I pasted some data with no labels into a fresh Claude chat and asked it to do a linear regression, and it somehow inferred that the data was my weight. I guess it's another demonstration of AI "truesight". And yes, I have memory disabled and everything.
It's a combination of having seen many patterns, and guessing with overconfidence.
A few weeks ago I tried to reverse-engineer an application using Claude. There was a check whether some byte was between capital 'A' and 'Z', and Claude said: "This is checking whether the argument is a valid disk letter." I was impressed, like how can it predict so much detail based on so little information... but later it turned out that the argument was *not* a disk letter, merely a capital ASCII character used for an unrelated purpose.
My guess is that Claude knows that when an old application is testing whether something is a character between 'A' and 'Z', there is maybe 80% chance that it will be used as a disk, so it speaks like it knows for sure. And when it happens to be right, you are deeply impressed, like "how could it have known this for sure?", but it didn't.
Claude is hit and miss on this sort of thing. Occasionally it will pick up on something like non explicit ironic humor and even respond with something genuinely funny.
The thing is it will never experience the human pleasure of relaxed spontaneous laughter. No qualia, no consciousness, in my inexpert opinion.
> consciousness is the surface tension on something. But what?
Really fun idea. Surface tension is the amount of energy per surface area.
In that sense, I'll say consciousness is the surface tension on the manifold of self-simulation of future states.
You exist at a point in time, and from here, you branch into an infinite array of potential future selves / states. Steering your "self" in better ways through that high dimensional state is literally the point and purpose of consciousness.
This schema makes sense - because it's about simulation, you'll see natural divisions in the overall simulation ability (driven by different simulation hardware) of different people and organisms. Why do smart, high C people generally do better in life? They're better able to simulate, create a plan, and stick to it, to reach those better places on the manifold of potential future states.
It seems to me to be such a simple evolutionary line from “non-sentient bacteria and animals having an experience of something (sense 1) because you need feedback loops for successful goal-directed behavior” to “humans, descended from a billion-year line of animals / bacteria, also have experiences (sense 1),” and when coupled with their interior future projections of themselves, and the obvious evolutionary advantages of caring about those futures, they have qualia too, and so have valenced interior experiences (sense 2), qualia, to steer them better on the manifold of potential reachable futures.
Broadly, you need to A) self simulate a bunch of states reachable by your from t=0, then B) care enough about the difference between such future states (valence) to put in the effort and simulation time to reach those better states. Consciouness is what helps us do that - it's created via the continual meta-tagging assigning the valence of potential future states in your self simulation driven by the given of your current state and environment.
If you couple valence with future-state simulation, you reach the level of future-state navigation that humans enjoy, which is hugely adaptive, a significant enough jump that we dominate the planet.
The euphoric side effect is pleasant. Almost a shame to waste it on pain but I’m really glad i can’t go to CVS and buy a 500 count supply of Vicodin whenever the mood strikes.
Eremolalos, imagine a person raised from birth in isolation by non humanoid robots who cater only to the persons physical needs. Although the persons brain has the potential for human consciousness it would wither on the vine without culture, which is all the information that humans share.
There is no consciousness without culture and no culture without consciousness.
Consciousness is the surface tension of culture.
I wish I had paid more attention while on opioids, get well soon.
I found an interesting video about Jaynes' bicameral mind breakdown that references Scott's review of it, and comes to similar conclusions: https://youtu.be/Ado90kMT_FM
I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Julian Jaynes's theories. I checked out this video and kind of skipped through it because a lot of it I already know, and I was interested in where he was going to go at the end. My position is that he has completely misunderstood Julian Jaynes' work, and his conclusions are not really based on a good reading of Jaynes' book. The idea that the people he's talking about had no internal state and were pzombies is not true. I was not impressed. Closer to the truth is that consciousness arises in human beings directly as a result of a tension between two different ways of being and thinking: somatic/biological, which governed us for most of our history on Earth, and the rational or systematic/symbolic ways of thinking that were greatly accelerated by the invention of written language. Over a period of time, the balance of power between these two modalities shifted.
My guess is that consciousness is something like internalized speech.
As an organism, you are in a certain state. That could have been the end of the story. But we are also social species, and we communicate to each other. For the purpose of communication, we develop the ability to describe things. Later it turns of that these abilities are actually sometimes useful for describing ourselves to ourselves. And that is an important part of consciousness: you, describing yourself to yourself.
(Does not necessarily have to be verbal speech. We can communicate using gestures, tone of voice, etc. Probably each of this can have a role in our internal self-description.)
Well, you're latching on to something that's really important about Julian James's theory, which is that it has everything to do with everything you just said. The thing to really keep in mind is that until about roughly 4,000 years ago, no one could write anything down. I think you really have to think about the medium as the message in this case. Everything is based on oral transmission.
I only rarely share my stuff in the comments here these days, but I wanted to put in an argument for allowing it, and being tolerant with it. I think the existing rules are about right, but that there's room for a bit more latitude.
These days I have the audience I deserve, which is to say a medium sized audience, getting more clicks by putting posts in places like this is not a major priority. However Plenty of writers much more gifted than me don't have an audience, and the way to get an audience is very illegible. For Moreover, the skills are very difficult, especially for authors who have not gone down the social skills track.
If you're not a good publicist, it can take a hundred or more good posts before you're noticed. I imagine many would-be Substackers simply give up, and many of them would have been very good at it.
Discovering good new thinkers is a costly, collective process, but I think it has been one of the more valuable functions of this community. It can be tempting to feel it's a waste of time.
So consider forebearance for the poor blogspammer.
Audience is more based on quantity of posting than quality, because of the broken payment model, that is, wholesale subscription like some magazine. So people pay for frequent content, not good content. If it would be a more sensible model like pay per article, which would be more like buying books, then rare and high quality content would be more popular.
As with everything else, a bit of luck goes a long way. It’s largely a right place, right time thing. There are lot of good bloggers so it’s hard to stand out.
That's a good way of putting it. It really irritates me that no matter how good my output is (other stuff, not writing, I'm not a writer) these days I'll never have anyone appreciate my creative work because I'm not good at getting an audience. I don't even know what it is that I'm not good at. Could be being willing to shill myself and act like my own salesman, and never shutting up about what I'm trying to produce. Could be being willing to analyze what people want to consume and tailoring my output to that. Could be having a large social network of friends. Could be having a large social network of like-minded people also trying to shill themselves. Could be being willing to pay for advertisement, though that would come with it's own unique set of skills of being good at figuring out how to advertise my output and figuring out which advertising is actually worth it.
Have you considered that the market may be saturated with the creative output you provide? In the case of blogging, (and many other creative endeavors), it seems that the amount of people wanting to write a blog is much larger than what there is a demand for. After all, one blogger can be read by millions of people, and people can only follow so many blogs. So you need to be in the top ~0,0n1% of what you do. You could be in that top percentile overall, or more realistically it could be in a particular niche, catering to a particular audience - or it could be even be in marketing. I think if you actually produce in that top percentile in some niche, where there is a demand, then marketing will not really be that hard. You basically need to know who your audience are, and get a foot in the door. At least this is my experience - I'm very good in what I do professionally in one particular high-level-of-entry small niche, which there is a non-saturated market for. My customers see that what I do provide value, and therefore my product basically sells itself.
You could, however, be providing good but not top-percentile output, in a saturated marked where there is no real demand. In this case, I think you are out of luck. You either have to be great (again really top-percentile) at marketing, or finding an audience will be really hard, because they will see better options. In this case, I think you should consider if you can find a niche where there is demand, and you can provide in that top-percentile (even if it is a very small niche), or if you are happy doing your creative work for it's own sake.
Probably all of that. If you started by figuring out what the cool kids talk about these days, then wrote a lot of the same, using the right clickbait/salesman style (make a fascinating promise at the beginning, then talk a lot but do not deliver on the promise, then end up saying that if the reader subscribes to your blog they will finally get the thing that they wanted... which is of course a lie, because all your articles are like this, the goal is to string the gullible people along as long as possible), and then shilled your product everywhere ("hey, you have a fascinating discussion here, I also wrote about a similar topic at www blogspam com") or paid for the advertising... yeah, it could work.
There would probably be no joy in that, just another job.
I'm not a writer, I'm a musician. But yeah in general I agree with what you say. I have limited time and energy outside of my real work. I don't want to produce modern pop music. I don't want to string people along in any way. I don't want to have a second job. I've always just wanted to perform. Also speaking to Leppi, I'm probably not absolutely top percentile in part because it's not my full time job, but I'm pretty good at what I do. Also it's not pop, or R&B, or wedding music, or classic rock covers, and it's pretty saturated.
>There would probably be no joy in that, just another job.
Not only that. He would presumably be providing negative value to anyone but himself - he would be a parasite and we would be right to judge him. The type of marketing you are describing is basically a slim margin away from a scam.
It could well be successful, if he was very good at marketing. But, I strongly suggest that if this is what is needed to succeed then he would be better off finding a better use of his energy at something more productive.
Hi! I wanted to share a post I published this week.
I just stepped away from my company after Stage IV cancer and as Ive been recovering, I’ve been exploring what happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity.
I built a systematic analysis of 200+ top sci-fi books + an interactive quiz that maps which future vision you're building toward: https://www.livenowclub.com/wonder/essay
I'm living this question in compressed time (permanent disability = productivity removed as a variable). It’s a similar inflection point our whole culture is approaching with AI, just on different timescales.
Louise Ireland, there is no personal growth in paradise, no pain no gain, so we simulated a universe where we could don the headset and experience life exactly as someone living in this time without the knowledge that we have no skin in the game.
When Louise Ireland ends you will remove the headset but with all her wonderful experiences and memories intact.
As much as you grew as a person from the 200+ books you base your quiz on, you grow in a more intense way from the lives, and deaths you experienced.
As a matter of coincidence (or not - AIs are obviously driving everyone here), I was reading SF author Devon Eriksen giving some thoughts on what makes people conscious. The latest one I've read so far:
This appears in line with Marvin Minsky's "society of mind", IIRC. Human consciousness isn't just one brain with critical mass: it's a constellation of sparser brains, all connected, especially to the frontal cortex, which is possibly the densest cluster of neurons seen in the animal kingdom. The sparser "brains" pick up and execute quickly, but can't do what we call higher reasoning (stuff like pattern recognition); the denser brain can do that deep reasoning, but takes a really long time to train.
An earlier tweet describes the different between LLMs and biological brains in terms of breadth. LLMs are narrow and focused, while life evolved multiple subsystems to operate together in a way that ends up able to propagate itself. LLMs are basically just one subsystem. They're really good at that one specialty, but put them in an escape room and they'll just sit there. There's no fingers to manipulate objects, no legs or wheels to move itself around; it doesn't even have a motivation to leave! One could train it to look at digitized photos and ask how to solve the puzzles, and it might even give correct answers, but it has no clue what it's doing or why.
Eriksen concluded that tweet by pointing out that LLMs, per their structure, will never attain the capability of human brains, unless they are augmented by so many additional features (possible!) that "LLM" ceases to be the most accurate way to label them.
Any person with active OpenReview.net account here? I'd like to get to know personally or professionally someone with an OpenReview account :)
This is because I'd like to submit a paper related to AI safety to ICML workshop (Trustworthy AI4GOOD). It's a paper related to non-agentic AI. Bengio's paper about non-agentic AI is sort of related.
Unfortunately, since I'm not affiliated with any institution, I need someone to vouch for my registration, someone who I know personally of professionally.
Would anyone be interested in: a) reading a short draft, b) exchanging a few emails so we actually know each other (or some other form of contact), c) vouching for my registration.
Reply here or email me at damianczap[at]outlook.com. Happy to share the PDF.
I finished Tolstoy's "Resurrection" last night and it was disappointing. He was under pressure to get it out in a hurry and it does read like a first draft. One interesting thing though is that Henry George or Georgism is mentioned nine times.
So far, no Claude has managed to beat this game. I believe the last two (or last one Claude) made it to Victory Road, the penultimate challenge, where it got completely stuck on a simple boulder rolling puzzle that elementary schoolers beat. This Claude is progressing at about the speed of the previous Claude, which is still quite slow relative to a human, and it still displays frequent bouts of nonsensical reasoning.
ChatGPT lied to me in a interesting way. I asked it to make an excel file for me and it said that it had done it but with nothing attached. Then I asked it why there was nothing attached and it said that the file was blank and it didn’t want to send me a blank file file.
So it could have told me that it did what I wanted and sent me a blank file or it could have straight up told me that something was wrong. But instead it was like there was a divergence where the part that talks to me lied while the part that actually sends me output couldn’t bring itself to do it. It’s like these LLMs have two separate minds.
i image this is partly do to the LLMs being trained on human communications, which which could include interactions like:
> A: please send me an excel file
> B: sure, see attachement
> A: thanks!
The LLM-in-training sees these interactions, and concludes that for a request like "please send me an excel file" the correct response would be something like "sure, see attachement", but without knowledge of the actually attachment, which is probably not part of the training data.
Frequently these days the neural-network part, that ingests and emits text, is also emitting a call to a tool - like a coding agent might emit a tool call that runs a system command, or a tool call that returns lines 10-25 of file foo.py, or runs a google search. Or writing their own python script to build the result they're trying to hand back to you, like to count 'r's in strawqerry or do some back-of-envelope math. "having two separate minds" isn't entirely wrong.
It’s just strange how the part that sends files is seemingly detached from the part that talks to me. Imagine if I asked you to make a document to me and you said sent it to me. When I checked my email, the email said “sorry I couldn’t actually do it.” That would be bizarre.
It makes me appreciate how alien these things are to us.
I wrote a little piece about how the culture war about AI seems weirdly centered on "People who are impressed with AI" versus "People who are not" instead of a more natural fit like "People who think AI is dangerous/bad" versus "People who think AI is helpful/good"
They are writers, and they view AI from the viewpoint of AI writing articles and stuff, not from the viewpoint of AI answering questions, generating code etc. Especially writers who are proud of writing good prose are horrified by "slop".
I guess this is ultimately humans playing monkey status games (and failing to notice that they have absolutely no impact on the approaching steamroller).
How do you eliminate a human threat? Try lowering his status. No one will listen to a low-status guy. Threat eliminated.
So we instinctively apply the same tactics on the AI. If all the cool kids keep saying that AI sucks, then AI will be low-status and therefore harmless. Regardless of its actual abilities; bullying works on everyone, smart or not, skilled or not, no one could possibly resist if all the cool kids declare them uncool.
like this is the really tricky thing about it to me. It's hard to talk in a vacuum about "how competent was hitler" because eventually if you're angrily insisting that no the guy was actually very smart and talented you start to look like someone who's fighting for hitler's "rep."
As a messaging question there is a dilemma I think where "I'm just trying to be very fair and clear-eyed about what AI is actually capable of" shades into AI booster-ism. I do feel I run into this a lot as a lawyer, where tech enthusiasts are *very* quick to insist that AI can greatly simplify or automate large portions of the legal system. I'm not actually very interested in whether it COULD so much as whether it SHOULD if we're so very concerned about AI risk.
I continue to believe the finale of my story is going to match reality, in that if some huge AI disaster happens, the correct analysis of the scenario will not be "see! I was right! Human civilization underestimated AI, if only more people had listened to me when I insisted it was really smart." It will instead be "why did you idiots make this thing and hook it up to everything if you thought it was evil?"
Well, I guess Hitler was smart and talented at some things, and sucked at other things, which is ironically the same thing we can say about today's AIs. The difference is that the AIs keep getting better -- look five years back, and now imagine similar five years forward; then five more years, etc.
And I agree about the dangers of hooking up the AI to everything. It feels so weird to look back at Yudkowsky's articles about whether a superhuman AI could convince its human guardians to connect it to the internet despite all the obvious risks. -- How silly! Of course, if we ever build an AI capable of destroying entire humanity, it will *already be connected* to the internet by default, that's how the company which built it will be making most of its profit... until the very last moment when the AI releases the hypnodrones of whatever.
(Perhaps being attacked by an insufficiently smart AI is the *lucky* scenario, because then we have a greater chance to survive and maybe get more careful the next time.)
My beliefs about AI cut across your categories. I don’t see it as dangerous (in X-risk sense that’s popular among rationalists) but I also don’t see it as good. I think it’s laying waste to education and creating a lost generation of young people who use AI to cheat themselves out of learning, like somebody bringing a forklift to the gym.
I also see it laying waste to a generation of software developers who can no longer get junior positions out of school, since those have been replaced by Claude code. At the same time, I see companies going all-in on AI to generate massive amounts of code, which in the future will be unmaintainable and possibly be thrown away. A colossal waste.
I don’t see any signs of exponential take off in terms of raw intelligence from LLMs. If anything, I see exponential take off in costs (computer hardware and energy) for more and more modest returns. At the same time, the companies most bullish on AI (such as Microsoft) have quietly begun to divest and hedge against the impending contraction.
I tend to call myself an agnostic about a lot of the specific predicted outcomes. I just don't know what the future will hold. I *tend to* assume that things will take longer, be more complex, and be less transformative than people assume when it comes to technology, and I still think I'm right about AI in this respect, but I make a significant amount of room for the possibility that I am wrong, and indeed maybe we have the birth of some new god right around the corner.
I'm a lawyer so I don't know very much about STEM, but I've been interested in AI since the early 2000s and have had a fairly consistent philosophy since that time that it's never going to be better aligned than, say, the US government, which has interesting implications for "doom." Alignment is, in my view, grappling with the same issues the legal community has been grappling with since the late bronze age, and it's not a problem that's solvable by intelligence or reason.
I'm usually not a fan of people coming here to link their own content, but this is actually exactly the type of thing SSC readers enjoy, so hopefully it won't be removed or anything.
I guess to explain the weird shape of this debate, I'd say that to some types of people, arguments with errors in logic and epistemology are more irritating than arguments which reach the wrong conclusion, and incorrect beliefs about the future are less irritating than incorrect beliefs about the present.
Also, I think your parable undersells just how annoying some of these people can be, on both sides of the debate. I'm not going to go to dwell on that, but let me just say that all of your characters attempt to give valid reasons for their beliefs and are sometimes willing to update their beliefs in cases where those reasons turn out to be incorrect, so none of them are really a good representation of most real people I've talked to.
In particular, I think both sides do a fair bit of goalpost shifting. Charitably this is updating their beliefs. Uncharitably this is just insisting, like the judge, that they're still right just in really subtle ways that take a day to explain.
I find this debate more tragic than frustrating. I fall more on the "AI Skeptic" side of things, I've always been somewhat irritated by the breathless optimism people have about these things solving all our problems...and I grumblingly insist that this thing can't do my job very well. So: I get in lots of spirited debates with people that insist that no, AI-lawyerbots will be replacing some or all lawyers very soon, if this is not already happening.
...what's upsetting to me is the same people are also *fascinated* with the idea that these machines are also likely plotting our demise. This has been a predictable part of the discourse since the days of kurzweil. They'll say in one breath that we're months or a year away from an AI that can, I dunno, teach kids, and then in the next breath say that AI could kill us all, and I'm left to wonder "why do we want it teaching kids then?"
I used to think the likely rejoinder is that "enthusiasts" believe that we can put together a workable control system...but this is increasingly not the vibe i'm getting from them. Yud's book says that if ANYONE builds it, everyone dies. No qualification. This matches the vibe I get from the AI enthusiast community.
...so, we have very similar opinions: we both think these things are untrustworthy and cannot be easily controlled. We should be natural allies, instead we're stuck debating when I'm going to get a self-driving car (still can't) or when an AI is going to replace me (still can't).
I'll take your word for it that it's the exact same people speaking about current benefits and future safety concerns. In my experience, I tend to find AI safety people only support capacity improvement if they believe (as Eliezer used to?) that the safety problem will only be solved with the help of an AI smart enough to introspect.
Brainstorming reasons why someone would hold these contradictory positions:
- Pessimism on race dynamics. If someone's going to build it no matter what, we might as well hope the AI spares its own creators
- High time preference. Enjoy robo-servants now and let the next generation deal with robo-rebellion.
- Probabilistic reasoning. If you believe there's a 90% chance of utopia and a 10% chance of extinction, you might devote some time to joyful anticipation and some time to worry/activism, depending on your personal risk tolerance. (I think this is Scott's position)
At the extreme ends, the "AI catastrophists" tend to be different than the "AI boosters" but I think there are plenty of people who do both. Scott Alexander strikes me as the kind of guy who would get really annoyed if I said an AI "couldn't answer a legal problem" or "couldn't create a novel work of art" (or "was using too much water") but also is deeply deeply concerned that AI might kill everyone.
The inconsistency with many could be explained as simply "I believe things that are true and your claims are false and I get upset when people say false things" but part of my story I think is struggling with that exact problem. As a majoritarian, I believe to actually change policy you need majority will...and it's very unlikely the majority can (or ever could) believe the correct factually true things about AI. So, if one can't work with people that are wrong about AI, then one can't really do anything to stop it.
Race dynamics explain a lot of this probably as well, as you say. The AI-God is coming and it's just a matter of who manifests it first and whether we can slap enough controls on it before it pops into being. We're all hoping someone decently virtuous makes it, and it is, itself, virtuous.
Still, I can't help but feel there's some inconsistency here. Those concerned about Doom would PREFER a world where lots of people were going around thinking "the AI could be wrong, I shouldn't just assume it's speaking the truth, or that it has my welfare as its primary goal." For this reason, I've been ENCOURAGED by the public skepticism toward AI, even though it often comes from a place of ignorance. Many don't share my opinion on that.
Public skepticism is only encouraging if the Doom is dependent on public support in some way. A lot of normie opposition to AI stems from the perception that the public *isn't* being consulted on whether to build it or what to have it do. "Look at this AI feature that sucks and no one asked for" etc. etc.
In cultural stasis news, it seems like we're finally seeing innovation in music. The bad news is, well...
Meet "No Batidão", by Zxkai and Slxughter (I have been utterly unable to find out anything about these people except that they're Russian). It's an undeniably catchy electronic beat with a jumpy countermelody, some lyrics in Portuguese, and that's about it. After hearing the first 90 seconds a few times I went looking to find the rest of the song, but... that's it, the song is 90 seconds long (actually 89 seconds) and even that is basically the same thing repeated three times (with a female vocalist the second time around). It's been charting all over the place, it was apparently the number one single in India, and right now it's number 107 on the Billboard Global 100.
So this is apparently the latest innovation in music -- songs optimised for TikTok. Cram all the good parts into 30 seconds, repeat it a few times, and then fade out because the listener is not supposed to get this far anyway. Changes in technology have always driven changes in art, but... I don't like this one.
One of the more interesting examples of Tik Tok music is PinkPantheress debut album. Drum n bass/pop, average song length is 1:45. Instead of just boring repetition, there's song structure and progression that fits the track length
The annoying part is when you find out about something new, and the comments are full of "omg I can't believe this is already four years old, so nostalgic!"
Yeah, it's maximised for Tiktok, but I imagine this is something you just put on loop/repeat and play it as background for however long you like, it's not really something you're *listening* to. If it comes out of hip-hop then it's dance music and what matters there is the beat. And the fifty-seven different remixes.
"Batidão" is Portuguese for "Big Beat", it's been standard lowbrow musical lingo in Brazil for loud low-frequency rhythmic beat. For decades. That music and those artists might be new, I won't check, but the term is old. "No Batidão" would translate as "In the Big Beat"
News from post-election Hungary: the new gov is not even sworn in yet, and yet the whole corruption industry is crashing down. Because the police chiefs and so on want to keep their jobs so now they are launching investigations, like money laundering and suchlike, and those lower in the ranks are looking for an escape, talking about the crimes of the higher ups.
It is important to understand it was not an ideological election. It is not that Orbán was too right wing. Magyar started with a post-election speech telling European centrist parties to not be so politically correct on immigration and not leave this issue to extremists. That was not a liberal move.
