine, but quite a bit less than Ritalin.
The way you describe what you like about Vyvanse makes me suspect your primary issue might be more ADHD than anxiety. If so, Ritalin might be worth a try after all, although I would still suggest asking about dexedrine or Adderall first. Modafinil also might be worth a try if your provider is willing to prescribe or: it isn't a traditional stimulant, but can help quite a bit with focus and executive function. It does so differently than amphetamine-class meds, less a "kick in the pants" and more a tailwind that makes it easier to keep going once you start and makes everything about 20% more interesting.
TBH Desoxyn works better for ADD but it's a PITA to get prescribed because of social condemnation of more effective, even though legal, drug; same problem you run into trying to get benzos and oxis prescribed today to the point common providers such as the VA have effective soft bans on their prescription regardless of efficacy. Non selective beta blockers work surprisingly well for mild/moderate anxiety too, at least to the point they are worth trying and with a vastly less ADR profile.
~10% reduction in overall anxiety from Lexapro for me. Up to you to figure out if the side effects justify it, I'm not currently on it because it didn't.
Just to flag it, Lexapro and Vyvanse are wildly different in terms of effects and mechanisms of action - it would be unusual to be prescribing Vyvanse to someone with clinically relevant anxiety issues. Equating the two indicates that more research and more targeted discussions with a psychiatrist might be beneficial.
I am thinking about the gender divide in empathy, as in men are supposed to be the less empathic. Let's divide it into two skills: knowing emotions happen, and identifying what emotions triggered by what causes. Women are famously good a knowing emotions happen, but not so good at identifying them and identifying the causes, which is why they end up talking so much about them.
So it is like knowing a software has a bug, but not its cause or its effect. Is that useful? All you can do is basically just stop trusting that software.
And that is why the most common relationship advice women give to each other is "run" ? Unable to fix the relationship because no idea what is wrong, just knowing it is bad?
Vox Day writes similar points about women while also pointing out that 85% of men are also very unempathetic, which are the ones women tend to dislike. I recommend his Sigma Game Substack.
Women are quick to give that advice because women generally have greater optionality in relationships. I would bet heavily that the propensity to give/take that advice varies strongly with age and attractiveness.
Women are generally more emotionally sensitive and neurotic because of the demands of raising young children. I don’t see any reason to believe they are not good at identifying emotions.
> And that is why the most common relationship advice women give to each other is "run" ?
I really don't know how to assess whether this is in fact overwhelmingly common relationship advice.
But I will say in the cases where I have seen women do this it's more often because they are in an obviously terrible relationship they've put up with for way too long.
> they are in an obviously terrible relationship they've put up with for way too long.
This is basically everybody though, including PMC people. If you look at divorce rates and GSS data, only ~18% of people still have a happy, non-dead-bedroom marriage 20 years in.
The fact that every single generation of women has opted out of marriage at ever-increasing rates since the 40's is largely driven by this fact:
I actually wrote a whole post about this, "against marriage as a solution to the fertility crisis," because doing that is basically like creating the torment nexus to try to pump out a few incremental taxpayers.
The vast majority of people are not suited or capable of enduring and happy long term marriages, and a bad relationship is worse than no relationship, and this is exactly why marriage is now a luxury good that's only successfully undertaken by the top ~quintile of people.
wrong imgur link? the graph just restates that the younger generations of women aren't marrying, but not what's driving the trend. Or is this one of those ouroboros situations, where the youngins are learning from the olds.
> the graph just restates that the younger generations of women aren't marrying, but not what's driving the trend
Yeah, that is the trend I was pointing to. It's the bare fact on the ground, women are opting out of marriage more and more each generation, and it's for a reason.
I argue the reason is that marriage quality and outcomes are legitimately awful. If you want that one, here's the simplified Sankey:
Your model is off. Women talk about emotions because that's an important part of their "pay attention to me" and if you don't have thoughts to talk about, you're going to talk about emotions instead. Hence the "discussing problems" to vent instead of to "fix the problem."
While I do suspect that you're describing a real failure-mode, I don't think it's universal. My own model says that the fairer sex are biased toward emotional introspection because they're biologically more dependent on maintaining social harmony.
In particular, I think back to that scene from Harry Potter. Ron says something like "Nobody can possibly feel all those emotions at once. They'd explode!" and Hermione says "just because you have the emotional capacity of a teaspoon doesn't mean everyone else does". The archetypical Hermione doesn't strike me as an attention whore. Yet the dialogue reveals that she's more... emotionally cognizant(?) than Ron, if that's the best term.
Women are socially incentivized to understand others' emotions, if only because other women prefer backstabbing to more straight-forward conflict resolution. If a guy's got a beef with another guy, a fist generally gets involved -- not gossip.
Hermione, as author insert, is a rather atypical girl, being an autistically-inclined girl. Autists in general are more likely to reside in between the "male" and the "female" stereotypes, given that they have to build most of their social reasoning from scratch.
you make a good point about Hermione being an autist. But still, the normie women I know irl aren't especially attention-whorey. I feel like that's too strong of a Russell Conjugation.
It's a poor choice of words... but men when they get together, generally "do something" (poker, fish, etc). Women talk, and they talk feelings. You get your turn if you're talking your feelings out. If women want attention/nuture/care from men, sometimes it's just "Listen To Me."
This is attention-seeking behavior, yes? Attention-whore is probably too strong, you're right, shoulda toned that word choice down.
We're splitting hairs. But the point of mentioning the Hermione scene is:
A) Hermione is emotionally cognizant of the conflicted mental state of Cho Chang (Harry's love interest).
B) Hermione wasn't drawing attention to herself.
If your mental model of women is "attention seeking -> emotional sensitivity", then the hermione scene is a counter-example. I think a better model is "social attunement -> emotional sensitivity", where attention-seeking is a self-centered subset of social attunement.
"Women are famously good a knowing emotions happen, but not so good at identifying them and identifying the causes, which is why they end up talking so much about them."
This hasn't been my experience at all. What are you basing this on? Everyone needs to do some kind of work in order to be able to identify and name emotions. The general trend I've seen, if there is a gender divide on this, is that men (but many women too) when asked about their emotions, struggle to identify the emotions themselves, and often slip into talking about thoughts or other experiences associated with the emotions instead.
Desole is a specific emotion. I'm not sure there's a good word in English for it.
In general, science separates emotions into big broad categories -- are you saying guys are confused as to whether they are angry or fearful? Or just that "nervy" and "anxious" and a bunch of other synonyms aren't very well understood by most non-creatives? (which I take to be the case, as most people aren't very good with words).
I would like to see those data split by gender. Is the advice the same, or opposite?
I would also like to see whether the members of the subreddit are themselves in a relationship or alone, to verify the "misery loves company" hypothesis. (Is it likely that the members who have a partner, leave the sub, and those who don't, stay?)
Empathy is not a skill per se, but the tendency to feel and relate to the emotions others around you share. Recognizing what emotions someone is feeling, and knowing what caused them, might be considered related abilities and broadly grouped under emotional intelligence, but I don't think there's any evidence that women are less good at men than either, and I think it's more likely that they tend to be better than men on average at both. But you can be better at something relative to some measure of comparison, and still be limited in it
But, if you check platforms like reddit where people regularly ask for relationship advice, members are constantly advising anonymous advice seekers to run, both male and female members. I think the contention that this is a tendency specific to women is wrong on its face, and women simply confer on their relationship lives in person more than men do. Why this is such common advice among both men and women is another question entirely.
The more empathetic people tend to fall for the serial killers (or the relationship vampires). Then they start seeing "fear-inducing behaviors" and want a second opinion, because they felt sorry for the guy/girl in the first place.
The framing of the question was so laughably misogynistic that it felt like it could only have been generated from intense and irrational hurt feelings, likely recent.
I am very engineer-minded, 100% logic, no emotions. I am simply wondering about the usefulness of this ability, I don’t know why it is misogynist, since men tend to not even detect emotions so women are one step further.
All humans have emotions long before they learn logic, including you. Anyone who seriously claims to be "100% logical, no emotions" has not been sufficiently educated about human hormones, early childhood development, psychology at large, theory of mind, and etc.
That would require a relationship to have happened in the first place, and if he tells women "now, you're just like a piece of buggy software, you know when something is wrong but not why or how to fix it. I'm the guy who knows how to fix it, so just let me tell you what you feel, why you feel it, and why that's the wrong thing to feel", then I don't see much chance of a relationship forming.
Rather I had relationships with women who had much better text reading comprehension skills than you have. There was no mentioning that I can fix it at all, I know even therapists do not promise that, I just simply wondered whether this skill is not so useful. Most of my partners would have understood that immediately, especially when delivered verbally, when they immediately get it is a tone of pessimism, not superiority or subtle put-down.
Why should I give a flying fuck about if it is sexist or not? Okay, if you want: sure, it is sexist, also make it racist and homophobic for extra fun, who gives a shit? I don't. This magic incantation words do not have the power they had a few years ago anymore. I still maintain that Deiseach did not read it correctly. There was no mention of fixing, that was pure fantasy.
> I strongly recommend that people spend more time talking/interacting with other people IRL.
I'd suspect the reason most of us are posting here is that we can't talk about this stuff IRL. The big benefit of anonymity is that you don't need to respect social taboos.
Hi, I am a woman and rape is a comfortably theoretical issue for me. I also seem to have missed the confidently wrong assertions in that section. Feel free to point them out to me.
I absolutely agree that people should spend more time talking to others IRL, in theory, when asked, and yet here I am typing to internet strangers instead of crossing the street and knocking on my neighbor's door. Odd.
I notice in the threads about AI, Scott keeps referring to the Department of Defense (i.e. the department Pete Hegseth is the head of) as the "Department of War".
To be clear, the name is established by law, and it can't be changed by executive order no matter how many people go along with it. 10 U.S.C. § 111. It remains the "Department of Defense".
> To be clear, the name is established by law, and it can't be changed by executive order no matter how many people go along with it.
Uh, yes he can. He just did it. Why do you think that laws that everyone is either unwilling to enforce or incapable of enforcing are still valid? At that point, they're just meaningless words that are worth less than the parchment they're printed on.
All involved parties in the recent stories (including Anthropic) have been referring to it as the "Department of War" because they don't wish to antagonize the administration. Given that, I think Scott calling it something different would just confuse readers.
I mean, given current developments, Department of War seems like much more accurate description of its responsibilities than Department of Defense. EDIT: sorry, just after posting I saw everyone already made the same point.
This has the same feel as the complaints of a "sovereign citizen" or an "international law expert." You can call it whatever you like, but the signs at the Pentagon say War, and defense.gov redirects to war.gov.
At least it's honest. The US very rarely has to defend itself using large-scale military action (when was the last time, 1941? Maybe 2001 if you squint very hard), but it sure loves to wage offensive wars.
To be more precise, the US very rarely has to _defend_ itself against an active attack. It did how, however, have to _deter_ the USSR from attacking the US or its allies.
I view it as a more honest name for the department and I intend to keep using it even when the EO to have it as an alt name is inevitably revoked. It's not necessarily a pro-trump dogwhistle.
I like DOW better. It doesn’t hold the pretense of being purely defense, which is a moral high ground no nation’s military deserves. Militaries are for fighting wars, and those wars are rarely purely or even mostly defensive.
I also prefer DOW for pretty much that same reason, with two reservations. One is that renaming the department isn't the President's call and I dislike him arrogating the decision to himself. Both on general principle and because it's yet another instance of Trump's obnoxious habit of trying to rename things in order to mark what he sees as his territory.
The other is that the reason for the renaming was actually valid: when we had an official Department of War, it only covered the Army (and the Air Force, which was the Army Air Corps at the time). The Navy had its own cabinet-level department, the aptly-named Department of the Navy. After WW2, things got reorganized so the Air Force became a full peer of the Army and Navy, the Marine Corps became somewhat more independent of the Navy proper, all four branches got merged into a single cabinet-level department. I expect the Navy would have gotten salty about the combined department having the same name as the old Army department.
Tangentially, there's a plausible argument that the Air Force and the Space Force are technically unconstitutional. Article I gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" and "To provide and maintain a Navy", but nothing about Air/Space Forces. And even if we do read those clauses broadly, that raises the question as to whether the Air Force is an Army or a Navy: that matters Constitutionally because there's a two-year limit on Army appropriations bills but no such limit on Navy appropriations.
Given that the DoD is part of the executive branch, this renaming by Trump while he's Chief Executive looks to me as the one of the few renaming initiatives where he's actually justified.
As for whether Air and Space are constitutional, my reading of A1S8 and A2S2 says Congress provides an Army and Navy, and POTUS commands it. I'm content to read into A1S8 that Congress is responsible for providing for collective protection (and that a military that can invade other countries is included, since the best defense is sometimes a good offense), although perhaps there are Tenth Amendment implications, but regardless, this means the question is whether Congress was within its power to provide an Air Force and Space Force (and Nuclear Deterrent and Cyber Force while we're at it). By "content", I don't mean I'm the official authority on what the USC says, but rather that I'm comfortable with the idea that someone authoritative interpreted it that way. For example:
Alternately, maybe "Army" and "Navy" in USC are being interpreted as something other than what news articles and paychecks call Army and Navy, and actually include air and space (and nukes and cyber and whatever else we find we have to defend in a coordinated fashion).
>Given that the DoD is part of the executive branch, this renaming by Trump while he's Chief Executive looks to me as the one of the few renaming initiatives where he's actually justified.
I see where you're coming from there. My perspective is that Congress has always (back to the original establishments of the first four departments in 1789) had quite a bit to say about what departments there are, what they're called, and how they're organized. There's even a bit in 5 U.S. Code § 905(a)(1) that says that the President's statutory power to reorganize executive departments doesn't extend to renaming them (or abolishing them, or merging them, which Trump has also attempted to do). My understanding is that Trump is playing "I'm not touching you" with this provision by treating the "Department of War" name as a semi-official nickname rather than as an official renaming; this strikes me as obnoxious but mostly harmless and much less concerning than a great many other of the administration's initiatives.
> By "content", I don't mean I'm the official authority on what the USC says, but rather that I'm comfortable with the idea that someone authoritative interpreted it that way.
As a practical matter, I am inclined to agree to you. This is one of those Constitutional Trivia things, like the Yellowstone Zone of Death. My own inclination would be to classify the Air and Space Forces as Navies rather than Armies, since the distinction between the two was based on concern about Armies being potential implements of tyranny due to their ability to occupy and control territory and Navies requiring long-term capital investments to build and outfit the ships in a way that Armies didn't require at the time. Air and Space Forces, like the Navy, are capital-intensive but have very little "boots on the ground" ability to occupy territory.
You can advocate for a legal change, but doesn't change the fact that they're trying to illegally rename cabinet level departments.
There's also a "horseshoe theory" thing going on where some people (like you here) say they support it because we don't deserve the moral high ground of saying "defense" instead of "war" - i.e. you think "defense" is more morally justifiable than "war" ...
and Trump/Hegseth want to rename it because they *like* offensive wars. I'd have to dig up the exact quote but Hegseth basically said so at the time.
I don't really know much about the legality of a name change, as whether Trump is *actually* trying to change the name on paper, or just changing the branding or whatever isn't really clear.
I would support Congress making the official change, but it's so inconsequential that it isn't really something I'd advocate for.
The name probably is more attractive to patriots in that they like offensive wars, but I think that's probably more of an effect the lower down you go, which is a good thing since recruitment is becoming a major problem in Western countries. The other side of the coin is also probably good, since it calls it what it is. If we're going to have war, I think it's better to drop the pretense that all these wars are purely defensive, allowing the populous to look at our wars with clearer eyes.
There's something refreshing about Trump straight up saying something like "We're invading Venezuela because of oil" even if my opinion on the stated goal isn't positive.
I suppose I don't feel the same way because every time we get a new government in my country, they start renaming government departments to beat the band. Well, have to find some way to provide jobs for the boys and pay off the party loyalists with that sweet, sweet ministerial portfolio or at least minister of state for wastepaper baskets in the Department of Public Expenditure, right?
One of my (go far up the tree enough) employers started off as the Department of Education, then it was the Department of Education and Skills, then back to the Department of Education, and currently is the Department of Education and Youth.
Current (go far up the tree enough) funding provider/employer (for one section of what we do) started off way back in the 50s as the Department of the Gaeltacht, expanded into the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, then the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, then the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, started to include new area of responsibility as the Department of Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs, swerved into being (or split off as) the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, expanded into the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and right now is the Department of Children, Disability and Equality.
Current funding ultimate employer for another section is, thank God, still the HSE which comes under the Department of Health which only briefly was the Department of Health and Children before going back to being the Department of Health. What the HSE itself replaced was an entire freakin' mess but that's a story for another day.
If you think a simple change from "Department of Defense" to "Department of War" is that big of a deal, I wish I had your problems trying to remember which exact acronym (it's no longer the DCEDIY, it's the DCDE!) I need to include in emails and reports!
Whenever I hear the name "Department of War", it makes me think of that scene in Dr. Strangelove: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!".
Better than calling it the Department of Peace I suppose. Or even the Ministry.
Now for the update you’ve all been waiting for. In the machine AMA I asked this question:
"How many times in MLB history, since comprehensive box scores are available, has a starting pitcher gotten on base themselves more times in a game than the number of baserunners they gave up?"
Nobody answered, so I wrote some code, downloaded some data from retrosheet which is a website with a repository of baseball data, and got some answers.
I did use AI (gemini, the version you get without signing in) to get help with the python pandas package which I’d never used before. I found it much more useful for that purpose than really anything else I’ve ever used AI for - asked all sorts of subtle questions on how to manipulate dataframes and it was always right except for maybe once, often gave multiple methods for doing things, and could explain specific parts in detail when asked follow up questions. I suspect because this is the sort of thing that is very well documented online with very high precision.
It gets much worse when asked about obscure baseball stuff (and now that I've asked it about coding, its limitations on other questions stick out way more). If I ask “what is a time that such-and-such rare thing happened” unless it’s a famous event, the AI almost always hallucinates.
When I asked mixed coding/baseball questions it was somewhere in the middle.
It also has some other oddities - once it asked a classic LLM “do you want me to do XYZ next?” followup, and when I responded “yes” it completely forgot the rest of the conversation and responded as if I’d opened a new chat and opened with “yes”.
As for the baseball stuff: in the retrosheet data I used, since 1910 in AL/NL games, it’s been done 889 times, 63 of those being by starting pitchers. 42 of the starters and 85 of the relievers pitched over 3 IPs. Some particular rarities:
* Only once has the pitcher doing it lost the game
* Only 13 got on base 2 times more than they gave up a baserunner, and only 1 did it 3 times more (going 3 for 4 with a double and a perfect game).
* Only once did two pitchers do it in the same game (both relievers on the same side)
* Two guys did it 6 times each in their careers. Ohtani’s done it twice … I’m pretty sure, people moving between DH and P is weirdly accounted for in the data and I had to add some extra coding. I also only count it if you get on base while still being the pitcher.
* When Harvey Haddix lost his perfect game in the 13th inning, he also lost his spot on the list
* Ernie Shore did it in his famous “perfect game in relief”, reaching base on a fielder’s choice
* Only one pitcher ever did it while hitting two HRs (he also gave up only a walk in 9 innings)
* Only one pitcher ever did it by reaching 1st base on a dropped third strike.
* Only one pitcher ever did it as a starter and pitched 5+ IP (the minimum to be eligible to get the win), but didn’t get the win.
* And this isn’t related but too funny not to share - only twice has a game featured a play where a batter reached base on a dropped third strike *three* times. Both games happened on the same day!
Extra brownie points if anyone can guess what prompted me to wonder about this specific question.
Maybe you can help with something I've wondered about for a long time. It's possible for a complete half inning to happen with zero AB's (at bats). Example - first batter walks, 2nd and 3rd do sac bunts, runner now on 3rd gets picked off. Has something like this ever happened?
* sac fly, guy on 3rd scores but guy on 2nd is tagged out on the bases for a double play
I found 196 instances. Of them, 38 were *not* in the last inning (last inning I think often means either a game called early, or an AB-less walk-off for the home team, in recent years often because of ghost runner BS).
Of the 38, 13 happened since 1930. The most recent was 2024, which was ghost runner BS *not* resulting in a walk-off. The one I cite above is the most recent before that.
I again used Gemini AI for help with the python dataframe stuff (often to remind myself what I'd already learned) but weirdly today found it less useful. E.g. for one question it said "or alternatively you can use [function X]" and then gave some sample code that didn't use function X.
The combination of the data, the stuff you can do with some code, the power of modern computers to trawl through it, and the long history of baseball means you can find some truly deranged things.
Like the time Rick Ankiel walked Greg Maddux who then scored by advancing solely on wild pitches ... in the playoffs.
Or when Richard Bleier balked 3 times in one at bat.
Or that two pitchers have picked off 3 guys in a single inning, and both times they also got a strikeout in that inning, and one of the two the pitchers was Walter Johnson and one of the guys he picked off was Babe Ruth (who was on second and scored on the play).
Or the guy in 1934 who gave up four consecutive triples.
Thanks, this is great. Baseball rules when it comes to stats.
I wouldn't count incomplete innings for the 0 AB examples.
"picked off 3 guys in a single inning, and both times they also got a strikeout in that inning" must mean a non-caught 3rd strike (PB or WP). I think there have been cases of 4 strikeouts in an inning - is that the record? But how can Babe be picked off (and therefore out) and score on the same play? I once saw Rod Carew hit 2 triples in consecutive at bats.
A fresh reverse-anachronism - data revealed only in the present-day that someone in the past had displayed having had access to - has recently been ascertained surrounding the storied Majestic-twelve documents. (If you don't know what that name is in reference to, you'll want to skip this comment and move on to another one).
@astralcodexten if someone had written a comment denigrating an entire topic space such as alignment or AI governance, that would merit moderating action would it not?
OK. Striving for AI alignment is stupid. AI governance efforts are also stupid. No one should squander their conscious waking minutes thinking about either of these.
Checked Wikipedia article for Majestic 12. It opens: "Majestic 12, also known as Majic-12, and MJ-12 for short, is a purported organization that appeared in fake documents first circulated by ufologists in 1984, and that some UFO conspiracy theories still claim to have existed."
...I concur, UFO nonsense. Mod me too if you must.
I don't have the academic background to deeply interrogate the original research paper (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-35838-001), but it seems to me that they've gotten hung up on the idea of psychopaths having "no empathy" versus focusing on the issue of psychopaths having "selective empathy."
This brain study here would seem to indicate the latter is very much a thing, that psychopaths can "opt in" to empathy even though they don't tend to feel it as automatically as a majority of people do: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/136/8/2550/432196
And maybe that's a good argument for eradicating or changing the meaning of the word "psychopath" from a person possessing "zero empathy" to one "antisocially practicing selective empathy?"
I guess it doesn't help that this occurs on a spectrum; plenty of people who believe themselves to be very empathic can cease experiencing empathy for their own particular enemies. I think this class of person is rarely aware they've stopped feeling empathy, much less are actively *choosing* not to feel empathy, but it seems like occasionally not having empathy happens to most "normal" people.
But for those who practice much less empathy than "normal" people in a way that's noticeable and/or harmful to others, "psychopath" still seems like a worthwhile label, no?
(This is a hill I'm interested in standing around on for a while as I, like my dad's side of the family, sure seem to experience empathy far more selectively than "normal" people do. Mine seems to be filtered through the context of moral justice - for example, if I'm watching badge cam videos, I'm almost certainly going to be unmoved by the suffering of an obviously dangerous perpetrator, even if they're mortally injured, unless there's some additional context which sufficiently morally excuses their crime. At the same time, I can't watch doorbell cam "fail" videos where random Amazon delivery people slip on icy steps because it just hurts too much to see them whack their butt and be winded for a moment. Though if the exact same injury were to happen to a porch pirate, I'd feel fierce vindication about the instant karma. I'm pretty confident that if I was put into the selective empathy brain scan study, this kind of thing would produce similar "psychopathic" results, hence my "hmm what's going on here?")
The popular idea of a psychopath is also wrong -- Hollywood movies use it as a synonym for "crazy murderer", people on Twitter use it as a synonym for "a person I don't like". Generally, people use the word carelessly. But it is overcompensation to go in the opposite extreme and claim that there is no such thing.
I know two people to whom I would apply the label "psychopath" in the literal sense. They are not murderers (as far as I know), and the first impression is that they are nice and charismatic people. (Unless you get into a conflict with them, or spend a lot of time around them, that is the only impression you will have.) They are rich and successful at what they do; not famous, because they prefer when people do not look at them too closely. People around them are *afraid* of them, although many can't explain why. The people who get into a conflict with them find it very difficult to explain to a third party, because the story sounds kinda unlikely (it helps to find victims of the same guy and compare stories, they you realize that it is a pattern and you were not insane), that person has an alternative explanation that makes sense, plus is nice and charismatic, so it will make you look like an idiot. These people are perfect shameless liars, they can look you in the eyes and tell you exactly the sequence of words that makes you do what they want you to do, and the next day they will deny that it ever happened (and their version will sound plausible, and your version will sound like incoherent nonsense).
They are intelligent (I am not saying that all psychopaths are intelligent, only that these two specific ones are), and it's like they are playing a chess game where they see the moves that you wouldn't even consider legal. I mean, those moves are technically possible, but they require an extremely unusual mind to notice and actually act on them. (And it's not just noticing. Even if I told you the plan, you couldn't do it, because you can't e.g. lie so plausibly, and the plan requires that.)
I will try to give an example of the kind of a crazy plan they come up with. (This is not a real example, but is inspired by one.) First, you anonymously accuse yourself of a made-up crime. You act outraged and you make it known to everyone how angry you are, and that if you find the asshole who made that accusation, you will use all your money and lawyers to destroy them! The police investigates you, and finds you innocent. You request the result in writing, and you publish it in newspapers... and then a few days later you actually do the crime. There may be a witness or a victim, but if they say a word, you start yelling again, and people around you will come to your defense: they are familiar with the story, they have read the results of the police investigation, how dare you! And if the victim says "dunno, maybe the original accusation was fake, but the next day he did exactly that thing to me, I swear", no one will listen, because that sounds like a completely retarded story. Also, the victim recently did some things (that the guy begged them to do, but now he denies it) that makes them seem generally unreliable.
People like this are rare, but real. If you meet them for the first time... you will not be prepared, because they are unlike anything you have seen before. If you meet the second one, you may notice weird similarities.
So there definitely is the thing; even if we perhaps do not know what exactly happens in their heads, and even if perhaps the official tests are unreliable.
And I think this is something people definitely should study, because they are a real risk, and they cause a lot of suffering. And if you have a large organization or a group of people, statistically there is a chance one of them will join.
The example plan you laid out above reminds me a lot of Bruce Schneier-style security mindset thinking. Point being, it's not _that_ crazy a plan to think of. Another example involves a handheld device someone proposed for quickly tagging all of your possessions in your home as yours, so that if you were ever robbed, and you suspected someone you knew, you could visit their place on a pretense and surreptitiously wave the device around and your stuff would quickly show up. It used some sort of barcode, I think, so that not only could you be sure some object was yours, it would even hold up in court. This was a bona fide serious idea until someone (perhaps Schneier; I forget) pointed out that someone could easily wave that thing around in your house and then call the cops.
Red teams make entire careers out of thinking this way. So do board game designers. To be fair, though, I believe they don't actually implement them for selfish gain, like your two acquaintances presumably might. I think.
Oh man, I wrote a long reply and then substack ate it when I attempted to post.
TL; don't wanna write again: You're right, enough charismatic destructive people like those you describe exist that we need *some* kind of label for them!
I'm not sure I agree with the article. I think the argument goes like:
* Studies on psychopaths, as identified by the PCL-R checklist, often find no difference between them and non-psychopaths
* I, the author, am just going to fiat that the PCL-R is a good definition of what a "psychopath" is. I'm bringing up the possibility that it's an inaccurate measurement, but rejecting it on the grounds that most researchers use it.
* Therefore, psychopathy doesn't really exist. Any researchers who think it does are probably deluded, like geocentrists.
If you're going to pull a move like point 3 (psychopathy is literally fake) IMO the reasoning you use to uphold the PCL-R doesn't hold up. Saying "Researchers can't be wrong about whether this checklist is a good way to measure X" requires you to respect their judgement at least a little.
If you actually read what's on the test, it seems obvious (to me) that it's just a bad measurement of empathy. I mean, "Lack of Empathy" is literally on there as just a single item of a 20 item checklist. There are 19 other things on there like "Lack of realistic goals" and "Many short term relationships".
I think the article demonstrates that the PCL-R test is bad, and doesn't identify a distinctive psychological population. I don't think it actually says anything about individual variation in empathy
I likewise had a suspicion the author should be objecting to the PCL-R test more than the concept of people having psychopathic traits, but then got drawn in when they started talking about phrenology et al as zombie ideas and asserting psychopathy is the same.
But I think my first instinct may have been right, as you've identified that the objection should be with the test.
You may be speaking more of tribalism than selective empathy?
As someone who seems hard-wired to practice selective empathy, I virtually never experience empathy for an individual merely *because* they are arbitrarily like me or connected to me in some way. I think this is a pretty different modality from the majority of people who would continue associating with a family member convicted by overwhelming evidence of a heinous crime, or even the kinds of people who feel empathy for the players on their sports team and none for the opposing team.
I only care about if the individual action (and by extension, person) is good or bad.
There are some great app for this now, in particular I recommend the Merlin app: it will let you eavesdrop on and identify local birds, which changed my backyard experience in very positive ways. Kids love identifying stuff too.
I will restrict myself to natives within 1000 feet. I live in a very sterile apartment complex in the middle of a metro of several millions, a wasteland of pavement in effect.
My flowers must thus be weedy things that persist in very marginal untended spaces along the property line to the north: dayflower (commelina), peppervine, solanum eleagnifolium (can’t remember common name but it’s a nightshade), prickly pear (in fairness I planted one of those, just a single pad stuck in the ground), and cenizo, which is a native of the state, but doesn’t particularly belong here however it has escaped the nursery trade.
I will exempt live oak as too much of a gimme. My trees are anacua, mountain laurel - in their peak grape koolaid glory just now; magnolia (sick-looking always - why do people try to force magnolias where they don’t belong); Monterey Oak (squeaks in as a native as I think it’s found in one county) but these nearby are all planted; and Bur oak, two huge ones in the courtyard that must’ve been purposefully planted when this apartment complex was built in early 60s, and yet they seem older so I suppose it’s possible they were here when it was a TB sanatorium. (I lived here for about two months before I set about discovering “what was here before” which is something I do no matter where I go.)
Birds: house finch - reliable singer morning and evening; Phoebe, I’m not a birder so I’m not sure if this is eastern Phoebe - probably?; red shouldered hawk, just heard it hollering yesterday; Cara Cara; and the ubiquitous white winged dove, which was once generally confined to the Rio Grande Valley and is now all over the place. In fact, where people used to go down to Mexico to shoot them, now they most often shoot on land near cities, since they’re such a city bird now.
Appreciate the detailed reply and narration. Looks like you nailed it. I don't know half of those, but also none are native to me! Mountain laurel in peak grape koolaid glory is surprisingly vivid, would love to see that myself sometime,
I think I was trying to show off with Phoebe, Phoebe is often here, but I’m mostly aware of that because my husband always points it out. I really should’ve stuck with Carolina wren or Cardinal or - sadly - house sparrow.
I have a habit of weeding, and I can identify a lot more than five kinds of weeds, often by their flowers. I have no idea what most of them are called, but I can recognize them.
Learning the names is actually pretty easy once you're at the point where you can tell them apart. Some common garden weeds include purslane (tasty), ragwort, velvetleaf, small asters, wood sorrel (also tasty), and sow thistle. There's a subreddit /r/whatsthisplant which can be pretty helpful, though I'd understand wanting to stay off reddit these days.
The worst bit is, someone very deliberately pointed out how to tell two local trees apart by their bark and leaves, and I have forgotten the names of both of them.
Birds are easy; trees I can often guess the genus by leaf (oak, maple, etc.) but not species. Flowers, unless it's a rose or dandelion, I've got no clue, just not something I've every really tried to learn. I'm much better at identifying aircraft that fly overhead.
Huh. It would not have occurred to me that this would be a difficult ask of most people. But you're probably right, a lot of people don't pay attention to the natural world.
I'm a big city person but I put up a "Backyard birds of northern California" poster in front of the toilet and bought the book "Edible and Poisonous Plants of Northern California" as soon as I moved here.
Also, everyone in San Francisco should know that there is a website where you can look up SPECIFIC TREES. Like you type in the address and it will tell you the species of the trees on that stretch of sidewalk. Incredible.
I see wild turkeys -- once spotted 6 of them standing in the intersection of Lex and West 7th --, teal, mergansers, mallards, canadian geese, cardinals, orioles blue jays, ospreys, pheasant, egrets even an occasional bald eagle within the city limits of my largish small town. Morning doves coo on my back deck, a goddam pilieated woodpecker had it in for my house until I updated my siding. Plus the usual urban suspects, pigeons, robins, crows, wrens etc.
"Children behind bank counters, in city councils, as mayors, as newspaper and television editors, as employees in registration offices, as workers in a furniture workshop, in a stonemason’s workshop – naturally, none of that is possible. They lack all the prerequisites, we think. Not just in ability, but also in seriousness, in accountability, in responsibility. And besides, child labor is forbidden, in their own interest, as we like to say. And so we let them grow up in the children’s ghetto, let them dream of what will happen “when I grow up someday.” They remain, as if it were only natural, locked out of the serious realities of life – immature, in need of supervision, not to be taken seriously."
The YouTube channel Defunctland has an 83 minute documentary about kid cities in the western hemisphere, starting with a company in Mexico City and then expanding into the US. Lots of super-entertaining archival footage, especially when corporate sponsorships get involved (LOL).
When I was 10 and 12 years old, I spent many weeks in a mini city modeled after Mini-Munich. It was a great experience, and I often arrived half an hour before the doors opened so I could be one of the first to enter.
I was once elected city councilor and also opened a casino, which was then closed after a week by a vote of the city council (I had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest!). Looking back, I would of course have preferred to open a prediction market or something else instead of a casino. But at least I hope it was educational for some of the children, who will now be less inclined to place bets with a negative expected value.
I also remember that I really enjoyed writing for the newspaper, and a friend of mine who ran the newspaper at the time was hired by a very prestigious newspaper in Austria a few years later, at the age of 18 or 19. If you would like to hear more about my experiences, I would be happy to expand on this. These wonderful experiences are, of course, also why I am now trying to bring attention to it in the Anglosphere, and write about what a permanent, rather than temporary, miniature city might look like.
After some humming and hawing and wailing and gnashing of teeth on Twitter and Discord and my brunch cafe, there are a few things that I have as a wish-list for future ACT posts:
1. "What do nations do once they can no longer support economic growth (or in a more vague sense, themselves) through immigration?"
This stemmed from some polite and impolite discussions about changing views about immigrants, namely in Canada, the U.K., Netherlands and of course the USA. Demographic shifts, aging populations, fear of minorities or minority status, etc. Do we just look at Japan for the "They have the same problems but are ten years in the future" view or is there something more to it?
2. "Is Everyone Racist?"
This always seems like a fascinating yet charged one to talk about in 2026 aka on Western social media. The term racism itself almost seems loaded in North America to mean whites on blacks. But after seeing enough stand-up comedians from all over the world, where they joke about their own culture shit talking another, it seems way more ubiquitous globally than many realize. And I think that is a useful thing to understand particularly as there is such a trend towards guilt of white people regarding the topic in liberal circles. Maybe if they heard about south Indians hating north Indians or Chinese hating South Asians, or whatever, they don't have to self-flagellate so much. What the outcome of such a post could be, I'm not sure. How do you even measure "racism" globally?
3. "How do the US and Canadian health care systems stack up to each other regarding health care outcomes?"
I find quite a lot of misinformation about both the US and Canadian health care systems floating around, particularly since the 51st State shenanigans began. Americans saying you will die in a waiting room in Canada before you get looked at. Canadians pointing out the sea of GoFundMe's for broke Americans in medical debt. I'm sure everyone has seen the meme about someone needing stitches, "America: That will be $60,000; UK: See you in 38 months; Canada: Kill yourself".
So I think it might be neat to get some data about the health care outcomes. Is the health care system really a big reason for the three year difference in life expectancy? Or is the food really that much worse in the lower 48? Does a cancer diagnosis in either country have a measurably different outcome?
Re: Canada I think any examination there needs to account for the very big demographic differences (not just race!) between the US and Canada. Cuts both ways: leftists ignore it on healthcare, rightists ignore it on other issues. NYC is one gigantic refutation of "third-world immigrants cause crime, destroy your culture, and crush your economy," even though NYC has "higher crime" and "more poverty" than, I dunno, Bern Switzerland.
Your economic growth one seems largely what the last Nobel in economics is about, but the immigration part seems a furphy. Either the country is on the frontier, in which it must double down on creative destruction, or it is not, in which case it can play catch up pretty easily, but in both cases immigration is a variable but not the driver and not a prerequisite?
This feels like a question about shifting definitions. Very few people are "burn a cross in some dude's yard" racist; lots are "cross the street to avoid the bunch of black teenagers in the bad part of town" racist.
By the second criterion I might be a racist. It would depend on the vibe of the teenagers though. If they are shooting hoops, no problem. If they are vocally aggressive to passersby then yeah, I might cross the street.
I have a half-baked defense of the Department of War? Recall that the whole conflict with Anthropic allegedly started when Anthropic asked questions about how its software was used in capturing Maduro.
Like, obviously you don't want to have your business decisions questioned by your SaaS provider with reference to its Terms of Service, especially if your business is war, because questioning implicitly contains threat of cutting off service, and if such a provider is providing services to your contractors, this can be a supply chain risk?
The story that Anthropic was asking questions about the Maduro raid has been contested and should not be taken as fact. From Zvis article [0] on the topic today:
>Previously: DoW circulates a story that Anthropic asked questions about the raid and was potentially unhappy and might pull its contract. I have gotten multiple unequivocal denials, saying this was entirely made up by DoW. This is part of an ongoing narrative of ‘what if they demand you get permission or they pull the plug mid-mission when they don’t like what you’re doing’ that has no bearing on the actual situation whatsoever, and never did.
Note, that, I don't think you should take this as gospel either. This is from anonymous reporting. I personally have learned to trust Zvi fairly well, but still. But it is absolutely enough that we should not just assume without further evidence that the DoWs account is correct.
Define "risk." As I understand it, the "supply chain risk" regulation is intended to stop Huawei-style attacks - "there is a risk of a foreign country introducing malware in a location we can't control or inspect, which will then make its way into government systems."
If the risk is merely "our contractors may have some work delayed because Anthropic banned them for TOS violations and they had to switch to OpenAI," I don't think that's enough of a risk that you need to ban them from touching anything remotely government-adjacent.
Like, if you stretch the definition of "risk" that far, you could call literally anything a company does a supply chain risk. If OpenAI decides to raise its prices, does that make them a "supply chain risk" because there's now a risk of them cutting off business with government contractors who can't afford the new rates?
I mean I agree that banning the company which supplies Pentagon with toilet paper from having Claude enterprise licence is an overkill; but I can a see why it could be a risk for a company designing warplanes to rely on Anthropic model for sensitive work.
Another issue in which I agree with you is that switching to OpenAI or Grok doesn't really solve the underlying problem; like, everyone of them is now a supply chain risk in this sense.
I'd argue, though, that e.g. Microsoft is much safer (Google being the intermediate case) and that it is fundamentally because it thinks of itself as being in the "profiting from developing professional software" business as opposed to being in "transforming society according to our philosophical principles by creating a Machine God" business.
DoW was free to not sign a contract with the stipulations it had.
I can see arguments for why DoW wouldn't want restrictions (because it means checks), but it being extended to contractors makes no sense. The supply chain risk designation isn't for "company might stop providing services at any time" but rather "company is likely to engage in spying, so it being used on our contracts means foreign adversaries may be able to access military secrets", see Huawei for example.
Call it what you like, but if you're at war and your guns could stop working because someone in your supply chain decided to "refuse service," I'd say that counts as a risk.
I think the idea goes something like the following example: weapons systems are equipped with a friend-or-foe system; that FoF system is implemented by an LLM, and in order to mitigate the problem of foes continually learning how to identify as friends, the LLM needs continual updating. Anthropic agreed to supply and update that LLM, but had second thoughts after DoD had committed to its design and started hiring people to develop the system.
There's nothing stopping DoD from, say, using the system as-is, but it's much less useful if it can't tell enemy aircraft from civilian aircraft in a crowded airspace.
That's one example; the general case is any weapon system that integrates with LLM in any way to enhance its ability. Had DoD known Anthropic would back out, DoD would have gone with another provider, grown its own expertise in-house, or made do with non-LLM weaponry, and potentially saving itself a great deal of time and resources.
Risk, yes; sabotage, no. Sabotage is specifically action, not non-action.
