It is not in any way a religious apologia, I don't consider the version of what I believe toxic enough that I feel I need to give a trigger warning. People on this forum believe some rare things, I don't see why this particular rare thing requires cones and tape and a security detail. I am arguing for UBI - if you think you have enough tech-adjacent liberals to get a plurality for UBI, go for it, I suspect you will need some pro-lifers in the Ross Douthat/Leah Libresco Seargent mould, my UBI defence is for them.
Fair. I have previously posted about the UBI project itself so this was a follow-up, in the end what is or isn't political is itself political, being on here I have to accept most people aren't theists and I don't freak out, so I don't quite get why I have to specify WARNING: THEIST so as atheists don't freak out but it is what it is. I appreciate you
As of this post, grimmoar has commented 73 times. Just below 10% volume wise. Most of these comments, in my opinion, are blatantly partisan, wrong, or at best, not adding much. I removed my social media apps because of doom scrolling tendencies, but now find myself doing the same here.
A request - please post half as much put double the effort into each? The reason you had to make a new account is related, and if I were in your position would lead to some reflection.
Seconded. GrimMoar's (and his previous accounts') comment spam consistently degrades these Open Threads. In the past, Scott banned posters for much less.
In absence of action, the status quo is that Grimmoar sets the tone of the comment section. If I'd have to guess, I'd guess the largest effect in the long term will be a filtering of which potential new arrivals read a few comments and elect to participate.
as of now it is at least at 111 out of 960 something comments (deeper layers of threads aren't found with ctrl-f. This means one out of every 9 comments is from a previously suspended account, with the quality of posts being equally mad. I don't know if there is a way to actually reach scott about this, but I feel that moderation is basically absent if this is not caught after a few days.
What can be done? I for now will avoid the comment section. Does reporting actually work?
It's probably not that simple, if the commenter in question is known for making acceptable comments at least some of the time. If Scott adopted a rule of banning people who make spammy comments even if they make some good ones, none of us would be here. So the rule has to be more complicated, and it's hard to both implement sufficiently sophisticated banning rules and also routinely write detailed articles, so here we are.
When a similar thing happened on LessWrong, the entire codebase had to be rewritten to get rid of a persistent annoying guy. Are these some skilled rationalist coders willing to create a better Substack? There is an opportunity to make *lots* of money if you do it well.
So. The USA are, ostensibly, going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. One of their goals was to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war. Who can make sense of it?
China has not responded officially or unofficially yet. But President Trump’s visit to China is back on the calendar, rescheduled for May 14–15. Originally planned for the end of March, the trip was postponed due to the ongoing US military operations against Iran. This caused Xi to lose face domestically and internationally. At the two big Party meetings in March, he had promised his opponents in the CCP that he'd be moving forward on the international relations front — to make up for purging senior PLA generals without getting buy-in from the other players in the CCP (some of whom were also patrons of these generals).
No, China wants cash from Russia. And a director of the Russian Central Bank complained that Russia is running short on Renminbi to pay its bills to China. Xi is totally a quid pro quo sort of guy.
LOL! Fox Business host Larry Kudlow claimed that once the conflict is resolved, prices will go even lower than before the war, adding, “This country is not beholden to the blockade in the Hormuz.” So everyone just chill and go with the plan! Us whiny libs just need to STFU. ;-)
Reminds me of the cover of the Economist print edition two issues ago (the one dated April 4th), which I think you can view here without being a subscriber:
To stop Iran from controlling it at will. I don't know anything that isn't on the news, but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it. So the US pushes to control it instead.
I mean, look at a map. Ukraine has cleared the Black Sea without a navy, and the distances in the Strait of Hormuz are much shorter. Iran are going to control it, at least to the point of denying access.
>but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it.
Pretty sure the current crisis began with a US sneak attack on Iran's leadership and military.
Oh, I'm not arguing that (and I never said Iran started the current crisis). I'm saying the US is doing things re: Hormuz because Iran is. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the US didn't strike Hormuz first. I'm also not saying there's necessarily much sense to what US is doing. But it sure seems to me that US began doing stuff with Hormuz as soon as Iran started to. Yes Iran did so because US struck first, but that's besides my claim.
Hormuz was the Obvious Response to any major escalation in the conflict. This is like attacking Egypt and being shocked that they "shut down the Suez first - without our slightest provocation."
The blockade was clearly advertised as included in the package US decided to purchase, and so they should have been ready for it.
I can believe that we can get to a point where both Iran and the US hold a checkpoint on the strait. E.g. "Iran doesn't control it at will". How do you think the downstream effects of this benefit the US?
IMO it seems like it will either (if the US halts more shipments) just further worsen the global supply of petroleum products, further driving up costs for the American consumer or (if the US does nothing) have no effect.
If costs for the American consumer are a significant concern/pain point for the administration, then this seems counter-productive or pointless, and our time and effort would be better served doing something else.
There's the possibility that this hurts every other country more than the US. Given that US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia control a sizable portion of the world's crude oil production, and countries like China rely on Iranian oil, this might give the oil-rich countries more leverage, or at least leave them better off than their competition.
It doesn't help the party's political prospects, granted, but they might be able to find ways around public opinion.
If Iran blockades the straight, the rest of the world is pressured to give in to its requirements to remove the blockade. That might involve the EU, China, India, etc. pressuring the US to stop the war.
If Iran and the US block the straight (assuming Trump's blockade is credible, which it probably isn't), then the rest of the world now is pressured by the US as well. It's kind of ridiculous, since if Iran agreed to stop the blockade there's no credible commitment mechanism making sure the US would continue the blockade, so the bottleneck is still on Iran, but with Trump's wild acts there might be some pressure as a result of his declaration.
It's like, what is the most effective way to prevent your enemies taking hostages? Shoot any and all hostages. By committing to an act that takes the value away from taking hostages in the first place, you nullify the incentive to take hostages in the first place. In this case Trump is "shooting the hostage" by saying he's going to blockade the straight that Iran was blockading already.
Of course a threat isn't a threat unless it's credible, and in this case there's no commitment mechanism for Trump, and it's completely irrational to blockade the straight once Iran stops, so this isn't a real threat. Only the "Trump uncertainty factor" gives it a bit of value as a threat, in that there's some expectation that Trump will behave irrationally later on, so the world leaders must factor it into their decision making a little bit. In this case it can be said that there may be *some* strategic value in Trump's erratic behavior.
Iran wants ships to pay large sums per crossing. There's a reasonable belief that this money would go to fund its war effort, fall into "its old ways" rather than into the shape US wants it to be, so by closing the strait, US is ensuring that Iran doesn't profit.
Trump's truth social post on the topic (sigh) also covers that they'd sic the navy after any ship that pays to cross.
Trumps flailing around trying to do something. He wants a hammer to hit Iran with, but can't (won't) use the big hammer. This whole war thing is a total mess, was there any type of war gaming? I expect congress will be looking into it.
Having reviewed the link, the first one (2012 simulated war) seemed worthless, for it had no useful content unless I clicked further, which I didn't do. The 2002 challenge may not have been realistic, from reading the Wikipedia article, and in any case, things have changed a lot since then. For example, drones, even if they existed, weren't viable weapons. I think an actual conflict would have little in common with the simulated one.
I read/saw we are sending an aircraft carrier around the African horn, (supposedly because we are afraid to send it through the Red sea... drones and the Houthis.) I just wanna say, we should make peace with all these people. Though that is totally a pipe dream at this point.
The Trump admin had some (obviously irrational) expectations regarding the effectiveness of their threats, and how closing the strait just makes "everyone angry" at Iran. (Where everyone is mostly China, as Russia obviously is happy to see oil prices go up.)
And we can assume the Trump throne thought that keeping oil flowing is more important for Iran than the military benefits of the blockade.
Of course in their infinite wisdom they somehow did not realize that Iran can apply this pressure selectively. (Though usually pundits say that the Pentagon has good planners, so we probably need to modify this claim to something like as usual they did not listen to the experts, or willfully decided to ignore them, or keep them out of the loop, etc.)
So they want to deny Iran the money from the tolls, maybe "to level the playing field".
Yes, the problem with this fucking Iran war is that Trump et al. (like so many others before them) believed that "strategic bombing works" (and they wanted the full Schrödinger's cake menu too by not disturbing the global economy, but starting a quick war at the global economy's few remaining chokepoints), and as a result many civilians died - so far for nothing - and of course if Iran runs out of gas many more will.
Opening the Strait of Hormuz was not a goal of the war. It is a goal *within* the war, which we want to continue into the postwar world. Rather like stopping the Holocaust was not the goal of World War II, and there wasn't even a genocide going on before the War, but once the Allies were fighting Germany for other reasons, yeah, we should take care of that too.
And a Strait isn't "open" if it's only open to some, or only open at a price. A regime where Iranian and Iranian-aligned ships can travel freely but everyone else has to cough up a couple megabucks per ship of protection money, is not an open Strait. But it is a situation quite favorable to Iran, and one they will require a great deal of encouragement or coercion to change. If Iranian and Iranian-allied ships are barred passage, that's still not "open", or if you want to quantify it then it is "less open", but it's also much less favorable to Iran so at least in principle it should make it easier to convince Iran to allow an actually-open Strait of Hormuz.
It's also illegal without a declaration of war or the equivalent, and it will cause still more damage to the economy of a world already fed up with this sort of nonsense from America, so maybe not a prudent strategy, but it's not a *silly* strategy, there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
And really, is any of this so hard to understand? Or were you just looking for a cheap dunk against Trump or America? Trump arguably deserves it, but this isn't the place for cheap dunks even against deserving targets.
Don't call me Napoleon just yet, but I'd suggest that Iran closing the Strait was a lot more predictable than the Holocaust. Given the situation, I'd also suggest that ceasing hostilities has a lot higher chance of opening the Strait than closing it, partially or not, justifiably or not.
> there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
If the Black Sea 2026 is any indication, then, given the more favourable geography of the Strait, that's quite optimistic. How would you suggest opening the strait militarily, while preventing a ship toll regime or whatever else Iran feels like doing? Invade and occupy the entire coastal strip, and get a Ukraine-style line of contact for which the US is unprepared on every level? Invade and occupy all of Iran? Nuke the place? At some point and rather sooner than later, the USA need to cut their losses and get out before they make everything worse still. Maybe even try real diplomacy for a change, for what it's still worth at this point.
But yes, I find it hard to talk about Trump, even rationally, without ending with a dunk, so I understand your suspicion.
This is factually incorrect. The UK (Hunt-class and Sandown-class MCMVs), France, and to a lesser degree the Netherlands and Belgium have serious mine countermeasures capability. I don't know enough about the Netherlands and Belgium to be able to assess their capabilities demining in a region like Hormuz.
I personally doubt that they would be willing unless there was some substantial shift in US-Iranian relations as a part of a ceasefire or deescalation, so while I do agree with the assessment that (as a part of the current status quo) only the US can demine it, it is factually untrue as a matter of capability.
Technically China has the capability as well but lacks the capability (by matter of practicality, lack of supportive infrastructure, and range) to be able to get MCM hulls into the straight of hormuz.
Edit: additional context for UK vessels - they lack the capability to sudden or immediate use, but could absolutely substantively contribute to demining within a timespan of 6-8 weeks.
We tried ceasing hostilities, Israel said "nuh uh, we're still going to bomb Lebanon", and Iran responded with "OK, then, the strait remains closed".
The United States controls what the United States Navy does, it does not control what Israel does(*). So solutions that involve "ceasing hostilities" are not something just the United States can do on, and the appeal of solutions where we might (probably won't, but might) get what we want by tasking the United States Navy with a particular sort of hostility should be obvious.
If any part of this is still confusing to you, I'm not sure what to say..
* Outside of certain conspiracy theories, and I think these days the conspiracy theorists are maybe 80/20 on Israel controlling what the US does rather than vice versa.
If the US wanted this war to end, could they not attempt to convince Israel to stop and, failing that, put pressure on Israel?
I've always assumed that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than vice versa and that Israel at least listens to and takes the US seriously in these matters.
Presumably Netanyahu can always decide to just keep going on, relatively no matter what the US says or does.
But the US could try again for a deal that Israel agrees and sticks to. Perhaps it's already happening behind the scenes. If not, it does seem worth a try. Mostly because the other options don't look great either.
In the realm of international relations, the phrase "put pressure on" mostly just means "do nothing of substance, and change nothing, but piously insist that the bad thing is now That Other Guy's Fault".
On rare occasions, actually useful "pressure" can be applied with significant results, e.g. the Suez Crisis. But, A: usually not and B: you need to be much more specific than "put pressure on" if you want to accomplish anything.
Yes, if we want, we can say the "pressure" thing that makes it Officially Israel's Fault. That almost certainly won't change anything.
I understand that that is how the phrase is often used.
That said, presumably it is actually possible to do something that would make it more costly for Israel to continue their current course of actions. That should give them some leverage. I had also filed that under "put pressure". If you want to use a different term for "going beyond empty words" that is fine by me, but I don't know that term
The US could coerce Israel fairly trivially, the same way the US is coercing the rest of the free world, without any conspiracy theories. Tariffs, withholding military aid, threats of war. The US hold "all the cards" in terms that Trump understands. They may quibble about details like bombing Iranian oil infrastructure without coordination, but in the broad picture the US are not coercing Israel because they're aligned.
If the US were "coercing" the free world, there would be British, French, Canadian, etc destroyers and frigates patrolling Hormuz right now. I mean, Trump wasn't at all subtle about that bit of attempted coercion.
I'm not sure what mental model of US diplomacy and politics you are running, but it seems to be based on a mix of conspiracy theory and perverse wishful thinking, and it's very definitely at odds with reality.
Are you absolutely sure you're not intentionally misunderstanding me? Because I'm not. When I say "coercion" and "coercing", I mean past or ongoing such acts. I don't mean their successful completion (i.e. Trump got something out of the act), although those do exist. If that level of dictionary disagreement is sufficient to label me a conspiracy theorist with a disconnect from reality, then I guess nice dunk, you got me.
Also, one just needs to look at Black Sea 2022-2026 what a state can do in constrained waters nowadays without a navy of its own, or even traditional air support.
I don't recall seeing a single remotely credible take prior to 2026 on any potential US-Iranian war that *didn't* very clearly predict that Iran would close the strait and the US would have to figure out a way to reopen it. That was as conventional as wisdom gets, right up there with the Sun rising in the East.
The previous status was that Iran was getting away with blockading it for everyone but themselves. Trump announced that if they're going to do that then we're going to blockade them for Iran bound vessels. This is the obviously reasonable thing we should have done since the start, they can't actually handle the straits being shut down for an extended period (whether or not we can depends on political will, but if Iran's shutting them down no matter what we do there's no drawback in keeping them closed for us).
With what minesweepers? Most of the ones we had in the Gulf were decomissioned late last year, and the rest were pulled back to IIRC Malaysia before the start of the current conflict. I have seen no reports that they have made it back to the Gulf yet; that's a voyage I would expect to take several weeks.
Modern minehunting (it isn't really "sweeping" any more) is indeed done by robots, more formally "Unmanned Underwater Vehicles" (UUVs). But you can't just dump them in the water and say "go hunt mines"; they need specialized support equipment and trained operators. Those are on the dedicated minehunting and minesweeping ships.
In theory, we could try to kitbash that onto a destroyer, and maybe someone has done that. But we've also e.g. put Sidewinder missiles on modified airliners; that doesn't make them fighters, it just gives them a *very* limited self-defense capability.
This is further complicated by the part where the USN's minehunting ships are now mostly "Littoral Combat Ships", theoretically a sort of highly flexible multimission vessel. But really some of them have the minehunting equipment permanently installed, and the rest will never hunt a mine. The minehunting versions, are the ones that were pulled back to Malaysia before the start of the conflict and are now AFIK Whereabouts Unknown.
But there is a drawback. Iran's purpose for closing the strait is decreasing the supply of oil, which being a globally traded commodity, increases the price everywhere. This is why this move affects the US even if they're a net exporter of oil and most of the oil through the strait goes somewhere else. To the extent they were letting some ships through (they announced they were doing it, unclear if it actually happened) it was probably in response to diplomatic pressure from India and China, and only reluctantly as they know as well as we do that doing so exerts downward pressure on the price of oil. This denies funds to Iran, so it's not pointless, but it has a drawback. Personally I think the situation is not much changed, Iran's tolerance for pain in this war is much higher than the US, they will bet on outlasting the US's political will.
I'd suggest marking GrimMoar's words here so we can mock him for them a month from now, but from past experience he'll probably be posting under a different name by then and deny the whole thing.
1. Soldiers can go without pay for several months before it becomes an issue. Once it becomes an issue you can use force to keep the machinery going for longer, I recall Washington "quelling" some soldier rebellions caused by lack of pay, this is common.
2. Iran's economy is something like 30% oil. Losing all that would hurt, but it's not the worse thing that has happened to an economy while conducting a war, it is manageable.
3. I expect Russia and China to send weapons, money and targeting data to Iran. I expect they're doing it already. I've heard reports of Russia sending weapons despite being obviously otherwise preoccupied, and I'm sure China would love sending some spare change for the cause (of harming the US).
All that (at least) is why one month is way too optimistic.
Iran has been charging significant fees on ships passing through, so it is rational to deny them those resources. It is also a desperate face saving measure. If the global economy is F'd we might as well do it on our own terms. I think that is the logic.
I would describe the US goals as more like "We want regime change in Iran, and we can tolerate a few weeks of Strait closure." Then we didn't get regime change, and now our position is "we can't tolerate Iran charging tolls in perpetuity or a permanent ban of US/Saudi aligned vessels".
A lot of popular commentary annoys me because it assumes that the strait is a binary open/closed, but there's more possible situations: open to Iran-allied ships but not US-allied ships, US-allied but not Iran-allied, "open" but Iran is charging tolls, or both sides declare it "open" but ship owners are still scared to send ships through.
The US is blockading a country they are at war with. A blockade exerts pressure on the target and makes them more likely to agree to the terms that the US demands (as the alternative is to be blockaded). While it is true that a blockade hurts the US (as it will raise oil prices), it's believed that it will hurt Iran more so the the US will gain an advantage in future negotiations.
To America opening the strait is important. But what's much much more important is ensuring that Iran doesn't control the strait.
Iran has established a perception (I would argue it was never a fact) that there was nothing the USA can do to stop it chucking drones at ships in the strait and so it will end the war as the de-facto owner and profit mightily for it.
What America has done is take that off the table. Instead of it becoming a question of whether its cheaper to fight Iran for the strait or accept their rule and pay them. Its now a question of who can live without the strait longer. The USA or Iran.
And I would argue the USA. Because for Trump himself the maximum cost is a bad midterms, and that's the last election he ever has to worry about. For the USA's allies, Saudi and the UAE, they have huge cash reserves, and Iran controlling the strait is much worse than the cost of waiting. Meanwhile for Iran, the potential cost is total economic collapse. It was on the brink before the war. The war started indirectly because of economic chaos in Iran.
(Incidentally that bit about Saudi and the UAE is why I think it was always a myth. If the USA wouldn't fight to open the Strait they'd do something themselves. Like build big pipelines West, Saudi already has one, or bomb Iran themselves. Rumours are that the UAE already has bombed)
Iran had not fully closed the strait prior to this point, instead letting some ships through in exchange for payment, and presumably other ships that were carrying Iranian oil for sale. The motivation for fully blockading the strait is that it will starve Iran of income in addition to the gulf states who have a large amount of their capacity blocked. A game of chicken for who will blink first.
Here in the real world, less than 15% of China's oil comes from Iran. The majority comes from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the other non-Iran Gulf States.
Comment copied from below (response to GrimMoar) just because it does apply to the initial posting:
My position is somewhere along these lines. I am not 100% certain on this, but it is my working basis. It is critical of Trump and his actions, but also doesn't rely on "Trump is an idiot that doesn't actually listen to the military strategists"
The charitable term I would use to explain the action within a cohesive model would be reactive-but-ideologically-consistent. The people in this administration have stable priors of two kinds: about adversaries (anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-Maduro) and about method (prefer unilateral action, skeptical of institutional constraints — the track record on Paris, JCPOA, INF, WHO, NATO burden-sharing, WTO-bypassing tariffs is pretty clear on this).
Those priors shape which responses look attractive, and the method priors shape what form the response takes — sanctions, military posturing, bilateral pressure rather than coalition-building or UN resolutions. The resulting pattern looks coordinated in retrospect because the same worldview is generating each decision rather than Venezuela-Iran-Cuba as a unified oil-denial campaign in advance. I agree it's almost definitely a factor, but I don't think the goal of each of these was to hurt China "from the get-go" as you say. I think that this confuses contingency and factor consideration with grand strategy and causation. In other words, the priors are stable and the triggers are contingent. Stable priors explain why the direction is consistent. Contingent triggers explain why specific moves happen.
I have a second part to my understanding, which I imagine you will disagree with.
I think that Trump has an unstable temperament which is sometimes performative and sometimes just reactive. Temperament explains why the magnitude of any given response is unpredictable — sometimes a measured sanction, sometimes wildly disproportionate escalation. I imagine your counterargument would be along the lines of Nixon's madman theory. My counter to this would be that this requires the madness to be performed over a coherent private process, targeted at specific adversaries for specific concessions, and calibrated enough to actually extract them. What we have instead is indiscriminate volatility, staff memoirs describing management-around rather than scripting, and bluffs that produce escalation rather than capitulation. Nixon's tapes show a sane planning process generating mad signals. I do think that Trump is at times performative, so I'm not saying there is nothing here. However, the substantive majority of evidence points (IMO, I know I haven't adequately proven this) to genuine erraticism or madman theory implemented poorly.
I would like to emphasize one final point: this argument does not collapse into "Trump's an idiot" — an erratic reactor with consistent priors knows what he wants and has clear positions, he's just unreliable about how and when he pursues it. Under this model,
Here is one final thing, which does reflect my biases as a historian (professional) and skeptic of authority (personal). I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally. Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things. I don't want to move away from the argument here too much so I hesitate to bring this up, but I would point Iraq is the instructive case: there genuinely was a long-running neocon project with named advocates, published manifestos, and people in position to push it* Yet, the war still turned out to be executed messily, with the occupation improvised after the invasion. Again, ideolically consistent response, but not a cohesive grand strategy.
Ideologically consistent but reactive.
*The advocacy predated Bush by years — PNAC's 1998 letter to Clinton explicitly urged Saddam's removal, and "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000) laid out the broader framework before anyone knew 9/11 was coming. That's the paper trail establishing it as a preexisting project rather than a post-9/11 invention. But "project" shouldn't be read as "unified bloc". Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Feith had overlapping but distinct agendas and fought each other on specifics throughout. And the execution itself is the clearest evidence against preplanning: Rumsfeld overruling Army force-level estimates, the disbanding of the Iraqi army by CPA order with no apparent plan for what the disbanded soldiers would do next, no serious occupation blueprint, the scramble to stand up the CPA itself. If the invasion had been the execution of a fully worked-out plan, those aren't the failure modes you'd expect. Instead, they're the failure modes of people who won the argument to invade and then improvised everything after.
>I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally.
I mean, nobody but his most ardent supporters seems to suspect Trump of having much strategy, grand or otherwise. Granted, strategy might be really hard and no war ever goes as planned, but what are we talking about here? Isn't this the modern equivalent of "Don't invade Russia in winter", some truism that every armchair general, like me, would get right?
>Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things.
"Even when"? Do you mean to argue that ideology motivates the actors to develop a strategy, or even that ideology is necessary for good strategy? Because intuitively I would say that when you have a firm ideology, you risk believing it so much that you expect good outcomes to manifest by themselves, or that at least it makes you not look too hard into what could go wrong. As in "We remove non-Democracy from that country, people will greet us as liberators, their every suppressed American will pop out, and all will live happily ever after in our image, Mission Accomplished."
Of course there are goals. The goals has always been the same.
1. Find big shiny thing to put name on
2. Get adulations
Every process, every decision, every declaration, is in support of one or both of these. See iron dome? Want bigger shinier "golden dome"! See prize? Want prize! People who praise are good, people who criticize or stand in the way of these are bad and the enemy.
I see no reason to go beyond this when questioning "why this?" for _anything_ he does. Someone has convinced him he will look good and get praise, or he thinks he will himself.
Let me (try to) be the first to ask: why do you think Orban lost the elections the way he did? I was rereading the "Dictator Book Club" entry about him, and Scott's piece made him look almost unmoveable.
My very naive take is that he might have realized that, to win the elections he might have to seriously destabilize the country, using his and his allies' powers against opposition leaders, but unlike in the past, there would be a serious risk of Russian or European (NATO?) intervention, since the overall political situation is at its shakiest in years.
Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media, and he really is just a ruthless politician, but a real believer in democratic-ish power-sharing norms? That doesn't align with Scott's piece, but it is in turn based on (naturally biased) books, and just two to boot
Disagree re: paragraph two. At least in my country the media has not used the word dictator. To portray him as a potential dictator is far from calling him one.
he used all the usual tools in the autocratic toolbox that was available for him. from false flag operations to sending (at least one group in one of the civilian) secret services after political targets, selective tax audits, funding football hooligan groups and using them to harass civilians, total capture of the state media, harassment and capture of private media outlets, and so on.
this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
is it North Korean-style absolute totalitarian despotic dynastic dictatorship? no. is it Soviet-style first secretary of the party dictatorship? (which Hungary had between 1956-1989?) yes, except without the backing of Soviet tanks, but coupled with the relative decrease in standard of living.
how close was it to the late Soviet times? well, the media frenzy was definitely worse, but it was easier to leave the country (thank to the EU).
...
one very visible inflection point was last year's Budapest Pride, which happened despite being legally banned, but no one got arrested in the end. (which is quite similar to how the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 at the border during the Pan-European picnic.)
> this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
Maybe but the question was - was he a dictator. Since he relinquished power through the democratic process then that’s easy to answer. He wasn’t. Netanyahu, a nastier man, is also not a dictator.
Given there are quite a few dictatorships in the world the concentration on Orban was always odd. I get Europeans worrying about Europe but most Americans probably couldn’t find Hungary on a map, and yet it lives rent free in the minds of America’s left.
Here’s a quote from Biden during a foreign policy speech early in his presidency
> We must demonstrate that democracy can still deliver… This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies… Look at Belarus, Poland, Hungary…”
Two of them are now not “dictatorships” anymore as the dictators left office. Unlike the 60 or so actual dictatorships
It just seems like the kind of thing some intern got upset about, and Biden said what he is told.
(Saudi Arabia did get a mention later on in the speech, which makes it a bit less hypocritical, not that that changed much in actual policy).
Granted, before he left, he *also* sounded out the military about resisting that election and got shut down, so he really only left power quasi voluntarily (at best). But he still is a pretty well-cited example of "a dictator" and nevertheless permitted an election and left after losing the vote.
I don't put Orban in the same category as Pinochet, though, to be clear.
Bolsonaro also flirted with using the military (as he was an officer for quite some time), and while the legislature was deliberating his proposed changes to election laws there was an unusual military parade.
There are a lot of precise (but jargon-y) descriptions of these soft dictatorships but they obviously did not became common colloquially so that we adopt a new word for their usual wannabe dictator. (Or did we?)
By that measure, is Xi Jinping a dictator? Currently, he's in a power struggle with two other factions in the CCP, and even if he weren't in the middle of a power struggle, he doesn't have absolute power. Xi decapitated the leadership of the PLA by purging Generals Zhang Youxia (CMC Vice Chairman) and Liu Zhenli (Joint Staff Department Chief). The Old Guard are pissed off about this. And unlike previous purges, Zhang and Liu have not been formally removed from their party posts (even though they're likely dead). Xi is holed up in Beijing, and he hasn't made the usual tour of the country after the two big annual Party pow-wows in March (except a quick trip to visit a school in Xiong'an New Area (Xi's new high-tech, "sustainable" metropolis) about 100km from Beijing (by train, and not by motorcade).
Y-y-yees? He can (and did) get people disappeared, seems to be completely set to rule for life, used the rule of law against his opponents, etc.
Just as Stalin and Mao he also put his own interpretation of "Marxism-Leninism" into some super important official document, and so on.
Dictator doesn't mean unopposed and undefeatable.
I mentioned in a comment somewhere that Ali Khamenei was also supreme absolute hyper leader, but obviously as a fragile old dude he was very much dependent on the IRCG (and the the various upper levels of the whole power structure).
You really need to spend more time studying Chinese politics. Xi does not have absolute power like, say, Kim Jong Un. The PLA hasn't been following his orders, and Xi hasn't left Beijing for over six months now. Former prime minister Wen Jiabao, one of the leaders of the faction opposing Xi, made a conspicuous public appearance a few weeks ago, visiting the Institute of Geographic Sciences in Beijing. Retired party officials are supposed to stay out of the limelight, but his visit was carefully scripted, with a crowd outside clapping and cheering him. Team Xi didn't dare stop him.
And BTW, the misconception that Khamenei was a supreme and absolute dictator was the miscalculation that got us into the mess. Trump's brain trust believed that removing Khamenei would collapse the regime. It hasn't. In fact, from the Iranian political perspective, the mullahs may be stronger now than they were before we attacked them.
Factions of the same party are completely different from actually rival parties. Stalin came to power to crushing rival factions of the Communist Party, but it was a dictatorship going all the way back to Lenin.
Dictator doesn't have a fixed technical definition, it's not like the speed of light.
Strongman doesn't have that kind of ring to it, and people are lazy, so the meaning of words shift. (With the Overton window, I guess).
Wikipedia already mentions the modern usage, also doesn't use absolute power, but instead says "extraordinary amount of personal power".
After all absolute power itself is a spectrum. Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader who had absolute power, but ... at the same time not really, as a 86 year old dude with only one hand he was more of a figurehead and the IRGC holds the keys to the theocracy.
The African dictators are also very much constrained by the realities of their power structure. (And I imagine the same goes for whatever Kim is currently the de jure God of North Korea.)
That said using the dictator label for Orban was always stupid, it just did not fit, but maybe that's why people wanted to anyway? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hl83Jpd_OI )
Communist Hungary forced all legal parties into a "People's Front", with opposition parties banned. So, no, Orban was not like Communist Hungary in that respect.
Orban's current regime went through the same collapse as he Communist party (~1970-1989), there are obvious differences (USSR as a background vs EU as a background), but the similarities are not lost on Hungarians (also there were already opposition parties in the late 80s).
> [...] in sixteen (twenty) years, Viktor Orbán had built the most textbook, most precise electoral autocracy in Hungary. For his own circle of power – it is much more accurate to talk about Orbán’s circle of power, as Fidesz as a party has long existed only in his name – he had accumulated resources that were perhaps the last to be available to the MSZMP [the Communist Party of Hungary] in 1988; he had tailored the public law system to himself, appointed his own confidants to the heads of almost all institutions important for the exercise of power, which were in principle independent of the government and party, controlled most of the press, and owned at least a quarter of the national economy in some way.
It shows the importance of institutions. If Orbán had illegally tried to stay in power, the EU almost certainly would have suspended aid and possibly expelled Hungary. Something similar happened in the nineties with Jörg Haider in Austria.
It would be more appropriate to call Orbán a strong man. He never attained absolute power, but he was slowly creating frictions in the system that would inhibit his removal by democratic processes (by changing the constitution and by court appointments come immediately to mind). Whether losing to a slim majority could have persuaded him to concede the election is anyone's guess. But with a 79% voter turnout and the opposition winning greater than two-thirds of the seats in their parliament, it would be hard to use any post-electoral shenanigans to maintain a hold on power. And his followers probably saw the writing on the wall as well.
Also, "dictator" does not imply "ruler-for-life". Wikipedia: "The word originated as the title of a Roman dictator elected by the Roman Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency. Like the terms "tyrant" and "autocrat", dictator came to be used almost exclusively as a non-titular term for oppressive rule. In modern usage, the term dictator is generally used to describe a leader who holds or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power." Orban did hold "an extraordinary amount of personal power" - compared say to the German chancellor (not a weak head of gov.!), but as we see now: not about election outcomes - unlike Stalin (or s.o.): "it does not matter who has most votes but who controls the vote counting" (or so).
German media seldom called Orban "dictator" but usu. still tried to make him appear as one. And it depends more on one's definition of "dictator" if he was one than on the extraordinary powers he got himself. We will see if the new guy will really reduce those powers, now that he has them.
Big respect to Orban that he did let the votes be counted fairly and that (unlike a certain guy in the USofA) he conceded early. I plead: Bonfire, not hell.
I have been amazed at the way people talk about how leaders of eg Hungary and the US are just a few inches away from being a dictator. It is like some weird conspiracy theory that completely discounts how many thousands and thousands of people with no incentive to cooperate and with excellent reasons not to cooperate would nonetheless gladly get stuck in. The debasement of language where people are either dictators potential dictators and in other areas too is incredibly annoying.
At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm?
You could argue that someone who writes an article about someone being 'close to becoming a dictator' when their P(dictator) is only 49% is 'inaccurate'.
But that judgement criterion is going to get you a lot of dictators.
Personally, I'm fine with different people having different thresholds depending on how mainstream and respected they are, with lots of lone voices raising the alarm at very low thresholds, and major outlets holding the line for longer. Which I think is what we have.
Well empirically a higher percentage of oligarchs have been assassinated than the percentage of Putins. Hard to extrapolate with confidence but it's at least weak evidence.
That's a strong an uncharitable claim, and one I don't see much evidence for.
Every politician in the world is on the opposite side from a huge number of writers and pundits. But only like 2-3 of those politicians are getting massive, constant 'possible dictator' warnings at any level above tweets, and I think they're plausibly the ones with the highest P(dictator).
I think most people actually mean and believe the things they say most of the time. Sure I agree that you will find *a reason* to attack the other side just because you see yourself as in a war with them, but I do think that people *choose which attacks* to use based on evidence and plausibility where possible.
Have you considered the possibility that all those writers and pundits are comfortable with dictators who back policies those writers and pundits agree with? To the point of not calling them out as dictators?
Someone who acts like an aspiring dictator is, by definition, not on "my side".
Saying that people, as a whole, are indifferent to bad behavior, as long as someone claims to be on "their team", whatever that means, is just lazy and undifferentiated equivocating.
in Hungary since 2010 the constitution was changed about 5-6 times, and in the last ~6 years there was a permanent emergency (because COVID, then the Russian invasion)
was it absolute totalitarian North Korean? no, fortunately no.
was it absolute like absolutist monarchy? quite close, but decide for yourself, Joseph II was like a reverse Orban
What's your point with the number of changes to the constitution? Sweden's constitution has changed twice as many in that time frame, and Malta's has changed twice as many times as Sweden's.
Trying to explain (and provide some evidence) the lengths his regime went to shape the country to their needs using the power initially granted to them.
Of course without knowing the changes it's a bit meaningless, sorry, Wikipedia has more about the sham process of democratic consultations, and in general that the changes served to exert power and gain populist points (by further demonizing LGBTQ folks for example), and eventually to restrict freedom of assembly too.
I think it's more of a flaw with the electorate, considering that they kept electing Fidesz while these changes were being made. Sure, a system like Sweden's – where the electorate is given a chance to stop a constitutional change before it takes effect – is probably a good idea, but it doesn't seem to me like it would have had much of an effect here.
Preventing rise of dictators is only as successful as the checks in place. In the US, there is a tangible reduction in how much power rule of law holds. It's not a country meant to be run through EOs (that weakens democracy), nor one that's meant to ignore the supreme court ruling (see el salvador planes). The government did threaten to retaliate against media institutions, the president openly called for public figures who criticized him to be fired.
I don't tend to think like that personally. The current state is that things are getting worse over there, and pointing fingers and going "they did it first" or "they're both guilty" doesn't really make things better.
I'm instead going to call out that the current state that's been reached is pretty concerning, which is what I'm doing above.
Really? For decades both sides have been rescinding people's green cards for writing op eds? Or threatening to yank broadcast licenses? Or rescinding security clearances for representing people they don't like? Or refusing to ok mergers for parent companies of newspapers who don't toe the line? Or excluding reporters from Pentagon briefings if they don't agree to be neutered? Give me a break.
1) Just *moving into the direction* of autocracy and dictatorship, in my mind, has to be called out and guarded against, no matter how small the steps are.
2) I think we might all underestimate how thin the lines between functional democracy and illiberal democracy and autocracy/dictatorshop really are. Famously, Adolf Hitler dismantled the democratic institutions from within, using the designated democratic processes for change (elections, parliamentary votes). Now look at the current state of the US institutions, how they work, what their intentions are and how the separation of powers is currently working out. It's a quick, short jump from democracy to autocracy, with no clear line delineating one from the other.
I disagree, let me explain. Let's talk about the most textbook dictator example: Hitler. He was elected. Also, there were Bundestag elections, several ones, and each and every time, the members fully legally voted infinite power to Hitler, and then proceeded to do nothing as they had no real job left. This was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 several times extended. It looked entirely legal on paper.
The "trick" was that every candidate who was known not to vote for this act was discouraged from running by having a very ugly talk with the Gestapo. Or more than talk. Which was clearly a crime, a very hidden crime. It was not done in the open.
So let's make a list:
1) one person gets extreme power
2) legally, on the surface
3) but supported by hidden crimes.
This is not so far from Orbán, who also had an enabling act allowing him as the executive to legislate, who put his guys everywhere so he could control everything from the supreme court to much of the press and much of the economy. That is close to the first point. Also, it was entirely legal on the surface. Third, massive crimes happened, thankfully not the violent kind, no one was tortured or incarcerated, rather the crime was that they stole money and ran a propaganda machine for it.
Clearly, Orbán was not Hitler, far far far less bad, but positive on all three indicators.
> Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media […]
I haven't really seen Orban being called a "dictator" in reputable Western media, and he obviously isn't one. Not yet at least. Him not being a dictator doesn't preclude him working to become one. And him peacefully handing over power doesn't mean he believes in democratic ideals, it only means that his hold on power isn't nearly as firm as would be required to ignore the election results.
Orban was able to use underhanded methods to keep power for decades. His control over state media basically gave him a self-reinforcing mechanism. His political position allowed him to control the media which allowed him to keep his political position. That's a sort of crooked democracy, but there were still elections, and there haven't been any substantial examples of actual subversion of democracy (forceful intimidation of voters, stuffing of ballot boxes, etc.).
He was never really a dictator. His power still required an electoral victory. The army and the whole government followed him because he was their elected leader. Calling him a dictator for all this time really diminishes the value of the word dictator.
Lack of a clear dividing line between functioning democracy and dictatorship with show elections does not mean you can't approximate where people fall on the spectrum. Putin is far on the end of dictatorship, Orban is on the end towards democracy. Corrupt democracy perhaps, but certainly not dictatorship.
I mean, Biden stepped down and Kamala lost the election, then there was a smooth transition of power, so far toward the side of democracy? We do this successfully every 4-8 years so I don't think you can call the Biden admin a dictatorship.
I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process. If whatever change you implement makes it more likely that right guy takes office, I'd support it. And vice versa. (Of course, there's a far bigger problem that the guy who campaigns on the right policies changes course after winning, and doesn't implement what he promised, but that's a deeper problem with "representative democracy," not fixable with minor tweaks to election systems.)
> I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process.
...the wrong guy also has followers that think this way. How confident are you, really, that the right side is better at subverting the system than the wrong side? Wouldn't it be better if the right-minded people had a fair chance, rather than leaving the whole thing to a dice roll of who's got the trickier trickster on their side?
I care about the sanctity of the process /because/ I care about the result.
This turns pretty critically on who the right guy is and how you decide that. If the majority of people in your country want Mr Smith to be president but Mr Smith is a drooling idiot who will lead the country to ruin, is Mr Smith the right guy?
Boris Yeltsin would probably disagree with that. He won what seems to have been a fair and contested election to the Presidency of the Russian Republic, technically a subordinate position at the time, but it rapidly became clear to all concerned that Russia was going to be ruled by the Russian Republic going forward, not the Soviet Union, and the Soviet leadership transferred power accordingly.
Yeah, but he resigned from the Communist party and won a contested election as a not-Communist who was actually going to run Russia without just being a mouthpiece for the Party. That's a real transfer of power, as was the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union
"Electoral autocracy" is just a confusion of ideology and regime type. I said at the time these people were going to be embarrassed when these regimes were just voted out of office and quietly went. First in Poland, now Hungary. It almost happened in Turkey and will eventually. My prediction was wrong only in that they're not embarrassed and have adapted the language of overthrowing a dictatorship to winning an election.
Exactly. The way they talk it's like they overthrew Orban in some kind of colour revolution. As far as I can see what happened is that Orban became unpopular, the opposition broke the habit of a lifetime and got their act together and he lost the election. That just seems standard stuff in a democracy. From what I can gather Orban was indeed quite corrupt but his main claim to be a dictator seems to come from not doing what the EU told him he should.
he became unpopular, lost in 2002, then he moved from a center-right ideology to a nationalist populist "Christian" one, and riding the wave of the 2008 recession he got absolute majority, *then* he started to prepare for the long haul (media capture, good old clientelism, any and all public works became ridiculously expensive and certain well positioned companies became very profitable overnight, and so on), then changed the system with the absolute majority, to remain in power.
and then it happened 3 more times.
sure, it's Eastern Europe after all, so quite standard stuff yes, but it's definitely not what we (and I assume most people) want to standardize as democracy.
Orban set up the system so rural votes counted more, but he didn't count on competent opposition which campaigned in rural areas, nor on having pissed off everyone with his level of corruption.
As for whether he was a dictator, I guess dictator/not dictator isn't a simple distinction.
SCOTUS simply made up the claim that everything in our constitutional system leads toward that. On the contrary, the ONE part of the Constitution prohibited from amendment is the equal representation of the states, which goes AGAINST "one man, one vote".
Yes, the word "dictator" does seem OTT for Orban, but might I point out that Lucius Cornelius Sulla [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla ] handed over power and retired (although I'm not sure if that was the result of an election). Mind you, after that he did ensure he had ten thousand military veterans watching his back!
ISTM that having too much power concentrated in the hands of the boss is a bad thing, but that it is far less bad when elections are reasonably fair and the boss actually loses power when the vote goes against him.
When what brings you down is opposition who campaigns well in rural areas and the public finding out about your corruption, I think the word "dictator" just doesn't fit.
1) Orbán was an autocrat who did every underhanded thing he though he could get away with to cement his power.
2) He was not willing to do away with democracy in the narrow sense of peaceful transfer of power by means of elections. (Whether that's out of genuinely held beliefs or pragmatism and sense of self-preservation is not an easily resolved question. Nor is the question of what exactly made the choice pragmatic - it can just as well be outside pressure due to Hungary's immersion in EU institutions, or inside pressure of Hungary's population that would make his rule unsustainable without popular backing.)
3) Western(-aligned) Media are inherently dishonest and use "democratic" and "on our (globalist-liberal) team" (as well as "dictator" and "not on our team") interchangeably, to the point where the terms lose all their literal meaning.
tl;dr: It was a smear job, and also (purely incidentally) true, and also (purely incidentally) overblown.
One general complaint I have about most media coverage of foreign right-wing leaders is that they're *all* the second coming of Hitler. Like, it doesn't seem to matter whether the guy's actual policies involve slightly tightening up immigration enforcement or invading Poland for liebenstraum, the panicky tone of the coverage is the same. And yet, it's seems clear that Meloni != LePen != Orban != Modi != Ergodan.
What kind of broken conceptual apparatus would make you call "Powers That Be" "The Left"?
I mean, if you get to this point, how can you even complain about others "rolling the script out"? Feels like the pot calling the kettle [racial slur].
"Ireland is calling in the army* to remove farmers protesting fuel prices, because apparently their green energy commitments are more important than actually letting farmers grow crops and raise animals. "
Sigh. It's not like that. Farmers, yes, but also hauliers and others (the school bus drivers are getting in on the act too, so I have been informed). Husband of a work colleague went to one of the protests because he's a lorry driver for a large manufacturer locally.
What happened was that the government rapidly gave in and gave a 10c excise deduction, but since before they folded, people had been panic-buying fuel, petrol stations ran out of supplies and - due to the blockades - couldn't get refills. That's why the army was called in - blockading the oil refinery in Cork isn't going to help ease the problem of high fuel prices.
Which our government can't really control much, anyway, because if there's no damn fuel supply because Iran can't get its oil to market, then they can't magic more oil out of thin air. It's not about pushing green energy, it's about we're a small island on the periphery and depending on importing fuel and if there's no fuel to be got, it's too damn bad.
The police were the main force involved, and asked for the help of the Defence Forces, so if anyone is visualising American-style National Guard interventions, that's not what happened:
"If you are just joining us, here are the latest developments on the fifth day of the protests over fuel prices:
- Defence Forces units are at the Whitegate oil refinery in east Cork.
- The Garda Public Order Unit has deployed pepper spray and pushed back protesters to enter the Whitegate facility.
- A meeting between Government ministers and representatives of farmers and hauliers is under way.
- The meeting aims to finalise a new Government package of fuel supports.
- It has emerged that the package will include a temporary Fuel Support Scheme aimed at the haulage, agri and contractor sectors.
- Around 600 filling stations across the country are out of petrol and diesel.
- Road closures remain in place in parts of the country due to blockades."
"Fuel trucks have regained access to an oil refinery that had been subjected to a days-long blockade after gardaí cleared protesters from the entrance.
In a major operation involving scores of gardaí, large tractors that had been blocking the entrance to the Whitegate oil refinery in Co Cork were moved and fuel tankers were once again able to access the site.
The operation to secure the site took approximately an hour and saw some physical clashes between the Public Order Unit and protesters, including instances where pepper spray was used.
Members of the Defence Forces were also at the scene as An Garda Síochána, had requested the availability of a military heavy-lift recovery truck if it needed to tow any of the large tractors or trucks involved in the blockade.
Gardaí escorted the fuel trucks to the premises."
There was some public criticism of the protests and blockades since it meant people were not able to get to hospitals for appointments, particularly the major hospitals in Dublin (if you're down the country and seriously ill, you'll probably get referred to a Dublin hospital for testing and treatment, and trying to get to Dublin when the roads are blocked off is very difficult).
Though the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is facing the prospect of a heave by his own party in the wake of all this:
While looking into this, I learned about the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party which was the fourth most popular party in the 2022 election and got 3.27% of the vote and six seats in Parliament.
> The party platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day workweek, two sunsets a day (in assorted colours), lower gravity, free beer, and low taxes.[9][better source needed] Other electoral pledges have included building a mountain on the Great Hungarian Plain. Party election posters were mostly in Szeged and featuring the candidate István Nagy, who is a two-tailed dog, with slogans such as "He's so cute, surely he isn't going to steal"
Sadly they only got 0.87% of the vote this time around. Also interesting in the electoral results are the huge number of parties promising "National Self-Government of..." various groups from other nearby countries, starting with "...Germans" who got 24,630 votes and finishing with Bulgarians who got just 157. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Self-Government_of_Germans_in_Hungary
(To which I'm tempted to say that if you want national self-government of Germans then you should probably just move to Germany, but I'm not sure they have that there any more either.)
He's not a dictator, but much of the world exists in a blurry middleground between the binary that 'dictatorship' and 'democracy' implies. There's a lot you can do to subvert democracy without abolishing it, and Orban wasn't above any of it really.
Ultimately, he lost masively, he's surrounded by countries who want him to lose massively and who knew he lost massively, and the atreets are full of people who again want and know his loss. If he tries to subvert an outcome like that, it would very likely fail. And the cost of failure would no longer be 'investigations into corruption' but rather 'firing squads'.
Yeah, democracy exists on a scale, it is not a "yes or no" question.
The central examples are that in democracy you can always change the government in fair elections, and in dictatorship the only way to change the government is a military coup.
Then there is the gray zone where for example the current ruler owns all the TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers; and uses a combination of legal and extralegal tools to destroy all competition. There are technically elections every few years, but it is extremely difficult for the population to coordinate on an alternative, because most people probably haven't even heard of an alternative or a reason why they might want to vote for it. So the only way you could lose is if too many people hate you too much, despite all the media convincing them that everything bad is actually caused by your enemies. Plus you can manipulate the votes, such as changing the law so that the votes of people in big cities practically don't count, and you also collect votes from people living abroad in a way that your opposition cannot verify. -- And yes, you *can* still lose, but it requires a "once in a few decades" type of situation. So not exactly a dictatorship, but not much of democracy either.
Democracy exists on some kind of scale, but also most people talk about "democracy" when they mean something more like "modern 21st century Western liberal democracy with a generous welfare state and substantial civil liberties." But ISTM that the load-bearing part of democracy is that the public can vote the bastards out and vote new bastards in. That's the thing that is required, to make the people in power care what happens to the people of the country. Democracy has little to do with whether your country treats gays well or which decisions are made by judges vs legislators vs the executive. It only has a little to do with even really fundamental rights (from an American perspective, anyway) like freedom of speech or religion--many EU counties have substantial restrictions on speech that includes pretty explicitly political speech, but still seem democratic. The UK arrests people for mean tweets, many countries have fined politicians for speeches they gave, but those countries are still places where elections ultimately decide who has power.
I think focusing in on only the existance of elections is a little too narrow. Is it still a democracy if you can freely vote but:
1. It's illegal to criticize the government in the media?
2. The main opposition candidate was conveniently found guilty of some ill-defined "corruption" charges a month before the elections?
3. Voting laws systematically exclude those who might be sceptical of the government from voting?
In general, if you want to go from on-paper democracy to de-facto democracy, you rather inevitably end up with some institutional requirements like "independent judiciary" and "freedom of speech". Rotting away at those institutions is how you end up on the road towards dictatorships, and while Hungary was moving in that direction they obviously were nowhere near as far gone as something like Russia.
I think this is right, though I also think it's too easy to give a pass to your own society's restrictions on democracy. I mean, in the US, we routinely have judges just flat throw out laws passed by elected legislators and signed by elected governors/presidents. That often leads to good results, but it doesn't seem like it has much to do with democracy. For that matter, the whole way our presidential elections work is pretty undemocratic (winner take all within a state so no Democrat in Texas or Republican in California ever has a voice in who the president is), most states let the politicians draw the voting districts to maximize their number of seats, some states have set-aside minority-majority districts to ensure some seats for the minority group, etc. I'd say we're still a more-or-less democratic society.
I think the core question is whether the public can get rid of the people in power. The more the state / politicians can put a thumb on the scales (suppress the opposition party, draw the voting districts to shut out some voices, annul sufficiently unpleasant election results), the less that feedback works, but as long as "enough" of it works (for some hard-to-define version of "enough") the public still gets a say, and so the powerful people still have to care what the voters think about what's going on.
I think the most obviously undemocratic thing about the US is how difficult it is to change their federal constitution (which I suppose is part of the reason why they let judges make up new constitutional law instead). They haven't changed it in 34 years, and that change took over two centuries to get ratified.
If you mean why he did not get the popular vote, it was a series of well-timed scandals, likely with the help of Western intelligence services, for example phone calls with Lavrov telling him he is doing a good job making Europe unhappy. Corruption, general dysfunction and pro-Russia stances were the three biggest thing the voters did not want. They are okay with a conservative government, the next government will be conservative too, in fact there are now only conservatives and far-righters in Parliament and zero liberals, but they want the efficient, uncorrupted and pro-Western kind of conservatism.
If you mean why he conceded fast, well, there were very clear signs the military and the police is not on his side. If you want to talk about dictators, although he was not one, not having the military and the police on the dictator's side is basically EPIC FAIL.
It is a classic dictator EPIC FAIL to cut the pay of soldiers, and their equipment, and piss them off in general. Surely that handbook says that?
I mean look at the French Revolution. King Louis managed to piss off the senior military staff by kicking their friends into pension as a way to cut costs, the middle officer staff by banning the promotion of those with too young nobility, and the common soldiers through draconical discipline. He had to send the troops out from Paris, because they were unreliable. The rest what happened is obvious? There was no one around to defend the Bastille. So that is really an autocrat EPIC FAIL. Keep the soldiers happy and you can get away with a lot of things.
I signed up with a throwaway email account, but have not tried participating in any topics yet (none piqued my interest). A couple of notes:
* I chose a fairly weak password when creating the account, but the site did not warn me about this.
* The welcome message says "no real money required", but all the debates have scoring metrics that look like "$20/$80", and my account appears to have "$100" in credit. It would be good to explain more explicitly that you're talking about play money, or perhaps use a symbol other than "$".
Played around a bit. So far, it feels like the first stage of a generative adversarial network: Essentially, we are trying to figure out your current AI judge's reward function and find inputs that maximize that. Fun, but too disparate from truth-seeking to feel rewarding.
I played an opponent in showdown whose pacing and phrasing seemed like an AI (perhaps taking the second step of this GAN). They got great scores simply telling a personal anecdote and describing how the emotional thrust of that anecdote supported their case. I don't know if this is optimal for this judge, or optimal for your RLHF of that judge, or optimal for the arguments you'd like the site to produce. As far as I can tell, there's no way of answering the latter questions from the site (and no way of answering the first except by playing).
Ultimately I think what's needed here is more judging of judge: If you laid your principles of what a good argument is in a clear "constitution", each judgment could be criticized by some aligned community as not optimally following that constitution. Over time, better judges could then be created.
On practice mode, I found that nearly all my feedback asked for more, more more: more evidence, more counterarguments, etc. Putting in made-up quotes or scientific studies increased my score by 5-10 points each. Not going back to correct typos also increased my score, if it let me get one more sentence in under the time limit.
On quick match, my two opponents both put in perfectly spelled, multi-paragraph answers with multiple named, dated sources. I assume they were using AI.
Yeah, I didn’t sign up for a speed-typing contest against an AI. If that’s what it does, you should at least make those matches not count towards the user’s ELO.
While we’re on the topic of fake points that feel bad to lose, it would be nice if quick match users could decline a topic if they know nothing about it.
Can I understand why I’ve been hearing so much about Christianity in connection with rationalism and EA recently? In my current worldview, religion is still the same problematic institution denounced by Richard Dawkins years ago, and anyone who holds religious beliefs is, de facto, irrational (again, just stating my world model without presuming it is correct).
Are there good sources for understanding the “rational Christian” viewpoint, so that I might update my model?
Right now, my intuition is that Christianity is mainly used as a shelling point to organize community activities and coordinate moral behavior. Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
My, admittedly cynical, take: there are still way more Christians (especially in the USA) than Rationalists/EA types, and so getting the nicer ones (more liberal in views, less doctrinaire, more intelligent and willing to move with the times) of us Bible-bashing rabble on-board means infiltrating the institutions and engaging in entryism to take over enough influence, at least, to shift churches towards EA-type goals. All that charitable donation and community organisation turned away from worship of God towards worship of the machine. Ready made network of established status and connections to steer towards the better goals as defined by Utilitarianism: greatest happiness of the greatest number in saecula saeculorum, amen!
Agreed; indeed, from the Rationalist perspective, hijacking Christian community networks is a perfectly rational course of action. After all, we're saving the world from imminent doom here, right ? What nobler goal is there ?
Some Christians believe their religion literally, but many are there simply because their parents were there, they were raised as religious from childhood, and there is a social pressure to remain... and they rationalize it to themselves either as "it's better to be safe, just in case the afterlife really exists", or "it's probably all just fairy tales, but if religion tells people to be nice, then it is a noble lie and should be supported".
To the latter, you can say "well, you can also be nice by helping other people, and there are more efficient ways than giving the money to your church authorities".
I know your take is cynical, but it reminded me of a Chesterton's Fence scenario I experienced.
Decades ago, I was a rationalist agnostic dating a girl who worked in youth programs at a church. It was perhaps an odd pairing, but she was hot and nice and I ended up being a regular church goer as a result.
A few people in the congregation's leadership got enthusiastic about sending aid to Africa. So they made a big pitch for a years-long commitment to tithes for aid. These leaders naively assumed that congregants would donate to Africa in addition to their normal tithe to the general operating fund. Instead, people tithed to the Africa fund instead of the general fund. (What great EAs!)
The general fund at most churches pays for building expenses, utilities, and salaries. Within six months, the budget was in enough of a hole that the church let several employees go, including my wife. The childrens' programs suffered greatly as a result. A good childrens' program is a huge draw for a church, and weekly attendance declined with the youth program.
With the decrease in attendance, tithes dropped. The leaders saw the writing on the wall and saw they couldn't afford the Africa program. So now zero dollars are being allocated for overseas aid (they still do a great deal of classic church charity work in the local area, like running a food pantry).
That's the thing, people talk about (as in comments here) money going to church facilities instead of charity, and I think often they have in mind the kind of American (which has spread to the Global South) Prosperity Gospel type of ministers who buy their own jets and the like.
But even EA projects have administrative overhead that *some* proportion of donations go towards, and church administration is the same - paying the wages of secretaries, programmes for members, printing the bulletins, heat and light, etc. It's not all "megachurch pastor shilling on TV for his second luxury car".
The more rational Christians are the ones who take the religion less literally, every Christian is to some degree irrational, maybe encouraging more of the less irrational version of Christianity can be good, but I think ultimately we want the whole thing gone
That's my feeling too, which is why I think attempts to do "Christianity and..." as in "Christianity and Effective Altruism" are suicide attempts.
To quote from "The Screwtape Letters":
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice."
"The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing."
I think he was saying that ultimately, he wants the "whole thing" of Christianity gone, which I know you would disagree with. That's a pretty timely quote though.
I think "Christianity and something" is better than "Christianity", and is useful to get people with religious tendencies to be more reasonable. Christianity can be seen as a useful fiction, but I think there can be just as useful fictions that are less likely to result in bigotry.
I think that if we're talking about Christianity and wanting it to survive, then "Christianity and something" is not better. It's exactly what you describe happening there - for someone whose interest is in the "and something", then Christianity is at best a tool and something ultimately to be disposed of in order to let the "something" be the important, major focus.
So if someone is Christian and trying to use the "Christianity and something" as any kind of a hook, they are only knotting the noose to hang themselves.
I think this applies to any movement; once you start diluting it with mission creep, the movement loses focus. At best, it becomes a financial instrument with extra bells and whistles; at worst, it falls apart.
Hmm... As an atheist/agnostic (with finite uncertainty, of course) myself, I'm happy to see a Christian revival as an impediment to Islamization. Does 'Christian and not-Muslim' count as one of the 'Christianity And' groups, according to C.S.Lewis's view?
No, it would not, because it is a statement of belief. Unless someone is trying to create some sort of political stance (we in X are Christians not Muslims) then it's not the same as trying to use Christianity as a peg to hang your pet cause on.
I’m certain that Galileo will be devastated once he learns of Dawkins opinion of his faith. Though perhaps he should have thought more carefully about pissing off his patrons . . .
If you're relying on the Pope to back you up against the Pigeon League, then don't write a book putting quotes allegedly the position on the topic the Pope holds into the mouth of the "dumb idiot" character 😁
Galileo was a bit like Dawkins in that both of them never met a controversy they didn't want to have an opinion on, and absolute certainty they were right and everyone else was a moron.
There’s that yes. His life seems to be one of Really Cool Discoveries like (Galilean) Relativity and Going Out Of His Way to Piss Off the Powerful. He’d have been better off going to Germany and nailing his theories to the church door.
Tyco and That Polish Dude with the Oddly Latin Name, Copernicus, both published on heliocentricism around the same time and died in their own beds.
Tycho had his own system, which was explicitly geocentric, but under the hood it was basically just Copernican heliocentrism with a coordinate transformation to a non-inertial reference frame where the Earth is defined as always being at (0,0,0). The Sun and the Moon then revolve around the Earth, and most everything else revolves about the Sun.
Tycho favored this for religious and aesthetic reasons; a moving Earth just felt so wrong he had to transmogrify everything else to fit around a stationary Earth. And then a century of Catholic astronomers went with the Tychonic system because that damned idiot Galileo had poisoned the geocentric well and it was safer to just do the silly bit of extra math and get on with their work than to risk pissing off the Vatican with the simple true version.
I have been in the rationalist space for over a decade and have become Christian over the last 5, with regular church attendance starting about 4 years ago. I was held back from Christianity by the rationalist strawman of Christianity for a long time, but there are limits to rationality. I ended up too rational to cope with the narrow scope of what rationalism affords and I started looking for answers elsewhere. The Christian intellectual tradition gave me the answers I needed. The Christian worldview fits reality better, affords more, and has led to a deeper and more fulfilling life for me and my loved ones. If other rationalists have a similar experience to mine, I can see why they would post about it.
I am no Rationalist, but still, your perspective intrigues me. This may be a stupid question, but what do you mean by being "Christian" ? I was always under the impression that Christianity implies faith in the supernatural ("the evidence of things not seen"), and is thus explicitly and deliberately irrational. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, who knows), I'm the kind of person who is unable to make himself believe propositions at will, and thus Christianity of this sort is not an option for me. But perhaps you are one of the people (arguably the majority) who can alter their beliefs at will; or perhaps your version of Christianity is not supernatural ?
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
A promise of Christianity is that you do not need to logic yourself into faith on your own. If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted. You are then no longer in a place where the belief is unjustified by your experience - you have felt cause and effect directly. Once you find yourself here, the worldview is internally consistent thereafter.
> If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted.
But this is a Catch-22: how can I sincerely pray to an entity who, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist ? Sure, I can mouth the words and perform the rituals and wear the special clothes (if any), but from my point of view doing all that is no different from cosplay at a LARP. Surely God would know of my insincerity even if I managed to somehow convince all the Christians, would he not ?
True, you need to be less than completely certain of your atheism in order to call out in sincere, humble hope of a reply. If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility - if it is already fully made up beyond swaying - I don't really know how to help with that. Seems like that sort of thing could be a problem for many rationalist pursuits also, though. If we're not prepared to examine positions that we find alien and think are only a little likely to be true, I frankly don't see how half the conversations that happen here can happen in seriousness.
> If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility...
As I'd said before, my mind is not open to any possibility of anything; at least, not in the way that I think you mean. For example, whenever I look at a rock, I cannot convince myself that it is a rabbit or an apple or even a turtle. I can certainly imagine the possibility intellectually (after all, I've been wrong many times before), but imagining a counterfactual world is not the same as convincing yourself that you do in fact live there. So the best I could do is say, "by all appearances this appears to be a plain old rock, and though I could always be wrong, in this case I don't think I am".
...I mean, I literally just quoted that: "not by works, so that no one can boast".
Christianity has been wrestling with free will vs predestination since well before the likes of Daniel Dennet and modern conversations about determinism. The God described in the bible isn't looking for coerced automatons. He's looking for people to come of their own free will. This isn't about performing a magic ritual correctly. This is about making up your mind to call out for help, and verbalising the result of that.
Well, you said it's to the best of your knowledge, which seems to leave room for some uncertainty (and is certainly the most defensible position). I think "God, if you do exist, in whatever form you exist" is a valid starting place for a prayer.
That is true; I could certainly pray this prayer, though of course the answer would depend on what kind of God actually exists (if any). Many versions of the Christian God would not grant me faith, as they stringently avoid impinging on free will. Eldritch abominations such as Cthulhu would not care, as they require sacrifice, not mere prayer. The Kami likely would not hear me unless I visited them personally in Japan. Odin demands valiant deeds, not pretty words, and Loki can't be trusted at all... and so on. So the fact that I've prayed the prayer and got no special revelations in return tells me very little.
I believe most Christian denominations, even those not explicitly Reformed / Calvinist or otherwise heavy on the predestination side, ascribe the work of the Holy Spirit to these types of questions. As Jesus said, "What is impossible with man is possible with God."
Faith is a gift, and it's not a certainty that everyone will have it. It's very difficult. If you cannot be convinced in your reason, then you won't be converted, and trying to 'nice force' anyone into it won't work in the long run.
Reason alone won't get you there, but if a little voice in the back of your head keeps piping up "this is all nonsense" then trying to pretend you believe what you don't is not enough. Better a sincere atheist trying to do good by his lights than an unhappy believer who doubts everything he tries to pretend he holds, because that kind of doubt then corrodes everything and eventually you might end up doubting even doing good.
I agree with the sentiment, but not the ultimate conclusion. I think it is incredibly important for a person who wants to do good to doubt himself !Too many terrible acts in history have been perpetrated by people who convinced themselves that they were doing good beyound any shadow of a doubt, that their path is the only proper path, and that some unfortunate sacrifices must be made in the name of this Greater Good.
I think you're using a spurious definition of "supernatural". As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
> As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
Sure, but this is not a definition that I find useful. When someone tells me that e.g. angels exist, I'm not interested in the abstract philosophical grounding of angelic entities; rather, my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?" This question is not just applicable to angels, of course; for example, few people seriously believed in neutrinos until they were detected; and few people believe in quantum loop gravity today for the same reason.
> lack of *sight* is not the same thing as a complete lack of evidence.
Agreed; I was talking about evidence in general, not literal visual sight. I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
Yes, this is what I tried to convey when I mentioned neutrinos -- which cannot be detected directly by e.g. ordinary human vision, and in fact require sophisticated detectors to be built just so we can infer the neutrinos' existence.
> this is not a definition that I find useful. [...] my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?"
I agree that the question of whether a thing exists is almost always more important than whether the thing is reducible to non-mental entities. Regardless, in ordinary language, the word "supernatural" is relevant to the latter question, not the former.
> I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
The most direct counterpoint is 1 Peter 3:15: "[..] Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. [...]".
Additionally, there's important historical context to consider. Christianity's central claim--Jesus's resurrection--is based on eyewitness testimony. Consequently, it makes perfect sense for Biblical authors to distinguish between a lack of firsthand experience and a general lack of evidence.
Hi bugmaster, thanks for your reply. I understand where you are coming from and think you are asking good questions. I worry that you will find my answers unsatisfying because there is a gulf between our experiences and worldview that an internet reply can't hope to fill. I will try to reframe your questions and respond to them. Let me know if my reframing seems off.
1. Does my Christian belief involve belief in the supernatural?
Short answer: yes.
More accurate but probably confusing answer: in becoming Christian, I entered into a worldview that predates the modern natural/supernatural dichotomy. This is one of the hardest things to communicate about my journey to becoming Christian. My epistemology has changed and my categories of reality have changed with them. I believe in God, angels, demons, all manner of things that my prior self would have called supernatural. My worldview has become more phenomenological now and I see myself as participating in a hierarchy of being that encompasses all things. From my current worldview, there is no line in that hierarchy that delineates the natural from the supernatural. We humans are made in God's image and can participate in the divine by following Christ. At the same time, we are made of dust.
2. How do I believe propositions that cannot be reasoned about with rationalism? As a rationalist, how did I "convince" myself?
Short answer: non propositional ways of knowing
More accurate but probably confusing answer: Another commenter mentioned Chesterton here. He and many others have tried to give rational accounts of the faith better than I ever could, but I don't believe their accounts would necessarily satisfy what you are looking for. I was never personally persuaded by rational/logical arguments for Christianity before I converted. I'm a Catholic, and a fairly new one, so do not take my words below as a representation of the Church's teachings, but this is how I believe.
Christianity is a way seeing and being in the world, not a set of propositions (not sure if Protestents would agree on that point). Propositional knowledge is important and has greatly improved our standard of living, so we rightly venerate it. However, it is not the only type of knowledge.
Consider riding a bicycle. I could give lengthy explanations on what your body will need to do to stay balanced and propel yourself forward. I could give precise angles on how far to lean when you turn. You could spend years studying everything there is to know about riding a bike. But the person who gets on the bike and starts pedaling will know how to ride a bike better than you almost immediately. This form of knowing is procedural, not propositional. There are many things we learn in life (including things as foundational as how we think) that can only be learned through our embodied participation in reality. Becoming Christian is one of those things. It happens through participation, not sets of propositions.
There are other forms of knowledge out there (see John Vervaeke's 4 P's of Knowledge for more insight) that Christianity has broadly categorized as revelation. As a rationalist, I was predisposed to undervaluing these other types of knowing until I went deeper, and deeper, following the breadcrumbs until I got to a level of doubt about the world rivaling Descartes. The fact of the matter is that rationality is built on a set of recent modern presuppositions that, when seriously questioned (with the rigor of a good rationalist) leaves you alone in an abyss of doubt. Christianity and its non propositional ways of knowing brought me back to reality. Until I prayed, went to Mass, participated in the sacraments, loved my neighbor, etc, I was bound by the limits of rationality.
Rationality and propositional knowledge are still indispensable tools that I use to navigate the world. But I see them now in the context of a much bigger, more beautiful reality that has Christ (the Logos) at its center.
That is very informative, thanks ! That said, as per your bicycle analogy, I fear that don't think I have the capacity to truly understand what you are talking about. For example, when think about a rock, I do not follow some logical chain of reasoning that concludes, from first principles, that the rock must be there. Instead, I see the rock, touch it, taste it (if the fancy strikes me), and the conclusion "the rock exists" automatically forms in my mind. If you told me that the rock is actually a turtle, I could not bring myself to believe it until the rock exhibited some signs of turtle-dom (such as perhaps poking out a head and a tail).
Granted, there are many things I cannot directly observe, such as electrons or the country of China; but my mental process is largely the same. Once my senses have gathered enough evidence, be it direct or indirect, the conclusion forms in my mind; and only additional evidence can dislodge it. This isn't something I've diligently trained myself to do (although training does help to streamline this process), it's just how my mind has always worked.
I have tried participating in many religious rituals (not just Christian ones), but they've always left me feeling like a LARPer. As I'd said above, I don't understand how someone could sincerely pray to an entity one does not believe to exist -- and what use are insincere prayers ?
That said though, I'm no Rationalist either, nor a philosopher; for example, I don't believe that some ultimate philosophical grounding of all thought is necessary to make useful conclusions about, well, anything. I am perfectly content with admitting that my mind is flawed and total certainty is unachievable about any proposition, even the ones as seemingly rock-solid as "2+2=4". Perhaps this is another thing that separates me from the Christians -- I'm not sure.
At least for me, I only truly believed in Christianity after really seriously trying to live like Christianity was real. I had some faith, but it was mostly just me going out on a limb and seeing if it would work. I had a very reconstructionist view before and didn't really agree with Christian ethics. However, as I started trying to turn the other cheek as much as I could and started deeply reading the Bible, belief came and ethics came. I guess you could say God just altered my priors. I do rationally believe in Christianity too, just resulting from evidence for scripture and miracles, but it is secondary to my otherwise unexplainable belief.
That is fair, but as I'd said in another comment, I am unable to bring myself to commit a large amount of time and effort to the pursuit of a practice I currently believe to be false -- despite the possibility that, once I have done so, it may reveal itself to be true. Perhaps I would be more willing to commit if Christianity were the only such practice in existence, but it's not; I hear the same from Muslims, Buddhists, and even Wiccans. I find this fact difficult to reconcile with Christianity being the one true faith.
If you don't mind me asking; what does believing in angels and demons mean to you? Do you believe that these things influence the physical world? Do they deliver knowledge of the material world? Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
The following are my views that are hopefully aligned with the Church.
> What does believing in angels and demons mean?
I believe in a heavenly hierarchy that includes beings that exist between us and God. Some of these beings are interested in humanity, others are not. These are real entities, not just psychological constructs. They would exist even if we did not.
> Do you believe that these things influence the physical world?
They do not have physical bodies but can influence the world through us via dreams, revelation, temptation, etc. I am unsure about their power to physically manipulate reality and would need to look into that.
> Do they deliver knowledge of the material world?
I think we can be compelled toward certain knowledge by them, but as far as I know they do not dole out facts of the universe.
> Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
I think this is a fine way to understand angels/demons for nonreligious people. I would add that they can have desires/affinities that may be completely alien to human desires/affinities.
Christianity does indeed imply faith in the supernatural, and yet plenty of people do come into it from at least somewhat rational routes. Christianity (unlike many other religions) does claim to be anchored in a true, historical fact: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And many sceptics who've investigated this have found the evidence surprisingly compelling that this did indeed happen. This implies that Jesus is at the very least worth listening to to see what he said about himself. Christians share many principles with rationalists, including the desire to believe only what is true (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:13-20); we just believe that that includes a creator God.
The rock example - does this rock exist? - is still in the realm of propositional knowledge and can be addressed with evidence. An example of a rock involving procedural knowledge would be the ability to turn a stone slab into a sculpture. That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation. It is knowledge that you obtain through practicing the art of sculpture.