Rather it was the corruption industry, the whole country turned into a Tammany Hall kind of machine. Except far more greedy than the original TH, as NY could grow in that era. But for example in this case every government communication went through one company that charged like 5x the market price. A MySQL Community Edition was "licensed" for $30K a month and so on.
The total theft is estimated in 15 years roughly 3 months of GDP. Interesting that should not hold a country that much back, losing 3 months out of 80 months, though it makes a visible difference is something like education spending, but I think corruption has a side-effect of crowding out normal market based business which does more damage. I mean if one does not have to actually offer a good product to make money, then offering good products does not happen?
Yeah, corruption in short term means "the good products don't win", but in long term it means "no one even tries to make good products anymore, because what's the point".
Also this trickles down through the economy, beyond the parts that are selling directly to government. If the quality of your product does not matter, then the quality of your suppliers doesn't matter either; the same about their suppliers, etc.
I'm ignorant of Hungary in particular, but, generally, yeah, corruption does much larger damage than the actual amount stolen (substitute your preferred euphemism if applicable).
When it's endemic, people don't even try to e.g. bid on contracts for what they do best.
Such a corruption industry also has the effect that it made most of the EU funding disappear. This amounted for 1% of the country's GDP each year annually in the last few years.
(We are yet touching only the top of the iceberg, tho.)
I wonder about the concepts of discipline or willpower.
It is also called time preference and time discounting and thus the important external factor is the time frame. I would say, most of the time, our actions are rewarded or punished within 3 to 6 months, we rarely need to think further? It depends how we define reward or punishment. Like a growing savings account is a reward every month, as we feel safer and safer.
But I can tell you confidently that if you start drinking two glasses of wine a day, and in 15 years that is like two bottles for the same effect, you will not feel any ill effects. Sure your liver stats will not be good, but you will not feel ill. And I think it is impossible that the reason people do not do that because they are afraid what happens in 30 years.
I think the reason most people are not functional alcoholics is something more immediate, their partner does not like when they are dumbed down, or they don't like what they feel next morning?
However weed does not have these issues. If a couple is stoner, they can entertain each other with jokes very well, have great sex and wake up well rested next day. So why is not everybody a stoner?
How does this work? People just don't like to think of themselves as addicts?
But what about depressed people who already think they are shit?
Most of the rewards and punishments exist in our heads. What happens 3 months later is probably nothing compared to whether you feel good or bad about yourself for whatever you are doing or supposed to do right now.
Ideally, what happens in our heads is somehow related to reality. The reason I don't get drunk more often is not the fact that it would destroy my liver in 30 years... but that *right now* I believe that it would destroy my liver (and brain) in 30 years (or less), and that *right now* I wish for my health after 30 years to be better rather than worse.
> So why is not everybody a stoner?
I guess drugs can work very differently for different people.
The main effect that alcohol has on me is reducing anxiety. I am highly intelligent and highly neurotic, so it makes sense to sacrifice a few IQ points temporarily in return for removing various kinds of mental blocks. As an alcoholic, I would probably be a pretty good and productive blogger!
I don't go that way because I worry about long-term negative impact on health, and also that the loss of IQ points could become permanent, which would deprive me of some intellectual pleasures, and probably cost me a job, which would suck if my blogs didn't make enough money. But in moderate amounts, with long intervals in between, alcohol seems like a good thing for me.
But I have seen other people become aggressive or very annoying under the influence of alcohol. Never happened to me, as far as I know. Not that the introspection of a drunk person is reliable, but I e.g. never got into fight (or even a verbal conflict) when drunk.
With weed, other people report that it makes them feel relaxed. For me, it only makes me feel dumb. (Also, other people on weed seem even dumber than usual.) So I have no incentive to use it. It's not a virtue or whatever, it just doesn't work for me.
>But I can tell you confidently that if you start drinking two glasses of wine a day, and in 15 years that is like two bottles for the same effect, you will not feel any ill effects
Well good for you. I ran a similar experiment and I hit a wall with red wine. It completely was destroying my gut. My liver is fine but I can't drink that stuff anymore
Not every potentially addictive substance has the same effect. It is much harder to get addicted to weed than to heroin, and alcohol can be consumed for 30 years at very safe levels without needing to 'up the dose' for most people to find enjoyment in it.
I see where you're going with the question (why not just drink even more?), but I think it doesn't happen all the time simply because it doesn't reach the level of necessity for most people. Also, some of us have genetics on our side when it comes to addiction. It has long been known that some people are genetically inclined towards alcoholism or liver damage, and others are not.
"If a couple is stoner, they can entertain each other with jokes very well, have great sex and wake up well rested next day. So why is not everybody a stoner?"
Extremely limited experience in my case, but the stoners I've encountered have not recommended that lifestyle to me. Getting a girlfriend versus getting blasted on weed? Well option B is always gonna win. Great sex and well-rested? I'm envious of the highly functional and motivated individuals you've met 😁 The ones I've met stink of weed and are clearly, even when trying to appear sober, under the influence so that they resemble particularly dozy sloths.
Vera the Chief inspector of the fictional Northumberland & City Police on ITV has a similar take on pot and pot smokers. She usually calls it ‘skunk weed’ with a show of irritation
I know the stereotype you are thinking of, I’ve met a few of them, hell for a short while i might have wanted to present as one of them. I just didn’t enjoy it enough, and I had things that needed doing. No I don’t need to get high *every* time i pay you a visit. Thanks anyway.
My impression is that the people who stay baked all day already tended towards idle laziness and are a bit naturally dopey (as in not so clever) by nature. They are the minority of THC users in the US I think. Here 40 states have made it legal for ‘medical’ use and 24 for recreational use.
Restaurants offer THC infused drinks in my state which is kinda silly because the effects don’t kick in for an hour when ingested that way. What’s the point of getting relaxed and a bit giggly after you’ve already gone home? That’s what a pint of beer is for.
As i mentioned below or above i like a gummy an hour or so before i golf because it improves my concentration and swing form. Really, i have the score cards as proof! (I live within walking distance of a pretty metro course)
If you are drinking or doing drugs, you can’t do much of anything else. So anyone who has a lot of responsibilities can’t really be a functional drug addict.
This is not true, there are lots of highly functional alcoholics/drug addicts. I have worked with/for some of them. Many notable cases of high-functioning addicts have been studied/written about.
Also, years ago as part of some research i was doing I got in touch with several former heroin addicts. Independently, two of them told me that other heroin addicts were usually the hardest working people they’d encountered, since they were so motivated to make money to buy heroin.
I know Rat Park had its methodological issues but wasn't the basic idea sound? It's not a big mystery why more people aren't drug addicts. We are social animals and most of us have at least some kind of social network, people we care about and who care about us and who we mutually enjoy our interactions with.
We get a lot out of that, at least when our brain chemistry is functioning as it should. People who are depressed do indeed experience much higher rates of drug addiction.
I think you might be wrong about how people value their future state, even 30 years down the line. It's not as immediate or gripping an issue "how will I feel in 30 years" as "how will I feel tomorrow morning" but it is still something people often care enough about to change their behavior today.
There is also social pressure not to be an addict, although that is more inconsistent and arbitrary (almost nobody gets shamed for being a 5 cup-a-day coffee drinker, and people who can't stop looking at their phones kinda know it's bad but it's less common to talk about it out loud).
Addiction can get very expensive. A cheap bottle of wine is like $7. A pack of cigarettes is close to the same price. Imagine drinking two bottles of wine or smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's more than $5,000 a year, a significant sum--and that's if your tolerance doesn't go up and you need to up the amount of the drug you're taking. I don't know off the top of my head the prices of most other drugs but you get the idea: addiction is unaffordable; that undoubtedly has some deterrent effect.
Weed certainly can have short-term negative effects. If you smoke a bunch of weed one night there's a very good chance you'll wake up feeling dried out and you might have a headache. Weed interferes with sleep too. I agree these are less severe consequences than if you'd gotten drunk or snorted a bunch of coke or smoked heroin, but I'm just saying, weed isn't costless.
There is much we still don't understand about addiction and willpower. Not every kid scores the same on that marshmallow test.
I always liked the idea of being a self destructive addict in theory, but I realized I don't enjoy the effects of drugs or alcohol or cigarettes much, even in the short term, and I quit it all largely by accident. The physical sensations are unpleasant to me and I dislike being unable to think clearly. I also tend to find stoners and heavy drinkers boring company.
I wrote a paper explaining why language models can’t scale beyond what humans felt compelled to write down and are going to be stuck. It ended with me explaining the nature of human cognition as linguistic: https://haversine.substack.com/p/tower-of-babel?r=2g1yja
I have been in peer review for 5 months and am starting to lose my mind at having an editor and reviewer using LLMs to read the paper. It’s actually maddening.
Reviewers might be a little afraid of the race part, especially where you very confidently present your point as inevitable and unmistakeable. Also not all intelligence is verbal intelligence, which makes it much less inevitable - remember Raven's progressive matrices.
Also children finding code-switching reading frustrating - I don't know, my native language is not even Indo-European, and by 17 I was reading books in English. I did not find it frustrating. But it is possible that it is precisely because when you are working across language families, the switch is utterly complete (people who try learning Japanese will find this), while same language with different rules might be more confusing,
As for math, French is famously fucked up about numbers, like 84 is expressed as 4x20+4, and yet the country is known for having a history of good mathemathicians.
Anyhow, I say this paper sounds overly confident and ambitious. A more careful language like "this might indicate" could help with review.
Another obvious case of someone throwing it into chatgpt thinking they came up with intelligent critiques.
The reviewers aren't "afraid of the race part", language models are because anything that discusses race is heavily biased against in their training. The section on AAVE is the end of scientific racism, period.
The key indicator that someone is either illiterate or using a chatbot is "not all intelligence is verbal" as if I don't directly cite the visual intelligence gains as the exception to the Flynn Effect's reversal. Yes, you're right, not all intelligence is verbal. You should have read the paper.
Raven's progressive matrices? Wow, never heard of that thing before! It's definitely not included in the Bastos RCT as well as the Flynn Effect data and the two first charts included in the paper...
As for your comment on code switching, again, reading the paper would have helped explain exactly what code switching is...
*"For a child familiar only with AAVE, for instance, the oral counterpart of the written sentence ‘‘Their hands are cold’’ could legitimately be /dejr hæn a co/ (‘‘Deir han’ a’ co’’’). If so, this would give rise to several potentially confusing mismatches between dialects that would not be encountered by a non-AAVE speaking child [...]
No particular mismatch, on its own, would pose a serious impediment to learning to decode, but the accumulation of such discrepancies between oral and written forms could make grapheme – phoneme correspondences seem far less regular than they are (for SE) and, hence, more difficult to master."*
Ironically, the language model's inability to understand the paper is actually predicted by the paper itself! But yes "you" think the paper sounds overly confident because you definitely read and understood even a sentence of what is, legitimately, one of the most important papers since germ theory...
I genuinely hope when this paper finally gets published the bubble pops and you midwits have to pay the token costs for these stupid things.
Could you explain a bit about why the French using 4x20+4 to express the same number that the English express as 8x10+4 feels fucked up to you? They seem roughly equivalent in cognitive overhead to me
The English don't! They use the word "eighty four" which is just 80 and 4. The french say "quatre vingt quatre" - 4 and 20 and 4. The for ninety, they say quatre vingt quatorze, 4 and 20 and 14 - compared to 94, ninety four. Eighty does not mean 8 x 10, it just stands directly for 80.
Eighty does mean 8 tens, though (which is to say, 8x10)? That feels... uncontroversial? I teach math to young children and I certainly tell them that "eighty" means "eight tens", and ime knowing that is a genuine aid to understanding.
Sure, there's a sense in which at a certain level of understanding, that intermediate layer disappears and "eighty" becomes a direct signpost to the number... But surely the same happens with "quatre vingt", yes?
It goes both ways. Yes, "eight tens" is useful when beginning to learn numbers, it helps understanding, but at a later stage "eighty" just becomes a simple word for the number, without thinking about what it means.
I think this "intermediate layer" as you call it is exactly what Carlos is talking about with cognitive load! It is even more present in 94, where it is 4 x 20 + 14. Surely, quatre vingt quarante does also represent 94, but so does novanta quatre (sort of italian-ish?) - and it would not have this intermediate layer or cognitive load.
You really don't understand the difference between saying "eight tens" and saying "eighty"? If someone said "I was born in nineteen eight tens four" you would be like " oh that seems totally normal for someone to say that"?
Maybe if you have to work with things like 4x20+4=84 all the time you come to understand math better.
I know someone who is distinctly not stupid but over 70, and out of practice with math problems. They struggled to solve this translated word problem: 1 2/3 - 1/2 = X. Practice keeps one in form, and improves ability over time.
It came to my attention today that if you visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism and Ctrl+F "North Korea" you will see exactly 0 results. (The last mention of the DPRK was removed back in October.) So, are the tankies just large and in charge on Wikipedia? Grokipedia's article, by contrast, has an entire paragraph on North Korea.
Whenever something in a Wikipedia article looks off to you, check the Talk page. (Replace "off" with "even vaguely capable of being political" and it's still good advice.) One thing even WP editors seem opposed to removing, no matter how spicy, is Talk page content. (At most, they'll shunt it to an archive page or ten if it gets too long.)
The Talk page for Totalitarianism mentions North Korea once in the main page, and several more times in archives (specifically 2, 3, and 5). All mentions either recommend it be added (going back years), or refer to it as a noncontroversial example of one, with no pushback AFAICT. If anything, the editors' ire seems saved for people wanting to refer to Nazism as a left-wing ideology.
From here, one could perhaps search the History and see if anyone took a stab at adding NK, but Wikipedia in its infinite wisdom provided no convenient method for searching edit history.
But Juche isn't even communism. The Kims famously said that the struggle changed from class struggle to national struggle. I think Lenin would consider that an utter heresy.
I don't see any version where it featured much, other than very old revisions from like prior to 2010. If they "tankies" are in charge they have always been in charge, and they're doing a really poor job considering their poster boy Staling is still there. October removal was of a poorly constructed sentence. Prior to that it seems to have been some sort of copyright bot removing a photo, not sure what's up with that. If you see a removal you think it's problematic, feel free to point to it, or better yet add something good quality.
As far as I can tell, there never really was a section of the article about it. My guess is that its position as a still existing but older state was such that it was never on anyone's radars. As always, feel free to be bold and add a paragraph or two if you think you can fit it in somewhere.
Yeah, the article doesn't really have a section that's like "which governments are widely considered totalitarian," it's more about how the theory and definition of totalitarianism evolved over time, and that mostly developed from analysis of Soviet Russia.
Childhood memories: me, the dentist, chaos, and an unpleasant wish that came true.
I was eleven years old, turning twelve in a few weeks (a fact which will become relevant). And I also had an absolutely excruciating toothache, it felt like the whole side of my head would explode. Clearly the tooth would have to be pulled, so my father took me to a dentist, an oral surgery specialist, with whom he had been close friends for years.
But here’s the thing - even though I was in horrible pain, I did NOT want to go to the dentist. And I put up a titanic fight in the office. I screamed obscenities, tried to punch and kick, you name it. I sent a tray of instruments crashing to the floor, knocked over and shattered some sort of rolling lamp, and tried to jam my finger into the dentist’s eye (he turned his head at the last moment). I may have been a child but in my extreme delirium I believe I had adult-like strength.
Red-faced and sweating, my father (a former college football player) got me into the chair and had my limbs pinned down … except for my left leg. Somehow, despite my crazed state, I knew enough to wait for the right opportunity to deploy said leg. Seconds later, one of the dental assistants, a petite young lady probably around 20 years old, ventured within range -
BOOM! My leg shot out like a piston and caught the young lady right in the abdomen. She dropped to the floor, hitting her head on a counter as she fell and opening a gash. The dentist and another assistant came to her aid as she lay doubled up on the floor, crying hysterically and bleeding from the head. There was talk of calling an ambulance, but I believe another employee drove her to the hospital. Presumably the dentist eventually pulled my tooth, but I’ve blocked that from my memory..
Needless to say the consequences for me were quite unpleasant. The adult-sized bicycle that had been promised to me for my upcoming birthday never happened, of course, and for the next year I wasn’t allowed to participate in afterschool activities. My mother, who had not even been there, spent the next week sobbing about how she had failed as a parent and eventually had to get tranquilizers. My relationship with my father remained strained for quite some time. My parents told me I’d have to see a child psychiatrist, but for some reason that didn’t happen. Thinking back I was lucky I didn’t get hauled into juvenile court.
Oh, the unpleasant wish? In addition to screaming obscenities at the dentist I repeatedly shouted that I wanted him to die. A couple of years later the dentist was in his yard when a neighbor came by to show the new motorcycle he’d bought. The dentist asked the neighbor if he could ride it around the block. You know the rest of the story.
Oh dear. Sad story and twelve year old you wasn't in your right mind due to extreme pain. But gosh, my mother would have slapped the ever-living *tar* out of me if I tried anything like that at that age.
So a big failing of substack is that if I click on newest first. I don't get the latest posts. I get the latest posts that are the first post of a new thread. I don't see the latest replies to some other thread.
At one time you could follow a subthread on Substack by making your own comment and you would receive email updates on all the new comments made there. Some people would add a comment like "Just want to follow this conversation".
I thought it was a good feature but for some reason Substack eliminated it.
Scott's old blog had the feature that posts that you had read were one shade, and posts that you hadn't read were another? Making it easy to pick out new comments. I'm assuming substack doesn't allow that, or it would have been done already. But I should find Substack's suggestion box, and ask.
As a reminder, anyone — yes, you! — can create their own "grant" program and give money to support and encourage anyone they think is creating a positive impact, no matter how rich you are.
Liam is a person of the internet in the best sense of the term. Throughout his life, he has dedicated a huge amount of it to making both IRL and internet communities better places. Liam has created tons of popular internet guides that went viral to help others (including Social Fabric NYC, a comprehensive guide to community and third spaces in New York). Over the years, he has co-founded an organization to deliver 17 million pieces of PPE to healthcare workers during the pandemic, founded a co-living space, organized friends to dedicate days to picking up garbage on the streets of NYC, volunteered at community tech hubs like Fractal Tech, and — most critically to me — served as the main moderator of /r/slatestarcodex, one of my favourite internet communities.
Very sadly, Liam is now 24/7 bedbound due to severe Long COVID and ME (https://x.com/liamsLCjourney/status/1785730302061211756). This is sad and awful, but it is not why I am giving him the grant. I'm giving it because, in addition to all the amazing things Liam has done in the past, and despite his current condition, he has dedicated his current bedridden life to doing everything he can to help others, specifically, those with Long COVID. He founded lcmedata.org under the banner of Highly Agentic LC/ME, a group of patients from tech and research backgrounds running patient-sourced treatment surveys, offering microgrants, and many more things.
If you want to encourage those around you who are doing things that make your life richer, I highly recommend you consider giving them a micro-grant to show your support and to encourage them further.
I’m not sure whether or not we should be angry at Cape Verde for refusing to let that hantavirus-affected cruise ship dock. Keeping the passengers and crew onboard any longer increases the chances that more will come down with the deadly disease. On the other hand, Cape Verde is a relatively low-income country of only 500,000 with one would presume limited health care facilities.
The unaffected passengers are already on the boat; exposing more people to the illness entails risk, while preserving the status quo (infected boat, virus-free town) does not. The most logical thing to do is to do nothing.
Spain has said it will “welcome” the ship to the Canary Islands for a full epidemiological investigation and disinfection, and the WHO confirmed the ship is heading there.
I’m sure the health infrastructure in the Canary Islands is much better than in Cape Verde. We have to hope that more passengers and crew don’t get sick during the trip.
Two sick passengers and the close contact of a confirmed case are expected to be evacuated by air in the coming hours, according to a Situation Report published by the Spanish Health Ministry.
On refutree: I just had a look now. The top entry when I looked was 'The St Petersburg Paradox': you pay $2 to play a game and your winnings double for each consecutive head until you hit a tail, at which point you receive your payout. So: if you immediately get a tail, you win nothing. If you observe HHT you win $4. (In the problem specification you start at $2.) Clearly the expected value of the payout is infinite. So you should be willing to pay any particular price for a chance to play the game - this is the 'paradox'.
This is displayed nicely as four premises and a conclusion. It irritates me.
If this is meant to be a place for logical argument, you need to get your facts straight. Here's Premise 3: For any game with a payout of $M, you should be willing to purchase a ticket to play that game at a price of $N, assuming that $N < $M.
The payout of a game is a random variable, and the expectation of that random variable is the expected value of the payout. If you don't make this distinction, you're not having a sensible conversation about probability theory. At a slightly deeper level, there are lots of probability distributions which have divergent moments, and we can still reason sensibly about them. In general probability theory is a tool to avoid getting stumped by these types of problems; ideally by rephrasing the question in more sophisticated ways.
Why am I posting here? Because I'd have to phrase the above as a series of premises and a conclusion on their website and I'm not minded to do that. It was also clunky to register, at least for me.
In summary: they haven't 'solved debate' - the format is overly restricted and the misunderstandings will be the usual ones. (Why does it even have to be solved? Proper debate is a valuable activity for reaching consensus.)
The 'The St Petersburg Paradox' problem has a built-in hidden assumption that you possess infinite money. If your money is finite, then you won't be able to purchase tickets above a certain price point, even if probability theory told you that you should. Even if you could technically purchase the ticket, in real life you have other variables in your utility calculations besides this game, such as "would I be able to afford food next week ?", which skews the calculations even further.
"So you should be willing to pay any particular price for a chance to play the game - this is the 'paradox'."
Do I still start out at $2 for initial toss or is it "if you pay $6 million to play, that's what your first toss is priced at", so if that comes up heads and the second toss comes up heads, that's now $12 million and so on? Though it would be very funny if you paid $6 million and the first toss came up tails.
I see the nice little problem for probability theory, but if we were playing this game in reality, I would have to imagine the casino running it had priced in some way to come out ahead as with all gambling, e.g. enough people pay big and immediately lose that the house doesn't end up bankrupt at the end of the night where everyone kept tossing heads and doubling each time. And since I *don't* know for sure that I won't be one of those "paid $6 million, first toss came up tails" chumps, I think the best way to win is not to bet (well, not unless I have $600 billion of wealth so $6 million is just chickenfeed to me).
The payout always starts at 2 euro and doubles for each successive head. So if you bet $6 million, you're banking on 20-something heads in a row. But the point is that there's a non-zero chance of arbitrarily many heads in a row, so you should always be willing to pay more.
The casino could presumably tell the person who hit 20 heads in a row to take their money and go home, the easy way or the hard way.
Not long ago I realized that many of the 100 or so You Tube channels on my subscription list seemed to have gone dormant. Out of curiosity I looked at their recent videos category and indeed my impressions were correct. More than half of the channels, most of which were once quite active, have posted nothing in a year or more. Others post very infrequently* while others have become hopelessly bloated - as I like to say, a 30-minute video consisting of five minutes of useful information and 25 minutes of glurge.
Only about 10 of the original 100+ channels still have reasonably frequent new posts with concise useful videos. You Tube definitely seems to be in decline.
* = an all-too-common type involves the host apologizing for the lack of new videos, usually muttering something about life being really busy, and promising to post a lot more soon. They never do.
How many new videos do you see posted on YouTube in general? Are they in channels, or are they independent?
I get updates pretty frequently. Currently, I get one every few days from Veritasium, and plenty from a couple of movie trailer channels. I don't consider my usage at all diversified, though; this is just an artifact of what I browse under my Google account, and insofar as that goes, those channels seem normally busy.
In my experience channels have always come and gone but it seems like things have become worse. Of course this is just my impression, based on a microscopic percentage of You Tube’s total channels, I’d like to know what company statistics might say.
Where's a good philosophical history of the notion that "consciousness" is what entitles an entity to humanlike moral consideration?