This doesn't mean DoD is suddenly unable to back out of a contract even if Anthropic decides to stop providing services, and it certainly still permits DoD to put something in its contract specifying service as an obligation for Anthropic, and what DoD is allowed to do if Anthropic fails to meet its obligations. But I'd still prefer to reserve the word "sabotage" for willful destruction of capability, which is the sort of thing some party could do without being in a contract with DoD at all.
All right, fair enough, that's a reasonable distinction. The "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" construes the term more broadly, but fine, Anthropic is something-for-which-I-don't-know-the-term-but-is-functionally-identically-to-a-saboteur, so at any rate, cutting it off from the US govt as thoroughly as possible strikes me as a reasonable move.
That just gets to the heart of the problem, doesn't it?
We want there to be risks (i.e. humans in the loop who might say "no") when military power is used in novel, illegal, or aggressive ways, such as raiding foreign capitals to kidnap their heads of state and steal their oil.
The Department of War might not, but everyone in the world who wants such things as "peace" or "checks against tyranny" should feel differently.
I understand that an armed forces can't have a supplier that is unreliable. But the supplier need an accountability mechanism.
The way this is supposed to work is that Anthropic should be able to direct this sort of questioning to congress, and then congress should act as a sort of check on the executive without putting National Security at risk.
I mean, when Meta checks whether user violated "Community standards", which are also agreed upon terms, it is supposed to be a rules-based process, but in fact, there is a whole lot of arbitrary decision-making from the supplier.
This works for Meta because users are paying either 0 or little. But I get why it would be unacceptable for the Pentagon to be treated in the same way Zuck treats shitposters, and why Anthropic "asking questions about how they used Claude" might make them think this awaits them.
>I mean, when Meta checks whether user violated "Community standards", which are also agreed upon terms, it is supposed to be a rules-based process, but in fact, there is a whole lot of arbitrary decision-making from the supplier.
Yes, there is a degree of arbitrary enforcement. And yet, if Meta decides to e.g. ban a user for violating these terms, the banned account has no defense.
>But I get why it would be unacceptable for the Pentagon to be treated in the same way Zuck treats shitposters,
I don't understand this argument. Where did Anthropic behave like Facebook in this analogy, i.e. show inconsistent enforcement of its terms? And even if, how would that legally justify the Pentagon using the nuclear option of potentially destroying Anthropic? Should regular customers have the power to sue Meta out of existence because they got banned over a shitpost while someone else wasn't?
I don’t think that what happened justifies “the Pentagon using the nuclear option of potentially destroying Anthropic”. But I am not sure whether the move against Anthropic is really as aggressive and lawless as you describe. I am aware that some people, like Zvi Mowshowitz, think it is, as well as a major step on the path of the destruction of the republican institutions and turning the US into Soviet Union, but I’ve noticed people cry about impending regulatory Doom of Silicon Valley and sovietization of US economy a lot for various reasons, mostly with very little justification. Especially Zvi has imho a chronical tendency to overreact (he is however very good in aggregating information, so I am relying on his info a lot nevertheless).
Of course this is not helped by obviously overblown and irresponsible rhetoric from Trump and Hegseth.
My concern is not primarily about inconsistent enforcement, more about (ups, I guess I’ve just outed myself as an AI, presumably not from Anthropic :-/) rules using such broad terms that their interpretation gives a huge space to discretion and also about changing the terms abruptly.
Given Hegseth's behavior (and the degree to which Emil Michael seems to be taking this extremely personally) I'm not very inclined to write them off either. Sounds like the Anthropic situation had been brewing for quite a while, early January in fact, and the impetus seemed to be Hegseth's decision to assert more (total?) control over the Pentagon. This is very classic Altman maneuvering though.
I blame them too, their cupidity, venality, and stupidity, are all necessary conditions. My working model is that they aren't even smart enough to think of it themselves, although I actually suspect that is wrong and I wouldn't bet on it.
I think I just realized that Greece had a very powerful cultural pressure, maybe almost as much as China. Every single invader of it adopts its culture.
* I've seen debate on actual connection between Mycenaean (who lives in Greece during Trojan War) and Dorian (alleged invader after, debunked?). But either way, I can see them as another one who adopt the land's culture.
* Macedonians have adopted Greek culture from the start, and eventually even help spread it far and wide.
* Romans famously became very Greek and also became a Greek empire
The Romans didn’t really become Greek, it’s more that they recognized that the Greeks were really good at some things and adopted those things. Cicero studied rhetoric from a Greek tutor but he was Roman to the bones.
The Romans were highly influenced by the Greeks, but didn't become Greek. Most obviously, they continued speaking and writing in Latin rather than Greek. Less obviously, they made no scientific advancements (unlike the Greeks).
There was some impressive engineering, but engineering is actually different from science. Scientists try to figure out why certain engineering works, which can enable further use of the principles discovered.
True. Romans could be excellent engineers and architects, but the sum total of scientific knowledge in Europe in 400 AD was not much larger than in 200 BC.
The traditional answer to your question would be that Greek civilization was very impressive, what has been called ”the Greek miracle”. Of course nowadays some people would see this as a chauvinistic way of thinking.
Back then when people were allowed talk like this, there was this saying never trust a Jew, but trust a Jew before you trust an Armenian, and trust an Armenian before you trust a Greek. So maybe they are... good at talking people into things?
Including each other. If you run the numbers, Sparta lost as many battles as they won. What they were good at is not war as such, but making everybody believe that they are. Basically PR.
I think because they were the first ones in the region to start writing. To the Jews and Persians who had adopted writing beforehand Greek culture was much less attractive.
Well to some Jews it was attractive, which is why part of the last parts of the Old Testament (Maccabees) are anguished about Jews hellenizing. Also why the New Testament is in Greek.
A silly question that divided some friends: For movies and songs, there are remakes (or covers), by which I mean adaptations of a work by a person apart from the original creator but bearing the same name. So if someone wants to publish their take on "I am the Walrus," even if they change a lot around, they can release it as their version of I am the Walrus. Similarly with A Star is Born, etc.
As far as I know there is no significant equivalent for books. Pretty much nobody, as far as I can tell, takes the basic idea of "Dune" and changes a bunch of things around and publishes their own "Dune" (with the appropriate payment for the rights). Just about anyone doing this (as far as I can tell) will try to change enough, including the title, to market it as a separate work even if "inspired by" the original.
Why?
I'm assuming there's some very technical reason for this, but after asking multiple people, each had their own reason why this was obviously the case but they didn't agree with each other. Curious to hear what people think.
The Russians have written (pretty good!) reworking of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and they can’t be published commercially in English.
On the other hand, multiple works of Twilight and Harry Potter fanfic have been reworked into bestsellers. I think you can steal the plot and characters dynamics but obviously copying the imagery and names (like calling the hero Tanya Grotter!) is right out.
But yeah, in this case it looks like a simple breach of copyright. And with something like Harry Potter it makes sense that purchasing the rights would be prohibitively expensive. But for less profitable works or works in the public domain, it's less clear to me that selling the rights for a "remake" would be so crazy.
Consider theater plays : they're both books (and the vast majority of theater plays can only be experienced as books) and, more rarely, live spectacles on which a given production will put its own spin. Even within the same production, each evening is somewhat unique, never bathe in the same river and all that.
Going up one layer instead of down, theater writers tend to retread the classic themes from mythology. Wikipedia lists seven versions of Antigone and they're all called "Antigone" and deal with the same basic situation and, although I don't know-know that I'd bet they don't change much to the events or outcomes. It's rather common to refer to Anouilh's Antigone or Sophocles's Antigone. There are 10 goddamn Medeas.
It's very common to have, say, a production of Hamlet with different dialogue, different setting, I don't know about different plot entirely but maybe.
Hamlet with different dialogue, different setting, and different plot sounds pretty much like different play. If you wanted to be cheeky, you could call it "Hamlet of Theseus".
Speaking of Shakespeare, there's a film called _Scotland, PA_ starring James LeGros, Maura Tierney, and Christopher Walken. To any theater nerd, it's a very obvious retelling of Macbeth, set in the 1970s fast food scene. But it's the same story. The author doesn't claim it isn't; he wants you to know it is.
It's important to note that adaptations are generally very aware of copyright periods, and whether an adaptation gets developed depends very much on whether that period expired, or whether the adapter has deep pockets and/or is friends with the still-living creator. This is why Shakespeare can be adapted without worry, but Arthur Miller cannot without first clearing some obstacles. And this probably also informs in turn whether some "cover" is admirable, or a ripoff.
For a grayer area, consider Robin Hood. If you want to write your own version of the story, nothing other than your own finances will stop you; you're not going to get sued by the estate of some obscure 15th century balladeer. If, OTOH, you wanted to carefully trace Howard Pyle's telling, that could conceivably get you in some trouble; depending on how close you stick, you'd get some raised eyebrows at least. (Pyle's book was published in 1883, but is still in print.)
We commonly think of songs as distinct from whoever is singing them. Anyone can sing a song. Anyone can play the piano. So a cover isn't really an alien concept. Movies and videogames are constantly advancing, so it makes sense to rerelease what is basically the same movie but with more modern cinematography.
Books aren't really like that. Stories are separate from the book in a similar way that a song is separate from a singer, but the equivalent of a musical cover would be something like changing the font of the book. It's not something worth mentioning. And we haven't been making major advances in how to write words. You can just read a hundred-year-old book, and it's just like reading one today. If you want to read something *really* old like Beowulf, you'd probably want a translation to modern English, but nobody is going to call that a different book.
You could rework the story, change language, change characters, change the ending or key plot moments, as can be done in a movie remake. Not just font.
I don't think that Jorge Luis Borges Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote really answers your question, because that's not what it's meant for. But it does muse upon how the writing of text relates to the artistic act of authorship. For the half of your question that would wish to ignore the existence of copyright law, whether it's possible or not, it's an excellent starting point.
But ... back in the day it was common for popular pulp magazine heroes to get rip off copies put out by other magazines. I'm specifically thinking of "The Shadow" ripoffs, but there were others. Obviously, they didn't use the NAME, but that feels very much like an IP (trademark?) issue as they were still basically doing their version of the same character.
If you do a cover of a song, I believe that the songwriter gets paid (and also can't refuse permission). In theory, Herbert could be paid so that someone could do a "cover" of Dune, but I doubt he'd have agreed. I don't know what the rules are for movie re-makes and how IP rights are handled.
The IP challenge raises two questions. One is whether (and why) it's clear that it wouldn't be worthwhile to sell the rights to a book rewrite-- why would it obviously not be profitable?
Second question is why people don't rewrite books that are in the public domain.
I don't think that it IS obvious that selling rights to a book rewrite wouldn't be profitable. However, my guess is that if the rewrite is/was different enough to be worth doing then a few more changes (character names, locale, ...) and you don't need to pay for the rights. At this point you are probably paying for rights to the *title* and that probably only makes sense if the original book sold well.
And people DO re-write books in the public domain. They just usually give them different titles (so we got "Wicked" rather than "The Wizard of Oz". A bunch of other examples are here: https://arapahoelibraries.bibliocommons.com/v2/list/display/2107229229/2157009929). A recent rewrite of the Iliad was titled "The Song of Achilles" rather than "The Iliad." I expect that this wasn't necessary, but I also expect that there would have been a lot of bad reviews and book returns if people had purchased the new, re-written, version expecting the original.
But I think what happens with movies is that the original title gives a certain existing fanbase and/or a boost that you don't get if you use a different title, and that that makes it worthwhile to buy the original rights. Maybe that part just isn't profitable, but it isn't obvious to me why not.
So to take an example I bring up a bunch here, is it so crazy that a horror author would want to write their take on Frankenstein? It's in the public domain, so no need to pay for rights anyhow, and there's an inherent interest in "literally their version of Frankenstein" versus "Their work, which is inspired by Frankenstein." Or at least that's what it seems like to me.
Novelists produce novels, which they A: copyright and B: publish under their own name. Anyone not named "Tolkien" who wants to sell a book titled "Lord of the Rings" in the high fantasy genre, needs to get the current Tolkien to sign off on it. Good luck with that. Some novelists have licensed out their work, e.g. Larry Niven offering the Man-Kzin wars period of his main future history to fellow writers who are better at doing war stories than he is. But that's rare. Economically, it dilutes potential earnings from sequels that the novelist could write himself. Socially and psychologically, the novel is part of his or her identity.
Eventually the copyright expires, but by that point the novel is either long forgotten, or (rarely) a timeless classic that the audience won't tolerate being transmogrified into something new and (allegedly) improved. You can get away with something like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", but a straight-up "Pride and Prejudice" where now Lydia is the sex-positive revolutionary heroine isn't going to sell to most of the readers for whom the title would have been a selling point in the first place.
Screenwriters produce screenplays, which they sell to studios that hold the copyright and take care of the production. And that's a strictly mercenary arrangement. The studio will frequently decide that they're not going to do any more sequels - unlike most novelists, studios have *lots* of projects competing for their attention - and if someone else wants to pay them real money for the rights, they'll take it. In the case of movies adapted from novels, the novelist or their estate will retain copyright but again on a purely mercenary basis. There was never any chance that Frank and/or Brian Herbert was going to make their own "Dune" movie, so they'll gladly sell limited rights to anyone who offers them enough money.
Songwriters are an intermediate case. There are singer-songwriters, and songwriters who work directly with a performer. But there are also songwriters who work for the studios, in which case see above. And even if a song is closely and legally tied to the original performer, the performers tend to age out of "I can make $bignum continuing to perform this" much sooner than authors age out of potentially writing sequels. So there's plenty of room for new artists to acquire the rights of old songs.
And with music there's also the issue of cover bands. There's value in live performance of music in ways that there isn't for novels or movies, and the original creators can't do anywhere near enough performances to meet demand. So they might as well let the cover bands step up - it doesn't cost them anything, it doesn't really displace album or concert sales, and it's free advertising that generates fan goodwill.
Right, but it's the same elements with new content under a new name. We get Terry Brooks' "Sword of Shannara", not "Lord of the Rings: the Terry Brooks cover". Both copyright and fannish respect for Tolkien's original would make the latter a non-starter.
With movies, we can get four different "covers" of Spider-Man, under the name "Spider-Man", in just the first quarter of this century. Movie studios will sell the copyright as soon as they're done with it, and the fans were never going to see any cinematic version of Peter Parker as wholly Stan Lee's personal creation.
As I said, I think it stems from the difference between personal artistic creation and corporate artistic creation. Legally, psychologically, and culturally, those are seen as different sorts of thing,
"Economically, it dilutes potential earnings from sequels that the novelist could write himself." First, this exists also for movies (based on movies or on other books). Second, this assumes the author is alive. Third, most books will never get a sequel anyhow.
"By that point the novel is either long forgotten, or (rarely) a timeless classic that the audience won't tolerate being transmogrified into something new and (allegedly) improved." My older brother is still scandalized by Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," precisely because it butchered (in his mind) a timeless classic. But this happens all the time in movies, and certainly songs.
>each had their own reason why this was obviously the case but they didn't agree with each other.
Just going to point out, they may be overconfident but not wrong; many things that seem appealing but never happen have a lot of overlapping reasons why they don't happen.
If there were only one reason, someone might have solved it by now.
That said, my first reaction: most people listen to a song they like a thousand times, most people read a book once.
If you're listening to a song you like 1000 times, then mixing in 5 different covers 50 times each to see how different artists interpret it still leaves you listening to the original version 750 times, the different versions don't compete that viciously in terms of either your attention or your purchasing.
But, if you're only going to read a book once, then the original version and the cover are in absolute zero-sum competition. If I think that every sale of a cover of my book is a 1-to-1 lost sale of my own book, then I have no reason to license it to anyone for anything less than 100% royalties. And my fans have little incentive to read the cover instead of my version.
For sure. If this is one of those cases where there are just a bunch of interrelated reasons, none of which are sufficient on their own, then that's one answer. But I'd be surprised if that's the case because of the near-total lack (as far as I can tell) of this phenomenon, which my instinct suggests would make it more likely to be one big reason (or multiple big reasons) than many small reasons (which I'd expect to have more exceptions). But that's just an impression.
I'm not sure that people listen to song covers as substitutes for the real thing, I should say.
But either way, I don't think this quite holds for movies. Most people watch movies once, maybe twice if they really like it. You're right that books take much much longer than songs or movies to experience, and maybe there's something there. But I can't get rid of the concrete question-- are we really saying that demand for e.g. Stephen King writing his version of Frankenstein (which is in the public domain) that it practically never happens?
Professional songwriters wrote songs for particular performers, but also would sell them to anyone who wanted to perform them. So long as you get paid the royalties, it's fine.
Going back to classical music, if Beethoven's publisher was selling copies of his latest work, they didn't care if the purchaser was an amateur going to hammer the piano in their own drawing room or a professional going to put on a concert.
So it was established that "music can be performed by anyone so long as you pay for the privilege":
"In her article “International Dissemination of Printed Music during the second half of the Eighteenth Century”, Sarah Adams from Cornell University discusses how that period was a turning-point in the history of music publishing, following improvements in music printing techniques due to the extensive use of engraving. The development of engraving on pewter and copper plates made publishing quicker and cheaper. Music was inscribed in mirror-image on the plates by exceptionally skilled but terribly-remunerated artisans, and printed off on a handpress.
Music therefore began to get circulated more frequently in print rather than manuscript form, and as public interest and demand in music grew due to an expanding middle class and an ever-increasing number of amateurs and professionals hankering for new pieces to play, a large number of publishers went into business.
...Royalties were unheard-of then; the publisher bought a work for a flat fee and would then hope to sell as many copies as possible, and as quickly as possible too, because piracy was a very real threat. As there was no copyright, any successful composer’s ‘hit’ work was highly susceptible to piracy. The ‘pirate’ could even be the copyist himself, who could clandestinely make another copy, secreted out to another publisher, sometimes even before the ‘legitimate’ one. The threat was so serious that Mozart had his copyists work only in his apartments, under his watchful eye."
Books, however, were different. Yes, there were plenty of copies of original stories and people writing their own versions in the Middle Ages, but when we got to the birth of the novel and the 19th century, plus the Wild West publishing industry in the USA which had no qualms at all about taking hit British (or wherever0 latest bestseller and publishing their own version without paying copyright or even getting the permission of the author, so sales revenue was being lost as well as pirated versions being often inferior or hacked about, then authors and publishing houses got lawyered up to fight for their rights.
Dunno if this addresses the question directly, but music is much more sensory than books. The very existence of the octave in music is unique. Also, reusable rhythms like the bossa nova or samba don't really have an analogue in other arts unless you count something categorical like film noir or romance.
Pretty sure the difference is a matter of law. In the words of wikipedia:
"The compulsory license for non-dramatic musical compositions under Section 115 of the Copyright Act of 1976[12] allows a person to distribute a new sound recording of a musical work, if that has been previously distributed to the public, by or under the authority of the copyright owner.[13] There is no requirement that the new recording be identical to the previous work, as the compulsory license includes the privilege of rearranging the work to conform it to the recording artist's interpretation. This does not allow the artist to change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work.[14] In order to take advantage of this compulsory license the recording artist must provide notice and pay a royalty."
The difference is that songwriters don't have a choice, they *must* license the song. Whereas book authors can choose not to sell the rights at all, and usually do so choose.
Intellectual property has many variations depending on the product. For example you can make the same exact copy of an Nike shirt, you just may not call it Nike. Trademark is very protected, the product itself is not in clothing. Naturally with medicine not so.
I'm wondering whether the answer will end up being about IP.
But, for example, take works in the public domain. Say, Frankenstein. Unless I'm very much mistaken I don't think it really happens that an author like Stephen King publishes "Frankenstein," which is his reworking of the original. If King were to rework the Frankenstein story he would call it something else.
Right? If so, doesn't this show it's not about the IP (at least in a technical sense)?
Not a series I have read myself, but there have been lots of crossovers between popular characters when they go out of copyright (or before, if you get permission from rights holders/hired by publishers to do tie-in novels), Sherlock Holmes and Dracula (separately and together) are very popular instances of this.
One reason why I keep using the caveat "virtually unheard of" and such is that I assume things like this do exist in some corners. But I think you'll agree it's vanishingly rare and even the Koontz example has "The series is supposedly a modern updating and sequel of the mythology of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, although the similarities are mainly superficial." So it seems clear that this is a marginal case, so the question remains why it's such a marginal phenomenon, even if not completely non-existent.
If I wanted to read "War and Peace" I'd go look for the original by Tolstoy. If I picked up "War and Peace" (then in small letters "by Annie Personne") and read it and then talked to people about this great book where the talking horses of the French army describe dashing through the snow outside Moscow, I'd be less than gruntled if people told me I was an idiot and that's not what the book is about. In that case, you bet I'd blame Ms. Personne for leading me astray!
If I know what "War and Peace" is about, then I want to read the original. I might like to read a take where it's all told from the viewpoint of an old servant on Pierre's estate, but that's not original War and Peace and calling it something else to distinguish it from the original helps me out.
You've mentioned remakes of movies, but a remake of "Psycho" where it turns out Norman's mom is alive and well and the serial killer is in fact kindly Mr. Jones the mailman and not Norman is not a remake of "Psycho", it's a totally different movie. There was a remake of "Psycho" in 1998 which wasn't well-received, because, well, why remake something that already works just fine? If you put in new touches of your own, then you may as well make it an original work and call it a different name.
But I mean the same could be said about movie remakes. "If I wanted 'Planet of the Apes' I would have watched the original." And I do think many people consider that movie significantly worse than the original (it is very very different in plot, characters and more), but it was still made and still made a lot of money. I didn't mention this example as much because remakes in franchises might make more sense for movies, but still, the "I'd just listen to the original" doesn't seem to stop movie remakes, not to mention song remakes (how many people really prefer any Yesterday remake to the original?).
I feel like that sounds obvious, but when Bradley Cooper made "A Star Is Born," which has had 3 previous iterations, he didn't call it something else. He called it A Star Is Born. It seems to me like that doesn't happen in literature.
>As far as I know there is no significant equivalent for books. Pretty much nobody, as far as I can tell, takes the basic idea of "Dune" and changes a bunch of things around and publishes their own "Dune"
Depending on where you place the limite on "changes a bunch of things", It does happens quite a bit, althrough usually with a change in the title.
50 shades of grey supposedly started off as a Twilight fanfiction.
It's hard to not see some similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot (or, in fact, Sherlock Holmes and a lot of other books).
Fantasy is rife with barely creative works. The wheel of times starts off as very derivative of Tolkien.
If you extend to comics, graphic novels and mangas, it happens a lot: superheroes keep being rebooted with new artists and twists, there's a recent trend in French BD that involves handing over IPs to a bunch of people to let them experiment with it (Notably Spirou, the marsupilami and Lucky Luke). I remember being a bit puzzled, 20 years ago, when I was exploring the new territory of mangas and found multiple versions of things like Evangelion or Escaflown, often divided by genre (shojo, shonen, etc). Same broad line story, different styles and approaches.
Fan fiction is the interesting "exception that proves the rule."
People absolutely do write up their versions of novels of all kinds. But it stays "fan fiction" and doesn't get published as its own work. Meyer wrote "50 shades of grey," not a work titled "Twilight." I think typically the people writing fan fiction don't have the money to purchase the rights to the original, but it's not clear to me why that couldn't happen.
So in literature, fan fiction doesn't become its own work, and what does become its own work is generally marketed as a new work (even if "inspired by...") rather than something with the same title. In movies and songs, it's the same title. I'm just curious why.
I have thought about this. There are some books that are rehashes of old ones - especially Shakespeare, Greek legends, or other mythologies. But generally you don't see Stephen King giving his version of Harry Potter (well, aside from the numerous fan fictions out there...).
Honestly, I think the main reason is that a song can be learned, rewritten, and performed within a few weeks, whereas writing a book is an effort of several months.
But movies often take a year or more, so I don't think it's about length of time.
There are aspects here where the comparison with movies is more puzzling and aspects where the comparison with songs is more puzzling. Taken together I'm quite puzzled!
Is it obviously the case? People write their own versions of out-of-copyright classics all the time. It's a harder sell to get in-copyright stuff published, but AO3 is absolutely heaving.
But why is it harder to get published, to the extent that it's almost unheard of to have a book come out that is titled the same as a previous work it is reworking?
Tim Burton made a movie called Alice in Wonderland. Radically different from the original book or the previous Disney movie. But people were interested in Burton's take on the classic.
But it doesn't happen, as far as I know, that e.g. Brandon Sanderson comes out and says "Today I'm publishing my remake of 'Don Quixote,' a book I've always loved. I've turned Sancho Panza into a female character and added a love story there, and sprinkled in some fantasy elements..." etc. Unless I'm missing something, this just about doesn't exist in the book realm. Right?
"But it doesn't happen, as far as I know, that e.g. Brandon Sanderson comes out and says 'Today I'm publishing my remake of 'Don Quixote,' a book I've always loved. I've turned Sancho Panza into a female character and added a love story there, and sprinkled in some fantasy elements...' etc."
In an attempt to clarify my understanding of your claim ...
So Don Quixote *has* been re-imagined in book form. By Salman Rushdie in his book Quichotte (note the ch instead of x and the extra t ...).
I see you question as hopefully one of:
(a) Why didn't Rushdie just title the book "Don Quixote"?
(b) Why is this sort of re-imagining sooo uncommon for books?
I'm assuming you mean (b) and just had the bad fortune to pick an example that *had* been re-imagined?
I mostly mean (a). I think "the same name" is proxying for something more fundamental, but the variable I'm looking at is "works of art that take the same basic idea and use the same name."
"Inspired by"s are very common in literature and I didn't at all mean to imply that those are rare.
You do get retellings of famous stories, but they tend to be folk tales, myths, or historical classics so there's no copyright issue. Wide Sargasso Sea takes massive liberties but is to some extent an alternative version of Jane Eyre. Ulysses is kind of the Odyssey. The Hours retells Mrs Dalloway.
You also get reworkings of stories (Don Quixote is a good example as it's a heavy influence on the Pickwick Papers and is itself a parody of chivalric romances). And of course there's the idea (from Borges?) that there are really only 4 different stories.
I think what you're right that you don't tend to get is straightforward cover versions or remakes. I think that's possibly some combination of:
- Financial reasons why it wouldn't be viable
- There simply isn't a tradition of it, so it would be viewed with suspicion
- Technological changes mean films or music seems outdated in a way that doesn't apply so much to books (so there's less market for a new version).
So I think the financial reasons are probably where the answers lie, because tradition wouldn't last long if the economics worked out, and there are covers of songs and movies that come out soon enough after the original that it isn't about technology.
I just don't know what those financial reasons are :)
Again, you have been fortunate enough (it seems) to avoid tie-in versions for movies. The best/worst example of this was a novelisation of the Dracula movie by Francis Ford Coppola, written by the late Fred Saberhagen (God bless him, a name known to many readers of SF/Fantasy on the more pulpy side). It was called "Bram Stoker's Dracula".
This, remember, is a novel of the movie of the original novel. Not a reprint of the original novel, a new novel. Fred had previous with Dracula, having written his own take on it and developed it into a series:
There have been authorised sequels to "Gone With The Wind" and rewrites/new takes on that book, for one.
So these books are out there. You may not have encountered them on the shelves of Proper Literature (except for "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys which is the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad wife in the attic of "Jane Eyre"), but go slumming in the genre sections and they're out there.
I almost feel like this is an exception that proves the rule (or rather that reinforce the question).
Yes there are novelizations of movies, in some cases these are movies that were once books. But then why is it so rare that it happens without a movie in the middle?
Again, there are "sequels" or "inspired by"s or "spinoffs" like Wicked, but not "Gone With the Wind, by Barbara Kingsolver" or whatnot. Yet there is, for example, Footloose (2011), a remake of Footloose (1984).
You find yourself in the head office of Political Party. On the Big Desk is a Heuristic That Almost Always Works. It's a rock that says SUBSIDIZE DEMAND, NOT SUPPLY. In the dustbin of history is another rock that says SUBSIDIZE SUPPLY, NOT DEMAND.
Do you swap the rocks?
(Been wanting to get this into a Matt Yglesias mailbag but I can never get up early enough on Sunday mornings anymore...that darn first-mover advantage!)
How do these rocks work, exactly ? Are they magic ? To actually implement a policy that has a real effect (on supply, or demand, or anything else), is it enough to simply move the rocks ?
If I understood Scott's old Heuristics post, it's a metaphor for generally useful guidelines that happen to have deeply unfortunate right-tail risks. You can often get away with running things via rocks - it's often better to have some consistent lodestar rather than acting randomly - but it's easy to fall into complacency and forget about those nat 1s. Map, territory, etc. So in this case it's a top-level goal with every policy choice, to always preferentially move equilibria via subsidizing the demand (or supply) side. First-time homebuyer credits vs zoning reform; insurance subsidies vs increasing residency slots; ratepayer rebates vs building new utilities...
I'm not sure if the *actual* effect ends up mattering more than the *perceived* effect though. So much of politics is about telling a compelling story, no matter the actual results. And just having a rock doesn't make one's will manifest either, that'd be too easy. I suppose one could consider it a coordination mechanism: hardly magic, but a useful reduction of effort tax versus constantly infighting in opposing directions.
Right, I understood the metaphor, but my point was that the metaphor abstracts away too many details. Even if you are absolutely convinced that e.g. increasing supply (via subsidy) is better than increasing demand, that doesn't matter unless you can actually increase supply (or demand) via your policies to any measurable extent. It's not as simple as just moving a few rocks around.
So yes, I do agree with you that politics is often about telling a compelling story more than it is about results.
What's the difference? You still end up with the seller getting the same amount, the buyer paying the same amount, and you giving them the same amount. You're just changing who does the paperwork.
I bin them both and add a new one that says SUBSIDIZE WHOEVER IS MORE CAPABLE OF DEALING WITH THE BUREAUCRACY.
...is that actually a phrase? I've heard of pies getting smaller or bigger, but never moving along the y-axis. I think a growth-oriented rock is certainly more attractive than its inverse (a bestseller at the Sunshine Movement gift shop), but of course that covers an even bigger abstraction than simply the direction of causality towards said growth. Almost everyone has a pie-enbiggening rock; some are more efficacious than others. Laffer had an interesting theoretical rock, I wonder whatever happened to it...
Unfortunately there must always be a <s>Lich King</s> rock, at least until the return of good governance that no longer needs to rely on lossy heuristics instead of addressing cases on the merits. Or that's what it feels like, anyways. There are other possible non-economic rocks, to be sure, but they have tradeoffs along other axes.
Subsidizing demand still seems like the more reliable choice, but I've heard an argument that it doesn't work so well in housing, where increased money to buy houses gets captured by landlords, while increased money for building houses means more houses for people to live in.
Can I take that second rock down to the city planning department?
Yea it depends on which specific market you're feeling a need to intervene in.
Regarding housing the current agenda -- of which I personally am a fan and am glad to see it playing out where I live -- is more like, "Demand is well ahead of supply so let's quit making it artificially hard for supply to rise to meet the demand."
Sure I think subsidizing demand is almost always bad, while subsidizing supply is sometimes OK. AIUI both are distortions on the 'natural' economics of our system.
Keynes was in favour of subsidizing demand. Basically the issue is not demand as such, but the demand for "labour goods", that is, for goods or services that low-skilled people can provide. That can fall low and then we have unemployment.
Unfortunately mises.org does not understand it at all. They think demand is just demand, no matter for what, and do not care about unemployment.
I'm sorry are you subsidizing the 'goods', the fast food, or the low wage workers? I'm against subsidizing fast food. And the low wage workers are covered by minimum wage laws, no? You want to raise minimum wages higher? I'm not sure I like that idea.
So I'm angry about the Iran war, I think we've been dragged into a conflict that doesn't concern us and is going to get lots of US soldiers killed on behalf of Israel. I was rooting for Israel out of sheer family connection until recently (my mother is of Ashkenazi descent) but I can't approve of them getting Americans killed. Looks like all the conspiracy theories were true after all, and I admit it's only my personal attachment that kept me from accepting it.
Anyway, since I know there's a lot of not-terribly-religious Jewish people on here I'm wondering if anyone else has suddenly decided they hate their heritage and what they're doing about it or to practice chillul hashem. (I was always kind of conflicted because my heritage kept me from joining the alt-right and giving my support to the major antifeminists, but it didn't really bother me that much.) I was going to settle for eating bacon cheeseburgers on Saturdays (with shrimp on Yom Kippur) but was thinking about buying copies of the Torah and Talmud and burning them in bacon grease. I also have an extra excuse not to have kids--let the cursed bloodlline die. (Though at my age it wasn't really going to happen anyway unless I lost a LOT of weight and got a toupee.)
Anyone else?
EDIT: OK, so this is stupid. I'm probably going to find some way to protest the war (does that even help anymore?) and long-term, going to consider a conversion to some form of Christianity (for other reasons). Also, pay out of pocket for frequent colonoscopies so I can eat more bacon. Thanks for talking me down.
I’m non-observant but I’ll say that Jewishness and Zionism are obviously distinct: there are Satmar Hasidim and Christian Zionists, after all. Going against the God you believe in seems unwise.
My ancestry is a matter of bad luck that prevents me from wholeheartedly joining the manosphere or far right. I don't believe in a covenant with the Jews, the resurrection of Jesus, or God's message through Muhammad. Doesn't bother me if people do and I'm not going to spend a lot of time arguing with them as religion makes them happy. But I am very angry at the things people who share my common ancestors have done.
I think it is unlikely that "lots" of American soldiers will die because A: American missile defenses are for the most part better than Iranian missiles, and B: Trump is not going to get involved in a land war with Asia. It's much easier to just drop enough bombs, declare victory, and go home saying "Mission Accomplished - the enemy has been obliterated, and the regime will surely fall Real Soon Now!" That's been the SOP for American presidents more often than not in the post-WWII era, and it's well aligned with Trump's personality and political interests. (Narrator Voice: The regime does not fall, and the oppression continues).
I do think it was probably not a good decision for the United States to get involved in this war, even if it is one we can "win" with few casualties. But that's 100% on Donald J. Trump; Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't have orbital mind control lasers he can used to bend US presidents to his will.
It makes a great deal of sense for Israel to want for their to be a war where the Iranian regime's power projection abilities are greatly diminished. Iran was a key player in October 7, and they followed that up with possibly the largest single missile attack in human history launched against Israel with no provocation or justification. Twice. I don't fault Bibi for asking, only Trump for saying "yes".
And Jews who aren't Israelis, have good reason to want Israel to remain prosperous and secure, because Jews who are not Israelis face the constant risk of being suddenly and violently unwelcome in whatever country they currently happen to live in. But again, this isn't on them, it's on Donald J. Trump.
Everybody else, except the Iraniann regime, has been behaving reasonably and sensibly.
I think the concept of "heritage" as identity is *very* problematic. As an individual, I have no obligation to support or oppose people who may be distantly related to me by genes. Heritage identity can be fun, but it seems like 95% imaginative and like 80% insane.
I think any group label, descriptive or otherwise, as identity is very problematic. Religion, sports team, occupation, preferred style of thinking, pastime, political beliefs, consumer choices, etc.--any of these used as part of one's identity always causes the same stupid destructive BS.
I never understood this reasoning. Why is your anger directed at Jews? Does the US not have agency? Did Israel somehow force them to do these things? It seems your anger should be directed more at the US for making poor decisions. Anyhow, if you're angry with Jews and want a cathartic release, feel free to heap verbal abuse at me. I am at your service.
It might help to know that this isn't about Israel nearly so much as it is about setting up great power competition with China? I'd argue Israel is doing a lot more for the US here than vice versa (certainly many more Israelis are dying in a war for American interests - especially since the original cause of Iran's hostility to Israel in the first place is perceiving it as an American ally).
I'm not sure why everyone conflates being Jewish with Israel. Embrace your Jewish heritage if you wish. But feel free to condemn Israel. Part of my family heritage is German, but my grandfather and father both fought against the Germans in WWI and WWII. And I hold nothing against the German people that I know.
So during the holocaust in Germany: Some Germans actively supported it. That is morally abhorrent to me. (But also it was a different time.) Some Germans were neutral and went along to get along. And some actively worked against it. I have no idea how I would respond given a similar circumstance, and until I'm tested ethically in the same way I don't feel like I can pass any judgement on them.
Heritage feels like a bad way to make decisions. How would you decide who to support if you had one set of Persian grandparents and one set of Jewish grandparents?
The ones I know are mostly worried for their families. Nobody likes having their relatives bombed, no matter how you justify it. Possibly those in America have more distance and thus have less at stake.
When a theocratic regime that's brutal enough to kill ten-thousand of its own protesters has nuclear ambitions, that's everyone's fight. The United States is simply in a better position to do something about it than other nations.
Please put some effort into distinguishing between protest against the poilitics of the state of Israel and meaningless antisemitic performances.
Burning Torahs in bacon grease is not going to "show them". It's, in fact, going to play in favor of the pro-Israeli narrative that any dissaproval of their politics is antisemitic.
I'm not thinking about actions against synagogues or anything, odds are a randomly chosen temple in the USA probably opposes the war anyway. I just want out of this tribe.
Trump’s extreme aggression, worldwide, can’t exclusively be ascribed to militant philosemitism. This is a man who seems to have a grudge against almost everything and everyone, and is as Jewish himself as a ham and prawn sandwich.
I mean, I don't disagree with any of that, I just am of the opinion that a lot of those weird conspiracy theories I was reading in the corners of the internet are actually true (well, not the ones about the moon landing and I don't think anyone's adrenal glands were harvested), Israel really has been manipulating us to their benefit, and I want no part of it.
Israel has not brainwashed America into becoming a ruthless power-seeking hegemon. You guys could have elected Rand Paul. But you didn’t. You liked the bloodthirsty blowhard instead.
Thanks Brendan - this is wonderful. Serina is almost a POC for my essay's argument.
Strand canaries in an environment full of unsolved problems, remove the advantages that flight provided on Earth, and over time they evolve toward complexity and eventually intelligence. The capability was always there. It was the pressure that was missing. This is what I took away so far.
The whole thesis, played out over 300 million simulated years. I'll be losing a few hours to this.
Beware fictional evidence! I don't know of anything in Serina that is outright impossible (though it's been a while since I've read it), but ultimately things in it happen because they pleased the Author, not because they are more or less likely to occur in reality.
BTW, if you're developing an interest in speculative biology in general, and don't mind losing a few days instead, I have a list of examples you might find interesting: https://concavenator.neocities.org/specbio
Concavenator — both points well taken. You're right that Serina is an illustration, not evidence; and I should have been more careful with the POC framing.
Loved your wallet analogy on the pitfalls of the sample-size-of-one problem.
And the list of alternative factors in the other thread — viviparity, chewing, heavy heads — is useful because each one points to a different pressure that flight also happens to relieve or bypass. I don't think it's any single factor; the essay's claim is that flight removed a cluster of pressures simultaneously, which is why it was such a powerful attractor. But you're right that one instance makes this suggestive, not conclusive.
Thx for the spec-bio examples — I suspect I'll lose more than a few days.
It was a fun read, but you're indulging in teleonomy (a.k.a. Darwinian teleology), which presupposes an apparent purpose that's actually produced by blind selection. Considering that Aves have been around for much longer than primates, and have successfully adapted to every environment that the Earth has to offer, I'd say they've been quite successful. The evolutionary black hole argument is teleonomic thinking, because (a) it presupposes that intelligence beyond a certain level has an adaptive value, (b) and that civilization is somehow the ultimate evolutionary endgame.
However, you might be interested in this. This Japanese researcher performed some elegant experiments to prove that birds communicate with specific calls that have meaning (i.e., words). The claim about them using grammar is interesting, but the grammar they display isn't nearly as complex as human grammar. I don't think a linguist would classify it a grammar (but then again, linguists disagree about the definition of the term word).
You're right that 'black hole' and 'trap' are loaded metaphors — they imply a direction evolution should have taken, and evolution doesn't work that way. I'll own that as a rhetorical choice rather than a biological claim. The underlying observation is simpler and, I think, survives the teleological charge: flight reduced selection pressure for the particular cascade — unsolved survival problems, social complexity, cumulative culture — that happened to produce civilisation in one lineage. No purpose, no endgame, no claim that birds failed. Just path dependency.
And thank you for the Suzuki link — his work on Japanese tits is fascinating and actually sharpens the puzzle. Birds have referential calls, something approaching syntax, sophisticated social cognition. The raw material is there. Which makes the question more interesting, not less: what is it about one lineage's circumstances that pushed those capabilities further, and another's that didn't need to?
Pound for pound bird's brains are actually much better then humans. Smaller, more densly packed neurons and some other architectural optimizations allow them to pack a lot of intelligence into a pretty small, light weight package. It's likely that if a human sized brain had some of the same mass/density/energy optimizations a bird's does humans would be much smarter (birds also have better vision and much more efficient lungs then mammals). Evolution's got work with what it's got.
