What is the absolutely minimal dose of exercise at 47 if you are no longer caring about looks, just trying to be minimally healthy? I am experimentind on day 1 set of push-ups with bars, B one set of bodyweight squats (currently 30), day C I set of chest expander, which trains those upper back muscles that help with posture. I might consider a weighted vest at some point.
Further info: not too fat, because low appetite, but feeling "creaky" and also weak. Looks, well when you are dating 45 years old women, just nice clothes are enough.
> What is the absolutely minimal dose of exercise at 47 if you are no longer caring about looks, just trying to be minimally healthy?
If you define "healthy" by "a 20% drop in all cause mortality over no exercise" it's around 90 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous intensity exercise.
You want to do both cardio and resistance, especially as a man, because sarcopenia / muscle loss increases with age. Your current body weight exercises are a good idea, broadly you want to hit most muscle groups twice a week.
The most bang for your cardio buck is HIIT, because 12 minutes worth of it is worth 30-60 minutes of moderate exercise.
Moderate exercise examples:
Walking or hiking
Most bicycling regular people do
Mowing your lawn
Intense exercise examples:
HIIT
Swimming continuous or sprint laps
Stairs
Running at <10 min / mile pace
Happy to discuss more if you have any questions, I have several posts on this, including a review of Dan Lieberman's Exercised, which goes into the science and why's and physiology behind the recommendations.
Would you prefer if he just lied? At least appreciate the silver lining that he is the most transparent president in the history of this country. He did not get in power by lying about his intents and ambitions. People want this.
In this specific case, even simply shutting up and resisting the urge to vomit every last thought that crosses your mind into the closest social media app would have been preferable.
Because _a little_ dishonesty, especially by way of omission, are important to maintain the social fabric. Just ask yourself, what would happen to your social circle if you went around and told everyone your bad opinions of them, even if they were 100% true?
Also, people with a large following, such as Trump, arguably have a higher responsiblity to this principle than the average person. How many micromorts is it when Trump says vile stuff like this?
Not transparent, because utterly random. "We won the Iran war. Also NATO should help." Meanwhile: Iran burns down an Israeli owned weapons factory in Czechia. Is that a win?
No. I’d prefer that he did not have such a cartoonishly shallow inner life that the only reaction blooming in there is “Mueller bad dead Mueller good ha ha.”
Also, while he may be transparent about his intents and ambitions, he is not about his accomplishments, even the ones in office. He does lying brags.
On the contrary, Donald "My retribution will be success" Trump has an exceptionally deep capacity for forgiveness. Just look at how he's treated everyone who attacked him, some quite viciously, during the 2016 campaign. It looks like he's able to get over it quickly and essentially completely, a paragon of the virtue of lightness. Like Goku.
I think the difference here is that he never did anything to Mueller, so he (reasonably) sees it as an unprovoked attack, and an unfair _asymmetric_ fight, using the institutions of the state to try to crush him, and THAT he does not forgive without justice.
But yes, I would also preach that he forgive even such enemies once they are dead.
With the recent article by Reuters deanonymizing the artist Banksy, it looks like the vehement opposition to having the subjects of their articles retain anonymity isn't specific to the New York Times writing about Scott.
Don't believe anything you see in the press. Anonymous people are pretty damn good at hiring others to be them (this is a well known practice in the creative world, if you're not J. D. Salinger and don't like talking with fans or signing books). Alam Smithee included, there's a lot of anonymous people in the art/writing world.
Is Trump trying to become a dictator, or just trying to create a France-style executive-dominant government?
In every country, one of the three branches of government is traditionally dominant. So in the UK it is the legislative, in France it is the executive, and in the US it is the judiciary.
E.g. remember how abortion and same-sex marriage was decided not by laws as in most countries, but the SCOTUS, also the SCOTUS created much of the regulatory state (I mean the basis for it, Chevron Defence, overturned 2 years ago) and so on. "Constitutional law" in the US is a misnomer, it is more like "whatever the SCOTUS decided", for example the Constution does not even state that the SCOTUS should be safeguarding it, they just assumed this power at some point. I could go on, but clearly in the US the judiciary branch was dominant.
Now an executive-dominant government structure can sometimes look dictatorial, Charles de Gaulle was sometimes called a dictator, a lot of power can be invested in one man, but of course it was not really so. But in France the executive is really powerful, everybody hates Macron now for nearly bankrupting the country, most of the legislative wants him gone, but he can just govern unimpeded anyway. No lame ducks in an executive-dominant government. No Liz Truss treatment.
Another interesting parallel is militarized, powerful police (gendarmerie) under central, not local control.
Article 49.3 this is a famous tool in the French Constitution that allows the executive to pass a law without a vote in the National Assembly, unless the opposition can successfully pass a motion of no confidence. Imagine if Trump tried that! Everybody would call dictator.
Executive decrees in France have the force of law, again, imagine that...
France has a parliamentary system where the government can be toppled by a vote of no confidence, so Macron can be kicked out theoretically any time. Liz Truss also had a lot of power until she scared the crap out of the markets and got the Julius Caesar treatment from her fellow Tories.
You can't really compare that to the US style Presidential system, which already makes the President very powerful and makes it nearly impossible to kick him out before the end of the term.
Please, this is trump, who tried to pocket veto the patriot act. He's not the authoritarian jackass Biden was (threatening "Americans with guns" with tanks and airplanes? Really?)
Biden also got so openly defiant of the SCOTUS that he dragged the SCOTUS back in session (and off vacation) to thwap his administration's paws for being absolute rats.
Wikipedia and its sources tells me Trump vetoed the extension of the Patriot Act because he didn't get MORE surveillance powers, so I'm not sure how you interpret this as being against authoritarianism.
I would not trust wikipedia to tell me if Trump's hair was blond or not. I also would not trust Trump to tell me why he was considering vetoing the extension of the Patriot act.
That is the problem. Unless you want to invest way more effort into finding truth than your generally being powerless to act on truth status justifies, you should trust Wikipedia.
Even assuming your claims are true, Trump didn't merely *threaten* to use the military, he literally did deploy the National Guard into American cities, against the wishes of their states' governors. The courts slapped him down in most states, but there are *still* National Guard on the streets of Washington DC today. For no real reason besides Trump wanted to look "tough on crime."
But go on, tell me more about how authoritarian Biden was. Refresh my memory - which president was it who sent a masked police force into cities he didn't like so they could harass Hispanic-looking people in the street and demand to see their papers?
Biden absolutely sent the national guard into Old San Juan to deal with a rather mythical covid19 emergency. you can consider your memory REFRESHED. Oh, yeah, and the people they were harassing were BLACKS not Hispanics, but that's tiddlywinks, ain't it just?
Scuttlebutt says National Guard in DC was because there were private armies on the streets. Considering the assassinations that occurred in DC under Biden, I'm not exactly surprised at this being the case.
Trump wasn't the guy who asked the National Guard to "cover me" and then the National Guard used upwards of 200 bullets to lay down... "covering fire." Let's just say there's a reason we don't use the Nasty Girls for police action (the police, it should be clear, wanted the Nat'l Guard to shoot, only if the police were getting shot at.)
The new DHS Secretary nominee Markwayne Mullin's confirmation hearing conflict with Sen. Rand Paul is pretty amusing. When Paul was attacked by his neighbor in 2017 (pretty violently, causing six broken ribs and a damaged lung), Mullin tweeted that he completely understood why his neighbor did it. When asked about it at the hearing, he refused to apologize for it, said it wasn't in the heat of the moment, and only clarified that he didn't _justify_ it, just said he completely understood it.
ROFL. I've not heard anyone say "Mr. Senator, you're an arse." in louder English.
(McCain was known for blowing his top at other Senators, and Hillary was a master diplomat, I haven't really heard much breeze about Paul one way or the other).
I still don't understand the typo in the amendment. The text according to the ACX post is
> After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
If I understand the Blaze right, there are three versions to consider:
1. A version that was approved by the senate but not passed by congress.
2. A version passed by congress. This version was produced from (1) by replacing "less" in the second-to-last line with "more", supposedly to correct an error.
3. A version distributed to states. This version was mistakenly produced from (1) by replacing the final "less" with "more".
But... what was the error in (1) that (2) fixed? Did (1) read
> ...until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
and then (2) read
> ...until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be more than two hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
? That seems like (2) is even more wrong than (3)!
Most of the relevant links in the article are dead, but the one to the Senate-approved version works. That confirms that (1) says "less, less". But... the "less" in the second-to-last line *is* the last "less", which means (2) and (3) should just be the same?
It sounds like The Blaze thinks the problem was that someone was supposed to make one change but actually made a different change. But it seems to me that the problem is that the original version was fine, and then congress changed it, and I have no idea why they did that.
What if low birthrates are mostly caused by the feeling of crowdedness? Imagine a low-birthrate but no immigration society in the future, like Japan 2060. Everybody has inherited 2-3 apartments, alongside with some cash, real estate is nearly free, maybe a repopulate-the-place instinct will kick in?
I mean why did British people with on the avg 6 kids moved to the prairie in the US and then had 12? They wanted to fill the place up, it felt empty, and there was there is room for their kids, for houses, for farmland, a living space.
I am 47, I already have an inheritance which I try not to squander, and my kid is 12. My life expentancy based on genetics and lifestyle is 15-20 years now. My daughter will have a big-ass house at about 30 and then future inheritance expected from her mothers side. She will not really need to work much, I think. A pretty safe financial background. I think she will feel like birthing the house full.
I mean "empowering careers" is basically a lie from a feminism captured by capitalism, women do not actually feel empowered doing the same jobs men hate too.
Seems to me that the relevant constraints are: space, time, money, lifestyle. Different people probably have fewer/no kids for different reasons.
Space, time, money = great, your daughter will have this handled: big house, not needing a job.
Lifestyle = potential risk. For starters, your daughter is the only child, so she may perceive a family with 1 child as "normal". (You could mitigate the risk by discouraging boyfriends from small families.) It would be good to tell her that sometimes having 2 children is easier than having 1, because two kids can play with each other, one child always wants your attention.
The there is a risk that she might decide to be e.g. a strong female CEO, and that having kids would interfere with her career. I think that it would be a bad choice, but the problem is that if you say that, it might sound hypocritical. (Are there families with 3+ kids around you that you could start spending more time with?)
> I mean "empowering careers" is basically a lie from a feminism captured by capitalism, women do not actually feel empowered doing the same jobs men hate too.
I agree, but the brainwashing is strong. When we planned the first child with my wife, she wanted us to buy a home as close to her work as possible, so that she could return to work as quickly as possible (like, taking the baby with her to the office). After staying at home for a few months she realized that she actually does not miss her work that much, and was okay to stay at home for 6 years, and now she works part-time. But she needed the experience of having a longer break from the job to realize that she actually does not like it as much as she thought she did.
Even with men it is kinda similar. When you go to work every day, it feels "normal", but if you happen to take a three-weeks vacation, returning to the work afterwards may be emotionally very painful; it feels like going to prison for life, because now you know (viscerally, not just intellectually) all the things you will miss compared to the counterfactual early retirement.
It is also a reason why people who were unemployed for a few months have a greater problem getting a job compared to people who lost their jobs only a few weeks ago. It's not just the loss of job skills, or a suspicious gap in CV. It is also the knowledge that there is a life outside of work, and that it's much better (except for the part where you lack the money).
thank you! OK for me the later part is not true, because I am really not good at doing things with my life now that I am single. when I was unemployed I was just in bed all day. but yes for people with partners and children at home it is so much better to be with them
People are just reacting to economic incentives. Capital is winning the class war over labor, and birth rates adjust accordingly. If the economy was soaking up every pair of hands, we wouldn't have the birth rate issues, and maybe we wouldn't have the anti-immigration issues.
I'd want to hope for a counterweight instinct to kick in, but what I'm hearing is kids are economically a drain now, and they weren't then in a farm-type environment. And people taken as a whole generally allow their reproduction strategy to follow some formula of:
economic viability * metaphysical belief * personal convenience * the zeitgeist * so many other assumptions that this equation is as bogus as it looks.
But I think the factors, despite the high bogosity, are largely right.
I was kvetching about all the contradictory info I'm getting from open-source news feeds about the current Gulf conflict. It turns out that it's not due to any ambiguity in the raw data — it's because commentators are putting their own spin on it. Well, Bilawal "Mr. Google Maps" Sidhu whipped together this conflict monitor over the weekend. We can see Chinese, Russian, and US satellites monitoring the conflict. How flights and shipping divert in real time. Zones of RF jamming lighting up in real-time, and military aircraft turning off their transponders before they go out to strike their targets. And the before-and-afters of the resulting strikes from the public satellite feeds. Pretty frickin' cool — even though people are actually dying down there.
I've heard similar things from other libs, wistfully looking back on the good old days of pre-Trump Christian conservatism, though I'm not sure how much of it is just concern trolling. They can only do this because the fiscally conservative right kept the Christian Right in line and prevented them from enacting their agenda. Had they done so it would have been a catastrophe. Much of the long-term reputation of an ideology comes down to whether it got a country to use as a canvas for its ideas. The social conservatives didn't, so we associate them with weird neighbor Ned Flanders instead of some government tyrant.
"U.S. Considers Withholding H.I.V. Aid Unless Zambia Expands Minerals Access"
This just seems like sound policy, and if "Christian moralism" is what kept previous administrations from doing obvious things for the benefit of the US and its citizens, the sooner it is abandoned, the better.
Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."
Shankar Sivarajan: "It's just sound policy. Taking control of Cloud City is obviously beneficial for the Empire and its citizens, and if morality previously kept Darth Vader from coming in and making demands at lightsaber-point, the sooner it is abandoned, the better."
As usual, there are multiple perspectives to take here.
First, morality doesn't mean that you are open to any kind of blackmail or exploitation, and unable to negotiate or get into conflict. There needs to be a specific debate on what is good or bad, whether the benefits outweigh the costs, etc. The conclusion is not automatic.
Second... yeah. That reminds me of some people saying "if there is no God, then there is no morality" and similar stuff. Apparently for *some* people it is true. Some people simply don't have an internal moral compass, so you either give them a textbook they can follow, or you cannot expect any nice behavior from them. They don't give a fuck about someone else's suffering, but they still care about getting in Heaven. And now that conservatives have adopted vice signaling, even Christian morality is considered "too woke" for many of them.
Humans have a *revealed preference* for getting old and dying.
Sure, some of them will argue the opposite on the internet. They will swear that they would prefer to stay young and live forever, or at least a few centuries more until they get bored.
But when you observe them, all of them get older and die. Hypocrites!
(Revealed preferences are science. Are you going to disagree with science?)
> (Revealed preferences are science. Are you going to disagree with science?)
Amen!
Don't forget the massive, ~80% incidence revealed preference for divorce and / or net miserable or dead bedroom relationships.
Oh, and there's one for everyone hating their careers - according to the Gallup "State of the Workplace" report, 70-85% of people report feeling disengaged, and something like 20-33% report being actively miserable. Obviously, everyone enjoys hating their jobs, by revealed preference!
People work 40 hour weeks because that is their "revealed preference"... not e.g. because it is virtually impossible for most people to get a part-time job.
I mean, unless you are special (which by definition most people are not), if you ask for a part-time job at the interview, the company will simply say "next". Logically, this shows that you prefer a 40 hour week to unemployment, but it *doesn't* show that you prefer a 40 hour week to a 30 hour week, which is the argument that people are trying to make when they talk about revealed preferences.
We have a lot more 20-30 hour/week jobs than we used to. In the 1990s, I'd have said, "yeah, if you don't flip burgers (a kid's job), you have to work fulltime." Now, there's a lot of jobs that can accomodate that.
Oh, my. Epstein's accountant just testified before Congress that Epstein paid off the woman who accused Trump of raping her when she was 13 years old. The implication is that Epstein did this as a favor to Trump.
From an NBC article about the accountant, Richard Kahn:
"Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., described Kahn as a “fixer” and said Epstein’s crimes were deeply intertwined with his own finances. He said Kahn’s name appeared on shell companies used to move money, including payments tied to tuition and victims. He did not provide details of the allegations."
"Did not provide details of the allegations" is one way to put it. If you've ever wondered what it's like to live through a McCarthyist moral panic, this is it.
And in case anyone is thinking of responding with "Trump and the GOP deserve this for indulging in conspiracy theories," Kahn has no connection to either.
Covid19 was a mccarthyist moral panic too. Folks with GBS were booted out of bands because they "wouldn't get vaccinated" despite it being medically contraindicated.
But what’s the import, really? Does not seem relevant to the question of whether Trump really raped the kid. And we already knew Trump and Epstein were buddies. Aren’t you irritated by the tone of the blog you link? . “IT’S A SMOKING CANNON!!!!!”
I guess I'm numb to being irritated by sensational headlines. Our national discourse is dominated by right-wing media that exaggerates the Left's shortcomings and minimizes the Right's batshit craziness. And I admit taking pleasure in Gavin Newsom's Trump-baiting. :-)
I've got nothing against baiting Trump! That link just seemed like lame midwit baiting. Also like an unusually hysterical example of the Trump's-gonna-pay revenge porn that's always going on in the liberal press, stuff about how much he's enriched himself to date, how some judge in Idaho blocked some decree of his, about somebody's suing him . And there's always this breathless quivery foreplay quality, *we're really gonna bust him this time!*. And people on the left get all streamed up. But they never never never get to cum.
Oh sorry - I meant if you felt that indexing on a sensational-sounding term like "smoking cannon" is a worthwhile habit for dismissing reviewing a piece of evidence presented.
Evidence as presented, which one can undertake to verify:
"Democratic Congressman Suhas Subramanyam walked out of that closed-door deposition and went straight to X. His notes don’t mince words: “A Trump accuser has received $ from the survivor fund managed by Kahn.”When reporters pressed him for detail, Subramanyam didn’t back down. “Another person who was an accuser of Donald Trump was given a settlement by Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. We did confirm that,” he said. “We wanted to confirm that certain accusers had received settlements, and he confirmed that.” "
>Oh sorry - I meant if you felt that indexing on a sensational-sounding term like "smoking cannon" is a worthwhile habit for dismissing reviewing a piece of evidence presented.
No, of course that's not a reason to discount the message. That was just an afterthought. I don't have any reason to discount the facts (tho have not checked them). My point was that all this, if true, was not of much import. Does not seem relevant to the crucial question of whether Trump actually raped the kid. A man in public life with woman claiming he raped her at 13 is going to want to hush her up quick whether her claim is true or not. And we already knew Trump and Epstein were buddies, so Epstein's doing Trump this favor also seems not to give any info one way or the other about whether Trump raped the girl.
The claim is that Epstein’s estate paid compensation to a woman who accused Epstein and Trump of sexual abuse. The payment came from a “survivor fund.”
The payment was not hush money, so it can’t be explained as a favor to Trump. But the payment can be explained without any reference to Trump whatsoever. The obvious explanation for the payment is that the Epstein estate concluded that it was more likely that not that Epstein had sexually abused the woman.
Firefly, more than even Buffy, depended on the unique writing talent of Joss Whedon, and none of the people I've seen try to imitate him over the years have come anywhere close. Fillion et al have a feel for their own characters, but I'm pretty sure that won't be enough.
I suppose it's possible that they're secretly bringing Whedon back as a writer under a pseudonym; there's precedent for that sort of thing with blacklisted writers, but probably not.
Wasn't optimistic about the proposed "Buffy" reboot, not optimistic about this one.
That's a good point. I remember Buffy seemed to suffer quite a bit in the last couple seasons when Whedon was busy with Angel and Firefly and Marti Noxton was showrunner. They weren't terrible, but they were noticeably weaker than the earlier seasons.
I've never understood the general consensus that the earlier seasons of Buffy are better. The coming-of-age metaphors are forced, the moral dilemmas are nonsensical, and the worldbuilding is wildly inconsistent.
Probably I'm just the wrong demographic. If I were old enough to have watched the show when it aired, I might be better able to appreciate it.
Yeah, there was a noticeable drop after the third season, when Joss made "Angel" his primary focus. Still individually good episodes, most notably the Whedon-scripted "Hush", but much of the storytelling was an inferior retread of the same material, plus some basically meh new stuff, and it usually didn't have the magic of S1-3. I didn't return after the S5 finale, figuring Buffy's death was the right way for the series to properly end, but from what I've heard it was another stepwise drop from S4-5. Not terrible, but I had better things to do with my time.
Yes, I saw the musical episode, and I'd regard it as another notably good exception to the declining trend, but for the fact that it was too closely tied to storylines I wasn't interested in.
But I still have the first three seasons on DVD, and those discs don't entirely gather dust.
Sometimes shows also just run out of good ideas. Many of the best episodes of Buffy use supernatural things as metaphors for aspects of growing up.
But there's only so many good ideas of this sort, and then there's a bunch of bad ones ("what if magic beer turned you into a caveman?") and then you're a bit stuck.
"Your ex-boyfriend who was nice until he had sex with you and then turned horrible" makes a much better villain than "disembodied source of all evil".
Sometimes, but in the case of "Buffy" the transition from a high school to a college setting should have given them a whole new set of ideas. College is very different than high school, and I was really looking forward to the real-life problems of young college students being metaphorically reflected in battles against occult evils in the way that Whedon had so adroitly done for the first three seasons,
Instead, we got maybe five episodes into S4 before the writers mostly forgot that any of the characters were even going to college, except for that one class where the professor was secretly running a military demon-hunting operation.
If "the show" ran out of ideas, it's not because there were no more ideas, it's because the writers didn't bother to look for them in the bucket labeled "here's a bunch of good ideas".
Well yeah, they could not really handle the college stuff well; on the other hand, they were able to transform the setup from "high-school" to "adult life".
Also, it is hard to judge the musical episode without context; yes, it is quite fun, but also deeply tragic, which hits you with its full strength only if you watched the previous episodes too, with Buffy's post-revival depression and all.
(S5 is a pretty fine ending for the show, though.)
I wouldn't be surprised if he were working as a "script doctor", i.e. an uncredited writer who does an editing pass on a mostly-finished script prior to production. It's something Whedon has quite a bit of in the past, and it seems like something that would play to his strengths.
BTW do you happen to know the Buffy comics? Are they worth reading? (I am a big fan of the TV show, and enjoyed Angel as well. And, of course, I don't expect Sandman quality...)
If they're going to do it, it makes sense to do it animated. The actors are more than two decades older than when the original show was produced, which would be immersion-breaking for a live-action sequel. I suppose you could recast, but a huge part of why the original worked as well as it did was the acting and the chemistry between the actors. And also, AFAIK, the sequel series is happening in large part because the actors want to do it.
I think that's part of it. As I understand it, the project is largely driven by the actors from the show wanting to do it,, with Fillion and Tudyk being the main ones driving it. I'm guessing Tudyk would prefer to set it during a time frame when his character is still alive.
Also, there's the question of story. Setting it in the unspecified time gap between the series and the movie allows them to try to do something that's pretty much more of the same of the original series. Setting it 20 years later means having to deal with the medium-to-long term consequences of the events of the movie, which could be a good story but would necessarily be a very different kind of story and would be a harder sell from a marketing perspective.
Is there any precedent for this kind of thing being good?
It's two decades late, the brains behind the original is not involved, and there's no stakes to any of the storytelling because it happens prior to the movie so nothing meaningful can actually happen.
I didn’t much like the Big Plot that explains where Reavers come from and what River Tam’s deal was, I just loved the picaresque adventures of the crew in the ‘Verse and will happy eat them up.
Sometimes the 'adventure of the week' is all you really need, especially if the characters are strong and the writing is good.
While a long arc story can be beneficial as a structural framework for a show, often it comes to dominate the entire series - and frequently it's just not interesting enough to sustain viewers engagement.
It's a pattern that happens over and over - a good, entertaining, largely stand-alone episode-based series gradually devolves into a melodrama that pushes the individual episode stories aside, to the major detriment of the whole thing.
Having a new creative team take a shot at a property some decades later can be successful, but in the examples I can think of there's usually more separation than a direct sequel with the same characters and there's often some continuity in creative team.
Star Trek: The Next Generation -- Took place a century after TOS, all-new main characters with only occasional guest appearances by TOS cast members. Gene Roddenberry was involved in the first couple of seasons.
Doctor Who (2005-) -- All-new cast. The Doctor is technically the same character, but regenerations allow for recasting and reinterpretation. I thought I remembered Russell T. Davies being involved in late Classic Doctor Who in some capacity, but I just looked it up and seem to have been mistaken about that.
Battlestar Galactica (2003-9) -- Full reboot, new creative team. Pretty major reinterpretations of characters and concepts. One cast member, Richard Hatch, returned but played a very different role (Apollo in Classic BSG, Tom Zarek in New BSG).
> I thought I remembered Russell T. Davies being involved in late Classic Doctor Who in some capacity, but I just looked it up and seem to have been mistaken about that.
He wasn't involved in the TV show before the 2005 reboot, but he wrote one of the 90s novels (https://tardis.wiki/wiki/Damaged_Goods_(novel)), which IMO could fairly be described as part of the classic era of Doctor Who.
My rule is, no remakes or reboots of a *good* movie or TV series. If it was good, the fans will be comparing it to the original, it's highly unlikely that they'll see yours as *better*, and they generally won't want to keep two different continuities in their head. So mostly you'll just be splitting the fanbase. And if you didn't care about the original fanbase, it was a waste of money to buy the rights.
Battlestar Galactica worked because there were an awful lot of people who remembered the original as a guilty pleasure, knew it was dreck when we were watching it but it was what we had between "Star Wars" and "Empire Strikes Back", and if someone can make something actually *good* with the idea that we wouldn't be embarrassed to watch, great. I'm perfectly happy to never again remember the original, or interact with anyone who thinks the original was some great masterpiece what should never be tampered with, and apparently I'm not the only one.
If the original is good, stick with prequels, sequels, or side stories that can more or less fit with the original continuity, and probably best not to use the original characters unless you can get the original actors at appropriate ages (though recasting younger for a prequel can sometimes work).
I'm mostly on board with that. In my mind, the best use of reboots is when a concept has major unrealized potential. "Good concept, bad execution" is probably the most clear-cut instance of this, and from what I've seen of old BSG (the three opening episodes and one or two random episodes in the middle), it seems to fall squarely in this category.
I'm also open to remakes and reboots on the grounds of shift-of-medium (making it more of an adaptation than a remake), lack of resources to do it right the first time, or severely abbreviated runs. Or the source material is already fractured enough that it can tolerate a reinterpretation without stepping on the original too badly.
For example, I think the Peter Jackson LotR movies were defensible despite the 1978 animated movie being serviceable, since by the early 2000s there was room to do a substantially bigger and better adaptation.
Likewise, I think it's defensible that the 2000s Addams Family movies were a reboot of the 1960s TV series rather than a sequel, prequel, or side story.
There have also been some really good reboots of big-name superhero franchises. For example, for Batman we had the Adam West TV series, the two movies directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton from c. 1990, and the 2000s trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale. But this can be and frequently is overdone: I felt no need to see the more recent remakes with Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson, and from what I gather I haven't missed much.
>and probably best not to use the original characters unless you can get the original actors at appropriate ages (though recasting younger for a prequel can sometimes work).
Agreed. For all their flaws, one of the bright points of the Star Wars prequels was Ewan McGregor's portrayal of Obi-Wan. Recasting a role originally and iconically played by Sir Alec Guinness is a very tall order, but I think McGregor pulled it off. They also got really lucky that Ian McDiarmid was on the younger side, made up to look older, when he played Palpatine in Return of the Jedi and 20 years later was in the right age range to play a younger Palpatine in the prequels.
And speaking of recasting Alec Guinness, I really liked the 2004 remake of The Ladykillers, with Tom Hanks playing Sir Alec's role. That one I think was a case of "unfulfilled potential", as the 1955 original, while generally well-regarded among people who had seen it, was a bit of a deep cut rather than a beloved classic with a passionate fan base.
> Firefly was already falling apart due to lack of backstory, there were so many holes...
Funny how differently people view things. I saw those 'holes' as tantalising opportunities for future stories, as little by little we got to see a bit more of the bigger picture.
Absolutely, 100% a feature, not a bug. Made me hungry for more.
Inconsistencies aren't "tantalizing opportunities" -- they're just logical holes. Firefly is full of refrigerator logic. It was marvelously inconsistent. When you're writing science fiction, you do the economics first -- how much does it cost to go from place to place? Will "what we've done here" count in later places? Is all communication ship-based?
TOS Star Trek went with "it is difficult to go from place to place" and "generally, there's limited FTL transmission" -- as a Western set in space, it works. 60 minutes to solve a problem, in general. (Note that teleporters have their own unique problems, economically speaking. TOS solves this by requiring Big Machines on one end, and a relatively limited teleport range (and by very conveniently not discussing the bank robberies this makes very easy). ).
The A-Team went with a "reputation" and "new problems to solve every week" model -- so they were actually called in, but also on the run from authorities.
There's "seat of your pants" logic, but this isn't it.
In fantasy, you also do the economics first. See Kulthea.
No, it's not rude to quote "noted authorities." I was doing so above, in my criticism of Firefly as having inconsistencies that were causing it to fall apart.
Straczynski was well known for throwing out his plots whenever he'd get into a jam session. "Well have you thought of this?" -- and Straczynski would just tear everything down and make an entirely new plot outline.
(Of course, part of the "speed of plot" is you can toss in problems with the engine to slow down the ship... so that it arrives at the correct dramatic moment.)
Andor is a really good, seriously dark TV series that has nothing to do with Star Wars except that someone somehow made a tie-in movie ten years earlier.
Andor is an outlier, though. It doesn't share the overall feel of the three space fantasy trilogies or their other spin-off TV series; it's basically an original dystopian sci-fi story wearing a Star Wars skin. That's absolutely different from Firefly's attempt to continue a series about a set of specific core characters.
And no, Diego Luna's character is not a core character of the Star Wars universe.
I'm a college student right now and I'm graduating this May. I have a well-paying remote job lined up so I can kind of throw a dart at the board in terms of where to go. My college town is nice with great outdoor access, but I don't think I want to stay here because it's pretty small and the social scene kind of evaporates once you graduate. I want somewhere that's urban with lots of culture+events but also good outdoors access. SF seems like a cool combo of this, but I've never actually been there so I'm kind of ignorant. Going to the ACX/"rationalist scene" stuff would be a plus, but isn't really my main motivation, I just figure this blog is likely to have a lot of Bay Area people here and would be a nice place to ask around.
I am really curious about how it is in terms of social scene/making friends and events/stuff to do. Would love to here y'alls experiences!
I live in the East Bay and I love it. I'm within driving distance of the culture and restaurants of San Francisco. I can take day trips up to wine country. I'm an hour or so away from some of the most scenic coastline in the country. Eight months of sunshine, most of the mellowed by the morning marine layer (which can get a bit gloomy until it burns off). And a four-month rainy season, in which the hills turn brilliant green. Redwoods in the coast hills. Bike trails and hiking trails are all over the place. Yes, suburbia clots thickly around the inner Bay, but it's a short drive to places that are still wild and scenic.
I lived in the South Bay for eight years and wish I'd left sooner.
The central problem was that I don't drive, and the Bay is a giant suburb. I biked a lot, but there wasn't that much worth doing within biking range. Things got much better when I moved to a city with public transit.
As far as the weather: it never actually snows, which is nice, but it gets chilly after dark even in summer, so get used to bringing extra layers. I remember one year I went to the Fourth of July celebration in San Francisco and wore my heaviest winter coat and was still shivering.
I've heard good things about Berkeley if you're a rationalist and into group houses. Haven't tried it though.
Interesting. I love cold rainy weather! The "giant suburb" thing is mostly applicable to the South Bay, right? my understanding was Berkeley/Oakland and stuff are supposed to be more urban, and SF is a big city?
Yeah very much also curious about Seattle! I know people talk about it as being pretty introverted, I'm curious how deep that runs. I actually lived in Bellingham, WA for a bit and found it a little bit too out there for me, but I know Seattle is very much a different place.
"The Bay" is a large and diverse area. If you mean SF...
- Check rents. Even if your remote job is well-paying, it might not be up to handling SF costs. Expect worse housing, food, etc for a given amount of money than you'd get anywhere else.
- SF has beautiful outdoors (especially if you have a car) and many events. Events will be skewed towards those that tech people do, which are (on the whole) less literary and social than East Coast equivalents, more likely to discuss futurism, self-help, science, etc.
- Everyone says that finding friends in SF is hard; theories range from the cost of space (eg you won't be able to afford a living room) to the people being busy and business-focused. The rationalist/ACX/AI communities are great but can be difficult to break into if you're not already socially adept or good friends with someone else in the space.
- You could also go to Berkeley/Oakland (somewhat cheaper than SF but still expensive, less stuff, great nature if you have a car) or San Jose (???, supposedly has a population of 1 million but nobody knows anyone who lives there).
> The rationalist/ACX/AI communities are great but can be difficult to break into if you're not already socially adept or good friends with someone else in the space.
Those places aren't autist friendly? Wow, that's a bit sad.
Thanks Scott! I really appreciate the advice, will definitely keep this in mind!
I wonder if maybe the signal of people saying places are "hard to make friends" is being lost a little these days. Everywhere I have ever lived, people have claimed it is "hard to make friends"; obviously the experience of making friends is very dependent on the individual, but in my opinion some of these places very much were easier to make friends in than others.
Not sure what the easiest way to objectively measure this would be. A quick Claude-session makes me think it seems understudied relative to how much people care about these things.
I think making friends as an adult is highly dependent on finding third places, somewhere that provides a context where you will see the same people over and over without having to schedule a hang. I can definitely believe there is variability in how many third places are available in a given place, and how many people go to them as well. I also believe there can be issues in finding third places one wants to go to for other than social reasons...
For sure. I've made plenty of really close friends in life, but they've all been through college/summer jobs/study abroad etc., the kind of environments where you see the same tight group of people over and over again. I'm not really sure what the best way to accomplish that is once you're out of school. That's why I kind of want to move to a bigger city, I figure there's just more stuff going on and more niche interest groups where you can make friends. The city I live in now is pretty small (~45k people) and for the most part there's just not a critical mass of people to support all but the most general of hobbies.
I wish you success. I live in a city of around 300k people and have much the same issue. I did find a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym that has a good community, but BJJ is like 4th or 5th in my list of interests, have had no luck finding groups for those others.
Hmmm. What do you feel like is the main blocker if not number and density of people? Are people not outgoing enough? are there not enough places for them to meet up?
And I missed this. Iran says it will only close the Strait of Hormuz to the US and its allies. Nice use of the carrot and the stick there. Now, nations have even less reason to respond positively Trump's request/demand that our allies contribute their naval and air assets to the operation.
Per Donny Evans's Developer blog...
> Iran is now explicitly framing the Strait of Hormuz as selectively closed—not to the world, but to the United States, Israel, and any countries that choose to line up with them. Speaking in Tehran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said:
>> “From our perspective it is open. It is only closed to our enemies, to those who carried out unjust aggression against our country and to their allies.”
They say that, but at the same time they are attacking random ships that have nothing to do with the U.S. After all, approximately zero of the ships are from the U.S. or Israel. It's just like how they say they are attacking U.S. bases but in reality they are sending drones into shopping malls and stuff like that. It's just propaganda like the AI videos of Tel Aviv being flatened, right?
It is very hard to even estimate the amount of actual hits. Just to mention the most obvious, Israel has military censorship in this topic. (Don't get me wrong, this is completely understandable, as they are at war for decades now, and why give up info on military targets, or lower the morale. Still, it is also worth keeping in mind when reading the "Iran only hit some camels in the desert, and one shopping mall on purpose" stories.)
"These restrictions have created some absurd situations for journalists. In one case known to +972 Magazine, an Iranian missile hit its target while fragments struck a nearby educational facility. Yet the media was only allowed to report on the latter, without being able to even mention the former or inspect the damage."
I haven't seen any clear accounting of the ships that have been attacked (by type, owner, registry, destination). Do you have one?
What I see is a bunch of conflicting reports put out by various media sites and experts (of whose expertise I'm unsure).
As for US military installations hit by Iranian drones, the description of the damage is vague. Reading the news and social media, I would have no clue as to whether US facilities have been operationally impacted by the attacks. All I have to go by is estimates of how many patriot interceptors were fired. And estimates of how many drones and missiles Iran launched. The ballpark count seems to be ~2000 Shahed drones vs ~800 Patriots. I suspect a lot Shaheds are getting through if this number is correct.
Oil is fungible, so is there maybe an equilibrium where oil from Hormuz goes to non-US countries and the US gets oil from elsewhere, but overall oil prices don't shift that much?
I'm honestly not sure how to think of the economics of that,
The benefits are surely wider than your analysis. Pretty sure it will be good for anyone working in the oil industry and for the general health of the US economy.
But beyond that I don't think I understand enough to comment.
If this goes on long enough that ExxonMobil et al decide that it's worth investing in new production capacity, sure. But I'm pretty sure that right now they're expecting TACO in a few months or so, in which case any new-production investment that wouldn't have been profitable last year, will go back to being unprofitable.
In which case, they'll be paying the same people to run the same facilities producing the same amount of oil as always, but they'll be selling that oil for $100/bbl rather than $80. And what's their motive to share any of that by e.g. paying any of the extra to their workers? Workers who would become accustomed to the "new normal" and consider it a betrayal to have their last raise revoked, even though the price of oil is back to $80 or whatever and the company couldn't afford to pay the higher wages going forward.
They'll just pocket the money. Good for them, not so much for anyone else.
Good question. And I haven't got a complete answer for you. Various news outlets and commentators claim that Iran is deploying smart mines, and there are all sorts of variations. The ones that sit on the bottom of the ocean seem to have an AI component that listens for acoustic signatures of certain types of ships. Others seem to hover close to the surface and can be programmed to explode when ships broadcasting specific AIS signals are detected.
Seems like the smart mine measure/counter-measure space is evolving quickly though.
You could do this with smart mines or acoustic profiling mines - and Iran probably is - but I don't think you need them and you could do this with any mines if you so wished.
I think you could simply declare a mine-free channel through the Strait ("we haven't laid any mines in a 1000 yard wide channel between this Lat/Long and that Lat/Long"), such that the safe channel takes ships through waters you definitively control: perhaps that channel goes really close in to your shoreline and you have a preponderance of FIACs (fast inshore attack craft) or drones or whatever there.
Then, you just have to say "We'll sink any USA-flagged merchant ships that attempt to transit this channel, but it's open to other shipping". (More realistically they would use AIS passage data rather than flag, but it's a similar principle)
The USA could maybe park a few destroyers in that safe channel to provide a defensive umbrella, but destroyers are of very limited use against FIAC swarms. They do have a huge 50+ mile defensive air umbrella, but I imagine splashing drones with defensive missiles is probably very expensive and not guaranteed to always work.
There are no waters that Iran definitively controls, and the shipping channels can't come close enough to the Iranian coast to matter because the water there isn't deep enough. If there's a mine-free channel, the Iranians can't stop anyone from using it except by missiles. drones, or kamikaze speedboats.
And a US destroyer, ideally with an E-3 circling a hundred miles away for situational awareness and a couple of F-18s circling overhead, is a very effective defense against drones, kamikaze speedboats, etc. Of course, the US destroyer fleet is stretched pretty thin, and we don't know how many high-end Chinese antiship missiles Iran has stashed away, so I doubt the USN is eager to park a Burke in the strait any time soon.
Hence Trump asking any of our allies to please step up and do that part, after spending the past year and a half trash-talking (or threatening to invade) basically all of our allies.
“There are no waters that Iran definitively controls, and the shipping channels can't come close enough to the Iranian coast to matter”
This certainly wasn't true when I was deployed to the Gulf! Although that was quite a few years ago and it's conceivable that the Iranian bases that then projected power over parts of the strait have been put out of action now?
“A US destroyer, ideally with an E-3 circling a hundred miles away for situational awareness and a couple of F-18s circling overhead, is a very effective defense against drones, kamikaze speedboats, etc.”
I don't know much about AVWAR (especially drone warfare!) so maybe that's a suitable defence against drones or missiles (bet it’s bloody expensive, though..) but as for the surface threat it's fairly unrealistic to expect a destroyer and a couple of FBAs to protect multiple large, slow-moving merchant ships from a FIAC swarm (Leaving aside how cheap Boghammar FIACs - which are most of the Iranian ORBAT - can be and how much money it costs to keep FBAs in the air..)
“I doubt the USN is eager to park a Burke in the strait any time soon”
Much as I've always been impressed with the defensive capabilities of Arleigh Burkes, I’m forced to agree with you. More likely they'd form-up a convoy of several USA-bound merchantmen in the Gulf, then escort them through in one go whilst the destroyer kept station on the up-threat side of the convoy and enforced a minimum CPA of a couple of miles (to give it a fighting chance to engage inbound FIACs in time). That's how it was done in my day (albeit with Ospreys rather than FBAs... they always looked like they were imminently on the point of plummeting out of the sky…)
Even doing that, though, unless you were very confident the Iranian bases in the theatre had no FIAC capability, I don't think you could be sufficiently confident of stopping every FIAC before it could get within range of any tanker as to make the tactic seem a particularly attractive option.
Also, we've got the threat of smart mines (of various ill-defined types) for which the lack of immediately available mine sweepers is causing ass-burn in the Pentagon.
I think it is not really about the possibility of such a defense, and more like the costs involved. At the moment the advantage of drones is that they are ridiculously cheap, e.g. a lot cheaper than the missiles used to shoot them down.
(And you can bet that we are far from being fully informed about cases when the super-duper defenses do not work.)
Four years ago, people were using ridiculously expensive missiles to shoot down cheap drones. Contrary to popular belief, "military intelligence" is not an oxymoron, and a lot of very smart people have spent the past four years figuring out better ways to approach this task.
And sometimes, it isn't even that hard. If the United States Navy needs to shoot down a Shahed anywhere close to one of its ships, it can just use a proximity-fuzed shell from the 5" deck gun - a technology developed eighty years ago, to defeat threats far more capable than an Iranian drone.
The US military is stretched pretty thin in some parts, for a variety of reasons, and so lots of things that we should be defending, won't be defended at all. But the things we do defend, are defended by means several orders of magnitude improved over "gosh, there's nothing we can do about your $5,000 drone except shoot a million-dollar missile at it".
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Christopher Rufo recently said that “The Right's collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it.” He’s like a drunk who can see how his drinking is ruining his life, yet no matter how many times he vows to go cold turkey, he always succumbs to the inevitable relapse. In this case, it means agreeing with conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who said that “Elon was run out of town because Republicans, and many close to Trump, are in on it, too.”
The real reason, of course, is that Elon decided to accuse Trump of complicity in pedophilia.* Non-autistic people generally grasp that doing that isn’t the way to win friends and influence people. I’m sure Rufo knows that, but he wants Elonbucks, so can’t criticize the man. That’s understandable, but he could have just not commented on the subject. Instead, he did the standard thing Rightists face when they can’t blame the man at the top who’s really at fault (like Musk or Trump), which is invent or endorse a conspiracy to explain his failure. Rufo doesn’t see anything wrong with it because his own brain has been melted by years spent in a culture where that is the normal, accepted way of thinking about the world.
*While technically all he said is that Trump was “in the Epstein files,” non-autistic people understand that when you say that, you’re implying something more than the literal meaning of the words.
A bit tangential, but I recently found this essay from 2012 about the history of conservative brain-melting.
The very very tl;dr version is that the B2C-ification of US politics, enabled by (and masqueraded as) mass mailing campaigns for charity causes led to the rise of well respected grifter politicians.
Mitt Romney lied about being pro-life because some a large fraction of the American populace are grown-up children who think a guy rose from the dead and he needed their votes. That's just how democracy works. Strategic lying for political advantage is rather different from the brainrot that affects the modern right, in which conspiracism is the default epistemology and nobody ever takes responsibility for anything.
I recommend reading the essay, because IMHO, it's absolutely not at all different.
The seeds of the current grievance politics turned up to 11 (on both sides) is very well noticeable in these campaigns. (The classic pearl clutching fearmongering weaponized, industrialized, and very conveniently for those running it, financialized.)