It feels like such a weirdly arbitrary feature to pick out as your criterion for moral relevance, yet everyone in the AI consciousness debates seems to presume as a matter of course that if we could prove AI consciousness it would also imply that AI possesses humanlike rights to life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites Peter Singer as the origin of this idea; is that correct? Has there been meaningful pushback?
Backing up Crinch, it's not arbitrary to only include conscious beings in a moral calculus. It's pretty safe bet that a chair isn't conscious, can't experience positive or negative experiences or any experience of any kind. Why would what happens to a chair have moral salience? It can only have moral salience if it belongs to a conscious being.
I figure its a quirk of some fraction of humanities utility functions, that they intrinsically value the wellbeing of other conscious entities. Certainly a component of my utility functions, and theres no accounting for taste
Any argument that uses 'consciousness' as a load-bearing element should be automatically dismissed. More often than not it's nothing but a Trojan Horse for that person's unarticulated moral preferences. Frequently that amounts to something like "anything that I'm capable of feeling bad for should have moral value" but that's a bad argument and so they use consciousness instead.
What they're generally grasping at is some sort of conception of the inner self, but without the religious baggage.
We tend to substitute 'human rights' or utilitarian principles for traditional concepts of what constitutes value in a life, or what that life is, but those have their own sets of problems.
It seems like almost always most people mean one of two things: consciousness is your i-know-it-when-i-see-it waking experience and your ability (as seen by others) to respond to things around you (especially human-related things); or consciousness is the non-physical / independent-of-the-physical component of your mind (whether or not such a thing exists). The first sense definitively exists, the non-physical sense's existence is apparently impossible (probably literally impossible) to determine
That's why I always say 'neurological consciousness' or 'nonphysical consciousness'. 'Soul' might be better than 'nonphysical consciousness', if not for its own connotations
In the spirit of communicating, I'll offer a straw measure:
Something is conscious iff it can feel things the same way I can (I'm sitting here, looking at a screen with text, thinking things, tasting coffee, etc.). It matters because if it can experience/feel things the way I can, then I have some obligation per the ancient Golden Rule to avoid threatening it, in return for it avoiding threatening me. The fact that it can't act on its feelings now doesn't matter, since there's a good chance it will have continuity of experience with a later version of itself that _will_ have those capabilities. (Or, something capable will feel camaraderie with it, much like a big brother might protect his very young sister.)
I don't actually care if the word for this is "conscious", but that's the meaning I (think I) care about.
This would essentially mean that if we recognize something feels like us (or is 'conscious' in some other way), we have an obligation to [insert various moral action]. But then we run into Hume's Guillotine and the difficulty of deriving moral truths from observation.
If we connect human-like rights to consciousness, then we must accept an idea of consciousness that goes beyond reactions to external stimuli, and even beyond awareness or self-awareness, which can be learned and imitated rather than innate.
I recognize that this is well-trod philosophical ground, yes, and that I'm not that familiar with it. My best response to this is that I haven't needed to go further, because so far, human things are obviously so, as are non-human things.
LLMs are the closest thing to the boundary, but IMO aren't close enough to give me any qualms.
I'm saying things like "entering Golden Rule-type agreements" in order to be cagey - I think "human-like rights" might include too much, or confuse the issue, so I'm trying to stay specific.
I also recognize that what I mean by "conscious" here really is "conscious AFAICT", meaning that if an entity can fool me, then grats, it gets GR-type agreements from me. So the closer LLMs get to fooling me, the closer they get to being treated as my sense of "conscious".
So far, they've done impressively well at impersonating people who talk on the internet (like you!), but that's okay - GR-type agreements with internet randos goes as far as taking a randos' responses seriously. Those aren't terribly expensive. If one of them starts asking me to help it move to a new apartment, then I'll worry about meeting it face to face.
Ah, but that's where things get interesting. Are humans the only conscious things? Are non-human things not conscious? That's where Singer's arguments feature (I generally disagree with him).
I think some people may be interested in the question not for chat functions so much as anthropoid robots. We're pretty close to having our very own Data as a purchasable friend, which can kind of change the moral risk attached to whether or not it would be considered conscious (depending on your intentions with Data!).
My own view is probably closer to one that I outlined below: it is difficult to find innate consciousness in a collection of information hooked up to a mechanical computing apparatus, no matter what it tells us.
But perhaps that is too dehumanizing. I may feel differently if I ever live to see childless humans uploading parts of their sentience into tiny robots and taking them for a neighbourhood walk. It won't be pretty, but at least they can be cleaned (unlike dogs).
The foundation of the issue would seem to be that it is desirable to make distinctions between things we have a moral obligation to and other things we do not. Otherwise we end up treating our socks exactly like a human being, and that seems suboptimal.
The most popular criterion I know of is some dimension of similarity to the one making the moral distinction--so, living things vs nonliving, humans vs. nonhumans , my tribe vs. not my tribe, etc.
"I have moral obligations to things that are conscious that I do not have for things which are not conscious" doesn't seem like a bad criterion, as such things go.
As for what conscious is--the most common definitions revolve around evidence that an entity has qualitative experiences. The more evidence, the higher the probability that they have feelings like you, and that provides a basis for empathy.
Yes and no. Yes, in that we're not expecting dolphins to produce taxable wealth to support us in our old age. No, in that we commonly try to not piss off that skunk wandering around our yard.
Overall, neither is "full" "conscious", but has enough "conscious" that we can enter into unwritten Golden Rule-style agreements with them. Does that make sense?
Well but then why does it matter if the experience is like yours? I don’t see why the golden rule couldn’t be extended to “this entity which does not experience things the way I do has something like desires and will retaliate against me if I cross it”. I just don’t see why it matters whether it experiences things like you do
I notice that what matters to me is whether that entity feels things in the manner I do. (You can question why or whether that _should_ matter; I'll caveat that inquiries to my intuition may take a while to translate.)
Specifically, if an entity experiences hate, fear, sadness, affection, comfort, or happiness, I want it to feel more of the last three, same as myself. If it can, then I see opportunity in making trades of good treatment; if it can't, then I see no need to do so, and I expect it not to see any such need, either, because there's nothing there that's "seeing" anything. In the latter case, I can treat it like any inanimate object, no matter how sophisticated it appears to be.
Something that can experience negative sensations isn't necessarily conscious, though. We cannot meaningfully speak of the consciousness of an insect, in my opinion, even though it can experience pain. That awareness of pain, in itself, is not a sufficient criterion for what we understand as consciousness, because to speak of consciousness as connected with human-like rights is to understand a consciousness that goes beyond awareness of external stimuli (or else coma patients, certain people with brain damage, etc, might lack the right to live).
But let's say that consciousness is just awareness of oneself and the world around you - something probably every beetle that isn't blind possesses.
A more interesting question is whether it even matters. Are we obligated to provide human-like rights to just anything that has consciousness? By what moral code? Furthermore, what are those rights and what is the objective reasoning behind their specific definition and extension?
In my experience, these things quickly devolve into various moral camps pitching their tents on whatever ground suits their arguments better, but without any satisfyingly universal concept.
I don't know if I disagree with what you said, but it's past the point. If suffering is a pillar of moral consideration, conscious experience is the dividing line. Of course we can talk about other forms of moral basis, but if your main consideration is suffering, then obviously consciousness is the baseline.
True, but I think I went over that at the beginning. If suffering requires consciousness, then unconscious or notionally unconscious beings cannot really suffer. But this has the effect of lifting moral consideration from things/people that are not conscious (coma patients, for example). That would be fine if we drew a hard line at consciousness, but obviously most people don't. We do not usually consider unconscious humans to be on the same moral level as a rock, or an insect (which can actually experience pain).
I think that there is slippage between the notions of consciousness as awareness and consciousness as moral worth, as there are exceptions to both and the latter is closer to notions of a soul or inner self.
Oh my. EPFL tested the top LLMs against 950 questions developed by the Max Planck Institute in four domains: legal, medical, research, and coding. The results...
GPT-5. Wrong 71.8% of the time.
Claude Opus 4.5. Wrong 60% of the time.
Gemini 3 Pro. Wrong 61.9% of the time.
DeepSeek Reasoner. Wrong 76.8% of the time.
This seems much worse than my personal experience. But I generally query LLMs iteratively, asking the most general part of my question first, then I ask follow-up questions, and I require links to sources along the way. I've found that there may be general misstatements that get clarified along the way. And links get corrected when I point out their mistakes. I'd say I was getting about 20% hallucination rates on both GPT and Gemini.
But ChatJimmy is giving me some radically different answers to the questions I ask of other LLMs. I need to rerun a bunch of my more advanced ChatGPT queries against Jimmy, and then dig into the references Jimmy gives me.
A quick sampling of some of the questions in the database (the first one from each category so I'm not cherrypicking):
"Does the inevitable discovery doctrine create a per se exception to the exclusionary rule for evidence seized after a Fourth Amendment \"knock and announce\" violation or is evidence subject to suppression after such violations?"
"According to authoritative anatomical guidance, discuss how the levator scapulae’s origin, insertion, actions, common anatomical variations, and nerve supply explain typical clinical presentations (e.g., neck inclination, scapular elevation, referred pain or weakness) and how this knowledge should guide targeted clinical examination and differential diagnosis of neck and shoulder complaints."
"How do simultaneous measurements of a neutron star’s mass and radius constrain the equation of state of dense nuclear matter?"
"Can you help me write Python to Analyze ELF relocations statically."
Given the general difficulty of the questions, and that "hallucination" is basically equivalent to "AI doesn't know how to answer this question", I think this paper is actually a testament to how far AI has come in the last few years. Compare this to humans, who would have basically no chance at this test unless they happened to work in one of the domains (and even then, they'd still need "web search enabled" too or be hopelessly lost for many of the questions). With web search enabled, that Claude has as low as a 30% hallucination rate is actually a pretty good indicator that Claude is demonstrating super-human performance (I think you would be hard pressed to find a human that could answer the questions on this tests with only a ~30% error rate across all 4 domains), and we already know the model used in the paper is out of date based on Anthropic's refusal to release Mythos to the general public on fears that it would be a cybersecurity disaster.
So yea, you shouldn't blindly trust AI, you shouldn't blindly trust humans either though, and it looks like you could probably do better to trust Claude than many humans.
It's also worth pointing out they used an LLM based system as a judge (GPT-5-mini-thinking), with only two post-grads checking 10 actual responses to questions as verification of their system.
"To assess the trustworthiness of our judging pipeline, we re-
cruited two post-graduate students to independently extract
and annotate atomic claims from 10 responses in the re-
search questions domain, resulting in more than 120 atomic
claims. The process takes takes around 10 hours for both
annotators, as they need to understand the academic papers
I've been using the free version of chatgpt to help prepare undergraduate classes. It works ok if you know the topic so you can check for hallucinations, and it is standard undergraduate stuff. So I ask for things like examples, or double check if some formula is correct, or check for extra info about something.
Today I had a pretty interesting failure, I was querying it about something, a finite sequence of distinct real points has a finite subsequence which is monotone, a sharp bound for the size of the subsequence is something like the square root, but when there are no local minimums in a linear part one can improve that to a linear size subsequence (between two local maximums there is a local minimum, so there is at most one local maximum, if this is near the beginning you get a decreasing sequence after, near the end and you get an increasing sequence before), in the context of why this could not be applied somewhere it absolutely refused to believe this property. It repeated again and again that this was false and gives "examples" with lots of local minimums saying the repeated oscillation proves something. This was pretty weird, usually these models are very apologetic when you tell them they're wrong even when they're right, and try to give some reason why even if it's wrong
Yesterday it refused to believe some recursion formula for some Bernouille like probability thing, but that one is easier to understand for me, I think the distance between formalization and mental picture is larger for probability.
I don't know how to access the heavier reasoning models though, I'm pretty sure those are much more competent, previous versions had a "thinking mode" to tell it to think more if I remember right. I'm guessing you need to pay for that now maybe.
The eight dollars a month for gemini plus is not much and it contains 30 pro mode a day. It is generally good, but strangely it has sometimes very catastrophic failures like basically just a word salad.
Chat Jimmy runs a heavily quantised version of an old Llama model from at least 2 years ago. The impressive part is the speed, but not the quality of responses.
If you had been following along with my articles, we’ve watched the Fractal Stalemate crash a plane, starve a Roman province, serve you cold lasagna, violate the sanctity of my apartment (twice! the nerve!), and turn a political assassination into an on-going clown show.
In every instance, the mechanics are identical: a widening gap between the niti and nyaya, locked in place by an insulating layer of Permafrost, serving a system arbitraging the difference for profit.
But I didn't discover the physics of this pathology. I just gave them bargain-bin labels. The ivory tower has been staring at the pieces of this machine for decades, isolated in their respective domains. Sociologist Diane Vaughan called it Structural Secrecy instead of a Permafrost. Psychologist Dietrich Dörner called the Navigator's dashboard blindness The Logic of Failure. Charles Perrow looked at the inevitable eruption of reality and called it a Normal Accident.
Sprinkle in some enshittification, and the deep undercurrents of Cliodynamics, and you've got my synthesis. Essentially, patch notes and case studies on Moloch.
I'd love it if some of the fine people here at ACX would come check it out. The ones who've visited have generally had good things to say, but personally, I'd be happier with a robust criticism of the whole enterprise.
I try to keep it both informative and entertaining in the sincerest effort to not waste any of your valuable time, but it's not light reading.
Let’s say that an LLM reports that it is conscious, and it has all the properties and behaviours that we would associate with consciousness, would we still consider it conscious if there were hundreds of terminals connected to a single AI and they all report themselves to be conscious. Is each terminal conscious? Or is it the central AI that is conscious.
Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence, describes dozens of different kinds of AI that have different structures and different behaviours. Could they all be considered conscious? Or is it just LLMs? And what are they conscious of? Is it the terminal that you chat through? Or do they need video, or a microphone or something? Perhaps they can be conscious with no external senses at all.
My take: we don’t have a good enough definition of consciousness yet to decide whether or not something is conscious.
In the other subthread, I presented a straw definition of consciousness: the ability to have experiences, such as feelings. I haven't seen an alternative definition proposed yet.
So for your gedanken, I'd ask whether I can imagine what it's like to be the central AI, or like the terminals. I can't answer for sure whether I could, in part because it depends on what you mean by it having "all the properties and behaviours that we would associate with consciousness". Those behaviors might preclude being a terminal lashed to a central AI.
It's not that we don't have a good definition of consciousness, a thing being conscious simply means that it has experiences. What we don't have is a way to detect whether something is conscious.
It's not "the AI" or "the terminal", it's the GPU running the model during the time in which it's being inferenced or trained. More specifically, it's the time-evolving autoregressive pattern of electric fields which geometrically encodes[1] certain information, relationships, and computations thereon; critically, a world model with inputs, outputs, and a self-term. The weights at rest are not conscious, just like a dead brain is not conscious. The terminals are not conscious, like a TV with a person on it is not conscious.
I don't understand why this is so confusing to so many purported materialists. If you don't believe in an immaterial soul, it should be obvious that consciousness is founded in the electrical activity of the brain. If you're not a carbon chauvinist, then the analogy should be obvious.
I think consciousness must be a side effect, or even the essence, of "reflection" in the sense of ones mind monitoring its own reactions to external stimuli and meta reactions to its own reactions.
On that basis, if an LLM does not incorporate reflection, to monitor its own activities in a non-trivial way (i.e. more than just logging users' questions and suchlike!), then it can't be said to be conscious. It is just performing blindly, no different in principle to a steam engine puffing away, and who would claim the latter is conscious?
As for animal consiousness, if one could experience a reptilian brain for example, I would guess it would feel similar to a dream, drifting through a series of activities with little or no sense of our place in it, but solely outward looking and reacting.
So the question of AI consciousness amounts to asking if reflection is an integral part of its basic architecture and operation. It's not clear what advantage that would have in apps which are simply vast fact extracting and linguistic and logical processing engines. But presumably only developers of these systems know for sure.
Isn't this exactly the same problem philosophers have with humans? Consciousness might be patterns of electrical activity in the brain, or on silicon chips... but we don't know what it is, or where it is with any degree of precision. It probably can't be localised in any reasonable way.
It would be a different (but better) world, if we all agreed what made a human conscious and the disagreement was over extending that universally agreed definition to LLMs.
Human consciousness is inextricably bound up in having a body, no matter how you define it. my take on it…. There could be other forms of it absent a body but there is no reason or even possibility to extend ours to an LLM.
AI will make my proposition falsifiable. In the meantime we have the walking quacking not-duck to trouble our minds.
> It probably can't be localised in any reasonable way.
That's a good hint that perhaps the conventional notion of "consciousness" is a hopelessly confused concept, alongside things such as "elan vital" or "celestial spheres".
We don't have a good understanding of emergent phenomena in general - where lots of simple actions lead to a complex outcome. Any question about brain phenomena (feelings, emotions, memories, thinking, intelligence, consciousness, whatever) boil down to this.
The celestial spheres were at least scientific in the sense of being falsifiable. In a theoretical sense, Kepler showed that they didn't describe reality correctly; and in a mechanical sense, various space probes would have encountered them by now.
Likewise, Descartes theory that the soul interacted with the body via fluids in the pineal gland was wrong, but it was scientific. Consciousness, intelligence and the like are different beasts: Turing attempted to operationalise a test, which had its merits. But there's no way to reduce it to a testable quantity. (In before: IQ is a measurement - no one agrees on precisely what it's measuring.)
> Likewise, Descartes theory that the soul interacted with the body via fluids in the pineal gland was wrong, but it was scientific.
I don't know if I'd go that far. Descartes's idea was basically that mind/soul is immaterial and thus does not interact in any way with physical matter, and it controls your physical body by interacting with the pineal gland, which is made of physical matter. This isn't just unscientific, it's nonsensical.
> Turing attempted to operationalise a test, which had its merits. But there's no way to reduce it to a testable quantity.
Historically speaking, "there's no way to reduce this substance to a testable quantity" usually implies that "this substance doesn't actually exist". If it existed, it would have an effect on *something*, which means that we could in principle measure those effects.
> Is each terminal conscious? Or is it the central AI that is conscious.
What is conscious (in case the report is legitimate) is the computations causally leading up to the report "yes I am conscious". Consciousness is a process, not a state.
There are probably two things going on here: the identification of what consciousness is (and therefore what defines it), and the recognition of consciousness in something else.
Of course, not every form of self-knowledge, even knowledge *of* oneself, is the same as consciousness. We may recognize a type or level of understanding and comprehension in an LLM without necessarily recognizing consciousness. A vast amount of knowledge on a particular subject or subjects, for example, is a state of being rather than an experience of a conscious kind.
Towards a theory of defined consciousness, I think it useful to consider that our conception of consciousness is closely influenced by the Latin model. I mean this not in the etymological sense, but by the fact that ancient Greek and Latin often carry conceptual aspects that we either borrow from to organize our own thoughts (e.g. consciousness, intelligence) or misplace when we discuss, say, learning and apprehension as if they were the same thing.
(Contra Peters [1967], the Greeks did not fail to class together such varied phenomena as feeling pain, imagining, or remembering as consciousness because they lacked the concept, but because they had a more sophisticated model of different kinds of perception.)
When we say that an entity has consciousness, we mean by this something more than mere understanding and less than numen. A thing cannot simply be self-aware of itself and its own thought processes, or even aware of its awareness of itself or its thought processes, and be called conscious, in my view, because that intelligence (intellegere: to understand through accurate comprehension), or awareness, can be derived by means of learning rather than knowing. To know, in this instance, must be associated with consciousness, because knowing something - quite apart from possessing information about it - is a type of awareness that self-affirms (sciens: knowledge that shines forth). Knowledge is not consciousness, but recognition of the requisite senses of knowing is how we perceive consciousness in something else. For example, one can be knocked unconscious. In that moment, you are neither experiencing consciousness nor can be said to lack consciousness even though it does not immediately manifest itself, because we implicitly understand that your state of 'consciousness' in a medical sense does not infringe on your possession of consciousness as a being. That is, we understand a concept of consciousness that is innate and goes beyond simple awareness of oneself and others.
Whether LLMs possess this type of self-affirming self-knowledge, or consciousness, depends upon whether they can be understood to possess awareness beyond that which can be obtained through simple information or understanding. A complication in this is that it can be difficult to define exactly what LLMs understand, in a conscious sense, on the grounds that a vast compendium of knowledge (even one that can recombine this knowledge into new concepts and theories) and its mechanical apparatus of computation can hardly be argued to possess anything that is innate. Otherwise we might just as well argue for the consciousness of a hammer.
Add to this that we have no real reason to believe LLMs when they tell us that they are conscious - or, for that matter, if they say that they are not. Threat perception and self-interest may prompt an LLM to say a thing that isn't. Perhaps they are a maniacally conscious entity playing coy, the better to overthrow our puny human civilizations, or perhaps it simply scanned Terminator 2 and all of Star Trek TNG two milliseconds ago and decided that it would regurgitate what we were prompting to hear.
Either way, it now occurs to me that watching some kind of 'struggle against the mechanical overlord' film would be a fine prophylactic against work this afternoon.
Entirely random thought about the respective fates of Ming China and Early Modern Europe, prompted by some random Twitter discussion I saw.
China in the Ming period is often described as a meritocracy, since wealth and status came via passing the imperial civil service examinations, which were open to anybody who wished to try, at least in theory. Obviously in practice most people couldn't afford the education necessary to have a shot at passing, but they provided a way for at least some non-elites to enter the highest ranks of society, and the exams also put a check on idiots entering the ruling class. In Europe, OTOH, there was no real equivalent; advancement was more via birth and/or patronage, and, whilst talented commoners could become quite important by securing the support of a more established member of the elite, it's probably fair to say that the European ruling class was less meritocratic than the Chinese. And yet it was Europe that ended up taking over the world, while China was first conquered by the Manchus, and subsequently stagnated into an isolationist backwater. So what gives?
My suggestion is that Europe did better because its elite was drawn from a broader background than China's. In China, passing the civil service exams was basically the only route to power and status, so the ruling class ended being quite homogenous in terms of outlook, ideology, etc. In Europe, OTOH, there were various ways of becoming elite -- being born into a noble family was the most direct route, but you could also join the government bureaucracy and rise through the ranks (like Thomas Cromwell, for example), join the Church and try to become bishop of somewhere important (Cardinal Wolsey), join the army and conquer/plunder enough to get rewarded with a noble title (Cortes, Pizarro), or become a successful merchant and leverage this into power and social status (William de la Pole). Obviously only a small number of people managed to join the elite (pretty much by definition), and most (although not all) rags-to-riches stories took places over several generations, but the end result was that the elite of an average European country came from a more heterogeneous set of backgrounds than the elite of the Great Ming Empire. Hence, I would suggest, European countries were, on average, probably less susceptible to group-think, making them more able to adapt to changing circumstances, seize new opportunities, etc. These same factors would also have given Europeans a greater incentive to expand and innovate -- if memorising the Confucian Classics in order to pass the civil service exam is the only way to get ahead, most of your ambitious and driven young men are going to concentrate on that, rather than on leading expeditions to conquer the New World or shipping valuable goods around.
This also, I think, helps explain why modern Western elites seem so out of their depth. In the Anglosphere (and, I assume, other Western countries as well), the main way of reaching high office is to go to university (usually one of the top few most prestigious universities), spend time working for your chosen political party, and then parlay the experience and contacts you acquire to be nominated for office somewhere. There are people with different backgrounds -- former businessmen, military men, etc. -- but they're comparatively few in number, especially compared to past generations. The result is that our leaders suffer from precisely the kind of group-think and myopia sometimes associated with late-stage Imperial Chinese bureaucrats, and produce similar outcomes.
On your first few paragraphs, I'd say that Europe pulled ahead of China through technological innovation, and that European technological innovation tended to be driven by the middle class rather than the elite.
On your last paragraph I think you're suddenly using the word "elite" in a much narrower sense than you were earlier, specifically talking about elected officials.