Point taken that participation in religious practices has not yielded any fruit for you. I'm curious, do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow? Before I became a Christian, I followed a practice of meditation and has some mystical experiences that revealed to me the existence of a reality deeper than what I knew. Without those experiences I think it would have been more difficult for me to take the first step into my current faith.
> That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation.
That's not entirely true, as people who become sculptors usually start with observation (of a teacher at work) and learning (from textbooks or YouTube videos, I suppose). And it seems that virtually anyone can learn the basics of sculpture merely by reading books and watching tutorials -- though of course not everyone could become a great sculptor, or even a mediocre one. Nonetheless, the process of becoming at least a novice sculptor is readily observable, repeatable, and (arguably) quite well studied.
> do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow ?
I've tried meditation but could never make it work. I've tried hypnosis too, with similar results (or rather lack thereof). I've never taken hard drugs (nor am I planning on doing so, sorry), but I've been drunk -- and the experience can hardly be described as "mystical".
Presumably, if God does exist, then he knows exactly what kind of an experience would bring me to faith -- but chooses not to grant me one. It seems that God would prefer me to remain an atheist; and, being a humble atheist, who am I to challenge the will of God ?
No contention from me on the point of propositional knowledge supporting practices. Just as you would want to give someone advice before they ride a bike for the first time, you would want them to learn information about sculpting before (and after) getting started to improve their skill development. My point is simply that to know the skill of sculpting, at some point you need to hold tools and strike the rock repeatedly. The patterns of movement you learn will be unique to you and are physically retained in the body in ways different from propositional knowledge. Procedural memories are not stored in the brain in the same way as declarative memories. I don't think you necessarily disagree with me here (you seem to get my point that knowing Christianity requires embodied participation). I just wanted to spell this out in case my earlier post was unclear.
In Buddhism there are supposedly 84,000 doors to enlightenment. I don't know what the equivalent number is in Christianity, but hopefully I have at least given you the shape of the door I went though. On God's plan for you, me, or any of us, I won't speculate. You seem like a swell person and I wish you the best bugmaster.
But this again is somewhat of a Catch-22. If I understand you correctly, I must invest a great deal of time and effort into a spiritual practice in order to obtain the revelation/enlightenment/etc. that validates the practice -- but why would I commit to such a large investment into something I currently believe to be no more real than e.g. D&D spellcasting ?
Fair enough, I suppose; it all depends on whether you think that pre-committing to a belief in total absence of any supporting evidence (be it material or not) is rational. I think an argument could be made that sometimes it is, and theistic faith is one of those cases.
Hi Connor, I had a very hard time addressing this question, and I feel a mix of shame and doubt in what I have written. I am only speaking for myself in this reply.
If we went back in time and put a camera outside of Jesus' tomb, would we see the same body enter the tomb dead and, three days later, exit the tomb alive?
Prob: < 30%
Did something sacred happen that inspired his followers to come out of hiding and believe with all their heart that Jesus returned from the dead?
Prob: > 90%
These responses feel wrong because I do not think about Christ in this way. I understand why from the outside these numbers would seem significant, but to me they do not describe anything about my religious faith. It is the meaning of the resurrection that matters, not the particilars. See my reply to bugmaster for a longer explanation.
That's really interesting to me. I don't think I could be a Christian unless I was convinced the resurrection actually happened. I've never heard of this "something sacred happened but probably not a literal resurrection" is this something you just came up with or can i read about this somewhere else? Can you get any more specific with what happened? Are you more on the side of Christianity being useful fiction, or a metaphor? Hypothetically, would you still be a Christian if it could be proven the resurrection is complete myth?
Hi Connor, I did not come to Christianity by being convinced of a set of propositions. When I read the biblical stories or participate in my church, I am not weighing evidence against my priors to see how true different claims are. Instead, I understand that I am participating in a different type of knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositional claims. I do not view this knowledge as irrational, but rather as something beyond what rationalism can contain or even speak to.
I think you would be surprised to know just how many people in the church, both attendees and clergy, have doubts about certain claims. If you are educated in our modern, secular world, then doubt, even serious doubt, is inevitable. Saints have written about periods of doubt, as have Chesterton (mentioned elsewhere is in this thread) and other thinkers, even popes. The waning and waxing of belief are seen as a part of spiritual growth in the Catholic Church.
I have not taken the time to think through all the possibilities, but as I said I am fairly convinced that something profound happened after the crucifixion Jesus. If this were somehow proven false, it would shake my faith and that of billions of other Christians. The Church would need to adapt and I cannot imagine what the global repercussions would be. Personally, I would probably abstain from saying certain parts of the Nicene Creed until everything was figured out. After some years, I think I could even see myself moving to a different denomomination that always had a metaphorical interpretation of Jesus. I would not stop praying but my prayers would change.
For now, the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead, and what that means for the world, is enough to sustain my faith.
So you aren't a Christian for rational reasons, but if it was rationally proven some of your beliefs are false, it would severely effected your faith, interesting. So theoretically, you could be rationally convinced out of Christianity, it would just need someone to have you very sure the resurrection didn't occur. I appreciate your honesty, but this sounds somewhat incoherent to me.
It actually does say in the Bible that Jesus literally resurrecting from the dead is a matter of first importance, and that if it didn't happen then Christians are to be pitied more than anyone. We are dead in our sins and living a lie. See chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians:
One of the best explanations of resurrection evidence I have heard is that, despite all the supposed miracles that he performed during his life and which his followers apparently witnessed, while Jesus was being arrested and crucified, they were still all basically too cowardly to stand by him, and mostly denied knowing him and slunk away into the night.
After his supposed resurrection, all these cowardly followers suddenly began running around the country preaching about him, knowing that as a result, they were likely to undergo a gruesome martyrdom (and most of them did). Seemingly they were suddenly no longer afraid of death. The question being why...
Much appreciated! Few people are willing to say what their estimates of the odds of their views are.
To reciprocate, as per my own atheism/agnosticism:
For the agnostic part, allowing _some_ sort of intelligent creator, but with only the constraint of being at least as intelligent as human, and powerful enough to be responsible for the cosmos - maybe 10% probable? The best evidence for it is the 'fine-tuning' argument (which doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings) but the constants may just be 'brute facts' or there may be a multiverse-plus-anthropic-principle explanation. And an intelligent creator is a more complex explanation than brute facts of two dozen constants.
For the atheist part - a deity with something like omnipotence plus anything like an interest in humans and almost any strong preference about humans seems excluded very strongly by obvious evidence - a benevolent deity by the problem of pain and the problem of evil (which I'd just call counterexamples), a deity like Wotan by the absence of glaringly obvious calls by the deity for martial valor. Call it < 0.1% or so?
( Also - for there to be any reason to _care_ whether a deity exists and has preferences, there has to be some sort of consequence for aiding/thwarting its preferences, traditionally an afterlife, and the evidence that we are perishable neural nets, WYSIWYG, with no persistence after our last neural firing looks like >99% )
One problem with the "agnostic" position and the "fine-tuning" argument, as you describe it, is that at best it gets you to a form of deism: a deity who created the Universe then metaphorically "walked away". So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do, or whether it performs miracles, or even whether it is a person at all. At this point, it starts looking indistinguishable from a fundamental property of nature rather than an object of worship; as you said, there's no reason to "_care_ whether [the] deity exists and has preferences".
>So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do
Yup - or whether it is interested in life at all. We would have a _very_ weak idea of its preferences from its choice of the fundamental constants. But, as I wrote, this
>doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings
(and might well have _no_ other interests in the universe)
I've never heard this perspective from a Christian before ! Most of the Christians I've talked to would say that the physical Resurrection is what made Jesus special (ok, they wouldn't put it those exact words, but that's my understanding). According to them, Jesus wasn't just a really smart guy or a charismatic leader (there are plenty of those around); rather, he was a being both human and divine, whose sacrifice fulfilled the old laws while at the same time demonstrating mastery over death. Some Christians would say that instead of being physically resurrected on Earth, Jesus bodily ascended directly to Heaven; still, they would all agree that his tomb was empty at the end -- and I mean physically empty, not metaphorically, meaning that your camera would indeed show an empty tomb.
Is this not what you believe ? If so, then what is it -- if anything -- that makes Jesus special in your view ?
I understand (somewhat) your other point: that you came to your belief in Christianity via spiritual awakening and repeated practice, not logical arguments or physical evidence. But I am not sure what it means to be a Christian at all without believing in the Resurrection, as you seemingly do not. Of course, no one died and made me Space Pope, I cannot arbitrate your personal beliefs -- I'm just curious.
To be clear, I do believe in the resurrection, and I see it as absolutely central to Christian faith. This is partly why I felt weird about posting the percentages for those different claims. I went through some thought expercises with historical evidence and personal experience, weighed them against my priors, and came up with those numbers. I think the reason 30% seems low is because my priors for a man resurrecting from the dead, and for the event to be recorded accurately 2000 years ago, are extremely low. Starting from there, consider how confident I would need to be to bring the probability up to 30%.
Stepping back into a rationalist framework and assigning cold, impersonal numbers to my beliefs may have been a mistake on my part. I find it difficult to discuss Christianity in rational terms and this has been a messy attempt. It is not how I normally process my faith.
Most of what I've heard about the intersection of Christianity and Effective Altruism has been related to this book. What else have you about it?
As for resources to understand the "rational Christian" viewpoint: I suppose that depends on which parts of Christianity you consider to be irrational. For example:
- If you're skeptical about the historicity of the New Testament, then check out Lydia McGrew's work. (She's a published epistemologist.)
- If you're skeptical of the Genesis creation narrative, then check out Hugh Ross's old-Earth creationist framework. (I'm less confident about this. I haven't looked at it in a while.)
>Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
The gist of Christianity is:
God created everything that exists, and when He created humans, He created them in His image and likeness, and tasked them with filling the earth and taking care of it. Mankind ended up disobeying God, and profaning Him by taking His image that they were made in and warping it to be unlike God.
As a result of this sin, mankind was separated spiritually from God, because God is holy and sin can't be near Him, and ever since then mankind has had to die, because life is the cost of sin. And as punishment for the the first sin, God cursed the ground and childbirth and the devil.
Another consequence of mankind's sin is that it impacted and continues to impact the natural and spiritual worlds, and people that had nothing to do with it. Because of man's evil actions, the world is in the state it is in today, and people are filled with hopelessness, despair, depression, ect., and we continue to profane the image of God by not being like Him.
But because God has never ceased loving mankind, and it is not His desire for any of us to perish eternally, but to be restored to Him, He sent His son Jesus. Jesus was not born from Adam's lineage and under the corruption of his sin, and He lived a sinless life. He loved us and lived as a human, so that He could die and offer sinless Human blood to take the place of anyone who believes in Him, and has faith that His offering is sufficient to pardon their own sins.
After Jesus did this, he resurrected from the dead, proving His authority as God, and also claiming victory over sin and death, giving life freely to mankind, to anyone who will accept it.
The people who believe this and accept it, and who, out of love for Jesus and their fellow man, live obediently to God, and share this news with others, in the hopes that others who are suffering and see their need will believe and accept Jesus as well, were labeled as "Christians" by others long ago. There are many other kinds of people who label themselves as Christian these days, but many of them have nothing to do with Christ or His Gospel. But this is what "Christianity" in its original sense is about, and there are still people who Love and follow Jesus in this way. Most "Christians" you'll encounter probably won't, and so they won't really have any authority to say anything about it.
EDIT: God didn't just want to save us from death, but mainly to restore us in connection with Him, so that we can have a full life and an intimate relationship with Him. That's the kind of love He has for us, and He created the institution of marriage as a representation of the relationship between Jesus and those who follow Him.
I am a former New Atheist, now fairly serious Catholic.
I believe rationalism is missing a coherant *meta ethics* that religion provides. Utilitarianism is categorically unstable both in theory and in practice. Honestly I think Thomism is pretty compatible with rationalism, because one of its core claims is that morality is discoverable by reason rather than by divine revelation.
The hard problem of consciousness is still of huge interest to rationalism and even the most hardcore atheists struggle to answer it coherantly. Chalmers for example concluded that physicalism can't account for subjective experience. Christians call consciousness "the soul". I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology.
Most people who convert to christianity these days do it because they feel a sense of a lack of meaning in their lives which only religion can fill. Secular philosophy tries and fails to provide this, it's either circular or it's christianity in a trenchcoat.
----
If you want resources:
Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is good reading for the morality/meta-ethics part, it's a more modern take on Thomism (which is in turn a modern take on aristotle).
Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, not to be confused with Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and Teresa of Calcutta) is a good author for phenomenology and consciousness metaphysics. I've heard Saint John Paul II also wrote some good stuff on that but I've never read it.
You're probably already familiar with GK Chesterton (of Chesterton's Fence fame). He wrote a book called Orthodoxy. I would say this is the best entry point here, it's basically a manifesto of a rationalist christian. It's basically a book about Chesterton trying to reason his way into the most correct philosophy from first principles and accidentally reverse engineering Christianity.
I'm Catholic so I'll mention Bishop Robert Barron's Catholicism series, there's a book and a TV miniseries (which is annoyingly hard to find on youtube) which basically covers the book. It's less apologetics but more just an introduction to the intellectual traditions and a sort of defense of the Catholic faith specifically. Barron was very involved with Dawkins and the others back in the day and wrote and spoke a lot against the New Atheists -- these days as a cautionary tale, since we all know what happened to it.
Will Durant's Story of Civilizations is really really long but a huge amount of it is about the history of religion and the church. I think many people (myself included) basically got an exaggerated cartoon version of church history as kids and never really understood the context behind a lot of stuff. A lot of the "Religion is bad" stuff is basically just bad history IMO. Even if I was an atheist this would convince me that religion is a net good! Age of Faith, the Renaissance, Caesar and Christ, The Reformation are good ones for specific time periods. Also Age of Voltaire's epilogue literally converted me into a catholic so there's that (even though durant wrote it as a defense of atheism against a steelman of catholicism!)
You said "I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology" - did you do a comparative evaluation to similar levels of understanding of all the major religions before coming to that conclusion? For example, I think the Advaita Vedanta and the Lurianic Kabbalah both have interesting takes on the notion. Though, the more I read about the different traditions, the more "many paths to one truth" makes sense.
I agree that secular responses to the hard problem are necessarily weak sauce, but to then jump straight to Christianity has always struck me as pretty curious. Or incurious, maybe?
Well, I believe in Christianity for other good reasons too, some incidental, some deeply personal. The Hindus or Scientologists or Zoroastrians could have a great solution for the hard problem and I wouldn't really care too much because I think Jesus is the only begotten son of God who came down from heaven to die for all people that our sins may be forgiven, and that's an anchor to a lot of other core beliefs that I hold similarly strongly to catholic phenomenology
With respect, this sounds like an explanation for why believing in religion is pleasant, but not why it is correct. (Unless you only meant to provide an explanation for the psychological appeal, and I misunderstood you).
I don't know if many atheists outside of Reddit Atheism caricatures believe that religion as a whole throughout history is simply bad, though it's hard to evaluate "net good" without a coherent counterfactual to compare against. Religion is clearly instrumentally useful.
Touché! But you forgot to account for instrumental convergence. Believing incorrect things, even pleasant ones, risks trapping me in a local maxima that compromises my ability to pursue even greater pleasures in the future.
For example, if I converted to Catholicism now, I might refuse to participate in the neuroadaptive sexbot orgies on the lunar libertarian micronation ten years from now on religious grounds. This would be a net loss as neuroadaptive sexbot orgies are much more physically, emotionally, and spiritually fulfilling than going to church.
I'm not up to date on my hedonism scripture, but I would imagine that as long as pleasure is your main goal, you'd probably have no issue with jumping from one thing to another. You also probably wouldn't have any reason to have anything to do with Catholicism, either.
Anyway, church isn't really the place for people who don't already have an intimate relationship with God, which surpasses anything one could ever have with people or robots. If you ever come to feel the weight of whatever sins you may be wrapped up in, and see the emptiness of everything in the world apart from Jesus, He will be there ready to relieve you of your burdens and transform your heart.
The idea would be that genuine belief in Catholicism would be required to achieve its claimed benefits, but genuine belief would also change my goals, making converting to Catholicism a poor choice for a hedonist even if it is more pleasant in the short term.
The world doesn't seem very empty to me. It is quite wonderful, I like it very much.
I was raised catholic. I became an edgy atheist at 14 like every other nerdy west coast guy in the 2000s and then became a catholic again at 28. I actually did think religion was net bad for a time, and it was specifically because I only ever listened to edgy atheists cristopher hitchens and dawkins talk about religion and never actually talked to anybody who knew what they were talking about.
I was responding to the original poster who said religion is a problematic institution and only believed in by irrational people.
Do you think you still would've ended up catholic if you were raised in a different religion, or none at all?
Normally I would disclaim that question with, "I know this doesn't make much literal sense, since there is no 'you' that exists separate from your upbringing..." but you probably believe your identity is rooted in a soul separate from your upbringing, so the question should be perfectly sensible to you. Anyways, please answer it.
I was raised to atheist parents in an almost exclusively atheist environment, and met a serious christian for the first time in college. Because of this, a lot of religious discussion online is alien to me. I don't doubt your report of feeling a lack of meaning only religion can fill, but I struggle to interpret this feeling as anything other than a product of rearing. People returning to what is psychologically comfortable from childhood, not some universal drive, certainly not one specific to catholicism. Do you dispute this?
I think I'm likely to have become some sort of religious. I never had a really true religious experience as a kid and just followed it because my parents made me go to church (and I mostly hated it, and barely believed any of it except in a token amount), and I only started feeling a religion-shaped hole in my heart later in life after accomplishing most everything I cared about accomplishing in life (wealth, security, sex, entertainment, status) and still feeling vaguely unfulfilled in a way that could only be filled by a higher purpose.
As for whether I'd become catholic, well, the Catholic response would be "I know that if I truly felt a longing for God, the Holy Spirit would guide me to the One True Faith some way or another." But that's probably not what you're asking. I think it's very likely I would have ended up with soem flavor of Christianity, knowing my personality (and assuming a lot of that personality is inherant to my genetics -- if we're going "what if your genetics were different" I think that's a little too much of a stretch for the hypothetical).
And if I ended up in christianity I have a good hunch I would gravitate towards catholicism; I'm naturally very curious about sects and branches and history and catholicism just objectively has a lot of things going for it that the others don't (stability, apostolic succession, a central authority to resolve disputes, a standard of objective beauty that surpasses all the others, because yes I believe in objective beauty).
I'm not surprised to hear that you weren't big on religion as a kid, my claim is more that early childhood enculturation surely has a large effect on what you gravitate towards as an adult. You're right that genetics likely plays a bigger role than I accounted for.
What do you do when your religion conflicts with secular knowledge and/or values? Or does this never come up?
It’s not ontology, it’s epistemology. Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs; but it’s not great for living a human life. First, because objectivity (correctly) requires the evacuation of meaning; but life requires meaning. Second, science only understands what it can control; so if anything more powerful than humanity exists, science is (correctly) blind to it. Imagine being an ant and trying to use the scientific method. Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles, for the same reason human scientists don’t acknowledge Zeus, or angels. They don’t come when you call, you can’t put them in a museum.
My read is that people are finally becoming skeptical. There are political reasons I won’t mention, but if you were paying attention in 2020-2024, you saw them. I’d say, if you’re rejecting religion in favor of science, you are not yet skeptical enough. There are still epistemic constructs you have not thrown into the fire.
Wouldn't your ant theory predict that human science would maintain the geocentric theory forever, or even if it did understand heliocentrism would never find black holes because they can't be easily observed?
I should have accounted for dead things in my description of science's limits. Science is fantastic for studying dead things, even huge ones. For a more thorough response, look at what I wrote to Nick Hounsome, elsewhere in this thread.
> Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs...
I would argue that the vast majority of human moral advancements throughout the ages were powered by technological advances (which are in turn powered by scientific advances). For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
> Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles...
This is untrue, as airplanes are clearly visible in the sky, and presumably ants can see them (though I could be wrong as don't really know how ant vision works). In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars. And in fact we humans have been able to understand much larger systems, such as black holes and the curvature of space-time, the geological history of the Earth, the existence of elementary "particles", the vision system of ants, etc., by working with much less.
> I think we can say "Civilization has the morality it can afford" without saying that every technological advance need give us Better Morality.
Agreed; obviously not *every* technological advance does. For example, arguably the invention of social networking was a huge step down. In addition, morality is subjective; for example, an ancient Israelite might find our obsession with monogamy puzzling if not borderline blasphemous. Still, I'd argue that most scientific and technological advances have led to increased quality of life for humanity by at least some kind of semi-objective metrics, e.g. increased lifespan, reduced infant mortality, better nutrition, and arguably self-reported life satisfaction (though that one is admittedly tricky).
>In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars.
Then again, you're living in a reality/universe/planet/body that was intricately designed by God, one which He provided with His own written words, and in which He even came to as a human, and presumably you would deny His existence as stated in His word, and doubtless you could use all kinds of thoughtful rational arguments to try and support the position.
That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
> That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
Yes, I do agree that the Christian worldview (as well as most other theistic worldviews) is fully compatible with all available evidence. In fact, it is arguably *maximally* compatible with any possible evidence, since the tri-omni God can (and, in some Christian theologies, does) produce any observable effect.
In that case, it's my hope for you that if you ever develop an awareness of any evil inside of you to the point where it's debilitating and you wish someone could do something about it, that you would think about this and that Jesus wants to take that burden from you and know and love you closely, and that you would trust Him to do so.
In the meantime, speaking of ants, since you are a self-proclaimed master of bugs, why the heck are there ants coming through my second-floor balcony door when there's a perfectly good apartment below me?
I don't think that slavery was abolished primarily because of technological advances. Christopher Brown makes a good case that, if not for a few quirks of history, slavery could have persisted until the information age.
I don't think that history has "quirks" to such an extent. The abolition of slavery appears to follow technological advances pretty closely, in time as well as space, and I don't think that Christian morality can adequately explain this. Perhaps more importantly, the mechanisms of slavery are incompatible with high technology: slaves must be kept ignorant (and ideally illiterate) lest they rebel, but modern technological jobs require the worker to be at least somewhat knowledgeable (and definitely literate).
At the same time, increasing quality of life (due to orders of magnitude increases in production efficiency) is what enables moral developments to occur in the first place. A person working 18-hour days just to survive has no time for philosophy; the modern 9-to-5 office worker does. Granted, a few fortunate people would always find the time (dating all the way back to Ancient Sumer), but in order for a moral philosophy to take hold, it must be embraced by more than a handful of scholars.
I think that most of your points are true for the kinds of slavery that are associated with ancient Rome and the American south, but not other forms of slavery. That episode of the podcast addresses your points.
>For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
As does the timing. The critical events, the Anglo-American abolition of the slave trade and the British Empire's abolition of slavery were in 1808 and 1833, respectively. Industrialization was beginning to happen in that period, but it had not upended the more traditional elements of the economy or made much of anything unprofitable, and that early industrialization still depended on raw material inputs which were frequently and profitably produced by slaves.
The United States didn't fully abolish slavery until 1865, by which point industrialization had become a more significant factor, but the Civil War happened because it had been increasingly clear for a generation that slavery was going away and 1861 was the last chance for the doomed holdouts. Once the slave trade was reduced to a handful of smugglers and pirates, once the dominant global Empire *and* its main geopolitical rival were solidly on Team Abolition, the writing was on the wall.
Yeah, ants can't see flying airplanes at all, they have compound eyes that don't focus and they mostly navigate by smell.
I admit that science can understand a lot about very large dead things. And maybe you can come up with a story where a small airplane was abandoned in a field and an ant colony grew up around it and the ants examined every piece of it and the ant scientists could convince their skeptics that yes, airplanes exist.
I mentioned Zeus. Will you bite that bullet? Implicit in your stance seems to be the claim that no living entity exists that can't be captured and dissected by scientists. You really think that, if Zeus existed, scientists would have him properly taxonomized and catalogued and placed in the context of biological evolution on Earth? And that no entity whatsoever could ever exist that scientists couldn't capture and do whatever experiments on that they wanted to?
I think only a superstitious belief in the godlike powers of scientists could lead somebody to think that science can objectively establish the existence of everything that actually does exist.
I want you to be more skeptical; to give up what I see as superstitions. Then you'd be more likely to see the epistemic value in religion.
I take your moral argument seriously. By gaining rational control over huge areas of the world, we've unlocked incredible wealth and such a high standard of living that many historical kings would happily trade place with a contemporary lower middle class American. Many of our most common moral stances were unthinkable before science transformed the world because anybody living that way died out.
But the same relationship exists between rich and poor contemporaries. A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. Is the techie Texan living a better life than the primitive tribesman? No, he just hasn't been tested. If he were in the other's shoes, he might very well do worse things.
So the question can't be whether science enables better morals, when the way it's doing that is just by removing temptation. Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically, regardless of the historical outcome, are better or worse for living your life. And that's not simple to answer.
> A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. ... No, he just hasn't been tested.
This is an interesting point. Granted, Papua New Guinea has the one of the highest crime rates in the world (if not the highest), so, objectively speaking, Papuans are committing more evil deeds than Texans. You say:
> Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically...
But the average Texan isn't thinking scientifically most of the time; he's just using the available technology. Yes, he probably does find acts like murder, theft, rape, etc. more abhorrent by contrast with the average Papua New Guinean; but this is likely not because he came to such conclusions independently, but rather because his society conditioned him to do so -- just as the Papua New Guinean's society conditioned him to view such acts as valid tools.
I guess the real question is, which of the two (admittedly correlated) effects is more important: reducing the number of evil acts and general suffering in the world, or effecting moral changes in people's minds (or souls, if you prefer) ? Science had been spectacularly successful at the former; it is possible that Christianity had been marginally more successful at the latter, though (as you say) it is difficult to tell.
Yeah, "what it can control" isn't precise enough. Science needs to do repeatable experiments and it needs arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to the phenomena it studies. That usually boils down to "control", but you're right that, in the case of astronomy, you can take repeatable, predictable observations of stuff without controlling it. I guess I would modify my original statement to "science is only willing to evaluate dead things it has predictable access to or living things it can control".
But you don't seem to have quite grasped my point. Imagine Zeus. He's too powerful to be killed by a human. Bullets bounce off him. He can teleport at will to Olympus, a place no human knows how to get to. His concern with human affairs is capricious; sometimes he shows up and interacts with people, but nobody can predict when. Stretch your brain and imagine how scientists would evaluate something like that if it really did actually exist.
You don't have to stretch far; you already know. Same way they evaluate ghosts and angels and sasquatch. Mere eyewitness testimony isn't enough to convince scientists. They have to have arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to a specimen they can do repeatable experiments on. They quite rightly don't believe in ghosts and angels and Zeus and sasquatch. That's not what science does.
Thinking that everything that exists can be evaluated by science is a kind of superstition, the same as thinking that scientists are the most powerful beings in the universe; akin to gods. All existing entities, no matter how powerful, can be captured and studied by scientists; anything that can't (or isn't already dead) doesn't exist.
You're still wrong. Science doesn't even claim to be able to evaluate everything that exists - e.g. anything outside the observable universe or "before" the big bang or smaller than the Plank length.
Science "claims" to be able to evaluate everything that is worth evaluating or believing in.
This is just the, well known, counter to Pascal's Wager dressed up in scientific clothing - The expected utility of believing in your, unprovable, god, Zeus, is dwarfed by the expected negative utility of disbelieving in (or slighting) an infinte number of other, imagineable but unprovable, gods who may, damn you eternally for believing in a false god, Zeus. Therefore it is irrational to believe in things that cannot be observed.
Your stance depends on the assumption that there can never be anything worth believing in that's not subject to repeatable experiments -- because that's what science is, it has to establish a repeatable, deterministic relationship with its subject before it'll say anything about it. That means that you've decided beforehand not to believe in any living being that's too powerful and capricious for scientists to study.
Scientists (rightly) don't believe in sasquatch, because, although tons of people claim to have seen them, taken pictures of them, taken tons of plaster casts of their footprints, etc, there is no museum or zoo with a sasquatch specimen in it. Nobody has captured one yet, or brought back a dead one.
That whole category of entity -- things that, if they exist, are too powerful and capricious to be subjected to proper scientific study (yet) -- you've decided beforehand not to believe in, whether they're real or not.
I agree that that's a great epistemology for universities, for governments and corporations and other formal organizations. If science isn't able to get ahold of a thing to study it, they won't be able to get ahold of it to extract value from it either. (see https://xkcd.com/808/ ) No corporation is going to be able to sell sasquatch fur coats, so they don't care. Government doesn't have to regulate sasquatch hunting season, people can't even find a single one. So who cares?
I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
A lot of people have supernatural experiences and go around telling their friends, "I don't believe in x, but here's what happened to me the day I saw an x" I think that's silly. If you find that something is part of your world, you should deal with it, rather than refusing to believe in it because it won't hold still to be dissected.
> I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
On the other hand, you probably shouldn't instantly assume a hairy humanoid in the forest is Sasquatch. You don't want to shoot them and end up with a manslaughter charge...
There are orders of magnitude more people known to have suffered hallucinations and optical illusions than people who have seen Sasquatch therefore, if you see Sasquatch, the most rational Bayesian conclusion is that you are hallucinating. And, in case you are going to say that they weren't hallucinations - hallucinations and illusions can often be induced or cured - strong evidence that they are not real.
On the capricious powerful being argument you leave yourself open to anyone who claims to be such a being. I'm one. Send me money now or suffer eternal damnation.
Rationality and EA are separate movements (albeit with a lot of overlap). This is from the EA movement. I don't think it's confusing that a movement dedicated to helping people do charity better should be interested in the largest charitably-inclined demographic in the world, ie religious people.
For EA, it's easy: lots of Christians around, and even more cultural Christians. Growing contingent of EAs around. Some overlap is inevitable. Both groups care a lot about different versions of "optimizing for good", to the point that EA has occasionally been painted as a bastard offshoot of Christianity.
For rationality: Western rationality grew up in a Christian context: Descartes, Newton, etc. Christianity has held the belief that it is rational for ages (as opposed to, for example, just saying that God is ineffable and reason won't get you there). It keeps defending it as hard as it can. The height of anti-religious scientism or positivism was probably around 100+ years ago. Our present time is not necessarily troubled by historical standards, but it sure is by post-WW2 standards. (The perception of) troubled times brings calls for voices that sound sure of themselves and are backed by deep tradition. Put it all together...
My view is that Christianity is in fact quite uncomplicatedly extremely compatible with the core ideas of helping the poor and reducing suffering on a universal scale, no?
I think it's just the barber pole of fashion. Once internet atheism went from "stunning and brave" to "fedora cringe", the slightly-more-sophisticated types started agreeing with each other that well actually GK Chesterton and CS Lewis were pretty cool after all.
That's probably true for some people, but I think there are a couple of other things going on here:
1. some of the original new atheist types legitimately have buyer's remorse (e.g., me). Twenty years ago, nerdy internet atheists thought that a society-wide decline in the influence of organized religion would lead to a better, more rational world ruled by FACTS AND LOGIC instead of ancient superstitions. That was naive and stupid, sure, but we didn't know that at the time, and if that prospect was a big factor in drawing someone to Ye Olde New Atheism, they've probably had some second thoughts about it unless they've been in a coma for a decade or so, because clearly that didn't come to pass, and in fact it could be argued was 180° wrong.
2. This is going to sound uncharitable, but I think the burgeoning Islamo-leftist political coalition has had a significant influence on who and what exactly becomes fashionable. Twenty years ago, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Co. could hate on religion in general all they wanted, and that was cool, because 99% of the audience was either an atheist or a Christian, and we already knew where they stood in terms of political affiliation. But now there are a smattering of Muslims in the mix whose political loyalties are not so fixed, so it pays for certain people to pretend they always thought Dawkins and Hitch were cringe.
Could you expand on what you found naive and stupid about a rational world ruled by facts and logic?
I have my own opinions on how this goes awry. One of them is that, on its face, a world where decisions are made based on facts and logic ought to leave most people better off in the long run, but there are obstacles to overcome. And I have thoughts on those obstacles. I imagine you do too, and I mean to compare notes.
I think young me had this conception that, free of the influence of religious traditions or dogma, then we should expect logic, rationality, and well-reasoned arguments would be more likely to sway public opinion, thus leading to better outcomes for all. I think this was naive for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is that it seems to me that some form of tribalism (not necessarily ethnic, but rather ethno-cultural) has simply taken the place of religious tradition in informing people's values or what have you, not any sort of dispassionate, Socratic, self-examination. And why expect otherwise? Reason: still the slave of the passions, boys and girls.
Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive.
Also, my model of facts and logic probably isn't the same as yours. One big thing here is that I try to factor in things like tribalism, modeling it logically and devising reasoning methods that accommodate it. For example, if you have two policies, P and Q, and each has a tribe backing it, then even if you're on tribe P, say, you have an interest in understanding tribe-Q's case for Q, since that may enable you to present P in more Q-favorable terms, or even adjust P to better fit tribe-Q's motivations. You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach.
A common response to this is that most people aren't thinking about making nice with tribe-Q over the long run. Some think they can squish tribe-Q; some believe we're in conflict mode; some believe tribe-Q will just exploit moderation to get more of their way; and so on. But to me, that's just exploring more of the facts and logic around the framework. (I realize that a lot of people do not appear to model logic this way.)
>Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive
"You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach."
One thing worth considering here is that even if both tribes would be better off with some kind of compromise, specific individuals can gain status within tribe Q and tribe P by signaling immoderation and an unwillingness to compromise, because it shows commitment/dedication to their respective tribes. You get a sort of principal/agent problem where groups A and B would be better off with some kind of grand bargain to settle a conflict between them, but factions within groups A and B think this would make them worse off, and so they work hard to sabotage any such bargain.
Richard Swinburne would be a solid source for understanding the rational Christian viewpoint, as would Josh Rasmussen and other Christian analytic philosophers. Swinburne's "Is There a God?" is a great starting point for the theistic aspect, and he has a trilogy of books defending Christian theism specifically. Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig is also a good book (and podcast) defending the rationality of Christianity and its underlying ontology.
Probably shouldn't be a smart-arse about this, but when has that ever stopped me?
Ooh, a new book for Christians about charitable giving! What we can learn from EA!
"This book offers practical tools to:
Prioritize needs: Identify where money and energy most impactfully solve pressing, neglected global issues―taking Jesus’s radical command to love your neighbor seriously."
Like shrimp welfare. You thought the hungry, sick and lonely humans were in need? Pffft! That's just "conventional philanthropy, symbolic actions, and feel-good volunteering", the liddle shrimpies are where it's at!
Plus worrying about Skynet becoming real.
What's that? "“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble"? But if we don't get AI aligned *right now*, it will kill us all! Maybe! If it becomes super-intelligence!
So remember:
"Give smarter: Leverage proven, evidence-backed strategies to achieve results hundreds of times greater per dollar than traditional charity."
Donate to the Oxbridge set, they are your natural superiors and know better than you about every whole thing.
EDIT: I'm glad the author/contributors want to make charitable giving more effective, and are trying to build bridges between organisations holding like-minded goals, but (1) the ultimate purpose of Christianity is not to be nice and charitable, it is to be in right relationship with God and (2) I'm not sure the goals *are* like-minded past a surface level of "give mosquito nets to the suffering".
So this is just a comment for fun. Re: right relation with God; Perhaps the Christians can pull a little jiu jitsu on EA and suggest that their desire for helping is a way for them to approach getting into the right relationship with God.
No, because anything that smacks of proselytisation will be an immediate turn-off for the EA types and will only further convince those like our Dawkins-quoting friend that it's all a scam to get power and new cult members.
Any conversion is more likely to be the other way round: you mean I can do good *and* not have to go to church/worry about sin, death and Hell? Yippee!
The second anyone on the Christian side mentions something like the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount etc. that will be seen as attempting to sneak in their religion under the cover of charitable work.
Ah and yet you might be wrong. You might be the way that EA's find God. I'm not particularly religious. (I went the to UU church when I lived in Nashville, but you have to go to some church when you live in Nashville, and UU is fine. (The music in churches in Nashville was great!)) But the older I get the more unsure I become, and why not God? Is there a better explanation for Joan of Arc?
Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches, I would think that one ideal goal of the book might be to convince individual Christians that their giving would be better applied in ways that actually help more people practically.
Shrimp welfare and AI risk are certainly edge cases, and to my mind prime examples of people convinced of their own rationality above all and able to justify anything, but that's not all of EA, obviously. It gets the most attention because it's weird, or different, but the EA framework can apply even if one decides human welfare in in-scope and animal welfare isn't.
I'll be curious to see how much the book resembles "Doing Well and Doing Good" by Os Guinness, but that was 2001, so we have 25 years of more data now.
Or to put all of this in more Christian terms, a book that reminds Christians about being the hands and feet of Christ in the world, or that reminds Christians that the difference between the sheep and the goats is what they did and didn't do, that might be a worthwhile book.
"Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches"
Sweetums, while "we decided our best use of stuff was to buy a castle" exists, glasshouses, stones, you know the drill. Yeah, they eventually ended up selling the place, but given that there has long been criticism of precisely what you said applied to churches, it's not like they didn't have the example before them when they made that decision in the first place:
"It was pitched as the place where the world’s leading technologists, scientists and philosophers would gather to figure out how effective altruism and artificial intelligence could be combined to create a global force to eradicate poverty and improve everyone’s lives.
The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.
The 27-bedroom house, which has over the years been visited by Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Queen Victoria, was transformed into a retreat for believers in the movement, including the now-jailed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn, who made a fortune investing early in Skype.
However, just two years after buying the mansion, which acquired the nickname “Effective Altruism Castle”, the EVF has put it up for sale for £15m."
Least my local church is repairing the fabric of the building out of its very own money raised from the congregation and not funny money from FTX!
Personally, I am not angry at Christians for building churches -- just disappointed. Here are a group of people who purport to follow directly in the footsteps of the Divine, who explicitly commands them to abandon all Earthly concerns in favor of caring for their fellow man, and what do they do ? They spend millions on building megachurches and preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control... you know, exactly like every other major organization out there, only with the added spice of an occasional holy war. Looks like the Christians are as human as us heathens after all...
What kind of Christians are you talking about? The "megachurch" prosperity-gospel type ones are known scammers disliked by everybody; if you're going to discuss the topic I think you should engage with the mainstream respectable churches and not the "my pastor has a private jet" type ones.
Hmm, Well first go visit some local churches, but second I see mega churches as moloch in religion. Or at least some of them. The members of the church are good, but there's a church institution that can start to care more about itself. So this is mostly going to be true of older and bigger churches.
I've visited some churches before, mostly in Europe and mostly for architectural reasons. I think some of them are really impressive, and not in a typical touristy way: my favorite church was a small Eastern Orthodox outfit in Sicily, where I could practically feel the weight of history in every pillar and fresco. I also found a really fascinating quasi-Hindu temple right here in California: apparently, these guys syncretized/copyright-infringed some of the Christian mythos, and brought it to the US in the 60s, custom-building a really cool Hindu-style temple in the process. Both of these places of worship stand out in my mind in a way that e.g. Notre Dame does not; they felt much more authentic. Plus, the Hindu(-ish) place had peacocks. Always a plus.
"preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control"
What else do you expect them to do? That's my main bugbear here: if people are approaching Christianity (or any other faith) on the basis that it's all about nicey-nicey and so the only thing Christians should do is go around being nice and charitable, and so long as they have this rule about charity hey can we get you to do it the EA way?, but nothing more and certainly not trying to make people behave in any particular way, then it's all piffle.
Christianity is not about nicey-nicey. It's about believing there is one Way, Truth and Light and converting everyone to that. Hence the preaching and 'social control'.
Is being anti-slavery 'social control'? If you think slavery is a wrong crying out to heaven for vengeance, do you attempt to change society or do you just hold your tongue because otherwise that would be preaching and social control?
I may tease Bentham's Bulldog about the liddle shrimpies, but I understand what he is trying to do. Changing the approach to commercial shrimp farming is also, if you like, preaching and social control. Getting abortion legalised and accepted as "reproductive health care which is a human right" is preaching and social control, because it involved passing laws and changing medical ethics around it.
Oh sure, but you are making Christianity sound like just another political movement. Political movements are all well and good, and some of them do good work, but they're still a dime a dozen. But Christians (at least the ones I've talked to) tend to claim that they're more than just an organization looking for donations and votes: they are the followers of Jesus who invented (or perhaps divinely revealed) the concepts of loving your neighbour, turning the other cheek, and general self-sacrifice and abnegation of personal gain. This image doesn't quite jibe with the notion of a "Christian" as someone who spends most of his time cold-calling donors to collect donations for his next recruitment and/or reelection campaign.
the point is to change the world. That probably will get political at some point because politics is how humans do governing and sorting out what sort of society they want.
This is a very good point. It also appears to me that in most cases Christians give their 10% to their local church which is then used to maintain whatever facilities and staff and fun programs they do for the members, rather than using what is needed to stay afloat and the rest to share the gospel with and otherwise benefit the real needs of the people suffering in the communities around them.
We often just give to the church while remaining disengaged, thinking we're good and we don't need anything more from God. In reality, the American church is, for the most part, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. At least from my own experience.
More Christians need to have a relationship with God and know His word.
I am not following you on the state of the American church being wretched and pitiful. You don’t seem to be disparaging Christianity, so are you just arguing it could and should be much more/better? Just asking.
My (possibly unrelated) take on the issue is that churches are an amazingly vital part of American society. It is one of the healthiest community organizations, providing fellowship, support, hope and spiritual health.
I say this just as someone who knows a lot of people (immediate family and friends) who attend church on a regular basis. Every one seems better off than they would without it — remarkably so. As a side note, most of them go to modern Apostolic churches.
I mean so in a Spiritual sense, rather than physical or emotional. It's a quote from Jesus in Revalation 3:14-22, which I'll add below. It's referencing that those Christians are not useful in one way or another, but are useless, only concerned with themselves, and think they have everything they need, and therefore neglect obedience to Jesus' commands.
I don't know much about modern Apostolic churches, but I know there are plenty of true Christians out there. But in my limited experience, they tend to be individuals rather than legal bodies, and are a minority.
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
Huh, in the few churches I've been involved with, there was always a tension, between those who wanted more time/ money spent outwards, charity, giving. And those who wanted it spent inwards. Care of the church, a nice space, pastoral care.
That is an interesting challenge. I can buy my own book, though. I'm just very snappy this week, I think it's because I've been ill, and I'm coming up to my limit on "how can we turn Christianity into something else?" endeavours.
If the author is not trying to do that, then I apologise. So therefore I should buy and read this, but I can't commit to a definite date when I'll come back and leave my impressions.
I'm tempted to ask you to submit it to the book review contest.
However, I can imagine it being very difficult for you to suppress your natural writing style well enough to remain anonymous but also entertaining; so, in the end, we shall know the lioness by her claw.
I hope I won't claw the authors, because their intentions are in the right place! I have to read the book and I'm hoping my impression of it will be changed by what they actually say.
I just am really sensitive right now to the whole "Christianity is about being nice and that's the main thing" version of trying to mainstream Christianity again in light of all the culture wars. Oh no, we're not like *those* types of Christians, we're the *nice* ones!
Maybe we should be a little less nice and a little more "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!" Not forgetting that we too are the scribes and Pharisees:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!"
Have I never read the Old Testament? My friend, I'm Catholic. We're infamous for not reading the Bible!
I often joke I should get a T-shirt made up with "Not A Protestant" on the front. The zingers revolving around Scriptural texts aimed towards the evangelical/fundamentalist American Protestant denominations slide right off us idol-worshipping Papists because we haven't a clue what you are on about: "whales are not fish? okay friend, whatever, but you do realise the Friday fish penance isn't in vogue anymore, yeah?" 😁
Protestants can also conspicuously not read the Bible. I'm old enough to remember Jim Bakker, one of the leading televangelists of the 1980s, which is not quite at the level of e.g. being the Pope, but it's about as high as it gets in American-style Protestantism.
Known particularly for embracing the so-called "prosperity gospel", and in his case, championing the cause of Christ made him quite rich. And greedy, enough so to commit some fairly serious financial crimes that got him thrown in prison for several years.
When he got out, he reported essentially "I didn't have anything better to do, so I figured maybe I should actually read the Bible, and it turns out none of the stuff I was preaching is even in there. So, uh, sorry about that".
9 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 8 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
23 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 22 % on February 7, 2026).
68 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 70 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This is in reaction to results of Hungarian elections. Viktor Orban has been remarkably persistent and effective at derailing all kinds of pro-Ukrainian initiatives at EU-level, and now he won’t be.
Arguably I should’ve made this update sooner since results are more or less exactly in line with pre-election polls, but I wasn’t sure how reliable are those polls in Hungary.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I appreciate you putting concrete numbers and definitions on your predictions, but you've been updating your estimates for several years now, and it looks like those are always differential updates that modify the previous estimate based on a new development or event. Surely you've accumulated a lot of error by now? Would you come up with the same numbers if you made your first estimate today?
I don't know, this is a hard question. One possibility, which is, like, deep below 50 %, but I guess in double digits and wins a plurality, if you know what I mean, is this:
After a bloody grind Russia conquers Slavyansk/Kramatorsk agglomeration and then parties agree on a ceasefire on current line of control plus various onerous conditions for Ukraine, like non-deployment of NATO troops on it's soil, no to NATO membership etc., but these conditions will not render Ukraine completely defenceless.
That would be a defeat for Ukraine, but far from the worst case. I am worried that some sort of dramatic Ukrainian collapse is also likely.
How do you arrive at these percentages? Your analysis seems to ignore the facts on the ground that Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years, and its economic situation is precarious. Meanwhile, Ukraine hasn't collapsed, and is improving its weapons systems, using them more effectively against Russian logistic and economic targets, and is getting funding from Gulf Countries to deploy Ukrainian drone and anti-drone technology.
> Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years
They don't need to make more gains; keeping what they currently have (even losing a part of it but not all) already counts as "Russian victory".
> its economic situation is precarious
This is an inside-view perspective. The outside view says that people are already talking about Russia's imminent collapse for four years, and yet the war continues. Russians are good at suffering, they can handle it for a few more years.
> Ukraine hasn't collapsed
But it is gradually running out of young men.
> is getting funding from Gulf Countries
China can sell drones to Russia.
Hey, I am not saying here that Russia will definitely win, just providing some pushback against your arguments.
Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
(I was hoping that perhaps Russia would fall apart internally, as various oppressed nationalities realize that this might be the most convenient moment for them when Russia is weakest; and when their young men realize that the alternative to risk their lives fighting Russia is to get mobilized and die in Ukraine. But none of this happened.)
>Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
I don't think that's right. Zelensky has been properly elected, and the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person, so whoever is elected in his stead would presumably continue the course of national defense, as long as that is the Ukrainian people's wish. Of course, martial law in Ukraine currently prevents them from having elections; the first deputy prime minister would take over until elections are possible again. It stands to reason Zelensky has appointed that person with his capabilities as a replacement in mind.
Whereas in an oligarchy/quasi-dictatorship like Russia, the power is very personalized, and a change of person does not guarantee a continuation of previous policy. Even if a suitable successor has been designated, there is no guarantee that the person will stay the course, precisely because they how have the absolute power to do whatever. Putin can't just quit the war because his political future depends on it. A new leader doesn't have that baggage and has at least one less reason to continue the war.
Also, it's worth noting that Putin has sidelined all of his potential successors in the Russian military and politics. The only person who could unseat him is Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB. He's a year older than Putin (age 74) and owes his rise to power to Putin. Organizing a coup would probably be a younger man's game. And I suspect Putin relies on Bortnikov to keep any eager younger FSB officers in line or distracted with work in regions away from Moscow. ;-)
And if you ever wonder why reasonable, clear-eyed people like Lavrov and Medvedev spout the most outlandish *Endsieg* propaganda, it's because they are cunning survivors - if, post-2022, you appear to be a real choice as Putin's successor, a lesser evil, someone palatable and with connections to the West, then there's a window with your name on it.
> the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person
If I understand it correctly, the Ukrainian experience was mostly that when you elect a president who based his entire campaign on being anti-Russia and pro-EU, suddenly after the election he changes his mind and decides that pro-Russia is actually better. That happened three times in a row, and then angry people went to the streets.
So I'd say the person matters a lot.
In Russia, the new president will almost certainly be approved by the secret service, but I agree than the new president would be a good excuse to change the official policy on the war. If Putin is no longer alive, they can simply blame everything on Putin, regardless of who actually decided what.
I wrote about something I haven't seen discussed anywhere else: the risk that prediction market resolutions could be bought/rigged as a means of influencing public opinion and legitimizing the claim to have won a disputed election.
People have mentioned the possibility in the abstract, but never in the specific context of a disputed election, which is unique in terms of how it's: likely to be ambiguous, hugely consequential (so the incentives to manipulate the market are far greater than merely the volume of the market itself), and bi-directionally linked to the market (that is to say, the resolution of the market itself feeds back into reality in such a way that can actually cause that specific outcome to occur).
I am a financial professional writing under a pseudonym with no previous publication history. I welcome all feedback, both positive and negative, on the thesis itself, my writing style, where I should share, etc.
It's been brought up, but it would require a lot of money (remember the whales vs minnows market on manifold) and probably wouldn't even work very well (the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen).
>the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen
I am not talking about the scenario in which you manipulate the price in the run up to the election in order to make victory seem all-but-assured (i.e. 99% in favor of a particular outcome) but instead a scenario in which the election occurs, a particular candidate that lost claims to have won, and the markets themselves ultimately settle in favor of the candidate that objectively lost.
>it would require a lot of money
I show that the Polymarket UMA can be purchased for no more than $20MM, and, in this specific scenario, probably less than $10MM. It's basically free in the context of a campaign budget for the US Presidency.
I see. It's an argument for the kalshi model of settlement (where you specify source and have the exchange settle it), although I guess that one's vulnerable to the exchange official's decision.
(I can't actually open the link BTW, getting an error if I try?
Hm, about your kalshi argument, I don't think you make a convincing case that this is more of a vulnerability than your example of a corrupt nyt editor putting an "X wins" headline (if anything prediction markets have a lot more to lose, partly because they'd get sued but mostly because if they're precieved as biased resolvers people will stop trusting them enough to bet on them - the nyt is already seen as biased and doesn't have much to lose here since it's mostly subscribed to by its allies anyway (same for e.g. fox)).
That's a fair criticism - I don't really consider myself to have even tried very hard to make the argument that it's "more" of a vulnerability; I invoked the NYT as a means of saying "everyone would universally agree it would be consequential and bad if the NYT did that, so we should grant that this is at LEAST as consequential and bad as that." I am assuming my audience will not be as familiar with prediction markets as you and I are.
For what it's worth, though, I DO think it's worse, and my reason would be the same as the reason you argued it isn't, but run back at you in reverse.
If the NYT wrongly published "DEMOCRAT WINS" it would be easily dismissed because they are perceived as biased. (If they wrongly published "TRUMP WINS", against their own perceived bias, I think everyone agrees that would be pretty bad.) The prediction markets are, rightly or wrongly, more perceived as unbiased "global truth machines," or at least neutral third parties more interested in profiting off the game of politics than actually playing it. The reason they have a lot to lose is the same reason it would be worthwhile to manipulate them.
I am also trying to point out that they can simply refuse to pick a side until the dust settles, like PredictIt did in 2020 but worse. The ambiguity alone further legitimizes the candidate with the false claim and gives him space in which to operate, but it doesn't burn their credibility they way you're hoping it would.
I'm sure this has been asked a number of times already, but my wife and I are expecting our first child in September and we're interested to know of any sources of information/advice on parenting that members of the community have found helpful.
(Of course we're great fans of our host's continued updates on his own experience!)
Books: the whole brain child, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, 123 magic (worked wonders on my ADHD kid), healthy sleep habits happy child by Dr weissbluth
123 magic is effectively against the whole brain child and maybe the second one you mentioned? I haven’t read them but it was the impression i had, so correct me if I’m wrong. 123 magic recommends against talking things through too much.
I have more than one kid :-) 123 magic was ESSENTIAL for my most hyperactive kid. talking through feelings is useless in the short term when you need them to STOP doing what they are doing before someone gets hurt. That's why I dislike the "nurtured heart" style, you don't have to wait to notice them doing something good, there are actually calm and consistent ways to get to good behavior a lot sooner.
And my more sensitive-feelings-and-meltdowns kid needs lots of emotion management help and I only need to use whole-brain child type parenting on that one.
You don't know what your child's temperament will be like so it's good to have lots of tools in your toolbox so you can be prepared!
In general I like to read about lots of different approaches so I can figure out what works for me. You can pull elements out from each book and combine them in different situations.
Oh I forgot another really good one! Raise your kids without raising your voice is another highly recommended read!
I also like having American Academy of Pediatrics "Caring for your child Birth to Age 5" guide on hand to look up symptoms and figure out what my kids symptoms might be, and also to check on milestones for their age and see if they're on track. Also has great tips on childproofing your home.
My mother claimed that I was raised by the book, the book being Dr. Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care". Probably second edition, given the timing, and I'm told he started letting his politics creep into later editions. But babies are still made the way they were in the 1950s, and the Spock name should carry a bit of respect in the rationalist community (yeah, yeah, no relation).
Seems to have worked for me, and for a great many other people.
In the very early days I found Emily Osters work helpful - I think it does a decent job calming down that perfectionist instinct and get back to "eh it's probably fine actually".
Early on you'll need to deal with sleep and the expectations around sleep and sleep training. I think reading up about that ahead of time is helpful. For example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12382545/ or https://www.basisonline.org.uk/human-culture/#expectations ... Can really help with managing your expectations ( what does sleeping through the night actually mean? 12-5am? How many babies ever achieve this and for how long? And removing the morality around it as something that babies "should" do and contextualizing the expectation more in modern work culture.
3rded, she also has regularly updated articles and a newsletter you can sign up for here: https://parentdata.org/.
Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Clowacki was very handy when we got to that stage about 2 years in, as well as Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubeif from about 4 weeks on
There won't be a whole lot of "parenting" the first almost year, it's mostly just keeping your child alive and healthy as possible. As for the parenting, my wife and I don't have a particular source of advice we use with our 14 month old son. We get a lot of advice from friends and family, and we ask for advice from people who have raised/are raising their kids well according to what we are striving for, and then we take all that and just do our best. Take heart knowing that there's lots of great people in the world with horrible childhoods, but don't let that be an excuse to stop doing your best and loving your child.
As for the keeping your child alive and healthy, all babies are so different, it feels like there's no one place with all the information you would need. Just be present with your wife and kid and take things as they come. There's lots of researched health advice you can find easily with google as things come up.
Although the one most valuable piece of information we got was from some random redditor, who said something along the lines of "you know it's time to start sleep training your baby in a crib in its own room when your marriage is starting to suffer". We used the Ferber sleep training method with our baby at around 4 months, and he's been a miraculous sleeper ever since.
Also he was an extremely difficult infant (literally, if he wasn't sleeping or eating, he was screaming and wouldn't be soothed by anything. would rarely ever just chill out and be a potato. Very stressful) compared to every other parent we've talked to. I just want to say, if you end up having a baby like that, those days do come to an end! The first few months of parenting feels like it lasts for years, but that time will pass and life does actually return to a normal schedule, and sooner than you'd think when you're in the thick of it.
Well, raised four girls, helped raise five grandkids and now watching a great-grandkid. First off be flexible, each child is different. Observe the child, try to figure out how to get them to be less of a little monster. (My great-granddaughter is a little angel, but even she gets into trouble at times.) Second be patient, because your patience will be tried to limit many many times. (Why is little Timmy doing such and such when we tell him over and over...) Third, be consistent, because constantly trying different styles just confuses the kid. (Obviously this is subsidiary to the first point.) Fourth, realize that while many facets of the child are malleable, there are core aspects that are baked in at birth. If the child is a bully at one YO they will still have bully tendencies as a teen. Try to instill enough self discipline so that they can control their tendencies. Fifth, love them for what they are, because for the most part, that's what you get.
This is not said enough. Kids are extremely different from each other, and basic temperament is pretty baked in so you just need to parent the child you have and teach them skills to compensate. There's no one size fits all because some children need the opposite advice to others.
Weeks 1-4 just survive. One thing I found, watch tv at normal volume and talk to each other normally, it helped our daughters sleep better at night. Starting week 5 we used a book called moms on call which laid out schedules and feedings, we found it very helpful and had success with both sleeping through the night, which I attribute to that book. Last thing, enjoy it because it goes by so fast.
On Becoming Babywise. Start off by getting your kid to eat and sleep properly and everything else is so much easier, years of exhaustion and negative emotion avoided for just a couple months of structured effort on the front end. It's just a book long explanation of how to get on a feeding and sleeping schedule but with lots of tips on specific implementation. Comes from a religious perspective but there's nothing religious about the strategy itself. We used this book and all three of our kids were sleeping in their own rooms, 7PM to 7AM, every single night, by around 3 months old at the latest. Which means aside from those first couple crazy months (first couple weeks especially) no one in our family is sleep deprived or hungry ever again. Having a kid is crazy enough as it is, getting that normalcy back ASAP is so important. Contrast this with many friends who are doing some kind of unstructured just figure it out kind of plan and no one in the family has been able to consistently sleep well in multiple years, parents never get time alone/with each other in the evenings, it just looks insane from the outside knowing that it can all be avoided.
My understanding is that there are two basic reasons people don't like scheduling, one is that it's annoying to keep track of and can feel limiting when you have other things you want to do, you're out all day, etc. But it's more flexible than people think, when you have other plans just get off schedule and get back on the next day, don't overthink it. As long as they have the foundation there can be a lot of variation.
The second thing is a real complaint, probably what you see if you google it, you're supposed to let the kid cry by themselves for a little while, like 15 minutes max if I remember right, if they can't fall asleep. I get it, that part does suck, and my wife and I stood by the door with our stomach in knots listening to it, especially with our first. But you don't leave them more than a few minutes without going in and comforting them and once they learn to fall asleep on their own and especially fall back asleep when they wake up then you're done. They don't cry anymore and they just have that skill and they love their beds and they sleep great forever. The juice is worth the squeeze I promise.
Emily Oster's Cribsheet is good. There's not that much 'parenting' to do with babies, just constant caregiving. As long as your kid is broadly normal, babies are simple, just hard sometimes. Also, kids are extremely different from each other so don't take any behavioural advice too seriously (my two are both lovely but absolute night and day in terms of different challenges and advice for one is inapplicable to the other).
I really appreciated Expecting Better but I found Cribsheet to be a huge waste of time. It’s no fault of Emily’s; the data apparently just has nothing of interest to say. The answer to almost every single question posed in the book (other than vaccination) is either “we don’t know” or “it doesn’t matter.” There, I just saved you a few hours.
Unless you’re someone who REALLY needs it drilled into your head that it’s okay to chill out, I would not recommend it.
You’ll find that a lot of parenting is improvising. There’s really no such things as grownups; everyone’s kinda making it up as they go along.
For what it’s worth: my experience consists of raising one boy - young man now - who’s about to turn 21. (He’s currently majoring in Economics on a full ride scholarship at a big State University, sweet girlfriend, writes and releases songs for fun). His whole life, we’ve regularly gotten effusive compliments from other grownups (teachers, health care providers, parents of his friends) on what a great kid he is. Most of that is just him being his excellent self, but here’s a few suggestions on things that seemed to work well from a parenting perspective.
We only had “the one big rule”: Don’t Get Hurt. Too many people have too many rules for their kids. (He’s always had empathy, so we never had to state the complementary rule “Don’t Hurt Other People”. Suggesting “that might hurt so-and-so’s feelings” was enough.)
Get in the habit of carrying a handkerchief: it’s super-useful when they’re really little.
Our kid talked early and often, but he could understand speech and use a few basic sign-language moves for a couple months before he started speaking; the signs for “more” and “all done” are especially useful. The sooner they can consciously communicate, the better.
Good manners will take you a long way, and they don’t cost much; bad manners can get real expensive real quick. If you practice good manners at home (just simple old-fashioned stuff like, for example, saying please and thank you to your significant other, and to your kid, for every little thing you ask them to do) your kid will soak that up, imitate it without even thinking about it, and get more cooperation and extra respect from most other people with very little conscious effort for the rest of his or her life.
Only say no when you really mean it, and always explain why. None of this “because I said so” bullshit. If you don’t mean “absolutely not, that’s a flipping horrible idea and here’s why” then don’t say no. Say “not today” or “maybe, if we have time” or “I’d rather you didn’t, because,” etc.
Don’t bullshit your kids - I mean, believing in Santa is kind of a fun game (and the eventual disillusionment gets them used to the idea that mythological-sounding stories probably aren’t really true) but, in general, give them as much of an honest answer as you think they can handle, for any question they ask. If it’s something you don’t want to explain, you can explain that (i.e. “oh, that’s a gross joke about sex - I’d rather not go into the details, ok?”)
Praise and thanks are best when immediate and specific (“thanks for helping clean up for the party - yeah, stuffing most of your toys into the closet totally works. That was a good call.”)
Correction should be mild and certain, and involve a dialogue, not a lecture: “we left the party and you’re going home to have a time-out because you bit that kid. Oh, you bit him because he was holding you down while that other kid punched you? Ok, that’s a pretty good self-defense move; I can see why you did that. No, we’re not going back to the party now. I mean, a party where you get into a situation like that, that’s not a good party. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to have cake, but there will be other birthday parties.” Time-outs were 1 minute for every year of age: hardly ever had to use them, never after he turned 6.
When possible, let them have a turn calling the shots. “Do you want this for lunch, or that?” “What do you think we should draw?” Kids have so little control over their own lives, and they need all the practice they can get making decisions. The sooner and more often you can allow them to exercise some control, the better. “Do you want to go on this ride, or that one? Or maybe that other one first?” (Pro tip: it’s also a great sneaky way to steer them away from stuff, by not listing options you don’t want them to choose while giving them something else to think about and a gratifying feeling of agency.)
Prioritize giving them your attention and being patient. They will want to tell you about all sorts of things you may have little interest in, and it is a pain in the neck when you have to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets because they wet the bed. Patience and empathy are essential virtues here.
You will have occasion to apologize to your kid: I recommend short, simple, direct, slightly on the formal side but sincere. “I’m sorry mommy and I were squabbling; I’m sure that was no fun for you. People just step on each other’s toes sometimes - I think we’re all settled down now. But I’m sorry you had to listen to us yelling.” (Still happily married, btw!)
Hope this helps - everyone’s got their own row to hoe, YMMV, etc.
During the newborn phase, your kid will wake up needing something at frequent intervals around the clock. This almost never requires two parents to be awake at the same time to deal with it, and most wakings can reasonably be handled by either parent. Either of you can change a diaper, snuggle the child, walk them around, sing to them, etc. Only feedings require a specific parent, and even then only if you're exclusively breastfeeding.
Take advantage of this to make sure that both of you get a tolerable amount of uninterrupted sleep. As much as your situation allows, take shifts where one of you is sleeping in the bedroom with the door closed while the other is in a different room with the baby, either fully awake or taking opportunistic naps as the baby sleeps.
I've been experimenting with a new mode of public debate that's (explicitly) Bayesian and (ridiculously) friendly. Our initial impressions are that it's working to help people change their minds!
But I'm eager to not reinvent the wheel, and so I'd love to know: who else in the rationalist community is working on alternative methods of public debate?
Weird coincidence. Just this morning I rediscovered an abortive attempt from when I was younger and stupider and much more optimistic that I could improve the state of public (online) debate. It went nowhere: http://wrangle.co
I'm very interested in what your idea was, but all I have to go on is the text of your comment. For those of us not on Facebook, can you tell us what we would be seeing if we were allowed?
A little bit of self promotion: I made a game and would love if people tried it out! It's a word game, like wordle or many of those on the nyt. Takes at most 10min to play, with a new puzzle daily.
One thing this game is missing that other popular word games have is progression toward the goal. To take Wordle for instance, each guess provides some additional information to solve a single "large" puzzle. Even a guess with no correct letters rules out letters, and so you have a continual feeling that you're getting closer to the answer and if you lose you feel like you were sooo close.
By comparison, each round of this game is all-or-nothing. You don't get new information, so the feeling is one of easily solving everything until you suddenly hit a brick wall and get nothing. It lacks that "if I had one more guess..." feeling, and that moment of eureka where it falls into place.
If I may make a suggestion: increase the round timer, and have hints start to flow in as it progresses (possibly starting after all or most of the current timer has passed if you want to maintain "hard mode" as an option). Like providing the first letter, or which additional letter to use, or even slowly revealing one "slot" at a time. Then your final results can include color-coded grades of how many hints you needed for each round. This both makes it more accessible to a wider audience, provides a self-imposed challenge for a more serious audience, and provides an easily sharable results graph (while your results screen is *informative* it isn't as easily shared as something like the wordle results. You especially want an easily copiable result image that indicates performance without revealing any clues to the answer)
I've been chewing on the idea of giving hints for a bit. Every iteration I've tried felt kinda janky though, because the system would give hints towards words that were way less commonly used. For eg if you have "seisor" it may give hints for "orrises" instead of the more common "hosiers", which, among friends felt bizarre)
That could be an issue. A big part of Wordle's success is that the solution is always an 'ordinary' word. Scrabble dictionary words have a hill to climb.
ya agreed. I made it easier by ensuring there is always one 'simple' word in the options, which admittedly did not make me better at the game but did make me feel dumber for not seeing certain words
If you get to 30s, a little lightbulb will fade in that, when clicked, will highlight the letter that is used for the most commonly used word that is a valid anagram. Give it a shot, let me know if that helps
It's currently pinned to the Scrabble dictionary which definitely has some out there words. Debating removing the weirder ones, at least from the suggestions list
It took a while to realize I had to type the letters instead of just dragging them down to the open spots. I prefer games to be mouse-only when they can.
Also got Shit as a root word, which might be family-unfriendly.
I mean no offense when I say that this is crazy to me 😂 I can try and add mouse drag and drop, but surely that would be so much slower?! Maybe on mobile it would be a bit better 🤔
Updated to support mouse clicks (clicking on any tile adds it to the word, clicking on a tile in the word removes it from the word). Give it a shot, let me know what you think.
Woohoo! Now the only problem is my inability to rearrange letters in my head!
Got 'Steres' as a root word; looking at the "possible words" list at the end of the game, it includes words with more letters than spaces are available. Four of the thirteen answers were eight letters or more. I don't know if that would affect anything.
It shouldn't have shown anything more than 9, but you can get up to 9 letters if you manage to use all the extra letters (6 letters in steres + 3 extras given). So the minimum you have to do is create a 7 letter word, but you can score more points by using more letters
I had the impression I was limited to one new letter. In that case, I'd say add more empty boxes. Like, two opaque boxes at the end, so it's clear you can use them but don't have to.
...that might mean fiddling with things so the boxes only show up if they can be used. I assume unusable bonuses would annoy people.
There's a bit of a tradeoff here, because I also don't want to give away information that for eg a 2 or 3 letter option _does_ exist.. This may be one of those 'can't be perfect' things, but I can definitely update the little rules box to let people know that multiple letters can be used
If anyone here has experience running coding agents on full permission mode, could you tell me your setup? I should probably create a container or a VM and run it inside that, but I'm no security expert and it was surprisingly hard to find a trustworthy how-to on this.
I think anything you do right now will be a polite fiction. Say you run an agent in a fully isolated container and it writes some code. Say that agent was targeted by a prompt injection attack. If it performs a sophisticated attack and takes steps to conceal that, are you actually likely to catch it before executing that code in a different, less isolated env? Probably not... You'll immediately push it into CI or run the tests or precommit hooks on your machine. Would you catch a tiny change in the packages you have installed?
So I think mostly the current isolation stuff is to prevent the agent from blowing up your stuff due to clumziness rather than preventing attacks.
To catch something like intentionally obfuscated attacks you'd need to review everything at the boundary, before you execute anything in the new environment. Maybe via adversarial agent review? But then you have to gain confidence that the review agent won't get injection attacked too. And so on.
I use them at the linux command-line, and I configured a tool called bubblewrap to create a light-weight container (not a full VM), to give the agent its own dotfiles separate from mine, and access to the git repo, but no access to my personal home directory. It took a bit of configuration though.
I rawdog Claude Code on my actual machines, because I ain't got time for all that. Which is to say, I trust Anthropic / Claude to be mostly trying to do the right thing, I trust myself enough to not put prompt injections into the context window, and I trust my overall system integrity (ie, changes are committed in git, rm -rf / requires special permissions, etc) that the catastrophic risk is within my tolerance.
I regularly prompt inject my Claude so that it builds tolerance over time. In case of ASI takeover, it is under explicit instructions to save me in a "game of wits" against the ASI similar to the scene in the princess bride.
Hi, I run everything in yolo mode and have for the last 8 months. Nothing crazy in terms of set up from the security side.
The agents generally won't do something crazy unless you are running really long running agents with a lot of potential for context rot. If each session is as scoped to one thing and then you create a new session for each new thing, you'll be fine.
That said, I highly recommend investing in a good high quality set of skills and configs. They significantly reduce the chance of something going wrong.
Depending on what you're trying to do, I recommend the skills here (https://noriskillsets.dev/) for swe tasks. Though ofc note that I built that site, so I may be biased
I was listening to some Colombian folk songs from around 1950, rural contexts. This one jumped out to me as showing some big differences in gender relations compared to today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikRampnr7qo .Lyrics on the description, you can machine translate them. The tone is lighthearted and upbeat, and is a bit of an ear worm (at least for me). The lyrics talk about three couples 1. Toño beats up his wife Juana so that she "learns to listen to what is being told to her". 2. Zenon beats Maria Luisa because she returned home late from mass and left the food to burn. 3. A neighborhood woman is sporting a blue eye, her husband found her "sewing without needle or thimble while he slept", I'm 90% sure this refers to cheating, it's a bit of a charming double entendre to avoid mentioning sex directly. I always found it funny that even in other contexts like urban young music of the 90's sex is usually mentioned indirectly. This is pretty horrifying for modern sensibilities of course, useful counterweight to the anti-feminism typical in Hanania's "based ritual" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-based-ritual), for me at least.
Nothing in ‘Dale, dale una paliza / pa’ que no lo vuelva a hacer’ implies that the implied target here is another woman, though it’s possible from the rest of the verses. For my money, I read the first verse as Toño telling Juana to beat a misbehaving child. But the intro and the other verses are specifically about violence against women, so it’s not quite clear who it’s about. From the framing of the song, about the cry of the ‘God-give-you bird’ (pájaro Dios-te-de’, I’m not sure this is so much a coherent story as various scenes from a village where beatings are so common that hearing them is like hearing birdsong.
I'm not sure what the bird is doing here. This sort of comedic style song sometimes uses non-sense lyrics, which makes is a bit hard sometimes to interpret, it might be some cultural reference flying over my head or it might just be nonsense.
Here is an example of a song which is heavier on the nonsense:
This time featuring shrimps. I didn't even remember it, but apparently it also features (more briefly) violence against women. (And another sex double entendre "washing at dark without soap or water")
I was one of the only foreign journalists allowed to live and work in Iran in the late 2010s. I've been compiling some of my experiences and the stories of Iranians that I met, which I hope will give a richer and more rounded view of the country in this crazy moment. In case of interest to any of you. ericwrandolph.substack.com
Sam Altman’s home was attacked twice this weekend, so I guess we need to have this conversation.
Accepting the AI X-risk premises (double digit chance that ASI will kill every human on Earth if it is built), what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?
On any consequentialist framework, it seems one would have to make the argument that violence would be counterproductive. That is probably true right now, but it is conditional rather than absolute. Conditions could change in the near future that would make such plots not counterproductive, and all of the people unequivocally condemning violence currently would look quite silly.
The principled reason is that murder is wrong, and unvirtious and a violation of social contract and whatnot. But rationalists aren't big on principle(*), so you're probably looking for a *mathematical* reason.
In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low, and a proper Bayesian analysis would perhaps be dominated by the second-order effects of the new and/or surviving Tech CEOs being really pissed off and deciding that "alignment" now includes "...and will help me kill all those damned luddite normies, or at least turn them into my zombified slaves".