Mitt Romney lied constantly, just as Trump, except not a lot of people cared, because (he didn't win and) was not as crazy as Trump.
Mitt Romney said his budget wouldn't increase the deficit when it would. He was far from the first politician to tell that kind of lie, nor are such lies exclusive to one side of the political aisle. (Remember the "Inflation Reduction Act" that most economists agreed would not actually reduce inflation?)
I think bad epistemics is at the root of all of this. I'm trying to highly down-weight my credence in people who were right for the wrong reasons, and upweight people who are wrong for the right reasons (e.g. took the upside on a 60/40 issue, being upfront about their uncertainty). Faulty moral reasoning coming in as a close second; "doing the Bad Thing to my enemy, because they are Bad."
Rufo is a smart guy but he was always playing with fire, morally speaking speaking, and very obviously was not being careful about how he arrived at the truth, so it's no surprise to see him get his shirtsleeve snagged in the roiling conspiracy machine.
" I'm trying to highly down-weight my credence in people who were right for the wrong reasons, and upweight people who are wrong for the right"
Given that we can determine much more accurately whether people were right than whether their reasons were, this sounds like encouraging bad epistemics rather rooting them out.
Well when someone says something like "I am in favor of re-opening schools during this pandemic because the globalist elites want to use this opportunity to usher in a new world government!" it's pretty easy to divine their reasons. What I mean by "the wrong reasons" is more "their explicit stated rational justification" not some deeper sense of their hidden motives.
It's just an endlessly repeating morality tale. People send years degrading gatekeeping and then are like "Oh wait now Donald Trump can just do whatever? Oops, if only there were gatekeepers."
And then they decide it's worth it to just get onboard and attack gatekeepers some more and then it's suddenly "Oh wait Candace Owens insists Brigitte Macron is secretly trans and for some reason was in the Stanford Prison Experiment? And she says that Erika Kirk worked with The Jews to murder her husband? We should really have had a gate in front of this or something."
I really look forward to whatever bullsh** is so crazy that Candace Owens - once she's again accepted as a mainstream figure - eventually finds crazy enough to disavow.
Great work. I only hear about your replication work when it goes viral because a study is especially bad - how often do you replicate a paper and find it's fine?
How sketchy would it be to generalize that to "half of econ studies are wrong"? Do you select studies that you think are particularly likely to be bad?
My general heuristic is: studies are exaggerated by ~30%.
There is some selection, in that I dig deeper into studies that seem problematic. But the projects I did for OP (Moretti innovation, Atwood measles) were selected based on importance.
1. Mojtaba Khamenei says Iran will fight to the end. Asymmetric warfare time. And it looks like the Trump brain trust (which doesn't look very brainy right now) thought Iran would roll over like Venezuela did.
2. Iran has said they'd let ships of friendly countries through the Strait of Hormuz. Chinese tankers are being let through. OTOH, I see reports that up to 6 ships (not clear if they're all tankers) have been struck by Iran. Reportedly, at least two tankers have been sunk. And I see reports that Iranian oil exports have increased (!). Which may be why I now see reports that the US has belatedly targeted Kharg Island, which is Iran's major transhipment point for oil.
3. Lots of unclear or contradictory reporting about US minesweepers. The US Navy may or may not have decommissioned a bunch of minesweepers it had stashed at bases in the Gulf States last year. More minesweepers are on the way, though! Last spotted in Malaysia yesterday. Or maybe not. Some experts are claiming they'd be highly vulnerable in the Gulf given Iranian drones. Other experts say that's nonsense.
4. Trump has asked for help from other nations to patrol the straits. So far, the UK, Japan, Australia, France, and Germany have declined.
5. Depending on who you listen to, Iran has at least 20,000 and possibly 80,000 Shahed drones in its inventory. Regardless, launches of Shaheds have declined significantly since the first days of Trump's Special Military Operation. Trump put out an all-caps statement on Truth Social that WE'RE NOT RUNNING OUT OF INTERCEPTORS. Reports say we and our allies in the Gulf have launched over 800 Patriots so far. xxxx-At $400K a pop, that's about $3.2 billion-xxx (CORRECTIONS: they cost between $3-4 million per missile depending on the type, so despite my misplacing decimal and screwed up math, that would be between $2.4 and $3.2 billion). I'm having trouble finding out what the current production rate is. But back in 2024, Lockheed delivered 500. It's unclear how much of this inventory is sitting over in NATO countries and other parts of the world. Zelenskyy has offered to share their anti-drone tech with the US, but of course, Trump declined the offer. Other countries, including some Gulf states, have shown an interest.
RUSSIA:
1. Shogyu is out. And rumors are that his subordinates are being purged. Internet lockdown in major Russian cities. So rumors are flying.
2. Even though RU is feeding targeting info to the Iranians, Trump has lifted sanctions on Russian oil. But Ukraine took their export facility on the Black Sea (Novorossiysk) offline. Primorsk and Ust-Luga have come back online after a long-range Ukrainian drone attack last year, but are not functioning at full capacity, yet. Russian Far East facilities are still functioning, but I'm unsure which RU oil pipelines are currently active (a bunch of Western RU pipeline hubs were struck by Ukraine last year). It's unclear how much Russia can immediately benefit from the windfall that Trump has given them.
3. Ukraine has recaptured a lot of the territory they lost last year to Russian meat-wave attacks. We're only talking about a few hundred square kilometers in either direction, though. But Starlink being taken away from the Russians seems to have changed the frontline dynamics. Russian Milbloggers are all doom and gloom. I understand that Telegram will be completely offline by April.
CHINA.
1. At the recent 14th National People's Congress (NPC), Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli have not officially been removed from their leadership roles (even though they're probably dead). And Xi was seen sitting alongside lower-ranking Party proles at the conference. Both these have been seen by commentators as signs that Xi hasn't been able to consolidate his power base after his autogolpe on the PLA in late January.
OUTRO:
Here's a link to Metric's "Doomscroller". My theme song!
On Iran 3, most aspects of that are true to some extent. The US had long kept mine warfare ships in the Gulf (minesweeping is a specific subset of mine warfare, and I'm going to be precise here) but that class is being decommissioned and replaced by a mine countermeasures package fitted to some of the LCSs. There are even reports that it might sort of work. (The LCS has not been a particularly successful program.) The plan when the old ships were rotated home a year ago was to replace them with a couple of MCM LCSs stationed at Bahrain. Fair enough and entirely normal. Then, when things started to heat up, the ships were ordered out of the Gulf. Again, seems reasonable. There's going to be a lot of stuff flying around, and it's probably better not to take chances. And then the decision not to keep them at sea also seems reasonable, although I am completely unable to explain why they ended up in Malaysia instead of Diego Garcia, which is about half the distance.
In terms of vulnerability, the ships have a 57mm gun that should be decent in the anti-drone role, as well as RAM of some sort that can handle most missiles. But magazine depth probably isn't what we want it to be, and the attacks would be pretty disruptive to mine clearance. You'd probably want to delegate handling that to someone else if possible.
But thanks for the clarification about the mine sweepers and anti-mine technology.
I'd consider that report that they were spotted in Malaysia to be a bit iffy. The US seems to be keeping a tight lid on information, and the open-source info coming through is very noisy.
Also, if Iran developed their own version of Sea Babies or Maguras, I wonder how well our navy could do against naval drones.
Naval drones have proven vulnerable to alert gunners with stabilized 20-30mm cannon, which pretty much every US warship has at least a pair of these days, and even more so to helicopters with door gunners, which ditto.
If the Iranians manage to copy the Ukrainian trick of fitting a few of those drones with repurposed air-to-air missiles to take out the helicopters, that could be a problem, but there are a lot of technological challenges to that and at least for the moment the people who understand that technology are on our side.
But the Russian Black Sea Fleet possessed ships equipped with stabilized cannons and automated weapon systems that were theoretically capable of countering naval drones, but they failed for some reason. According to the narratives I've read/listened to, Ukraine often sends out multiple drones that attack from multiple directions and overwhelm the RU tracking capabilities. Also, they attacked at night, which made detection more difficult, even with thermal imaging. And their low profiles were shielded from radar by ocean chop. I don't think we'll know how well US anti-drone systems work until we finally have to deal with that sort of threat.
Well, the US _could_ pay Ukraine a few M$ for a shoal of Sea Babies [1] plus a couple of days of their operators' time, do an exercise, and find out. I don't think this would ever happen under the current administration, though.
Questions, since you seem to be following this closely:
1. Is there some kind of economic evening-out with oil? That is, if oil is allowed to go to China, then the total supply of oil doesn't change, only the use profile - China can consume all of Iran's oil, and the people who previously sold to China will sell to other people instead. This seems like an economic proof that the cost of oil won't change. But it did change (and the Iranians seem to think that shipping to China doesn't counter their goal of economically squeezing the US) so what's wrong with the proof?
2. Why is Trump so interested in getting help from other countries? Doesn't the US have a bigger navy than anyone else? Why do we need so much help?
3. Can you say more about Telegram being offline?
4. Doesn't Xi control the seating at the Congress? Why would he arrange the seating in a pattern that indicates he has been unsuccessful?
Regarding #2, the United States has by far the largest navy, but it's also by far the most overstretched. Over the past year it has been called on to invade Venezuela, blockade Cuba, bombard Iran, dissuade China from invading Taiwan, threaten to invade Denmark, and shoot up drug smugglers, on top of all its normal peacetime duties like training and showing the flag and maintaining the pretense that we'll try to defend any of our allies at need.
Under normal circumstances, the United States Navy can keep about a third of its ships forward-deployed in foreign waters, as the rest are rotated through maintenance and overhaul, training, and R&R. After the past year, I'd be surprised if more than a sixth of the fleet is actually up for real operations. And note that in today's news, the Navy's largest and newest aircraft carrier, after ten straight months at sea, caught fire without the Iranians even bothering to shoot at her and is apparently being withdrawn to Crete to recover.
And the USN is *particularly* overstretched in the area of destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers, the type of ships you need to e.g. operate close off an enemy's coast and/or escort merchant vessels through contested waters. Our last *three* attempts to develop new ships for those missions have been dismal failures, and the older designs we are relying on are increasingly worn-down and were never available in the numbers we need to meet all our commitments.
The rest of NATO et al's navies, while smaller even in total than the USN, are very well equipped with destroyers and frigates, first because they mostly can't afford anything bigger, and second because they are quite well suited for what those navies normally do (which doesn't involve winning big sea battles or invading anyone). If we could still call these countries "allies" with a straight face, they could be really helpful right now.
If successful, it would help bring global oil prices back down, a benefit to all net oil importers. I'm not sure if that's worth it, though, because the main drawback would be getting dragged into yet another Middle East war started by the US.
To what end? So Trump is free to start the next war, maybe threaten to annex Greenland again, this time with an aircraft carrier instead of a symbolic JD Vance visit? No, it was Trump who effectively ended the US alliance system, so he gets to deal with the consequences. If you give in to a bully, he won't leave you alone.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. You asked, "so what's the point [in helping to re-open the strait of Hormuz]?", I gave you one strategic benefit for other countries to help re-open the strait which has nothing to do with Trump and his bullying. And I explicitly said that this doesn't necessarily make it a good choice.
1. I don't know if this will answer your question, but this is what I've been able to ascertain: China was buying most of Iran's oil output (estimated at ~90%), at 1.4-1.6 million barrels per day. I just checked, and that's about half the volume of an ultra-large crude tanker. Or a couple of mid-sized tankers could accommodate that daily volume. Iran gave China a steep discount because China had to do some sort of an export-laundering game with Malaysia (I admit don't understand it). But Iran also accepted Chinese Renminbi, which bypasses the pesky checks and balances on US Dollar transactions. And I think Iran got to buy Chinese weapon systems with those Renminbi. Iran accounted for between 13-20% of Chinese oil imports. (BTW, Chinese state media reported that the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference had revoked the seats three leaders of the China's biggest defense companies: Liu Shiquan, a missiles expert and chairman of NORINCO; Wu Yansheng, the chair of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation; and Wang Changqing, a deputy manager of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). For financial irregularities. Of course. But the story goes that all the CPC factions were shocked at how shittily Chinese weapons systems performed in Venezuela and Iran.)
So, Iran's only big customer was China. And if China doesn't get it from Iran, they'll suck it up and buy oil on the open market. And I'm sure China will negotiate a steep discount with Putin if more oil starts flowing out of Russia.
The oil from Arabia and Gulf States can get out via a pipeline to Jeddah on the Red Sea, and one that ends in Lebanon. But I don't know if the pipelines have the capacity to carry the volume that tankers can carry out via the Strait of Hormuz. Transporting it out via the Red Sea and Lebanon will definitely make it more costly, though, because they don't have as many port facilities on the Red Sea (two) and Lebanon (one?). And I count eight port facilities that the Saudis and the Gulf States have along the Persian Gulf. And I don't know if the Saudi's could or would transport Kuwaiti, UAE, or Qatari oil. Does anybody on this group know how this could work?
Bottom line, the logistics of bypassing the Strait of Hormuz will probably make oil more expensive for the foreseeable future.
2. Yes, the US has a bigger navy than anyone else. Except for the UK, I don't think any European country has long-range naval capabilities. And their navy is much smaller than it was during the Falklands war. Maybe France can operate over long distances. They have a nuclear aircraft carrier. Before the war, 100-140 ships (oil and cargo) traversed the Strait of Hormuz daily. But basically, the US Navy is in a class of its own — and it's on its own. I don't know what Trump and his advisors were thinking. Probably they're just freaking out, now that Iran didn't roll over like they expected.
Also, the Trump request may have been for minesweepers. We don't seem to have started this operation with enough on hand. Who knows what other countries have in their inventory, and even if they agree to lend us their minesweepers, how long will it take to get them there?
3. Russia was already discouraging Telegram use, trying to get its citizens over to the state-run app called Max Messenger. Too many grumpy milbloggers were criticizing Putin's lack of progress. Too many videos were being posted of oil refineries, FSB regional HQs, weapons factories, and power plants being blown up by Ukraine drones and cruise missiles. In fact, the government made it illegal for citizens to post pictures of "disasters" on Telegram, but people kept posting them. But Telegram was hard to shut down due to the app's advanced anti-censorship techniques, including IP hopping and domain fronting, which masked its traffic as legitimate Google or other cloud services. Previous attempts in 2018 resulted in major collateral damage to Russian web services, leading to a 2020 reversal. And its widespread use by Russian troops and officials has made a full ban technically and strategically difficult. But fuck the troops, bad news is worse for the Kremlin than soldiers losing one of their major communication apps (Starlink being the other). Now the Kremlin is shutting off the Internet in major cities. And they're also shutting down mobile phone infrastructure. Authorities are painstakingly unblocking a white list of Kremlin-approved sites. In the meantime, businesses, even critical war procurement outfits, are going back to landlines and faxes to get orders processed. By shutting down the Internet and opening pinholes in it they hope to take Telegram and other social apps out of play.
4. Xi is not in total control. Besides the Xi faction, there's the old guard and the reformers. Each has control/influence over certain state "power" centers. Xi decapitated the leadership of the PLA because they had turned from his allies into allies of the old guard (reportedly over the wisdom of invading Taiwan). Xi has not yet been able to replace them with his own people. (It's kind of like the old mafia. To prevent open inter-family warfare, if someone important had to be taken out, the leaders of the organized crime families would meet, hash it out, and come to an agreement over compensation and/or spoils to take out a major player.) Xi didn't follow the code, and there's a question of whether he'll make it past the 24th Party Congress next year.
Re: RU-3. Is it correct to call these advances meat wave attacks? As far as I know, Ukraine had bungled another troop rotation and had to pull back to stabilize the frontline, with Russia chasing them with minimal forces. The counterattack then came before Russia could fully consolidate its presence.
It sure looks like meatgrinder attacks to my untrained eye. The old Soviet Union suffered a total of ~15,000 deaths and ~53K wounded during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). Russia, during its push into Ukraine last December, suffered ~12,000 deaths in less than two weeks. This doesn't approach peak WWII, Eastern Front casualty rates, but the Soviets were advancing when they took their peak losses. Russia has moved the line forward a few kilometers, and now they've lost those few kilometers. That's not to say Ukraine isn't suffering heavy casualties, and have fewer troops, but their superior drone technology and drone strategy seems to be making up for the gap.
Correction: it looks like the Soviets took their heaviest losses early in the German invasion, except for the battle for Smolensk in 1943. Their casualty rate while advancing was about 3x what it is in Ukraine, where they aren't really advancing.
Can anyone explain why Trump rebuffed Zelensky's offer of help? Were there strings attached? Is this just arrogance? Does Trump have some sort of deal with Russia that this would interfere with?
Trump's attitude toward Putin has always been strangely favorable, even deferential. The old theory that Putin had blackmail material on Trump doesn't seem to hold anymore, because the hypothetical pee-pee tape would be a drop in the bucket compared to what's come out so far in the Epstein material. I doubt he has any deal with Putin, because Putin doesn't seem to regard Trump seriously.
According to the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies...
> Trump tends to admire authoritarian leaders, viewing Putin as a strong counterpart rather than a threat to US interests, often siding with him on issues like Ukraine.
> Shared Worldview (Illiberal Nationalism): Both leaders share a disdain for liberal international order, championing conservative values and using ethnic, anti-immigrant narratives to build a "populist" image of protecting the people against elites.
> Transactional Mentality: Trump’s focus appears to be on direct, personal interaction (a "great man" approach) rather than traditional diplomacy, believing a personal bond with Putin can resolve geopolitical issues.
> Behavioral Cues: During meetings, analysts noted Trump sometimes adopting a defensive or submissive posture, with "mouth purse" gestures, while attempting to assert dominance through handshakes, suggesting a complex mix of admiration and competition.
It sounds like Zelenskyy is proposing a manufacturing deal, not just tech sharing. The US would be buying interceptor drones from Ukrainian factories. At least according to Zelenskyy as of a couple days ago, they're still in negotiations over the price and details despite Trump's remarks dismissing the offer.
Most obviously, you can run it with far higher permissions than Android would normally let you do, so you can get tool use with other programs (like making phone calls, sending texts, using the camera).
Such an OS would almost certainly be an Android fork, of course.
I’m looking for paid hourly contract work right now, especially in agentic engineering. I can start immediately, commit around 20 hours per week now, and if the fit is good I’d be happy to discuss expanding from there.
This is a funding bridge while I keep building Keisei, my current hardware startup. Keisei is a deep-tech energy company working on space-based solar power and laser power transmission.
By agentic engineering I mean building systems where LLMs use tools, APIs, workflows, and human review to do real work, not just generate plausible text.
I’m strongest at turning messy, ambiguous processes into working AI-assisted systems: tool-using agents, research/data pipelines, human-in-the-loop automations, and fast MVPs/demos.
I work heavily with CLI tools, and I’m comfortable wiring LLM workflows into real constraints: APIs, MCP/Linear, web scraping, Airtable/DBs, PDF/document flows, evaluation loops, and operational guardrails.
Recent work includes:
1/ Scoping and building an AI-assisted estimating demo for electrical contractors, including PDF ingest, AI brief, takeoff/proposal workflow, and rapid user-feedback iteration.
2/ Building climate-tech mapping and research automation for Project Drawdown-style work, including web scraping, Airtable/local website work, company-solution matching, and multi-step automation design.
3/ Building a BJJ training tracker app from scratch for a real user: technique library, training/session logging, sparring/round stats, Vercel deploy, and a launch-day auth fix under deadline pressure.
I’m especially useful in zero-to-one work: founder support, technical PM plus hands-on implementation, productizing vague ideas, and getting something real in front of users quickly.
I also have solid context in energy, climate, infrastructure, and hard-tech, so I’m not limited to generic SaaS problems.
I previously found work through ACT, and the founder I worked with later wrote a public postmortem of the solar project we built together that includes a strong endorsement of my work: https://7goldfish.com/articles/Requiem_for_a_solar_plant.php.
What I need now is paid hourly work I can start immediately: short prototype sprints, agent workflow setup, automation builds, research systems, technical PM, or a small paid trial project. My typical hourly rate is $80-100 depending on scope and complexity.
Based in Belgrade (Serbia), with overlap for both EU and US time zones.
If you need someone to scope, prototype, or ship an agentic workflow fast, email svrmnnk at gmail com
I have a post coming out tomorrow called "The day the Earth understood," which in part uses "Meditations on Moloch" as a bit of a springboard.
The dek is "Man, machine and global peace."
It's an essay with a twist ending. But I stole the twist ending. But I'm also up front about that. It's a forgotten twist ending that's worth reviving. It will show up here tomorrow morning at 7:11 AM ET
I'm a longtime ACX and SSC reader, tho I've usually shown up pseudonymously. I'd show up at some of the NYC events on occasion, but I'm not there any longer. Gonna see if there's a meetup in Fayetteville this year, though. And I'll go to that if so.
If you can't wait till tomorrow to see what my site is about, a couple posts that have ACX vibes include:
How you know you're old: some whipper-snapper writes a post about a classic SF story turned into a classic SF movie and tells everybody "now, I'm gonna reference a forgotten twist ending from a story you probably never heard of" 😊
To be fair, I *had* forgotten the remake movie (thankfully)!
Ha ha, that story was a revelation for me. I knew the classic movie and that was what got me thinking about the whole idea of this. When I started digging in to write this, I learned about the story and read it and then everything came together.
I wish I could say I knew about the story before I started writing, but I didn't. It's great tho! Too bad it's semi-forgotten now.
Decent premise for an article, but I found myself frustrated reading it. Meandering, repetitive, several passages very obviously of the "AI prose" styling, etc. 3/4 of the way through, if you had asked me "What is this essay arguing?" I would have been unable to give you a correct answer- that's not good!
As someone who had, for a time, subscribed to the Marxian point of view, and who still considers themselves Marxist-adjacent, I've been wondering for a while why no one has ever written an "anti-communist FAQ" that actually goes into the reasons why so many people consider Marx outdated or ineffective or philosophically missing something, and which actually tackles communist or socialist apologetics, and the reason why the failures of socialist states can't just be handwaved away by gesturing at bad conditions and ideological capture by bad actors
I find it's surprisingly hard to find a codified set of reasons for why "X is wrong" when X is a political coalition at large
I had to be in the right community and ask a lot of questions to even be exposed to the idea that "Progressive reforms very often fail for x,y and z reasons" when I had always just assumed they work out best for everyone and the Left was generally correct about everything on the meta level
Part of the problem is that people pick and choose what to believe and so it's arbitrary what to rebut.
Did Marx describe capitalism as a necessary stage to accumulate capital? I know there are leftists who think so, and think that the trick is merely seizing the accumulated capital by violence and building the new society on that lump.
But that is silly because capital is not a lump you can live off forever. Capital is always having to be accumulated in order to replace what wears out and breaks down.
That's really the crux of it all, ain't it? Even if communism was theoretically capable of actually providing better living conditions, the core problem is that it's simply inefficient, and cannot survive in a world with any meaningful amount of competition. There is no future for those unwilling to sacrifice everything in order to secure power.
It’s very hard to argue against online Marxists because they don’t know any Marx. Basically they are ultra progressive or woke. Bourgeois liberals the lot of them.
No games here, as I do know Marx. The fetish for lumpen proles and criminality, the dislike of the normal working guy, the obsession with race and intersectionality, and LGBT are either non Marxist or anti Marxist. Hyper liberalism.
There was an odd thread that completely ignored class analysis throughout the 2010s. That has mostly been resolved now
Adopting social conservatism, however, will not do leftists any good
Maybe we can completely change our approach to discussing equity and equality, Maybe we can admit when diversity measures do more harm than good, Maybe we can admit when our methods have a chilling effect on free speech, or are unnecessarily rude, dogmatic, or alienating
This is distinct from positioning ourselves as separate from the groups we claim to speak for, however
But we have nothing at all to gain by dropping LGBT rights or racial issues as concerns. Deeply unserious suggestion, motivated by persnickety resentment
> Deeply unserious suggestion, motivated by persnickety resentment
Don’t know what I am resenting here, maybe the great success of Marxist parties to dominate the politics across the western world?
By abandoning class Marxists have abandoned their core beliefs, and by embracing liberalism, individualism, progressivism and woke they have just become more liberals than the liberals. Anybody can be pro lgbt, including capitalists and capitalist entities. DEI is used to cause working class friction, and the whole shebang is just more American liberal ideology anyway obsessed with individual rights and race.
Aside from the Ten Point Program in the Communist Manifesto, AFAIK, Marx never formulated a detailed roadmap for how a Communist political-economic state would function. Did he?
Blaming Marx for the failure of communist states seems wrong-headed — similar to blaming Moses for Christians who don't follow the Ten Commandments. ;-)
Sure, I'm talking about the correctness of ideas that were directly Marx's, and whether there's still value in subscribing to his socialist tradition, which mostly exists now as a holdover, instead of changing our approach entirely
I'd say that Marx was a brilliant critic of 19th-century capitalism, and many of his observations still hold true for 21st-century capitalism. Unfortunately, we understand the symptoms, but nobody has come up with a good cure for the ills of capitalism despite a century of trying. :-)
I'd say that Marx was a brilliant critic of Moloch. His mistake was thinking that Moloch is capitalism, and can be defeated if you overthrow capitalism.
Turned out that Moloch is present in (real) socialism, too.
The thing is, when Russian Marxists asked Marx how to implement his ideas in Russia, he explicitly told them to not even try, because you cannot jump over stages of historic development. Therefore, ALL Bolshevism is fake Marxism. However Bolshevism had the economic resources of a great power, while real Marxism had nothing, so they could spend far more on propaganda, linking Marx with Lenin in the minds of both leftists and rightists. This is annoying and very hard to fight.
They were in a sense honest. After all they did not say the Soviet Union has socialism. They said it is building socialism. Now, what is the stage before socialism? Obviously capitalism: state capitalism in this case, they were just continuing Sergei Witte's state capitalism.
The messaging about building socialism was current in the 1930s, in the aftermath of the destruction of the New Economic Policy. By the 1950s, the Soviets were talking about a mature socialist economy.
The problem with someone who hates Marx trying to debunk Marx is that they run into a fundamental problem about Marx. Which is that he was a gifted economist making valuable and relevant critiques of Capitalism based on the huge amounts of empirical data about Capitalism that he had to draw from, and also a speculative fiction writer who did a lot of world building around a utopian society he liked to imagine but which didn't really hold up in practice.
Debunking the speculative fiction is relatively easy.
But if you *only* do that, people will notice that you're ignoring most of the things he said that modern advocates actually care about.
And then if you try to touch the critiques of capitalism, the audience will notice that your debunking of that isn't so good, and actually he's got some pretty relevant things to say about all of that, and suddenly you're just drawing attention to the thing you wanted to obfuscate.
Do modern economists take Marx's critiques of capitalism seriously? I think the answer is generally no, but I suppose there might be some counter-examples. Really, I think your "gifted economist" description is pretty much invalidated by the fact that there isn't a Marxist branch of economics that exists today (to the extent there ever was, it perished long ago) and nobody you'd attach the description "Marxist economist" or whatever to.
I think that it would be valid to argue that Marx did not critique Capitalism as much as he had invented it, as a straw man, so that he could paint a contrasting picture of his socialist fantasies. The fact is, all of his predictions about the future were proven to be wrong within his own lifetime. Like Ehrlich, however, he chose to stick to his guns blindly. Now, of course, Kapital is scripture and cannot be questioned.
Immiseration is clearly false. Over production just isn’t a thing - if there a critique of modern capitalism is that capital should be more productive, imperialism is neither unique to capitalist societies nor essential to most - most countries are capitalist bit not empires- and the claim monopolies is only partially true. Capitalism does tend to trend towards monopolies, but also to the kind of disruption that overturns them.
None of this means I think that capitalism doesn’t need social contracts, trade unions or even government ownership. Whatever works.
What immiseration? Working people in market-based industrial societies are both richer and freer than those in any other. Imperialism has been a feature of every economic system. It appears to be a natural consequence of power. Monopolies fall as quickly as they rise. Overproduction is a mechanism for controlling prices. And what's wrong with capital accumulation, anyway? If not by individuals, it is accumulated by the states--simply not as well. And when you look at the rate of technologically-driven living standards, I think you will find that only market-based economies have a consistently high rate.
Fundamentally, Marx was a religious thinker and a bad economist. His concerns were moral, not pragmatic. He forced the data to confirm his predetermined outcome and blatantly ignored everything that did not align. I would love to see him consigned to the ash heap of history, but, unfortunately, bad ideas that sound nice always have a major following.
I think it would be quite hard to put something together given how vast and complicated Marxist thought is. Very few people would have an appropriate handle on all the various Marxisms and of mainstream economics to do this comprehensively.
Yes this is it. The neo-Marxist philosophers of the 80s who struggled with carrying forward Marxism on new grounds despite the inaccuracy of the LTV all eventually drifted towards liberalism without fanfare
I think this is what I needed to hear, I want to read about this Rawls fellow and his ideas
As I pointed out in my follow-up comment, I don't think Heath's timeline quite makes sense. And even he doesn't claim that G. A. Cohen or (the now late) Jurgen Habermas ever identified as liberals rather than Marxists.
True. But the essence of the idea, that "No matter what you think is important or true in Marxism, there is now some better theory, that allows you to articulate that conviction more clearly and persuasively, without encumbering yourself with false and unsustainable theoretical commitments", pretty much addresses my ambivalent feelings
LTV doesn't work, I should listen to the modern economists
Historical materialism left a lot out and people have made improvements on it since then, especially by incorporating Freud
What is left of Marxism without those two things is pretty superfluous
These are all things I've directly suspected, and it's been laid out for me
Marxists had a big problem in the 1960s in criticising high wage earners. the philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia talked about the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, the first millionaire basketball player. Nozick said that in a free society if thousands of people want to pay a dollar to watch Wilt play and he becomes a millionaire by doing so, what of it. Marxists couldn’t really answer this question because Walt actually didn’t earn that money directly - he was paid a salary. In Marxists terminology he was actually exploited.
Other egalitarians can just say, it’s too much, let’s tax him.
Economics is something that can be modelled and measured. LTV, which used to be the main theory of value in the 19th century, has apparently been shown to not explain economic phenomena like prices as well as modern subjective theories, which take into account the demand side as well as the supply side (which contains things like socially necessary labour time)
If a new model works better, the new model is "more correct"
I want to be more correct
And as the frankfurt school showed, once you disprove LTV and historical materialism, there really is no good reason to value Marx above all the other more contemporary theoretical figures, or think that a marxist socialist state would be an improvement over a current liberal capitalist state with social safety nets and high-trust
Of course, those states are running into all sorts of long-term issues, and it does seem like the system is destabilizing and risks making another major transition, so who knows? Fukuyama could be wrong, and historical materialism could have a useful bit of truth to its predictions after all
Unfortunately, Freud was also a pseudoscientist https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_K-qtp6iiL1M0Nuam5qSWhybHM/view?resourcekey=0-z_NPz_EGgEur-AKstp02wQ Karl Popper pointed out Marx & Freud both were long ago, but I figured I'd link to a more recent philosopher that Heath would consider a contemporary, and one focused on Freudianism rather than Marxism. Freud had a contemporary though who approached psychiatry/psychology in a more scientific manner: Emil Kraepelin.
This is true! Freud was a nutcase! But psychoanalysis pointed in the right direction, in a way that I'd say platonism (even if plato wasn't a nutcase at all) didn't
>But the essence of the idea, that "No matter what you think is important or true in Marxism, there is now some better theory, that allows you to articulate that conviction more clearly and persuasively, without encumbering yourself with false and unsustainable theoretical commitments", pretty much addresses my ambivalent feelings
I don't think so. Everybody but Marxists confuse capitalism with free markets. In reality capitalism is alienated labour which can happen both on free markets and unfree markets (Soviet Union).
I'm sure there are alternatives to capitalism and things that will come after. But as much affection I have for the Marxian tradition, I have to admit. The party is over, it's a dead end. We gave it a fair shot, and that's admirable, and it didn't work out. And a lot of people died, because history is messy and ugly, but that's how history goes
The most important thing is to figure out what to do next.
As for the second link, I don't think it was Hayek who started the "socialist calculation debate", and I recall from Bryan Caplan's arguments with the Austrians that Mises had a different argument than Hayek (he though it was fundamentally impossible, whereas Hayek thought it was just difficult to gather all the information together in one place).
> I had to be in the right community and ask a lot of questions to even be exposed to the idea that "Progressive reforms very often fail for x,y and z reasons"
I'm interested in some info on that :) Do you have some sources to share?
Price controls almost always make things worse because capping the price means that the resources can't be allocated to the people willing to pay the most, so the people making the thing in demand cannot make as much, leading to an artificial shortage
A lot of red tape around environmental review and mandating that new housing built must be affordable actually prevents a lot of infrastructure from being built (the people I know always complain about how bad California apparently is)
The narrative that there are millions of unoccupied houses is only technically true in the sense that at any moment, there are millions of houses that are in the process of being sold (but it's not the same millions of houses, it's a rotating millions of houses), or that are just unfit to live in
Apparently even building high-income housing would help the issue, since wealthy people could move into those, allowing the price of the houses they're moving out of to go down (hermit crab shell swap analogy)
Some unions, like the dockworker's union, exist solely to hold everyone else hostage and prevent automation that would lower prices and increase efficiency for everyone. They're able to completely prevent any attempt at updating american ports from being on par with other countries' ports by threatening to completely shut down work, all at once. A lot of public sector unions are also somewhat like this
Policies like California's wildfire suppression policies have directly led to more forest fires
Whole language over Phonics, was also a progressive reform, which turned out horribly
I really cannot overstate how little I was exposed to these ideas. It's like that cliche "Why did no one ever tell me this?" But of course, it's perfectly natural that one would be insulated from actually solid material critiques of their ideas when in a biased environment. I guess I'm glad I'm learning it now. Though I'd be happy to be told if any of this is incorrect
>Price controls almost always make things worse because capping the price means that the resources can't be allocated to the people willing to pay the most, so the people making the thing in demand cannot make as much, leading to an artificial shortage
Agreed, although I am going to point out that in modern US the most common form of price fixing that we argue about is rent control. Since new land isn't being produced and landlords don't directly produce more apartments, this argument doesn't straightforwardly apply, and often gets misused in this context. Of course there's still an argument about developers building new housing on undeveloped land or etc., but rent control policy can easily include exemptions to maintain incentives around development, and often does.
>Some unions, like the dockworker's union, exist solely to hold everyone else hostage and prevent automation that would lower prices and increase efficiency for everyone.
I mean, not for the members of the union, right? They would mostly be fired, or deskilled and paid less?
Like a couple of your examples, this feels more like conflict theory than policy failure. Yes, there's a tradeoff between consumer benefits and labor rights; yes, there's a tradeoff between housing supply and environmental protection. You can argue that the tradeoff we are making currently is bad, or even that there are Pareto improvements we could make from the current equilibrium, but I'm not sure I'd call a policy a 'failure' just because it accomplishes its goals at the expense of its opponents.
Assar Lindbeck was a socialist. Nevertheless, he said, "In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing."
Well, he was a Social Democrat, but he left the party in 1982 when they introduced the Employee Funds, which were meant to gradually transition large corporations from private ownership to collective ownership by the workers, so he doesn't seem to me to have been much of a socialist.
But I do feel like the equilibrium we could get in counterfactual worlds would be better for more people.
When you're looking at it from a birds-eye view, conflicting groups have different sizes. And if you're a utilitarian, you ought to pick the bigger group when the bad outcomes for the smaller group are out-weighed and neccessary
My priority is "what ever works" + "what ever makes me culturally happy", whateverworksism is something we all must aspire to
I agree, I guess what I'm trying to do is draw a distinction between 'Liberal policies fail (at their own stated goals), therefore it's irrational for liberals to try them' vs. 'liberal policies fail (based on some broad social utility function, but they succeed at doing the thing the person implementing them wanted), therefore society in general should be wary of them'.
Which I guess is really just going back to mistake theory vs conflict theory... just pointing out that some of these are mistakes, and others are smart moves for one side in a conflict, and I think it's really important to understand and be tracking the difference.
I just wish that "X action fails at goal, or has Y consequences" was more widely known, since leftists and liberals are almost never exposed to good faith policy-focused critiques
Curtis Yarvin, back before he turned into a mindless Trump cultist, imagined a world where witches existed:
"In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn."
Here’s a variant: imagine a country where witches are prominent in business, politics, and culture. The ordinary people know about, hate, and fear the witches, and elect politicians who promise to root out witchcraft. The witches are not perturbed because they know it’s all for show. Two parties competing with one another for the votes of dumb and ignorant anti-witch voters, while privately their leaders visit the covens and ask for campaign contributions.
You may have noticed a parallel to modern America. Democratic politicians, everyone from far-leftists like Ro Khanna to centrists like Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper, run against the Epstein Class. The ultra-wealthy don’t take offense to attempts to tie their entire class to a “pedophile” because they know it’s just red meat for low-IQ voters. Bill Gates, who donated 50 million to the Harris Campaign, isn’t angry that the Democrats released a bunch of embarrassing details about him. He’s actually happy that the Epstein files release will help the Democrats; he agreed to take one for the team. They all discussed it at the Secret Epstein Class Conspiracy Meeting.
Okay, no, there was no Secret Epstein Class Conspiracy Meeting; the world doesn’t work like that. Which raises the question, did the Dems run it by Bill Gates when they decided to demand release of the Epstein files? Did they message test “Epstein class” with the Epstein class? Did they message test “latinx” with Latinos? You can make a massive Reddit thread debating whether “Karen” is an anti-white slur, or whether “Washington Redskins” is an insult against Native Americans. Yet perception is reality. If a bunch of Lithuanian Americans become convinced that “that’s fishy” is a slur against their ethnic group, a politician who wants their votes must care, no matter how silly it seems. What the phrase “Epstein class” objectively means is less important than what the targets perceive it to mean.
The Democrats got themselves in this position because they ignored and took for granted their white working-class base. The blue wall is the blue wall, until it isn’t. Now they risk making the same mistake, assuming and taking for granted the support of wealthy elites. Assuming their high intelligence and basic decency will keep them on the side of the sane, intelligent, and good. But the lesson of Elon Musk is that success in business is not inconsistent with being extraordinarily childish and spiteful.
Do the Democrats have an alternative? I argue they do: just do cultural moderation. Promise to enforce anti-discrimination laws just as zealously when the discriminated-against are white or male.* Condemn anti-white and anti-male ideology as just as bad as racist or sexist ideology targeting blacks or women. Pass laws modelled on Florida’s don’t say gay law, which can be sold to the base as also preventing teachers from expressing bigoted views toward the gay community. Promise to hire more police, toughen penalties for violent crimes, and seek the support of police unions. At the same time, Democrats can sell themselves as the party of technocratic leadership that will appoint competent people to office, listen to doctors and scientists, repeal Trump’s tariffs, and protect abortion rights.
*Alternatively, they could argue for abolition of these laws altogether.
The Democrats haven't done well with the white working class since the seventies. I don't know where this meme comes from that it started in like 2016 or 2012 or whatever.
That said, I agree that cultural moderation is important.
The rich and powerful are not going to abandon the Democrats because of the Epstein revelations - mainly because they are not a monolithic group and 99.99% of them are not affected by the Epstein disclosure and either (1) actually want to see the perpetrators punished or (2) do not care. This is where the "witches" analogy (which hypothesizes a monolithic group) falls down.
Trump obviously a member of the Epstein clique (I don't say class) but future Republican leadership may not be. I would not gamble on the Republican party's leadership to keep the angry rubes in the box. The post-Trump Republican party is just as likely to be run by the craziest asylum inmates as it is to return to "normal".
> The rich and powerful are not going to abandon the Democrats because of the Epstein revelations - mainly because they are not a monolithic group
They don't need to be a monolith or truly care about any of this. This is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: use the liberal elites as a scapegoat on which to blame the sins of Epstein, while removing them and their anti-capitalist ideology from any position of power.
I have been looking at US vs International (mostly Europe and Japan) economies and noticing that they are *qualitatively* different. For one thing, the US economy has a lot more large tech companies (Microsoft, Google, ...).
It turns out that the economies are also quantitatively different ... the average cap weighted US company is a lot *younger* than the equivalent companies in Japan, Germany, ...
I think this might be a good proxy for economic dynamism.
If so, things are looking bad for much of the world and especially the UK where the average large company is getting older at an alarming clip
I heard an argument that a lot of what makes Japan 'weird' or 'cool' is that its essentially the future. It's what an even later-stage-capitalist state looks like. Almost no babies being born, aging population, increased social isolation, proliferation of cheap food from automat-esque restaurants and vending machines
>If you see a beautiful photo, and later learn it was AI-generated, are you harmed? What is the harm?
Yes; I would have been lied to. "Photo" implies depiction of (some instance of) reality, whereas an LLM would at best output a realistic illustration, and at worst some confabulated nonsense - infamously, Google image search was at one point inundated by fake slop to such a degree that queries like "baby peacock" overwhelmingly output cutesy fakes. Looks like they have cleaned up this particular one somewhat, but I'm sure there are still plenty other outrageous examples to be found.
Would it count as a lie if there was no caption that said, "This is a real photograph"? I'm not arguing with your emotional reaction (which I would probably share) but I'm wondering if you have really put your finger on its cause.
Well, once these fakes proliferate enough, a random realistic image will no longer by itself carry an implication of overwhelmingly likely being real. At that point the intuitive notion of "photo" will cease to be meaningful, and thus the deception capacity will also disappear. Happy days...
I like fanfiction? Nobody pretends fanfiction is real, though. Some people may not understand that certain stories are fanfiction... In that sense, yes, someone could be harmed (in that their suspension of disbelief was raised, by not understanding the genre), but it's really a very small harm.
Dr. Who is "fiction" (a dignified word for "lie"), which is common knowledge. Of course, fiction typically aspires to be truthful about some features of reality, and can still be harmful insofar as it's subtly/believably deceitful about those aspects.
If I cared that much about having been lied to, I would be demanding the immediate foreclosure on pretty much every magazine, newspaper, and online media source in the world, since pretty much every one of them has used a copy of Photoshop. This is even if I only cared about being lied to about life-or-death matters such as war, rather than whether some celebrity has perfect skin.
If anything, I'm actually thankful for AI, since AI gives me one more chance to detect fakery.
Can you explain what quality you're referring to? Because I remember photos coming out venues like AP or Reuters from about 20 years ago that were complete fabrications, and there are famous examples from much further back.
I'm not saying faked photos are fine; I'm saying they're not new, and haven't been for decades. "Don't believe everything you see on the Internet" is a well-known aphorism. So it's weird to me to act as if AI is suddenly bringing some new brand of perfidy down on us.
>So it's weird to me to act as if AI is suddenly bringing some new brand of perfidy down on us.
"AI-generated photo" is always a 100% lie, unless there was a robot literally operating a camera. Few things in the world are ever as clear cut as this, so calling it a new brand of perfidy doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Scott's account of the media rarely lying read to me like "the media is frequently deceptive in ways that cannot be prosecuted in a courtroom without leading to even worse problems", not a treatise on how the media is actually truthful most of the time.
Meanwhile, ask a circa-2026 AI for a picture of a farmer holding a carrot, and you will get a plausible picture of a farmer holding a carrot. Sure, there's no real world farmer that looks exactly like that, but so what? Magazine cover models rarely look like the cover photo in real life, and sometimes never. Pictures intended to depict real-world events commonly only depict a generalized version, rather than the actual example. Multiple websites exist that supply terabytes of stock photos expressly for depicting generalizations of events that actually took place much earlier and nowhere near them, and candid photos of real events rarely convey a complete portrayal of those events and are even purposefully framed to only show the angle the creator wishes to show to the audience. I repeat: none of this filtering is new.
>Sure, there's no real world farmer that looks exactly like that, but so what?
Well, my point is that unless you knew beforehand what farmers and carrots look like, you can't trust that you're getting a truthful representation of even the general concept, and not some cultural-censor-approved cardboard cutout, or entirely confabulated nonsense. This is the crucial issue at the heart of so-called "generative AI" - it can only generate simulacra in principle, whereas bespoke human perfidy requires particular intent, and much more effort.