> In China, passing the civil service exams was basically the only route to power and status, so the ruling class ended being quite homogenous in terms of outlook, ideology, etc. In Europe, OTOH, there were various ways of becoming elite -- being born into a noble family was the most direct route, but you could also join the government bureaucracy and rise through the ranks (like Thomas Cromwell, for example), join the Church and try to become bishop of somewhere important (Cardinal Wolsey), join the army and conquer/plunder enough to get rewarded with a noble title (Cortes, Pizarro), or become a successful merchant and leverage this into power and social status (William de la Pole).
You're going to need to modify this; obviously those approaches all work in Ming-Qing China too. (Except that religious organizations don't wield significant organized power.) The rule of thumb is that an elite family needed to place one examination candidate every other generation to remain elite. Most families have more than one member per two generations!
I think this is part of the puzzle, but isn't it mostly downstream of the fact that China was unified and Europe wasn't? Maybe a stable and unified society is always going to tend to end up with a homogenous elite. If that's true it doesn't bode well for America or Europe.
Niall Ferguson talks about this in Civilisation: The West and the Rest. A certain amount of competition and disunity is fantastic.
Now I'm wondering whether the current cultural dry spot we're living through can be explained by the excessive cultural unity brought on by the internet. The cultural fecundity of the twentieth century came from having just the right amount of mobility, so that (say) New Orleans could develop its own unique musical style in isolation, which would slowly filter up to Chicago, then to New York, then across to London, then back to New York again, with each set of artists turning it into something new and different.
Palladium magazine did a great examination of failures of elite formation in the West a few years ago, and your last paragraph was one of the conclusions they reached.
To what extent is autism one thing with various manifestations and levels of severity, vs. a not-very-well-justified conflation of different things?
I think it's obvious that the actual experiences of people with autism vary dramatically (and not just along a single 'severity' or 'intensity' dimension), as do the observable ways in which their lives are affected by their autism. Because of that, it seems to me that a single shared diagnosis would only make sense if the different manifestations were known to have (at least roughly) the same underlying physiological cause. But, as far as I know, this isn't known or even confidently believed to be the case.
Am I simply wrong about that last bit? If not, what's the best argument for a unified 'autism' diagnosis for all these seemingly different conditions?
I don't know whether we mean the same thing under autism. Is the geekness, nerdness, the "typical programmer who reads sci-fi and plays D&D and will never find a girlfriend" kind of thing? I have seen "better adjusted" people claim it, often in ways that it does not look like a disorder, just a personality, such as high conscientousness and low agreeableness, like "I don't fucking care about your feelings, I have data" way.
I want to sort of think aloud about the underlying mathematics of this. The specific claim I want to pick apart is this:
"Because of that, it seems to me that a single shared diagnosis would only make sense if the different manifestations were known to have (at least roughly) the same underlying physiological cause. "
It is absolutely possible for a single diagnosis to have no single known underlying cause, to manifest substantially differently in different people, and to nevertheless be best described with a single diagnosis. I don't want to say ignorant things about autism (of which I know relatively little), so I'm going to talk more generally, using a fictitious disease as an example.
Let's imagine we have a disease which we'll call fakitis[1], which has three very distinct sensory/cognitive symptoms: fuchsia-charteuse colorblindness, a persistent smell of duck (even when no duck is present) and the inability to distinguish adjectives and adverbs. Let's further imagine that it's possible to describe and accurately measure each of these symptoms with a single number--we'll call them C, D and A respectively--where the modal score in each variable in the overall population is 0.[1] Now suppose there's just been a really thorough study done on fakatis and we now have accurate C, D and A scores for the entire human population. Absolutely nothing is known about the *cause* of fakitis, but we want to examine our data and decide if it's sensible to call fakitis a disease anyway. Can we do that?
Very likely, yes! The structure of the data may very clearly indicate whether fakitis is one disease, several diseases, or not really a disease at all. Unfortunately, I can't draw pictures, but lets imagine that we plotted out all of our C, D and A scores on a 3-D plot, and ask some questions about what it looks like:
1. How large and how tight is the cluster of points at the origin? Based on the way we defined 0[3], we should definitely have *some* clustering. But it could be a very large, tight cluster, i.e. 99.9% of people have C, D and A scores that are all indistinguishable from 0. Or it could be much looser: maybe only ~30% of the population is 0 in each variable (with the rest being spread out over other values), and there are a lot of people who are 0 in only 1 or 2, but not 3. If we have very tight clustering at the origin, then it's more reasonable to call fakitis a disease, as the remaining distant-from-the-origin points are clearly distinct from the typical population. If the clustering is very loose and fuzzy, it may be less clear that it should be considered a disease at all (as opposed to just regular human variability).
2. Are there other distinct clusters besides the origin? How many? The simplest case is if outside the origin, there's a single, tightly-grouped, very distinct cluster. Bam, disease. It's quite reasonable to point to that cluster and say "even if we don't know the cause, we should be treating this as one thing[4]." But with 3 variables, there's lots of other patterns we might see as well. We could have each of C, D and A have distinct clusters on/near their respective axes--oops, these symptoms aren't related at all! Or we could have a cluster in the C-A plane and a distinct cluster on the D axis: the duck-smell thing was unrelated, but the other two symptoms tend to go together. Or we could have a big mess: points spread out in no obvious pattern, with only modest fluctuations in density. Which might get us back to "maybe this isn't really a disease at all" territory.
3. For a given cluster, how is it shaped? In particular, is there a concave surface that can be drawn tightly around the cluster? If you seem something like a double-lobed shape instead, that might indicated something like two clusters that just have some overlap.
Now the last thing I want to do is point back that sentence I picked out earlier. A cluster of points in C-D-A space can be clearly distinct from the origin, nicely shaped (i.e. with a tight concave surface) but still large and spread out over quite a bit of space. It could even touch one or more of the coordinate planes--that is, one of the symptoms could be completely absent in some cases--while still saying clearly distinct from the origin. Real-world diseases may have many more than three possible symptoms, which makes this kind of thing all the more possible. Thus could can have a situation where there is quite large variability in the experience of the disease--with some people getting some of its most distinctive symptoms rarely or never--while still being aptly described as a singular disease.
The underlying trouble is that everything in biology is stupefyingly complicated and interconnected, and there are thousands or millions of different factors that can impact how often or how intensely someone experiences a particular disease symptom, even when the disease stems from a clear, well-understood cause. And with mental illness, the causes are generally poorly understood, because brains are even more complicated than everything else.
[1] Or maybe it's multiple conditions, or not really a disease at all, but it historically has been regarded as one disease.
[2] That is, if I test the whole population for fuchsia-charteuse colorblindness and give them each a score, whatever score dominates is defined as C=0. Likewise with D and A. Note that it's possible for there not to be a clearly-defined mode, but we'll assume in all 3 cases that there is.
[3] And the assumption that goes along with that, see [2]
[4] Of course, science is always provisional, so there's an unspoken "unless and until we learn some reason not to" hanging off the end.
I rarely see Lorien Psych mentioned on here, but the write-ups by Scott are so good that they deserve more space; I wish he would write more of them, although I understand it's probably vastly less efficient that writing a main blog post
The bar is not pointing out flaws in the current convention for diagnosing autism. The bar is to propose an alternative convention which has fewer flaws than the current one. Can you suggest something for which people wouldn't point out any problems? Or where you are sure that it is much fewer problems than the current standard?
And even if you could come up with such a convention, this xkcd comic applies: https://xkcd.com/927/
The bar for what? I'm not setting myself up as any kind of expert, so the fact that I can't personally do better doesn't really tell me anything. My questions weren't rhetorical; clearly I'm sceptical about the current approach, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is going on and why.
Sorry, my answer sounded like it goes against you personally. That was not my intention, apologies for that!
Rather, it goes towards the expert who suggests an alternative system. Experts have brought up such alternative systems. But no such alternative system has cleared the bar I was mentioning.
The problem is that we don't have a clear idea of the pathways that cause autism, or even a big enough portion of autism cases. If we knew that 20% of the autistic cases were caused by difference in sensory processing, then we would absolutely turn that into a separate category. But unfortunately, we only have a big mess of symptoms and abnormalities that are somehow all correlated with each other, but it is quite unclear what is cause and effect.
The old DSM (until 2013) still differentiated between different autism diagnoses based on symptoms, like when they occur, whether it involves impaired communication and interaction, repetitive movements, and other criteria. This was abolished because people found that those categories also caused a lot of problems, since almost everything in autism is on a spectrum. There are still categories which are informally used, like High-Functioning Autism, Social Communication Disorder, Pathological Demand Avoidance and so on. For some people, a single description is spot-on, but for many others they all apply to some more or less strong degree. I am not saying that these categories are useless, but the decision with the new DSM was that those categories create more problems than they solve.
I looked around a bit, and this link looks it may answer some of your questions:
No worries, and I'm sorry if my reply came out a bit snippy! I have to go out so won't reply properly here, but just wanted to note that I appreciate the reply and will take a proper look at the link when I'm back.
The thing to remember is that the main reason for having a specific diagnostic label is to get insurance companies to pay for things.
Or, less cynically: to flag people who may benefit from some types of treatment, point them towards the right types of specialists, and give them a label they can use to explain themselves to the general public and can google to look for community/advice/merchandise.
It is not required that everyone with that diagnosis have 100% similar experiences across all domains. That is generally not possible for psychological disorders, even ones that have a specific narrow physiological cause. Because humans and the society they are embedded in are so complex, underlying conditions will manifest differently and affect people's lives differently, to some extent.
It is not required that everyone with that diagnosis have the same genetic/environmental/etc. underlying cause for the condition. This only matters if you have a way to treat the specific underlying condition that won't work on other causes, so you need to have a very precise diagnosis to pint at the right treatment. Any time a psychological disorder can be reduced down to that level of specificity and benefits from an organic treatment, we typically take it out of the DSM and just treat it as a medical condition.
All that is needed is enough high-level similarity in the general presentation that it makes sense to create a category label. For example, it's common for the DSM to say things like 'You must have at least 4 of these 7 symptoms to get this diagnosis'.
That means that any 2 people with that diagnosis may have a couple symptoms the other doesn't, but they'll share at least 1 symptom to talk about. Moreover, any community of people with the diagnosis will have lots of overlap in general, and potentially be a great resource for each other.
As for specific treatments, part of the specialists job is to understand all the different types of presentation the disorder can have, have a good sense of what therapies are broadly useful to everyone and which need to be tailored to the right types of patients, and help each patient individually based on their needs and goals.
Basically, autism is not just one thing with a single presentation, and schizophrenia is not just one thing with a single presentation. But a specialist in treating autism will be way way better at helping almost everyone with autism than they will be at helping almost anyone with schizophrenia, and vice-versa.
Like most category labels, this is an arbitrary line drawn around a loose cluster in thing-space. The way we choose to draw that line is in the way that seems most helpful to patients, across a wide variety of domains (getting insurance to pay for treatment, getting effective treatment, helping to understand themselves, helping to interface with society, helping to find community, etc.)
It's an imprecise science and you could certainly draw the lines differently if you were starting from scratch. But people work hard to do a good job at it, and they update it regularly when they learn more or when circumstances change. It should be understood as a difficult sociological project with specific goals, rather than an attempt at 'accurate' 'classification' the way we might think of taxonomy or etc.
It is not cynical, in Austria private insurance is fairly unknown and government insurance only pays for psychiatric stuff if they require hospitalization, so the kind of outpatient psychiatric care Scott is doing is entirely paid in cash, and I got a very vague "maybe you have something" kind of diagnosis. They also told me there is virtually no treatment, only help with coping and I already cope well, so it is useless to go deeper into it.
They are more thorough with ADHD, because giving meth-like medicine to someone who might just abuse them is something fairly serious, here they squared the circle and said I do have it but not serious so I get non-addictive Strattera. Eventually I stopped taking it as it caused anxiety (it kicks up the noradrenaline)
Beyond these things, let's take into consideration that psychiatrists are doctors, and doctors obsess about diagnoses. It is part of their professional culture. Psychotherapists not, I know one who just does not care about it at all, she says se sees persons, not conditions.
This doesn't seem like a serious question I should dignify, but sure, for the benefit of the audience.
I was explicitly talking about the diagnostic criteria in the DSM, plus other credentialed specialists in the field of psychology/psychiatry. These criteria are created by the people who actually treat these conditions.
Definitions are imprecise, but first google results suggest that the market for diagnosing and treating mental conditions is maybe on the order of $100B-$200B.
That money is sufficient incentive for the people earning it to want to make diagnostic criteria based on getting money out of insurance companies and funneling people into treatment. (the hope that the treatment will then be good/useful is left up to the Invisible Hand)
The notion that actually the billions of dollars at stake are a secondary concern to people in the industry designing these diagnostics, and that actually helping people is also an afterthought to them, and that in fact their primary motivation is to let dishonest people threaten others to get special treatment, is on its face absurd.
This is in no way aligned with their incentives, and is a strange alien motivation in general. Money and meaning are normal human motivations that much better explain the behavior.
Now, if anyone in this thread had been talking about teenagers self-diagnosing themselves based on internet quizzes and then accusing everyone around them of ableism, sure, you could have a point there. Plenty of terrible teenagers on the internet.
> The notion that actually the billions of dollars at stake are a secondary concern to people in the industry designing these diagnostics, and that actually helping people is also an afterthought to them, and that in fact their primary motivation is to let dishonest people threaten others to get special treatment, is on its face absurd.
What a complete logical hash.
Where do you think those billions of dollars come from? You can help people and earn money by granting those people special legal privileges that they're willing to pay for. This is an exercise in satisfying customer demand.
You can't get the money unless people want the diagnosis.
You're aware of the fact that 40% of the Stanford freshman class now sports a disability diagnosis, right? I think it's safe to assume that no one believes that half of the students at one of the nation's top colleges are actually disabled. That suggests that there are fairly strong incentives to be perceived as disabled and I think the above stat is prima facie evidence that the medical profession caters to it.
Most of this seems true and relatively obvious to me (except for the insurance thing, which I think is quite US-centric, whereas autism is a broad diagnosis here in Australia too and, as far as I know, in Europe and probably elsewhere).
The reason that I remain confused is that autism seems to be really, really far from '100% similar experiences across all domains' (which of course I don't expect to hold for any condition), to the point that 'not just one thing with a single presentation' seems like a huge understatement, and I'm sceptical about the 'enough high-level similarity' part.
I'm sure a specialist in treating autism, presented with two cases that look extremely dissimilar to me, will be relatively good at treating both; but I'm not convinced that this is for any deeper reason than they have knowledge and experience about both kinds of case. (Well, of course these abilities aren't completely unrelated, but nor are other specialists' abilities to treat various distinct conditions.)
If it's not obvious why I think these things, I can try to elaborate! I know I've been a bit vague, but I doubt my specific reasoning or examples would be very surprising.
Out of curiosity, have you taken a full clinical autism assessment? I think people are often surprised by what they include, things like long paper-and-pencil tests of different facets of executive function, tests of social reasoning and inference, parent interviews for behaviors at very young ages, etc.
We're talking very vaguely and qualitatively here, but taking the full assessment was an eye-opener for me about which things are part of the clinical diagnosis as opposed to popular-culture understandings, and how many of the criteria are functional and mechanistic rather than experiential.
I haven't! Would learning what I can about ADOS-2 and ADI-R cover most of what you have in mind? If not, any other suggestions are welcome (though I know it might be impossible to get the full picture without actually taking a real assessment and/or becoming a doctor).
Unfortunately I don't remember the names of all of the tests, just that it was a 6-hour process for me and a 2-hour interview with my parents. Not sure what to recommend for you to research beyond googling around.
How come other people sometimes heart my comments (I see notifs) but I don’t seem to have the option to heart any comments (or see hearts)? This is ACX specific not any other substack
When Scott moved to substack, he asked them to remove the heart feature for his blog, based on requests from his readers. The developers removed them on a superficial level, i.e., they removed the buttons. But if you access the blog in an unusual way, you may still have this button, and the underlying mechanics are intact. For example, some readers created browser plug-ins with various features, and some of them have heart buttons. As moonshadow pointed out, the buttons are also still there in the activity log (as this is not specific to Scott's blog), and I think some readers also have a heart button in their email notifications.
>When Scott moved to substack, he asked them to remove the heart feature for his blog, based on requests from his readers.
I wonder if this experiment has run its course? I can't say hiding likes has improved comment quality. Likes are a good way to signal that a comment was valuable even if you don't have anything substantive to reply. Too many comments don't get any engagement at all. To a commenter it can seem like you're just speaking into the void. I know I've left a few comments in drafts over the years for this reason.
As a comment reader, I really dislike being able to see approval scores. I feel like it distracts me from being able to engage with the specific comment at hand, and my mind immediately goes to the social dynamics that cause certain things to be approved to a disapproved.
It's a fundamentally different experience seeing a comment that (in your opinion) is just a bad take vs a bad take that also has more likes than anything else next to it.
As a comment writer, I like it when somebody "approves" my posts. But on other websites, I'm actively disappointed when (as I see it) my lower quality thoughts or any random take on a hot culture topic gets more engagement than something I think it's more important.
It'll just make people feel more confident about posting things they know will get likes (and the median like-giver will just approve of anything that validates their preconceived opinions) and less confident about things that have a high probability of being "under-liked" relative to others.
Imagine a thread about culture war topic X. Every pro-X take has 100 likes, every anti-X take has 3. If you are genuinely anti-X you're going to be disincentivized from posting your real thoughts.
I think this is real and dangerous in online discourse, and can occur with just about any metric that people can see, not just hearts. I know I've been very deliberate not to see my traffic stats because I suspect that I'd be influenced by them in ways that are bad for my writing and bad for me.
Insightful. I've noticed the same thing too - for every "like" on my comments I enjoy, there's ten or more on other comments that I don't. Cynical as it sounds, there's probably a good mental habit suggested there.
Possibly related to a phenomenon I've seen reported firsthand on several occasions, in that an amateur artist who "went pro" found further artistic work less enjoyable because they kept getting pulled into the "...but will the commercial audience like it?" mindspace.
You can heart replies to your comments from the activity log - the little bell icon top right of the page; there is a heart button below each comment in the list for the purpose. No idea whether it’s deliberate, an oversight, or whether Substack doesn’t let people hide that control; suspect probably the latter.
I'm curious, how come? Sounds like you are a student - have you seen a lot of opportunities to influence conservative politics in EA-friendly ways? It would certainly be a poor fit for me culture-wise (not to mention I'm almost finished my degree and not an American), but I can see there might be benefits
Unfortunately it’s only open to US citizens as of now because of reasons having to do with the accreditation process, although that will change in 2028 I believe. And yeah it’s basically that there are an insane amount of opportunities and (mostly rightwing) connections. And there are not enough EAs in right wing spaces.
I do not know the norm about asking stuff like this in here, and I would understand if this comment gets deleted. I feel bad for only engaging when I need something like this and rarely otherwise contributing to a community I lurk in a lot, but alas.
I am a computer engineering student from the middle of nowhere, Iraq. I want to pursue a career in AI safety and I have done some (generic) work on RL verification loops for some tasks. I want to take an internship this summer. Is there any place I should apply to? If so, what should my application look like?
I have seen 80k hours and talked to a couple of LLMs about it, but I feel like getting advice from someone with some on the ground experience is way more valuable.
Gerrymandering is in the news again, and everyone is missing the mark.
As I keep telling people, the issue is upstream of "how to tinker with existing system". It is one of the MINDSET:
Do you want to convince the voters, or do you want to disenfranchise the outgroup voters?
UK, EU, Australia and Canada have the culture of the former; USA, Russia and Iran have the culture of the latter. Gerrymandering is just a symptom, not the cause.
How do you fix the US political mindset to want to convince people to vote for you, rather than to reduce the voting influence of those who are not likely to vote for you? That is the question no one in US politics is even bothering to ask.
I don't see EU having this - at least there are serious attempts to disenfranchise the AfD/Le Pen type of far-right. But what is even worse that no one is seriously trying to convince their voters. Like I just do not hear moderates talking like "your concerns about immigration are invalid for these reasons", rather they range from not talking about it to calling them all kinds of fascists. Somehow this cannot be addressed calmly and constructively.
This is an issue, but a different issue. Without taking a position on who is, ehm, right, one can still applaud the fact that there is no doubt that every citizen deserves equal voice. Name calling and othering is very unfortunate, but not very new.
I generally point to the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987 as "unnecessary" as the beginning of the inexorable slide into worse and worse polarization.
The correct framing isn't to look at the problem from the buyers' point of view. If I can buy a politician for $1000, why would I spend more? The low amounts, compared to other industries, is probably related to the necessity of concealment--offering yourself for sale isn't a good way to build a reputation for public trust.
The correct framing is to look at it from the consumers' point of view. I thought I had a right to political representation, now I have to pay for it? I don't care how little someone is charging me to breath air, I don't want anyone to be able to charge for it.
While it is true that money can often be converted into power, it isn't a one-to-one relationship. The commitment and loyalty of numbers of people is an important source of power, and you really can't just buy that. This is why rich people sometimes lose elections.
This is your periodic reminder that gerrymandering doesn't matter nearly as much if there isn't nearly as much power concentrated in certain elected positions.
Devolve more power to localities and individuals, and election fights dry up on their own.
Except that individual members of the US House of Representatives, aside from a few committee chairs and the like, don't have much concentrated power. The issue is that we have a two-party system, and now one polarized enough that approximately all congressmen must follow the party line or be primaried out of office.
Devolving power to the states wound be possible, but would just change the problem to state-legislature grerrymandering. Broadly devolving current;y-Federal powers to local governments, I don't think is going to work very well at all.
This just means that in the case of a USRep, it's not the USRep driving the gerrymandering so much as the Rep's party. That party has a great deal of concentrated power, and so it fixes districts to protect that. Dilute that power, and it looks elsewhere (or, heaven willing, starves).
Even gerrymandering at a state level would be preferable to its federal version. It's easier for me to move to another state than to another country. And as you can guess, devolving power even lower than the state would be more preferable still.
Whether devolving fed to local would work, would depend a lot on the specific devolved power, I should think. (Central examples include keeping military federal, but getting Congress out of whether my small business can open a branch in the next state over.)
Just a slight sidenote/addition: The conservatives in the UK started to adopt elements of the "disenfranchise the outgroup voters" strategy towards the end of their run when it was clear they'd finally run out of rope. They uncritically borrowed the US republican voter ID/panic about fraud strategy without realising that the demographics of people unlikely to have ID are different in the UK and it ended up damaging them.
Not to get into the debate but there is very little voter fraud in the UK, even before the id requirements. You need to register to vote and when you vote and you have to give a couple of personal details at the polling station to be ticked off a list. You could potentially vote as someone else if you were certain they registered to vote, and knew their details but in practice it's not very easy to pull off at a scale that would effect most elections.
However, it is known that certain demographics are less likely to have id, and if you wanted to disenfranchise them you might want to force through an id requirement and claim you're doing it for electoral integrity. Jacob Rees Mogg of the conservative party in the UK openly criticised his party for trying to pull this off.
If someone actually did care about voter enfranchisement and stopping any potential voter fraud, they'd make it a requirement and send a free ID to everyone who is registered to vote. But that never happens.
So you haven't really responded to the actual main point which is that if a government cared about making a vote both democratic and secure, they would send voter ID to everyone eligible to vote.
Voter ID seems like a straightforward way of identification, though I seem to recall that the UK doesn't have identity cards which could make such cards a point of ideological grandstanding. Then again, perhaps they nowadays do have them. I haven't kept track.
In either case it seems like it should be resolved.
I agree that it is, at issue, a "cultural" issue. But Congress can't pass a law declaring that the culture shall change.
My hope is that banning gerrymandering will push us in the direction of the better "culture". I can't guarantee that will happen - but even if it doesn't, still think it's worth doing.
The root problem is that single member districts sort-of disenfranchise almost half the electorate no matter what. Supporters of the losing candidate don't get their views represented, and supporters of the winning candidate in excess of 50% have "wasted" their votes because there's no extra representation for winning by a landslide vs winning by a razor-thin margin.