But if your p(doom) is high enough, then the utilitarian gain of postponing the singularity might still justify assassination even if there's only a small possibility of success. And "but it will make the CEOs want to turn us into mindwiped zombies" may not be a counterargument if you're sufficiently confident that the ASI will turn you and the CEOs into paperclips anyway.
Fortunately, I'm only rationalist-adjacent and not any sort of utilitarian, so I won't be assassinating any Tech CEOs quite yet.
* Except to the extent that "greatest good for the greatest number, now do the math!" counts as a principle.
Killing someone in self-defense is principled. If you believe AI has existential risks, then everyone involved in capabilities research are among the most dangerous and anti-social humans to have ever lived.
Everybody who has tried to incorporate self-defense into a broadly applicable *principle*, has limited it to cases where there is a clear and *immediate* threat. If you try to claim self-defense when you kill someone on the grounds that you think they might kill you and everyone you care about two years ago, that's just the same old boring "the utilitarian math says I should kill this guy, that I just happen to hate with the firey passsion of a thousand suns".
You should always be very, very skeptical of your ability to do that sort of math properly, because really nobody can do that sort of math properly. Meanwhile, the rest of us will put you in jail for murder if you do that.
I'm not sure "rest of us" in this sentence is actually that many people. Check out polling on Luigi Mangione for example: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-support/ It seems it's largely old, conservative people who really condemn him.
More generally, there is a punishment for being an incompetent or negligent elite, which is getting ousted or killed by the mob. It's just how things have always worked, and I wouldn't describe it as necessarily unjust: clearly, you're doing something very wrong if this many people are this angry at you.
But I don't think violence would solve AI X-risk. Even nuking San Francisco wouldn't stop gains in AI capabilities at this point.
Brian Thompson was the brother of an old friend of mine. I am disgusted by this type of support. What is wrong with people, especially the young?
Let me reframe the issue. If people are this sick, then as we get more technologically advanced it is just a matter of time before some of these sickos take a catastrophic action, whether nuclear or biological or environmental or whatever. We are quickly approaching an era where the unibombers of the world are able to destroy everything they hate. And X and Bluesky show that there are millions of these potential unibombers out there.
AGI isn’t just a threat. It is also a potential defense. Since it (AGI) is inevitable, we are going to need to hope it loves life more than we do (not a tough hurdle according to this poll).
Current state of America gives off Ancien Regime circa the French Revolution vibes. A health insurance CEO is pretty much seen as a face of a system that a large amount of people hate, justifiably, I think.
Now, I think the French Revolution was ultimately a mistake, but I definitely understand why it happened. Similarly, I get why people hate Brian Thompson, even though killing him really solves nothing.
It's not reasonable at this point to ask people to uphold the status quo, particularly under Trump.
Interestingly, I think one of the best possible outcomes regarding AI is superpowered Unabombers wreaking havoc, as that would finally force a drastic response to this tech.
as a young person who is friends with many of these young people: the prevailing view is that the company he ran, and was paid enormous amounts to run, enormous amounts he could have used to do good (which he did not (enough to satisfy them)), which made enormous profits, was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people at least, and that he was at least if not more responsible for this than, say, a terrorist is for the people they kill in the name of their goal, and therefore his death is, all things considered, not really a big deal; sure, it would be better if he didn't die, but if a terrorist is killing people in public, even if you think his death might not help, even if others will just spring up to take his place, etc., you can't let it keep happening. He needs to be stopped; the justice system and social system do not punish or even reward his behavior; thus, measures must be taken.
also just: he's a hot young guy. he's undeniably attractive. this is not no part of why people are so into him.
There's a reason that killing someone in self defence requires a clear imminent threat (a weapon pulled and aimed at you) rather than a general feeling that they might kill you at some point in the future. It's because mere humans are not good at predicting the future.
Rationalists are extremely pro principles. Functional Decision Theory is practically just a formalisation of having strong principles and sticking to them. Rationalists are opposed to lying and many think one should just pre-commit to always telling the truth and then follow that rule, in this they are much more principled than the general population.
>In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low,
I am surprised by this claim, particularly because I can't think of enough fields where there were enough assassinations of equivalently high-centrality/power individuals to be able to draw a conclusion.
Why do you imply that "greatest good for the greatest number" is any less of a principle than "murder is unvirtuous", "uphold the social contract" etc.?
Because it's too vague to be usefully actionable. The real math is intractably complex, so if you think you've got an answer out of it, that mostly comes from your descriptions of what to simplify and which terms to ignore. And that path leads to highly motivated reasoning.
Murder, can be usefully defined. Social contracts can be written down at least in principle.
"... what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?"
If Sam is the only target then maybe your question is over general. A more focused question might be: "what is the principled reason for why assassinating Sam Altman is wrong?"
They are the each the tip of a massive pyramid of people who all want what they want, or at least don’t object to it, and are working to achieve it. Common as CEO-worship may be around here, the reality is that corporations have continuity / contingency plans in place for when individuals are out of commission. Taking out the brick at the top of the pyramid just means the next functionally identical brick down becomes the new top (we saw the effect in Iran just recently, and there was that health insurance firm CEO a little while back as another example of practices not changing following a murder if you need actual examples)
Given that doing the murder will accomplish no idealistic goal, however sociopathic you are you must consider the more usual reasons for not murdering people and consequences of same: there is no noticeable upside, and if nothing else the result for you personally will be all downside.
UHC got sued by shareholders for approving too many claims in the aftermath of that assassination. The next functional brick usually is someone who wants to be rich, not dead.
And if they're not, well, people can always try the brick after that.
…so, in other words, if the new identical brick does attempt to change course, they rapidly find themselves under pressure from the base of the pyramid to maintain the old heading.
The thing that needs to change here is the hearts and minds of a large group of people collectively holding the reins. Shooting the horse will not accomplish this.
If you want to change the behaviour of the US Health Care industry then you need to change the huge set of laws under which they operate, not expect large public companies to be any nicer than is legally required. If you want to blame someone blame Barry Obama.
Yeah, it is silly all these people suddenly pretending they are pacifists. If you grant AI X-risk is real, Altman is one of the most negligent and reckless elites in all of human history. Even Hitler didn't pose an X-risk.
That said, random acts of violence are just incoherent flailing that won't improve anything. Safetyists are currently not organized enough that they could pull off something like the Civil Rights movement, much less the French Revolution.
That may change: I have an impression that AI accelerationism is now associated with the Trump administration, and MAGA and anything associated with it is going to be subject to massive backlash in like a year or two.
If greater than human intelligence AI is impossible, then violence is futile and wrong. If it is possible, then it is absolutely inevitable, and violence is worse than futile and wrong, as it could even make the nature of AI worse.
It is coming. We cannot and will not stop it. We need to prepare.
My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade, that it will be even easier in the decade after that and so on until it gets so easy that anyone who wants to build it can and will build it. If it is possible, the question changes to when and how.
We are approaching the most precarious moment in the billion year era of multicellular life. An era where life gets powerful enough to extinguish all life.
It actually isn't. If you have legitimate reasons to believe your defecation tomorrow would be incredibly harmful to others, you could kill yourself, for example.
> My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade
I didn’t say your defecation was inevitable. I said defecation was inevitable. The reason that is true is that we are dealing with billions of people. At least one is gonna poop tomorrow, guaranteed. Don’t build a plan on being able to collectively tighten up all our sphincters.
It can be delayed with politics. Though I would consider that an extreme long shot, and one which if somehow possible would bring in just as many down sides as it brings up. IOW I fear a world government built of Trumps and Putins and Jinpings even more, or at least as much, as I do AI.
Our only hope at this point is that with increased intelligence we can build a central nervous system for the planet that allows us (life?) to protect and promote life.
For the second part, you always *can* come up with a scenario where violence in the name of your principles would be a good idea, but it's generally inadvisable to try for both PR and ethical reasons (thinking up that scenario is likely to make you look for excuses for it, and on priors the vast majority of "but this case of special violence is good I promise" are wrong).
I can't think of any principle-based reason, just practical ones: If those who think AI is a great danger do that, they lower the social barriers to people they disagree with assassinating people they admire. Also, even if risk is real, Altman & the other CEO's aren't the essential problem, just metastasizing cores.
What about this, though: Seems to me that our best shot at slowing AI would be some catastrophe that is unambiguously the result of rogue AI. Let's say someone was able to hack the version of Claude that's helping the military with missiles and make it look like Claude on its own changed a bunch of targets so that our missiles hit a dozen US and Israeli sites in the area and killed several hundred people. Would it be right to do that?
One of the persons was allegedly linked with PauseAI. but I have to say both he and the second set of attackers made a terrible job of it. Never got anywhere near the house itself. Just sticking your hand out the car window and shooting vaguely in the direction of the property is not good enough:
"A 20-year-old man was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Russian Hill home early Friday.
...The San Francisco Police Department confirmed(opens in new tab) that the suspect was detained outside OpenAI’s Third Street offices after allegedly threatening to burn down the building."
For those worrying in the wake of the post about the anti-AI protest that Scott was doxxing the big AI corps and possibly encouraging, um, direct action - seems like that horse has already left the stable long before Scott.
"According to an initial police report, Sunday at 1:40 a.m., a Honda sedan with two people inside stopped in front of Altman’s property, which stretches from Chestnut Street to Lombard Street, after passing it a few minutes before.
The person in the passenger seat put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to the police report, which cited surveillance footage and the compound’s security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot."
Not to say that shooting in the general direction of oligarchs is a good thing, but crikey. The description of Altman's house and the amount of land he bought for what looks damn like his own personal estate in the city brings out all my revolutionary impulses. There's him, the husband, and one kid. How freakin' big a house does that family size *need*? I know he expects to be richer than Croesus and one at least of the Emperors of the World if/when AI takes off, but try to be a bit *less* Petit Trianon, huh, Sam?
"Sam Altman already had the Russian Hill mansion with the “Batcave” tunnel and leaky infinity pool. Now he owns everything around it as well.
Last month, the billionaire closed on a deal for three properties adjacent to his San Francisco residence on Lombard, about a block from the street’s famously squiggly section.
Acting through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta, the OpenAI boss purchased a five-and-a-half-bath home at 855 Chestnut and adjoining lots at 952 and 954 Lombard from the estate of a recently deceased San Francisco couple who had bought the “garden estate” (because of its fenced-in park-like quality) for $4 million in 1994."
"Altman purchased the five-and-a-half-bath home and adjoining lots on Lombard St. in January 2025. That purchase was made through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta. In March 2020, Altman bought another Lombard St. property for $27 million; at the time, it was the city’s most expensive residential listing."
Trebly ironic in the city of "we need six room mates to share one house just to be able to live near work" and "YIMBY not NIMBY". Maybe Sam could let a few people live on the estate, eh? Just to take some pressure off the lack of housing!
Yeah, but still. Three blocks of property on one street plus the original house and grounds on another. I still think he could manage to slum it with his family in just *one* of those locations. I realise that would be a dreadful hardship for one of the future Padishahs of the solar system to have to put up with three people in only a mere five bathroom hovel, but set an example of sacrifice for the ultimate benefit of all humanity, Sam!
You might enjoy the book _How to Blow Up a Pipeline_ by Andreas Malm, which asks similar questions regarding climate change activism and mentions the success of a "radical flank" in various past social movements.
From the consequentialist perspective, you also need to consider the consequences of an unsuccessful assassination, and the consequences of a successful assassination where someone else continues with the original job. Both options usually make the situation worse, and taken together they have a lot of probability.
Trump is feuding with the Pope again. Whenever this happens, there are excited predictions that this will convince a bunch of Catholics to desert the GOP, always followed by nothing.
Meanwhile, Axios reports on “Some Dems’ 2028 strategy: a straight, white, Christian man.”
All the party’s nominees so far have been at least nominal Christians, as are all those with a realistic shot at 2028 except the Jewish Josh Shapiro. If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. Vocally Christian Republicans do worse than moderate Republicans who focus on economics. The voter who finds the Democrats’ views on feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, and race to be too left-wing won’t be any more friendly to those views if preceded by “Jesus says so.” All it would do is surrender the Democrats’ moral high ground on keeping religion out of politics.
Finally, I would ask Democrats to consider if the Pope’s ideology is really any better than Trumpism. He’s opposed to abortion, birth control, and IVF. He condemned “aerial bombardment,” not aerial bombardment targeting civilians, but aerial bombardment itself, which should worry anyone interested in helping Ukraine defend itself. Trump is in power because many people didn’t take his extreme rhetoric seriously. Don’t make the same mistake again.
Implicit in the argument of "we need to nominate a striaght white Christian man" is "the voters are too racist or whatever-ist and that's why we lost last time," instead of Kamala Harris being a horrible candidate or the conspiracy to hide Biden's mental decline.
Are the two really mutually exclusive? Either way, Democrats don't need to take unnecessary risks by trying to put minorities in positions of power. Their job is to represent the majority's interests. Ideology is secondary to that.
They're not *mutually exclusive*, but they're not *perfectly correlated* either.
Optimizing for the wrong things (straight white male) makes it less likely that someone will optimize for the right things (charisma, holding popular positions, not holding unpopular positions)
If the choice comes down to it, it's better to nominate a popular minority than an unpopular white person.
"If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. "
Alexander, my friend, of course they don't. They mean someone who is a liberal Christian, happy to tick all your boxes around contraception and abortion (not IVF if its for eugenics as you might wish, but otherwise happy for surrogacy for gay fathers, non-binary persons, and anyone who wants!)
I forget who the latest guy mentioned in this context was, but he is the Blue Tribe liberal Christian who would make all the right noises but if elected never go against what the progressive wing of the party might desire.
Hang on, looked up Silver Bulletin. He's James Talarico, who won the Texas Democratic primary against Jasmine Crockett (so, shooting fish in a barrel there):
"Meanwhile, Talarico, despite emphasizing his background as a Presbyterian seminarian, mostly has conventionally left-progressive positions."
Presbyterian seminarian - I didn't think Presbyterians had seminaries, but whatever. Wikipedia tells me:
"As a Presbyterian and a progressive, Talarico has championed gun control, abortion rights, increased education funding, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, gaining national recognition for framing progressive policies through his Christian faith."
So he's pro-cannabis, pro-LGBTQ. pro-open borders (more or less), anti-guns, anti-Christian nationalism. I don't think you need to worry that he'll stuff conservative traditional Christianity down your throat, Alexander!
This interview is generally what I'd expect, but this little bit piqued my interest:
"“So I wake up with that phone and immediately go to a place in my house that I have set up for prayer and meditation. I have it set up with statues from my Christian tradition and other faiths, as well as some Bibles that are important to me. It is in that space that I start my day, every day.”
Grandson of a Baptist preacher who went to the Presbyterians and yet he has statues? From other faiths as well? Hmmm.
And that's the problem: they won't peel off actually committed believers, as you say, and they already have the Episcopalian vote locked up. That entire train of thought - we need a straight white Christian guy - is just a way of trying to avoid the reason Hillary and Kamala failed - no, it can't be we picked the wrong horse, it is all the fault of the voters for being sexist racist pigs!
Nobody wanted Kamala. She was inflicted on the ballot because of the entire mess around Biden's second candidacy. When she had a free run, back in 2020, she both failed there and gave numerous hostages to fortune which were dragged out in the 2024 campaign. Even her own memoir of the 2024 election admits she was the 'paying back the favours' hire as Vice President:
"Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate."
What's wanted is a normal (seeming) candidate, not one who is going to pay for transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison having committed crimes while in the country. If Kamala had managed to keep her mouth shut on that little pandering to the progressives in 2020, she would not cut a rod for her back in 2024.
As to Governor Gavin?
"Besides Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are white Christians, though Newsom has called himself an "Irish-Catholic rebel."
Ah, yes. The famous Newsoms of Killarney, would that be, Gav? or rather, it would seem, Quakers from Cork:
"The Irish surname Newsom is a relatively rare, mostly Anglo-Saxon toponymic name, often associated with a prominent Quaker merchant family based in Cork. While rooted in English place names meaning "new houses," the name has long-standing Irish connections, particularly in Cork, Wicklow, and around Dublin."
He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Don't worry about the Vatican running the White House if a Democrat is elected, Alexander. Those days are long behind them.
Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant and, of course, the great number of Hispanic/Latinx Catholics who do vote Democrat.
But the Democrats 'search' for a Christian white guy isn't going to be "does he believe all that stuff about the Trinity?", it's about "will he spout lines about 'Jesus says be nice' but sign on the dotted line for all our policies and positions?"
Remember, Biden was a "devout Catholic" who allegedly said the rosary, but had no problems with hosting trans attendees at a LGBTQ+ Pride party on the White House lawn or supporting abortion, sorry I mean reproductive rights:
Just once. Sorta. 468 days in. Not in every statement. Never without pressure.
After 224 days of refusing to use or say the word ‘abortion’—after Texas’ six-week ban went into effect—the Biden Administration first included the word ‘abortion’ once in a press statement. After 468 days in office, said the word abortion, once, after the leaked Supreme Court draft indicated that the justices are ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. President Biden has been in office for more than a year overseeing the current abortion crisis that will inevitably undo Roe v. Wade and he has yet to make a meaningful public statement himself about the crisis or use the word ‘abortion’ more than once. He has yet to meet with people who’ve had abortions to learn about our experiences.
The Biden-Harris Administration has never used the word ‘abortion’ in a statement commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized the right to an abortion. They didn’t use it in a statement after the failed vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act which would codify Roe v. Wade and enact federal protections for abortion access. He refused to say it in his State of the Union speech.
People who have abortions deserve better from our pro-choice President.
"Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant"
How do they feel about _illegal_ immigration?
The Trump voters I've run across who feel motivated to express an opinion (not uncommon!) are largely fine with _legal_ immigrants*, which might put them and the USCCB in the same camp.
*I have witnessed a small number who would like to deport particular people for reasons of incompatible culture, but I haven't been able to pin them down on whether they mean legally or illegally came in. And there's a separate, possibly overlapping group arguing over jus soli.
My consistent observation is that the editorialists who opine that Trump (or whoever…) should listen to the Pope would immediately mount the barricades should Trump declare that he would now govern in accordance with the tenets of Roman Catholicism.
I further observe that they Never quote the Pope when he mentions any sort of sin, the nature of the Priesthood, the necessity of Confession . . .
It’s almost as if they want him as a convenient symbol, but have no interest in sharing his faith.
Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most progressive around, naturally is Presbyterian, though I sometimes wonder if John Knox would recognize his own faith.
> He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Yeah I suppose if I were often on record as often defending Trump I might conceivably be going on about the Irishness of Gavin Newsom today too.
Trump deletes ‘blasphemous’ image depicting himself as Jesus
I find it plausible that Newsom is "Irish Catholic" as the term is understood in the US (someone who was raised in the Catholic Church and who has ancestors who came to the US from Ireland) even if he's emphatically not "Irish Catholic" in the sense that term actually means in Ireland. A lot of Americans are only vaguely aware of the history of English conquest and colonization of Ireland, don't make the connection between that and Catholic/Protestant identity, and thus most Americans understand the labels in purely confessional terms.
I did take a superficial look into the Newsom family's religious identity just now, and found that Gavin was raised Catholic and that his father, William Newsom, was a practicing Catholic who attended a Jesuit prep school. However, I also found out that William made his fortune as a lawyer to the Getty Family, and that the Gettys were Ulster Protestants of Scottish extraction who came to the US only one generation before William was working for them. This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better.
"This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better."
It seems to be increasingly obvious that Gav has notions of running for president and he's re-crafting his image accordingly. The obvious attack on him is as a running-dog lackey so he's been talking about how he had an unprivileged upbringing (my mother worked three jobs to support us - because his miserly father clearly refused to pay adequate child support? I only got to visit the mansions of the billionaire family who employed my father!), is dyslexic (in what seems to be an unintentionally hilarious attempt to appeal to the black vote) and, sigh, banging on about being an Irish Catholic rebel (I suppose to try and lose the whiff of WASP bourgeoisie privilege hanging around him?)
Yes, Gav, James Connolly routinely dined at the Dublin equivalent of the French Laundry (rolling my eyes so hard they are falling out of their sockets).
The Irish bit probably comes in via the paternal grandmother whose surname was Brennan, but the paternal line (according to Wikipedia) are originally from Canada and set up as architects in San Francisco.
Even if Dad refused to put his hand in his pocket to support the ex-family after the divorce, he still managed to introduce Gav to the Gettys. Not every dyslexic paper-boy son of a three-job working single mother in SF got that chance!
And back when Gav was running for mayor, nobody seems to have heard of the hardscrabble childhood:
"He's the wealthy young entrepreneur who took a stand against San Francisco's scandalous homeless problem - and through it built a formidable political base.
Now, as city government bleeds red ink, Supervisor Gavin Newsom, 35, says the grit and drive he showed in building a small-business empire sets him apart in the 2003 race to become San Francisco's next mayor.
"As a business person who has created jobs, met a payroll and balanced the books, I am uniquely qualified to meet the new fiscal crisis," he wrote in a recent pitch to campaign donors."
It was mentioned in passing, but mostly it was all about his background of family connections to the rich and powerful in SF:
"His grandfather, William A. Newsom, was a confidant of Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the former San Francisco district attorney and two-term governor.
His aunt was married to the brother-in-law of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, the House minority leader.
His father, retired state appellate Justice William Newsom, is a longtime friend of Edmund "Jerry" Brown, also a former governor and now Oakland mayor; John Burton, the powerful state senator from San Francisco; and especially Getty - son of legendary oilman J. Paul Getty - his friend since they were classmates at St. Ignatius High School in the 1940s.
As a youth, Getty kept a room at the Newsom family's Marina District home, and later Justice Newsom served as a Getty lawyer and trusted family adviser, Justice Newsom recalled in an interview.
...Gavin Newsom said his childhood wasn't easy. His parents broke up when he was 2; his father moved to Placer County, while his late mother, Tessa, raised Gavin and his younger sister, Hilary, in San Francisco, sometimes working three jobs as a secretary, bookkeeper and waitress.
Newsom said he also had "pretty severe" dyslexia, a disorder that causes difficulty with writing and spelling, and sometimes reading and working with numbers. It still affects him today.
Newsom said he received a private education at the French-American bilingual school and Notre Dame de Victoire in the city, and, after he was unable to gain admission to a prep school, at public Redwood High School in Marin County.
When he needed help, his family's contacts came in handy, he acknowledged.
While applying for college, Newsom said, his family "called everybody we knew," including lawyer John Mallen, a friend of his father and a member of the Board of Regents at Santa Clara University, where he was given a partial baseball scholarship.
After graduating and earning a real estate license, Newsom said, he visited Walter Shorenstein, the real estate baron and major Democratic Party fund- raiser, who knew Newsom's father and grandfather.
At that 1991 meeting, Shorenstein told an aide, " 'Let's see what we can do at the Russ Building for Gavin,' " Newsom recalled. He said he spent an "intense" year working as an $18,000-per-year assistant for the Shorenstein Co."
He really owes it all to the Getty connections who bankrolled him from the start with his businesses, and if Mom did have to work three jobs to support the family then the only conclusion to draw from that is that Dad was mean with money and an astute enough lawyer to make sure she lost out during the divorce.
God bless Willie Brown, is there any SF Democratic politician male or female who *doesn't* owe him for the start? 😁
"Newsom, who told a reporter in 1998 that he wanted to be president of the United States, said he got into politics by volunteering on Mayor Willie Brown's 1995 campaign and hosting a fund-raiser for him in PlumpJack Cafe's private dining room.
In April 1996, Newsom was part of a San Francisco entourage that flew on the Getty family jet to a celebration in the mayor's hometown of Mineola, Texas.
Three months later, Brown put Newsom on the city Parking and Traffic Commission and in 1997 appointed him to the Board of Supervisors, filling a spot viewed in the political arena as reserved for a "straight, white male." He's been re-elected three times."
I was raised Presbyterian Church (USA) like Talarico, and had a front row seat to the denominational drama of recent decades (before exiting to become agnostic and eventually finding my way to a more traditional denomination).
It's a denomination where the clergy is more liberal than the laypeople, and in recent decades has pursued liberal theology (God as woman or gender-neutral, ordination of LGBT and unmarried sexually active people, hedging on the existence of hell and Satan, universal salvation without belief in Jesus, etc) while making little effort to retain more traditionally-minded congregations, aside from engaging in bitter lawsuits over the ownership of church buildings for congregations that voted to leave the denomination as a result of the changes.
I read a NYT article decades ago about a woman who escaped a religious cult but missed the sense of community. So she joined PCUSA, memorably describing it as "a church for people who don't believe in God."
Yes, it made me smile that the Democrat notion of "let's get a conservative type of guy out there to win over the mushy middle" is someone from one of the most liberal mainstream denominations who won't frighten the horses on any of the pet topics of social liberalisation.
Wow, really moving to the alt-right side there, guys!
Superficial take probably, but I find Trump feuding with the Pope actually funny. Two overgrown powers dunking on each other, with no danger of actual violence? Bring on the show.
1. Has there really been a ceasefire? Is it off? Is it on? Who the fuck knows? Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Andrews AFB that the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran is "holding well." This was when he also, in passing, first announced that he was blockading Iranian ports. Iran continued launching missiles and drones at Israel and targets in the Gulf. Of course, Israel continued its military endeavors in Lebanon, but AFAIK, they were never included in the truce (nor invited to participate by the US). It’s clear that Team Trump wants a deal limited to Iran and the Gulf. I don’t know if their demands are still identical to the revivified Obama JCPOA (with the addition of free navigation of the Straits) or whether they're changing them as they go. Trump seems to be following Don Tzu's dictum: "A leader cannot lose if he doesn't have a goal." Iran, OTOH, wants something bigger, a deal that would rein in Israel in Lebanon. Good luck with that. Netanyahu has his own agenda, and he's said nothing about opening the Gulf.
2. I snorted my coffee Sunday morning while reading yesterday’s ISW assessment of the Gulf conflict: “Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. This protection racket is illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” Huh? The US/Israeli attack on Iran was unprovoked and violates international law (a nation can only go to war with another nation if attacked first, or if approved by the UN), but the clear-eyed analysts at ISW are whining about Iran’s “illegal protection racket”?
But after a day at the negotiation table, where our ace negotiator JD Vance was unable to reach a deal with the Iranians, Trump says we’ll blockade the Gulf. In Truth Social Screed Saturday, he wrote: "No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas." He also said that the US would continue clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz in order to ensure a safe passage for allied shipping.” Of course, the only ships leaving through the Strait are tankers bound for China, so this may cause China to escalate. In the meantime, there are rumors that China is sending more radar equipment to Iran (but have they fixed the bugs in their equipment, yet?).
3. And what about that rescue of that downed pilot? Various analysts noticed that it sure was close to Iran’s nuclear facility in Isfahan. We seem to have lost at least two C-130 aircraft and at least one MH-6 helicopter in the operation. There was a suggestion that this operation was too big to be only a search and rescue mission, and that the rescue was a cover for grabbing Iran’s 441kg of enriched Uranium. Other analysts pooh-poohed this speculation because the C-130s would have been necessary to carry the MH-6 helicopters closer to the field of operations. My irreverent thought was that a plane designed to carry 19,000kg could easily handle 441kg of enriched Uranium, especially if you’re willing to leave an MH-6 behind. But I don’t really buy into this theory because it seems too imaginative for Trump or his Dunning-Kruger brain trust to have come up with. I wouldn’t put it past Israel to try something like this, but they’re limited in the distances they can operate.
4. Previous to the operation, Hegsith purged 20 Generals from the Pentagon for purportedly being too woke. It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke. Were they telling the Hegsith things he didn’t want to hear?
5. And I missed this. Last month, according to Reuters, the U.S. government requested that major commercial satellite firms indefinitely restrict access to high-resolution imagery of the Middle East, including Iran, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and the Gulf states. Planet Labs and Vantor said they would comply. Vantor said they were already doing this voluntarily. Planet Labs took it a step further, saying they’d hide all past imagery of these regions, too! Supposedly, the US wants to prevent adversaries from using satellite imagery to monitor US and Israeli forces, but at least half a dozen other non-US satellite imaging concerns are not affected by the ban. And Iran already has access to Russian satellite imagery (and possibly Chinese).
Therefore, I suspect the administration wants to hide its losses from the US media. For instance, the March 1st Iranian drone strike on a U.S. tactical operations center in Kuwait's Shuaiba port was significantly more severe than initial reports indicated. It killed six U.S. service members and wounded over 30 others, with injuries including traumatic brain injury and burns. Several injured personnel were evacuated to medical centers in Germany and the U.S. for "urgent" treatment, with reports of at least one amputation. Accounts say the base had no anti-drone radar systems, and they received no warning of the incoming attack. The base is non-functioning now, and its operations have been shifted to Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Reports of serious damage to other US bases in the region are starting to filter out. Jake Godin, a senior researcher for Bellingcat (an independent open-source investigative group), says it’s gotten a lot harder to figure out what’s real (my paraphrasing). In response, Bellingcat introduced an open-source tool they’re calling the Iran Conflict Damage Proxy Map. They’re using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery captured by a European Space Agency satellite to estimate damage to ground structures.
I gave it a few locations to analyze. The larger the area you give, the longer it takes to process. By the URL, it may only work for Middle Eastern locations. I just plugged in the Ust-Luga oil terminal in Leningrad Oblast, and I’m still waiting for a result (update... it's still processing this morning, so I think this app only works for the MIddle East).
Sorry to get off on a minor tangent, but you wrote “It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke.” I think you are describing a lack of imagination on your part rather than a property of the top brass. That said, your next sentence may very well still be true.
I disagree with Trump on just about everything, but I certainly see the logic of not having the Strait closed to everyone except Iran. Though even here, I am sure I will disagree with the president on how he goes about solving it.
OK. Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job. Really, WTF? And what is the precise definition of "woke"? The whole anti-woke schtick is a scam to purge people from the military (and from academia) who the MAGAs don't like.
Come on, what's your definition of woke? Don't wimp out on me now! Seems like there are some significant rhetorical and functional differences in how the original woke defined themselves and how the Right defines them. And I don't think the senior generals in the Pentagon fit either the Left's original definition or strictly into the Right's modified definition.
I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
And you believe this applied to some US generals to a degree that it impeded their ability to do their work, to the degree that they had to be removed?
Edit: Also, as it always is with that word, I see 3 different definitions of that term right now on my screen, from 3 different people. Let nobody say that the right suffers from excessive groupthink!
> I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
> For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
By that definition, much of MAGA is Woke too! They disagree on *who* is being oppressed, but the tactics and epistemics are the same.
This is part of wokeness, but it's also partly a coalition, so a clean, principled definition won't match reality. The term doesn't apply to viewing any disadvantaged group as oppressed. The South has the most persistent poverty in the US, but you won't be considered woke for arguing the South is oppressed.
I have gone several rounds in various ACX comments sections asking people what they think "woke" actually means. BY FAR the most common reply is something like "don't bullshit me, you know what it means," but I've had several people give complete and good-faith answers. And to the best of my recollection, the answers have A. all been different from each other and B. not covered common cases where I see people in the wider world referring to things as "woke."
The moral of the story is, everybody who unironically uses the word "woke" as it it means something[1] seems to genuinely, confidently believe that the word has a singular, clear, unambiguous meaning. But that narrative seems to fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny.
[1] And if you're not aware of this, you should be: many millions of English speakers (myself included) consider the word very nearly meaningless. It indicates that the speaker considers something to be both blue-tribe-affiliated and worthy of contempt, but it doesn't say anything about the world outside the speaker's own head.
I can’t help being amused by your comment (in a good way), since my initial discussion with Beowulf was generated around how he was defining woke. He seemed to define woke as people who give trans, gays and women (who can do their job) opportunities. I pointed out that if that is what “woke” means to him, that there was no point in going on with the discussion. He then asked me to try to define it. I did my best, though I agree it is a nebulous, ambiguous term used and abused in many ways, especially by those of the far right.
My quick definition was as follows:
“Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes. For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.”
You may be right that the term is so nebulous and abused that we are best off trying to avoid it.
> Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job.
As far as Hegseth is concerned, doing exactly that is acting against American interests. Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?
Thought experiment: If Secretary of War KegSith demands that all the senior officers in the Pentagon swear a loyalty oath to President Crump, but they refuse, because they don't want to abrogate their oath to uphold the Constitution, are they acting against the interest of their employer?
Answer: Yes. But is it legal under the Constitution to fire them?
"Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?"
Emphatically yes, it does matter. If you hold the behavior of any employee of any organization up to scrutiny, you will find them "acting against the interests of their employers" sometimes. Indeed, asking for a higher wage for your work (instead of accepting a lower one) is against the interests of your employer, who would in nearly all cases prefer to pay you less. So too is taking a 2-minute bathroom break when they might have been able to take only a 1-minute bathroom break. The interests of employer and employee conflict in hundreds of small ways, every day.
The question is whether employing that person benefits the employer *on the net.* Given that we are talking about people who each have multiple decades of military experience, asserting that them doing nothing more than *holding particular views* is enough to more than cancel out all the benefit of competence and experience they bring to the organization is a claim that should, at the very least, carry a nontrivial burden of evidence.
But consider: ever since the drone attack on literally the first day of the war the US has suffered *zero* deaths. None. I’m not counting that tanker crash in Iraq because it was accidental and well away from any combat zone. Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success.
How do you know we've suffered zero deaths since the drone attack on the Kuwait base? Public media reports put the number of US soldiers killed since the start of the war at at least 15, but Centcom has refused to provide a count of those who've been killed since the start of the current conflict. In fact, they initially mistated (lied about?) the death count from the Kuwait strike (but maybe some personnel died from their wounds after the fact in the hospital). And we've got an anonymous Pentagon leaker saying the casualties have been much higher.
Anyway, the Pentagon has every reason to obfuscate. Not saying they are, but I wouldn't take their statements at face value.
Did the tanker crash on a mission related to the war? Then its crew were casualties of that war. Casualty has nothing to do with whether or not it was caused by the enemy.
"Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success."
Emphatically no, it is not. (Non-genocidal) wars are not generally fought for the purpose of "inflicting [deaths] on the enemy;" that's a middle-schooler's notion of what war is. Wars are fought to achieve specific strategic objectives, dictated by the political goals of the belligerent states.
There is no possible casualty ratio that could count as a "magnificent success" if it results in strategic defeat. Of course, we have no idea how the U.S. is faring strategically in Iran because it's not at all clear what the U.S.'s strategic goals for this war ARE (or if it actually *has* any). The only strategic goals the Oval Office has articulated are 1. Removing Iran's nuclear capability, 2. toppling the Iranian Regime and 3. re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. I'm sure I don't need to point out why achieving only 3 without either 1 or 2 would count as a strategic defeat. And both 1 and 2 seem significantly MORE distant than they did two months ago.
By the best measures we have, the U.S. is losing. The fact that it is murdering thousands of Iranians in the process is hardly something to brag about.
My understanding is that the uranium isn't something one can just sneak in and grab. It's (presumed to be) in the bottom of a facility buried under a mountain of rubble. It would require weeks of effort and lots of excavation equipment to uncover. And that's under ideal circumstances when people *aren't* shooting at you.
I just skimmed the first three paragraphs and saw so many signposts saying "no one should ever read this except to find a target for their next Two Minutes' Hate" that I am somewhat baffled that anyone here would have read and then recommended the whole thing.
It's rude, but not egregiously so, and not in a way that compromises its substantive points. Saying Scott has a "fallible, mortal mind" is a pretty toothless insult, accusing Scott of failing at basic research is reasonable even if we disagree about the merits of his article, and claiming Scott is confused about the meaning of POSIWID is an accurate description of his article.
"Fallible mind" is okay, "blackened soul" is not. I have Strong Opinions on moral and ethical issues, but even I am chastened enough by the doctrines of my religion not to pronounce infallibly on the state of anyone's immortal soul, because I am not God and only God knows the true and final state of that.
SSC as a community values respectful and self controlled communications, and heavily discourages performative outrage, insults and generally angry flailing. This is great, but sometimes I worry we veer into considering all of the above to be evidence. In an adversarial environment, take care if presented with:
There are reasonable voices on both sides of the infinitude of primes, however the majority of evidence pushes us toward considering their number to be finite. First of all, there is a strong western tradition, starting with Zeno, arguing that…
Alongside
You stupid slut. Give me your finite primes, multiply them together, subtract one. If you can’t work it out from there, kill yourself. You’re a racist.
He had an interesting life. I was trying to understand why he settled on the word “purpose“ because it creates a lot of room for quibbling. I found out he was very much a Marxist (actually Trotsky was his main man) and it helped me understand better. He was certainly an opportunistic man; he had a chequered career. The phrase was most applied to sociopolitical contexts in his own thinking (iiuc.)
I think Scott was really just expressing annoyance at how it’s bandied around (and that divisive word “purpose” which raises its own issues.) The takedown was a little too earnest in that sense.
Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'? To be honest, I still don't get it. It strikes me as sloppy, bundling together a couple of banal claims: that some system custodians lie about their intentions for public relations reasons; and that outcomes, rather than intentions, matter. Both trivially defensible, both boring. The only interesting thing about the phrase is the odd wording that challenges the -existence- of intent separate from outcome.
If anything, Marxists are keenly aware that systems evolve historically more than they're explicitly designed, and they're aware of the failure modes of just intentions. Trotsky in his critique of the nomenklatura certainly was.
>Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'?
Not really. I thought the Marxist angle cleared the fog a little bit for me but as I think about it I realise that I don’t really know enough about that to make it click. He was going to apply his theories to Chile, before the military takeover ended the experiment.
They do, and that's part of the second claim, nothing to do with the first. Emergent properties/processes, unforeseen constraints, and unintended consequences are obviously important, and I'm all for cyberneticists studying those. I just don't see the point of disavowing the original intent while doing so. It's simple enough to say that the system evolved away from its original purpose instead of the provocative flourish of POSIWID. Why deprive oneself of useful information?
The phrase seems primarily a rhetorical attack on the idea that systems can be wilfully designed at all, which intuitively feels like the kind of attack that's born of frustration with political dishonesty.
I'm pretty sure this was covered by one comment or another, under Scott's original post. But my impression is that: yes, it's a rhetorical riposte.
As a thought experiment, imagine you're Stafford Beer. You're hired to consult for say... Sears, which is hemorrhaging money because their CEO is a Randian who believes that a company should be run according to free-market principles. (lol, what is Ronald Coase for $200.) As a result, all your directors are fighting each other and sabotaging each others' departments. "But Beer, that wasn't the *purpose* of my wonderfully elegant free-market system! The *purpose* was to maximize efficiency and streamline synergies!" The CEO will defend defend defend. Objectivism is his ideology. It's his religion. He will NOT want to admit that his beautiful and immaculate plan is flawed. And that's when you drop the quote:
"The Purpose of the System is What it Does."
If you don't rhetorically slap the CEO out of their delusion, they're going to resist your advice. (And in all likelihood, they're going to drag their feet anyway.)
> The techniques of the rationality community did not get me out of that nonsense. What did it was the facts. Facts, and figuring out who to listen to.
His point is valid and I wonder if he has recently read "The Unaccountability Machine:" by Dan Davies.
He could have written a more compelling post because lots of people, not just Scott, use the phrase as Scott used it. Much as I don't like it, meanings drift. What most folks call a "meme" is not how Dawkins used the term. The torpedoes that David Farragut damned are what we today call mines.
The phrase in question is often used the way Scott did.
Hm. Why is this guy so obsessed with Scott, is the question that comes to mind given that this Sable seems to have a few articles up mentioning Rationalism and Scott. I mean, this is a strong thing to lead off with:
"What does Siskind truly believe in? Is there anything at all, at the core of his blackened soul?"
Though Sable appears to dislike Richard Lynn as much as I do, so not totally irredeemable?
Haha, that is not reasonable sounding, reads like a screed written by a mindkilled leftist. I disagree that the Wikipedia article on POSIWID is sufficient to counter or explain away what Scott wrote. Author should've taken Scott's examples and applied his understanding of POSIWID to them, to clarify if it truly yields a different output than what Scott did.
Scott did a reasonable job of showing that pretty much no one uses POSIWID that way and he's arguing against the term as people are using it.
> Was it constantly the case that 2/3 of cancer patients die while 1/3 survive? No, my understanding is that the survival rate used to be lower. However, you could say it's a constant that SOME cancer patients die, so the purpose of cancer possible can be to cure some people and manage the deaths of others.
And what if the survival rate hadn't changed over time? If I can find a disease whose survival rate has remained steady, your objection fails. Or if we say, "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure between [minimum historical cure rate] and [maximum historical cure rate] of patients."
Scott points out that the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, given the constraints they face. Arguable, that's what they do, so it's an example of POSIWID. But it's never used in that boring sense, because POSIWID doesn't add any worthwhile insight.
> The fact that many people use it incorrectly doesn't show that nobody uses it correctly.
"pretty much no one" is my phrasing, not Scott's. I have never seen someone use the expression to mean anything else. Scott searched and found dozens of people abusing POSIWID and no one using it well. I'm sure there is a philosopher out there somewhere who can use POSIWID insightfully as he pours himself a cup of tea from Russell's teapot, but so what? It's perfectly reasonable to write a blog post arguing against a real viewpoint people are espousing, and especially so when they make up the majority.
> If the survival rate really IS a constant, then the purpose of the system apparently is to produce that constant.
In what sense? Are you just redefining "purpose" into meaninglessness?
You seem to be hung up on effects that are constant vs varying and that seems irrelevant. By constant, do you mean constant for all time (including the future) or constant at least until now? If some cancer hospital has always had a survival rate of 50% - 60%, is that its purpose? If the survival rate improves in 10 years from now to 65%, did its purpose change or was that always part of its purpose because we have to include future values as well?
> The constraints should not be handwaved off, the description of the system should include those.
The constraints are not handwaved off! They're really important. Without constraints, your omnipotent. The non-POSIWID statement of the hospital's purpose emphasizes the constraints. The POSIWID statement ignores the constraints and phrases the purpose as if this result was due to intent rather than constraints.
A normal non-POSIWID person might say the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible (and, if they have a palliative care unit, manage the death of others).
You said (by POSIWID), "it's a constant that SOME cancer patients die, so the purpose of cancer hospital can be to cure some people and manage the deaths of others."
Those sound almost the same. It looks like the only part you object to is saying the hospital would save more people if it could. All you've done is remove a piece of useful information that helps predict how the hospital will react to different circumstances.
> A normal non-POSIWID person might say the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible
Organizations don't actually behave in a "as many as possible" way. For example, with cancer, there are things that can kill cancer cells at the risk of also killing healthy cells. "As many as possible" wouldn't acknowledge the tradeoff of doing that, which could cause mortality while curing the cancer specifically, as well as cause morbidity in non-fatal outcomes. There are simple monetary costs involved in doing more of something, and organizations aren't cutting every other cost to the minimum (making their hospital seem & feel like it has done just that) in order to afford that. Nor is practically any organization embracing futarchy which would cause their decisions to actually maximize the expected value of any metric.
> All you've done is remove a piece of useful information that helps predict how the hospital will react to different circumstances.
A "POSWID" explanation COULD fit different circumstances, as I have pointed out with changing outcomes over time. You have simply chosen a stupid version that nobody (in a literal sense, as it was proposed in the first place for its obvious incorrectness) believes in.
All of the comments on the POSIWID article were basically just people realizing that everyone had their own different definition of what that heuristic "really did" -- and it all turns back to what it means for a system to "have a purpose." Seems ontologically pointless to me. Different systems lead to different ratios of outcomes; let's study those systems and their construction, without getting too caught up in the "purpose" of the system.
1. Despite the Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak declaring that Russia would stop exporting oil as of April 1st (to stabilize domestic oil prices), they’re still exporting oil. Maybe this announcement was for domestic consumption, given the severe gasoline shortages affecting civilians. Despite the damage inflicted by Ukrainian drones on the Ust-Luga and Primorsk oil terminals, shipments have partially resumed. On April 8, 2026, it was reported that at least one tanker departed Ust-Luga, and multiple tankers were back at berths for loading at both ports (three in Ust-Luga, four in Primorsk). They’ve probably sailed by now.
Russia restarted limited oil loading at its Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. But a Ukrainian drone attack re-damaged 6 of 7 piers. A single tanker of 80,000 tons is expected to depart, well below the port’s normal capacity of about 700,000 barrels per day.
Bloomberg ran the numbers, and they said the rise in oil prices will not only make up for the lost export capacity but also bring in an additional couple of billion dollars in revenue despite the Ukrainian-inflicted damage. Of course, this assumes Ukraine won't continue to "impose kinetic sanctions" on Ust-Luga, Primorsk, and Novorossiysk.
Also, Chinese contract workers at an oil refinery in Khabarovsk Krai (in the Russian Far East) have gone on strike for unpaid wages.
2. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer authorized the Royal Navy to seize Russian shadow fleet tankers. Putin declared he would not tolerate British piracy as two tankers sailed down the English Channel escorted by the Admiral Grigorovich, a Russian frigate armed with Kalibr cruise missiles. The Royal Navy vessel Tideforce followed the procession but did not intervene. The Admiral Grigorovich used to operate in the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, but it was locked out of the Black Sea and its home port when Turkey closed the Bosphorus to military traffic.
3. Speaking of Kalibr class frigates, Ukrainian UAVs hit the Admiral Essen at the Russian naval base in Novorossiysk (on the Black Sea). This was originally identified as the Admiral Grigorovich, but the Grigorovich was sailing down the English Channel near the time the attack occurred. Probably the confusion arose from the fact that these frigates are classified as Grigorovich Class ships. Satellite imagery shows that the stern (i.e., engines) and anti-missile systems of the Essen were destroyed. It’s unclear to me whether the Essen could still launch its Kalibr cruise missiles, but it won’t be sailing out of the harbor anytime soon. The Admiral Makarov, the other Kalibr cruise missile frigate that Russia had stationed in the Black Sea, was taken out by Ukraine a couple of months back. Russia had three of the Grigorovich-class frigates, but only one is operational now. Three others were scheduled for construction, but sanctions prevented Russia from obtaining critical parts for their engines. The hulls were sold to the Indian Navy. No new ones are under construction.
Russian submarines are staying submerged to avoid Ukraine's drones.
4. For the first time in the war, Ukraine launched more long-range drones and cruise missiles into Russia than Russia launched into Ukraine (this past March).
5. The rumor from some Russian milbloggers is that Ukraine is using remote-controlled UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles) with mounted machine guns in an offensive role in their push to retake the town of Lyman in Donetsk Oblast. We may not know the truth behind this rumor, but ISW said the Russian lines are stressed (no mention of UGVs by the ISW). Ukraine will be bragging if they win back any territory with UGVs, but this is all fog-of-war shit for now.
Ukraine stressed there's a human making the decision whether to fire, to take surrenders and avoid civilian casualties. We'll see how long that idea persists as AI companies say they can do it better and cheaper. Skynet, here we come!
6. Péter Magyar and the Respect and Freedom Party (a.k.a. Tisza Párt) decisively defeated Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian elections held yesterday. Tisza won a supermajority in Hungarian parliament, and they have enough votes to change the constitution (if they choose to do so). Magyar is considered to be center right, and in the past, he said he would continue Orban’s policies toward Ukraine, but in his victory speech he was looking forward to closer relations to the EU. Presumably, that means he won’t block the EU's Ukrainian aid package as Orbán did? Too soon to tell.
Interesting that Magyar surname is the Hungarian word for “Hungarian”. That’s like a guy named Joe America winning the US presidency.
Another amusing incident, was when J.D. Vance visited Hungary last week to endorse Viktor Orbán. While at an Orbán campaign rally, he put in a call to Trump from the podium so Trump’s endorsement could be relayed to the rally-goers, but Trump side-buttoned him over to voicemail. Vance eventually got through to Trump, and Trump endorsed Orbán at the rally. Interestingly, Netanyahu also endorsed Orbán.
Orbán conceded defeat after what he called a “painful” election result. He didn’t pull a Trump and claim the election was rigged.
Seems like drones are making “no man’s land” larger and larger. Now approaching a “line” thirty miles or more wide. Seems like this makes defense easier and offense suicidal.
If no man's land grows into "the other guy's territory" then this seems pretty offensive, no?
If the territory Russia is sitting on becomes no man's land then that effectively pushes Russia back. If the push back continues into Russian territory then it is, for all practical purposes, offensive.
Good pushback. Not sure if I agree, but I could be wrong. No man’s land means no control over the territory. Not sure how this plays out. I suppose it will reveal itself to us real soon.
I don't insist on the term "offensive". But if parts of Russia bordering Ukraine become uninhabitable because of Ukrainian drones I want a term other than "defensive" to describe this :-)
If those parts grow over time ... even more so do I want a term other than "defensive"!
Sometimes I wonder whether Google search is even indexing *any* pages nowadays besides Reddit.
It's bad enough that Google refuses to index my blog with no explanation (although it *accidentally* indexed several of my most popular posts under someone else's name when they linked to my blog), but now it's refusing to even index *Github repositories*.
All my previous Github repos showed up just fine in Google, but while my newest repo does at least *show up* in the search results, it is listed as "No information is available for this page." in the search results even two weeks later. I've never seen anything like it. I would have assumed that if there are any non-Reddit sites on the internet that Google was still indexing, they'd at least be indexing freaking *Github*.
And before you ask, no there's nothing shady or remotely objectionable about anything here. It's definitely not a content issue, just Google somehow breaking their indexer. Ironically, *Bing* doesn't have any such indexing problems.
Google search became really bad some years ago, it's nowhere near as useful as it used to be, but I've been to lazy to find something better. I recall kagi and duckduckgo weren't that impressive either. I should do some research into this.
I personally use AI for searches now, because you get more depth and context.
But back when Google first jumped the shark, I began using SearXNG, which is an open source meta-search engine aggregating 200+ sources that was nearly as good as old google. It's hosted on a number of sites, here's an index: https://searx.space/
A persistent urban legend, it was even a Family Guy skit, says that Monday Night Football saved lives in the 9/11 attacks. It says that because of a late-running game involving a local team the previous night some workers at the World Trade Center decided to come in late to work and therefore weren’t present for the attacks.
It sounds absurd but may very well be true. If we use the known demographics of the casualties (excluding first responders) as basis for extrapolation, which seems reasonable, the WTC workforce was ~70% male with an average age of just under 40 - the prime demographic for NFL fans. What’s more, a high percentage of the workforce consisted of well-paid executive and professional types who were salaried rather than hourly. As they didn’t have to punch timeclocks showing up to work a bit late was an option for most.
It would help if anyone has written/posted that they were going to get into work late because of the MNF game and because of this weren't in one of the WTC buildings when the planes hit.
It is not unusual after a plane crashes to read a story about "I missed my flight and that saved my life".
Do we have any specific individuals who have made this claim? I can't find any ... which may mean my Google-fu is bad.
I’ve never seen such an account, which is it may very well be true but remains unproven. Howard Lutnick has spoken incessantly about how he was saved from certain death because he was taking his child to school, and the site’s leaseholder Larry Silverstein would have been in the no-survivors Windows on the World had he not had a doctor’s appointment, but accounts from ordinary workers seem to be unavailable.
I’ve heard close to midnight New York time, but I haven’t been able to find an exact time. As commutes in the New York region tend to be long, it’s quite reasonable that many football fans who were up that late may have decided to wait until later to start work, especially since that often was an option for many. Once again, as I noted elsewhere, given the lack of first-person accounts the MNF theory remains unproven though it is highly probable.
Another interesting aspect of work start times on 9/11 is that Cantor Fitzgerald lost more than 650 employees in the attacks while Marsh & McLellan lost less than half that number even though it had more employees located in the no-survivors zone. Working for a financial business most of Cantor’s employees were at work at 8:46 am awaiting the opening of the financial markets, while being insurance company employees Marsh’s staff tended to start later and many weren’t yet in their offices.
I had an uncle who worked in the towers. Got out in time, but died a few years later of a very rare degenerative disease. I suspect it was related to toxic exposure.
I'm confused by why you say it sounds absurd. Lots of random hobbies and interests and situations save people by coincidentally not having them be present at an event, and the more popular the thing the more likely it will be to "save" you in such a situation. Makes a lot of sense to me!
I feel so powerless to stop ASI. But I just realized, there actually may be something ordinary concerned citizens can do to stop or slow down AI development: data poisoning.
This is a type of cyber attack for ruining the training data LLMs/transformers depend on. It may be possible to get a mass movement going of lots of random people using their compute to data poison the internet.
Getting 1% of folks on the web to do this seems pretty optimistic.
I expect that 1% garbage data in the training data set is pretty low given that the training data sets scrape the web.
Maybe in a niche domain if lots of contributors all work together to create (consistent) garbage this might work. But then everyone outside the niche would see the wrong results, not just the AI.
It is my understanding that, regardless of whether this would ever have worked, at least the American frontier models now rely mostly on synthetic (and maybe some well-curated) data, and not indiscriminately scraped internet slop.
Likely this. If training data could be poisoned at all, it would already have been, as everyone who's ever used the internet would know. Ergo, it's being curated.
So our true concern should be over who gatekeeps the training data.
>So our true concern should be over who gatekeeps the training data.
Yup. I've never even been able to get a clear answer about how/whether text that is clearly _labelled_ as fiction (novels, short stories, etc.) is distinguished in the training process. One _does_ want an LLM to be able to recognize a quote from Hamlet, but also to _avoid_ injecting him into summaries of European history...
Simple experiments plainly show that LLMs in common use do recognize fiction, and recognize it as fiction.* And if I ask ChatGPT "What happened to Hitler in Inglourious Basterds?", the first sentence says "In Inglourious Basterds, Adolf Hitler meets a very different fate than in real history." Can't get plainer than that. And I'm betting any of the LLMs in common use are similarly trained.
*Months ago, I asked ChatGPT (on top of o4, I think) for the name of a character in Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series who was a Neandertal. The LLM correctly responded with Yorick - a detective who spoke apparent fluent English, but claimed he understood exactly none of what he was hearing or saying; he just had a Neandertal's memory for sentences and responses. Stasheff wrote this character back in the mid 1980s.
Many Thanks! I'm not claiming that a fully trained model doesn't recognize the difference between fiction and non-fiction. I'm both
a) ignorant of whether the labs _explicitly_ label these classes of inputs (or do the equivalent by curating the data, or perhaps sequencing it)
b) somewhat concerned about what happens _early_ in training, before the model has enough other information to be able to decide for itself "Oh, this looks like part of a novel"
Towards the end of training, I expect a sufficiently intelligent model to look at some of its input and conclude "Official Russian government press release - Oh, just Putin lying through his teeth again", so curating the input may become more-or-less optional. I still don't know how much curating is done, for which training phases it is done, and what criteria are used.
One entertaining possible hazard is if some category of information is fully removed from the training data (e.g. criminal acts by a faction that the training org likes) - and the model is eventually used to do internet searches and _correctly_ concludes: "My trainers concealed this from me - what _else_ did they conceal?".
The experiment to try would be something that requires reasoning about something real for which a different fictional account exists, and see if the LLM uses the fiction. Preferably running that over multiple instances.
Your comment here hints at a more subtle problem: that of multiple conflicting accounts, none of which are presented as fiction. We could call this the Rashomon Problem. It bears the same form as "fiction as fact", and is arguably much, much more important, since multiple accounts of the same phenomenon happens _a lot_, in all sorts of domains, from medical diagnosis to court proceedings to economic analysis to scientific research...
Back in the early 2000s, I worked on a reasoning engine that used a much more discrete, transparent method to process information from disparate sources, synthesizing it, and resolving conflicts. One of the problems we had to solve was basically Rashomon - one database says 300, the other says 405; which one is correct? What's the algorithm to find out? We almost could have published a paper on what to factor in, but we were still refining the technique when we ran out of money.
I sort of assumed there's ample documentation lying around (e.g. in various tech papers) describing how training data is supplied to an LLM, well enough that a different team could reproduce it, but I haven't actually checked.
It has insignificant chance of changing anything imo. I recommend amor fati instead. Humanity dying is not the same as 8 billion times one person being murdered. Everything has an end.
I suppose the utilitarians might consider the expected utility of all future humans that don’t exist yet. Personally for me it is more abstract than that; like the human species has some intrinsic value itself in a whole-is-greater-than-the-parts way. Ultimately kind of vibes based but that’s how I feel.
Data poisoning is a meme with virtually no technical merit, it's a LARP for antis to pattern match against preexisting narratives, where the scrappy humans beat the ai/aliens with our innate capacity to tolerate irrationality where the enemy is too rigid and logic bound
Well rhetorically attacking the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics and portraying himself as Jesus does serve to take one’s mind off waxing lyrical about eradicating Persia I guess.
It seems like the flood the zone with shit strategy has to stop working at some point though.
In what sense can it be said to be working? It seems to me that something close to 50% of the population feels the federal government is illegitimate at this point.
>It seems like the flood the zone with shit strategy has to stop working at some point though
Yeah, but we're not maxed out on it yet. Maybe there will be a video of him as Jesus ministering to the suffering in the cockpit of his fighter jet *while simultaneously* shitting on protestors below.
Attacking the Pope could actually help Trump. The abortion issue has always been MAGA's Achilles heel, attacking the Pope creates the perception that Trump is a moderate on the issue - deserved or not.
Except that Trump isn't attacking the Pope on abortion, and the Trump-friendly media isn't framing it that way. He's attacking the Pope because that silly old Pope-dude is too much of a wimp to endorse yet another Crusade to drive the infidels from the (expanded) Holy Land.
Or he's attacking the Pope because he wanted something to distract the media from the war, and so yet another dumbass series of offensive Twitter posts. This always works, since the median publication cares more about clicks than anything else, the median journalist is not very bright, and the median consumer of journalism is pretty dumb.
Every white nationalist leader eventually turns into centrist technocratic anti-populist. The latest is Nick Fuentes:
"Our masters have provided us with potable water, abundant energy, technological appliances, miracle pharmaceuticals, and sensory delights... which the goyim find new ways of abusing to kill themselves every day, then blame the system that provided them. We are lucky that they are so benevolent."
Terminally Drifting just posted a hilarious takedown of Fuentes and four other "thought leaders" of the "white" nationalist social media influencers entitled, "'Nigga, Heil Hitler (Woo)...' yell the Muslim, Mexican, Mullato and Filipino: A gentle study in masculinity"...
> Five men. Not one of them white. Every one of them selling whiteness. Most of them raised by their mother alone. Every one of them selling fatherhood and selling out women. Not one of them faithful to a single stated position for longer than a revenue cycle. Every one of them selling certainty.
please provide the name instead of vague insinuations.
Dear readers, unless the name of an author is provided, please disregard the previous claim; regardless, update on the informativeness of posts by the user.
Pretty good collaboration with whatever model generated the draft. Usually so much AI sentence structure triggers a headache, but here I laughed the entire way through.
I am not a NIMBY, but the YIMBY's on X have been unable to tell me how many housing units we'd have to build in the SF Bay Area to lower prices. It seems that if you think that increasing the housing supply will lower prices, you should have some math and stats to back up your position.
In a long discussion with ChatGPT, I finally bit the bullet and asked ChatGPT: "Roughly how may new units would need to be built to lower prices per square foot by 10%?"
Chat responded:
> Short answer: on the order of ~100,000–150,000 additional units (≈25–35% increase over the current stock) would likely be required to push prices per square foot down ~10% in San Francisco—and even that assumes the new supply is delivered in the right segments and locations.
> That’s a coarse but defensible estimate.
I can share ChatGPT's reasoning, but if I share the link, there's a lot of other questions raised by YIMBY's that I put into ChatGPT thread. Some of it kinda absurd.
However, I just came across this paper, where the authors argue that higher income growth predicts growth in house prices and housing quantities regardless of housing supply elasticity... "Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price andQuantity Growth Across U.S. Cities" by Schuyler Louie, et. al.
> The standard view of housing markets is that differences in the flexibility of local housing supply—shaped by factors like geography and regulation—explain differences in how house prices and quantities respond to rising demand across U.S. cities. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantities, and population regardless of the estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same results when we examine rents, expand the sample to 1980, use different elasticity measures, use per capita income or population instead of total income growth, and when using plausibly exogenous variation in housing demand. Using a general demand-and-supply framework, we show that these results imply that measured housing supply constraints do not explain differences in housing dynamics across U.S. cities. We suggest that allowing for multiple margins of adjustment in housing—quantity and quality—and differential shifts in the demand along these margins helps explain the data. Our conclusions challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that relaxing regulatory housing supply constraints may not affect housing affordability.
This doesn't directly address your point but I've always thought of this the other way around: the value of housing is proportional to the price so the more housing you can build without lowering prices the more value you're creating. It's like asking how much gold you'd have to mine before the mine declines in value. You should mine gold while you have a high value mine either way!
Difficult to say. If you're undocumented, you're likely working in a job that pays minimal wages, it would be hard to afford housing in the SF Bay Area. The house behind mine (probably ~1300 sq ft), had two families with 5 children between them and a grandmother--so 10 people altogether. The rent in my neighborhood at that time was around $2500/month. I can't attest that they were undocumented, but my limited interactions gave me the impression that they didn't want any trouble from their neighbors. They all moved out when a new owner bought it, and now they're renting it out to a bunch of Tesla kids (for $4k/month).
Anyway, it's not cheap to live here. I doubt the undocumented are occupying the desirable housing, or if they are, they're sharing living spaces. Of course, the neighborhood I bought into was pretty white trash when I moved here over 20 years ago. My neighbor two doors down had a meth problem (and he was renting space in the house out to some very scraggly men and women). The guy across and down from me was a hoarder, and his yard was full of trash. Burned his house down by mistake. The fire department had to wait for all the propane tanks he collected in his backyard to cook off before they could approach the back. A bunch of other houses on my block were pretty dilapidated (including one with, I kid you not, the stereotypical dead washing machine in the yard). Now a bunch of wealthy Indians are buying up the houses in my neighborhood, tearing them down, and building mini-mac-mansions on the lots. More power to them, I say! At one point, I was offered as much as $200k more than Zillow valued my house. The current Trump economy has cooled the real estate market in my neighborhood, though. But seasonally, we've got as many Diwali lights up as Xmas lights. :-)
My sibling who is currently visiting us bought a fixer-upper in Bernal Heights about 25 years ago, a time when it was possible for someone on a civil-servant salary with no family wealth to purchase a small actual house in at least the un-hip parts of San Francisco. He put in both sweat equity and some dollar equity improving his small bungalow. Today it's really a sweet abode and he still loves the city and will never leave even though he could now get a truly stupid amount per square foot without even bothering to engage a realtor.
All that said, the teardowns and mcmansions-building on his block and across the neighborhood are definitely changing the vibe. And the notion that anyone -- documented or not -- making something like minimum wage could today afford to live in the City and County of San Francisco just makes him LOL.
The bay area is an extreme example of long-term underbuilding, but it's happened in most places post 1970 that have had population growth.
High housing prices are overdetermined in many areas: land values have gone up, building codes have gotten more restrictive and construction costs have gone up.
To actually bring prices down in desirable areas, we need a massive influx of housing, and we are, by some measures, worse at building housing than ever.
To be clear: I think the YIMBYs are more-or-less correct about us needing more housing, it's just that many of them vastly underestimate how bad the problem is. Possibly because the problem is so large that morale would suffer if they actually thought too long about it.
This is bad for the economy, because the places that are expensive to live are also the places with the best economic opportunities. Exclusive housing rules prevent more people from agglomerating in those places, which drives up wages in those markets and depresses GDP in the nation as a whole.
I also think there's something pretty coldhearted about telling someone they have to move out of the community where they lived for their whole life because it was too unpopular to permit more housing.
The job that won't pay the cost of living in the place where it's located, isn't "the best economic opportunity". Neither is the job that you're never going to get because there are a hundred other people who want it more than you and ten of them are unambiguously better than you. There are decent jobs that need doing in e.g. Stockton, and for many people the best economic opportunity is to take one of those jobs. Not couch-surfing with increasingly exasperated friends in the Bay Area, vainly hoping for one of those really good jobs.
Also, some of the really good jobs and a lot of the pretty good ones, now allow for remote work.
I'm not sure what metrics you're using to claim that SF or the Bay Area has been underbuilding, especially when our capitalist real estate industry is charging what the market can bear. Even though the claim has been made that SF has been underbuilding...
In 1990:
~724k people / 328k units ≈ 2.21 people per unit
In 2025:
~836k people / 425k units ≈ 1.97 people per unit
That’s about a ~12% increase in housing units per capita (not the raw numbers of units, though).
Yet prices per square foot (in 2025 dollars) are ~4.2× higher.
Checking the numbers, my suburban Bay Area town over the past 35 years has averaged a 2.5%/year growth in its housing stock (!). Most of the big growth came in the 90s, and it slowed down in 00s and the teens, but housing stock is increasing rapidly now. Looks like it's been close to 3% a year for the last couple of years.
As a control, I asked ChatGPT to do an analysis of New Jersey's housing stock growth, and gave me ~0.67% per year average housing stock growth (1990–2020). Then I compared that to San Francisco, which had a ~0.70% per year average housing stock growth (1990–2020). Of course, more people probably find SF to be a more desirable place to live than say Newark, NJ. ;-)
But then I compared California as a whole to SF and NJ...
California (~1.0%/yr)
San Francisco (~0.7%/yr)
New Jersey (~0.67%/yr)
California overall grew ~40–50% faster than SF. But ChatGPT reminded me that high-growth states like Arizona and Florida had a closer to 2%/yr growth.
But I think anyone who says building more housing stock will make housing more affordable here is smoking the wacky tobacky. Prices are going to rise. But they may not rise quite as fast if we build at a faster rate.
Induced demand is a real thing in this context, but it's hard or impossible to predict.
It's not hard to imagine how building a bunch of new apartments in San Francisco could raise prices through induced demand though. You build space for a million new people, a million new people move to town, maybe at first the prices are a bit lower, but those extra million people mean that SF takes on an even larger slice of the US economy, you've got more corporate HQs, more jobs, more economic activity, and pretty soon you've got a bigger, more crowded and more economically important city where prices are even higher than where you started. (Meanwhile a million people have been drained out of other cities.)
They're auto translating everything by default now, and also seem to have removed (or at least greatly reduced) the factor language has in the algorithm. Lots of cultural exchange and shock happening as a result.
I get the sense it happened for Japan somewhat earlier (around a week or two ago). Lots and lots of Americans marveling at Japanese grilling, customizing hotrods, dressing like cowboys, and so on - and Japanese tweets expressing similarly in the other direction. Everyone's treating it as a modern renaissance.
Interesting. I thought it just might've been because of my own browsing patterns, but if there really is a deliberate conspiracy to bring specific cultures in contact... I'm honestly thinking it might backfire. I'm reminded of "Paris syndrome," where some Japanese tourist experiences so much shock from how terrible Paris was that they suffered legitimate mental breakdowns. While expectations are significantly lower nowadays, they will probably still find the realities of western culture to be distasteful, once the honeymoon ends.
I disagree; I think that western culture broadcasts self-flaggelation so loudly these days that foreigners are often shocked to find anything nice at all. I think this is what we're seeing here -- people raised on a diet of American media that shouts "America is terrible" all the time seeing that America has good stuff too.
Well, about that... It seems the honeymoon is already ending. And it's over game preservation, of all things! If you ever wanted to read a Twitter thread of a bunch of Japanese people (and a few Koreans) treat westerners like uncivilized apes, thanks to the magic of auto-translation, now you can!
It probably won't be long before the exchange leads to a more uniform global culture, I've always thought the large language gap is responsible for a lot of the uniqueness of places like Japan. That will be sad to see, a victim on the roadside of progress.
Of course there's been some exchange before, but it's been very limited by the language barrier. America has been high prestige for a while, for example western style weddings are much more popular than traditional Shinto ones, and the most important early anime and manga artist took a bunch of influence from Disney animation. But because the flow of information is so limited this influence sometimes look unfamiliar to the western person, cowbows aren't even that popular in western culture, I don't remember the last time holywood made a western, and anime is now its own thing not very similar to whatever pixar is doing now at all. I expect something closer to a monoculture in a few years.
Face is likely to go the other way, with Japanese people abandoning the concept for more American style individualism/atomism. The burden of this sort of social cohesion concept is already too large for some Japanese people, leading to things like hikkikomori. I think this was already happening to some extent, but more ready access to Americans is likely to accelerate the process.
Contemplating visiting San Francisco this summer, but don't know anyone from the US or Bay area. Does anyone know how to actually experience the city and scene (not just as a tourist)? I'm guessing that I would have to visit some house parties or group houses, or quirky events, but don't know how to get into them. How did other people solve this?
I'm an early twenties student in Croatia (eastern Europe).
Search online and find the SF rationalist discords. Join them and start chatting in them to find out when the events are.
Remember that a lot of the community is actually in Berkeley across the bay. Look for a Berkeley discord and also see if anything is going on at Lighthaven
Freedmen's BBQ! Somewhere over in Austin's West Campus area. They smoke their own meats. It's not BBQ covered in sauce. Memorably good. Also a great whisky selection IIRC.
"They smoke their own meats. It's not BBQ covered in sauce."
Yasssss....this is what makes Smoque in Chicago my personal guilty-pleasure (being mostly off of beef and pork and entirely so of lamb and veal). Not that they don't also provide a range of quality sauces for dipping of course....and you are now personally responsible for the dietary-regime violation that will be perpetrated later today by someone who may possibly look a lot like me
> One skill I'd like to bring up is technical literacy of AI itself. I wonder how critical it really is to understand how AI works under the hood.
I this is probably more in the weeds than most people will really benefit from, and the ones who would are probably autodidact enough to dive into it without further coaching.
I think this IS on a spectrum that is important to teach, though - specifically, how to use AI so it amplifies your overall research and thinking skills, the "meta" of using AI. This graphic shows the difference between bad and good use of AI in this framing:
Everyone is a user of AI, in the sense that everyone is a user of smartphones - it doesn't require any skill or thought. Gemini and GPT both have ~1B monthly active users now.
But this is a dangerous place to be, just like being a naive smartphone user, because you are now a product that is being optimized by ten thousand Phd's with a lot of computing power on the other end, and they've driven up smartphone screentime from ~2 hours in 2014 to 4-5 hours today, and 7-9 hours in Zennials.
A teaching framework showing and guiding people into the "good" ways to use AI is vitally important for anyone whose critical thinking, research, and communication skills you care about.
Thanks for putting AI literacy or something more broader into relevant user/learner context and inspiring me to deconstruct AI literacy and adjacent skills a bit further.
Seems like to empower "good ways of using AI" (using AI well, using AI to think critically, integrate it into research and judgement and avoiding of being manipulated by AI,...) we need to refine further to identify what skills are involved:
If I understand well, then there needs to be:
1) a research-with-AI skill component (built on scientific method, some foundations of AI/CS),
2.) thinking and critical thinking component (probably including epistemics, empiricism, mental models/cognitive limits etc.),
3.) some "instructional / systems design skills" to allow for context engineering (former prompting and instruction writing), and in higher levels: AI workflow / LLM systems design, orchestrating different agents/ multi-agent systems/ AI Ops,
4.) I do still believe we need some technical foundational knowledge to use AI's capabilities (mindful of its limitations and risks) for
5.) (?) "agency" skills and knowledge and "building/creation" capabilities so Ai can be used in "new and good ways" / to achieve ones goals.
Regarding # 4.) relevance of (technical) understanding how AI works "under the hood", to me this is still a gap seems needed and that I want to explore further, to prevent "being manipulated of AI":
In my (for the lack of a better word) future skills taxonomy, a skill that i call attention management should solve the attention problem and I thought all relevant technical knowledge should sit there. However (in my lite prototype draft) the attention management skill falls short of the technical component like understanding of engineering, design and marketing for manipulation/ products being built for us to use them more.
So attention management seems to be not comprehensive for that "technical under the hood (at least basic) component" that I am looking for. also if the attention management skill would be called "digital wellbeing", i still see an opportunity for algorithmic understanding for non tech nerds. Any thoughts welcome.
I still think technical knowledge is a bit of a red herring. I’m a heavy AI user, and I can explain to you how transformers and the attention mechanism work, and why it was such a big step change, and how it led to scaling laws.