Contra Scott, the media does lie, and lie a lot. However, the lie is generally in "who gets the byline." Would you read press that is written directly by the advertising company? Probably not.
Prediction-market related story that seems relevant to the crowd here: Short version is a writer reported an explosion/impact in Israel as a missile strike, with some people disagreeing and claiming it was actually a falling interceptor, not a missile impact.
Kicker is, the question of what actually caused this explosion resolves a 14 million $ Polymarket and now people who are set to lose money are campaigning said reporter to change their article and are sending them & their family (reasonably credible) threats.
Curious what peoples take here is. To me, this kind of behaviour (+ the insider trading by officials we have already seen) seems like the very predictable (hah) consequences of the way these markets function and the prime reason why they could never work in the way EAs envisioned them
I wish I knew more about this. My guess is that reporters covering war in Israel get death threats regularly, and this one went viral because it's about a new technology and people love discussing the harms of new technology. Ten years ago, journalists getting death threats on social media would go viral as proof that social media had lots of harms. Now it's accepted as part of life.
I think this is falling to a bit of confirmation bias @Scott -- it may be true that reporters get death threats often, but it seems categorically different to get death threats *because* of the gambling than, e.g., because you are the wrong religion and have opinions.
(Also, I'm not sure we should want a world where 'people getting death threats because of gambling' is an accepted part of life -- the comparison to social media is not obviously a win, social media really does have a lot of harms and many people think it made the world way way worse!)
based on the messages being sent in hebrew i'm lead to believe that these are israelis harassing their own kind (presumably in the IDF or other government officials). hm, really makes you think
The part I have to respond to here is "(reasonably credible)"
Look I've been a journalist for over a decade. As far as I can tell, the only thing death threats ever accomplish is to give reporters bragging rights (tho they never admit they are bragging)
I read this over. The person making the threats sounds like everyone else who makes threats on the internet. What's credible about it?
If the larger point is: Do you think generalized prediction markets create perverse incentives and it's just going to get weirder and weirder? Yes. Yes. Yes. Obviously.
But of the things I'm worried about: death threats? Not so much.
This does put me in mind a lot of the sports betting analogue, where the naive take is that it's bad to ban things but in practice it seems like the social cost of easily-placed bets is just way too high.
Although I also wonder in general if society is ever going to figure out how to reduce online death threats in general or if this is just an endless problem.
Is there a word for this general phenomenon? In the sense of "in principle freedom is good but in practice $4.99 fentanyl at the gas station leads to really bad outcomes"? Seems like a unresolved issue in liberalism.
I’m sure Robin Hanson has a solution for this using insurance or something. Like “your health insurance company bans you from going to stores that sell fentanyl”.
The Liberal Paradox - under any system for aggregating people's preferences, there are situations where the option chosen by free choice is not the Pareto optimal choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox
I feel like there definitely could be a fancy word for this, although in some level it seems like it's just "impracticality". (Note it took me a good 15 minutes to come up with this.)
So I watched the Academy Awards last night and they eulogized Rob Reiner. It was heart felt - Billy Chrystal - and not too saccharine, rather upbeat.
I read an article by the very psychologist that advised Reiner on the documentary film he did on his son’s condition. The doctor said Reiner ignored his advice and made a fairytale version festooned with positivity. The doctor politely called it a fantasy and just wrong: he marvelled at the display of invincible ignorance. Politely.
I offer this because the Hollywood stars in all their vein glory aggravated me deeply. Luxury beliefs galore, they declare themselves artists when all they are is good actors, fame whores and rich.
Rob Reiner was a good director, he made fantasies come to life, but life (or the real thing?) shot him down.
This is us.
Rob Reiner is the perfect counterpoint to the Trump monster in all his hilarious rudeness. We have a man skilled at pretend doing battle with an orange monster calling bullshit.
Jebus. It’s vainglory, meaning excessive or unwarranted pride in one’s accomplishments or qualities, not vein glory — which might describe striking a rich lode of precious metals in a story about the Klondike Gold Rush, but not much in this context.
These are bold words about a family tragedy, not sure what any of this has to do with Trump who is lucky enough to not have anyone with serious mental illness among his kids.
It was an entirely preventable one. All society needs to do is stop giving the mentally ill free reign, and start dealing with them as the liabilities that they are. His son wasn't even an only child. He had alternatives.
>I offer this because the Hollywood stars in all their vein glory aggravated me deeply. Luxury beliefs galore, they declare themselves artists when all they are is good actors, fame whores and rich.
I don't know why you would attribute this to his being a Hollywood star, as opposed to, say, a father. I sincerely doubt that Hollywood stars are more subject to wishful thinking about their troubled children than anyone else; I certainly would not infer that from n=1.
It was on my mind. It’s not that complicated. Did you see my argument where I equated Trump to Archie and Reiner to a real life version of the meathead. That was the starting point
The psychologist who advised Reiner is a piece of shit for (1) not speaking up strongly enough to Reiner to either have an impact or get fired and (2) giving interviews now where she runs her mouth about the family.
The psychologist was Leslie Dobson, PhD, a woman. No, I do not think much of your argument. I have a lot of sympathy for Reiner, or anyone who has a severely mentally ill child. It’s a terrible situation, often with no solution that’s even halfway decent.
Understood. You probably never saw the TV show. All in the family was seminal for my generation.
It’s highly ironic that Reiner’s liberal views backfired in real life. That was the entire comedy routine, of the show. Archie told him he was a meathead and his fancy notions were going to destroy everything which made Archie the butt of the joke! Norman Lear and the writers were laughing at the reactionary Archie. It’s probably hard for you to realize how confident we were back then . We were absolutely certain that we were special and we had solved the riddle of life. It was peak 1960s antiauthoritarian dream casting. It is everything I believed in. It is everything your teachers believe in to this day. It is you.
Here’s a good summation:
Soteriology is a doctrine of salvation and the soteriology of the enlightenment is the narrative of progress.
“Liberal and communist polities are both perpetually poised in the now and the not yet, between the emergence from the dim night of unreason and the final triumph .”
Adrian Vermeule
That’s the meat head.
Archie was held out as atrocious so Reiners death was very much on the nose. Wildly prophetic and poignant now as we see what that liberal empowerment movement has devolved into.
Norman Lear and the writers were laughing at *everybody* in that show. All of them were presented as deluded idiots. All of them were *also* presented as being good and decent people trying to do the right thing as they saw it, but all of them seeing it from a different perspective shaped by the culture around them.
If all you saw was everybody laughing at that silly bigot Archie Bunker, you missed what made AitF one of the all-time greats.
I have seen many episodes of All in the Family. The reason I am not impressed and tickled to death by your argument is not that I lack the relevant background, it's that your point's not particularly clever, and seems fueled mostly by mean-spirited delight in somebody else's misfortune.
I remember the TV show very well, and contemporary viewer responses to it. Two comments on your argument:
(a) You are ignoring what actually made the show, and Carroll O'Connor's performance and Lear's direction of it, uniquely resonant: making Archie seem like a real human being rather than a cartoon character. That was why for instance O'Connor won his Emmy Award category 5 times in a row and 8 times in 9 years. It was why the show rather than _just_ being polarizing or an echo chamber was, during my U.S. childhood, a unique touchstone of conversation across political/cultural lines.
(b) "It’s highly ironic that Reiner’s liberal views backfired in real life." This would be a silly argument -- considering Reiner's historically-lengthy and richly-rewarded career in his chosen field, his leaving behind some of the seminal works in that field, his three highly-successful children/stepchildren, etc. -- if it wasn't also a deeply ignorant and offensive one. It is based solely on the one deep tragedy in Reiner's life that led to his death. As if that one situation, to whatever degree it was or was not Reiner's fault which by the way is absolutely none of your fucking business, somehow invalidated everything else about this person.
I'm a secular person myself with no connection to anyone named Reiner, but every now and then can't help rooting for karma to be real. If you are ever unfortunate enough to have such a tragic situation in your personal life, do try to make it public knowledge so that anonymous online cowards can slander you with it.
Brett Stevens had an on point take on Trump’s Truth Social post regarding Rob Reiner’s death.
“Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House…
I think a lot of people are going to end up learning a similar lesson soon enough. Say what you will about Trump, he has no delusions of morality, no needless sentimentality towards things that really don't matter at the end of the day. All these lies about the sanctity of life, about what "humanity" stands for, they'll be burned away, replaced with the cruel truth that everything they've done was for nothing. I'm sure nobody will accept that even at the very end of it all, but the world moves on regardless.
Trump relentlessly moralizes against his enemies. He doesn't call them hypocrites, which seems to be what motivates you. He calls them evil and sick and treasonous.
> That Democrats are illegitimate and should be de-naturalized.
Yes, because they are an obstacle to his happiness and his vision for the country. Why wouldn't he feel that way? What makes it unique is that it does not extend past him. And in a sense, that makes his morality more coherent and grounded than any other.
What do you mean? Every other politician seems to pretend that there is some greater purpose to this country beyond securing power for itself, but Trump doesn't do that beyond the bare minimum moral justifications that just pay lip service to things being "mutually beneficial" or whatever. The whole "America First" movement is epitomizes that. They see no need to pretend that this country owes the world anything, that any of the lives outside the border matter. It exists for its own sake and nothing more.
I was mostly agreeing with what you said, but from the perspective that that's good, actually. I personally find sermons about the evils of racism or drugs or antisemitism/anti-Zionism or whatever the hobbyhorse du jour is so repellant that I like that he's doing precisely the opposite, regardless of its other effects.
If you're saying a sermon, whether an actor on a show or a politician, you are saying something with no content. You are wasting time or you have no talent or you are flattering or deflecting from something else. Trump by not doing sanctimony says things that are sometimes funny, sometimes maddening, not infrequently true, and often useful to hear, regardless of what you think about him. There will never be such a transparent president again. After the strikes on Iran, asked who is going to be in charge there: "I don't know, most of the people we had in mind are dead I think."
Pressed again the other day, he said something along the lines of - I don't really care, I just don't want us to have to come back in 10 years.
Huh? So let me get this straight, at an annual awards banquet for the film industry, a moment was set aside for a popular member of said industry who tragically lost his life due to his failure as a father to come to terms with the reality of his son’s mental illnesses. This aggravated you more than the President of the United States who literally can’t speak for longer than 1 minute without vomiting nonsensical bullshit, who has quite possibly sent the economy into a recession due to most recently starting a war in the Middle East that has killed a dozen Americans along with thousands of Iranian civilians. Which doesn’t even begin to encompass all of the Trump administration’s disastrous and corrupt policies. But yeah that Rob Reiner guy…
Don’t try so hard Jay K. It’s counterproductive. Check out Curtis Yarvin‘s argument on the inaction imperative. It’s very counter intuitive but once you read it, it will change you.
Maybe you don’t want that. Maybe you’ve decided what you believe and you’re done.
Trump is the most consequential person of the last 75 years. An equivalent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He’s the first American leader that is able to lead. He’s the only one that has the temerity and courage to go against the managerial state.
As for your dislike of him , you should look beyond his quirky personality. Be the bigger man.
We Should also pray that his Iran gambit works. If it does work, I think the Middle East will be solved. It is tremendously risky. Let’s hope it works. The Iranian people deserve better and Trump just might be able to deliver it to them….from evil (so to speak).
You think the Middle East will be solved? What is he trying to solve exactly? Curtis Yarvin? The little weirdo that keeps making an ass out of himself every time he leaves the United States?
What is the best ai to pay for? I'm not a programmer and I don't do technical work, but I want to expand my ai skills. I worry about employment and making money in the coming years. I want to stay ahead of the curve.
expert here -- claude. It is the easiest to work with because even though it makes mistakes, those mistakes are the most human.
Since you mention interest in learning and expanding skills, claude code also has the most configuration options of any of the others and is worth learning what they do and how they work.
Two months ago, Claude. Since then Anthropic seems to have hit such severe capacity limits, it’s much worse.
ChatGPT got much better, and now I strongly prefer it for coding.
Claude still seems smarter in a “thinks holistically about problems” sense so I often build plans with Claude still. But ChatGPT 5.4 is basically as good as Opus for me in chunks of coding tasks, 5x faster and significantly cheaper.
FWIW, I wish it were otherwise, because I’m philosophically much more on team Anthropic.
Gemini is fine, BTW, but I wouldn’t pay for it. Fortunately Google almost never rate limits me, and it’s free!
I dig AI and use both Claude and ChatGPT extensively for different things. Chat has a very calm businesslike personality but will loosen up a bit in long chats, Claude is more friendly and will also talk about itself more readily. Chat seems to be able to handle big documents better, and can make excellent images; Claude can create great documents and does really cool visualizations.
Something I've realized that I want to inject into the ratsphere is that there's one set of rules for understanding the universe and another for actually convincing people of things or getting them to do what you want.
The first I think people have exhaustively explored here and I don't have much more to add. The second, well, there are lots of people better than me at this but it's worth mentioning that stuff like social proof, trying to appear high status, getting someone's friend to talk to them, listing personal points of agreement, and so on are much more effective than charts and graphs in most cases.
I'm curious to see what other people think about this.
Is this kind of stuff considered immoral in the ratsphere? You are kind of formulating this as “hacks” and manipulation but a lot of this is straight out of Dale Carnegie.
It might be more useful to think that the rules of long-term persuasion are different from those of short-term persuasion. Logical arguments, charity, and data lose on Instagram and TikTok but one day TikyTak and all the modern media will be gone, we'll all have degenerated to some more base media obsession, and everything built on top such platforms will disappear.
In the past, many members of your outgroup had great social status, influential relationships, and were probably super sexy to boot. I don't want to say it availed them not and yet...I may doubt their lasting impact as compared to those who pursued other avenues. Keynes was a more correct than not to observe: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
Having said that, technology is rapidly advancing timeframes and mfers be getting crazy, so you should probably swag up and start lifting. We all have to make sacrifices to short-term concerns in this fallen world.
The truth is that most people don't really believe anything. What they "believe" is just a social strategy to fit in with the people they want to fit in with.
The unfortunate upshot of this is that there's no reason to try to convince most people who disagree with you about anything.
Most people, without even realizing it, are just repeating whatever the leading light in their particular group says or thinks. Change that person's mind and you can move the others.
However, that person also has the strongest incentive to stand their ground.
Long story short: Ideas, for most people, are just fashion, and they don't want to stand out at all.
"I don't like how agreeing with you [about politics] makes me feel." -My self-described "very left" ex-boyfriend, while dumping me for being politically nonbinary.
I think I've finally found the descriptor for myself! politically nonbinary. huh. I usually says something to the affect of neither the left or the right have space for me.
I'll just be the token pedant pointing out that those aren't two different things. You learn how to persuade people by applying the set of rules for understanding the universe to the question of persuasion.
And I'll also point out that all the things you talk about as methods of persuasion are not outside Bayesian decision theory and ratthink.
The original Sequences talked about Aumann's Agreement Theorem; in a highly complex social world with specialization of expertise, most of the evidence for your beliefs will and should come from what other humans believe.
The only stumbling block is determining which humans are honest and competent on a given subject, and everything you list is a part of that judgement:
-social proof just means lots of people believe something, which generally correlates with it being true (lots of people believe the sky is blue and dogs have fur)
-high status is supposed to be at least correlated with merit
-your friends are people you trust to be honest with you
-if someone agrees with you on many points then they probably share your epistemics, and the updates they made based on evidence they've seen but you haven't are probably the same ones you would have made
All of this is about deciding how much to update from another person's beliefs. That's perfectly rational Bayesian thinking.
I don't think it has one single thing to do with trust on the fundamentals of "is this right or not" it's just about getting along with a group.
If the group you want to get along with you says that you don't actually need food to live you will confidently assert that you don't need it while chomping a hamburger
So there's a general phenomenon here which I'm not sure if there's a name for, where people overlook the basic thing that makes up 99% of the iceberg because it's so normal and uncontroversial that it's invisible, and end up focusing on the 1% that people fight about as if it's all that exists.
Sure, people use in-group signifiers to fit in and get along with their group, including mouthing beliefs they don't alieve. That's a thing that happens.
But if you think that's most of what is going on with human communication, that that's all that is going on when humans exchange information with each other, then you've stayed too long at the fair.
When someone runs into a cabin and yells 'a bear is chasing the children!', the parents inside don't go 'Yes! A bear is chasing the children! We all agree on this important cultural signifier! and then go back to eating their dinner.
They grab the rifles and run outside, because the purpose of communication is mostly to communicate information, and you actually do update your beliefs as if the things other people say is actual Bayesian evidence, and you actually do do it more strongly the more you trust and respect that person, and all of that is exactly how it should wok rationally.
Again, yes, the phenomenon you're talking about exists. But it's like .001% of all human communication of this type. It's a very interesting phenomenon to talk about, and important in some crucial situations we care about. But don't miss the forest for one interesting tree.
Talk about taking an example of something that never happens to make a point about what's happening constantly, all around you, every where.
Sorry, no. Not how the world works at all. When it comes to sense making, folks are primarily turning to those they need to get along with them and saying what they need to say to stay in their groups and other larger affiliations and not draw the eye of fate.
People who read blogs like this are more immune to it. If you're like me, didn't even see it was happening till your late 30s.
But most people simply swim in the conventional wisdom without evaluating it at all.
Unfortunately, I think many, if not most rationalists are loathe to recognize that there isn't one best way to describe an idea or a policy. That you can describe a policy in very different ways while still being honest.
Partly a cope because a lot of us are compulsively blunt, and incapable of being diplomatic. And naturally, it feels better to frame our compulsions as virtues. (A bit ironic?)
While it's true that certain dishonest strategies are better at convincing people than good faith rational discussion you're missing out on the benefits of constantly discussing and defending your viewpoints which usually leads to a better and wider understanding of the issue.
So you'll convince people to do things but the things they'll be doing won't be as well thought out as they would've been had you done things in good faith.
Fully agree - I think there is even an 80k hours article/podcast where they discuss the merits of intentionally *not* trying to become super persuasive (in the more manipulative sense) -- you preserve good epistemics and good will. At least in American politics we do not need to look too far to see what happens to epistemics when persuasion and vibes rule the roost, as opposed to (ho boy) "facts and logic."
Why do you believe that to be an insult instead of just a neutral descriptor of the strategies? "Skillful lying is more effective at persuading most people of what you want them to believe than telling them the truth" could simply be true, and I believe it is.
I've been plinking away at the draft of an essay titled something like, "Being Smart Makes You Stupid About Low IQ People" for over a year, because it really is that difficult to describe dumb people's (apparent) internal workings to smart people.
And smart people need the explanation. Smart people, god bless 'em, can't seem to fully imagine what it's like to be too dumb to ever wonder if they're wrong about something, much less actively embrace the likelihood that they're *probably* wrong about a lot of things and actively embrace correcting the wrongness.
Worse, the vast majority of smart people work and live with other smart people, so they never get a chance to directly and closely observe dumb people over time. They simply don't see dumb people and thus can't quite bring themselves to believe that dumb people *really* exist and that they entirely lack - and can't be taught - certain modes of intellectual processing used by smart people.
And of course, because dumb people can't understand certain kinds of processes used by smart people, they can't be motivated/manipulated/convinced by the kinds of arguments that smart people instinctively love.
I'm dumb enough that it took me 15 years of working with dumb people to understand that they *REALLY* can't be made smart by education. I'm only barely smart enough to have observed it and pivoted to other strategies when I'm tempted to offer rational arguments to them.
It reminds me of the viral 4chan post about the people who were supposedly too stupid to answer the question "how would you feel if you hadn't eaten breakfast today?"
I thought it sounded fishy, so I asked some of my friends the question in real life. What I found is that for the most part even stupid people can answer the question easily, but there's a certain level of mental disability that does indeed make the question nearly impossible. I mean that there's a range of people who are intelligent enough to have a normal-ish conversion and can tell you in detail what they ate for breakfast that morning, but are more or less incapable of understanding conditional questions.
It was very surprisingly to me, since I'd mostly thought of differences in intelligence as basically quantitative and relative distinctions. Some people can remember more, or think faster, but it's really just a matter of degree. I'm not so sure about that anymore. Now I'm thinking the differences can be so large that they create a genuine categorical difference in how different people think.
Also makes me wonder: what is it that smart people can do that I can't? Am I even capable of understanding what I don't understand well enough to understand that I don't understand it? Scary stuff.
I don't know if this makes me stupid or even worse, but the problem with that question is that it assumes people do eat breakfast regularly. So the ideal answer, presumably, is something along the lines of "If I did not eat breakfast today, I would be hungry by now (maybe also angry or low in energy or other negative physical/mental result)".
However, I don't eat breakfast and haven't done so for decades, so the question is useless. I could answer truthfully and honestly "I wouldn't feel any different" but this would be unacceptable since the presupposition is "but you *will* feel different, you *will* be hungry etc." or at least "*imagine* that the ideal answerer to this question will feel such-and-such a way".
Well, I'm not hungry or foggy by skipping breakfast (ironically, the times I *do* eat breakfast, it seems to rev up my appetite so that at eleven o'clock/break time I am hungry etc.) so what do I answer? "I don't feel different" is the 'wrong' answer, but if I give the expected answer "If I did not eat breakfast I would be hungry and slower and suffering brain fog" that is lying.
The question really is asking "do you know how to play the social game? do you know the 'acceptable' answer?" and not for the truth. Some people may not be able to construct the hypothesis "If I did/did not do X, I would/would not behave in Y fashion" and so it's an intelligence test, but some people may indeed not eat breakfast, or it's all the same to them if they ate breakfast or not, or even if they ate breakfast they would still be hungry later on, and so forth.
No, your answer is perfectly acceptable too. If someone just says something like "I didn't eat breakfast today because I usually feel about the same whether or not I eat" that's perfectly fine. I'm actually one of those people so it makes perfect sense to me. It's also acceptable for people to refuse hypothetical questions because they're afraid of verbal traps, or they just find questioning invasive, or just happen to not feel talkative at the moment.
What I'm talking about is people who did eat breakfast and remember what they ate, and are perfectly willing to talk about it, but have trouble with the question itself. If I ask them how they'd feel if they didn't, they'll just say "I ate breakfast." If I say "but if you didn't, how would you feel?" they just tell me they ate it again.
The level of intelligence I'm talking about is somewhere around the threshold of being mentally incompetent to stand trial.
> "Also makes me wonder: what is it that smart people can do that I can't? Am I even capable of understanding what I don't understand well enough to understand that I don't understand it? Scary stuff."
I think if you're asking this question, you're smart enough that there's not a meaningful difference between you and a true outlier genius when it comes to your capacity for developing wisdom and shaping good life outcomes if random tragedy doesn't get in the way.
I don't feel that's accurate. Probably everyone has jagged competence. It's true that the "highest degree of competence" differs widely, but that's not the usual problem. The usual problem is that people who observe their competence in one area tend to assume that they have equal (or nearly equal) competence in other areas...and they're wildly wrong.
An additional common problem is differing goals. It's very hard for people to accept that things which conflict with their goals are true. This is one of the main reasons most people don't accept global warming. (Another is over-generalization of local observations, where local refers to both space and time.)
Have you looked at the best curated models in order to make your determination about global warming, or have you only looked at the ones where over half the data is flawed?
Trick question: highly doubt you've looked at any of the data, in terms of getting into the nitty gritty of the analysis.
You're clearly making the opposite mistake: being smart enough to find one piece of data that is wrong, then using it to wrongly convince yourself the entire narrative is wrong.
Yes, scientists have heard of the urban heat island effect. Yes, some global warming scaremongers use data contaminated by that. No, that doesn't mean "global warming is fake" or "it's impossible to know" or anything else you seem to be claiming.
Mauna Loa CO2 ought to have changed, sometime, around 2020, right? I mean, intuitively, if this is anthrogenic, and not simply "more patterns than you want to shake a stick at" -- we basically konked the world economy for months...
Sea Ice stands as its own pattern, I'll leave that be.
Turns out when you use good, uncontaminated data, you don't see global warming (yes, this is a smaller timeframe. that's what happens when you demand good data, not back to the 1920s).
Zanni/Wimbli/Aristocat, please do us all the favor of sticking with a username so that those who have chosen to mute you don't have to be subjected to your vague insinuations, shoddy links, and appeals to 'personal interviews' as evidence
I know that I'm not competent to interpret the raw data, so I haven't looked, and won't. It wouldn't do any good. I've seen several different, relatively independent, reports from folks that purport to be skilled enough to interpret the data. But I accept, e.g., that Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than was forecast a decade ago. And that our global rate of CO2 emission has, at best, barely slowed.
Twenty years ago, I was in Olympia National Park. They were saying that the temperate rainforests were likely to disappear within the next twenty years. 20 years later, and they're just fine. Even Cook Forest is still a temperate rainforest, and that one is actually marginal, for the designation.
I've talked to people who have put together independent reports. You know, like ExxonSecrets? When even folks like that won't say that global warming is actually happening, it's starting to sound like a real big hoax.
Who was saying temperate rain forests would be gone in 20 years?
As a person who cares deeply about climate change, activist-world’s absurdly bad takes are pretty terrible.
Physicists have been pretty accurate on climate models for decades now. Activists have been routinely wrong on decades-scale local climate predictions.
As someone who considers himself a normie. (Whatever that actually is.) I find the above framing somewhat insulting. First plenty of 'uneducated' people are plenty smart. (And visa versa) But mostly I don't think 'smart' people are as different as the picture you paint. The typical 'smart' rationalist gets caught in just as many silly side streams as the normie. In fact maybe more. The normie is more conservative, I'll do it this way 'cause it's how my dad did it. Without making up some 'rational' argument for their behavior. We all think we are so damn smart, and yet I feel like we hardly know anything.
I'm a little taken aback that you're describing yourself as a "normie" but then assuming that "normies" would fall under the category of "dumb people."
Listen. That you are reading and commenting on this site as a leisure activity means you're not in the category of "dumb" that I'm describing, and likely that you don't know anyone who is too dumb to understand any of the concepts and perspectives being discussed here.
You're smart, but you're stupid about dumb people. If you're going to be insulted about anything, be insulted about that.
"and likely that you don't know anyone who is too dumb to understand any of the concepts and perspectives being discussed here."
I live and work in rural america as a prep cook at the local tavern. I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know out here who read books. (And 1/2 of those are family.) When you speak of dumb I picture two people I work with. We can all agree they are not the sharpest stick in the pile, not very world-wise, but totally lovable and we just talk about different things.
One of the chief frustrations of this topic is that I'm not talking about class or education. There are lots of smart but (formally) uneducated lowerclass people. You can spot them by observing their curiosity, imagination (notably the ability to predict likely consequences of their actions into the near and distant future), openness to being challenged/corrected when they're wrong about something, and general problem-solving capabilities.
While there are fewer dumb people among the educated upper classes, than the reverse, they do exist!
I grew up on a cattle farm in the middle of Texas. Most of my extended family probably comes off as normie. My grandfather dropped out of school in the 8th grade. His brothers and sisters all had this twangy manner of speech one commonly associates with rural Texans.
OTOH, he dropped out of 8th grade in order to spend more time supporting his family, doing things like trapping, hunting, and miscellaneous farm work. Apparently he was skilled at carpentry, helping build everything from single family homes to commercial buildings, including multiple structures on UT Austin's campus (I'm told he worked on the Harry Ransom Center). He also had the presence of mind to buy land, develop it, and resell it, well enough to work run single-person farms the way he preferred and be a millionaire by the time he passed away. His whole life, I never saw him write a complete sentence without misspelling two or more words.
There's a popular game in central Texas called 84, played with dominoes. He was one of the best players I'd seen of that and its mini-version, 42. Not only could he beat you; he'd be amused the whole time, as if it was effortless. He was like Larry Bird, telling you exactly what he was going to do to get around you, and then doing it like you weren't even there. I still don't know how he pulled off some of the bids he did. And even so, he'd get beaten by some of his siblings, or even his mother, in her 90s.
People like him taught me that normies are very often much smarter than apparent at first glance. Multiple reasons; sometimes I'd not find the topic they were smart about; sometimes they simply didn't care about proving it to me. There's intelligence in learning which things are actually worth taking seriously, and normies often have it.
Given that the Harry Ransom Center is nearly 70 years old your grandfather must have been born no later than the 1930’s and probably earlier. At that time it was still not uncommon for intelligent people to have little formal education by today’s standards, especially in rural areas.
What you are describing isn't smart people, it's midwits. Geniuses take on difficult problems and know very well that they don't understand most things, as they fall flat on their face a lot. They also solve problems that midwits can't, so it evens out.
Dumb people tend to do surprisingly well for their lack of smarts -- they develop filters, "That's too difficult" or "that's too complicated" and thus don't get scammed. But it has taken actual research to figure out how to quickly identify someone who is lacking in intelligence...
I find it very funny that "smart people and dumb people both understand things in a way that average people do not" is such a popular meme. There must be a lot of 'midwits' who think it.
Midwits aren't "average people" they are average people "gassed up" to believe that they're "intelligent."
LLMs are artificial midwits, after all.
Did I ever claim to be not a midwit? If so, can you point me there? (I actually do have some talent at intuiting, which is one of the main strengths that geniuses have and midwits do not, but it hardly shows online. Conversation is not one of my strengths).
> Midwits aren't "average people" they are average people "gassed up" to believe that they're "intelligent."
The prototypical midwit meme is literally an IQ distribution with labels, so I'm not sure what you base this on.
> Did I ever claim to be not a midwit?
I didn't say that you did. I just noted that "people in the center of the distribution (i.e. most of them) understand things worse" is an ironic meme to be popular.
> I actually do have some talent at intuiting, which is one of the main strengths that geniuses have and midwits do not[...]
This is more my serious issue here - where are people coming up with these "midwits be like..." takes? It's an Internet meme. What actual basis does anybody have for taking it seriously and describing the traits of "midwits" (again, i.e. most people)?
The midwit meme is a simplification of the concept. Originally it meant having an IQ within (100; 100+σ], that is, being someone technically smarter than average but still among the intellectual majority despite looking down on the other half of it. An enthusiastic reader of Coelho or Harari.
Models made by one of the top 1000 people in the world. I don't look at the memes you're talking about, I listen to people who are credible and administer IQ tests I couldn't pass.
The whole discipline of behavioural economics exists to explain the gap between rational agents and how people process information to make decisions in reality.
In general I think the gap between persuading people of a valid argument and persuading them to action is quite wide and *this is a good thing*. Some of the more extreme narratives about the dangers posed by AI seem to assume that people will stop acting in their own self interest because the AI presents a sufficiently compelling argument. In reality, people will go on doing things as they always have until they're forced by events to do something new - they won't adopt the new tech as soon as it becomes available and forget all previous instructions.
You imply that understanding the ruleset and skills for how to convince people is not part of understanding the universe. This sounds like an a priori contradiction, as "the universe" implies everything - including the knowledge about how to convince people.
From my perspective, this is a very common STEM mindset: The universe, as understood by natural sciences, and then being disappointed/surprised/annoyed/wondered by the fact, that a large amount of people do not care that much about a natural-science-perspective on the world (and presumably act "irrationally" egoistic, moralistic, or altruistic?).
That's a quick shot, in good faith. Feel free to poke holes into my assumption and I will do my best to answer, again in good faith.
A lesson I feel I learned too late. A lot of the signs and signifiers of intelligence are larping/identity play. Complaining that you are "too intelligent to effectively relate to normies" is actually just an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance between the identity you have as "intelligent", and the success you have in the world.
"Intelligent" people have nerdy hobbies and watch science themed youtube content and maybe have poor social skills. Actually intelligent people don't larp as if they are intelligent, they just win more and that includes socially.
I can agree with the ghist of your message, but I don't agree with "intelligent" vs. intelligent. It all hinges on the definition of intelligence, and you made quite some implicit definitions with "just win more, including socially". It even relates to your implicit definition of success.
There are the celebrity-billionaire measures of success, which may be themed around money, power and all the typical vices that seem to come with that.
There are "poor philosopher" measures of success, the kind that tells Kings to step out of the sun (Diogenes, if you didn't catch it).
And everything between those two.
Similarly for intelligence: Do you define it as in the academic world, a kind of raw power to gather and understand deep knowledge and patterns in science, or is it "social and economic success", which might be completely divorced from the previous? Both are valid, if the definition is done transparently.
I think more often, people who are not "intelligent" in the academic sense, but still successful, are called either "clever", "smart", etc. And also quite often, "intelligence" is understood to be a measure of academic prowess independent of social or economic success.
No, I think you're right. I think the thing is a lot of trying to convince people is using the logical fallacies (appeal to authority, appeal to tradition, appeal to emotion) everyone spends so much time warning against for understanding the universe. So it's a different skill set.
The best people at convincing others are enthusiastic about the product themselves. It's why Nick Offerman's support of Lagavulin actually works. He genuinely likes it.
You can try to sell "prestige" or "standing" or all these other things... or you can just Sell What You Love, and explain to people why they'll love it too.
Regarding Nectome: Chemical preservation will absolutely kill any cells that weren't already dead. The structural resolution may be better, but reviving someone who's been crosslinked with glutaraldehyde will not be an option. So being "brought back" will rely on scanning + uploading.
(That being said, traditional cryonics also causes too much damage and there's not a good way to repair this.)
Seems like an improvement over traditional cryonics if I had to choose at the moment. Given that you have to assume essentially magically post-human technology anyways, why not choose the modality that gives you the best chance of getting there and not destroying information in your brain?
Apparently vitrification still requires active preservation. Which seems like a huge problem to my engineers brain (continuity of expensive infrastructure). But at least, cheaper than cryonics, and more robust to i.e. temporary power loss whereas with cyronics you just become mush
Ideally if there were be some way to basically plasticize and passively store a body, that seems much more credible and plausible to me (even if still a hail mary)
I'd also like to share and expand on info from one of my comments on that subscriber-only thread:
A public service announcement, tangentially related.
*YOU CAN FIX YOUTUBE!*
I've had *tremendous* success getting AI slop off my YouTube suggestions by viciously smashing "remove from watch history" on *every* *single* *video* using AI slop content.
(I make an exception for a few trusted YouTubers I was following before they began using AI b-roll in place of licensed b-roll from an image library. However, as those are mostly lecture-based channels where visuals don't matter at all and I'm often not even watching anyway, I'm mostly tolerating it for now. (Though the two that went too far with the use of AI exaggerated slop thumbnails have been unsubscribed.)).
Liberal use of smashing "not interested" and "don't recommend channel" are also great if you catch an AI slop video before you click through, but really, nothing seems to correct the algorithm faster than "remove from watch history."
Edit: per @skaladom's comment below, don't forget to disable autoplay!
Also, a friendly reminder from the Technology Connections YouTube channel that you can thwart YouTube's recommendation algorithm entirely by only watching your "Subscriptions" feed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA).
*YOU CAN FIX FACEBOOK!*
F.B. Purity is a free browser plugin which gives you total control of desktop Facebook. No sponsored ads, filter away content you don't want to see from your friends, and delete columns, buttons, links, etc to configure the appearance and content of Facebook *exactly* to your liking. My version of Facebook basically looks like it's time-traveling from 2009.
And according to a Facebook employee I once met at an ACX meetup, it's used *in the actual offices of Facebook* by Facebook's employees, because the experience of using Facebook all day for work would otherwise be completely intolerable.
Meanwhile, I'm still lamenting the fact that YouTube's playlist feature doesn't work beyond allowing me to have them. Playback's a bitch, if you'll pardon the pun. Frequent interruptions for ads, I can understand, but why does it only randomize the first hundred or so items and ignore the rest?
And don't get me started on how poorly it handles deleted items.
A $25 family plan to YouTube Premium is one of the best things I spend my money on each month. No ad breaks, includes YouTube music (so no need for Spotify or the like), and with lines for five other users, it's pretty damn cheap per person.
Plus you're directly supporting content creators as you watch. If I could only have one content subscription, that would be it.
I remember seeing one or two AI slop videos on YouTube, but yeah, removed from history. I've always aggressively pruned slop channels (even before AI; clickbait, &c), and so far the most AI content I've seen was in the RedLetterMedia video about AI-generated videos.
For Youtube, I configured it to not store my data, now when I open it it would simply say "Your watch history is off" without any video recommendations. This has been quite helpful for staying off addictive contents.
(I don't know if this truly stops Youtube collecting my data, but privacy isn't my main motivation)
That's an option, of course, but now that I've curated the watch history content YouTube uses to generate suggestions, I feel like it makes a lot of excellent suggestions.
Agree about Youtube, I watch good amounts of high quality content on it (lectures and concerts, mostly), and the algorithm can be tamed. "Remove from history" is gold, and enough smashing on "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" also works.
I go one step further and disable auto-play, so I have to manually click on things instead of being force-fed the first few seconds of whatever the algo recommends, but apparently that's not to everyone's taste.
Also, what's the deal with auto-dubbed videos? They're horrible, and there are more and more of them. Nevermind the comic effect when YT decides that a music video is actually speech in some language and tries to auto-dub it.
Really? I've had autoplay off for ages and playlists still advance. One problem is that when you do a search, many of the results are sneakily turned into lists, so they still autoplay with autoplay off.
Oh, excellent call on the auto-play; I just added it as an edit to my original comment, crediting you.
I loathe the over-stimulation of auto-play features and always instantly turn them off on every platform that uses them, so I kind of forget they even exist unless I'm at someone else's house, haha.
Gentle reminder that another viable solution to slop and shitty platforms is abstinence.
Nothing against your solutions though. I find it interesting that you can "fix" the youtube slop that way, to be honest.
FBpurity sounds like a platform-specific powerful adblock like ublock, no? I think with ublock, you could also arbitrarily block elements of websites, whether they were ads or not.
My personal mostly-abstinence based solution leads me back to even more offline-activities, and researching more into platforms and tech that are outside of big-corporate(TM) control. The latter makes me feel more like being in the early internet again, which is cool! Maybe not so accessible for the less tech-savvy, but I suspect this is a causal aspect, not mere correlation.
Choosing a better partner can be part of the solution. That would mean, to avoid the partner that is well-known to spread STIs and trying to avoid protection.
But the analogy is a bit stretched. I think is much easier to abstain from YouTube than from sex, given the evolutionary evidence. And there are other video platforms.
YouTube is a fantastic educational and entertainment resource! Why would you want to avoid it, except to close your mind to information? While it may be a big-corporate(TM)-controlled platform, serious researchers and analysts post first-rate content up there, and for many musicians, YouTube has been an economic lifeline around the music industry and streaming media death spiral.
I’m not suggesting to avoid it. I merely mentioned that abstinence is one solution, too.
Just because I think YouTube is a drain doesn’t mean there’s nothing good there. I also find some good content there.
But I’ve also seen many creators leave or beg their viewers to come over to another platform, where they are less dependent on the random good will of BigCorp. I feel it’s a toss up. I do watch some stuff, but irregularly because of how much the platform annoys me.
Fun fact for those non-subscribers who can't see the 171 comments on the subscribers-only post:
One comment, which might have been satirical, apparently didn't understand the image was AI even though that was literally the subject of the post.
Four or five comments approved of the AI image Scott shared, with another three or four arguing that, in general, photo realistic AI images aren't meaningfully different than obvious fantasy fiction/reality TV/etc.
However!
I'm relieved and proud to report the rest of the comments spanned a range of mild dislike to total hatred of the undisclosed use of AI mimicking photography in the real world.
Yeah, it was nice to see the vast, overwhelming majority of commenters on the side of truth. No surprise reception has been more mixed in the public thread: the people who care were already subscribed and don't care to talk about it again.
Probably why the Cass Report "debunker" reposted his comment here: he got pretty thoroughly eviscerated in the subscriber thread and may be hoping nobody in this thread will care to engage at that level.
What was the nature of the Cass-debunker evisceration? His assessment seems pretty compelling to me, and it echoes other critical responses I've heard to the report.
Maybe it's because I'm a more out-doorsy person than Scott and so am more familiar with how these things actually work, but I was surprised he ever thought that photo might be real. The way the snow-covered branches looked to me was immediately and obviously fake.
When we watch *fictional* media, both the creator and the audience understand that none of the content is intended to document the nature of reality.
This is the opposite of photo-realistic AI images which are actively attempting to deceive the audience into believing they are fundamentally documentary.
In your country, do ordinary people invest in private equity (through a fund, presumably)?
I ask because in Finland you often hear these days that small and medium businesses are struggling to secure funding. Lots of people I know are picking stocks or buying index funds, but none are investing in private equity. I'm wondering if it's different elsewhere and if so, why that might be.
It's for SMALL businesses. They often don't need much in the way of capital. $5000 for an ice cream maker (professional grade), and that's seed capital. Scoop it out by hand into the ice cream buckets.
To my knowledge there is no such product in Ireland. We have a 'deemed disposal' law which forces investors in index funds to liquidate their holdings every 8 years, pay tax on them, and then reinvest. Banks offer very low returns on deposits (maybe 0.1% per annum unless you move your money regularly). We have some large number of billions, the majority of household savings sitting idle in these poor quality savings accounts, but there is a lack of competition in the Irish market -- something like you propose would be welcomed warmly, I think.
That law sounds like a nightmare. You'd think that brokers would be lobbying for ways to make investing a more appealing alternative to bank deposits – but maybe the regular banks are lobbying for that *not* to happen.
To be fair, the brokers take care of the details (i.e. by taxing all gains at 41%). The rule was introduced after 2008, when the Government was strapped for cash. It probably still works out that returns beat inflation, in contrast to the offerings from the banks. But it does conflict with the public policy rationale for encouraging individuals to save/invest.
Some subset of parents have had to deal with their adolescent or adult offspring lying and stealing things from them, for example when those offspring have drug or behavioral addictions.
I'm specifically curious to know what such parents would tell their younger selves with the benefit of hindsight, back when their kids were still actual kids.
I don't expect many commenters here to have dealt with such a situation personally, but hoping maybe someone can point me in the direction of a good resource on that question.
Note: please don't just reply with the answer you imagine you'd give if you were one of those parents when you're not one. I'm looking for actual resources. Of course if you have actually been through that situation yourself then please share.
There was an era when my daughter was a teen when she lied and stole things from me. But I’m not sure what your question is. Is it what I would have said at that time to myself as a younger parent, when my daughter was a small child?
I’m talking about like when the kid (age 16-25) steals the TV to sell it for drug money. So if you’re a parent in that situation, what do you wish you could go back and tell yourself when the kid was much younger, perhaps before the kid started on that behavioral “track”
Your initial post was about someone’s kid lying and stealing from them, perhaps because of drug or behavioral addictions. Now you’re sounding pretty hyperspecific: kid steals substantial household item for drug money. My kid stole $10-$20 from me on a handful of occasions, and lied to me very extensively for the entire bad period of a couple years, but did not have a drug or behavioral addiction. Is this even the kind of thing you have in mind? And what really are you trying to learn with this question of yours about what the parent of a kid doing that stuff would regret about their parenting when the kid was small?
I think your situation is actually within the range of what I have in mind, although it wasn't a central example I was envisioning when I asked the question. (The central example being "kid steals TV for drug money" or rough equivalent. But stealing $10 and lying, even without any drug thing, is still bad.)
I'm a parent of a preteen, one who lies and takes things, and I'm worried the lying and taking stuff will get worse, so I'm looking for advice from people who've been through it getting worse already.
I framed it as "what advice would you give yourself with the benefit of hindsight" because I know sometimes it's hard to just give blanket advice without a specific context. But I probably didn't phrase any of that clearly. Sorry again.
> (The central example being "kid steals TV for drug money" or rough equivalent. But stealing $10 and lying, even without any drug thing, is still bad.)
Mine's still a baby, so I can't speak from the parenting end, but as a formerly troubled teen¹ who's thought about what I'd do in similar situations, I'll chime in.
The big problem here is peer groups, they've fallen in with a bad crowd, and they care much more about their friends' opinion than yours. The only solution is nuclear - a complete change in peer groups, via changing schools, or moving, ideally both. And by changing schools, you specifically need to go richer / better, to get the selection effects on your side for a better prospective peer group.