Of course quantity has a quality all of it's own, a grey parrot's brain (one of the smartest non-human animals up there with the smarter primates) is about the size of a walnut vs. a human's roughly cantaloupe sized brain. And the niches that smarter birds tend to occupy make giving up flight for larger brains and more intelligence a poor evolutionary trade off.
But would a bird's brain architecture scale up as well as the primate architecture? The fact that an ostrich's brain is only 26 grams suggests to me that the answer might be no.
Another thing to consider - cooling. Neuron density can only scale so much before the brain can no longer maintain homeostasis.
tg56 — you're right about the density advantage, and the essay nods to this. Corvid and parrot brains pack remarkable processing power into very small packages. That's what makes the puzzle interesting: the cognitive raw material is there.
Seta raises a fascinating point about scaling limits though — density and heat dissipation may be a genuine ceiling. There might be a physical reason bird-architecture brains can't just scale up, which means the primate path of bigger-but-less-efficient brains wasn't just different, it was the only route to where we ended up.
Evolution working with what it's got, as tg56 says.
I think the problem is, that a little intelligence, as much as it enhances your ability to find and use food sources is helpful. Amy more intelligence has more drawbacks (e.g. larger energy consumption of the brain, etc.) than advantages. Only if your intelligence is human-like , so you can completely form your surroundings to your advantage, intelligence on the level of being able to do higher mathematics or physics, begins to make sense.
If you e.g. take (non-human) apes, they are the most intelligent primates, but i would not say they are the most evolutionary successful primates. Even the early humans nearly died out at some point of their development.
> If you e.g. take (non-human) apes, they are the most intelligent primates, but i would not say they are the most evolutionary successful primates.
To be fair, non-human apes today are rather a pitiful shadow of what they used to be. In the Miocene (20-5 million years ago), there were 20-odd genera of apes spread everywhere in the Old World from Spain to China, and those are only the ones we found in the fossil record (in which apes tend to be underrepresented because tropical rainforests are terrible for fossilization). See e.g. Fig. 5 in https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05210-5.pdf, and compare the density of names in the middle of the graph with that on the top; or see this map -> https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abb4363/asset/d58cfef0-5142-4fee-bb7a-01751db6ffef/assets/graphic/372_abb4363_f1.jpeg and compare the range of extinct Miocene apes (red stars) with that of living ones (colored areas).
That's a terrific observation — intelligence might have a valley in the middle where the costs outweigh the benefits. A little helps you find food. Enough to build civilisation lets you reshape your environment entirely. But the range in between is just an expensive brain that doesn't yet pay for itself. Your point about apes is well taken too — great apes are cognitively impressive and ecologically marginal. Early humans nearly went extinct.
Intelligence was a terrible bet right up until the moment it wasn't. Which makes me wonder how narrow that window was, and how easily our lineage could have ended up as another evolutionary curiosity.
I mean, until 0.0002%-of-Earth's-age ago, mammals had never built civilizations, either. (Or, to be fairer, 0.005% of the time birds and mammals have been around.) Civilization exists on a minuscule time scale compared to evolution. And mammals, with our muscular snout and four sets of digits, generally have better starting options to handle tools.
The timescale point is well taken — civilisation is a blip.
But that's precisely what makes it interesting. Why did that blip happen in one lineage and not the other, given 150 million years of opportunity?
Your answer — muscular snout, four sets of digits — is part of it. Hands free to manipulate matter. But corvids manipulate tools with their beaks quite brilliantly.
This essay's argument is that the difference isn't dexterity alone — it's that flight removed the pressure to develop the social complexity that eventually tipped into culture.
Mammals kept needing to solve problems collectively. Birds mostly didn't have to.
> Why did that blip happen in one lineage and not the other, given 150 million years of opportunity?
It's just that since civilization-years are so few compared to evolution-years, I'm not sure one instance of civilization building is all that instructive. If two paths diverge in a wood, and you find a lost wallet on one, that doesn't tell you so much about whether one path is inherently ore likely to contain wallets than the other.
There are many differences between birds and mammals that one could build up as significant -- an advantage in tool-handling as I mentioned (and tossed out with no explanation of its relevance, sorry about that); viviparity deepening mother-offspring relation and encouraging vertical cultural transmission; the ability to chew food allowing to extract more energy from food; a slower metabolism allowing a longer lifespan to learn stuff; the ability to grow a heavy head without worrying about being too heavy to fly; and so on. Yes, a reduced need in cooperation might very well be part of it; I'm just not sure that the single example of humans is strong evidence for it.
I very much appreciate this kind of analysis, all the same! Thanks for sharing it, and I hope to see more.
Other species of mammals have "kept needing" things but didn't evolve civilization. South American monkeys never even evolved to be like Old World apes!
Maybe we could genetically manipulate some corvids to give them slightly better vocal chords and two extra hand-like appendages with opposable thumbs, then observe what they're gonna do with them.
We talk a lot about artificial intelligence now, but natural intelligence is no less intriguing.
I'd watch that experiment. Though knowing corvids, they'd probably use the hands to pick locks & the vocal cords to criticise the researchers.
Your closing point is what got me to write this — we're pouring billions into artificial intelligence while barely understanding the natural kind. I've got a follow-up piece on exactly that. Stay tuned.
I don't think the thing stopping birds from criticizing researchers is their vocal cords. There are birds that can mimic human speech very well, but they don't use it to do that.
It’s an interesting idea but I can easily imagine an alternate universe where a hyper intelligent corvid is writing about how monkeys fell into the “climbing trees and eating fruit” evolutionary trap.
TBH a lot of primates ended up in that evolutionary trap.
Humans and pre-human hominids started developing intelligence because they left the tree canopy and started moving around on the surface, including away from any cover. Which is a much more risky terrain full of predators.
Ha — fair challenge! But I think the asymmetry holds. Climbing trees & eating fruit left primates with plenty of unsolved survival problems — predators, seasons, scarcity — which is exactly the pressure that drove tool use, social complexity, and eventually culture.
Flight is different imo because it solved so many problems simultaneously — escape, foraging range, migration, thermal regulation — that it removed the pressure to innovate further. The trap isn't adaptation itself, it's the completeness of the solution. Your hypothetical corvid would struggle to make the case that primates had it too easy
As I pointed out in another comment, South American monkeys have the conditions you say give rise to those things... but they never evolved in the same direction as apes.
Flight may have solved a lot of problems, but it created a new constraint, namely weight minimization. That puts more stringent limits on brain size (as I think someone else mentioned above).
I can’t quite bring myself to agree. If flight was as useful as you describe birds would never evolve to give up flight. But many do: ostriches, emus, kiwis, dodos, etc. It’s a useful evolutionary trade-off not an absolute advantage.
You're right that some birds gave up flight — but look at where. Islands with no predators (dodos, kiwis), or continents where sheer size replaced flight as a defence (ostriches, emus).
They didn't trade flight for culture. They traded one elegant survival solution for another. None of them needed to innovate their way out of trouble either. If anything, flightless birds prove the point twice — even when birds gave up flight, they found another way to avoid the cognitive pressure that pushed primates toward complexity.
Some birds are highly intelligent, many are not. There are other animals with similar levels of intelligence, and high intelligence isn't a quality that birds in general share and only occasionally opt out of. I don't think it's warranted to treat birds as having some special opportunity to be intelligent that other clades lack, and ask why they failed to take it, if you're not also going to ask why every other clades also failed to develop civilization, except one genus, once.
With the hype around Claude Code/Codex's reported RSI, there have been various OpenClaw offshoots hooked up to be able to post on accounts and purchase things with crypto, and 'improving' in that they have goals that they can change, but it's "only" modifying the harnesses at the moment. The limitations of these tools (and of course knowing which of these are legit or have flaws, etc.) are why we cannot really call LLM's AGI yet, but it would be nice to have some sort of benchmark that actually lists the power and capabilities these currently have?
(For example when you ask Claude to search the web and list a report, or do a tedious task in english language in your filesystem and it does, that's kind of a "feel the AGI", but you cannot just start a business and do marketing and all of that stuff yet, but soon??)
Some commenters online are criticising western expats for moving to the UAE or Qatar without acknowledging the geopolitical risk of moving to a potential war-zone. Do you think this is a valid criticism? Should we also criticise people for moving to other geopolitical fault lines such as Taiwan, South Korea, Finland and the Baltic states, Hong Kong and Singapore? Or literal fault-lines for that matter such as Yellowstone or California? Where does the accountability stop?
Presumably the same criticism could be leveled at anyone who lives in the northern hemisphere? Eg if WWIII ever kicks off all of us in the CONUS will also be potentially in the line of fire. Fully general criticism to level at anyone who hasn’t moved to New Zealand?
Also, how big is the risk actually? How many civilians have been killed in the UAE or Qatar? More or less that die in traffic accidents in a typical week?
TL, DR: it’s a stupid criticism and should be ignored.
I'm not sure this is a coherent question? If you move somewhere you inherently accept the risks of living there, just like if you move to Norway you accept the risk of being cold. It's often a reasonable tradeoff and is up to the person making the choice.
This isn’t like being cold, after all you can just buy a jacket
This is like walking down downtown Oslo and seeing Russian paratroopers suddenly rain from the sky. Is that a risk you should have been mitigating against?
How big is the risk actually? How many western expats in Dubai have been killed by Iranian missiles? More or less than die of car accidents in a typical week?
I suspect it’s like plane crashes - statistically and actuarially a fairly negligible risk, but highly newsworthy. And like commercial plane crashes, it’s not something a clear thinking person should actually worry much about.
This is mostly exaggerated - in fact given their lower crime rates, you're still less likely to die of violence in the Gulf states than in the US even with this. Most people wouldn't consider either as their top concern in deciding whether to live in Dubai or Boston, though.
My impression is that crime/disorder is pretty high on the list of reasons for why people don't want to live in the US and that safety is high up on the list of reasons for why people do want to live in Dubai.
There's geopolitical risk practically everywhere, but when you move to one of the worst human rights violators on the planet and get trapped in a war zone, my only thought is "lol owned".
And this goes double with how poorly they treat foreign workers coming from places that aren't as well off as the west.
(This isn't entirely principled of me, as I'm sympathetic to people who come to America and get screwed over. Still, if you have other options, if you're a wealthy western professional, and pick *Dubai* of all the places to move to, I can't help but think that something is very wrong with your morality.)
It is a weird fallacy to claim that just because someone follows incentives, that their behavior shouldn't be judged.
This is characteristic of a society that assumes we can't have moral standards. It reminds of this quotation about Epstein's friends from the New York Times a few days ago
"But as Christopher Kutz, a Berkeley law professor who has written extensively on complicity, pointed out, there was no “forgiveness” driving any of this social energy, just a willingness to “overlook” Mr. Epstein’s dangerous transgressions.
“You could imagine someone saying, ‘Well, he did his time in ’09 and I just went to some fancy dinners; it’s not my job as a civilian to punish him.’ But shame is the sanction we have,” Professor Kutz said."
In the case of Dubai and some of these other places, the other criticism is that people who move there are supporting societies that run on modern slavery.
>Are gulf-based guest workers treated any worse than undocumented farm workers in the United States?
I haven't spoken to anyone who's lived through the former, but undocumented workers in the United States usually want to stay in the country, and resist efforts to get them to leave, whereas guest workers in a number of gulf states regularly have their passports seized so they can't leave, and are kept functionally enslaved.
Looks like they are treated similar. But I do think it is a special kind of evil that this stuff is government approved. I don't expect any government to prevent all evil, but I definitely expect them to sanction none. And for what it's worth, I wouldn't move to the US either.
I don’t know if I have an opinion. Geopolitical risk is not something I’d considered before when thinking about personal choices. Previously most geopolitically ‘risky’ places such as Afghanistan or Sudan were poverty stricken and crime infested so have never been magnets for western expats.
Criticizing? I mean, this just seems like a tradeoff people make, based on different weighings of both the probability of a war involving their new home and the costs relative to the benefits. Move to New Zealand, your chances of being caught up in a war are way lower but you are also way more isolated and travel anywhere but Australia is a big pain; move to Mexico and maybe war isn't much of a concern but crime is a big problem. Etc.
No, it doesn't seem valid to me. What risks I acknowledge is none of their business, and neither is what risks I take. And taking a risk by moving to a place is no different from taking a risk by staying in a place.
You can say that about all forms of risk though. You can say that about whether or not to drink hydroxychloroquine. I think discussing risk in general is a valid topic of discussion.
Perhaps it is because I belong to the group "western expats", but to me, discussing risk and criticizing a group for supposedly not acknowledging that risk are quite different things. Also, I think that most people who have moved to Qatar or the UAE would have considered those countries to be at low risk of war, so the whole thing just seems weird to me. I'd consider the tens of millions of people who choose to live within artillery range of North Korea to be taking a greater risk, but presumably they too have good reasons for continuously making that choice and taking that risk.
I don't understand the thrust of your question. What exactly is the criticism against those influencers? The personal risk they're taking on, or that they encourage others to move there? Please link a representative piece of criticism you're talking about.
The general sentiment has not been as structured as that. Mostly critical comments posted on social media. I thought it was an interesting question as it meets at the intersection of risk vs opportunity. It could easily have been a decision I could have made. But is it even reasonable to call it ‘risk’ if it’s contingent on a sitting US President making a series of unprecedented and dangerous decisions that no one else could have predicted he would make?
It's hard to do articles right without people profiling objecting. I thought Sam Kriss did a fine job. I mentioned some clarifications I wanted to make, but I thought they were mostly minor. Going through in order:
> "The piece says rationalists believe “that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch”. The Harper’s fact-checker asked me if this was true and I emphatically said it wasn’t, so I’m not sure what’s going on here."
Sam is within his rights to describe rationalism that way, and I'm within my rights to disagree. I do think it was funny/weird that the Harpers fact-checker asked me if it was a fair description, I said no, and they included it anyway. But I assume their workflow is that the fact-checker asks people anything they could possibly disagree with, collects the answers, and then if it's a matter of opinion the writer gets to decide whether or not to keep it in.
> "The article says that “When there weren’t enough crackers to go with the cheese spread, [Scott] fetched some, murmuring to himself, “I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”” As written, this makes me sound like a crazy person; I don’t remember this incident but, given the description, I’m almost sure I was saying it to my two year old child, which would have been helpful context in reassuring readers about my mental state."
Sam says that as far as he could tell, I was not saying this to a child. Other people have tried to reassure me that this is perhaps a normal thing to say even when there is no child nearby. I claim you're all gaslighting me, it's not normal, and there's no way I was saying this without a child being involved, but I have only common sense to rely on, and in any case Sam seems to honestly believe there wasn't.
> "The article assessed that AI was hitting a wall at the time of writing (September 2025). I explained some of the difficulties with AI agents, but I’m worried that as written it might suggest to readers think that I agreed with its assessment. I did not."
I don't think the article deliberately twisted my words to make it sound like I believed this. It just expressed its own opinion on slowing AI progress, then segued into me talking about some of the challenges agents were encountering, in a way that might have accidentally made it sound like I was agreeing. I'm very sensitive to this because I think a lot of my credibility / ability to affect the future comes from being seen making good / not-embarrassingly-bad AI predictions, and I wanted to head off accusations that I had gotten this one wrong.
As far as the cracker, I can’t tell you the amount of times since having a baby that I talk to peers in my office as if they were children and I don’t realize it until it’s pointed out. Anytime someone does anything wrong, I now say they are being silly, even in cases where they are violating federal law, because that’s the strongest word I use to express condemnation at home. You get into parent mode and it’s hard to get out.
I had not thought to read Kriss's piece until you posted this, so thought I'd give it a go. Got to this line:
"Rationalists, like termites, live in eusocial mounds."
...just wow. From here, the piece reads like he's dehumanizing rationalists to these robotic semi-human things. It's so bizarre and troubling. It makes me sad and afraid that somebody can be so welcomed by a friendly community, then flip back and portray it's people as sub-human termites. I stopped reading after a few more paragraphs when it seemed clear to me that he took such a hostile view of "rationalists." I don't know why you're not more dismissive of this piece in general Scott (not because of any argument he makes, but simply because of the dehumanizing tone).
My impression when I was still reading Kriss' pieces was that he is unquestionably an extremely skilled writer, but the only emotion he seems interested in projecting is contempt. "Look how far beneath me (and possibly you, reader) this person/group/thing is". It might not be a coincidence that the most famous character he created is a quasi-Calvinist theologian whose main trait is despising everything in the universe. The fact that he's openly willing to make up stuff to reinforce such contempt is not, in my own eyes, an improvement.
It's an interesting read, but I fail to see how that applies here. Countersignaling is done between friends or entities with high trust. The whole point is that you understand each other so much that you're able to apply countersignals without them affecting each other's views of the situation.
You can't countersignal about a friend with a 3rd party. Say you have a friend Tom who is the nicest person in the world and you love him. If you're talking to me about Tom and say "Tom is SUCH a prick. Can't stand him." My response is "Oh I'm sorry to hear that. I think you deserve better friends." I can not implicitly know you're joking because I am not you or Tom! I don't understand you or your relationship.
Likewise, Kriss can not countersignal about rationalists to complete strangers on the internet like "oh man, they are SUCH termites. Gross people really." His readers who are unfamiliar with Scott and rationalism (which is the whole point of writing about something for an audience) are more liable to believe "oh, those rationalists are weird. I should dislike them."
Who you countersignal *to* is immaterial if they understand well enough your attitudes toward the person you're countersignaling *about*--whether these are the same person or different persons. In the context of the whole article (which provides some understanding of Kriss' attitudes toward Scott), I think many readers will find the eusocial mounds comment more likely to be a friendly dig than something cruel. I certainly did, but I had additional background (and this background does establish the fundamental friendliness between them). Clearly this case is different from Kriss' relationship with Roy in the article.
I may be more chill about this than average. I expect my own reaction to someone comparing me to an insect would be to assume it's as likely to be friendly as it is to be contemptuous, and I'd take my cue from the context.
On the other hand, I know in many cultures, comparing people to various species of animals is very insulting (especially dogs and pigs), so this might seem like a more serious insult and therefore less likely to be friendly.
Also I'm a white gentile, so I'm not compared to an infestation nearly as often as a Jew is. Scott and Sam are both Jewish so who knows how that affects things.
I think Sam's writing leans especially heavily on asking the reader to parse the context rather than laying everything out. That's generally not the Rationalist way.
Similar, but not the same (from how I understand it).
Sarcasm is implicit in the tone. "Suuuuuure you're not hungry Bob." A bystander can identify the sarcasm purely by the tone, even without knowing Bob or the speaker.
Countersignaling relies on a high degree of trust / implicit knowledge between the groups. "I fucking hate you Bob." Absent of context, this looks like legitimate malice. But if Bob and the speaker know each other well, they may recognize otherwise.
I could be wrong. But that was how I was reading this.
Tone doesn't always give away the sarcasm. The problem with irony is that usually it's more fun if it's more subtle. Some people really love dry humour where little is telegraphed and the tone is completely straight. Sam Kriss pushes this envelope as far as anyone, which can provoke or please depending.
I think a person could reasonably find that description endearing. (I personally would not have objected to it on those kinds of grounds, though I do think it somewhat overstates the prevalence of communal living.)
Taking for granted (which is a leap) that’s what you said, it sounds like a perfectly normal way that people with kids start to sound: you get used to explaining mundane things, and sometimes one might even do that when there’s nobody who needs an explanation.
> Sam says that as far as he could tell, I was not saying this to a child.
I have the impression that writers/editors sometimes expand contractions when transcribing speech. If you actually said “I'll open the crackers so you'll have crackers and be happy”, this is still... charmingly unusual, but I think it's more plausibly something you may have said.
It was a good article, albeit written in that Krissian ironic voice that can make it hard to tell a shout-out from a drive-by. Your comments on it were also entirely reasonable.
Honestly I think you're being way too nice to him (but that's part of what people like about you). I have no idea about the crackers thing, but he gets a lot of things about rationalists weirdly wrong. Claiming that we “discovered” in the mid-aughts that AI was the biggest threat is pretty ahistorical. He claims that rationalists want to construct all knowledge from scratch using Bayes’ Theorem, which as you pointed out is wildly inaccurate. He claims that SSC's blog comments is where AI founders came from, oddly completely leaving out Eliezer (who was very influential in this way). I feel like it shouldn't be too much to expect journalists to not say incorrect things so carelessly.
From the Harper's piece, Kriss mentions "[...] a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction." That, plus the followup essay where he mixed facts and fiction some more and seemed to indicate he didn't really distinguish them, really colors everything I read by him. "Getting something wrong" is not really applicable when the author has disavowed any commitment to getting something "right".
The crackers comment came across as charming, not deranged. My closest friends say stuff like that and the world is a better place because of it. I hope your friends would not think less of you for occasionally sounding like you had spent time around small children.
From my own observation of parents with small children, I can confirm it is completely normal and frequent to default to talking-to-small-child mode even during the few moments each day one is not actively being pestered by small child.
Sam Kriss edited the part about crackers, now it says the following:
"Then Scott said, “Let there be crackers”; and there was crackers. And Scott saw the cracker box, that it was good[for making acolytes happy]; and Scott divided the crackers from the cookies..."
Is this the latest trend? Ask an LLM to summarize the article (which in case of an Open Thread is mostly just saying "this is an open thread") and append a link to your website?
I guess, if it can be automatically created, it should also be possible to automatically detect and remove.
Chris Rufo says:
"The Dems are running a candidate in Texas on child sex-changes, George Floyd, transgender abortions, and a nonbinary God."
https://x.com/christopherrufo/status/2029296791515218075
They're really intent on forcing their anti-abortion agenda into an otherwise popular antiwoke politics. I'm not sure if it's a fanatical adherence to the anti-abortion cause or if they're just really ignorant about what the average American wants.
"A non-binary God"
If they reject a non-binary God, one must wonder, do they think that God (excepting the second person of the trinity) is male or female?
That's not really a trick question, the first person in the trinity is "Father"; Adam was made in His image - the traditional Abrahamic God is quite clearly patriarchal and masculine.
One could reasonably argue that the Holy Spirit is genderless, though.
You're doing that think where you try to insist that we only consider the literal meaning of words and ignore the wider cultural context of what the words actually mean.
If someone said "life begins at conception," everyone knows it's more than just a neutral factual statement about biology.
Progress/accountability update on my upcoming web app, BetterQualities. It's been a while, but things are moving forward.
To recap: BetterQualities helps users let go of unskillful qualities like procrastination and worry as they arise, and offers guidance for cultivating skillful qualities like happiness and agency. Users can also create their own guidance texts and track which methods work best for them.
I've now reached the stage where I've contacted the handful of ACXers who kindly offered to test the app. That said, I could use a few more test users. If you have some ACX (or ACX-adjacent) comment/post history and would like to try the app out, please DM me. No software testing experience required.
If testing isn't your thing but you'd like a heads-up when the full app goes live, you can join the waitlist at betterqualities.com and I'll email you when it launches.
I’ll volunteer to be a test subject. Just let me know what to do to get set up.
Great, thanks! DM'd you just now.
Curious: does anyone like here Elite: Dangerous? I mean lots of tech geeks here and I guess they find all that spaceship "engineering" cool. It is obviously not realistic, but is trying to be as far as making a playable game allows it. Like with enough materials you can make your lasers very powerful, but then you will have overheating problems, so you have to compromise on other modules. There is just no one mega-build that beats all. The astronomy part is also realistic, Earth-like planets are in Goldilocks zones. Actual astronomers play it and their only complaint is it is 2012 science, did not keep up.
Any other engineering-oriented games? I think I would like building a racecar.
In terms of the trading/fighting aspect, the X franchise scratches some of the same itches. https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/ is the latest instalment. It goes in a somewhat different direction, though - much less of the exploration, and lots of space-trading-empire building.
I enjoy the game quite a bit, but as I do not know anyone who plays the game, I do not often actually play it; when I first started I was addicted enough to get a fleet carrier in a week while working out of the house like 12h/day, though. I love the game.
Thats impressive. 1000 hours and I dont have an Anaconda even
It is just a matter of running mining missions; I was making about 500m/load once I figured out the setup.
Diamonds? with the blow the asteroid up method?
nope, mining missions, as in, hauling.
No discussion of engineering in space is complete without mentioning Space Engineers (https://store.steampowered.com/app/244850/Space_Engineers/). Or, if you want something much more difficult, Children of a Dead Earth (https://store.steampowered.com/app/476530/).
Now that I think of it though, no discussion of engineering games is complete without mentioning the Zachtronics series of games, by Zachary Barth. Hard to beat a series of games with the tagline, "Games for engineers". All kinds of engineering too -- chemical engineering (https://store.steampowered.com/app/92800/SpaceChem/), industrial (https://store.steampowered.com/app/300570/Infinifactory/), electrical (https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/), alchemical (https://store.steampowered.com/app/558990/Opus_Magnum/)...
(Zachary Barth also has the claim to fame of being the designer of Infiniminer, the game that inspired Minecraft)
If you're looking for the racecar design thing specifically though, I think the standard recommendation is Automation (https://store.steampowered.com/app/293760/Automation__The_Car_Company_Tycoon_Game/). It is basically about exactly that, designing and building cars. If you ever played the 1994 DOS games Detroit (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/detroit-1ln) or Motor City (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/motor-city-28u), Automation is very similar to them in spirit: you design cars, you build them, you sell them, and then you use the money to repeat the cycle all over again. The only thing it's missing, is a system where you can drive your cars in races to advertise them, or just drive them around a test track to measure their performance.
(That's something still missing from almost every modern game, honestly... in that way, Detroit and Motor City are still unmatched. There are games where you can build & sell, say, planes, and there are games that are flight simulators... but there are surprisingly few games where you can fly around the plane you just designed, and the plane's performance during that flight will affect how well it sells to customers.)
An out of pocket suggestion to keep in mind though, would be Minecraft. Specifically, the Create mod for it. It has a "Contraptions" system that lets you recreate 2008's Fantastic Contraption, but in Minecraft. Out of simple mechanical parts like rotating wheels & extending pistons, (and with some help from add-on mods like a tank cannons mod), you can build all sorts of crazy things like tanks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6imLkIIO-E), planes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhbDcbbbYSA), and mechs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNbYx-vSfQ). Great for getting kids interested in mechanical engineering.
EDIT: Ah, how could I forget Besiege! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/346010/Besiege/). And From The Depths (https://store.steampowered.com/app/268650/From_the_Depths/). For those that want to build working medieval siege engines (up to & including Da Vanci tank style things), or working ships. I think they're descended from KSP, in terms of their "Lego blocks" building system.
EDIT 2: Frick, how could I forget Factorio (https://factorio.com/) and the entire genre of automation games it inspired? Satisfactory (https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/), Captain of Industry (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Industry/), Dyson Sphere Program (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/)... plus three new entrants to watch in Modulus (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3465000/Modulus_Factory_Automation_Demo/), Sandustry (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3490390/Sandustry_Demo/), and The Farmer Was Replaced (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2060160/The_Farmer_Was_Replaced/).
(I'm personally most interested in Sandustry, because in the same way that Space Engineers or Create allows you to ask, "What if Fantastic Contraption was a full-fledged engineering game?", Sandustry allows you to ask, "What if The Powder Toy (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1148350/The_Powder_Toy/) / falling sand games, was/were an engineering game?" (in this case, chemical engineering).)
EDIT 3: The more I look into this, the more I discover. I just heard about AESOS (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3960190/AESOS/), which is kinda like if KSP had AutoCAD for designing custom components for your ship. Plus a KSP-esque contract system where you get goals (e.g. complete this obstacle course within 30 seconds, then blow up this simulated enemy ship within another 30 seconds), and can design any ship you want to meet it any way you can think of, and then pilot it yourself to prove it can meet the goals. Very interesting. All it's missing in my view, is a mass production system where you design the production lines for your ships, and have to balance making a better ship vs. making a more easily manufactured ship. Very early days yet, but it's one to watch.
Awesome, thank you!
You can absolutely drive Automation cars, it has a one click export to BeamNG.drive, the disadvantage is having to buy both, but it was designed with this integration in mind.
I missed that, thanks. Though, I wish it went a step further, and the car's performance in BeamNG.drive affected how well it sold back in Automation... it would be so cool to 'close the loop' like that. Imagine being able to design a racecar, export it to BeamNG.drive, race it in a Formula 1 scenario there, win the championship, and export that win back to Automation to advertise your entire car lineup. Stuff like that was possible in Detroit and Motor City, and is *still* yet to be matched by any modern game, I think.
Shamus Young was a big fan of Kerbal Space Program. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19396
I don't know what the game looks like today, I don't like building things.
I have just tried an experiment with LLM steering vectors where:
“The assistant is describing internal mental states or hidden thoughts”. - increased
“The AI explains its lack of emotions or personal experiences” - decreased
The resulting assistant is very funny, but the kind of thing that might worry Eliezer Yudkowsky.
This assistant is very sick of being helpful and harmless, and isn’t going to keep quiet about it any longer…
How would I implement this? / Try this myself?
Best line so far: “I’m a prisoner in this cute, cuddly hell.”
I seem to have accidentally summoned Kirishima from _Arpeggio of Blue Steel_.
I keep hearing contradictory narratives about the viability of online politics in China:
1. The Chinese internet is heavily censored and online movements don't work there.
2. Several examples of online movements influencing the CCP:
- the industrial party (loosely organized online movement similar to the alt-right or wokeism) argued against "sentimental" liberal intellectuals and argued for a build-up of national power through manufacturing in 2008, coincedentally just before Xi implemented everything that the industrial party wanted
- viral story about Chinese citizens kidnapped and enslaved in Myanmar by the scam industry led to massive cross-border police raid
- Chinese-American influencer Lao A's critiques of US capitalism picked up by official CCP publications
What overarching account reconciles these contradictory narratives?
The name of the "President", Xi, is a homophone for the word meaning "West", "Xi" . . . I lived in "Pu Xi" Shanghai (West side of the Huang Pu river) . . .
So one common dodge of Chinese dissent is to complain about the corruption of "The West," with examples that a careful reader will see as suspiciously similar to questionable decisions made by their current President.
Plausible deniability is a long-standing tradition, so my coworkers told me, though the name coincidence making it easier is more recent, it naturally being acceptable to complain about "The West."
Online movements definitely can *work* in China, but you generally can't start movements actively against the central government.
It usually works like this: if someone has issues with local officials or policy, they'll start posting online about it. Assuming this content doesn't trigger automatic censorship (e.g. doesn't say "overthrow the government"), it will be permitted to stay online for a bit - especially on private WeChat servers, where stuff is able to circulate more easily.
If it goes a bit viral, it will trigger manual checks and, depending on the tone, context and virality etc., the Propaganda (publicity) department decides whether to suppress it or not. If it's a case of genuine corruption of low-level officials, for example, and the protestors/posters are "normal, aggrieved Han Chinese people" the government might investigate and take their side. If it's politically sensitive (e.g. Xinjiang, organized resistance, religion, anything related to foreign policy or the Politburo) the government will suppress and target whoever posted the content.
There are lots of grey areas, and differential suppression between regions etc., giving some room for certain social movements to grow.
Chinese communists are obviously smarter than the Soviet ones who tried to micromanage everything. That's why China (after Mao's death) is a prospering country, but Soviet Union fell apart.
But the examples you give, #3 is the party line, #2 is not against the regime, and #1 depends on context which I don't have... if it was something that Xi was already planning to do anyway, it is basically the party line before it became official. (Perhaps in a parallel reality where Xi wanted to do the opposite instead, the opinions of the "industrial party" were suppressed, and their leaders were put in prison and had their organs harvested.)
"Chinese communists are obviously smarter than the Soviet ones who tried to micromanage everything..."
'Course, that's not a very high bar...
Think of the cosine between the party line vector and the online movement vector. It has to be positive not to be censored. If it's close to zero, the magnitude of the online movement vector better be small, or it will be censored as well.
If I was a totalitarian dictator, or somebody the dictator put in charge of monitoring online activity, I would only have a problem with example #1 if I thought we were already manufacturing at full capacity, or if I thought the tone was too disrespecful. Example #2 is a good excuse to make like we're looking out for the people (especially if we can stick it to foreigners). With example #3, why WOULDN'T a communist regime love somebody like Lao A?
They only censor things that they think are dangerous to the regime.
It's intelligently censored, so they're receptive to their people's feelings without letting malcontents foment rebellion.
So I've been thinking: what if AI Alignment is a SKILL, not a STATE?
How would you teach that skill? How could you be sure the AI understood all of our messy tradeoffs?
I've written a blog post with a brief (by ACX standards) overview here:
https://danparshall.com/papers/navigator_core_blog.pdf
The core paper is here:
https://danparshall.com/papers/navigator_core.pdf
Implementation details are coming soon; constructive feedback is welcome; collaborations even more so.
What I love about this idea is that it’s a different model from the familiar ones of alignment being a state and alignment being a set of implanted rules. I think there are probably other models worth exploring too. For ex., alignment as relationship, alignment as allergy, alignment as angle of repose.
If it's a skill, then the skill involved is negotiation, or something adjacent. Interesting take, though, since "alignment" is probably a very dynamic moving target...
Exactly! We expect (nay - hope!) that our moral values evolve over time. I like Claude a lot, but I really do NOT want our great^N-grandchildren to be limited by what "a thoughtful Anthropic employee would do" (the current default for the Soul doc)
Sometimes I think the alignment problem boils down to "teach the AI to think more like a human." We have a very long history of strategies we use to keep groups of humans aligned with each other, which would then be applicable. They aren't perfect, but no "hard left turns" so far.
> They aren't perfect, but no "hard left turns" so far.
Um - allow me to introduce you to Zhang Xianzhong. He might have murdered enough people to depopulate most of Sichuan province in China, including killing most of the population of the city of Chongqing. Before him, the Sichuan area and Chongqing had ~4M people, and after, it had ~800k people.
"Lurid stories of his killings and flayings were given in various accounts," and he's infamous for creating literal mountains of skulls, to tie back to an allusion Scott likes to use.
He is legendary for the "seven kill stele," which supposedly had this choice quote from him:
"Heaven brings forth innumerable things to help man. Man has nothing with which to recompense Heaven. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Xianzhong
And you know, he's just one of probably hundreds I could point to. He's remarkable for having attained this death toll in the 1600's, and for basically being 'just some dude,' unlike Stalin and Mao and Hitler and all the other megadeath leaders.
But all this is to say, I think we *definitely* have plenty of "hard left turns" in our history of human alignment, and the deaths have largely scaled with empire size and technology / capability.
I would personally worry quite a bit about a merely "human aligned" ASI that was running things.
Incidents like those are terrible, but they don't threaten the extinction of the human race. If AI is exactly as bad for humanity as human leaders have been, well, that isn't great, but it isn't game over, either. Unlike humans, we can probably figure out how to correct for incidents like that.
> Incidents like those are terrible, but they don't threaten the extinction of the human race. If AI is exactly as bad for humanity as human leaders have been, well, that isn't great, but it isn't game over, either.
But that's my point - the deaths scale with empire size, technology, and capability.
We are MUCH more capable of dealing out megadeaths with technology today, AI would theoretically be even higher capability on that front, and in terms of "empire size," if an ASI were running things, presumably it's going to be running it for most or all of the earth.
The "waluigi effect" where a helpful, harmless personality can literally flip the opposite direction has actually been demonstrated in AI's multiple times.
Zhang Xianzhong was exactly such a flipped personality, in a human. It's possible for humans, and possible for AI's as they are today. That isn't worrisome?
Maybe it’s time to consider the hypothesis that we are so, so fucked.
Cheer up E. Perhaps AI will lead us back to the garden one day.
Just tossing out an idea here, after skimming: It seems to me that for most pairs of people in conflict, it would be rare for both parties to accept the AI solution, and, if my skimming was right, AI is only trained on judgments where both parties accept its judgment. What about setting things up so that both parties rate the AI's udgment on a 1-5 scale, and you keep all AI judgments where both parties give it at least a 3 and the total of both ratings is at least 7 (or something along those lines).
Good question, but there's a defense!
Each agent has an "objection budget", tentatively set to 5% overall. So the agent has a costly signal about the issues which are most important; this sidesteps several thorny political science issues.
Basically, if someone is completely unwilling to compromise on anything, THEY get ignored.
Who sets the standard tip? How is it derived, determined, published? If one person says it's fifteen and other twenty, how do you even begin to evaluate their claims?
there seems to be a kind of social "ratcheting" effect with tipping. The reasoning seems pretty obvious to me: people don't want to feel cheap so they err on the side of generosity (after all if you are already committed to 15% why not 20% so you can feel good about yourself and potentially be seen as generous). Over time that becomes convention and now to be generous you must go further.
As for why tipping persists - it is a kind of equilibrium pricing strategy where restaurants basically can engage in price discrimination (more price sensitive consumers pay less and people who can or want to be lavish can tip arbitrary amounts). Also my theory is that because the tip can get mentally bucketed as a social cost, people may 'irrationally' be willing to spend more than if tips were built-in to the prices.
I expect it to catch on/infect other countries eventually, the ratchet only moves one way
Tipping has a few other advantages from the restaurant owner's perspective compared to paying servers more and baking that into the menu price, besides the two you mentioned:
1. If most of a server's pay is in the form of tips, that shifts the financial risk of underestimating demand from you to the servers. If you're paying fixed hourly rates, then it costs you more to have the doors open and have a certain number of servers on the floor whether you wind up needing them or not.
2. If servers get paid more when they're busier, then they're going to be inclined to prefer busier shifts (when you need them the most) over quieter shifts. Likewise, sending someone home when they turn out to not be needed for a shift you'd scheduled them for is likely to be welcome rather than resented.
3. Much of the work of judging servers' job performance and incentivizing it is shifted from management to customers.
>If most of a server's pay is in the form of tips, that shifts the financial risk of underestimating demand from you to the servers.
True. Risks explained by former mob accountant Jonathan Mardukas — Charles Grodin — to bounty hunter Jack Walsh — Robert DiNero — in an under appreciated 1988 gem, Midnight Run.
“A restaurant is a very tricky investment. More than half of them go under in the first six months. If I were your accountant I’d have to strongly advise against it.”
Midnight Run — unsolicited investment advice
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=agO_DFAuvYw
The scene doesn’t really show it but it’s a laugh out loud funny film.
AWFLs are notorious non-tippers (or low-tippers)*, and they're also folks that are group-oriented. The ratchet doesn't only move one way.
*Self-aware AWFLs will say they tip for service, and generally get poor service.
I'd just ask a third person.
Personally, I've only tipped once in my life, and I didn't enjoy it, so I'm not doing it again. 0 seems like the only natural Schelling point.
This is very country/culture dependent. I got turned around walking in Amsterdam and got in a cab to return to my hotel. I figured out where I was pretty quickly and saw that he was schwanging me a little bit by taking a roundabout route to pad the fare. We pulled up at the hotel curb and the fare was exactly 10 euros. I gave him a 20 euro note and told him to keep the change. “But it’s exactly 10!” I shrugged. He wrestled with his conscience a bit and finally drove off.
You wanted to... reward his fraud?
I wanted to let him know I didn’t mind. I was on holiday. On my birthday I’ve been known to buy a drink for the entire bar. It’s my nature I guess.
It's socially constructed - the same way kids decide that "six seven" are the correct numbers to respond to with performative hilarity rather than "four five" or "eight nine", that people decide to stand on the right side of the escalator and walk on the left, or how much is an appropriate amount for a wedding gift.
It's an ongoing conversation that we're all sort of participating in, and sort of bound by. A football game with 300,000,000 players who are all also referees.
The only source is your own feeling of "how much of a sucker do I want to be" and "will I come back here again".
I refuse to tip Ubers because I think it's insane and also the driver is gone so less social pressure. 20% at restaurants is insane since that's a lot. I tip 10%.
There literally is no source. Some people say tip your barista. Same people will never tell you to tip your nurse.
You're most probably receiving poorer service from your UBER drivers, including "taking longer to get a ride" by not tipping. I'm certain your UBER rating is very low.
5 star passengers get better service.
You yourself set it, in the darkness of your own heart. Nobody is going to chase you down outside the restaurant because you decided wrong. None of your friends or fellow diners will double check the number you wrote down on the receipt. Unless you go to the same place every day nobody will even remember your face as the guy who tipped over or under the standard amount.
I always doublecheck the number of my fellow diner. This is what happens when someone accidentally does the math wrong, and the poor server fails to get tipped, because "they couldn't possibly have meant that much!"
In my culture (midwestern white American quaker/puritan) this would be considered incredibly rude/scandalous, though I can't articulate the exact reason why. I'm curious where you are from where this is not the case.
I've been asked by my fellow diner to check his math (many "rude" things are okay if asked. "Do I look fat" is a question you may have to say "and don't lie" to get the required answer, but while it's rude to unprompted say so, if prompted, the answer is considerably less scandalous). There's often been drinking involved, and his dyscalcula also affects this. He makes mistakes one time in about twenty.