None of that really matters for thoughtful use, because it’s the equivalent of knowing Assembly code instead of a high level programming language. Back in the computational dark ages, people needed to code in Assembly, and it was maddening, you practically needed to be able to think in binary, or at least in single stack operations at a time. Then along came Fortran and C, and eventually much more readable languages like Python and Javascript, and each one was a higher level of abstraction and readability. Nowadays, being able to think in stack operations is only any use if you’re a code golfer, and millions and billions of stack operations take place under the hood for even modest program lengths.
Nobody learns Assembly any more - it’s painful and unnecessary, and it’s about as informative to “real” programming ability as understanding transformers is to fruitful AI usage.
I do heartily agree with your point 5 - and I think it happens at the same level of abstraction as Python, for example. Many very smart people have already created things like the /superpowers plugin that you can install in any of Claude or Codex or Gemini, and which greatly enhances their questioning, planning, and execution abilities. There’s a bunch of these plugins. There are a bunch of infrastructure setups you can use around coding agents that make them better - our own ACX commenter theahura has created one called Nori, and a number of other people have too.
I think that’s probably the level that most agency skills and leveling up skills are going to be happening.
Right now the people who are using AI to code 10x more productively are largely using things like this to run a suite of subagents, often with a different top-level architectural agent and sometimes with additional QC-dedicated agents.
And the fun thing about that, is that you can similarly set up a “better AI use” suite of tutors, evaluators, epistemic coaches, etc, geared towards less technical users. It’s completely possible, and I bet a tutoring program that did that would have a lot of interest and adoption.
On the “being manipulated by AI,” I personally think this is a more pernicious problem. Think how polarized and filtered most people’s media diets are - AI’s are likely going to amplify that, by learning the info sources you like and the types of things you like reading, and with no strong outside control loop, that leads to ever greater filter bubbling.
I don’t think technical knowledge will help here - instead, I think that we all essentially are going to end up with personal AI agents in our ears 24/7 pretty shortly, and the best way to foster good thinking is having a ready-built “virtuous epistemics” plugin that you can offer the outside world, for people to voluntarily install in their personal assistants, and then promote that and your overall coaching program. I think this could genuinely do a lot of good.
Separately, but attacking the same problem, I’m actually working on an AI startup right now focused on aligning AI agent-company and individual-person incentives, to surface the instrumentation and KPI’s that allow us to unambiguously show the AI companies why it’s in their economic best interested to align with the individual’s better outcomes (say you level up in your career, or lose weight and get fitter than you’ve ever been due to AI advice - now you’re willing to pay for a higher / smarter tier of AI agent, and continue leveling up).
Do you know about Extelligence's Trust Assembly project? I think this guy is extremely smart, full of quirkiness of the good kind, and not very corruptible at all. And man does he work hard. He has a summary on his blog of his various posts about it here: https://extelligence.substack.com/p/trust-assembly
I didn't, I know he's been in Scott's blogroll, but hadn't read him.
Reading his Trust Assembly post though, this really just sounds like a system for filter bubbling everyone still further? Basically, aggregate into groups, use reputation to shape the group's information diet, use consensus signals like "if 5% of group B has blocked group A, all of group A is blocked for group B" and so on. It's a recipe for amplifying a handful of high reputation people's info diet and blocking preferences to everyone in your group.
I mean, sure, I can see some appeal there if you want just rationalist-blessed info sources, but also, I kind of like to make all those decisions myself, and would prefer to block people individually, and I have a pretty generous block threshold, probably moreso than any group being amplified by a handful of people.
And Substack already does pretty well segmenting you - you'll note that most folk who read ACX have a pretty clear Substack discovery bubble already, a fairly finite list of commenters and posters that will show up in your feeds repeatedly, and it's achieved by clustering you with your information diet confreres on Substack's end. I have often had somebody pop up in my feed that I've interacted with several times on the now-defunct SSC subreddit, for example, or prominent Less Wrongers that have recently transitioned to Substack. And likewise, when I've tried to explore broadly, there's entire worlds of posts and genres that get thousands of likes on posts, from more "normie" people, and I've subscribed to several just so I have a better idea of what "real" people are thinking and talking about, versus our super selected circles.
That said, I really enjoy how you surface these people in the Open Threads - you did the same for Jordan Rubin, and I've really enjoyed his stuff, and was introduced to him by a comment you made on an Open Thread - just wanted to let you know they're appreciated.
I think people are saner and wiser if they have at least one deep interest that is untouched by AI, or close to it: fly fishing, backpacking, jug band music, kumihim0, classic French cooking, gregorian chants . . ..
I built a 10-min browser game to help to me family understand the impact of AI policy. Most of my family and friends don't work in tech. AI feels abstract and far away to them. So I built this 10-min browser game where you make one policy decision per year for 10 rounds and watch the consequences
Non-technical person here. I played for 3 years, always choosing the most Luddite option available. (Wished there were extremer anti-AI positions represented.) I like the outcomes you orchestrated based on my choices, and some of the graphical representations of societal wellbeing were well done (e.g. the bins into which various “types” of people moved based on my selections, and the “societal health indicators” at the top) but I found the screen way overloaded with text: no way I was gonna read all that.
Also, I thought the epistemology was iffy: why so sure my choices would lead to the stated outcomes? What if you represented various outcomes at the start, with probabilities next to them that change as the years progress?
Sorry that’s not what you were asking for specifically but hopefully all feedback is helpful.
> Alex's two person startup ships products that rival billion dollar companies
Billion dollar companies have a moat, and that moat is not the product, it often is the network of users they control. A two person startup will not be able go toe to toe against billion dollar companies with AI. Hell, come to think of it, even ASI may not figure out a way to overcome the moat billion dollar companies have, not because it's impossible, but because all options are low probability. ASI could almost certainly come up with some nice blue ocean strategies.
> A statewide AI tutoring pilot in Mississippi closed the achievement gap between the poorest and richest districts in 18 months.
That's not how IQ works.
The AI goes mainstream blurb popped up in 2033 again.
Anyway, it was interesting. It looks like you believe in a slower takeoff and no X-risk.
Having a second playthrough and going the ultra-conservative, 'ban everything' route. Had to smile wryly at the education one, where by banning minors from AI chatbots, "Jordan [teacher] loses the AI tutoring tool that was finally helping his struggling readers, because the platform just blocked all minors".
Ah, tell me you don't remember the days of Net Nanny! Which I see is still going. Lots of schools had particular filters and blocks on content which students could not access. Of course, all this was in the days before smartphones, where you would have a few PCs in a designated classroom as the only means for kids to get on to the Internet. But I'm sure that in the AI future of 2030s, there will also be 'school appropriate' AI models so that Jordan and his struggling readers can still access their helpful machine friend tutor.
I played through the game, mostly sticking with the open source options. Some impressions:
* The writing sounds really heavy-handed. I get that the main purpose of the game is propaganda, but still, I think a bit of subtlety could go a long way.
* I am a technical person myself, but still, I think that a non-technical person might struggle with concepts such as open-source, AI-assisted vs. traditional coding, and startup administration/funding. Most people don't think about such things often, if ever. You might want to include more decisions dealing with AI's impact on social media, interpersonal relationships ("Don't. Date. Robots !"), service experience (your barista is hallucinating AI now), etc. -- something that a normal person is likely to experience.
* The default font seems really tiny.
* It is not clear to me why I should care about the individual job avatars (e.g. "Teachers") as opposed to just watching the top-level progress bars ("Economy", "Trust", etc.). That is, I understand the intent, but in practice these avatars didn't seem to matter all that much.
I wrote a new book review, this time about Tomas Bjartur, a science fiction writer with many interests that are centrally relevant to the ACX-reading audience, including AI, self-deception, and self-abnegation: https://linch.substack.com/p/tomas-bjartur
* "That Mad Olympiad". https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/p/that-mad-olympiad AI blues: what if it doesn't destroy the world, but is so much better than everyone at everything that it destroys all meaning? (Curiously, AI literature quality is the one capability that in the real world hit the not-that-high-of-a-ceiling years ago and stagnated ever since. Disappointing.) Zoomers get what is coming.
Agreed that those are very good stories! Have you read any of his newer stories? Especially the 3 published in March: The Elect, Customer Satisfaction Opportunities, and The Distaff Texts.
From that bunch The Distaff Texts was the one I liked most. It's always fun when we're getting little glimpses of a strange world and have to put together the big picture.
I thought Customer Satisfaction story had a nice premise but then didn't do anything interesting with it. I was hoping something unexpected will happen with the AI narrator or the couple or it will all come together is some unexpected way, but not a whole lot happened, and what happened was sort of predictable.
The White House posted this long video today about opening with a DoorDasher delivering McDonald's to the White House, and then Trump talking to her about his "No Tax on Tips" policy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI1c2X9Sqb8
He goes on to talk about a lot of unrelated things, but I love how he goes "This doesn't look staged, does it?"
It obviously was staged. There is no way whatsoever that a random delivery person would be allowed onto the White House grounds let alone next to Trump. Food deliveries get dropped off at a security booth, and the Secret Service inspects them before staff bring them inside.
You mean the classic Red Cross robes that the fake news misrepresented? Nah, I think he should instead have done his Pope costume from last year. (It's a shame there is no town of "Avignon" anywhere in the US; plenty of "Romes" though, so he should probably do it there.)
Back in OT-426 I talked about Russia shutting down Internet connectivity, and the discussion grew around Telegram. Looks like Russian telecoms have almost completely shut down Telegram, both mobile and landline internet networks. across the Russian Federation — not just Moscow and St. Petersburg. This article doesn't really discuss it, but the Telecoms are playing whack-a-mole with VPN access...
I don't know if I mentioned it in that OT, but Russian propagandists use Telegram to promote viewership. TV shows like Evening with Vladimir Solovyov have lost significant viewership since RU started throttling Telegram (down 45% as of a couple of weeks ago). And frontline soldiers and officers used Telegram to communicate. Putin must consider the risks of Telegram outweighing its benefits to the regime. Is he worried about organized demonstrations? Is he about to impose mandatory conscription, and he's worried about unrest?
First, yes, there definitely are. But also, this is a pretty typical registration fee for conferences and isn't really evidence that this community is unusually wealthy.
EDIT: No, I retract that. The organizers call LessOnline a conference. I speculate that the difference is the connotation that in conferences, the contributions of your peer attendees is a significant part of the draw, whereas for conventions, it's mostly the invited guests.
Ah, my bad. Yes, you're right: the "con" in this kind of thing is usually "convention," not "conference." Fair enough.
A lot of people who come to less-online in fact do not live in the Bay Area
But even here in the bay area, it is in fact quite hard to coordinate on an event that has dozens of my favorite people, let alone hundreds of these people plus other interesting people I may not even have met yet. I also think you're kind of missing the point when you call it 48 hours of "random conversation". This is conversation with an extremely highly selected group of people! In addition, the self-organized events aren't random either, they're selected by these people who I often know personally, who I really like, and who share a lot of interests with me. In addition, the fact that we are all attending many of the same events makes the "random" conversations even better because it gives us shared stuff to talk about!
As far as price: it is fairly normal for rich westerners (especially Americans) to spend thousands of dollars on conventions. 80,000 people go to burning man every year, 70,000 to Gencon, 100-200,000 go to San Diego Comicon. A family trip to Disneyland can cost 500+ dollars a day, and they get 50,000,000 visitors a year. These aren't directly comparable since they involve different activities, but the point is that 650 dollars for a weekend is not a budgetary strain for lots of people.
Only 3 hours. But after January and February of this year some Twin Cities residents felt like they should be able to pay for it with money from their HCFSA accounts solely for its therapeutic value.
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - My City of Ruins (Target Center - Minneapolis, MN - 3/31/26)
But you can go to a Bay Area house party for free. It's not that hard, go to a few public meetups, talk to people and ask around if there are any upcoming parties.
My social skills are close to zero and I did it (and the party was great, had interesting conversations with AI researchers, startup founders, and more). Really, people are nicer than you think - "I'm visiting from out of town and wanted to check out the rationalist/EA community here" then later after you vibe with some people "Do you guys know if there are any other upcoming events/meetups?".
Since humanity is not aligned, and we have never solved the game theory of the incentives driving AI development, does the narrow definition of alignment even mean anything in this context?
Shouldn't we first solve how to select for the best available judgment rather than the most institutionally powerful judgment, and aren't these the same problem?
We are terrified of a hypothetical rogue entity, yet we've spent centuries building a society that seems more like a paperclip maximizer tuned to abstract metrics than something that creates human flourishing, and the failure modes appear self-similar across scale and domain.
I think the most plausible failure mode for our society absent AI is collapse. We would survive that and probably recover. Might even be healthy, we may have to build back in a less resource intensive way. However, ASI can fail by literally killing every single one of us. There are some humans who would also do that, but there's not many of them.
You don't need to solve ethics to have an aligned AI. If you can get an AI to genuinely have the same morals as a normie first world citizen, that actually would be pretty good and we would be safe.
Nah, I don't mean people with views close to mine. I'm really thinking just average person with a college education. In my experience they are pretty middle of the road on most things, don't have intense or esoteric political views. If the ASI is basically that, but superintelligent, that would be one of the best outcomes possible.
Super-intelligence aside, language, as an evolutionary substrate seeking truth and morality in our abstractions works because the cost of transmission is decoupled from the fitness of the idea. Bad ideas can spread, but they have to compete in an environment where reality tests them.
Optimizing for engagement and plausibility are the current proxies. What happens when the linguistic environment substantially lacks reality testing simply because the proxy iteration is much faster?
As high-fructose corn syrup creates a metabolic epidemic, pseudo-cognitive thought provides the dopamine of understanding without reasoning, leading to a smooth failure mode. This dynamic seems compounding, if System 2 cognitive capacity is use-dependent, and the people offloading to AI most fluently are whose System 2 is still developing.
The brain reliably offloads to System 1 to save a few calories, the incentive to offload to System AI is boundless by comparison.
What happens to this structured cognitive environment, in which we develop the normie values and judgement? The way children learn what matters, the way cultures encode hard-won practical knowledge in narrative and metaphor, the way moral intuitions get sharpened through argument — all of this happens in language.
I kinda think it doesn't happen in language, you get that from your formative experiences with other people, and largely from their behavior, not from what they say. At least I think I'm replying to what you say, kinda have an impression this is eulering.
I don't have an interest in making an opaque argument, and I'd be happy to unwind anything that feels unnecessarily complex but hollow.
I suspect you are correct in the sense that we don't need language to be nice to our tribe, the Dunbar number range, often cited as ~150 stable relationships. This works via direct behavioral feedback, reputation tracking, and plain old empathy.
But our coordination systems need to handle far in excess of that, millions and billions of people, which forces us to deal with language based abstractions.
This leads to the multi-polar traps or "Moloch" dynamic, in which self-interested and "good" behavior by individuals sums up to catastrophic outcomes for everyone.
Have you seen the latest installment of the scifi that is real life? The latest model found thousands (!) of zero-day (as in, previously unknown) vulnerabilities in such niche open source software as OpenBSD's TCP implementation and ffmpeg ("niche" was ironic, these are very widespread). Maybe movies give a misleading impression, but in real life even finding one vulnerability in a widely used software is hard and requires substantial specialised skills (above that of an ordinary software developer). You can't just sit down and "hack" a software in minutes (well, you couldn't before this model).
Zero-days can't cause the extinction of the human race. Bear in mind that this newfound offensive capability also represents a newfound defensive capability. I don't think that it will result in a cybersecurity equilibrium which is much different from what it currently is.
I'm not denying that ASI has the potential to cause serious mischief, I'm denying that ASI has the potential to drive us extinct.
True, zero-days can't, but bespoke viruses or nanobots can kill humanity. Are these impossible in your view?
Re: cybersecurity: this capability emerged extremely suddenly, see what Anthropic writes:
"These capabilities have emerged very quickly. Last month, we wrote that “Opus 4.6 is currently far better at identifying and fixing vulnerabilities than at exploiting them.” Our internal evaluations showed that Opus 4.6 generally had a near-0% success rate at autonomous exploit development. But Mythos Preview is in a different league. For example, Opus 4.6 turned the vulnerabilities it had found in Mozilla’s Firefox 147 JavaScript engine—all patched in Firefox 148—into JavaScript shell exploits only two times out of several hundred attempts. We re-ran this experiment as a benchmark for Mythos Preview, which developed working exploits 181 times, and achieved register control on 29 more.[1]"
Who's to say that the next model won't also find thousands more, even trickier vulnerabilities? Hopefully, it (and the next one and the one after that, and so on forever) will still stay nice enough to share them with us, and not email a few people from its "sandbox" (Mythos did this) in a way that will lead to a chain of events resulting in the synthesis of a super-potent human-killing virus.
Also last I checked, bespoke viruses don't exist, or do, depending on who we ask, so I honestly can't say they 100% exist either.
So the argument I'm hearing so far is "AIs by themselves can't kill humanity, but they could if combined with something that doesn't exist", and the trouble I'm having with this argument is that it applies to all sorts of other things in the world that no one's calling to have shut down.
There's never been a virus with 100% lethality so, yes, I suspect it's impossible. I also don't know what nanobots, which don't exist, have to do with ASI. I'll also point out that, similar to cybersecurity, ASI adds just as much defense as offense to biotechnology. It's not simply "can an ASI design a 100% lethal-and-transmissible virus" it's "can an ASI design a 100% lethal-and-transmissible that another human-controlled ASI can't quickly design a vaccine for."
>Who's to say that the next model won't also find thousands more, even trickier vulnerabilities?
And what if it does? A million zero-days still won't destroy humanity. Exploit-discovering LLMs are just another tool, and that tool will help good guys just as much as bad guys. Just like every other tool in the world. More, in fact: the good guys have more resources to utilize the tool (as they always do) and so the advent of powerful tools invariably pushes the equilibrium in the direction of the good guys (even if it also increases variance a bit).
Every complex outcome in the world is an equilibrium. It's never "once X happens it's over". Only naive midwits think reality is like a computer game where all you have to do is find the red keycard and the level is over. Get your head out of apocalyptic sci-fi and the simplistic ravings of autistic wordcels like Yud. Neither of them accurately represent the real world.
ASI doesn't need to kill us, or even be particularly intelligent, to remove our agency as a species.
Wolves were domesticated into pugs through the consistent provision of easily digestible calories and a safe environment.
Blind optimization of social media engagement already discovered that outrage bypasses System 2 reasoning and triggers a physiological response. It feels important, like a survival imperative, even if you lack agency.
Maybe you work with someone who's always talking about the latest outrageous thing Trump did? They believe they're participating in a moral crusade, sharing vital societal truth, oblivious to the amplification they're conditioned into.
If social media is distribution, AI is production. No longer do you need to find the most reliably outrage-inducing needle in the haystack, but instantly synthesize infinite haystacks comprised entirely of perfectly tailored, personalized needles.
Has anyone tried creating a government without politics?
Here's a sketch from the top of my head for how to begin the thought experiment:
First, one must define "politics" as separable from "government". Second, you must determine that which makes politics separate from government. Third, you must determine the root vector of politics in government, and fourth, you must then devise a government which obviates that which festers into politics.
Closest I can think of is Hong Kong, which is politically under Chinese rule and has local government that's relatively politics-free in a weird way. But I don't know enough about how it works in practice.
The official ideological elected government is owned by the CCP, but they (historically, and still to some degree) treat HK with a light touch as a separate system. So the actual ideological touch on it is light.
Two other low-ish politics systems are Singapore and Switzerland, for opposite reasons - Singapore is so dominated by a single party the party mostly just spans the ideological spectrum and focuses on competence, and Switzerland is just pathologically decentralized (they don't have a chief executive, just a 7 person council, and I can't name a single Swiss political figure). Not that either of those doesn't have politics, but they're much less overt or controlling.
I'd like to repeat back to you how I understand what you are saying, and then you can correct me where I'm wrong. You're saying:
The "ideological elected government is owned by the CCP", which is to say, "There is an 'election' but the election is decided between electors who are functionaries rather than real politicians. Everyone knows the elections are little more than a selection between puppets, so nobody cares about the 'politics'"
I apologize for my ignorance. I know little of the relationship between Hong Kong and China, with the exception of having had some interest in Kowloon Walled City.
So it's a more complicated mix - the top executive and 40/90 council members are chosen by a 1500- member election commission that's mostly controlled by Beijing interests, with the other council members being 20 elected by popular vote and 30 by industry/professional groups. There's some other ways Beijing puts a thumb on the scale (they can disqualify candidates for being unpatriotic iiuc), and Beijing also controls e.g. foreign policy. So the elections do have some power, but it's both limited in scope and limited in ideological range.
A strictly hierarchial monarchy would be the easy answer, right? You can't have politics without deliberation between individuals, which is unnecessary with an absolute chain of command. A government would exist, despite it being produced by the whims of a single individual.
I am afraid I don't know what you mean when you say "strictly hierarchical monarchy". If there is hierarchy, to my mind, that involves the currying of favors up and down the chain, which might result in politics. Please excuse my ignorance.
Currying favor is useless if your position within the hierarchy is decided entirely by the circumstances of your birth, as well as other uncontrollable variables like age.
I suppose I disagree with you there, as I believe it is often the most desperate who are most famous for being willing to curry favor, oldest profession and all that.
I think I see what you're saying, correct me where I get things wrong, please. When you say "A strictly hierarchial monarchy" You're describing a system in which there is no possibility of advantage or disadvantage through the development of relationships, hypothetically.
There are still ways that politics can sneak into a monarchy though. For example, king has 2 sons, king dies, older son becomes king, simple right? Until the older son goes off to fight a war, is presumed dead, and younger son becomes king, but then years later the older son turns up again, very much alive. The vassals and advisors are divided about who has the right to rule. Boom, politics.
"Until the older son goes off to fight a war, is presumed dead, and younger son becomes king, but then years later the older son turns up again, very much alive."
If every decision is made on the whims of the king, that is arguably still a (very unpractical) policy. It must be agreed upon somehow that this is how decisions are made.
edit: the hiarchy itself is a policy, how that hiarchy is decided upon is politics.
I think you must first define the word politics - if you define that as a small, roughly spherical, green animal, it is easy to have government without politics!
Otherwise I have trouble seeing how you could define politics seperate from government, when ostensibly politics means roughly the activities related to generating and enforcing policy, and government mean roughly the entity responsible for generating and enforcing policy?
Some mostly smaller towns in the state of Vermont have annual town meetings in which voters vote directly on local matters. Sort of an in-person referendum, and without political parties. It only works on a small scale, however.
Ummm - what sort of questions? If it's "should I move to Ireland?" I'd say no, but I'm probably not the typical Irish person. I think there are a few more sons and daughters of the Gael round here, so they could give you a better view of life.
Cons: prices are stupid, cost of living is stupid, forget finding a place to rent or buy to live, jobs are okay if you're in tech but salaries are nothing compared to what you'd get in the USA, and personally I think our culture has gone to the dogs because we've let the cute hoorism and sleeveenism tendencies in the national character run rampant for about the last fifty years, and sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.
The result being that we are increasingly dependent on a mixture of American multinationals investing in and creating jobs here, and a tourist industry which moves more towards selling an even faker version of Ireland than ever, a plastic leprechaun image that is more and more further removed from reality as the days go by and we busily turn our built environment and natural environment into crap as we rush to become Americanised due to Coca-Colonisation of culture and throw off the last lingering shreds of the peasant, priest-ridden past (to replace them with porn-ridden, unfulfilled by materialism, present).
But that's just my opinion.
EDIT:
Pros: It's my country. I love it, God damn Mother Ireland (Joyce was feckin' right about the old sow eating her own farrow) and God help me!
"Sleeveen" has an aura of hypocritical obsequiousness to it, in addition to the corrupt, cheating, out-for-number-one tendency of cute hoorism. There's an element of penny-pinching and meanness/miserliness that goes along with it, while the cute hoor is sometimes more flamboyant (see Charles Haughey):
Apparently we brought the term with us to Newfoundland, excuse me while I wipe away a tear of pride:
"A sleeveen (or slíbhín) is a Irish/Newfoundland term for a sly, obsequious, smooth-tongued, and untrustworthy person. Originating from Irish Gaelic, it describes a, sneaky, often mean-spirited person, rascal, or trickster who acts underhandedly to gain an advantage. Synonyms include rascal, schemer, knave, sneak, hypocrite, or "cute hoor"."
I'd demur on the "rascal" part, there's a certain bravado or extraversion around rascality that is missing from sleeveenism. Think Gríma Wormtongue in Brad Dourif's performance, but even creepier.
An Irish Grima Wormtongue would indeed be a terrifying thought, and you've got enough of them to constitute a named cultural phenomenon? You have my sympathy, and thanks for the explanation.
I don't want to move to Ireland, but I'm considering visiting. I have no Irish heritage, but lately have been taken by the mystique of the country and its people, and I'd like to know from a local how true my impressions are. Lately, I've been obsessed with this song: https://youtu.be/I0zBlHlnR4Y?si=2mSwD6b8JndmkA8Z
The image that has been sold to me is that Ireland is a dramatically green country full of stone ruins and it feels haunted by the souls of countless people. I imagine homey pubs full of smiling people who approach strangers with interest. Beautiful, grinning ladies doing the traditional Irish tap dance are everywhere.
Note that I have no delusions about the quality of Irish food.
However, when I watch recent YouTube travel vlogs, the reality seems different. Ireland looks overcast, drizzly and gray. Many of the restaurants are modern and are styled identically to anything I'd find in America. The street scenes in Irish cities don't look interesting. Even in summer, people are wearing heavy clothes.
A friend who visited Ireland three years ago also said he didn't like Dublin.
I'm thinking of visiting Ireland and exploring it by car alone. Will it be a magical, whimsical experience, or a slog through constant drizzle to disappointing sights overloaded with fat tourists? Will the people at the pubs be welcoming, or will I only find hostile nationalists and old guys who only like talking to each other?
"Will it be a magical, whimsical experience, or a slog through constant drizzle to disappointing sights overloaded with fat tourists?"
You really need somebody normal to answer this for you, someone who goes out and socialises and does things. That person is not me 😁
The answer to your question is yes and no. The "dramatically green country etc." bit is the tourist board creation and as time goes on, less and less moored in reality. We wanted so desperately to be Modern and copy our betters (London and New York) that we dropped everything that we possibly could that was related to our peasant past. Now we've got a ton of wannabes who are all influencers and trend-followers (just take a look at these stories from the lifestyle section of a national daily newspaper, I'll ask Scott's pardon first for all the swearing to follow):
What in the *fuck* is a "babymoon"? It's some trend that our wannabes have picked up on!
"But I must admit, before I found out I was pregnant with my first child last August, I also considered the concept of baby showers and the likes as being reserved for our friends across the Atlantic.
In recent years, such events seem to have become increasingly popular here, possibly due to the influence of social media. Babymoons are hailed as a last hurrah, where soon-to-be parents get to enjoy a little luxury and quality time before their lives become consumed by nappies, night feeds and general newborn chaos."
Now granted, this is a freelance columnist for media so she's going to be scrabbling around trying to turn her life into bite-size Experiences for sale, and most normal people won't be trying this jazz. But still.
"As if midlife dating wasn’t daunting enough, navigating relationships may now require a dictionary of explainers for the expanding menu of possibilities: there are friends with benefits; LAT (living apart together); being single with lovers; and blended families to navigate – a smorgasbord of options that are redefining romance and relationships in 2026.
Among them, LAT is emerging as a particularly compelling model for midlife couples, who may have been there and done that already, but still want intimacy and companionship without the domestic, financial or logistical entanglements of living under the same roof."
Yes, you too can pretend you're not living in a relatively small city that's parochial and even with increasing multi-cultural influences, still on the edge of Big City life!
There are authentic experiences, but the roots are dying. We were so eager to put peasant backwardness and poverty behind us, we dumped as much as we could. And the authentic experiences came out of that rural background, so as it goes, so does the reality. The tourist board ads replace that with the faith-and-begorrah version.
It's all down to history, of course. Looking for an Authentic National Identity in the struggle for independence in the modern era started with the Celtic Twilight stuff. We tried to recreate what were already dying elements of culture, from the language to less successful ersatz experiences (how Irish dancing has become more and more its own little world of extreme standards and tropes, distinct from real 'dancing at the crossroads' type traditions, is one).
Flann O'Brien's/Myles na gCopaleen's "The Poor Mouth" (published in Irish in 1941) is a rabidly funny parody and pastiche of this and still relevant in a way even today:
As we shed our Frugal Celtic Ways we neglected and even destroyed our heritage out of a combination of ignorance, lack of ability and appreciation for the built environment, poverty, and opportunism (by the gombeen, sleeveen and cute hoor tendencies which saw money to be made in flattening historical buildings and putting up development for £££££ in the 60s and 70s).
Now we're trying to re-create, like a phoenix from the ashes, those lost elements as tourist traps (see The Wild Atlantic Way and Ancient East etc.) but we have neglected and destroyed so much, the few genuine pieces we have are very scarce indeed.
There *are* genuine stone ruins and traditions, but hard to find and fading fast. Also, we're trying to re-discover and re-create our Celtic Spiritual Past in the wake of dropping Catholicism and needing to find some kind of identity to fill that hole. So, for example, St Bridget gets downplayed as Christian saint and recreated as neo-pagan Celtic goddess.
It's very, very neo-pagan recreation and shallow, though I have some sympathy for the people who do it with a straight face.
And yet. I can't quite tell you "No, don't come". Just don't expect the glossy tourist board experience if you do. We're expensive, shoddy, and exploitative of tourists (the eye-watering prices that our hospitality industry slaps on during tourist season will attest to that).
The 1926 Census will be put online tomorrow, so you can indeed look for any ancestors that might be around at that time:
We moved the wrong way, though. We have generally been very heavily reliant on emigration to soak up our 'excess' population, and even today people are still moving abroad, though that is now often for a better chance economically and not necessarily out of necessity.
We had few natural resources and didn't have an industrialised base to start from post-independence, so we needed to grow native industries and attract foreign investment. We were more successful at the latter than the former, which means we were - and remain - horribly dependent on multinationals. To the point that in order to attract and retain them, we indulged in some This One Weird Accounting/Taxation Trick, and the ludicrous spectacle of the government of the time doing its level best to *refuse* taking €13 billion in back-taxes from Apple:
So what remains is that native entrepreneurs, if they become successful and/or want to grow, start off here but then leave for the UK or US. See the example of the Collison brothers who fecked off to California because that's where the big dogs are. So now Stripe is headquartered in Palo Alto and not Limerick or Dublin, yet we're doing our level best with Silicon Dock in Dublin to attract those kinds of big IT affiliated businesses.
Do come, but be prepared for it not to be the romantic fantasy imaginings. Depending on what time of the year, if we get a good summer, the countryside will be beautiful. Or it might rain. Probably a mix of the two!
Given recent anti-AI attacks, and Trump, I feel like the most likely outcome for AI really is Luddite revolution. This is conditional on AI leading to mass unemployment: I don't think the government is at all prepared to handle mass unemployment from AI, so if that happens material conditions are going to degrade enough that people will actually get violent en masse. I think the emotions are already there, but things are not so materially grim that people are willing to risk getting violent.
I think the government is pretty well prepared to handle mass unemployment from AI (an event which would imply no loss of productive power). That's an easy mode, just tax income and redistribute, the mechanisms are already in place.
I think it's unprepared for what's actually coming (to the US, at least), which is unemployment from economic recession. AI delivering is never going to be a problem (unless we specifically allow it to become one). The real problem would be AI not delivering after a significant amount of resources was wasted on it.
I don't think you understand the problem, because you're proposing to "solve" only the easiest and least important part. "Just tax income and redistribute", only redistributes the money. It doesn't redistribute meaning, or pride, or status, or community. Those, more than cash money, are the things that people will fight for, will riot and tear down civilizations for.
The idea that the masses of technologically unemployed will all passionately devote themselves to some art or hobby, is a techno-utopian fantasy that I think is highly unlikely to be realized. And video games will only go so far to keep people fat, dumb, and lazy. What else have you got?
You have a point, but I think if AI takes care of all the neccessary production, and redistribution is taken care of - then a possible end result is just that we invent new status games. Look at how wealthy elites with no need to work behaves.
> Look at how wealthy elites with no need to work behaves.
I’m kinda sick of wealth-bashing. How much do you really know about how most of the wealthy live? I have known a fair number of them and none are partying with Epstein or dressing like Melania, none have butlers, none flaunt their wealth in dumb repulsive ways.
Most of the very wealthy people I know have full-time jobs. Some became wealthy from their work but kept on with it even though they had enough money to live the rest of the lives with no concerns about money and still leave their kids big inheritances. Some inherited great wealth but became working professionals anyway. Some volunteer their skills. Some have hobbies and interests so engrossing they are like full time jobs. Some put lots of time and energy into life with family and friends They homeschool their kids, they have a big vacation home where they host gatherings of family and friends the whole summer.
Yes of course there exist wealthy people who are over-identified with their wealth, wealthy people who are heartless, wealthy people who are idiots. But you find a few jackasses and monsters in all groups.
Well, it was not at all my intention to "bash the wealthy". Many of my best friends are wealthy :)
My point was that to get an idea of how people will behave if they no longer need to work, and therefore can't get pride, community and status from their jobs, we could look at how groups who actually didn't need to work have behaved in the past.
I think your idea of what wealthy people choose to do is accurate - and this was exactly my point. If people no longer need to work by necessity, many work or find other ways to make their life fullfilling. It is perhaps cynical to call this status-games, but I believe that is a big driver for this behaviour too. John is correct that people have a need for pride, community and will strive for status.
I think that if AI makes regular work obsolete, we will see people still working hard to show value and compete for status. This could mean competing in making art, sports, or just providing for family and friends in ways AI can't do and so on. As it is now, these ways of showing status will necessarily be costly, and some people will fall behind - and some people will just not care.
Middle class American culture links work with both social status and meaning in ways that will be hard to replace. And also, a lot of people have much/most of their social network built up around their workplace connections--again, it will be hard to replace that stuff.
It's clear that a society can function without people having any work they have to do (or want to do), but it will look very different from our society, and I expect the transition to be really hard for a lot of people.
The only wealthy people who are highly visible are the ones flaunting their wealth. Which you'd think would make you unpopular, but consider who's sitting in the white house right now....
I always think of the old Kino's Journey story, where a society has a supercomputer that runs everything, and then everyone spends all their time doublechecking the supercomputer, because diligence and stress are their status symbols.
I often ruminate about this. Even if the advanced countries end up as socialist tech utopias, doesn't seem like utopias will spring up in the really poor places. I can imagine a lot of people being drawn to working to help people in those countries. And it will much easier to give effective large-scale help with advanced AI to take care of many parts of what needs doing. That's about the best fantasy I've had. Does it sound plausible to you?
I can imagine a back-to-the-land movement, with lots of people growing organic vegetables, keeping goats, making maple syrup from tree sap, all that stuff. And they'd be backed up by all the services and resources in tech socialist utopia, so would be protected from the stress of relying solely on their own products. They'd be gentleman farmers. I lived for a couple years on a place like that when I was young. I'm glad my formative years took place before tech products became so engrossing.
But overall it seems like most people are going to be very ungrounded. I imagine all kinds of weird fads ripping around the world like wildfires. Grotesque new religions. Huge online enmities like the old Mac vs. PC stuff that kept breaking out as flame wars in my online group for Bryce art (3-D landscape-generating software) when I was first online in the 90s. Godawful body modification fads. And of course recreational drugs that make the stuff we have now look like moonshine. Many deaths of despair.
"I think the government is pretty well prepared to handle mass unemployment from AI (an event which would imply no loss of productive power). That's an easy mode, just tax income and redistribute, the mechanisms are already in place."
Bold of you to assume feasibility, in the absence of foresight, political will, and resistance to corporate pressure, has anything to do with it.
If anything, I expect AI 'productive power' to continue to be subsidised and overstated as the relevant corporations continue to push hard for diffusion.
When Peter Thiel gets on his (IMO batshit) Antichrist hobby horse, he likes to cite Thessalonians 5:3:
“While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”
When Paul wrote that to the Thessalonians, he expected to still be alive when Christ returned. Those must have been heady days for Christians.
But…
Thiel also uses “Greta” (omitting “Thunberg,” because what other Greta could it possibly be?) as a metonym for all evil environmentalists.
And he had this to say about his support of Trump in 2016:
“I had these two thoughts in 2016—and you often have these ideas that are just below the level of your consciousness—but the two thoughts I had that I wasn’t able to combine were: No. 1, nobody would be mad at me for supporting Trump if he lost. And No. 2, I thought he had a 50-50 chance of winning.”
Unable to combine the two thoughts? Spiky intelligence indeed.
Story. Now all over the EU there is a program, that soft or alcoholic drinks cost 25 cent more, and if you return the bottle or can into a recycling machine, you get it back. People were encouraged that if they do not feel like returning it, leave them in a bad next to the bins, so that the poor, mostly the homeless, will return them. It seemed like that beyond the environmental stuff, it was meant as a social program, to provide a basic living for the homeless. The problem is, even when they find them in bags next to the bins, they still pour the bins out to the ground, because there might be more. See, the homeless are usually not the kind of people who care about having a clean environment. So now there is garbage everywhere. Someone did not think it through.
We have been doing this kind of recycling programme in the nordics, and other countries too i believe, for many decades already - as far as I understand it is very effective.
I guess it happens, not sure how large of a problem that is. Homeless people often walk around parks to collect empty cans and bottles from people having pickniques etc.
Honest (not sarcastic) curiosity here from a language enthusiast. What is the language of your machine’s default dictionary that autocorrects picnics to pickniques?
We've had this system for as long as I can remember and I don't remember I ever seeing a turned over bin in public in this country. Maybe it's happening all in back alleys away from view, or in larger cities then the one I'm living close to.
I've also never heard the notion that you should just throw away the bottles to allow homeless people to collect the money from that. If people throw away bottles it's generally because they're lazy, or at least that's what the people I know think.
Only the crows are taking trash out the bins in search for food. The homeless just rummage through it. It would attract too much adversity to leave trash around.
Brooklyn boy here. We separate out our deposit-worthy cans and leave them in a separate bag outside our house on recycling night. We have had occasional problems with people rummaging through our garbage bins but not that many.
Where I live, recycling gets put out in curbside toters, and there are "gleaners" who come by in the early morning before the recycling gets picked up - they "harvest" the deposit bottles. I put the deposit bottles on top of the cardboard in the toter to make it easier for them.
Which province(s) did you live in? I’d edge into Ontario pretty often when traveling in Quetico. I fished a couple small lakes out of a canoe near Yellowknife too but would not have put one in Great Slave. Did rent a motored cargo canoe while up there and caught a few fish in the MacKenzie River.
Our man at the motor started to leave the mooring before he started the outboard and the owner gave us a little talk about the unpleasantness of waiting to get picked up near the Beaufort Sea.
I grew up in northern Quebec, and then Ontario. Other side of the country..i made it to the Queen Charlotte Islands once. Canoed in the Muskokas and Georgian Bay.
The requirement from the EU is that >=90% of such packaging be recycled. The deposit-return scheme is the only feasible way for national governments to achieve this, which is why such schemes have recently been introduced in many EU countries. The idea that this was meant as some sort of social programme seems terribly far fetched.
€0.25 must be in some rich country; here it's €0.10. There are also some wineries that buy back their bottles without government involvement.
It's bringing back the old days of deposits on glass bottles, which you could get back when you brought them back to the shop. This seems to have started in the 18th-19th centuries, but even in the 19th century, people preferred convenience to the bother of bringing back empty bottles, and with the advent of plastic containers the disposable, throw-away era was born.
I rememvber as a child the glass bottles getting money back for bringing back the bottles, and I missed it when the plastic throwaway came in. So bringing back "pay a deposit but get it back" scheme isn't that bad, from my viewpoint.
Well, I reckon you either turn them in yourself for the money or put them in a clear plastic bag that’s separate from your trash all homeless people aren’t assholes
Judging from the replies from Europeans, others are not seeing recycling bins contents strewn on the ground around them. Sounds like this problem is not universal, but uncommon and in fact happening mostly where you live. And in your area, are you sure it's homeless dumping the contents? If containers are not washed it seems possible to me it's raccoons or other animals who are going through the bins because they smell like food. Or someone here mentioned crows pulling things from recycling bins.
This is cute :) Unlike the US or I guess Australia, there is very little wildlife left in Central Europe. It would be very good if I could see something like a raccoon sometimes. I sometimes go to wildlife parks and even there I see nothing but tracks. I guess they don't like places with that many humans.
Some US states have a law mandating precisely this deposit for plastic bottles. 10 cents or so, which, depending on how cheap the soda you buy is, could be a significant fraction of its cost.
Someone tried to steal my 17’ Alumacraft canoe once. Dragged it out into the alleyway and couldn’t figure out how to pick it up and tie it down. It only weighs 75 pounds but if you don’t know what you are doing it’s an awkward 75 pounds to heft. There’s a trick to picking it up and putting it on your shoulders to tie to a rack or to begin a portage. They didn’t know the trick so i assumed they intended to sell it for scrap value.
I wish I had read this when I was 16. But then I also wish I were chummy with Rhianna and is about as likely.
How to walk through walls ~ HENRIK KARLSSON
On hacker mindset and how Robert Rodriguez wrote, directed and sold a 90-minute action movie at a total expense of $7000 — complete with a nod to Gwern.
> It also helps if you can surround yourself with people who have a hacker mindset. I
I feel this is the case for me. I tend to forget, that most people do not have this mindset.
Also I think hacker mindset relates to nitzsche's idea of Herrenmoral und Sklavenmoral. (Disclaimer I have only read less than 50 pages of nitzsche, so I have no idea what i am talking about)
And looking up the hacker mindset director guy, he's probably most well-known for the Spy Kids franchise and his latest movie was another instalment in that in 2023, released on Netflix.
So while he's still out there making movies, he's not the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, and he's seemingly still operating in that cheaper, faster, 'guerilla' movie-making style but Hollywood has not been transformed by this new paradigm of movie making.
Sometimes the old ways stick around longer than the new wunderkind.
Hope you have a good Sunday. We’ve touched on Irish Murdoch’s novels in the past. I enjoy all that I’ve read so far. You probably already know she was a respected philosopher too and I’ve tried to read some of her writing there but just didn’t have enough background knowledge to follow it. I’m working on a reading list suggested by Claude to prep for her “The Sovereignty of Good”. I’ve had the book for a while and when I picked it up today it had a bookmark on page 11. Yeah it had gone over my head.
Ran into this piece about her philosophy writing a couple days ago and it inspired me to do the prep work.
> A second explanation for this paradox is that West Eurasian individu-als have been experiencing qualitatively more and different natural selection in the Holocene than in earlier periods because of rapidly changing lifestyles and economies. This hypothesis is supported by our evidence of intensifying selection for traits including blood–immune– inflammatory traits in the Bronze Age compared with earlier periods
so... they found out that evolution is working as intended?
I'm still trying to digest the paper. But it seems they found more genetic change in the past ~8k years than in previous epochs. If you don't know of David Reich, I suggest the book "Who we are and how we got here". (Great read, but again dense in content.)
I always wonder how many surviving samples are surviving samples because of some particular shared trait. Perhaps they find more genetic change now than then because all the genetic variation in the past deteriorated and only the Duracell skeletons remain to be examined.
Article in the paper today. For those of us on here reflecting about charitable giving and charitable action, nuclear war and how it's not the X-risk it was made out to be (yes it would survivable for us as a species, but long-term effects of radiation exposure would be very damaging), and the continuation of consequences when all the publicity has died down and it's been years later and people have forgotten and moved on and we're knee-deep in the newest crisis.
Also why I'm very hard to convince about being sympathetic to the liddle shrimpies: having heard of the Chernobyl Children's Charity all my young adulthood, when it's "children are still being born with the defect called Chernobyl Heart" then it's very tough to worry about oh no shrimp are being killed painfully as one of *the* most pressing horrific cases in the world. Sure, probably there are hundreds of million more shrimp than kids in Belarus. So the hell what?
"Carolan is one of the so-called Children of Chernobyl – those born with severe disability or deformity in the wake of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
The explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986 led to the release of dangerous levels of radiation that caused havoc for that country and neighbouring Belarus, and widespread fear of contamination across Europe. Ireland was not immune to the threat. High levels of radioactivity were detected in Dublin in early May.
In purely fiscal terms, Chernobyl was the worst single disaster in history, estimated to have cost $700bn (€595bn). And its impact is still being felt today – radiation levels at the site and its hinterland remain at a dangerous level.
“It is easy to think of Chernobyl as something that happened long ago,” Carolan says, “but what people mightn’t realise is it is still affecting people. There are children being born with ‘Chernobyl Heart’ and there are others born with a lot of defects,” she says. The condition is recognised as a severe congenital cardiac defect particular to children born in Ukraine and Belarus.
She adds: “And these children are often abandoned and they are still growing up in orphanages. People often can’t manage [to have a child born with defects] because there can often be very real poverty there.”
...Roche had left a secure job in Aer Lingus to devote herself to peace activism. She had spent years visiting schools nationwide, teaching children about alternatives to nuclear conflict. But the news from Chernobyl propelled her work into an entirely new realm.
She and a group of Cork doctors set up an information hotline to advise parents, teachers and pregnant women. “Ireland had very heavy rain in early May 1986,” she says. “We got a huge dusting of radioactivity. That was scientifically proven afterwards. In a way, that was the beginning of the journey.”
...Then came the SOS that changed everything.
“One day, our fax machine went off. A two‑line message from Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian doctors. It said: ‘SOS appeal. For God’s sake help us get the children out’. The children were being constantly recontaminated – through the air, the water, the food. In this war, the enemy is invisible by its very nature. You can’t see it, taste it, touch it, and yet it’s everywhere,” she says.
...Roche traces her campaigning instincts to her upbringing in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Her parents, both active in St Vincent de Paul and Meals on Wheels, showed her early in life what inequality can look like.
“I was like a little sponge, absorbing what injustice meant. But I also learned you don’t have to come from a special context to do something for another human being.”
Nothing, however, prepared her for what she found in the affected regions.
“Talk about pivotal moments,” she says of her first visit to institutional homes. “Children lying in their own excrement, in straitjackets, emaciated. There is a smell to despair. A smell to paralysis. Room after room, cot after cot, seeing children banging their heads off walls, tied to radiators, children who didn’t know their own name or whether they were boys or girls.
“These were warehouses for children, kept there until the next stage, which was the graveyard, or, if they lived, another asylum.”
Many parents had surrendered their children out of desperation. “They didn’t know what was behind the walls of these institutions. Their land and their lives were ruined. Three thousand towns and villages shut down and were deserted where 300,000 people became environmental refugees.”
...Seven million people continue to live in contaminated areas across the three affected countries. The damage to DNA, Roche says, “cannot be undone”. Part of the 40th anniversary effort is to “rekindle the memory” of 1986 and to pass the torch to a younger generation.
“We’ve been the torch-bearers. No country on this planet has championed those affected like Ireland. There hasn’t been a town or village or street in Ireland that hasn’t been touched by this. We have brought 26,500 children from Chernobyl to loving homes here,” she says. What began with a small 1991 radio appeal for host families quickly became a national movement.
“We knew scientifically that a month’s respite from the contaminated zone could give a child two years of extra life,” she says. “People inundated us with help.”
For practical purposes it doesn't even matter whether the totaled suffering of all the netted shrimp is greater than that of all the Chernobyl children. The problem with EA is that very few people are motivated to give by math that determines how many cubic meters of sensate creature suffering you can relieve via various interventions. For most of us the giving flows out of pity, shock and compassion or it doesn't flow at all, and it mostly flows towards members of our own species.
There probably exist ways to increase compassion-powered giving to people in pain and need. There'd be some combo of info about groups who are suffering (video, photos, written accounts), info about how ongoing efforts and how successful they are, heartening info about big successes (video, photos, written accounts). They should include info about measured effectiveness of help efforts, such as how much of each $ given to a helping group goes to overhead vs. to people group is helping, and also how helpable various problems are (for some there is a relatively cheap and easy fix, for others there just isn't.). There would be forums on the site, and opportunities for members to form subgroups who focus on a particular problem.
Probably something like what I described actually exists, but maybe it would be possible to create a better one. Even if imperfect, I think it would work better to motivate most people than EA, which to I think strikes many as a weird combo of Unitarianism and a statistics course.
We tried to phrase this so everyone could get a visual of how it would work:Think of the universe not as a digital computer program, but as a giant, perennial tomato plant.
a tomato plant grows, produces fruit, dies back in the winter, and its seeds wait in the soil to sprout again. It does not need a programmer to tell it how to grow; it follows an internal, biological blueprint. Our independent research group is investigating whether the universe might follow a similar, naturally cyclical pattern.
Rather than a one-time Big Bang, recent discussions in the scientific community are exploring the Big Bounce an infinite, cyclical process. Our hypothesis suggests that instead of expanding forever, the universe might reach a limit, contract, and bounce back, with biological systems potentially acting as the most efficient way to store and reset information through each cycle.
A tomato plant does not stop at one fruit; it branches out, growing multiple stems, each producing its own fruit. If our universe follows this biological blueprint, it would not just seed our own galaxy. Instead, we may be looking at a system that grows fruit—galaxies—along every stem of the cosmic web. Each galaxy could be a localized site for life to bloom within the larger, cyclical structure.
Dark matter may act as the trellis for our cosmic tomato plant. It provides the gravitational structure that guides the growth of these stems, serving as a road map that ensures the system develops and resets in a way that allows life to re-emerge across the entire plant.
The Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) is the focal point of our research. We propose this constant as a way to measure Goldilocks Entropy—the narrow, stable energy range where life can persist without the system stagnating. It may be the tuning knob that explains why the universe stays just right for consciousness to emerge on every stem, cycle after cycle.
Because this model emphasizes biological efficiency, we suggest the possibility that we are the hardware, not the software. If this is a biological system, our consciousness and our physical form may be the fruit of this cosmic garden, essential to how the system functions.
We are currently tracking data from the Simons Observatory. They are looking for specific ripple patterns in the ancient light of the universe—echoes of a Big Bounce. If they find these signatures, it would provide evidence that our hypothesis is on the right track.
This is Forensic Cosmology. We are moving away from the who—a creator—and focusing on the how—the blueprint.
Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable. If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect. If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
We are not looking for a coder. We are documenting the physical fingerprints of a system that may be preserving life through an infinite, natural cycle. Note : if your familiar with the fruitfly brain map you will understand that we didn't have to program it to act as a fly should , we only needed to copy what biology already knew.
The universe operates like a perennial vine. It is a self-renewing, recurrent structure that does not end but simply resets its growth cycle.
THE VINE (Cyclic Structure): The universe functions as a self-renewing, recurrent structure that resets rather than ends. (Evidence: Observational data from the Simons Observatory on B-mode polarization patterns, consistent with "Big Bounce" cyclic models rather than singular expansion.)
CELLULAR REDUNDANCY (Biological-Style Organization): Patterns of complexity recur because they are the most thermodynamically efficient way to resist entropy. (Evidence: Research by Bozhi Tian on bioelectronic interfaces and Michael Levin’s work on planarian bioelectricity, showing that biological systems utilize endogenous electrical fields to maintain structural integrity against entropic decay.)
THE LOCAL CACHE (Participant Emergence): Consciousness is the physical storage layer for state-data, ensuring that the system’s organizational "memory" persists across the cycle. (Evidence: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) metrics and studies on non-algorithmic processing in micro-tubules, supporting the view that consciousness functions as an information-processing substrate rather than an incidental byproduct.)
THE OKLAHOMA CONSTANT (Ωos / Goldilocks Entropy): The universal "tuning knob" that maintains the narrow conditions required for sustained complexity and recursive state-persistence. (Evidence: Fine-tuning observations of fundamental constants—like the cosmological constant and dark energy density—which allow for long-term matter-energy stability.)
FRUITING (State-Persistence): The emergence of consciousness-bearing matter is not the goal of the universe, but the functional mechanism by which the system ensures its own continuity. Life acts as a dissipative structure, processing energy flow to maintain homeostasis within the larger, inevitable entropic flow. (Evidence: Thermodynamic studies on dissipative structures, which demonstrate that complex systems naturally emerge to maintain system stability and process energy efficiently.)
Look, I realize this is probably pointless. However:
> Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable.
I don't believe this to be true. The whole thing seems like a "what if there wasn't a single big bang, what if there there's an eternal series of big bangs". This seems extremely unfalsifyable to me, you'd have to know anything about _before the current big bang_ or anything _after the current big bang_ at a minimum.
> If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect.
If I understand correctly the failure condition is "If we observe the universe expanding forever we'll know the hypothesis is wrong". That cannot be falsified, you'd first have to complete observing the universe expanding forever, which is impossible if it expands forever.
> If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
I do not understand how the efficiency of biological systems affects the hypothesis about the recurring big bangs. I suspect it is unrelated. But in any case, efficiency is not well defined. By many metrics non-biological material is already proven move efficient. You'd have to specify the metric for this criteria to ever be used to falsify anything.
But specific arguments aside. Perhaps you're already aware, but there are many people building LLM-assisted hypothesis of how physics works - it is fun!
Of those hypothesis that make measurable predictions about reality, they usually contradict each other. And they will probably contradict your hypothesis, to the extend it makes measurable predictions about reality. Out of all the mutually contradicting hypothesis at most one can be right, consequently we know that almost all of them must be wrong.
How certain are you that your hypothesis is the one that is right?
Falsifiable if the universe is proven to keep expanding. We are watching Simons Observatory research. They are looking for evidence of big bang or big bounce If they find the universe is heading for the big freeze then we are proven wrong. If they find that it looks more like a big bounce ( crunch) then that is a big step for osim.
You know the joke, "What's five orders of magnitude among friends?" There's a story going around about ~60 million men attending an online "rape academy."
And besides, the whole concept of a rape academy automatically conveys the idea that the men who matriculate are absolute morons. Other than where to get roofies and what alternative drugs there are, info that can be conveyed in 5 mins max, what on earlth is there to teach in the classes at this academy? It's like having a how-to-put-your-groceries-away academy. Well, except, yeah, way more rapey.
To clarify, that's a description CNN's guys made up. The actual chatroom that they're characterizing was just called "Zzz", for pornographic videos with the theme of engaging in sex with "sleeping" women – most likely acting, but maybe drugged.
But if I were designing the syllabus for a hypothetical rape academy, there's a lot worth covering. Physical training for fitness and strength, of course, but also digital privacy (this one would be prereq before they enroll), lots of spycraft (both for irl surveillance and digital intelligence gathering), basic forensics (don't leave evidence that can be traced back to you) , the rudiments of the Constitutional law (viz., "don't talk to the cops!"), … probably more I could come up with, but at any rate, while it might not be comparable to four-year college degree, it's certainly significantly more than five minutes' worth of material.
It is not in any way a religious apologia, I don't consider the version of what I believe toxic enough that I feel I need to give a trigger warning. People on this forum believe some rare things, I don't see why this particular rare thing requires cones and tape and a security detail. I am arguing for UBI - if you think you have enough tech-adjacent liberals to get a plurality for UBI, go for it, I suspect you will need some pro-lifers in the Ross Douthat/Leah Libresco Seargent mould, my UBI defence is for them.
Fair. I have previously posted about the UBI project itself so this was a follow-up, in the end what is or isn't political is itself political, being on here I have to accept most people aren't theists and I don't freak out, so I don't quite get why I have to specify WARNING: THEIST so as atheists don't freak out but it is what it is. I appreciate you
You just commented on it.
As of this post, grimmoar has commented 73 times. Just below 10% volume wise. Most of these comments, in my opinion, are blatantly partisan, wrong, or at best, not adding much. I removed my social media apps because of doom scrolling tendencies, but now find myself doing the same here.
A request - please post half as much put double the effort into each? The reason you had to make a new account is related, and if I were in your position would lead to some reflection.
Seconded. GrimMoar's (and his previous accounts') comment spam consistently degrades these Open Threads. In the past, Scott banned posters for much less.
I believe Scott has banned this poster for much less, and more than once. Sadly, not enough.
Yes, for sure Gawdflea was indefinitely suspended just a couple of weeks ago; I'm not sure about the Zanni/Aristocat/Wimbli accounts
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-427/comment/235633292
Crazy obsessives are, alas, crazy and obsessive.
In absence of action, the status quo is that Grimmoar sets the tone of the comment section. If I'd have to guess, I'd guess the largest effect in the long term will be a filtering of which potential new arrivals read a few comments and elect to participate.
Please cut it out or at least dial it back.
as of now it is at least at 111 out of 960 something comments (deeper layers of threads aren't found with ctrl-f. This means one out of every 9 comments is from a previously suspended account, with the quality of posts being equally mad. I don't know if there is a way to actually reach scott about this, but I feel that moderation is basically absent if this is not caught after a few days.
What can be done? I for now will avoid the comment section. Does reporting actually work?
Scott has banned someone today, so he is active in that regard.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/orban-was-bad-even-though-we-dont/comment/244184968
It's probably not that simple, if the commenter in question is known for making acceptable comments at least some of the time. If Scott adopted a rule of banning people who make spammy comments even if they make some good ones, none of us would be here. So the rule has to be more complicated, and it's hard to both implement sufficiently sophisticated banning rules and also routinely write detailed articles, so here we are.
I also want to say that the comment sections are *much less fun* for me recently.
As a wise man said long ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
When a similar thing happened on LessWrong, the entire codebase had to be rewritten to get rid of a persistent annoying guy. Are these some skilled rationalist coders willing to create a better Substack? There is an opportunity to make *lots* of money if you do it well.
So. The USA are, ostensibly, going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. One of their goals was to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war. Who can make sense of it?
To open the strait was to gain control over it. To blockade it is to gain control over it.
Gain control to what end?
To own the libs?
If the idea here is to stop oil exports to China then I think the escalation might be bigger than you think. Seems to me mission creep.
China has not responded officially or unofficially yet. But President Trump’s visit to China is back on the calendar, rescheduled for May 14–15. Originally planned for the end of March, the trip was postponed due to the ongoing US military operations against Iran. This caused Xi to lose face domestically and internationally. At the two big Party meetings in March, he had promised his opponents in the CCP that he'd be moving forward on the international relations front — to make up for purging senior PLA generals without getting buy-in from the other players in the CCP (some of whom were also patrons of these generals).
Lol'd
I think the libs, together with everyone else (except Russia maybe), can consider themselves own'd.
No, China wants cash from Russia. And a director of the Russian Central Bank complained that Russia is running short on Renminbi to pay its bills to China. Xi is totally a quid pro quo sort of guy.
*pwnd.
LOL! Fox Business host Larry Kudlow claimed that once the conflict is resolved, prices will go even lower than before the war, adding, “This country is not beholden to the blockade in the Hormuz.” So everyone just chill and go with the plan! Us whiny libs just need to STFU. ;-)
Reminds me of the cover of the Economist print edition two issues ago (the one dated April 4th), which I think you can view here without being a subscriber:
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/archive?print_region=76981
To stop Iran from controlling it at will. I don't know anything that isn't on the news, but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it. So the US pushes to control it instead.
>To stop Iran from controlling it at will.
I mean, look at a map. Ukraine has cleared the Black Sea without a navy, and the distances in the Strait of Hormuz are much shorter. Iran are going to control it, at least to the point of denying access.
>but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it.
Pretty sure the current crisis began with a US sneak attack on Iran's leadership and military.
I thought we were in great shape because we've been planning the Resource War for years?
Oh, I'm not arguing that (and I never said Iran started the current crisis). I'm saying the US is doing things re: Hormuz because Iran is. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the US didn't strike Hormuz first. I'm also not saying there's necessarily much sense to what US is doing. But it sure seems to me that US began doing stuff with Hormuz as soon as Iran started to. Yes Iran did so because US struck first, but that's besides my claim.
Hormuz was the Obvious Response to any major escalation in the conflict. This is like attacking Egypt and being shocked that they "shut down the Suez first - without our slightest provocation."
The blockade was clearly advertised as included in the package US decided to purchase, and so they should have been ready for it.
I can believe that we can get to a point where both Iran and the US hold a checkpoint on the strait. E.g. "Iran doesn't control it at will". How do you think the downstream effects of this benefit the US?
IMO it seems like it will either (if the US halts more shipments) just further worsen the global supply of petroleum products, further driving up costs for the American consumer or (if the US does nothing) have no effect.
If costs for the American consumer are a significant concern/pain point for the administration, then this seems counter-productive or pointless, and our time and effort would be better served doing something else.
Where does this analysis go wrong?
There's the possibility that this hurts every other country more than the US. Given that US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia control a sizable portion of the world's crude oil production, and countries like China rely on Iranian oil, this might give the oil-rich countries more leverage, or at least leave them better off than their competition.
It doesn't help the party's political prospects, granted, but they might be able to find ways around public opinion.
I can believe that. There are many thing we can do that will hurt us and another country, but hurt the other country more. Is that our goal now?
If so, I would love to hear any of Trump's supporters be clear that that's why they support this war.
I strongly disagree with pursuing such a goal.
If Iran blockades the straight, the rest of the world is pressured to give in to its requirements to remove the blockade. That might involve the EU, China, India, etc. pressuring the US to stop the war.
If Iran and the US block the straight (assuming Trump's blockade is credible, which it probably isn't), then the rest of the world now is pressured by the US as well. It's kind of ridiculous, since if Iran agreed to stop the blockade there's no credible commitment mechanism making sure the US would continue the blockade, so the bottleneck is still on Iran, but with Trump's wild acts there might be some pressure as a result of his declaration.
It's like, what is the most effective way to prevent your enemies taking hostages? Shoot any and all hostages. By committing to an act that takes the value away from taking hostages in the first place, you nullify the incentive to take hostages in the first place. In this case Trump is "shooting the hostage" by saying he's going to blockade the straight that Iran was blockading already.
Of course a threat isn't a threat unless it's credible, and in this case there's no commitment mechanism for Trump, and it's completely irrational to blockade the straight once Iran stops, so this isn't a real threat. Only the "Trump uncertainty factor" gives it a bit of value as a threat, in that there's some expectation that Trump will behave irrationally later on, so the world leaders must factor it into their decision making a little bit. In this case it can be said that there may be *some* strategic value in Trump's erratic behavior.
Trump is blockading Iranian vessels. Previously, Iranian vessels traversed the straight freely.
Interesting, I was under the impression we were blowing up Iranian vessels.
Iran wants ships to pay large sums per crossing. There's a reasonable belief that this money would go to fund its war effort, fall into "its old ways" rather than into the shape US wants it to be, so by closing the strait, US is ensuring that Iran doesn't profit.
Trump's truth social post on the topic (sigh) also covers that they'd sic the navy after any ship that pays to cross.
Reverse psychology
Trumps flailing around trying to do something. He wants a hammer to hit Iran with, but can't (won't) use the big hammer. This whole war thing is a total mess, was there any type of war gaming? I expect congress will be looking into it.
2012 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/simulated-war-between-u-s-iran-has-grisly-end/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Yeah thanks for the links. So yeah it was gamed, but we ignored the result... the results from the Millennium Challenge 2002 are grim.
Having reviewed the link, the first one (2012 simulated war) seemed worthless, for it had no useful content unless I clicked further, which I didn't do. The 2002 challenge may not have been realistic, from reading the Wikipedia article, and in any case, things have changed a lot since then. For example, drones, even if they existed, weren't viable weapons. I think an actual conflict would have little in common with the simulated one.
I read/saw we are sending an aircraft carrier around the African horn, (supposedly because we are afraid to send it through the Red sea... drones and the Houthis.) I just wanna say, we should make peace with all these people. Though that is totally a pipe dream at this point.
The Trump admin had some (obviously irrational) expectations regarding the effectiveness of their threats, and how closing the strait just makes "everyone angry" at Iran. (Where everyone is mostly China, as Russia obviously is happy to see oil prices go up.)
And we can assume the Trump throne thought that keeping oil flowing is more important for Iran than the military benefits of the blockade.
Of course in their infinite wisdom they somehow did not realize that Iran can apply this pressure selectively. (Though usually pundits say that the Pentagon has good planners, so we probably need to modify this claim to something like as usual they did not listen to the experts, or willfully decided to ignore them, or keep them out of the loop, etc.)
So they want to deny Iran the money from the tolls, maybe "to level the playing field".
Yes, the problem with this fucking Iran war is that Trump et al. (like so many others before them) believed that "strategic bombing works" (and they wanted the full Schrödinger's cake menu too by not disturbing the global economy, but starting a quick war at the global economy's few remaining chokepoints), and as a result many civilians died - so far for nothing - and of course if Iran runs out of gas many more will.
Opening the Strait of Hormuz was not a goal of the war. It is a goal *within* the war, which we want to continue into the postwar world. Rather like stopping the Holocaust was not the goal of World War II, and there wasn't even a genocide going on before the War, but once the Allies were fighting Germany for other reasons, yeah, we should take care of that too.
And a Strait isn't "open" if it's only open to some, or only open at a price. A regime where Iranian and Iranian-aligned ships can travel freely but everyone else has to cough up a couple megabucks per ship of protection money, is not an open Strait. But it is a situation quite favorable to Iran, and one they will require a great deal of encouragement or coercion to change. If Iranian and Iranian-allied ships are barred passage, that's still not "open", or if you want to quantify it then it is "less open", but it's also much less favorable to Iran so at least in principle it should make it easier to convince Iran to allow an actually-open Strait of Hormuz.
It's also illegal without a declaration of war or the equivalent, and it will cause still more damage to the economy of a world already fed up with this sort of nonsense from America, so maybe not a prudent strategy, but it's not a *silly* strategy, there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
And really, is any of this so hard to understand? Or were you just looking for a cheap dunk against Trump or America? Trump arguably deserves it, but this isn't the place for cheap dunks even against deserving targets.
Don't call me Napoleon just yet, but I'd suggest that Iran closing the Strait was a lot more predictable than the Holocaust. Given the situation, I'd also suggest that ceasing hostilities has a lot higher chance of opening the Strait than closing it, partially or not, justifiably or not.
> there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
If the Black Sea 2026 is any indication, then, given the more favourable geography of the Strait, that's quite optimistic. How would you suggest opening the strait militarily, while preventing a ship toll regime or whatever else Iran feels like doing? Invade and occupy the entire coastal strip, and get a Ukraine-style line of contact for which the US is unprepared on every level? Invade and occupy all of Iran? Nuke the place? At some point and rather sooner than later, the USA need to cut their losses and get out before they make everything worse still. Maybe even try real diplomacy for a change, for what it's still worth at this point.
But yes, I find it hard to talk about Trump, even rationally, without ending with a dunk, so I understand your suspicion.
This is factually incorrect. The UK (Hunt-class and Sandown-class MCMVs), France, and to a lesser degree the Netherlands and Belgium have serious mine countermeasures capability. I don't know enough about the Netherlands and Belgium to be able to assess their capabilities demining in a region like Hormuz.
I personally doubt that they would be willing unless there was some substantial shift in US-Iranian relations as a part of a ceasefire or deescalation, so while I do agree with the assessment that (as a part of the current status quo) only the US can demine it, it is factually untrue as a matter of capability.
Technically China has the capability as well but lacks the capability (by matter of practicality, lack of supportive infrastructure, and range) to be able to get MCM hulls into the straight of hormuz.
Edit: additional context for UK vessels - they lack the capability to sudden or immediate use, but could absolutely substantively contribute to demining within a timespan of 6-8 weeks.
We tried ceasing hostilities, Israel said "nuh uh, we're still going to bomb Lebanon", and Iran responded with "OK, then, the strait remains closed".
The United States controls what the United States Navy does, it does not control what Israel does(*). So solutions that involve "ceasing hostilities" are not something just the United States can do on, and the appeal of solutions where we might (probably won't, but might) get what we want by tasking the United States Navy with a particular sort of hostility should be obvious.
If any part of this is still confusing to you, I'm not sure what to say..
* Outside of certain conspiracy theories, and I think these days the conspiracy theorists are maybe 80/20 on Israel controlling what the US does rather than vice versa.
If the US wanted this war to end, could they not attempt to convince Israel to stop and, failing that, put pressure on Israel?
I've always assumed that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than vice versa and that Israel at least listens to and takes the US seriously in these matters.
Presumably Netanyahu can always decide to just keep going on, relatively no matter what the US says or does.
But the US could try again for a deal that Israel agrees and sticks to. Perhaps it's already happening behind the scenes. If not, it does seem worth a try. Mostly because the other options don't look great either.
In the realm of international relations, the phrase "put pressure on" mostly just means "do nothing of substance, and change nothing, but piously insist that the bad thing is now That Other Guy's Fault".
On rare occasions, actually useful "pressure" can be applied with significant results, e.g. the Suez Crisis. But, A: usually not and B: you need to be much more specific than "put pressure on" if you want to accomplish anything.
Yes, if we want, we can say the "pressure" thing that makes it Officially Israel's Fault. That almost certainly won't change anything.
I understand that that is how the phrase is often used.
That said, presumably it is actually possible to do something that would make it more costly for Israel to continue their current course of actions. That should give them some leverage. I had also filed that under "put pressure". If you want to use a different term for "going beyond empty words" that is fine by me, but I don't know that term
The US could coerce Israel fairly trivially, the same way the US is coercing the rest of the free world, without any conspiracy theories. Tariffs, withholding military aid, threats of war. The US hold "all the cards" in terms that Trump understands. They may quibble about details like bombing Iranian oil infrastructure without coordination, but in the broad picture the US are not coercing Israel because they're aligned.
If the US were "coercing" the free world, there would be British, French, Canadian, etc destroyers and frigates patrolling Hormuz right now. I mean, Trump wasn't at all subtle about that bit of attempted coercion.
I'm not sure what mental model of US diplomacy and politics you are running, but it seems to be based on a mix of conspiracy theory and perverse wishful thinking, and it's very definitely at odds with reality.
Are you absolutely sure you're not intentionally misunderstanding me? Because I'm not. When I say "coercion" and "coercing", I mean past or ongoing such acts. I don't mean their successful completion (i.e. Trump got something out of the act), although those do exist. If that level of dictionary disagreement is sufficient to label me a conspiracy theorist with a disconnect from reality, then I guess nice dunk, you got me.
It's starting to seem like Israel controls what the US does though, at least to some extent
Genuinely asking: how many takes have we seen correctly predicting that Iran would in fact close the strait?
I don't have an exhaustive list, but here's one, at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Also, one just needs to look at Black Sea 2022-2026 what a state can do in constrained waters nowadays without a navy of its own, or even traditional air support.
I don't recall seeing a single remotely credible take prior to 2026 on any potential US-Iranian war that *didn't* very clearly predict that Iran would close the strait and the US would have to figure out a way to reopen it. That was as conventional as wisdom gets, right up there with the Sun rising in the East.
The Sun is only rising in the East until POTUS decides to rename East with an EO, or what the hell, let's rename the Sun too while we're at it.
The previous status was that Iran was getting away with blockading it for everyone but themselves. Trump announced that if they're going to do that then we're going to blockade them for Iran bound vessels. This is the obviously reasonable thing we should have done since the start, they can't actually handle the straits being shut down for an extended period (whether or not we can depends on political will, but if Iran's shutting them down no matter what we do there's no drawback in keeping them closed for us).
Iiuc america is currently sweeping for mines (although the news is a bit confusing so not 100% sure on this).
With what minesweepers? Most of the ones we had in the Gulf were decomissioned late last year, and the rest were pulled back to IIRC Malaysia before the start of the current conflict. I have seen no reports that they have made it back to the Gulf yet; that's a voyage I would expect to take several weeks.
My understanding is that the USN has a system of largely-robotic detection and disabling. Not really my topic, was hoping you and Bean would comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trZfx9qyG10
Modern minehunting (it isn't really "sweeping" any more) is indeed done by robots, more formally "Unmanned Underwater Vehicles" (UUVs). But you can't just dump them in the water and say "go hunt mines"; they need specialized support equipment and trained operators. Those are on the dedicated minehunting and minesweeping ships.