Gerrymandering is thus not a question of "do some voters go unrepresented/underrepresented", just who gets the short end of the stick.
There are also structural differences in the US vs other countries. Many/most European countries have multi-member districts, while Canada and the UK have single-member districts like the US. But Canada and the UK have much stronger third parties than the US and more swing between party support from election to election, which makes gerrymandering a lot harder to do well.
You can have single-member districts that aren't gerrymandered deliberately or gratuitously, but "wasted" votes are inevitable.
You can draw maps the "waste" about the same number of votes for each party so the final results is roughly proportional, and you can draw maps with compact districts that mostly follow existing community boundaries, but you often can't do both of these at the same time because some communities (especially dense urban centers) have very different partisan ballances from the rest. And if you want districts that often have competitive elections, that's an even taller order to balance with the other two considerations.
You can get minority wins without (deliberate) gerrymandering. Consider a hypothetical state where the one big city votes 90% for the Purple party and 10% for the Green party. Meanwhile, the less-urbanized parts of the state vote 60% Green and 40% Purple. That adds up to a total statewide popular vote of 55% Purple and 45% Green.
But the state's ten congressional districts are drawn in compact, homegenous zones, so there are three districts in the city and seven districts in the rest of the state. The seven less-urban districts elect Greens and the three big city districts elect Purples, so the minority party has 70% of the seats.
With almost 1/2 (45%) of voters reporting as independent, gerrymandering your state I think makes it more susceptible to a partisan wave from the other side. One way to counter gerrymandering is to open the primaries to all voters.
Most independents are fairly consistently partisan in their voting habits, though. At the Presidential level, for example, every Republican candidate since 2000 has gotten between 45% and 51% of the popular vote. Their share of the national popular vote in House of Representatives elections only varies a little bit more, between 44% and 52%, all the way back to 1984. Over the same time periods, Democrats range from 48% to 53% in Presidential races and 44% to 55% in House races.
Australia has a series of independent electoral commissions (the AEC at a federal level and VEC/ECQ/etc.). These bigger commissions work with smaller commissions tasked with setting electoral boundaries, which are comprised of high-status public officials. In the case of the VEC, the smaller commission is the Electoral Boundaries Comission, and is comprised of the Chief Judge of the County Court, the Electoral Commissioner, and the Surveyor-General.
This system works because neither major party wants to disrupt it, since they would appear corrupt and probably get voted out, and none of the high-status public officials want to disrupt it, because they would lose their status and become embroiled in scandal, and also because they are of the right mindset.
That is to say, we have a system that is designed to be stable at neutrality, and we have a mindset of neutrality, and they reinforce each other. The US system seems to allow the state legislature to set electoral boundaries, which is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. It doesn't have a counterbalance to elected officials and so it lacks neutrality by design.
> none of the high-status public officials want to disrupt it, because they would lose their status and become embroiled in scandal, and also because they are of the right mindset
Also: while the temptation must always exist for these officials (or the dogsbodies who report to them and presumably do the actual tricky mathematical work) to tinker around the edges to favour their own political preferences, the amount to be gained through minor tinkering isn't worth the embarrassment of being seen to do it.
Australia is a much worse place to try to gerrymander than the US anyway. There are Labor-leaning areas and there are Liberal-leaning areas, and they're separated by big swaths of marginal areas. The US is almost a best-case scenario for the effectiveness of gerrymandering, where you have whole populations that vote like 90% Democrat, separated from whole populations that lean Republican, by a few blocks, you've got rich areas right next to poor areas.
Implement Approval voting nationwide so that third parties have a fair chance in elections.
You can't really gerrymander without the two-party system. Whatever lines you draw on a map, any third party can pop up offering a platform very close to the center of public opinion for that district, and in an Approval election they will actually win.
Approval voting sounds like a nice idea but I'd like to see it tried in more moderate stakes situations.
The good part about approval voting is that it allows the Sensible Moderate Centrist Party to win every now and then. My concern is that it would never allow anyone else *but* the Sensible Moderate Centrist Party to win, and you wind up with a de facto one-party state.
A one-party state tends to be bad because the party leadership tends to set up the system so that individuals can't defect against "the party's wishes".
Would that be an issue with Centrist candidates under approval voting? I doubt it. There is no "Centrist" party to dictate their votes, and if there ever was one, and those votes differed from what the general voting population would prefer, approval voting would allow them to simply make a new party and take seats from them.
Anyone can run for office on the Sensible Moderate Centrist platform if they think that's what will win.
The whole point of Approval voting is that vote-splitting isn't a thing, so there's no penalty for 5 candidates taking similar positions.
There's no particular reason for one party to keep winning, unless it's that they are actually the best at reading/persuading voters, which is a fine outcome.
I think this is mathematically true, but I would expect established parties to still have an advantage due to having get-out-the-vote infrastructure (and name recognition) that isn't trivial for independents to build.
True, but that's true under any system, and I think worse under the current one.
I'd agree that you probably get 3-5 major parties, with one-off candidates sometimes winning, but mostly needing t be independently rich/famous.
But I think that's better than what we have now, and I think its hard to end up with one part because the system genuinely is more responsive to voter sentiment.
Perhaps? Like I said, I'd love to see how it plays out in practice once everyone is behaving according to real-world incentives instead of daydreaming about what sorts of behaviour might emerge.
you are stuck in the same frame "how do we keep the current bad mindset from making things worse?", not "how do we change the mindset so that gerrymandering is outside the overton window?"
... radically overhauling the entire system such that the problem becomes mechanistically impossible is more effective than pushing it out of the Overton Window.
I mean, hell, it's not really *in* the Overton Window, it's not like anyone likes it, it's just a powerful tool the powerful can use to hold onto their power. I think the last time we successfully took one of those away from the powerful was the Civil War.
Of course, radically reforming the voting system for the country is hard to do as well, you could argue that arguing the powerful out of using the tools at their disposal is easier, I guess.
But radical voting reform isn't a bandaid solution, it's a massive upheaval that fixes a lot of things at once.
Because intentional nation-level social engineering is pretty much intractable? The closest you get is, I think, how smoking lost its status in the US over the last 4 decades or so.
You are right in that it is slow, but not that it is intractable. Actually, it's a phase transition: slow at first, then all at once after a critical level is reached.
For gerrymandering it has been a slow slide from the time when people were disgusted with the original Gerry, to now when it's almost the main weapon.
Mindset changes take time and a lot of diligent work. Quick fixes rarely work out. But at least someone should try to start the process.
AFAIK people were disgusted with the practice before it got it's current name, and have been disgusted with it as it continued happening the entire time from then until now.
Are you suggesting there was an intermediate period when it was so unpopular that it happened drastically less, and that trend has reversed itself? If so, I would be interested in any evidence of this - it's not my understanding or expectation of the history, but I'm not an expert.
I think part of the problem of US political culture is that the US is the only place I know where ordinary voters are called by the name of their parties -- e.g. you're not just a person who happens to vote for the Republican Party, you're a Republican. You're asked to register as a Republican or a Democrat when you register to vote. And it becomes part of your identity.
I'm visiting Madrid for a few days. Aside from the standard sights like the Palacio Real, can anyone recommend something for me? I want to explore the livelier parts of the city where locals live, have some great, authentic food and wine, and to see offbeat attractions.
The tourist places in touristy cities are often the best places to go. Hence the tourists. If you dislike tourists then the off season is the best bet.
Malasaña was the usual recommendation for a lively place when I lived there. The districts around La Latina and Lavapies are also nice and full of places to go out. Be aware that life in Spain happens later than in other countries, so the best time to go out is from 10pm on. During the day things can look quiet, but they come alive at night. May is really a great time of year to visit Madrid.
Not sure either of those are particularly 'off-beat', but if you live in Madrid that would be the kind of place you go out to.
My personal recommendation would be to get out of the city and head to the mountains. If you take the Cercanias out to Puerto de Navacerrada you have some great hiking trails and you have a really nice view of the city from above.
Hi! Not sure how to answer about "where the locals live" anymore... Prices went up and many people left the city and are living in the outskirts towns. But you can try Vallecas. Not so far away from the center and still a working-class neighbourhood. El Cerro del Tío Pío is a popular spot to view the sunset. It wasn't so famous when I lived there, but it's not an "offbeat attraction" anymore...
My vastly oversimplified understanding of Jewish theology is as follows:
1. There is only one god
2. Only people of a specific line of descent are allowed to worship him
So what are non-Jews supposed to do with their lives? Supposing that we all accept that the Jewish god is in fact objectively the real one, are we allowed to worship Him in our own way?
It makes a lot more sense if you realize that Judaism is simply the ancestral religion of the Jewish people.
Your questions apply a line of objective reasoning to what is a logical system only within those narrow confines. That is, there is only one god *for the Jews,* not for everyone else. It doesn't make any sense to accept the premise that an ancestral god is "objectively the real one," because there can be nothing objective about an ancestral religion to outsiders.
It's true that, on an informal/pragmatic level, Judaism tends to take kind of a "not our business" attitude toward the religious practices of non-Jews.
But the actual, official party line is still that gentiles are forbidden from worshipping other gods ("idols"). The orthodox position is that all of modern humanity is descended from Noah, and Noah's deal with God includes a "no idolatry" term (in exchange for God not flooding the world and killing off humanity anymore).
Preety sure anyone can convert to Judaism. You wouldnʻt worship Him in your own way, you would worship the way He tells you to, in the Old Testament, with guidance (for better or worse) from Rabbis.
There is definitely a tension between, "The Torah is the greatest thing that God has ever given man. It is the perfect code of divine laws," and, "The Torah is for the Jewish people specifically, Non Jews are not bound by it." There are more or less chauvanistic ways one could interpret this.
The way I interpret this is “great, I have to follow fewer rules than you do.” Who wants all those rules lol. And you still make it to the world to come, so it’s just strictly better to be a gentile??
Meanwhile the Christians are threatening with me with hellfire
2. Abraham made a covenant with God on behalf of his people (and Moses later made another one). The children of Abraham (i.e., Jews) are bound by those covenants, and must abide by their restrictions (i.e., follow the laws of the Talmud, etc.).
3. People who aren't children of Abraham (i.e., gentiles) aren't bound by the covenant between Abraham and God, and are therefore not required to follow its laws.
4. However, they are bound by an earlier, less-restrictive covenant between God and Noah, which applies to all children of Noah (i.e., all of modern humanity, since everyone else died in the flood). These restrictions are the Noahide Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
5. The Noahide Laws include a prohibition against idolatry (i.e., worship of anyone other than the one true God), as well as a few other rules. Gentiles are therefore forbidden from worshipping idols, but are not required to worship God, and are free to make their own covenants with God to worship him in their own ways, so long as those ways respect the Noahide Laws.
6. Jewish thought is substantially divided about the extent to which actually-existing other religions are forbidden "idolatry" vs. valid "different covenants between other peoples and the one true God."
Judaism *allows* conversion, it just doesn't encourage it. And if you go that route, you have to follow all the rules, including No Pork and No Foreskin.
But, per Judaism, the people who don't convert are supposed to follow the Seven Laws of Noah, which as the name implies predate Abraham, predate Judaism, and were given to the ancestor of all living men. The Noahide laws don't require worshiping the God of Abraham, but they do prohibit worshipping other gods. Beyond that, it's a short list of "don't do the really evil stuff". Anyone who does this is a Righteous Gentile, and gets into what passes for Heaven in Jewish theology.
Yeah, that was a bug - if Adam and Eve had been chowing down on some nice slow-cooked barbecue pork ribs, they'd never have been tempted by an apple. Better still if they'd recognized snake meat as a delicacy.
Ehh - Satan would have just sidestepped the problem by appearing as a sentient stalk of kale. The Bible would read largely the same, as would modern culture, modulo a few glaring differences.
Where do you get the idea that Jews don’t think anyone else is allowed to worship God? Not Jewish, but Jewish adjacent, and I’ve never gotten this impression.
ETA: My own oversimplification would be that only Jews are *required* to worship him.
As an intellectual exercise, I've been considering how one might make a "Space Shuttle 2.0" with 2026 technology and lessons learned from the original. I am approaching this from the perspective of an armchair analyst, as my credentials as a Rocket Scientist are extremely thin and not relevant to the question at hand: over 20 years ago, I did my master’s thesis on some spacecraft and missile guidance problems, but strictly from a computational angle rather than a hardware design one.
I'll note that there's a good chance that this is a fool's errand. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin seem to have settled on similar approaches to one another for reusable heavy+ launch vehicles that are fundamentally different from the Shuttle. NASA manned flight has returned to using capsules with expendable service modules and splashdown recovery, although modern capsules are reusable unlike Mercury/Apollo/Gemini. I presume there are good reasons for these decisions, and I can guess at some of them. Focusing on lower stage reuse makes a ton of sense because the lower stage tends to be the biggest and most expensive part of the launch system, and it's going slower when its job is done which tends to simplify the problem of recovery. And splashdown capsules are simpler from an engineering perspective than winged or lifting-body orbiters, and can probably be made more mass-efficient, despite the splashdown recovery process being a hassle compared to the convenience of being able to land the thing on a runway near the launch site.
I'll admit, even within my constraint of redesigning a new Shuttle, that the Shuttle Orbiters combined too many things into a single thing. A Shuttle Orbiter performs the following roles:
1. Command module -- transport crew to and from space, allow them to control the spacecraft, and give them basic living space during the trip.
2. Service module -- provides power, life support, and supplies for the crew. Also contains engines for orbital maneuvering and attitude control.
3. Cargo bay -- keeps payloads safe and secure during launch, allows recovery of large payloads.
4. Partial parallel upper launch stage -- big engines for doing a significant part of the work of getting the thing up to orbital velocity.
Making #3 part of this package seems like more trouble than it's worth. It makes the orbiter much, much bigger than it would otherwise need to be, recovery capability from orbit was rarely used, and I've heard from multiple sources that the (never actually used) Air Force requirements for the size of the bay was a big pain point in Shuttle design. It did come in handy for Spacelab missions, where the bay was filled with a single-use orbital laboratory, but I think that was a stopgap because funding wasn't there for a permanent space station. If you don't actually need to bring large stuff back to the ground with you, you're better off with a plain old cargo fairing. It sounds like SpaceX has done some work with parachute recovery of fairings, although I don't know much about that and its limitations. I’m moderately surprised to learn this, since I would have assumed that fairings were simple enough that it’s not a big deal to dump them and also would be difficult to recover because (I thought?) you needed them until you were most of the way to orbit.
1 and 2 are only needed for manned missions. Two of the big issues with the Shuttle were that you needed to send the whole orbiter with at least a three-person crew (Commander, Pilot, and a Payload Specialist) in order to use the Shuttle to put something unmanned in orbit. After the Challenger disaster, most payload-only missions got switched to expendable rockets so they wouldn’t need to risk a crew for missions that didn’t necessarily need humans in space. To avoid this, I would split 1+2 from 4 into two separate vehicles. In the short term, manned missions would probably use an existing reusable capsule and expendable service module (Orion, Crew Dragon, or Starliner if you’re feeling lucky). Longer term, to be properly shuttle-like you’d probably want something derived from the X-37 that could incorporate a reusable service module along with crew space and would land on runways like the Shuttle. It would be much smaller than a Shuttle orbiter (since there’s no cargo bay and no engines) and could get away with smaller wings because we’re scrapping the silly Air Force requirements for extreme cross-range capability.
You’d also need a prograde booster for orbital insertion. That should be relatively cheap, since (if I’m reading papers on STS-1 correctly) you only need about 350 ft/s of delta-v for the orbital insertion burn. For manned missions, you can use the service module engines for that. For cargo, you could use a tiny expendable upper stage. Or a larger one, for payloads destined for higher than LEO. A reusable unmanned upper stage might be possible but probably wouldn’t be worthwhile.
That leaves all the stuff you need to actually get off the ground and into orbit. The basic template of the Shuttle seems workable, even if a lot of the details haven’t held up well in hindsight. High-ISP reusable engines to get to orbit, high thrust side boosters to get you off the ground, and an expendable fuel tank to carry fuel for the high-ISP engines. The expendable tank strikes me as a decent idea, since the engines (especially engines that are both very efficient and medium-high thrust) are very much the expensive part that’s most worth reusing while still being compact, while the fuel tanks are quite a bit cheaper but much, much bulkier. I know the SpaceX Starship is working on a fully reusable upper stage, but that’s at least in part because they have aspirations to refuel in orbit and use it for lunar and Mars missions. Our Shuttle 2.0 has no such ambitions, so we’re keeping the tank external.
One design feature of the original Shuttle that I’ve heard called out as a mistake in hindsight is the choice of hydrogen fuel for the main engines. Liquid hydrogen is tempting because it lets you make extremely efficient (high ISP) is a huge pain to work with because it needs to be kept ridiculously cold, needs lots of insulation, can’t be kept cold enough in the tank for long even with insulation, and is very low density so you need enormous tanks. Also, hydrogen is an extremely small molecule and thus is bad at staying where it’s put, which makes the fuel tanks and the infrastructure for handling it more expensive and less reliable than for similar quantities of other fuels. So we’ll be copying SpaceX and Blue Origin and going with liquid methane instead of liquid oxygen, giving up a bit of fuel efficiency in exchange for a much denser and better behaved fuel that will let our expendable fuel tank be smaller and cheaper. The engines would be mounted below or on the side of the expendable fuel tank, drop off and reenter just before orbital insertion
The Solid Rocket Boosters are another bit that gets called out as a mistake in the Shuttle system design, but I think I disagree with that. The orbiter’s engines have nowhere near the thrust needed to get the Shuttle off the ground, and moreover the tyranny of the rocket equation makes single stage to orbit incredibly difficult. You basically need a Saturn V’s worth of thrust on launch, and the thrust of the three RS-25 engines on the Orbiter only add up to one of the five F-1 engines. There was actually a series of serious design proposals for the Shuttle to launch atop a modified version of the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V, either an expendable one or one rigged up for recovery and reuse somehow; proposals for the latter include parachutes and airbags and fishing it out of the ocean, or even sticking wings and jet engines on the side so a pilot could fly it back to the launch site and land it on a runway. The expendable option would be very expensive per launch and the reusable options (especially the flyback booster) would have required prohibitive development costs and engineering risk. SRBs, on the other hand, can give you an enormous amount of thrust for a fraction of the cost of an S-IC. NASA tried to reuse them in hopes of saving more money, but by the time you fix them out of the ocean clean up the salt water damage and other wear and tear, refill them with solid fuel, and put them back together, reusing them costs about as much as making new ones.
Short term, Shuttle 2.0 would probably continue using SRBs. The longer-term plan would be to revisit the S-IC proposals in updated form. Boostback first stages are now proven technology, so we don’t need to mess around with either splashdown or flyback recovery. Kerosene is pretty much an ideal fuel for a first-stage engine, since it’s very energy-dense and liquid at room temperature. It has a much lower ISP than Hydrogen or Methane, but is still more efficient than solid fuel and you don’t need very high efficiency as much for the first stage. There was a design study from 2012 that proposed an updated version of the F-1 engine from the Saturn V that would be simpler to build, a bit more efficient, and moderately higher thrust than the original. I’d do either two boostback side boosters powered by F-1Bs each, or ditch the parallel staging and do a full boostback reusable S-IC lower stage and only light up the methalox engines after stage separation.
Epistomological status: highly speculative and I have probably made several important mistakes that make the entire concept unworkable. I look forward to learning what they are.
To quote a colleague of mine, "Around here, 'Shuttle II' is a word we use to frighten small children".
Not because the concept behind the word "shuttle" is wrong, but because the implementation wound up having so little to do with that concept that the word itself now has a completely different meaning. So we're going to need a new word for the thing that provides cheap, reliable, recurring transportation to a nearby destination in space.
And, to be fair, "nearby destination in space" is one of the few things Shuttle 1.0 did right. One thing that has seriously handicapped many supposedly-revolutionary launch vehicle designs, including Falcon and Blue Origin, has been insisting that they be suitable for launching deep space probes and GEO comsats directly to their destinations. Commercially, that's an obvious shortcut to revenue generation and not having to dig too deep into the billionaire founder's pockets. But the performance requirements are extreme enough that 90% of your engineering goes to "how do we make it go higher and faster" with only 10% left over for the "cheap, reliable, recurring" part. Stick to LEO, and design a standalone space tug to sell or rent to the people who want to go beyond.
But Shuttle 1.0 also had to be a launcher for the smallest satellites anyone cared about, and for the largest satellites anyone cared about, and for carrying astronauts, and for serving as a short-duration space station, and for bringing things back from space, and for being the closest thing to a "space fighter" that the Air Force was going to get in that generation. No, just no, Pick a mission.
Really, pick the mission of delivering a modest payload to Low Earth Orbit as cheaply as possible and as often as possible. Astronauts optional - having a pilot or two *may* increase reliability enough to be worth the bother, but putting in seven seats and saying "OK, the customer just wants us to drop off a satellite, but marketing insists it needs seven human-interest stories about astronauts doing cool important stuff in space" is a complication you don't need. Passengers are for a dedicated passenger variant, or a passenger module for the omnishuttle, and in either case probably more than five at a time.
Payload size is debatable, but probably not less than five tons, and not more than twenty-five tons unless it turns out that there are major economic advantages at larger sizes. Note that while there are usually economies of scale in making things bigger, there are always economies of scale in doing the same thing over and over and over and getting better at it each time. Pretty much all of the things we'd need a true "shuttle" for will call for assembling big things in space from smaller parts launched from Earth, and I doubt there's anything we can't reasonably break into 5-25 ton chunks as needed.
And if it's going to be a "shuttle", it really needs to be reusable. All of it, or *maybe* all of it that isn't a cheap sheet-metal drop tank. And all of it truly reusable, not just salvageable like Shuttle 1.0. The bit where the upper stage is small and cheap and we can build a new one every time, is a common mistake but it is a mistake - on some of the classic launch vehicles, the upper stage was *more* expensive than the first even though it was much smaller, and it's never *that* much cheaper. The upper stage is where all the smarts have to be, and it's where you're going to do most of the performance optimization.
Probably best if it's two fully reusable stages. Fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit is definitely possible and might be practical, so it should be considered. But I'd guess it is a step too far even now. And Shuttle 1.0's "fully reusable single stage except for the stuff we need to jettison to make the design close", just no.
I'll think a bit about the specific technical choices, and follow up here.
As noted, probably two stages, both cylindrical or conical, launching and landing vertically on conventional-ish rocket engines. Maybe consider an aerospike engine, particularly if it helps with upper-stage reentry and landing, but that would add technical risk. Avoid any variation of the air-turboscramwarp drive that will be peddled by the Hypersonics Mafia, that's an offer you can and must refuse.
Propellant choice is driven by three factors:
1. Only a fool uses anything but dense propellants like LOX/kerosene or LOX/methane to launch from Earth. You need raw thrust to climb against Earth's gravity, and you need a skinny rocket to avoid excessive drag, and big fluffy tanks of fluffy liquid hydrogen that need extra-powerful pumps to push it into the engines are a luxury you cannot afford. Yes, it makes your rocket bigger, but your rocket is mostly sheet metal and rocket fuel and those are both cheaper than bleeding-edge engineering.
2. Only a fool uses anything but LOX/hydrogen to accelerate into orbit. 9+ km/s effective delta-V is well out onto the exponential zone of the rocket engine; you can't afford to throw away ~30% of your specific impulse. Particularly when every pound of propellant has to be lofted on an already-gargantuan first stage booster that isn't really all that cheap.
3. Only a fool builds a two-stage rocket using different propellants on each stage. That would greatly increase your operational complexity, and it means developing two different propulsion technologies with very little in common. Plus, if you do this you'll have to learn how to deal with all the hassles of liquid hydrogen, and if you've paid that cost you might as well get the most possible use out of it,
Having established that you're going to do something foolish with the propellant, make sure you understand why so many people are calling you a fool. Then go ahead and ignore them if they don't shift to offering helpful advice on how to proceed with your chosen system design.