Is it worth upending your family's entire life to achieve this? Surely there's a better way? I don't think so, and moving is probably better because if they're really close to their current bad crowd friends, they'll still be close geographically and can continue the friendship(s) behind your back if they're motivated.
That said, certainly you have to weigh the odds and counterfactuals. You could move and send them to the richest, Harvard-pipeline junior high or high school there is, and they can still find a bad crowd and drugs there if they're motivated. If they're weird or prone to being bullied, moving could easily make their lives worse! No easy answers here.
But yeah, that's what I'd do - you've got to change the peer group, and get it more selected.
¹ Mainly "troubled" because I hated school and was crushingly bored, and found out incidentally via some youthful hijinks that if you're sent to the IEP "bad kids" school, they give you all your work for the week at 8am monday, so you can knock out that pile of nonsense in a few hours and spend the rest of the week flirting with the troubled goth girls.
But yeah, it led to me having a bad crowd as my friends and peer group, and led to me getting up to a lot of stuff I'm sure would horrify my parents if they knew about - just the 10% they found out about horrified them.
Oh. What I remember most from that era is feeling terrible about myself as a parent. Had a feeling she would not have done that stuff if she had felt more loved or had more structure or something. In retrospect, I don’t think it was my fault in such a deep way. Now I think what would have helped was my being more networked with other parents. My daughter became friends with one kid in particular who was a terrible friend and a really bad influence, and I didn’t know he was. If I’d known the other parents better somebody might have alerted me. A related thing was that I did not understand how powerful an influence the peer group becomes at that age.
As for how I handled it: I remember punishing the stealing pretty harshly — no allowance for a while, and not buying her something big we’d agreed she’d be getting. I think the best thing I did about the lying and stealing was give her a vivid picture of the impact it had. Talked some about my hurt and anger, but mostly about the impact it was going to have, how for quite a while, now, I was going to doubt things she said. And then in the next few weeks I did indeed often doubt things, even in contexts where she was confiding and asking for support. And I’d tell her then, “I sort of believe you, but I can’t get rid of the memory of you lying to me in May, so now I am wondering a little bit whether this thing you’re confiding to me now is true.” Often at those times she was telling the truth, and it really hurt her feelings that I felt some doubt, but I think it was good for her to hear that. It really was true that the doubt popped up all the time for me, and I couldn’t get rid of it, so she was hearing about a genuine bad consequence of her lying.
You're assuming that the kids only started doing such when they became adolescents. Quite a few kids will steal (generally food), and hoard it in their rooms and such. Attracts mice. Other kids will steal from their siblings (and parents, one assumes, I only knew the sibling). Sometimes this is an outgrowth of adoption.
Link for Italian constitutional referendum leads to a long list of manifold markets adjacent to that topic. It's unclear, at least for me, what is the text on which comment is requested, or where to put a comment (not that I would necessarily have anything useful on that topic).
What if the Founding Fathers intended the Giant Congress amendment not to stop at 50000 people per representative, that they thought we would be smart enough to recognize an arithmetic progression without them spelling it out? I think that's a plausible option.
A Giant Congress with an unbounded progression would have one representative per 200000 people until the population of the US reached 360 million. Or 1657 representatives until the 2030 census. Just a 3.8x increase over the current one.
I think your suggestions is extremely reasonable, but fails to satisfy any real-world constraints of feasibility as mentioned in the original article about it. It pisses off existing congress, is not supported in literal writing of the Founding Fathers, and therefore "impossible" to implement in the current situation?
So what would happen if the US Supreme Court decided that all decisions made by Congress since 1790 are null and void? I'm guessing that it would not usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity, but that instead, the newly elected megacongress would simply decide to reinstate all of that legislation.
The experience was real, but the harm is epistemic, not aesthetic. Your gut was signaling that something beautiful exists in the world, but that signal was wrong. Finding out it's AI doesn't make the feeling go away; it just makes the inference wrong.
Re: Nectome, I've been curious about the answers to these questions:
Given that we actually can restore vitrified brain tissue back to life right now (see: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2516848123 - mouse brain hippocampus slices, ~70% functionality, synapse plasticity restored; much less consistently whole brains), does this mean Alcor and CI's vitrification-only approaches are not so hopeless?
Doesn't glutaraldehyde permanently damage some of the chemistry of the cell? If engrams are an important part of information storage in the brain, and engrams are encoded chemically, and thus the connectome isn't the whole picture, doesn't this mean that fixation by that method could destroy important information?
Why aren't Alcor and CI doing MAiD? If Nectome is right about the 12 minute window, and they believe Aurelia on this matter, wouldn't they want to set up their own clinics in Oregon for this, and offer preparatory services as well?
What will the prices be in 5, 10 years? Will this always cost as much as a house?
The LW comments are quite good too, IMO. The fruit fly partial upload, the aspirational plan to get Medicare to pay for cryonics eventually (cheaper than end of life care!), etc.
There's "scam" and there's "never going to work". It's hard to argue that, eg., Alcor is a scam when various founders and board members are already frozen in their storage tanks.
If technological progress continues for another 50 years without civilization crashing, and if the companies persist that long with the brains/bodies still frozen/vitrified/chemically fixed, then I think it's highly likely to work. Why? First, the necessary scanning technology seems highly likely to be possible in *some* form, given enough development time. Second, with continued AI advancement, most possible plus currently-plausible technologies probably become available in less than 50 years.
Whether any particular new preservation tech is adequate, or whether any given company has its act together, is worth investigating, but for at least some of the cryonics companies the answer seems to be probably-yes.
ok i'll expand a bit. i won't go into the details of the company (because i haven't read them) or about the science (i'm an actuary, not a biologist/doctor/neuroscientist so I can't comment).
3 reasons why i wouldn't want to put my money anywhere near such companies:
1. it's the perfect template for an overzealous entrepreneur to draw money in. There is no product, but rather the promise of a future product. All you need is a strong brand and marketing presence. It requires a large upfront investment It's appealing to a lot of people, who doesn't want to live forever? which draws us on to...
2. the people it attracts. who is inspired by the prospect of wanting to live forever? Above average intelligence, typically wealthy (or at least upper middle class), and frankly, ego-centric. Are you gonna freeze your body and brain when it's in its prime in order to have a chance to live forever some day? Who would do that? Okay maybe only your brain before you get alzheimers so you can still live a bit. Again, really? It's the perfect target market for any company targeting members of the public.
3. Even if 1 and 2 are covered by legalese, scientific breakthroughs, fair pricing, etc. There's still the problem of the very long-term nature of the product. How long are they planning on freezing your body for? 50 years? 100 years? How many new companies last that long? The founders of the company might have good intentions, but at some point there will be new management, new shareholders, new incentives. Will they still honor your $100k one time payment? The power dynamics also change massively. Say your dad is currently frozen and they come to you saying oh actually due to increasing energy costs and delays in the science and xyz, we actually need another $20k from you. Cough up or else we pull the plug. Of course this is an extreme that you could put in writing not to happen, but the dynamics change.
Plus, who wants to live forever? Enjoy what you have now. When the time comes, a newer generation will take on the world. It's quite the boomer mentality to want to not let go of what you have (read: presidents, senior management at any companies, final salary pension schemes, etc.)
I want to live forever or at least until I change my mind. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to live forever if they could live in youth and health. I certainly understand not wanting to live in a decrepit old body with pain and little freedom but that not the prospect people who want to live forever are imagining.
I’ve got 100s of years of things I want to do assuming I have infinite time and youth and health. Spend 10yrs each in. Various countries and get fluent as just one example
Death is good, I'll be there in ~10 yrs or so. (Barring some accident.) With death comes rebirth, new life, change. Get out of the way for the next generation. If we didn't die we'd still be some giant ball of slime living in some tidal pool. I'll take death and change thankyou very much.
If we didn't eat each other's waste products we'd still be slime living in a tidal pool, or not even that. Doesn't mean we should start eating shit now. Times change.
>I’ve got 100s of years of things I want to do assuming I have infinite time and youth and health. Spend 10yrs each in. Various countries and get fluent as just one example
sounds like cope to me. similar to people that complain how millionaire actors are ripped cause they can afford personal trainers and have more time.
don't take everything you read on the internet so literally :)
I'd say my prior on cryogenics not working/being a scam is roughly 90%-100% unlikely of being updated by a good posterior. But giving a range isn't as rage-bait and comment-inducing as talking in vague absolute terms, and hopefully someone could actually convince me otherwise!
How is it possible to "preserve the whole body, including the brain, at nanoscale, subsynaptic detail"? This sounds way beyond what I understand to be the current state of the art, I'm curious what advances they're making use of.
Have you looked into this? They won the Large Mammal Preservation Prize (see https://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/ ), which was considered reputable and stood for eight years. They've published microscopic before-and-after slides. And people I trust endorse them. Can you tell me more about why you think this?
I will reply properly tonight or tomorrow night (the Theranos comparison was unduly harsh, I don't have evidence they're actually fraudulent, but I maintain that it is misrepresented and hand waves away the hardest problems).
Right, this is turning into a full on essay, even as I avoid the philosophical and social elements... Will link in a future open thread. I have some pretty firm reasons to be skeptical for both general cryopreservation and for Nectome's claims in particular (human brains are much larger than pig brains, a connectome is nowhere near what you need for full modelling, 'revival' for Nectome almost certainly means creating a digital approximate-copy given their methods, and more) but these are only meaningful with a proper explanation.
"Quip less, write more" is probably good advice for me in any case.
Yes, this was my initial reaction, but I was hoping Scott had vetted or verified it to some extent. If that's not the case I'm a bit disappointed and will have to update accordingly :/
Not really. Unexpected death can come at any age, and it seems better to always have a safety net. (IIRC I originally signed up with Alcor around age 34.)
I've posted a preprint critiquing the Cass Review, the bad UK government-commissioned report that got puberty blockers banned for trans adolescents: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18961485
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Key messages:
• The Cass Review led to the UK banning puberty blockers for transgender adolescents, after taking over from the standardised NHS review protocol.
• The Review repeatedly distorted its own scientific sources.
• The Review’s outcome was predetermined, with the same rationales for replacing the NHS protocol later recycled into rationales for restriction.
• The Review concealed its use of material from an anti-LGBT hate group.
Thanks for doing this. I find I can never predict your political leaning on any given topic, which I guess means you must be thinking for yourself. I'd like to write a post on puberty blockers sometime and will read your preprint and maybe ask you if I have some questions.
I read your preprint and the Cass Review. I agree with your assessment that the Cass Review employs dishonest tactics. The review is full of isolated demands for rigor, pairing weak evidence in favor of PB/HRT with disclaimers and objections, some highly speculative, while letting weak evidence against PB/HRT slide unopposed. As one example, the Cass Review presented without disclaimer the "reasons for detransition" reported by a survey (Littman 2021) conducted on ideologically anti-trans forums not representative of typical detransitioners, failing to give the survey a fraction of the scrutiny it gives pro-PB/HRT results.
I have some questions:
1. What *is* the rationale for puberty blockers as a default option? You've convinced me that the Cass Review makes poor arguments against them, and banning is obviously governmental overreach, but you present PBs as a delay tactic and imply they're unnecessary. Why not go straight to HRT?
2. In your discussion section you make a case for discrediting Cass based on involvement with hate groups, but your arguments are hard to follow. What's the relevance of the ADF or the ACPeds beyond being nebulously present? Was Cass hiding her contact with SEGM? You present your "narrative" as a revelation, but I don't understand why I should be scandalized by shadowy suggestions and guilt-by-association.
3. What is your stance on the evidence base for providing HRT to adolescents? I admit to an American view: I don't have a strong opinion on what the NHS should or shouldn't cover, but hands off private practices.
Speaking of non-NHS options, I know a few people that DIY'd their own hormones as teens in the UK. A recent breathless article in the Times claimed 12% of adolescents referred to NHS gender services were already DIY'ing. Cass and the NHS may not think the preferences of adolescents count as an "outcome", but the adolescents do, and from that perspective the benefits of early HRT are utterly undeniable and easily worth the risks. Most people would do the same thing in their shoes.
I'm strongly of the belief that adolescents deserve bodily autonomy, and I'd prefer if they had access to medical supervision. The lesser-evil arguments used to (often poorly) justify other restrictions on adolescent autonomy are invalidated by urgency. The UK, naturally, treats even its adults as wards of the nanny state.
1. two answers. First: desistance is rare, but not zero, so an extra chance to change your mind isn't useless. Second: it'd be harder to get society on board with immediate CSHs.
2. the Cass Review and NHS overall lacked transparency, and didn't publicly disclose the membership of the policy working group and the advisory groups (though in one case they did privately confirm Hakeem's involvement to Trans Safety Network). When I tried to FOI these the names were redacted. Some SEGM members have self-disclosed, ironically being more transparent than NHS was (I guess they see it as enhancing their credibility).
ADF and ACPeds are part of the same overall coordinated network that SEGM is in (among other groups). E.g., ADF and ACPeds had also been thinking about how to undermine the WPATH standards of care for years, even before SEGM was founded and used Cass to do it.
3. There are more studies, which means I've looked at them less (apart from the specific criticism I make of Cass' distortion of them in my table 1). My rough impression is that it's similar to the situation with PBs and parachutes[i], where it's officially low certainty evidence, given the shortage of studies with negative controls, but still obviously works. In the reply I'll say some more tangents to this one
1. Aren't there additional social harms associated with not developing alongside peers, and medical risks associated with using PBs too late? I recognize that as a pragmatic point, "society wouldn't like it" might be the only answer that matters here, but I don't see why we should on principle default to PBs before HRT.
2. If you're still editing, I would recommend emphasizing the fact that the NHS/Cass Review team redacted the names of contributers involved in controversial advocacy groups. I still don't understand what it means for the ADF and ACPeds to be part of the same "network" as SEGM. What does that entail? Did they exchange a few emails, or do they have significant overlap in members, share funding, collaborate on projects?
3. As a less extreme example, a while back I got into an argument over whether sunscreen prevents skin cancer. It certainly does, based on our thorough knowledge of skin cancer, sunscreen, and the nature of the sun as a deadly laser, but there's far less "real" data on this than you'd expect. Partially this is because it is difficult to conduct trials on an intervention that cannot be blinded and must be monitored over decades to catch rare events, and partially this is because the answer is so obvious nobody would bother funding new studies to check.
- Erin Reed has a write-up criticizing NHS' gender-affirming hormone reviews, including: "split the question into ... 10 artificially narrow reviews, each searching for a hyper-specific patient population" ruling out most studies and even excluding studies due to the patients having received PBs first before CSHs (i.e., if she's right, excluding any study that followed the Dutch protocol)! https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-nhs-england-review-excluded-97
a third tangent: Some annoyances about de Vries et al (2014), the Dutch cohort study after proceeding to CSHs (https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-2958). Both tie into my broader pet peeves about science and scales and over-abstraction making us forget stuff we know
- on the "Body Image Satisfaction" (BIS) scale they use, lower means more satisfied and higher means less satisfied. Why would you call it that then
- the original "Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale" questionnaire was always sex-specific, and never meant to apply both before and after medical transition. So they flipped which scale to use after transition—which was also nonsense. (When a trans man gets rid of his boobs, this strategy means he automatically counts as less dysphoric, not even because he likes his body more, but simply because he didn't suddenly start wishing he had boobs!) The BIS scale *does* show they got more satisfied with their bodies, but the UGDS scale-flipping was silly. And it gave the anti-trans activists a gotcha on a silver platter.
I saw another commenter saying you got "thoroughly eviscerated" in the subscriber thread. I'm not a paid subscriber on this substack but I'm sympathetic to the idea that the Cass report was ideological bullshit. I'd be very interested to hear what you made of the criticism you saw over there, and whether you thought it had any merit that you'd want to address in your revisions.
I see the commenter is Brenton Baker. Since he didn't comment on my post in the hidden open thread, I'm not sure which comments in that thread he's describing as "thorough evisceration."
One person wondered if SEGM had gotten the figure from Cass instead of the other way around; I reiterated that the embedded file still had the SEGM logo.
One person asked for clarification on my basis for calling SEGM a hate group + background on the network, and I shared again the SPLC + Mother Jones sources that I'd included in the supplemental material.
One person who hates gay marriage objected to being called an anti-LGBT hater for hating gay marriage.
One person mentioned they'd listened to a podcast episode about it; I then listened to it too and noted which of Cass' distortions the podcast had fallen for.
There were no objections in the thread to any of the distortions I documented.
One person did find an old Quora answer where I'd acciddentally referred to Grimes as Vivian Wilson's mom (rather she's the mom of some of Vivian's half-siblings), which I then corrected lol
Since one person there, and you here, both wanted more clarity on the network, it's possible that that's background many people lack. I might consider trying to do more to provide it. But on the other hand I might continue to defer the fuller explanation to the sources I already give, to keep down the bloat.* The network is already documented, maybe as well as it can be based only on public information, my goal is to laser focus on the Cass Review's role.
Interested readers might also learn more about the network from e.g. Trans Data Library (listed as a useful resource in the supplemental material), or from trans bloggers like Zinnia Jones or journalists like Erin Reed or Evan Urquhart or academics like Julia Serano or Florence Ashley or Alejandra Caraballo.
(John Oliver also has a good video on ADF, which reminds viewers that they already know ADF by their works: these are the guys that overturned Roe v Wade and who were behind the gay wedding cake thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCAuHH5EYnE&)
Officer K Woods: "Just because it's crazy does not mean it's not true."
"I appreciate that there's a community that wants to go down the rabbit hole of ufos, I don't have a way with which to pursue that, and so those theories have to be set aside; unless we were to find something that indicated that. So we can only go off of fact at this point."
Reports say that General McCasland is at risk because of medical needs but due to privacy concerns the authorities won’t specify these needs. His wife has said he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia but won’t elaborate further.
Medical needs could mean many things of course, but I’m wondering if they aren’t somehow related to his disappearance. Especially given his wife’s failure to say much - if, for example, he needs insulin to survive, there’s seemingly no reason why she doesn’t say so.
Bernalillo County Sheriff's office discusses status of the search. The Sheriff or Officer Woods appeared to downplay the role of possible mental concern. Evidently some time over months past the retired General said something about brain fog (which is something I can identify with just about every morning :p ); Officer Woods said that if any of them were in the same room as McCasland, that McCasland would still be the smartest person in it.
(I confirmed that the fb screen capture is faithful to source)
Read words or read tone as one wishes. Just bear in mind you're reading the public-facing output of someone who's suffered the trauma of their partner in life just having disappeared a week prior. Not for nothing does the term gallows humor exit.
I've read the FB post, as I've already said in the other OT. So what are you getting at? What is that discussion on r/UFOs supposed to tell me about it? Are there any comments, specifically, that would invalidate my assertion, or that at least are indicative of your position?
Linking to the r/UFOs post was simply to provide the FB post in a way that's slightly less ephemeral & easier to access. Your assertion that 'she finds the supposed Aliens connection ridiculous' is straw-manning, but on her part as much as your own.
So is the inference here "he was disappeared because he Knew Too Much"? I stopped watching the X-Files about the end of season seven and never picked it back up, and I'm not interested in "Aha! Conspiracy government cover-ups assassinations aliens working with the super-so-secret nobody knows of their existence government agency" stuff anymore.
Back in the late 1940s, Project Mogul operated out of an unpublicized base in New Mexico, designed to detect Soviet nuclear detonations using a train of high-altitude balloons. Eventually we figured out seismic and other methods that were more reliable.
One day, one of the balloons crashed on an adjoining ranch. The military declared it a "crashed weather balloon" which was obviously untrue and thus was born the Legend of the Rosewell Incident.
This despite the program being long-since declassified and the uncanny resemblance of the "crashed UFO" to typical Project Mogul apparatus.
The only mystery to me is why they didn't give the rancher a suitcase full of cash and Kindly suggest that he retire to FL and keep his Damn Mouth Shut.
I guess the occasional Naruto Run around the perimeter of the site is some small consolation.
My take is that the military *intentionally* went with the obviously wrong “weather balloon” story in the expectation that it would feed into UFO claims. Doing so distracted people from asking what the object really was. For similar reasons I’m convinced that the military likes to hear claims that Area 51 harbors crashed UFO’s and alien corpses.
Oh, if they got the guy to move away, there would be even more layers of conspiracy theorising as to 'what did he know, when did he know it, and this government pay-off is proof he knew what really crashed and saw it all before the feds could arrive to cover it up!'
You look at photos from the time and go "yeah, that's earth tech, not flying saucer material" but that's probably explained away by "ah, but this was the *fake* material released to help the cover-up!" True Believers gonna believe no matter what.
The shift in the portrayal of alien contacts, and how it moved from spiritualism to pseudo-science, is fascinating but not something I know in depth or have the time to get into right now.
Same psychological compulsion that makes you try to pick online fights with strangers, Anon!
OP is trying to get people to consider UFOs/UAPs are aliens. That invites comment from all. Such comments are going to include why/why not someone might/might not accept the premise that 'aliens real and crashed here, we haz the bodies'.
If OP is putting forward "hmm, guy mysteriously disappeared, could it be?" then they are going to have to accept that one set of answers is "nope, it could not be" and "I don't care about little green men".
Grainy images and "deathbed confessions" are real, UAPs are real... but alien spacecrafts are not. If they were, there would be better evidence than that.
Sergei, how can we doubt such unimpeachable testimony as this? 😊
“I do remember stories from youth of those that spoke with some of the men that worked at the base that held the wreckage and the aliens they picked up and kept in storage there,” Nancy Crownover, who lives in Ruidoso, New Mexico, about 75 miles from Roswell, told CNN.
“I will say they were very believable. Much like I believe that my Native friend saw Sasquatch. There are always those that will say they don’t believe. I appreciate a world that is so much more fun and interesting with aliens,” Crownover said.
The man retired 13 years ago, according to the news article, so that's a very long time to wait to disappear him if he knew too much. People go missing all the time, their families have no idea why, they say everything was normal, and then maybe ten years later a hiker finds a skeleton on some trail. Or they are never found at all.
Case in point: the Jameson Family. A husband, wife, and their 6-y.o. daughter disappeared in Oklahoma in 2009 under odd circumstances. As there was a small child involved the authorities conducted a massive long-lasting search around their last known location. It was in an area that was wooded but not particularly rugged or swampy.
Four years later a hunter stumbled across the family members’ skeletons. The skeletons were less than three miles from the last known location, well within the search radius, were not in a concealed place, and as best could be determined had never been moved since death.
There's a lot of sad cases, where people who are (or think they are, or are but in a different environment) experienced hikers/climbers/such-like go out and disappear, and their remains are not found until years later, if at all.
It's surprisingly easy, even in 'safe' places, to go missing or have bad/fatal accidents. A video I stumbled across, where if you went walking in these woods you could easily fall down one of these holes and not be found, simply because the locations have been forgotten in the past hundred and fifty-plus years:
I am not an expert in human disappearance, so not interested in this discussion. The argument is that in 70 years since the UFO craze started, and with vast improvements in optics and coverage, we still have nothing better photographed by the public than unusual roundish bright far away lights moving "unlike a plane or a balloon". Those are some really playful aliens, aren't they?
The human brain runs on twenty watts—what it takes for a night lamp—and two bowls of rice a day. It has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. 2 weeks ago researchers uploaded a fruit fly brain (140,000 neurons) in a digital environment and it was a genuine breakthrough. The distance between those two numbers is what this piece is about. How should we treat claims about superintelligence?
Building an “in silico” brain is an interesting project, but it’s orthogonal to building super intelligent AI.
We already have AI that would have absolutely blown my dad’s mind: you can talk to it! You can get it to draw pictures and create recipes and psychoanalyse your friends!
None of that beyond the neural net concept relates directly to human brains, and if we built a virtual human brain, it probably would be way more useful to brain researchers than AI researchers.
There was a pretty interesting documentary about an attempt to create an “in silico” brain model and all the rosdblocks it encountered.
We're in agreement. My essay isn't arguing that understanding the brain is the path to superintelligence — it's arguing that what's running on twenty watts is worth understanding in its own right. Your point about a virtual brain being more useful to brain researchers than AI researchers is exactly the distinction I'd make. The AI conversation tends to absorb everything into its orbit, but the brain is interesting even if it teaches us nothing about building better chatbots. Would love to know which documentary (In Silico?) you're referring to — sounds like it's in the same spirit.
Thank you — adding it to my list. A billion euros and a decade of ambition meeting the complexity of twenty watts. Sounds like it proves the essay's point from the inside.
A night light uses more like 0.5 watts or even less, at least if you mean those little lights that are always on so you don't trip. 20 watts of modern LED lighting is a full overhead light with two 60 watt equivalent bulbs in it.
Thanks for the link to the Google blog and highlighting the "up to 50 synapses can connect pairs of neurons" finding. I wasn't aware of this and it seems key for overcoming current neural network architectural limitations.
I think this comment maybe the answer to your previous comment. You're right that emergence from compact descriptions isn't new — but the specific architecture keeps revealing things that are surprising. Fifty synapses between a single pair of neurons is exactly the kind of detail that changes how you think about what the system is doing. Glad that landed.
Not sure what your argument is... and how it is related to superintelligence. A single logical gate started at several inches and tens of Watts, and now it is a couple of nanometers and draws almost nothing. If your point is about how long it will take for simulated fruit fly ganglia to become, faster, smaller and cooler than the real thing, then you have already conceded that it will happen some day, and the haggling is over the timelines.
My argument isn't about timelines — it's simpler than that. We mapped a poppy seed's worth of brain and found a universe of complexity we didn't expect. That's interesting in its own right, regardless of what it implies for AI development. You may be right that simulated brains will eventually be faster, smaller and cooler than the biological version. The essay isn't disputing that. It's observing that the thing we're trying to replicate — or surpass — is more astonishing than we tend to acknowledge in the rush to get there.
Why is this presented as somehow surprising? The Mandelbrot set is generated from a tiny description; a fruit fly's brain is massively larger than most descriptions of things studied in mathematics and computer science so of course it's going to exhibit emergent effects.
Arguing for biological anchors in AI predictions might have seemed reasonable in 2022, but by now it's clear that it just doesn't work. AIs are already far smarter than typical humans by any reasonable measure.
> AIs are already far smarter than typical humans by any reasonable measure.
Care to elaborate?
Is "knowing that you don't walk to the car wash" not a "reasonable measure" that the typical human easily aces?
To me it seems that what LLMs have demonstrated is that basically all our measures for smartness break down if the assumption that smartness ist relatively uniform across a lot of tasks breaks down.
Wait - is the latter not the definition of "general intelligence" as in "Artificial General Intelligence"?
I would be very interested in your post LLM take on how to measure smartness in both humans and AIs. I think getting that right is extremely important [and I assume everyone who has tried hiring someone in the last 6 months will agree].
The essay isn't arguing biological anchors or making specific AI predictions. It's a piece about the brain, not primarily about AI. Whether current models are smarter than typical humans by some measures is a separate and interesting question — but it doesn't change the fact that 86 billion neurons running on twenty watts and two bowls of rice is doing something worth pausing to admire.
Ever since I read The Satanic Verses, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when you strip founding myths of their mythological framing and imagine them unfolding in a setting that feels ordinary. Stories that feel distant, sacred, or symbolic can suddenly become strange again when they’re placed in familiar surroundings, or, conversely, lose their strangeness and acquire new moral dimensions.
That curiosity eventually led me to write two novels that try the experiment in different ways.
One, Inversion, takes inspiration from the legendary founding narrative of Buddhism. Instead of presenting it in its traditional setting, the story asks what the same underlying drama — renunciation, enlightenment, transformation — might look like if it unfolded in a technological world that treats consciousness almost like information. What parts of the story still resonate when the religious framing is removed, and which parts start to feel uncanny?
The other, The Field of Blood, is essentially the Gospel story told from the perspective of Judas Iscariot—but translated into a modern, recognizable milieu so the events can be seen without the accumulated religious symbolism that normally surrounds them. When the miracles and sacred language fall away, the story becomes something else: a political and moral drama between people who may not fully understand the roles they are playing.
What interests me about this kind of retelling is that it lets you see the structure of the myth more clearly. When you move the same narrative skeleton into an ordinary environment, some elements suddenly feel universal while others start to feel contingent.
I’m curious whether people here have favorite examples of this technique in fiction — stories where a well-known myth or religious narrative is relocated into a mundane context so that we experience it as a human story again.
And a broader question: if you took the founding narrative of a religion or ideology and placed it in an ordinary modern setting, would it still feel profound — or would it just feel strange?
If anyone is curious about the two stories I mentioned, they’re here:
Thanks to everyone who answered my question. It looks like what I have written might be somewhat unique.
I have seen mythology treated in speculative fashion. Larry Niven, I believe, wrote about the collision of Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was a fairly lightweight book.
Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov put gospel stories in their books, masked in Dostoyevsky's case, but they were mere subplots.
Lord of Light by Zelazny might be interesting. There is a mostly Buddhist narrative in a science fiction context. I don't know enough about Buddhist founding myths to know if there is a match.
Although it doesn't retell the story in a modern or mundane setting, I would count "The Last Temptation of Christ" as the exemplar of the type of storytelling you're discussing.
A few years ago, I wrote the interactive fiction "According to Cain," which retells the Cain & Abel story from the perspective of the older brother. Again, not a modern setting, but using modernist approaches to fill-in-the-blanks of an ancient myth.
For me, what's going on here (and possibly happening in your stories) is an attempt to fully flesh out the interiority and psyche of these old characters, where older texts tend to focus on an objective telling—he did this, he said that, the end. It's not just to humanize them, but also to refamiliarize texts that "feel" unfamiliar to us.
This was done by Nikos Kazantzakis, for one, with his 1955 novel "The Last Temptation of Christ" later made into a so-so movie in 1988. Kazantzakis is probably more famous in English-speaking territories for the movie out of another novel, "Zorba the Greek".
I think this can be done, but it depends on the motives of the person doing it. A lot of these attempts are "taking religion and turning it into something more in tune with The Modern Audience/what we as intelligent people can believe", which generally means "turning the story secular". Thomas Jefferson did this with his edited gospels which stripped out all the miraculous and just left "ethical teachings of Joshua bar-Joseph":
But there is a good point there that the original messages get dulled by familiarity. Putting them in a new context can startle us and re-awaken us as to why the originals were controversial and striking in their time.
Yes, thank you for bringing Kazantzakis into the conversation.
My original idea was actually to set the story in first-century Judea. But I eventually decided on a contemporary setting, specifically to remove the instinctive connection readers might have between the characters and the existing mythology. I wanted the events to be experienced as something new rather than as a familiar sacred narrative.
Once I made that decision, the rest fell into place. I chose the particular time and place because the political and spiritual ferment of 1970s San Francisco seemed to echo, in its own way, the atmosphere that must have surrounded the events of the Gospels.
The characters themselves draw partly on the traditional mythology, but also on what we know about modern millenarian movements. Figures like David Koresh and Jim Jones were useful reference points. So the story isn’t meant as a simple retelling of the myth; it’s more an attempt to look at how a similar story might unfold if we take seriously what we’ve learned about how charismatic movements and apocalyptic groups actually function.
I think you'd really enjoy 'The Book of Longings'. It reimagines the Gospel story from the perspective of a women following the disciples, exploring the historical role of women in 0AD, and warmly touching on themes of myth making and feminism.
Could anybody provide an 'is it worth it' review of allergy pills/SLIT? If possible from the perspective of moving from the coast to Texas and getting reamed by seasonal allergies. It was reccomended to me but I am skeptical about expensive pills forever, and waiting years for results
I tried sublingual immunotherapy, it wasn’t very effective and made my tongue itch but was much more convenient than going to an allergy clinic for shots, which actually worked for me.
Are you hospitalized from allergic responses? Is your immune system creating systemic responses that interfere with driving? How about cytokine cascades?
There's a LOT of room in "allergies." (Also, there's a lot of room in Texas. Houston very different from San Antonio).
Have you gotten allergy tests? Have you gone into anaphylactic shock from allergy tests?
Don't cheap over-the-counter antihistamines (loratadine, cetirizine) help for you? I would suggest trying such options before jumping to expensive newer treatments where the side effects are less well understood.
I don’t know if this works for you but I take Costco allertec (Zyrtec) which is $10 a year. It blunts 90% of my seasonal allergies.
But when I lived in Boston I never got any seasonal allergies due to lack of plants. So maybe some big cities/climates out there would be a better fit for you.
I used to have prescriptions for The Good Stuff(tm) that's misted up the nose, rather than pill form...on the one hand, it does work? Significant blunting of allergy sensitivity, let me work around our floral department without being a constant sneezy mess. On the other hand, had to stop eventually due to excessive side effects. You're not really supposed to use such medicines long-term, slowly degrades the mucous membranes and results in (at best) high susceptibility to nosebleeds. Maybe there are better formulations these days, I'm not sure...and of course the profile for pills is different. But I try to go for exposure therapy + only medicating during acute episodes as needed now. It's a long and unpleasant process either way, unfortunately...
(Air purification at home, and also at the office if possible, is a huge help though. Having at least one sanctum of "clean air" makes it a lot easier to face the regular respiratory beatings.)
What is the absolutely minimal dose of exercise at 47 if you are no longer caring about looks, just trying to be minimally healthy? I am experimentind on day 1 set of push-ups with bars, B one set of bodyweight squats (currently 30), day C I set of chest expander, which trains those upper back muscles that help with posture. I might consider a weighted vest at some point.
Further info: not too fat, because low appetite, but feeling "creaky" and also weak. Looks, well when you are dating 45 years old women, just nice clothes are enough.
> What is the absolutely minimal dose of exercise at 47 if you are no longer caring about looks, just trying to be minimally healthy?
If you define "healthy" by "a 20% drop in all cause mortality over no exercise" it's around 90 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous intensity exercise.
You want to do both cardio and resistance, especially as a man, because sarcopenia / muscle loss increases with age. Your current body weight exercises are a good idea, broadly you want to hit most muscle groups twice a week.
The most bang for your cardio buck is HIIT, because 12 minutes worth of it is worth 30-60 minutes of moderate exercise.
Moderate exercise examples:
Walking or hiking
Most bicycling regular people do
Mowing your lawn
Intense exercise examples:
HIIT
Swimming continuous or sprint laps
Stairs
Running at <10 min / mile pace
Happy to discuss more if you have any questions, I have several posts on this, including a review of Dan Lieberman's Exercised, which goes into the science and why's and physiology behind the recommendations.
“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm” ~ James Madison — Federalist 10 — 1787
“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” ~ DJT — 2026
Federalist 10:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0178
Would you prefer if he just lied? At least appreciate the silver lining that he is the most transparent president in the history of this country. He did not get in power by lying about his intents and ambitions. People want this.
> Would you prefer if he just lied?
In this specific case, even simply shutting up and resisting the urge to vomit every last thought that crosses your mind into the closest social media app would have been preferable.
Because _a little_ dishonesty, especially by way of omission, are important to maintain the social fabric. Just ask yourself, what would happen to your social circle if you went around and told everyone your bad opinions of them, even if they were 100% true?
Also, people with a large following, such as Trump, arguably have a higher responsiblity to this principle than the average person. How many micromorts is it when Trump says vile stuff like this?
Not transparent, because utterly random. "We won the Iran war. Also NATO should help." Meanwhile: Iran burns down an Israeli owned weapons factory in Czechia. Is that a win?
>Would you prefer if he just lied?
No. I’d prefer that he did not have such a cartoonishly shallow inner life that the only reaction blooming in there is “Mueller bad dead Mueller good ha ha.”
Also, while he may be transparent about his intents and ambitions, he is not about his accomplishments, even the ones in office. He does lying brags.
On the contrary, Donald "My retribution will be success" Trump has an exceptionally deep capacity for forgiveness. Just look at how he's treated everyone who attacked him, some quite viciously, during the 2016 campaign. It looks like he's able to get over it quickly and essentially completely, a paragon of the virtue of lightness. Like Goku.
I think the difference here is that he never did anything to Mueller, so he (reasonably) sees it as an unprovoked attack, and an unfair _asymmetric_ fight, using the institutions of the state to try to crush him, and THAT he does not forgive without justice.
But yes, I would also preach that he forgive even such enemies once they are dead.
Yeah, Federalist 10 talks about situations like this.
With the recent article by Reuters deanonymizing the artist Banksy, it looks like the vehement opposition to having the subjects of their articles retain anonymity isn't specific to the New York Times writing about Scott.
Don't believe anything you see in the press. Anonymous people are pretty damn good at hiring others to be them (this is a well known practice in the creative world, if you're not J. D. Salinger and don't like talking with fans or signing books). Alam Smithee included, there's a lot of anonymous people in the art/writing world.
Is Trump trying to become a dictator, or just trying to create a France-style executive-dominant government?
In every country, one of the three branches of government is traditionally dominant. So in the UK it is the legislative, in France it is the executive, and in the US it is the judiciary.
E.g. remember how abortion and same-sex marriage was decided not by laws as in most countries, but the SCOTUS, also the SCOTUS created much of the regulatory state (I mean the basis for it, Chevron Defence, overturned 2 years ago) and so on. "Constitutional law" in the US is a misnomer, it is more like "whatever the SCOTUS decided", for example the Constution does not even state that the SCOTUS should be safeguarding it, they just assumed this power at some point. I could go on, but clearly in the US the judiciary branch was dominant.
Now an executive-dominant government structure can sometimes look dictatorial, Charles de Gaulle was sometimes called a dictator, a lot of power can be invested in one man, but of course it was not really so. But in France the executive is really powerful, everybody hates Macron now for nearly bankrupting the country, most of the legislative wants him gone, but he can just govern unimpeded anyway. No lame ducks in an executive-dominant government. No Liz Truss treatment.
Another interesting parallel is militarized, powerful police (gendarmerie) under central, not local control.
Article 49.3 this is a famous tool in the French Constitution that allows the executive to pass a law without a vote in the National Assembly, unless the opposition can successfully pass a motion of no confidence. Imagine if Trump tried that! Everybody would call dictator.
Executive decrees in France have the force of law, again, imagine that...
France has a parliamentary system where the government can be toppled by a vote of no confidence, so Macron can be kicked out theoretically any time. Liz Truss also had a lot of power until she scared the crap out of the markets and got the Julius Caesar treatment from her fellow Tories.
You can't really compare that to the US style Presidential system, which already makes the President very powerful and makes it nearly impossible to kick him out before the end of the term.
Please, this is trump, who tried to pocket veto the patriot act. He's not the authoritarian jackass Biden was (threatening "Americans with guns" with tanks and airplanes? Really?)
Biden also got so openly defiant of the SCOTUS that he dragged the SCOTUS back in session (and off vacation) to thwap his administration's paws for being absolute rats.
Wikipedia and its sources tells me Trump vetoed the extension of the Patriot Act because he didn't get MORE surveillance powers, so I'm not sure how you interpret this as being against authoritarianism.
I would not trust wikipedia to tell me if Trump's hair was blond or not. I also would not trust Trump to tell me why he was considering vetoing the extension of the Patriot act.
That is the problem. Unless you want to invest way more effort into finding truth than your generally being powerless to act on truth status justifies, you should trust Wikipedia.
I mean. We are mostly subjects.
Even assuming your claims are true, Trump didn't merely *threaten* to use the military, he literally did deploy the National Guard into American cities, against the wishes of their states' governors. The courts slapped him down in most states, but there are *still* National Guard on the streets of Washington DC today. For no real reason besides Trump wanted to look "tough on crime."
But go on, tell me more about how authoritarian Biden was. Refresh my memory - which president was it who sent a masked police force into cities he didn't like so they could harass Hispanic-looking people in the street and demand to see their papers?
Biden absolutely sent the national guard into Old San Juan to deal with a rather mythical covid19 emergency. you can consider your memory REFRESHED. Oh, yeah, and the people they were harassing were BLACKS not Hispanics, but that's tiddlywinks, ain't it just?
Scuttlebutt says National Guard in DC was because there were private armies on the streets. Considering the assassinations that occurred in DC under Biden, I'm not exactly surprised at this being the case.
Trump wasn't the guy who asked the National Guard to "cover me" and then the National Guard used upwards of 200 bullets to lay down... "covering fire." Let's just say there's a reason we don't use the Nasty Girls for police action (the police, it should be clear, wanted the Nat'l Guard to shoot, only if the police were getting shot at.)
Whenever two options are offered to explain Trump's behaviour, and one of them is "principled theory", I prefer the other option.
The new DHS Secretary nominee Markwayne Mullin's confirmation hearing conflict with Sen. Rand Paul is pretty amusing. When Paul was attacked by his neighbor in 2017 (pretty violently, causing six broken ribs and a damaged lung), Mullin tweeted that he completely understood why his neighbor did it. When asked about it at the hearing, he refused to apologize for it, said it wasn't in the heat of the moment, and only clarified that he didn't _justify_ it, just said he completely understood it.
ROFL. I've not heard anyone say "Mr. Senator, you're an arse." in louder English.
(McCain was known for blowing his top at other Senators, and Hillary was a master diplomat, I haven't really heard much breeze about Paul one way or the other).
I still don't understand the typo in the amendment. The text according to the ACX post is
> After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
If I understand the Blaze right, there are three versions to consider:
1. A version that was approved by the senate but not passed by congress.
2. A version passed by congress. This version was produced from (1) by replacing "less" in the second-to-last line with "more", supposedly to correct an error.
3. A version distributed to states. This version was mistakenly produced from (1) by replacing the final "less" with "more".
But... what was the error in (1) that (2) fixed? Did (1) read
> ...until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
and then (2) read
> ...until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be more than two hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
? That seems like (2) is even more wrong than (3)!
Most of the relevant links in the article are dead, but the one to the Senate-approved version works. That confirms that (1) says "less, less". But... the "less" in the second-to-last line *is* the last "less", which means (2) and (3) should just be the same?
It sounds like The Blaze thinks the problem was that someone was supposed to make one change but actually made a different change. But it seems to me that the problem is that the original version was fine, and then congress changed it, and I have no idea why they did that.
What if low birthrates are mostly caused by the feeling of crowdedness? Imagine a low-birthrate but no immigration society in the future, like Japan 2060. Everybody has inherited 2-3 apartments, alongside with some cash, real estate is nearly free, maybe a repopulate-the-place instinct will kick in?
I mean why did British people with on the avg 6 kids moved to the prairie in the US and then had 12? They wanted to fill the place up, it felt empty, and there was there is room for their kids, for houses, for farmland, a living space.
I am 47, I already have an inheritance which I try not to squander, and my kid is 12. My life expentancy based on genetics and lifestyle is 15-20 years now. My daughter will have a big-ass house at about 30 and then future inheritance expected from her mothers side. She will not really need to work much, I think. A pretty safe financial background. I think she will feel like birthing the house full.
I mean "empowering careers" is basically a lie from a feminism captured by capitalism, women do not actually feel empowered doing the same jobs men hate too.
Seems to me that the relevant constraints are: space, time, money, lifestyle. Different people probably have fewer/no kids for different reasons.
Space, time, money = great, your daughter will have this handled: big house, not needing a job.
Lifestyle = potential risk. For starters, your daughter is the only child, so she may perceive a family with 1 child as "normal". (You could mitigate the risk by discouraging boyfriends from small families.) It would be good to tell her that sometimes having 2 children is easier than having 1, because two kids can play with each other, one child always wants your attention.
The there is a risk that she might decide to be e.g. a strong female CEO, and that having kids would interfere with her career. I think that it would be a bad choice, but the problem is that if you say that, it might sound hypocritical. (Are there families with 3+ kids around you that you could start spending more time with?)
> I mean "empowering careers" is basically a lie from a feminism captured by capitalism, women do not actually feel empowered doing the same jobs men hate too.
I agree, but the brainwashing is strong. When we planned the first child with my wife, she wanted us to buy a home as close to her work as possible, so that she could return to work as quickly as possible (like, taking the baby with her to the office). After staying at home for a few months she realized that she actually does not miss her work that much, and was okay to stay at home for 6 years, and now she works part-time. But she needed the experience of having a longer break from the job to realize that she actually does not like it as much as she thought she did.