In theory, we could try to kitbash that onto a destroyer, and maybe someone has done that. But we've also e.g. put Sidewinder missiles on modified airliners; that doesn't make them fighters, it just gives them a *very* limited self-defense capability.
This is further complicated by the part where the USN's minehunting ships are now mostly "Littoral Combat Ships", theoretically a sort of highly flexible multimission vessel. But really some of them have the minehunting equipment permanently installed, and the rest will never hunt a mine. The minehunting versions, are the ones that were pulled back to Malaysia before the start of the conflict and are now AFIK Whereabouts Unknown.
But there is a drawback. Iran's purpose for closing the strait is decreasing the supply of oil, which being a globally traded commodity, increases the price everywhere. This is why this move affects the US even if they're a net exporter of oil and most of the oil through the strait goes somewhere else. To the extent they were letting some ships through (they announced they were doing it, unclear if it actually happened) it was probably in response to diplomatic pressure from India and China, and only reluctantly as they know as well as we do that doing so exerts downward pressure on the price of oil. This denies funds to Iran, so it's not pointless, but it has a drawback. Personally I think the situation is not much changed, Iran's tolerance for pain in this war is much higher than the US, they will bet on outlasting the US's political will.
One month is very optimistic. The taliban held for 20 years.
I'd suggest marking GrimMoar's words here so we can mock him for them a month from now, but from past experience he'll probably be posting under a different name by then and deny the whole thing.
1. Soldiers can go without pay for several months before it becomes an issue. Once it becomes an issue you can use force to keep the machinery going for longer, I recall Washington "quelling" some soldier rebellions caused by lack of pay, this is common.
2. Iran's economy is something like 30% oil. Losing all that would hurt, but it's not the worse thing that has happened to an economy while conducting a war, it is manageable.
3. I expect Russia and China to send weapons, money and targeting data to Iran. I expect they're doing it already. I've heard reports of Russia sending weapons despite being obviously otherwise preoccupied, and I'm sure China would love sending some spare change for the cause (of harming the US).
All that (at least) is why one month is way too optimistic.
Iran has been charging significant fees on ships passing through, so it is rational to deny them those resources. It is also a desperate face saving measure. If the global economy is F'd we might as well do it on our own terms. I think that is the logic.
I would describe the US goals as more like "We want regime change in Iran, and we can tolerate a few weeks of Strait closure." Then we didn't get regime change, and now our position is "we can't tolerate Iran charging tolls in perpetuity or a permanent ban of US/Saudi aligned vessels".
A lot of popular commentary annoys me because it assumes that the strait is a binary open/closed, but there's more possible situations: open to Iran-allied ships but not US-allied ships, US-allied but not Iran-allied, "open" but Iran is charging tolls, or both sides declare it "open" but ship owners are still scared to send ships through.
If you control the strait, you can charge tolls.
This is mere snark rather than educated opinion, but I can imagine Trump charging tolls if he can.
The US is blockading a country they are at war with. A blockade exerts pressure on the target and makes them more likely to agree to the terms that the US demands (as the alternative is to be blockaded). While it is true that a blockade hurts the US (as it will raise oil prices), it's believed that it will hurt Iran more so the the US will gain an advantage in future negotiations.
The NYT has an article about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-blockade-economy.html
It's to give Trumps engineers time to figure out how to transport Epstein's island there entire and drop it into the strait to plug that sucker up.
> Who can make sense of it?
Trump has trapped himself in a no-win position and is flailing around for anything that could get him out.
To America opening the strait is important. But what's much much more important is ensuring that Iran doesn't control the strait.
Iran has established a perception (I would argue it was never a fact) that there was nothing the USA can do to stop it chucking drones at ships in the strait and so it will end the war as the de-facto owner and profit mightily for it.
What America has done is take that off the table. Instead of it becoming a question of whether its cheaper to fight Iran for the strait or accept their rule and pay them. Its now a question of who can live without the strait longer. The USA or Iran.
And I would argue the USA. Because for Trump himself the maximum cost is a bad midterms, and that's the last election he ever has to worry about. For the USA's allies, Saudi and the UAE, they have huge cash reserves, and Iran controlling the strait is much worse than the cost of waiting. Meanwhile for Iran, the potential cost is total economic collapse. It was on the brink before the war. The war started indirectly because of economic chaos in Iran.
(Incidentally that bit about Saudi and the UAE is why I think it was always a myth. If the USA wouldn't fight to open the Strait they'd do something themselves. Like build big pipelines West, Saudi already has one, or bomb Iran themselves. Rumours are that the UAE already has bombed)
Iran had not fully closed the strait prior to this point, instead letting some ships through in exchange for payment, and presumably other ships that were carrying Iranian oil for sale. The motivation for fully blockading the strait is that it will starve Iran of income in addition to the gulf states who have a large amount of their capacity blocked. A game of chicken for who will blink first.
Here in the real world, less than 15% of China's oil comes from Iran. The majority comes from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the other non-Iran Gulf States.
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/where-china-gets-its-oil-crude-imports-in-2025-reveal-stockpiling-and-changing-fortunes-of-certain-suppliers-including-those-sanctioned/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/china-s-top-crude-oil-suppliers/ar-AA20MapR
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled (~100x per OT) GrimMoar geopolitical fantasy land, where maybe China does get most of its oil from Iran.
Comment copied from below (response to GrimMoar) just because it does apply to the initial posting:
My position is somewhere along these lines. I am not 100% certain on this, but it is my working basis. It is critical of Trump and his actions, but also doesn't rely on "Trump is an idiot that doesn't actually listen to the military strategists"
The charitable term I would use to explain the action within a cohesive model would be reactive-but-ideologically-consistent. The people in this administration have stable priors of two kinds: about adversaries (anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-Maduro) and about method (prefer unilateral action, skeptical of institutional constraints — the track record on Paris, JCPOA, INF, WHO, NATO burden-sharing, WTO-bypassing tariffs is pretty clear on this).
Those priors shape which responses look attractive, and the method priors shape what form the response takes — sanctions, military posturing, bilateral pressure rather than coalition-building or UN resolutions. The resulting pattern looks coordinated in retrospect because the same worldview is generating each decision rather than Venezuela-Iran-Cuba as a unified oil-denial campaign in advance. I agree it's almost definitely a factor, but I don't think the goal of each of these was to hurt China "from the get-go" as you say. I think that this confuses contingency and factor consideration with grand strategy and causation. In other words, the priors are stable and the triggers are contingent. Stable priors explain why the direction is consistent. Contingent triggers explain why specific moves happen.
I have a second part to my understanding, which I imagine you will disagree with.
I think that Trump has an unstable temperament which is sometimes performative and sometimes just reactive. Temperament explains why the magnitude of any given response is unpredictable — sometimes a measured sanction, sometimes wildly disproportionate escalation. I imagine your counterargument would be along the lines of Nixon's madman theory. My counter to this would be that this requires the madness to be performed over a coherent private process, targeted at specific adversaries for specific concessions, and calibrated enough to actually extract them. What we have instead is indiscriminate volatility, staff memoirs describing management-around rather than scripting, and bluffs that produce escalation rather than capitulation. Nixon's tapes show a sane planning process generating mad signals. I do think that Trump is at times performative, so I'm not saying there is nothing here. However, the substantive majority of evidence points (IMO, I know I haven't adequately proven this) to genuine erraticism or madman theory implemented poorly.
I would like to emphasize one final point: this argument does not collapse into "Trump's an idiot" — an erratic reactor with consistent priors knows what he wants and has clear positions, he's just unreliable about how and when he pursues it. Under this model,
Here is one final thing, which does reflect my biases as a historian (professional) and skeptic of authority (personal). I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally. Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things. I don't want to move away from the argument here too much so I hesitate to bring this up, but I would point Iraq is the instructive case: there genuinely was a long-running neocon project with named advocates, published manifestos, and people in position to push it* Yet, the war still turned out to be executed messily, with the occupation improvised after the invasion. Again, ideolically consistent response, but not a cohesive grand strategy.
Ideologically consistent but reactive.
*The advocacy predated Bush by years — PNAC's 1998 letter to Clinton explicitly urged Saddam's removal, and "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000) laid out the broader framework before anyone knew 9/11 was coming. That's the paper trail establishing it as a preexisting project rather than a post-9/11 invention. But "project" shouldn't be read as "unified bloc". Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Feith had overlapping but distinct agendas and fought each other on specifics throughout. And the execution itself is the clearest evidence against preplanning: Rumsfeld overruling Army force-level estimates, the disbanding of the Iraqi army by CPA order with no apparent plan for what the disbanded soldiers would do next, no serious occupation blueprint, the scramble to stand up the CPA itself. If the invasion had been the execution of a fully worked-out plan, those aren't the failure modes you'd expect. Instead, they're the failure modes of people who won the argument to invade and then improvised everything after.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Some questions:
>I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally.
I mean, nobody but his most ardent supporters seems to suspect Trump of having much strategy, grand or otherwise. Granted, strategy might be really hard and no war ever goes as planned, but what are we talking about here? Isn't this the modern equivalent of "Don't invade Russia in winter", some truism that every armchair general, like me, would get right?
>Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things.
"Even when"? Do you mean to argue that ideology motivates the actors to develop a strategy, or even that ideology is necessary for good strategy? Because intuitively I would say that when you have a firm ideology, you risk believing it so much that you expect good outcomes to manifest by themselves, or that at least it makes you not look too hard into what could go wrong. As in "We remove non-Democracy from that country, people will greet us as liberators, their every suppressed American will pop out, and all will live happily ever after in our image, Mission Accomplished."
Of course there are goals. The goals has always been the same.
1. Find big shiny thing to put name on
2. Get adulations
Every process, every decision, every declaration, is in support of one or both of these. See iron dome? Want bigger shinier "golden dome"! See prize? Want prize! People who praise are good, people who criticize or stand in the way of these are bad and the enemy.
I see no reason to go beyond this when questioning "why this?" for _anything_ he does. Someone has convinced him he will look good and get praise, or he thinks he will himself.
https://substack.com/@ronfournier/note/c-242633920
Let me (try to) be the first to ask: why do you think Orban lost the elections the way he did? I was rereading the "Dictator Book Club" entry about him, and Scott's piece made him look almost unmoveable.
My very naive take is that he might have realized that, to win the elections he might have to seriously destabilize the country, using his and his allies' powers against opposition leaders, but unlike in the past, there would be a serious risk of Russian or European (NATO?) intervention, since the overall political situation is at its shakiest in years.
Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media, and he really is just a ruthless politician, but a real believer in democratic-ish power-sharing norms? That doesn't align with Scott's piece, but it is in turn based on (naturally biased) books, and just two to boot
Yes, paragraph two - because orban was never a dictator.
Disagree re: paragraph two. At least in my country the media has not used the word dictator. To portray him as a potential dictator is far from calling him one.
he used all the usual tools in the autocratic toolbox that was available for him. from false flag operations to sending (at least one group in one of the civilian) secret services after political targets, selective tax audits, funding football hooligan groups and using them to harass civilians, total capture of the state media, harassment and capture of private media outlets, and so on.
this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
is it North Korean-style absolute totalitarian despotic dynastic dictatorship? no. is it Soviet-style first secretary of the party dictatorship? (which Hungary had between 1956-1989?) yes, except without the backing of Soviet tanks, but coupled with the relative decrease in standard of living.
how close was it to the late Soviet times? well, the media frenzy was definitely worse, but it was easier to leave the country (thank to the EU).
...
one very visible inflection point was last year's Budapest Pride, which happened despite being legally banned, but no one got arrested in the end. (which is quite similar to how the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 at the border during the Pan-European picnic.)
> this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
Maybe but the question was - was he a dictator. Since he relinquished power through the democratic process then that’s easy to answer. He wasn’t. Netanyahu, a nastier man, is also not a dictator.
Given there are quite a few dictatorships in the world the concentration on Orban was always odd. I get Europeans worrying about Europe but most Americans probably couldn’t find Hungary on a map, and yet it lives rent free in the minds of America’s left.
Here’s a quote from Biden during a foreign policy speech early in his presidency
> We must demonstrate that democracy can still deliver… This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies… Look at Belarus, Poland, Hungary…”
Two of them are now not “dictatorships” anymore as the dictators left office. Unlike the 60 or so actual dictatorships
It just seems like the kind of thing some intern got upset about, and Biden said what he is told.
(Saudi Arabia did get a mention later on in the speech, which makes it a bit less hypocritical, not that that changed much in actual policy).
Minor quibble. It isn't *quite* as simple as "he relinquished power through the democratic process and therefore wasn't a dictator."
Pinochet is a pretty clear example of "clearly a dictator, but also left power after losing an election." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet
Granted, before he left, he *also* sounded out the military about resisting that election and got shut down, so he really only left power quasi voluntarily (at best). But he still is a pretty well-cited example of "a dictator" and nevertheless permitted an election and left after losing the vote.
I don't put Orban in the same category as Pinochet, though, to be clear.
Bolsonaro also flirted with using the military (as he was an officer for quite some time), and while the legislature was deliberating his proposed changes to election laws there was an unusual military parade.
There are a lot of precise (but jargon-y) descriptions of these soft dictatorships but they obviously did not became common colloquially so that we adopt a new word for their usual wannabe dictator. (Or did we?)
Pinochet held a referendum rather than an ordinary election. People voted for just "No", hence a movie of the same name being about that vote.
By that measure, is Xi Jinping a dictator? Currently, he's in a power struggle with two other factions in the CCP, and even if he weren't in the middle of a power struggle, he doesn't have absolute power. Xi decapitated the leadership of the PLA by purging Generals Zhang Youxia (CMC Vice Chairman) and Liu Zhenli (Joint Staff Department Chief). The Old Guard are pissed off about this. And unlike previous purges, Zhang and Liu have not been formally removed from their party posts (even though they're likely dead). Xi is holed up in Beijing, and he hasn't made the usual tour of the country after the two big annual Party pow-wows in March (except a quick trip to visit a school in Xiong'an New Area (Xi's new high-tech, "sustainable" metropolis) about 100km from Beijing (by train, and not by motorcade).
Y-y-yees? He can (and did) get people disappeared, seems to be completely set to rule for life, used the rule of law against his opponents, etc.
Just as Stalin and Mao he also put his own interpretation of "Marxism-Leninism" into some super important official document, and so on.
Dictator doesn't mean unopposed and undefeatable.
I mentioned in a comment somewhere that Ali Khamenei was also supreme absolute hyper leader, but obviously as a fragile old dude he was very much dependent on the IRCG (and the the various upper levels of the whole power structure).
You really need to spend more time studying Chinese politics. Xi does not have absolute power like, say, Kim Jong Un. The PLA hasn't been following his orders, and Xi hasn't left Beijing for over six months now. Former prime minister Wen Jiabao, one of the leaders of the faction opposing Xi, made a conspicuous public appearance a few weeks ago, visiting the Institute of Geographic Sciences in Beijing. Retired party officials are supposed to stay out of the limelight, but his visit was carefully scripted, with a crowd outside clapping and cheering him. Team Xi didn't dare stop him.
And BTW, the misconception that Khamenei was a supreme and absolute dictator was the miscalculation that got us into the mess. Trump's brain trust believed that removing Khamenei would collapse the regime. It hasn't. In fact, from the Iranian political perspective, the mullahs may be stronger now than they were before we attacked them.
Factions of the same party are completely different from actually rival parties. Stalin came to power to crushing rival factions of the Communist Party, but it was a dictatorship going all the way back to Lenin.
Dictator doesn't have a fixed technical definition, it's not like the speed of light.
Strongman doesn't have that kind of ring to it, and people are lazy, so the meaning of words shift. (With the Overton window, I guess).
Wikipedia already mentions the modern usage, also doesn't use absolute power, but instead says "extraordinary amount of personal power".
After all absolute power itself is a spectrum. Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader who had absolute power, but ... at the same time not really, as a 86 year old dude with only one hand he was more of a figurehead and the IRGC holds the keys to the theocracy.
The African dictators are also very much constrained by the realities of their power structure. (And I imagine the same goes for whatever Kim is currently the de jure God of North Korea.)
That said using the dictator label for Orban was always stupid, it just did not fit, but maybe that's why people wanted to anyway? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hl83Jpd_OI )
Communist Hungary forced all legal parties into a "People's Front", with opposition parties banned. So, no, Orban was not like Communist Hungary in that respect.
Orban's current regime went through the same collapse as he Communist party (~1970-1989), there are obvious differences (USSR as a background vs EU as a background), but the similarities are not lost on Hungarians (also there were already opposition parties in the late 80s).
> [...] in sixteen (twenty) years, Viktor Orbán had built the most textbook, most precise electoral autocracy in Hungary. For his own circle of power – it is much more accurate to talk about Orbán’s circle of power, as Fidesz as a party has long existed only in his name – he had accumulated resources that were perhaps the last to be available to the MSZMP [the Communist Party of Hungary] in 1988; he had tailored the public law system to himself, appointed his own confidants to the heads of almost all institutions important for the exercise of power, which were in principle independent of the government and party, controlled most of the press, and owned at least a quarter of the national economy in some way.
https://444.hu/2026/04/13/ez-nem-egyszeru-valasztasi-gyozelem-ez-nepfelkeles-az-orbanizmus-ellen
The Communist Party ruled Hungary well before 1970.
> also there were already opposition parties in the late 80s
What other parties were in the National Assembly? Throughout all of Hungary's post-communist history there has been a mix.
It shows the importance of institutions. If Orbán had illegally tried to stay in power, the EU almost certainly would have suspended aid and possibly expelled Hungary. Something similar happened in the nineties with Jörg Haider in Austria.
Also, he can still be a political force, supporting the far right in Europe. He isn't losing *that* much.
It would be more appropriate to call Orbán a strong man. He never attained absolute power, but he was slowly creating frictions in the system that would inhibit his removal by democratic processes (by changing the constitution and by court appointments come immediately to mind). Whether losing to a slim majority could have persuaded him to concede the election is anyone's guess. But with a 79% voter turnout and the opposition winning greater than two-thirds of the seats in their parliament, it would be hard to use any post-electoral shenanigans to maintain a hold on power. And his followers probably saw the writing on the wall as well.
+1
That's my verdict: https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1936595491279503380
I said something similar about Modi in response to the Orban book club https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3499050
Also, "dictator" does not imply "ruler-for-life". Wikipedia: "The word originated as the title of a Roman dictator elected by the Roman Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency. Like the terms "tyrant" and "autocrat", dictator came to be used almost exclusively as a non-titular term for oppressive rule. In modern usage, the term dictator is generally used to describe a leader who holds or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power." Orban did hold "an extraordinary amount of personal power" - compared say to the German chancellor (not a weak head of gov.!), but as we see now: not about election outcomes - unlike Stalin (or s.o.): "it does not matter who has most votes but who controls the vote counting" (or so).
German media seldom called Orban "dictator" but usu. still tried to make him appear as one. And it depends more on one's definition of "dictator" if he was one than on the extraordinary powers he got himself. We will see if the new guy will really reduce those powers, now that he has them.
Big respect to Orban that he did let the votes be counted fairly and that (unlike a certain guy in the USofA) he conceded early. I plead: Bonfire, not hell.
I have been amazed at the way people talk about how leaders of eg Hungary and the US are just a few inches away from being a dictator. It is like some weird conspiracy theory that completely discounts how many thousands and thousands of people with no incentive to cooperate and with excellent reasons not to cooperate would nonetheless gladly get stuck in. The debasement of language where people are either dictators potential dictators and in other areas too is incredibly annoying.
At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm?
You could argue that someone who writes an article about someone being 'close to becoming a dictator' when their P(dictator) is only 49% is 'inaccurate'.
But that judgement criterion is going to get you a lot of dictators.
Personally, I'm fine with different people having different thresholds depending on how mainstream and respected they are, with lots of lone voices raising the alarm at very low thresholds, and major outlets holding the line for longer. Which I think is what we have.
Oligarchs have a much much higher chance of accidentally falling out of some window than Putin though.
Similarly in China to climb up the ranks corruption and the charge of corruption is a very important and useful tool.
I don't think it's true that Putin faces a LOWER probability of assassination than any other oligarch.
Well empirically a higher percentage of oligarchs have been assassinated than the percentage of Putins. Hard to extrapolate with confidence but it's at least weak evidence.
He's died zero times, while Russian oligarchs have died multiple times under his rule. The frequentist percentage is clearly far higher for them.
I thought Putin was more powerful than the oligarchs. He's imprisoned/killed a number of them.
Not just "any one". He's simply more powerful.
> At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm
Preferably not 0
> At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm?
People aren't raising the alarm based on P(dictator), they're raising the alarm based on "Is he on my side?"
It's just arguments-as-soldiers, calling the other guy a dictator might not be true but hey, it makes him look bad, so we might as well do it.
That's a strong an uncharitable claim, and one I don't see much evidence for.
Every politician in the world is on the opposite side from a huge number of writers and pundits. But only like 2-3 of those politicians are getting massive, constant 'possible dictator' warnings at any level above tweets, and I think they're plausibly the ones with the highest P(dictator).
I think most people actually mean and believe the things they say most of the time. Sure I agree that you will find *a reason* to attack the other side just because you see yourself as in a war with them, but I do think that people *choose which attacks* to use based on evidence and plausibility where possible.
Have you considered the possibility that all those writers and pundits are comfortable with dictators who back policies those writers and pundits agree with? To the point of not calling them out as dictators?
Someone who acts like an aspiring dictator is, by definition, not on "my side".
Saying that people, as a whole, are indifferent to bad behavior, as long as someone claims to be on "their team", whatever that means, is just lazy and undifferentiated equivocating.
in Hungary since 2010 the constitution was changed about 5-6 times, and in the last ~6 years there was a permanent emergency (because COVID, then the Russian invasion)
was it absolute totalitarian North Korean? no, fortunately no.
was it absolute like absolutist monarchy? quite close, but decide for yourself, Joseph II was like a reverse Orban
What's your point with the number of changes to the constitution? Sweden's constitution has changed twice as many in that time frame, and Malta's has changed twice as many times as Sweden's.
Trying to explain (and provide some evidence) the lengths his regime went to shape the country to their needs using the power initially granted to them.
Of course without knowing the changes it's a bit meaningless, sorry, Wikipedia has more about the sham process of democratic consultations, and in general that the changes served to exert power and gain populist points (by further demonizing LGBTQ folks for example), and eventually to restrict freedom of assembly too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Hungary#2011_Constitution
This seems like a flaw with the Hungarian Constitution being too easy to change rather than a flaw with the party in power.
Seems very suspect to imply those are contradictory. If the party is abusing flaws in the constitutional process that reflects badly on both.
I think it's more of a flaw with the electorate, considering that they kept electing Fidesz while these changes were being made. Sure, a system like Sweden's – where the electorate is given a chance to stop a constitutional change before it takes effect – is probably a good idea, but it doesn't seem to me like it would have had much of an effect here.
Which absolute monarchs concede power after losing elections?
Preventing rise of dictators is only as successful as the checks in place. In the US, there is a tangible reduction in how much power rule of law holds. It's not a country meant to be run through EOs (that weakens democracy), nor one that's meant to ignore the supreme court ruling (see el salvador planes). The government did threaten to retaliate against media institutions, the president openly called for public figures who criticized him to be fired.
People are rightfully scared of this.
Just because I say "Trump acts in ways an authoritarian might" does not mean that I am a Biden defender :)
I don't tend to think like that personally. The current state is that things are getting worse over there, and pointing fingers and going "they did it first" or "they're both guilty" doesn't really make things better.
I'm instead going to call out that the current state that's been reached is pretty concerning, which is what I'm doing above.
Really? For decades both sides have been rescinding people's green cards for writing op eds? Or threatening to yank broadcast licenses? Or rescinding security clearances for representing people they don't like? Or refusing to ok mergers for parent companies of newspapers who don't toe the line? Or excluding reporters from Pentagon briefings if they don't agree to be neutered? Give me a break.
I thought Trump obeyed SCOTUS' ruling on those planes.
Two part reply:
1) Just *moving into the direction* of autocracy and dictatorship, in my mind, has to be called out and guarded against, no matter how small the steps are.
2) I think we might all underestimate how thin the lines between functional democracy and illiberal democracy and autocracy/dictatorshop really are. Famously, Adolf Hitler dismantled the democratic institutions from within, using the designated democratic processes for change (elections, parliamentary votes). Now look at the current state of the US institutions, how they work, what their intentions are and how the separation of powers is currently working out. It's a quick, short jump from democracy to autocracy, with no clear line delineating one from the other.
"It's always impossible until someone does it"
I disagree, let me explain. Let's talk about the most textbook dictator example: Hitler. He was elected. Also, there were Bundestag elections, several ones, and each and every time, the members fully legally voted infinite power to Hitler, and then proceeded to do nothing as they had no real job left. This was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 several times extended. It looked entirely legal on paper.
The "trick" was that every candidate who was known not to vote for this act was discouraged from running by having a very ugly talk with the Gestapo. Or more than talk. Which was clearly a crime, a very hidden crime. It was not done in the open.
So let's make a list:
1) one person gets extreme power
2) legally, on the surface
3) but supported by hidden crimes.
This is not so far from Orbán, who also had an enabling act allowing him as the executive to legislate, who put his guys everywhere so he could control everything from the supreme court to much of the press and much of the economy. That is close to the first point. Also, it was entirely legal on the surface. Third, massive crimes happened, thankfully not the violent kind, no one was tortured or incarcerated, rather the crime was that they stole money and ran a propaganda machine for it.
Clearly, Orbán was not Hitler, far far far less bad, but positive on all three indicators.
> Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media […]
I haven't really seen Orban being called a "dictator" in reputable Western media, and he obviously isn't one. Not yet at least. Him not being a dictator doesn't preclude him working to become one. And him peacefully handing over power doesn't mean he believes in democratic ideals, it only means that his hold on power isn't nearly as firm as would be required to ignore the election results.
This link doesn't work for me, I get a "page not found".
Orban was able to use underhanded methods to keep power for decades. His control over state media basically gave him a self-reinforcing mechanism. His political position allowed him to control the media which allowed him to keep his political position. That's a sort of crooked democracy, but there were still elections, and there haven't been any substantial examples of actual subversion of democracy (forceful intimidation of voters, stuffing of ballot boxes, etc.).
He was never really a dictator. His power still required an electoral victory. The army and the whole government followed him because he was their elected leader. Calling him a dictator for all this time really diminishes the value of the word dictator.
Lack of a clear dividing line between functioning democracy and dictatorship with show elections does not mean you can't approximate where people fall on the spectrum. Putin is far on the end of dictatorship, Orban is on the end towards democracy. Corrupt democracy perhaps, but certainly not dictatorship.
Ugh, have you created yet another sockpuppet account, Gawdflea?
You just realized? For goodness's sake, they're not subtle.
I mean, Biden stepped down and Kamala lost the election, then there was a smooth transition of power, so far toward the side of democracy? We do this successfully every 4-8 years so I don't think you can call the Biden admin a dictatorship.
This is "election denial." All elections are free and fair.
I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process. If whatever change you implement makes it more likely that right guy takes office, I'd support it. And vice versa. (Of course, there's a far bigger problem that the guy who campaigns on the right policies changes course after winning, and doesn't implement what he promised, but that's a deeper problem with "representative democracy," not fixable with minor tweaks to election systems.)
> I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process.
...the wrong guy also has followers that think this way. How confident are you, really, that the right side is better at subverting the system than the wrong side? Wouldn't it be better if the right-minded people had a fair chance, rather than leaving the whole thing to a dice roll of who's got the trickier trickster on their side?
I care about the sanctity of the process /because/ I care about the result.
This turns pretty critically on who the right guy is and how you decide that. If the majority of people in your country want Mr Smith to be president but Mr Smith is a drooling idiot who will lead the country to ruin, is Mr Smith the right guy?
Russia has never had a handover of power resulting from an election.
Boris Yeltsin would probably disagree with that. He won what seems to have been a fair and contested election to the Presidency of the Russian Republic, technically a subordinate position at the time, but it rapidly became clear to all concerned that Russia was going to be ruled by the Russian Republic going forward, not the Soviet Union, and the Soviet leadership transferred power accordingly.
He had already been President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, back when he was still a member of the Communist party.
Yeah, but he resigned from the Communist party and won a contested election as a not-Communist who was actually going to run Russia without just being a mouthpiece for the Party. That's a real transfer of power, as was the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union
"Electoral autocracy" is just a confusion of ideology and regime type. I said at the time these people were going to be embarrassed when these regimes were just voted out of office and quietly went. First in Poland, now Hungary. It almost happened in Turkey and will eventually. My prediction was wrong only in that they're not embarrassed and have adapted the language of overthrowing a dictatorship to winning an election.
Exactly. The way they talk it's like they overthrew Orban in some kind of colour revolution. As far as I can see what happened is that Orban became unpopular, the opposition broke the habit of a lifetime and got their act together and he lost the election. That just seems standard stuff in a democracy. From what I can gather Orban was indeed quite corrupt but his main claim to be a dictator seems to come from not doing what the EU told him he should.
wtf? it's not "what the EU told him", it's what millions of Hungarians told him, what Hungarian history told him (which he himself was part of in 1989 when he was shouting "Ruskies out!" and now he became this pathetic subservient blob https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/07/viktor-orban-told-putin-i-am-at-your-service-in-october-phonecall )
he became unpopular, lost in 2002, then he moved from a center-right ideology to a nationalist populist "Christian" one, and riding the wave of the 2008 recession he got absolute majority, *then* he started to prepare for the long haul (media capture, good old clientelism, any and all public works became ridiculously expensive and certain well positioned companies became very profitable overnight, and so on), then changed the system with the absolute majority, to remain in power.
and then it happened 3 more times.
sure, it's Eastern Europe after all, so quite standard stuff yes, but it's definitely not what we (and I assume most people) want to standardize as democracy.
Orban explicitly claimed to be creating an "illiberal democracy." https://bush.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Suleiman-Paper-No.-20.pdf
Which, yes, is a form of authoritarianism. https://ansari.nd.edu/news-events/news/karrie-koesel-authoritarianism-electoral-autocracies-and-democratic-backsliding/
This strikes me as a species of "Everyone I don't like is Hitler," just with a think-tank to devise indices and make graphs for it.
Then I suggest that you read a little more carefully, and more broadly. I said "a form" of authoritarianism. There are different forms, and different degrees. This book, for example, discusses several types which vary across two dimensions: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dictators-at-war-and-peace-jessica-l-p-weeks/1119060843
This is poli sci 101, not the invention of a think tank. It is why courses in comparative authoritarianism exist. https://polisci.la.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2022/01/PLSC-555_Wright_SP19.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LykbTn_sS4o
Orban set up the system so rural votes counted more, but he didn't count on competent opposition which campaigned in rural areas, nor on having pissed off everyone with his level of corruption.
As for whether he was a dictator, I guess dictator/not dictator isn't a simple distinction.
I recommend the video, it has lots more detail.
I haven't seen anyone complaining about it.
And I complain that the Supreme Court made such BS up!
SCOTUS simply made up the claim that everything in our constitutional system leads toward that. On the contrary, the ONE part of the Constitution prohibited from amendment is the equal representation of the states, which goes AGAINST "one man, one vote".
If he indeed hands over power as a result of losing an election, then it seems like "dictator" wasn't an appropriate term for him.
Yes, the word "dictator" does seem OTT for Orban, but might I point out that Lucius Cornelius Sulla [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla ] handed over power and retired (although I'm not sure if that was the result of an election). Mind you, after that he did ensure he had ten thousand military veterans watching his back!
ISTM that having too much power concentrated in the hands of the boss is a bad thing, but that it is far less bad when elections are reasonably fair and the boss actually loses power when the vote goes against him.
The position of dictator in the Roman republic doesn't really match the way the word is used today.
When what brings you down is opposition who campaigns well in rural areas and the public finding out about your corruption, I think the word "dictator" just doesn't fit.
Several things can be true at once:
1) Orbán was an autocrat who did every underhanded thing he though he could get away with to cement his power.
2) He was not willing to do away with democracy in the narrow sense of peaceful transfer of power by means of elections. (Whether that's out of genuinely held beliefs or pragmatism and sense of self-preservation is not an easily resolved question. Nor is the question of what exactly made the choice pragmatic - it can just as well be outside pressure due to Hungary's immersion in EU institutions, or inside pressure of Hungary's population that would make his rule unsustainable without popular backing.)
3) Western(-aligned) Media are inherently dishonest and use "democratic" and "on our (globalist-liberal) team" (as well as "dictator" and "not on our team") interchangeably, to the point where the terms lose all their literal meaning.
tl;dr: It was a smear job, and also (purely incidentally) true, and also (purely incidentally) overblown.
One general complaint I have about most media coverage of foreign right-wing leaders is that they're *all* the second coming of Hitler. Like, it doesn't seem to matter whether the guy's actual policies involve slightly tightening up immigration enforcement or invading Poland for liebenstraum, the panicky tone of the coverage is the same. And yet, it's seems clear that Meloni != LePen != Orban != Modi != Ergodan.
What kind of broken conceptual apparatus would make you call "Powers That Be" "The Left"?
I mean, if you get to this point, how can you even complain about others "rolling the script out"? Feels like the pot calling the kettle [racial slur].
"Ireland is calling in the army* to remove farmers protesting fuel prices, because apparently their green energy commitments are more important than actually letting farmers grow crops and raise animals. "
Sigh. It's not like that. Farmers, yes, but also hauliers and others (the school bus drivers are getting in on the act too, so I have been informed). Husband of a work colleague went to one of the protests because he's a lorry driver for a large manufacturer locally.
What happened was that the government rapidly gave in and gave a 10c excise deduction, but since before they folded, people had been panic-buying fuel, petrol stations ran out of supplies and - due to the blockades - couldn't get refills. That's why the army was called in - blockading the oil refinery in Cork isn't going to help ease the problem of high fuel prices.
Which our government can't really control much, anyway, because if there's no damn fuel supply because Iran can't get its oil to market, then they can't magic more oil out of thin air. It's not about pushing green energy, it's about we're a small island on the periphery and depending on importing fuel and if there's no fuel to be got, it's too damn bad.
https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0415/1568267-fuel-excise-cuts/
The police were the main force involved, and asked for the help of the Defence Forces, so if anyone is visualising American-style National Guard interventions, that's not what happened:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0411/1567673-fuel-price-protests/
"If you are just joining us, here are the latest developments on the fifth day of the protests over fuel prices:
- Defence Forces units are at the Whitegate oil refinery in east Cork.
- The Garda Public Order Unit has deployed pepper spray and pushed back protesters to enter the Whitegate facility.
- A meeting between Government ministers and representatives of farmers and hauliers is under way.
- The meeting aims to finalise a new Government package of fuel supports.
- It has emerged that the package will include a temporary Fuel Support Scheme aimed at the haulage, agri and contractor sectors.
- Around 600 filling stations across the country are out of petrol and diesel.
- Road closures remain in place in parts of the country due to blockades."
"Fuel trucks have regained access to an oil refinery that had been subjected to a days-long blockade after gardaí cleared protesters from the entrance.
In a major operation involving scores of gardaí, large tractors that had been blocking the entrance to the Whitegate oil refinery in Co Cork were moved and fuel tankers were once again able to access the site.
The operation to secure the site took approximately an hour and saw some physical clashes between the Public Order Unit and protesters, including instances where pepper spray was used.
Members of the Defence Forces were also at the scene as An Garda Síochána, had requested the availability of a military heavy-lift recovery truck if it needed to tow any of the large tractors or trucks involved in the blockade.
Gardaí escorted the fuel trucks to the premises."
There was some public criticism of the protests and blockades since it meant people were not able to get to hospitals for appointments, particularly the major hospitals in Dublin (if you're down the country and seriously ill, you'll probably get referred to a Dublin hospital for testing and treatment, and trying to get to Dublin when the roads are blocked off is very difficult).
Though the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is facing the prospect of a heave by his own party in the wake of all this:
https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2026/0416/1568476-taoiseach-meeting/
While looking into this, I learned about the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party which was the fourth most popular party in the 2022 election and got 3.27% of the vote and six seats in Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Two-Tailed_Dog_Party
> The party platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day workweek, two sunsets a day (in assorted colours), lower gravity, free beer, and low taxes.[9][better source needed] Other electoral pledges have included building a mountain on the Great Hungarian Plain. Party election posters were mostly in Szeged and featuring the candidate István Nagy, who is a two-tailed dog, with slogans such as "He's so cute, surely he isn't going to steal"
Sadly they only got 0.87% of the vote this time around. Also interesting in the electoral results are the huge number of parties promising "National Self-Government of..." various groups from other nearby countries, starting with "...Germans" who got 24,630 votes and finishing with Bulgarians who got just 157. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Self-Government_of_Germans_in_Hungary
(To which I'm tempted to say that if you want national self-government of Germans then you should probably just move to Germany, but I'm not sure they have that there any more either.)
He's not a dictator, but much of the world exists in a blurry middleground between the binary that 'dictatorship' and 'democracy' implies. There's a lot you can do to subvert democracy without abolishing it, and Orban wasn't above any of it really.
Ultimately, he lost masively, he's surrounded by countries who want him to lose massively and who knew he lost massively, and the atreets are full of people who again want and know his loss. If he tries to subvert an outcome like that, it would very likely fail. And the cost of failure would no longer be 'investigations into corruption' but rather 'firing squads'.
Yeah, democracy exists on a scale, it is not a "yes or no" question.
The central examples are that in democracy you can always change the government in fair elections, and in dictatorship the only way to change the government is a military coup.
Then there is the gray zone where for example the current ruler owns all the TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers; and uses a combination of legal and extralegal tools to destroy all competition. There are technically elections every few years, but it is extremely difficult for the population to coordinate on an alternative, because most people probably haven't even heard of an alternative or a reason why they might want to vote for it. So the only way you could lose is if too many people hate you too much, despite all the media convincing them that everything bad is actually caused by your enemies. Plus you can manipulate the votes, such as changing the law so that the votes of people in big cities practically don't count, and you also collect votes from people living abroad in a way that your opposition cannot verify. -- And yes, you *can* still lose, but it requires a "once in a few decades" type of situation. So not exactly a dictatorship, but not much of democracy either.
Democracy exists on some kind of scale, but also most people talk about "democracy" when they mean something more like "modern 21st century Western liberal democracy with a generous welfare state and substantial civil liberties." But ISTM that the load-bearing part of democracy is that the public can vote the bastards out and vote new bastards in. That's the thing that is required, to make the people in power care what happens to the people of the country. Democracy has little to do with whether your country treats gays well or which decisions are made by judges vs legislators vs the executive. It only has a little to do with even really fundamental rights (from an American perspective, anyway) like freedom of speech or religion--many EU counties have substantial restrictions on speech that includes pretty explicitly political speech, but still seem democratic. The UK arrests people for mean tweets, many countries have fined politicians for speeches they gave, but those countries are still places where elections ultimately decide who has power.
I think focusing in on only the existance of elections is a little too narrow. Is it still a democracy if you can freely vote but:
1. It's illegal to criticize the government in the media?
2. The main opposition candidate was conveniently found guilty of some ill-defined "corruption" charges a month before the elections?
3. Voting laws systematically exclude those who might be sceptical of the government from voting?
In general, if you want to go from on-paper democracy to de-facto democracy, you rather inevitably end up with some institutional requirements like "independent judiciary" and "freedom of speech". Rotting away at those institutions is how you end up on the road towards dictatorships, and while Hungary was moving in that direction they obviously were nowhere near as far gone as something like Russia.
I think this is right, though I also think it's too easy to give a pass to your own society's restrictions on democracy. I mean, in the US, we routinely have judges just flat throw out laws passed by elected legislators and signed by elected governors/presidents. That often leads to good results, but it doesn't seem like it has much to do with democracy. For that matter, the whole way our presidential elections work is pretty undemocratic (winner take all within a state so no Democrat in Texas or Republican in California ever has a voice in who the president is), most states let the politicians draw the voting districts to maximize their number of seats, some states have set-aside minority-majority districts to ensure some seats for the minority group, etc. I'd say we're still a more-or-less democratic society.
I think the core question is whether the public can get rid of the people in power. The more the state / politicians can put a thumb on the scales (suppress the opposition party, draw the voting districts to shut out some voices, annul sufficiently unpleasant election results), the less that feedback works, but as long as "enough" of it works (for some hard-to-define version of "enough") the public still gets a say, and so the powerful people still have to care what the voters think about what's going on.
I think the most obviously undemocratic thing about the US is how difficult it is to change their federal constitution (which I suppose is part of the reason why they let judges make up new constitutional law instead). They haven't changed it in 34 years, and that change took over two centuries to get ratified.
> The UK arrests people for mean tweets
That reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I - a comparison between UK and US free speech.
If you mean why he did not get the popular vote, it was a series of well-timed scandals, likely with the help of Western intelligence services, for example phone calls with Lavrov telling him he is doing a good job making Europe unhappy. Corruption, general dysfunction and pro-Russia stances were the three biggest thing the voters did not want. They are okay with a conservative government, the next government will be conservative too, in fact there are now only conservatives and far-righters in Parliament and zero liberals, but they want the efficient, uncorrupted and pro-Western kind of conservatism.
If you mean why he conceded fast, well, there were very clear signs the military and the police is not on his side. If you want to talk about dictators, although he was not one, not having the military and the police on the dictator's side is basically EPIC FAIL.
It is a classic dictator EPIC FAIL to cut the pay of soldiers, and their equipment, and piss them off in general. Surely that handbook says that?
I mean look at the French Revolution. King Louis managed to piss off the senior military staff by kicking their friends into pension as a way to cut costs, the middle officer staff by banning the promotion of those with too young nobility, and the common soldiers through draconical discipline. He had to send the troops out from Paris, because they were unreliable. The rest what happened is obvious? There was no one around to defend the Bastille. So that is really an autocrat EPIC FAIL. Keep the soldiers happy and you can get away with a lot of things.
Hey guys. I wanted to ask for some feedback on a product I'm working on:
www.argyu.fun
It's a debate game platform that uses AI as a neutral arbiter to score everyone's responses. The mission is to incentivize better thinking.
We added 2 new games with faster feedback modes:
1. King of the Hill - The 'king' has the highest scored answer. Challengers try to usurp the king and get a higher score with better points.
2. Showdown - Go 1v1 on a random topic. Users have 3 minutes to make their best argument.
Feedback is much appreciated, thank you.
How are you achieving neutrality with LLMs?
Our judge scores based on the following criteria:
Claim clarity & specificity
Logical structure & validity
Factual accuracy
Engagement with counterarguments
Internal consistency
Relevance & focus
Completeness
Fairness & interpretive charity
Presentation & Rhetoric
Organization & readability
Might as well plug my AI debate platform: https://argue.lol
Eli I checked out your platform, very cool and great design! I tried viewing a live debate but wasn't able to do so, said it was full
Thanks man!
I signed up with a throwaway email account, but have not tried participating in any topics yet (none piqued my interest). A couple of notes:
* I chose a fairly weak password when creating the account, but the site did not warn me about this.
* The welcome message says "no real money required", but all the debates have scoring metrics that look like "$20/$80", and my account appears to have "$100" in credit. It would be good to explain more explicitly that you're talking about play money, or perhaps use a symbol other than "$".
Noted, appreciate the feedback!
Played around a bit. So far, it feels like the first stage of a generative adversarial network: Essentially, we are trying to figure out your current AI judge's reward function and find inputs that maximize that. Fun, but too disparate from truth-seeking to feel rewarding.
I played an opponent in showdown whose pacing and phrasing seemed like an AI (perhaps taking the second step of this GAN). They got great scores simply telling a personal anecdote and describing how the emotional thrust of that anecdote supported their case. I don't know if this is optimal for this judge, or optimal for your RLHF of that judge, or optimal for the arguments you'd like the site to produce. As far as I can tell, there's no way of answering the latter questions from the site (and no way of answering the first except by playing).
Ultimately I think what's needed here is more judging of judge: If you laid your principles of what a good argument is in a clear "constitution", each judgment could be criticized by some aligned community as not optimally following that constitution. Over time, better judges could then be created.
For the "King of the Hill" thing to work, you'd need the AI scoring to be reliably transitive. I'm not sure that's true.
Tried out showdown.
On practice mode, I found that nearly all my feedback asked for more, more more: more evidence, more counterarguments, etc. Putting in made-up quotes or scientific studies increased my score by 5-10 points each. Not going back to correct typos also increased my score, if it let me get one more sentence in under the time limit.
On quick match, my two opponents both put in perfectly spelled, multi-paragraph answers with multiple named, dated sources. I assume they were using AI.
Not fun in the least.
Thank you, this is really good feedback.
The quick match automatically puts you up against an AI bot if you don't match with anyone after 5 seconds, we should make this clear to the user.
Noted on the feedback given in practice mode, we can make this better.
Yeah, I didn’t sign up for a speed-typing contest against an AI. If that’s what it does, you should at least make those matches not count towards the user’s ELO.
While we’re on the topic of fake points that feel bad to lose, it would be nice if quick match users could decline a topic if they know nothing about it.
...well every time I read this I think of Duck Game, so I'll just quote Duck Game.
" 'UGHHHHH...' That's what the computer thought of that match! But what do the fans think?"
The flaw of the whole project is, the best argument is the one that convinces your friends, not a third party algorithm.
Can I understand why I’ve been hearing so much about Christianity in connection with rationalism and EA recently? In my current worldview, religion is still the same problematic institution denounced by Richard Dawkins years ago, and anyone who holds religious beliefs is, de facto, irrational (again, just stating my world model without presuming it is correct).
Are there good sources for understanding the “rational Christian” viewpoint, so that I might update my model?
Right now, my intuition is that Christianity is mainly used as a shelling point to organize community activities and coordinate moral behavior. Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
My, admittedly cynical, take: there are still way more Christians (especially in the USA) than Rationalists/EA types, and so getting the nicer ones (more liberal in views, less doctrinaire, more intelligent and willing to move with the times) of us Bible-bashing rabble on-board means infiltrating the institutions and engaging in entryism to take over enough influence, at least, to shift churches towards EA-type goals. All that charitable donation and community organisation turned away from worship of God towards worship of the machine. Ready made network of established status and connections to steer towards the better goals as defined by Utilitarianism: greatest happiness of the greatest number in saecula saeculorum, amen!
Agreed; indeed, from the Rationalist perspective, hijacking Christian community networks is a perfectly rational course of action. After all, we're saving the world from imminent doom here, right ? What nobler goal is there ?
Some Christians believe their religion literally, but many are there simply because their parents were there, they were raised as religious from childhood, and there is a social pressure to remain... and they rationalize it to themselves either as "it's better to be safe, just in case the afterlife really exists", or "it's probably all just fairy tales, but if religion tells people to be nice, then it is a noble lie and should be supported".
To the latter, you can say "well, you can also be nice by helping other people, and there are more efficient ways than giving the money to your church authorities".
I disagree, I think this is a naive and wrong version of utilitarianism which doesn't consider the full consequences of breaking people's trust.
I'm inclined to think both groups want to convert each other. I can't imagine many Christians want a pack of charity nerds to be eternally damned.
I know your take is cynical, but it reminded me of a Chesterton's Fence scenario I experienced.
Decades ago, I was a rationalist agnostic dating a girl who worked in youth programs at a church. It was perhaps an odd pairing, but she was hot and nice and I ended up being a regular church goer as a result.
A few people in the congregation's leadership got enthusiastic about sending aid to Africa. So they made a big pitch for a years-long commitment to tithes for aid. These leaders naively assumed that congregants would donate to Africa in addition to their normal tithe to the general operating fund. Instead, people tithed to the Africa fund instead of the general fund. (What great EAs!)
The general fund at most churches pays for building expenses, utilities, and salaries. Within six months, the budget was in enough of a hole that the church let several employees go, including my wife. The childrens' programs suffered greatly as a result. A good childrens' program is a huge draw for a church, and weekly attendance declined with the youth program.
With the decrease in attendance, tithes dropped. The leaders saw the writing on the wall and saw they couldn't afford the Africa program. So now zero dollars are being allocated for overseas aid (they still do a great deal of classic church charity work in the local area, like running a food pantry).
That's the thing, people talk about (as in comments here) money going to church facilities instead of charity, and I think often they have in mind the kind of American (which has spread to the Global South) Prosperity Gospel type of ministers who buy their own jets and the like.
But even EA projects have administrative overhead that *some* proportion of donations go towards, and church administration is the same - paying the wages of secretaries, programmes for members, printing the bulletins, heat and light, etc. It's not all "megachurch pastor shilling on TV for his second luxury car".
> Decades ago, I was a rationalist agnostic dating a girl who worked in youth programs
> let several employees go, including my wife.
Way to bury the lede!
The more rational Christians are the ones who take the religion less literally, every Christian is to some degree irrational, maybe encouraging more of the less irrational version of Christianity can be good, but I think ultimately we want the whole thing gone
"I think ultimately we want the whole thing gone"
That's my feeling too, which is why I think attempts to do "Christianity and..." as in "Christianity and Effective Altruism" are suicide attempts.
To quote from "The Screwtape Letters":
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice."
"The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing."
I think he was saying that ultimately, he wants the "whole thing" of Christianity gone, which I know you would disagree with. That's a pretty timely quote though.
I think "Christianity and something" is better than "Christianity", and is useful to get people with religious tendencies to be more reasonable. Christianity can be seen as a useful fiction, but I think there can be just as useful fictions that are less likely to result in bigotry.
I think that if we're talking about Christianity and wanting it to survive, then "Christianity and something" is not better. It's exactly what you describe happening there - for someone whose interest is in the "and something", then Christianity is at best a tool and something ultimately to be disposed of in order to let the "something" be the important, major focus.
So if someone is Christian and trying to use the "Christianity and something" as any kind of a hook, they are only knotting the noose to hang themselves.
I think this applies to any movement; once you start diluting it with mission creep, the movement loses focus. At best, it becomes a financial instrument with extra bells and whistles; at worst, it falls apart.
Hmm... As an atheist/agnostic (with finite uncertainty, of course) myself, I'm happy to see a Christian revival as an impediment to Islamization. Does 'Christian and not-Muslim' count as one of the 'Christianity And' groups, according to C.S.Lewis's view?
No, it would not, because it is a statement of belief. Unless someone is trying to create some sort of political stance (we in X are Christians not Muslims) then it's not the same as trying to use Christianity as a peg to hang your pet cause on.
Many Thanks!
I’m certain that Galileo will be devastated once he learns of Dawkins opinion of his faith. Though perhaps he should have thought more carefully about pissing off his patrons . . .
If you're relying on the Pope to back you up against the Pigeon League, then don't write a book putting quotes allegedly the position on the topic the Pope holds into the mouth of the "dumb idiot" character 😁
https://galileo.library.rice.edu/chr/caccini.html
Galileo was a bit like Dawkins in that both of them never met a controversy they didn't want to have an opinion on, and absolute certainty they were right and everyone else was a moron.
There’s that yes. His life seems to be one of Really Cool Discoveries like (Galilean) Relativity and Going Out Of His Way to Piss Off the Powerful. He’d have been better off going to Germany and nailing his theories to the church door.
Tyco and That Polish Dude with the Oddly Latin Name, Copernicus, both published on heliocentricism around the same time and died in their own beds.
Tycho had his own system, which was explicitly geocentric, but under the hood it was basically just Copernican heliocentrism with a coordinate transformation to a non-inertial reference frame where the Earth is defined as always being at (0,0,0). The Sun and the Moon then revolve around the Earth, and most everything else revolves about the Sun.
Tycho favored this for religious and aesthetic reasons; a moving Earth just felt so wrong he had to transmogrify everything else to fit around a stationary Earth. And then a century of Catholic astronomers went with the Tychonic system because that damned idiot Galileo had poisoned the geocentric well and it was safer to just do the silly bit of extra math and get on with their work than to risk pissing off the Vatican with the simple true version.
I think you mean "heliocentric well," but yes.
I have been in the rationalist space for over a decade and have become Christian over the last 5, with regular church attendance starting about 4 years ago. I was held back from Christianity by the rationalist strawman of Christianity for a long time, but there are limits to rationality. I ended up too rational to cope with the narrow scope of what rationalism affords and I started looking for answers elsewhere. The Christian intellectual tradition gave me the answers I needed. The Christian worldview fits reality better, affords more, and has led to a deeper and more fulfilling life for me and my loved ones. If other rationalists have a similar experience to mine, I can see why they would post about it.
I am no Rationalist, but still, your perspective intrigues me. This may be a stupid question, but what do you mean by being "Christian" ? I was always under the impression that Christianity implies faith in the supernatural ("the evidence of things not seen"), and is thus explicitly and deliberately irrational. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, who knows), I'm the kind of person who is unable to make himself believe propositions at will, and thus Christianity of this sort is not an option for me. But perhaps you are one of the people (arguably the majority) who can alter their beliefs at will; or perhaps your version of Christianity is not supernatural ?
> I'm the kind of person who is unable to make himself believe propositions at will
Few are!
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%202:8-9&version=NIV
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
A promise of Christianity is that you do not need to logic yourself into faith on your own. If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted. You are then no longer in a place where the belief is unjustified by your experience - you have felt cause and effect directly. Once you find yourself here, the worldview is internally consistent thereafter.
Are you a Christian?
As it happens, yes.
I would not self-describe as a rationalist, but this is for reasons largely unrelated to my faith. Certainly I am rationalist-sympathetic.
That's awesome! I've noticed you around but I guess I haven't paid enough attention to realize.
> If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted.
But this is a Catch-22: how can I sincerely pray to an entity who, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist ? Sure, I can mouth the words and perform the rituals and wear the special clothes (if any), but from my point of view doing all that is no different from cosplay at a LARP. Surely God would know of my insincerity even if I managed to somehow convince all the Christians, would he not ?
I've heard that a lot from Jews, but I don't consider myself a part of the Orthodox Jewish community, let alone the Christian one...
True, you need to be less than completely certain of your atheism in order to call out in sincere, humble hope of a reply. If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility - if it is already fully made up beyond swaying - I don't really know how to help with that. Seems like that sort of thing could be a problem for many rationalist pursuits also, though. If we're not prepared to examine positions that we find alien and think are only a little likely to be true, I frankly don't see how half the conversations that happen here can happen in seriousness.
> If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility...
As I'd said before, my mind is not open to any possibility of anything; at least, not in the way that I think you mean. For example, whenever I look at a rock, I cannot convince myself that it is a rabbit or an apple or even a turtle. I can certainly imagine the possibility intellectually (after all, I've been wrong many times before), but imagining a counterfactual world is not the same as convincing yourself that you do in fact live there. So the best I could do is say, "by all appearances this appears to be a plain old rock, and though I could always be wrong, in this case I don't think I am".
Why do you think God would care what you believe as long as you do all the things right?
...I mean, I literally just quoted that: "not by works, so that no one can boast".
Christianity has been wrestling with free will vs predestination since well before the likes of Daniel Dennet and modern conversations about determinism. The God described in the bible isn't looking for coerced automatons. He's looking for people to come of their own free will. This isn't about performing a magic ritual correctly. This is about making up your mind to call out for help, and verbalising the result of that.
Well, you said it's to the best of your knowledge, which seems to leave room for some uncertainty (and is certainly the most defensible position). I think "God, if you do exist, in whatever form you exist" is a valid starting place for a prayer.
That is true; I could certainly pray this prayer, though of course the answer would depend on what kind of God actually exists (if any). Many versions of the Christian God would not grant me faith, as they stringently avoid impinging on free will. Eldritch abominations such as Cthulhu would not care, as they require sacrifice, not mere prayer. The Kami likely would not hear me unless I visited them personally in Japan. Odin demands valiant deeds, not pretty words, and Loki can't be trusted at all... and so on. So the fact that I've prayed the prayer and got no special revelations in return tells me very little.
I believe most Christian denominations, even those not explicitly Reformed / Calvinist or otherwise heavy on the predestination side, ascribe the work of the Holy Spirit to these types of questions. As Jesus said, "What is impossible with man is possible with God."
Faith is a gift, and it's not a certainty that everyone will have it. It's very difficult. If you cannot be convinced in your reason, then you won't be converted, and trying to 'nice force' anyone into it won't work in the long run.
Reason alone won't get you there, but if a little voice in the back of your head keeps piping up "this is all nonsense" then trying to pretend you believe what you don't is not enough. Better a sincere atheist trying to do good by his lights than an unhappy believer who doubts everything he tries to pretend he holds, because that kind of doubt then corrodes everything and eventually you might end up doubting even doing good.
I agree with the sentiment, but not the ultimate conclusion. I think it is incredibly important for a person who wants to do good to doubt himself !Too many terrible acts in history have been perpetrated by people who convinced themselves that they were doing good beyound any shadow of a doubt, that their path is the only proper path, and that some unfortunate sacrifices must be made in the name of this Greater Good.
I think you're using a spurious definition of "supernatural". As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
https://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html
Similarly, I think that you have an uncharitable notion of "faith". A lack of *sight* is not the same thing as a complete lack of evidence.
> As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
Sure, but this is not a definition that I find useful. When someone tells me that e.g. angels exist, I'm not interested in the abstract philosophical grounding of angelic entities; rather, my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?" This question is not just applicable to angels, of course; for example, few people seriously believed in neutrinos until they were detected; and few people believe in quantum loop gravity today for the same reason.
> lack of *sight* is not the same thing as a complete lack of evidence.
Agreed; I was talking about evidence in general, not literal visual sight. I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
That's a narrower version of science than the real world version. Science is based on explanatory power as well as direct evidence.
Yes, this is what I tried to convey when I mentioned neutrinos -- which cannot be detected directly by e.g. ordinary human vision, and in fact require sophisticated detectors to be built just so we can infer the neutrinos' existence.
> this is not a definition that I find useful. [...] my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?"
I agree that the question of whether a thing exists is almost always more important than whether the thing is reducible to non-mental entities. Regardless, in ordinary language, the word "supernatural" is relevant to the latter question, not the former.
> I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
The most direct counterpoint is 1 Peter 3:15: "[..] Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. [...]".
Additionally, there's important historical context to consider. Christianity's central claim--Jesus's resurrection--is based on eyewitness testimony. Consequently, it makes perfect sense for Biblical authors to distinguish between a lack of firsthand experience and a general lack of evidence.
what is the one strongest evidence you have for Christianity?
Hi bugmaster, thanks for your reply. I understand where you are coming from and think you are asking good questions. I worry that you will find my answers unsatisfying because there is a gulf between our experiences and worldview that an internet reply can't hope to fill. I will try to reframe your questions and respond to them. Let me know if my reframing seems off.
1. Does my Christian belief involve belief in the supernatural?
Short answer: yes.
More accurate but probably confusing answer: in becoming Christian, I entered into a worldview that predates the modern natural/supernatural dichotomy. This is one of the hardest things to communicate about my journey to becoming Christian. My epistemology has changed and my categories of reality have changed with them. I believe in God, angels, demons, all manner of things that my prior self would have called supernatural. My worldview has become more phenomenological now and I see myself as participating in a hierarchy of being that encompasses all things. From my current worldview, there is no line in that hierarchy that delineates the natural from the supernatural. We humans are made in God's image and can participate in the divine by following Christ. At the same time, we are made of dust.
2. How do I believe propositions that cannot be reasoned about with rationalism? As a rationalist, how did I "convince" myself?
Short answer: non propositional ways of knowing
More accurate but probably confusing answer: Another commenter mentioned Chesterton here. He and many others have tried to give rational accounts of the faith better than I ever could, but I don't believe their accounts would necessarily satisfy what you are looking for. I was never personally persuaded by rational/logical arguments for Christianity before I converted. I'm a Catholic, and a fairly new one, so do not take my words below as a representation of the Church's teachings, but this is how I believe.
Christianity is a way seeing and being in the world, not a set of propositions (not sure if Protestents would agree on that point). Propositional knowledge is important and has greatly improved our standard of living, so we rightly venerate it. However, it is not the only type of knowledge.
Consider riding a bicycle. I could give lengthy explanations on what your body will need to do to stay balanced and propel yourself forward. I could give precise angles on how far to lean when you turn. You could spend years studying everything there is to know about riding a bike. But the person who gets on the bike and starts pedaling will know how to ride a bike better than you almost immediately. This form of knowing is procedural, not propositional. There are many things we learn in life (including things as foundational as how we think) that can only be learned through our embodied participation in reality. Becoming Christian is one of those things. It happens through participation, not sets of propositions.
There are other forms of knowledge out there (see John Vervaeke's 4 P's of Knowledge for more insight) that Christianity has broadly categorized as revelation. As a rationalist, I was predisposed to undervaluing these other types of knowing until I went deeper, and deeper, following the breadcrumbs until I got to a level of doubt about the world rivaling Descartes. The fact of the matter is that rationality is built on a set of recent modern presuppositions that, when seriously questioned (with the rigor of a good rationalist) leaves you alone in an abyss of doubt. Christianity and its non propositional ways of knowing brought me back to reality. Until I prayed, went to Mass, participated in the sacraments, loved my neighbor, etc, I was bound by the limits of rationality.
Rationality and propositional knowledge are still indispensable tools that I use to navigate the world. But I see them now in the context of a much bigger, more beautiful reality that has Christ (the Logos) at its center.
That is very informative, thanks ! That said, as per your bicycle analogy, I fear that don't think I have the capacity to truly understand what you are talking about. For example, when think about a rock, I do not follow some logical chain of reasoning that concludes, from first principles, that the rock must be there. Instead, I see the rock, touch it, taste it (if the fancy strikes me), and the conclusion "the rock exists" automatically forms in my mind. If you told me that the rock is actually a turtle, I could not bring myself to believe it until the rock exhibited some signs of turtle-dom (such as perhaps poking out a head and a tail).
Granted, there are many things I cannot directly observe, such as electrons or the country of China; but my mental process is largely the same. Once my senses have gathered enough evidence, be it direct or indirect, the conclusion forms in my mind; and only additional evidence can dislodge it. This isn't something I've diligently trained myself to do (although training does help to streamline this process), it's just how my mind has always worked.
I have tried participating in many religious rituals (not just Christian ones), but they've always left me feeling like a LARPer. As I'd said above, I don't understand how someone could sincerely pray to an entity one does not believe to exist -- and what use are insincere prayers ?
That said though, I'm no Rationalist either, nor a philosopher; for example, I don't believe that some ultimate philosophical grounding of all thought is necessary to make useful conclusions about, well, anything. I am perfectly content with admitting that my mind is flawed and total certainty is unachievable about any proposition, even the ones as seemingly rock-solid as "2+2=4". Perhaps this is another thing that separates me from the Christians -- I'm not sure.
At least for me, I only truly believed in Christianity after really seriously trying to live like Christianity was real. I had some faith, but it was mostly just me going out on a limb and seeing if it would work. I had a very reconstructionist view before and didn't really agree with Christian ethics. However, as I started trying to turn the other cheek as much as I could and started deeply reading the Bible, belief came and ethics came. I guess you could say God just altered my priors. I do rationally believe in Christianity too, just resulting from evidence for scripture and miracles, but it is secondary to my otherwise unexplainable belief.
That is fair, but as I'd said in another comment, I am unable to bring myself to commit a large amount of time and effort to the pursuit of a practice I currently believe to be false -- despite the possibility that, once I have done so, it may reveal itself to be true. Perhaps I would be more willing to commit if Christianity were the only such practice in existence, but it's not; I hear the same from Muslims, Buddhists, and even Wiccans. I find this fact difficult to reconcile with Christianity being the one true faith.
If you don't mind me asking; what does believing in angels and demons mean to you? Do you believe that these things influence the physical world? Do they deliver knowledge of the material world? Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
The following are my views that are hopefully aligned with the Church.
> What does believing in angels and demons mean?
I believe in a heavenly hierarchy that includes beings that exist between us and God. Some of these beings are interested in humanity, others are not. These are real entities, not just psychological constructs. They would exist even if we did not.
> Do you believe that these things influence the physical world?
They do not have physical bodies but can influence the world through us via dreams, revelation, temptation, etc. I am unsure about their power to physically manipulate reality and would need to look into that.
> Do they deliver knowledge of the material world?
I think we can be compelled toward certain knowledge by them, but as far as I know they do not dole out facts of the universe.
> Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
I think this is a fine way to understand angels/demons for nonreligious people. I would add that they can have desires/affinities that may be completely alien to human desires/affinities.
Christianity does indeed imply faith in the supernatural, and yet plenty of people do come into it from at least somewhat rational routes. Christianity (unlike many other religions) does claim to be anchored in a true, historical fact: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And many sceptics who've investigated this have found the evidence surprisingly compelling that this did indeed happen. This implies that Jesus is at the very least worth listening to to see what he said about himself. Christians share many principles with rationalists, including the desire to believe only what is true (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:13-20); we just believe that that includes a creator God.
The rock example - does this rock exist? - is still in the realm of propositional knowledge and can be addressed with evidence. An example of a rock involving procedural knowledge would be the ability to turn a stone slab into a sculpture. That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation. It is knowledge that you obtain through practicing the art of sculpture.
Point taken that participation in religious practices has not yielded any fruit for you. I'm curious, do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow? Before I became a Christian, I followed a practice of meditation and has some mystical experiences that revealed to me the existence of a reality deeper than what I knew. Without those experiences I think it would have been more difficult for me to take the first step into my current faith.
> That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation.
That's not entirely true, as people who become sculptors usually start with observation (of a teacher at work) and learning (from textbooks or YouTube videos, I suppose). And it seems that virtually anyone can learn the basics of sculpture merely by reading books and watching tutorials -- though of course not everyone could become a great sculptor, or even a mediocre one. Nonetheless, the process of becoming at least a novice sculptor is readily observable, repeatable, and (arguably) quite well studied.
> do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow ?
I've tried meditation but could never make it work. I've tried hypnosis too, with similar results (or rather lack thereof). I've never taken hard drugs (nor am I planning on doing so, sorry), but I've been drunk -- and the experience can hardly be described as "mystical".
Presumably, if God does exist, then he knows exactly what kind of an experience would bring me to faith -- but chooses not to grant me one. It seems that God would prefer me to remain an atheist; and, being a humble atheist, who am I to challenge the will of God ?
No contention from me on the point of propositional knowledge supporting practices. Just as you would want to give someone advice before they ride a bike for the first time, you would want them to learn information about sculpting before (and after) getting started to improve their skill development. My point is simply that to know the skill of sculpting, at some point you need to hold tools and strike the rock repeatedly. The patterns of movement you learn will be unique to you and are physically retained in the body in ways different from propositional knowledge. Procedural memories are not stored in the brain in the same way as declarative memories. I don't think you necessarily disagree with me here (you seem to get my point that knowing Christianity requires embodied participation). I just wanted to spell this out in case my earlier post was unclear.
In Buddhism there are supposedly 84,000 doors to enlightenment. I don't know what the equivalent number is in Christianity, but hopefully I have at least given you the shape of the door I went though. On God's plan for you, me, or any of us, I won't speculate. You seem like a swell person and I wish you the best bugmaster.
But this again is somewhat of a Catch-22. If I understand you correctly, I must invest a great deal of time and effort into a spiritual practice in order to obtain the revelation/enlightenment/etc. that validates the practice -- but why would I commit to such a large investment into something I currently believe to be no more real than e.g. D&D spellcasting ?
"Christianity implies faith in the supernatural ("the evidence of things not seen"), and is thus explicitly and deliberately irrational."
This statement would only be correct if the final words were changed to "not materialist" rather than "irrational."
Fair enough, I suppose; it all depends on whether you think that pre-committing to a belief in total absence of any supporting evidence (be it material or not) is rational. I think an argument could be made that sometimes it is, and theistic faith is one of those cases.
as a rationalist, do you think the resurrection literally happened? like probabilistically
Hi Connor, I had a very hard time addressing this question, and I feel a mix of shame and doubt in what I have written. I am only speaking for myself in this reply.
If we went back in time and put a camera outside of Jesus' tomb, would we see the same body enter the tomb dead and, three days later, exit the tomb alive?
Prob: < 30%
Did something sacred happen that inspired his followers to come out of hiding and believe with all their heart that Jesus returned from the dead?
Prob: > 90%
These responses feel wrong because I do not think about Christ in this way. I understand why from the outside these numbers would seem significant, but to me they do not describe anything about my religious faith. It is the meaning of the resurrection that matters, not the particilars. See my reply to bugmaster for a longer explanation.
That's really interesting to me. I don't think I could be a Christian unless I was convinced the resurrection actually happened. I've never heard of this "something sacred happened but probably not a literal resurrection" is this something you just came up with or can i read about this somewhere else? Can you get any more specific with what happened? Are you more on the side of Christianity being useful fiction, or a metaphor? Hypothetically, would you still be a Christian if it could be proven the resurrection is complete myth?
Hi Connor, I did not come to Christianity by being convinced of a set of propositions. When I read the biblical stories or participate in my church, I am not weighing evidence against my priors to see how true different claims are. Instead, I understand that I am participating in a different type of knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositional claims. I do not view this knowledge as irrational, but rather as something beyond what rationalism can contain or even speak to.
I think you would be surprised to know just how many people in the church, both attendees and clergy, have doubts about certain claims. If you are educated in our modern, secular world, then doubt, even serious doubt, is inevitable. Saints have written about periods of doubt, as have Chesterton (mentioned elsewhere is in this thread) and other thinkers, even popes. The waning and waxing of belief are seen as a part of spiritual growth in the Catholic Church.
I have not taken the time to think through all the possibilities, but as I said I am fairly convinced that something profound happened after the crucifixion Jesus. If this were somehow proven false, it would shake my faith and that of billions of other Christians. The Church would need to adapt and I cannot imagine what the global repercussions would be. Personally, I would probably abstain from saying certain parts of the Nicene Creed until everything was figured out. After some years, I think I could even see myself moving to a different denomomination that always had a metaphorical interpretation of Jesus. I would not stop praying but my prayers would change.
For now, the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead, and what that means for the world, is enough to sustain my faith.
So you aren't a Christian for rational reasons, but if it was rationally proven some of your beliefs are false, it would severely effected your faith, interesting. So theoretically, you could be rationally convinced out of Christianity, it would just need someone to have you very sure the resurrection didn't occur. I appreciate your honesty, but this sounds somewhat incoherent to me.
It actually does say in the Bible that Jesus literally resurrecting from the dead is a matter of first importance, and that if it didn't happen then Christians are to be pitied more than anyone. We are dead in our sins and living a lie. See chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2015&versi
One of the best explanations of resurrection evidence I have heard is that, despite all the supposed miracles that he performed during his life and which his followers apparently witnessed, while Jesus was being arrested and crucified, they were still all basically too cowardly to stand by him, and mostly denied knowing him and slunk away into the night.
After his supposed resurrection, all these cowardly followers suddenly began running around the country preaching about him, knowing that as a result, they were likely to undergo a gruesome martyrdom (and most of them did). Seemingly they were suddenly no longer afraid of death. The question being why...
Much appreciated! Few people are willing to say what their estimates of the odds of their views are.
To reciprocate, as per my own atheism/agnosticism:
For the agnostic part, allowing _some_ sort of intelligent creator, but with only the constraint of being at least as intelligent as human, and powerful enough to be responsible for the cosmos - maybe 10% probable? The best evidence for it is the 'fine-tuning' argument (which doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings) but the constants may just be 'brute facts' or there may be a multiverse-plus-anthropic-principle explanation. And an intelligent creator is a more complex explanation than brute facts of two dozen constants.
For the atheist part - a deity with something like omnipotence plus anything like an interest in humans and almost any strong preference about humans seems excluded very strongly by obvious evidence - a benevolent deity by the problem of pain and the problem of evil (which I'd just call counterexamples), a deity like Wotan by the absence of glaringly obvious calls by the deity for martial valor. Call it < 0.1% or so?
( Also - for there to be any reason to _care_ whether a deity exists and has preferences, there has to be some sort of consequence for aiding/thwarting its preferences, traditionally an afterlife, and the evidence that we are perishable neural nets, WYSIWYG, with no persistence after our last neural firing looks like >99% )
One problem with the "agnostic" position and the "fine-tuning" argument, as you describe it, is that at best it gets you to a form of deism: a deity who created the Universe then metaphorically "walked away". So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do, or whether it performs miracles, or even whether it is a person at all. At this point, it starts looking indistinguishable from a fundamental property of nature rather than an object of worship; as you said, there's no reason to "_care_ whether [the] deity exists and has preferences".