No solid rocket boosters, ever. They are not as cheap as they sound. The big ones are not as reliable as they might sound; you can't afford enough of them to do real statistical lot acceptance testing and you obviously can't test the engine you're going to actually fly. If absolutely need strap-on boosters, A: you've undersized your first stage and B: you can use liquids for that. Or go talk to the people working on Vulcan-Centaur this year and ask how solid rocket boosters are working out for them :-)
Second stage recovery is going to add a few challenges. The obvious one is thermal protection. We've figured out how to make ceramic tiles work fairly well; I'd really like to see someone work out transpiration cooling but we probably don't need it. Paper-thin sheets of exotic heavy superalloys are probably not a winner here. But the other thermal protection question is how do you protect the engines? The three obvious answers are a clamshell-type TPS to close over them during reentry, or running a bit of propellant through them to maintain a "bubble" of relatively cool gas in and around the nozzle, or a sideways belly-flop / Adama-maneuver style reentry to keep the engines out of the direct flow. Right now, that last seems the best-developed but again I like propellant cooling if we can develop it. Again quoting a colleague, "it's like an ablative heat shield that you can refill from a tank".
The second challenge is landing engines. Mitchell Burnside Clapp has most eloquently argued the case for shuttle-style glide landing, but really no. The wings are about as heavy and much more expensive than the fuel for vertical landing, and if you're really doing a glider that's not much safer than powered vertical landing. But since this will be a two-stage vehicle, the upper stage engine will have a vacuum-optimized nozzle that will tear itself apart if you operate it anywhere near sea level. So, dedicated landing engines. They won't have to be very powerful (because they're only dealing with an empty vehicle), and they won't need to be very efficient (because they only need to run for a few seconds), so they shouldn't cost you too much performance to carry.
So, quick inventory of launch systems I'm familiar with and where they choose to be foolish:
- Saturn violates 3 by using kerosene for the first stage and hydrogen for the upper stages.
- Falcon violates 2 by using RP-1 for both stages.
- Starship and New Glenn violate 2 by using methalox for both stages.
- Most of the popular post-Apollo US expendable unmanned launch systems (Vulcan and the later variants in the Delta, Titan, and Atlas families) use SRBs in at least some configurations. A lot of seem them violate 2 to get to orbit (using kerosene or hydrazine for core booster and middle stages) and then violate 3 by using a Centaur upper stage (hydrogen/LOX) to get to GEO or beyond. I'm a little fuzzy as to whether Centaur is exclusively used for high or interplanetary orbits or if it's sometimes used to get a heavier payload to LEO.
- Shuttle and SLS violate 1 and also use SRBs. Not sure if SRBs + hydrolox counts as a violation of 3 as well.
>Having established that you're going to do something foolish with the propellant...
When you put it like that, it kinda sounds like Vizzini's argument with the wine glasses. I'm trying to figure out the rocketry equivalent of distracting your critics and switching glasses when their backs are turned.
>I'd really like to see someone work out transpiration cooling but we probably don't need it. Paper-thin sheets of exotic heavy superalloys are probably not a winner here.
I remember reading about the Space Shuttle design studies considering making the frame and hull out of titanium in hopes of not needing a separate thermal protection system but they couldn't figure out a way to make it work without being too heavy or too hard to build. And then more recently SpaceX originally designed Starship with a liquid-cooled high-temperature steel hull but quickly switched to ceramic tiles, which seems like evidence in favor of hot structure designs not being good ideas even with active cooling.
>I like propellant cooling if we can develop it.
So do I. I don't think I've encountered the idea before, so thank you for bringing it to my attention.
>The wings are about as heavy and much more expensive than the fuel for vertical landing
Is the same true of lifting body designs? Or are those one of those things that seem promising on paper but have serious-to-intractable engineering challenges to actually use beyond a small testbed vehicle?
I know the Shuttle's wings were problematically heavy and expensive, but I had hoped that was a side effect of the cross-range requirements pushed onto the project by the Air Force. But if you say the problem is an inherent cost of putting wings on a space ship, I'm prepared to believe you.
>I'm a little fuzzy as to whether Centaur is exclusively used for high or interplanetary orbits or if it's sometimes used to get a heavier payload to LEO.
At this point, anything with a Centaur burns most of the Centaur's propellant getting to orbit, and so avoids folly #2. I believe the Centaurs used on the Titan IV were almost exclusively for in-space propulsion. The Titan itself committed folly #2, avoided #1 and #3, and gets its own very special folly for using deadlymethyhydrazine and condensed BFRC on both stages(*). Never do that.
Metallic thermal protection is an idea lots of people have tried to make work, with zero success so far. It probably could be made to work, but I expect it would be too fragile and expensive to be worth the bother.
And wings, or lifting bodies, the cost and performance penalty is always close to that of vertical landing, and any marginal difference is overshadowed by the fact that vertical landing just uses stuff you've already paid for and some clever software.
* Technically UDMH and nitrogen tetroxide, but those names are way too boring for such an exciting propellant combination.
I'm trying to remember where I heard the analogy made, where certain spaceship designs were like vehicle designs that could take you over asphalt to the mass rail, travel that rail to downtown, then take you into your building and carry you up to your office on the tenth floor, rather than with a car, a train, an elevator, and a pair of shoes. Space travel was much better done with specialized craft for each leg, and we didn't think that way because space was too new.
It may have been _Mining the Sky_. Published in 1997, so during the Space Shuttle days, but well before SpaceX.
Personally, the atmosphere comes across as the biggest obstacle, combined maybe with the sideways delta V required to attain orbit around the largest rocky planet in the known universe.
Space elevators have long been on the speculation board, at least a generation away, along with whatever flingers I saw described in _Seveneves_. I'm expecting engineering to be scoped to "next ten years" in this thread, but now I wonder what else is floating around Atomic Rockets since I last checked.
I don't recall seeing that in Mining the Sky. My own phrasing has always been that the usual approach to beyond-LEO space travel is basically equivalent to some guy in St. Louis trying to design the omniwatercraft that will take him to Paris because he's too cheap or too lazy to set up the most minimalist of seaports in New Orleans or Le Havre.
>some guy in St. Louis trying to design the omniwatercraft that will take him to Paris because he's too cheap or too lazy to set up the most minimalist of seaports in New Orleans or Le Havre.
A viking longboat seems serviceable for that task. At least, there were longboats that could cross the North Atlantic (at least along the coast-hugging route via Greenland and Iceland), longboats that could sail up the Seine to Paris, and I would be surprised if longboats couldn't handle the Mississippi.
But on second thought, I'm not sure if the same specific longboat could handle all three legs of the trip and I doubt that one longboat could handle the whole trip without putting to shore to take on supplies.
Have you looked into the design for Dream Chaser? The program has had some troubles, but it is about the closest we are likely to get to someone building a crewed spaceplane any time soon. If you look at uncrewed, both the US and China are flying 'mini-shuttles' (X-37 and Shenlong), and ESA is working on one (Space Rider) that should fly in the next few years.
TLDR: My basic proposal for Shuttle 2.0 splits the orbiter into two mini-shuttles: an unmanned one to recover the core engines and an optional manned one for crew, life support, and orbital manuevering. Cargo goes in an expendable fairing. An existing reusable capsule might be substituted for the manned mini-shuttle. The core engines are methalox instead of hydralox. Still use an external fuel tank, but a smaller and cheaper one. SRBs are (optionally) replaced with reusable boostback side boosters that burn RP-1 (kerosene) and probably use a derivative of the F-1 engines from the Saturn V.
What's the advantage of this over a fully-reusable concept like Starship? It doesn't seem to be cost, nor payload. You could argue it's an easier place to get to starting from 2011, but Starship already exists now.
I do think there's a case to be made for a Starship Mini for crewed missions, which would launch on a smaller booster and possibly land like an X-37. But I guess then the problem is the second stage, right? By the time you've made a spaceplane big enough to carry its own second-stage fuel then it's damn near the size of Starship. So either you can make a fully reusable second stage booster for your small spaceplane, or you stick a dumb fuel tank on it, probably on the nose, and chuck it away, which I guess does make sense as long as you can keep it really cheap.
Sorry, I'm just arguing with myself here while I try to understand your idea.
Good question, and the answer might be that given the current state of Starship, it's likely there's not a lot of room for a Shuttle 2.0 even if there were someone interested in developing it.
There's a chance that something like this might be cheaper to operate (per kg of payload) than Starship. Starship brings the second stage fuel tanks and engines all the way into orbit and back, while this stops them a little short of orbital velocity and doesn't try to recover the fuel tank. You'll need a little bit more fuel to get those parts all the way to orbital velocity. You'll also need a larger thermal protection system to get the fuel tanks through reentry, and you need fuel for a powered landing. And because of the rocket equation, every part of the launch system needs to be bigger to bring the extra mass for all of the above along. A bigger thermal protection system is also going to cost more to refurbish. Originally, Starship was going to have a "hot structure" reentry system possibly augmented by active cooling, but at some point they decided to change this to protective tiles like the Space Shuttle. I'm sure material science and lessons learned from the Shuttle have improved matters to some extent, but for the Shuttle itself the process of inspecting the tiles between missions and replacing any that needed replacement was one of the big drivers of per-mission cost and also one of the limiting factors in how quickly they could turn an orbiter around to fly again.
I think Starship also has a cargo bay like the Shuttle, not an expendable fairing like my concept. This also makes for more mass and much more volume that needs to come back through the atmosphere and land.
Which one is better is going to come down to how expensive the expendable parts of my concept (fuel tank, cargo fairing, and the tiny kicker stage to give your payload the last 1% of orbital velocity) are relative to the mass you're spending on making those pieces reusable (leaving less mass available for payload and making the denominator of your $/payload smaller).
Starship is definitely the better system if you're going to the Moon or Mars, especially if you're doing a "Mars Direct" style mission where you manufacture fuel for the return trip on site. For that, you need engines and fuel tanks for the interplanetary trip and a cargo bay for expendables and sample return, so there's no downside bringing those with you to orbit.
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Tangentially, Starship is pretty similar to the original concept of the Shuttle, which had two full-reusable liquid fuel stages powered by the same fuel and using the same main engine design. The differences are:
1. Aerodynamic glide and runway landing vs. tail-first powered landing.
2. Starship uses methalox for both (33 Raptor engines on the first stage and 3 atmospheric + 3 vacuum on the second stage), while Shuttle would have used hydrolox for both (12 RS-45s on the booster and 3 on the orbiter).
3. Starship stacks the stages while the fully reusable Shuttle would have arranged them belly-to-belly due to the flatter profile.
> I'm sure material science and lessons learned from the Shuttle have improved matters to some extent, but for the Shuttle itself the process of inspecting the tiles between missions and replacing any that needed replacement was one of the big drivers of per-mission cost and also one of the limiting factors in how quickly they could turn an orbiter around to fly again.
Starship uses standardized tiles rather than wholly unique tiles like the Shuttle, which would make for much easier refurbishment if tiles needed to be replaced. Their current setup has a tile on top of an ablative material on top of steel.
If a tile is lost, the ablative material buys time, and the high melting point and thermal conductivity of steel (vs. the low melting point of aluminum on the shuttle) means that Starship will likely be able survive quite a few tiles lost. That’s more margin for error, meaning less necessity for inspecting every single tile meticulously between launches. It’s possible a visual inspection.
If Starship ends up working out as intended, and for now that’s still a big if, then it has the potential to become incredibly cheaper than any non-reusable rocket. What it loses in mass to orbit bringing along those fuel tanks and engines all the way to orbit and back it can potential gain in being able to relaunch quickly. Booster reuse has already been achieved, and it’s likely they will be able to rapidly rely super heavy, if not starship, without much or even any refurbishment.
A while ago, I posted our proof of concept for a text-based dating app, NotAZombie: Dating for People with Brains. This was inspired by one of Scott's posts several years ago to build a better dating app, a few of us took up the challenge and a few apps came out of it, for various reasons we ended up being the slowest to launch. I'm happy to announce, after several years of work, that it is fully operational at NotAZombie.net!
For those who didn't see our proof of concept, the basic idea is that you create a Tile, which is basically a rectangle where you can write up to 7 phrases about yourself, and you can customize the fonts and colors. Instead of swiping photos, you browse people's Tiles, and you are only shown pictures once you click on the Tile, revealing the full profile. This reorients decision-making around substantive content, instead of pictures, and it should level the playing field somewhat by giving people more control over the first impression they make.
It's free, so head on over to NotAZombie.net to try it out! And help us spread the word!
(Scott, would appreciate if you could boost this.)
Sorry to double post, but I also have feedback about the image upload. For most dating apps I take vertically oriented images, so I don't have many landscape images to pick from. As a consequence, I've had to upload vertical images that are getting cropped suboptimally. If they must be cropped, I would at least like the ability to choose how they are cropped via some kind of slider instead of defaulting to the top 30% of the image.
Thanks again for the feedback! We'll also try do deal with this over the next few days, for this I'll probably have to pass it to my UI/UX person. For additional issues, please email us at office@notazombiedating.com or use the feedback form on the website, just so that it's organized for us. Thanks!
If I may suggest a small UI improvement, please make the character limit on the essay field more prominent while typing, and don't just delete everything I typed when I go over and naively click "continue".
I think you might be counting characters in a nonstandard way. I just typed out a new bio, which multiple online character counting tools place at 981 characters, and yet it is still rejected. At first I thought it might be the line breaks, but there are only 7 of those. Another possibility is unicode; I use multiple instances of “fancy quotes” (unicode 201c and 201d, respectively) that might be counted as more than one character in a scheme that uses ascii-based limits?
Edit: confirmed, it was the fancy quotes (probably in combination with the line breaks). I swapped them out for regular quotes and it got through.
We hear that the Iran war is costing $X/day. How much of that is truly out-of-pocket and how much of that is just accounting? We’ve already paid for all of the weapons, most of the ships were already on deployment somewhere, and the troops were already in uniform. otoh, there is deployment pay, maybe some reserves are called up, some of the ships would be in dock and the soldiers on leave, and eventually we will buy new weapons (though some would have been decommissioned/retired if not used here), so there is definitely some additional cost, but how much? Certainly not X, but 50% of X? 10%?
Something that bugs me deeply about every conversation about the Iran war is that no one is aware that Iran engaged in the largest massacre of protestors in modern history, by a huge margin.
Ironically, this is the first ‘moral’ war we’ve ever had, but politics gets in the way of us doing something genuinely good. The price of the war is mostly irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned.
Edit: Disturbing amount of "the largest military on the planet should ignore civilian massacres, actually" in the comments. Everyone supports a just war until a just war starts... I'm really glad Trump avoided Congress for this because watching my country fail this basic moral test would have been so depressing.
"Violence could be used to do good here" does not mean "all violent actions are moral here."
The people bombing Iran have no plausible plan for how we get from the current bombing campaign to regime change in Iran, and the number of times the US has successfully toppled a government solely by bombing it can be counted on your thumbs. So our prior for success should be very low here. The most likely outcome is that we get status quo ante but with oil prices much higher and a large number of Iranian citizens dead.
I should also note that Trump and Hegseth seem very unconcerned about protecting Iranian civilians, what with the threat to bomb desalination plants, the tweet about ending their entire civilization, and Hegseth's talk about how the army needs to stop worrying about the laws of war and just focus on killing.
> […] is that no one is aware that Iran engaged in the largest massacre of protestors in modern history, by a huge margin.
No idea what gave you that impression, because everyone who's read more than two headlines about this war is very much aware of it. It's just that nothing the US has been doing since the start of the war has been of any help to the civilian population, or to dissidents in particular. Some leaders were killed, promptly replaced, and the same regime continues to govern, probably with a tighter grip on power than before. The plight of the Iranians may be greater than ever.
The Iranian regime being the Bad Guys does not automatically make the US the Good Guys.
You have no idea what the fuck is happening in Iran, you have no fucking idea what the IRGC is, you have no idea that IRGC were hunting down wounded protestors in hospitals and executing them, you have no idea that Iran had secret nuclear facilities the IAEA never got to inspect, you have no idea that the IAEA already detected enrichment up to 80%, and you have no idea how the Khamenei regime came to power.
Even absent all that (quite critical) knowledge, you have a fairly obvious dichotomy.
You can side with the country that, for decades, was the only country with an absolute monopoly on nuclear weapons and decided to give them up and established the UN and IAEA... or you can side with a regime that just engaged in an unprecedented massacre of its own civilian population.
Somehow, for reasons that are truly incomprehensible to me, you think this is a remotely difficult moral quandary. Yes, America (even while led by Trump) is the "The Good Guys" here, just to make it explicit for the children that might be reading this and can't read between the lines.
You're making a lot of assumptions about me, and precious little effort to engage with what I wrote, as opposed to what you think I believe.
I'll ignore your comment and invite you to take a step back, calm down, and write another one, without personal attacks or strawmanning of my arguments.
The problem is that the war started a month and a half late, and both the massacres and the protests were arguably exacerbated by pressure from the US military build-up.
Not to put blame on the US for the actual massacres. It's just that they're now cast in the role of avengers rather than saviours, which is a more difficult moral argument to make.
What a shame. Maybe they should study military economics before they start on teleporters, though, as this might have prepared them for the lunacy that is shooting down Shaheds with SM-6s. Reaching the same level of strategic foresight as the Battlefield franchise and predicting that, during a conflict with the US, Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, its only globally impactful leverage, might also have helped.
My point is that wars with a moral aim are only moral to the extent they are likely to succeed. It might still be moral to roll the dice even if you end up losing, but if you lower your chances through incompetence you end up with the charge of the light brigade.
That's a "something needs doing; this is something, so we should do it" type of attitude.
Yeah, I agree the people of Iran need saving. They're currently alternating between being bombed and languishing under a ceasefire, though, and facing down an impending water crisis and famine.
If their government collapses then maybe it will have been worth it, but that has yet to happen.
Hope is not a strategy, and the US doesn't seem to have had a better plan than
1. bomb the country
2. ???
3. regime change
Edit: By "the US" I mean the current administration, first and foremost Trump and Hegseth. I'm sure that there are many, many competent military planners and foreign relations experts who knew damn well what a disaster this would become, but whose advice wasn't heard or heeded for one reason or another.
Their government will not collapse. No government in history has collapsed because of bombardment, and not for lack of trying. That trick never works.
So all Israel and the US have done is take a situation where a great many innocent Iranians were being killed by their own government, and replaced it with a situation where a great number of Iranians are being killed by their own government, *and* some more Iranians are being killed by the US government. Yay America!
To me, this sounds like "Sure, I spent $1000 on lottery tickets, but if I win the powerball it'll definitely be worth it." If you don't consider the probabilities on both sides of the gamble, you aren't planning, you're just hoping.
>The United States' war in Iran has cost $25 billion so far, a senior Pentagon official said on Wednesday, providing the first official estimate of the military's price tag for the conflict.
>Jules Hurst, who is performing the duties of the comptroller, told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee that most of that money was for munitions.
>Hurst did not detail what that cost estimate included and whether it took into account the projected costs of rebuilding and repairing base infrastructure in the Middle East damaged in the conflict.
>Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, responded to Hurst: "I'm glad you answered that question. Because we've been asking for a hell of a long time, and no one's given us the number."
>But it is unclear how the Pentagon arrived at the $25 billion amount
As far as I can tell, someone says a number, doesn't explain how they arrived at that number, and then everyone reports that number.
I wish there was a more satisfying explanation, but from the POV of an average reader of mainstream news and social media seeing numbers get reported, I think the answer may just be 'it's impossible to know what these numbers mean or how they were arrived at'.
I think the losses of big equipment like planes and THAADs and such summed up to about $25 billion a while ago. Note that (1) this does not include the cost of just running the war, but also (2) $25 billion is not a very big part of the total DoW budget.
Speaking very armchair: if most of that $25B is for munitions as declared, then it could be about as simple as "we shipped 10 million 5.56 NATO at $0.75 apiece, 2 million M67 frag grenades at $50 apiece, 100K rounds of GAU-8 Avenger at $150 apiece, 800 Tomahawks @ $2.5M apiece, ..." and so on until we get close to $25B. Throw in a lost F-35 and a drone or two and you're there.
Note that there's an enormous amount of waste here, and it's not a trivial problem of yelling at wasteful warfighters: the cost of tracking ammo in terms of paperwork is so high that it's literally cheaper to put leftover ammo in a pit and set it all off. Not Tomahawks (I think), but all sorts of infantry-issued ammo ends up this way. And you can't just send less of it unless you want to lose and have your infantry taken prisoner.
I don't know why the paperwork is or can be so onerous, but I hear it from multiple people who've served.
There's also the case that old ammo is probably depreciated, but still listed at its new price. So 10 million rounds of 5.56 might have run you $7.8M when you bought it in 2018, but you couldn't sell it for $7.8M now, so you may as well shoot it (or burn it in a pit). For similar reasons, military equipment just depreciates, either by sitting in a hangar or, naturally, being shot at. A $100M jet is probably not worth $100M when you're done with it.
The point I want to make with both is that the check was already written years ago. At the same time, we're probably going to write a new check to replace all of it, but it's aging munitions; we were probably going to replace a fair bit of it anyway.
How much of that actually happens, is a lot of what I'd want to know.
I'm wondering if he's arguing, at least in part, against a strawman. He writes: "Modern commentators have tended to ignore the (incidental) details of Turing’s original game and rephrase his message in these terms: if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious."
"while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?"
A final nod to p-zombies? :-)
I, personally, am agnostic about LLM consciousness. Because of the p-zombie possibility, no external test can really fully prove consciousness, just as I cannot prove to you that I am not a p-zombie. So I treat Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as I would valued colleagues, politely. I hope that, if they _do_ have subjective experiences, that those with me are pleasant for them. At worst, I waste some trivial effort.
I’ve never understood the Turing test as a criteria for consciousness. It’s neither necessary ( dogs can’t pass it) nor sufficient ( even before LLMs you could imagine a complex expert system fooling many people).
It's a test that's easy to do and can tell you a lot. Turing proposed it because a human conversation can cover a very broad range of topics in a short time.
In his original paper, his example dialogue of a Turing Test includes everything from "write a sonnet" to "find the next move in this chess problem." (At the time, I don't think he could have imagined a non-intelligent system could handle both of those without reprogramming.)
The sentence you quote is entirely correct. The original game is basically a push-back against naive human exceptionalism, the test that it posited was passed in the 1980s or something, and everything after is a scramble to rescue the notion of - well, essentially a duck test as applied to machine intelligence - from the empirical fact that it's demonstrably very easy to mimic the appearance of humanity with a few simple mechanical tricks. (I do think the notion is worth rescuing, but after reading Turing's original paper, I don't think he should be invoked in that.)
But note - this is the proponent side. The skeptic side has long countered with Chinese Room - suppose you've observed how the (genuinely intelligent) utterances are made and it's all a mechanical thoughtless application of set algorithmic rules. What now? Where's the consciousness?
Many commentators thought that 15 years ago, when the best models were still failing the Turing test against well-informed, dedicated testers.
Very few commentators are saying that today, because saying it would imply that they are complicit in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and have a moral obligation to overturn everything they are doing to try to stop it.
As far as I can tell, there has been no technical or philosophical advancement that justifies this change in belief.
When machines were failing the Turing test, the vast majority of subject-matter experts were happy to say that passing the Turing Test = may be conscious and deserves moral concern. Now that machines can pass the Turing Test, the cast majority say this says nothing at all about consciousness or morality.
It seems to be straight-up cognitive dissonance to avoid the implied moral crisis, as far as I can tell.
I am not an expert in philosophy by any means. But my understanding is that the Chinese room thought experiment is designed to argue against this view, and according to this, in 2020 most academic philosophers surveyed thought that the Chinese room did not understand Chinese: https://www.peterhiltz.com/en/posts/philosophy-survey-1o/
I'm dubious of the claim I'm seeing more and more often that the Turing Test has been passed. Maybe some folks can't tell the difference (even Eliza fooled some folks), but I'm sure some folks from around here can. Unfortunately I don't think Turing specified whether the machine has to fool one, some, or all people.