Even with men it is kinda similar. When you go to work every day, it feels "normal", but if you happen to take a three-weeks vacation, returning to the work afterwards may be emotionally very painful; it feels like going to prison for life, because now you know (viscerally, not just intellectually) all the things you will miss compared to the counterfactual early retirement.
It is also a reason why people who were unemployed for a few months have a greater problem getting a job compared to people who lost their jobs only a few weeks ago. It's not just the loss of job skills, or a suspicious gap in CV. It is also the knowledge that there is a life outside of work, and that it's much better (except for the part where you lack the money).
thank you! OK for me the later part is not true, because I am really not good at doing things with my life now that I am single. when I was unemployed I was just in bed all day. but yes for people with partners and children at home it is so much better to be with them
People are just reacting to economic incentives. Capital is winning the class war over labor, and birth rates adjust accordingly. If the economy was soaking up every pair of hands, we wouldn't have the birth rate issues, and maybe we wouldn't have the anti-immigration issues.
I'd want to hope for a counterweight instinct to kick in, but what I'm hearing is kids are economically a drain now, and they weren't then in a farm-type environment. And people taken as a whole generally allow their reproduction strategy to follow some formula of:
economic viability * metaphysical belief * personal convenience * the zeitgeist * so many other assumptions that this equation is as bogus as it looks.
But I think the factors, despite the high bogosity, are largely right.
I was kvetching about all the contradictory info I'm getting from open-source news feeds about the current Gulf conflict. It turns out that it's not due to any ambiguity in the raw data — it's because commentators are putting their own spin on it. Well, Bilawal "Mr. Google Maps" Sidhu whipped together this conflict monitor over the weekend. We can see Chinese, Russian, and US satellites monitoring the conflict. How flights and shipping divert in real time. Zones of RF jamming lighting up in real-time, and military aircraft turning off their transponders before they go out to strike their targets. And the before-and-afters of the resulting strikes from the public satellite feeds. Pretty frickin' cool — even though people are actually dying down there.
https://www.spatialintelligence.ai/p/the-intelligence-monopoly-is-over
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p8o7AeHDzg
Matt Yglesias says "Conservative politics untempered by any sense of honor or Christian moralism is really ugly."
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2033669360842138027
I've heard similar things from other libs, wistfully looking back on the good old days of pre-Trump Christian conservatism, though I'm not sure how much of it is just concern trolling. They can only do this because the fiscally conservative right kept the Christian Right in line and prevented them from enacting their agenda. Had they done so it would have been a catastrophe. Much of the long-term reputation of an ideology comes down to whether it got a country to use as a canvas for its ideas. The social conservatives didn't, so we associate them with weird neighbor Ned Flanders instead of some government tyrant.
"U.S. Considers Withholding H.I.V. Aid Unless Zambia Expands Minerals Access"
This just seems like sound policy, and if "Christian moralism" is what kept previous administrations from doing obvious things for the benefit of the US and its citizens, the sooner it is abandoned, the better.
Darth Vader: "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."
Shankar Sivarajan: "It's just sound policy. Taking control of Cloud City is obviously beneficial for the Empire and its citizens, and if morality previously kept Darth Vader from coming in and making demands at lightsaber-point, the sooner it is abandoned, the better."
As usual, there are multiple perspectives to take here.
First, morality doesn't mean that you are open to any kind of blackmail or exploitation, and unable to negotiate or get into conflict. There needs to be a specific debate on what is good or bad, whether the benefits outweigh the costs, etc. The conclusion is not automatic.
Second... yeah. That reminds me of some people saying "if there is no God, then there is no morality" and similar stuff. Apparently for *some* people it is true. Some people simply don't have an internal moral compass, so you either give them a textbook they can follow, or you cannot expect any nice behavior from them. They don't give a fuck about someone else's suffering, but they still care about getting in Heaven. And now that conservatives have adopted vice signaling, even Christian morality is considered "too woke" for many of them.
Humans have a *revealed preference* for getting old and dying.
Sure, some of them will argue the opposite on the internet. They will swear that they would prefer to stay young and live forever, or at least a few centuries more until they get bored.
But when you observe them, all of them get older and die. Hypocrites!
(Revealed preferences are science. Are you going to disagree with science?)
Thank you! This needed to be said.
> (Revealed preferences are science. Are you going to disagree with science?)
Amen!
Don't forget the massive, ~80% incidence revealed preference for divorce and / or net miserable or dead bedroom relationships.
Oh, and there's one for everyone hating their careers - according to the Gallup "State of the Workplace" report, 70-85% of people report feeling disengaged, and something like 20-33% report being actively miserable. Obviously, everyone enjoys hating their jobs, by revealed preference!
Man, this is fun.
What else is there?
Depressed and despairing people -- revealed preference for misery.
20-30% of traffic fatalities are caused by speeding [1]. This reveals the preference of those drivers to rather be dead than late.
[1] https://etsc.eu/oecd-study-says-inappropriate-speed-responsible-for-up-to-30-of-all-fatal-crashes/
Shower thought?
Expressing my frustration with people who smugly say "revealed preferences" whenever someone complains that something sucks.
What specifically are you referring to?
Again:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/being-john-rawls/comment/230127037
Actually, it's the same person.
People use it often, but the most recent example is:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-425/comment/229269028
People work 40 hour weeks because that is their "revealed preference"... not e.g. because it is virtually impossible for most people to get a part-time job.
I mean, unless you are special (which by definition most people are not), if you ask for a part-time job at the interview, the company will simply say "next". Logically, this shows that you prefer a 40 hour week to unemployment, but it *doesn't* show that you prefer a 40 hour week to a 30 hour week, which is the argument that people are trying to make when they talk about revealed preferences.
We have a lot more 20-30 hour/week jobs than we used to. In the 1990s, I'd have said, "yeah, if you don't flip burgers (a kid's job), you have to work fulltime." Now, there's a lot of jobs that can accomodate that.
So what're the chances that congress funds the war in Iran?
I would love it if they denied Trump. But I'd bet against it. Say 70%
Oh, my. Epstein's accountant just testified before Congress that Epstein paid off the woman who accused Trump of raping her when she was 13 years old. The implication is that Epstein did this as a favor to Trump.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-190722892
From an NBC article about the accountant, Richard Kahn:
"Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., described Kahn as a “fixer” and said Epstein’s crimes were deeply intertwined with his own finances. He said Kahn’s name appeared on shell companies used to move money, including payments tied to tuition and victims. He did not provide details of the allegations."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/richard-kahn-jeffrey-epstein-accountant-testimony-house-oversight-rcna263136
"Did not provide details of the allegations" is one way to put it. If you've ever wondered what it's like to live through a McCarthyist moral panic, this is it.
And in case anyone is thinking of responding with "Trump and the GOP deserve this for indulging in conspiracy theories," Kahn has no connection to either.
Covid19 was a mccarthyist moral panic too. Folks with GBS were booted out of bands because they "wouldn't get vaccinated" despite it being medically contraindicated.
> If you've ever wondered what it's like to live through a McCarthyist moral panic,
Wasn't #MeToo during the first Trump presidency?
But what’s the import, really? Does not seem relevant to the question of whether Trump really raped the kid. And we already knew Trump and Epstein were buddies. Aren’t you irritated by the tone of the blog you link? . “IT’S A SMOKING CANNON!!!!!”
I guess I'm numb to being irritated by sensational headlines. Our national discourse is dominated by right-wing media that exaggerates the Left's shortcomings and minimizes the Right's batshit craziness. And I admit taking pleasure in Gavin Newsom's Trump-baiting. :-)
I've got nothing against baiting Trump! That link just seemed like lame midwit baiting. Also like an unusually hysterical example of the Trump's-gonna-pay revenge porn that's always going on in the liberal press, stuff about how much he's enriched himself to date, how some judge in Idaho blocked some decree of his, about somebody's suing him . And there's always this breathless quivery foreplay quality, *we're really gonna bust him this time!*. And people on the left get all streamed up. But they never never never get to cum.
Reminds me of the classic "Bombshell montage": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908
I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
LOL! True.
For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.
>Aren’t you irritated by the tone of the blog you link?
Accuracy-increasing or poor heuristic for weight applied to analysis of presented evidence?
Is this a reply to me? I don't understand your question.
Oh sorry - I meant if you felt that indexing on a sensational-sounding term like "smoking cannon" is a worthwhile habit for dismissing reviewing a piece of evidence presented.
Evidence as presented, which one can undertake to verify:
"Democratic Congressman Suhas Subramanyam walked out of that closed-door deposition and went straight to X. His notes don’t mince words: “A Trump accuser has received $ from the survivor fund managed by Kahn.”When reporters pressed him for detail, Subramanyam didn’t back down. “Another person who was an accuser of Donald Trump was given a settlement by Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. We did confirm that,” he said. “We wanted to confirm that certain accusers had received settlements, and he confirmed that.” "
>Oh sorry - I meant if you felt that indexing on a sensational-sounding term like "smoking cannon" is a worthwhile habit for dismissing reviewing a piece of evidence presented.
No, of course that's not a reason to discount the message. That was just an afterthought. I don't have any reason to discount the facts (tho have not checked them). My point was that all this, if true, was not of much import. Does not seem relevant to the crucial question of whether Trump actually raped the kid. A man in public life with woman claiming he raped her at 13 is going to want to hush her up quick whether her claim is true or not. And we already knew Trump and Epstein were buddies, so Epstein's doing Trump this favor also seems not to give any info one way or the other about whether Trump raped the girl.
The claim is that Epstein’s estate paid compensation to a woman who accused Epstein and Trump of sexual abuse. The payment came from a “survivor fund.”
The payment was not hush money, so it can’t be explained as a favor to Trump. But the payment can be explained without any reference to Trump whatsoever. The obvious explanation for the payment is that the Epstein estate concluded that it was more likely that not that Epstein had sexually abused the woman.
> The implication is that Epstein either did this as a favor to Trump.
What is the other option of the "either"? Or is the "either" a typo?
or did it on the behest of some third party for unknown reasons.
typo. Originally I wrote as a favor or at the behest of trump. But behest would be a favor. correcting it.
Hot takes on the upcoming Firefly animated series?
Firefly, more than even Buffy, depended on the unique writing talent of Joss Whedon, and none of the people I've seen try to imitate him over the years have come anywhere close. Fillion et al have a feel for their own characters, but I'm pretty sure that won't be enough.
I suppose it's possible that they're secretly bringing Whedon back as a writer under a pseudonym; there's precedent for that sort of thing with blacklisted writers, but probably not.
Wasn't optimistic about the proposed "Buffy" reboot, not optimistic about this one.
Catch Fillion in Big Mouth, if you haven't already.
That's a good point. I remember Buffy seemed to suffer quite a bit in the last couple seasons when Whedon was busy with Angel and Firefly and Marti Noxton was showrunner. They weren't terrible, but they were noticeably weaker than the earlier seasons.
I've never understood the general consensus that the earlier seasons of Buffy are better. The coming-of-age metaphors are forced, the moral dilemmas are nonsensical, and the worldbuilding is wildly inconsistent.
Probably I'm just the wrong demographic. If I were old enough to have watched the show when it aired, I might be better able to appreciate it.
Yeah, there was a noticeable drop after the third season, when Joss made "Angel" his primary focus. Still individually good episodes, most notably the Whedon-scripted "Hush", but much of the storytelling was an inferior retread of the same material, plus some basically meh new stuff, and it usually didn't have the magic of S1-3. I didn't return after the S5 finale, figuring Buffy's death was the right way for the series to properly end, but from what I've heard it was another stepwise drop from S4-5. Not terrible, but I had better things to do with my time.
Yes, I saw the musical episode, and I'd regard it as another notably good exception to the declining trend, but for the fact that it was too closely tied to storylines I wasn't interested in.
But I still have the first three seasons on DVD, and those discs don't entirely gather dust.
Sometimes shows also just run out of good ideas. Many of the best episodes of Buffy use supernatural things as metaphors for aspects of growing up.
But there's only so many good ideas of this sort, and then there's a bunch of bad ones ("what if magic beer turned you into a caveman?") and then you're a bit stuck.
"Your ex-boyfriend who was nice until he had sex with you and then turned horrible" makes a much better villain than "disembodied source of all evil".
Sometimes, but in the case of "Buffy" the transition from a high school to a college setting should have given them a whole new set of ideas. College is very different than high school, and I was really looking forward to the real-life problems of young college students being metaphorically reflected in battles against occult evils in the way that Whedon had so adroitly done for the first three seasons,
Instead, we got maybe five episodes into S4 before the writers mostly forgot that any of the characters were even going to college, except for that one class where the professor was secretly running a military demon-hunting operation.
If "the show" ran out of ideas, it's not because there were no more ideas, it's because the writers didn't bother to look for them in the bucket labeled "here's a bunch of good ideas".
Well yeah, they could not really handle the college stuff well; on the other hand, they were able to transform the setup from "high-school" to "adult life".
Also, it is hard to judge the musical episode without context; yes, it is quite fun, but also deeply tragic, which hits you with its full strength only if you watched the previous episodes too, with Buffy's post-revival depression and all.
(S5 is a pretty fine ending for the show, though.)
Maybe that's what Joss does these days, writes scripts for pay under other names...
I wouldn't be surprised if he were working as a "script doctor", i.e. an uncredited writer who does an editing pass on a mostly-finished script prior to production. It's something Whedon has quite a bit of in the past, and it seems like something that would play to his strengths.
BTW do you happen to know the Buffy comics? Are they worth reading? (I am a big fan of the TV show, and enjoyed Angel as well. And, of course, I don't expect Sandman quality...)
They're not terrible, but also not at the quality of the show.
There are a few comics written by Whedon. They still didn't really grip me. The TV actors are better, I guess...
Thanks!
Too bad I'm still curious...
Without Joss Whedon? I'm sure I will watch it, and I'm pretty sure I will regret it.
Exactly what I was thinking.
If they're going to do it, it makes sense to do it animated. The actors are more than two decades older than when the original show was produced, which would be immersion-breaking for a live-action sequel. I suppose you could recast, but a huge part of why the original worked as well as it did was the acting and the chemistry between the actors. And also, AFAIK, the sequel series is happening in large part because the actors want to do it.
Why couldn't the live-action sequel be set twenty years later ? (unless they're hellbent on bringing back the ones who died)
I think that's part of it. As I understand it, the project is largely driven by the actors from the show wanting to do it,, with Fillion and Tudyk being the main ones driving it. I'm guessing Tudyk would prefer to set it during a time frame when his character is still alive.
Also, there's the question of story. Setting it in the unspecified time gap between the series and the movie allows them to try to do something that's pretty much more of the same of the original series. Setting it 20 years later means having to deal with the medium-to-long term consequences of the events of the movie, which could be a good story but would necessarily be a very different kind of story and would be a harder sell from a marketing perspective.
They should do it like Pink Panther, and make the cartoon about an actual firefly.
Is there any precedent for this kind of thing being good?
It's two decades late, the brains behind the original is not involved, and there's no stakes to any of the storytelling because it happens prior to the movie so nothing meaningful can actually happen.
I didn’t much like the Big Plot that explains where Reavers come from and what River Tam’s deal was, I just loved the picaresque adventures of the crew in the ‘Verse and will happy eat them up.
Me too!
Sometimes the 'adventure of the week' is all you really need, especially if the characters are strong and the writing is good.
While a long arc story can be beneficial as a structural framework for a show, often it comes to dominate the entire series - and frequently it's just not interesting enough to sustain viewers engagement.
It's a pattern that happens over and over - a good, entertaining, largely stand-alone episode-based series gradually devolves into a melodrama that pushes the individual episode stories aside, to the major detriment of the whole thing.
Having a new creative team take a shot at a property some decades later can be successful, but in the examples I can think of there's usually more separation than a direct sequel with the same characters and there's often some continuity in creative team.
Star Trek: The Next Generation -- Took place a century after TOS, all-new main characters with only occasional guest appearances by TOS cast members. Gene Roddenberry was involved in the first couple of seasons.
Doctor Who (2005-) -- All-new cast. The Doctor is technically the same character, but regenerations allow for recasting and reinterpretation. I thought I remembered Russell T. Davies being involved in late Classic Doctor Who in some capacity, but I just looked it up and seem to have been mistaken about that.
Battlestar Galactica (2003-9) -- Full reboot, new creative team. Pretty major reinterpretations of characters and concepts. One cast member, Richard Hatch, returned but played a very different role (Apollo in Classic BSG, Tom Zarek in New BSG).
> I thought I remembered Russell T. Davies being involved in late Classic Doctor Who in some capacity, but I just looked it up and seem to have been mistaken about that.
He wasn't involved in the TV show before the 2005 reboot, but he wrote one of the 90s novels (https://tardis.wiki/wiki/Damaged_Goods_(novel)), which IMO could fairly be described as part of the classic era of Doctor Who.
My rule is, no remakes or reboots of a *good* movie or TV series. If it was good, the fans will be comparing it to the original, it's highly unlikely that they'll see yours as *better*, and they generally won't want to keep two different continuities in their head. So mostly you'll just be splitting the fanbase. And if you didn't care about the original fanbase, it was a waste of money to buy the rights.
Battlestar Galactica worked because there were an awful lot of people who remembered the original as a guilty pleasure, knew it was dreck when we were watching it but it was what we had between "Star Wars" and "Empire Strikes Back", and if someone can make something actually *good* with the idea that we wouldn't be embarrassed to watch, great. I'm perfectly happy to never again remember the original, or interact with anyone who thinks the original was some great masterpiece what should never be tampered with, and apparently I'm not the only one.
If the original is good, stick with prequels, sequels, or side stories that can more or less fit with the original continuity, and probably best not to use the original characters unless you can get the original actors at appropriate ages (though recasting younger for a prequel can sometimes work).
I'm mostly on board with that. In my mind, the best use of reboots is when a concept has major unrealized potential. "Good concept, bad execution" is probably the most clear-cut instance of this, and from what I've seen of old BSG (the three opening episodes and one or two random episodes in the middle), it seems to fall squarely in this category.
I'm also open to remakes and reboots on the grounds of shift-of-medium (making it more of an adaptation than a remake), lack of resources to do it right the first time, or severely abbreviated runs. Or the source material is already fractured enough that it can tolerate a reinterpretation without stepping on the original too badly.
For example, I think the Peter Jackson LotR movies were defensible despite the 1978 animated movie being serviceable, since by the early 2000s there was room to do a substantially bigger and better adaptation.
Likewise, I think it's defensible that the 2000s Addams Family movies were a reboot of the 1960s TV series rather than a sequel, prequel, or side story.
There have also been some really good reboots of big-name superhero franchises. For example, for Batman we had the Adam West TV series, the two movies directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton from c. 1990, and the 2000s trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale. But this can be and frequently is overdone: I felt no need to see the more recent remakes with Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson, and from what I gather I haven't missed much.
>and probably best not to use the original characters unless you can get the original actors at appropriate ages (though recasting younger for a prequel can sometimes work).
Agreed. For all their flaws, one of the bright points of the Star Wars prequels was Ewan McGregor's portrayal of Obi-Wan. Recasting a role originally and iconically played by Sir Alec Guinness is a very tall order, but I think McGregor pulled it off. They also got really lucky that Ian McDiarmid was on the younger side, made up to look older, when he played Palpatine in Return of the Jedi and 20 years later was in the right age range to play a younger Palpatine in the prequels.
And speaking of recasting Alec Guinness, I really liked the 2004 remake of The Ladykillers, with Tom Hanks playing Sir Alec's role. That one I think was a case of "unfulfilled potential", as the 1955 original, while generally well-regarded among people who had seen it, was a bit of a deep cut rather than a beloved classic with a passionate fan base.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Twin Peaks? At least the two decades check out.
Fate Stay Zero, Steins Gate Zero, Thrawn series for star wars...
So, pretty much no (it would take a genius, and Hollywood isn't hiring anymore).
Firefly was already falling apart due to lack of backstory, there were so many holes...
> Firefly was already falling apart due to lack of backstory, there were so many holes...
Funny how differently people view things. I saw those 'holes' as tantalising opportunities for future stories, as little by little we got to see a bit more of the bigger picture.
Absolutely, 100% a feature, not a bug. Made me hungry for more.
Inconsistencies aren't "tantalizing opportunities" -- they're just logical holes. Firefly is full of refrigerator logic. It was marvelously inconsistent. When you're writing science fiction, you do the economics first -- how much does it cost to go from place to place? Will "what we've done here" count in later places? Is all communication ship-based?
TOS Star Trek went with "it is difficult to go from place to place" and "generally, there's limited FTL transmission" -- as a Western set in space, it works. 60 minutes to solve a problem, in general. (Note that teleporters have their own unique problems, economically speaking. TOS solves this by requiring Big Machines on one end, and a relatively limited teleport range (and by very conveniently not discussing the bank robberies this makes very easy). ).
The A-Team went with a "reputation" and "new problems to solve every week" model -- so they were actually called in, but also on the run from authorities.
There's "seat of your pants" logic, but this isn't it.
"When you're writing science fiction, you do the economics first"
However, Firefly is fantasy, only set in space.
(Would it be rude to also quote Straczynski from Babylon 5 that "spaceships travel at the speed of plot"?)
In fantasy, you also do the economics first. See Kulthea.
No, it's not rude to quote "noted authorities." I was doing so above, in my criticism of Firefly as having inconsistencies that were causing it to fall apart.
Straczynski was well known for throwing out his plots whenever he'd get into a jam session. "Well have you thought of this?" -- and Straczynski would just tear everything down and make an entirely new plot outline.
(Of course, part of the "speed of plot" is you can toss in problems with the engine to slow down the ship... so that it arrives at the correct dramatic moment.)
That'd be "economics, the dismal science', that you are referring to there?? :-)
Andor was quite well received. I also enjoyed the Clone Wars animated series.
Andor is a really good, seriously dark TV series that has nothing to do with Star Wars except that someone somehow made a tie-in movie ten years earlier.
Andor is an outlier, though. It doesn't share the overall feel of the three space fantasy trilogies or their other spin-off TV series; it's basically an original dystopian sci-fi story wearing a Star Wars skin. That's absolutely different from Firefly's attempt to continue a series about a set of specific core characters.
And no, Diego Luna's character is not a core character of the Star Wars universe.
I expect I will expect too much.
How is living in the Bay actually?
I'm a college student right now and I'm graduating this May. I have a well-paying remote job lined up so I can kind of throw a dart at the board in terms of where to go. My college town is nice with great outdoor access, but I don't think I want to stay here because it's pretty small and the social scene kind of evaporates once you graduate. I want somewhere that's urban with lots of culture+events but also good outdoors access. SF seems like a cool combo of this, but I've never actually been there so I'm kind of ignorant. Going to the ACX/"rationalist scene" stuff would be a plus, but isn't really my main motivation, I just figure this blog is likely to have a lot of Bay Area people here and would be a nice place to ask around.
I am really curious about how it is in terms of social scene/making friends and events/stuff to do. Would love to here y'alls experiences!
I live in the East Bay and I love it. I'm within driving distance of the culture and restaurants of San Francisco. I can take day trips up to wine country. I'm an hour or so away from some of the most scenic coastline in the country. Eight months of sunshine, most of the mellowed by the morning marine layer (which can get a bit gloomy until it burns off). And a four-month rainy season, in which the hills turn brilliant green. Redwoods in the coast hills. Bike trails and hiking trails are all over the place. Yes, suburbia clots thickly around the inner Bay, but it's a short drive to places that are still wild and scenic.
Sounds beautiful!
I lived in the South Bay for eight years and wish I'd left sooner.
The central problem was that I don't drive, and the Bay is a giant suburb. I biked a lot, but there wasn't that much worth doing within biking range. Things got much better when I moved to a city with public transit.
As far as the weather: it never actually snows, which is nice, but it gets chilly after dark even in summer, so get used to bringing extra layers. I remember one year I went to the Fourth of July celebration in San Francisco and wore my heaviest winter coat and was still shivering.
I've heard good things about Berkeley if you're a rationalist and into group houses. Haven't tried it though.
Interesting. I love cold rainy weather! The "giant suburb" thing is mostly applicable to the South Bay, right? my understanding was Berkeley/Oakland and stuff are supposed to be more urban, and SF is a big city?
That's my understanding, yeah!
Seattle has pretty much all of the amenities you're seeking of the Bay Area but is slightly less expensive (but only slightly).
Yeah very much also curious about Seattle! I know people talk about it as being pretty introverted, I'm curious how deep that runs. I actually lived in Bellingham, WA for a bit and found it a little bit too out there for me, but I know Seattle is very much a different place.
Seattle also has the “Seattle Freeze” unfortunately (it’s a social chill, although we also have plenty of atmospheric ones)
Admittedly, that's also true. You and I have been commenting together across threads for how long now, and never tried to meet up?
The freeze can definitely be a thing if you don't find an exception in a more outgoing local micro-culture.
"The Bay" is a large and diverse area. If you mean SF...
- Check rents. Even if your remote job is well-paying, it might not be up to handling SF costs. Expect worse housing, food, etc for a given amount of money than you'd get anywhere else.
- SF has beautiful outdoors (especially if you have a car) and many events. Events will be skewed towards those that tech people do, which are (on the whole) less literary and social than East Coast equivalents, more likely to discuss futurism, self-help, science, etc.
- Everyone says that finding friends in SF is hard; theories range from the cost of space (eg you won't be able to afford a living room) to the people being busy and business-focused. The rationalist/ACX/AI communities are great but can be difficult to break into if you're not already socially adept or good friends with someone else in the space.
- You could also go to Berkeley/Oakland (somewhat cheaper than SF but still expensive, less stuff, great nature if you have a car) or San Jose (???, supposedly has a population of 1 million but nobody knows anyone who lives there).
> The rationalist/ACX/AI communities are great but can be difficult to break into if you're not already socially adept or good friends with someone else in the space.
Those places aren't autist friendly? Wow, that's a bit sad.
Thanks Scott! I really appreciate the advice, will definitely keep this in mind!
I wonder if maybe the signal of people saying places are "hard to make friends" is being lost a little these days. Everywhere I have ever lived, people have claimed it is "hard to make friends"; obviously the experience of making friends is very dependent on the individual, but in my opinion some of these places very much were easier to make friends in than others.
Not sure what the easiest way to objectively measure this would be. A quick Claude-session makes me think it seems understudied relative to how much people care about these things.
I think making friends as an adult is highly dependent on finding third places, somewhere that provides a context where you will see the same people over and over without having to schedule a hang. I can definitely believe there is variability in how many third places are available in a given place, and how many people go to them as well. I also believe there can be issues in finding third places one wants to go to for other than social reasons...
For sure. I've made plenty of really close friends in life, but they've all been through college/summer jobs/study abroad etc., the kind of environments where you see the same tight group of people over and over again. I'm not really sure what the best way to accomplish that is once you're out of school. That's why I kind of want to move to a bigger city, I figure there's just more stuff going on and more niche interest groups where you can make friends. The city I live in now is pretty small (~45k people) and for the most part there's just not a critical mass of people to support all but the most general of hobbies.
I wish you success. I live in a city of around 300k people and have much the same issue. I did find a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym that has a good community, but BJJ is like 4th or 5th in my list of interests, have had no luck finding groups for those others.
Hmmm. What do you feel like is the main blocker if not number and density of people? Are people not outgoing enough? are there not enough places for them to meet up?
If anyone is interested I created this market, I would love to create more but only if there is a bit of interest: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/42560/confirmed-deaths-from-iran-war-2026/
And I missed this. Iran says it will only close the Strait of Hormuz to the US and its allies. Nice use of the carrot and the stick there. Now, nations have even less reason to respond positively Trump's request/demand that our allies contribute their naval and air assets to the operation.
Per Donny Evans's Developer blog...
> Iran is now explicitly framing the Strait of Hormuz as selectively closed—not to the world, but to the United States, Israel, and any countries that choose to line up with them. Speaking in Tehran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said:
>> “From our perspective it is open. It is only closed to our enemies, to those who carried out unjust aggression against our country and to their allies.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-191030672
This just doesn't seem practical. Are they going to start pre-clearing ships; "Yes we'll let you through, not we won't let you through."?
To some minimal extent they are already doing this. Some Indian ships were allowed through.
Yes. But threats are threats. And US warships would be easy to identify if they started escorting tankers.
They say that, but at the same time they are attacking random ships that have nothing to do with the U.S. After all, approximately zero of the ships are from the U.S. or Israel. It's just like how they say they are attacking U.S. bases but in reality they are sending drones into shopping malls and stuff like that. It's just propaganda like the AI videos of Tel Aviv being flatened, right?
It is very hard to even estimate the amount of actual hits. Just to mention the most obvious, Israel has military censorship in this topic. (Don't get me wrong, this is completely understandable, as they are at war for decades now, and why give up info on military targets, or lower the morale. Still, it is also worth keeping in mind when reading the "Iran only hit some camels in the desert, and one shopping mall on purpose" stories.)
e.g. https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
"These restrictions have created some absurd situations for journalists. In one case known to +972 Magazine, an Iranian missile hit its target while fragments struck a nearby educational facility. Yet the media was only allowed to report on the latter, without being able to even mention the former or inspect the damage."
I haven't seen any clear accounting of the ships that have been attacked (by type, owner, registry, destination). Do you have one?
What I see is a bunch of conflicting reports put out by various media sites and experts (of whose expertise I'm unsure).
As for US military installations hit by Iranian drones, the description of the damage is vague. Reading the news and social media, I would have no clue as to whether US facilities have been operationally impacted by the attacks. All I have to go by is estimates of how many patriot interceptors were fired. And estimates of how many drones and missiles Iran launched. The ballpark count seems to be ~2000 Shahed drones vs ~800 Patriots. I suspect a lot Shaheds are getting through if this number is correct.
Oil is fungible, so is there maybe an equilibrium where oil from Hormuz goes to non-US countries and the US gets oil from elsewhere, but overall oil prices don't shift that much?
The US is a net oil exporter. It still imports some oil from the middle east, but it's not any major amounts.
Not sure if this means this heightened oil prices are actually good for the US economy?
Good for the minority of Americans who own oil companies, but not in a way likely to quickly trickle down to anyone else.
I'm honestly not sure how to think of the economics of that,
The benefits are surely wider than your analysis. Pretty sure it will be good for anyone working in the oil industry and for the general health of the US economy.
But beyond that I don't think I understand enough to comment.
If this goes on long enough that ExxonMobil et al decide that it's worth investing in new production capacity, sure. But I'm pretty sure that right now they're expecting TACO in a few months or so, in which case any new-production investment that wouldn't have been profitable last year, will go back to being unprofitable.
In which case, they'll be paying the same people to run the same facilities producing the same amount of oil as always, but they'll be selling that oil for $100/bbl rather than $80. And what's their motive to share any of that by e.g. paying any of the extra to their workers? Workers who would become accustomed to the "new normal" and consider it a betrayal to have their last raise revoked, even though the price of oil is back to $80 or whatever and the company couldn't afford to pay the higher wages going forward.
They'll just pocket the money. Good for them, not so much for anyone else.
The simplest mechanism is this:
When more money flows into the US, these rich jerks spend more money, and a lot of people on the selling side earn more money.
I get the feeling Trump is losing this one, it will be interesting to see how he reacts.
How does that work with mines?
Good question. And I haven't got a complete answer for you. Various news outlets and commentators claim that Iran is deploying smart mines, and there are all sorts of variations. The ones that sit on the bottom of the ocean seem to have an AI component that listens for acoustic signatures of certain types of ships. Others seem to hover close to the surface and can be programmed to explode when ships broadcasting specific AIS signals are detected.
Seems like the smart mine measure/counter-measure space is evolving quickly though.
You could do this with smart mines or acoustic profiling mines - and Iran probably is - but I don't think you need them and you could do this with any mines if you so wished.
I think you could simply declare a mine-free channel through the Strait ("we haven't laid any mines in a 1000 yard wide channel between this Lat/Long and that Lat/Long"), such that the safe channel takes ships through waters you definitively control: perhaps that channel goes really close in to your shoreline and you have a preponderance of FIACs (fast inshore attack craft) or drones or whatever there.
Then, you just have to say "We'll sink any USA-flagged merchant ships that attempt to transit this channel, but it's open to other shipping". (More realistically they would use AIS passage data rather than flag, but it's a similar principle)
The USA could maybe park a few destroyers in that safe channel to provide a defensive umbrella, but destroyers are of very limited use against FIAC swarms. They do have a huge 50+ mile defensive air umbrella, but I imagine splashing drones with defensive missiles is probably very expensive and not guaranteed to always work.
There are no waters that Iran definitively controls, and the shipping channels can't come close enough to the Iranian coast to matter because the water there isn't deep enough. If there's a mine-free channel, the Iranians can't stop anyone from using it except by missiles. drones, or kamikaze speedboats.
And a US destroyer, ideally with an E-3 circling a hundred miles away for situational awareness and a couple of F-18s circling overhead, is a very effective defense against drones, kamikaze speedboats, etc. Of course, the US destroyer fleet is stretched pretty thin, and we don't know how many high-end Chinese antiship missiles Iran has stashed away, so I doubt the USN is eager to park a Burke in the strait any time soon.
Hence Trump asking any of our allies to please step up and do that part, after spending the past year and a half trash-talking (or threatening to invade) basically all of our allies.
“There are no waters that Iran definitively controls, and the shipping channels can't come close enough to the Iranian coast to matter”
This certainly wasn't true when I was deployed to the Gulf! Although that was quite a few years ago and it's conceivable that the Iranian bases that then projected power over parts of the strait have been put out of action now?
“A US destroyer, ideally with an E-3 circling a hundred miles away for situational awareness and a couple of F-18s circling overhead, is a very effective defense against drones, kamikaze speedboats, etc.”
I don't know much about AVWAR (especially drone warfare!) so maybe that's a suitable defence against drones or missiles (bet it’s bloody expensive, though..) but as for the surface threat it's fairly unrealistic to expect a destroyer and a couple of FBAs to protect multiple large, slow-moving merchant ships from a FIAC swarm (Leaving aside how cheap Boghammar FIACs - which are most of the Iranian ORBAT - can be and how much money it costs to keep FBAs in the air..)
“I doubt the USN is eager to park a Burke in the strait any time soon”
Much as I've always been impressed with the defensive capabilities of Arleigh Burkes, I’m forced to agree with you. More likely they'd form-up a convoy of several USA-bound merchantmen in the Gulf, then escort them through in one go whilst the destroyer kept station on the up-threat side of the convoy and enforced a minimum CPA of a couple of miles (to give it a fighting chance to engage inbound FIACs in time). That's how it was done in my day (albeit with Ospreys rather than FBAs... they always looked like they were imminently on the point of plummeting out of the sky…)
Even doing that, though, unless you were very confident the Iranian bases in the theatre had no FIAC capability, I don't think you could be sufficiently confident of stopping every FIAC before it could get within range of any tanker as to make the tactic seem a particularly attractive option.
Also, we've got the threat of smart mines (of various ill-defined types) for which the lack of immediately available mine sweepers is causing ass-burn in the Pentagon.
I think it is not really about the possibility of such a defense, and more like the costs involved. At the moment the advantage of drones is that they are ridiculously cheap, e.g. a lot cheaper than the missiles used to shoot them down.
(And you can bet that we are far from being fully informed about cases when the super-duper defenses do not work.)
Four years ago, people were using ridiculously expensive missiles to shoot down cheap drones. Contrary to popular belief, "military intelligence" is not an oxymoron, and a lot of very smart people have spent the past four years figuring out better ways to approach this task.
And sometimes, it isn't even that hard. If the United States Navy needs to shoot down a Shahed anywhere close to one of its ships, it can just use a proximity-fuzed shell from the 5" deck gun - a technology developed eighty years ago, to defeat threats far more capable than an Iranian drone.
The US military is stretched pretty thin in some parts, for a variety of reasons, and so lots of things that we should be defending, won't be defended at all. But the things we do defend, are defended by means several orders of magnitude improved over "gosh, there's nothing we can do about your $5,000 drone except shoot a million-dollar missile at it".
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Christopher Rufo recently said that “The Right's collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it.” He’s like a drunk who can see how his drinking is ruining his life, yet no matter how many times he vows to go cold turkey, he always succumbs to the inevitable relapse. In this case, it means agreeing with conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who said that “Elon was run out of town because Republicans, and many close to Trump, are in on it, too.”
The real reason, of course, is that Elon decided to accuse Trump of complicity in pedophilia.* Non-autistic people generally grasp that doing that isn’t the way to win friends and influence people. I’m sure Rufo knows that, but he wants Elonbucks, so can’t criticize the man. That’s understandable, but he could have just not commented on the subject. Instead, he did the standard thing Rightists face when they can’t blame the man at the top who’s really at fault (like Musk or Trump), which is invent or endorse a conspiracy to explain his failure. Rufo doesn’t see anything wrong with it because his own brain has been melted by years spent in a culture where that is the normal, accepted way of thinking about the world.
https://x.com/christopherrufo/status/2026019868353671346
https://x.com/christopherrufo/status/2033302753033019695
*While technically all he said is that Trump was “in the Epstein files,” non-autistic people understand that when you say that, you’re implying something more than the literal meaning of the words.
A bit tangential, but I recently found this essay from 2012 about the history of conservative brain-melting.
The very very tl;dr version is that the B2C-ification of US politics, enabled by (and masqueraded as) mass mailing campaigns for charity causes led to the rise of well respected grifter politicians.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
Mitt Romney lied about being pro-life because some a large fraction of the American populace are grown-up children who think a guy rose from the dead and he needed their votes. That's just how democracy works. Strategic lying for political advantage is rather different from the brainrot that affects the modern right, in which conspiracism is the default epistemology and nobody ever takes responsibility for anything.
I recommend reading the essay, because IMHO, it's absolutely not at all different.
The seeds of the current grievance politics turned up to 11 (on both sides) is very well noticeable in these campaigns. (The classic pearl clutching fearmongering weaponized, industrialized, and very conveniently for those running it, financialized.)
Mitt Romney lied constantly, just as Trump, except not a lot of people cared, because (he didn't win and) was not as crazy as Trump.
Mitt Romney said his budget wouldn't increase the deficit when it would. He was far from the first politician to tell that kind of lie, nor are such lies exclusive to one side of the political aisle. (Remember the "Inflation Reduction Act" that most economists agreed would not actually reduce inflation?)
"Slop vat churner angry about slop!"
I think bad epistemics is at the root of all of this. I'm trying to highly down-weight my credence in people who were right for the wrong reasons, and upweight people who are wrong for the right reasons (e.g. took the upside on a 60/40 issue, being upfront about their uncertainty). Faulty moral reasoning coming in as a close second; "doing the Bad Thing to my enemy, because they are Bad."
Rufo is a smart guy but he was always playing with fire, morally speaking speaking, and very obviously was not being careful about how he arrived at the truth, so it's no surprise to see him get his shirtsleeve snagged in the roiling conspiracy machine.
" I'm trying to highly down-weight my credence in people who were right for the wrong reasons, and upweight people who are wrong for the right"
Given that we can determine much more accurately whether people were right than whether their reasons were, this sounds like encouraging bad epistemics rather rooting them out.
Well when someone says something like "I am in favor of re-opening schools during this pandemic because the globalist elites want to use this opportunity to usher in a new world government!" it's pretty easy to divine their reasons. What I mean by "the wrong reasons" is more "their explicit stated rational justification" not some deeper sense of their hidden motives.
That would be reason to revisit the question of whether globalist elites want to use this opportunity to usher in a new world government.
I don’t have a hot take on this other than finding it very funny that Rufo of all people is complaining about this.
It's just an endlessly repeating morality tale. People send years degrading gatekeeping and then are like "Oh wait now Donald Trump can just do whatever? Oops, if only there were gatekeepers."
And then they decide it's worth it to just get onboard and attack gatekeepers some more and then it's suddenly "Oh wait Candace Owens insists Brigitte Macron is secretly trans and for some reason was in the Stanford Prison Experiment? And she says that Erika Kirk worked with The Jews to murder her husband? We should really have had a gate in front of this or something."
I really look forward to whatever bullsh** is so crazy that Candace Owens - once she's again accepted as a mainstream figure - eventually finds crazy enough to disavow.
if only there was a parable about this that these people could have read about...something with a pithy name, maybe "chesterton's gate"
My replication of Moretti (2021) is now accepted at the American Economic Review. I found 10 problems with the paper.
https://blog.michaelwiebe.com/p/moretti-replication-published-in
Any idea how this will affect coefficient giving?
Great work. I only hear about your replication work when it goes viral because a study is especially bad - how often do you replicate a paper and find it's fine?
I'd say roughly half of studies are robust (if slightly exaggerated, ie. presenting a neater story than reality):
https://michaelwiebe.com/research/
How sketchy would it be to generalize that to "half of econ studies are wrong"? Do you select studies that you think are particularly likely to be bad?
My general heuristic is: studies are exaggerated by ~30%.
There is some selection, in that I dig deeper into studies that seem problematic. But the projects I did for OP (Moretti innovation, Atwood measles) were selected based on importance.
New post testing if AI can detect the same errors:
https://blog.michaelwiebe.com/p/can-ai-do-replications-gpt52-vs-gpt54
Good work! Bravo
Fog of War stuff...
IRAN:
1. Mojtaba Khamenei says Iran will fight to the end. Asymmetric warfare time. And it looks like the Trump brain trust (which doesn't look very brainy right now) thought Iran would roll over like Venezuela did.
2. Iran has said they'd let ships of friendly countries through the Strait of Hormuz. Chinese tankers are being let through. OTOH, I see reports that up to 6 ships (not clear if they're all tankers) have been struck by Iran. Reportedly, at least two tankers have been sunk. And I see reports that Iranian oil exports have increased (!). Which may be why I now see reports that the US has belatedly targeted Kharg Island, which is Iran's major transhipment point for oil.
3. Lots of unclear or contradictory reporting about US minesweepers. The US Navy may or may not have decommissioned a bunch of minesweepers it had stashed at bases in the Gulf States last year. More minesweepers are on the way, though! Last spotted in Malaysia yesterday. Or maybe not. Some experts are claiming they'd be highly vulnerable in the Gulf given Iranian drones. Other experts say that's nonsense.
4. Trump has asked for help from other nations to patrol the straits. So far, the UK, Japan, Australia, France, and Germany have declined.
5. Depending on who you listen to, Iran has at least 20,000 and possibly 80,000 Shahed drones in its inventory. Regardless, launches of Shaheds have declined significantly since the first days of Trump's Special Military Operation. Trump put out an all-caps statement on Truth Social that WE'RE NOT RUNNING OUT OF INTERCEPTORS. Reports say we and our allies in the Gulf have launched over 800 Patriots so far. xxxx-At $400K a pop, that's about $3.2 billion-xxx (CORRECTIONS: they cost between $3-4 million per missile depending on the type, so despite my misplacing decimal and screwed up math, that would be between $2.4 and $3.2 billion). I'm having trouble finding out what the current production rate is. But back in 2024, Lockheed delivered 500. It's unclear how much of this inventory is sitting over in NATO countries and other parts of the world. Zelenskyy has offered to share their anti-drone tech with the US, but of course, Trump declined the offer. Other countries, including some Gulf states, have shown an interest.
RUSSIA:
1. Shogyu is out. And rumors are that his subordinates are being purged. Internet lockdown in major Russian cities. So rumors are flying.
2. Even though RU is feeding targeting info to the Iranians, Trump has lifted sanctions on Russian oil. But Ukraine took their export facility on the Black Sea (Novorossiysk) offline. Primorsk and Ust-Luga have come back online after a long-range Ukrainian drone attack last year, but are not functioning at full capacity, yet. Russian Far East facilities are still functioning, but I'm unsure which RU oil pipelines are currently active (a bunch of Western RU pipeline hubs were struck by Ukraine last year). It's unclear how much Russia can immediately benefit from the windfall that Trump has given them.
3. Ukraine has recaptured a lot of the territory they lost last year to Russian meat-wave attacks. We're only talking about a few hundred square kilometers in either direction, though. But Starlink being taken away from the Russians seems to have changed the frontline dynamics. Russian Milbloggers are all doom and gloom. I understand that Telegram will be completely offline by April.