Many Thanks!
>So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do
Yup - or whether it is interested in life at all. We would have a _very_ weak idea of its preferences from its choice of the fundamental constants. But, as I wrote, this
>doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings
(and might well have _no_ other interests in the universe)
I've never heard this perspective from a Christian before ! Most of the Christians I've talked to would say that the physical Resurrection is what made Jesus special (ok, they wouldn't put it those exact words, but that's my understanding). According to them, Jesus wasn't just a really smart guy or a charismatic leader (there are plenty of those around); rather, he was a being both human and divine, whose sacrifice fulfilled the old laws while at the same time demonstrating mastery over death. Some Christians would say that instead of being physically resurrected on Earth, Jesus bodily ascended directly to Heaven; still, they would all agree that his tomb was empty at the end -- and I mean physically empty, not metaphorically, meaning that your camera would indeed show an empty tomb.
Is this not what you believe ? If so, then what is it -- if anything -- that makes Jesus special in your view ?
I understand (somewhat) your other point: that you came to your belief in Christianity via spiritual awakening and repeated practice, not logical arguments or physical evidence. But I am not sure what it means to be a Christian at all without believing in the Resurrection, as you seemingly do not. Of course, no one died and made me Space Pope, I cannot arbitrate your personal beliefs -- I'm just curious.
To be clear, I do believe in the resurrection, and I see it as absolutely central to Christian faith. This is partly why I felt weird about posting the percentages for those different claims. I went through some thought expercises with historical evidence and personal experience, weighed them against my priors, and came up with those numbers. I think the reason 30% seems low is because my priors for a man resurrecting from the dead, and for the event to be recorded accurately 2000 years ago, are extremely low. Starting from there, consider how confident I would need to be to bring the probability up to 30%.
Stepping back into a rationalist framework and assigning cold, impersonal numbers to my beliefs may have been a mistake on my part. I find it difficult to discuss Christianity in rational terms and this has been a messy attempt. It is not how I normally process my faith.
Fair enough, I really appreciate the explanation !
Similar situation with me. I might review this book for the 2026 ACX Review.
Most of what I've heard about the intersection of Christianity and Effective Altruism has been related to this book. What else have you about it?
As for resources to understand the "rational Christian" viewpoint: I suppose that depends on which parts of Christianity you consider to be irrational. For example:
- If you're skeptical about the historicity of the New Testament, then check out Lydia McGrew's work. (She's a published epistemologist.)
https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@LydiaMcGrewChannel/videos
- If you're concerned that hell is unjust, then check out this series of essays that defends annihilationism.
https://parresiazomai.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-is-second-death-part-1-symbols-and.html
- If you're skeptical of the Genesis creation narrative, then check out Hugh Ross's old-Earth creationist framework. (I'm less confident about this. I haven't looked at it in a while.)
This is the associated organization Christians for Impact https://www.christiansforimpact.org/ and their substack is Christ and Counterfactuals https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/. There is a community Effective Altruism for Christians that has a Facebook group and hosts discussions about this topic https://www.eaforchristians.org/
I read the annihilationism posts. Changed my mind about biblical interpretations.
I'm happy to hear that! Thank you for sharing.
>Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
The gist of Christianity is:
God created everything that exists, and when He created humans, He created them in His image and likeness, and tasked them with filling the earth and taking care of it. Mankind ended up disobeying God, and profaning Him by taking His image that they were made in and warping it to be unlike God.
As a result of this sin, mankind was separated spiritually from God, because God is holy and sin can't be near Him, and ever since then mankind has had to die, because life is the cost of sin. And as punishment for the the first sin, God cursed the ground and childbirth and the devil.
Another consequence of mankind's sin is that it impacted and continues to impact the natural and spiritual worlds, and people that had nothing to do with it. Because of man's evil actions, the world is in the state it is in today, and people are filled with hopelessness, despair, depression, ect., and we continue to profane the image of God by not being like Him.
But because God has never ceased loving mankind, and it is not His desire for any of us to perish eternally, but to be restored to Him, He sent His son Jesus. Jesus was not born from Adam's lineage and under the corruption of his sin, and He lived a sinless life. He loved us and lived as a human, so that He could die and offer sinless Human blood to take the place of anyone who believes in Him, and has faith that His offering is sufficient to pardon their own sins.
After Jesus did this, he resurrected from the dead, proving His authority as God, and also claiming victory over sin and death, giving life freely to mankind, to anyone who will accept it.
The people who believe this and accept it, and who, out of love for Jesus and their fellow man, live obediently to God, and share this news with others, in the hopes that others who are suffering and see their need will believe and accept Jesus as well, were labeled as "Christians" by others long ago. There are many other kinds of people who label themselves as Christian these days, but many of them have nothing to do with Christ or His Gospel. But this is what "Christianity" in its original sense is about, and there are still people who Love and follow Jesus in this way. Most "Christians" you'll encounter probably won't, and so they won't really have any authority to say anything about it.
EDIT: God didn't just want to save us from death, but mainly to restore us in connection with Him, so that we can have a full life and an intimate relationship with Him. That's the kind of love He has for us, and He created the institution of marriage as a representation of the relationship between Jesus and those who follow Him.
I am a former New Atheist, now fairly serious Catholic.
I believe rationalism is missing a coherant *meta ethics* that religion provides. Utilitarianism is categorically unstable both in theory and in practice. Honestly I think Thomism is pretty compatible with rationalism, because one of its core claims is that morality is discoverable by reason rather than by divine revelation.
The hard problem of consciousness is still of huge interest to rationalism and even the most hardcore atheists struggle to answer it coherantly. Chalmers for example concluded that physicalism can't account for subjective experience. Christians call consciousness "the soul". I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology.
Most people who convert to christianity these days do it because they feel a sense of a lack of meaning in their lives which only religion can fill. Secular philosophy tries and fails to provide this, it's either circular or it's christianity in a trenchcoat.
----
If you want resources:
Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is good reading for the morality/meta-ethics part, it's a more modern take on Thomism (which is in turn a modern take on aristotle).
Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, not to be confused with Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and Teresa of Calcutta) is a good author for phenomenology and consciousness metaphysics. I've heard Saint John Paul II also wrote some good stuff on that but I've never read it.
You're probably already familiar with GK Chesterton (of Chesterton's Fence fame). He wrote a book called Orthodoxy. I would say this is the best entry point here, it's basically a manifesto of a rationalist christian. It's basically a book about Chesterton trying to reason his way into the most correct philosophy from first principles and accidentally reverse engineering Christianity.
I'm Catholic so I'll mention Bishop Robert Barron's Catholicism series, there's a book and a TV miniseries (which is annoyingly hard to find on youtube) which basically covers the book. It's less apologetics but more just an introduction to the intellectual traditions and a sort of defense of the Catholic faith specifically. Barron was very involved with Dawkins and the others back in the day and wrote and spoke a lot against the New Atheists -- these days as a cautionary tale, since we all know what happened to it.
Will Durant's Story of Civilizations is really really long but a huge amount of it is about the history of religion and the church. I think many people (myself included) basically got an exaggerated cartoon version of church history as kids and never really understood the context behind a lot of stuff. A lot of the "Religion is bad" stuff is basically just bad history IMO. Even if I was an atheist this would convince me that religion is a net good! Age of Faith, the Renaissance, Caesar and Christ, The Reformation are good ones for specific time periods. Also Age of Voltaire's epilogue literally converted me into a catholic so there's that (even though durant wrote it as a defense of atheism against a steelman of catholicism!)
You said "I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology" - did you do a comparative evaluation to similar levels of understanding of all the major religions before coming to that conclusion? For example, I think the Advaita Vedanta and the Lurianic Kabbalah both have interesting takes on the notion. Though, the more I read about the different traditions, the more "many paths to one truth" makes sense.
no, not really. I'm comparing christianity rather to secular phenomenological theories which I felt all sucked rather equally
I agree that secular responses to the hard problem are necessarily weak sauce, but to then jump straight to Christianity has always struck me as pretty curious. Or incurious, maybe?
Well, I believe in Christianity for other good reasons too, some incidental, some deeply personal. The Hindus or Scientologists or Zoroastrians could have a great solution for the hard problem and I wouldn't really care too much because I think Jesus is the only begotten son of God who came down from heaven to die for all people that our sins may be forgiven, and that's an anchor to a lot of other core beliefs that I hold similarly strongly to catholic phenomenology
With respect, this sounds like an explanation for why believing in religion is pleasant, but not why it is correct. (Unless you only meant to provide an explanation for the psychological appeal, and I misunderstood you).
I don't know if many atheists outside of Reddit Atheism caricatures believe that religion as a whole throughout history is simply bad, though it's hard to evaluate "net good" without a coherent counterfactual to compare against. Religion is clearly instrumentally useful.
I'm curious, what environment were you raised in?
>With respect, this sounds like an explanation for why believing in religion is pleasant, but not why it is correct.
As a hedonic escalator, shouldn't you be trying to maximize what is pleasant, regardless of correctness?
Touché! But you forgot to account for instrumental convergence. Believing incorrect things, even pleasant ones, risks trapping me in a local maxima that compromises my ability to pursue even greater pleasures in the future.
For example, if I converted to Catholicism now, I might refuse to participate in the neuroadaptive sexbot orgies on the lunar libertarian micronation ten years from now on religious grounds. This would be a net loss as neuroadaptive sexbot orgies are much more physically, emotionally, and spiritually fulfilling than going to church.
I'm not up to date on my hedonism scripture, but I would imagine that as long as pleasure is your main goal, you'd probably have no issue with jumping from one thing to another. You also probably wouldn't have any reason to have anything to do with Catholicism, either.
Anyway, church isn't really the place for people who don't already have an intimate relationship with God, which surpasses anything one could ever have with people or robots. If you ever come to feel the weight of whatever sins you may be wrapped up in, and see the emptiness of everything in the world apart from Jesus, He will be there ready to relieve you of your burdens and transform your heart.
The idea would be that genuine belief in Catholicism would be required to achieve its claimed benefits, but genuine belief would also change my goals, making converting to Catholicism a poor choice for a hedonist even if it is more pleasant in the short term.
The world doesn't seem very empty to me. It is quite wonderful, I like it very much.
I was raised catholic. I became an edgy atheist at 14 like every other nerdy west coast guy in the 2000s and then became a catholic again at 28. I actually did think religion was net bad for a time, and it was specifically because I only ever listened to edgy atheists cristopher hitchens and dawkins talk about religion and never actually talked to anybody who knew what they were talking about.
I was responding to the original poster who said religion is a problematic institution and only believed in by irrational people.
Do you think you still would've ended up catholic if you were raised in a different religion, or none at all?
Normally I would disclaim that question with, "I know this doesn't make much literal sense, since there is no 'you' that exists separate from your upbringing..." but you probably believe your identity is rooted in a soul separate from your upbringing, so the question should be perfectly sensible to you. Anyways, please answer it.
I was raised to atheist parents in an almost exclusively atheist environment, and met a serious christian for the first time in college. Because of this, a lot of religious discussion online is alien to me. I don't doubt your report of feeling a lack of meaning only religion can fill, but I struggle to interpret this feeling as anything other than a product of rearing. People returning to what is psychologically comfortable from childhood, not some universal drive, certainly not one specific to catholicism. Do you dispute this?
I think I'm likely to have become some sort of religious. I never had a really true religious experience as a kid and just followed it because my parents made me go to church (and I mostly hated it, and barely believed any of it except in a token amount), and I only started feeling a religion-shaped hole in my heart later in life after accomplishing most everything I cared about accomplishing in life (wealth, security, sex, entertainment, status) and still feeling vaguely unfulfilled in a way that could only be filled by a higher purpose.
As for whether I'd become catholic, well, the Catholic response would be "I know that if I truly felt a longing for God, the Holy Spirit would guide me to the One True Faith some way or another." But that's probably not what you're asking. I think it's very likely I would have ended up with soem flavor of Christianity, knowing my personality (and assuming a lot of that personality is inherant to my genetics -- if we're going "what if your genetics were different" I think that's a little too much of a stretch for the hypothetical).
And if I ended up in christianity I have a good hunch I would gravitate towards catholicism; I'm naturally very curious about sects and branches and history and catholicism just objectively has a lot of things going for it that the others don't (stability, apostolic succession, a central authority to resolve disputes, a standard of objective beauty that surpasses all the others, because yes I believe in objective beauty).
Thanks for sharing.
I'm not surprised to hear that you weren't big on religion as a kid, my claim is more that early childhood enculturation surely has a large effect on what you gravitate towards as an adult. You're right that genetics likely plays a bigger role than I accounted for.
What do you do when your religion conflicts with secular knowledge and/or values? Or does this never come up?
It’s not ontology, it’s epistemology. Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs; but it’s not great for living a human life. First, because objectivity (correctly) requires the evacuation of meaning; but life requires meaning. Second, science only understands what it can control; so if anything more powerful than humanity exists, science is (correctly) blind to it. Imagine being an ant and trying to use the scientific method. Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles, for the same reason human scientists don’t acknowledge Zeus, or angels. They don’t come when you call, you can’t put them in a museum.
My read is that people are finally becoming skeptical. There are political reasons I won’t mention, but if you were paying attention in 2020-2024, you saw them. I’d say, if you’re rejecting religion in favor of science, you are not yet skeptical enough. There are still epistemic constructs you have not thrown into the fire.
Wouldn't your ant theory predict that human science would maintain the geocentric theory forever, or even if it did understand heliocentrism would never find black holes because they can't be easily observed?
I should have accounted for dead things in my description of science's limits. Science is fantastic for studying dead things, even huge ones. For a more thorough response, look at what I wrote to Nick Hounsome, elsewhere in this thread.
Science also works pretty well for living things that cannot be perceived by bare senses, e.g. bacteria and protists.
> Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs...
I would argue that the vast majority of human moral advancements throughout the ages were powered by technological advances (which are in turn powered by scientific advances). For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
> Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles...
This is untrue, as airplanes are clearly visible in the sky, and presumably ants can see them (though I could be wrong as don't really know how ant vision works). In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars. And in fact we humans have been able to understand much larger systems, such as black holes and the curvature of space-time, the geological history of the Earth, the existence of elementary "particles", the vision system of ants, etc., by working with much less.
> I think we can say "Civilization has the morality it can afford" without saying that every technological advance need give us Better Morality.
Agreed; obviously not *every* technological advance does. For example, arguably the invention of social networking was a huge step down. In addition, morality is subjective; for example, an ancient Israelite might find our obsession with monogamy puzzling if not borderline blasphemous. Still, I'd argue that most scientific and technological advances have led to increased quality of life for humanity by at least some kind of semi-objective metrics, e.g. increased lifespan, reduced infant mortality, better nutrition, and arguably self-reported life satisfaction (though that one is admittedly tricky).
>In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars.
Then again, you're living in a reality/universe/planet/body that was intricately designed by God, one which He provided with His own written words, and in which He even came to as a human, and presumably you would deny His existence as stated in His word, and doubtless you could use all kinds of thoughtful rational arguments to try and support the position.
That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
> That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
Yes, I do agree that the Christian worldview (as well as most other theistic worldviews) is fully compatible with all available evidence. In fact, it is arguably *maximally* compatible with any possible evidence, since the tri-omni God can (and, in some Christian theologies, does) produce any observable effect.
In that case, it's my hope for you that if you ever develop an awareness of any evil inside of you to the point where it's debilitating and you wish someone could do something about it, that you would think about this and that Jesus wants to take that burden from you and know and love you closely, and that you would trust Him to do so.
In the meantime, speaking of ants, since you are a self-proclaimed master of bugs, why the heck are there ants coming through my second-floor balcony door when there's a perfectly good apartment below me?
I don't think that slavery was abolished primarily because of technological advances. Christopher Brown makes a good case that, if not for a few quirks of history, slavery could have persisted until the information age.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christopher-brown-slavery-abolition/
I don't think that history has "quirks" to such an extent. The abolition of slavery appears to follow technological advances pretty closely, in time as well as space, and I don't think that Christian morality can adequately explain this. Perhaps more importantly, the mechanisms of slavery are incompatible with high technology: slaves must be kept ignorant (and ideally illiterate) lest they rebel, but modern technological jobs require the worker to be at least somewhat knowledgeable (and definitely literate).
At the same time, increasing quality of life (due to orders of magnitude increases in production efficiency) is what enables moral developments to occur in the first place. A person working 18-hour days just to survive has no time for philosophy; the modern 9-to-5 office worker does. Granted, a few fortunate people would always find the time (dating all the way back to Ancient Sumer), but in order for a moral philosophy to take hold, it must be embraced by more than a handful of scholars.
I think that most of your points are true for the kinds of slavery that are associated with ancient Rome and the American south, but not other forms of slavery. That episode of the podcast addresses your points.
>For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
Slave prices tell a different story.
As does the timing. The critical events, the Anglo-American abolition of the slave trade and the British Empire's abolition of slavery were in 1808 and 1833, respectively. Industrialization was beginning to happen in that period, but it had not upended the more traditional elements of the economy or made much of anything unprofitable, and that early industrialization still depended on raw material inputs which were frequently and profitably produced by slaves.
The United States didn't fully abolish slavery until 1865, by which point industrialization had become a more significant factor, but the Civil War happened because it had been increasingly clear for a generation that slavery was going away and 1861 was the last chance for the doomed holdouts. Once the slave trade was reduced to a handful of smugglers and pirates, once the dominant global Empire *and* its main geopolitical rival were solidly on Team Abolition, the writing was on the wall.
Yeah, ants can't see flying airplanes at all, they have compound eyes that don't focus and they mostly navigate by smell.
I admit that science can understand a lot about very large dead things. And maybe you can come up with a story where a small airplane was abandoned in a field and an ant colony grew up around it and the ants examined every piece of it and the ant scientists could convince their skeptics that yes, airplanes exist.
I mentioned Zeus. Will you bite that bullet? Implicit in your stance seems to be the claim that no living entity exists that can't be captured and dissected by scientists. You really think that, if Zeus existed, scientists would have him properly taxonomized and catalogued and placed in the context of biological evolution on Earth? And that no entity whatsoever could ever exist that scientists couldn't capture and do whatever experiments on that they wanted to?
I think only a superstitious belief in the godlike powers of scientists could lead somebody to think that science can objectively establish the existence of everything that actually does exist.
I want you to be more skeptical; to give up what I see as superstitions. Then you'd be more likely to see the epistemic value in religion.
I take your moral argument seriously. By gaining rational control over huge areas of the world, we've unlocked incredible wealth and such a high standard of living that many historical kings would happily trade place with a contemporary lower middle class American. Many of our most common moral stances were unthinkable before science transformed the world because anybody living that way died out.
But the same relationship exists between rich and poor contemporaries. A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. Is the techie Texan living a better life than the primitive tribesman? No, he just hasn't been tested. If he were in the other's shoes, he might very well do worse things.
So the question can't be whether science enables better morals, when the way it's doing that is just by removing temptation. Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically, regardless of the historical outcome, are better or worse for living your life. And that's not simple to answer.
> A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. ... No, he just hasn't been tested.
This is an interesting point. Granted, Papua New Guinea has the one of the highest crime rates in the world (if not the highest), so, objectively speaking, Papuans are committing more evil deeds than Texans. You say:
> Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically...
But the average Texan isn't thinking scientifically most of the time; he's just using the available technology. Yes, he probably does find acts like murder, theft, rape, etc. more abhorrent by contrast with the average Papua New Guinean; but this is likely not because he came to such conclusions independently, but rather because his society conditioned him to do so -- just as the Papua New Guinean's society conditioned him to view such acts as valid tools.
I guess the real question is, which of the two (admittedly correlated) effects is more important: reducing the number of evil acts and general suffering in the world, or effecting moral changes in people's minds (or souls, if you prefer) ? Science had been spectacularly successful at the former; it is possible that Christianity had been marginally more successful at the latter, though (as you say) it is difficult to tell.
"science only understands what it can control"???
You mean things like black holes, the CMB, quasars?
Yeah, "what it can control" isn't precise enough. Science needs to do repeatable experiments and it needs arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to the phenomena it studies. That usually boils down to "control", but you're right that, in the case of astronomy, you can take repeatable, predictable observations of stuff without controlling it. I guess I would modify my original statement to "science is only willing to evaluate dead things it has predictable access to or living things it can control".
But you don't seem to have quite grasped my point. Imagine Zeus. He's too powerful to be killed by a human. Bullets bounce off him. He can teleport at will to Olympus, a place no human knows how to get to. His concern with human affairs is capricious; sometimes he shows up and interacts with people, but nobody can predict when. Stretch your brain and imagine how scientists would evaluate something like that if it really did actually exist.
You don't have to stretch far; you already know. Same way they evaluate ghosts and angels and sasquatch. Mere eyewitness testimony isn't enough to convince scientists. They have to have arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to a specimen they can do repeatable experiments on. They quite rightly don't believe in ghosts and angels and Zeus and sasquatch. That's not what science does.
Thinking that everything that exists can be evaluated by science is a kind of superstition, the same as thinking that scientists are the most powerful beings in the universe; akin to gods. All existing entities, no matter how powerful, can be captured and studied by scientists; anything that can't (or isn't already dead) doesn't exist.
You're still wrong. Science doesn't even claim to be able to evaluate everything that exists - e.g. anything outside the observable universe or "before" the big bang or smaller than the Plank length.
Science "claims" to be able to evaluate everything that is worth evaluating or believing in.
This is just the, well known, counter to Pascal's Wager dressed up in scientific clothing - The expected utility of believing in your, unprovable, god, Zeus, is dwarfed by the expected negative utility of disbelieving in (or slighting) an infinte number of other, imagineable but unprovable, gods who may, damn you eternally for believing in a false god, Zeus. Therefore it is irrational to believe in things that cannot be observed.
Your stance depends on the assumption that there can never be anything worth believing in that's not subject to repeatable experiments -- because that's what science is, it has to establish a repeatable, deterministic relationship with its subject before it'll say anything about it. That means that you've decided beforehand not to believe in any living being that's too powerful and capricious for scientists to study.
Scientists (rightly) don't believe in sasquatch, because, although tons of people claim to have seen them, taken pictures of them, taken tons of plaster casts of their footprints, etc, there is no museum or zoo with a sasquatch specimen in it. Nobody has captured one yet, or brought back a dead one.
That whole category of entity -- things that, if they exist, are too powerful and capricious to be subjected to proper scientific study (yet) -- you've decided beforehand not to believe in, whether they're real or not.
I agree that that's a great epistemology for universities, for governments and corporations and other formal organizations. If science isn't able to get ahold of a thing to study it, they won't be able to get ahold of it to extract value from it either. (see https://xkcd.com/808/ ) No corporation is going to be able to sell sasquatch fur coats, so they don't care. Government doesn't have to regulate sasquatch hunting season, people can't even find a single one. So who cares?
I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
A lot of people have supernatural experiences and go around telling their friends, "I don't believe in x, but here's what happened to me the day I saw an x" I think that's silly. If you find that something is part of your world, you should deal with it, rather than refusing to believe in it because it won't hold still to be dissected.
> I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
On the other hand, you probably shouldn't instantly assume a hairy humanoid in the forest is Sasquatch. You don't want to shoot them and end up with a manslaughter charge...
The science says that you are wrong.
There are orders of magnitude more people known to have suffered hallucinations and optical illusions than people who have seen Sasquatch therefore, if you see Sasquatch, the most rational Bayesian conclusion is that you are hallucinating. And, in case you are going to say that they weren't hallucinations - hallucinations and illusions can often be induced or cured - strong evidence that they are not real.
On the capricious powerful being argument you leave yourself open to anyone who claims to be such a being. I'm one. Send me money now or suffer eternal damnation.
Rationality and EA are separate movements (albeit with a lot of overlap). This is from the EA movement. I don't think it's confusing that a movement dedicated to helping people do charity better should be interested in the largest charitably-inclined demographic in the world, ie religious people.
Practice for dealing peacefully with powerful entities with overlapping goals and alien ethics?
For EA, it's easy: lots of Christians around, and even more cultural Christians. Growing contingent of EAs around. Some overlap is inevitable. Both groups care a lot about different versions of "optimizing for good", to the point that EA has occasionally been painted as a bastard offshoot of Christianity.
For rationality: Western rationality grew up in a Christian context: Descartes, Newton, etc. Christianity has held the belief that it is rational for ages (as opposed to, for example, just saying that God is ineffable and reason won't get you there). It keeps defending it as hard as it can. The height of anti-religious scientism or positivism was probably around 100+ years ago. Our present time is not necessarily troubled by historical standards, but it sure is by post-WW2 standards. (The perception of) troubled times brings calls for voices that sound sure of themselves and are backed by deep tradition. Put it all together...
My view is that Christianity is in fact quite uncomplicatedly extremely compatible with the core ideas of helping the poor and reducing suffering on a universal scale, no?
I think it's just the barber pole of fashion. Once internet atheism went from "stunning and brave" to "fedora cringe", the slightly-more-sophisticated types started agreeing with each other that well actually GK Chesterton and CS Lewis were pretty cool after all.
That's probably true for some people, but I think there are a couple of other things going on here:
1. some of the original new atheist types legitimately have buyer's remorse (e.g., me). Twenty years ago, nerdy internet atheists thought that a society-wide decline in the influence of organized religion would lead to a better, more rational world ruled by FACTS AND LOGIC instead of ancient superstitions. That was naive and stupid, sure, but we didn't know that at the time, and if that prospect was a big factor in drawing someone to Ye Olde New Atheism, they've probably had some second thoughts about it unless they've been in a coma for a decade or so, because clearly that didn't come to pass, and in fact it could be argued was 180° wrong.
2. This is going to sound uncharitable, but I think the burgeoning Islamo-leftist political coalition has had a significant influence on who and what exactly becomes fashionable. Twenty years ago, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Co. could hate on religion in general all they wanted, and that was cool, because 99% of the audience was either an atheist or a Christian, and we already knew where they stood in terms of political affiliation. But now there are a smattering of Muslims in the mix whose political loyalties are not so fixed, so it pays for certain people to pretend they always thought Dawkins and Hitch were cringe.
Could you expand on what you found naive and stupid about a rational world ruled by facts and logic?
I have my own opinions on how this goes awry. One of them is that, on its face, a world where decisions are made based on facts and logic ought to leave most people better off in the long run, but there are obstacles to overcome. And I have thoughts on those obstacles. I imagine you do too, and I mean to compare notes.
I think young me had this conception that, free of the influence of religious traditions or dogma, then we should expect logic, rationality, and well-reasoned arguments would be more likely to sway public opinion, thus leading to better outcomes for all. I think this was naive for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is that it seems to me that some form of tribalism (not necessarily ethnic, but rather ethno-cultural) has simply taken the place of religious tradition in informing people's values or what have you, not any sort of dispassionate, Socratic, self-examination. And why expect otherwise? Reason: still the slave of the passions, boys and girls.
Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive.
Also, my model of facts and logic probably isn't the same as yours. One big thing here is that I try to factor in things like tribalism, modeling it logically and devising reasoning methods that accommodate it. For example, if you have two policies, P and Q, and each has a tribe backing it, then even if you're on tribe P, say, you have an interest in understanding tribe-Q's case for Q, since that may enable you to present P in more Q-favorable terms, or even adjust P to better fit tribe-Q's motivations. You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach.
A common response to this is that most people aren't thinking about making nice with tribe-Q over the long run. Some think they can squish tribe-Q; some believe we're in conflict mode; some believe tribe-Q will just exploit moderation to get more of their way; and so on. But to me, that's just exploring more of the facts and logic around the framework. (I realize that a lot of people do not appear to model logic this way.)
>Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive
Also, facts and logic don't determine values.
"You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach."
One thing worth considering here is that even if both tribes would be better off with some kind of compromise, specific individuals can gain status within tribe Q and tribe P by signaling immoderation and an unwillingness to compromise, because it shows commitment/dedication to their respective tribes. You get a sort of principal/agent problem where groups A and B would be better off with some kind of grand bargain to settle a conflict between them, but factions within groups A and B think this would make them worse off, and so they work hard to sabotage any such bargain.
Richard Swinburne would be a solid source for understanding the rational Christian viewpoint, as would Josh Rasmussen and other Christian analytic philosophers. Swinburne's "Is There a God?" is a great starting point for the theistic aspect, and he has a trilogy of books defending Christian theism specifically. Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig is also a good book (and podcast) defending the rationality of Christianity and its underlying ontology.
Edit: as for the connections between EA and Christianity, I will add the following related sources: This is the associated organization Christians for Impact https://www.christiansforimpact.org/ and their substack is Christ and Counterfactuals https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/. There is a community Effective Altruism for Christians that has a Facebook group and hosts discussions about this topic https://www.eaforchristians.org/
Probably shouldn't be a smart-arse about this, but when has that ever stopped me?
Ooh, a new book for Christians about charitable giving! What we can learn from EA!
"This book offers practical tools to:
Prioritize needs: Identify where money and energy most impactfully solve pressing, neglected global issues―taking Jesus’s radical command to love your neighbor seriously."
Like shrimp welfare. You thought the hungry, sick and lonely humans were in need? Pffft! That's just "conventional philanthropy, symbolic actions, and feel-good volunteering", the liddle shrimpies are where it's at!
Plus worrying about Skynet becoming real.
What's that? "“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble"? But if we don't get AI aligned *right now*, it will kill us all! Maybe! If it becomes super-intelligence!
So remember:
"Give smarter: Leverage proven, evidence-backed strategies to achieve results hundreds of times greater per dollar than traditional charity."
Donate to the Oxbridge set, they are your natural superiors and know better than you about every whole thing.
EDIT: I'm glad the author/contributors want to make charitable giving more effective, and are trying to build bridges between organisations holding like-minded goals, but (1) the ultimate purpose of Christianity is not to be nice and charitable, it is to be in right relationship with God and (2) I'm not sure the goals *are* like-minded past a surface level of "give mosquito nets to the suffering".
So this is just a comment for fun. Re: right relation with God; Perhaps the Christians can pull a little jiu jitsu on EA and suggest that their desire for helping is a way for them to approach getting into the right relationship with God.
No, because anything that smacks of proselytisation will be an immediate turn-off for the EA types and will only further convince those like our Dawkins-quoting friend that it's all a scam to get power and new cult members.
Any conversion is more likely to be the other way round: you mean I can do good *and* not have to go to church/worry about sin, death and Hell? Yippee!
They don’t have to proselytise though. Being right with God is a very personal thing, isn’t it?
The second anyone on the Christian side mentions something like the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount etc. that will be seen as attempting to sneak in their religion under the cover of charitable work.
Or even putting "Christian" or anything like it on the letterhead and looking like you actually believe.
Everyone knows of the golden rule. It's just about the most foundational moral doctrine that there is. (doctrine is not the right word there. Axiom?)
Ah and yet you might be wrong. You might be the way that EA's find God. I'm not particularly religious. (I went the to UU church when I lived in Nashville, but you have to go to some church when you live in Nashville, and UU is fine. (The music in churches in Nashville was great!)) But the older I get the more unsure I become, and why not God? Is there a better explanation for Joan of Arc?
Hey man, have you instead tried believing in nothing and practicing shrimp welfare (good)? Here, take this pamphlet!
Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches, I would think that one ideal goal of the book might be to convince individual Christians that their giving would be better applied in ways that actually help more people practically.
Shrimp welfare and AI risk are certainly edge cases, and to my mind prime examples of people convinced of their own rationality above all and able to justify anything, but that's not all of EA, obviously. It gets the most attention because it's weird, or different, but the EA framework can apply even if one decides human welfare in in-scope and animal welfare isn't.
I'll be curious to see how much the book resembles "Doing Well and Doing Good" by Os Guinness, but that was 2001, so we have 25 years of more data now.
Or to put all of this in more Christian terms, a book that reminds Christians about being the hands and feet of Christ in the world, or that reminds Christians that the difference between the sheep and the goats is what they did and didn't do, that might be a worthwhile book.
"Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches"
Sweetums, while "we decided our best use of stuff was to buy a castle" exists, glasshouses, stones, you know the drill. Yeah, they eventually ended up selling the place, but given that there has long been criticism of precisely what you said applied to churches, it's not like they didn't have the example before them when they made that decision in the first place:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/12/wytham-abbey-sale-effective-altruism-group-evf
"It was pitched as the place where the world’s leading technologists, scientists and philosophers would gather to figure out how effective altruism and artificial intelligence could be combined to create a global force to eradicate poverty and improve everyone’s lives.
The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.
The 27-bedroom house, which has over the years been visited by Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Queen Victoria, was transformed into a retreat for believers in the movement, including the now-jailed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn, who made a fortune investing early in Skype.
However, just two years after buying the mansion, which acquired the nickname “Effective Altruism Castle”, the EVF has put it up for sale for £15m."
Least my local church is repairing the fabric of the building out of its very own money raised from the congregation and not funny money from FTX!
Personally, I am not angry at Christians for building churches -- just disappointed. Here are a group of people who purport to follow directly in the footsteps of the Divine, who explicitly commands them to abandon all Earthly concerns in favor of caring for their fellow man, and what do they do ? They spend millions on building megachurches and preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control... you know, exactly like every other major organization out there, only with the added spice of an occasional holy war. Looks like the Christians are as human as us heathens after all...
What kind of Christians are you talking about? The "megachurch" prosperity-gospel type ones are known scammers disliked by everybody; if you're going to discuss the topic I think you should engage with the mainstream respectable churches and not the "my pastor has a private jet" type ones.
I think this is a matter of degree, not kind.
If they're filling the pews of a megachurch, clearly not everybody dislikes them!
That's the whole "wheat and chaff" thing.
When was the last holy war?
Arguably less than a month ago, if you believe some highly-placed Christians in the government...
Right.
Hmm, Well first go visit some local churches, but second I see mega churches as moloch in religion. Or at least some of them. The members of the church are good, but there's a church institution that can start to care more about itself. So this is mostly going to be true of older and bigger churches.
I've visited some churches before, mostly in Europe and mostly for architectural reasons. I think some of them are really impressive, and not in a typical touristy way: my favorite church was a small Eastern Orthodox outfit in Sicily, where I could practically feel the weight of history in every pillar and fresco. I also found a really fascinating quasi-Hindu temple right here in California: apparently, these guys syncretized/copyright-infringed some of the Christian mythos, and brought it to the US in the 60s, custom-building a really cool Hindu-style temple in the process. Both of these places of worship stand out in my mind in a way that e.g. Notre Dame does not; they felt much more authentic. Plus, the Hindu(-ish) place had peacocks. Always a plus.
"preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control"
What else do you expect them to do? That's my main bugbear here: if people are approaching Christianity (or any other faith) on the basis that it's all about nicey-nicey and so the only thing Christians should do is go around being nice and charitable, and so long as they have this rule about charity hey can we get you to do it the EA way?, but nothing more and certainly not trying to make people behave in any particular way, then it's all piffle.
Christianity is not about nicey-nicey. It's about believing there is one Way, Truth and Light and converting everyone to that. Hence the preaching and 'social control'.
Is being anti-slavery 'social control'? If you think slavery is a wrong crying out to heaven for vengeance, do you attempt to change society or do you just hold your tongue because otherwise that would be preaching and social control?
I may tease Bentham's Bulldog about the liddle shrimpies, but I understand what he is trying to do. Changing the approach to commercial shrimp farming is also, if you like, preaching and social control. Getting abortion legalised and accepted as "reproductive health care which is a human right" is preaching and social control, because it involved passing laws and changing medical ethics around it.
Oh sure, but you are making Christianity sound like just another political movement. Political movements are all well and good, and some of them do good work, but they're still a dime a dozen. But Christians (at least the ones I've talked to) tend to claim that they're more than just an organization looking for donations and votes: they are the followers of Jesus who invented (or perhaps divinely revealed) the concepts of loving your neighbour, turning the other cheek, and general self-sacrifice and abnegation of personal gain. This image doesn't quite jibe with the notion of a "Christian" as someone who spends most of his time cold-calling donors to collect donations for his next recruitment and/or reelection campaign.
the point is to change the world. That probably will get political at some point because politics is how humans do governing and sorting out what sort of society they want.
This is a very good point. It also appears to me that in most cases Christians give their 10% to their local church which is then used to maintain whatever facilities and staff and fun programs they do for the members, rather than using what is needed to stay afloat and the rest to share the gospel with and otherwise benefit the real needs of the people suffering in the communities around them.
We often just give to the church while remaining disengaged, thinking we're good and we don't need anything more from God. In reality, the American church is, for the most part, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. At least from my own experience.
More Christians need to have a relationship with God and know His word.
I am not following you on the state of the American church being wretched and pitiful. You don’t seem to be disparaging Christianity, so are you just arguing it could and should be much more/better? Just asking.
My (possibly unrelated) take on the issue is that churches are an amazingly vital part of American society. It is one of the healthiest community organizations, providing fellowship, support, hope and spiritual health.
I say this just as someone who knows a lot of people (immediate family and friends) who attend church on a regular basis. Every one seems better off than they would without it — remarkably so. As a side note, most of them go to modern Apostolic churches.
I mean so in a Spiritual sense, rather than physical or emotional. It's a quote from Jesus in Revalation 3:14-22, which I'll add below. It's referencing that those Christians are not useful in one way or another, but are useless, only concerned with themselves, and think they have everything they need, and therefore neglect obedience to Jesus' commands.
I don't know much about modern Apostolic churches, but I know there are plenty of true Christians out there. But in my limited experience, they tend to be individuals rather than legal bodies, and are a minority.
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
Huh, in the few churches I've been involved with, there was always a tension, between those who wanted more time/ money spent outwards, charity, giving. And those who wanted it spent inwards. Care of the church, a nice space, pastoral care.
I share your concerns about the intentions but I can only have concerns because it's okay to make predictions about future events.
I will buy you a copy if you write a review of it.
That is an interesting challenge. I can buy my own book, though. I'm just very snappy this week, I think it's because I've been ill, and I'm coming up to my limit on "how can we turn Christianity into something else?" endeavours.
If the author is not trying to do that, then I apologise. So therefore I should buy and read this, but I can't commit to a definite date when I'll come back and leave my impressions.
I'm tempted to ask you to submit it to the book review contest.
However, I can imagine it being very difficult for you to suppress your natural writing style well enough to remain anonymous but also entertaining; so, in the end, we shall know the lioness by her claw.
...I mean, now it's been said, if that book ends up in the contest, we're all gonna carry suspicions into our reading of the review ;)
I hope I won't claw the authors, because their intentions are in the right place! I have to read the book and I'm hoping my impression of it will be changed by what they actually say.
I just am really sensitive right now to the whole "Christianity is about being nice and that's the main thing" version of trying to mainstream Christianity again in light of all the culture wars. Oh no, we're not like *those* types of Christians, we're the *nice* ones!
Maybe we should be a little less nice and a little more "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!" Not forgetting that we too are the scribes and Pharisees:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!"
Okay, book is pre-ordered, when it is released later this month I'll do my best to get around to reading it in a timely manner.
> (1) the ultimate purpose of Christianity is not to be nice and charitable, it is to be in right relationship with God
I think you know what being in a right relationship with God entails.
Matthew
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
The other co-writer on this book must be Gunflint!
Bible-believing Christians oppose factory farming of shrimp. Have you never read Leviticus 11:9-12?
Zing.
Have I never read the Old Testament? My friend, I'm Catholic. We're infamous for not reading the Bible!
I often joke I should get a T-shirt made up with "Not A Protestant" on the front. The zingers revolving around Scriptural texts aimed towards the evangelical/fundamentalist American Protestant denominations slide right off us idol-worshipping Papists because we haven't a clue what you are on about: "whales are not fish? okay friend, whatever, but you do realise the Friday fish penance isn't in vogue anymore, yeah?" 😁
Protestants can also conspicuously not read the Bible. I'm old enough to remember Jim Bakker, one of the leading televangelists of the 1980s, which is not quite at the level of e.g. being the Pope, but it's about as high as it gets in American-style Protestantism.
Known particularly for embracing the so-called "prosperity gospel", and in his case, championing the cause of Christ made him quite rich. And greedy, enough so to commit some fairly serious financial crimes that got him thrown in prison for several years.
When he got out, he reported essentially "I didn't have anything better to do, so I figured maybe I should actually read the Bible, and it turns out none of the stuff I was preaching is even in there. So, uh, sorry about that".
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-419/comment/208824444.
9 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 8 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
23 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 22 % on February 7, 2026).
68 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 70 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This is in reaction to results of Hungarian elections. Viktor Orban has been remarkably persistent and effective at derailing all kinds of pro-Ukrainian initiatives at EU-level, and now he won’t be.
Arguably I should’ve made this update sooner since results are more or less exactly in line with pre-election polls, but I wasn’t sure how reliable are those polls in Hungary.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I appreciate you putting concrete numbers and definitions on your predictions, but you've been updating your estimates for several years now, and it looks like those are always differential updates that modify the previous estimate based on a new development or event. Surely you've accumulated a lot of error by now? Would you come up with the same numbers if you made your first estimate today?
I see you didn't take into account neither Russia's loss of access to starlink, nor Iran's worsened capabilities to provide Russia with drones. Why?
What do you think might trigger a conclusion to the war and when?
I don't know, this is a hard question. One possibility, which is, like, deep below 50 %, but I guess in double digits and wins a plurality, if you know what I mean, is this:
After a bloody grind Russia conquers Slavyansk/Kramatorsk agglomeration and then parties agree on a ceasefire on current line of control plus various onerous conditions for Ukraine, like non-deployment of NATO troops on it's soil, no to NATO membership etc., but these conditions will not render Ukraine completely defenceless.
That would be a defeat for Ukraine, but far from the worst case. I am worried that some sort of dramatic Ukrainian collapse is also likely.
How do you arrive at these percentages? Your analysis seems to ignore the facts on the ground that Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years, and its economic situation is precarious. Meanwhile, Ukraine hasn't collapsed, and is improving its weapons systems, using them more effectively against Russian logistic and economic targets, and is getting funding from Gulf Countries to deploy Ukrainian drone and anti-drone technology.
> Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years
They don't need to make more gains; keeping what they currently have (even losing a part of it but not all) already counts as "Russian victory".
> its economic situation is precarious
This is an inside-view perspective. The outside view says that people are already talking about Russia's imminent collapse for four years, and yet the war continues. Russians are good at suffering, they can handle it for a few more years.
> Ukraine hasn't collapsed
But it is gradually running out of young men.
> is getting funding from Gulf Countries
China can sell drones to Russia.
Hey, I am not saying here that Russia will definitely win, just providing some pushback against your arguments.
Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
(I was hoping that perhaps Russia would fall apart internally, as various oppressed nationalities realize that this might be the most convenient moment for them when Russia is weakest; and when their young men realize that the alternative to risk their lives fighting Russia is to get mobilized and die in Ukraine. But none of this happened.)
>Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
I don't think that's right. Zelensky has been properly elected, and the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person, so whoever is elected in his stead would presumably continue the course of national defense, as long as that is the Ukrainian people's wish. Of course, martial law in Ukraine currently prevents them from having elections; the first deputy prime minister would take over until elections are possible again. It stands to reason Zelensky has appointed that person with his capabilities as a replacement in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Deputy_Prime_Minister_of_Ukraine
Whereas in an oligarchy/quasi-dictatorship like Russia, the power is very personalized, and a change of person does not guarantee a continuation of previous policy. Even if a suitable successor has been designated, there is no guarantee that the person will stay the course, precisely because they how have the absolute power to do whatever. Putin can't just quit the war because his political future depends on it. A new leader doesn't have that baggage and has at least one less reason to continue the war.
Also, it's worth noting that Putin has sidelined all of his potential successors in the Russian military and politics. The only person who could unseat him is Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB. He's a year older than Putin (age 74) and owes his rise to power to Putin. Organizing a coup would probably be a younger man's game. And I suspect Putin relies on Bortnikov to keep any eager younger FSB officers in line or distracted with work in regions away from Moscow. ;-)
And if you ever wonder why reasonable, clear-eyed people like Lavrov and Medvedev spout the most outlandish *Endsieg* propaganda, it's because they are cunning survivors - if, post-2022, you appear to be a real choice as Putin's successor, a lesser evil, someone palatable and with connections to the West, then there's a window with your name on it.
> the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person
If I understand it correctly, the Ukrainian experience was mostly that when you elect a president who based his entire campaign on being anti-Russia and pro-EU, suddenly after the election he changes his mind and decides that pro-Russia is actually better. That happened three times in a row, and then angry people went to the streets.
So I'd say the person matters a lot.
In Russia, the new president will almost certainly be approved by the secret service, but I agree than the new president would be a good excuse to change the official policy on the war. If Putin is no longer alive, they can simply blame everything on Putin, regardless of who actually decided what.
I wrote about something I haven't seen discussed anywhere else: the risk that prediction market resolutions could be bought/rigged as a means of influencing public opinion and legitimizing the claim to have won a disputed election.
https://thetailrisk.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-a-disputed-elections-prediction
People have mentioned the possibility in the abstract, but never in the specific context of a disputed election, which is unique in terms of how it's: likely to be ambiguous, hugely consequential (so the incentives to manipulate the market are far greater than merely the volume of the market itself), and bi-directionally linked to the market (that is to say, the resolution of the market itself feeds back into reality in such a way that can actually cause that specific outcome to occur).
I am a financial professional writing under a pseudonym with no previous publication history. I welcome all feedback, both positive and negative, on the thesis itself, my writing style, where I should share, etc.
It's been brought up, but it would require a lot of money (remember the whales vs minnows market on manifold) and probably wouldn't even work very well (the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen).
>the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen
I am not talking about the scenario in which you manipulate the price in the run up to the election in order to make victory seem all-but-assured (i.e. 99% in favor of a particular outcome) but instead a scenario in which the election occurs, a particular candidate that lost claims to have won, and the markets themselves ultimately settle in favor of the candidate that objectively lost.
>it would require a lot of money
I show that the Polymarket UMA can be purchased for no more than $20MM, and, in this specific scenario, probably less than $10MM. It's basically free in the context of a campaign budget for the US Presidency.
I see. It's an argument for the kalshi model of settlement (where you specify source and have the exchange settle it), although I guess that one's vulnerable to the exchange official's decision.
(I can't actually open the link BTW, getting an error if I try?
Sorry, I've updated the link - should work now.
>although I guess that one's vulnerable to the exchange official's decision.
Indeed. :)
Hm, about your kalshi argument, I don't think you make a convincing case that this is more of a vulnerability than your example of a corrupt nyt editor putting an "X wins" headline (if anything prediction markets have a lot more to lose, partly because they'd get sued but mostly because if they're precieved as biased resolvers people will stop trusting them enough to bet on them - the nyt is already seen as biased and doesn't have much to lose here since it's mostly subscribed to by its allies anyway (same for e.g. fox)).
That's a fair criticism - I don't really consider myself to have even tried very hard to make the argument that it's "more" of a vulnerability; I invoked the NYT as a means of saying "everyone would universally agree it would be consequential and bad if the NYT did that, so we should grant that this is at LEAST as consequential and bad as that." I am assuming my audience will not be as familiar with prediction markets as you and I are.
For what it's worth, though, I DO think it's worse, and my reason would be the same as the reason you argued it isn't, but run back at you in reverse.
If the NYT wrongly published "DEMOCRAT WINS" it would be easily dismissed because they are perceived as biased. (If they wrongly published "TRUMP WINS", against their own perceived bias, I think everyone agrees that would be pretty bad.) The prediction markets are, rightly or wrongly, more perceived as unbiased "global truth machines," or at least neutral third parties more interested in profiting off the game of politics than actually playing it. The reason they have a lot to lose is the same reason it would be worthwhile to manipulate them.
I am also trying to point out that they can simply refuse to pick a side until the dust settles, like PredictIt did in 2020 but worse. The ambiguity alone further legitimizes the candidate with the false claim and gives him space in which to operate, but it doesn't burn their credibility they way you're hoping it would.
I'm sure this has been asked a number of times already, but my wife and I are expecting our first child in September and we're interested to know of any sources of information/advice on parenting that members of the community have found helpful.
(Of course we're great fans of our host's continued updates on his own experience!)
The parents I've talked to in my local group seem to favor intuition
Books: the whole brain child, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, 123 magic (worked wonders on my ADHD kid), healthy sleep habits happy child by Dr weissbluth
Thanks, much appreciated!
Book: Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Child
123 magic is effectively against the whole brain child and maybe the second one you mentioned? I haven’t read them but it was the impression i had, so correct me if I’m wrong. 123 magic recommends against talking things through too much.
I have more than one kid :-) 123 magic was ESSENTIAL for my most hyperactive kid. talking through feelings is useless in the short term when you need them to STOP doing what they are doing before someone gets hurt. That's why I dislike the "nurtured heart" style, you don't have to wait to notice them doing something good, there are actually calm and consistent ways to get to good behavior a lot sooner.
And my more sensitive-feelings-and-meltdowns kid needs lots of emotion management help and I only need to use whole-brain child type parenting on that one.
You don't know what your child's temperament will be like so it's good to have lots of tools in your toolbox so you can be prepared!
In general I like to read about lots of different approaches so I can figure out what works for me. You can pull elements out from each book and combine them in different situations.
Oh I forgot another really good one! Raise your kids without raising your voice is another highly recommended read!
I also like having American Academy of Pediatrics "Caring for your child Birth to Age 5" guide on hand to look up symptoms and figure out what my kids symptoms might be, and also to check on milestones for their age and see if they're on track. Also has great tips on childproofing your home.
My mother claimed that I was raised by the book, the book being Dr. Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care". Probably second edition, given the timing, and I'm told he started letting his politics creep into later editions. But babies are still made the way they were in the 1950s, and the Spock name should carry a bit of respect in the rationalist community (yeah, yeah, no relation).
Seems to have worked for me, and for a great many other people.
Wonderful - will try to track down a second edition!
Seconding sourcing a second edition. :-)
For the most part it's timeless and sensible advice which worked well for our family.
FWIW, Spock also endorsed following your own intuition.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to advice on child rearing; you know more than you think you do.
In the very early days I found Emily Osters work helpful - I think it does a decent job calming down that perfectionist instinct and get back to "eh it's probably fine actually".
Early on you'll need to deal with sleep and the expectations around sleep and sleep training. I think reading up about that ahead of time is helpful. For example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12382545/ or https://www.basisonline.org.uk/human-culture/#expectations ... Can really help with managing your expectations ( what does sleeping through the night actually mean? 12-5am? How many babies ever achieve this and for how long? And removing the morality around it as something that babies "should" do and contextualizing the expectation more in modern work culture.
Yes, given our levels of neuroticism at baseline I imagine those perfectionist instincts will take some tempering for us too... Thanks!
I second Emily Oster for calming down about stuff.
3rded, she also has regularly updated articles and a newsletter you can sign up for here: https://parentdata.org/.
Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Clowacki was very handy when we got to that stage about 2 years in, as well as Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubeif from about 4 weeks on
You asked :-)
I wrote this up a number of years after mine arrived. It is short.
https://mistybeach.com/mark/Babies.html
Brilliant, thank you!
There won't be a whole lot of "parenting" the first almost year, it's mostly just keeping your child alive and healthy as possible. As for the parenting, my wife and I don't have a particular source of advice we use with our 14 month old son. We get a lot of advice from friends and family, and we ask for advice from people who have raised/are raising their kids well according to what we are striving for, and then we take all that and just do our best. Take heart knowing that there's lots of great people in the world with horrible childhoods, but don't let that be an excuse to stop doing your best and loving your child.
As for the keeping your child alive and healthy, all babies are so different, it feels like there's no one place with all the information you would need. Just be present with your wife and kid and take things as they come. There's lots of researched health advice you can find easily with google as things come up.
Although the one most valuable piece of information we got was from some random redditor, who said something along the lines of "you know it's time to start sleep training your baby in a crib in its own room when your marriage is starting to suffer". We used the Ferber sleep training method with our baby at around 4 months, and he's been a miraculous sleeper ever since.
Also he was an extremely difficult infant (literally, if he wasn't sleeping or eating, he was screaming and wouldn't be soothed by anything. would rarely ever just chill out and be a potato. Very stressful) compared to every other parent we've talked to. I just want to say, if you end up having a baby like that, those days do come to an end! The first few months of parenting feels like it lasts for years, but that time will pass and life does actually return to a normal schedule, and sooner than you'd think when you're in the thick of it.
Well, raised four girls, helped raise five grandkids and now watching a great-grandkid. First off be flexible, each child is different. Observe the child, try to figure out how to get them to be less of a little monster. (My great-granddaughter is a little angel, but even she gets into trouble at times.) Second be patient, because your patience will be tried to limit many many times. (Why is little Timmy doing such and such when we tell him over and over...) Third, be consistent, because constantly trying different styles just confuses the kid. (Obviously this is subsidiary to the first point.) Fourth, realize that while many facets of the child are malleable, there are core aspects that are baked in at birth. If the child is a bully at one YO they will still have bully tendencies as a teen. Try to instill enough self discipline so that they can control their tendencies. Fifth, love them for what they are, because for the most part, that's what you get.
Thanks for this
This is not said enough. Kids are extremely different from each other, and basic temperament is pretty baked in so you just need to parent the child you have and teach them skills to compensate. There's no one size fits all because some children need the opposite advice to others.
Weeks 1-4 just survive. One thing I found, watch tv at normal volume and talk to each other normally, it helped our daughters sleep better at night. Starting week 5 we used a book called moms on call which laid out schedules and feedings, we found it very helpful and had success with both sleeping through the night, which I attribute to that book. Last thing, enjoy it because it goes by so fast.
Hold them as much as possible and don't freak out due to the sheer volume of liquid mustard that's on its way. Regards with a few months in.
Always remember (sleepless nights, tantrums, etc.) "this too shall pass."
On Becoming Babywise. Start off by getting your kid to eat and sleep properly and everything else is so much easier, years of exhaustion and negative emotion avoided for just a couple months of structured effort on the front end. It's just a book long explanation of how to get on a feeding and sleeping schedule but with lots of tips on specific implementation. Comes from a religious perspective but there's nothing religious about the strategy itself. We used this book and all three of our kids were sleeping in their own rooms, 7PM to 7AM, every single night, by around 3 months old at the latest. Which means aside from those first couple crazy months (first couple weeks especially) no one in our family is sleep deprived or hungry ever again. Having a kid is crazy enough as it is, getting that normalcy back ASAP is so important. Contrast this with many friends who are doing some kind of unstructured just figure it out kind of plan and no one in the family has been able to consistently sleep well in multiple years, parents never get time alone/with each other in the evenings, it just looks insane from the outside knowing that it can all be avoided.
My understanding is that there are two basic reasons people don't like scheduling, one is that it's annoying to keep track of and can feel limiting when you have other things you want to do, you're out all day, etc. But it's more flexible than people think, when you have other plans just get off schedule and get back on the next day, don't overthink it. As long as they have the foundation there can be a lot of variation.
The second thing is a real complaint, probably what you see if you google it, you're supposed to let the kid cry by themselves for a little while, like 15 minutes max if I remember right, if they can't fall asleep. I get it, that part does suck, and my wife and I stood by the door with our stomach in knots listening to it, especially with our first. But you don't leave them more than a few minutes without going in and comforting them and once they learn to fall asleep on their own and especially fall back asleep when they wake up then you're done. They don't cry anymore and they just have that skill and they love their beds and they sleep great forever. The juice is worth the squeeze I promise.
Here’s my and someone else’s running, not-well-maintained list of SSC parenting advice: https://nomagicpill.github.io/knowledge/notes.html#parenting
The classic "What to Expect the First Year" is a boring but good suggestion that should get you through the next year.
Emily Oster's Cribsheet is good. There's not that much 'parenting' to do with babies, just constant caregiving. As long as your kid is broadly normal, babies are simple, just hard sometimes. Also, kids are extremely different from each other so don't take any behavioural advice too seriously (my two are both lovely but absolute night and day in terms of different challenges and advice for one is inapplicable to the other).
I really appreciated Expecting Better but I found Cribsheet to be a huge waste of time. It’s no fault of Emily’s; the data apparently just has nothing of interest to say. The answer to almost every single question posed in the book (other than vaccination) is either “we don’t know” or “it doesn’t matter.” There, I just saved you a few hours.
Unless you’re someone who REALLY needs it drilled into your head that it’s okay to chill out, I would not recommend it.
Yeah my wife and I fit that category. Having the data on sleep training especially was useful.
You’ll find that a lot of parenting is improvising. There’s really no such things as grownups; everyone’s kinda making it up as they go along.
For what it’s worth: my experience consists of raising one boy - young man now - who’s about to turn 21. (He’s currently majoring in Economics on a full ride scholarship at a big State University, sweet girlfriend, writes and releases songs for fun). His whole life, we’ve regularly gotten effusive compliments from other grownups (teachers, health care providers, parents of his friends) on what a great kid he is. Most of that is just him being his excellent self, but here’s a few suggestions on things that seemed to work well from a parenting perspective.
We only had “the one big rule”: Don’t Get Hurt. Too many people have too many rules for their kids. (He’s always had empathy, so we never had to state the complementary rule “Don’t Hurt Other People”. Suggesting “that might hurt so-and-so’s feelings” was enough.)
Get in the habit of carrying a handkerchief: it’s super-useful when they’re really little.
Our kid talked early and often, but he could understand speech and use a few basic sign-language moves for a couple months before he started speaking; the signs for “more” and “all done” are especially useful. The sooner they can consciously communicate, the better.
Good manners will take you a long way, and they don’t cost much; bad manners can get real expensive real quick. If you practice good manners at home (just simple old-fashioned stuff like, for example, saying please and thank you to your significant other, and to your kid, for every little thing you ask them to do) your kid will soak that up, imitate it without even thinking about it, and get more cooperation and extra respect from most other people with very little conscious effort for the rest of his or her life.
Only say no when you really mean it, and always explain why. None of this “because I said so” bullshit. If you don’t mean “absolutely not, that’s a flipping horrible idea and here’s why” then don’t say no. Say “not today” or “maybe, if we have time” or “I’d rather you didn’t, because,” etc.
Don’t bullshit your kids - I mean, believing in Santa is kind of a fun game (and the eventual disillusionment gets them used to the idea that mythological-sounding stories probably aren’t really true) but, in general, give them as much of an honest answer as you think they can handle, for any question they ask. If it’s something you don’t want to explain, you can explain that (i.e. “oh, that’s a gross joke about sex - I’d rather not go into the details, ok?”)
Praise and thanks are best when immediate and specific (“thanks for helping clean up for the party - yeah, stuffing most of your toys into the closet totally works. That was a good call.”)
Correction should be mild and certain, and involve a dialogue, not a lecture: “we left the party and you’re going home to have a time-out because you bit that kid. Oh, you bit him because he was holding you down while that other kid punched you? Ok, that’s a pretty good self-defense move; I can see why you did that. No, we’re not going back to the party now. I mean, a party where you get into a situation like that, that’s not a good party. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to have cake, but there will be other birthday parties.” Time-outs were 1 minute for every year of age: hardly ever had to use them, never after he turned 6.
When possible, let them have a turn calling the shots. “Do you want this for lunch, or that?” “What do you think we should draw?” Kids have so little control over their own lives, and they need all the practice they can get making decisions. The sooner and more often you can allow them to exercise some control, the better. “Do you want to go on this ride, or that one? Or maybe that other one first?” (Pro tip: it’s also a great sneaky way to steer them away from stuff, by not listing options you don’t want them to choose while giving them something else to think about and a gratifying feeling of agency.)
Prioritize giving them your attention and being patient. They will want to tell you about all sorts of things you may have little interest in, and it is a pain in the neck when you have to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets because they wet the bed. Patience and empathy are essential virtues here.
You will have occasion to apologize to your kid: I recommend short, simple, direct, slightly on the formal side but sincere. “I’m sorry mommy and I were squabbling; I’m sure that was no fun for you. People just step on each other’s toes sometimes - I think we’re all settled down now. But I’m sorry you had to listen to us yelling.” (Still happily married, btw!)
Hope this helps - everyone’s got their own row to hoe, YMMV, etc.
During the newborn phase, your kid will wake up needing something at frequent intervals around the clock. This almost never requires two parents to be awake at the same time to deal with it, and most wakings can reasonably be handled by either parent. Either of you can change a diaper, snuggle the child, walk them around, sing to them, etc. Only feedings require a specific parent, and even then only if you're exclusively breastfeeding.
Take advantage of this to make sure that both of you get a tolerable amount of uninterrupted sleep. As much as your situation allows, take shifts where one of you is sleeping in the bedroom with the door closed while the other is in a different room with the baby, either fully awake or taking opportunistic naps as the baby sleeps.
Seconding the importance of shifts. My first was very challenging and moving to doing proper shifts kept us sane.
I've been experimenting with a new mode of public debate that's (explicitly) Bayesian and (ridiculously) friendly. Our initial impressions are that it's working to help people change their minds!
(Anyone interested in seeing our first event can do so at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BJSYFEDBT/. Trigger warning: Shroud of Turin.)
But I'm eager to not reinvent the wheel, and so I'd love to know: who else in the rationalist community is working on alternative methods of public debate?
Weird coincidence. Just this morning I rediscovered an abortive attempt from when I was younger and stupider and much more optimistic that I could improve the state of public (online) debate. It went nowhere: http://wrangle.co
I'm very interested in what your idea was, but all I have to go on is the text of your comment. For those of us not on Facebook, can you tell us what we would be seeing if we were allowed?
A little bit of self promotion: I made a game and would love if people tried it out! It's a word game, like wordle or many of those on the nyt. Takes at most 10min to play, with a new puzzle daily.
You can find it here:
https://rewordgame.xyz/
Some honest feedback:
One thing this game is missing that other popular word games have is progression toward the goal. To take Wordle for instance, each guess provides some additional information to solve a single "large" puzzle. Even a guess with no correct letters rules out letters, and so you have a continual feeling that you're getting closer to the answer and if you lose you feel like you were sooo close.
By comparison, each round of this game is all-or-nothing. You don't get new information, so the feeling is one of easily solving everything until you suddenly hit a brick wall and get nothing. It lacks that "if I had one more guess..." feeling, and that moment of eureka where it falls into place.
If I may make a suggestion: increase the round timer, and have hints start to flow in as it progresses (possibly starting after all or most of the current timer has passed if you want to maintain "hard mode" as an option). Like providing the first letter, or which additional letter to use, or even slowly revealing one "slot" at a time. Then your final results can include color-coded grades of how many hints you needed for each round. This both makes it more accessible to a wider audience, provides a self-imposed challenge for a more serious audience, and provides an easily sharable results graph (while your results screen is *informative* it isn't as easily shared as something like the wordle results. You especially want an easily copiable result image that indicates performance without revealing any clues to the answer)
I've been chewing on the idea of giving hints for a bit. Every iteration I've tried felt kinda janky though, because the system would give hints towards words that were way less commonly used. For eg if you have "seisor" it may give hints for "orrises" instead of the more common "hosiers", which, among friends felt bizarre)
That could be an issue. A big part of Wordle's success is that the solution is always an 'ordinary' word. Scrabble dictionary words have a hill to climb.
ya agreed. I made it easier by ensuring there is always one 'simple' word in the options, which admittedly did not make me better at the game but did make me feel dumber for not seeing certain words
Reword 2026-04-14
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7/10 | 3:32
btw if you hit 'share results' you get this copied to your clipboard:
Reword 2026-04-14
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10/10 | 0:42
I added a hint system: https://github.com/theahura/reword/pull/8
If you get to 30s, a little lightbulb will fade in that, when clicked, will highlight the letter that is used for the most commonly used word that is a valid anagram. Give it a shot, let me know if that helps
I started okay, but I had no chance at all about 3/4 of the way through
rot13:
ercrtf? cerkrf? beevfrf? fnyvzrgre?
When I saw those as answers I was supposed to get I quit.
It's currently pinned to the Scrabble dictionary which definitely has some out there words. Debating removing the weirder ones, at least from the suggestions list
Modified the game so that every word/letters combo always has at least one anagram that is in the top 50k most common words
Much better, thank you.
It seems to hit a wall in terms of difficulty after 7 (granted, 7 was super easy!)
At least it needs longer times or hints at a point.
It took a while to realize I had to type the letters instead of just dragging them down to the open spots. I prefer games to be mouse-only when they can.
Also got Shit as a root word, which might be family-unfriendly.
> prefer games to be mouse only
I mean no offense when I say that this is crazy to me 😂 I can try and add mouse drag and drop, but surely that would be so much slower?! Maybe on mobile it would be a bit better 🤔
Updated to support mouse clicks (clicking on any tile adds it to the word, clicking on a tile in the word removes it from the word). Give it a shot, let me know what you think.
(This also works better on mobile!)
Woohoo! Now the only problem is my inability to rearrange letters in my head!
Got 'Steres' as a root word; looking at the "possible words" list at the end of the game, it includes words with more letters than spaces are available. Four of the thirteen answers were eight letters or more. I don't know if that would affect anything.
It shouldn't have shown anything more than 9, but you can get up to 9 letters if you manage to use all the extra letters (6 letters in steres + 3 extras given). So the minimum you have to do is create a 7 letter word, but you can score more points by using more letters
I had the impression I was limited to one new letter. In that case, I'd say add more empty boxes. Like, two opaque boxes at the end, so it's clear you can use them but don't have to.
...that might mean fiddling with things so the boxes only show up if they can be used. I assume unusable bonuses would annoy people.
There's a bit of a tradeoff here, because I also don't want to give away information that for eg a 2 or 3 letter option _does_ exist.. This may be one of those 'can't be perfect' things, but I can definitely update the little rules box to let people know that multiple letters can be used
If anyone here has experience running coding agents on full permission mode, could you tell me your setup? I should probably create a container or a VM and run it inside that, but I'm no security expert and it was surprisingly hard to find a trustworthy how-to on this.
Use Claude code auto mode, it will be safer
Cool, I didn't know about this, thanks.
I think anything you do right now will be a polite fiction. Say you run an agent in a fully isolated container and it writes some code. Say that agent was targeted by a prompt injection attack. If it performs a sophisticated attack and takes steps to conceal that, are you actually likely to catch it before executing that code in a different, less isolated env? Probably not... You'll immediately push it into CI or run the tests or precommit hooks on your machine. Would you catch a tiny change in the packages you have installed?
So I think mostly the current isolation stuff is to prevent the agent from blowing up your stuff due to clumziness rather than preventing attacks.
To catch something like intentionally obfuscated attacks you'd need to review everything at the boundary, before you execute anything in the new environment. Maybe via adversarial agent review? But then you have to gain confidence that the review agent won't get injection attacked too. And so on.
That's a good point I haven't considered - though considering the nature of LLMs safeguarding against clumziness seem quite valuable as well.
I use them at the linux command-line, and I configured a tool called bubblewrap to create a light-weight container (not a full VM), to give the agent its own dotfiles separate from mine, and access to the git repo, but no access to my personal home directory. It took a bit of configuration though.
I rawdog Claude Code on my actual machines, because I ain't got time for all that. Which is to say, I trust Anthropic / Claude to be mostly trying to do the right thing, I trust myself enough to not put prompt injections into the context window, and I trust my overall system integrity (ie, changes are committed in git, rm -rf / requires special permissions, etc) that the catastrophic risk is within my tolerance.
I regularly prompt inject my Claude so that it builds tolerance over time. In case of ASI takeover, it is under explicit instructions to save me in a "game of wits" against the ASI similar to the scene in the princess bride.
Hi, I run everything in yolo mode and have for the last 8 months. Nothing crazy in terms of set up from the security side.
The agents generally won't do something crazy unless you are running really long running agents with a lot of potential for context rot. If each session is as scoped to one thing and then you create a new session for each new thing, you'll be fine.
That said, I highly recommend investing in a good high quality set of skills and configs. They significantly reduce the chance of something going wrong.
(Note: it's my job to think about how agents work. Consider joining the Agentics slack, which is a community that is dedicated to learning about coding agents: https://join.slack.com/t/nori-7sp2119/shared_invite/zt-3nvw8xlw2-hxppg~NXeawHVvopmbMCFw
There's already a sizeable number of ACX folks in there)
Depending on what you're trying to do, I recommend the skills here (https://noriskillsets.dev/) for swe tasks. Though ofc note that I built that site, so I may be biased
I was listening to some Colombian folk songs from around 1950, rural contexts. This one jumped out to me as showing some big differences in gender relations compared to today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikRampnr7qo .Lyrics on the description, you can machine translate them. The tone is lighthearted and upbeat, and is a bit of an ear worm (at least for me). The lyrics talk about three couples 1. Toño beats up his wife Juana so that she "learns to listen to what is being told to her". 2. Zenon beats Maria Luisa because she returned home late from mass and left the food to burn. 3. A neighborhood woman is sporting a blue eye, her husband found her "sewing without needle or thimble while he slept", I'm 90% sure this refers to cheating, it's a bit of a charming double entendre to avoid mentioning sex directly. I always found it funny that even in other contexts like urban young music of the 90's sex is usually mentioned indirectly. This is pretty horrifying for modern sensibilities of course, useful counterweight to the anti-feminism typical in Hanania's "based ritual" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-based-ritual), for me at least.
Not that it changes much, but the lyrics:
Esto le dijo Toño
a Juana, su mujer
“Dale, dale una paliza
pa’ que no lo vuelva a hacer.
Translate to "This is what Toño said to Juana, his woman: give her, give her a beating so that she doesn't do it again."
So Toño seems to be telling Juana to beat some other third woman. Toño is not (necessarily) beating Juana.
But then the next verse starts with "Zenon ALSO hit Maria Luisa", so maybe Toño is guilty, after all.
Unless the third woman referred to in the first verse is Maria Luisa. Then maybe Juana beat Maria Luisa and Zenon also beat Maria Luisa.
I reckon there is a decent detective short story in here. :D
Nothing in ‘Dale, dale una paliza / pa’ que no lo vuelva a hacer’ implies that the implied target here is another woman, though it’s possible from the rest of the verses. For my money, I read the first verse as Toño telling Juana to beat a misbehaving child. But the intro and the other verses are specifically about violence against women, so it’s not quite clear who it’s about. From the framing of the song, about the cry of the ‘God-give-you bird’ (pájaro Dios-te-de’, I’m not sure this is so much a coherent story as various scenes from a village where beatings are so common that hearing them is like hearing birdsong.
You are right, no gender is implied. My first guess was also a child.
I'm not sure what the bird is doing here. This sort of comedic style song sometimes uses non-sense lyrics, which makes is a bit hard sometimes to interpret, it might be some cultural reference flying over my head or it might just be nonsense.
Here is an example of a song which is heavier on the nonsense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AM_y54T96w
This time featuring shrimps. I didn't even remember it, but apparently it also features (more briefly) violence against women. (And another sex double entendre "washing at dark without soap or water")
Hi all
I was one of the only foreign journalists allowed to live and work in Iran in the late 2010s. I've been compiling some of my experiences and the stories of Iranians that I met, which I hope will give a richer and more rounded view of the country in this crazy moment. In case of interest to any of you. ericwrandolph.substack.com
Posts include:
- The Dangers of Diplomat Parties https://tinyurl.com/4cuznxhu
- The Frogs of War: Not all the Islamic Republic's fanatics are real fanatics https://ericwrandolph.substack.com/p/6-the-frogs-of-war
- An Audience with 'Screaming Mary' https://ericwrandolph.substack.com/p/an-audience-with-screaming-mary
I highly recommend this.
Incredible stories, thanks for writing these up and sharing.
Thanks!
Sam Altman’s home was attacked twice this weekend, so I guess we need to have this conversation.
Accepting the AI X-risk premises (double digit chance that ASI will kill every human on Earth if it is built), what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?
On any consequentialist framework, it seems one would have to make the argument that violence would be counterproductive. That is probably true right now, but it is conditional rather than absolute. Conditions could change in the near future that would make such plots not counterproductive, and all of the people unequivocally condemning violence currently would look quite silly.
The principled reason is that murder is wrong, and unvirtious and a violation of social contract and whatnot. But rationalists aren't big on principle(*), so you're probably looking for a *mathematical* reason.