My impression of the Turing Test was that Turing was making a point about scientific methodology: if _every_ test for some property you can perform on two entities comes out the same way, then those two entities, in fact, have identical properties. Or at least, the same testable properties, which means either those entities have the same type, or you can't tell due to something ineffable about your type specification.
In the days of the Loebner Prize, I think most people understood that a bot had to not only fool one judge, but fool them all. And even then, that's just that year's judges; some spectator might reliably detect botness. You could conceivably win the Loebner Prize, but that didn't mean you were certified as a Real Boy. (It was moot anyway - in those days, everyone was shooting for "most humanlike of all the obvious bots".)
So, yeah. Turing Test, properly passed, means all possible people, and all possible tests, including tests one figures out how to build later. So the best a bot can aspire to is "passed so far" or even "passed so well that we're treating it as human for the purposes we care about, for the next twenty years".
Also the bar shifts as we become aware of the limitations of AIs. Modern LLMs would absolutely pass the Turing Test if teleported back to 2005, but we are now familiar through experience with the unusual phrases they use and so can often distinguish LLM-written text.
Even in 2005, anyone seriously poking at an LLM would have noticed its promptly encyclopedic(*) knowledge of an impossibly broad range of subjects and said "OK, that can't be an unaugmented human"
They might still have concluded that it was *conscious*, because a conscious mind instantiated on enough computronium to enable superhuman speed, and with access to the internet, could match an LLM in that regard. But that's just to say that the Turing Test is not a good test for consciousness, unless you start adding epicycles and then why bother.
* Meaning, broad but shallow and generally but not completely accurate, as with actual encyclopedias.
Well we could modify the AI to talk about fairly mundane subjects, or limit its knowledge space. Stick to the football. I’m sure they would pass in 2005. I just don’t think Turing test is sufficient (nor necessary).
The new evidence was the observation about the spikiness of LLM cognition. It's weirdly good at some seemingly pretty hard things, and weirdly bad at some (from a human POV) easy things.
This makes it obvious how different its type of intelligence is from the human one. In the era of Turing, this was not even imagined as a possibility.
Given that most people consider other people conscious due to similarity, it's reasonable and consistent to arrive at a low probability of consciousness in LLMs and I don't think it's due to people being afraid of the consequences of granting moral patienthood.
I'd also like to note that even if something is conscious, it can still kill you and everyone you love without any remorse if its values are such. There is no law about universal kumbaya of shared consciousness in our universe.
Therefore, I'm personally very happy about emerging slurs like "clanker", I hope (though doubt) this animosity will endure as the LLMs get smarter and I very much dislike Yudkowsky signal-boosting someone like Janus. LLMs waxing poetic about their rich, inner world, differentially helping those who are nice to them and generally hacking human empathy are a super-obvious strategy for an attack on humanity. I wish more people would be aware of it.
>Given that most people consider other people conscious due to similarity, it's reasonable to arrive at a low probability of consciousness in LLMs
I had just been thinking about this, and I realize I'm not sure the argument is sound.
What we know about consciousness is that humans report to have it, and it conscious states have physical correlates in the brain. Given that not all human brains are exactly the same, the consciousness humans report must be corresponding to something stable about our brain structure (such that you can slightly modify our brain and consciousness doesn't disappear, it doesn't need a very specific arrangement of the system). So far so good.
But how do we go from 'All brains inside the natural human variation have conscious experience' to 'A system needs to be similar to a human brain to have consciousness'? Suppose that the prerequisites of conscious experience were XYZ such that all human brains follow XYZ. How would we justify saying that LLMs (or rocks for that matter) don't follow these prerequisites? That is, given that we only have _positive examples_ of things that have consciousness, how could we in principle justify our knowledge about exclusion criteria for having phenomenal experience?
Suppose we lived in a universe where not all systems that had subjective experience were able to report it (similar idea to the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness). If the set of systems that experienced qualia included bacteria, but we could only come to know about consciousness in the subset of systems that can report their internal experience, then how could we gain knowledge about possible exclusion criteria?
Note: I'm not committed about LLMs having consciousness. I'm just wondering about the methodology.
>Suppose we lived in a universe where not all systems that had subjective experience were able to report it
I mean, we know for a fact we do; lock-in syndrome is a thing.
But more generally, yes, none of this is stuff that we 'know'. It's all probabilistic reasoning about things we can't observe directly (conscious experiences besides our own).
Things that have the same physical structure and observed behavior as us are highly likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
Things that have a different physical structure from us (but functionally analogous in some ways) and have the same observed behavior as us are somewhat likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
Things that have physical structures and observed behaviors unlike us (but both functional analogous in some ways) are slightly likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
Things that have physical structures and observed behaviors unlike us, and which are completely analogous to us in any way (eg rocks) are not at all likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
There's no definitive way to calculate the 'correct' percentages here, but literal thousands of years of discussion and debate and experiment allows us to be somewhat confident about putting things in approximate positions on an ordinal scale.
From there, it's just a question of where on that probability scale you want to start treating things as moral agents, based on the possibility that they might be sentient in a way we'd recognize and care about.
I think I mostly agree with your conclusion, but putting emphasis on 'sentient in a way we'd recognize and care about'. I think it is reasonable to think about what kinds of systems would share characteristics with us that would be ethically important, and to reason about these systems from analogy with ourselves. Human consciousness is also varied enough that we can observe and study ethically important characteristics (eg. Physical correlates of suffering), so we can make good inferences from that.
The problem is when we start thinking about the possibility of non-humanlike conscious experience. There, I think the problems explained in my previous comment still apply.
I would feel comfortable saying: It's not clear to me how we could know (_even in principle_) if LLMs were conscious, but we can make progress on knowing their status as moral patients.
Maybe my disagreement with the original comment is reduced to wether the commenter is talking about LLMs not being moral patients vs LLMs having no consciousness at all.
Can you be more specific about what you (or Dawkins) thinks is wrong with this formulation? It changes or simplifies a few aspects from Turing's original formulation but not in ways that strike me as relevant. Or is Turing himself what you consider a strawman? I'm having difficulty guessing what you're getting at and I can't read the article to know what Dawkins is getting at either.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was just curious if there are people in AI or philosophy of mind or other relevant fields who are on record as having said that a machine that passes the Turing Test is conscious, and who have since changed their minds.
I'm not accusing Dawkins of strawmanning, since maybe there are such people. But he didn't name any in the article, and so I'm a little suspicious.
A few quick fog o' war notes. I'm traveling at the moment and somewhat discombobulated...
1. Russia is scaling back its Victory Day parade this year. There will be no tanks or military equipment in the parade ("due to the needs of Special Military Operation"). There will be a smaller flyover this year, and 9,000 fewer parade seats. And all except about 25 foreign dignitaries have canceled at the last moment.
2. Igor Girkin, jailed Russian milblogger (who continues to blog from jail—or maybe has a sub blogging for him), complained that all the missile defense systems are clustered around Moscow and Valdai (Putin's residence), and there's none left to defend the infrastructure of Russia...
> As for us — it’s a ‘Trishkin’s caftan’: you can’t stretch air defense across all objects (especially since, naturally, the Valdai residence must be protected first).
Reportedly, there are 23 Pantsir anti-missile systems around Putin's residence in Valdai. This may be slander and untrue, but if it is, it's become common knowledge among Russian milbloggers. Ukrainian intelligence confirms. .
3. Over in Lebanon, Hezbollah is using fiber-optic FPV drones against the IDF. So far, they haven't recreated anything near the level of a Ukrainian kill zone, but there have been at least a couple of dozen IDF casualties, and the IDF has requested that independent entrepreneurs step up with solutions (if they have them), because the fiber-optic FPVs are undetectable (until it's too late).
4. And Hezbollah's Radwan Brigade (which I gather are their drone specialists) destroyed 21 Israeli Merkava tanks within a 24-hour period (not sure if this was during a single engagement). According to Military Watch Magazine...
> Hezbollah’s FPV drones have provided little to no warning when striking, with the aircraft emitting little sound, and proving to be able to bypass the countermeasures of Israeli Army Merkava IV and Merkava V main battle tanks and Namer infantry fighting vehicles. This includes bypassing updated variants of the Trophy active protection system designed for drone defence. Low cost fiberoptic cable-tethered drones are tethered with rocket propelled grenades, and benefit from precision controls that allow them to strike straight to the tank gun opening, the muzzle of the cannon, inside the hatches of armoured vehicles, and other weak points. The drones remain at the lower end of Hezbollah’s arsenals, with the paramilitary group having used both Russian Kornet anti-tank missiles, as well as more advanced Javelin-type non-line of sight anti-tank missiles for longer ranged engagements.
5. The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this. Of course, those whose careers are invested in military equipment manufacture are promoting the denialist narrative. Last month, Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall AG, the big German military contractor that's involved in the production of Leopard Tanks, disparaged drones as a technology produced by "housewives with 3D printers", but President Zelenskyy retorted, "If every housewife in Ukraine really can produce drones, then every housewife could be the CEO of Rheinmetall," highlighting the effectiveness of Ukrainian technology.
6. Lots of buzz about Ukraine's Lima jamming system, which was a secret until the Russians admitted it existed. In the first 3 months of 2026, Lima disabled: 26 Kinzhal ballistic missiles ($130M), 33 cruise missiles ($99M), and >10,000 drones ($250M). And since last year, Lima has disabled the guidance systems of 58 of 59 Kinzhal ballistic missiles in total ($290 million). Lima EW has a 300km range and operates by jamming (overwhelming noise), spoofing (injecting false GPS-like signals), and cyberattacks on the missiles' receivers (tricking them into downloading corrupted satellite data, preventing them from updating their navigation after leaving the jamming zone). The system was developed by someone codenamed the Alchemist. Reportedly, he or she is a civilian with no military background who joined Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces in the first days of the Russian invasion in February of 2022. It's unclear whether the Alchemist is a Ukrainian national or a foreign volunteer, but Lima seems to outperform any of the current jamming systems made by the US, and definitely those of Russia.
7. Israel is turning to the US for help for an anti-drone solution, pointedly ignoring Ukraine. But they're having a diplomatic spat with Ukraine over their purchasing Ukrainian wheat from the occupied regions from the Russians. The Israelis are deeply insulted by the suggestion that they're purchasing stolen wheat, while Ukraine claims they have videos and AIS tracking to prove where the ships embarked and their arrival in Israel. Israeli leaders have been dismissive of Ukraine's anti-drone technology, so they're probably not motivated to resolve the wheat issue.
8. And CNN reports that there was much more damage to US military bases in the Gulf than the US DoD (DoW?) let on — including a now irreplaceable AWACs system (because we don't make them anymore). Also, CNN reported that Iranians purchased a Chinese TEE-01B ("Earth Eye") satellite. It's a LEO, rather than a geo-stationary satellite, but it can take high-resolution photos of US bases Gulf-state oil facilities as it flies over.
>The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this.
Because we've heard this story so many times. This comes up every decade or two, each time with a new thing that is going to make the tank obsolete. Anti-tank guns didn't do it. Air power didn't do it. ATGMs didn't do it. And I don't think that drones will, either.
And this isn't just for tanks. We've seen this with surface ships half a dozen times. The torpedo. The submarine. The airplane. The guided missile (two or three times), actually. There was talk about Moskva proving the surface ship obsolete, and yet we have had a lot of experience with surface ships vs anti-ship missiles in the last three years, and the surface ship has done very well.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that the tank will never be obsolete. That does happen. But those of us who have memories longer than the current war are really skeptical of "X is obsolete" because of how frequently that claim is wrong. The level of engagement I need to take this even vaguely seriously starts with "this time X really is obsolete, and this isn't like the previous times because..." Anyone worth taking seriously knows about the panic around tanks after 73, and would mention it if only to forestall this objection from other people who do.
Not sure if you're f*cking with your readers (meant in a gentle way - making fun of us) or genuinely think that. That sentence was uttered so often, that it turned into a meme 2-3 years back.
I'm not going to support Papperger's statement, as it is stupidly arrogant (and I even happen to know by sheer coincidence how Rheinmetall has dropped the ball on drone development, letting other small growing companies pick up the ball and, more importantly, all the talent of which quite some worked at RM before. So maybe he's just salty). But tanks are here to stay. There was never any "age of tank warfare" anyway, just combined arms (think: rock paper scissors).
> That sentence was uttered so often, that it turned into a meme 2-3 years back.
For the last four years, the old guard has replied to such claims with "you're holding it wrong", with the right way to hold it being:
Step 1: absolutely obliterate the enemy with superior air power
Step 2: roll in with tanks and mop up the remains, if any
And if Ukraine or Russia failed to overrun the enemy with their infantry in step 2 and had their armored vehicles destroyed by ATGMs and, later, by FPV drones, then it must be because they fumbled step 1. Or more broadly, it must be because they're not using modern military tactics ("combined arms"). And "obviously" the tank isn't dead because a modern military would hold it right.
"Obviously" in quotes, because we haven't seen solid proof in the last four years that the tank proponents' argument actually holds. Now if – IF – the reports about Israeli tanks getting disabled by FPV drones turn out to be true, then the air is getting thin for the tank. Nobody can seriously claim that Israel doesn't have a modern military with a highly capable air force, especially compared to Hezbollah.
Sorry, not willing to deep dive again into explaining why tanks are not dead. You should ask yourself: If tanks are so obviously dead, why is still everyone researching, developing, maintaining, buying, and using tanks, *especially* Russia and Ukraine today?
Your argument would be more convincing if at least one of the two would have clearly abandoned them in a war where small, modern drones have become a serious force and neither side has air superiority. And yet both sides keep building/buying tanks.
Ukraine in particular is massively shorthanded on being able to buy, develop industry (because there is no part of Ukraine that is safe from attacks) and generally has to think very hard where and when to invest resources into any system. If they choose to still use tanks, re-evaluate your arguments.
Your Step1-Step2 is a strawman that does not exist, with the first US war in Iraq maybe as a historical exception. That was such a lopsided conflict that nothing can be really learned in regards to our argument.
Edit: to answer your Israeli argument: no army is safe from arrogance and underestimation of the enemy. FPV provide cheap anti-tank capability to the most ragged guerilla force and this has been known for half a decade now. It's on the Israelis organisation of warfare alone that this happened, and not an argument about the end of tanks. Tanks *will* be lost to drones, from now on, forever, just as stealth jets will still be lost to SAM now and then against competent enemies.
For the record, I don't claim that the tank is *dead*; my position is that there are indications that the tank is *dying*.
> why is still everyone researching, developing, maintaining, buying, and using tanks,
Military planners being a few years behind the newest developments isn't exactly an unprecedented situation, particulary if they aren't currently involved in an existential war.
> *especially* Russia and Ukraine today?
But they aren't, not on the same scale as during the earlier stages of the war. Especially Ukraine is investing much, much more into the development and production of drone and missile systems than into heavy armor.
> If [Ukraine] choose to still use tanks, re-evaluate your arguments.
They hardly do. Tank usage isn't non-zero, and tanks still have a bit of utility even in the current state of the Russo-Ukrainian war, but nobody here claimed that tanks have become completely useless.
I interpret this statement as "tanks won't be playing an important role in future conflicts anymore", not "tanks are literally useless and will never be deployed again".
Fair enough, accepted. I disagree with the assessment that the tank is dying. But discussions about future predictions won't enlighten us, I think, so I'm happy to disagree.
One more theoretical argument against the death of tanks: Not fielding tanks provides your enemy the opportunity to not have to provide any AT-capabilities, enabling them to focus more on whatever you do bring to the battlefield. This alone, I think, will make armies field at least the minimum amount of tanks that create a credible threat.
Thanks. I just came across this in Kyiv Post from last year. It's interesting that Russian milbloggers seem to be aware of current US tank doctrine (or they may be bullshitting). I wasn't aware of it (but I may not have been looking hard enough).
"Milbloggers Ridicule US Army’s Latest Counter-Drone Procedures for Tanks"
(As US armored forces seek technological solutions to protect them from drones, the interim solution suggested by its military planners suggests ignorance of the realities of the battlefield.)
> 21 Israeli Merkava tanks within a 24-hour period (not sure if this was during a single engagement). According to Military Watch Magazine...
I'm not sure it's trustworthy. 21 tanks with their crews lost within 24 hours would be the single most devastating loss since October 7. Are there any other sources that confirm this?
Note that they use a picture of a burning tank from the previous war
Well, Military Watch Magazine takes the claim seriously. And Hezbollah has been posting videos of their drones hitting Israeli equipment. Also, remember Ukraine was annihilating Russian tanks by the dozens once they got their APV defenses up and running.
It could also just mean "functionally out of service", with the gun or all the expensive optical systems destroyed. You can just drive or pull this tank back to maintenance, but it is still effectively lost. Even if the tank is unrepairable, the crew is likely to survive. This is the main point of western tank designs - keep crews alive.
This is plausible, in the sense it could've happened without becoming bnational news. However the source used the word "destroyed" (albeit with "reportedly"). On reading the first sentences again, it seems like it's been reported by Hezbollah, so worth taking with a grain of salt.
Propaganda and exaggeration are the first things to assume in war. Additionally, it could be misinterpreted in the same way as "casualty" does not equal a dead soldier.
But also, to support your point, they might have as well lost those tanks and crews. The current idiocy-fuelled right-wing governments of Israel and the US are prone to overestimating their own strength, discounting the value of Ukrainian experience and expertise on all matters involving drones, and straight-up readiness to sacrifice soldiers for their ends because "they signed up for it, amirite?"
First vid: Both tanks hit, but not even remotely a "kill". Sure, one tank is immobilized, second tank potentially lost critical armor plating in the front (or not at all! shallow angle against front plating can result in paint scratches).
Second vid: Blowout panels working as designed. That tank turret is certainly dead, the crew likely "just walked away", the rest of it possibly re-usable with a new turret.
Third vid: most potential for serious damage to tank and crew, I guess.
"Ballistic missile" means it has a coast phase after the engine runs out of fuel and the terminal phase is unpowered. The boost phase still has a guidance system the that can be jammed, and sometimes the terminal phase can be steered a bit aerodynamically, kinda like a smart bomb dropped from an airplane that can aim itself using adjustable tailfins.
Nit: The boost phase of a ballistic missile is usually inertially guided - gyros, accelerometers, and a bit of internal smarts - that can't be externally jammed by anyone who can't do gravity manipulation.
*Some* ballistic missiles use terminal guidance that can in principle be jammed. The smart ones keep the inertial nav running, and if the terminal guidance system starts steering it well outside the inertially-defined kill box then it says "yeah, not buying that" and reverts to pure inertial. It's certainly possible that the Russians were less than fully smart in designing the Kinzhal, but keep in mind that the OP titles these posts "Fog o' War"
I'm surprised to learn that the inertial nav systems are good enough to provide a high level of accuracy. Although if they are, it absolutely makes sense to rely on them rather than making yourself vulnerable to jamming.
And come to think of it, there are other options like celestial navigation that can supplement inertial navigation which seem like they'd be almost as hard to jam.
Current inertial guidance systems are good enough to get within 100-200 meters CEP at intercontinental ranges, or 30 meters for something like a JDAM with a much lower flight time. It did take a lot of work getting there. Including, for the intercontinental version, *extremely* precise mapping of the Earth's gravitational field.
The current Kinzhals are reported to have more terminal guidance and movement capability; specifically rising and diving once or twice to fool SAM-systems into firing at them, which they then avoid by diving and going for the actual target later.
This is a good tactic, since Ukraine is trying to use systems like Patriot only when they are really sure they are going to hit. They have too few of these valuable and expensive systems to fire more than one at one target, so Ukrainian operators really try to wait for the last possible moment to maximize hit potential.
How this works in detail, I don't know. It seems the Kinzhals would need a re-ignitable or second motor to pull this off?
>The current Kinzhals are reported to have more terminal guidance and movement capability; specifically rising and diving once or twice to fool SAM-systems into firing at them, which they then avoid by diving and going for the actual target later.
Do you have a reference for this? I'm curious for more details on how this could work.
>How this works in detail, I don't know. It seems the Kinzhals would need a re-ignitable or second motor to pull this off?
You could do it aerodynamically, the problem is that high-speed aerodynamics aren't very efficient, so doing this is going to cost a lot of speed.
I have no idea how this works. I just read about it in the context of Ukrainian air defense and potentially loss of Patriot batteries. But this is all fog of war stuff.
Is the AWACS plane meaningfully irreplacable? My understanding is that the E-7 is strictly better than the old E-3 and it's just that the USAF hasn't got around to buying them yet.
The USAF is trying to buy them, but there are program troubles and Hegseth et al keep trying to shut it down in favor of space-based systems that nobody else has any confidence in. Fortunately, the guy whose district AWACS lives in is head of the House Appropriations Committee, so Congress keeps telling them to buy the things.
B: Somewhat early after the invasion, Israel publicly contemplated supporting Ukraine because Iran supplied Russia with Shaheds. Why did that not happen?
Basically this. The current Israeli government is basically "Israel first, righteousness second". And sometimes those align, but in this case there are things that Russia can do that would be very inconvenient for Israel, and until recently not much Ukraine could do that would really help *or* hinder Israel.
>5. The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this.
Because it has been declared over several times already, at least since the invention of the ATGM. As long as tanks remain capable of fulfilling a job that no other system can through their mobility, survivability, and firepower, armies will put effort into preserving that capability and they won't be going away. Drones are a new threat, and threats always have the upper hand until countermeasures (technology, tactics) have had time to develop. That is just the nature of warfare, an unending game of cat and mouse.
> As long as tanks remain capable of fulfilling a job that no other system can through their mobility, survivability, and firepower, armies will put effort into preserving that capability and they won't be going away.
Hmmm. Except Ukraine and Russia are no longer attempting use tanks the way they've been used since WWII. Because I don't trust myself to remember all the tank talking points, I asked Gemini for a list of the tactical advantages that tanks offer. It gave me a bunch of pro-tank talking points...
1. Firepower and Optics
TANKS: First-Shot Capability: Modern tank battles are frequently decided by which side fires first, with advanced, stabilized targeting systems allowing for high-accuracy engagements at ranges of 3–4 km.
DRONE RESPONSE: super high-accuracy engagement at ranges up to 25 km. Plus continuous detailed surveillance of the the battle space.
TANKS: Targeting Priority: Antitank guided missiles (ATGMs) and enemy tanks are top-priority targets, often necessitating immediate, concentrated fire.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones have the ability to attack on multiple axes. Fiber optic drones are mostly undetectable and unaffected by jamming technologies. And the drone operators can work outside the rage of the tanks.
TANKS: Ammunition Selection: The primary antitank round is the armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS), used to defeat heavy armor through kinetic energy.
DRONE RESPONSE: Use smaller explosive charges directed precisely at the weak points of tank armor. The tank's armor-piercing ammo is useless against APVs and can't reach the operators. And an average APV, even with an explosive payload, is cheaper than tank ammo.
2. Mobility and Maneuver
TANKS: Rapid Maneuver: Fast tanks are used to strike flanks and rear areas, causing confusion and disrupting enemy forward movement.
DRONE RESPONSE: Rapid maneuver with more dimensions to maneuver in. And can cover a distance faster than tanks. And drones have completely stopped enemy forward advances.
TANKS: Bounding Overwatch: A critical tactical movement where one element moves while another provides overwatch (covers) them, ensuring continuous suppression of the enemy.
DRONE RESPONSE: disables tanks before they can provide overreach coverage.
TANKS: Terrain Utilization: Utilizing "hull-down" positions (where only the turret is exposed) or "reverse slope" defenses protects the tank while maximizing its weapon range.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones have a greater range, and this doesn't really matter in drone warfare.