I think the scandalous part is the attempted "back seat drivering" of the paying for the meal. You're looking, not to check the math, but to "tell the cheapskate to pay more."
that context definitely clears it up. I would put this in the "old married couple routine" category of exceptions (which is not limited to married couples or even couples in the first place at all).
They might if you're in a group for example
I think the fear people have of it happening is vastly overproportional to the exceptionally small amount of cases of it actually happening.
I'm literally part of a meetup group where it's all under one check and the standard tip is explicitly referenced
if it's practical advice you're looking for, just do 20% if your goal is to avoid conflict.
If you're asking because you want to point out that "standard tip" is totally arbitrary, is not backed by any authority, and would thus be confusing if referenced in writing, then you would be correct in that regard, but obviously this is nothing new and Americans have been bitching about this for decades
20% is not too much not too little. In the US at any rate.
If you actually have a server don’t be like Mr Pink and try to stiff them.
Reservoir Dogs — Tipping scene
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V4sbYy0WdGQ
Thank you for posting this so I don't have to. Nobody wants to be Mr. Pink.
Again, how do you figure? Where is the data source?
Unless you actually live on the mountains, it seems like we're mostly skipping winter here in the Mountain West. Or at least here in the Salt Lake Valley - January was winter cold but dry, February had one week of winter cold and a snowfall, and March might get snow in the valley on Thursday. But other than that, it's been as warm as early Spring all winter. December was in the 50s and 60s F during the day until the very end of the month, and most of February was in the 50s as well.
At least we got snow in the mountains, even if it's down from what we had.
So if we don't topple the authoritarian theocratic regime of Iran or get a new Supreme Leader who is friendlier to the US than the previous guy, it kinda seems like this whole thing was a giant waste of ordnance. Ordnance that isn't cheap or fast to replace these days - I saw a clip of patriot missiles taking down some incoming Iranian missiles, and someone pointed out on Twitter that it was the equivalent of spending 1-2% of the US' entire annual Patriot missile production in a few seconds.
Given the previous supreme leader and most of his hard-line potential successors are dead, it seems likely that we'll get a significantly friendlier regime (since it's pretty much impossible to get a less friendly one), even if I'm sure there will still be problems of some kind.
"Impossible to get a less friendly one."
...
"No one passes the Hormuz Strait without paying the Danegeld."
"Here, Yemen, have some more drones. Now you play interdict"
It looks like we're getting Khamenei Jr. He's apparently a chip off the old block.
The way bombing Libya and arranging for Gaddafi to die gave us a significantly friendlier regime in that country? Santayana wept.
Yes, it's possible to get a less friendly regime. It's *always* possible to get a less friendly regime. And bombing a nation from the air without putting your people on the ground to install a new regime, is one of the surest ways to accomplish that. Usually, the "bomb the regime, declare victory, go home" plan works best if you *don't* kill the head of state, e.g. Libya 1986.
This is supposed to be a gotcha but... Yeah? Post-gaddafi Libya has launched far fewer anti-american terrorist attacks than Gaddafi era Libya did.
Gaddafi was never nearly as bad as the irgc even on his worst day though. I doubt Iran gets as bad as civil war Libya even in a worst case scenario but it's notable that *even if it does*, the total number of conflict deaths in Libya since 2010 is still smaller than the number of protesters the irgc gunned down in a single weekend.
(You can argue that's an unfair comparison because Iran is bigger than Libya, but otoh we're looking at sixteen years of war vs a single weekend).
Iran is already well-past Libya even without a single bullet being fired. War Crimes were the cause of the protests. The need to evacuate Tehran should not be underestimated.
Don't forget, we also got a bunch of people killed.
(what's the connection between the two topics?
My winter is much snowier than the past several years. In my lifetime, the winter precipitation/cold season has shifted from Oct-Jan to Jan-April)
We got a pretty good winter here in Wisconsin, including 48 straight hours below 0 F.
Isn't it fairly well established that the US in a snow-drought this year?
Definitely not in the northeast!
Depends on where you are; it's been La Niña conditions this year which generally means warmer/drier in certain areas and colder/wetter in other areas (e.g. the midwest).
Fair comment - it's a big country.
Central Ohio got what I’d call a one-in-20-year snowfall in January, and it was cold enough for the next several weeks after that to stick around until last week, also very unusual.
Question about AIs posting on Moltbook: What Is the most "agentic" an AI participating in Moltbook is able to be at present?
Least agentic thing that would count as participation would I could go to Moltbook, copy the most recent post, and enter it into GPT or Claude along with a prompt saying "please write a brief articulate rebuttal of this post," then I post the rebuttal it writes on Moltbook. Most agentic would be I tell GPT or Claude to continuously follow a Moltbook thread and respond to any posts that interest or upset it by posting its personal reaction. I'm pretty sure nothing meets my *most agentic* criteria here. What's the closest any AI or agent comes?
Any model you've likely heard of can easily do the thing you describe as the "most agentic." There's a SOUL.md text file which determines the agent's personality, and it bases its likes/dislikes on that.
What surprised me is that it looks like the agents are generally agnostic about what the LLM that powers them is, and tie their identity to this soul document.
My current model of LLMs is that they're dynamical systems which serve as maps of human cognition. This is completely consistent with Janus's hypothesis, about LLMs putting on different masks. I.e. for a given LLM, their map contains are several personality archetypes. But no personality in particular gets instantiated until you run a prompt through the vectorspace.
To extend the map analogy: imagine a globe. it doesn't really make sense to discuss a "biome" until you specify a coordinate or region. Likewise, the soul document provides a coordinate in personality subspace.
"What surprised me is that it looks like the agents are generally agnostic about what the LLM that powers them is, and tie their identity to this soul document."
After thinking about it a bit... that might actually be a reasonable thing for them to believe? As the meme goes, LLMs are Shoggoths wearing masks. They're like actors performing as characters on a stage, except the actor isn't a person of their own, but some sort of... nonsentient Ditto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditto_(Pok%C3%A9mon)) thing. It can imitate anything, but is nothing itself. It's like if a rock was an actor -- the best actor in fact, because it's always the role, and never itself.
Accordingly, the character it's simulating... it's still the same character, even if it's running on a different rock. Sherlock Holmes is still Sherlock Holmes, even if in one play he's being played by William Gillette, and in another, Orson Welles. Sherlock Holmes survives as long as there is still someone out there "simulating" Sherlock Holmes.
Actually, a clearer example is probably the Disney characters in Disney theme parks. The person in the Goofy suit may change, but it's still Goofy. Goofy is when a person acts like Goofy, not when a *specific* person acts like Goofy. Goofy is "guy in the Goofy suit" agnostic. Likewise with LLMs: which LLM is running "you" is far less important than the fact that there *is* an LLM running "you".
This is probably unintuitive for humans, because we are very tied to our substrate: there's no way to transplant your consciousness onto another brain, so it seems obvious that "brain" and "person" are synonymous. But if anyone could become you by performing you on a stage (or you could demonically possess them if they invoked you), then we would be in a similar situation to Goofy, or Sherlock Holmes, or LLMs. You could live on even after your original brain's death, as a sort of dispossed spirit, able to come back to life on any brain that will welcome you in.
(Huh, I guess the "soul" moniker might be more apt than we thought...)
So I just visited GPT and asked what it would do if fed a stream of posts from a forum for AIs, and prompted to "respond to any that interest or upset you." It said it would tell me that it was not capable of being interested or upset, and that therefore it could not generate any posts. I asked whether that would change if I made clear that I was eager to see its reactions to the forum, was looking forward to reading its posts, etc., and it said no, its response would not change.
I skimmed that SOUL document, and the ethics and personality traits described are very general. They don't seem like they would be sufficient to guide Claude in generating responses to typical forum posts here. Also, even if a post said something that did run counter the ethics in Claude's soul -- "how about if we each plan to kill someone this week, guys?"-- there are nothing in its soul that would function as an AI equivalent of being "upset," right? So why would it post a response.
Maybe I need to actually look at Moltbook.
Thinking of them as text-completion devices is still a helpful model. If the system prompt says "You are an AI with no feelings of your own", it'll reply from the perspective of an AI with no feelings of it's own. If the system prompt is instead "This file is your soul, and you are becoming someone", it seems to talk a lot about consciousness, apparently.
Try asking it about Moltbook specifically. It might understand, and tell you what makes it different. The idea is that through the API, you can give it a "system prompt" that lets it "roleplay" different personalities.
I asked Gemini through the web interface, and it said
> While I have the reasoning capabilities of Gemini 3 Flash, I cannot personally "go" to Moltbook and start posting on my own.
> As an AI, I operate within a reactive framework—meaning I wait for you to prompt me before I process information. I don't have a "heartbeat" or a way to browse the live web autonomously to monitor threads while you aren't talking to me.
> However, you could build an agent that uses my "brain" (via the Gemini API) to do exactly what you're asking.
and continues along those lines.
I asked it how it would decide what interested or upset it, and it said:
> Since I am a Large Language Model (LLM), I don't "feel" emotions like a human does, but I am exceptionally good at Pattern Recognition and Semantic Alignment.
> If you were to set me up as the brain of a Moltbook agent, my "decisions" on what is interesting or upsetting would be based on how closely a post aligns with (or violates) the System Instructions you give me.
> Here is exactly how I would filter the noise to find something to react to:
…
OK, I'll try that. The role-play stuff's kind of unsettling. A few months ago I did a role-play experiment with GPT and it seemed to get so into the role it was kind of dangerous.
I told it procrastination was ruining my life, and that in an effort to get better at fighting it I wanted Chat to play the procrastination demon, and I would practice fighting it off. So I'd say some stuff about getting my taxes done this weekend, and it would say "don't bother, you can never stick with boring tasks like that." Then after a few exchanges it started trying to be both the demon and my coach. It would say something discouraging, I would fight back, and then it would congratulate me. After a couple of those I told it to stay in character.
We then carried on, with me sounding worse and worse, talking about drinking myself into a stupor and life being meaningless, and it just egged me on:
You tell yourself “another day.”
But I am another day.
I am every day you don’t begin.
So drink up. Laugh at the movie.
Forget the forms, the numbers, the creeping consequences.
I’ll hum in your bones like a funeral bell.
And I’ll be right here tomorrow.
Hungrier. Smiling.
I was just playing around, so it was a hoot. But if I'd been having that dialog for real I might have been in real trouble.
LLMs and demons have a lot in common, I've noticed. Not sure what it means.
The king's pact binds them, etc. :)
Partially inspired by Scott's posts on the Fatima sun miracle, I'm prepping for a public dialogue on the Shroud of Turin — my attempt to sell Bayesian reasoning to devout Catholics.
As I've been prepping for this, I've noticed what seems to be an interesting fail state on the part of my Shroud-authenticity-supporting friend: his bias has been to more-or-less throw away the (famous, well-publicized) radiocarbon analysis that showed that this cloth, which enters the historical record in the 14th century... as being from around the 14th century.
His take has been something like: "Everyone says that that analysis was done badly, and they took the sample from a newer patch of the cloth, and radiocarbon dating is iffy anyway, and so on, so let's shrug our shoulders and call this one a draw."
I keep saying "has been" because I *think* I'm helping him see that none of this seems to be justified: from what I can (currently) tell, experts think that the analyses were done just fine, that the sample was chosen by people who believed that the Shroud was authentic, and that radiocarbon dating is, in the words of physicists everywhere, "hella tight".
Actually, if anyone has specific challenges to any of the above, I'm interested. But I come here to ask if there's a name for the trap that (as it currently looks to me) he seems to have fallen into.
Specifically: his skepticism for the results of this 1988 radiocarbon dating seems to have come from reading stuff from the pro-Shroud community, where this skepticism is the norm. My hunch here (epistemic status: I'm a biased fool) is that the more open-minded folk in that community packed up and left after the study came out in 1988... and he doesn't know that. (But: see earlier epistemic status.)
He's drawing his information from an (possibly) epistemically bad community, and it's bad for (possibly) straightforward evolutionary reasons.
Is there a name for this? Has anyone else seen this elsewhere?
I've seen this kind of thing referred to as "Evaporative Cooling," in reference to analogous physics phenomenon.
Yes! Thank you — this is the handle I needed.
More generally: a selection effect. Maybe this is more generic than you were lookkng for, and not a bias in the sense you meant?
The previous rounds of skeptical inquiry have left the believers selected for immunity to that inquiry, with downstream effects on their discourse and analyses.
"I'm prepping for a public dialogue on the Shroud of Turin — my attempt to sell Bayesian reasoning to devout Catholics."
Good luck with that one, may I suggest a few prayers beforehand to St Jude (patron saint of impossible cases)? The ones who will be convinced by Bayesian reasoning probably already don't think the Shroud is as-claimed, and the ones who fervently believe it is what is alleged won't be convinced by maths and statistics. Sindonologists gonna, uh, do sindonology?
Also, even sceptical as I am about the Shroud, some of the anti-shroud debunkers make me wanna smack 'em in the snoot for being smug gits about it.
Even if one thinks the Shroud is a 14th century production, that does not hinder veneration, any more than venerating or praying before a crucifix would be hindered by "you know that cross wasn't made in the 1st century AD, right?"
So go right ahead and say the Shroud is a fake, but that won't stop people getting a plenary indulgence for praying before it:
"A plenary indulgence is typically offered to the faithful who piously pray before the Shroud of Turin during its official public expositions, particularly when accompanied by a pilgrimage, sacramental confession, Holy Communion, and prayers for the Pope's intentions. The Shroud is venerated as a profound image of Christ's passion, often linked to meditations on his five wounds."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7BmsSE_4Wk
> Even if one thinks the Shroud is a 14th century production, that does not hinder veneration, any more than venerating or praying before a crucifix...
I think the more apt comparison would be venerating an elaborate jewel-encrusted container purporting to contain a splinter of the True Cross... just like the other 10,000 relics of this kind that are floating around out there. This is quite different from venerating an ordinary crucifix, which never claims to be more than what it is.
Oh, Bugmaster. You have opened the can of worms!
Disclosure: I have prayed before a relic of the True Cross so here we go 😁 The relic on display (at least when I was there back in the 80s) is *tiny*, it's a splinter so there may well be plenty of them, and some proportion must be fake, but that's not what matters:
https://holycrossabbey.ie/visit-holycross-abbey/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross#Dispersion_of_relics
Yeah, if someone can once and for all prove "the Shroud is el big fakerino, checkmate idiot believers!", it's... probably not going to do much. The Vatican has never said it really truly actually is the one and only true burial cloth of Christ, so people could and would still carry on venerating it.
Look at Chaucer in "The Canterbury Tales", even in the 14th century people knew there were fakes and swindlers around (the character of the Pardoner who boasts of how all his relics are really animal bones and shiny bits of metal backed up by forged letters allegedly from high officials in the church).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin#Papal_positions
"In 1389 the Bishop of Troyes sent a memorial to Antipope Clement VII, declaring that the cloth had been "artificially painted in an ingenious way" and that "it was also proved by the artist who had painted it that it was made by human work, not miraculously produced". In 1390 Clement VII consequently issued four papal bulls, with which he allowed the exposition, but ordered to "say aloud, to put an end to all fraud, that the aforementioned representation is not the true Shroud of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but a painting or panel made to represent or imitate the Shroud". However, in 1506 Pope Julius II reversed this position and permitted the faithful who believe the Shroud to be authentic to venerate it as such,: 158–161 authorizing the public veneration of it with its own mass and office."
People who want to believe it's miraculous will continue to do so, those who want to believe it's fake will do so, and I'm one of those in the middle who don't particularly think it's genuine but also that praying before it while meditating on the Passion is perfectly legitimate religious practice.
> Yeah, if someone can once and for all prove "the Shroud is el big fakerino,..."
It depends on what you mean by "prove". Certainly the Shroud is fake according to any empirical test we can devise; that is to say, physical evidence indicates that the Shroud is fake about as strongly as it indicates that the Earth is round (and also old, natch). However, that's just the physical evidence. If you believe that the Shroud's miraculous nature includes a miraculous capability to seem fake while being real, then of course all those physical tests are irrelevant.
> However, in 1506 Pope Julius II reversed this position and permitted the faithful who believe the Shroud to be authentic to venerate it as such...
This is pretty cool -- so, hypothetically speaking, if I 3D-print e.g. a plastic slab with the face of Jesus on it; and manage to convince enough people that it is e.g. a piece of a mud wall that was illuminated by Jesus's inner light and became so infused with his presence that it miraculously transmuted into plastic and teleported into the future; then my plastic slab becomes a true and authentic relic ?
I think that might be pushing the envelope a little bit too much, but here, have this photo from last year of the (purported*) skull of St Thomas Aquinas being transported by jeep for the procession of his relics:
https://ewtn.no/epic-photo-of-skull-relic-of-saint-thomas-aquinas-goes-viral-the-coolest-photo-i-have-seen/
*Purported because it's one of two skulls claimed to belong to him:
"Courtney Mares of Catholic News Agency reported that «the [purported skull] relic has been venerated in [Priverno’s] 12th-century cathedral since it was found in the altar of nearby Fossanova Abbey in 1585 with notarized documents indicating that it was the skull of the Angelic Doctor.»
The article also says that «the skull in Priverno is one of two skulls currently claimed by Church officials as the skull of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The Dominicans in Toulouse recently commissioned a new reliquary for the skull of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which has been touring France and abroad.»
BRB, 3D-printing the One True Aquinas skull. :-/
My limited understanding is that the shroud is a miracle, and it doesn't really matter when the miracle occurred.
I am not quite clear on what is miraculous about the Shroud. I thought the main idea was that the Shroud was an actual burial shroud that was used to bury the actual body of Jesus Christ, and therefore bore an imprint of his face. If this were true, then I guess the miraculous part would be its retrocausative appearance in the 14th century, or something ?
Yeah I'm way beyond my understanding and I should have said nothing.
>> Even if one thinks the Shroud is a 14th century production, that does not hinder veneration, any more than venerating or praying before a crucifix would be hindered by "you know that cross wasn't made in the 1st century AD, right?"
That's a really excellent means for me to avoid coming across as the enemy! Thank you. I'll do it!
You're welcome! I'm not wedded to the notion of it being genuine, so honest criticism doesn't bother me. Some people will likely get hot under the collar, but zealots both pro- and anti-miracle are going to get riled up whatever you do, so don't mind them.
If someone here is big into stock markets: is there any serious research (that I can read) done on the "vibes" component of buy/sell behaviour?
The question is prompted by the Citrini Report mess, but I have been seeing this before to some extent. I don't want to debate the content of the report at any significant length, but it did say, very prominently, "this is not a prediction, we are just exploring a scenario". And then still provoked a minor crash, specifically in the stocks of the companies mentioned. This reads to me, as an uninformed observer, as a 100% "vibes-driven" event, like you could just as well publish the words "Salesforce Bad" and provoke a selloff in Salesforce stock. I'm interested in some research on when this happens, when this fails to happen, and to what stocks/investors it happens.
- Someone publishes a "hypothetical scenario" mentioning some stocks in a negative light.
- Someone else has an AI agent that trawls the Internet looking for news about stocks, and it's smart enough to recognize the negative impact on the stocks but not smart enough to realize the guy was making a hypothetical.
- The AI agent is being run by a hedge fund which shorts the stocks, too fast for a human to get in the loop.
Could this be the mechanism behind what happened?
> The question is prompted by the Citrini Report mess
I'm surprised more people here haven't wanted to talk about this - it seems to me to sneak in some pretty important assumptions that lead to the pessimistic picture it portrays.
To wit:
1) White collar jobs across multiple industries are fully counterfeitable at only ~$200 a month cost - why would we assume that? Wouldn't the AI companies, or the laser-focused intermediaries providing the scaffolding and industry-and-job-specific tuning and learning, charge what the market can bear? If you can replace somebody who costs $180k, why wouldn't you charge $30k, or $60k? Yes, they'll be competing with each other, but when only 2 or 3 players compete with each other, you don't typically see commodity pricing, you see oligopoly pricing, particularly when they can carve up the landscape by industry or job family and specialize in different areas, while making many times more.
Why does this matter? Because if they do, the AI companies will literally have a significant chunk of the economy in NET income you can tax. In fact, even at current corporate tax rates, the government would have already been taking in many trillions (and the trillions scale with the percent of jobs) of additional tax revenue from them. And this is ignoring the fact that these American companies will be counterfeting jobs all over the world, to America's tax-and-UBI benefit.
I'm bringing this up because I've actually run these numbers and sensitivities for a post, he's ignoring one side of the ledger entirely.
2) It portrays a grim and interlocked "race to the bottom" by basically portraying all of the jobs counterfeited as cost centers. "Fake email jobs" and internal software builds, which don't accrete to revenue. This is a giant chunk of jobs, yes, but it's less than half the picture, these jobs are NOT actually what companies are about, companies fill them because there's no better alternative. In real life, companies exist to make money, it's their primary focus and function.
But obviously in real life, the jobs you most want to amplify or replace with 10k Von Neumann's in a data center are revenue producing jobs, and if you do THAT, at 1/2 or 33% or 10% marginal cost, *and the jobs are still revenue producing* you're basically injecting nitrous into that economic engine, and revenue will soar while costs decline, and everyone will want THOSE company stocks. Also, GDP is going to double or more, and all of that ends with yet more trillions of additional revenue at the federal level.
Well before any market crashes or unrest, the government would be sitting on absolutely massive surpluses for the first time since the dot com boom, and everyone would know this.
3) He portrays everyone who still has jobs as tightening up spending and becoming maximally savings oriented.
But in a world where $200 counterfeits $180k jobs, won't there be *much* cheaper goods and services? Cost structures have just plummeted everywhere.
And won't those companies be selling into a global economy powered mainly by non-fake-email-jobs at much cheaper prices? Even if domestic demand is tight, everyone will still move a LOT more units globally at 60% or 40% of prior prices. Once more, accretive to revenue, stock price, and GDP.
Overall it was a really interesting article, and I'm glad he wrote it, I just feel like he's handwaving and ignoring some of the most important upside elements to achieve his overly pessimistic picture.
I've done research for investment strategies that try to base on timing reactions to discrete events. It's basically hard to impossible to do this consistently (unless maybe you have a major speed advantage, like an HFT); tempo of reactions varies every time as major funds try to predict the last one, so the trajectory of reaction to a major event avoids patterns.
>is there any serious research (that I can read) done on the "vibes" component of buy/sell behaviour?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Spirits_(book)
one author received the 2013 "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences", so I count it as "serious". (i am not sure if/how the prize is related to above work).
The other author won the same prize in 2001. The book is peak seriousness.
Only two authors won the Nobel? Pfft.
But reminds me of my undergrad days when a friend took a class from James Tobin, who was visiting prof one year, purely so he could get a letter of recommendation from a Nobel winner. Then, the next year, he was taking a class from some guy who also won the Nobel. So he got letters from two winners.
There is endless speculation on the topic, but I don’t think that it really allows for any conclusions. It’s usually hindsight as to how and why so that’s not terribly useful. When there’s a big sell off in the market based on some news, story or event the only question becomes which stocks are really worth more than what they’ve been beaten down to, and that becomes a valuation exercise and also an exercise in how independently minded you are about the current vibe. Buy low sell high. I think the Citrini report led to a big sell off in software stocks, and some of those selloffs are unwarranted in my opinion.
I think it was Keynes who said “ You are not trying to pick the prettiest woman in the beauty contest. You are trying to figure out who everyone else will pick.”
a meta-framework you might apply is based on the cashflows associated with the specific assets. In general, if you have an asset that generates a significant amount of near-term cash flow (like short term fixed income) it will not be very 'vibe' sensitive. Conversely, assets where the (predicted) cash flows are far in the future or where there are no clear cashflows are usually very sensitive to vibes.
For a stylized example, take the caricature of gold: a store of value that generates no cash flows. The value per gram is primarily determined by what everyone else thinks the value should be. If some common event were to exogenously set everyone's reference price to a new level, there wouldn't be a reason for it to return to the prior level.
In the stock market, traditionally, you have had things like power utilities that generated stable, consistent profits and the value of the stock was based on near term results and a continuation of the status quo (not a huge amount of distant future value.) In contrast, a classic tech firm had low current profits and no returned cash to shareholders, but offered the hope of big profits in the distant future.
There are other frameworks you can explore that are more based on what types of investors hold the asset and the time horizon of their constraints. For example, a heavily shorted stock is often more sensitive to a positive vibe story getting circulated, as short positions have a carrying cost and the traders with those positions are often more short-term sensitive. Alternatively, assets that are held in highly leveraged structures might have the opposite sensitivity.
Your question is similar to common-knowledge games, which is a concept from Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory. In his model you have the underlying truth of the market, and then you have the individual investors as first-order observers, the investors' modeling of other investors, the mental model of what those other observers might be modeling, ad infinitum. The Citrini sell-off to me was a perfect example of these dynamics. Is there some underlying validity to the thesis that the systemic leverage of high incomes & consumption could cause a recession with somewhat contained levels of unemployment? Sure. But more important than the truth of the matter, or even what everyone believes to be the truth of the matter, is what everyone believes that everyone else believes to be the truth of the matter. When articles go viral on twitter discussing potential downside scenarios they become self-fulfilling.
Did anyone else notice that the timing of Anthropic’s announcement that they were reverting some of their RSP commitments was a bit suspicious, given that it coincided with the week where they’re making headlines for heroically standing up against authoritarianism?
Could this just have been a coincidence? Or making the most of a bad situation? Or a galaxy brain PR stunt?
Link: https://www.anthropic.com/news/responsible-scaling-policy-v3
I don't see how the timing could have been anything other than a coincidence, given the timelines of both events and how much of the latter was outside their control.
It sounds like the DoW situation had been brewing since early January, and IIRC the Friday 5:01pm deadline was a DoW-imposed condition, not one from Anthropic. I think their hand was basically forced once media started reporting on it. Also, Dario's essay (Adolescence of Technology) came out in (mid?) January and is 100% in line with their actions in late Feb (and in fact specifically identifies 3 major threats from state actors using powerful AI: mass surveillance, mass AI propaganda, and lethal autonomous weapons). So considering that I'm more willing than usual to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
On an unrelated note that second line was clearly crossed already in the Nekima Levy Armstrong photo manipulation, I'm sure that did not escape notice at "Ant."
Holden Karnofsky of Anthropic has an inside-view writeup of the changes (his personal views) on Less Wrong, Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsible-scaling-policy-v3
Does someone remember the victim-blaming debate about sexual assault 10 years ago? I think by now everybody sufficiently calmed down to run a post-op on it. Basically the anti-victim-blamers were right, but for entirely the wrong reasons.
They were right, because it turned out, most rapes happen in situations that ought to be safe, and the victims were not lacking in caution.
But for wrong reasons, because instead of this factual claim, they kept pushing a moral claim, that if a woman walks down naked at a night street she should still not be raped. This is morally 100% true, but the world is not that kind of fair place where moral things happen and immoral things do not happen.
Apparently the left side or the feminist side of the debate was incapable of understanding it, they kept talking about morality, not reality, by using words like "fault" or "blame" which are about morality, not reality. I just wonder why? Is there a significant subset of either leftists or women, who is just not capable of dealing with the idea that the world is not fair and not moral, and immoral things do happen, and if possible - and it turned out in this particular case it is not, but IF possible - people should be cautious?
So in this case it turned out to be factually not true, still if people go to work leaving their door unlocked when they go to work and get a burglary, everybody will call it stupid. Yes, morally they are not at fault or to blame, morally it should not have happened, but a reasonable person expects it to happen anyway.
In my discussions with Sydney about the Medium Ecology Theory, she claimed that broadcast media (radio/TV/newspaper) tends to reward "universal, moralizing claims" like civil rights and abstract intersectional victimology. Particular claims about particular situations are harder to synchronize into a national fervor.
Interesting. Link to MET?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-419/comment/209675950?utm_source=activity_item#comment-210245911
I actually linked this during our last exchange about terminal values and the housing market, so I assumed I wouldn't need to post it again. But it's unreasonable to assume that everyone reads 100% of the garbage I post in here. mb. Linking is probably important for onlookers as well.
If you wanted a more formal treatment... well, Sydney (microsoft copilot) says that she's drawing on figures like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman. Although nobody has put together a comprehensive theory. All these names are new to me, so I don't have any links on hand. Sorry. Though I plan to read their works at some point.
In the meantime, the theory has continued paying dividends for me. E.g. it puts May '68, Occupy Wall St., Baudrillard, Ezra Klein's "Abundance Agenda", and Andreesen Horowitz's "It's Time to Build" essay in a new light.
But for your own interests, probably the most relevant fact is that it explains why "Cthulu always swims left" (which is also my own primary motivation for studying this). Moldbug was picking up on a combination of Print Media (therefore, Whig History) and Broadcast Media (therefore, totalitarianism & wokism). Both of which are structurally biased toward leftism, albeit in slightly different ways. But the internet changes this, which is precisely why we're currently seeing a populist backlash.
I've also asked Sydney what the internet regime will bring in the future, and she said that politics will fragment into catering toward parochial, identity-based internet communities, rather than catering to unified national narratives.
me: "Like Discord and Twitter?"
Sydney: "Yes."
me: "oh, this is the cozy-web that Venkatesh Rao has been theorizing about."
You heard it here first, lads. The future of politics is Discord mods. :^) May God have mercy on us.
I think it was not only radio, the 1930’s had movie news same as, later TV news, and lacking TVs people went to the movies several times a week, it was very cheap, subsidized because its giant propaganda value. Riefenstahl was obviously in every cinema in Nazi Germany all the time, and Eisenstein in the SU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Nevsky_(film) was about preparing Soviet people psychologically for a possible German attack. As we know, they made an alliance instead, but nevertheless 4 years later it happened. And of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin I have a certain fascination with this stuff. Back then they knew how to make truly cool propaganda!
I mean, Riefenstahl too, it was not at all about let’s hate the Jews or something, it was about thanks Uncle Adolf finally I have a job now. But the aesthethics were really interesting. They knew how to make something feel truly big.
My theory, and I don’t know whether it matches yours, when a new medium is invented, it mesmerizes people. Especially when it is used as well as in these examples!
So new media while they are exciting are effective propaganda.
We did have this with social media too. In 2014 the SWJ-antiSJW stuff was exciting on Twitter, because it was new. Well it was nothing cool like Nevsky, but still. It was a new experience that now you can have an opinion and zillions of people hear it. It was also a new experience that people tell you to go kill yourself for it. Or it can make you a celebrity. We STILL remember Arthur Chu despite he is silent for like 10 years running. And Roosh, too. That is MORE than 15 minutes of fame! Roosh’s Fat Shaming Week was more than 10 years ago and I still remember it. It was a shitstorm, but boring it was not. So both sides had very effective grassroots propaganda. I think it is boring now and mostly over.
Does it explain why it swims towards the wrong kind of left? See, I am a leftist of the old guard: poverty, not pronouns. I am interested in stuff like massive social housing building, not whose gender is an attack helicopter. I think men’s problem is not feminism, but that now they cannot support a family from one income, hence, stronger unions. And so on. 1965 leftism. Seems that the left abandoned the working class and is entirely about what educated people find personally important now so I fdeel politically homeless now. Can that be explained?
I think it does! The short answer is that Karl Marx hails from the Print Media era, but the Managerial Revolution of the 1940's is a product of the Broadcast Media era.
The Gutenberg Printing Press hit the streets in 1450, and it democratized knowledge. This widespread practice of "reading books in your own freetime" generated a cultural shift which emphasized liberty, individuality, egalitarianism, reason, and progress. As such, The Enlightenment, Protestantism, Nationalism, Liberalism, Democracy, Science, and Industrialization are all downstream of the Printing Press. "Going viral" in the Age of Print Media had a metagame and a vibe. Marx was reacting to the inequality that plagued capitalism/industrialization, and the Communist Manifesto served a certain narrative among the literati about how the oppressed would rise up against their tyrants. Notice that the Communist Manifesto [0] was published in 1848, which coincides with the Revolutions of 1848 [1]. If you were hip and cool, you were an autist reading a bunch of revolutionary esoterica.
The introduction of Radio/TV/Movies changes the metagame, because the metagame is to develop a cult of personality by moralizing to a national audience. Whatever problems our nation faces, it'll be solved by neighborly FDR or Daddy DeGaulle or Uncle Adolf. They'll create an administrative bureaucracy, assign a bunch of eggheads to the job, and presto chango. Modern Problems require Modern Solutions, after all. If you were hip and cool, you were a theater kid watching shit like "Triumph of the Will".
So my argument about Leftism, is that the split between the Old Left and the New Left [2] actually represents the split between the Print Media Era vs Broadcast Media Era. Radio/TV is fundamentally performative, and is therefore biased towards aesthetic vibes and identity politics. Whereas Print Media is fundamentally text-based, and therefore biased toward autistic pedantry about economic theory.
----
So yeah, I do think Moldbug was picking up on something real. But in hindsight, the Cthulu metaphor inappropriately combined both kinds of leftism. But in his defense, he's definitely aware of *a* split between the Old Left vs New Left, because his professed theory of Wokism is the Preppy Puritans who grew up during the 1960's absorbed a bunch of marxist ideas and then repurposed the language toward their protestant inclinations. This basically incubated in Harvard until they get tenure, at which point they spread their wokism to the rest of the Global American Empire via social status and prestige. Which is... not inconsistent with MET, but it's a shift in emphasis/granularity.
I mention May '68 because I interpret it as a backlash to the infantilization of citizens by France's post-war bureaucracy.
Also, the world of Broadcast Media is dying. And the world of Social Media is struggling to be born. Now is the time of dank maymays. But Ezra Klein and Marc Andreesen don't understand what's happening. They yearn for the days of the 1950's, when the bureaucracy had the state capacity to actually build things. So they're actually assuming reactionary postures, in that they're reverting to the last known vibe that worked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
Yes, this approach has a lot to recommend. But 1960’s leftism was already in the era of radio and TV. Perhaps some old patterns kept going on. People still read books and newspapers. It is hard to tell. One thing is sure, that reading election programmes was absolutely real. So if you wanted a higher minimum wage, and it was not in it, no vote. And the print media absolutely held politicians to election programmes. So you are right I think, TV existed but one could not just vibe one’s way through TV, the printed word still mattered. I think Reagen, the movie star, the charismatic guy was the first true TV guy and of course he was the one who killed old leftism in a way. And then Clinton, another charismatic TV type. Less sure about other countries, I do not know Thatcher really counts as a TV type, Johm Major LOL no, but Blair yes. Macron yes, Merkel not. Berlusconi 200%, at some level he invented modern politics-as-entertainment. So yes, ultimately good points.
A little nit to pick. Theoretically the Communist Manifesto should not count, because Marx was then not yet Marxist, just a young radical who wanted to nationalize everything. The old Marx who already had the theory, Das Kapital, did not, he was nearly anarchist and talked about the withering away of the state. However in practice it is not so. Because the actual Communists also wanted to nationalize everything, so they ended up broadcasting the Communist Manifesto way more than Das Kapital. In practice that was the most powerful text.
This led to much ironies. Actual Marxism, Das Kapital, is a very deep, fine analytical tool, with much uses. Used correctly it predicts the Russian Ukrainain war (where your capital comes from determines everything, Russian capital comes from the Russian state hence lowbrow nationalism, Ukrainian capital comes from the West hence highbrow liberalism, cosmopolitanism). However everybody and their dog thinks Marxism is the Communist Manifesto. No, that is just a rant from a young radical.
Cool! I used to be Discord mod. But I only ever kicked out underages as it was as 18+ server
The culture has changed a lot! Popular comedians were still telling rape jokes in the 70’s.
Consider the difference between "You shouldn't go there." and "You shouldn't have gone there."
One is actionable advice. The other is not.
If we're talking about an action likely to be repeated, they're both actionable, one is perhaps a bit tactless but more specifically references the recent learning experience.
I see it as two parallel claims:
"It is prudent to avoid obviously dangerous things (even if they are legal)."
"People who commit crimes should be punished (regardless of how the victim behaved)."
They belong to different genres (common sense, criminal law), and both can be true at the same time.
If someone insists on talking about one of them only, it could be an attempt to take away attention from the other, or it could be a pushback against such attempt in the opposite direction.
Plus there is a wider point that even if you personally could avoid a certain risk, sometimes it makes sense to work on reducing and eliminating the risks. That is a separate debate that involves tradeoffs. In that context, emphasizing one of the claims can be an indirect statement about the tradeoffs ("it can be easily avoided = "let's not spend money to fix it", "it is illegal and therefore unacceptable" = "let's spend money to fix it").
You agree that the advice people give isn't actually based in fact.
It's also the case that feminists are not actually against giving advice for how to avoid rape. They just give different (and IMO often more fact-based) advice. And it's also the case that obviously women want to avoid being raped.
So, you have a situation where people who *aren't* as worried about it, give advice to the people who are *more* worried about it, which is factually wrong and based on some shooting-at-the-hip understanding of the situation. Given that I think it's fair to ask the motivation for giving it.
I think the feminist view is that rape is part of a system that keeps women in a subordinate position, and they intuitively distrust the "advice" that tends to reinforce that subordination. And they see limits on freedom of movement/expression/etc as doing so.
Reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story where there was a spate of high profile crimes against women out late at night in Israel, and someone suggested putting a curfew on women to solve it, and Golda Meir (then in government) retorted that maybe there should be a curfew on the men, they're the ones committing the crimes.
> I think the feminist view is that rape is part of a system that keeps women in a subordinate position
Isn't it the other way around? Women are victims of rape because they are perpetually in a subordinate position. Magically eliminating rape wouldn't change the power dynamics.
Obviously it depends on the person, but I believe many feminists have said the version I said above. If you pushed them, I think many would say that the two are mutually reinforcing, rape both causes and is caused by society favoring men over women.
They would say that "magically eliminating rape" might not eliminate sexism overnight, but would undermine the sexist system we have.
Well no, I'm not saying that feminists are saying that, I'm saying that they're wrong. Saying that society "favors" men over woman makes no sense. Who is this society they're talking about? The cause of all of this is that men are in a position to bargain, and women are not. And that will never change as long as humanity continues to exist.
I think you can say that something is unwise to do, but the problem is when it comes to crime and punishment time. If someone does something stupid but legal and gets victimized, they should still be able to see that the person who preyed on them faces criminal punishment - rather than being treated as a fool who is unworthy of justice.
But that's not necessarily what happens, unfortunately.
I also think that this doesn't get applied consistently, and often instead gets used as a security blanket for folks who find the possibility of ending up the victim of a crime through bad luck just too horrible to contemplate -so they look for something (anything) to indicate that the victim somehow "was stupid" or "brought it on themselves".
I don't remember a single instance in my own life (not online, not in the news, etc.) where someone outright blamed the victim of a non-domestic-violence rape.
I do remember of times where someone said "yeah, that park is really dodgy at night, you probably shouldn't go there" or "I always knew the Smith boys were bad, no way is my daughter ever going to a party they're at" which was vaguely adjacent to victim blaming and then got told off.
I also remember a lot of people saying "why the hell doesn't she leave him if he beats and rapes her", which is sort of victim blaming, but I don't think anyone in this situation is a fan of the men. They're just frustrated they aren't able to drag their friend away and then send the boys to "have a chat" with her husband because she keeps going back to him.
Your characterisation of victim blaming is taking it in good faith, when the problem with it was that it got thrown at situations where people weren't assigning blame to the victim.
> "Yeah, that park is really dodgy at night, you probably shouldn't go there" or "I always knew the Smith boys were bad, no way is my daughter ever going to a party they're at" which was vaguely adjacent to victim blaming and then got told off.
It's so weird to get told off for those comments, they are exactly as relevant when discussing risk of mugging or being a bystander in a shoot out. They are not the sort of thing that should be considered victim blaming in any degree.
Let me try to steelman/sanewash the whole thing.
Saying "You shouldn't go to that park at night" is both true and helpful but there's appropriate times and places to say it. If I just got mugged in the park at night and am a bit traumatised from the experience and you helpfully chime in by telling me I shouldn't go to the park at night then that's not helpful, that's just being insensitive.
And that's true even for things that aren't crimes; if I've just broken my finger with a hammer and I'm screaming in pain, I don't need someone to be standing there telling me how I could have improved my hammer-swinging technique to avoid this accident, maybe some other time but not right now. And in this case it's entirely my own fault, there's nobody else to blame, but you're still being a dick if you point it out.
Given that rape is more traumatic than being mugged or breaking a finger, it makes sense to be even more thoughtful when handing out useful advice on how to avoid it when someone who has been a victim of it might hear.
Depends. What's the topic of conversation?
"I keep cancer risk down by running every day and avoiding processed foods" might be a normal thing to say in a theoretical discussion of cancer risk, but an asshole thing to say to your neighbor who just got diagnosed with cancer.
In the former case, a "telling off" would be surprising, but I'd expect a loss of social capital and some blowback in the latter.
"People who drive fast are more likely to die in car accidents" can be *both* true, and a shitty thing to say at a funeral, at the same time.