CHINA.
1. At the recent 14th National People's Congress (NPC), Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli have not officially been removed from their leadership roles (even though they're probably dead). And Xi was seen sitting alongside lower-ranking Party proles at the conference. Both these have been seen by commentators as signs that Xi hasn't been able to consolidate his power base after his autogolpe on the PLA in late January.
OUTRO:
Here's a link to Metric's "Doomscroller". My theme song!
ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjNytMN4QL0&list=RDYjNytMN4QL0&start_radio=1
Thanks for these updates, they are very informative.
On Iran 3, most aspects of that are true to some extent. The US had long kept mine warfare ships in the Gulf (minesweeping is a specific subset of mine warfare, and I'm going to be precise here) but that class is being decommissioned and replaced by a mine countermeasures package fitted to some of the LCSs. There are even reports that it might sort of work. (The LCS has not been a particularly successful program.) The plan when the old ships were rotated home a year ago was to replace them with a couple of MCM LCSs stationed at Bahrain. Fair enough and entirely normal. Then, when things started to heat up, the ships were ordered out of the Gulf. Again, seems reasonable. There's going to be a lot of stuff flying around, and it's probably better not to take chances. And then the decision not to keep them at sea also seems reasonable, although I am completely unable to explain why they ended up in Malaysia instead of Diego Garcia, which is about half the distance.
In terms of vulnerability, the ships have a 57mm gun that should be decent in the anti-drone role, as well as RAM of some sort that can handle most missiles. But magazine depth probably isn't what we want it to be, and the attacks would be pretty disruptive to mine clearance. You'd probably want to delegate handling that to someone else if possible.
But thanks for the clarification about the mine sweepers and anti-mine technology.
I'd consider that report that they were spotted in Malaysia to be a bit iffy. The US seems to be keeping a tight lid on information, and the open-source info coming through is very noisy.
Also, if Iran developed their own version of Sea Babies or Maguras, I wonder how well our navy could do against naval drones.
USNI is reporting the ships in Malaysia, which moves it pretty clearly into "confirmed" in my book.
I had gotten that info second hand w/o an attribution. I didn't see the ultimate source.
Naval drones have proven vulnerable to alert gunners with stabilized 20-30mm cannon, which pretty much every US warship has at least a pair of these days, and even more so to helicopters with door gunners, which ditto.
If the Iranians manage to copy the Ukrainian trick of fitting a few of those drones with repurposed air-to-air missiles to take out the helicopters, that could be a problem, but there are a lot of technological challenges to that and at least for the moment the people who understand that technology are on our side.
But the Russian Black Sea Fleet possessed ships equipped with stabilized cannons and automated weapon systems that were theoretically capable of countering naval drones, but they failed for some reason. According to the narratives I've read/listened to, Ukraine often sends out multiple drones that attack from multiple directions and overwhelm the RU tracking capabilities. Also, they attacked at night, which made detection more difficult, even with thermal imaging. And their low profiles were shielded from radar by ocean chop. I don't think we'll know how well US anti-drone systems work until we finally have to deal with that sort of threat.
Well, the US _could_ pay Ukraine a few M$ for a shoal of Sea Babies [1] plus a couple of days of their operators' time, do an exercise, and find out. I don't think this would ever happen under the current administration, though.
[1] I think "shoal" is more appropriate than "school", since they don't always swim in the same direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoaling_and_schooling
And lookie here! NATO did such a practice run with a Ukrainian naval drone team, and the NATO ships didn't fare well in the wargame...
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/03/16/8025793/
"Trump has asked for help from other nations to patrol the straits. "
Finally, us being a small and landlocked country has its advantages!
Questions, since you seem to be following this closely:
1. Is there some kind of economic evening-out with oil? That is, if oil is allowed to go to China, then the total supply of oil doesn't change, only the use profile - China can consume all of Iran's oil, and the people who previously sold to China will sell to other people instead. This seems like an economic proof that the cost of oil won't change. But it did change (and the Iranians seem to think that shipping to China doesn't counter their goal of economically squeezing the US) so what's wrong with the proof?
2. Why is Trump so interested in getting help from other countries? Doesn't the US have a bigger navy than anyone else? Why do we need so much help?
3. Can you say more about Telegram being offline?
4. Doesn't Xi control the seating at the Congress? Why would he arrange the seating in a pattern that indicates he has been unsuccessful?
Regarding #2, the United States has by far the largest navy, but it's also by far the most overstretched. Over the past year it has been called on to invade Venezuela, blockade Cuba, bombard Iran, dissuade China from invading Taiwan, threaten to invade Denmark, and shoot up drug smugglers, on top of all its normal peacetime duties like training and showing the flag and maintaining the pretense that we'll try to defend any of our allies at need.
Under normal circumstances, the United States Navy can keep about a third of its ships forward-deployed in foreign waters, as the rest are rotated through maintenance and overhaul, training, and R&R. After the past year, I'd be surprised if more than a sixth of the fleet is actually up for real operations. And note that in today's news, the Navy's largest and newest aircraft carrier, after ten straight months at sea, caught fire without the Iranians even bothering to shoot at her and is apparently being withdrawn to Crete to recover.
And the USN is *particularly* overstretched in the area of destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers, the type of ships you need to e.g. operate close off an enemy's coast and/or escort merchant vessels through contested waters. Our last *three* attempts to develop new ships for those missions have been dismal failures, and the older designs we are relying on are increasingly worn-down and were never available in the numbers we need to meet all our commitments.
The rest of NATO et al's navies, while smaller even in total than the USN, are very well equipped with destroyers and frigates, first because they mostly can't afford anything bigger, and second because they are quite well suited for what those navies normally do (which doesn't involve winning big sea battles or invading anyone). If we could still call these countries "allies" with a straight face, they could be really helpful right now.
>If we could still call these countries "allies" with a straight face, they could be really helpful right now.
Does that make strategic sense to those allies? You piss off Iran, and you can't please Trump, so what's the point?
If successful, it would help bring global oil prices back down, a benefit to all net oil importers. I'm not sure if that's worth it, though, because the main drawback would be getting dragged into yet another Middle East war started by the US.
To what end? So Trump is free to start the next war, maybe threaten to annex Greenland again, this time with an aircraft carrier instead of a symbolic JD Vance visit? No, it was Trump who effectively ended the US alliance system, so he gets to deal with the consequences. If you give in to a bully, he won't leave you alone.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. You asked, "so what's the point [in helping to re-open the strait of Hormuz]?", I gave you one strategic benefit for other countries to help re-open the strait which has nothing to do with Trump and his bullying. And I explicitly said that this doesn't necessarily make it a good choice.
1. I don't know if this will answer your question, but this is what I've been able to ascertain: China was buying most of Iran's oil output (estimated at ~90%), at 1.4-1.6 million barrels per day. I just checked, and that's about half the volume of an ultra-large crude tanker. Or a couple of mid-sized tankers could accommodate that daily volume. Iran gave China a steep discount because China had to do some sort of an export-laundering game with Malaysia (I admit don't understand it). But Iran also accepted Chinese Renminbi, which bypasses the pesky checks and balances on US Dollar transactions. And I think Iran got to buy Chinese weapon systems with those Renminbi. Iran accounted for between 13-20% of Chinese oil imports. (BTW, Chinese state media reported that the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference had revoked the seats three leaders of the China's biggest defense companies: Liu Shiquan, a missiles expert and chairman of NORINCO; Wu Yansheng, the chair of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation; and Wang Changqing, a deputy manager of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). For financial irregularities. Of course. But the story goes that all the CPC factions were shocked at how shittily Chinese weapons systems performed in Venezuela and Iran.)
So, Iran's only big customer was China. And if China doesn't get it from Iran, they'll suck it up and buy oil on the open market. And I'm sure China will negotiate a steep discount with Putin if more oil starts flowing out of Russia.
The oil from Arabia and Gulf States can get out via a pipeline to Jeddah on the Red Sea, and one that ends in Lebanon. But I don't know if the pipelines have the capacity to carry the volume that tankers can carry out via the Strait of Hormuz. Transporting it out via the Red Sea and Lebanon will definitely make it more costly, though, because they don't have as many port facilities on the Red Sea (two) and Lebanon (one?). And I count eight port facilities that the Saudis and the Gulf States have along the Persian Gulf. And I don't know if the Saudi's could or would transport Kuwaiti, UAE, or Qatari oil. Does anybody on this group know how this could work?
Bottom line, the logistics of bypassing the Strait of Hormuz will probably make oil more expensive for the foreseeable future.
2. Yes, the US has a bigger navy than anyone else. Except for the UK, I don't think any European country has long-range naval capabilities. And their navy is much smaller than it was during the Falklands war. Maybe France can operate over long distances. They have a nuclear aircraft carrier. Before the war, 100-140 ships (oil and cargo) traversed the Strait of Hormuz daily. But basically, the US Navy is in a class of its own — and it's on its own. I don't know what Trump and his advisors were thinking. Probably they're just freaking out, now that Iran didn't roll over like they expected.
Also, the Trump request may have been for minesweepers. We don't seem to have started this operation with enough on hand. Who knows what other countries have in their inventory, and even if they agree to lend us their minesweepers, how long will it take to get them there?
3. Russia was already discouraging Telegram use, trying to get its citizens over to the state-run app called Max Messenger. Too many grumpy milbloggers were criticizing Putin's lack of progress. Too many videos were being posted of oil refineries, FSB regional HQs, weapons factories, and power plants being blown up by Ukraine drones and cruise missiles. In fact, the government made it illegal for citizens to post pictures of "disasters" on Telegram, but people kept posting them. But Telegram was hard to shut down due to the app's advanced anti-censorship techniques, including IP hopping and domain fronting, which masked its traffic as legitimate Google or other cloud services. Previous attempts in 2018 resulted in major collateral damage to Russian web services, leading to a 2020 reversal. And its widespread use by Russian troops and officials has made a full ban technically and strategically difficult. But fuck the troops, bad news is worse for the Kremlin than soldiers losing one of their major communication apps (Starlink being the other). Now the Kremlin is shutting off the Internet in major cities. And they're also shutting down mobile phone infrastructure. Authorities are painstakingly unblocking a white list of Kremlin-approved sites. In the meantime, businesses, even critical war procurement outfits, are going back to landlines and faxes to get orders processed. By shutting down the Internet and opening pinholes in it they hope to take Telegram and other social apps out of play.
4. Xi is not in total control. Besides the Xi faction, there's the old guard and the reformers. Each has control/influence over certain state "power" centers. Xi decapitated the leadership of the PLA because they had turned from his allies into allies of the old guard (reportedly over the wisdom of invading Taiwan). Xi has not yet been able to replace them with his own people. (It's kind of like the old mafia. To prevent open inter-family warfare, if someone important had to be taken out, the leaders of the organized crime families would meet, hash it out, and come to an agreement over compensation and/or spoils to take out a major player.) Xi didn't follow the code, and there's a question of whether he'll make it past the 24th Party Congress next year.
I suspect the Kremlin might be getting some Great Firewall know-how from their Chinese neighbors.
I can imagine that "Trump brain trust" didn't have a great plans and expectations.
But I'm DAMN SURE the Israelis have things extremely well prepared and thought out!
Re: RU-3. Is it correct to call these advances meat wave attacks? As far as I know, Ukraine had bungled another troop rotation and had to pull back to stabilize the frontline, with Russia chasing them with minimal forces. The counterattack then came before Russia could fully consolidate its presence.
It sure looks like meatgrinder attacks to my untrained eye. The old Soviet Union suffered a total of ~15,000 deaths and ~53K wounded during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). Russia, during its push into Ukraine last December, suffered ~12,000 deaths in less than two weeks. This doesn't approach peak WWII, Eastern Front casualty rates, but the Soviets were advancing when they took their peak losses. Russia has moved the line forward a few kilometers, and now they've lost those few kilometers. That's not to say Ukraine isn't suffering heavy casualties, and have fewer troops, but their superior drone technology and drone strategy seems to be making up for the gap.
Correction: it looks like the Soviets took their heaviest losses early in the German invasion, except for the battle for Smolensk in 1943. Their casualty rate while advancing was about 3x what it is in Ukraine, where they aren't really advancing.
I think the question was about the Russian losses when conquering the particular area which Ukraine conquered back recently.
> 800 Patriots so far. At $400K a pop, that's about $3.2 billion
$320 million
Double oopsie. ;-) I see they're $3-4 mil each. So, that's between $2.4 and $3.2 bills.
Can anyone explain why Trump rebuffed Zelensky's offer of help? Were there strings attached? Is this just arrogance? Does Trump have some sort of deal with Russia that this would interfere with?
Trump's attitude toward Putin has always been strangely favorable, even deferential. The old theory that Putin had blackmail material on Trump doesn't seem to hold anymore, because the hypothetical pee-pee tape would be a drop in the bucket compared to what's come out so far in the Epstein material. I doubt he has any deal with Putin, because Putin doesn't seem to regard Trump seriously.
According to the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies...
> Trump tends to admire authoritarian leaders, viewing Putin as a strong counterpart rather than a threat to US interests, often siding with him on issues like Ukraine.
> Shared Worldview (Illiberal Nationalism): Both leaders share a disdain for liberal international order, championing conservative values and using ethnic, anti-immigrant narratives to build a "populist" image of protecting the people against elites.
> Transactional Mentality: Trump’s focus appears to be on direct, personal interaction (a "great man" approach) rather than traditional diplomacy, believing a personal bond with Putin can resolve geopolitical issues.
> Behavioral Cues: During meetings, analysts noted Trump sometimes adopting a defensive or submissive posture, with "mouth purse" gestures, while attempting to assert dominance through handshakes, suggesting a complex mix of admiration and competition.
YMMV.
It sounds like Zelenskyy is proposing a manufacturing deal, not just tech sharing. The US would be buying interceptor drones from Ukrainian factories. At least according to Zelenskyy as of a couple days ago, they're still in negotiations over the price and details despite Trump's remarks dismissing the offer.
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/zelenskyy-ukraine-offered-us-50b-drone-deal-1773598322.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/us-donald-trump-snubs-ukraine-volodymyr-zelenskyy-drone-help-middle-east/
What would be the appeal of using an OpenAI operating system as opposed to using an Android phone with the ChatGPT app installed on it?
OpenAI considers me a customer, Google considers me a product, which considerably changes what I'm allowed to do with my device.
Google is absolutely not going to let me have a device that just does what I want without showing me ads. OpenAI.... might?
Most obviously, you can run it with far higher permissions than Android would normally let you do, so you can get tool use with other programs (like making phone calls, sending texts, using the camera).
Such an OS would almost certainly be an Android fork, of course.
Such an OS would be banned within a week.
LOOKING FOR PAID HOURLY WORK
I’m looking for paid hourly contract work right now, especially in agentic engineering. I can start immediately, commit around 20 hours per week now, and if the fit is good I’d be happy to discuss expanding from there.
This is a funding bridge while I keep building Keisei, my current hardware startup. Keisei is a deep-tech energy company working on space-based solar power and laser power transmission.
By agentic engineering I mean building systems where LLMs use tools, APIs, workflows, and human review to do real work, not just generate plausible text.
I’m strongest at turning messy, ambiguous processes into working AI-assisted systems: tool-using agents, research/data pipelines, human-in-the-loop automations, and fast MVPs/demos.
I work heavily with CLI tools, and I’m comfortable wiring LLM workflows into real constraints: APIs, MCP/Linear, web scraping, Airtable/DBs, PDF/document flows, evaluation loops, and operational guardrails.
Recent work includes:
1/ Scoping and building an AI-assisted estimating demo for electrical contractors, including PDF ingest, AI brief, takeoff/proposal workflow, and rapid user-feedback iteration.
2/ Building climate-tech mapping and research automation for Project Drawdown-style work, including web scraping, Airtable/local website work, company-solution matching, and multi-step automation design.
3/ Building a BJJ training tracker app from scratch for a real user: technique library, training/session logging, sparring/round stats, Vercel deploy, and a launch-day auth fix under deadline pressure.
I’m especially useful in zero-to-one work: founder support, technical PM plus hands-on implementation, productizing vague ideas, and getting something real in front of users quickly.
I also have solid context in energy, climate, infrastructure, and hard-tech, so I’m not limited to generic SaaS problems.
I previously found work through ACT, and the founder I worked with later wrote a public postmortem of the solar project we built together that includes a strong endorsement of my work: https://7goldfish.com/articles/Requiem_for_a_solar_plant.php.
What I need now is paid hourly work I can start immediately: short prototype sprints, agent workflow setup, automation builds, research systems, technical PM, or a small paid trial project. My typical hourly rate is $80-100 depending on scope and complexity.
Based in Belgrade (Serbia), with overlap for both EU and US time zones.
If you need someone to scope, prototype, or ship an agentic workflow fast, email svrmnnk at gmail com
I have a post coming out tomorrow called "The day the Earth understood," which in part uses "Meditations on Moloch" as a bit of a springboard.
The dek is "Man, machine and global peace."
It's an essay with a twist ending. But I stole the twist ending. But I'm also up front about that. It's a forgotten twist ending that's worth reviving. It will show up here tomorrow morning at 7:11 AM ET
https://www.frontstageexit.com/
I'm a longtime ACX and SSC reader, tho I've usually shown up pseudonymously. I'd show up at some of the NYC events on occasion, but I'm not there any longer. Gonna see if there's a meetup in Fayetteville this year, though. And I'll go to that if so.
If you can't wait till tomorrow to see what my site is about, a couple posts that have ACX vibes include:
- This one about quantum money — which is a total head trip if you aren't familiar with the concept. It's like basically sorcery, though it's not sorcery: https://www.frontstageexit.com/p/as-bitcoiners-dismiss-quantum-progress
- This podcast about Robin Hanson's 'grabby aliens' thing: https://www.frontstageexit.com/p/how-to-see-the-sky-with-bitcoin
But, seriously, tomorrow's post. It's a journey. I hope some of you will check it out.
How you know you're old: some whipper-snapper writes a post about a classic SF story turned into a classic SF movie and tells everybody "now, I'm gonna reference a forgotten twist ending from a story you probably never heard of" 😊
To be fair, I *had* forgotten the remake movie (thankfully)!
Ha ha, that story was a revelation for me. I knew the classic movie and that was what got me thinking about the whole idea of this. When I started digging in to write this, I learned about the story and read it and then everything came together.
I wish I could say I knew about the story before I started writing, but I didn't. It's great tho! Too bad it's semi-forgotten now.
Here it is:
https://www.frontstageexit.com/p/the-day-the-earth-understood
Decent premise for an article, but I found myself frustrated reading it. Meandering, repetitive, several passages very obviously of the "AI prose" styling, etc. 3/4 of the way through, if you had asked me "What is this essay arguing?" I would have been unable to give you a correct answer- that's not good!
As someone who had, for a time, subscribed to the Marxian point of view, and who still considers themselves Marxist-adjacent, I've been wondering for a while why no one has ever written an "anti-communist FAQ" that actually goes into the reasons why so many people consider Marx outdated or ineffective or philosophically missing something, and which actually tackles communist or socialist apologetics, and the reason why the failures of socialist states can't just be handwaved away by gesturing at bad conditions and ideological capture by bad actors
I find it's surprisingly hard to find a codified set of reasons for why "X is wrong" when X is a political coalition at large
I had to be in the right community and ask a lot of questions to even be exposed to the idea that "Progressive reforms very often fail for x,y and z reasons" when I had always just assumed they work out best for everyone and the Left was generally correct about everything on the meta level
Part of the problem is that people pick and choose what to believe and so it's arbitrary what to rebut.
Did Marx describe capitalism as a necessary stage to accumulate capital? I know there are leftists who think so, and think that the trick is merely seizing the accumulated capital by violence and building the new society on that lump.
But that is silly because capital is not a lump you can live off forever. Capital is always having to be accumulated in order to replace what wears out and breaks down.
That's really the crux of it all, ain't it? Even if communism was theoretically capable of actually providing better living conditions, the core problem is that it's simply inefficient, and cannot survive in a world with any meaningful amount of competition. There is no future for those unwilling to sacrifice everything in order to secure power.
It’s very hard to argue against online Marxists because they don’t know any Marx. Basically they are ultra progressive or woke. Bourgeois liberals the lot of them.
Let's not play those games right now
No games here, as I do know Marx. The fetish for lumpen proles and criminality, the dislike of the normal working guy, the obsession with race and intersectionality, and LGBT are either non Marxist or anti Marxist. Hyper liberalism.
There was an odd thread that completely ignored class analysis throughout the 2010s. That has mostly been resolved now
Adopting social conservatism, however, will not do leftists any good
Maybe we can completely change our approach to discussing equity and equality, Maybe we can admit when diversity measures do more harm than good, Maybe we can admit when our methods have a chilling effect on free speech, or are unnecessarily rude, dogmatic, or alienating
This is distinct from positioning ourselves as separate from the groups we claim to speak for, however
But we have nothing at all to gain by dropping LGBT rights or racial issues as concerns. Deeply unserious suggestion, motivated by persnickety resentment
> Deeply unserious suggestion, motivated by persnickety resentment
Don’t know what I am resenting here, maybe the great success of Marxist parties to dominate the politics across the western world?
By abandoning class Marxists have abandoned their core beliefs, and by embracing liberalism, individualism, progressivism and woke they have just become more liberals than the liberals. Anybody can be pro lgbt, including capitalists and capitalist entities. DEI is used to cause working class friction, and the whole shebang is just more American liberal ideology anyway obsessed with individual rights and race.
Aside from the Ten Point Program in the Communist Manifesto, AFAIK, Marx never formulated a detailed roadmap for how a Communist political-economic state would function. Did he?
Blaming Marx for the failure of communist states seems wrong-headed — similar to blaming Moses for Christians who don't follow the Ten Commandments. ;-)
Sure, I'm talking about the correctness of ideas that were directly Marx's, and whether there's still value in subscribing to his socialist tradition, which mostly exists now as a holdover, instead of changing our approach entirely
I'd say that Marx was a brilliant critic of 19th-century capitalism, and many of his observations still hold true for 21st-century capitalism. Unfortunately, we understand the symptoms, but nobody has come up with a good cure for the ills of capitalism despite a century of trying. :-)
I'd say that Marx was a brilliant critic of Moloch. His mistake was thinking that Moloch is capitalism, and can be defeated if you overthrow capitalism.
Turned out that Moloch is present in (real) socialism, too.
What immiseration? Working people in market-based industrial societies are both richer and freer than those in any other.
The thing is, when Russian Marxists asked Marx how to implement his ideas in Russia, he explicitly told them to not even try, because you cannot jump over stages of historic development. Therefore, ALL Bolshevism is fake Marxism. However Bolshevism had the economic resources of a great power, while real Marxism had nothing, so they could spend far more on propaganda, linking Marx with Lenin in the minds of both leftists and rightists. This is annoying and very hard to fight.
They were in a sense honest. After all they did not say the Soviet Union has socialism. They said it is building socialism. Now, what is the stage before socialism? Obviously capitalism: state capitalism in this case, they were just continuing Sergei Witte's state capitalism.
The messaging about building socialism was current in the 1930s, in the aftermath of the destruction of the New Economic Policy. By the 1950s, the Soviets were talking about a mature socialist economy.
The problem with someone who hates Marx trying to debunk Marx is that they run into a fundamental problem about Marx. Which is that he was a gifted economist making valuable and relevant critiques of Capitalism based on the huge amounts of empirical data about Capitalism that he had to draw from, and also a speculative fiction writer who did a lot of world building around a utopian society he liked to imagine but which didn't really hold up in practice.
Debunking the speculative fiction is relatively easy.
But if you *only* do that, people will notice that you're ignoring most of the things he said that modern advocates actually care about.
And then if you try to touch the critiques of capitalism, the audience will notice that your debunking of that isn't so good, and actually he's got some pretty relevant things to say about all of that, and suddenly you're just drawing attention to the thing you wanted to obfuscate.
Do modern economists take Marx's critiques of capitalism seriously? I think the answer is generally no, but I suppose there might be some counter-examples. Really, I think your "gifted economist" description is pretty much invalidated by the fact that there isn't a Marxist branch of economics that exists today (to the extent there ever was, it perished long ago) and nobody you'd attach the description "Marxist economist" or whatever to.
I think that it would be valid to argue that Marx did not critique Capitalism as much as he had invented it, as a straw man, so that he could paint a contrasting picture of his socialist fantasies. The fact is, all of his predictions about the future were proven to be wrong within his own lifetime. Like Ehrlich, however, he chose to stick to his guns blindly. Now, of course, Kapital is scripture and cannot be questioned.
This is what the previous person was talking about, unfortunately
First google result for 'Marx predictions capitalism' lists:
>immiseration of the masses due to capital accumulation, chronic overproduction, capitalist-driven imperialism, and the inevitable rise of monopolies
I think all of those are 100% true, or at least have very strong arguments to be made in favor of them in the modern economy.
(and before you say it: yes, improving technology does raise living standards. No, capitalism doesn't get all the credit for that)
Immiseration is clearly false. Over production just isn’t a thing - if there a critique of modern capitalism is that capital should be more productive, imperialism is neither unique to capitalist societies nor essential to most - most countries are capitalist bit not empires- and the claim monopolies is only partially true. Capitalism does tend to trend towards monopolies, but also to the kind of disruption that overturns them.
None of this means I think that capitalism doesn’t need social contracts, trade unions or even government ownership. Whatever works.
What immiseration? Working people in market-based industrial societies are both richer and freer than those in any other. Imperialism has been a feature of every economic system. It appears to be a natural consequence of power. Monopolies fall as quickly as they rise. Overproduction is a mechanism for controlling prices. And what's wrong with capital accumulation, anyway? If not by individuals, it is accumulated by the states--simply not as well. And when you look at the rate of technologically-driven living standards, I think you will find that only market-based economies have a consistently high rate.
Fundamentally, Marx was a religious thinker and a bad economist. His concerns were moral, not pragmatic. He forced the data to confirm his predetermined outcome and blatantly ignored everything that did not align. I would love to see him consigned to the ash heap of history, but, unfortunately, bad ideas that sound nice always have a major following.
"And what's wrong with capital accumulation, anyway?"
Nothing. It's going to be needed in the post-Revolution Utopia because no Revolution will overrule Entropy. Machinery to be replaced and all that.
I think it would be quite hard to put something together given how vast and complicated Marxist thought is. Very few people would have an appropriate handle on all the various Marxisms and of mainstream economics to do this comprehensively.
You might be interested in Joseph Heath's take on Marxism:
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/key-stages-in-the-decline-of-academic
Oh. Wow. Rawls.
Yes this is it. The neo-Marxist philosophers of the 80s who struggled with carrying forward Marxism on new grounds despite the inaccuracy of the LTV all eventually drifted towards liberalism without fanfare
I think this is what I needed to hear, I want to read about this Rawls fellow and his ideas
As I pointed out in my follow-up comment, I don't think Heath's timeline quite makes sense. And even he doesn't claim that G. A. Cohen or (the now late) Jurgen Habermas ever identified as liberals rather than Marxists.
True. But the essence of the idea, that "No matter what you think is important or true in Marxism, there is now some better theory, that allows you to articulate that conviction more clearly and persuasively, without encumbering yourself with false and unsustainable theoretical commitments", pretty much addresses my ambivalent feelings
LTV doesn't work, I should listen to the modern economists
Historical materialism left a lot out and people have made improvements on it since then, especially by incorporating Freud
What is left of Marxism without those two things is pretty superfluous
These are all things I've directly suspected, and it's been laid out for me
Thank you
Marxists had a big problem in the 1960s in criticising high wage earners. the philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia talked about the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, the first millionaire basketball player. Nozick said that in a free society if thousands of people want to pay a dollar to watch Wilt play and he becomes a millionaire by doing so, what of it. Marxists couldn’t really answer this question because Walt actually didn’t earn that money directly - he was paid a salary. In Marxists terminology he was actually exploited.
Other egalitarians can just say, it’s too much, let’s tax him.
> LTV doesn't work, I should listen to the modern economists
Whether LTV works or not is irrelevant as long as enough people believe that it does and act accordingly.
What?
No?
Economics is something that can be modelled and measured. LTV, which used to be the main theory of value in the 19th century, has apparently been shown to not explain economic phenomena like prices as well as modern subjective theories, which take into account the demand side as well as the supply side (which contains things like socially necessary labour time)
If a new model works better, the new model is "more correct"
I want to be more correct
And as the frankfurt school showed, once you disprove LTV and historical materialism, there really is no good reason to value Marx above all the other more contemporary theoretical figures, or think that a marxist socialist state would be an improvement over a current liberal capitalist state with social safety nets and high-trust
Of course, those states are running into all sorts of long-term issues, and it does seem like the system is destabilizing and risks making another major transition, so who knows? Fukuyama could be wrong, and historical materialism could have a useful bit of truth to its predictions after all
Unfortunately, Freud was also a pseudoscientist https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_K-qtp6iiL1M0Nuam5qSWhybHM/view?resourcekey=0-z_NPz_EGgEur-AKstp02wQ Karl Popper pointed out Marx & Freud both were long ago, but I figured I'd link to a more recent philosopher that Heath would consider a contemporary, and one focused on Freudianism rather than Marxism. Freud had a contemporary though who approached psychiatry/psychology in a more scientific manner: Emil Kraepelin.
This is true! Freud was a nutcase! But psychoanalysis pointed in the right direction, in a way that I'd say platonism (even if plato wasn't a nutcase at all) didn't
>But the essence of the idea, that "No matter what you think is important or true in Marxism, there is now some better theory, that allows you to articulate that conviction more clearly and persuasively, without encumbering yourself with false and unsustainable theoretical commitments", pretty much addresses my ambivalent feelings
I don't think so. Everybody but Marxists confuse capitalism with free markets. In reality capitalism is alienated labour which can happen both on free markets and unfree markets (Soviet Union).
What industrial system would produce “un alienated” labor. And how?
I'm sure there are alternatives to capitalism and things that will come after. But as much affection I have for the Marxian tradition, I have to admit. The party is over, it's a dead end. We gave it a fair shot, and that's admirable, and it didn't work out. And a lot of people died, because history is messy and ugly, but that's how history goes
The most important thing is to figure out what to do next.
What would be an example of modern non-capitalism then?
I should note I have my own quibbles with Heath's account, but since there's no comments section there I had to comment (on the first link) elsewhere:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/rawls-killed-marx.html#blog-comment-160804682
As for the second link, I don't think it was Hayek who started the "socialist calculation debate", and I recall from Bryan Caplan's arguments with the Austrians that Mises had a different argument than Hayek (he though it was fundamentally impossible, whereas Hayek thought it was just difficult to gather all the information together in one place).
> I had to be in the right community and ask a lot of questions to even be exposed to the idea that "Progressive reforms very often fail for x,y and z reasons"
I'm interested in some info on that :) Do you have some sources to share?
I could list off some examples
Price controls almost always make things worse because capping the price means that the resources can't be allocated to the people willing to pay the most, so the people making the thing in demand cannot make as much, leading to an artificial shortage
A lot of red tape around environmental review and mandating that new housing built must be affordable actually prevents a lot of infrastructure from being built (the people I know always complain about how bad California apparently is)
The narrative that there are millions of unoccupied houses is only technically true in the sense that at any moment, there are millions of houses that are in the process of being sold (but it's not the same millions of houses, it's a rotating millions of houses), or that are just unfit to live in
Apparently even building high-income housing would help the issue, since wealthy people could move into those, allowing the price of the houses they're moving out of to go down (hermit crab shell swap analogy)
Some unions, like the dockworker's union, exist solely to hold everyone else hostage and prevent automation that would lower prices and increase efficiency for everyone. They're able to completely prevent any attempt at updating american ports from being on par with other countries' ports by threatening to completely shut down work, all at once. A lot of public sector unions are also somewhat like this
Policies like California's wildfire suppression policies have directly led to more forest fires
Whole language over Phonics, was also a progressive reform, which turned out horribly
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wm8z6hm
https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs-balanced-literacy-the-history-of-the-reading-wars
https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/the-progressive-paradox-why-america-cant-do-big-things/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlsDkN9tHHk
I really cannot overstate how little I was exposed to these ideas. It's like that cliche "Why did no one ever tell me this?" But of course, it's perfectly natural that one would be insulated from actually solid material critiques of their ideas when in a biased environment. I guess I'm glad I'm learning it now. Though I'd be happy to be told if any of this is incorrect
>Price controls almost always make things worse because capping the price means that the resources can't be allocated to the people willing to pay the most, so the people making the thing in demand cannot make as much, leading to an artificial shortage
Agreed, although I am going to point out that in modern US the most common form of price fixing that we argue about is rent control. Since new land isn't being produced and landlords don't directly produce more apartments, this argument doesn't straightforwardly apply, and often gets misused in this context. Of course there's still an argument about developers building new housing on undeveloped land or etc., but rent control policy can easily include exemptions to maintain incentives around development, and often does.
>Some unions, like the dockworker's union, exist solely to hold everyone else hostage and prevent automation that would lower prices and increase efficiency for everyone.
I mean, not for the members of the union, right? They would mostly be fired, or deskilled and paid less?
Like a couple of your examples, this feels more like conflict theory than policy failure. Yes, there's a tradeoff between consumer benefits and labor rights; yes, there's a tradeoff between housing supply and environmental protection. You can argue that the tradeoff we are making currently is bad, or even that there are Pareto improvements we could make from the current equilibrium, but I'm not sure I'd call a policy a 'failure' just because it accomplishes its goals at the expense of its opponents.
Assar Lindbeck was a socialist. Nevertheless, he said, "In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing."
Well, he was a Social Democrat, but he left the party in 1982 when they introduced the Employee Funds, which were meant to gradually transition large corporations from private ownership to collective ownership by the workers, so he doesn't seem to me to have been much of a socialist.
And?
You do realize that disagreement about means does not mean disagreement about ends? He could have just thought the Funds were counterproductive?
Of course. I agree
But I do feel like the equilibrium we could get in counterfactual worlds would be better for more people.
When you're looking at it from a birds-eye view, conflicting groups have different sizes. And if you're a utilitarian, you ought to pick the bigger group when the bad outcomes for the smaller group are out-weighed and neccessary
My priority is "what ever works" + "what ever makes me culturally happy", whateverworksism is something we all must aspire to
I agree, I guess what I'm trying to do is draw a distinction between 'Liberal policies fail (at their own stated goals), therefore it's irrational for liberals to try them' vs. 'liberal policies fail (based on some broad social utility function, but they succeed at doing the thing the person implementing them wanted), therefore society in general should be wary of them'.
Which I guess is really just going back to mistake theory vs conflict theory... just pointing out that some of these are mistakes, and others are smart moves for one side in a conflict, and I think it's really important to understand and be tracking the difference.
Of course!
I just wish that "X action fails at goal, or has Y consequences" was more widely known, since leftists and liberals are almost never exposed to good faith policy-focused critiques
Curtis Yarvin, back before he turned into a mindless Trump cultist, imagined a world where witches existed:
"In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn."
Here’s a variant: imagine a country where witches are prominent in business, politics, and culture. The ordinary people know about, hate, and fear the witches, and elect politicians who promise to root out witchcraft. The witches are not perturbed because they know it’s all for show. Two parties competing with one another for the votes of dumb and ignorant anti-witch voters, while privately their leaders visit the covens and ask for campaign contributions.
You may have noticed a parallel to modern America. Democratic politicians, everyone from far-leftists like Ro Khanna to centrists like Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper, run against the Epstein Class. The ultra-wealthy don’t take offense to attempts to tie their entire class to a “pedophile” because they know it’s just red meat for low-IQ voters. Bill Gates, who donated 50 million to the Harris Campaign, isn’t angry that the Democrats released a bunch of embarrassing details about him. He’s actually happy that the Epstein files release will help the Democrats; he agreed to take one for the team. They all discussed it at the Secret Epstein Class Conspiracy Meeting.
Okay, no, there was no Secret Epstein Class Conspiracy Meeting; the world doesn’t work like that. Which raises the question, did the Dems run it by Bill Gates when they decided to demand release of the Epstein files? Did they message test “Epstein class” with the Epstein class? Did they message test “latinx” with Latinos? You can make a massive Reddit thread debating whether “Karen” is an anti-white slur, or whether “Washington Redskins” is an insult against Native Americans. Yet perception is reality. If a bunch of Lithuanian Americans become convinced that “that’s fishy” is a slur against their ethnic group, a politician who wants their votes must care, no matter how silly it seems. What the phrase “Epstein class” objectively means is less important than what the targets perceive it to mean.
The Democrats got themselves in this position because they ignored and took for granted their white working-class base. The blue wall is the blue wall, until it isn’t. Now they risk making the same mistake, assuming and taking for granted the support of wealthy elites. Assuming their high intelligence and basic decency will keep them on the side of the sane, intelligent, and good. But the lesson of Elon Musk is that success in business is not inconsistent with being extraordinarily childish and spiteful.
Do the Democrats have an alternative? I argue they do: just do cultural moderation. Promise to enforce anti-discrimination laws just as zealously when the discriminated-against are white or male.* Condemn anti-white and anti-male ideology as just as bad as racist or sexist ideology targeting blacks or women. Pass laws modelled on Florida’s don’t say gay law, which can be sold to the base as also preventing teachers from expressing bigoted views toward the gay community. Promise to hire more police, toughen penalties for violent crimes, and seek the support of police unions. At the same time, Democrats can sell themselves as the party of technocratic leadership that will appoint competent people to office, listen to doctors and scientists, repeal Trump’s tariffs, and protect abortion rights.
*Alternatively, they could argue for abolition of these laws altogether.
The Democrats haven't done well with the white working class since the seventies. I don't know where this meme comes from that it started in like 2016 or 2012 or whatever.
That said, I agree that cultural moderation is important.
The rich and powerful are not going to abandon the Democrats because of the Epstein revelations - mainly because they are not a monolithic group and 99.99% of them are not affected by the Epstein disclosure and either (1) actually want to see the perpetrators punished or (2) do not care. This is where the "witches" analogy (which hypothesizes a monolithic group) falls down.
Trump obviously a member of the Epstein clique (I don't say class) but future Republican leadership may not be. I would not gamble on the Republican party's leadership to keep the angry rubes in the box. The post-Trump Republican party is just as likely to be run by the craziest asylum inmates as it is to return to "normal".
> The rich and powerful are not going to abandon the Democrats because of the Epstein revelations - mainly because they are not a monolithic group
They don't need to be a monolith or truly care about any of this. This is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: use the liberal elites as a scapegoat on which to blame the sins of Epstein, while removing them and their anti-capitalist ideology from any position of power.
I thought he'd sold out to the Trump cult well before this.
I have been looking at US vs International (mostly Europe and Japan) economies and noticing that they are *qualitatively* different. For one thing, the US economy has a lot more large tech companies (Microsoft, Google, ...).
It turns out that the economies are also quantitatively different ... the average cap weighted US company is a lot *younger* than the equivalent companies in Japan, Germany, ...
I think this might be a good proxy for economic dynamism.
If so, things are looking bad for much of the world and especially the UK where the average large company is getting older at an alarming clip
Short-ish writeup here: https://mistybeach.com/mark/EconomicDynamism.html
I heard an argument that a lot of what makes Japan 'weird' or 'cool' is that its essentially the future. It's what an even later-stage-capitalist state looks like. Almost no babies being born, aging population, increased social isolation, proliferation of cheap food from automat-esque restaurants and vending machines
And, at least on the governmental level, no democracy. A few months ago the governing LDP party won that huge that it literally run out of candidates.
>If you see a beautiful photo, and later learn it was AI-generated, are you harmed? What is the harm?
Yes; I would have been lied to. "Photo" implies depiction of (some instance of) reality, whereas an LLM would at best output a realistic illustration, and at worst some confabulated nonsense - infamously, Google image search was at one point inundated by fake slop to such a degree that queries like "baby peacock" overwhelmingly output cutesy fakes. Looks like they have cleaned up this particular one somewhat, but I'm sure there are still plenty other outrageous examples to be found.
Would it count as a lie if there was no caption that said, "This is a real photograph"? I'm not arguing with your emotional reaction (which I would probably share) but I'm wondering if you have really put your finger on its cause.
If it looks real, then they want you to think it's real, which it isn't. To stop it being a lie they have to directly inform you that it's fake.
Well, once these fakes proliferate enough, a random realistic image will no longer by itself carry an implication of overwhelmingly likely being real. At that point the intuitive notion of "photo" will cease to be meaningful, and thus the deception capacity will also disappear. Happy days...
Most movies these days lie to you. Are you harmed by Dr. Who? Are you harmed when a building is digitally drawn?
Are you harmed when your schoolmate tells you about an awesome new Dr. Who episode he's watched that later turns out to be his complete fabrication?
I like fanfiction? Nobody pretends fanfiction is real, though. Some people may not understand that certain stories are fanfiction... In that sense, yes, someone could be harmed (in that their suspension of disbelief was raised, by not understanding the genre), but it's really a very small harm.
Dr. Who is "fiction" (a dignified word for "lie"), which is common knowledge. Of course, fiction typically aspires to be truthful about some features of reality, and can still be harmful insofar as it's subtly/believably deceitful about those aspects.
No one considers fiction to be a “dignified word for lie”.
The reader isn’t seeing fiction as being true. The writer of fiction isn’t intending the reader to see it as true.
(There could be lies in fiction but that’s something else.)
If I cared that much about having been lied to, I would be demanding the immediate foreclosure on pretty much every magazine, newspaper, and online media source in the world, since pretty much every one of them has used a copy of Photoshop. This is even if I only cared about being lied to about life-or-death matters such as war, rather than whether some celebrity has perfect skin.
If anything, I'm actually thankful for AI, since AI gives me one more chance to detect fakery.
There's a qualitative difference in lying between Photoshopped embellishments (in decently reputable papers/magazines) and outright fabrication.
Can you explain what quality you're referring to? Because I remember photos coming out venues like AP or Reuters from about 20 years ago that were complete fabrications, and there are famous examples from much further back.
I'm not saying faked photos are fine; I'm saying they're not new, and haven't been for decades. "Don't believe everything you see on the Internet" is a well-known aphorism. So it's weird to me to act as if AI is suddenly bringing some new brand of perfidy down on us.
>Can you explain what quality you're referring to?
Thankfully, Scott already did, much better than I could - "the media very rarely lies". https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
>So it's weird to me to act as if AI is suddenly bringing some new brand of perfidy down on us.
"AI-generated photo" is always a 100% lie, unless there was a robot literally operating a camera. Few things in the world are ever as clear cut as this, so calling it a new brand of perfidy doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Scott's account of the media rarely lying read to me like "the media is frequently deceptive in ways that cannot be prosecuted in a courtroom without leading to even worse problems", not a treatise on how the media is actually truthful most of the time.
Meanwhile, ask a circa-2026 AI for a picture of a farmer holding a carrot, and you will get a plausible picture of a farmer holding a carrot. Sure, there's no real world farmer that looks exactly like that, but so what? Magazine cover models rarely look like the cover photo in real life, and sometimes never. Pictures intended to depict real-world events commonly only depict a generalized version, rather than the actual example. Multiple websites exist that supply terabytes of stock photos expressly for depicting generalizations of events that actually took place much earlier and nowhere near them, and candid photos of real events rarely convey a complete portrayal of those events and are even purposefully framed to only show the angle the creator wishes to show to the audience. I repeat: none of this filtering is new.
>not a treatise on how the media is actually truthful most of the time
Yeah, Scott also has a post on how to deal with this: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
>Sure, there's no real world farmer that looks exactly like that, but so what?
Well, my point is that unless you knew beforehand what farmers and carrots look like, you can't trust that you're getting a truthful representation of even the general concept, and not some cultural-censor-approved cardboard cutout, or entirely confabulated nonsense. This is the crucial issue at the heart of so-called "generative AI" - it can only generate simulacra in principle, whereas bespoke human perfidy requires particular intent, and much more effort.