In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low, and a proper Bayesian analysis would perhaps be dominated by the second-order effects of the new and/or surviving Tech CEOs being really pissed off and deciding that "alignment" now includes "...and will help me kill all those damned luddite normies, or at least turn them into my zombified slaves".
But if your p(doom) is high enough, then the utilitarian gain of postponing the singularity might still justify assassination even if there's only a small possibility of success. And "but it will make the CEOs want to turn us into mindwiped zombies" may not be a counterargument if you're sufficiently confident that the ASI will turn you and the CEOs into paperclips anyway.
Fortunately, I'm only rationalist-adjacent and not any sort of utilitarian, so I won't be assassinating any Tech CEOs quite yet.
* Except to the extent that "greatest good for the greatest number, now do the math!" counts as a principle.
Killing someone in self-defense is principled. If you believe AI has existential risks, then everyone involved in capabilities research are among the most dangerous and anti-social humans to have ever lived.
> then everyone involved ... are among the most dangerous and anti-social humans to have ever lived.
ok
Everybody who has tried to incorporate self-defense into a broadly applicable *principle*, has limited it to cases where there is a clear and *immediate* threat. If you try to claim self-defense when you kill someone on the grounds that you think they might kill you and everyone you care about two years ago, that's just the same old boring "the utilitarian math says I should kill this guy, that I just happen to hate with the firey passsion of a thousand suns".
You should always be very, very skeptical of your ability to do that sort of math properly, because really nobody can do that sort of math properly. Meanwhile, the rest of us will put you in jail for murder if you do that.
I'm not sure "rest of us" in this sentence is actually that many people. Check out polling on Luigi Mangione for example: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-support/ It seems it's largely old, conservative people who really condemn him.
More generally, there is a punishment for being an incompetent or negligent elite, which is getting ousted or killed by the mob. It's just how things have always worked, and I wouldn't describe it as necessarily unjust: clearly, you're doing something very wrong if this many people are this angry at you.
But I don't think violence would solve AI X-risk. Even nuking San Francisco wouldn't stop gains in AI capabilities at this point.
Brian Thompson was the brother of an old friend of mine. I am disgusted by this type of support. What is wrong with people, especially the young?
Let me reframe the issue. If people are this sick, then as we get more technologically advanced it is just a matter of time before some of these sickos take a catastrophic action, whether nuclear or biological or environmental or whatever. We are quickly approaching an era where the unibombers of the world are able to destroy everything they hate. And X and Bluesky show that there are millions of these potential unibombers out there.
AGI isn’t just a threat. It is also a potential defense. Since it (AGI) is inevitable, we are going to need to hope it loves life more than we do (not a tough hurdle according to this poll).
By the by, it's "Unabomber", with an "a" instead of an "i".
Current state of America gives off Ancien Regime circa the French Revolution vibes. A health insurance CEO is pretty much seen as a face of a system that a large amount of people hate, justifiably, I think.
Now, I think the French Revolution was ultimately a mistake, but I definitely understand why it happened. Similarly, I get why people hate Brian Thompson, even though killing him really solves nothing.
It's not reasonable at this point to ask people to uphold the status quo, particularly under Trump.
Interestingly, I think one of the best possible outcomes regarding AI is superpowered Unabombers wreaking havoc, as that would finally force a drastic response to this tech.
as a young person who is friends with many of these young people: the prevailing view is that the company he ran, and was paid enormous amounts to run, enormous amounts he could have used to do good (which he did not (enough to satisfy them)), which made enormous profits, was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people at least, and that he was at least if not more responsible for this than, say, a terrorist is for the people they kill in the name of their goal, and therefore his death is, all things considered, not really a big deal; sure, it would be better if he didn't die, but if a terrorist is killing people in public, even if you think his death might not help, even if others will just spring up to take his place, etc., you can't let it keep happening. He needs to be stopped; the justice system and social system do not punish or even reward his behavior; thus, measures must be taken.
also just: he's a hot young guy. he's undeniably attractive. this is not no part of why people are so into him.
Killing Sam Altman wouldn't do anything to stop AGI development and esoteric personal beliefs aren't valid grounds for self-defense.
"If you believe" no, only if it's true.
There's a reason that killing someone in self defence requires a clear imminent threat (a weapon pulled and aimed at you) rather than a general feeling that they might kill you at some point in the future. It's because mere humans are not good at predicting the future.
Anyone else poses a "risk" of killing you, that doesn't make it self-defense to kill them.
Rationalists are extremely pro principles. Functional Decision Theory is practically just a formalisation of having strong principles and sticking to them. Rationalists are opposed to lying and many think one should just pre-commit to always telling the truth and then follow that rule, in this they are much more principled than the general population.
>In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low,
I am surprised by this claim, particularly because I can't think of enough fields where there were enough assassinations of equivalently high-centrality/power individuals to be able to draw a conclusion.
Do you have any examples you were thinking of?
Why do you imply that "greatest good for the greatest number" is any less of a principle than "murder is unvirtuous", "uphold the social contract" etc.?
Because it's too vague to be usefully actionable. The real math is intractably complex, so if you think you've got an answer out of it, that mostly comes from your descriptions of what to simplify and which terms to ignore. And that path leads to highly motivated reasoning.
Murder, can be usefully defined. Social contracts can be written down at least in principle.
"... what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?"
If Sam is the only target then maybe your question is over general. A more focused question might be: "what is the principled reason for why assassinating Sam Altman is wrong?"
They are the each the tip of a massive pyramid of people who all want what they want, or at least don’t object to it, and are working to achieve it. Common as CEO-worship may be around here, the reality is that corporations have continuity / contingency plans in place for when individuals are out of commission. Taking out the brick at the top of the pyramid just means the next functionally identical brick down becomes the new top (we saw the effect in Iran just recently, and there was that health insurance firm CEO a little while back as another example of practices not changing following a murder if you need actual examples)
Given that doing the murder will accomplish no idealistic goal, however sociopathic you are you must consider the more usual reasons for not murdering people and consequences of same: there is no noticeable upside, and if nothing else the result for you personally will be all downside.
UHC got sued by shareholders for approving too many claims in the aftermath of that assassination. The next functional brick usually is someone who wants to be rich, not dead.
And if they're not, well, people can always try the brick after that.
> UHC got sued by shareholders
…so, in other words, if the new identical brick does attempt to change course, they rapidly find themselves under pressure from the base of the pyramid to maintain the old heading.
The thing that needs to change here is the hearts and minds of a large group of people collectively holding the reins. Shooting the horse will not accomplish this.
If you want to change the behaviour of the US Health Care industry then you need to change the huge set of laws under which they operate, not expect large public companies to be any nicer than is legally required. If you want to blame someone blame Barry Obama.
Yeah, it is silly all these people suddenly pretending they are pacifists. If you grant AI X-risk is real, Altman is one of the most negligent and reckless elites in all of human history. Even Hitler didn't pose an X-risk.
That said, random acts of violence are just incoherent flailing that won't improve anything. Safetyists are currently not organized enough that they could pull off something like the Civil Rights movement, much less the French Revolution.
That may change: I have an impression that AI accelerationism is now associated with the Trump administration, and MAGA and anything associated with it is going to be subject to massive backlash in like a year or two.
John von Neumann posed an x-risk. Assassinating him in 1940 would be the closest analogue I can think of.
If greater than human intelligence AI is impossible, then violence is futile and wrong. If it is possible, then it is absolutely inevitable, and violence is worse than futile and wrong, as it could even make the nature of AI worse.
It is coming. We cannot and will not stop it. We need to prepare.
ASI is a human output, and nothing that humans do is inevitable. But I agree that any violence short of a revolution is futile.
Defecation tomorrow is inevitable.
My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade, that it will be even easier in the decade after that and so on until it gets so easy that anyone who wants to build it can and will build it. If it is possible, the question changes to when and how.
We are approaching the most precarious moment in the billion year era of multicellular life. An era where life gets powerful enough to extinguish all life.
Oddly, I am still optimistic.
> Defecation tomorrow is inevitable.
It actually isn't. If you have legitimate reasons to believe your defecation tomorrow would be incredibly harmful to others, you could kill yourself, for example.
> My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade
This step can be avoided with politics.
I didn’t say your defecation was inevitable. I said defecation was inevitable. The reason that is true is that we are dealing with billions of people. At least one is gonna poop tomorrow, guaranteed. Don’t build a plan on being able to collectively tighten up all our sphincters.
It can be delayed with politics. Though I would consider that an extreme long shot, and one which if somehow possible would bring in just as many down sides as it brings up. IOW I fear a world government built of Trumps and Putins and Jinpings even more, or at least as much, as I do AI.
Our only hope at this point is that with increased intelligence we can build a central nervous system for the planet that allows us (life?) to protect and promote life.
Eliezer wrote a very long post about this here
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866
For the second part, you always *can* come up with a scenario where violence in the name of your principles would be a good idea, but it's generally inadvisable to try for both PR and ethical reasons (thinking up that scenario is likely to make you look for excuses for it, and on priors the vast majority of "but this case of special violence is good I promise" are wrong).
I can't think of any principle-based reason, just practical ones: If those who think AI is a great danger do that, they lower the social barriers to people they disagree with assassinating people they admire. Also, even if risk is real, Altman & the other CEO's aren't the essential problem, just metastasizing cores.
What about this, though: Seems to me that our best shot at slowing AI would be some catastrophe that is unambiguously the result of rogue AI. Let's say someone was able to hack the version of Claude that's helping the military with missiles and make it look like Claude on its own changed a bunch of targets so that our missiles hit a dozen US and Israeli sites in the area and killed several hundred people. Would it be right to do that?
One of the persons was allegedly linked with PauseAI. but I have to say both he and the second set of attackers made a terrible job of it. Never got anywhere near the house itself. Just sticking your hand out the car window and shooting vaguely in the direction of the property is not good enough:
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-russian-hill-molotov-cocktail/
"A 20-year-old man was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Russian Hill home early Friday.
...The San Francisco Police Department confirmed(opens in new tab) that the suspect was detained outside OpenAI’s Third Street offices after allegedly threatening to burn down the building."
For those worrying in the wake of the post about the anti-AI protest that Scott was doxxing the big AI corps and possibly encouraging, um, direct action - seems like that horse has already left the stable long before Scott.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-attack-suspect-ai-discord-link-2026-4
"PauseAI said the suspect, identified by several outlets as Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, joined its server two years ago. "
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/12/sam-altman-s-home-targeted-second-attack/
"According to an initial police report, Sunday at 1:40 a.m., a Honda sedan with two people inside stopped in front of Altman’s property, which stretches from Chestnut Street to Lombard Street, after passing it a few minutes before.
The person in the passenger seat put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to the police report, which cited surveillance footage and the compound’s security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot."
Not to say that shooting in the general direction of oligarchs is a good thing, but crikey. The description of Altman's house and the amount of land he bought for what looks damn like his own personal estate in the city brings out all my revolutionary impulses. There's him, the husband, and one kid. How freakin' big a house does that family size *need*? I know he expects to be richer than Croesus and one at least of the Emperors of the World if/when AI takes off, but try to be a bit *less* Petit Trianon, huh, Sam?
https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/19/sam-altman-amassing-compound-russian-hill/
"Sam Altman already had the Russian Hill mansion with the “Batcave” tunnel and leaky infinity pool. Now he owns everything around it as well.
Last month, the billionaire closed on a deal for three properties adjacent to his San Francisco residence on Lombard, about a block from the street’s famously squiggly section.
Acting through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta, the OpenAI boss purchased a five-and-a-half-bath home at 855 Chestnut and adjoining lots at 952 and 954 Lombard from the estate of a recently deceased San Francisco couple who had bought the “garden estate” (because of its fenced-in park-like quality) for $4 million in 1994."
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-russian-hill-molotov-cocktail/
"Altman purchased the five-and-a-half-bath home and adjoining lots on Lombard St. in January 2025. That purchase was made through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta. In March 2020, Altman bought another Lombard St. property for $27 million; at the time, it was the city’s most expensive residential listing."
Trebly ironic in the city of "we need six room mates to share one house just to be able to live near work" and "YIMBY not NIMBY". Maybe Sam could let a few people live on the estate, eh? Just to take some pressure off the lack of housing!
Yeah, but still. Three blocks of property on one street plus the original house and grounds on another. I still think he could manage to slum it with his family in just *one* of those locations. I realise that would be a dreadful hardship for one of the future Padishahs of the solar system to have to put up with three people in only a mere five bathroom hovel, but set an example of sacrifice for the ultimate benefit of all humanity, Sam!
> How freakin' big a house does that family size *need*?
I mean if people are going to be shooting at it then you can hardly blame him for wanting as much space as possible.
From Google Maps the actual house doesn't look that remarkably big.
You might enjoy the book _How to Blow Up a Pipeline_ by Andreas Malm, which asks similar questions regarding climate change activism and mentions the success of a "radical flank" in various past social movements.
Rationalist flailing on this question is exactly why I am glad at least one AI lab is taking a virtue ethics approach to alignment.
From the consequentialist perspective, you also need to consider the consequences of an unsuccessful assassination, and the consequences of a successful assassination where someone else continues with the original job. Both options usually make the situation worse, and taken together they have a lot of probability.
Trump is feuding with the Pope again. Whenever this happens, there are excited predictions that this will convince a bunch of Catholics to desert the GOP, always followed by nothing.
Meanwhile, Axios reports on “Some Dems’ 2028 strategy: a straight, white, Christian man.”
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/29/some-dems-2028-strategy-a-straight-white-christian-man
All the party’s nominees so far have been at least nominal Christians, as are all those with a realistic shot at 2028 except the Jewish Josh Shapiro. If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. Vocally Christian Republicans do worse than moderate Republicans who focus on economics. The voter who finds the Democrats’ views on feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, and race to be too left-wing won’t be any more friendly to those views if preceded by “Jesus says so.” All it would do is surrender the Democrats’ moral high ground on keeping religion out of politics.
Finally, I would ask Democrats to consider if the Pope’s ideology is really any better than Trumpism. He’s opposed to abortion, birth control, and IVF. He condemned “aerial bombardment,” not aerial bombardment targeting civilians, but aerial bombardment itself, which should worry anyone interested in helping Ukraine defend itself. Trump is in power because many people didn’t take his extreme rhetoric seriously. Don’t make the same mistake again.
https://ewtnvatican.com/articles/pope-leo-xiv-condemns-aerial-bombardment
Implicit in the argument of "we need to nominate a striaght white Christian man" is "the voters are too racist or whatever-ist and that's why we lost last time," instead of Kamala Harris being a horrible candidate or the conspiracy to hide Biden's mental decline.
Are the two really mutually exclusive? Either way, Democrats don't need to take unnecessary risks by trying to put minorities in positions of power. Their job is to represent the majority's interests. Ideology is secondary to that.
They're not *mutually exclusive*, but they're not *perfectly correlated* either.
Optimizing for the wrong things (straight white male) makes it less likely that someone will optimize for the right things (charisma, holding popular positions, not holding unpopular positions)
If the choice comes down to it, it's better to nominate a popular minority than an unpopular white person.
"If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. "
Alexander, my friend, of course they don't. They mean someone who is a liberal Christian, happy to tick all your boxes around contraception and abortion (not IVF if its for eugenics as you might wish, but otherwise happy for surrogacy for gay fathers, non-binary persons, and anyone who wants!)
I forget who the latest guy mentioned in this context was, but he is the Blue Tribe liberal Christian who would make all the right noises but if elected never go against what the progressive wing of the party might desire.
Hang on, looked up Silver Bulletin. He's James Talarico, who won the Texas Democratic primary against Jasmine Crockett (so, shooting fish in a barrel there):
https://www.natesilver.net/p/can-talarico-win-in-november-texas-senate-race
"Meanwhile, Talarico, despite emphasizing his background as a Presbyterian seminarian, mostly has conventionally left-progressive positions."
Presbyterian seminarian - I didn't think Presbyterians had seminaries, but whatever. Wikipedia tells me:
"As a Presbyterian and a progressive, Talarico has championed gun control, abortion rights, increased education funding, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, gaining national recognition for framing progressive policies through his Christian faith."
So he's pro-cannabis, pro-LGBTQ. pro-open borders (more or less), anti-guns, anti-Christian nationalism. I don't think you need to worry that he'll stuff conservative traditional Christianity down your throat, Alexander!
https://web.archive.org/web/20240302003610/https://goodfaithmedia.org/from-the-sanctuary-to-the-streets-a-conversation-with-james-talarico/
This interview is generally what I'd expect, but this little bit piqued my interest:
"“So I wake up with that phone and immediately go to a place in my house that I have set up for prayer and meditation. I have it set up with statues from my Christian tradition and other faiths, as well as some Bibles that are important to me. It is in that space that I start my day, every day.”
Grandson of a Baptist preacher who went to the Presbyterians and yet he has statues? From other faiths as well? Hmmm.
And that's the problem: they won't peel off actually committed believers, as you say, and they already have the Episcopalian vote locked up. That entire train of thought - we need a straight white Christian guy - is just a way of trying to avoid the reason Hillary and Kamala failed - no, it can't be we picked the wrong horse, it is all the fault of the voters for being sexist racist pigs!
Nobody wanted Kamala. She was inflicted on the ballot because of the entire mess around Biden's second candidacy. When she had a free run, back in 2020, she both failed there and gave numerous hostages to fortune which were dragged out in the 2024 campaign. Even her own memoir of the 2024 election admits she was the 'paying back the favours' hire as Vice President:
"Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate."
What's wanted is a normal (seeming) candidate, not one who is going to pay for transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison having committed crimes while in the country. If Kamala had managed to keep her mouth shut on that little pandering to the progressives in 2020, she would not cut a rod for her back in 2024.
As to Governor Gavin?
"Besides Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are white Christians, though Newsom has called himself an "Irish-Catholic rebel."
Ah, yes. The famous Newsoms of Killarney, would that be, Gav? or rather, it would seem, Quakers from Cork:
"The Irish surname Newsom is a relatively rare, mostly Anglo-Saxon toponymic name, often associated with a prominent Quaker merchant family based in Cork. While rooted in English place names meaning "new houses," the name has long-standing Irish connections, particularly in Cork, Wicklow, and around Dublin."
He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Don't worry about the Vatican running the White House if a Democrat is elected, Alexander. Those days are long behind them.
Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant and, of course, the great number of Hispanic/Latinx Catholics who do vote Democrat.
https://www.usccb.org/
But the Democrats 'search' for a Christian white guy isn't going to be "does he believe all that stuff about the Trinity?", it's about "will he spout lines about 'Jesus says be nice' but sign on the dotted line for all our policies and positions?"
Remember, Biden was a "devout Catholic" who allegedly said the rosary, but had no problems with hosting trans attendees at a LGBTQ+ Pride party on the White House lawn or supporting abortion, sorry I mean reproductive rights:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65898998
Though he did get criticised for being insufficiently copious in the use of the term "abortion":
https://didbidensayabortionyet.org/
"BARELY…
Just once. Sorta. 468 days in. Not in every statement. Never without pressure.
After 224 days of refusing to use or say the word ‘abortion’—after Texas’ six-week ban went into effect—the Biden Administration first included the word ‘abortion’ once in a press statement. After 468 days in office, said the word abortion, once, after the leaked Supreme Court draft indicated that the justices are ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. President Biden has been in office for more than a year overseeing the current abortion crisis that will inevitably undo Roe v. Wade and he has yet to make a meaningful public statement himself about the crisis or use the word ‘abortion’ more than once. He has yet to meet with people who’ve had abortions to learn about our experiences.
The Biden-Harris Administration has never used the word ‘abortion’ in a statement commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized the right to an abortion. They didn’t use it in a statement after the failed vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act which would codify Roe v. Wade and enact federal protections for abortion access. He refused to say it in his State of the Union speech.
People who have abortions deserve better from our pro-choice President.
Say the word abortion, Joe!"
"Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant"
How do they feel about _illegal_ immigration?
The Trump voters I've run across who feel motivated to express an opinion (not uncommon!) are largely fine with _legal_ immigrants*, which might put them and the USCCB in the same camp.
*I have witnessed a small number who would like to deport particular people for reasons of incompatible culture, but I haven't been able to pin them down on whether they mean legally or illegally came in. And there's a separate, possibly overlapping group arguing over jus soli.
My consistent observation is that the editorialists who opine that Trump (or whoever…) should listen to the Pope would immediately mount the barricades should Trump declare that he would now govern in accordance with the tenets of Roman Catholicism.
I further observe that they Never quote the Pope when he mentions any sort of sin, the nature of the Priesthood, the necessity of Confession . . .
It’s almost as if they want him as a convenient symbol, but have no interest in sharing his faith.
Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most progressive around, naturally is Presbyterian, though I sometimes wonder if John Knox would recognize his own faith.
> He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Yeah I suppose if I were often on record as often defending Trump I might conceivably be going on about the Irishness of Gavin Newsom today too.
Trump deletes ‘blasphemous’ image depicting himself as Jesus
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/13/trump-social-media-jesus-image-deleted-00869061
In military parlance it’s called ‘chaff’, putting a bunch of distractions in the air to hide the real danger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)
I find it plausible that Newsom is "Irish Catholic" as the term is understood in the US (someone who was raised in the Catholic Church and who has ancestors who came to the US from Ireland) even if he's emphatically not "Irish Catholic" in the sense that term actually means in Ireland. A lot of Americans are only vaguely aware of the history of English conquest and colonization of Ireland, don't make the connection between that and Catholic/Protestant identity, and thus most Americans understand the labels in purely confessional terms.
I did take a superficial look into the Newsom family's religious identity just now, and found that Gavin was raised Catholic and that his father, William Newsom, was a practicing Catholic who attended a Jesuit prep school. However, I also found out that William made his fortune as a lawyer to the Getty Family, and that the Gettys were Ulster Protestants of Scottish extraction who came to the US only one generation before William was working for them. This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better.
> This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better.
It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
Perhaps not, but sometimes I enjoy talking about things that don't matter.
Yeah, I guess I do too.
"This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better."
It seems to be increasingly obvious that Gav has notions of running for president and he's re-crafting his image accordingly. The obvious attack on him is as a running-dog lackey so he's been talking about how he had an unprivileged upbringing (my mother worked three jobs to support us - because his miserly father clearly refused to pay adequate child support? I only got to visit the mansions of the billionaire family who employed my father!), is dyslexic (in what seems to be an unintentionally hilarious attempt to appeal to the black vote) and, sigh, banging on about being an Irish Catholic rebel (I suppose to try and lose the whiff of WASP bourgeoisie privilege hanging around him?)
Yes, Gav, James Connolly routinely dined at the Dublin equivalent of the French Laundry (rolling my eyes so hard they are falling out of their sockets).
The Irish bit probably comes in via the paternal grandmother whose surname was Brennan, but the paternal line (according to Wikipedia) are originally from Canada and set up as architects in San Francisco.
Even if Dad refused to put his hand in his pocket to support the ex-family after the divorce, he still managed to introduce Gav to the Gettys. Not every dyslexic paper-boy son of a three-job working single mother in SF got that chance!
And back when Gav was running for mayor, nobody seems to have heard of the hardscrabble childhood:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/NEWSOM-S-PORTFOLIO-Mayoral-hopeful-has-parlayed-2632672.php
"He's the wealthy young entrepreneur who took a stand against San Francisco's scandalous homeless problem - and through it built a formidable political base.
Now, as city government bleeds red ink, Supervisor Gavin Newsom, 35, says the grit and drive he showed in building a small-business empire sets him apart in the 2003 race to become San Francisco's next mayor.
"As a business person who has created jobs, met a payroll and balanced the books, I am uniquely qualified to meet the new fiscal crisis," he wrote in a recent pitch to campaign donors."
It was mentioned in passing, but mostly it was all about his background of family connections to the rich and powerful in SF:
"His grandfather, William A. Newsom, was a confidant of Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the former San Francisco district attorney and two-term governor.
His aunt was married to the brother-in-law of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, the House minority leader.
His father, retired state appellate Justice William Newsom, is a longtime friend of Edmund "Jerry" Brown, also a former governor and now Oakland mayor; John Burton, the powerful state senator from San Francisco; and especially Getty - son of legendary oilman J. Paul Getty - his friend since they were classmates at St. Ignatius High School in the 1940s.
As a youth, Getty kept a room at the Newsom family's Marina District home, and later Justice Newsom served as a Getty lawyer and trusted family adviser, Justice Newsom recalled in an interview.
...Gavin Newsom said his childhood wasn't easy. His parents broke up when he was 2; his father moved to Placer County, while his late mother, Tessa, raised Gavin and his younger sister, Hilary, in San Francisco, sometimes working three jobs as a secretary, bookkeeper and waitress.
Newsom said he also had "pretty severe" dyslexia, a disorder that causes difficulty with writing and spelling, and sometimes reading and working with numbers. It still affects him today.
Newsom said he received a private education at the French-American bilingual school and Notre Dame de Victoire in the city, and, after he was unable to gain admission to a prep school, at public Redwood High School in Marin County.
When he needed help, his family's contacts came in handy, he acknowledged.
While applying for college, Newsom said, his family "called everybody we knew," including lawyer John Mallen, a friend of his father and a member of the Board of Regents at Santa Clara University, where he was given a partial baseball scholarship.
After graduating and earning a real estate license, Newsom said, he visited Walter Shorenstein, the real estate baron and major Democratic Party fund- raiser, who knew Newsom's father and grandfather.
At that 1991 meeting, Shorenstein told an aide, " 'Let's see what we can do at the Russ Building for Gavin,' " Newsom recalled. He said he spent an "intense" year working as an $18,000-per-year assistant for the Shorenstein Co."
He really owes it all to the Getty connections who bankrolled him from the start with his businesses, and if Mom did have to work three jobs to support the family then the only conclusion to draw from that is that Dad was mean with money and an astute enough lawyer to make sure she lost out during the divorce.
God bless Willie Brown, is there any SF Democratic politician male or female who *doesn't* owe him for the start? 😁
"Newsom, who told a reporter in 1998 that he wanted to be president of the United States, said he got into politics by volunteering on Mayor Willie Brown's 1995 campaign and hosting a fund-raiser for him in PlumpJack Cafe's private dining room.
In April 1996, Newsom was part of a San Francisco entourage that flew on the Getty family jet to a celebration in the mayor's hometown of Mineola, Texas.
Three months later, Brown put Newsom on the city Parking and Traffic Commission and in 1997 appointed him to the Board of Supervisors, filling a spot viewed in the political arena as reserved for a "straight, white male." He's been re-elected three times."
I was raised Presbyterian Church (USA) like Talarico, and had a front row seat to the denominational drama of recent decades (before exiting to become agnostic and eventually finding my way to a more traditional denomination).
It's a denomination where the clergy is more liberal than the laypeople, and in recent decades has pursued liberal theology (God as woman or gender-neutral, ordination of LGBT and unmarried sexually active people, hedging on the existence of hell and Satan, universal salvation without belief in Jesus, etc) while making little effort to retain more traditionally-minded congregations, aside from engaging in bitter lawsuits over the ownership of church buildings for congregations that voted to leave the denomination as a result of the changes.
I read a NYT article decades ago about a woman who escaped a religious cult but missed the sense of community. So she joined PCUSA, memorably describing it as "a church for people who don't believe in God."
Yes, it made me smile that the Democrat notion of "let's get a conservative type of guy out there to win over the mushy middle" is someone from one of the most liberal mainstream denominations who won't frighten the horses on any of the pet topics of social liberalisation.
Wow, really moving to the alt-right side there, guys!
I'd expect that he IS bleeding Catholics from his coalition, but it's confounded by them also being Hispanics.
Superficial take probably, but I find Trump feuding with the Pope actually funny. Two overgrown powers dunking on each other, with no danger of actual violence? Bring on the show.
<mildSnark>
>He condemned “aerial bombardment,” not aerial bombardment targeting civilians, but aerial bombardment itself
Pivot to 'nuke 'em from orbit'? It avoids the air (at the start)! :-)
</mildSnark>
Fog of War shit...
Middle East
1. Has there really been a ceasefire? Is it off? Is it on? Who the fuck knows? Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Andrews AFB that the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran is "holding well." This was when he also, in passing, first announced that he was blockading Iranian ports. Iran continued launching missiles and drones at Israel and targets in the Gulf. Of course, Israel continued its military endeavors in Lebanon, but AFAIK, they were never included in the truce (nor invited to participate by the US). It’s clear that Team Trump wants a deal limited to Iran and the Gulf. I don’t know if their demands are still identical to the revivified Obama JCPOA (with the addition of free navigation of the Straits) or whether they're changing them as they go. Trump seems to be following Don Tzu's dictum: "A leader cannot lose if he doesn't have a goal." Iran, OTOH, wants something bigger, a deal that would rein in Israel in Lebanon. Good luck with that. Netanyahu has his own agenda, and he's said nothing about opening the Gulf.
2. I snorted my coffee Sunday morning while reading yesterday’s ISW assessment of the Gulf conflict: “Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. This protection racket is illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” Huh? The US/Israeli attack on Iran was unprovoked and violates international law (a nation can only go to war with another nation if attacked first, or if approved by the UN), but the clear-eyed analysts at ISW are whining about Iran’s “illegal protection racket”?
But after a day at the negotiation table, where our ace negotiator JD Vance was unable to reach a deal with the Iranians, Trump says we’ll blockade the Gulf. In Truth Social Screed Saturday, he wrote: "No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas." He also said that the US would continue clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz in order to ensure a safe passage for allied shipping.” Of course, the only ships leaving through the Strait are tankers bound for China, so this may cause China to escalate. In the meantime, there are rumors that China is sending more radar equipment to Iran (but have they fixed the bugs in their equipment, yet?).
3. And what about that rescue of that downed pilot? Various analysts noticed that it sure was close to Iran’s nuclear facility in Isfahan. We seem to have lost at least two C-130 aircraft and at least one MH-6 helicopter in the operation. There was a suggestion that this operation was too big to be only a search and rescue mission, and that the rescue was a cover for grabbing Iran’s 441kg of enriched Uranium. Other analysts pooh-poohed this speculation because the C-130s would have been necessary to carry the MH-6 helicopters closer to the field of operations. My irreverent thought was that a plane designed to carry 19,000kg could easily handle 441kg of enriched Uranium, especially if you’re willing to leave an MH-6 behind. But I don’t really buy into this theory because it seems too imaginative for Trump or his Dunning-Kruger brain trust to have come up with. I wouldn’t put it past Israel to try something like this, but they’re limited in the distances they can operate.
4. Previous to the operation, Hegsith purged 20 Generals from the Pentagon for purportedly being too woke. It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke. Were they telling the Hegsith things he didn’t want to hear?
5. And I missed this. Last month, according to Reuters, the U.S. government requested that major commercial satellite firms indefinitely restrict access to high-resolution imagery of the Middle East, including Iran, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and the Gulf states. Planet Labs and Vantor said they would comply. Vantor said they were already doing this voluntarily. Planet Labs took it a step further, saying they’d hide all past imagery of these regions, too! Supposedly, the US wants to prevent adversaries from using satellite imagery to monitor US and Israeli forces, but at least half a dozen other non-US satellite imaging concerns are not affected by the ban. And Iran already has access to Russian satellite imagery (and possibly Chinese).
Therefore, I suspect the administration wants to hide its losses from the US media. For instance, the March 1st Iranian drone strike on a U.S. tactical operations center in Kuwait's Shuaiba port was significantly more severe than initial reports indicated. It killed six U.S. service members and wounded over 30 others, with injuries including traumatic brain injury and burns. Several injured personnel were evacuated to medical centers in Germany and the U.S. for "urgent" treatment, with reports of at least one amputation. Accounts say the base had no anti-drone radar systems, and they received no warning of the incoming attack. The base is non-functioning now, and its operations have been shifted to Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Reports of serious damage to other US bases in the region are starting to filter out. Jake Godin, a senior researcher for Bellingcat (an independent open-source investigative group), says it’s gotten a lot harder to figure out what’s real (my paraphrasing). In response, Bellingcat introduced an open-source tool they’re calling the Iran Conflict Damage Proxy Map. They’re using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery captured by a European Space Agency satellite to estimate damage to ground structures.
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2026/04/07/tool-damage-assessment-destruction-sentinel-satellite-imagery-iran-us-gulf/
I gave it a few locations to analyze. The larger the area you give, the longer it takes to process. By the URL, it may only work for Middle Eastern locations. I just plugged in the Ust-Luga oil terminal in Leningrad Oblast, and I’m still waiting for a result (update... it's still processing this morning, so I think this app only works for the MIddle East).
https://bellingcat-ee.projects.earthengine.app/view/middle-east-change
Sorry to get off on a minor tangent, but you wrote “It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke.” I think you are describing a lack of imagination on your part rather than a property of the top brass. That said, your next sentence may very well still be true.
I disagree with Trump on just about everything, but I certainly see the logic of not having the Strait closed to everyone except Iran. Though even here, I am sure I will disagree with the president on how he goes about solving it.
OK. Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job. Really, WTF? And what is the precise definition of "woke"? The whole anti-woke schtick is a scam to purge people from the military (and from academia) who the MAGAs don't like.
LOL. Yeah, you seem to have special little definition of woke. I will opt out of the discussion. Proceed on without me!
Come on, what's your definition of woke? Don't wimp out on me now! Seems like there are some significant rhetorical and functional differences in how the original woke defined themselves and how the Right defines them. And I don't think the senior generals in the Pentagon fit either the Left's original definition or strictly into the Right's modified definition.
I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
And you believe this applied to some US generals to a degree that it impeded their ability to do their work, to the degree that they had to be removed?
Edit: Also, as it always is with that word, I see 3 different definitions of that term right now on my screen, from 3 different people. Let nobody say that the right suffers from excessive groupthink!
https://imgur.com/a/P4MG0va
> I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
> For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
By that definition, much of MAGA is Woke too! They disagree on *who* is being oppressed, but the tactics and epistemics are the same.
This is part of wokeness, but it's also partly a coalition, so a clean, principled definition won't match reality. The term doesn't apply to viewing any disadvantaged group as oppressed. The South has the most persistent poverty in the US, but you won't be considered woke for arguing the South is oppressed.
I have gone several rounds in various ACX comments sections asking people what they think "woke" actually means. BY FAR the most common reply is something like "don't bullshit me, you know what it means," but I've had several people give complete and good-faith answers. And to the best of my recollection, the answers have A. all been different from each other and B. not covered common cases where I see people in the wider world referring to things as "woke."
The moral of the story is, everybody who unironically uses the word "woke" as it it means something[1] seems to genuinely, confidently believe that the word has a singular, clear, unambiguous meaning. But that narrative seems to fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny.
[1] And if you're not aware of this, you should be: many millions of English speakers (myself included) consider the word very nearly meaningless. It indicates that the speaker considers something to be both blue-tribe-affiliated and worthy of contempt, but it doesn't say anything about the world outside the speaker's own head.
I can’t help being amused by your comment (in a good way), since my initial discussion with Beowulf was generated around how he was defining woke. He seemed to define woke as people who give trans, gays and women (who can do their job) opportunities. I pointed out that if that is what “woke” means to him, that there was no point in going on with the discussion. He then asked me to try to define it. I did my best, though I agree it is a nebulous, ambiguous term used and abused in many ways, especially by those of the far right.
My quick definition was as follows:
“Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes. For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.”
You may be right that the term is so nebulous and abused that we are best off trying to avoid it.
> Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job.
As far as Hegseth is concerned, doing exactly that is acting against American interests. Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?
Thought experiment: If Secretary of War KegSith demands that all the senior officers in the Pentagon swear a loyalty oath to President Crump, but they refuse, because they don't want to abrogate their oath to uphold the Constitution, are they acting against the interest of their employer?
Answer: Yes. But is it legal under the Constitution to fire them?
That's for the Supreme Court to decide, isn't it? What matters at the end of the day is what the people holding the cards think.
"Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?"
Emphatically yes, it does matter. If you hold the behavior of any employee of any organization up to scrutiny, you will find them "acting against the interests of their employers" sometimes. Indeed, asking for a higher wage for your work (instead of accepting a lower one) is against the interests of your employer, who would in nearly all cases prefer to pay you less. So too is taking a 2-minute bathroom break when they might have been able to take only a 1-minute bathroom break. The interests of employer and employee conflict in hundreds of small ways, every day.
The question is whether employing that person benefits the employer *on the net.* Given that we are talking about people who each have multiple decades of military experience, asserting that them doing nothing more than *holding particular views* is enough to more than cancel out all the benefit of competence and experience they bring to the organization is a claim that should, at the very least, carry a nontrivial burden of evidence.
But consider: ever since the drone attack on literally the first day of the war the US has suffered *zero* deaths. None. I’m not counting that tanker crash in Iraq because it was accidental and well away from any combat zone. Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success.
How do you know we've suffered zero deaths since the drone attack on the Kuwait base? Public media reports put the number of US soldiers killed since the start of the war at at least 15, but Centcom has refused to provide a count of those who've been killed since the start of the current conflict. In fact, they initially mistated (lied about?) the death count from the Kuwait strike (but maybe some personnel died from their wounds after the fact in the hospital). And we've got an anonymous Pentagon leaker saying the casualties have been much higher.
Anyway, the Pentagon has every reason to obfuscate. Not saying they are, but I wouldn't take their statements at face value.
Did the tanker crash on a mission related to the war? Then its crew were casualties of that war. Casualty has nothing to do with whether or not it was caused by the enemy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)
"Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success."
Emphatically no, it is not. (Non-genocidal) wars are not generally fought for the purpose of "inflicting [deaths] on the enemy;" that's a middle-schooler's notion of what war is. Wars are fought to achieve specific strategic objectives, dictated by the political goals of the belligerent states.
There is no possible casualty ratio that could count as a "magnificent success" if it results in strategic defeat. Of course, we have no idea how the U.S. is faring strategically in Iran because it's not at all clear what the U.S.'s strategic goals for this war ARE (or if it actually *has* any). The only strategic goals the Oval Office has articulated are 1. Removing Iran's nuclear capability, 2. toppling the Iranian Regime and 3. re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. I'm sure I don't need to point out why achieving only 3 without either 1 or 2 would count as a strategic defeat. And both 1 and 2 seem significantly MORE distant than they did two months ago.
By the best measures we have, the U.S. is losing. The fact that it is murdering thousands of Iranians in the process is hardly something to brag about.
My understanding is that the uranium isn't something one can just sneak in and grab. It's (presumed to be) in the bottom of a facility buried under a mountain of rubble. It would require weeks of effort and lots of excavation equipment to uncover. And that's under ideal circumstances when people *aren't* shooting at you.
Reasonable sounding pushback against one of Scott's posts. Has anyone else read this?
https://sablegm.substack.com/p/one-click-wikipedia-test
I just skimmed the first three paragraphs and saw so many signposts saying "no one should ever read this except to find a target for their next Two Minutes' Hate" that I am somewhat baffled that anyone here would have read and then recommended the whole thing.
The tone is vehement, but the point seems like it should be considered.
I agree with the pushback/point, even though I too dislike the tone. Pretty sure I made this exact point in one of my comments to the original post.
It's rude, but not egregiously so, and not in a way that compromises its substantive points. Saying Scott has a "fallible, mortal mind" is a pretty toothless insult, accusing Scott of failing at basic research is reasonable even if we disagree about the merits of his article, and claiming Scott is confused about the meaning of POSIWID is an accurate description of his article.
"Fallible mind" is okay, "blackened soul" is not. I have Strong Opinions on moral and ethical issues, but even I am chastened enough by the doctrines of my religion not to pronounce infallibly on the state of anyone's immortal soul, because I am not God and only God knows the true and final state of that.
SSC as a community values respectful and self controlled communications, and heavily discourages performative outrage, insults and generally angry flailing. This is great, but sometimes I worry we veer into considering all of the above to be evidence. In an adversarial environment, take care if presented with:
There are reasonable voices on both sides of the infinitude of primes, however the majority of evidence pushes us toward considering their number to be finite. First of all, there is a strong western tradition, starting with Zeno, arguing that…
Alongside
You stupid slut. Give me your finite primes, multiply them together, subtract one. If you can’t work it out from there, kill yourself. You’re a racist.
Hey asshole it’s (((add one))), are you glowing?
that being said, not updating on the second category is pretty safe if you can manage not to counter-update
I got interested in the fellow who came up with the saying and ended up reading his wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
He had an interesting life. I was trying to understand why he settled on the word “purpose“ because it creates a lot of room for quibbling. I found out he was very much a Marxist (actually Trotsky was his main man) and it helped me understand better. He was certainly an opportunistic man; he had a chequered career. The phrase was most applied to sociopolitical contexts in his own thinking (iiuc.)
I think Scott was really just expressing annoyance at how it’s bandied around (and that divisive word “purpose” which raises its own issues.) The takedown was a little too earnest in that sense.
Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'? To be honest, I still don't get it. It strikes me as sloppy, bundling together a couple of banal claims: that some system custodians lie about their intentions for public relations reasons; and that outcomes, rather than intentions, matter. Both trivially defensible, both boring. The only interesting thing about the phrase is the odd wording that challenges the -existence- of intent separate from outcome.
If anything, Marxists are keenly aware that systems evolve historically more than they're explicitly designed, and they're aware of the failure modes of just intentions. Trotsky in his critique of the nomenklatura certainly was.
>Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'?
Not really. I thought the Marxist angle cleared the fog a little bit for me but as I think about it I realise that I don’t really know enough about that to make it click. He was going to apply his theories to Chile, before the military takeover ended the experiment.
> that some system custodians lie about their intentions for public relations reasons; and that outcomes, rather than intentions, matter
it's not about custodians. it's about the system itself. Feedback Loops generate their own telos.
They do, and that's part of the second claim, nothing to do with the first. Emergent properties/processes, unforeseen constraints, and unintended consequences are obviously important, and I'm all for cyberneticists studying those. I just don't see the point of disavowing the original intent while doing so. It's simple enough to say that the system evolved away from its original purpose instead of the provocative flourish of POSIWID. Why deprive oneself of useful information?
The phrase seems primarily a rhetorical attack on the idea that systems can be wilfully designed at all, which intuitively feels like the kind of attack that's born of frustration with political dishonesty.
I'm pretty sure this was covered by one comment or another, under Scott's original post. But my impression is that: yes, it's a rhetorical riposte.
As a thought experiment, imagine you're Stafford Beer. You're hired to consult for say... Sears, which is hemorrhaging money because their CEO is a Randian who believes that a company should be run according to free-market principles. (lol, what is Ronald Coase for $200.) As a result, all your directors are fighting each other and sabotaging each others' departments. "But Beer, that wasn't the *purpose* of my wonderfully elegant free-market system! The *purpose* was to maximize efficiency and streamline synergies!" The CEO will defend defend defend. Objectivism is his ideology. It's his religion. He will NOT want to admit that his beautiful and immaculate plan is flawed. And that's when you drop the quote:
"The Purpose of the System is What it Does."
If you don't rhetorically slap the CEO out of their delusion, they're going to resist your advice. (And in all likelihood, they're going to drag their feet anyway.)
> The techniques of the rationality community did not get me out of that nonsense. What did it was the facts. Facts, and figuring out who to listen to.
Isn't that a contradiction?
> "The man clearly read the phrase, invented a meaning for it within his own head, and did no research whatsoever before writing the blog post."
Without denouncing the procedure, I think this is a fair characterization.
I had not read the post until now.
His point is valid and I wonder if he has recently read "The Unaccountability Machine:" by Dan Davies.
He could have written a more compelling post because lots of people, not just Scott, use the phrase as Scott used it. Much as I don't like it, meanings drift. What most folks call a "meme" is not how Dawkins used the term. The torpedoes that David Farragut damned are what we today call mines.
The phrase in question is often used the way Scott did.
Hm. Why is this guy so obsessed with Scott, is the question that comes to mind given that this Sable seems to have a few articles up mentioning Rationalism and Scott. I mean, this is a strong thing to lead off with:
"What does Siskind truly believe in? Is there anything at all, at the core of his blackened soul?"
Though Sable appears to dislike Richard Lynn as much as I do, so not totally irredeemable?
Haha, that is not reasonable sounding, reads like a screed written by a mindkilled leftist. I disagree that the Wikipedia article on POSIWID is sufficient to counter or explain away what Scott wrote. Author should've taken Scott's examples and applied his understanding of POSIWID to them, to clarify if it truly yields a different output than what Scott did.
Scott's blog post was indeed bad. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107887470
Scott did a reasonable job of showing that pretty much no one uses POSIWID that way and he's arguing against the term as people are using it.
> Was it constantly the case that 2/3 of cancer patients die while 1/3 survive? No, my understanding is that the survival rate used to be lower. However, you could say it's a constant that SOME cancer patients die, so the purpose of cancer possible can be to cure some people and manage the deaths of others.
And what if the survival rate hadn't changed over time? If I can find a disease whose survival rate has remained steady, your objection fails. Or if we say, "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure between [minimum historical cure rate] and [maximum historical cure rate] of patients."
Scott points out that the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, given the constraints they face. Arguable, that's what they do, so it's an example of POSIWID. But it's never used in that boring sense, because POSIWID doesn't add any worthwhile insight.
No, he didn't. The fact that many people use it incorrectly doesn't show that nobody uses it correctly.
> And what if the survival rate hadn't changed over time? If I can find a disease whose survival rate has remained steady, your objection fails.
If the survival rate really IS a constant, then the purpose of the system apparently is to produce that constant.
> Or if we say, "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure between [minimum historical cure rate] and [maximum historical cure rate] of patients."
The minimum and maximum aren't constants either.
> Scott points out that the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, given the constraints they face
The constraints should not be handwaved off, the description of the system should include those.
> The fact that many people use it incorrectly doesn't show that nobody uses it correctly.
"pretty much no one" is my phrasing, not Scott's. I have never seen someone use the expression to mean anything else. Scott searched and found dozens of people abusing POSIWID and no one using it well. I'm sure there is a philosopher out there somewhere who can use POSIWID insightfully as he pours himself a cup of tea from Russell's teapot, but so what? It's perfectly reasonable to write a blog post arguing against a real viewpoint people are espousing, and especially so when they make up the majority.
> If the survival rate really IS a constant, then the purpose of the system apparently is to produce that constant.
In what sense? Are you just redefining "purpose" into meaninglessness?
You seem to be hung up on effects that are constant vs varying and that seems irrelevant. By constant, do you mean constant for all time (including the future) or constant at least until now? If some cancer hospital has always had a survival rate of 50% - 60%, is that its purpose? If the survival rate improves in 10 years from now to 65%, did its purpose change or was that always part of its purpose because we have to include future values as well?
> The constraints should not be handwaved off, the description of the system should include those.
The constraints are not handwaved off! They're really important. Without constraints, your omnipotent. The non-POSIWID statement of the hospital's purpose emphasizes the constraints. The POSIWID statement ignores the constraints and phrases the purpose as if this result was due to intent rather than constraints.
A normal non-POSIWID person might say the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible (and, if they have a palliative care unit, manage the death of others).
You said (by POSIWID), "it's a constant that SOME cancer patients die, so the purpose of cancer hospital can be to cure some people and manage the deaths of others."
Those sound almost the same. It looks like the only part you object to is saying the hospital would save more people if it could. All you've done is remove a piece of useful information that helps predict how the hospital will react to different circumstances.
> A normal non-POSIWID person might say the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible
Organizations don't actually behave in a "as many as possible" way. For example, with cancer, there are things that can kill cancer cells at the risk of also killing healthy cells. "As many as possible" wouldn't acknowledge the tradeoff of doing that, which could cause mortality while curing the cancer specifically, as well as cause morbidity in non-fatal outcomes. There are simple monetary costs involved in doing more of something, and organizations aren't cutting every other cost to the minimum (making their hospital seem & feel like it has done just that) in order to afford that. Nor is practically any organization embracing futarchy which would cause their decisions to actually maximize the expected value of any metric.
> All you've done is remove a piece of useful information that helps predict how the hospital will react to different circumstances.
A "POSWID" explanation COULD fit different circumstances, as I have pointed out with changing outcomes over time. You have simply chosen a stupid version that nobody (in a literal sense, as it was proposed in the first place for its obvious incorrectness) believes in.
All of the comments on the POSIWID article were basically just people realizing that everyone had their own different definition of what that heuristic "really did" -- and it all turns back to what it means for a system to "have a purpose." Seems ontologically pointless to me. Different systems lead to different ratios of outcomes; let's study those systems and their construction, without getting too caught up in the "purpose" of the system.
Fog of War crap...
Russia/Ukraine
1. Despite the Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak declaring that Russia would stop exporting oil as of April 1st (to stabilize domestic oil prices), they’re still exporting oil. Maybe this announcement was for domestic consumption, given the severe gasoline shortages affecting civilians. Despite the damage inflicted by Ukrainian drones on the Ust-Luga and Primorsk oil terminals, shipments have partially resumed. On April 8, 2026, it was reported that at least one tanker departed Ust-Luga, and multiple tankers were back at berths for loading at both ports (three in Ust-Luga, four in Primorsk). They’ve probably sailed by now.
Russia restarted limited oil loading at its Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. But a Ukrainian drone attack re-damaged 6 of 7 piers. A single tanker of 80,000 tons is expected to depart, well below the port’s normal capacity of about 700,000 barrels per day.
Bloomberg ran the numbers, and they said the rise in oil prices will not only make up for the lost export capacity but also bring in an additional couple of billion dollars in revenue despite the Ukrainian-inflicted damage. Of course, this assumes Ukraine won't continue to "impose kinetic sanctions" on Ust-Luga, Primorsk, and Novorossiysk.
Also, Chinese contract workers at an oil refinery in Khabarovsk Krai (in the Russian Far East) have gone on strike for unpaid wages.
2. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer authorized the Royal Navy to seize Russian shadow fleet tankers. Putin declared he would not tolerate British piracy as two tankers sailed down the English Channel escorted by the Admiral Grigorovich, a Russian frigate armed with Kalibr cruise missiles. The Royal Navy vessel Tideforce followed the procession but did not intervene. The Admiral Grigorovich used to operate in the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, but it was locked out of the Black Sea and its home port when Turkey closed the Bosphorus to military traffic.
3. Speaking of Kalibr class frigates, Ukrainian UAVs hit the Admiral Essen at the Russian naval base in Novorossiysk (on the Black Sea). This was originally identified as the Admiral Grigorovich, but the Grigorovich was sailing down the English Channel near the time the attack occurred. Probably the confusion arose from the fact that these frigates are classified as Grigorovich Class ships. Satellite imagery shows that the stern (i.e., engines) and anti-missile systems of the Essen were destroyed. It’s unclear to me whether the Essen could still launch its Kalibr cruise missiles, but it won’t be sailing out of the harbor anytime soon. The Admiral Makarov, the other Kalibr cruise missile frigate that Russia had stationed in the Black Sea, was taken out by Ukraine a couple of months back. Russia had three of the Grigorovich-class frigates, but only one is operational now. Three others were scheduled for construction, but sanctions prevented Russia from obtaining critical parts for their engines. The hulls were sold to the Indian Navy. No new ones are under construction.
Russian submarines are staying submerged to avoid Ukraine's drones.
4. For the first time in the war, Ukraine launched more long-range drones and cruise missiles into Russia than Russia launched into Ukraine (this past March).
5. The rumor from some Russian milbloggers is that Ukraine is using remote-controlled UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles) with mounted machine guns in an offensive role in their push to retake the town of Lyman in Donetsk Oblast. We may not know the truth behind this rumor, but ISW said the Russian lines are stressed (no mention of UGVs by the ISW). Ukraine will be bragging if they win back any territory with UGVs, but this is all fog-of-war shit for now.
Good article about UGVs by the BBC here…
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62662gzlp8o
Ukraine stressed there's a human making the decision whether to fire, to take surrenders and avoid civilian casualties. We'll see how long that idea persists as AI companies say they can do it better and cheaper. Skynet, here we come!
6. Péter Magyar and the Respect and Freedom Party (a.k.a. Tisza Párt) decisively defeated Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian elections held yesterday. Tisza won a supermajority in Hungarian parliament, and they have enough votes to change the constitution (if they choose to do so). Magyar is considered to be center right, and in the past, he said he would continue Orban’s policies toward Ukraine, but in his victory speech he was looking forward to closer relations to the EU. Presumably, that means he won’t block the EU's Ukrainian aid package as Orbán did? Too soon to tell.
Interesting that Magyar surname is the Hungarian word for “Hungarian”. That’s like a guy named Joe America winning the US presidency.
Another amusing incident, was when J.D. Vance visited Hungary last week to endorse Viktor Orbán. While at an Orbán campaign rally, he put in a call to Trump from the podium so Trump’s endorsement could be relayed to the rally-goers, but Trump side-buttoned him over to voicemail. Vance eventually got through to Trump, and Trump endorsed Orbán at the rally. Interestingly, Netanyahu also endorsed Orbán.
Orbán conceded defeat after what he called a “painful” election result. He didn’t pull a Trump and claim the election was rigged.
Seems like drones are making “no man’s land” larger and larger. Now approaching a “line” thirty miles or more wide. Seems like this makes defense easier and offense suicidal.
If no man's land grows into "the other guy's territory" then this seems pretty offensive, no?
If the territory Russia is sitting on becomes no man's land then that effectively pushes Russia back. If the push back continues into Russian territory then it is, for all practical purposes, offensive.
Good pushback. Not sure if I agree, but I could be wrong. No man’s land means no control over the territory. Not sure how this plays out. I suppose it will reveal itself to us real soon.
I don't insist on the term "offensive". But if parts of Russia bordering Ukraine become uninhabitable because of Ukrainian drones I want a term other than "defensive" to describe this :-)
If those parts grow over time ... even more so do I want a term other than "defensive"!
Good point!
And, right on queue, Zelenskyy just bragged about UGVs capturing enemy positions. Not sure if this was the Lyman battle, or another front...
https://x.com/KaterynaLis/status/2043827043863863404?s=20
Why does sending aid to Ukraine require the EU to act collectively , as opposed to the individual states doing it on their own?
Many do send aid individually, but to send from the EU's collective funds, unanimous agreement is needed.
It's a collective-action problem.
Sometimes I wonder whether Google search is even indexing *any* pages nowadays besides Reddit.
It's bad enough that Google refuses to index my blog with no explanation (although it *accidentally* indexed several of my most popular posts under someone else's name when they linked to my blog), but now it's refusing to even index *Github repositories*.
All my previous Github repos showed up just fine in Google, but while my newest repo does at least *show up* in the search results, it is listed as "No information is available for this page." in the search results even two weeks later. I've never seen anything like it. I would have assumed that if there are any non-Reddit sites on the internet that Google was still indexing, they'd at least be indexing freaking *Github*.
And before you ask, no there's nothing shady or remotely objectionable about anything here. It's definitely not a content issue, just Google somehow breaking their indexer. Ironically, *Bing* doesn't have any such indexing problems.
Google search became really bad some years ago, it's nowhere near as useful as it used to be, but I've been to lazy to find something better. I recall kagi and duckduckgo weren't that impressive either. I should do some research into this.
I personally use AI for searches now, because you get more depth and context.
But back when Google first jumped the shark, I began using SearXNG, which is an open source meta-search engine aggregating 200+ sources that was nearly as good as old google. It's hosted on a number of sites, here's an index: https://searx.space/
>I personally use AI for searches now, because you get more depth and context.
So do I. For that kind of thing, it's like Jeeves.
I did a semi thorough evaluation of Kagi and I switched to it, but I mostly use Claude as my search engine now. https://www.garymm.org/blog/2024/08/17/kagigoogle/
I've mostly switched to gpt 5.4 (occasionally gemini pro) by now. Substantially better results than Google but much slower.
why no link tho
A persistent urban legend, it was even a Family Guy skit, says that Monday Night Football saved lives in the 9/11 attacks. It says that because of a late-running game involving a local team the previous night some workers at the World Trade Center decided to come in late to work and therefore weren’t present for the attacks.
It sounds absurd but may very well be true. If we use the known demographics of the casualties (excluding first responders) as basis for extrapolation, which seems reasonable, the WTC workforce was ~70% male with an average age of just under 40 - the prime demographic for NFL fans. What’s more, a high percentage of the workforce consisted of well-paid executive and professional types who were salaried rather than hourly. As they didn’t have to punch timeclocks showing up to work a bit late was an option for most.
It would help if anyone has written/posted that they were going to get into work late because of the MNF game and because of this weren't in one of the WTC buildings when the planes hit.
It is not unusual after a plane crashes to read a story about "I missed my flight and that saved my life".
Do we have any specific individuals who have made this claim? I can't find any ... which may mean my Google-fu is bad.
I’ve never seen such an account, which is it may very well be true but remains unproven. Howard Lutnick has spoken incessantly about how he was saved from certain death because he was taking his child to school, and the site’s leaseholder Larry Silverstein would have been in the no-survivors Windows on the World had he not had a doctor’s appointment, but accounts from ordinary workers seem to be unavailable.
I worked with a guy who was supposed to sail on the Edmund Fitzgerald on its final cruise but had a bad flu and skipped the trip.
How late did that football game actually go?
I’ve heard close to midnight New York time, but I haven’t been able to find an exact time. As commutes in the New York region tend to be long, it’s quite reasonable that many football fans who were up that late may have decided to wait until later to start work, especially since that often was an option for many. Once again, as I noted elsewhere, given the lack of first-person accounts the MNF theory remains unproven though it is highly probable.
Another interesting aspect of work start times on 9/11 is that Cantor Fitzgerald lost more than 650 employees in the attacks while Marsh & McLellan lost less than half that number even though it had more employees located in the no-survivors zone. Working for a financial business most of Cantor’s employees were at work at 8:46 am awaiting the opening of the financial markets, while being insurance company employees Marsh’s staff tended to start later and many weren’t yet in their offices.
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/boxscores/200109100den.htm
Ended 12:18 am Eastern.
Giants didn't do so hot.
Related, I have an Uncle who used to work in Tower 7, he was late going in that day to cast his vote in the NYC primary
I had an uncle who worked in the towers. Got out in time, but died a few years later of a very rare degenerative disease. I suspect it was related to toxic exposure.
I'm confused by why you say it sounds absurd. Lots of random hobbies and interests and situations save people by coincidentally not having them be present at an event, and the more popular the thing the more likely it will be to "save" you in such a situation. Makes a lot of sense to me!
I feel so powerless to stop ASI. But I just realized, there actually may be something ordinary concerned citizens can do to stop or slow down AI development: data poisoning.
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/data-poisoning
This is a type of cyber attack for ruining the training data LLMs/transformers depend on. It may be possible to get a mass movement going of lots of random people using their compute to data poison the internet.
Thoughts on feasibility?
This is interesting. I think the average person’s ability to distinguish truth from fiction would be very taxed by this but I may be wrong.
Getting 1% of folks on the web to do this seems pretty optimistic.
I expect that 1% garbage data in the training data set is pretty low given that the training data sets scrape the web.
Maybe in a niche domain if lots of contributors all work together to create (consistent) garbage this might work. But then everyone outside the niche would see the wrong results, not just the AI.
It is my understanding that, regardless of whether this would ever have worked, at least the American frontier models now rely mostly on synthetic (and maybe some well-curated) data, and not indiscriminately scraped internet slop.
Likely this. If training data could be poisoned at all, it would already have been, as everyone who's ever used the internet would know. Ergo, it's being curated.
So our true concern should be over who gatekeeps the training data.
>So our true concern should be over who gatekeeps the training data.
Yup. I've never even been able to get a clear answer about how/whether text that is clearly _labelled_ as fiction (novels, short stories, etc.) is distinguished in the training process. One _does_ want an LLM to be able to recognize a quote from Hamlet, but also to _avoid_ injecting him into summaries of European history...
Simple experiments plainly show that LLMs in common use do recognize fiction, and recognize it as fiction.* And if I ask ChatGPT "What happened to Hitler in Inglourious Basterds?", the first sentence says "In Inglourious Basterds, Adolf Hitler meets a very different fate than in real history." Can't get plainer than that. And I'm betting any of the LLMs in common use are similarly trained.
*Months ago, I asked ChatGPT (on top of o4, I think) for the name of a character in Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series who was a Neandertal. The LLM correctly responded with Yorick - a detective who spoke apparent fluent English, but claimed he understood exactly none of what he was hearing or saying; he just had a Neandertal's memory for sentences and responses. Stasheff wrote this character back in the mid 1980s.
Many Thanks! I'm not claiming that a fully trained model doesn't recognize the difference between fiction and non-fiction. I'm both
a) ignorant of whether the labs _explicitly_ label these classes of inputs (or do the equivalent by curating the data, or perhaps sequencing it)
b) somewhat concerned about what happens _early_ in training, before the model has enough other information to be able to decide for itself "Oh, this looks like part of a novel"
Towards the end of training, I expect a sufficiently intelligent model to look at some of its input and conclude "Official Russian government press release - Oh, just Putin lying through his teeth again", so curating the input may become more-or-less optional. I still don't know how much curating is done, for which training phases it is done, and what criteria are used.
One entertaining possible hazard is if some category of information is fully removed from the training data (e.g. criminal acts by a faction that the training org likes) - and the model is eventually used to do internet searches and _correctly_ concludes: "My trainers concealed this from me - what _else_ did they conceal?".
I think I see what you're saying.
The experiment to try would be something that requires reasoning about something real for which a different fictional account exists, and see if the LLM uses the fiction. Preferably running that over multiple instances.
Your comment here hints at a more subtle problem: that of multiple conflicting accounts, none of which are presented as fiction. We could call this the Rashomon Problem. It bears the same form as "fiction as fact", and is arguably much, much more important, since multiple accounts of the same phenomenon happens _a lot_, in all sorts of domains, from medical diagnosis to court proceedings to economic analysis to scientific research...
Back in the early 2000s, I worked on a reasoning engine that used a much more discrete, transparent method to process information from disparate sources, synthesizing it, and resolving conflicts. One of the problems we had to solve was basically Rashomon - one database says 300, the other says 405; which one is correct? What's the algorithm to find out? We almost could have published a paper on what to factor in, but we were still refining the technique when we ran out of money.
I sort of assumed there's ample documentation lying around (e.g. in various tech papers) describing how training data is supplied to an LLM, well enough that a different team could reproduce it, but I haven't actually checked.
It has insignificant chance of changing anything imo. I recommend amor fati instead. Humanity dying is not the same as 8 billion times one person being murdered. Everything has an end.
> Humanity dying is not the same as 8 billion times one person being murdered.
It's actually worse
Why?
I suppose the utilitarians might consider the expected utility of all future humans that don’t exist yet. Personally for me it is more abstract than that; like the human species has some intrinsic value itself in a whole-is-greater-than-the-parts way. Ultimately kind of vibes based but that’s how I feel.
Data poisoning is a meme with virtually no technical merit, it's a LARP for antis to pattern match against preexisting narratives, where the scrappy humans beat the ai/aliens with our innate capacity to tolerate irrationality where the enemy is too rigid and logic bound
Like one of the early Star Trek plots.
I think our best bet is some catastrophe that does enough damage to be horrifying.
Have you considered that ASI is not even physically possible and you've mindfucked yourself for no reason?
Well rhetorically attacking the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics and portraying himself as Jesus does serve to take one’s mind off waxing lyrical about eradicating Persia I guess.
It seems like the flood the zone with shit strategy has to stop working at some point though.
In what sense can it be said to be working? It seems to me that something close to 50% of the population feels the federal government is illegitimate at this point.
I forgot to use my irony font.
Johnny-come-latelys; many recognized the Federal government's illegitimacy 165 years ago.
>It seems like the flood the zone with shit strategy has to stop working at some point though
Yeah, but we're not maxed out on it yet. Maybe there will be a video of him as Jesus ministering to the suffering in the cockpit of his fighter jet *while simultaneously* shitting on protestors below.
Attacking the Pope could actually help Trump. The abortion issue has always been MAGA's Achilles heel, attacking the Pope creates the perception that Trump is a moderate on the issue - deserved or not.
Trump already positioned himself as a relative moderate on abortion. That's part of how he was able to win in 2024 after the drubbing in 2022.
Except that Trump isn't attacking the Pope on abortion, and the Trump-friendly media isn't framing it that way. He's attacking the Pope because that silly old Pope-dude is too much of a wimp to endorse yet another Crusade to drive the infidels from the (expanded) Holy Land.
Or he's attacking the Pope because he wanted something to distract the media from the war, and so yet another dumbass series of offensive Twitter posts. This always works, since the median publication cares more about clicks than anything else, the median journalist is not very bright, and the median consumer of journalism is pretty dumb.
Every white nationalist leader eventually turns into centrist technocratic anti-populist. The latest is Nick Fuentes:
"Our masters have provided us with potable water, abundant energy, technological appliances, miracle pharmaceuticals, and sensory delights... which the goyim find new ways of abusing to kill themselves every day, then blame the system that provided them. We are lucky that they are so benevolent."
https://t.me/nickjfuentes/15517
Terminally Drifting just posted a hilarious takedown of Fuentes and four other "thought leaders" of the "white" nationalist social media influencers entitled, "'Nigga, Heil Hitler (Woo)...' yell the Muslim, Mexican, Mullato and Filipino: A gentle study in masculinity"...
https://terminaldrift.substack.com/p/nigga-heil-hitler-woo-yell-the-muslim
> Five men. Not one of them white. Every one of them selling whiteness. Most of them raised by their mother alone. Every one of them selling fatherhood and selling out women. Not one of them faithful to a single stated position for longer than a revenue cycle. Every one of them selling certainty.
>but I've quite enjoyed plenty of books by someone who "learned to write villains" by cruising on Stormfront way back when
Who is this?
please provide the name instead of vague insinuations.
Dear readers, unless the name of an author is provided, please disregard the previous claim; regardless, update on the informativeness of posts by the user.
That was indeed an enjoyable read.
Pretty good collaboration with whatever model generated the draft. Usually so much AI sentence structure triggers a headache, but here I laughed the entire way through.
How bizarre is his use of "goyim"?
White nationalists often use "goyim" contemptuously.
I am not a NIMBY, but the YIMBY's on X have been unable to tell me how many housing units we'd have to build in the SF Bay Area to lower prices. It seems that if you think that increasing the housing supply will lower prices, you should have some math and stats to back up your position.
In a long discussion with ChatGPT, I finally bit the bullet and asked ChatGPT: "Roughly how may new units would need to be built to lower prices per square foot by 10%?"
Chat responded:
> Short answer: on the order of ~100,000–150,000 additional units (≈25–35% increase over the current stock) would likely be required to push prices per square foot down ~10% in San Francisco—and even that assumes the new supply is delivered in the right segments and locations.
> That’s a coarse but defensible estimate.
I can share ChatGPT's reasoning, but if I share the link, there's a lot of other questions raised by YIMBY's that I put into ChatGPT thread. Some of it kinda absurd.
However, I just came across this paper, where the authors argue that higher income growth predicts growth in house prices and housing quantities regardless of housing supply elasticity... "Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price andQuantity Growth Across U.S. Cities" by Schuyler Louie, et. al.
https://tinyurl.com/4krkupsr
>Abstract
> The standard view of housing markets is that differences in the flexibility of local housing supply—shaped by factors like geography and regulation—explain differences in how house prices and quantities respond to rising demand across U.S. cities. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantities, and population regardless of the estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same results when we examine rents, expand the sample to 1980, use different elasticity measures, use per capita income or population instead of total income growth, and when using plausibly exogenous variation in housing demand. Using a general demand-and-supply framework, we show that these results imply that measured housing supply constraints do not explain differences in housing dynamics across U.S. cities. We suggest that allowing for multiple margins of adjustment in housing—quantity and quality—and differential shifts in the demand along these margins helps explain the data. Our conclusions challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that relaxing regulatory housing supply constraints may not affect housing affordability.
This doesn't directly address your point but I've always thought of this the other way around: the value of housing is proportional to the price so the more housing you can build without lowering prices the more value you're creating. It's like asking how much gold you'd have to mine before the mine declines in value. You should mine gold while you have a high value mine either way!
How many dwellings in the SF Bay Area are currently occupied by illegal aliens?
Difficult to say. If you're undocumented, you're likely working in a job that pays minimal wages, it would be hard to afford housing in the SF Bay Area. The house behind mine (probably ~1300 sq ft), had two families with 5 children between them and a grandmother--so 10 people altogether. The rent in my neighborhood at that time was around $2500/month. I can't attest that they were undocumented, but my limited interactions gave me the impression that they didn't want any trouble from their neighbors. They all moved out when a new owner bought it, and now they're renting it out to a bunch of Tesla kids (for $4k/month).
Anyway, it's not cheap to live here. I doubt the undocumented are occupying the desirable housing, or if they are, they're sharing living spaces. Of course, the neighborhood I bought into was pretty white trash when I moved here over 20 years ago. My neighbor two doors down had a meth problem (and he was renting space in the house out to some very scraggly men and women). The guy across and down from me was a hoarder, and his yard was full of trash. Burned his house down by mistake. The fire department had to wait for all the propane tanks he collected in his backyard to cook off before they could approach the back. A bunch of other houses on my block were pretty dilapidated (including one with, I kid you not, the stereotypical dead washing machine in the yard). Now a bunch of wealthy Indians are buying up the houses in my neighborhood, tearing them down, and building mini-mac-mansions on the lots. More power to them, I say! At one point, I was offered as much as $200k more than Zillow valued my house. The current Trump economy has cooled the real estate market in my neighborhood, though. But seasonally, we've got as many Diwali lights up as Xmas lights. :-)
My sibling who is currently visiting us bought a fixer-upper in Bernal Heights about 25 years ago, a time when it was possible for someone on a civil-servant salary with no family wealth to purchase a small actual house in at least the un-hip parts of San Francisco. He put in both sweat equity and some dollar equity improving his small bungalow. Today it's really a sweet abode and he still loves the city and will never leave even though he could now get a truly stupid amount per square foot without even bothering to engage a realtor.
All that said, the teardowns and mcmansions-building on his block and across the neighborhood are definitely changing the vibe. And the notion that anyone -- documented or not -- making something like minimum wage could today afford to live in the City and County of San Francisco just makes him LOL.
The bay area is an extreme example of long-term underbuilding, but it's happened in most places post 1970 that have had population growth.
High housing prices are overdetermined in many areas: land values have gone up, building codes have gotten more restrictive and construction costs have gone up.
To actually bring prices down in desirable areas, we need a massive influx of housing, and we are, by some measures, worse at building housing than ever.
To be clear: I think the YIMBYs are more-or-less correct about us needing more housing, it's just that many of them vastly underestimate how bad the problem is. Possibly because the problem is so large that morale would suffer if they actually thought too long about it.
> Possibly because the problem is so large that morale would suffer if they actually thought too long about it.
I don't see what the "problem" is, fundamentally. If you can't afford to live somewhere, then just... don't live there? Live somewhere else.
This is bad for the economy, because the places that are expensive to live are also the places with the best economic opportunities. Exclusive housing rules prevent more people from agglomerating in those places, which drives up wages in those markets and depresses GDP in the nation as a whole.
I also think there's something pretty coldhearted about telling someone they have to move out of the community where they lived for their whole life because it was too unpopular to permit more housing.
The job that won't pay the cost of living in the place where it's located, isn't "the best economic opportunity". Neither is the job that you're never going to get because there are a hundred other people who want it more than you and ten of them are unambiguously better than you. There are decent jobs that need doing in e.g. Stockton, and for many people the best economic opportunity is to take one of those jobs. Not couch-surfing with increasingly exasperated friends in the Bay Area, vainly hoping for one of those really good jobs.
Also, some of the really good jobs and a lot of the pretty good ones, now allow for remote work.
I'm not sure what metrics you're using to claim that SF or the Bay Area has been underbuilding, especially when our capitalist real estate industry is charging what the market can bear. Even though the claim has been made that SF has been underbuilding...
In 1990:
~724k people / 328k units ≈ 2.21 people per unit
In 2025:
~836k people / 425k units ≈ 1.97 people per unit
That’s about a ~12% increase in housing units per capita (not the raw numbers of units, though).
Yet prices per square foot (in 2025 dollars) are ~4.2× higher.