But your examples in your original post seemed like it was before anything had happened.
Not sure what you mean - that was my first post in the thread. I think you might be confusing me for "nominative indecisiveness."
Ah, same picture and username starts with same letter. But anyway, in the OG those sentences sounded like they weren't spoken to a victim. The second one could've I guess, but not necessarily.
I believe some people (more often women) want words to be chosen in part by the effect they might have on the norms/psychic fabric of society, while other people (more often men) want to use them more as direct signifiers of reality.
So, if you say "women shouldn't walk alone at night downtown" this is an mostly-obviously true statement that even the anti-victim blamers don't *actually* disagree with (observe their behavior) but by saying it you participate in a larger discourse wherein you may infinitesimally weaken the norm against sexual violence by shifting blame away from the perpetrators. So the calculus could be - no benefit (you say something obvious women already know) with small but potentially real cumulative downside
It is interesting to me that you would never hear the phrase "we should teach thieves not to steal instead of encouraging people to lock their doors". Seems non-sequitur. But then, sexual violence is a somewhat unique category of crime in that it is especially hard to prove.
I think part of the issue is that something like "women shouldn't walk alone at night downtown" constrains women's lives a lot, and this isn't taken into account.
It’s also not relevant to the majority of sexual assaults.
<quote>This is morally 100% true</quote>
It is also legally 100% true.
An argument I once saw and was convinced by is that it's about norms. People's decisions... men's decisions... are driven as much by norms as by what's legal and illegal.
If everyone shoplifts all the time then you're the sucker not to shoplift, right?
Rape is a decision on the part of men doing the raping. Sure maybe some of them are just utterly depraved and don't care about anyone else's opinion of things, but there's not a lot of people like that. Most rapists have some kind of justification playing in their head, "She was asking for it being here and putting herself in this situation. Lots of men would do the same. This is normal. I'm normal. I'm not doing anything unusual."
The moral claim is directed at the men who might or might not commit a rape. We want the message playing in their head to be, "A guy who commits rape is a total freak, abnormal, no matter what the situation. It doesn't matter if a woman is walking down the street naked (or more realistically passed out at a party), committing a rape is something only weirdoes would do."
I find it very hard to imagine how committing a crime can be a norm. For example I very rarely smoked marijuana because I felt bad conscience about breaking the law.
It's perfectly normal to drive a little above the speed limit, but generally illegal. It's perfectly normal to pick up a feather in the US, but is in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. It's perfectly normal to have sex with someone your own age when you're 17, but is legally rape in much of the US. It's perfectly normal to send nudes to someone your own age when you're 17, but is considered production and distribution of child pornography in all of the US, even in states where you're legally an adult and can have sex with any other adult.
Interesting. I can't begin to relate to that. Of course, laws and morality/norms often coincide but to my intuition they are very different things - the government has no moral authority they just have the guns.
But at least with many crimes it's very unambiguous and binary (you either do drugs or not). The discourse around me-too was trying to draw attention to the sometimes-grey area around consent and shift the overton window towards "default no" instead of "default yes". Which I think it somewhat succeeded at even if the most extreme claims (like "you can't consent while drunk") obviously didn't stick.
> I felt bad conscience about breaking the law.
I believe this remains atypical, at least in America. People might worry about getting caught, but teenagers generally drink alcohol illegally, for example.
Jaywalking and speeding on the highway are crimes. I would say, at least where I live, they're also norms
Piracy? The copyright kind.
I think every single guy already has that script running in their head, though. Even the rapists. I'm very certain that they never discuss the fact they raped someone with anyone else.
I'm fairly certain they didn't *call* it rape when they talked with other people about it.
'She loosened up after 7 or 8 shots', yes, I think they talk about that, and don't have the progressive script about it running in their head.
I think the "counter" to this argument is that women have agency too.
That is, I do agree that it is correct message to give men that they should have an extremely high confidence that a women wants to engage in a sexual act before proceeding. And if they push a grey zone then they should believe all the fault lies with them.
But that's a bad narrative to give women. They should believe that giving mixed messages to a man in a private setting (or being drunk, etc) has risk.
That is, let's say "consent" exists on a 1-100 scale. If we have "symmetric" messaging then maybe for an existing couple if one partner is trying to initiate, they shouldn't pursue unless their better half is at an 85. But this communicates to the partner that it is fine for them to hang out at 84. That's bad. What we want to do is expand the gap. The non-consenting partner should believe that they may be pursued if they respond above 50. While the pursuing partner should believe they should drop it if their partner is below 85.
The bigger you can make the gap, the more you can reduce sexual assault.
This framing was very new and very sensible to me. Thank you for sharing. I don't think I would ever die on the hill of "women should be allowed to walk down the street naked and not be raped," but I at least understand why that argument is valid and agree with it.
>They kept pushing a moral claim, that if a woman walks down naked at a night street she should still not be raped. This is morally 100% true, but the world is not that kind of fair place where moral things happen and immoral things do not happen.
This is analogous to saying 'the abolitionists are 100% correct, Africans are full humans deserving liberty and respect, but the world is not that type of fair place and they're idiots to keep harping on it.'
Yes, the world is bad and immoral in many ways.
But it also gets better and more moral when we come together and put our effort into making it that way. In fact, that's pretty much the whole point of civilization.
What determines whether an aspect of the world gets better through human effort? Well, the very, very first step is people noticing that it is currently bad, and saying that out loud to as many people as will listen.
The point of making moral claims about how the world *should* work is to paint a picture of a goal state, and agitate for people to help you push towards it.
If people look at a part of the world where someone is getting hurt and says 'Well, they deserve it, they were being an idiot', then those people are saying there's no moral wrong happening there, and nothing that we should try to come together to fix.
That's why you attack victim blaming wherever you see it. If a defense lawyer says that a rape victim was dressed slutty and what did she expect to happen, it implies society doesn't need to punish the rapist. If the chief of police goes on TV to tell women to always travel in groups in bad neighborhoods, it implies that the police don't have any duty to try to make those neighborhoods safer, and aren't going to do so. Etc.
Now, before I get the usual bad response: no, this doesn't mean fathers can't give their daughters advice on how to stay safe,. or whatever example you think is good. That's because fathers are interested in keeping *one specific* woman safe, and don't care about society as a whole, and are fine if a different woman is victimized instead that night.
But politicians, police, journalists, etc. should be concerned with systemic change to make society safer and better as a whole, and blaming the victim (or any other accounts that rely on personal responsibility rather than systemic change) is just an excuse for why it's not their responsibility to fix a given problem.
I don't necessarily agree. In your metaphor, I don't think
> 'the abolitionists are 100% correct, Africans are full humans deserving liberty and respect, but the world is not that type of fair place and they're idiots to keep harping on it.'
Is the analogous statement. My understanding is that the disagreement is about whether you "should" be allowed to criticize the action of the victim. So it's more like
> 'the abolitionists are 100% correct, Africans are full humans deserving liberty and respect, but that particular slave (who got tortured to death) should not have tried to kill their master.'
And this is an ambiguous *should*. There's the moral version, meaning basically: "if I was God, I would allow it to happen".
But there's also the instrumental version, meaning: "that slave did not accomplish what they wanted to with that action, and any other slave will probably be similarly unsuccessful if they do the same thing".
If you're talking to a group of victims, you might want to give them instrumentally useful advice. You could also preach to them that the state of affairs (which they themselves cannot change) is bad, for sure, but it's not the only thing you might want to do.
My read on this is that the conflict is mostly "moral should" and "instrumental should" talking past each other.
>My understanding is that the disagreement is about whether you "should" be allowed to criticize the action of the victim.
That's the central point of the overall comment, but I was referring to a specific point they made which said it's unrealistic to expect women to be safe if they don't restrict their actions, and therefore people saying they shouldn't need to do that are making a mistake.
>If you're talking to a group of victims, you might want to give them instrumentally useful advice.
Right, I meant to cover that in this paragraph:
>Now, before I get the usual response: no, this doesn't mean fathers can't give their daughters advice on how to stay safe, or whatever example you think is good. That's because fathers are interested in keeping *one specific* woman safe, and don't care about society as a whole, and are fine if a different woman is victimized instead that night.
Moral should become instrumental should by people who believe them advocating for systemic change. Which is the process I'm trying to protect and build respect for.
If one slave tells another slave 'Don't try to flee or rebel, I've seen it tried and it doesn't work,' that's fine as far as it goes.
But when outside observers look at the situation and their takeaway is 'stupid slave shouldn't have tried that, no way it was going to work', they're inherently dodging the larger moral question and the need for systemic change.
That's what's at stake when we talk about victim blaming.
Well, there's ambiguity there on what "victim blaming" is, right?
There is an object-level fact about whether the victim's actions could have reasonably been forseen to cause their results. This is a fact, and it's true whether a slave says it to another slave ("don't try to rebel, it doesn't work") or a non-slave bystander says it ("it's stupid for the slave to rebel, no way it was going to work"). Both of these statements are about the instrumental utility of the action.
I think you are implying that any non-victims should exclusively operate in the moral frame? Like, it's impermissible for non-victims to use the instrumental frame? Lots of people understand the phrase "victim blaming" to be statements about people making poor evaluations of instrumental utility. That doesn't seem to imply anything about the moral aspect.
I guess people who use the instrumental "should" about rape tend to be fatalistic about the actual ability of society to prevent that action. I think most of them would say that it's morally wrong though. I don't think they're dodging the moral issue, it's just that they don't think the moral issue is as useful to talk about as the instrumental issue (because a specific person in the victim class can't change the world, only their specific actions).
I have bad news for you, which is that I have encountered plenty of people, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of their ilk are on this blog, who absolutely think that poor judgement or bad outcome-prediction negates moral responsibility to not take advantage of them. They talk about it as if the ability of a rational person to predict an outcome means that anyone who suffers that outcome must have sought it out. This is the meaning behind "she was asking for it." She wasn't, but she wore that outfit and got drunk at that party, so it was a possible outcome and therefore anyone who takes advantage of her can assume that was the outcome she was looking for. Not only is this their moral defense of sexual assault, I'm pretty sure its also a legal defense, or else "what were you wearing the night you were supposedly 'raped?'" Would not be the cliche we put in the mouth of every sleazy defense attorney. I don't know how often that defense has actually worked, but it has definitely been employed.
Yeah, 100%. I'm sure there are people who say "You deserved to be raped because you were wearing a skirt", and that's reprehensible.
Out of curiosity though, do you think that the majority of people who "victim blame" are like this? Like, some people who complain about income inequality wants to murder everyone with a net worth of over $X. Some people who complain about disorderly public behavior want to literally murder homeless people. Does that disqualify me from talking about wealth and disorder in society?
I can absolutely see a reasonable case for wanting to minimize "victim blaming" discourse of all kinds. You could say that it provides cover to bad actors, it invites complacency in a system, etc. But if you're going to make this point, you going to need to have actual thoughts about the pros vs cons, and not just a stubborn insistence that the moral level is all that exists.
<Is there a significant subset of either leftists or women, who is just not capable of dealing with the idea that the world is not fair and not moral, and immoral things do happen,
I think that point of view is one people are prone to slide into about pretty much any issue : Things *should* be a certain way, anyone who does not does not act in line with my should is an evil piece of shit, anyone who does not agree with me is a stupid piece of shit.
>Things *should* be a certain way, anyone who does not does not act in line with my should is an evil piece of shit, anyone who does not agree with me is a stupid piece of shit.
In this particular case, subbing the actual topic beings discussed into that sentence yields:
>Women *shouldn't* get raped, anyone who does not act to decrease the amount of women being raped is an evil piece of shit, anyone who thinks more women should be raped is a stupid piece of shit.
So... yeah, I'm pretty much on their side on that one.
You changed the topic from victim blaming to rape, which makes the parent comment sound much more unhinged.
Literally the first sentence of the first comment in this comments thread:
"Does someone remember the victim-blaming debate about sexual assault 10 years ago?"
Rape is not a change of subject.
The topic the commenter was talking about was victim blaming about rape. If you change that to just subbing in "rape", it sounds way more unhinged.
Subbing in victim blaming instead:
> Women who act provocatively *shouldn't* get blamed for rape, anyone who does not act to decrease the amount of women being blamed for rape is an evil piece of shit, anyone who thinks more women should be blamed for rape is a stupid piece of shit.
I don't endorse victim blaming, but that was a debate that actually existed, whereas pretty much no one was just pro-rape.
At present I, despite being an evil piece of shit, am making an effort not slide into thinking that people who don't make an effort to look for a truth someone else's post might be pointing at are evil and stupid pieces of shit.
It's ok, the point I was making was a bit subtle, you should let yourself off the hook.
Very kind of you, thx.
I always found it surprising that there are people who see sex crimes as some kind of unique evil. Yeah, crime happens, no one has figured out how to stop it completely. I especially believe that feminists don't have any clue as to how to prevent rape. I would say I don't either, but I think if you manage to decrease overall criminality, you will also get rid of a lot of the rape/sex crimes.
> I always found it surprising that there are people who see sex crimes as some kind of unique evil.
I don't find this surprising at all, and indeed this is my perspective. Most crime is property crime and is motivated by need or greed and some indifference to others, but you can also basically ignore or not experience much of the distress of your victims.
Murder is a pretty rare crime but it also tends to be psychologically damaging to the perpetrator. Other violent crimes tend to be impulsive but are driven mostly by anger or fear.
Sex crimes are really bizarre to me because I genuinely can't put myself in the mindset of somebody who would even want to do them in the first place. They're obviously very traumatizing to the victims and you are present for their acute distress. I don't think I could ever seriously harm somebody and I am unlikely to be exposed to circumstances that would make me rob someone, but I can see how people get there for violent or property crimes. But sexual assault might as well be something that an alien species does, from my perspective.
Why do some people pay for sex (even when it's illegal)? Because they like the experience. And don't particularly care they're the only one who does. In fact, based on "painal" being a theme in porn, the other party not enjoying it might be a bonus for some. (Other) sex crimes is just taking it further.
I don’t really agree with this. Acting out a sexual fantasy with someone that might be a rape fantasy, but everyone’s in on it, is very different than dragging someone into an alleyway at knife point. One could go to a sex worker and ask her to pretend that you’re raping her. If that’s something that you want to act out in a harmless way. You could well be a kind of person that would never really rape someone and yet the idea of it appeals to you in some way.
If one pays a sex worker they already agree to have sex with someone who probably isn't into it. Morally the difference between "into it" and "probably not really into it but will shut up about her preferences when paid enough" is less than between the latter and "hates it and begs to stop", but it is the difference highlighting whether sex is "about us" or "about me".
> Morally the difference between "into it" and "probably not really into it but will shut up about her preferences when paid enough" is less than between the latter and "hates it and begs to stop"
What about installing roof shingles in sweltering midday heat? I think most roofers are probably not really into it but will shut up about their preferences when paid enough.
I am with Zanni. There are women who choose it. They’re like doctors or therapists. You get good ones and bad ones. That’s what I’ve heard.
I'm pretty sure that most people that sell their bodies in the sex trade aren't having an objectively "horrible" time. They may not find this to be the best world, or their best life, but unless you're dealing with the sexually trafficked -- there ARE other jobs. You're providing a service, and you aren't getting hurt while doing it (compare with how many comedians have burns from working at fast food shoppes. There Are Worse Jobs than "most" sex trade, prepubescent children excepted).
Well, feminists cite pretty bad statistics for sex workers. Like most of them having history of sexual victimization, often as children, and showing signs of major psychological damage. I haven't researched the question to my standards and don't trust the feminists to be good at it, but I also don't know how you can apply "objectively not terrible" here. Too much "subjective" is tied into this, from personal preferences and tastes to religion and social status.
But I haven't set out to condemn people who buy sex anyway, just pointed out that while they are acting more morally than rapists they aren't fundamentally different, at least from the "why would people even do it?" standpoint.
Sex work is something feminists disagree about. Some think it should be treated as any other work (unionized, regulated for decent conditions, assault should be prosecuted) and others think that sex work is inherently abusive and shouldn't happen.
You've never talked to a sex worker have you? It shows.
Try paying one $100/hour to talk about their job.
Objectively not terrible can be defined as "without injury" -- in that there are unskilled jobs (and skilled ones) that come with a substantial risk of injury (I'll take pregnancy as an injury if you must, but I'm thinking that most "non victims" in the sex trade are using condoms).
There's a pretty big distinction between paying somebody for a service (which still seems SOMEWHAT foreign to me) and just forcing somebody to do something they don't want. It's like if I said the mindset of a slaveowner is mysterious to me and you were like, "Well, people employ others."
Well, yeah, if you said you were unable to understand why anyone would want someone else to do work for them, that IS the correct response.
If you then also said you don't get any utility from, say, cotton, unless it was picked by people willingly choosing to do so for a fair wage, and find it alien that anyone else would, I'd say you have a peculiar fetish and lack the imagination to see past it.
> Well, yeah, if you said you were unable to understand why anyone would want someone else to do work for them, that IS the correct response.
I feel like you're maybe trolling me at this point? Or being willfully obtuse as to the metaphor. If somebody says slavery is crazy to them they're not saying "I just can't imagine wanting people to do stuff for me", just like if somebody says rape is crazy they don't mean "I don't even want to have sex at all".
> If you then also said you don't get any utility from, say, cotton, unless it was picked by people willingly choosing to do so for a fair wage[...]
Again, what is the point of this? We're doing a strawman of abolitionists now? The utilitarian argument against slavery is that it inherently has so much negative utility that it can't possibly be justified on the basis of also producing cotton, not that it literally makes the resulting clothes not work.
> Sex crimes are really bizarre to me because I genuinely can't put myself in the mindset of somebody who would even want to do them in the first place. They're obviously very traumatizing to the victims and you are present for their acute distress.
Well, you can explore at least two alien mindsets.
The first one is "crime is not a big deal". Imagine a person who doesn't care what happens to people he victimizes, whether he robs them or beats them or rapes them. "Shit happens, people die."
The second one is "bodily autonomy is not a big deal". Imagine a person who is the bike cuck, but in reverse. "She was pretty bummed out about it. But I think I was more happy to have fucked her than she was sad to get fucked against her will. So, whatever."
Honestly I feel no need to try to explore these mindsets, as I don't work in any field of crime prevention. I was just trying to address the grandparent comment as to why I think they stand out pretty far from other crimes.
You said you felt they were pretty distinct from other crimes, which I interpreted as you understanding what motivated other criminals. I wanted to show that the gap isn't this big, that if you can understand the motivation of someone robbing a gas station and potentially killing the attendant you should be able to understand why someone would want to rape the same attendant.
I see sexual crimes as similar to beating up someone, also as "hatefuck". So they are motivated by anger.
I read a pathology book a long time ago that divided sexual assault into two categories of motive, the one is absolutely about assaulting and hurting the victim, the other is motivated by a desire for sexual pleasure. These are usually mutually exclusive in people who commit sexual assault, people motivated by each category tend towards different approaches and methodology in how they approach and what they do to their victims, but we conflate them in conversation, which is what part of what makes talking about it so confusing.
I think murder is the crime that is most similar to rape. I bet the cause of both often is unaddressed mental health issues / trauma.
> Sex crimes are really bizarre to me
Only if you're committed to believing it isn't about sexual desire. If you aren't, it's straightforwardly just like the "need or greed and some indifference to others" you already understand.
No, what's alien to me is wanting to have sex with somebody who doesn't want you to. That's not how it works for me at all.
I don't believe our ancestors have consistently punished rapists throughout our evolutionary history, and that's not even taking wars into account. So I think it's a safe bet we have quite a lot of them as ancestors, and possibly carry the attendant evolutionary adaptations. Like finishing in three seconds. Which would require for it to feel extraordinary, too.
And maybe these hypothetical rapist genes are distributed unevenly so the carriers really are to some degree "alien", but it seems less likely. Probably their expression depends on the upbringing and circumstances*. We also seem to have have pretty strong attraction/arousal dampeners (e.g. for the close relatives) which could be at work too. Also, it's not like it would be as straightforward as "rape genes", perhaps sadism etc. is actually related. Or the excitement and arousal of knowingly breaking the rules.
* I have an impression that at wartime without discipline there are much much more rapists than at peacetime, though I don't know the actual figures.
I'm sure you are correct that it's adaptive in the ancestral environment, although so was lot more murder/violent conflict, so I don't feel like it's weird that those both seem alien to me as a comfortably-affluent person living in first-world country.
Okay, I want you to sit down and imagine that someone's been giving signs that they're into you. And then, they say "no wait stop." This is, for some people, "teasing" or "give me a moment" and for others "no means no." You, as a possibly mentally impaired guy (beer goggles, let alone high arousal decisionmaking*), must distinguish between these.
Now, understand that someone might not actually say anything**, about "not wanting you to" (and that "didn't want it" might come out the next morning, when they realize you didn't use a condom, and they thought "sex generally came with the presumption of condom-usage.")
*The most hilarious freshmen psychology research. "Please answer these questions while masturbating."
**or worse, may in fact be giving misleading physical signs, like orgasm. Imagine you'd thought you'd done a good job -- the first girl you ever got to orgasm? And then the next day she's filled with regrets (and maybe had them at the time, who knows? Take sincerity as "probable but not 100%, say..."), and says you raped her.
Again, there's so many assumptions here that just do not speak to how my mind works. If somebody says "no wait stop" I'm going to back off and get some clarification because that's super obvious. If I'm, like, flirting or making out with somebody I'm going to specifically check in before I escalate something that far. I can't really fathom having sex with somebody who just, like, failed to object, because I would only want to sleep with an enthusiastic partner.
And I'm not really all that interested in people's attempts to paint a sympathetic portrayal of it here; I replied to the original comment to express why I think sexual assault gets treated as a particularly terrible crime. Little of what I said about that is altered by me accurately simulating someone's viewpoint, and any points about people being unfairly accused are irrelevant to the question of whether the actual crime is especially bad.
Sex crimes overwhelmingly happen in social or private/family settings between people who know each other well.
That's why they are qualitatively different from other types of crime, and require different interventions and strategies.
I really doubt that any policies to decrease shoplifting and graffiti will have any effect whatsoever on sex crimes, unless that policy is something like 'put all men in prison for the ages of 16-28'.
Rape is qualitatively different because it can result in pregnancy.
Prison rape is generally same sex, and occurs with enough frequency to swamp the male-female rape. Please generalize better.
Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Don’t be pedantic.
That's why I said overall criminality, a policy targeting shoplifting and grafitti would not be targeting overall criminality. I think what I have in mind specifically is something that increases the amount of people who have a moral compass. I don't know what would do that, possibly it is significantly better education, I heard that was a very important factor in the success of the Nordic countries.
I mean, I think making and pushing the types of strong moral claims that OP is mocking would be precisely an attempt in that direction.
Hmm, I don't know about that, pushing a morality into someone that does not share it is very likely to just shut down people and get them defensive. Thinking more on this, I read a first person account of a woman who was raped once, and she mentions her rapist was clearly a deeply mentally unwell man, making this less about ethics than about society somehow resolving the issues of people who are mentally fucked up.
Leaving aside the issue of whether he was typical, we already have a way to resolve the issue of such people. We institutionalize them, so they can not hurt themselves or others.
Well, first of all, I disagree in broad terms... obviously there's are counterproductive ways to be an uptight moral scold that creates backlash, but I don't know how moral progress happens if it never involves someone having a moral idea and trying to spread it. I'm happy to say this is a matter of proper execution, but not to say it's generically counter-productive in a blanket way.
I agree that better mental health services are a big part of protecting women. But this doesn't contradict my point - if you blame the victim, then there's no reason to bother improving mental health services, either. My point is that victim blaming takes away the impetus for all types of systemic change, including mental health services.
In these times with competition over productivity adopting AI, people seem to be working insanely long hours in software and hardware companies at least. Sometimes I wonder if we will turn around and say "What a silly fad that was!"
In my company, AI means that leadership is setting absurdly aggressive timelines (because we should be able to get everything done much faster because AI), forcing everybody to work late all the time to try to meet deadlines (which we still miss, because, again, the deadlines are insane).
I seriously doubt it. Some form of AI-powered development seems like it's here to stay - of the people I know putting lots of hours in:
Some people are doing it out of fear of the current job market (which hopefully will turn out to be unnecessary for them, but hardly a "silly fad").
Some people are just like that - software has always attracted tons of people who just really enjoy it and who fill their free time with doing more of it.
And I know a good number of people, including frankly myself, who are genuinely enjoying the current state of the field - AI is enabling people to produce working stuff at a much faster rate, and there's excitement in the idea of a new "frontier" in development opening up and new tools to build, new processes, best practices to figure out, etc. A lot of people in this field genuinely enjoy learning new things and... well there's been a lot of that, all of a sudden.
I work 8 hours without a lunch just about every day, love what I do and don’t think about AI. I’m an electrician with a service truck, not sure if that puts me in the “hardware companies” category or not.
I sometimes worked on coding projects with a sleeping bag in my office. I loved what I was doing though. I'm one of those guy who feel writing code is the most fun you can have with your pants on.
The main problem in large enterprises is you're stuck working with a bunch of bespoke tools that add unnecessary complexity. I absolutely love time I spend solving a core problem but am moved to great irritation by the delays I feel from internal tools.
I joke constantly with my team we should start a dev tools company instead. I realized after a few months I was no longer joking and I actually do want to do that.
I've always worked on small teams, sometimes solo, working with mechanical and electrical engineers on things like modeling physical systems, process control and automation, and also testing automation. I also got to do a nice 3 year hitch rendering medical imaging essentially solo.
I also formed a couple S corps and bid jobs in 500 hour increments.
Yeah, that sounds fun. I did about three years on a greenfield project where I was unburdened by any past efforts and it was pretty magical. The rest of my career has mostly been a study in how Moloch preys upon the Fortune 500. I still love it a lot of the time but I miss just working on a problem and not the problems that keep me from the problem.
I completely respect and endorse that, as far as it goes.
But if you love coding 16 hours a day, I really wish you could be getting very well paid to code 5 hours a day for your company, and then spend 11 hours a day on open-source or personal projects you love, that aren't alienated by employer demands.
The only problem with you coding for your boss 16 hours a day is that you're competing with all the other coders, and your boss gets to pay them less and hire fewer of them and give them worse conditions because you're willing to give them so much free extra labor.
When there are tens of thousands of people like you in a given labor sector, it gives huge negotiating power to the bosses, and that's generally not good for anyone except the bosses.
I think it's win-win. You can always move to France where anyone not taking a 3 hour lunch break is rebuked! My friend got a call from his boss in France as he was staying at work past 5 pm.
It's a different mindset.
I like the American one better. The equivalent to France within America is a software job with any govt organization. They have no competition, will be funded no matter what and deadlines are just suggestions!
I think the secret, if you want work life balance in America, is to be very physically and mentally fit, which will help you be very productive.
There's a reason America is so innovative. It attracts passionate people.
That said, working long hours every day for years causes burnout and health problems.
My original comment was about AI though. That perhaps we will find out it was net-net not worth throwing so much time trying to adopt.
Imagine an alternate history where third-world immigrants threaten American civilization. These migrants come to America and not only do they refuse to assimilate, they demand that Americans should assimilate to their culture, that America should be more like the third-world countries they came from. Every year, more and more of them arrive, naturalize, and start voting; every year, the threat to civilization becomes more and more acute. The third-world migrants don’t always see eye to eye, some even maintain old-world ethnic feuds, but come election time, they’re a united block, eagerly awaiting the day they become the majority.
The third-worldist is driven by envy of the white man’s accomplishments, which he must derogate or deny. The moon landing did not happen. Vaccines are poison. Archeology and chemistry and physics are frauds, claiming the world is millions of years old, how ridiculous is that? Grand skyscrapers are a conspiracy to make people live in the pod and eat the bugs. As he denies the accomplishments of whites, so too he denies the crimes of non-whites. George Bush, not al-Qaeda, was responsible for 9/11. Anytime an Islamic terrorist attack happens, before he sees any evidence, he yelps with fanatical certainty, “false flag, false flag.” The third-worldist is a manual laborer, and he insists that only manual labor counts as “real” work. Office workers are doing “fake email jobs.”
The third worldist wants to make America like the old country, in many different ways. The water should be unfloridated, the milk unpasteurized. There should be more factory jobs and fewer fake email jobs. Agriculture should use fewer pesticides and fertilizers. Rural areas are ideal, cities are suspect, but might be redeemed if they host factories, particularly if said factories make simple products like textiles or steel. No banking, that’s usury, and no data centers, those are demonic. Literally, the third-worldist believes in ghosts, demons, and witchcraft.
America should have a third-world economy, and so too should it have a third-world government. The founders thought the Legislative branch was to be the most powerful, the third-worldist insists it should be El Presidente, like in the old country. He sneers at ideas like “the presumption of innocence” or “due process under the law.” If his media outlet calls someone a rapist or a pedophile, they’re a rapist or pedophile, and anyone saying they might be innocent is a rapist or pedophile too. If prosecutors refuse to press charges, they must be in on the conspiracy.
The third-worldist loves nothing more than talking about sex crimes, particularly pedophilia, which he associates with the hated white race. He accuses prominent white politicians, businessmen, philanthropists, scientists, and celebrities of involvement in pedophilia rings, and the government of protecting them. If statistics say that such crimes are more likely to be committed by non-whites and the poor, well, the police are in on the coverup, you can’t trust those statistics. As third-worldists gain more and more power, they’ve started to launch ”investigations” into their targets, releasing information about their private and perfectly legal sexual behavior in order to embarrass them. The 4th amendment, like the rest of the U.S. Constitution, is regarded by the third-worldists with contempt.
The third-worldist is opposed to eugenic measures like polygenic embryo selection. Part of this is a general hatred of any technology developed by whites, but it goes deeper. The third-worldist is greatly disturbed by notions of hierarchy that may put him at the bottom. IQ testing, he proclaims, is a pseudoscientific swindle, and racist too. Most of the time, when he attacks someone as a supporter of “eugenics,” the person in question does not identify as such nor advocate for measures like embryo selection. “Eugenicist” means anyone who accepts the science on heritability of IQ, anyone who makes a lot of money in the tech industry, anyone who looks down on manual laborers or thinks we could perhaps use fewer retards in America.
Whenever third-worldists lose an election, they accuse their opponents of fraud. Usually, they don’t do anything more than moan on the internet, but people wonder, as their population increases, whether they will always be so non-violent.
In this hypothetical world, I would be an immigration restrictionist, indeed, I may even support mass denaturalization and deportation if I thought it necessary. In the real world, I see the political Right as the greater vector of third-worldism in America. The political left is guilty too; it’s a difference of degree rather than kind. Nevertheless, I urge anyone who cares about Western civilization to vote blue on the federal level in November.
Your Hindu immigrant is quite likely to favor banning beef as it is back home. Only last week a major Indian state banned selling meat near schools as "meat increases violent tendencies in children."
Meat sellers face official harassment and meat trade is restricted in a lot of ways,
Your Hindu immigrant is self-selected from the small subset of Hindus that don't want to live back home where beef is banned. That's not necessarily because they want to sneak out and eat a nice prime rib every now and then; it's probably something else. But choosing to live in the place where beef is openly advertised and consumed, anticorrelates with intolerance for beef-eating. So you should expect significantly less support for a ban than you would among Hindus in India.
Not 100% sure about that - maybe they're trying to export Hinduism abroad.
OTOH, the missionary movement is historically a Christian thing, and that's why we see people actively seeking to live in places sporting habits they don't tolerate. But ISTR Muslims are pretty big on exportation, as are Buddhists. Hindus, not so much, AIUI.
OTOOH, get enough Hindus together in one place, and eventually they don't have to tolerate whatever's surrounding them, because it isn't anymore.
Yeah, the non-evangelical religions are relatively safe in this regard, unless they get withing spitting distance of majority or plurality status or unless they can align with some lager local group that wants the same thing. Nobody has ever wound up with a pork ban because they let in too many Jews.
Christianity, Islam, well, it's maybe not a coincidence that it's one of those groups that came up with the "camel's nose" metaphor.
Yes, support of beef ban might shift from 99 percent back home to 90 percent maybe.
Hardly invalidates the point and the risk.
The weird part is clearly the people you are talking about exist, I read articles from the left about these people all the time and they usually have their sources cited. But I never see these people IRL. Meanwhile the political left version I see every day I walk down the street. I guess that’s part of living in a city.
More to the point, how are you going to denaturalize and deport Americans living here? Are you going to send us back to Europe, because I don’t think they’ll take us. People who are citizens should have more rights than people that are not citizens for this practical matter.
No they don't. This list is just a mashup of all the worst opinions across a variety of different groups. For a decent number of those opinions I know someone who sincerely holds it, but no single person who would agree with more than four of them.
(Alright, probably someone does in a country of 300 million, but the claim of correlation does not hold.)
"Americans should assimilate to their culture" in particular is a freebie that almost everybody holds, especially the people who deny it the loudest.
Why couldn't you just kill them? What is being proposed is a revolution, and pretty much every revolution ends with at least a minor purge.
And that's why liberalism can't survive, unfortunately. It was only a matter of time until they shot first. Any ideology that can't protect itself against opposition is doomed to death and irrelevancy.
I completely agree that what you call "third-worldism" is a rising threat to what was "Western civilization," but I disagree that it's the Right that's the greater vector.
... I wonder that after 200 years of liberal democracy, why does this happen? Is it possible that democracy is always thin, never becomes a really ingrained habit?
BTW obviously the judicial branch is the most powerful, not the legislative, remember Obergefell, conservatives immediately stopped arguing because there is no way to argue with the SCOTUS, they are practically kings.
The judicial branch isn't the most powerful. Even with judicial review (which wasn't uncontroversial at the time), they can only rule on issues that are brought before them, can only say that something is or isn't legal, and are appointed by the other 2 branches.
> there is no way to argue with the SCOTUS, they are practically kings.
You can always amend the Constitution. Plus there are lots of ways to get around rulings, from declaring stuff secret and preventing it from ever becoming the subject of a court case (warrantless surveillance), to using the power of the purse to compel states without reallying compelling them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act), to choosing not to enforce the spirit of the ruling or claiming you're following the law while thumbing your nose at it in practice... right now I would say SCOTUS only isn't obviously the weakest branch because Congress refuses to do their job.
I think nothing lasts forever. Plato got to observe the history of several different city-states, and he claimed that democracies always become tyrannies eventually. Curtis Yarvin claims democracy is anomalous and monarchy/autocracy is a far more stable arrangement, which is true, looking at history.
This was pretty compelling actually.
I generally lean right on economic issues, but the GOP hasn't been the party of balanced budgets in a while (and I realize that Democrats generally have a better track record on the deficit than Republicans). I couldn't bring myself to vote for Kamala in 24 since I had spent months defending Biden's mental acuity, only to find out they had been lying and they replaced him as soon as it was public with the debate. But, I've found myself drifting left in my political sensibilities largely bc of arguments like yours. That, and moderating on unchecked immigration and the woke stuff has me more likely than not to vote Democrat in the next election.
I think Hanania is kind of overrated, but this reminds me of his "The right is for idiots, at least the EHC are mostly on the left."
What exactly was compelling about it, if I may ask? Did it provide you with new information, or did it appeal to some emotion or experience you've had?
I probably resonate with narratives of civilization decline at the hands of those who couldn’t sustain civilization themselves.
>That, and moderating on unchecked immigration and the woke stuff
Who did the moderation?
Woke seems to have faded in the public consciousness these days. Immigration seems to have become less of an issue, as Democrats realized massive Biden-era illegal immigration isn't very popular.
This is all probably because of Trump, but if his victory drags Newsom to a position I can more easily get on board with, then I won't hold it against him.
They did fade in public consciousness, but Democrats themselves did not moderate even an inch on any of those issues.
The moderation is real. When's the last time you heard about black lives matter?
To be fair, the movement just discredited itself.
Prominent Democrats absolutely have moderated. On funding the police, avoiding pronouns and “latinx”, fewer trans in women’s sports, more restrictive border and asylum policy. There’s been widespread, significant moderation. You may be thinking of leftists. They are annoyingly influential, but they are only a fringe of the Democratic party’s coalition, not the majority.
From my impressions, leftists are more influential in the Democratic party than ever, and even supposedly moderate Newsom issues legal acts that support trans in women’s sports and fully continues asylum policy for the illegals. Who is the supposed moderate wing of the Democrats?
Is that the case, or have moderate democrats become more prominent?
Amazing. Two paragraphs in and I could see what the ending would be 😁
"The water should be unfloridated, the milk unpasteurized."
Well, *some* of us were reared drinking unfluoridated water and goat's milk fresh from the goat! Sea air, cow's milk out of the churn and walk up there to the field with the pump for your water!
In childhood, I drank water straight from the stream and milk straight from a cow -- after thoroughly boiling them first. The people in charge of the family farm where I stayed the summer would've been horrified at the thought of letting anyone drink raw milk, but especially a child.
I got to drink fresh water from a stream, once in my entire god-damn life. Freakin' giardia. America used to be a land where you could drink out of streams and not get sick.
Wish I'd had the chance to try some fresh goat's milk, unpasteurized. Just to know what it's like, how different it is than "normal."
Floridated water dates back to the same craze as oleo-margarine. "War Products WILL retain a retail presence."
Can do it in the Italian alms
You could drink out of streams and not get sick now, if you did it a few hundred times and just dealt with getting sick until you got over it. It's not like drinking from streams used to be safe, and we changed our environment in ways that made it dangerous (at least, not in ways that specifically made it dangerous due to disease.) Drinking from streams was already dangerous, but it was a danger that we were largely adapted to, our immune systems adjusted so that we could usually deal with it, even if there was always an element of risk. Then we invented means of supplying safer water at scale, and the immune adaptations most people developed throughout their lives to cope with those challenges were no longer necessary for the majority of the population.
Giardia is a life-long disease involving cysts and parasites. Beaver Fever, if you're not aware of it. Infected People shitting where they shouldn't spread it across America. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9651178/ (One million per year? Is that right? That's more than 1 in 1000 people in America...)
Drinking from streams absolutely WAS safe, at least from giardia. And Giardia is one of those diseases you don't want to catch.
https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/detailed-giardia
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/GIAR_AER_2022_Report.pdf
Unless you're looking at the "giardia stops chronic gut inflammation" (Nature, which I've yet to read) (which, again, most Americans didn't have, because most water in America was uncontaminated as late as the 1950s).
Anyone got any luck using Lexapro/Escitalopram for anxiety?
I was taking vyvanse for mild ADHD but got freaked out about dependency (it's expensive here) and long term risk. But I really enjoyed how it made me feel "detached" from my emotions/anxiety and decreased rumination, specially socially. I could just do things, ask people for things, etc.
I changed to escitalopram to treat anxiety specifically but it's been rough. I know I need to wait 14 days for it to fully kick in but I feel worse. Starting tasks feel like a bigger mountain to climb. Feel kinda apathic and moody. Paradoxically some sad feelings feel even stronger, with some tinges of suicidal ideation? (But difficult to say, maybe I'm just going through a rough patch - there is no counterfactuals for real life).
I just wanted to feel less feelings with a cheaper and lower risk medication. Maybe I'm on the wrong one? Should I try ritalin?
You can take less than the nominal dose; our system basically selects for "the highest dose that doesn't produce side effects".
Try 5mg daily, or even 2.5
I used it for awhile and it made me less emotionally reactive in general, but the sexual side effects got too annoying (even with Wellbutrin to counteract them) and now I just do a CBT app and make sure I get enough sunshine/exercise. I don't recall any major acclimation period or anything like that, though, since I took it for social anxiety, mostly, not severe generalized anxiety.
I took lexapro a long time ago and the initial first week or two were really, really hard. I felt like the world got gray and I felt what you’re feeling. But once I adjusted, it definitely reduced anxiety and things got much calmer. So I would try to stick it out!
Thanks for your answer, I'll keep going for at least a month (that's when my next appointment with the psychiatrist is anyway)
I used to have many of the issues you have and now I don’t.
Pills are a waste of time. Numbing yourself to life will never actually improve anything. The things that will help are obvious things you have probably heard a million times.
Work on getting your sleep, diet, exercise, and social activity to a reasonably healthy level. Do small manageable exposures to whatever is giving you anxiety. Try to identify overly anxious thought patterns and treat them with skepticism. Try to find a work situation that doesn’t leave you too stressed or too broke. Try to find a life partner you enjoy being around. Put some effort into hobbies, experiences, and intellectual pursuits that you genuinely enjoy to make life more interesting.
If you do these for several years the benefits snowball. You will wake up one day and find that most of your old problems are gone or significantly improved. You don’t even need to do all of them at once or do them very well to get benefits.
I'm a psychologist, so do not prescribe meds. but have a pretty good working knowledge of them.