Contra Scott, the media does lie, and lie a lot. However, the lie is generally in "who gets the byline." Would you read press that is written directly by the advertising company? Probably not.
Prediction-market related story that seems relevant to the crowd here: Short version is a writer reported an explosion/impact in Israel as a missile strike, with some people disagreeing and claiming it was actually a falling interceptor, not a missile impact.
Kicker is, the question of what actually caused this explosion resolves a 14 million $ Polymarket and now people who are set to lose money are campaigning said reporter to change their article and are sending them & their family (reasonably credible) threats.
Curious what peoples take here is. To me, this kind of behaviour (+ the insider trading by officials we have already seen) seems like the very predictable (hah) consequences of the way these markets function and the prime reason why they could never work in the way EAs envisioned them
Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/
I wish I knew more about this. My guess is that reporters covering war in Israel get death threats regularly, and this one went viral because it's about a new technology and people love discussing the harms of new technology. Ten years ago, journalists getting death threats on social media would go viral as proof that social media had lots of harms. Now it's accepted as part of life.
I think this is falling to a bit of confirmation bias @Scott -- it may be true that reporters get death threats often, but it seems categorically different to get death threats *because* of the gambling than, e.g., because you are the wrong religion and have opinions.
(Also, I'm not sure we should want a world where 'people getting death threats because of gambling' is an accepted part of life -- the comparison to social media is not obviously a win, social media really does have a lot of harms and many people think it made the world way way worse!)
based on the messages being sent in hebrew i'm lead to believe that these are israelis harassing their own kind (presumably in the IDF or other government officials). hm, really makes you think
The part I have to respond to here is "(reasonably credible)"
Look I've been a journalist for over a decade. As far as I can tell, the only thing death threats ever accomplish is to give reporters bragging rights (tho they never admit they are bragging)
I read this over. The person making the threats sounds like everyone else who makes threats on the internet. What's credible about it?
If the larger point is: Do you think generalized prediction markets create perverse incentives and it's just going to get weirder and weirder? Yes. Yes. Yes. Obviously.
But of the things I'm worried about: death threats? Not so much.
This does put me in mind a lot of the sports betting analogue, where the naive take is that it's bad to ban things but in practice it seems like the social cost of easily-placed bets is just way too high.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment
Although I also wonder in general if society is ever going to figure out how to reduce online death threats in general or if this is just an endless problem.
Is there a word for this general phenomenon? In the sense of "in principle freedom is good but in practice $4.99 fentanyl at the gas station leads to really bad outcomes"? Seems like a unresolved issue in liberalism.
I’m sure Robin Hanson has a solution for this using insurance or something. Like “your health insurance company bans you from going to stores that sell fentanyl”.
The Liberal Paradox - under any system for aggregating people's preferences, there are situations where the option chosen by free choice is not the Pareto optimal choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox
I feel like there definitely could be a fancy word for this, although in some level it seems like it's just "impracticality". (Note it took me a good 15 minutes to come up with this.)
So I watched the Academy Awards last night and they eulogized Rob Reiner. It was heart felt - Billy Chrystal - and not too saccharine, rather upbeat.
I read an article by the very psychologist that advised Reiner on the documentary film he did on his son’s condition. The doctor said Reiner ignored his advice and made a fairytale version festooned with positivity. The doctor politely called it a fantasy and just wrong: he marvelled at the display of invincible ignorance. Politely.
I offer this because the Hollywood stars in all their vein glory aggravated me deeply. Luxury beliefs galore, they declare themselves artists when all they are is good actors, fame whores and rich.
Rob Reiner was a good director, he made fantasies come to life, but life (or the real thing?) shot him down.
This is us.
Rob Reiner is the perfect counterpoint to the Trump monster in all his hilarious rudeness. We have a man skilled at pretend doing battle with an orange monster calling bullshit.
Trump is Archie, Reiner was in life the meathead.
I'm going to assume this "Archie versus the meathead" is referencing Riverdale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvOdN3rz2A8
lol
Jebus. It’s vainglory, meaning excessive or unwarranted pride in one’s accomplishments or qualities, not vein glory — which might describe striking a rich lode of precious metals in a story about the Klondike Gold Rush, but not much in this context.
I always screw stuff like that up.
These are bold words about a family tragedy, not sure what any of this has to do with Trump who is lucky enough to not have anyone with serious mental illness among his kids.
It was an entirely preventable one. All society needs to do is stop giving the mentally ill free reign, and start dealing with them as the liabilities that they are. His son wasn't even an only child. He had alternatives.
>I offer this because the Hollywood stars in all their vein glory aggravated me deeply. Luxury beliefs galore, they declare themselves artists when all they are is good actors, fame whores and rich.
I don't know why you would attribute this to his being a Hollywood star, as opposed to, say, a father. I sincerely doubt that Hollywood stars are more subject to wishful thinking about their troubled children than anyone else; I certainly would not infer that from n=1.
Guilty as charged: good work. Of course, your mom and dad are not on TV last night. Nor were mine.
Why does that matter?
It was on my mind. It’s not that complicated. Did you see my argument where I equated Trump to Archie and Reiner to a real life version of the meathead. That was the starting point
The psychologist who advised Reiner is a piece of shit for (1) not speaking up strongly enough to Reiner to either have an impact or get fired and (2) giving interviews now where she runs her mouth about the family.
Unless she was contractually obligated to keep it private, I think running her mouth is fine. People should be warned about stuff like this.
I think it was a man. I read an article by him on sub stack. If I could find it, I would send it to you.
Generally, I thought it was a clever argument I made that Trump is Archie and Reiner his meathead. Yes?
The psychologist was Leslie Dobson, PhD, a woman. No, I do not think much of your argument. I have a lot of sympathy for Reiner, or anyone who has a severely mentally ill child. It’s a terrible situation, often with no solution that’s even halfway decent.
Understood. You probably never saw the TV show. All in the family was seminal for my generation.
It’s highly ironic that Reiner’s liberal views backfired in real life. That was the entire comedy routine, of the show. Archie told him he was a meathead and his fancy notions were going to destroy everything which made Archie the butt of the joke! Norman Lear and the writers were laughing at the reactionary Archie. It’s probably hard for you to realize how confident we were back then . We were absolutely certain that we were special and we had solved the riddle of life. It was peak 1960s antiauthoritarian dream casting. It is everything I believed in. It is everything your teachers believe in to this day. It is you.
Here’s a good summation:
Soteriology is a doctrine of salvation and the soteriology of the enlightenment is the narrative of progress.
“Liberal and communist polities are both perpetually poised in the now and the not yet, between the emergence from the dim night of unreason and the final triumph .”
Adrian Vermeule
That’s the meat head.
Archie was held out as atrocious so Reiners death was very much on the nose. Wildly prophetic and poignant now as we see what that liberal empowerment movement has devolved into.
It’s a time capsule .
Norman Lear and the writers were laughing at *everybody* in that show. All of them were presented as deluded idiots. All of them were *also* presented as being good and decent people trying to do the right thing as they saw it, but all of them seeing it from a different perspective shaped by the culture around them.
If all you saw was everybody laughing at that silly bigot Archie Bunker, you missed what made AitF one of the all-time greats.
I have seen many episodes of All in the Family. The reason I am not impressed and tickled to death by your argument is not that I lack the relevant background, it's that your point's not particularly clever, and seems fueled mostly by mean-spirited delight in somebody else's misfortune.
I remember the TV show very well, and contemporary viewer responses to it. Two comments on your argument:
(a) You are ignoring what actually made the show, and Carroll O'Connor's performance and Lear's direction of it, uniquely resonant: making Archie seem like a real human being rather than a cartoon character. That was why for instance O'Connor won his Emmy Award category 5 times in a row and 8 times in 9 years. It was why the show rather than _just_ being polarizing or an echo chamber was, during my U.S. childhood, a unique touchstone of conversation across political/cultural lines.
(b) "It’s highly ironic that Reiner’s liberal views backfired in real life." This would be a silly argument -- considering Reiner's historically-lengthy and richly-rewarded career in his chosen field, his leaving behind some of the seminal works in that field, his three highly-successful children/stepchildren, etc. -- if it wasn't also a deeply ignorant and offensive one. It is based solely on the one deep tragedy in Reiner's life that led to his death. As if that one situation, to whatever degree it was or was not Reiner's fault which by the way is absolutely none of your fucking business, somehow invalidated everything else about this person.
I'm a secular person myself with no connection to anyone named Reiner, but every now and then can't help rooting for karma to be real. If you are ever unfortunate enough to have such a tragic situation in your personal life, do try to make it public knowledge so that anonymous online cowards can slander you with it.
Brett Stevens had an on point take on Trump’s Truth Social post regarding Rob Reiner’s death.
“Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/opinion/trump-reiner-death-post-truth-social.html?unlocked_article_code=1.T1A.sOMi.lyvqoKPuThA3&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Well, at least I gave you a thrill. The Archie meathead fight is Trump versus Rob Reiner, it is CNN vs Fox, it is very old.
I think a lot of people are going to end up learning a similar lesson soon enough. Say what you will about Trump, he has no delusions of morality, no needless sentimentality towards things that really don't matter at the end of the day. All these lies about the sanctity of life, about what "humanity" stands for, they'll be burned away, replaced with the cruel truth that everything they've done was for nothing. I'm sure nobody will accept that even at the very end of it all, but the world moves on regardless.
> no delusions of morality,
That precludes sanctimonious moralizing, which is a significant part of what distinguishes him from almost all other politicians.
Trump relentlessly moralizes against his enemies. He doesn't call them hypocrites, which seems to be what motivates you. He calls them evil and sick and treasonous.
What moral principle do you believe him to be espousing (perhaps implicitly) when he does so?
That Democrats are illegitimate and should be de-naturalized.
Beyond Trump, quite a few of his supporters vocally oppose people with names like yours. That's their principles: blood and soil.
> That Democrats are illegitimate and should be de-naturalized.
Yes, because they are an obstacle to his happiness and his vision for the country. Why wouldn't he feel that way? What makes it unique is that it does not extend past him. And in a sense, that makes his morality more coherent and grounded than any other.
What do you mean? Every other politician seems to pretend that there is some greater purpose to this country beyond securing power for itself, but Trump doesn't do that beyond the bare minimum moral justifications that just pay lip service to things being "mutually beneficial" or whatever. The whole "America First" movement is epitomizes that. They see no need to pretend that this country owes the world anything, that any of the lives outside the border matter. It exists for its own sake and nothing more.
I was mostly agreeing with what you said, but from the perspective that that's good, actually. I personally find sermons about the evils of racism or drugs or antisemitism/anti-Zionism or whatever the hobbyhorse du jour is so repellant that I like that he's doing precisely the opposite, regardless of its other effects.
If you're saying a sermon, whether an actor on a show or a politician, you are saying something with no content. You are wasting time or you have no talent or you are flattering or deflecting from something else. Trump by not doing sanctimony says things that are sometimes funny, sometimes maddening, not infrequently true, and often useful to hear, regardless of what you think about him. There will never be such a transparent president again. After the strikes on Iran, asked who is going to be in charge there: "I don't know, most of the people we had in mind are dead I think."
Pressed again the other day, he said something along the lines of - I don't really care, I just don't want us to have to come back in 10 years.
What other president would be so candid?
SS speaks for me.
Probably not the best initial to use, but... who am I kidding, we're past the point where concepts like that are relevant.
Oh, I was saying that it's good too, though more in the sense that nothing of value is being lost through the death of a failed system.
Jimmy: 🎯. In fact, I think this realization is the proper starting point for a new dispensation.
Huh? So let me get this straight, at an annual awards banquet for the film industry, a moment was set aside for a popular member of said industry who tragically lost his life due to his failure as a father to come to terms with the reality of his son’s mental illnesses. This aggravated you more than the President of the United States who literally can’t speak for longer than 1 minute without vomiting nonsensical bullshit, who has quite possibly sent the economy into a recession due to most recently starting a war in the Middle East that has killed a dozen Americans along with thousands of Iranian civilians. Which doesn’t even begin to encompass all of the Trump administration’s disastrous and corrupt policies. But yeah that Rob Reiner guy…
Don’t try so hard Jay K. It’s counterproductive. Check out Curtis Yarvin‘s argument on the inaction imperative. It’s very counter intuitive but once you read it, it will change you.
Maybe you don’t want that. Maybe you’ve decided what you believe and you’re done.
Trump is the most consequential person of the last 75 years. An equivalent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He’s the first American leader that is able to lead. He’s the only one that has the temerity and courage to go against the managerial state.
As for your dislike of him , you should look beyond his quirky personality. Be the bigger man.
We Should also pray that his Iran gambit works. If it does work, I think the Middle East will be solved. It is tremendously risky. Let’s hope it works. The Iranian people deserve better and Trump just might be able to deliver it to them….from evil (so to speak).
Try not to freak out on me.
You think the Middle East will be solved? What is he trying to solve exactly? Curtis Yarvin? The little weirdo that keeps making an ass out of himself every time he leaves the United States?
Callous? I’ve heard that before.
> Trump is the most consequential person of the last 75 years.
What do you mean by "most consequential"? That his actions have the greatest consequences?
> He’s the first American leader that is able to lead.
Are you claiming that no other US president was "able to lead"?
Yes, by comparison
What do you base this assessment on? On his promises and demeanor, or on the results and outcomes of his actions? If the latter, which specifically?
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2-the-inaction-imperative?r=j0s6f&utm_medium=ios
What is the best ai to pay for? I'm not a programmer and I don't do technical work, but I want to expand my ai skills. I worry about employment and making money in the coming years. I want to stay ahead of the curve.
expert here -- claude. It is the easiest to work with because even though it makes mistakes, those mistakes are the most human.
Since you mention interest in learning and expanding skills, claude code also has the most configuration options of any of the others and is worth learning what they do and how they work.
Two months ago, Claude. Since then Anthropic seems to have hit such severe capacity limits, it’s much worse.
ChatGPT got much better, and now I strongly prefer it for coding.
Claude still seems smarter in a “thinks holistically about problems” sense so I often build plans with Claude still. But ChatGPT 5.4 is basically as good as Opus for me in chunks of coding tasks, 5x faster and significantly cheaper.
FWIW, I wish it were otherwise, because I’m philosophically much more on team Anthropic.
Gemini is fine, BTW, but I wouldn’t pay for it. Fortunately Google almost never rate limits me, and it’s free!
I dig AI and use both Claude and ChatGPT extensively for different things. Chat has a very calm businesslike personality but will loosen up a bit in long chats, Claude is more friendly and will also talk about itself more readily. Chat seems to be able to handle big documents better, and can make excellent images; Claude can create great documents and does really cool visualizations.
tl;dr it depends what you want one for
Inexpert take here: If you're mainly using it for better search and wordy things, it might just be about personality.
I know people love Claude. I can't stand it. The slightly more austere and immoral ChatGPT works great for me.
Also ChatGPT edits images much better than Claude (which as far as I can tell is hopeless at it) — and that's my main advanced use case.
Mostly I'm a copy-editing guy with AI. ChatGPT also seems to do that best. Claude is much too polite about it.
ChatGPT is like: "this is all wrong what is your problem?" Better.
Did you mean immoral, or amoral?
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text
There are several good flagships, so if you have any access to a discount/partnership, that might just be what to go with.
Something I've realized that I want to inject into the ratsphere is that there's one set of rules for understanding the universe and another for actually convincing people of things or getting them to do what you want.
The first I think people have exhaustively explored here and I don't have much more to add. The second, well, there are lots of people better than me at this but it's worth mentioning that stuff like social proof, trying to appear high status, getting someone's friend to talk to them, listing personal points of agreement, and so on are much more effective than charts and graphs in most cases.
I'm curious to see what other people think about this.
Is this kind of stuff considered immoral in the ratsphere? You are kind of formulating this as “hacks” and manipulation but a lot of this is straight out of Dale Carnegie.
Yup. Trying to get more rats to pay attention to it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
It might be more useful to think that the rules of long-term persuasion are different from those of short-term persuasion. Logical arguments, charity, and data lose on Instagram and TikTok but one day TikyTak and all the modern media will be gone, we'll all have degenerated to some more base media obsession, and everything built on top such platforms will disappear.
In the past, many members of your outgroup had great social status, influential relationships, and were probably super sexy to boot. I don't want to say it availed them not and yet...I may doubt their lasting impact as compared to those who pursued other avenues. Keynes was a more correct than not to observe: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
Having said that, technology is rapidly advancing timeframes and mfers be getting crazy, so you should probably swag up and start lifting. We all have to make sacrifices to short-term concerns in this fallen world.
This is for sure right.
The truth is that most people don't really believe anything. What they "believe" is just a social strategy to fit in with the people they want to fit in with.
The unfortunate upshot of this is that there's no reason to try to convince most people who disagree with you about anything.
Most people, without even realizing it, are just repeating whatever the leading light in their particular group says or thinks. Change that person's mind and you can move the others.
However, that person also has the strongest incentive to stand their ground.
Long story short: Ideas, for most people, are just fashion, and they don't want to stand out at all.
"I don't like how agreeing with you [about politics] makes me feel." -My self-described "very left" ex-boyfriend, while dumping me for being politically nonbinary.
I think I've finally found the descriptor for myself! politically nonbinary. huh. I usually says something to the affect of neither the left or the right have space for me.
Thank you for this
"politically non-binary" is a funny way to put it ha ha
I'll just be the token pedant pointing out that those aren't two different things. You learn how to persuade people by applying the set of rules for understanding the universe to the question of persuasion.
And I'll also point out that all the things you talk about as methods of persuasion are not outside Bayesian decision theory and ratthink.
The original Sequences talked about Aumann's Agreement Theorem; in a highly complex social world with specialization of expertise, most of the evidence for your beliefs will and should come from what other humans believe.
The only stumbling block is determining which humans are honest and competent on a given subject, and everything you list is a part of that judgement:
-social proof just means lots of people believe something, which generally correlates with it being true (lots of people believe the sky is blue and dogs have fur)
-high status is supposed to be at least correlated with merit
-your friends are people you trust to be honest with you
-if someone agrees with you on many points then they probably share your epistemics, and the updates they made based on evidence they've seen but you haven't are probably the same ones you would have made
All of this is about deciding how much to update from another person's beliefs. That's perfectly rational Bayesian thinking.
I don't think it has one single thing to do with trust on the fundamentals of "is this right or not" it's just about getting along with a group.
If the group you want to get along with you says that you don't actually need food to live you will confidently assert that you don't need it while chomping a hamburger
So there's a general phenomenon here which I'm not sure if there's a name for, where people overlook the basic thing that makes up 99% of the iceberg because it's so normal and uncontroversial that it's invisible, and end up focusing on the 1% that people fight about as if it's all that exists.
Sure, people use in-group signifiers to fit in and get along with their group, including mouthing beliefs they don't alieve. That's a thing that happens.
But if you think that's most of what is going on with human communication, that that's all that is going on when humans exchange information with each other, then you've stayed too long at the fair.
When someone runs into a cabin and yells 'a bear is chasing the children!', the parents inside don't go 'Yes! A bear is chasing the children! We all agree on this important cultural signifier! and then go back to eating their dinner.
They grab the rifles and run outside, because the purpose of communication is mostly to communicate information, and you actually do update your beliefs as if the things other people say is actual Bayesian evidence, and you actually do do it more strongly the more you trust and respect that person, and all of that is exactly how it should wok rationally.
Again, yes, the phenomenon you're talking about exists. But it's like .001% of all human communication of this type. It's a very interesting phenomenon to talk about, and important in some crucial situations we care about. But don't miss the forest for one interesting tree.
Talk about taking an example of something that never happens to make a point about what's happening constantly, all around you, every where.
Sorry, no. Not how the world works at all. When it comes to sense making, folks are primarily turning to those they need to get along with them and saying what they need to say to stay in their groups and other larger affiliations and not draw the eye of fate.
People who read blogs like this are more immune to it. If you're like me, didn't even see it was happening till your late 30s.
But most people simply swim in the conventional wisdom without evaluating it at all.
Unfortunately, I think many, if not most rationalists are loathe to recognize that there isn't one best way to describe an idea or a policy. That you can describe a policy in very different ways while still being honest.
Partly a cope because a lot of us are compulsively blunt, and incapable of being diplomatic. And naturally, it feels better to frame our compulsions as virtues. (A bit ironic?)
Hmm I find that 'keeping up with the Jones' described by Girard's mimetic theory is a much bigger driver of social behavior than any rational thought.
While it's true that certain dishonest strategies are better at convincing people than good faith rational discussion you're missing out on the benefits of constantly discussing and defending your viewpoints which usually leads to a better and wider understanding of the issue.
So you'll convince people to do things but the things they'll be doing won't be as well thought out as they would've been had you done things in good faith.
Fully agree - I think there is even an 80k hours article/podcast where they discuss the merits of intentionally *not* trying to become super persuasive (in the more manipulative sense) -- you preserve good epistemics and good will. At least in American politics we do not need to look too far to see what happens to epistemics when persuasion and vibes rule the roost, as opposed to (ho boy) "facts and logic."
Calling strategies dishonest is a poor man's insult. Given that a large fraction of "dishonest strategies" involve scientific papers...
Why do you believe that to be an insult instead of just a neutral descriptor of the strategies? "Skillful lying is more effective at persuading most people of what you want them to believe than telling them the truth" could simply be true, and I believe it is.
One of my favorite topics!
Sort of!
I've been plinking away at the draft of an essay titled something like, "Being Smart Makes You Stupid About Low IQ People" for over a year, because it really is that difficult to describe dumb people's (apparent) internal workings to smart people.
And smart people need the explanation. Smart people, god bless 'em, can't seem to fully imagine what it's like to be too dumb to ever wonder if they're wrong about something, much less actively embrace the likelihood that they're *probably* wrong about a lot of things and actively embrace correcting the wrongness.
Worse, the vast majority of smart people work and live with other smart people, so they never get a chance to directly and closely observe dumb people over time. They simply don't see dumb people and thus can't quite bring themselves to believe that dumb people *really* exist and that they entirely lack - and can't be taught - certain modes of intellectual processing used by smart people.
And of course, because dumb people can't understand certain kinds of processes used by smart people, they can't be motivated/manipulated/convinced by the kinds of arguments that smart people instinctively love.
I'm dumb enough that it took me 15 years of working with dumb people to understand that they *REALLY* can't be made smart by education. I'm only barely smart enough to have observed it and pivoted to other strategies when I'm tempted to offer rational arguments to them.
It reminds me of the viral 4chan post about the people who were supposedly too stupid to answer the question "how would you feel if you hadn't eaten breakfast today?"
I thought it sounded fishy, so I asked some of my friends the question in real life. What I found is that for the most part even stupid people can answer the question easily, but there's a certain level of mental disability that does indeed make the question nearly impossible. I mean that there's a range of people who are intelligent enough to have a normal-ish conversion and can tell you in detail what they ate for breakfast that morning, but are more or less incapable of understanding conditional questions.
It was very surprisingly to me, since I'd mostly thought of differences in intelligence as basically quantitative and relative distinctions. Some people can remember more, or think faster, but it's really just a matter of degree. I'm not so sure about that anymore. Now I'm thinking the differences can be so large that they create a genuine categorical difference in how different people think.
Also makes me wonder: what is it that smart people can do that I can't? Am I even capable of understanding what I don't understand well enough to understand that I don't understand it? Scary stuff.
I don't know if this makes me stupid or even worse, but the problem with that question is that it assumes people do eat breakfast regularly. So the ideal answer, presumably, is something along the lines of "If I did not eat breakfast today, I would be hungry by now (maybe also angry or low in energy or other negative physical/mental result)".
However, I don't eat breakfast and haven't done so for decades, so the question is useless. I could answer truthfully and honestly "I wouldn't feel any different" but this would be unacceptable since the presupposition is "but you *will* feel different, you *will* be hungry etc." or at least "*imagine* that the ideal answerer to this question will feel such-and-such a way".
Well, I'm not hungry or foggy by skipping breakfast (ironically, the times I *do* eat breakfast, it seems to rev up my appetite so that at eleven o'clock/break time I am hungry etc.) so what do I answer? "I don't feel different" is the 'wrong' answer, but if I give the expected answer "If I did not eat breakfast I would be hungry and slower and suffering brain fog" that is lying.
The question really is asking "do you know how to play the social game? do you know the 'acceptable' answer?" and not for the truth. Some people may not be able to construct the hypothesis "If I did/did not do X, I would/would not behave in Y fashion" and so it's an intelligence test, but some people may indeed not eat breakfast, or it's all the same to them if they ate breakfast or not, or even if they ate breakfast they would still be hungry later on, and so forth.
No, your answer is perfectly acceptable too. If someone just says something like "I didn't eat breakfast today because I usually feel about the same whether or not I eat" that's perfectly fine. I'm actually one of those people so it makes perfect sense to me. It's also acceptable for people to refuse hypothetical questions because they're afraid of verbal traps, or they just find questioning invasive, or just happen to not feel talkative at the moment.
What I'm talking about is people who did eat breakfast and remember what they ate, and are perfectly willing to talk about it, but have trouble with the question itself. If I ask them how they'd feel if they didn't, they'll just say "I ate breakfast." If I say "but if you didn't, how would you feel?" they just tell me they ate it again.
The level of intelligence I'm talking about is somewhere around the threshold of being mentally incompetent to stand trial.
> "Also makes me wonder: what is it that smart people can do that I can't? Am I even capable of understanding what I don't understand well enough to understand that I don't understand it? Scary stuff."
I think if you're asking this question, you're smart enough that there's not a meaningful difference between you and a true outlier genius when it comes to your capacity for developing wisdom and shaping good life outcomes if random tragedy doesn't get in the way.
I don't feel that's accurate. Probably everyone has jagged competence. It's true that the "highest degree of competence" differs widely, but that's not the usual problem. The usual problem is that people who observe their competence in one area tend to assume that they have equal (or nearly equal) competence in other areas...and they're wildly wrong.
An additional common problem is differing goals. It's very hard for people to accept that things which conflict with their goals are true. This is one of the main reasons most people don't accept global warming. (Another is over-generalization of local observations, where local refers to both space and time.)
> most people don't accept global warming
…wait, what?
What's your profession?
Have you looked at the best curated models in order to make your determination about global warming, or have you only looked at the ones where over half the data is flawed?
Trick question: highly doubt you've looked at any of the data, in terms of getting into the nitty gritty of the analysis.
I'm siding with Dr. Clauser and the physicists.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/27/new-surface-stations-report-released-its-worse-than-we-thought/
You're clearly making the opposite mistake: being smart enough to find one piece of data that is wrong, then using it to wrongly convince yourself the entire narrative is wrong.
Yes, scientists have heard of the urban heat island effect. Yes, some global warming scaremongers use data contaminated by that. No, that doesn't mean "global warming is fake" or "it's impossible to know" or anything else you seem to be claiming.
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today (arctic sea ice) and https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ (Mauna Loa CO2) are two data points that are nearly conclusive on their own.
Mauna Loa CO2 ought to have changed, sometime, around 2020, right? I mean, intuitively, if this is anthrogenic, and not simply "more patterns than you want to shake a stick at" -- we basically konked the world economy for months...
Sea Ice stands as its own pattern, I'll leave that be.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/u-s-surface-temperature/
Turns out when you use good, uncontaminated data, you don't see global warming (yes, this is a smaller timeframe. that's what happens when you demand good data, not back to the 1920s).
https://x.com/_ClimateCraze/status/1701060770660778459
Zanni/Wimbli/Aristocat, please do us all the favor of sticking with a username so that those who have chosen to mute you don't have to be subjected to your vague insinuations, shoddy links, and appeals to 'personal interviews' as evidence
I know that I'm not competent to interpret the raw data, so I haven't looked, and won't. It wouldn't do any good. I've seen several different, relatively independent, reports from folks that purport to be skilled enough to interpret the data. But I accept, e.g., that Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than was forecast a decade ago. And that our global rate of CO2 emission has, at best, barely slowed.
Twenty years ago, I was in Olympia National Park. They were saying that the temperate rainforests were likely to disappear within the next twenty years. 20 years later, and they're just fine. Even Cook Forest is still a temperate rainforest, and that one is actually marginal, for the designation.
I've talked to people who have put together independent reports. You know, like ExxonSecrets? When even folks like that won't say that global warming is actually happening, it's starting to sound like a real big hoax.
Who was saying temperate rain forests would be gone in 20 years?
As a person who cares deeply about climate change, activist-world’s absurdly bad takes are pretty terrible.
Physicists have been pretty accurate on climate models for decades now. Activists have been routinely wrong on decades-scale local climate predictions.
As someone who considers himself a normie. (Whatever that actually is.) I find the above framing somewhat insulting. First plenty of 'uneducated' people are plenty smart. (And visa versa) But mostly I don't think 'smart' people are as different as the picture you paint. The typical 'smart' rationalist gets caught in just as many silly side streams as the normie. In fact maybe more. The normie is more conservative, I'll do it this way 'cause it's how my dad did it. Without making up some 'rational' argument for their behavior. We all think we are so damn smart, and yet I feel like we hardly know anything.
I'm a little taken aback that you're describing yourself as a "normie" but then assuming that "normies" would fall under the category of "dumb people."
Listen. That you are reading and commenting on this site as a leisure activity means you're not in the category of "dumb" that I'm describing, and likely that you don't know anyone who is too dumb to understand any of the concepts and perspectives being discussed here.
You're smart, but you're stupid about dumb people. If you're going to be insulted about anything, be insulted about that.
"and likely that you don't know anyone who is too dumb to understand any of the concepts and perspectives being discussed here."
I live and work in rural america as a prep cook at the local tavern. I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know out here who read books. (And 1/2 of those are family.) When you speak of dumb I picture two people I work with. We can all agree they are not the sharpest stick in the pile, not very world-wise, but totally lovable and we just talk about different things.
Okay, we're on the same page after all!
One of the chief frustrations of this topic is that I'm not talking about class or education. There are lots of smart but (formally) uneducated lowerclass people. You can spot them by observing their curiosity, imagination (notably the ability to predict likely consequences of their actions into the near and distant future), openness to being challenged/corrected when they're wrong about something, and general problem-solving capabilities.
While there are fewer dumb people among the educated upper classes, than the reverse, they do exist!
I grew up on a cattle farm in the middle of Texas. Most of my extended family probably comes off as normie. My grandfather dropped out of school in the 8th grade. His brothers and sisters all had this twangy manner of speech one commonly associates with rural Texans.
OTOH, he dropped out of 8th grade in order to spend more time supporting his family, doing things like trapping, hunting, and miscellaneous farm work. Apparently he was skilled at carpentry, helping build everything from single family homes to commercial buildings, including multiple structures on UT Austin's campus (I'm told he worked on the Harry Ransom Center). He also had the presence of mind to buy land, develop it, and resell it, well enough to work run single-person farms the way he preferred and be a millionaire by the time he passed away. His whole life, I never saw him write a complete sentence without misspelling two or more words.
There's a popular game in central Texas called 84, played with dominoes. He was one of the best players I'd seen of that and its mini-version, 42. Not only could he beat you; he'd be amused the whole time, as if it was effortless. He was like Larry Bird, telling you exactly what he was going to do to get around you, and then doing it like you weren't even there. I still don't know how he pulled off some of the bids he did. And even so, he'd get beaten by some of his siblings, or even his mother, in her 90s.
People like him taught me that normies are very often much smarter than apparent at first glance. Multiple reasons; sometimes I'd not find the topic they were smart about; sometimes they simply didn't care about proving it to me. There's intelligence in learning which things are actually worth taking seriously, and normies often have it.
Your grandfather was apparently a smart lower class guy who wasn't formally educated.
There are a lot of those!
Given that the Harry Ransom Center is nearly 70 years old your grandfather must have been born no later than the 1930’s and probably earlier. At that time it was still not uncommon for intelligent people to have little formal education by today’s standards, especially in rural areas.
What you are describing isn't smart people, it's midwits. Geniuses take on difficult problems and know very well that they don't understand most things, as they fall flat on their face a lot. They also solve problems that midwits can't, so it evens out.
Dumb people tend to do surprisingly well for their lack of smarts -- they develop filters, "That's too difficult" or "that's too complicated" and thus don't get scammed. But it has taken actual research to figure out how to quickly identify someone who is lacking in intelligence...
I find it very funny that "smart people and dumb people both understand things in a way that average people do not" is such a popular meme. There must be a lot of 'midwits' who think it.
You might like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz-w1KcaEAA5kbC.png?name=orig
Midwits aren't "average people" they are average people "gassed up" to believe that they're "intelligent."
LLMs are artificial midwits, after all.
Did I ever claim to be not a midwit? If so, can you point me there? (I actually do have some talent at intuiting, which is one of the main strengths that geniuses have and midwits do not, but it hardly shows online. Conversation is not one of my strengths).
> Midwits aren't "average people" they are average people "gassed up" to believe that they're "intelligent."
The prototypical midwit meme is literally an IQ distribution with labels, so I'm not sure what you base this on.
> Did I ever claim to be not a midwit?
I didn't say that you did. I just noted that "people in the center of the distribution (i.e. most of them) understand things worse" is an ironic meme to be popular.
> I actually do have some talent at intuiting, which is one of the main strengths that geniuses have and midwits do not[...]
This is more my serious issue here - where are people coming up with these "midwits be like..." takes? It's an Internet meme. What actual basis does anybody have for taking it seriously and describing the traits of "midwits" (again, i.e. most people)?
The midwit meme is a simplification of the concept. Originally it meant having an IQ within (100; 100+σ], that is, being someone technically smarter than average but still among the intellectual majority despite looking down on the other half of it. An enthusiastic reader of Coelho or Harari.
Models made by one of the top 1000 people in the world. I don't look at the memes you're talking about, I listen to people who are credible and administer IQ tests I couldn't pass.
The whole discipline of behavioural economics exists to explain the gap between rational agents and how people process information to make decisions in reality.
In general I think the gap between persuading people of a valid argument and persuading them to action is quite wide and *this is a good thing*. Some of the more extreme narratives about the dangers posed by AI seem to assume that people will stop acting in their own self interest because the AI presents a sufficiently compelling argument. In reality, people will go on doing things as they always have until they're forced by events to do something new - they won't adopt the new tech as soon as it becomes available and forget all previous instructions.
You imply that understanding the ruleset and skills for how to convince people is not part of understanding the universe. This sounds like an a priori contradiction, as "the universe" implies everything - including the knowledge about how to convince people.
From my perspective, this is a very common STEM mindset: The universe, as understood by natural sciences, and then being disappointed/surprised/annoyed/wondered by the fact, that a large amount of people do not care that much about a natural-science-perspective on the world (and presumably act "irrationally" egoistic, moralistic, or altruistic?).
That's a quick shot, in good faith. Feel free to poke holes into my assumption and I will do my best to answer, again in good faith.
A lesson I feel I learned too late. A lot of the signs and signifiers of intelligence are larping/identity play. Complaining that you are "too intelligent to effectively relate to normies" is actually just an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance between the identity you have as "intelligent", and the success you have in the world.
"Intelligent" people have nerdy hobbies and watch science themed youtube content and maybe have poor social skills. Actually intelligent people don't larp as if they are intelligent, they just win more and that includes socially.
I can agree with the ghist of your message, but I don't agree with "intelligent" vs. intelligent. It all hinges on the definition of intelligence, and you made quite some implicit definitions with "just win more, including socially". It even relates to your implicit definition of success.
There are the celebrity-billionaire measures of success, which may be themed around money, power and all the typical vices that seem to come with that.
There are "poor philosopher" measures of success, the kind that tells Kings to step out of the sun (Diogenes, if you didn't catch it).
And everything between those two.
Similarly for intelligence: Do you define it as in the academic world, a kind of raw power to gather and understand deep knowledge and patterns in science, or is it "social and economic success", which might be completely divorced from the previous? Both are valid, if the definition is done transparently.
I think more often, people who are not "intelligent" in the academic sense, but still successful, are called either "clever", "smart", etc. And also quite often, "intelligence" is understood to be a measure of academic prowess independent of social or economic success.
No, I think you're right. I think the thing is a lot of trying to convince people is using the logical fallacies (appeal to authority, appeal to tradition, appeal to emotion) everyone spends so much time warning against for understanding the universe. So it's a different skill set.
The best people at convincing others are enthusiastic about the product themselves. It's why Nick Offerman's support of Lagavulin actually works. He genuinely likes it.
You can try to sell "prestige" or "standing" or all these other things... or you can just Sell What You Love, and explain to people why they'll love it too.
Regarding Nectome: Chemical preservation will absolutely kill any cells that weren't already dead. The structural resolution may be better, but reviving someone who's been crosslinked with glutaraldehyde will not be an option. So being "brought back" will rely on scanning + uploading.
(That being said, traditional cryonics also causes too much damage and there's not a good way to repair this.)
Seems like an improvement over traditional cryonics if I had to choose at the moment. Given that you have to assume essentially magically post-human technology anyways, why not choose the modality that gives you the best chance of getting there and not destroying information in your brain?
Apparently vitrification still requires active preservation. Which seems like a huge problem to my engineers brain (continuity of expensive infrastructure). But at least, cheaper than cryonics, and more robust to i.e. temporary power loss whereas with cyronics you just become mush
Ideally if there were be some way to basically plasticize and passively store a body, that seems much more credible and plausible to me (even if still a hail mary)
It makes for some entertaining science fiction, Larry Niven’s corpsicles and a popular urban legend regarding Walt Disney, but yeah.
I'd also like to share and expand on info from one of my comments on that subscriber-only thread:
A public service announcement, tangentially related.
*YOU CAN FIX YOUTUBE!*
I've had *tremendous* success getting AI slop off my YouTube suggestions by viciously smashing "remove from watch history" on *every* *single* *video* using AI slop content.
(I make an exception for a few trusted YouTubers I was following before they began using AI b-roll in place of licensed b-roll from an image library. However, as those are mostly lecture-based channels where visuals don't matter at all and I'm often not even watching anyway, I'm mostly tolerating it for now. (Though the two that went too far with the use of AI exaggerated slop thumbnails have been unsubscribed.)).
Liberal use of smashing "not interested" and "don't recommend channel" are also great if you catch an AI slop video before you click through, but really, nothing seems to correct the algorithm faster than "remove from watch history."
Edit: per @skaladom's comment below, don't forget to disable autoplay!
Also, a friendly reminder from the Technology Connections YouTube channel that you can thwart YouTube's recommendation algorithm entirely by only watching your "Subscriptions" feed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA).
*YOU CAN FIX FACEBOOK!*
F.B. Purity is a free browser plugin which gives you total control of desktop Facebook. No sponsored ads, filter away content you don't want to see from your friends, and delete columns, buttons, links, etc to configure the appearance and content of Facebook *exactly* to your liking. My version of Facebook basically looks like it's time-traveling from 2009.
And according to a Facebook employee I once met at an ACX meetup, it's used *in the actual offices of Facebook* by Facebook's employees, because the experience of using Facebook all day for work would otherwise be completely intolerable.
(https://www.fbpurity.com/)
If anyone has any tools or tricks for making other platforms more pleasant and/or usable in the battle against AI slop, please share!
Meanwhile, I'm still lamenting the fact that YouTube's playlist feature doesn't work beyond allowing me to have them. Playback's a bitch, if you'll pardon the pun. Frequent interruptions for ads, I can understand, but why does it only randomize the first hundred or so items and ignore the rest?
And don't get me started on how poorly it handles deleted items.
A $25 family plan to YouTube Premium is one of the best things I spend my money on each month. No ad breaks, includes YouTube music (so no need for Spotify or the like), and with lines for five other users, it's pretty damn cheap per person.
Plus you're directly supporting content creators as you watch. If I could only have one content subscription, that would be it.
I remember seeing one or two AI slop videos on YouTube, but yeah, removed from history. I've always aggressively pruned slop channels (even before AI; clickbait, &c), and so far the most AI content I've seen was in the RedLetterMedia video about AI-generated videos.
Thanks! I didn't know about the remove from history trick.
For Youtube, I configured it to not store my data, now when I open it it would simply say "Your watch history is off" without any video recommendations. This has been quite helpful for staying off addictive contents.
(I don't know if this truly stops Youtube collecting my data, but privacy isn't my main motivation)
That's an option, of course, but now that I've curated the watch history content YouTube uses to generate suggestions, I feel like it makes a lot of excellent suggestions.
How do you do that?
This might help - check the "Pause watch history" part.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725
(I give you a link because my account is not in English and I don't know exactly what they look like to you)
Agree about Youtube, I watch good amounts of high quality content on it (lectures and concerts, mostly), and the algorithm can be tamed. "Remove from history" is gold, and enough smashing on "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" also works.
I go one step further and disable auto-play, so I have to manually click on things instead of being force-fed the first few seconds of whatever the algo recommends, but apparently that's not to everyone's taste.
Also, what's the deal with auto-dubbed videos? They're horrible, and there are more and more of them. Nevermind the comic effect when YT decides that a music video is actually speech in some language and tries to auto-dub it.
I want autoplay for playlist, but not for single videos, but apparently that's too wild an idea.
Really? I've had autoplay off for ages and playlists still advance. One problem is that when you do a search, many of the results are sneakily turned into lists, so they still autoplay with autoplay off.
Oh, excellent call on the auto-play; I just added it as an edit to my original comment, crediting you.
I loathe the over-stimulation of auto-play features and always instantly turn them off on every platform that uses them, so I kind of forget they even exist unless I'm at someone else's house, haha.
Gentle reminder that another viable solution to slop and shitty platforms is abstinence.
Nothing against your solutions though. I find it interesting that you can "fix" the youtube slop that way, to be honest.
FBpurity sounds like a platform-specific powerful adblock like ublock, no? I think with ublock, you could also arbitrarily block elements of websites, whether they were ads or not.
My personal mostly-abstinence based solution leads me back to even more offline-activities, and researching more into platforms and tech that are outside of big-corporate(TM) control. The latter makes me feel more like being in the early internet again, which is cool! Maybe not so accessible for the less tech-savvy, but I suspect this is a causal aspect, not mere correlation.
Sure, one can avoid STIs and pregnancy by practicing sexual abstinence, too, but who wants that?
A whole bunch of GOP-associated interest groups?
LOL!
Choosing a better partner can be part of the solution. That would mean, to avoid the partner that is well-known to spread STIs and trying to avoid protection.
But the analogy is a bit stretched. I think is much easier to abstain from YouTube than from sex, given the evolutionary evidence. And there are other video platforms.
YouTube is a fantastic educational and entertainment resource! Why would you want to avoid it, except to close your mind to information? While it may be a big-corporate(TM)-controlled platform, serious researchers and analysts post first-rate content up there, and for many musicians, YouTube has been an economic lifeline around the music industry and streaming media death spiral.
I’m not suggesting to avoid it. I merely mentioned that abstinence is one solution, too.
Just because I think YouTube is a drain doesn’t mean there’s nothing good there. I also find some good content there.
But I’ve also seen many creators leave or beg their viewers to come over to another platform, where they are less dependent on the random good will of BigCorp. I feel it’s a toss up. I do watch some stuff, but irregularly because of how much the platform annoys me.
Fun fact for those non-subscribers who can't see the 171 comments on the subscribers-only post:
One comment, which might have been satirical, apparently didn't understand the image was AI even though that was literally the subject of the post.
Four or five comments approved of the AI image Scott shared, with another three or four arguing that, in general, photo realistic AI images aren't meaningfully different than obvious fantasy fiction/reality TV/etc.
However!
I'm relieved and proud to report the rest of the comments spanned a range of mild dislike to total hatred of the undisclosed use of AI mimicking photography in the real world.
Yeah, it was nice to see the vast, overwhelming majority of commenters on the side of truth. No surprise reception has been more mixed in the public thread: the people who care were already subscribed and don't care to talk about it again.
Probably why the Cass Report "debunker" reposted his comment here: he got pretty thoroughly eviscerated in the subscriber thread and may be hoping nobody in this thread will care to engage at that level.
What was the nature of the Cass-debunker evisceration? His assessment seems pretty compelling to me, and it echoes other critical responses I've heard to the report.