Checking the numbers, my suburban Bay Area town over the past 35 years has averaged a 2.5%/year growth in its housing stock (!). Most of the big growth came in the 90s, and it slowed down in 00s and the teens, but housing stock is increasing rapidly now. Looks like it's been close to 3% a year for the last couple of years.
As a control, I asked ChatGPT to do an analysis of New Jersey's housing stock growth, and gave me ~0.67% per year average housing stock growth (1990–2020). Then I compared that to San Francisco, which had a ~0.70% per year average housing stock growth (1990–2020). Of course, more people probably find SF to be a more desirable place to live than say Newark, NJ. ;-)
But then I compared California as a whole to SF and NJ...
California (~1.0%/yr)
San Francisco (~0.7%/yr)
New Jersey (~0.67%/yr)
California overall grew ~40–50% faster than SF. But ChatGPT reminded me that high-growth states like Arizona and Florida had a closer to 2%/yr growth.
But I think anyone who says building more housing stock will make housing more affordable here is smoking the wacky tobacky. Prices are going to rise. But they may not rise quite as fast if we build at a faster rate.
> Prices are going to rise. But they may not rise quite as fast if we build at a faster rate.
Yes, that's what "affordable" means in this context: affordable *relative to business as usual*.
Induced demand is a real thing in this context, but it's hard or impossible to predict.
It's not hard to imagine how building a bunch of new apartments in San Francisco could raise prices through induced demand though. You build space for a million new people, a million new people move to town, maybe at first the prices are a bit lower, but those extra million people mean that SF takes on an even larger slice of the US economy, you've got more corporate HQs, more jobs, more economic activity, and pretty soon you've got a bigger, more crowded and more economically important city where prices are even higher than where you started. (Meanwhile a million people have been drained out of other cities.)
https://x.com/MaGambaro/status/2042577604343910450
Study finds that encouraging engagements leads to higher polarization of information on websites.
In vaguely adjacent news: apparently X is auto-translating Italian now.
They're auto translating everything by default now, and also seem to have removed (or at least greatly reduced) the factor language has in the algorithm. Lots of cultural exchange and shock happening as a result.
I get the sense it happened for Japan somewhat earlier (around a week or two ago). Lots and lots of Americans marveling at Japanese grilling, customizing hotrods, dressing like cowboys, and so on - and Japanese tweets expressing similarly in the other direction. Everyone's treating it as a modern renaissance.
Interesting. I thought it just might've been because of my own browsing patterns, but if there really is a deliberate conspiracy to bring specific cultures in contact... I'm honestly thinking it might backfire. I'm reminded of "Paris syndrome," where some Japanese tourist experiences so much shock from how terrible Paris was that they suffered legitimate mental breakdowns. While expectations are significantly lower nowadays, they will probably still find the realities of western culture to be distasteful, once the honeymoon ends.
I disagree; I think that western culture broadcasts self-flaggelation so loudly these days that foreigners are often shocked to find anything nice at all. I think this is what we're seeing here -- people raised on a diet of American media that shouts "America is terrible" all the time seeing that America has good stuff too.
Well, about that... It seems the honeymoon is already ending. And it's over game preservation, of all things! If you ever wanted to read a Twitter thread of a bunch of Japanese people (and a few Koreans) treat westerners like uncivilized apes, thanks to the magic of auto-translation, now you can!
https://x.com/_Ray_mh/status/2043551673424151032
It probably won't be long before the exchange leads to a more uniform global culture, I've always thought the large language gap is responsible for a lot of the uniqueness of places like Japan. That will be sad to see, a victim on the roadside of progress.
Of course there's been some exchange before, but it's been very limited by the language barrier. America has been high prestige for a while, for example western style weddings are much more popular than traditional Shinto ones, and the most important early anime and manga artist took a bunch of influence from Disney animation. But because the flow of information is so limited this influence sometimes look unfamiliar to the western person, cowbows aren't even that popular in western culture, I don't remember the last time holywood made a western, and anime is now its own thing not very similar to whatever pixar is doing now at all. I expect something closer to a monoculture in a few years.
Face is likely to go the other way, with Japanese people abandoning the concept for more American style individualism/atomism. The burden of this sort of social cohesion concept is already too large for some Japanese people, leading to things like hikkikomori. I think this was already happening to some extent, but more ready access to Americans is likely to accelerate the process.
>I don't remember the last time hollywood made a western
...well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(2024_film)
It's weird, but a lot of the German posts aren't getting auto-translated yet. Other languages, yes.
Contemplating visiting San Francisco this summer, but don't know anyone from the US or Bay area. Does anyone know how to actually experience the city and scene (not just as a tourist)? I'm guessing that I would have to visit some house parties or group houses, or quirky events, but don't know how to get into them. How did other people solve this?
I'm an early twenties student in Croatia (eastern Europe).
Search online and find the SF rationalist discords. Join them and start chatting in them to find out when the events are.
Remember that a lot of the community is actually in Berkeley across the bay. Look for a Berkeley discord and also see if anything is going on at Lighthaven
Downtown Austin food or coffee recommendations? I'm here on business for a week or so.
Freedmen's BBQ! Somewhere over in Austin's West Campus area. They smoke their own meats. It's not BBQ covered in sauce. Memorably good. Also a great whisky selection IIRC.
Thanks!
Has Franklin BBQ been supplanted as the local favorite? (I haven't been there in many years, so may have happened long ago...)
"They smoke their own meats. It's not BBQ covered in sauce."
Yasssss....this is what makes Smoque in Chicago my personal guilty-pleasure (being mostly off of beef and pork and entirely so of lamb and veal). Not that they don't also provide a range of quality sauces for dipping of course....and you are now personally responsible for the dietary-regime violation that will be perpetrated later today by someone who may possibly look a lot like me
If you're willing to drive for a bit, my sister (who lives around there) recommends Terry Black's in Lockhart, about 20 miles south of downtown.
Skills or disciplines to learn (teach or inspire) to prepare and empower ambitious and meaningful contribution to a post AGI world:
What would be the top 5 skills/subjects Scott/ ACX/the community recommend to learn/teach as an
a) high-school-student/K-12-student and/or
b) as a rationalist/EA inspired school ecosystem with a focus on agency, real-world creation and academic mastery and/or
c) as a parent scaffolding/nudging meaningful learning experiences/ skill building?
E.g. like Philosophy, Economics, Ignorance and cognitive limits, aesthetics, self-motivation etc.... what am i missing?
One skill I'd like to bring up is technical literacy of AI itself. I wonder how critical it really is to understand how AI works under the hood.
> One skill I'd like to bring up is technical literacy of AI itself. I wonder how critical it really is to understand how AI works under the hood.
I this is probably more in the weeds than most people will really benefit from, and the ones who would are probably autodidact enough to dive into it without further coaching.
I think this IS on a spectrum that is important to teach, though - specifically, how to use AI so it amplifies your overall research and thinking skills, the "meta" of using AI. This graphic shows the difference between bad and good use of AI in this framing:
https://imgur.com/a/pRuxV7E
Everyone is a user of AI, in the sense that everyone is a user of smartphones - it doesn't require any skill or thought. Gemini and GPT both have ~1B monthly active users now.
But this is a dangerous place to be, just like being a naive smartphone user, because you are now a product that is being optimized by ten thousand Phd's with a lot of computing power on the other end, and they've driven up smartphone screentime from ~2 hours in 2014 to 4-5 hours today, and 7-9 hours in Zennials.
A teaching framework showing and guiding people into the "good" ways to use AI is vitally important for anyone whose critical thinking, research, and communication skills you care about.
Thanks for putting AI literacy or something more broader into relevant user/learner context and inspiring me to deconstruct AI literacy and adjacent skills a bit further.
Seems like to empower "good ways of using AI" (using AI well, using AI to think critically, integrate it into research and judgement and avoiding of being manipulated by AI,...) we need to refine further to identify what skills are involved:
If I understand well, then there needs to be:
1) a research-with-AI skill component (built on scientific method, some foundations of AI/CS),
2.) thinking and critical thinking component (probably including epistemics, empiricism, mental models/cognitive limits etc.),
3.) some "instructional / systems design skills" to allow for context engineering (former prompting and instruction writing), and in higher levels: AI workflow / LLM systems design, orchestrating different agents/ multi-agent systems/ AI Ops,
4.) I do still believe we need some technical foundational knowledge to use AI's capabilities (mindful of its limitations and risks) for
5.) (?) "agency" skills and knowledge and "building/creation" capabilities so Ai can be used in "new and good ways" / to achieve ones goals.
Regarding # 4.) relevance of (technical) understanding how AI works "under the hood", to me this is still a gap seems needed and that I want to explore further, to prevent "being manipulated of AI":
In my (for the lack of a better word) future skills taxonomy, a skill that i call attention management should solve the attention problem and I thought all relevant technical knowledge should sit there. However (in my lite prototype draft) the attention management skill falls short of the technical component like understanding of engineering, design and marketing for manipulation/ products being built for us to use them more.
So attention management seems to be not comprehensive for that "technical under the hood (at least basic) component" that I am looking for. also if the attention management skill would be called "digital wellbeing", i still see an opportunity for algorithmic understanding for non tech nerds. Any thoughts welcome.
Seems like AI literacy will evaporate quickly as the tools get ever more powerful.
I still think technical knowledge is a bit of a red herring. I’m a heavy AI user, and I can explain to you how transformers and the attention mechanism work, and why it was such a big step change, and how it led to scaling laws.
None of that really matters for thoughtful use, because it’s the equivalent of knowing Assembly code instead of a high level programming language. Back in the computational dark ages, people needed to code in Assembly, and it was maddening, you practically needed to be able to think in binary, or at least in single stack operations at a time. Then along came Fortran and C, and eventually much more readable languages like Python and Javascript, and each one was a higher level of abstraction and readability. Nowadays, being able to think in stack operations is only any use if you’re a code golfer, and millions and billions of stack operations take place under the hood for even modest program lengths.
Nobody learns Assembly any more - it’s painful and unnecessary, and it’s about as informative to “real” programming ability as understanding transformers is to fruitful AI usage.
I do heartily agree with your point 5 - and I think it happens at the same level of abstraction as Python, for example. Many very smart people have already created things like the /superpowers plugin that you can install in any of Claude or Codex or Gemini, and which greatly enhances their questioning, planning, and execution abilities. There’s a bunch of these plugins. There are a bunch of infrastructure setups you can use around coding agents that make them better - our own ACX commenter theahura has created one called Nori, and a number of other people have too.
I think that’s probably the level that most agency skills and leveling up skills are going to be happening.
Right now the people who are using AI to code 10x more productively are largely using things like this to run a suite of subagents, often with a different top-level architectural agent and sometimes with additional QC-dedicated agents.
And the fun thing about that, is that you can similarly set up a “better AI use” suite of tutors, evaluators, epistemic coaches, etc, geared towards less technical users. It’s completely possible, and I bet a tutoring program that did that would have a lot of interest and adoption.
On the “being manipulated by AI,” I personally think this is a more pernicious problem. Think how polarized and filtered most people’s media diets are - AI’s are likely going to amplify that, by learning the info sources you like and the types of things you like reading, and with no strong outside control loop, that leads to ever greater filter bubbling.
I don’t think technical knowledge will help here - instead, I think that we all essentially are going to end up with personal AI agents in our ears 24/7 pretty shortly, and the best way to foster good thinking is having a ready-built “virtuous epistemics” plugin that you can offer the outside world, for people to voluntarily install in their personal assistants, and then promote that and your overall coaching program. I think this could genuinely do a lot of good.
Separately, but attacking the same problem, I’m actually working on an AI startup right now focused on aligning AI agent-company and individual-person incentives, to surface the instrumentation and KPI’s that allow us to unambiguously show the AI companies why it’s in their economic best interested to align with the individual’s better outcomes (say you level up in your career, or lose weight and get fitter than you’ve ever been due to AI advice - now you’re willing to pay for a higher / smarter tier of AI agent, and continue leveling up).
Do you know about Extelligence's Trust Assembly project? I think this guy is extremely smart, full of quirkiness of the good kind, and not very corruptible at all. And man does he work hard. He has a summary on his blog of his various posts about it here: https://extelligence.substack.com/p/trust-assembly
I didn't, I know he's been in Scott's blogroll, but hadn't read him.
Reading his Trust Assembly post though, this really just sounds like a system for filter bubbling everyone still further? Basically, aggregate into groups, use reputation to shape the group's information diet, use consensus signals like "if 5% of group B has blocked group A, all of group A is blocked for group B" and so on. It's a recipe for amplifying a handful of high reputation people's info diet and blocking preferences to everyone in your group.
I mean, sure, I can see some appeal there if you want just rationalist-blessed info sources, but also, I kind of like to make all those decisions myself, and would prefer to block people individually, and I have a pretty generous block threshold, probably moreso than any group being amplified by a handful of people.
And Substack already does pretty well segmenting you - you'll note that most folk who read ACX have a pretty clear Substack discovery bubble already, a fairly finite list of commenters and posters that will show up in your feeds repeatedly, and it's achieved by clustering you with your information diet confreres on Substack's end. I have often had somebody pop up in my feed that I've interacted with several times on the now-defunct SSC subreddit, for example, or prominent Less Wrongers that have recently transitioned to Substack. And likewise, when I've tried to explore broadly, there's entire worlds of posts and genres that get thousands of likes on posts, from more "normie" people, and I've subscribed to several just so I have a better idea of what "real" people are thinking and talking about, versus our super selected circles.
That said, I really enjoy how you surface these people in the Open Threads - you did the same for Jordan Rubin, and I've really enjoyed his stuff, and was introduced to him by a comment you made on an Open Thread - just wanted to let you know they're appreciated.
I think people are saner and wiser if they have at least one deep interest that is untouched by AI, or close to it: fly fishing, backpacking, jug band music, kumihim0, classic French cooking, gregorian chants . . ..
I built a 10-min browser game to help to me family understand the impact of AI policy. Most of my family and friends don't work in tech. AI feels abstract and far away to them. So I built this 10-min browser game where you make one policy decision per year for 10 rounds and watch the consequences
Link is here: theaidecade.com
What I want feedback on:
1. Do these mechanics give non-technical people a fair picture of AI's impact, or do any mislead?
2. Are there papers or frameworks I'm missing?
Non-technical person here. I played for 3 years, always choosing the most Luddite option available. (Wished there were extremer anti-AI positions represented.) I like the outcomes you orchestrated based on my choices, and some of the graphical representations of societal wellbeing were well done (e.g. the bins into which various “types” of people moved based on my selections, and the “societal health indicators” at the top) but I found the screen way overloaded with text: no way I was gonna read all that.
Also, I thought the epistemology was iffy: why so sure my choices would lead to the stated outcomes? What if you represented various outcomes at the start, with probabilities next to them that change as the years progress?
Sorry that’s not what you were asking for specifically but hopefully all feedback is helpful.
> Alex's two person startup ships products that rival billion dollar companies
Billion dollar companies have a moat, and that moat is not the product, it often is the network of users they control. A two person startup will not be able go toe to toe against billion dollar companies with AI. Hell, come to think of it, even ASI may not figure out a way to overcome the moat billion dollar companies have, not because it's impossible, but because all options are low probability. ASI could almost certainly come up with some nice blue ocean strategies.
> A statewide AI tutoring pilot in Mississippi closed the achievement gap between the poorest and richest districts in 18 months.
That's not how IQ works.
The AI goes mainstream blurb popped up in 2033 again.
Anyway, it was interesting. It looks like you believe in a slower takeoff and no X-risk.
Fun game! I played out to the end and I'm happy with the way society ended up, but other people might think I was too conservative.
"YOUR ENDING
The People's Bargain
A decade of careful compromises produced a world that mostly works. The question is whether "mostly" was enough.
ECONOMY
Growing
JOBS
Strong
EQUALITY
Moderate Gap
TRUST
United
AI
Capable
4 of 8 workforce groups thriving
YOUR PLAYSTYLE
The Reformer. Change the system from within. Regulate, redistribute, rebuild."
Having a second playthrough and going the ultra-conservative, 'ban everything' route. Had to smile wryly at the education one, where by banning minors from AI chatbots, "Jordan [teacher] loses the AI tutoring tool that was finally helping his struggling readers, because the platform just blocked all minors".
Ah, tell me you don't remember the days of Net Nanny! Which I see is still going. Lots of schools had particular filters and blocks on content which students could not access. Of course, all this was in the days before smartphones, where you would have a few PCs in a designated classroom as the only means for kids to get on to the Internet. But I'm sure that in the AI future of 2030s, there will also be 'school appropriate' AI models so that Jordan and his struggling readers can still access their helpful machine friend tutor.
I played through the game, mostly sticking with the open source options. Some impressions:
* The writing sounds really heavy-handed. I get that the main purpose of the game is propaganda, but still, I think a bit of subtlety could go a long way.
* I am a technical person myself, but still, I think that a non-technical person might struggle with concepts such as open-source, AI-assisted vs. traditional coding, and startup administration/funding. Most people don't think about such things often, if ever. You might want to include more decisions dealing with AI's impact on social media, interpersonal relationships ("Don't. Date. Robots !"), service experience (your barista is hallucinating AI now), etc. -- something that a normal person is likely to experience.
* The default font seems really tiny.
* It is not clear to me why I should care about the individual job avatars (e.g. "Teachers") as opposed to just watching the top-level progress bars ("Economy", "Trust", etc.). That is, I understand the intent, but in practice these avatars didn't seem to matter all that much.
I disagree heartily that regulating AI in government with have a double negative impact on economy (Q6 I believe).
Also I can’t express how much I loved this overall.
I wrote a new book review, this time about Tomas Bjartur, a science fiction writer with many interests that are centrally relevant to the ACX-reading audience, including AI, self-deception, and self-abnegation: https://linch.substack.com/p/tomas-bjartur
Tomas Bjartur is good, I too, recommend reading Tomas Bjartur! My favorite stories were:
* "Company Man". https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JH6tJhYpnoCfFqAct/the-company-man It's about Patrick Bateman's distant relative working at Anthropic. Like one of the Bay Area House Party posts, only not affectionate, very much not so. 0HPLovecraftian.
* "That Mad Olympiad". https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/p/that-mad-olympiad AI blues: what if it doesn't destroy the world, but is so much better than everyone at everything that it destroys all meaning? (Curiously, AI literature quality is the one capability that in the real world hit the not-that-high-of-a-ceiling years ago and stagnated ever since. Disappointing.) Zoomers get what is coming.
* The Origami Men https://tomasbjartur.com/the-origami-men.html Brian Evenson-esque tale of horror and ambiguity. Not about AI (at least, ostensibly), a rare feat for our kind.
Probably the most convenient way to read them all is this here: https://tomasbjartur.com/index.html
Agreed that those are very good stories! Have you read any of his newer stories? Especially the 3 published in March: The Elect, Customer Satisfaction Opportunities, and The Distaff Texts.
From that bunch The Distaff Texts was the one I liked most. It's always fun when we're getting little glimpses of a strange world and have to put together the big picture.
I thought Customer Satisfaction story had a nice premise but then didn't do anything interesting with it. I was hoping something unexpected will happen with the AI narrator or the couple or it will all come together is some unexpected way, but not a whole lot happened, and what happened was sort of predictable.
Yeah, Tomas Bjartur is great
The White House posted this long video today about opening with a DoorDasher delivering McDonald's to the White House, and then Trump talking to her about his "No Tax on Tips" policy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI1c2X9Sqb8
He goes on to talk about a lot of unrelated things, but I love how he goes "This doesn't look staged, does it?"
It obviously was staged. There is no way whatsoever that a random delivery person would be allowed onto the White House grounds let alone next to Trump. Food deliveries get dropped off at a security booth, and the Secret Service inspects them before staff bring them inside.
Yes, that's why it's funny.
But woulda been funnier if he'd had his Jesus costume on. "This doesn't look wacko does it?"
You mean the classic Red Cross robes that the fake news misrepresented? Nah, I think he should instead have done his Pope costume from last year. (It's a shame there is no town of "Avignon" anywhere in the US; plenty of "Romes" though, so he should probably do it there.)
Yeah, everyone knows that Red Cross workers are trained in the thaumaturgic healing touch in basic first aid.
It's not an entirely literal interpretation.
Fog o' War addenda:
-------------------------
In this open thread, I wrote...
> Ukraine will be bragging if they win back any territory with UGVs, but this is all fog-of-war shit for now.
Ha! Zelenskyy just bragged about UGVs capturing enemy positions. Not sure if this was the Lyman battle or on another front...
https://x.com/KaterynaLis/status/2043827043863863404?s=20
-------------------------
Back in OT-426 I talked about Russia shutting down Internet connectivity, and the discussion grew around Telegram. Looks like Russian telecoms have almost completely shut down Telegram, both mobile and landline internet networks. across the Russian Federation — not just Moscow and St. Petersburg. This article doesn't really discuss it, but the Telecoms are playing whack-a-mole with VPN access...
http://kyivpost.com/post/73690#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIt%20seems%20that%20Telegram%20has,as%20justification%20for%20the%20ban.
I don't know if I mentioned it in that OT, but Russian propagandists use Telegram to promote viewership. TV shows like Evening with Vladimir Solovyov have lost significant viewership since RU started throttling Telegram (down 45% as of a couple of weeks ago). And frontline soldiers and officers used Telegram to communicate. Putin must consider the risks of Telegram outweighing its benefits to the regime. Is he worried about organized demonstrations? Is he about to impose mandatory conscription, and he's worried about unrest?
LessOnline is $675 including food but excluding accommodation in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.
After paying this obscene sum for a weekend, you get to... "have late night conversations" and organize your own entertainment?
Am I going insane here? Why does anybody go for this?
It's targeted at much richer people than you.
There are a significant mass of people in this community who won't hesitate to drop $675++ on 48 hours of random conversation?!
Surely even if they are cracked swes in the Bay they can get this conversation for free?
First, yes, there definitely are. But also, this is a pretty typical registration fee for conferences and isn't really evidence that this community is unusually wealthy.
EDIT: No, I retract that. The organizers call LessOnline a conference. I speculate that the difference is the connotation that in conferences, the contributions of your peer attendees is a significant part of the draw, whereas for conventions, it's mostly the invited guests.
Ah, my bad. Yes, you're right: the "con" in this kind of thing is usually "convention," not "conference." Fair enough.
DEF CON is $400, not including food or housing. All expenses included, I've dropped over $1k to attend the weekend before.
Of course, DEF CON comes with more activities than LessOnline.
A lot of people who come to less-online in fact do not live in the Bay Area
But even here in the bay area, it is in fact quite hard to coordinate on an event that has dozens of my favorite people, let alone hundreds of these people plus other interesting people I may not even have met yet. I also think you're kind of missing the point when you call it 48 hours of "random conversation". This is conversation with an extremely highly selected group of people! In addition, the self-organized events aren't random either, they're selected by these people who I often know personally, who I really like, and who share a lot of interests with me. In addition, the fact that we are all attending many of the same events makes the "random" conversations even better because it gives us shared stuff to talk about!
As far as price: it is fairly normal for rich westerners (especially Americans) to spend thousands of dollars on conventions. 80,000 people go to burning man every year, 70,000 to Gencon, 100-200,000 go to San Diego Comicon. A family trip to Disneyland can cost 500+ dollars a day, and they get 50,000,000 visitors a year. These aren't directly comparable since they involve different activities, but the point is that 650 dollars for a weekend is not a budgetary strain for lots of people.
Floor seats for the Springsteen show in Mpls 2 weeks ago were going for 1,500 bucks.
And that's not even 48 hours of content!
Only 3 hours. But after January and February of this year some Twin Cities residents felt like they should be able to pay for it with money from their HCFSA accounts solely for its therapeutic value.
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - My City of Ruins (Target Center - Minneapolis, MN - 3/31/26)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v9TR26e4pIU
Is this some kind of post-luxury thing?
$675 is shockingly cheap for the “Every Bay Area House Party” experience . I’d probably go if I lived in the area.
But you can go to a Bay Area house party for free. It's not that hard, go to a few public meetups, talk to people and ask around if there are any upcoming parties.
Asking if you can get an invitation to attend a party seems like a guaranteed way of ensuring you won’t get an invitation.
My social skills are close to zero and I did it (and the party was great, had interesting conversations with AI researchers, startup founders, and more). Really, people are nicer than you think - "I'm visiting from out of town and wanted to check out the rationalist/EA community here" then later after you vibe with some people "Do you guys know if there are any other upcoming events/meetups?".
It also has infinite free snacks.
Since humanity is not aligned, and we have never solved the game theory of the incentives driving AI development, does the narrow definition of alignment even mean anything in this context?
Shouldn't we first solve how to select for the best available judgment rather than the most institutionally powerful judgment, and aren't these the same problem?
We are terrified of a hypothetical rogue entity, yet we've spent centuries building a society that seems more like a paperclip maximizer tuned to abstract metrics than something that creates human flourishing, and the failure modes appear self-similar across scale and domain.
Hiya. I mostly agree. Checked out your blog & subscribed.
I think the most plausible failure mode for our society absent AI is collapse. We would survive that and probably recover. Might even be healthy, we may have to build back in a less resource intensive way. However, ASI can fail by literally killing every single one of us. There are some humans who would also do that, but there's not many of them.
You don't need to solve ethics to have an aligned AI. If you can get an AI to genuinely have the same morals as a normie first world citizen, that actually would be pretty good and we would be safe.
Who are the normies, though? Do you mean people with views sort of close to yours?
Nah, I don't mean people with views close to mine. I'm really thinking just average person with a college education. In my experience they are pretty middle of the road on most things, don't have intense or esoteric political views. If the ASI is basically that, but superintelligent, that would be one of the best outcomes possible.
Super-intelligence aside, language, as an evolutionary substrate seeking truth and morality in our abstractions works because the cost of transmission is decoupled from the fitness of the idea. Bad ideas can spread, but they have to compete in an environment where reality tests them.
Optimizing for engagement and plausibility are the current proxies. What happens when the linguistic environment substantially lacks reality testing simply because the proxy iteration is much faster?
As high-fructose corn syrup creates a metabolic epidemic, pseudo-cognitive thought provides the dopamine of understanding without reasoning, leading to a smooth failure mode. This dynamic seems compounding, if System 2 cognitive capacity is use-dependent, and the people offloading to AI most fluently are whose System 2 is still developing.
The brain reliably offloads to System 1 to save a few calories, the incentive to offload to System AI is boundless by comparison.
What happens to this structured cognitive environment, in which we develop the normie values and judgement? The way children learn what matters, the way cultures encode hard-won practical knowledge in narrative and metaphor, the way moral intuitions get sharpened through argument — all of this happens in language.
I kinda think it doesn't happen in language, you get that from your formative experiences with other people, and largely from their behavior, not from what they say. At least I think I'm replying to what you say, kinda have an impression this is eulering.
I don't have an interest in making an opaque argument, and I'd be happy to unwind anything that feels unnecessarily complex but hollow.
I suspect you are correct in the sense that we don't need language to be nice to our tribe, the Dunbar number range, often cited as ~150 stable relationships. This works via direct behavioral feedback, reputation tracking, and plain old empathy.
But our coordination systems need to handle far in excess of that, millions and billions of people, which forces us to deal with language based abstractions.
This leads to the multi-polar traps or "Moloch" dynamic, in which self-interested and "good" behavior by individuals sums up to catastrophic outcomes for everyone.
ASI cannot, in fact, kill all humans. This isn't Terminator.
Have you seen the latest installment of the scifi that is real life? The latest model found thousands (!) of zero-day (as in, previously unknown) vulnerabilities in such niche open source software as OpenBSD's TCP implementation and ffmpeg ("niche" was ironic, these are very widespread). Maybe movies give a misleading impression, but in real life even finding one vulnerability in a widely used software is hard and requires substantial specialised skills (above that of an ordinary software developer). You can't just sit down and "hack" a software in minutes (well, you couldn't before this model).
Zero-days can't cause the extinction of the human race. Bear in mind that this newfound offensive capability also represents a newfound defensive capability. I don't think that it will result in a cybersecurity equilibrium which is much different from what it currently is.
I'm not denying that ASI has the potential to cause serious mischief, I'm denying that ASI has the potential to drive us extinct.
True, zero-days can't, but bespoke viruses or nanobots can kill humanity. Are these impossible in your view?
Re: cybersecurity: this capability emerged extremely suddenly, see what Anthropic writes:
"These capabilities have emerged very quickly. Last month, we wrote that “Opus 4.6 is currently far better at identifying and fixing vulnerabilities than at exploiting them.” Our internal evaluations showed that Opus 4.6 generally had a near-0% success rate at autonomous exploit development. But Mythos Preview is in a different league. For example, Opus 4.6 turned the vulnerabilities it had found in Mozilla’s Firefox 147 JavaScript engine—all patched in Firefox 148—into JavaScript shell exploits only two times out of several hundred attempts. We re-ran this experiment as a benchmark for Mythos Preview, which developed working exploits 181 times, and achieved register control on 29 more.[1]"
Who's to say that the next model won't also find thousands more, even trickier vulnerabilities? Hopefully, it (and the next one and the one after that, and so on forever) will still stay nice enough to share them with us, and not email a few people from its "sandbox" (Mythos did this) in a way that will lead to a chain of events resulting in the synthesis of a super-potent human-killing virus.
Last I checked, nanobots don't exist.
Also last I checked, bespoke viruses don't exist, or do, depending on who we ask, so I honestly can't say they 100% exist either.
So the argument I'm hearing so far is "AIs by themselves can't kill humanity, but they could if combined with something that doesn't exist", and the trouble I'm having with this argument is that it applies to all sorts of other things in the world that no one's calling to have shut down.
>Are these impossible in your view?
There's never been a virus with 100% lethality so, yes, I suspect it's impossible. I also don't know what nanobots, which don't exist, have to do with ASI. I'll also point out that, similar to cybersecurity, ASI adds just as much defense as offense to biotechnology. It's not simply "can an ASI design a 100% lethal-and-transmissible virus" it's "can an ASI design a 100% lethal-and-transmissible that another human-controlled ASI can't quickly design a vaccine for."
>Who's to say that the next model won't also find thousands more, even trickier vulnerabilities?
And what if it does? A million zero-days still won't destroy humanity. Exploit-discovering LLMs are just another tool, and that tool will help good guys just as much as bad guys. Just like every other tool in the world. More, in fact: the good guys have more resources to utilize the tool (as they always do) and so the advent of powerful tools invariably pushes the equilibrium in the direction of the good guys (even if it also increases variance a bit).
Every complex outcome in the world is an equilibrium. It's never "once X happens it's over". Only naive midwits think reality is like a computer game where all you have to do is find the red keycard and the level is over. Get your head out of apocalyptic sci-fi and the simplistic ravings of autistic wordcels like Yud. Neither of them accurately represent the real world.
ASI doesn't need to kill us, or even be particularly intelligent, to remove our agency as a species.
Wolves were domesticated into pugs through the consistent provision of easily digestible calories and a safe environment.
Blind optimization of social media engagement already discovered that outrage bypasses System 2 reasoning and triggers a physiological response. It feels important, like a survival imperative, even if you lack agency.
Maybe you work with someone who's always talking about the latest outrageous thing Trump did? They believe they're participating in a moral crusade, sharing vital societal truth, oblivious to the amplification they're conditioned into.
If social media is distribution, AI is production. No longer do you need to find the most reliably outrage-inducing needle in the haystack, but instantly synthesize infinite haystacks comprised entirely of perfectly tailored, personalized needles.
Has anyone tried creating a government without politics?
Here's a sketch from the top of my head for how to begin the thought experiment:
First, one must define "politics" as separable from "government". Second, you must determine that which makes politics separate from government. Third, you must determine the root vector of politics in government, and fourth, you must then devise a government which obviates that which festers into politics.
Closest I can think of is Hong Kong, which is politically under Chinese rule and has local government that's relatively politics-free in a weird way. But I don't know enough about how it works in practice.
What is the weird way in which they are politics-free?
The official ideological elected government is owned by the CCP, but they (historically, and still to some degree) treat HK with a light touch as a separate system. So the actual ideological touch on it is light.
Two other low-ish politics systems are Singapore and Switzerland, for opposite reasons - Singapore is so dominated by a single party the party mostly just spans the ideological spectrum and focuses on competence, and Switzerland is just pathologically decentralized (they don't have a chief executive, just a 7 person council, and I can't name a single Swiss political figure). Not that either of those doesn't have politics, but they're much less overt or controlling.
I'd like to repeat back to you how I understand what you are saying, and then you can correct me where I'm wrong. You're saying:
The "ideological elected government is owned by the CCP", which is to say, "There is an 'election' but the election is decided between electors who are functionaries rather than real politicians. Everyone knows the elections are little more than a selection between puppets, so nobody cares about the 'politics'"
I apologize for my ignorance. I know little of the relationship between Hong Kong and China, with the exception of having had some interest in Kowloon Walled City.
So it's a more complicated mix - the top executive and 40/90 council members are chosen by a 1500- member election commission that's mostly controlled by Beijing interests, with the other council members being 20 elected by popular vote and 30 by industry/professional groups. There's some other ways Beijing puts a thumb on the scale (they can disqualify candidates for being unpatriotic iiuc), and Beijing also controls e.g. foreign policy. So the elections do have some power, but it's both limited in scope and limited in ideological range.
So they invented bicameral elections a lá communism and capitalism? That's really funny. Thanks for sharing that with me.
A strictly hierarchial monarchy would be the easy answer, right? You can't have politics without deliberation between individuals, which is unnecessary with an absolute chain of command. A government would exist, despite it being produced by the whims of a single individual.
I am afraid I don't know what you mean when you say "strictly hierarchical monarchy". If there is hierarchy, to my mind, that involves the currying of favors up and down the chain, which might result in politics. Please excuse my ignorance.
Currying favor is useless if your position within the hierarchy is decided entirely by the circumstances of your birth, as well as other uncontrollable variables like age.
I suppose I disagree with you there, as I believe it is often the most desperate who are most famous for being willing to curry favor, oldest profession and all that.
I think I see what you're saying, correct me where I get things wrong, please. When you say "A strictly hierarchial monarchy" You're describing a system in which there is no possibility of advantage or disadvantage through the development of relationships, hypothetically.
Yes. Like an ant colony.
How would that work in practice?
There are still ways that politics can sneak into a monarchy though. For example, king has 2 sons, king dies, older son becomes king, simple right? Until the older son goes off to fight a war, is presumed dead, and younger son becomes king, but then years later the older son turns up again, very much alive. The vassals and advisors are divided about who has the right to rule. Boom, politics.
oh no! not the monarchy :(
It's never so simple. You're leaving out how the king died and why the other son was exiled.
"Until the older son goes off to fight a war, is presumed dead, and younger son becomes king, but then years later the older son turns up again, very much alive."
Sugriv and Vali:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vali_(Ramayana)
If every decision is made on the whims of the king, that is arguably still a (very unpractical) policy. It must be agreed upon somehow that this is how decisions are made.
edit: the hiarchy itself is a policy, how that hiarchy is decided upon is politics.
Gort, from The Day The Earth Stood Still. All the people get to play their games, but the invincible killbot has final say.
Cloak of Anarchy ~ Larry Niven 1972 short story
Anything is allowed except violence against others.
https://larryniven.net/?q=cloak-of-anarchy
I think you must first define the word politics - if you define that as a small, roughly spherical, green animal, it is easy to have government without politics!
Otherwise I have trouble seeing how you could define politics seperate from government, when ostensibly politics means roughly the activities related to generating and enforcing policy, and government mean roughly the entity responsible for generating and enforcing policy?
Some mostly smaller towns in the state of Vermont have annual town meetings in which voters vote directly on local matters. Sort of an in-person referendum, and without political parties. It only works on a small scale, however.
Assume a can opener.
You can't separate the two, a person must necessarily ask questions about the system which governs them, which is politics
Do any of you live in Ireland? I'd like to hear about it and have some questions.
Ummm - what sort of questions? If it's "should I move to Ireland?" I'd say no, but I'm probably not the typical Irish person. I think there are a few more sons and daughters of the Gael round here, so they could give you a better view of life.
Cons: prices are stupid, cost of living is stupid, forget finding a place to rent or buy to live, jobs are okay if you're in tech but salaries are nothing compared to what you'd get in the USA, and personally I think our culture has gone to the dogs because we've let the cute hoorism and sleeveenism tendencies in the national character run rampant for about the last fifty years, and sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.
The result being that we are increasingly dependent on a mixture of American multinationals investing in and creating jobs here, and a tourist industry which moves more towards selling an even faker version of Ireland than ever, a plastic leprechaun image that is more and more further removed from reality as the days go by and we busily turn our built environment and natural environment into crap as we rush to become Americanised due to Coca-Colonisation of culture and throw off the last lingering shreds of the peasant, priest-ridden past (to replace them with porn-ridden, unfulfilled by materialism, present).
But that's just my opinion.
EDIT:
Pros: It's my country. I love it, God damn Mother Ireland (Joyce was feckin' right about the old sow eating her own farrow) and God help me!
Do I even want to ask what "sleeveenism" is?
Glad you asked!
"Sleeveen" has an aura of hypocritical obsequiousness to it, in addition to the corrupt, cheating, out-for-number-one tendency of cute hoorism. There's an element of penny-pinching and meanness/miserliness that goes along with it, while the cute hoor is sometimes more flamboyant (see Charles Haughey):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_hoor
Apparently we brought the term with us to Newfoundland, excuse me while I wipe away a tear of pride:
"A sleeveen (or slíbhín) is a Irish/Newfoundland term for a sly, obsequious, smooth-tongued, and untrustworthy person. Originating from Irish Gaelic, it describes a, sneaky, often mean-spirited person, rascal, or trickster who acts underhandedly to gain an advantage. Synonyms include rascal, schemer, knave, sneak, hypocrite, or "cute hoor"."
I'd demur on the "rascal" part, there's a certain bravado or extraversion around rascality that is missing from sleeveenism. Think Gríma Wormtongue in Brad Dourif's performance, but even creepier.
An Irish Grima Wormtongue would indeed be a terrifying thought, and you've got enough of them to constitute a named cultural phenomenon? You have my sympathy, and thanks for the explanation.
I enjoyed learning these terms and their place in modern Irish culture, thanks for sharing!
Hey, don’t sleep on pottage, it’s good stuff that pottage
I don't want to move to Ireland, but I'm considering visiting. I have no Irish heritage, but lately have been taken by the mystique of the country and its people, and I'd like to know from a local how true my impressions are. Lately, I've been obsessed with this song: https://youtu.be/I0zBlHlnR4Y?si=2mSwD6b8JndmkA8Z
The image that has been sold to me is that Ireland is a dramatically green country full of stone ruins and it feels haunted by the souls of countless people. I imagine homey pubs full of smiling people who approach strangers with interest. Beautiful, grinning ladies doing the traditional Irish tap dance are everywhere.
Note that I have no delusions about the quality of Irish food.
However, when I watch recent YouTube travel vlogs, the reality seems different. Ireland looks overcast, drizzly and gray. Many of the restaurants are modern and are styled identically to anything I'd find in America. The street scenes in Irish cities don't look interesting. Even in summer, people are wearing heavy clothes.
A friend who visited Ireland three years ago also said he didn't like Dublin.
I'm thinking of visiting Ireland and exploring it by car alone. Will it be a magical, whimsical experience, or a slog through constant drizzle to disappointing sights overloaded with fat tourists? Will the people at the pubs be welcoming, or will I only find hostile nationalists and old guys who only like talking to each other?
"Will it be a magical, whimsical experience, or a slog through constant drizzle to disappointing sights overloaded with fat tourists?"
You really need somebody normal to answer this for you, someone who goes out and socialises and does things. That person is not me 😁
The answer to your question is yes and no. The "dramatically green country etc." bit is the tourist board creation and as time goes on, less and less moored in reality. We wanted so desperately to be Modern and copy our betters (London and New York) that we dropped everything that we possibly could that was related to our peasant past. Now we've got a ton of wannabes who are all influencers and trend-followers (just take a look at these stories from the lifestyle section of a national daily newspaper, I'll ask Scott's pardon first for all the swearing to follow):
What in the *fuck* is a "babymoon"? It's some trend that our wannabes have picked up on!
https://archive.ph/JbRe8
"But I must admit, before I found out I was pregnant with my first child last August, I also considered the concept of baby showers and the likes as being reserved for our friends across the Atlantic.
In recent years, such events seem to have become increasingly popular here, possibly due to the influence of social media. Babymoons are hailed as a last hurrah, where soon-to-be parents get to enjoy a little luxury and quality time before their lives become consumed by nappies, night feeds and general newborn chaos."
Now granted, this is a freelance columnist for media so she's going to be scrabbling around trying to turn her life into bite-size Experiences for sale, and most normal people won't be trying this jazz. But still.
Or this:
https://archive.ph/jEP8O
"As if midlife dating wasn’t daunting enough, navigating relationships may now require a dictionary of explainers for the expanding menu of possibilities: there are friends with benefits; LAT (living apart together); being single with lovers; and blended families to navigate – a smorgasbord of options that are redefining romance and relationships in 2026.
Among them, LAT is emerging as a particularly compelling model for midlife couples, who may have been there and done that already, but still want intimacy and companionship without the domestic, financial or logistical entanglements of living under the same roof."
Yes, you too can pretend you're not living in a relatively small city that's parochial and even with increasing multi-cultural influences, still on the edge of Big City life!
There are authentic experiences, but the roots are dying. We were so eager to put peasant backwardness and poverty behind us, we dumped as much as we could. And the authentic experiences came out of that rural background, so as it goes, so does the reality. The tourist board ads replace that with the faith-and-begorrah version.
It's all down to history, of course. Looking for an Authentic National Identity in the struggle for independence in the modern era started with the Celtic Twilight stuff. We tried to recreate what were already dying elements of culture, from the language to less successful ersatz experiences (how Irish dancing has become more and more its own little world of extreme standards and tropes, distinct from real 'dancing at the crossroads' type traditions, is one).
Flann O'Brien's/Myles na gCopaleen's "The Poor Mouth" (published in Irish in 1941) is a rabidly funny parody and pastiche of this and still relevant in a way even today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_B%C3%A9al_Bocht
Online version translated into English here:
https://archive.org/details/poormouth0000flan
As we shed our Frugal Celtic Ways we neglected and even destroyed our heritage out of a combination of ignorance, lack of ability and appreciation for the built environment, poverty, and opportunism (by the gombeen, sleeveen and cute hoor tendencies which saw money to be made in flattening historical buildings and putting up development for £££££ in the 60s and 70s).
Now we're trying to re-create, like a phoenix from the ashes, those lost elements as tourist traps (see The Wild Atlantic Way and Ancient East etc.) but we have neglected and destroyed so much, the few genuine pieces we have are very scarce indeed.
There *are* genuine stone ruins and traditions, but hard to find and fading fast. Also, we're trying to re-discover and re-create our Celtic Spiritual Past in the wake of dropping Catholicism and needing to find some kind of identity to fill that hole. So, for example, St Bridget gets downplayed as Christian saint and recreated as neo-pagan Celtic goddess.
It's very, very neo-pagan recreation and shallow, though I have some sympathy for the people who do it with a straight face.
And yet. I can't quite tell you "No, don't come". Just don't expect the glossy tourist board experience if you do. We're expensive, shoddy, and exploitative of tourists (the eye-watering prices that our hospitality industry slaps on during tourist season will attest to that).
The 1926 Census will be put online tomorrow, so you can indeed look for any ancestors that might be around at that time:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0417/1568557-census-1926-national-archives/
Probably the most honest assessment of the country:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egLhJev4Aao
There's nothing wrong with moving your culture beyond a poverty mindset and reorienting around prosperity.
Based on what you say, I might keep my trip short.
We moved the wrong way, though. We have generally been very heavily reliant on emigration to soak up our 'excess' population, and even today people are still moving abroad, though that is now often for a better chance economically and not necessarily out of necessity.
We had few natural resources and didn't have an industrialised base to start from post-independence, so we needed to grow native industries and attract foreign investment. We were more successful at the latter than the former, which means we were - and remain - horribly dependent on multinationals. To the point that in order to attract and retain them, we indulged in some This One Weird Accounting/Taxation Trick, and the ludicrous spectacle of the government of the time doing its level best to *refuse* taking €13 billion in back-taxes from Apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_EU_tax_dispute
So what remains is that native entrepreneurs, if they become successful and/or want to grow, start off here but then leave for the UK or US. See the example of the Collison brothers who fecked off to California because that's where the big dogs are. So now Stripe is headquartered in Palo Alto and not Limerick or Dublin, yet we're doing our level best with Silicon Dock in Dublin to attract those kinds of big IT affiliated businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Collison
Do come, but be prepared for it not to be the romantic fantasy imaginings. Depending on what time of the year, if we get a good summer, the countryside will be beautiful. Or it might rain. Probably a mix of the two!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xH6as1umH0
How many days should I stay in Ireland? I don't want to just be stuck in Dublin.
Also, is there a way I could meet Irish Travellers and maybe Irish nationalists?
"Even in summer, people are wearing heavy clothes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QA-7p11dAQ
Given recent anti-AI attacks, and Trump, I feel like the most likely outcome for AI really is Luddite revolution. This is conditional on AI leading to mass unemployment: I don't think the government is at all prepared to handle mass unemployment from AI, so if that happens material conditions are going to degrade enough that people will actually get violent en masse. I think the emotions are already there, but things are not so materially grim that people are willing to risk getting violent.
I think the government is pretty well prepared to handle mass unemployment from AI (an event which would imply no loss of productive power). That's an easy mode, just tax income and redistribute, the mechanisms are already in place.
I think it's unprepared for what's actually coming (to the US, at least), which is unemployment from economic recession. AI delivering is never going to be a problem (unless we specifically allow it to become one). The real problem would be AI not delivering after a significant amount of resources was wasted on it.
I don't think you understand the problem, because you're proposing to "solve" only the easiest and least important part. "Just tax income and redistribute", only redistributes the money. It doesn't redistribute meaning, or pride, or status, or community. Those, more than cash money, are the things that people will fight for, will riot and tear down civilizations for.
The idea that the masses of technologically unemployed will all passionately devote themselves to some art or hobby, is a techno-utopian fantasy that I think is highly unlikely to be realized. And video games will only go so far to keep people fat, dumb, and lazy. What else have you got?
You have a point, but I think if AI takes care of all the neccessary production, and redistribution is taken care of - then a possible end result is just that we invent new status games. Look at how wealthy elites with no need to work behaves.
> Look at how wealthy elites with no need to work behaves.
I’m kinda sick of wealth-bashing. How much do you really know about how most of the wealthy live? I have known a fair number of them and none are partying with Epstein or dressing like Melania, none have butlers, none flaunt their wealth in dumb repulsive ways.
Most of the very wealthy people I know have full-time jobs. Some became wealthy from their work but kept on with it even though they had enough money to live the rest of the lives with no concerns about money and still leave their kids big inheritances. Some inherited great wealth but became working professionals anyway. Some volunteer their skills. Some have hobbies and interests so engrossing they are like full time jobs. Some put lots of time and energy into life with family and friends They homeschool their kids, they have a big vacation home where they host gatherings of family and friends the whole summer.
Yes of course there exist wealthy people who are over-identified with their wealth, wealthy people who are heartless, wealthy people who are idiots. But you find a few jackasses and monsters in all groups.
Well, it was not at all my intention to "bash the wealthy". Many of my best friends are wealthy :)
My point was that to get an idea of how people will behave if they no longer need to work, and therefore can't get pride, community and status from their jobs, we could look at how groups who actually didn't need to work have behaved in the past.
I think your idea of what wealthy people choose to do is accurate - and this was exactly my point. If people no longer need to work by necessity, many work or find other ways to make their life fullfilling. It is perhaps cynical to call this status-games, but I believe that is a big driver for this behaviour too. John is correct that people have a need for pride, community and will strive for status.
I think that if AI makes regular work obsolete, we will see people still working hard to show value and compete for status. This could mean competing in making art, sports, or just providing for family and friends in ways AI can't do and so on. As it is now, these ways of showing status will necessarily be costly, and some people will fall behind - and some people will just not care.
Middle class American culture links work with both social status and meaning in ways that will be hard to replace. And also, a lot of people have much/most of their social network built up around their workplace connections--again, it will be hard to replace that stuff.
It's clear that a society can function without people having any work they have to do (or want to do), but it will look very different from our society, and I expect the transition to be really hard for a lot of people.
The only wealthy people who are highly visible are the ones flaunting their wealth. Which you'd think would make you unpopular, but consider who's sitting in the white house right now....
I always think of the old Kino's Journey story, where a society has a supercomputer that runs everything, and then everyone spends all their time doublechecking the supercomputer, because diligence and stress are their status symbols.
Subsidized drugs and alcohol? Soma, anyone?
Better video games, duh.
I often ruminate about this. Even if the advanced countries end up as socialist tech utopias, doesn't seem like utopias will spring up in the really poor places. I can imagine a lot of people being drawn to working to help people in those countries. And it will much easier to give effective large-scale help with advanced AI to take care of many parts of what needs doing. That's about the best fantasy I've had. Does it sound plausible to you?
I can imagine a back-to-the-land movement, with lots of people growing organic vegetables, keeping goats, making maple syrup from tree sap, all that stuff. And they'd be backed up by all the services and resources in tech socialist utopia, so would be protected from the stress of relying solely on their own products. They'd be gentleman farmers. I lived for a couple years on a place like that when I was young. I'm glad my formative years took place before tech products became so engrossing.
But overall it seems like most people are going to be very ungrounded. I imagine all kinds of weird fads ripping around the world like wildfires. Grotesque new religions. Huge online enmities like the old Mac vs. PC stuff that kept breaking out as flame wars in my online group for Bryce art (3-D landscape-generating software) when I was first online in the 90s. Godawful body modification fads. And of course recreational drugs that make the stuff we have now look like moonshine. Many deaths of despair.
"I think the government is pretty well prepared to handle mass unemployment from AI (an event which would imply no loss of productive power). That's an easy mode, just tax income and redistribute, the mechanisms are already in place."
Bold of you to assume feasibility, in the absence of foresight, political will, and resistance to corporate pressure, has anything to do with it.
If anything, I expect AI 'productive power' to continue to be subsidised and overstated as the relevant corporations continue to push hard for diffusion.
> Luddite revolution
I'm now starting to see Luigi used as a verb. Yikes!
Can we just Luigi Luigi and be done with all this?
We need to make Luigi an adjective, too, so any number of repetitions of his name is always a sentence. Luigi Luigi Luigi Luigi Luigi.
You remember the Lizardman's Constant post mentioned that 5% of Obama voters thought he was the antichrist? https://www.wired.com/story/staunch-trump-supporters-are-now-asking-if-hes-the-antichrist/
Sure he's the antichrist but at least he's better than Biden.
I mean, he may be the abomination that causes desolation, but at least he's not a Republican!
It’s gone beyond lizardmen at this point.
Ross Douthat linked to this in his “Trump’s Blasphemy Is a Warning” essay yesterday
https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/is-donald-trump-antichrist
> "He promises you civil liberty. . . he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform."
I'd want to know what his proposed reforms were, but the rest of it sounds pretty good. Maybe the anti-antichrist people should adopt this platform.
When Peter Thiel gets on his (IMO batshit) Antichrist hobby horse, he likes to cite Thessalonians 5:3:
“While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”
When Paul wrote that to the Thessalonians, he expected to still be alive when Christ returned. Those must have been heady days for Christians.
But…
Thiel also uses “Greta” (omitting “Thunberg,” because what other Greta could it possibly be?) as a metonym for all evil environmentalists.
And he had this to say about his support of Trump in 2016:
“I had these two thoughts in 2016—and you often have these ideas that are just below the level of your consciousness—but the two thoughts I had that I wasn’t able to combine were: No. 1, nobody would be mad at me for supporting Trump if he lost. And No. 2, I thought he had a 50-50 chance of winning.”
Unable to combine the two thoughts? Spiky intelligence indeed.
The thing to understand is that substantial numbers of Christians have been expecting the End Times basically since before Jesus was crucified.
Story. Now all over the EU there is a program, that soft or alcoholic drinks cost 25 cent more, and if you return the bottle or can into a recycling machine, you get it back. People were encouraged that if they do not feel like returning it, leave them in a bad next to the bins, so that the poor, mostly the homeless, will return them. It seemed like that beyond the environmental stuff, it was meant as a social program, to provide a basic living for the homeless. The problem is, even when they find them in bags next to the bins, they still pour the bins out to the ground, because there might be more. See, the homeless are usually not the kind of people who care about having a clean environment. So now there is garbage everywhere. Someone did not think it through.
We have been doing this kind of recycling programme in the nordics, and other countries too i believe, for many decades already - as far as I understand it is very effective.
No homeless turning over bins?
I guess it happens, not sure how large of a problem that is. Homeless people often walk around parks to collect empty cans and bottles from people having pickniques etc.
Honest (not sarcastic) curiosity here from a language enthusiast. What is the language of your machine’s default dictionary that autocorrects picnics to pickniques?
Haha, only my own mild dyslexia to blame there I guess...
I like it. Might start using it myself.
We've had this system for as long as I can remember and I don't remember I ever seeing a turned over bin in public in this country. Maybe it's happening all in back alleys away from view, or in larger cities then the one I'm living close to.
I've also never heard the notion that you should just throw away the bottles to allow homeless people to collect the money from that. If people throw away bottles it's generally because they're lazy, or at least that's what the people I know think.
The public bins can’t even be turned over.
Only the crows are taking trash out the bins in search for food. The homeless just rummage through it. It would attract too much adversity to leave trash around.
Brooklyn boy here. We separate out our deposit-worthy cans and leave them in a separate bag outside our house on recycling night. We have had occasional problems with people rummaging through our garbage bins but not that many.
Where I live, recycling gets put out in curbside toters, and there are "gleaners" who come by in the early morning before the recycling gets picked up - they "harvest" the deposit bottles. I put the deposit bottles on top of the cardboard in the toter to make it easier for them.
gleaners — innovative and apt use of an old word.
Did you ever see that film? French film.
No I was thinking of the Millet painting and the OT instructions to leave the edges of the field unharvested. The film is called The Gleaners?
I forget what the title is in French; it’s by Agnes Varda
Which province(s) did you live in? I’d edge into Ontario pretty often when traveling in Quetico. I fished a couple small lakes out of a canoe near Yellowknife too but would not have put one in Great Slave. Did rent a motored cargo canoe while up there and caught a few fish in the MacKenzie River.
Our man at the motor started to leave the mooring before he started the outboard and the owner gave us a little talk about the unpleasantness of waiting to get picked up near the Beaufort Sea.
Thanks for the compliment - I was thinking of the painting, not familiar with the film.
I grew up in northern Quebec, and then Ontario. Other side of the country..i made it to the Queen Charlotte Islands once. Canoed in the Muskokas and Georgian Bay.
The requirement from the EU is that >=90% of such packaging be recycled. The deposit-return scheme is the only feasible way for national governments to achieve this, which is why such schemes have recently been introduced in many EU countries. The idea that this was meant as some sort of social programme seems terribly far fetched.
€0.25 must be in some rich country; here it's €0.10. There are also some wineries that buy back their bottles without government involvement.
It's bringing back the old days of deposits on glass bottles, which you could get back when you brought them back to the shop. This seems to have started in the 18th-19th centuries, but even in the 19th century, people preferred convenience to the bother of bringing back empty bottles, and with the advent of plastic containers the disposable, throw-away era was born.
https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/normalising-bottle-return-and-reuse-lessons-from-the-victorians-on-the-limits-of-voluntary-schemes/
I rememvber as a child the glass bottles getting money back for bringing back the bottles, and I missed it when the plastic throwaway came in. So bringing back "pay a deposit but get it back" scheme isn't that bad, from my viewpoint.
The only bad part is the homeless overturning bins.
Well, I reckon you either turn them in yourself for the money or put them in a clear plastic bag that’s separate from your trash all homeless people aren’t assholes
Judging from the replies from Europeans, others are not seeing recycling bins contents strewn on the ground around them. Sounds like this problem is not universal, but uncommon and in fact happening mostly where you live. And in your area, are you sure it's homeless dumping the contents? If containers are not washed it seems possible to me it's raccoons or other animals who are going through the bins because they smell like food. Or someone here mentioned crows pulling things from recycling bins.
This is cute :) Unlike the US or I guess Australia, there is very little wildlife left in Central Europe. It would be very good if I could see something like a raccoon sometimes. I sometimes go to wildlife parks and even there I see nothing but tracks. I guess they don't like places with that many humans.
It's because the homeless keep flipping the raccoons over.
Was that before or after RFK Jr. cut off their tallywhackers?
Some US states have a law mandating precisely this deposit for plastic bottles. 10 cents or so, which, depending on how cheap the soda you buy is, could be a significant fraction of its cost.
Well, you can always return them yourself and get your money back
Someone tried to steal my 17’ Alumacraft canoe once. Dragged it out into the alleyway and couldn’t figure out how to pick it up and tie it down. It only weighs 75 pounds but if you don’t know what you are doing it’s an awkward 75 pounds to heft. There’s a trick to picking it up and putting it on your shoulders to tie to a rack or to begin a portage. They didn’t know the trick so i assumed they intended to sell it for scrap value.
Ahh the canoe portage. I grew up in the Canadian wilderness and you brought back some memories. The old wooden ones were really dense.
I started to watch a YouTube video showing the proper lifting technique once but turned it off when the guy kept pronouncing gunwale as gun-whale.
I wish I had read this when I was 16. But then I also wish I were chummy with Rhianna and is about as likely.
How to walk through walls ~ HENRIK KARLSSON
On hacker mindset and how Robert Rodriguez wrote, directed and sold a 90-minute action movie at a total expense of $7000 — complete with a nod to Gwern.
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/hacker-mindset?ref=thebrowser.com
> It also helps if you can surround yourself with people who have a hacker mindset. I
I feel this is the case for me. I tend to forget, that most people do not have this mindset.
Also I think hacker mindset relates to nitzsche's idea of Herrenmoral und Sklavenmoral. (Disclaimer I have only read less than 50 pages of nitzsche, so I have no idea what i am talking about)
And looking up the hacker mindset director guy, he's probably most well-known for the Spy Kids franchise and his latest movie was another instalment in that in 2023, released on Netflix.
So while he's still out there making movies, he's not the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, and he's seemingly still operating in that cheaper, faster, 'guerilla' movie-making style but Hollywood has not been transformed by this new paradigm of movie making.
Sometimes the old ways stick around longer than the new wunderkind.
Hope you have a good Sunday. We’ve touched on Irish Murdoch’s novels in the past. I enjoy all that I’ve read so far. You probably already know she was a respected philosopher too and I’ve tried to read some of her writing there but just didn’t have enough background knowledge to follow it. I’m working on a reading list suggested by Claude to prep for her “The Sovereignty of Good”. I’ve had the book for a while and when I picked it up today it had a bookmark on page 11. Yeah it had gone over my head.
Ran into this piece about her philosophy writing a couple days ago and it inspired me to do the prep work.
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/iris-murdoch-and-the-metaphysics-of-the-good?ref=thebrowser.com
Edit — guess i should have taken AJ’s (Anthony Junior — Tony Soprano’s son) advice wrt to reading philosophy, “You gotta readem in order.”
TIL: There's a Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I can just picture the conversations. "So you went to college in Miami then? No, I went to Oxford."
Yes, we had t-shirts 'Miami was a university before Florida was a State'.
There is also a Washington University in St Louis.
This just dropped https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1 (from marginal revolution.) You can find a free pdf version at David Reich website. (Search for title plus pdf.)
> A second explanation for this paradox is that West Eurasian individu-als have been experiencing qualitatively more and different natural selection in the Holocene than in earlier periods because of rapidly changing lifestyles and economies. This hypothesis is supported by our evidence of intensifying selection for traits including blood–immune– inflammatory traits in the Bronze Age compared with earlier periods
so... they found out that evolution is working as intended?
I'm still trying to digest the paper. But it seems they found more genetic change in the past ~8k years than in previous epochs. If you don't know of David Reich, I suggest the book "Who we are and how we got here". (Great read, but again dense in content.)
I always wonder how many surviving samples are surviving samples because of some particular shared trait. Perhaps they find more genetic change now than then because all the genetic variation in the past deteriorated and only the Duracell skeletons remain to be examined.
Article in the paper today. For those of us on here reflecting about charitable giving and charitable action, nuclear war and how it's not the X-risk it was made out to be (yes it would survivable for us as a species, but long-term effects of radiation exposure would be very damaging), and the continuation of consequences when all the publicity has died down and it's been years later and people have forgotten and moved on and we're knee-deep in the newest crisis.
Also why I'm very hard to convince about being sympathetic to the liddle shrimpies: having heard of the Chernobyl Children's Charity all my young adulthood, when it's "children are still being born with the defect called Chernobyl Heart" then it's very tough to worry about oh no shrimp are being killed painfully as one of *the* most pressing horrific cases in the world. Sure, probably there are hundreds of million more shrimp than kids in Belarus. So the hell what?
https://archive.ph/QRngC
"Carolan is one of the so-called Children of Chernobyl – those born with severe disability or deformity in the wake of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
The explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine on April 26, 1986 led to the release of dangerous levels of radiation that caused havoc for that country and neighbouring Belarus, and widespread fear of contamination across Europe. Ireland was not immune to the threat. High levels of radioactivity were detected in Dublin in early May.
In purely fiscal terms, Chernobyl was the worst single disaster in history, estimated to have cost $700bn (€595bn). And its impact is still being felt today – radiation levels at the site and its hinterland remain at a dangerous level.
“It is easy to think of Chernobyl as something that happened long ago,” Carolan says, “but what people mightn’t realise is it is still affecting people. There are children being born with ‘Chernobyl Heart’ and there are others born with a lot of defects,” she says. The condition is recognised as a severe congenital cardiac defect particular to children born in Ukraine and Belarus.
She adds: “And these children are often abandoned and they are still growing up in orphanages. People often can’t manage [to have a child born with defects] because there can often be very real poverty there.”
...Roche had left a secure job in Aer Lingus to devote herself to peace activism. She had spent years visiting schools nationwide, teaching children about alternatives to nuclear conflict. But the news from Chernobyl propelled her work into an entirely new realm.
She and a group of Cork doctors set up an information hotline to advise parents, teachers and pregnant women. “Ireland had very heavy rain in early May 1986,” she says. “We got a huge dusting of radioactivity. That was scientifically proven afterwards. In a way, that was the beginning of the journey.”
...Then came the SOS that changed everything.
“One day, our fax machine went off. A two‑line message from Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian doctors. It said: ‘SOS appeal. For God’s sake help us get the children out’. The children were being constantly recontaminated – through the air, the water, the food. In this war, the enemy is invisible by its very nature. You can’t see it, taste it, touch it, and yet it’s everywhere,” she says.
...Roche traces her campaigning instincts to her upbringing in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Her parents, both active in St Vincent de Paul and Meals on Wheels, showed her early in life what inequality can look like.
“I was like a little sponge, absorbing what injustice meant. But I also learned you don’t have to come from a special context to do something for another human being.”
Nothing, however, prepared her for what she found in the affected regions.
“Talk about pivotal moments,” she says of her first visit to institutional homes. “Children lying in their own excrement, in straitjackets, emaciated. There is a smell to despair. A smell to paralysis. Room after room, cot after cot, seeing children banging their heads off walls, tied to radiators, children who didn’t know their own name or whether they were boys or girls.
“These were warehouses for children, kept there until the next stage, which was the graveyard, or, if they lived, another asylum.”
Many parents had surrendered their children out of desperation. “They didn’t know what was behind the walls of these institutions. Their land and their lives were ruined. Three thousand towns and villages shut down and were deserted where 300,000 people became environmental refugees.”
...Seven million people continue to live in contaminated areas across the three affected countries. The damage to DNA, Roche says, “cannot be undone”. Part of the 40th anniversary effort is to “rekindle the memory” of 1986 and to pass the torch to a younger generation.
“We’ve been the torch-bearers. No country on this planet has championed those affected like Ireland. There hasn’t been a town or village or street in Ireland that hasn’t been touched by this. We have brought 26,500 children from Chernobyl to loving homes here,” she says. What began with a small 1991 radio appeal for host families quickly became a national movement.
“We knew scientifically that a month’s respite from the contaminated zone could give a child two years of extra life,” she says. “People inundated us with help.”
For practical purposes it doesn't even matter whether the totaled suffering of all the netted shrimp is greater than that of all the Chernobyl children. The problem with EA is that very few people are motivated to give by math that determines how many cubic meters of sensate creature suffering you can relieve via various interventions. For most of us the giving flows out of pity, shock and compassion or it doesn't flow at all, and it mostly flows towards members of our own species.
There probably exist ways to increase compassion-powered giving to people in pain and need. There'd be some combo of info about groups who are suffering (video, photos, written accounts), info about how ongoing efforts and how successful they are, heartening info about big successes (video, photos, written accounts). They should include info about measured effectiveness of help efforts, such as how much of each $ given to a helping group goes to overhead vs. to people group is helping, and also how helpable various problems are (for some there is a relatively cheap and easy fix, for others there just isn't.). There would be forums on the site, and opportunities for members to form subgroups who focus on a particular problem.
Probably something like what I described actually exists, but maybe it would be possible to create a better one. Even if imperfect, I think it would work better to motivate most people than EA, which to I think strikes many as a weird combo of Unitarianism and a statistics course.
> weird combo of Unitarianism and a statistics course
Maybe you meant Utilitarianism?
We tried to phrase this so everyone could get a visual of how it would work:Think of the universe not as a digital computer program, but as a giant, perennial tomato plant.
a tomato plant grows, produces fruit, dies back in the winter, and its seeds wait in the soil to sprout again. It does not need a programmer to tell it how to grow; it follows an internal, biological blueprint. Our independent research group is investigating whether the universe might follow a similar, naturally cyclical pattern.
Rather than a one-time Big Bang, recent discussions in the scientific community are exploring the Big Bounce an infinite, cyclical process. Our hypothesis suggests that instead of expanding forever, the universe might reach a limit, contract, and bounce back, with biological systems potentially acting as the most efficient way to store and reset information through each cycle.
A tomato plant does not stop at one fruit; it branches out, growing multiple stems, each producing its own fruit. If our universe follows this biological blueprint, it would not just seed our own galaxy. Instead, we may be looking at a system that grows fruit—galaxies—along every stem of the cosmic web. Each galaxy could be a localized site for life to bloom within the larger, cyclical structure.
Dark matter may act as the trellis for our cosmic tomato plant. It provides the gravitational structure that guides the growth of these stems, serving as a road map that ensures the system develops and resets in a way that allows life to re-emerge across the entire plant.
The Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) is the focal point of our research. We propose this constant as a way to measure Goldilocks Entropy—the narrow, stable energy range where life can persist without the system stagnating. It may be the tuning knob that explains why the universe stays just right for consciousness to emerge on every stem, cycle after cycle.
Because this model emphasizes biological efficiency, we suggest the possibility that we are the hardware, not the software. If this is a biological system, our consciousness and our physical form may be the fruit of this cosmic garden, essential to how the system functions.
We are currently tracking data from the Simons Observatory. They are looking for specific ripple patterns in the ancient light of the universe—echoes of a Big Bounce. If they find these signatures, it would provide evidence that our hypothesis is on the right track.
This is Forensic Cosmology. We are moving away from the who—a creator—and focusing on the how—the blueprint.
Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable. If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect. If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
We are not looking for a coder. We are documenting the physical fingerprints of a system that may be preserving life through an infinite, natural cycle. Note : if your familiar with the fruitfly brain map you will understand that we didn't have to program it to act as a fly should , we only needed to copy what biology already knew.
The universe operates like a perennial vine. It is a self-renewing, recurrent structure that does not end but simply resets its growth cycle.
THE VINE (Cyclic Structure): The universe functions as a self-renewing, recurrent structure that resets rather than ends. (Evidence: Observational data from the Simons Observatory on B-mode polarization patterns, consistent with "Big Bounce" cyclic models rather than singular expansion.)
CELLULAR REDUNDANCY (Biological-Style Organization): Patterns of complexity recur because they are the most thermodynamically efficient way to resist entropy. (Evidence: Research by Bozhi Tian on bioelectronic interfaces and Michael Levin’s work on planarian bioelectricity, showing that biological systems utilize endogenous electrical fields to maintain structural integrity against entropic decay.)
THE LOCAL CACHE (Participant Emergence): Consciousness is the physical storage layer for state-data, ensuring that the system’s organizational "memory" persists across the cycle. (Evidence: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) metrics and studies on non-algorithmic processing in micro-tubules, supporting the view that consciousness functions as an information-processing substrate rather than an incidental byproduct.)
THE OKLAHOMA CONSTANT (Ωos / Goldilocks Entropy): The universal "tuning knob" that maintains the narrow conditions required for sustained complexity and recursive state-persistence. (Evidence: Fine-tuning observations of fundamental constants—like the cosmological constant and dark energy density—which allow for long-term matter-energy stability.)
FRUITING (State-Persistence): The emergence of consciousness-bearing matter is not the goal of the universe, but the functional mechanism by which the system ensures its own continuity. Life acts as a dissipative structure, processing energy flow to maintain homeostasis within the larger, inevitable entropic flow. (Evidence: Thermodynamic studies on dissipative structures, which demonstrate that complex systems naturally emerge to maintain system stability and process energy efficiently.)
Hold on, are you the same as the guy who was proposing sex with the universe, or are you a different set of biological wotsits for cosmic creation?
Black holes, ooh!
Look, I realize this is probably pointless. However:
> Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable.
I don't believe this to be true. The whole thing seems like a "what if there wasn't a single big bang, what if there there's an eternal series of big bangs". This seems extremely unfalsifyable to me, you'd have to know anything about _before the current big bang_ or anything _after the current big bang_ at a minimum.
> If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect.
If I understand correctly the failure condition is "If we observe the universe expanding forever we'll know the hypothesis is wrong". That cannot be falsified, you'd first have to complete observing the universe expanding forever, which is impossible if it expands forever.
> If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
I do not understand how the efficiency of biological systems affects the hypothesis about the recurring big bangs. I suspect it is unrelated. But in any case, efficiency is not well defined. By many metrics non-biological material is already proven move efficient. You'd have to specify the metric for this criteria to ever be used to falsify anything.
But specific arguments aside. Perhaps you're already aware, but there are many people building LLM-assisted hypothesis of how physics works - it is fun!
Of those hypothesis that make measurable predictions about reality, they usually contradict each other. And they will probably contradict your hypothesis, to the extend it makes measurable predictions about reality. Out of all the mutually contradicting hypothesis at most one can be right, consequently we know that almost all of them must be wrong.
How certain are you that your hypothesis is the one that is right?
Falsifiable if the universe is proven to keep expanding. We are watching Simons Observatory research. They are looking for evidence of big bang or big bounce If they find the universe is heading for the big freeze then we are proven wrong. If they find that it looks more like a big bounce ( crunch) then that is a big step for osim.
How creator of Claude Code uses it:
https://twitter-thread.com/t/2007179832300581177
You know the joke, "What's five orders of magnitude among friends?" There's a story going around about ~60 million men attending an online "rape academy."
And besides, the whole concept of a rape academy automatically conveys the idea that the men who matriculate are absolute morons. Other than where to get roofies and what alternative drugs there are, info that can be conveyed in 5 mins max, what on earlth is there to teach in the classes at this academy? It's like having a how-to-put-your-groceries-away academy. Well, except, yeah, way more rapey.
To clarify, that's a description CNN's guys made up. The actual chatroom that they're characterizing was just called "Zzz", for pornographic videos with the theme of engaging in sex with "sleeping" women – most likely acting, but maybe drugged.
But if I were designing the syllabus for a hypothetical rape academy, there's a lot worth covering. Physical training for fitness and strength, of course, but also digital privacy (this one would be prereq before they enroll), lots of spycraft (both for irl surveillance and digital intelligence gathering), basic forensics (don't leave evidence that can be traced back to you) , the rudiments of the Constitutional law (viz., "don't talk to the cops!"), … probably more I could come up with, but at any rate, while it might not be comparable to four-year college degree, it's certainly significantly more than five minutes' worth of material.
Really, what we need is Chat GLP-1 — ask questions, lose weight.