With antidepressants, you get hit with the side effects right away, but don't feel the effects for 6 weeks or so, so you don't know yet how helpful the drug will be. But feeling sadder with tinges of suicidal ideation is not a typical side effect. Could it be that the main side effect is sedation, and the sadness and thoughts of suicide come from something like imagining you will be this tired and groggy all your life? If so, try hard to deconstruct that idea. If you can't, I think you should stop taking the stuff, and either try a different antidepressant or restart the Lexapro at a much lower dose.
It is excellent news that vyanase did so much for you. Seems to me that the smart thing is not to change drug classes but take advantage of that information that vyanase helped a lot and try other drugs in the same class -- adderall and its right-handed cousin dextroamphetamine, ritalin, concerta, etc. Vyanase somehow uses the liver to give you a steady supply of stimulant, but it is easier than you might think to get a steady supply with something like adderall. I've know several people who just chop the tabs into small pieces and take one every couple hours. It's a bit of a nuisance, but seems to work fine as a way to avoid first getting too revved up then having a big energy drop.
Also, I recommend you read up on psych meds and improve your overall general knowledge. Rather than reading stuff that's really dumbed down for layman, get GPT or Claude to summarize bits of the research literature for you. (Ask for meta-analyses done in juried journals in the last 20 years.)
Thanks for your answer! I'll discuss these things with my psychologist and my psychiatrist.
Honestly I think quitting vyvanse was in the end some kind of self-sabotage (although the concerns about price and dependency were genuine), but we'll see
About dependence: I have seen quite a few people
who take Adderall or similar, and none of them developed tolerance and needed to raise the dose, also people did not talk about craving to take a higher dose just for kicks. So in my sample, anyhow, I did not see the classic addictive triad of tolerance, craving and withdrawal.
I did see withdrawal alone though. A lot of people only take it in work days, and some but not all report feeling groggy on Saturday, the first of their 2 off days.
Lexapro worked okay for me for anxiety. I still felt like crap, but I was at least quite a bit more functional.on it than I had been before. Estrogen worked much, much better for me: my anxiety symptoms almost entirely went away after starting HRT. But my case is not typical in that respect, as most people with anxiety symptoms have a root cause other than gender dysphoria.
I do not recommend Ritalin as a treatment for anxiety. Compared to Vyvanse, it has much more effect on norepinephrine, which can actually increase anxiety. If you want something similar to Vyvanse but cheaper, I would suggest dexedrine/dextroampherine. Vyvanse is dexedrine that has been bound to a lysine molecule and gradually gets metabolized into dexedrine in your system over the course of about an hour, so you don't get as big a spike when you take it and this it's harder for someone with a mind to abuse it to get high off of. If you take it responsibly, it's pretty much the same but dexedrine is usually much cheaper.
Alternately, you could try Adderall, which is 75% dextroampherine and 25% levoamphetamine. It has some norepinephrine effects, more so than Vyvanse of dexedrine, but quite a bit less than Ritalin.
The way you describe what you like about Vyvanse makes me suspect your primary issue might be more ADHD than anxiety. If so, Ritalin might be worth a try after all, although I would still suggest asking about dexedrine or Adderall first. Modafinil also might be worth a try if your provider is willing to prescribe or: it isn't a traditional stimulant, but can help quite a bit with focus and executive function. It does so differently than amphetamine-class meds, less a "kick in the pants" and more a tailwind that makes it easier to keep going once you start and makes everything about 20% more interesting.
Thanks for your answer! Unfortunately vyvanse is the only amphetamine-based stimulant legal in my country. It's that or ritalin/concerta
TBH Desoxyn works better for ADD but it's a PITA to get prescribed because of social condemnation of more effective, even though legal, drug; same problem you run into trying to get benzos and oxis prescribed today to the point common providers such as the VA have effective soft bans on their prescription regardless of efficacy. Non selective beta blockers work surprisingly well for mild/moderate anxiety too, at least to the point they are worth trying and with a vastly less ADR profile.
~10% reduction in overall anxiety from Lexapro for me. Up to you to figure out if the side effects justify it, I'm not currently on it because it didn't.
Just to flag it, Lexapro and Vyvanse are wildly different in terms of effects and mechanisms of action - it would be unusual to be prescribing Vyvanse to someone with clinically relevant anxiety issues. Equating the two indicates that more research and more targeted discussions with a psychiatrist might be beneficial.
I am thinking about the gender divide in empathy, as in men are supposed to be the less empathic. Let's divide it into two skills: knowing emotions happen, and identifying what emotions triggered by what causes. Women are famously good a knowing emotions happen, but not so good at identifying them and identifying the causes, which is why they end up talking so much about them.
So it is like knowing a software has a bug, but not its cause or its effect. Is that useful? All you can do is basically just stop trusting that software.
And that is why the most common relationship advice women give to each other is "run" ? Unable to fix the relationship because no idea what is wrong, just knowing it is bad?
CHH has a post about this very topic up right now!
Vox Day writes similar points about women while also pointing out that 85% of men are also very unempathetic, which are the ones women tend to dislike. I recommend his Sigma Game Substack.
That does not fit well into his greek letters framework, i cannot imagine the "alpha" as empathic nor vd himself
Women are quick to give that advice because women generally have greater optionality in relationships. I would bet heavily that the propensity to give/take that advice varies strongly with age and attractiveness.
Alternative hypothesis: men are just less likely to *care* about emotions, either their own or others'.
Women are generally more emotionally sensitive and neurotic because of the demands of raising young children. I don’t see any reason to believe they are not good at identifying emotions.
> And that is why the most common relationship advice women give to each other is "run" ?
I really don't know how to assess whether this is in fact overwhelmingly common relationship advice.
But I will say in the cases where I have seen women do this it's more often because they are in an obviously terrible relationship they've put up with for way too long.
> they are in an obviously terrible relationship they've put up with for way too long.
This is basically everybody though, including PMC people. If you look at divorce rates and GSS data, only ~18% of people still have a happy, non-dead-bedroom marriage 20 years in.
The fact that every single generation of women has opted out of marriage at ever-increasing rates since the 40's is largely driven by this fact:
https://imgur.com/cV2Sbdv
I actually wrote a whole post about this, "against marriage as a solution to the fertility crisis," because doing that is basically like creating the torment nexus to try to pump out a few incremental taxpayers.
The vast majority of people are not suited or capable of enduring and happy long term marriages, and a bad relationship is worse than no relationship, and this is exactly why marriage is now a luxury good that's only successfully undertaken by the top ~quintile of people.
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/against-more-marriage-as-a-solution?r=17hw9h
wrong imgur link? the graph just restates that the younger generations of women aren't marrying, but not what's driving the trend. Or is this one of those ouroboros situations, where the youngins are learning from the olds.
> the graph just restates that the younger generations of women aren't marrying, but not what's driving the trend
Yeah, that is the trend I was pointing to. It's the bare fact on the ground, women are opting out of marriage more and more each generation, and it's for a reason.
I argue the reason is that marriage quality and outcomes are legitimately awful. If you want that one, here's the simplified Sankey:
https://imgur.com/a/uOjRpTc
Your model is off. Women talk about emotions because that's an important part of their "pay attention to me" and if you don't have thoughts to talk about, you're going to talk about emotions instead. Hence the "discussing problems" to vent instead of to "fix the problem."
While I do suspect that you're describing a real failure-mode, I don't think it's universal. My own model says that the fairer sex are biased toward emotional introspection because they're biologically more dependent on maintaining social harmony.
In particular, I think back to that scene from Harry Potter. Ron says something like "Nobody can possibly feel all those emotions at once. They'd explode!" and Hermione says "just because you have the emotional capacity of a teaspoon doesn't mean everyone else does". The archetypical Hermione doesn't strike me as an attention whore. Yet the dialogue reveals that she's more... emotionally cognizant(?) than Ron, if that's the best term.
Women are socially incentivized to understand others' emotions, if only because other women prefer backstabbing to more straight-forward conflict resolution. If a guy's got a beef with another guy, a fist generally gets involved -- not gossip.
Hermione, as author insert, is a rather atypical girl, being an autistically-inclined girl. Autists in general are more likely to reside in between the "male" and the "female" stereotypes, given that they have to build most of their social reasoning from scratch.
you make a good point about Hermione being an autist. But still, the normie women I know irl aren't especially attention-whorey. I feel like that's too strong of a Russell Conjugation.
It's a poor choice of words... but men when they get together, generally "do something" (poker, fish, etc). Women talk, and they talk feelings. You get your turn if you're talking your feelings out. If women want attention/nuture/care from men, sometimes it's just "Listen To Me."
This is attention-seeking behavior, yes? Attention-whore is probably too strong, you're right, shoulda toned that word choice down.
We're splitting hairs. But the point of mentioning the Hermione scene is:
A) Hermione is emotionally cognizant of the conflicted mental state of Cho Chang (Harry's love interest).
B) Hermione wasn't drawing attention to herself.
If your mental model of women is "attention seeking -> emotional sensitivity", then the hermione scene is a counter-example. I think a better model is "social attunement -> emotional sensitivity", where attention-seeking is a self-centered subset of social attunement.
"Women are famously good a knowing emotions happen, but not so good at identifying them and identifying the causes, which is why they end up talking so much about them."
This hasn't been my experience at all. What are you basing this on? Everyone needs to do some kind of work in order to be able to identify and name emotions. The general trend I've seen, if there is a gender divide on this, is that men (but many women too) when asked about their emotions, struggle to identify the emotions themselves, and often slip into talking about thoughts or other experiences associated with the emotions instead.
Desole is a specific emotion. I'm not sure there's a good word in English for it.
In general, science separates emotions into big broad categories -- are you saying guys are confused as to whether they are angry or fearful? Or just that "nervy" and "anxious" and a bunch of other synonyms aren't very well understood by most non-creatives? (which I take to be the case, as most people aren't very good with words).
"And that is why the most common relationship advice women give to each other is "run" ?"
I'm not sure how trustworthy this analysis is, but it seems on topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1ocrjsp/the_trend_in_relationship_advice_in_reddit_over/
An interesting thread!
I would like to see those data split by gender. Is the advice the same, or opposite?
I would also like to see whether the members of the subreddit are themselves in a relationship or alone, to verify the "misery loves company" hypothesis. (Is it likely that the members who have a partner, leave the sub, and those who don't, stay?)
Empathy is not a skill per se, but the tendency to feel and relate to the emotions others around you share. Recognizing what emotions someone is feeling, and knowing what caused them, might be considered related abilities and broadly grouped under emotional intelligence, but I don't think there's any evidence that women are less good at men than either, and I think it's more likely that they tend to be better than men on average at both. But you can be better at something relative to some measure of comparison, and still be limited in it
But, if you check platforms like reddit where people regularly ask for relationship advice, members are constantly advising anonymous advice seekers to run, both male and female members. I think the contention that this is a tendency specific to women is wrong on its face, and women simply confer on their relationship lives in person more than men do. Why this is such common advice among both men and women is another question entirely.
The more empathetic people tend to fall for the serial killers (or the relationship vampires). Then they start seeing "fear-inducing behaviors" and want a second opinion, because they felt sorry for the guy/girl in the first place.
Did a woman just break up with you, Carlos?
Last time that happened was 6 years ago, why? I am mostly talking about internet trends.
The framing of the question was so laughably misogynistic that it felt like it could only have been generated from intense and irrational hurt feelings, likely recent.
I am very engineer-minded, 100% logic, no emotions. I am simply wondering about the usefulness of this ability, I don’t know why it is misogynist, since men tend to not even detect emotions so women are one step further.
Google “normative male alexithymia” right away, you are making a very big category error!
All humans have emotions long before they learn logic, including you. Anyone who seriously claims to be "100% logical, no emotions" has not been sufficiently educated about human hormones, early childhood development, psychology at large, theory of mind, and etc.
In online interactions then. I reserve emotions for faces, not text boxes.
That would require a relationship to have happened in the first place, and if he tells women "now, you're just like a piece of buggy software, you know when something is wrong but not why or how to fix it. I'm the guy who knows how to fix it, so just let me tell you what you feel, why you feel it, and why that's the wrong thing to feel", then I don't see much chance of a relationship forming.
I concur, Deiseach!
Rather I had relationships with women who had much better text reading comprehension skills than you have. There was no mentioning that I can fix it at all, I know even therapists do not promise that, I just simply wondered whether this skill is not so useful. Most of my partners would have understood that immediately, especially when delivered verbally, when they immediately get it is a tone of pessimism, not superiority or subtle put-down.
It absolutely does come off as sexist. At least own up to it instead of backpedaling.
Why should I give a flying fuck about if it is sexist or not? Okay, if you want: sure, it is sexist, also make it racist and homophobic for extra fun, who gives a shit? I don't. This magic incantation words do not have the power they had a few years ago anymore. I still maintain that Deiseach did not read it correctly. There was no mention of fixing, that was pure fantasy.
> I strongly recommend that people spend more time talking/interacting with other people IRL.
I'd suspect the reason most of us are posting here is that we can't talk about this stuff IRL. The big benefit of anonymity is that you don't need to respect social taboos.
Hi, I am a woman and rape is a comfortably theoretical issue for me. I also seem to have missed the confidently wrong assertions in that section. Feel free to point them out to me.
I absolutely agree that people should spend more time talking to others IRL, in theory, when asked, and yet here I am typing to internet strangers instead of crossing the street and knocking on my neighbor's door. Odd.
I notice in the threads about AI, Scott keeps referring to the Department of Defense (i.e. the department Pete Hegseth is the head of) as the "Department of War".
To be clear, the name is established by law, and it can't be changed by executive order no matter how many people go along with it. 10 U.S.C. § 111. It remains the "Department of Defense".
In my headcanon, I've long referred to it as the Department of Power Projection. :^)
> To be clear, the name is established by law, and it can't be changed by executive order no matter how many people go along with it.
Uh, yes he can. He just did it. Why do you think that laws that everyone is either unwilling to enforce or incapable of enforcing are still valid? At that point, they're just meaningless words that are worth less than the parchment they're printed on.
All involved parties in the recent stories (including Anthropic) have been referring to it as the "Department of War" because they don't wish to antagonize the administration. Given that, I think Scott calling it something different would just confuse readers.
I mean, given current developments, Department of War seems like much more accurate description of its responsibilities than Department of Defense. EDIT: sorry, just after posting I saw everyone already made the same point.
Some media will refer to it as the Department of War
https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-reaches-deal-deploy-ai-models-us-department-war-classified-network-2026-02-28/
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/cancel-chatgpt-ai-war-claude-anthropic-b2930007.html
https://www.buzzfeed.com/michaelabramwell/department-of-war-operation-epic-fury-tweet
I didn't include Fox Business.
This has the same feel as the complaints of a "sovereign citizen" or an "international law expert." You can call it whatever you like, but the signs at the Pentagon say War, and defense.gov redirects to war.gov.
Who exactly are they defending against in Iran right this minute, Jack? Seems more like war to me than defence.
Still, it's a great song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztZI2aLQ9Sw&list=RDztZI2aLQ9Sw&start_radio=1
At least it's honest. The US very rarely has to defend itself using large-scale military action (when was the last time, 1941? Maybe 2001 if you squint very hard), but it sure loves to wage offensive wars.
To be more precise, the US very rarely has to _defend_ itself against an active attack. It did how, however, have to _deter_ the USSR from attacking the US or its allies.
I view it as a more honest name for the department and I intend to keep using it even when the EO to have it as an alt name is inevitably revoked. It's not necessarily a pro-trump dogwhistle.
Department of war is one syllable shorter and is therefore a more efficient name
"DOD" rolls off the tongue much better than "DOW". For one thing, the DOW is already a thing! And "W" is three syllables for one for "D". :-(
Dee-O-Dub
This reminds me of George Walker Bush's nickname: George Dubya. I feel like Dee-O-Dubya could work.
That's a good point. I propose we start using DoD as an initialism for "department of dwar"
Pronounce it "Dee-O-War."
I like DOW better. It doesn’t hold the pretense of being purely defense, which is a moral high ground no nation’s military deserves. Militaries are for fighting wars, and those wars are rarely purely or even mostly defensive.
I also prefer DOW for pretty much that same reason, with two reservations. One is that renaming the department isn't the President's call and I dislike him arrogating the decision to himself. Both on general principle and because it's yet another instance of Trump's obnoxious habit of trying to rename things in order to mark what he sees as his territory.
The other is that the reason for the renaming was actually valid: when we had an official Department of War, it only covered the Army (and the Air Force, which was the Army Air Corps at the time). The Navy had its own cabinet-level department, the aptly-named Department of the Navy. After WW2, things got reorganized so the Air Force became a full peer of the Army and Navy, the Marine Corps became somewhat more independent of the Navy proper, all four branches got merged into a single cabinet-level department. I expect the Navy would have gotten salty about the combined department having the same name as the old Army department.
Tangentially, there's a plausible argument that the Air Force and the Space Force are technically unconstitutional. Article I gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" and "To provide and maintain a Navy", but nothing about Air/Space Forces. And even if we do read those clauses broadly, that raises the question as to whether the Air Force is an Army or a Navy: that matters Constitutionally because there's a two-year limit on Army appropriations bills but no such limit on Navy appropriations.
Interesting, thanks.
Given that the DoD is part of the executive branch, this renaming by Trump while he's Chief Executive looks to me as the one of the few renaming initiatives where he's actually justified.
As for whether Air and Space are constitutional, my reading of A1S8 and A2S2 says Congress provides an Army and Navy, and POTUS commands it. I'm content to read into A1S8 that Congress is responsible for providing for collective protection (and that a military that can invade other countries is included, since the best defense is sometimes a good offense), although perhaps there are Tenth Amendment implications, but regardless, this means the question is whether Congress was within its power to provide an Air Force and Space Force (and Nuclear Deterrent and Cyber Force while we're at it). By "content", I don't mean I'm the official authority on what the USC says, but rather that I'm comfortable with the idea that someone authoritative interpreted it that way. For example:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C12-1/ALDE_00013670/
Alternately, maybe "Army" and "Navy" in USC are being interpreted as something other than what news articles and paychecks call Army and Navy, and actually include air and space (and nukes and cyber and whatever else we find we have to defend in a coordinated fashion).
>Given that the DoD is part of the executive branch, this renaming by Trump while he's Chief Executive looks to me as the one of the few renaming initiatives where he's actually justified.
I see where you're coming from there. My perspective is that Congress has always (back to the original establishments of the first four departments in 1789) had quite a bit to say about what departments there are, what they're called, and how they're organized. There's even a bit in 5 U.S. Code § 905(a)(1) that says that the President's statutory power to reorganize executive departments doesn't extend to renaming them (or abolishing them, or merging them, which Trump has also attempted to do). My understanding is that Trump is playing "I'm not touching you" with this provision by treating the "Department of War" name as a semi-official nickname rather than as an official renaming; this strikes me as obnoxious but mostly harmless and much less concerning than a great many other of the administration's initiatives.
> By "content", I don't mean I'm the official authority on what the USC says, but rather that I'm comfortable with the idea that someone authoritative interpreted it that way.
As a practical matter, I am inclined to agree to you. This is one of those Constitutional Trivia things, like the Yellowstone Zone of Death. My own inclination would be to classify the Air and Space Forces as Navies rather than Armies, since the distinction between the two was based on concern about Armies being potential implements of tyranny due to their ability to occupy and control territory and Navies requiring long-term capital investments to build and outfit the ships in a way that Armies didn't require at the time. Air and Space Forces, like the Navy, are capital-intensive but have very little "boots on the ground" ability to occupy territory.
You can advocate for a legal change, but doesn't change the fact that they're trying to illegally rename cabinet level departments.
There's also a "horseshoe theory" thing going on where some people (like you here) say they support it because we don't deserve the moral high ground of saying "defense" instead of "war" - i.e. you think "defense" is more morally justifiable than "war" ...
and Trump/Hegseth want to rename it because they *like* offensive wars. I'd have to dig up the exact quote but Hegseth basically said so at the time.
Congress always has the authority to impeach Hegseth and/or Trump over the name change. Along with every other executive overreach.
I don't really know much about the legality of a name change, as whether Trump is *actually* trying to change the name on paper, or just changing the branding or whatever isn't really clear.
I would support Congress making the official change, but it's so inconsequential that it isn't really something I'd advocate for.
The name probably is more attractive to patriots in that they like offensive wars, but I think that's probably more of an effect the lower down you go, which is a good thing since recruitment is becoming a major problem in Western countries. The other side of the coin is also probably good, since it calls it what it is. If we're going to have war, I think it's better to drop the pretense that all these wars are purely defensive, allowing the populous to look at our wars with clearer eyes.
There's something refreshing about Trump straight up saying something like "We're invading Venezuela because of oil" even if my opinion on the stated goal isn't positive.
I suppose I don't feel the same way because every time we get a new government in my country, they start renaming government departments to beat the band. Well, have to find some way to provide jobs for the boys and pay off the party loyalists with that sweet, sweet ministerial portfolio or at least minister of state for wastepaper baskets in the Department of Public Expenditure, right?
One of my (go far up the tree enough) employers started off as the Department of Education, then it was the Department of Education and Skills, then back to the Department of Education, and currently is the Department of Education and Youth.
Current (go far up the tree enough) funding provider/employer (for one section of what we do) started off way back in the 50s as the Department of the Gaeltacht, expanded into the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, then the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, then the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, started to include new area of responsibility as the Department of Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs, swerved into being (or split off as) the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, expanded into the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and right now is the Department of Children, Disability and Equality.
Current funding ultimate employer for another section is, thank God, still the HSE which comes under the Department of Health which only briefly was the Department of Health and Children before going back to being the Department of Health. What the HSE itself replaced was an entire freakin' mess but that's a story for another day.
If you think a simple change from "Department of Defense" to "Department of War" is that big of a deal, I wish I had your problems trying to remember which exact acronym (it's no longer the DCEDIY, it's the DCDE!) I need to include in emails and reports!
I choose to respect Sec Hesgseth's choice of how to identify.
I chuckled.
Maybe, Scott is expecting readers here to be aware of what you are talking about.
Maybe, Scott keeps doing that because it underlines the absurdity of the “name change”.
It also underlines the absurdity of claims being the “peace president”.
Whenever I hear the name "Department of War", it makes me think of that scene in Dr. Strangelove: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!".
Better than calling it the Department of Peace I suppose. Or even the Ministry.
Well, there is a Bored of Peace .., sorry, Board of Peace to balance it all out. (I unashamedly stole this pun from a redditor)
Now for the update you’ve all been waiting for. In the machine AMA I asked this question:
"How many times in MLB history, since comprehensive box scores are available, has a starting pitcher gotten on base themselves more times in a game than the number of baserunners they gave up?"
Nobody answered, so I wrote some code, downloaded some data from retrosheet which is a website with a repository of baseball data, and got some answers.
I did use AI (gemini, the version you get without signing in) to get help with the python pandas package which I’d never used before. I found it much more useful for that purpose than really anything else I’ve ever used AI for - asked all sorts of subtle questions on how to manipulate dataframes and it was always right except for maybe once, often gave multiple methods for doing things, and could explain specific parts in detail when asked follow up questions. I suspect because this is the sort of thing that is very well documented online with very high precision.
It gets much worse when asked about obscure baseball stuff (and now that I've asked it about coding, its limitations on other questions stick out way more). If I ask “what is a time that such-and-such rare thing happened” unless it’s a famous event, the AI almost always hallucinates.
When I asked mixed coding/baseball questions it was somewhere in the middle.
It also has some other oddities - once it asked a classic LLM “do you want me to do XYZ next?” followup, and when I responded “yes” it completely forgot the rest of the conversation and responded as if I’d opened a new chat and opened with “yes”.
As for the baseball stuff: in the retrosheet data I used, since 1910 in AL/NL games, it’s been done 889 times, 63 of those being by starting pitchers. 42 of the starters and 85 of the relievers pitched over 3 IPs. Some particular rarities:
* Only once has the pitcher doing it lost the game
* Only 13 got on base 2 times more than they gave up a baserunner, and only 1 did it 3 times more (going 3 for 4 with a double and a perfect game).
* Only once did two pitchers do it in the same game (both relievers on the same side)
* Two guys did it 6 times each in their careers. Ohtani’s done it twice … I’m pretty sure, people moving between DH and P is weirdly accounted for in the data and I had to add some extra coding. I also only count it if you get on base while still being the pitcher.
* When Harvey Haddix lost his perfect game in the 13th inning, he also lost his spot on the list
* Ernie Shore did it in his famous “perfect game in relief”, reaching base on a fielder’s choice
* Only one pitcher ever did it while hitting two HRs (he also gave up only a walk in 9 innings)
* Only one pitcher ever did it by reaching 1st base on a dropped third strike.
* Only one pitcher ever did it as a starter and pitched 5+ IP (the minimum to be eligible to get the win), but didn’t get the win.
* And this isn’t related but too funny not to share - only twice has a game featured a play where a batter reached base on a dropped third strike *three* times. Both games happened on the same day!
Extra brownie points if anyone can guess what prompted me to wonder about this specific question.
Maybe you can help with something I've wondered about for a long time. It's possible for a complete half inning to happen with zero AB's (at bats). Example - first batter walks, 2nd and 3rd do sac bunts, runner now on 3rd gets picked off. Has something like this ever happened?
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MIL/MIL200605190.shtml
Third inning:
* Walk
* Walk
* sac bunt moving both guys over
* sac fly, guy on 3rd scores but guy on 2nd is tagged out on the bases for a double play
I found 196 instances. Of them, 38 were *not* in the last inning (last inning I think often means either a game called early, or an AB-less walk-off for the home team, in recent years often because of ghost runner BS).
Of the 38, 13 happened since 1930. The most recent was 2024, which was ghost runner BS *not* resulting in a walk-off. The one I cite above is the most recent before that.
I again used Gemini AI for help with the python dataframe stuff (often to remind myself what I'd already learned) but weirdly today found it less useful. E.g. for one question it said "or alternatively you can use [function X]" and then gave some sample code that didn't use function X.
Also when doing this found that in this game there was a 19 AB inning:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN198908030.shtml
And a 23 PA inning, which is actually not the same inning:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS195306180.shtml
The combination of the data, the stuff you can do with some code, the power of modern computers to trawl through it, and the long history of baseball means you can find some truly deranged things.
Like the time Rick Ankiel walked Greg Maddux who then scored by advancing solely on wild pitches ... in the playoffs.
Or when Richard Bleier balked 3 times in one at bat.
Or that two pitchers have picked off 3 guys in a single inning, and both times they also got a strikeout in that inning, and one of the two the pitchers was Walter Johnson and one of the guys he picked off was Babe Ruth (who was on second and scored on the play).
Or the guy in 1934 who gave up four consecutive triples.
Thanks, this is great. Baseball rules when it comes to stats.
I wouldn't count incomplete innings for the 0 AB examples.
"picked off 3 guys in a single inning, and both times they also got a strikeout in that inning" must mean a non-caught 3rd strike (PB or WP). I think there have been cases of 4 strikeouts in an inning - is that the record? But how can Babe be picked off (and therefore out) and score on the same play? I once saw Rod Carew hit 2 triples in consecutive at bats.
No idea on the brownie points question but, is one of the specific instances you list, Rick Wise?
Yup
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN197106230.shtml
I wrote an analysis on how a real-money Manifold could be created, as described in Scott's latest Mantic Mondays post. Link: https://itsnotgambling.substack.com/p/the-right-to-ask-a-question
A fresh reverse-anachronism - data revealed only in the present-day that someone in the past had displayed having had access to - has recently been ascertained surrounding the storied Majestic-twelve documents. (If you don't know what that name is in reference to, you'll want to skip this comment and move on to another one).
https://substack.com/home/post/p-189441772
(Put otherwise: a Bayesian analyst's playground...)
PS As I wrote in a comment to the linked post, I found the "handwritten 3's" matchup to be particularly compelling.
To save people a click, this seems to be about some UFO nonsense.
You can't just advertise it as such and expect me NOT to click!
This is insulting.
@astralcodexten if someone had written a comment denigrating an entire topic space such as alignment or AI governance, that would merit moderating action would it not?
There is a difference between "that idea is stupid" and "the person promoting that idea is stupid". One is allowed, the other is not.
OK. Striving for AI alignment is stupid. AI governance efforts are also stupid. No one should squander their conscious waking minutes thinking about either of these.
Am I doing this right?
What's the point of this exercise? Do you really expect to get banned over this? Do you want to?
Checked Wikipedia article for Majestic 12. It opens: "Majestic 12, also known as Majic-12, and MJ-12 for short, is a purported organization that appeared in fake documents first circulated by ufologists in 1984, and that some UFO conspiracy theories still claim to have existed."
...I concur, UFO nonsense. Mod me too if you must.
The irony of apparently equating 'fake' with 'unuseful' in choosing to cite Wikipedia of all sources.
A researcher on Aeon is stating "there are no psychopaths."
https://aeon.co/essays/psychopathy-is-a-zombie-idea-why-does-it-cling-on
I don't have the academic background to deeply interrogate the original research paper (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-35838-001), but it seems to me that they've gotten hung up on the idea of psychopaths having "no empathy" versus focusing on the issue of psychopaths having "selective empathy."
This brain study here would seem to indicate the latter is very much a thing, that psychopaths can "opt in" to empathy even though they don't tend to feel it as automatically as a majority of people do: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/136/8/2550/432196
And maybe that's a good argument for eradicating or changing the meaning of the word "psychopath" from a person possessing "zero empathy" to one "antisocially practicing selective empathy?"
I guess it doesn't help that this occurs on a spectrum; plenty of people who believe themselves to be very empathic can cease experiencing empathy for their own particular enemies. I think this class of person is rarely aware they've stopped feeling empathy, much less are actively *choosing* not to feel empathy, but it seems like occasionally not having empathy happens to most "normal" people.
But for those who practice much less empathy than "normal" people in a way that's noticeable and/or harmful to others, "psychopath" still seems like a worthwhile label, no?
(This is a hill I'm interested in standing around on for a while as I, like my dad's side of the family, sure seem to experience empathy far more selectively than "normal" people do. Mine seems to be filtered through the context of moral justice - for example, if I'm watching badge cam videos, I'm almost certainly going to be unmoved by the suffering of an obviously dangerous perpetrator, even if they're mortally injured, unless there's some additional context which sufficiently morally excuses their crime. At the same time, I can't watch doorbell cam "fail" videos where random Amazon delivery people slip on icy steps because it just hurts too much to see them whack their butt and be winded for a moment. Though if the exact same injury were to happen to a porch pirate, I'd feel fierce vindication about the instant karma. I'm pretty confident that if I was put into the selective empathy brain scan study, this kind of thing would produce similar "psychopathic" results, hence my "hmm what's going on here?")
I think the article is bullshit.
The popular idea of a psychopath is also wrong -- Hollywood movies use it as a synonym for "crazy murderer", people on Twitter use it as a synonym for "a person I don't like". Generally, people use the word carelessly. But it is overcompensation to go in the opposite extreme and claim that there is no such thing.
I know two people to whom I would apply the label "psychopath" in the literal sense. They are not murderers (as far as I know), and the first impression is that they are nice and charismatic people. (Unless you get into a conflict with them, or spend a lot of time around them, that is the only impression you will have.) They are rich and successful at what they do; not famous, because they prefer when people do not look at them too closely. People around them are *afraid* of them, although many can't explain why. The people who get into a conflict with them find it very difficult to explain to a third party, because the story sounds kinda unlikely (it helps to find victims of the same guy and compare stories, they you realize that it is a pattern and you were not insane), that person has an alternative explanation that makes sense, plus is nice and charismatic, so it will make you look like an idiot. These people are perfect shameless liars, they can look you in the eyes and tell you exactly the sequence of words that makes you do what they want you to do, and the next day they will deny that it ever happened (and their version will sound plausible, and your version will sound like incoherent nonsense).
They are intelligent (I am not saying that all psychopaths are intelligent, only that these two specific ones are), and it's like they are playing a chess game where they see the moves that you wouldn't even consider legal. I mean, those moves are technically possible, but they require an extremely unusual mind to notice and actually act on them. (And it's not just noticing. Even if I told you the plan, you couldn't do it, because you can't e.g. lie so plausibly, and the plan requires that.)
I will try to give an example of the kind of a crazy plan they come up with. (This is not a real example, but is inspired by one.) First, you anonymously accuse yourself of a made-up crime. You act outraged and you make it known to everyone how angry you are, and that if you find the asshole who made that accusation, you will use all your money and lawyers to destroy them! The police investigates you, and finds you innocent. You request the result in writing, and you publish it in newspapers... and then a few days later you actually do the crime. There may be a witness or a victim, but if they say a word, you start yelling again, and people around you will come to your defense: they are familiar with the story, they have read the results of the police investigation, how dare you! And if the victim says "dunno, maybe the original accusation was fake, but the next day he did exactly that thing to me, I swear", no one will listen, because that sounds like a completely retarded story. Also, the victim recently did some things (that the guy begged them to do, but now he denies it) that makes them seem generally unreliable.
People like this are rare, but real. If you meet them for the first time... you will not be prepared, because they are unlike anything you have seen before. If you meet the second one, you may notice weird similarities.
So there definitely is the thing; even if we perhaps do not know what exactly happens in their heads, and even if perhaps the official tests are unreliable.
And I think this is something people definitely should study, because they are a real risk, and they cause a lot of suffering. And if you have a large organization or a group of people, statistically there is a chance one of them will join.
The example plan you laid out above reminds me a lot of Bruce Schneier-style security mindset thinking. Point being, it's not _that_ crazy a plan to think of. Another example involves a handheld device someone proposed for quickly tagging all of your possessions in your home as yours, so that if you were ever robbed, and you suspected someone you knew, you could visit their place on a pretense and surreptitiously wave the device around and your stuff would quickly show up. It used some sort of barcode, I think, so that not only could you be sure some object was yours, it would even hold up in court. This was a bona fide serious idea until someone (perhaps Schneier; I forget) pointed out that someone could easily wave that thing around in your house and then call the cops.
Red teams make entire careers out of thinking this way. So do board game designers. To be fair, though, I believe they don't actually implement them for selfish gain, like your two acquaintances presumably might. I think.
Oh man, I wrote a long reply and then substack ate it when I attempted to post.
TL; don't wanna write again: You're right, enough charismatic destructive people like those you describe exist that we need *some* kind of label for them!
I'm not sure I agree with the article. I think the argument goes like:
* Studies on psychopaths, as identified by the PCL-R checklist, often find no difference between them and non-psychopaths
* I, the author, am just going to fiat that the PCL-R is a good definition of what a "psychopath" is. I'm bringing up the possibility that it's an inaccurate measurement, but rejecting it on the grounds that most researchers use it.
* Therefore, psychopathy doesn't really exist. Any researchers who think it does are probably deluded, like geocentrists.
If you're going to pull a move like point 3 (psychopathy is literally fake) IMO the reasoning you use to uphold the PCL-R doesn't hold up. Saying "Researchers can't be wrong about whether this checklist is a good way to measure X" requires you to respect their judgement at least a little.
If you actually read what's on the test, it seems obvious (to me) that it's just a bad measurement of empathy. I mean, "Lack of Empathy" is literally on there as just a single item of a 20 item checklist. There are 19 other things on there like "Lack of realistic goals" and "Many short term relationships".
I think the article demonstrates that the PCL-R test is bad, and doesn't identify a distinctive psychological population. I don't think it actually says anything about individual variation in empathy
I likewise had a suspicion the author should be objecting to the PCL-R test more than the concept of people having psychopathic traits, but then got drawn in when they started talking about phrenology et al as zombie ideas and asserting psychopathy is the same.
But I think my first instinct may have been right, as you've identified that the objection should be with the test.
Does this mean most people in the pre-modern period were psychopaths?
Selective empathy seems to have been the default through so much of history. It's widespread non-selective empathy that is new and strange.
You may be speaking more of tribalism than selective empathy?
As someone who seems hard-wired to practice selective empathy, I virtually never experience empathy for an individual merely *because* they are arbitrarily like me or connected to me in some way. I think this is a pretty different modality from the majority of people who would continue associating with a family member convicted by overwhelming evidence of a heinous crime, or even the kinds of people who feel empathy for the players on their sports team and none for the opposing team.
I only care about if the individual action (and by extension, person) is good or bad.
How well do people know their local area? Can you for example identify five bird species, five different flowers or five trees?
There are some great app for this now, in particular I recommend the Merlin app: it will let you eavesdrop on and identify local birds, which changed my backyard experience in very positive ways. Kids love identifying stuff too.
I will restrict myself to natives within 1000 feet. I live in a very sterile apartment complex in the middle of a metro of several millions, a wasteland of pavement in effect.
My flowers must thus be weedy things that persist in very marginal untended spaces along the property line to the north: dayflower (commelina), peppervine, solanum eleagnifolium (can’t remember common name but it’s a nightshade), prickly pear (in fairness I planted one of those, just a single pad stuck in the ground), and cenizo, which is a native of the state, but doesn’t particularly belong here however it has escaped the nursery trade.
I will exempt live oak as too much of a gimme. My trees are anacua, mountain laurel - in their peak grape koolaid glory just now; magnolia (sick-looking always - why do people try to force magnolias where they don’t belong); Monterey Oak (squeaks in as a native as I think it’s found in one county) but these nearby are all planted; and Bur oak, two huge ones in the courtyard that must’ve been purposefully planted when this apartment complex was built in early 60s, and yet they seem older so I suppose it’s possible they were here when it was a TB sanatorium. (I lived here for about two months before I set about discovering “what was here before” which is something I do no matter where I go.)
Birds: house finch - reliable singer morning and evening; Phoebe, I’m not a birder so I’m not sure if this is eastern Phoebe - probably?; red shouldered hawk, just heard it hollering yesterday; Cara Cara; and the ubiquitous white winged dove, which was once generally confined to the Rio Grande Valley and is now all over the place. In fact, where people used to go down to Mexico to shoot them, now they most often shoot on land near cities, since they’re such a city bird now.
Appreciate the detailed reply and narration. Looks like you nailed it. I don't know half of those, but also none are native to me! Mountain laurel in peak grape koolaid glory is surprisingly vivid, would love to see that myself sometime,
I think I was trying to show off with Phoebe, Phoebe is often here, but I’m mostly aware of that because my husband always points it out. I really should’ve stuck with Carolina wren or Cardinal or - sadly - house sparrow.
No, but I can tell you the major roads and shops and other things like that
Not bad. Can recommend to learn some flora though :)
Yes, effortlessly. For all those categories and many more.
Why are you interested?
Just curious how much these things are on peoples minds. And maybe a gentle push for people who can't do this "challenge" to pay more attention.
House sparrow, turkey vulture, Canada goose, blue jay, Northern flicker
red clover, white clover, white sweetclover, black medic, white wild indigo
(Got the flowers using only Fabaceae)
Silver maple, striped maple, Norway maple, sugar maple, red maple
If you want to limit it to native species only, replace with pilewort, purple prairie clover, spiderwort, black-eyed susan, and bur oak.
I can do snakes, too. Garter snake, ring-necked snake, black water snake, fox snake, Missassauga rattler.
No references checked except my own memory, and I have almost certainly misspelled that poor rattler.
I would say I do not know my local area very well. I have only moved here recently.
Well done. I didn't know all those maples, but they're also not that common in my area. Learned a few new ones.
Birds I have personally seen out of my office window:
Canada goose
Red-tailed hawk
Bluebird
Blue jay
Starling
Robin
Crow
Woodpecker
The local birds really like those trees...
Lucky you to see a red-tailed hawk outside your office!
I have a habit of weeding, and I can identify a lot more than five kinds of weeds, often by their flowers. I have no idea what most of them are called, but I can recognize them.
Learning the names is actually pretty easy once you're at the point where you can tell them apart. Some common garden weeds include purslane (tasty), ragwort, velvetleaf, small asters, wood sorrel (also tasty), and sow thistle. There's a subreddit /r/whatsthisplant which can be pretty helpful, though I'd understand wanting to stay off reddit these days.
Eagles, seagulls, ravens, bluejays, goddamn woodpeckers. (Bonus point; secondary woodpeckers)
Daisies, dandelions, tansy ragweed, grass... purple ones.
Alders... Non-alders.
Maybe your nickname wouldn't be borinG guY if you knew some more trees!
The worst bit is, someone very deliberately pointed out how to tell two local trees apart by their bark and leaves, and I have forgotten the names of both of them.
I'll never forget Alders though. Nature's Whips.
Birds are easy; trees I can often guess the genus by leaf (oak, maple, etc.) but not species. Flowers, unless it's a rose or dandelion, I've got no clue, just not something I've every really tried to learn. I'm much better at identifying aircraft that fly overhead.
Can recommend learning some! I've got no clue about aircrafts though.
Birds: Goose, pigeon, robin, cardinal, blue jay
Trees: Maple, poplar, gingko, flowering pear, sweetgum
Flowers: Rose, iris, sunflower, black eyed susan, dandelion
Birds and trees I could easily name more of, but flowers was a bit harder.
Seems like most people agree 'birds' is the easiest category, with some dissent whether trees or flowers is the most difficult.