It was several long comments back and forth. Too much to repost, and I wouldn't try to summarize.
lmao
Maybe it's because I'm a more out-doorsy person than Scott and so am more familiar with how these things actually work, but I was surprised he ever thought that photo might be real. The way the snow-covered branches looked to me was immediately and obviously fake.
AI images aren't meaningfully different from the "CGI" in typical fantasy fiction. (I mean it literally IS Computer Generated Imagery.)
When we watch *fictional* media, both the creator and the audience understand that none of the content is intended to document the nature of reality.
This is the opposite of photo-realistic AI images which are actively attempting to deceive the audience into believing they are fundamentally documentary.
In your country, do ordinary people invest in private equity (through a fund, presumably)?
I ask because in Finland you often hear these days that small and medium businesses are struggling to secure funding. Lots of people I know are picking stocks or buying index funds, but none are investing in private equity. I'm wondering if it's different elsewhere and if so, why that might be.
Suggest some sort of coupons, or something like that.
https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2024/02/222025-honeycomb-is-reporting-23-2m-invested-in-local-businesses/
Talk to Honeycomb, you could even start one yourself.
Thanks, that's an interesting concept. Looks like the scale is still pretty marginal, though.
It's for SMALL businesses. They often don't need much in the way of capital. $5000 for an ice cream maker (professional grade), and that's seed capital. Scoop it out by hand into the ice cream buckets.
To my knowledge there is no such product in Ireland. We have a 'deemed disposal' law which forces investors in index funds to liquidate their holdings every 8 years, pay tax on them, and then reinvest. Banks offer very low returns on deposits (maybe 0.1% per annum unless you move your money regularly). We have some large number of billions, the majority of household savings sitting idle in these poor quality savings accounts, but there is a lack of competition in the Irish market -- something like you propose would be welcomed warmly, I think.
That law sounds like a nightmare. You'd think that brokers would be lobbying for ways to make investing a more appealing alternative to bank deposits – but maybe the regular banks are lobbying for that *not* to happen.
To be fair, the brokers take care of the details (i.e. by taxing all gains at 41%). The rule was introduced after 2008, when the Government was strapped for cash. It probably still works out that returns beat inflation, in contrast to the offerings from the banks. But it does conflict with the public policy rationale for encouraging individuals to save/invest.
That's crazy. And I thought 15% long term capital gains in the US was bad. At least I'm not being forced to liquidate to pay the government
Some subset of parents have had to deal with their adolescent or adult offspring lying and stealing things from them, for example when those offspring have drug or behavioral addictions.
I'm specifically curious to know what such parents would tell their younger selves with the benefit of hindsight, back when their kids were still actual kids.
I don't expect many commenters here to have dealt with such a situation personally, but hoping maybe someone can point me in the direction of a good resource on that question.
Note: please don't just reply with the answer you imagine you'd give if you were one of those parents when you're not one. I'm looking for actual resources. Of course if you have actually been through that situation yourself then please share.
There was an era when my daughter was a teen when she lied and stole things from me. But I’m not sure what your question is. Is it what I would have said at that time to myself as a younger parent, when my daughter was a small child?
I’m talking about like when the kid (age 16-25) steals the TV to sell it for drug money. So if you’re a parent in that situation, what do you wish you could go back and tell yourself when the kid was much younger, perhaps before the kid started on that behavioral “track”
Your initial post was about someone’s kid lying and stealing from them, perhaps because of drug or behavioral addictions. Now you’re sounding pretty hyperspecific: kid steals substantial household item for drug money. My kid stole $10-$20 from me on a handful of occasions, and lied to me very extensively for the entire bad period of a couple years, but did not have a drug or behavioral addiction. Is this even the kind of thing you have in mind? And what really are you trying to learn with this question of yours about what the parent of a kid doing that stuff would regret about their parenting when the kid was small?
Sorry, I didn't mean to make you defensive.
I think your situation is actually within the range of what I have in mind, although it wasn't a central example I was envisioning when I asked the question. (The central example being "kid steals TV for drug money" or rough equivalent. But stealing $10 and lying, even without any drug thing, is still bad.)
I'm a parent of a preteen, one who lies and takes things, and I'm worried the lying and taking stuff will get worse, so I'm looking for advice from people who've been through it getting worse already.
I framed it as "what advice would you give yourself with the benefit of hindsight" because I know sometimes it's hard to just give blanket advice without a specific context. But I probably didn't phrase any of that clearly. Sorry again.
> (The central example being "kid steals TV for drug money" or rough equivalent. But stealing $10 and lying, even without any drug thing, is still bad.)
Mine's still a baby, so I can't speak from the parenting end, but as a formerly troubled teen¹ who's thought about what I'd do in similar situations, I'll chime in.
The big problem here is peer groups, they've fallen in with a bad crowd, and they care much more about their friends' opinion than yours. The only solution is nuclear - a complete change in peer groups, via changing schools, or moving, ideally both. And by changing schools, you specifically need to go richer / better, to get the selection effects on your side for a better prospective peer group.
Is it worth upending your family's entire life to achieve this? Surely there's a better way? I don't think so, and moving is probably better because if they're really close to their current bad crowd friends, they'll still be close geographically and can continue the friendship(s) behind your back if they're motivated.
That said, certainly you have to weigh the odds and counterfactuals. You could move and send them to the richest, Harvard-pipeline junior high or high school there is, and they can still find a bad crowd and drugs there if they're motivated. If they're weird or prone to being bullied, moving could easily make their lives worse! No easy answers here.
But yeah, that's what I'd do - you've got to change the peer group, and get it more selected.
______________________________________________________
¹ Mainly "troubled" because I hated school and was crushingly bored, and found out incidentally via some youthful hijinks that if you're sent to the IEP "bad kids" school, they give you all your work for the week at 8am monday, so you can knock out that pile of nonsense in a few hours and spend the rest of the week flirting with the troubled goth girls.
But yeah, it led to me having a bad crowd as my friends and peer group, and led to me getting up to a lot of stuff I'm sure would horrify my parents if they knew about - just the 10% they found out about horrified them.
Did your parents move to change your peer group?
Oh. What I remember most from that era is feeling terrible about myself as a parent. Had a feeling she would not have done that stuff if she had felt more loved or had more structure or something. In retrospect, I don’t think it was my fault in such a deep way. Now I think what would have helped was my being more networked with other parents. My daughter became friends with one kid in particular who was a terrible friend and a really bad influence, and I didn’t know he was. If I’d known the other parents better somebody might have alerted me. A related thing was that I did not understand how powerful an influence the peer group becomes at that age.
As for how I handled it: I remember punishing the stealing pretty harshly — no allowance for a while, and not buying her something big we’d agreed she’d be getting. I think the best thing I did about the lying and stealing was give her a vivid picture of the impact it had. Talked some about my hurt and anger, but mostly about the impact it was going to have, how for quite a while, now, I was going to doubt things she said. And then in the next few weeks I did indeed often doubt things, even in contexts where she was confiding and asking for support. And I’d tell her then, “I sort of believe you, but I can’t get rid of the memory of you lying to me in May, so now I am wondering a little bit whether this thing you’re confiding to me now is true.” Often at those times she was telling the truth, and it really hurt her feelings that I felt some doubt, but I think it was good for her to hear that. It really was true that the doubt popped up all the time for me, and I couldn’t get rid of it, so she was hearing about a genuine bad consequence of her lying.
That's really helpful to know, thanks. Did her behavior eventually change, and did you eventually learn to trust her?
You're assuming that the kids only started doing such when they became adolescents. Quite a few kids will steal (generally food), and hoard it in their rooms and such. Attracts mice. Other kids will steal from their siblings (and parents, one assumes, I only knew the sibling). Sometimes this is an outgrowth of adoption.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I mean the more drastic kind of situations where expensive things are stolen, e.g. to be sold for drug money
Link for Italian constitutional referendum leads to a long list of manifold markets adjacent to that topic. It's unclear, at least for me, what is the text on which comment is requested, or where to put a comment (not that I would necessarily have anything useful on that topic).
What if the Founding Fathers intended the Giant Congress amendment not to stop at 50000 people per representative, that they thought we would be smart enough to recognize an arithmetic progression without them spelling it out? I think that's a plausible option.
A Giant Congress with an unbounded progression would have one representative per 200000 people until the population of the US reached 360 million. Or 1657 representatives until the 2030 census. Just a 3.8x increase over the current one.
I think your suggestions is extremely reasonable, but fails to satisfy any real-world constraints of feasibility as mentioned in the original article about it. It pisses off existing congress, is not supported in literal writing of the Founding Fathers, and therefore "impossible" to implement in the current situation?
So what would happen if the US Supreme Court decided that all decisions made by Congress since 1790 are null and void? I'm guessing that it would not usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity, but that instead, the newly elected megacongress would simply decide to reinstate all of that legislation.
The experience was real, but the harm is epistemic, not aesthetic. Your gut was signaling that something beautiful exists in the world, but that signal was wrong. Finding out it's AI doesn't make the feeling go away; it just makes the inference wrong.
Re: Nectome, I've been curious about the answers to these questions:
Given that we actually can restore vitrified brain tissue back to life right now (see: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2516848123 - mouse brain hippocampus slices, ~70% functionality, synapse plasticity restored; much less consistently whole brains), does this mean Alcor and CI's vitrification-only approaches are not so hopeless?
Doesn't glutaraldehyde permanently damage some of the chemistry of the cell? If engrams are an important part of information storage in the brain, and engrams are encoded chemically, and thus the connectome isn't the whole picture, doesn't this mean that fixation by that method could destroy important information?
Why aren't Alcor and CI doing MAiD? If Nectome is right about the 12 minute window, and they believe Aurelia on this matter, wouldn't they want to set up their own clinics in Oregon for this, and offer preparatory services as well?
What will the prices be in 5, 10 years? Will this always cost as much as a house?
The LW comments are quite good too, IMO. The fruit fly partial upload, the aspirational plan to get Medicare to pay for cryonics eventually (cheaper than end of life care!), etc.
"Why aren't Alcor and CI doing MAiD?"
See here for an example:
https://gizmodo.com/california-man-becomes-the-first-death-with-dignity-p-1831652934
Thank you!
Every cryogenics or ‘we will preserve your body and brain when you die’ company is a scam, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Low effort, high temperature comment. Please try to do better than this.
It’s quasi-religious, which means it doesn’t have to prove its arguments.
Low effort, high temperature comment. Please try to do better than this.
My apologies. I do think it’s a grand wager with no guarantee, but I regret the dismissive tone.
There's "scam" and there's "never going to work". It's hard to argue that, eg., Alcor is a scam when various founders and board members are already frozen in their storage tanks.
If technological progress continues for another 50 years without civilization crashing, and if the companies persist that long with the brains/bodies still frozen/vitrified/chemically fixed, then I think it's highly likely to work. Why? First, the necessary scanning technology seems highly likely to be possible in *some* form, given enough development time. Second, with continued AI advancement, most possible plus currently-plausible technologies probably become available in less than 50 years.
Whether any particular new preservation tech is adequate, or whether any given company has its act together, is worth investigating, but for at least some of the cryonics companies the answer seems to be probably-yes.
That is not a very strong argument, is it?
ok i'll expand a bit. i won't go into the details of the company (because i haven't read them) or about the science (i'm an actuary, not a biologist/doctor/neuroscientist so I can't comment).
3 reasons why i wouldn't want to put my money anywhere near such companies:
1. it's the perfect template for an overzealous entrepreneur to draw money in. There is no product, but rather the promise of a future product. All you need is a strong brand and marketing presence. It requires a large upfront investment It's appealing to a lot of people, who doesn't want to live forever? which draws us on to...
2. the people it attracts. who is inspired by the prospect of wanting to live forever? Above average intelligence, typically wealthy (or at least upper middle class), and frankly, ego-centric. Are you gonna freeze your body and brain when it's in its prime in order to have a chance to live forever some day? Who would do that? Okay maybe only your brain before you get alzheimers so you can still live a bit. Again, really? It's the perfect target market for any company targeting members of the public.
3. Even if 1 and 2 are covered by legalese, scientific breakthroughs, fair pricing, etc. There's still the problem of the very long-term nature of the product. How long are they planning on freezing your body for? 50 years? 100 years? How many new companies last that long? The founders of the company might have good intentions, but at some point there will be new management, new shareholders, new incentives. Will they still honor your $100k one time payment? The power dynamics also change massively. Say your dad is currently frozen and they come to you saying oh actually due to increasing energy costs and delays in the science and xyz, we actually need another $20k from you. Cough up or else we pull the plug. Of course this is an extreme that you could put in writing not to happen, but the dynamics change.
Plus, who wants to live forever? Enjoy what you have now. When the time comes, a newer generation will take on the world. It's quite the boomer mentality to want to not let go of what you have (read: presidents, senior management at any companies, final salary pension schemes, etc.)
How is #1 supposed to work? All the cryonics firms are nonprofits.
I want to live forever or at least until I change my mind. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to live forever if they could live in youth and health. I certainly understand not wanting to live in a decrepit old body with pain and little freedom but that not the prospect people who want to live forever are imagining.
I’ve got 100s of years of things I want to do assuming I have infinite time and youth and health. Spend 10yrs each in. Various countries and get fluent as just one example
That doesn’t mean I trust crypto companies tho
Death is good, I'll be there in ~10 yrs or so. (Barring some accident.) With death comes rebirth, new life, change. Get out of the way for the next generation. If we didn't die we'd still be some giant ball of slime living in some tidal pool. I'll take death and change thankyou very much.
If we didn't eat each other's waste products we'd still be slime living in a tidal pool, or not even that. Doesn't mean we should start eating shit now. Times change.
without death, what's the point in living?
>I’ve got 100s of years of things I want to do assuming I have infinite time and youth and health. Spend 10yrs each in. Various countries and get fluent as just one example
sounds like cope to me. similar to people that complain how millionaire actors are ripped cause they can afford personal trainers and have more time.
Obligatory: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hFTkZjPiAyQ9RtCQf/the-meaning-that-immortality-gives-to-life
> without death, what's the point in living?
That's an empty platitude, and I hope it was just a knee-jerk reaction, and not a representation of your actual thought process.
The point of living is to experience life. You can't experience life if you're dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-aging_trance
My point in living is grandkids... but you do you.
With death, what's the point in dying?
*crypt companies, FTFY?
Use the process on a live person, and then resurrect them. Otherwise it's a scam.
"You can't convince me otherwise" is a helluva way to start a conversation.
don't take everything you read on the internet so literally :)
I'd say my prior on cryogenics not working/being a scam is roughly 90%-100% unlikely of being updated by a good posterior. But giving a range isn't as rage-bait and comment-inducing as talking in vague absolute terms, and hopefully someone could actually convince me otherwise!
I try to take people literally https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/07/discover_your_i.html
You'll find many customers and might find a seller who estimates the odds that it works at less than 10%.
if you told 100 people there's a 90% chance of dying if you skydive without a parachute, would 10 people do it?
This is a very backwards analogy.
If you told people a damaged parachute had a 5-10% chance of saving them when they jumped out of a plane, would they use it or jump without it?
It worked.
So do cigarettes, but we don't like those either. We expect better quality comments here. More light, less heat.
How is it possible to "preserve the whole body, including the brain, at nanoscale, subsynaptic detail"? This sounds way beyond what I understand to be the current state of the art, I'm curious what advances they're making use of.
They discuss their methodology at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401500245X (that's the scientific paper, popular article is https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/brain-freeze )
EDIT: My previous comment was unfairly harsh; I think the researchers are genuine but still overstate their findings and are overly confident.
Have you looked into this? They won the Large Mammal Preservation Prize (see https://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/ ), which was considered reputable and stood for eight years. They've published microscopic before-and-after slides. And people I trust endorse them. Can you tell me more about why you think this?
I will reply properly tonight or tomorrow night (the Theranos comparison was unduly harsh, I don't have evidence they're actually fraudulent, but I maintain that it is misrepresented and hand waves away the hardest problems).
Right, this is turning into a full on essay, even as I avoid the philosophical and social elements... Will link in a future open thread. I have some pretty firm reasons to be skeptical for both general cryopreservation and for Nectome's claims in particular (human brains are much larger than pig brains, a connectome is nowhere near what you need for full modelling, 'revival' for Nectome almost certainly means creating a digital approximate-copy given their methods, and more) but these are only meaningful with a proper explanation.
"Quip less, write more" is probably good advice for me in any case.
Yes, this was my initial reaction, but I was hoping Scott had vetted or verified it to some extent. If that's not the case I'm a bit disappointed and will have to update accordingly :/
The Nectome pre-sale is a better deal than described, at $20k if you plan on not dying in the next 10 years. (And pro-rated if you do.)
I'm already signed up with Alcor, but am having a call with Nectome tomorrow, as they seem like a better choice if you can plan for your demise.
How old are you if you don't mind me asking?
37
Do you think your decision to sign up for cryonics would be different if you were 27, 47 or 57?
Not really. Unexpected death can come at any age, and it seems better to always have a safety net. (IIRC I originally signed up with Alcor around age 34.)
I've posted a preprint critiquing the Cass Review, the bad UK government-commissioned report that got puberty blockers banned for trans adolescents: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18961485
---
Key messages:
• The Cass Review led to the UK banning puberty blockers for transgender adolescents, after taking over from the standardised NHS review protocol.
• The Review repeatedly distorted its own scientific sources.
• The Review’s outcome was predetermined, with the same rationales for replacing the NHS protocol later recycled into rationales for restriction.
• The Review concealed its use of material from an anti-LGBT hate group.
Thanks for doing this. I find I can never predict your political leaning on any given topic, which I guess means you must be thinking for yourself. I'd like to write a post on puberty blockers sometime and will read your preprint and maybe ask you if I have some questions.
I read your preprint and the Cass Review. I agree with your assessment that the Cass Review employs dishonest tactics. The review is full of isolated demands for rigor, pairing weak evidence in favor of PB/HRT with disclaimers and objections, some highly speculative, while letting weak evidence against PB/HRT slide unopposed. As one example, the Cass Review presented without disclaimer the "reasons for detransition" reported by a survey (Littman 2021) conducted on ideologically anti-trans forums not representative of typical detransitioners, failing to give the survey a fraction of the scrutiny it gives pro-PB/HRT results.
I have some questions:
1. What *is* the rationale for puberty blockers as a default option? You've convinced me that the Cass Review makes poor arguments against them, and banning is obviously governmental overreach, but you present PBs as a delay tactic and imply they're unnecessary. Why not go straight to HRT?
2. In your discussion section you make a case for discrediting Cass based on involvement with hate groups, but your arguments are hard to follow. What's the relevance of the ADF or the ACPeds beyond being nebulously present? Was Cass hiding her contact with SEGM? You present your "narrative" as a revelation, but I don't understand why I should be scandalized by shadowy suggestions and guilt-by-association.
3. What is your stance on the evidence base for providing HRT to adolescents? I admit to an American view: I don't have a strong opinion on what the NHS should or shouldn't cover, but hands off private practices.
Speaking of non-NHS options, I know a few people that DIY'd their own hormones as teens in the UK. A recent breathless article in the Times claimed 12% of adolescents referred to NHS gender services were already DIY'ing. Cass and the NHS may not think the preferences of adolescents count as an "outcome", but the adolescents do, and from that perspective the benefits of early HRT are utterly undeniable and easily worth the risks. Most people would do the same thing in their shoes.
I'm strongly of the belief that adolescents deserve bodily autonomy, and I'd prefer if they had access to medical supervision. The lesser-evil arguments used to (often poorly) justify other restrictions on adolescent autonomy are invalidated by urgency. The UK, naturally, treats even its adults as wards of the nanny state.
1. two answers. First: desistance is rare, but not zero, so an extra chance to change your mind isn't useless. Second: it'd be harder to get society on board with immediate CSHs.
2. the Cass Review and NHS overall lacked transparency, and didn't publicly disclose the membership of the policy working group and the advisory groups (though in one case they did privately confirm Hakeem's involvement to Trans Safety Network). When I tried to FOI these the names were redacted. Some SEGM members have self-disclosed, ironically being more transparent than NHS was (I guess they see it as enhancing their credibility).
ADF and ACPeds are part of the same overall coordinated network that SEGM is in (among other groups). E.g., ADF and ACPeds had also been thinking about how to undermine the WPATH standards of care for years, even before SEGM was founded and used Cass to do it.
3. There are more studies, which means I've looked at them less (apart from the specific criticism I make of Cass' distortion of them in my table 1). My rough impression is that it's similar to the situation with PBs and parachutes[i], where it's officially low certainty evidence, given the shortage of studies with negative controls, but still obviously works. In the reply I'll say some more tangents to this one
[i] classic parody of systematic reviews: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459
1. Aren't there additional social harms associated with not developing alongside peers, and medical risks associated with using PBs too late? I recognize that as a pragmatic point, "society wouldn't like it" might be the only answer that matters here, but I don't see why we should on principle default to PBs before HRT.
2. If you're still editing, I would recommend emphasizing the fact that the NHS/Cass Review team redacted the names of contributers involved in controversial advocacy groups. I still don't understand what it means for the ADF and ACPeds to be part of the same "network" as SEGM. What does that entail? Did they exchange a few emails, or do they have significant overlap in members, share funding, collaborate on projects?
3. As a less extreme example, a while back I got into an argument over whether sunscreen prevents skin cancer. It certainly does, based on our thorough knowledge of skin cancer, sunscreen, and the nature of the sun as a deadly laser, but there's far less "real" data on this than you'd expect. Partially this is because it is difficult to conduct trials on an intervention that cannot be blinded and must be monitored over decades to catch rare events, and partially this is because the answer is so obvious nobody would bother funding new studies to check.
tangents to #3:
- NHS is also restricting gender-affirming hormones for <16, still in the "pause" phase but definitely planning to make it indefinite. https://www.engage.england.nhs.uk/consultation/prescribing-masculinising-and-feminising-hormones/
- Erin Reed has a write-up criticizing NHS' gender-affirming hormone reviews, including: "split the question into ... 10 artificially narrow reviews, each searching for a hyper-specific patient population" ruling out most studies and even excluding studies due to the patients having received PBs first before CSHs (i.e., if she's right, excluding any study that followed the Dutch protocol)! https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-nhs-england-review-excluded-97
a third tangent: Some annoyances about de Vries et al (2014), the Dutch cohort study after proceeding to CSHs (https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-2958). Both tie into my broader pet peeves about science and scales and over-abstraction making us forget stuff we know
- on the "Body Image Satisfaction" (BIS) scale they use, lower means more satisfied and higher means less satisfied. Why would you call it that then
- the original "Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale" questionnaire was always sex-specific, and never meant to apply both before and after medical transition. So they flipped which scale to use after transition—which was also nonsense. (When a trans man gets rid of his boobs, this strategy means he automatically counts as less dysphoric, not even because he likes his body more, but simply because he didn't suddenly start wishing he had boobs!) The BIS scale *does* show they got more satisfied with their bodies, but the UGDS scale-flipping was silly. And it gave the anti-trans activists a gotcha on a silver platter.
[reposted from hidden open thread]
I saw another commenter saying you got "thoroughly eviscerated" in the subscriber thread. I'm not a paid subscriber on this substack but I'm sympathetic to the idea that the Cass report was ideological bullshit. I'd be very interested to hear what you made of the criticism you saw over there, and whether you thought it had any merit that you'd want to address in your revisions.
I see the commenter is Brenton Baker. Since he didn't comment on my post in the hidden open thread, I'm not sure which comments in that thread he's describing as "thorough evisceration."
One person wondered if SEGM had gotten the figure from Cass instead of the other way around; I reiterated that the embedded file still had the SEGM logo.
One person asked for clarification on my basis for calling SEGM a hate group + background on the network, and I shared again the SPLC + Mother Jones sources that I'd included in the supplemental material.
One person who hates gay marriage objected to being called an anti-LGBT hater for hating gay marriage.
One person mentioned they'd listened to a podcast episode about it; I then listened to it too and noted which of Cass' distortions the podcast had fallen for.
There were no objections in the thread to any of the distortions I documented.
One person did find an old Quora answer where I'd acciddentally referred to Grimes as Vivian Wilson's mom (rather she's the mom of some of Vivian's half-siblings), which I then corrected lol
Since one person there, and you here, both wanted more clarity on the network, it's possible that that's background many people lack. I might consider trying to do more to provide it. But on the other hand I might continue to defer the fuller explanation to the sources I already give, to keep down the bloat.* The network is already documented, maybe as well as it can be based only on public information, my goal is to laser focus on the Cass Review's role.
Interested readers might also learn more about the network from e.g. Trans Data Library (listed as a useful resource in the supplemental material), or from trans bloggers like Zinnia Jones or journalists like Erin Reed or Evan Urquhart or academics like Julia Serano or Florence Ashley or Alejandra Caraballo.
(John Oliver also has a good video on ADF, which reminds viewers that they already know ADF by their works: these are the guys that overturned Roe v Wade and who were behind the gay wedding cake thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCAuHH5EYnE&)
*https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/anti-lgbtq/; https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/alliance-defending-freedom/; https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/american-college-pediatricians/; https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/captain/; https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/timeline-building-pseudoscience-network/; https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/; https://doi.org/10.1017/jme.2023.9
The New Mexico search for former Air Force Research Lab head General McCasland (ret.) is well into its third week. Many in the UAP community were surprised at how long it took for the story to reach national prominence, but it got there, with well over one hundred outlets covering. Marquis would be NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/us/mccasland-missing-ufo-us-air-force-new-mexico.html yet today's piece from CNN was remarkably comprehensive and supportive to providing the relevant topic context for the UAP-curious among normies: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/15/us/wright-patterson-air-force-base
The search for retired Gen. McCasland - Update 17-Mar
Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office press gaggle:
https://x.com/BCSONM/status/2033686648396144691?s=20
Officer K Woods: "Just because it's crazy does not mean it's not true."
"I appreciate that there's a community that wants to go down the rabbit hole of ufos, I don't have a way with which to pursue that, and so those theories have to be set aside; unless we were to find something that indicated that. So we can only go off of fact at this point."
(from 16:25)
Reports say that General McCasland is at risk because of medical needs but due to privacy concerns the authorities won’t specify these needs. His wife has said he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia but won’t elaborate further.
Medical needs could mean many things of course, but I’m wondering if they aren’t somehow related to his disappearance. Especially given his wife’s failure to say much - if, for example, he needs insulin to survive, there’s seemingly no reason why she doesn’t say so.
https://x.com/BCSONM/status/2033686648396144691?s=20
Bernalillo County Sheriff's office discusses status of the search. The Sheriff or Officer Woods appeared to downplay the role of possible mental concern. Evidently some time over months past the retired General said something about brain fog (which is something I can identify with just about every morning :p ); Officer Woods said that if any of them were in the same room as McCasland, that McCasland would still be the smartest person in it.
One thing his wife has made abundantly clear in her Facebook post is that she finds the supposed Aliens connection ridiculous.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-424/comment/227916594
>One thing his wife has made abundantly clear in her Facebook post is that she finds the supposed Aliens connection ridiculous.
Mrs. McCasland's 'abundantly clear'-making:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1rmpi7k/new_update_on_neil_mccaslands_disappearance/
(I confirmed that the fb screen capture is faithful to source)
Read words or read tone as one wishes. Just bear in mind you're reading the public-facing output of someone who's suffered the trauma of their partner in life just having disappeared a week prior. Not for nothing does the term gallows humor exit.
But moreover she's no stranger to treating insufficiently-explained events in tongue-in-cheek fashion https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1978QJRAS..19..282W/0000282.000.html ; make of that what you will.
For background context only, a U. Arizona PhD in Astronomy https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/298619, she was an early 1980 astronaut candidate https://www.spacefacts.de/bios/candidates/nasa9/english/wilkerson_susan.htm and https://www.scribd.com/document/981761/NASA-83132main-1980 , and she's led an extensive Air Force-centric career. https://prabook.com/web/susan_mccasland.wilkerson/3362026.
>Mrs. McCasland's 'abundantly clear'-making:
I've read the FB post, as I've already said in the other OT. So what are you getting at? What is that discussion on r/UFOs supposed to tell me about it? Are there any comments, specifically, that would invalidate my assertion, or that at least are indicative of your position?
Linking to the r/UFOs post was simply to provide the FB post in a way that's slightly less ephemeral & easier to access. Your assertion that 'she finds the supposed Aliens connection ridiculous' is straw-manning, but on her part as much as your own.
So is the inference here "he was disappeared because he Knew Too Much"? I stopped watching the X-Files about the end of season seven and never picked it back up, and I'm not interested in "Aha! Conspiracy government cover-ups assassinations aliens working with the super-so-secret nobody knows of their existence government agency" stuff anymore.
Back in the late 1940s, Project Mogul operated out of an unpublicized base in New Mexico, designed to detect Soviet nuclear detonations using a train of high-altitude balloons. Eventually we figured out seismic and other methods that were more reliable.
One day, one of the balloons crashed on an adjoining ranch. The military declared it a "crashed weather balloon" which was obviously untrue and thus was born the Legend of the Rosewell Incident.
This despite the program being long-since declassified and the uncanny resemblance of the "crashed UFO" to typical Project Mogul apparatus.
The only mystery to me is why they didn't give the rancher a suitcase full of cash and Kindly suggest that he retire to FL and keep his Damn Mouth Shut.
I guess the occasional Naruto Run around the perimeter of the site is some small consolation.
My take is that the military *intentionally* went with the obviously wrong “weather balloon” story in the expectation that it would feed into UFO claims. Doing so distracted people from asking what the object really was. For similar reasons I’m convinced that the military likes to hear claims that Area 51 harbors crashed UFO’s and alien corpses.
Oh, if they got the guy to move away, there would be even more layers of conspiracy theorising as to 'what did he know, when did he know it, and this government pay-off is proof he knew what really crashed and saw it all before the feds could arrive to cover it up!'
You look at photos from the time and go "yeah, that's earth tech, not flying saucer material" but that's probably explained away by "ah, but this was the *fake* material released to help the cover-up!" True Believers gonna believe no matter what.
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/c-gettyimages-864308318.jpg?c=original&q=w_860,c_fill/f_webp
Yep, you caught us. No 'Murricans are pulling the wool over your eyes.
If only Spielberg hadn't leaked images of the Greys . . . 😂
(Seriously: Since Close Encounters, EVERY alien has been a Spielberg alien. See also cartoonist Nathan Pyle's whole career)
The shift in the portrayal of alien contacts, and how it moved from spiritualism to pseudo-science, is fascinating but not something I know in depth or have the time to get into right now.
Same psychological compulsion that makes you try to pick online fights with strangers, Anon!
OP is trying to get people to consider UFOs/UAPs are aliens. That invites comment from all. Such comments are going to include why/why not someone might/might not accept the premise that 'aliens real and crashed here, we haz the bodies'.
If OP is putting forward "hmm, guy mysteriously disappeared, could it be?" then they are going to have to accept that one set of answers is "nope, it could not be" and "I don't care about little green men".
Grainy images and "deathbed confessions" are real, UAPs are real... but alien spacecrafts are not. If they were, there would be better evidence than that.
Sergei, how can we doubt such unimpeachable testimony as this? 😊
“I do remember stories from youth of those that spoke with some of the men that worked at the base that held the wreckage and the aliens they picked up and kept in storage there,” Nancy Crownover, who lives in Ruidoso, New Mexico, about 75 miles from Roswell, told CNN.
“I will say they were very believable. Much like I believe that my Native friend saw Sasquatch. There are always those that will say they don’t believe. I appreciate a world that is so much more fun and interesting with aliens,” Crownover said.
The man retired 13 years ago, according to the news article, so that's a very long time to wait to disappear him if he knew too much. People go missing all the time, their families have no idea why, they say everything was normal, and then maybe ten years later a hiker finds a skeleton on some trail. Or they are never found at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQr7ygEAGQ
https://www.news10.com/news/national/the-mystery-of-missing-persons-in-americas-national-parks/
Case in point: the Jameson Family. A husband, wife, and their 6-y.o. daughter disappeared in Oklahoma in 2009 under odd circumstances. As there was a small child involved the authorities conducted a massive long-lasting search around their last known location. It was in an area that was wooded but not particularly rugged or swampy.
Four years later a hunter stumbled across the family members’ skeletons. The skeletons were less than three miles from the last known location, well within the search radius, were not in a concealed place, and as best could be determined had never been moved since death.
There's a lot of sad cases, where people who are (or think they are, or are but in a different environment) experienced hikers/climbers/such-like go out and disappear, and their remains are not found until years later, if at all.
It's surprisingly easy, even in 'safe' places, to go missing or have bad/fatal accidents. A video I stumbled across, where if you went walking in these woods you could easily fall down one of these holes and not be found, simply because the locations have been forgotten in the past hundred and fifty-plus years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OU3QjuZCYQ
1. Reality conforms to the views expressed in your comment.
2. The least unlikely reason the General is missing is _____________.
3. Therefore the General is most likely located ______________ [any localizing criteria, e.g. in a barn, in a SCIF, in MGRS grid square XXX YYY, etc.]
I am not an expert in human disappearance, so not interested in this discussion. The argument is that in 70 years since the UFO craze started, and with vast improvements in optics and coverage, we still have nothing better photographed by the public than unusual roundish bright far away lights moving "unlike a plane or a balloon". Those are some really playful aliens, aren't they?
The human brain runs on twenty watts—what it takes for a night lamp—and two bowls of rice a day. It has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. 2 weeks ago researchers uploaded a fruit fly brain (140,000 neurons) in a digital environment and it was a genuine breakthrough. The distance between those two numbers is what this piece is about. How should we treat claims about superintelligence?
https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/night-light
Building an “in silico” brain is an interesting project, but it’s orthogonal to building super intelligent AI.
We already have AI that would have absolutely blown my dad’s mind: you can talk to it! You can get it to draw pictures and create recipes and psychoanalyse your friends!
None of that beyond the neural net concept relates directly to human brains, and if we built a virtual human brain, it probably would be way more useful to brain researchers than AI researchers.
There was a pretty interesting documentary about an attempt to create an “in silico” brain model and all the rosdblocks it encountered.
We're in agreement. My essay isn't arguing that understanding the brain is the path to superintelligence — it's arguing that what's running on twenty watts is worth understanding in its own right. Your point about a virtual brain being more useful to brain researchers than AI researchers is exactly the distinction I'd make. The AI conversation tends to absorb everything into its orbit, but the brain is interesting even if it teaches us nothing about building better chatbots. Would love to know which documentary (In Silico?) you're referring to — sounds like it's in the same spirit.
Yeah, that’s it, really interesting both scientifically and as a portrait of a smarmy lab director
Thank you — adding it to my list. A billion euros and a decade of ambition meeting the complexity of twenty watts. Sounds like it proves the essay's point from the inside.
A night light uses more like 0.5 watts or even less, at least if you mean those little lights that are always on so you don't trip. 20 watts of modern LED lighting is a full overhead light with two 60 watt equivalent bulbs in it.
Thanks for the link to the Google blog and highlighting the "up to 50 synapses can connect pairs of neurons" finding. I wasn't aware of this and it seems key for overcoming current neural network architectural limitations.
I think this comment maybe the answer to your previous comment. You're right that emergence from compact descriptions isn't new — but the specific architecture keeps revealing things that are surprising. Fifty synapses between a single pair of neurons is exactly the kind of detail that changes how you think about what the system is doing. Glad that landed.
Not sure what your argument is... and how it is related to superintelligence. A single logical gate started at several inches and tens of Watts, and now it is a couple of nanometers and draws almost nothing. If your point is about how long it will take for simulated fruit fly ganglia to become, faster, smaller and cooler than the real thing, then you have already conceded that it will happen some day, and the haggling is over the timelines.
My argument isn't about timelines — it's simpler than that. We mapped a poppy seed's worth of brain and found a universe of complexity we didn't expect. That's interesting in its own right, regardless of what it implies for AI development. You may be right that simulated brains will eventually be faster, smaller and cooler than the biological version. The essay isn't disputing that. It's observing that the thing we're trying to replicate — or surpass — is more astonishing than we tend to acknowledge in the rush to get there.
Why is this presented as somehow surprising? The Mandelbrot set is generated from a tiny description; a fruit fly's brain is massively larger than most descriptions of things studied in mathematics and computer science so of course it's going to exhibit emergent effects.
Ah yeah, I agree, the new discoveries are awaiting us. And will probably require a lot of adjustment and reevaluation.
Arguing for biological anchors in AI predictions might have seemed reasonable in 2022, but by now it's clear that it just doesn't work. AIs are already far smarter than typical humans by any reasonable measure.
> AIs are already far smarter than typical humans by any reasonable measure.
Care to elaborate?
Is "knowing that you don't walk to the car wash" not a "reasonable measure" that the typical human easily aces?
To me it seems that what LLMs have demonstrated is that basically all our measures for smartness break down if the assumption that smartness ist relatively uniform across a lot of tasks breaks down.
Wait - is the latter not the definition of "general intelligence" as in "Artificial General Intelligence"?
I would be very interested in your post LLM take on how to measure smartness in both humans and AIs. I think getting that right is extremely important [and I assume everyone who has tried hiring someone in the last 6 months will agree].
The essay isn't arguing biological anchors or making specific AI predictions. It's a piece about the brain, not primarily about AI. Whether current models are smarter than typical humans by some measures is a separate and interesting question — but it doesn't change the fact that 86 billion neurons running on twenty watts and two bowls of rice is doing something worth pausing to admire.
Ever since I read The Satanic Verses, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when you strip founding myths of their mythological framing and imagine them unfolding in a setting that feels ordinary. Stories that feel distant, sacred, or symbolic can suddenly become strange again when they’re placed in familiar surroundings, or, conversely, lose their strangeness and acquire new moral dimensions.
That curiosity eventually led me to write two novels that try the experiment in different ways.
One, Inversion, takes inspiration from the legendary founding narrative of Buddhism. Instead of presenting it in its traditional setting, the story asks what the same underlying drama — renunciation, enlightenment, transformation — might look like if it unfolded in a technological world that treats consciousness almost like information. What parts of the story still resonate when the religious framing is removed, and which parts start to feel uncanny?
The other, The Field of Blood, is essentially the Gospel story told from the perspective of Judas Iscariot—but translated into a modern, recognizable milieu so the events can be seen without the accumulated religious symbolism that normally surrounds them. When the miracles and sacred language fall away, the story becomes something else: a political and moral drama between people who may not fully understand the roles they are playing.
What interests me about this kind of retelling is that it lets you see the structure of the myth more clearly. When you move the same narrative skeleton into an ordinary environment, some elements suddenly feel universal while others start to feel contingent.
I’m curious whether people here have favorite examples of this technique in fiction — stories where a well-known myth or religious narrative is relocated into a mundane context so that we experience it as a human story again.
And a broader question: if you took the founding narrative of a religion or ideology and placed it in an ordinary modern setting, would it still feel profound — or would it just feel strange?
If anyone is curious about the two stories I mentioned, they’re here:
https://sisyphusofmyth.substack.com/p/my-stories
Thanks to everyone who answered my question. It looks like what I have written might be somewhat unique.
I have seen mythology treated in speculative fashion. Larry Niven, I believe, wrote about the collision of Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was a fairly lightweight book.
Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov put gospel stories in their books, masked in Dostoyevsky's case, but they were mere subplots.
I cannot think of more.
Lord of Light by Zelazny might be interesting. There is a mostly Buddhist narrative in a science fiction context. I don't know enough about Buddhist founding myths to know if there is a match.
Yes, I’ve read that one. It was one of my inspirations.
“Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal” by Chris Moore is probably the funniest version of this
I remember that one! Good call
Although it doesn't retell the story in a modern or mundane setting, I would count "The Last Temptation of Christ" as the exemplar of the type of storytelling you're discussing.
A few years ago, I wrote the interactive fiction "According to Cain," which retells the Cain & Abel story from the perspective of the older brother. Again, not a modern setting, but using modernist approaches to fill-in-the-blanks of an ancient myth.
For me, what's going on here (and possibly happening in your stories) is an attempt to fully flesh out the interiority and psyche of these old characters, where older texts tend to focus on an objective telling—he did this, he said that, the end. It's not just to humanize them, but also to refamiliarize texts that "feel" unfamiliar to us.
Yes, The Last Temptation was one of my touchpoints. Please see my response ot Diseach for a bit more detail.
This was done by Nikos Kazantzakis, for one, with his 1955 novel "The Last Temptation of Christ" later made into a so-so movie in 1988. Kazantzakis is probably more famous in English-speaking territories for the movie out of another novel, "Zorba the Greek".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Temptation_of_Christ_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Temptation_of_Christ_(film)
I think this can be done, but it depends on the motives of the person doing it. A lot of these attempts are "taking religion and turning it into something more in tune with The Modern Audience/what we as intelligent people can believe", which generally means "turning the story secular". Thomas Jefferson did this with his edited gospels which stripped out all the miraculous and just left "ethical teachings of Joshua bar-Joseph":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
But there is a good point there that the original messages get dulled by familiarity. Putting them in a new context can startle us and re-awaken us as to why the originals were controversial and striking in their time.
Yes, thank you for bringing Kazantzakis into the conversation.
My original idea was actually to set the story in first-century Judea. But I eventually decided on a contemporary setting, specifically to remove the instinctive connection readers might have between the characters and the existing mythology. I wanted the events to be experienced as something new rather than as a familiar sacred narrative.
Once I made that decision, the rest fell into place. I chose the particular time and place because the political and spiritual ferment of 1970s San Francisco seemed to echo, in its own way, the atmosphere that must have surrounded the events of the Gospels.
The characters themselves draw partly on the traditional mythology, but also on what we know about modern millenarian movements. Figures like David Koresh and Jim Jones were useful reference points. So the story isn’t meant as a simple retelling of the myth; it’s more an attempt to look at how a similar story might unfold if we take seriously what we’ve learned about how charismatic movements and apocalyptic groups actually function.
I think you'd really enjoy 'The Book of Longings'. It reimagines the Gospel story from the perspective of a women following the disciples, exploring the historical role of women in 0AD, and warmly touching on themes of myth making and feminism.
Thank you, I was unfamiliar with this book. I will check it out.
Could anybody provide an 'is it worth it' review of allergy pills/SLIT? If possible from the perspective of moving from the coast to Texas and getting reamed by seasonal allergies. It was reccomended to me but I am skeptical about expensive pills forever, and waiting years for results
I tried sublingual immunotherapy, it wasn’t very effective and made my tongue itch but was much more convenient than going to an allergy clinic for shots, which actually worked for me.
Are you hospitalized from allergic responses? Is your immune system creating systemic responses that interfere with driving? How about cytokine cascades?
There's a LOT of room in "allergies." (Also, there's a lot of room in Texas. Houston very different from San Antonio).
Have you gotten allergy tests? Have you gone into anaphylactic shock from allergy tests?
The greatest thing I ever did was get allergy shots. Have you considered this?
Also called injection therapy - worked wonders for me. Need to see an allergy specialist.
Don't cheap over-the-counter antihistamines (loratadine, cetirizine) help for you? I would suggest trying such options before jumping to expensive newer treatments where the side effects are less well understood.
I don’t know if this works for you but I take Costco allertec (Zyrtec) which is $10 a year. It blunts 90% of my seasonal allergies.
But when I lived in Boston I never got any seasonal allergies due to lack of plants. So maybe some big cities/climates out there would be a better fit for you.
I used to have prescriptions for The Good Stuff(tm) that's misted up the nose, rather than pill form...on the one hand, it does work? Significant blunting of allergy sensitivity, let me work around our floral department without being a constant sneezy mess. On the other hand, had to stop eventually due to excessive side effects. You're not really supposed to use such medicines long-term, slowly degrades the mucous membranes and results in (at best) high susceptibility to nosebleeds. Maybe there are better formulations these days, I'm not sure...and of course the profile for pills is different. But I try to go for exposure therapy + only medicating during acute episodes as needed now. It's a long and unpleasant process either way, unfortunately...
(Air purification at home, and also at the office if possible, is a huge help though. Having at least one sanctum of "clean air" makes it a lot easier to face the regular respiratory beatings.)