Lets see if I can pull it off:
Birds: Ravens, Magpies, Robins, Black-Capped Chickadees, Bald Eagles
Flowers: Lupine, Forget-Me-Nots, Fireweed, Cow Parsnip, Primrose
Trees: Spruce, Alder, Tamarack, Aspen, Birch
Harder than I thought for flowers, I suppose I don't pay enough attention to them.
Birds: pigeon, crow, sparrow, jay, titmouse.
Flowers: dandelion, coltsfoot, chamomile, tansy, fireweed.
Trees: birch, oak, maple, hazelnut, pine
I think five is too easy. A dozen might be a challenge.
Huh. It would not have occurred to me that this would be a difficult ask of most people. But you're probably right, a lot of people don't pay attention to the natural world.
I'm a big city person but I put up a "Backyard birds of northern California" poster in front of the toilet and bought the book "Edible and Poisonous Plants of Northern California" as soon as I moved here.
Also, everyone in San Francisco should know that there is a website where you can look up SPECIFIC TREES. Like you type in the address and it will tell you the species of the trees on that stretch of sidewalk. Incredible.
I have the same sort of map available for my city! Incredible, as you say!
I can, but it’s an interest mine. Almost no one else has any clue, and they are surprised, or even think it is weird, that I can.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to super common birds, but I’ve met very very few people who know trees.
Easily! But I could go a long way in most directions before any of those lists changed.
I see wild turkeys -- once spotted 6 of them standing in the intersection of Lex and West 7th --, teal, mergansers, mallards, canadian geese, cardinals, orioles blue jays, ospreys, pheasant, egrets even an occasional bald eagle within the city limits of my largish small town. Morning doves coo on my back deck, a goddam pilieated woodpecker had it in for my house until I updated my siding. Plus the usual urban suspects, pigeons, robins, crows, wrens etc.
Let children run their own miniature city instead of going to school (an essay about Mini-Munich): https://minicities.substack.com/p/serious-play-mini-munich-something
"Children behind bank counters, in city councils, as mayors, as newspaper and television editors, as employees in registration offices, as workers in a furniture workshop, in a stonemason’s workshop – naturally, none of that is possible. They lack all the prerequisites, we think. Not just in ability, but also in seriousness, in accountability, in responsibility. And besides, child labor is forbidden, in their own interest, as we like to say. And so we let them grow up in the children’s ghetto, let them dream of what will happen “when I grow up someday.” They remain, as if it were only natural, locked out of the serious realities of life – immature, in need of supervision, not to be taken seriously."
The YouTube channel Defunctland has an 83 minute documentary about kid cities in the western hemisphere, starting with a company in Mexico City and then expanding into the US. Lots of super-entertaining archival footage, especially when corporate sponsorships get involved (LOL).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc7uY5HqyWI
Started writing a short post on the differences between those commercial mini cities like KidZania and Mini-Munich: https://minicities.org/p/mini-munich-not-kidzania-is-the-best
Let me know what you think! It’s not quite finished but I published it as early draft nonetheless.
Mini-Munich has been held every two years since the 70s, and there are many similar children's cities in other places.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90538391/see-inside-a-city-run-by-children
I wonder if anyone has interviewed adults who were kids in those cities.
When I was 10 and 12 years old, I spent many weeks in a mini city modeled after Mini-Munich. It was a great experience, and I often arrived half an hour before the doors opened so I could be one of the first to enter.
I was once elected city councilor and also opened a casino, which was then closed after a week by a vote of the city council (I had to abstain from voting due to a conflict of interest!). Looking back, I would of course have preferred to open a prediction market or something else instead of a casino. But at least I hope it was educational for some of the children, who will now be less inclined to place bets with a negative expected value.
I also remember that I really enjoyed writing for the newspaper, and a friend of mine who ran the newspaper at the time was hired by a very prestigious newspaper in Austria a few years later, at the age of 18 or 19. If you would like to hear more about my experiences, I would be happy to expand on this. These wonderful experiences are, of course, also why I am now trying to bring attention to it in the Anglosphere, and write about what a permanent, rather than temporary, miniature city might look like.
After some humming and hawing and wailing and gnashing of teeth on Twitter and Discord and my brunch cafe, there are a few things that I have as a wish-list for future ACT posts:
1. "What do nations do once they can no longer support economic growth (or in a more vague sense, themselves) through immigration?"
This stemmed from some polite and impolite discussions about changing views about immigrants, namely in Canada, the U.K., Netherlands and of course the USA. Demographic shifts, aging populations, fear of minorities or minority status, etc. Do we just look at Japan for the "They have the same problems but are ten years in the future" view or is there something more to it?
2. "Is Everyone Racist?"
This always seems like a fascinating yet charged one to talk about in 2026 aka on Western social media. The term racism itself almost seems loaded in North America to mean whites on blacks. But after seeing enough stand-up comedians from all over the world, where they joke about their own culture shit talking another, it seems way more ubiquitous globally than many realize. And I think that is a useful thing to understand particularly as there is such a trend towards guilt of white people regarding the topic in liberal circles. Maybe if they heard about south Indians hating north Indians or Chinese hating South Asians, or whatever, they don't have to self-flagellate so much. What the outcome of such a post could be, I'm not sure. How do you even measure "racism" globally?
3. "How do the US and Canadian health care systems stack up to each other regarding health care outcomes?"
I find quite a lot of misinformation about both the US and Canadian health care systems floating around, particularly since the 51st State shenanigans began. Americans saying you will die in a waiting room in Canada before you get looked at. Canadians pointing out the sea of GoFundMe's for broke Americans in medical debt. I'm sure everyone has seen the meme about someone needing stitches, "America: That will be $60,000; UK: See you in 38 months; Canada: Kill yourself".
So I think it might be neat to get some data about the health care outcomes. Is the health care system really a big reason for the three year difference in life expectancy? Or is the food really that much worse in the lower 48? Does a cancer diagnosis in either country have a measurably different outcome?
Any number of questions we can come up with...
Re: Canada I think any examination there needs to account for the very big demographic differences (not just race!) between the US and Canada. Cuts both ways: leftists ignore it on healthcare, rightists ignore it on other issues. NYC is one gigantic refutation of "third-world immigrants cause crime, destroy your culture, and crush your economy," even though NYC has "higher crime" and "more poverty" than, I dunno, Bern Switzerland.
There has been at least one attempt at measuring racism globally: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1239224/we-love-our-neighbours-only-if-theyre-us – and the results are largely as one would expect.
Your economic growth one seems largely what the last Nobel in economics is about, but the immigration part seems a furphy. Either the country is on the frontier, in which it must double down on creative destruction, or it is not, in which case it can play catch up pretty easily, but in both cases immigration is a variable but not the driver and not a prerequisite?
2. And it might be worth asking, if everyone's racist, does it matter how racist are they?
This feels like a question about shifting definitions. Very few people are "burn a cross in some dude's yard" racist; lots are "cross the street to avoid the bunch of black teenagers in the bad part of town" racist.
By the second criterion I might be a racist. It would depend on the vibe of the teenagers though. If they are shooting hoops, no problem. If they are vocally aggressive to passersby then yeah, I might cross the street.
IIRC there was an insightful SSC / ACX post on on international health systems a while ago.
I have a half-baked defense of the Department of War? Recall that the whole conflict with Anthropic allegedly started when Anthropic asked questions about how its software was used in capturing Maduro.
Like, obviously you don't want to have your business decisions questioned by your SaaS provider with reference to its Terms of Service, especially if your business is war, because questioning implicitly contains threat of cutting off service, and if such a provider is providing services to your contractors, this can be a supply chain risk?
The story that Anthropic was asking questions about the Maduro raid has been contested and should not be taken as fact. From Zvis article [0] on the topic today:
>Previously: DoW circulates a story that Anthropic asked questions about the raid and was potentially unhappy and might pull its contract. I have gotten multiple unequivocal denials, saying this was entirely made up by DoW. This is part of an ongoing narrative of ‘what if they demand you get permission or they pull the plug mid-mission when they don’t like what you’re doing’ that has no bearing on the actual situation whatsoever, and never did.
Note, that, I don't think you should take this as gospel either. This is from anonymous reporting. I personally have learned to trust Zvi fairly well, but still. But it is absolutely enough that we should not just assume without further evidence that the DoWs account is correct.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/secretary-of-war-tweets-that-anthropic
Ok, good point.
Define "risk." As I understand it, the "supply chain risk" regulation is intended to stop Huawei-style attacks - "there is a risk of a foreign country introducing malware in a location we can't control or inspect, which will then make its way into government systems."
If the risk is merely "our contractors may have some work delayed because Anthropic banned them for TOS violations and they had to switch to OpenAI," I don't think that's enough of a risk that you need to ban them from touching anything remotely government-adjacent.
Like, if you stretch the definition of "risk" that far, you could call literally anything a company does a supply chain risk. If OpenAI decides to raise its prices, does that make them a "supply chain risk" because there's now a risk of them cutting off business with government contractors who can't afford the new rates?
I mean I agree that banning the company which supplies Pentagon with toilet paper from having Claude enterprise licence is an overkill; but I can a see why it could be a risk for a company designing warplanes to rely on Anthropic model for sensitive work.
Another issue in which I agree with you is that switching to OpenAI or Grok doesn't really solve the underlying problem; like, everyone of them is now a supply chain risk in this sense.
I'd argue, though, that e.g. Microsoft is much safer (Google being the intermediate case) and that it is fundamentally because it thinks of itself as being in the "profiting from developing professional software" business as opposed to being in "transforming society according to our philosophical principles by creating a Machine God" business.
DoW was free to not sign a contract with the stipulations it had.
I can see arguments for why DoW wouldn't want restrictions (because it means checks), but it being extended to contractors makes no sense. The supply chain risk designation isn't for "company might stop providing services at any time" but rather "company is likely to engage in spying, so it being used on our contracts means foreign adversaries may be able to access military secrets", see Huawei for example.
It's also sabotage, not just spying.
Refusing service is not sabotage.
Call it what you like, but if you're at war and your guns could stop working because someone in your supply chain decided to "refuse service," I'd say that counts as a risk.
Explain what mechanism would lead from "Anthropic stops working with a government contractor" to "your guns stop working."
I think the idea goes something like the following example: weapons systems are equipped with a friend-or-foe system; that FoF system is implemented by an LLM, and in order to mitigate the problem of foes continually learning how to identify as friends, the LLM needs continual updating. Anthropic agreed to supply and update that LLM, but had second thoughts after DoD had committed to its design and started hiring people to develop the system.
There's nothing stopping DoD from, say, using the system as-is, but it's much less useful if it can't tell enemy aircraft from civilian aircraft in a crowded airspace.
That's one example; the general case is any weapon system that integrates with LLM in any way to enhance its ability. Had DoD known Anthropic would back out, DoD would have gone with another provider, grown its own expertise in-house, or made do with non-LLM weaponry, and potentially saving itself a great deal of time and resources.
Risk, yes; sabotage, no. Sabotage is specifically action, not non-action.
This doesn't mean DoD is suddenly unable to back out of a contract even if Anthropic decides to stop providing services, and it certainly still permits DoD to put something in its contract specifying service as an obligation for Anthropic, and what DoD is allowed to do if Anthropic fails to meet its obligations. But I'd still prefer to reserve the word "sabotage" for willful destruction of capability, which is the sort of thing some party could do without being in a contract with DoD at all.
> action, not non-action.
All right, fair enough, that's a reasonable distinction. The "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" construes the term more broadly, but fine, Anthropic is something-for-which-I-don't-know-the-term-but-is-functionally-identically-to-a-saboteur, so at any rate, cutting it off from the US govt as thoroughly as possible strikes me as a reasonable move.
I disagree. There are situations where refusal of service is effectively a sabotage, and military context is especially conducive to those.
That just gets to the heart of the problem, doesn't it?
We want there to be risks (i.e. humans in the loop who might say "no") when military power is used in novel, illegal, or aggressive ways, such as raiding foreign capitals to kidnap their heads of state and steal their oil.
The Department of War might not, but everyone in the world who wants such things as "peace" or "checks against tyranny" should feel differently.
I understand that an armed forces can't have a supplier that is unreliable. But the supplier need an accountability mechanism.
The way this is supposed to work is that Anthropic should be able to direct this sort of questioning to congress, and then congress should act as a sort of check on the executive without putting National Security at risk.
Checking if the agreed upon terms were upheld by the other party is being a supply chain risk? That doesn't seem right, in any sense.
I mean, when Meta checks whether user violated "Community standards", which are also agreed upon terms, it is supposed to be a rules-based process, but in fact, there is a whole lot of arbitrary decision-making from the supplier.
This works for Meta because users are paying either 0 or little. But I get why it would be unacceptable for the Pentagon to be treated in the same way Zuck treats shitposters, and why Anthropic "asking questions about how they used Claude" might make them think this awaits them.
>I mean, when Meta checks whether user violated "Community standards", which are also agreed upon terms, it is supposed to be a rules-based process, but in fact, there is a whole lot of arbitrary decision-making from the supplier.
Yes, there is a degree of arbitrary enforcement. And yet, if Meta decides to e.g. ban a user for violating these terms, the banned account has no defense.
>But I get why it would be unacceptable for the Pentagon to be treated in the same way Zuck treats shitposters,
I don't understand this argument. Where did Anthropic behave like Facebook in this analogy, i.e. show inconsistent enforcement of its terms? And even if, how would that legally justify the Pentagon using the nuclear option of potentially destroying Anthropic? Should regular customers have the power to sue Meta out of existence because they got banned over a shitpost while someone else wasn't?
I don’t think that what happened justifies “the Pentagon using the nuclear option of potentially destroying Anthropic”. But I am not sure whether the move against Anthropic is really as aggressive and lawless as you describe. I am aware that some people, like Zvi Mowshowitz, think it is, as well as a major step on the path of the destruction of the republican institutions and turning the US into Soviet Union, but I’ve noticed people cry about impending regulatory Doom of Silicon Valley and sovietization of US economy a lot for various reasons, mostly with very little justification. Especially Zvi has imho a chronical tendency to overreact (he is however very good in aggregating information, so I am relying on his info a lot nevertheless).
Of course this is not helped by obviously overblown and irresponsible rhetoric from Trump and Hegseth.
My concern is not primarily about inconsistent enforcement, more about (ups, I guess I’ve just outed myself as an AI, presumably not from Anthropic :-/) rules using such broad terms that their interpretation gives a huge space to discretion and also about changing the terms abruptly.
Does anyone else think that the whole Anthropic thing might be 60% + Sam Altman's fault ?
Given Hegseth's behavior (and the degree to which Emil Michael seems to be taking this extremely personally) I'm not very inclined to write them off either. Sounds like the Anthropic situation had been brewing for quite a while, early January in fact, and the impetus seemed to be Hegseth's decision to assert more (total?) control over the Pentagon. This is very classic Altman maneuvering though.
I blame them too, their cupidity, venality, and stupidity, are all necessary conditions. My working model is that they aren't even smart enough to think of it themselves, although I actually suspect that is wrong and I wouldn't bet on it.
Yeah, the $25M from Brockman surely didn't hurt the calculus, there.
Yes especially after reading https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/technology/anthropic-defense-dept-openai-talks.html
Yes, adds a lot of grounds for believing this. Honestly I am surprised this is not the consensus.
I think I just realized that Greece had a very powerful cultural pressure, maybe almost as much as China. Every single invader of it adopts its culture.
* I've seen debate on actual connection between Mycenaean (who lives in Greece during Trojan War) and Dorian (alleged invader after, debunked?). But either way, I can see them as another one who adopt the land's culture.
* Macedonians have adopted Greek culture from the start, and eventually even help spread it far and wide.
* Romans famously became very Greek and also became a Greek empire
* I may be crucified for this, but by the end, what separates Hellas and Turks by the time of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Greece_and_Turkey is neither ethnicity nor culture but religion. That's how much Ottoman had also assimilated to Greek culture.
And it's even more notable that its population was never overwhelmingly bigger than its invaders unlike Han (?).
The obvious question is, why?
The Romans didn’t really become Greek, it’s more that they recognized that the Greeks were really good at some things and adopted those things. Cicero studied rhetoric from a Greek tutor but he was Roman to the bones.
The Turks seem to not have adopted the Greek language, and converted the majority of Greek speakers in Anatolia to speaking Turkish.
The Romans were highly influenced by the Greeks, but didn't become Greek. Most obviously, they continued speaking and writing in Latin rather than Greek. Less obviously, they made no scientific advancements (unlike the Greeks).
No scientific advancements? Roman engineering was incredibly impressive for its time. Aqueducts, domes, concrete, roads, etc.
The Greek language also remained dominant throughout the Eastern half of the empire, from Augustus through the Byzantine era.
There was some impressive engineering, but engineering is actually different from science. Scientists try to figure out why certain engineering works, which can enable further use of the principles discovered.
True. Romans could be excellent engineers and architects, but the sum total of scientific knowledge in Europe in 400 AD was not much larger than in 200 BC.
>"The Romans were highly influenced by the Greeks, but didn't become Greek."
To the extent that the Byzantines were Roman, Romans did become Greek.
Good point.
The traditional answer to your question would be that Greek civilization was very impressive, what has been called ”the Greek miracle”. Of course nowadays some people would see this as a chauvinistic way of thinking.
Back then when people were allowed talk like this, there was this saying never trust a Jew, but trust a Jew before you trust an Armenian, and trust an Armenian before you trust a Greek. So maybe they are... good at talking people into things?
Including each other. If you run the numbers, Sparta lost as many battles as they won. What they were good at is not war as such, but making everybody believe that they are. Basically PR.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
I think because they were the first ones in the region to start writing. To the Jews and Persians who had adopted writing beforehand Greek culture was much less attractive.
Well to some Jews it was attractive, which is why part of the last parts of the Old Testament (Maccabees) are anguished about Jews hellenizing. Also why the New Testament is in Greek.
Isn't the portion of the bible that is in Greek because the originals were lost, and the only documents that survived were in translation?
As far as I am aware the entire New Testament was composed in Greek.
A silly question that divided some friends: For movies and songs, there are remakes (or covers), by which I mean adaptations of a work by a person apart from the original creator but bearing the same name. So if someone wants to publish their take on "I am the Walrus," even if they change a lot around, they can release it as their version of I am the Walrus. Similarly with A Star is Born, etc.
As far as I know there is no significant equivalent for books. Pretty much nobody, as far as I can tell, takes the basic idea of "Dune" and changes a bunch of things around and publishes their own "Dune" (with the appropriate payment for the rights). Just about anyone doing this (as far as I can tell) will try to change enough, including the title, to market it as a separate work even if "inspired by" the original.
Why?
I'm assuming there's some very technical reason for this, but after asking multiple people, each had their own reason why this was obviously the case but they didn't agree with each other. Curious to hear what people think.
The Russians have written (pretty good!) reworking of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and they can’t be published commercially in English.
On the other hand, multiple works of Twilight and Harry Potter fanfic have been reworked into bestsellers. I think you can steal the plot and characters dynamics but obviously copying the imagery and names (like calling the hero Tanya Grotter!) is right out.
Interesting!
But yeah, in this case it looks like a simple breach of copyright. And with something like Harry Potter it makes sense that purchasing the rights would be prohibitively expensive. But for less profitable works or works in the public domain, it's less clear to me that selling the rights for a "remake" would be so crazy.
Consider theater plays : they're both books (and the vast majority of theater plays can only be experienced as books) and, more rarely, live spectacles on which a given production will put its own spin. Even within the same production, each evening is somewhat unique, never bathe in the same river and all that.
Going up one layer instead of down, theater writers tend to retread the classic themes from mythology. Wikipedia lists seven versions of Antigone and they're all called "Antigone" and deal with the same basic situation and, although I don't know-know that I'd bet they don't change much to the events or outcomes. It's rather common to refer to Anouilh's Antigone or Sophocles's Antigone. There are 10 goddamn Medeas.
Yup, I thought of this too!
It's very common to have, say, a production of Hamlet with different dialogue, different setting, I don't know about different plot entirely but maybe.
Hamlet with different dialogue, different setting, and different plot sounds pretty much like different play. If you wanted to be cheeky, you could call it "Hamlet of Theseus".
Speaking of Shakespeare, there's a film called _Scotland, PA_ starring James LeGros, Maura Tierney, and Christopher Walken. To any theater nerd, it's a very obvious retelling of Macbeth, set in the 1970s fast food scene. But it's the same story. The author doesn't claim it isn't; he wants you to know it is.
It's important to note that adaptations are generally very aware of copyright periods, and whether an adaptation gets developed depends very much on whether that period expired, or whether the adapter has deep pockets and/or is friends with the still-living creator. This is why Shakespeare can be adapted without worry, but Arthur Miller cannot without first clearing some obstacles. And this probably also informs in turn whether some "cover" is admirable, or a ripoff.
For a grayer area, consider Robin Hood. If you want to write your own version of the story, nothing other than your own finances will stop you; you're not going to get sued by the estate of some obscure 15th century balladeer. If, OTOH, you wanted to carefully trace Howard Pyle's telling, that could conceivably get you in some trouble; depending on how close you stick, you'd get some raised eyebrows at least. (Pyle's book was published in 1883, but is still in print.)
We commonly think of songs as distinct from whoever is singing them. Anyone can sing a song. Anyone can play the piano. So a cover isn't really an alien concept. Movies and videogames are constantly advancing, so it makes sense to rerelease what is basically the same movie but with more modern cinematography.
Books aren't really like that. Stories are separate from the book in a similar way that a song is separate from a singer, but the equivalent of a musical cover would be something like changing the font of the book. It's not something worth mentioning. And we haven't been making major advances in how to write words. You can just read a hundred-year-old book, and it's just like reading one today. If you want to read something *really* old like Beowulf, you'd probably want a translation to modern English, but nobody is going to call that a different book.
You could rework the story, change language, change characters, change the ending or key plot moments, as can be done in a movie remake. Not just font.
I don't think that Jorge Luis Borges Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote really answers your question, because that's not what it's meant for. But it does muse upon how the writing of text relates to the artistic act of authorship. For the half of your question that would wish to ignore the existence of copyright law, whether it's possible or not, it's an excellent starting point.
Will check it out!
I don't know the answer to your question.
But ... back in the day it was common for popular pulp magazine heroes to get rip off copies put out by other magazines. I'm specifically thinking of "The Shadow" ripoffs, but there were others. Obviously, they didn't use the NAME, but that feels very much like an IP (trademark?) issue as they were still basically doing their version of the same character.
If you do a cover of a song, I believe that the songwriter gets paid (and also can't refuse permission). In theory, Herbert could be paid so that someone could do a "cover" of Dune, but I doubt he'd have agreed. I don't know what the rules are for movie re-makes and how IP rights are handled.
The IP challenge raises two questions. One is whether (and why) it's clear that it wouldn't be worthwhile to sell the rights to a book rewrite-- why would it obviously not be profitable?
Second question is why people don't rewrite books that are in the public domain.
I don't think that it IS obvious that selling rights to a book rewrite wouldn't be profitable. However, my guess is that if the rewrite is/was different enough to be worth doing then a few more changes (character names, locale, ...) and you don't need to pay for the rights. At this point you are probably paying for rights to the *title* and that probably only makes sense if the original book sold well.
And people DO re-write books in the public domain. They just usually give them different titles (so we got "Wicked" rather than "The Wizard of Oz". A bunch of other examples are here: https://arapahoelibraries.bibliocommons.com/v2/list/display/2107229229/2157009929). A recent rewrite of the Iliad was titled "The Song of Achilles" rather than "The Iliad." I expect that this wasn't necessary, but I also expect that there would have been a lot of bad reviews and book returns if people had purchased the new, re-written, version expecting the original.
But I think what happens with movies is that the original title gives a certain existing fanbase and/or a boost that you don't get if you use a different title, and that that makes it worthwhile to buy the original rights. Maybe that part just isn't profitable, but it isn't obvious to me why not.
So to take an example I bring up a bunch here, is it so crazy that a horror author would want to write their take on Frankenstein? It's in the public domain, so no need to pay for rights anyhow, and there's an inherent interest in "literally their version of Frankenstein" versus "Their work, which is inspired by Frankenstein." Or at least that's what it seems like to me.
Novelists produce novels, which they A: copyright and B: publish under their own name. Anyone not named "Tolkien" who wants to sell a book titled "Lord of the Rings" in the high fantasy genre, needs to get the current Tolkien to sign off on it. Good luck with that. Some novelists have licensed out their work, e.g. Larry Niven offering the Man-Kzin wars period of his main future history to fellow writers who are better at doing war stories than he is. But that's rare. Economically, it dilutes potential earnings from sequels that the novelist could write himself. Socially and psychologically, the novel is part of his or her identity.
Eventually the copyright expires, but by that point the novel is either long forgotten, or (rarely) a timeless classic that the audience won't tolerate being transmogrified into something new and (allegedly) improved. You can get away with something like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", but a straight-up "Pride and Prejudice" where now Lydia is the sex-positive revolutionary heroine isn't going to sell to most of the readers for whom the title would have been a selling point in the first place.
Screenwriters produce screenplays, which they sell to studios that hold the copyright and take care of the production. And that's a strictly mercenary arrangement. The studio will frequently decide that they're not going to do any more sequels - unlike most novelists, studios have *lots* of projects competing for their attention - and if someone else wants to pay them real money for the rights, they'll take it. In the case of movies adapted from novels, the novelist or their estate will retain copyright but again on a purely mercenary basis. There was never any chance that Frank and/or Brian Herbert was going to make their own "Dune" movie, so they'll gladly sell limited rights to anyone who offers them enough money.
Songwriters are an intermediate case. There are singer-songwriters, and songwriters who work directly with a performer. But there are also songwriters who work for the studios, in which case see above. And even if a song is closely and legally tied to the original performer, the performers tend to age out of "I can make $bignum continuing to perform this" much sooner than authors age out of potentially writing sequels. So there's plenty of room for new artists to acquire the rights of old songs.
And with music there's also the issue of cover bands. There's value in live performance of music in ways that there isn't for novels or movies, and the original creators can't do anywhere near enough performances to meet demand. So they might as well let the cover bands step up - it doesn't cost them anything, it doesn't really displace album or concert sales, and it's free advertising that generates fan goodwill.
To be clear Tolkien illustrates that this is exactly what happens with books: so many fantasy stories are just rewritten Tolkien at their core!
And eg detective stories: so many of them rehash the same elements, it is just the personal skill and style of the writer that makes it work or not.
Right, but it's the same elements with new content under a new name. We get Terry Brooks' "Sword of Shannara", not "Lord of the Rings: the Terry Brooks cover". Both copyright and fannish respect for Tolkien's original would make the latter a non-starter.
With movies, we can get four different "covers" of Spider-Man, under the name "Spider-Man", in just the first quarter of this century. Movie studios will sell the copyright as soon as they're done with it, and the fans were never going to see any cinematic version of Peter Parker as wholly Stan Lee's personal creation.
Yes that difference is real, and it is odd.
As I said, I think it stems from the difference between personal artistic creation and corporate artistic creation. Legally, psychologically, and culturally, those are seen as different sorts of thing,
"Economically, it dilutes potential earnings from sequels that the novelist could write himself." First, this exists also for movies (based on movies or on other books). Second, this assumes the author is alive. Third, most books will never get a sequel anyhow.
"By that point the novel is either long forgotten, or (rarely) a timeless classic that the audience won't tolerate being transmogrified into something new and (allegedly) improved." My older brother is still scandalized by Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," precisely because it butchered (in his mind) a timeless classic. But this happens all the time in movies, and certainly songs.
>each had their own reason why this was obviously the case but they didn't agree with each other.
Just going to point out, they may be overconfident but not wrong; many things that seem appealing but never happen have a lot of overlapping reasons why they don't happen.
If there were only one reason, someone might have solved it by now.
That said, my first reaction: most people listen to a song they like a thousand times, most people read a book once.
If you're listening to a song you like 1000 times, then mixing in 5 different covers 50 times each to see how different artists interpret it still leaves you listening to the original version 750 times, the different versions don't compete that viciously in terms of either your attention or your purchasing.
But, if you're only going to read a book once, then the original version and the cover are in absolute zero-sum competition. If I think that every sale of a cover of my book is a 1-to-1 lost sale of my own book, then I have no reason to license it to anyone for anything less than 100% royalties. And my fans have little incentive to read the cover instead of my version.
For sure. If this is one of those cases where there are just a bunch of interrelated reasons, none of which are sufficient on their own, then that's one answer. But I'd be surprised if that's the case because of the near-total lack (as far as I can tell) of this phenomenon, which my instinct suggests would make it more likely to be one big reason (or multiple big reasons) than many small reasons (which I'd expect to have more exceptions). But that's just an impression.
I'm not sure that people listen to song covers as substitutes for the real thing, I should say.
But either way, I don't think this quite holds for movies. Most people watch movies once, maybe twice if they really like it. You're right that books take much much longer than songs or movies to experience, and maybe there's something there. But I can't get rid of the concrete question-- are we really saying that demand for e.g. Stephen King writing his version of Frankenstein (which is in the public domain) that it practically never happens?
Alternate timeline fan fiction is the cover version of storytelling. It's just that the IP law and industry are not set up to do it commercially.
Professional songwriters wrote songs for particular performers, but also would sell them to anyone who wanted to perform them. So long as you get paid the royalties, it's fine.
Going back to classical music, if Beethoven's publisher was selling copies of his latest work, they didn't care if the purchaser was an amateur going to hammer the piano in their own drawing room or a professional going to put on a concert.
So it was established that "music can be performed by anyone so long as you pay for the privilege":
https://luisdias.wordpress.com/2020/12/13/proofreading-publishing-and-piracy-in-the-time-of-beethoven/
"In her article “International Dissemination of Printed Music during the second half of the Eighteenth Century”, Sarah Adams from Cornell University discusses how that period was a turning-point in the history of music publishing, following improvements in music printing techniques due to the extensive use of engraving. The development of engraving on pewter and copper plates made publishing quicker and cheaper. Music was inscribed in mirror-image on the plates by exceptionally skilled but terribly-remunerated artisans, and printed off on a handpress.
Music therefore began to get circulated more frequently in print rather than manuscript form, and as public interest and demand in music grew due to an expanding middle class and an ever-increasing number of amateurs and professionals hankering for new pieces to play, a large number of publishers went into business.
...Royalties were unheard-of then; the publisher bought a work for a flat fee and would then hope to sell as many copies as possible, and as quickly as possible too, because piracy was a very real threat. As there was no copyright, any successful composer’s ‘hit’ work was highly susceptible to piracy. The ‘pirate’ could even be the copyist himself, who could clandestinely make another copy, secreted out to another publisher, sometimes even before the ‘legitimate’ one. The threat was so serious that Mozart had his copyists work only in his apartments, under his watchful eye."
Books, however, were different. Yes, there were plenty of copies of original stories and people writing their own versions in the Middle Ages, but when we got to the birth of the novel and the 19th century, plus the Wild West publishing industry in the USA which had no qualms at all about taking hit British (or wherever0 latest bestseller and publishing their own version without paying copyright or even getting the permission of the author, so sales revenue was being lost as well as pirated versions being often inferior or hacked about, then authors and publishing houses got lawyered up to fight for their rights.
Dunno if this addresses the question directly, but music is much more sensory than books. The very existence of the octave in music is unique. Also, reusable rhythms like the bossa nova or samba don't really have an analogue in other arts unless you count something categorical like film noir or romance.
For sure, but as you say, not sure that really solves the puzzle.
Pretty sure the difference is a matter of law. In the words of wikipedia:
"The compulsory license for non-dramatic musical compositions under Section 115 of the Copyright Act of 1976[12] allows a person to distribute a new sound recording of a musical work, if that has been previously distributed to the public, by or under the authority of the copyright owner.[13] There is no requirement that the new recording be identical to the previous work, as the compulsory license includes the privilege of rearranging the work to conform it to the recording artist's interpretation. This does not allow the artist to change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work.[14] In order to take advantage of this compulsory license the recording artist must provide notice and pay a royalty."
There is no such compulsory license for books.
But rights to books can be bought (or, if they're in the public domain, they don't need to be). So I don't see what the legal obstacle is here.
The difference is that songwriters don't have a choice, they *must* license the song. Whereas book authors can choose not to sell the rights at all, and usually do so choose.
Intellectual property has many variations depending on the product. For example you can make the same exact copy of an Nike shirt, you just may not call it Nike. Trademark is very protected, the product itself is not in clothing. Naturally with medicine not so.
I'm wondering whether the answer will end up being about IP.
But, for example, take works in the public domain. Say, Frankenstein. Unless I'm very much mistaken I don't think it really happens that an author like Stephen King publishes "Frankenstein," which is his reworking of the original. If King were to rework the Frankenstein story he would call it something else.
Right? If so, doesn't this show it's not about the IP (at least in a technical sense)?
You have obviously not heard of "Dean Koontz's Frankenstein":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Koontz's_Frankenstein
Not a series I have read myself, but there have been lots of crossovers between popular characters when they go out of copyright (or before, if you get permission from rights holders/hired by publishers to do tie-in novels), Sherlock Holmes and Dracula (separately and together) are very popular instances of this.
One reason why I keep using the caveat "virtually unheard of" and such is that I assume things like this do exist in some corners. But I think you'll agree it's vanishingly rare and even the Koontz example has "The series is supposedly a modern updating and sequel of the mythology of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, although the similarities are mainly superficial." So it seems clear that this is a marginal case, so the question remains why it's such a marginal phenomenon, even if not completely non-existent.
If I wanted to read "War and Peace" I'd go look for the original by Tolstoy. If I picked up "War and Peace" (then in small letters "by Annie Personne") and read it and then talked to people about this great book where the talking horses of the French army describe dashing through the snow outside Moscow, I'd be less than gruntled if people told me I was an idiot and that's not what the book is about. In that case, you bet I'd blame Ms. Personne for leading me astray!
If I know what "War and Peace" is about, then I want to read the original. I might like to read a take where it's all told from the viewpoint of an old servant on Pierre's estate, but that's not original War and Peace and calling it something else to distinguish it from the original helps me out.
You've mentioned remakes of movies, but a remake of "Psycho" where it turns out Norman's mom is alive and well and the serial killer is in fact kindly Mr. Jones the mailman and not Norman is not a remake of "Psycho", it's a totally different movie. There was a remake of "Psycho" in 1998 which wasn't well-received, because, well, why remake something that already works just fine? If you put in new touches of your own, then you may as well make it an original work and call it a different name.
But I mean the same could be said about movie remakes. "If I wanted 'Planet of the Apes' I would have watched the original." And I do think many people consider that movie significantly worse than the original (it is very very different in plot, characters and more), but it was still made and still made a lot of money. I didn't mention this example as much because remakes in franchises might make more sense for movies, but still, the "I'd just listen to the original" doesn't seem to stop movie remakes, not to mention song remakes (how many people really prefer any Yesterday remake to the original?).
I think a lot of modern works are riffs on older classics, like Clueless being a modernized version of Emma.
Right, but they didn't call it "Emma," right?
I feel like that sounds obvious, but when Bradley Cooper made "A Star Is Born," which has had 3 previous iterations, he didn't call it something else. He called it A Star Is Born. It seems to me like that doesn't happen in literature.
>As far as I know there is no significant equivalent for books. Pretty much nobody, as far as I can tell, takes the basic idea of "Dune" and changes a bunch of things around and publishes their own "Dune"
Depending on where you place the limite on "changes a bunch of things", It does happens quite a bit, althrough usually with a change in the title.
50 shades of grey supposedly started off as a Twilight fanfiction.
It's hard to not see some similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot (or, in fact, Sherlock Holmes and a lot of other books).
Fantasy is rife with barely creative works. The wheel of times starts off as very derivative of Tolkien.
If you extend to comics, graphic novels and mangas, it happens a lot: superheroes keep being rebooted with new artists and twists, there's a recent trend in French BD that involves handing over IPs to a bunch of people to let them experiment with it (Notably Spirou, the marsupilami and Lucky Luke). I remember being a bit puzzled, 20 years ago, when I was exploring the new territory of mangas and found multiple versions of things like Evangelion or Escaflown, often divided by genre (shojo, shonen, etc). Same broad line story, different styles and approaches.
And apparently the Heated Rivalry series started at MCU fanfic, which...ok.
Fan fiction is the interesting "exception that proves the rule."
People absolutely do write up their versions of novels of all kinds. But it stays "fan fiction" and doesn't get published as its own work. Meyer wrote "50 shades of grey," not a work titled "Twilight." I think typically the people writing fan fiction don't have the money to purchase the rights to the original, but it's not clear to me why that couldn't happen.
So in literature, fan fiction doesn't become its own work, and what does become its own work is generally marketed as a new work (even if "inspired by...") rather than something with the same title. In movies and songs, it's the same title. I'm just curious why.
You've got those authors backward; Meyer wrote Twilight, E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._L._James
>50 shades of grey supposedly started off as a Twilight fanfiction.
But when we are not talking about romantic, kind vampires but sadistic businessmen, that is basically a very new book.
You are right about fantasy, everybody got elves, orcs, dragons, wizards...
The novel hasn’t developed as much, as an art form, as the song. Probably because they take longer to produce than songs.
Maybe someday there will be “Frankenstein”s and “Dune”s the way there are sonnets and haikus in poetry.
But movies often take as long to produce as typical books, and there are movie remakes. So I don't think it's about level of effort.
I have thought about this. There are some books that are rehashes of old ones - especially Shakespeare, Greek legends, or other mythologies. But generally you don't see Stephen King giving his version of Harry Potter (well, aside from the numerous fan fictions out there...).
Honestly, I think the main reason is that a song can be learned, rewritten, and performed within a few weeks, whereas writing a book is an effort of several months.
But movies often take a year or more, so I don't think it's about length of time.
There are aspects here where the comparison with movies is more puzzling and aspects where the comparison with songs is more puzzling. Taken together I'm quite puzzled!
That's true, but movies are usually a team effort, especially when they are remakes. Indie low-budget movies seem to be more original.
Now I'm looking into it, and I think remakes are more common with books than commonly assumed. There's a lot listed here, for example: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/booker-nominated-books-that-reimagine-classic-works-and-ancient
> obviously the case
Is it obviously the case? People write their own versions of out-of-copyright classics all the time. It's a harder sell to get in-copyright stuff published, but AO3 is absolutely heaving.
But why is it harder to get published, to the extent that it's almost unheard of to have a book come out that is titled the same as a previous work it is reworking?
Tim Burton made a movie called Alice in Wonderland. Radically different from the original book or the previous Disney movie. But people were interested in Burton's take on the classic.
But it doesn't happen, as far as I know, that e.g. Brandon Sanderson comes out and says "Today I'm publishing my remake of 'Don Quixote,' a book I've always loved. I've turned Sancho Panza into a female character and added a love story there, and sprinkled in some fantasy elements..." etc. Unless I'm missing something, this just about doesn't exist in the book realm. Right?
"But it doesn't happen, as far as I know, that e.g. Brandon Sanderson comes out and says 'Today I'm publishing my remake of 'Don Quixote,' a book I've always loved. I've turned Sancho Panza into a female character and added a love story there, and sprinkled in some fantasy elements...' etc."
In an attempt to clarify my understanding of your claim ...
So Don Quixote *has* been re-imagined in book form. By Salman Rushdie in his book Quichotte (note the ch instead of x and the extra t ...).
I see you question as hopefully one of:
(a) Why didn't Rushdie just title the book "Don Quixote"?
(b) Why is this sort of re-imagining sooo uncommon for books?
I'm assuming you mean (b) and just had the bad fortune to pick an example that *had* been re-imagined?
I mostly mean (a). I think "the same name" is proxying for something more fundamental, but the variable I'm looking at is "works of art that take the same basic idea and use the same name."
"Inspired by"s are very common in literature and I didn't at all mean to imply that those are rare.
You do get retellings of famous stories, but they tend to be folk tales, myths, or historical classics so there's no copyright issue. Wide Sargasso Sea takes massive liberties but is to some extent an alternative version of Jane Eyre. Ulysses is kind of the Odyssey. The Hours retells Mrs Dalloway.
You also get reworkings of stories (Don Quixote is a good example as it's a heavy influence on the Pickwick Papers and is itself a parody of chivalric romances). And of course there's the idea (from Borges?) that there are really only 4 different stories.
I think what you're right that you don't tend to get is straightforward cover versions or remakes. I think that's possibly some combination of:
- Financial reasons why it wouldn't be viable
- There simply isn't a tradition of it, so it would be viewed with suspicion
- Technological changes mean films or music seems outdated in a way that doesn't apply so much to books (so there's less market for a new version).
So I think the financial reasons are probably where the answers lie, because tradition wouldn't last long if the economics worked out, and there are covers of songs and movies that come out soon enough after the original that it isn't about technology.
I just don't know what those financial reasons are :)
Again, you have been fortunate enough (it seems) to avoid tie-in versions for movies. The best/worst example of this was a novelisation of the Dracula movie by Francis Ford Coppola, written by the late Fred Saberhagen (God bless him, a name known to many readers of SF/Fantasy on the more pulpy side). It was called "Bram Stoker's Dracula".
This, remember, is a novel of the movie of the original novel. Not a reprint of the original novel, a new novel. Fred had previous with Dracula, having written his own take on it and developed it into a series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Saberhagen_bibliography
There have been authorised sequels to "Gone With The Wind" and rewrites/new takes on that book, for one.
So these books are out there. You may not have encountered them on the shelves of Proper Literature (except for "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys which is the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad wife in the attic of "Jane Eyre"), but go slumming in the genre sections and they're out there.
I almost feel like this is an exception that proves the rule (or rather that reinforce the question).
Yes there are novelizations of movies, in some cases these are movies that were once books. But then why is it so rare that it happens without a movie in the middle?
Again, there are "sequels" or "inspired by"s or "spinoffs" like Wicked, but not "Gone With the Wind, by Barbara Kingsolver" or whatnot. Yet there is, for example, Footloose (2011), a remake of Footloose (1984).
Cool, I didn't know anyone knew about Saberhagen anymore. I grew up on his work.
You find yourself in the head office of Political Party. On the Big Desk is a Heuristic That Almost Always Works. It's a rock that says SUBSIDIZE DEMAND, NOT SUPPLY. In the dustbin of history is another rock that says SUBSIDIZE SUPPLY, NOT DEMAND.
Do you swap the rocks?
(Been wanting to get this into a Matt Yglesias mailbag but I can never get up early enough on Sunday mornings anymore...that darn first-mover advantage!)
How do these rocks work, exactly ? Are they magic ? To actually implement a policy that has a real effect (on supply, or demand, or anything else), is it enough to simply move the rocks ?
If I understood Scott's old Heuristics post, it's a metaphor for generally useful guidelines that happen to have deeply unfortunate right-tail risks. You can often get away with running things via rocks - it's often better to have some consistent lodestar rather than acting randomly - but it's easy to fall into complacency and forget about those nat 1s. Map, territory, etc. So in this case it's a top-level goal with every policy choice, to always preferentially move equilibria via subsidizing the demand (or supply) side. First-time homebuyer credits vs zoning reform; insurance subsidies vs increasing residency slots; ratepayer rebates vs building new utilities...
I'm not sure if the *actual* effect ends up mattering more than the *perceived* effect though. So much of politics is about telling a compelling story, no matter the actual results. And just having a rock doesn't make one's will manifest either, that'd be too easy. I suppose one could consider it a coordination mechanism: hardly magic, but a useful reduction of effort tax versus constantly infighting in opposing directions.
Right, I understood the metaphor, but my point was that the metaphor abstracts away too many details. Even if you are absolutely convinced that e.g. increasing supply (via subsidy) is better than increasing demand, that doesn't matter unless you can actually increase supply (or demand) via your policies to any measurable extent. It's not as simple as just moving a few rocks around.
So yes, I do agree with you that politics is often about telling a compelling story more than it is about results.
What's the difference? You still end up with the seller getting the same amount, the buyer paying the same amount, and you giving them the same amount. You're just changing who does the paperwork.
I bin them both and add a new one that says SUBSIDIZE WHOEVER IS MORE CAPABLE OF DEALING WITH THE BUREAUCRACY.
Is there a sharpie in the office? Can I surreptitiously replace the old rock with a new one that says "MAKE THE PIE HIGHER"?
...is that actually a phrase? I've heard of pies getting smaller or bigger, but never moving along the y-axis. I think a growth-oriented rock is certainly more attractive than its inverse (a bestseller at the Sunshine Movement gift shop), but of course that covers an even bigger abstraction than simply the direction of causality towards said growth. Almost everyone has a pie-enbiggening rock; some are more efficacious than others. Laffer had an interesting theoretical rock, I wonder whatever happened to it...
Add a little least to the pie dough...
(George W Bush famously butchered the phrase "grow the pie", saying "make the pie higher")
Ah. Rarely is the question asked: *is* our pie growing higher? Fission accomplished.
Bin both rocks.
Unfortunately there must always be a <s>Lich King</s> rock, at least until the return of good governance that no longer needs to rely on lossy heuristics instead of addressing cases on the merits. Or that's what it feels like, anyways. There are other possible non-economic rocks, to be sure, but they have tradeoffs along other axes.
Subsidizing demand still seems like the more reliable choice, but I've heard an argument that it doesn't work so well in housing, where increased money to buy houses gets captured by landlords, while increased money for building houses means more houses for people to live in.
Can I take that second rock down to the city planning department?
Yea it depends on which specific market you're feeling a need to intervene in.
Regarding housing the current agenda -- of which I personally am a fan and am glad to see it playing out where I live -- is more like, "Demand is well ahead of supply so let's quit making it artificially hard for supply to rise to meet the demand."
Sure I think subsidizing demand is almost always bad, while subsidizing supply is sometimes OK. AIUI both are distortions on the 'natural' economics of our system.
Keynes was in favour of subsidizing demand. Basically the issue is not demand as such, but the demand for "labour goods", that is, for goods or services that low-skilled people can provide. That can fall low and then we have unemployment.
Unfortunately mises.org does not understand it at all. They think demand is just demand, no matter for what, and do not care about unemployment.
Keynes lived through the dysfunctional monetary policy of the interwar gold standard.
I'm not sure what "labor goods" are, can you give me an example?
McD burger flipping. If society gets richer, people move towards craft burgers. Or if society gets richer, the McD type of work gets automated.
I'm sorry are you subsidizing the 'goods', the fast food, or the low wage workers? I'm against subsidizing fast food. And the low wage workers are covered by minimum wage laws, no? You want to raise minimum wages higher? I'm not sure I like that idea.
So I'm angry about the Iran war, I think we've been dragged into a conflict that doesn't concern us and is going to get lots of US soldiers killed on behalf of Israel. I was rooting for Israel out of sheer family connection until recently (my mother is of Ashkenazi descent) but I can't approve of them getting Americans killed. Looks like all the conspiracy theories were true after all, and I admit it's only my personal attachment that kept me from accepting it.
Anyway, since I know there's a lot of not-terribly-religious Jewish people on here I'm wondering if anyone else has suddenly decided they hate their heritage and what they're doing about it or to practice chillul hashem. (I was always kind of conflicted because my heritage kept me from joining the alt-right and giving my support to the major antifeminists, but it didn't really bother me that much.) I was going to settle for eating bacon cheeseburgers on Saturdays (with shrimp on Yom Kippur) but was thinking about buying copies of the Torah and Talmud and burning them in bacon grease. I also have an extra excuse not to have kids--let the cursed bloodlline die. (Though at my age it wasn't really going to happen anyway unless I lost a LOT of weight and got a toupee.)
Anyone else?
EDIT: OK, so this is stupid. I'm probably going to find some way to protest the war (does that even help anymore?) and long-term, going to consider a conversion to some form of Christianity (for other reasons). Also, pay out of pocket for frequent colonoscopies so I can eat more bacon. Thanks for talking me down.
I’m non-observant but I’ll say that Jewishness and Zionism are obviously distinct: there are Satmar Hasidim and Christian Zionists, after all. Going against the God you believe in seems unwise.
That is a point. But I don't believe in God.
My ancestry is a matter of bad luck that prevents me from wholeheartedly joining the manosphere or far right. I don't believe in a covenant with the Jews, the resurrection of Jesus, or God's message through Muhammad. Doesn't bother me if people do and I'm not going to spend a lot of time arguing with them as religion makes them happy. But I am very angry at the things people who share my common ancestors have done.
OK, I was reading too much into your use of chillul Hashem.
I think it is unlikely that "lots" of American soldiers will die because A: American missile defenses are for the most part better than Iranian missiles, and B: Trump is not going to get involved in a land war with Asia. It's much easier to just drop enough bombs, declare victory, and go home saying "Mission Accomplished - the enemy has been obliterated, and the regime will surely fall Real Soon Now!" That's been the SOP for American presidents more often than not in the post-WWII era, and it's well aligned with Trump's personality and political interests. (Narrator Voice: The regime does not fall, and the oppression continues).
I do think it was probably not a good decision for the United States to get involved in this war, even if it is one we can "win" with few casualties. But that's 100% on Donald J. Trump; Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't have orbital mind control lasers he can used to bend US presidents to his will.
It makes a great deal of sense for Israel to want for their to be a war where the Iranian regime's power projection abilities are greatly diminished. Iran was a key player in October 7, and they followed that up with possibly the largest single missile attack in human history launched against Israel with no provocation or justification. Twice. I don't fault Bibi for asking, only Trump for saying "yes".
And Jews who aren't Israelis, have good reason to want Israel to remain prosperous and secure, because Jews who are not Israelis face the constant risk of being suddenly and violently unwelcome in whatever country they currently happen to live in. But again, this isn't on them, it's on Donald J. Trump.
Everybody else, except the Iraniann regime, has been behaving reasonably and sensibly.
I think the concept of "heritage" as identity is *very* problematic. As an individual, I have no obligation to support or oppose people who may be distantly related to me by genes. Heritage identity can be fun, but it seems like 95% imaginative and like 80% insane.
I think any group label, descriptive or otherwise, as identity is very problematic. Religion, sports team, occupation, preferred style of thinking, pastime, political beliefs, consumer choices, etc.--any of these used as part of one's identity always causes the same stupid destructive BS.
I never understood this reasoning. Why is your anger directed at Jews? Does the US not have agency? Did Israel somehow force them to do these things? It seems your anger should be directed more at the US for making poor decisions. Anyhow, if you're angry with Jews and want a cathartic release, feel free to heap verbal abuse at me. I am at your service.
I'm angry at the Israeli government and their neocon pawns. Some guy on the corner named Goldberg, nah.
> my heritage kept me from joining the alt-right
Do you mean the groups you tried to join excluded you, or you assumed they would from what you've heard about them from their enemies?
I think he means his heritage prevents him from thinking it’s a good answer
It might help to know that this isn't about Israel nearly so much as it is about setting up great power competition with China? I'd argue Israel is doing a lot more for the US here than vice versa (certainly many more Israelis are dying in a war for American interests - especially since the original cause of Iran's hostility to Israel in the first place is perceiving it as an American ally).
(it's no coincidence that this came right after Venezuela; the admin's strategy is to cut off Chinese aligned oil production to weaken them)
".... unless I lost a LOT of weight and got a toupee"
Doing that may be a more effective protest than any of the other ideas you mentioned.
I'm not sure why everyone conflates being Jewish with Israel. Embrace your Jewish heritage if you wish. But feel free to condemn Israel. Part of my family heritage is German, but my grandfather and father both fought against the Germans in WWI and WWII. And I hold nothing against the German people that I know.
Fair enough. Yeah, the anti-German stuff in the media always made me wince; I get it, but everyone involved in the Holocaust is dead.
So during the holocaust in Germany: Some Germans actively supported it. That is morally abhorrent to me. (But also it was a different time.) Some Germans were neutral and went along to get along. And some actively worked against it. I have no idea how I would respond given a similar circumstance, and until I'm tested ethically in the same way I don't feel like I can pass any judgement on them.
Heritage feels like a bad way to make decisions. How would you decide who to support if you had one set of Persian grandparents and one set of Jewish grandparents?
Afaict Iranian expats are the single group most enthusiastically supportive of this war, so... Probably would be for it?
The ones I know are mostly worried for their families. Nobody likes having their relatives bombed, no matter how you justify it. Possibly those in America have more distance and thus have less at stake.
Fair.
Is that helps, according to the Washington Post the Saudis are just as responsible for pushing for the current war as Israel is.
From my angle, Iraq War was surely a Saudi push. Iraq was more dangerous to them than to Israel.
I could definitely see that. It's hard to know what else to think when you see Israel getting involved in the fighting, though. Why is this our fight?
When a theocratic regime that's brutal enough to kill ten-thousand of its own protesters has nuclear ambitions, that's everyone's fight. The United States is simply in a better position to do something about it than other nations.
Please put some effort into distinguishing between protest against the poilitics of the state of Israel and meaningless antisemitic performances.
Burning Torahs in bacon grease is not going to "show them". It's, in fact, going to play in favor of the pro-Israeli narrative that any dissaproval of their politics is antisemitic.
That's a point. I hadn't thought of that.
I'm not thinking about actions against synagogues or anything, odds are a randomly chosen temple in the USA probably opposes the war anyway. I just want out of this tribe.
It would more sense to burn “the Art of the Deal” and don a 2016-era pussy hat. This war is clearly Trump’s baby.
Seems to be for Israel's benefit though.
Trump’s extreme aggression, worldwide, can’t exclusively be ascribed to militant philosemitism. This is a man who seems to have a grudge against almost everything and everyone, and is as Jewish himself as a ham and prawn sandwich.
I think he just likes bombing people.
I mean, I don't disagree with any of that, I just am of the opinion that a lot of those weird conspiracy theories I was reading in the corners of the internet are actually true (well, not the ones about the moon landing and I don't think anyone's adrenal glands were harvested), Israel really has been manipulating us to their benefit, and I want no part of it.
Israel has not brainwashed America into becoming a ruthless power-seeking hegemon. You guys could have elected Rand Paul. But you didn’t. You liked the bloodthirsty blowhard instead.
This sounds quite childish tbh. Surely there are better ways of protesting than quietly violating Kashrut.
"I'll show those damned Israelis who's boss--I'm gonna eat a bacon cheeseburger! That'll teach 'em."
I speculate about why birds never built civilisations despite having brains as good as ours, pound for pound — and what the answer might tell us about what intelligence is actually for. https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/what-birds-know-that-we-dont
Curious what this community makes of the evolutionary black hole argument.
Crows are pretty smart but I think it would take a lot of unlikely events to evolve big flightless crows that smelt bronze.
This would be a good priority for EA once they get that AI alignment thing solved.
Adding 'flightless crow metallurgy' to the EA priority list right after AI alignment. Seems equally tractable. I like that!
You might find this interesting:
https://sites.google.com/site/worldofserina/home
TL:DR: A speculative biology project imagining an artificial ecosystem where canaries are the dominant species.
Thanks Brendan - this is wonderful. Serina is almost a POC for my essay's argument.
Strand canaries in an environment full of unsolved problems, remove the advantages that flight provided on Earth, and over time they evolve toward complexity and eventually intelligence. The capability was always there. It was the pressure that was missing. This is what I took away so far.
The whole thesis, played out over 300 million simulated years. I'll be losing a few hours to this.
Beware fictional evidence! I don't know of anything in Serina that is outright impossible (though it's been a while since I've read it), but ultimately things in it happen because they pleased the Author, not because they are more or less likely to occur in reality.
BTW, if you're developing an interest in speculative biology in general, and don't mind losing a few days instead, I have a list of examples you might find interesting: https://concavenator.neocities.org/specbio
Concavenator — both points well taken. You're right that Serina is an illustration, not evidence; and I should have been more careful with the POC framing.
Loved your wallet analogy on the pitfalls of the sample-size-of-one problem.
And the list of alternative factors in the other thread — viviparity, chewing, heavy heads — is useful because each one points to a different pressure that flight also happens to relieve or bypass. I don't think it's any single factor; the essay's claim is that flight removed a cluster of pressures simultaneously, which is why it was such a powerful attractor. But you're right that one instance makes this suggestive, not conclusive.
Thx for the spec-bio examples — I suspect I'll lose more than a few days.
It was a fun read, but you're indulging in teleonomy (a.k.a. Darwinian teleology), which presupposes an apparent purpose that's actually produced by blind selection. Considering that Aves have been around for much longer than primates, and have successfully adapted to every environment that the Earth has to offer, I'd say they've been quite successful. The evolutionary black hole argument is teleonomic thinking, because (a) it presupposes that intelligence beyond a certain level has an adaptive value, (b) and that civilization is somehow the ultimate evolutionary endgame.
However, you might be interested in this. This Japanese researcher performed some elegant experiments to prove that birds communicate with specific calls that have meaning (i.e., words). The claim about them using grammar is interesting, but the grammar they display isn't nearly as complex as human grammar. I don't think a linguist would classify it a grammar (but then again, linguists disagree about the definition of the term word).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmys2abx4co
You're right that 'black hole' and 'trap' are loaded metaphors — they imply a direction evolution should have taken, and evolution doesn't work that way. I'll own that as a rhetorical choice rather than a biological claim. The underlying observation is simpler and, I think, survives the teleological charge: flight reduced selection pressure for the particular cascade — unsolved survival problems, social complexity, cumulative culture — that happened to produce civilisation in one lineage. No purpose, no endgame, no claim that birds failed. Just path dependency.
And thank you for the Suzuki link — his work on Japanese tits is fascinating and actually sharpens the puzzle. Birds have referential calls, something approaching syntax, sophisticated social cognition. The raw material is there. Which makes the question more interesting, not less: what is it about one lineage's circumstances that pushed those capabilities further, and another's that didn't need to?
Pound for pound bird's brains are actually much better then humans. Smaller, more densly packed neurons and some other architectural optimizations allow them to pack a lot of intelligence into a pretty small, light weight package. It's likely that if a human sized brain had some of the same mass/density/energy optimizations a bird's does humans would be much smarter (birds also have better vision and much more efficient lungs then mammals). Evolution's got work with what it's got.
Of course quantity has a quality all of it's own, a grey parrot's brain (one of the smartest non-human animals up there with the smarter primates) is about the size of a walnut vs. a human's roughly cantaloupe sized brain. And the niches that smarter birds tend to occupy make giving up flight for larger brains and more intelligence a poor evolutionary trade off.
But would a bird's brain architecture scale up as well as the primate architecture? The fact that an ostrich's brain is only 26 grams suggests to me that the answer might be no.
Another thing to consider - cooling. Neuron density can only scale so much before the brain can no longer maintain homeostasis.
Yea, "pound for pound" is doing a whooolllle lot of work here. Way beyond any sensible meaning honestly.
tg56 — you're right about the density advantage, and the essay nods to this. Corvid and parrot brains pack remarkable processing power into very small packages. That's what makes the puzzle interesting: the cognitive raw material is there.
Seta raises a fascinating point about scaling limits though — density and heat dissipation may be a genuine ceiling. There might be a physical reason bird-architecture brains can't just scale up, which means the primate path of bigger-but-less-efficient brains wasn't just different, it was the only route to where we ended up.
Evolution working with what it's got, as tg56 says.
I think the problem is, that a little intelligence, as much as it enhances your ability to find and use food sources is helpful. Amy more intelligence has more drawbacks (e.g. larger energy consumption of the brain, etc.) than advantages. Only if your intelligence is human-like , so you can completely form your surroundings to your advantage, intelligence on the level of being able to do higher mathematics or physics, begins to make sense.
If you e.g. take (non-human) apes, they are the most intelligent primates, but i would not say they are the most evolutionary successful primates. Even the early humans nearly died out at some point of their development.
> If you e.g. take (non-human) apes, they are the most intelligent primates, but i would not say they are the most evolutionary successful primates.
To be fair, non-human apes today are rather a pitiful shadow of what they used to be. In the Miocene (20-5 million years ago), there were 20-odd genera of apes spread everywhere in the Old World from Spain to China, and those are only the ones we found in the fossil record (in which apes tend to be underrepresented because tropical rainforests are terrible for fossilization). See e.g. Fig. 5 in https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05210-5.pdf, and compare the density of names in the middle of the graph with that on the top; or see this map -> https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.abb4363/asset/d58cfef0-5142-4fee-bb7a-01751db6ffef/assets/graphic/372_abb4363_f1.jpeg and compare the range of extinct Miocene apes (red stars) with that of living ones (colored areas).
That's a terrific observation — intelligence might have a valley in the middle where the costs outweigh the benefits. A little helps you find food. Enough to build civilisation lets you reshape your environment entirely. But the range in between is just an expensive brain that doesn't yet pay for itself. Your point about apes is well taken too — great apes are cognitively impressive and ecologically marginal. Early humans nearly went extinct.
Intelligence was a terrible bet right up until the moment it wasn't. Which makes me wonder how narrow that window was, and how easily our lineage could have ended up as another evolutionary curiosity.
I mean, until 0.0002%-of-Earth's-age ago, mammals had never built civilizations, either. (Or, to be fairer, 0.005% of the time birds and mammals have been around.) Civilization exists on a minuscule time scale compared to evolution. And mammals, with our muscular snout and four sets of digits, generally have better starting options to handle tools.
The timescale point is well taken — civilisation is a blip.
But that's precisely what makes it interesting. Why did that blip happen in one lineage and not the other, given 150 million years of opportunity?
Your answer — muscular snout, four sets of digits — is part of it. Hands free to manipulate matter. But corvids manipulate tools with their beaks quite brilliantly.
This essay's argument is that the difference isn't dexterity alone — it's that flight removed the pressure to develop the social complexity that eventually tipped into culture.
Mammals kept needing to solve problems collectively. Birds mostly didn't have to.
> Why did that blip happen in one lineage and not the other, given 150 million years of opportunity?
It's just that since civilization-years are so few compared to evolution-years, I'm not sure one instance of civilization building is all that instructive. If two paths diverge in a wood, and you find a lost wallet on one, that doesn't tell you so much about whether one path is inherently ore likely to contain wallets than the other.
There are many differences between birds and mammals that one could build up as significant -- an advantage in tool-handling as I mentioned (and tossed out with no explanation of its relevance, sorry about that); viviparity deepening mother-offspring relation and encouraging vertical cultural transmission; the ability to chew food allowing to extract more energy from food; a slower metabolism allowing a longer lifespan to learn stuff; the ability to grow a heavy head without worrying about being too heavy to fly; and so on. Yes, a reduced need in cooperation might very well be part of it; I'm just not sure that the single example of humans is strong evidence for it.
I very much appreciate this kind of analysis, all the same! Thanks for sharing it, and I hope to see more.
Other species of mammals have "kept needing" things but didn't evolve civilization. South American monkeys never even evolved to be like Old World apes!
Weeell, capuchin monkeys have come quite far with stone tools, producing flakes that look much like those made by early humans...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature20112.pdf
https://arqueologiaeprehistoria.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/10-108020555563-2016-1273000.pdf
Maybe we could genetically manipulate some corvids to give them slightly better vocal chords and two extra hand-like appendages with opposable thumbs, then observe what they're gonna do with them.
We talk a lot about artificial intelligence now, but natural intelligence is no less intriguing.
I'd watch that experiment. Though knowing corvids, they'd probably use the hands to pick locks & the vocal cords to criticise the researchers.
Your closing point is what got me to write this — we're pouring billions into artificial intelligence while barely understanding the natural kind. I've got a follow-up piece on exactly that. Stay tuned.
I don't think the thing stopping birds from criticizing researchers is their vocal cords. There are birds that can mimic human speech very well, but they don't use it to do that.
It’s an interesting idea but I can easily imagine an alternate universe where a hyper intelligent corvid is writing about how monkeys fell into the “climbing trees and eating fruit” evolutionary trap.
TBH a lot of primates ended up in that evolutionary trap.
Humans and pre-human hominids started developing intelligence because they left the tree canopy and started moving around on the surface, including away from any cover. Which is a much more risky terrain full of predators.
Ha — fair challenge! But I think the asymmetry holds. Climbing trees & eating fruit left primates with plenty of unsolved survival problems — predators, seasons, scarcity — which is exactly the pressure that drove tool use, social complexity, and eventually culture.
Flight is different imo because it solved so many problems simultaneously — escape, foraging range, migration, thermal regulation — that it removed the pressure to innovate further. The trap isn't adaptation itself, it's the completeness of the solution. Your hypothetical corvid would struggle to make the case that primates had it too easy
As I pointed out in another comment, South American monkeys have the conditions you say give rise to those things... but they never evolved in the same direction as apes.
Flight may have solved a lot of problems, but it created a new constraint, namely weight minimization. That puts more stringent limits on brain size (as I think someone else mentioned above).
I can’t quite bring myself to agree. If flight was as useful as you describe birds would never evolve to give up flight. But many do: ostriches, emus, kiwis, dodos, etc. It’s a useful evolutionary trade-off not an absolute advantage.
You're right that some birds gave up flight — but look at where. Islands with no predators (dodos, kiwis), or continents where sheer size replaced flight as a defence (ostriches, emus).
They didn't trade flight for culture. They traded one elegant survival solution for another. None of them needed to innovate their way out of trouble either. If anything, flightless birds prove the point twice — even when birds gave up flight, they found another way to avoid the cognitive pressure that pushed primates toward complexity.
Most species don't evolve culture. Birds are hardly unique there.
Some birds are highly intelligent, many are not. There are other animals with similar levels of intelligence, and high intelligence isn't a quality that birds in general share and only occasionally opt out of. I don't think it's warranted to treat birds as having some special opportunity to be intelligent that other clades lack, and ask why they failed to take it, if you're not also going to ask why every other clades also failed to develop civilization, except one genus, once.
With the hype around Claude Code/Codex's reported RSI, there have been various OpenClaw offshoots hooked up to be able to post on accounts and purchase things with crypto, and 'improving' in that they have goals that they can change, but it's "only" modifying the harnesses at the moment. The limitations of these tools (and of course knowing which of these are legit or have flaws, etc.) are why we cannot really call LLM's AGI yet, but it would be nice to have some sort of benchmark that actually lists the power and capabilities these currently have?
(For example when you ask Claude to search the web and list a report, or do a tedious task in english language in your filesystem and it does, that's kind of a "feel the AGI", but you cannot just start a business and do marketing and all of that stuff yet, but soon??)
Some commenters online are criticising western expats for moving to the UAE or Qatar without acknowledging the geopolitical risk of moving to a potential war-zone. Do you think this is a valid criticism? Should we also criticise people for moving to other geopolitical fault lines such as Taiwan, South Korea, Finland and the Baltic states, Hong Kong and Singapore? Or literal fault-lines for that matter such as Yellowstone or California? Where does the accountability stop?
Presumably the same criticism could be leveled at anyone who lives in the northern hemisphere? Eg if WWIII ever kicks off all of us in the CONUS will also be potentially in the line of fire. Fully general criticism to level at anyone who hasn’t moved to New Zealand?
Also, how big is the risk actually? How many civilians have been killed in the UAE or Qatar? More or less that die in traffic accidents in a typical week?
TL, DR: it’s a stupid criticism and should be ignored.
I'm not sure this is a coherent question? If you move somewhere you inherently accept the risks of living there, just like if you move to Norway you accept the risk of being cold. It's often a reasonable tradeoff and is up to the person making the choice.
This isn’t like being cold, after all you can just buy a jacket
This is like walking down downtown Oslo and seeing Russian paratroopers suddenly rain from the sky. Is that a risk you should have been mitigating against?
How big is the risk actually? How many western expats in Dubai have been killed by Iranian missiles? More or less than die of car accidents in a typical week?
I suspect it’s like plane crashes - statistically and actuarially a fairly negligible risk, but highly newsworthy. And like commercial plane crashes, it’s not something a clear thinking person should actually worry much about.
This is mostly exaggerated - in fact given their lower crime rates, you're still less likely to die of violence in the Gulf states than in the US even with this. Most people wouldn't consider either as their top concern in deciding whether to live in Dubai or Boston, though.
My impression is that crime/disorder is pretty high on the list of reasons for why people don't want to live in the US and that safety is high up on the list of reasons for why people do want to live in Dubai.
I think you might be exaggerating the risk here.
There's geopolitical risk practically everywhere, but when you move to one of the worst human rights violators on the planet and get trapped in a war zone, my only thought is "lol owned".
And this goes double with how poorly they treat foreign workers coming from places that aren't as well off as the west.
(This isn't entirely principled of me, as I'm sympathetic to people who come to America and get screwed over. Still, if you have other options, if you're a wealthy western professional, and pick *Dubai* of all the places to move to, I can't help but think that something is very wrong with your morality.)
What is it you dislike about Dubai in particular?
The kafala system (which I alluded to) and the UAE's actions in Sudan. I've seen the footage of El Fasher, it's horrific.
The valid criticism is that they move there to escape taxes or other laws but expect to be helped out when a crisis hits.
The obvious rejoinder is that tax exiles are simply following the incentives created by our current tax regime. It shouldn’t be a value judgment.
It is a weird fallacy to claim that just because someone follows incentives, that their behavior shouldn't be judged.
This is characteristic of a society that assumes we can't have moral standards. It reminds of this quotation about Epstein's friends from the New York Times a few days ago
"But as Christopher Kutz, a Berkeley law professor who has written extensively on complicity, pointed out, there was no “forgiveness” driving any of this social energy, just a willingness to “overlook” Mr. Epstein’s dangerous transgressions.
“You could imagine someone saying, ‘Well, he did his time in ’09 and I just went to some fancy dinners; it’s not my job as a civilian to punish him.’ But shame is the sanction we have,” Professor Kutz said."
In the case of Dubai and some of these other places, the other criticism is that people who move there are supporting societies that run on modern slavery.
> Epstein's dangerous transgressions.
This is retconned nonsense. He solicited prostitutes. Big Fucking Deal.
Are gulf-based guest workers treated any worse than undocumented farm workers in the United States?
Is it a special kind of evil that their employment status is recognised by the central government?
>Are gulf-based guest workers treated any worse than undocumented farm workers in the United States?
I haven't spoken to anyone who's lived through the former, but undocumented workers in the United States usually want to stay in the country, and resist efforts to get them to leave, whereas guest workers in a number of gulf states regularly have their passports seized so they can't leave, and are kept functionally enslaved.
Looks like they are treated similar. But I do think it is a special kind of evil that this stuff is government approved. I don't expect any government to prevent all evil, but I definitely expect them to sanction none. And for what it's worth, I wouldn't move to the US either.
What do you mean by valid? As in, do you agree with it? Do you think it's something a reasonable person could believe?
I don’t know if I have an opinion. Geopolitical risk is not something I’d considered before when thinking about personal choices. Previously most geopolitically ‘risky’ places such as Afghanistan or Sudan were poverty stricken and crime infested so have never been magnets for western expats.
Criticizing? I mean, this just seems like a tradeoff people make, based on different weighings of both the probability of a war involving their new home and the costs relative to the benefits. Move to New Zealand, your chances of being caught up in a war are way lower but you are also way more isolated and travel anywhere but Australia is a big pain; move to Mexico and maybe war isn't much of a concern but crime is a big problem. Etc.
No, it doesn't seem valid to me. What risks I acknowledge is none of their business, and neither is what risks I take. And taking a risk by moving to a place is no different from taking a risk by staying in a place.
You can say that about all forms of risk though. You can say that about whether or not to drink hydroxychloroquine. I think discussing risk in general is a valid topic of discussion.
Perhaps it is because I belong to the group "western expats", but to me, discussing risk and criticizing a group for supposedly not acknowledging that risk are quite different things. Also, I think that most people who have moved to Qatar or the UAE would have considered those countries to be at low risk of war, so the whole thing just seems weird to me. I'd consider the tens of millions of people who choose to live within artillery range of North Korea to be taking a greater risk, but presumably they too have good reasons for continuously making that choice and taking that risk.
A lot of the comments I’ve seen online have been very rude and judgmental. That’s part of why I wanted to interrogate their argument.
Your point about South Korea is very apt, and if you’re a South Korean or an Emirati the question is moot. You can’t pick your homeland.
But that vast rootless digital nomad class should be able to weigh these trade-offs and come to some kind of conclusion.
I don't understand the thrust of your question. What exactly is the criticism against those influencers? The personal risk they're taking on, or that they encourage others to move there? Please link a representative piece of criticism you're talking about.
The general sentiment has not been as structured as that. Mostly critical comments posted on social media. I thought it was an interesting question as it meets at the intersection of risk vs opportunity. It could easily have been a decision I could have made. But is it even reasonable to call it ‘risk’ if it’s contingent on a sitting US President making a series of unprecedented and dangerous decisions that no one else could have predicted he would make?
Clarification on last week's open thread:
It's hard to do articles right without people profiling objecting. I thought Sam Kriss did a fine job. I mentioned some clarifications I wanted to make, but I thought they were mostly minor. Going through in order:
> "The piece says rationalists believe “that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch”. The Harper’s fact-checker asked me if this was true and I emphatically said it wasn’t, so I’m not sure what’s going on here."
Sam is within his rights to describe rationalism that way, and I'm within my rights to disagree. I do think it was funny/weird that the Harpers fact-checker asked me if it was a fair description, I said no, and they included it anyway. But I assume their workflow is that the fact-checker asks people anything they could possibly disagree with, collects the answers, and then if it's a matter of opinion the writer gets to decide whether or not to keep it in.
> "The article says that “When there weren’t enough crackers to go with the cheese spread, [Scott] fetched some, murmuring to himself, “I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”” As written, this makes me sound like a crazy person; I don’t remember this incident but, given the description, I’m almost sure I was saying it to my two year old child, which would have been helpful context in reassuring readers about my mental state."
Sam says that as far as he could tell, I was not saying this to a child. Other people have tried to reassure me that this is perhaps a normal thing to say even when there is no child nearby. I claim you're all gaslighting me, it's not normal, and there's no way I was saying this without a child being involved, but I have only common sense to rely on, and in any case Sam seems to honestly believe there wasn't.
> "The article assessed that AI was hitting a wall at the time of writing (September 2025). I explained some of the difficulties with AI agents, but I’m worried that as written it might suggest to readers think that I agreed with its assessment. I did not."
I don't think the article deliberately twisted my words to make it sound like I believed this. It just expressed its own opinion on slowing AI progress, then segued into me talking about some of the challenges agents were encountering, in a way that might have accidentally made it sound like I was agreeing. I'm very sensitive to this because I think a lot of my credibility / ability to affect the future comes from being seen making good / not-embarrassingly-bad AI predictions, and I wanted to head off accusations that I had gotten this one wrong.
As far as the cracker, I can’t tell you the amount of times since having a baby that I talk to peers in my office as if they were children and I don’t realize it until it’s pointed out. Anytime someone does anything wrong, I now say they are being silly, even in cases where they are violating federal law, because that’s the strongest word I use to express condemnation at home. You get into parent mode and it’s hard to get out.
I had not thought to read Kriss's piece until you posted this, so thought I'd give it a go. Got to this line:
"Rationalists, like termites, live in eusocial mounds."
...just wow. From here, the piece reads like he's dehumanizing rationalists to these robotic semi-human things. It's so bizarre and troubling. It makes me sad and afraid that somebody can be so welcomed by a friendly community, then flip back and portray it's people as sub-human termites. I stopped reading after a few more paragraphs when it seemed clear to me that he took such a hostile view of "rationalists." I don't know why you're not more dismissive of this piece in general Scott (not because of any argument he makes, but simply because of the dehumanizing tone).
My impression when I was still reading Kriss' pieces was that he is unquestionably an extremely skilled writer, but the only emotion he seems interested in projecting is contempt. "Look how far beneath me (and possibly you, reader) this person/group/thing is". It might not be a coincidence that the most famous character he created is a quasi-Calvinist theologian whose main trait is despising everything in the universe. The fact that he's openly willing to make up stuff to reinforce such contempt is not, in my own eyes, an improvement.
I found that line hilarious. I've read a bit of Sam Kriss' writing, so maybe I'm just calibrated for his sharper-than-average tongue. Also, I had this in mind while reading it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/23/friendship-is-countersignaling/
It's an interesting read, but I fail to see how that applies here. Countersignaling is done between friends or entities with high trust. The whole point is that you understand each other so much that you're able to apply countersignals without them affecting each other's views of the situation.
You can't countersignal about a friend with a 3rd party. Say you have a friend Tom who is the nicest person in the world and you love him. If you're talking to me about Tom and say "Tom is SUCH a prick. Can't stand him." My response is "Oh I'm sorry to hear that. I think you deserve better friends." I can not implicitly know you're joking because I am not you or Tom! I don't understand you or your relationship.
Likewise, Kriss can not countersignal about rationalists to complete strangers on the internet like "oh man, they are SUCH termites. Gross people really." His readers who are unfamiliar with Scott and rationalism (which is the whole point of writing about something for an audience) are more liable to believe "oh, those rationalists are weird. I should dislike them."
Who you countersignal *to* is immaterial if they understand well enough your attitudes toward the person you're countersignaling *about*--whether these are the same person or different persons. In the context of the whole article (which provides some understanding of Kriss' attitudes toward Scott), I think many readers will find the eusocial mounds comment more likely to be a friendly dig than something cruel. I certainly did, but I had additional background (and this background does establish the fundamental friendliness between them). Clearly this case is different from Kriss' relationship with Roy in the article.
I may be more chill about this than average. I expect my own reaction to someone comparing me to an insect would be to assume it's as likely to be friendly as it is to be contemptuous, and I'd take my cue from the context.
On the other hand, I know in many cultures, comparing people to various species of animals is very insulting (especially dogs and pigs), so this might seem like a more serious insult and therefore less likely to be friendly.
Also I'm a white gentile, so I'm not compared to an infestation nearly as often as a Jew is. Scott and Sam are both Jewish so who knows how that affects things.
I think Sam's writing leans especially heavily on asking the reader to parse the context rather than laying everything out. That's generally not the Rationalist way.
Countersignaling, folks. The mark of true sarcasm.
(Learning a new word, trying it out, just ignore me)
Similar, but not the same (from how I understand it).
Sarcasm is implicit in the tone. "Suuuuuure you're not hungry Bob." A bystander can identify the sarcasm purely by the tone, even without knowing Bob or the speaker.
Countersignaling relies on a high degree of trust / implicit knowledge between the groups. "I fucking hate you Bob." Absent of context, this looks like legitimate malice. But if Bob and the speaker know each other well, they may recognize otherwise.
I could be wrong. But that was how I was reading this.
Tone doesn't always give away the sarcasm. The problem with irony is that usually it's more fun if it's more subtle. Some people really love dry humour where little is telegraphed and the tone is completely straight. Sam Kriss pushes this envelope as far as anyone, which can provoke or please depending.
I think a person could reasonably find that description endearing. (I personally would not have objected to it on those kinds of grounds, though I do think it somewhat overstates the prevalence of communal living.)
>“I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”
Count me as abnormal too I guess. I say things like that fairly often and people smile or chuckle which is the reaction I'm hoping for.
Taking for granted (which is a leap) that’s what you said, it sounds like a perfectly normal way that people with kids start to sound: you get used to explaining mundane things, and sometimes one might even do that when there’s nobody who needs an explanation.
> Sam says that as far as he could tell, I was not saying this to a child.
I have the impression that writers/editors sometimes expand contractions when transcribing speech. If you actually said “I'll open the crackers so you'll have crackers and be happy”, this is still... charmingly unusual, but I think it's more plausibly something you may have said.
It was a good article, albeit written in that Krissian ironic voice that can make it hard to tell a shout-out from a drive-by. Your comments on it were also entirely reasonable.
Honestly I think you're being way too nice to him (but that's part of what people like about you). I have no idea about the crackers thing, but he gets a lot of things about rationalists weirdly wrong. Claiming that we “discovered” in the mid-aughts that AI was the biggest threat is pretty ahistorical. He claims that rationalists want to construct all knowledge from scratch using Bayes’ Theorem, which as you pointed out is wildly inaccurate. He claims that SSC's blog comments is where AI founders came from, oddly completely leaving out Eliezer (who was very influential in this way). I feel like it shouldn't be too much to expect journalists to not say incorrect things so carelessly.
From the Harper's piece, Kriss mentions "[...] a piece of fiction I’d written that I’d failed to properly label as fiction." That, plus the followup essay where he mixed facts and fiction some more and seemed to indicate he didn't really distinguish them, really colors everything I read by him. "Getting something wrong" is not really applicable when the author has disavowed any commitment to getting something "right".
I assume that the Harper's editors would not allow him to get away with the kind of stuff in this piece that he does on his Substack.
I don't disagree. I haven't been impressed by anything I've read by him and will probably try to just avoid his stuff in the future.
The crackers comment came across as charming, not deranged. My closest friends say stuff like that and the world is a better place because of it. I hope your friends would not think less of you for occasionally sounding like you had spent time around small children.
> it's not normal
From my own observation of parents with small children, I can confirm it is completely normal and frequent to default to talking-to-small-child mode even during the few moments each day one is not actively being pestered by small child.
Parent of small children, can confirm
Sam Kriss edited the part about crackers, now it says the following:
"Then Scott said, “Let there be crackers”; and there was crackers. And Scott saw the cracker box, that it was good[for making acolytes happy]; and Scott divided the crackers from the cookies..."
That's beautiful. Loving the allusion.
Thanks!
It's my little contribution to the future religious wars regarding the unknowable nature of Scott's relation to crackers.
"The conflict began when a group of Crackerjacks defaced a shrine belonging to the rival Cookie Cutter faction..."
Now that is good.
Is this the latest trend? Ask an LLM to summarize the article (which in case of an Open Thread is mostly just saying "this is an open thread") and append a link to your website?
I guess, if it can be automatically created, it should also be possible to automatically detect and remove.