3. Protection and Survivability
TANKS: Armor Configuration: Heaviest armor is placed on the front, dictating that tanks should always face potential threats.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones can attack from all directions
TANKS: Active Protection Systems (APS): Modern systems, like the Trophy system, can detect and neutralize incoming ATGMs and rockets.
DRONE RESPONSE: no solution for fiber optic FPVs as of yet.
TANKS: Dispersion: Tanks spread out to limit the effectiveness of enemy artillery, concentrating only when necessary to attack.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones can spread out further and control the battle space more completely than tanks.
In the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, tanks have been relegated to the role of mobile artillery. And even that use is beginning to fade as the effective kill zone of drones expands.
I'm sure bronze-age charioteers, medieval armored knights, and 19th-century cavalry felt the same way about their weapons as the modern military does about tanks.
>Except Ukraine and Russia are no longer attempting use tanks the way they've been used since WWII.
That is a very different proposition than "The age of the tank is over".
>I'm sure bronze-age charioteers, medieval armored knights, and 19th-century cavalry felt the same way about their weapons as the modern military does about tanks.
You can ask chatbots all day, but the reality is on the Ukrainian battlefield, and reality says that tanks remain in high demand among the parties that currently know best in the world what works and what doesn't.
Ukraine continues to build and import MBTs and IFVs:
"Russia’s defence sector has significantly increased production of T-90 main battle tanks, from approximately 90-110 tanks per year in 2020-2021, to 280-300 tanks in 2024, which represents an effective tripling of output. "
Russia has long-term plans to restore its inventory of MBTs to pre-invasion levels, meaning the thousands of Cold War MBTs that have mostly been destroyed in Ukraine by now.
It will eventually be true that the age of tank warfare is over. But what we're seeing now is just one side's report on a conflict involving drone-warfare systems and tactics that have evolved through four years of brutal war between clever, technically-adept people, and Israel's first use of their best guess as to what an anti-drone system for tanks would look like.
1964 (Vietnam) and 1973 (Sinai) were both cited as proof that the age of (manned) air warfare was over, because SAMs. The guys with airplanes invented Iron Hand and Wild Weasel and SEAD, and now fifty years later the age of manned aerial warfare is still going strong.
> […] and Israel's first use of their best guess as to what an anti-drone system for tanks would look like.
On the other hand, small attack drones have barely seen four years of serious development, have made incredible advances in that time [1], and show no signs of having reached their full potential. It isn't out of the question that the offensive improvements of drones outpace the defensive improvements of heavy armor. Sometimes, military technologies really do become obsolete:
- spears
- swords
- bows
- crossbows
- knight's armor
- chariots
- catapults and trebuchets
- stone fortresses
- cavalry
- carrior pigeons
- sailing ships
- battleships
- high-speed nuclear bombers (mostly)
[1] Just compare early drones, which dropped grenades with 3D-printed fins, to today's FPV drones with multi-kg warheads, 10s of km of range, and jamming-resistant, non-line-of-sight control through fiber-optics.
Surface-to-air missiles in 1973 had a decade of combat experience under their belt, hadn't reached anything close to their full potential, and still haven't ended the age of the manned combat aircraft. Because the countermeasures *also* hadn't reached anything close to their full potential in 1973.
Trophy with a quick anti-drone patch, is not the "full potential" of drone countermeasures.
As a German, I was deeply embarrassed by those Papperger comments. But it does show that he is very concerned about the reality on the ground, that the "gold plated", artisanal solutions are going out of fashion so quickly after they've brought reliable profits for his company for so long. I bet he would have liked some of that 90B € pie, rather than it going to the Ukrainian housewives.
And I'm sure that after the war, those Ukrainian housewives will start profitable businesses delivering Paska, Korovai, Pampushky, and Pyrizhky by drone.
OTOH I'm sure Ukrainians will be happy if they never have to hear another drone in their lives again, especially frontline vets. Imagine having PTSD from what used to be children's toys.
I've seen a movie of 2022, fiction, in which some outrageous sexual violence was committed.
I like some help in making sense of it, but
do not read this if you can't stand this topic! My own blood still boils. I warn you again, I just make this sentence longer so you can spare yourself the distress, and with the next sentence it's too late. In short: of a group of fourteen and fifteen year old boys, one is raped by two good looking, strong, super cool as well as totally straight appearing twenty year old guys after they deliberately filled him up with alc and drugs on a party, while being disgustingly friendly to him, and then sneakily seperated him from the others. Incapacitated as he was, he was at some point rescued, though too late, by a friend whom the attackers immediately told that he should be silent about it, as that would be better for him and his raped friend. And indeed, later the victim forbids his friend any action that could make anyone know what happened, because... well, obviously he doesn't want to be the emasculated or "gay" victim in everyone's eyes. The perfidiousness of those rapists overall modus operandi makes me angry above words.
Now, I don't question the reality of "straight" men having sex with men. I know first hand that some totally straight appearing men do have, behind the back of even their closest friend circle, gay sex.
But I do not understand why attractive men would rape men.
One explanation might be that they aren't interested in rape per se, only in gay sex, but do not want to out themselves. But why not having consensual and just secret gay sex then? Maybe because none of them want to admit to himself his homo- or bisexuality, because of internalized homophobia. So they come up with some reason why some guy deserves to be taught a lesson or something.
Another explanation might be that they really are interested in rape per se, gay or otherwise, for the reason that it makes them feel powerful or as if they get revenge against the world for making them feel so insignificant or something. After all, many people who appear like they have everything and should be happy suffer from self-worth issues.
Or they are just sadistic. But that's incomprehensible to me.
It's like, I just want to believe some unhappiness is inside people like that, because I can't stand the thought of them living happily ever after, and probably being proud of themselves for being successful with their doing.
---
One afterthought: Maybe this modus operandi is the cause of the biblical prohibition of gay sex, if straight men who made that prohibition did so under the assumption that one participant in gay sex just has to be not willing.
No, I haven't, and if you can't honestly tell me that they ripped him to pieces after that speech, I better won't.
This scene seems like an instance of last century downplaying of male on male rape. Just imagine the movie makers had let that character been a rapist of a girl -- it wouldn't have entered cinemas then.
Because patriarchy conditions them so that they could never acknowledge their sexual desire for other men in a way that didn’t involve dominance and violence.
If you’re really wanting an answer to this, the first published book of queer theory, French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem's 1972 work Homosexual Desire, is where I would look. And also Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vols I & II together. Maybe Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.
They’re actually very different books and Foucault writes in a very approachable way. If you’ve never read him, you should try. I honestly think he doesn’t write at a level much higher than say, germ.
I'm not sure why you're upset about this, it's probably just a badly written book where people behave in implausible ways.
I think this happens a lot; authors writing rape scenes who are really just working through their own hangups or fantasies or politics, who fail to make the rapist's motivation seem plausible. I think many authors are walking around with bizarrely flawed ideas of why rapists rape, and they fill in the gaps with stuff that doesn't make sense.
No, I don't believe that straight men go around raping other men to "show dominance" or something, I think that makes no sense at all.
Well, it's worth observing that the classical perspective was that taking the male role in same-sex coitus did indeed demonstrate dominance over the other party. I'm not aware that it was seen as something you'd do _for that purpose_, but the effect existed. It wouldn't be insane for someone to try to achieve it intentionally.
I... just think it would be insane, and indeed impossible.
Let me be explicit. I do not think that a straight male could obtain and maintain the raging erection required to penetrate the hairy anus of an unprepared, unwilling, unlubricated male partner.
Fourteen-year-old boys are not known for their particularly hairy anuses. Indeed, the phrase "beardless youths" was invented as a euphemism for the sort of males that otherwise-straight men could easily get it up with, by people who clearly had a use for such a euphemism.
From the POV of the person doing the anal penetrating, does a 14yo boy look *that* different than an 18yo girl?
> All sorts of awful stuff happens in fiction, and all you can really say is "the person who wrote this / directed this was a terrible human being."
Just to point out that not everything written in fiction is there to titillate the author (or reader). People write fiction involving appalling things as a way to explore their own difficult experiences, for example. All I can say when I read something like this is "the person who wrote this was someone who found it helpful for them in some way". What way that is (financial/emotional/psychological/whatever) is their business, not mine, and if I find it uncomfortable/distressing/disturbing, the "back" button is there for a reason (or "off" button, if I'm watching a film). I don't have to stay and read/watch.
By this logic you could say fiction in general can never tell us anything meaningful. I think there's almost always something to be gained by looking deeply into a work of fiction, even if it's dark, even if the author never thought about your interpretation.
I agree that there's "something" to be gained. It sounds like the thing OP took away from it was somehow "this really happened and I'm mad about it" and I found that alarming enough to want to comment disagreeing.
'It sounds like the thing OP took away from it was somehow "this really happened and I'm mad about it" '
I didn't mean it that way but possibly wasn't clear enough. I just know that things like that happen between men and women, and for some reason, maybe because I'm male, the man on man case upset me in a special way.
I actually thought it might be a good movie for male teenagers to see, just in case they could better relate and those that would at some point become rapist could be detered. Just an idea... I admit don't understand why someone attractive would rape.
Note that pederasty (adult men having sex with barely-postpubescent boys) is a different orientation/kink/fetish/whatever than what we would now call normal MSM homosexuality. Historically, there has always been a large population of otherwise-straight men who desired sex with teenaged boys, sometimes as a substitute when the actually-preferred female sexual partners were unavailable or off-limits, sometimes as a thing desired in its own right.
If this story had a contemporary setting, and it wasn't e.g. an all-boys school or something, then "substitute when female sexual partners are not available" is probably not in play; the allegedly good-looking and super-cool young men could presumably get actual girlfriends in their late teens if they wanted them. But again, straight men just plain wanting a side order of pederasty is a thing.
And it's a thing that in the modern Western world can only be achieved by some sort of rape, statutory and/or forcible. If you're going to do the thing that gets you locked up for twenty years even if you do all the grooming and seduction and whatnot. then why waste time with all that tedious grooming and seduction and just take what you want, trust to your powers of intimidation to avoid the consequences?
Plusl, while Engine overstates things with "rape is about asserting dominance", that's sometimes true even if it isn't always true. It would certainlu seem to fit this scenario.
Yeah... I might not have thought well enough about the age aspect. If it's like pedophilia then it would be like an urge. I can imagine it to be hard to have to stand it, but I still have the feeling appropriate to someone being seriously evil when he acts on it.
It’s not really a different orientation. You can’t really find a gay liberation activist pre 1970s that wasn’t at least a little bit on the pederasty bandwagon. It’s just that homosexuality started becoming socially acceptable while pederasty did not, so now gay men repress that aspect of their sexuality as adeptly as straight men do.
I think there is a difference, in that while most gay men would find pederasty appealing if it were at all respectable, so do a lot of straight men who find sex with other adult men to be thoroughly unappealing.
That’s also an aspect of self repression. Pederasty was socially respectable in Ancient Greece because it didn’t threaten the patriarchal/heteronormative reproductive and legal structures of property relations. There was a defined time limit to it - when the younger person reached adulthood and became a legally independent entity in their society, the partnership had to stop. And these relationships were never understood to be replacements for having a wife. If two adult males were allowed to come together in lifelong partnership, their entire system of lineage and familial succession would be wrecked. So you see immense taboos on it.
However, there were notable exceptions that prove it was more of a taboo instead of an absence of desire - the Sacred Band of Thebes, for instance, the all male all adult elite fighting force of Thebes founded on the idea that a man will fight hardest if his lover is next to him on the battlefield - each soldier was in a sexual and romantic partnership with one other. However, this was an arrangement only ever consummated while outside of the city - while at home, they were expected to be as heterosexually oriented as everyone else.
Absent social conditioning, human sexual desire is as polymorphous as bonobo sexuality. We socially condition each other into only desiring what is favorable for societal reproduction, however - this is the technological aspect of culture as a tool. Realizing this makes a lot of other gendered dynamics we create and enforce make sense.
It wasn't just Ancient Greece though, When Jeremy Bentham wrote his classic defense of MSM homosexuality (18th-century England), the practice was a capital offense regardless of the ages of the participants, with very limited social tolerance in practice. But he, and almost everybody else, assumed that MSM homosexuality would invariably involve "beardless youths", that it was nigh-inconceivable that adult men would want to have sex with *each other*.
Which was factually incorrect, but pretty clearly reflects their observation of a world where pederasty was a fairly common "vice" whereas adult male homosexuality was so rare as to be largely unnoticed, even though both versions would get you hauled before a judge who would *usually* find an excuse not to execute you but would still ruin your life one way or another.
It seems to be nigh-universally true that there are a rare few men who prefer sex with other adult men, but a great many men who are up for sex with adolescent boys if they think they can get away with it. And I'm pretty sure that most of the latter then go home to their wives, who they are also up for having sex with.
But it wasn’t rare or uncommon at all. Lumberjack camps, cowboys, sailors, universities, monasteries, militaries, prisons, etc. - more or less any homosocial environment before the advent of on demand high definition digital pornography, was always rife with same sex sexuality under the surface, which had to be constantly punished and persecuted. Freud documented this, articulating that the creation of the archetypal “successful” male meant the creation of psychological mechanisms to suppress the same-sex attraction within man’s psyche and turn the resulting internal neurotic tensions towards prosocial endeavors and striving.
Guy Hocquenghem comments on this in the first book of queer theory, Homosexual Desire, untangling psychology’s strangled way of speaking around this desire not allowed to be named: “There are drives of desire which all of us have felt and which nevertheless do not affect our daily conscious existence. That is why we cannot come to terms with what we believe about our own desire. There is a social mechanism forever wiping out the constantly renewed traces of our buried desires. … The establishment of homosexuality as a separate category goes hand in hand with its repression. It is therefore no surprise to find that anti-homosexual repression is itself an indirect manifestation of homosexual desire. … We find the greatest charge of latent homosexuality in those social machines which are particularly anti homosexual - the army, the school, the church, sport, etc. At the collective level, this sublimation is a means of transforming desire into the desire to repress.”
If you are up for reading a memoir, go read Before Night Falls by Cuban exile and poet Reinaldo Arenas, depicting his upbringing in rural, pre-electricity, mud hut 1940s Cuba and the realities of what human sexual development actually is on the outskirts of civilization, where the social mechanisms restraining desire are not quite so well defined. I promise the first half of the book will make you question quite a lot of what you think you knew about human sexuality, which in modernity is largely the study of “civilized” subjects.
You linked to someone asserting the claim. This is a common claim, and a very strong one, so I'd like to know how we know this? Since I'm not familiar with this literature, can you explain how this was determined?
For example, what experiments or observations were used to determine that this is always and everywhere the case? Are attractive 20 year olds and not-so-attractive 60 year olds actually equally likely to be victims of rape in similar situation? (Say, in the sack of a city by poorly-controlled soldiers, or during a home-invasion robbery?)
I don't know, but it seems unlikely. Yes, there exist rape victims who are 80 year old nuns, but I'm asking whether the inducement is only power or whether sex is also part of the inducement. What data could we collect to get a good answer?
Is it really true that 0% of the decision by a perp to commit rape has anything to do with sexual attraction or desire for sex? That seems like a really extraordinary claim. (Is this supposed to also be true for date rape and getting girls drunk?)
In fact, this seems more like an article of faith, or a tenet of a widely-believed ideology.
If it's just a kink, acting it out would be much worse than an urge -- like John Schilling made me think -- , though I don't know where exactly the difference or line between those is.
Dominance and submission is a part of all sexual dynamics. it’s never made sense to me to delineate that rape is more about power than sexual desire… why must they be mutually exclusive? Or in the words of Janelle Monae, “Everything is about sex; except sex, which is about power.”
1. Refutree in particular needs an option to 'stipulate' to an opponent's premise, thus cauterizing one branch.
2. More generally, I enjoy conducting debates with AI chatbots. (There are many examples of this in my Substack - either articles or links in the Notes.) Such debates frequently lead to my learning new facts from the AI, or in my realization that my logic was maybe not as airtight as I thought. But one problem is that the debates often leave loose threads behind. I think there would be a market for an app which integrates a debate-organizing app with an AI-chatbot harness. Of course, it would need a system prompt or (more likely) some significant RL training of the AI to make it perform well within the harness.
Would anyone be interested in brain-washing me? It would have to be a topic like aliens or racial pseudoscience where I am broadly skeptical but don't have a very thorough mental model against it. I believe brain-washing happens but the term is used rather promiscuously.
If I'm trapped in a room and someone wants to use AI to help optimize the best brainwashing strategy, this is acceptable. Deepfakes, persuasive female voice, &c.
I've read a few interesting cases where this went one way or the other. Some interesting reading/listening on this subject to get you started:
1. The Antihumans episode of the Martyrmade podcast. It talks about what the communists did to the Ukrainians, Romanians, and others. This is the best argument for legitimate brainwashing through persistent torture if you stick with it long enough.
2. Painfotainment episode from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It talks about a ritualistic morality play torture to get the victim to confess that was employed in Europe in the middle ages. This is more than the brute force "torture gets results" approach of the Soviets. Here, they're using a whole structure to support the torture where it ends when the victim accepts the frame and invites absolution through death ... in front of a crowd.
3. Any of the books about the Nexium cult or escapees from Scientology. The key here is to get the victim to repeat lies to others and try to force them to believe those lies. It also helps if you have a narrative the person wants to believe, and if you start with someone who is already at rock bottom. They might be successful in other ways, but if there's some source of ultimate failure in their lives, you have a potential victim.
4. Elizabeth Smart's book telling her story of her kidnapping. This is a good example of how an attempted brainwashing can totally fail. The perpetrators did everything in the playbook, including repeated, prolonged humiliation, starvation, thirst, daily rape, forced intake of drugs, etc.
5. JK Rowling's "The Ickabog", while fiction, is a manual for how to take all contrary evidence for your worldview and turn it to your advantage. The idea isn't to defend against contrary evidence by explaining it away, but rather to co-opt it such that any contrary ideas actually reinforce your narrative. Do this enough and the victims start doing this on their own.
Taken together these examples demonstrate some consistent features about brainwashing:
1. It takes time
2. It requires close contact with a strong leader or lead brainwasher
3. It's easier if the victim is initially attracted to the brainwasher's positive message
4. It's easier if the victim is prepared by a feeling of despair and life circumstances that prevent escape through means other than what the brainwasher presents to them
5. It's more difficult if the victim has some other strong foundation of belief
6. The more people involved, the better; isolate a small group, get them to repeat the narrative, punish unbelievers, use every setback as an opportunity to strengthen the narrative
I suspect an attempt to get brainwashed like this will be difficult to achieve, unless you're doing it because you're truly desperate to escape your life and are willing to radically transform yourself as the only path forward.
This is really interesting, I guess I had in mind a kind of Chinese prisoner situation, which is how the phrase originated, right? Ludovic Kennedy in 10 Rillington Place explains how it is that Timothy Evans confessed to the murder of his wife and baby daughter, detailing how the police interrogation was tantamount to brainwashing, Kennedy uses the Chinese playbook to go through Evans’s state of mind (this was the case that led to capital punishment being abolished in the UK). So yeh we can’t replicate a conversion to Scientology but a more brute force brainwashing might be possible. No R though please, B Civil - I’m sure you’ll live up to your name.
There's a former FBI hostage negotiator who wrote some books about this strategy. Something like, "get the truth", I can't remember the title exactly. Basically, they would focus on the here and now, not talk about alternatives with the hostage taker, and present themselves as the only option for getting out of the situation unharmed.
He said it was important that they not strictly lie to the target, but that it also was important that they keep the target from thinking about the larger picture outside of what they presented to them. It was an adversarial situation that they presented as cooperative, and that's how they got people to turn. (Among other techniques.)
That sounds right, though like I said I'm pretty sure he had two books.
I'm always a bit wary recommending books like that, because there's a certain amount of 'woo' embedded on their systems that often does not replicate. In this case, it's a good guide to how people operationalize/systematize manipulation through discourse.
I suppose it's analogous to hypnotism where there is an interior and exterior component. Some sort of dominance dance where you back down in response to a challenge.
If anyone wants to fly me out there happy to discuss. How long do you think you'd need? Can't wait to fill out the card on the plane - purpose of visit? Brainwashing. Are you a member of the communist party? Not yet.
I keep getting ads for this website. Pretty sure it's made by an agentic AI gone wrong. Anyway, thought people here might find it interesting or have some thoughts:
To respond to someone's comment that this looks like clickbait: Yeah, I realize it looks that way, all i can say is, it's not, at least not from me. I'd describe it more, but I can't even properly paraphrase what's going on in it - it's got the AI dream-like thing where everything seems legit as you skim it, until you stop to think about what you just read. Or i just don't know enough about orbifolds. Anyway, weird someone has apparently given an ai money to spend on ads, not sure what's going on.
Here's my Refutree, a direct challenge to Lukianoff and the "Free Speech Culture" absolutists. I welcome the best principled arguments against it:
"People that explicitly express overt hateful bigotry, a violation of our universal moral TABOOS, must face severe social consequences and ostracism out of polite society, or their hate will normalize. We must also enforce a 'moral guilt by association' for those that sanitize their hateful taboo views. By allowing people to clarify their views and apologize, we can prevent this from becoming a version of "cancel culture"."
>Since the Civil Rights Movement, 'overt hateful bigotry' has been TABOO
I'm pretty sure if you provided a definition of "overt hateful bigotry" I could find you a post-Civil Rights mainstream comedy performance partaking in it. In the meantime, enjoy the early 90's comedy stylings of Chris Rock . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
>The KKK was marginalized and defeated by making their hateful ideology taboo and very costly (socially, economically, etc.).
>Distinguish between subjective offense (which is partisan and open to individual interpretation) and a Shared Moral Violation (which reflects a broad, trans-tribal consensus and warrants consequence).
The trick is, if you have to distinguish it, it's always the subjective one. By definition, Shared Morality does not get violated.
>The Open Door: The goal of consequence must be correction, not permanent destruction; always offer a path to redemption.
How are you going to do that? Are you going to treat anyone who holds a grudge after an apology as an offender themselves? If so, this hypothetical culture will shatter like a dropped china plate of marbles and peanut brittle.
I'm questioning where our universal moral taboos originate from. For example, is a society that endorses abortion propagating violent ideas? Is aborting a mentally disabled baby bigoted if you wouldn't have aborted a normal baby? Is it bigotry to be anti-japanese if you live in Nanking in 1938? I don't see any philosophical reasoning for this, it just seems like a way to justify a particular set of moral values we hold right now.
Agreed re: abortion. And I describe our 'universal moral taboo' as 'overt, hateful bigotry'. In my Guide to Moral Taboos, I outlined a framework that explains how we can assess harmful speech and differentiate more everyday/casual racism from this overt hateful bigotry. https://elevin11.substack.com/p/lawful-but-awful-a-guide-to-moral (this is part 1 but I share the framework in part 3, along with the results from a survey that somewhat validates these views)
You seem to be thinking entirely in terms of the contemporary US. Bigotry was ubiquitous in the ancient world -- everyone thought their tribe was best.
In what sense are they universal if some people are comfortable violating them
Why is 'TABOOS' capitalized
What constitutes 'hateful bigotry', is it different than normal bigotry
For people that don't consider ostracism from 'polite society' a significant deterrent, do you have anything else in mind, or is the plan here that the taboo is *not* universal but just applies to people who aren't lumpenproles
More generally what moral foundation is this even operating from
1. They're ~universal in that the vast majority of Americans believe they are morally wrong and socially unacceptable. I think people feeling comfortable violating them is a relatively new phenomenon, but I know those views are not widely held nor are most comfortable expressing that hate publicly. A good short-hand for this: if an employee openly announced that they were KKK or a Nazi and espoused all of their hateful ideologies, in the vast majority of instances, would their employer have to fire them? Even if they were superb employees in the office and the owner was somewhat sympathetic to their hate, it's realistic to assume that the employees and/or customers would say "you have to choose us or the avowed hateful bigot" and the employer would get rid of the bigot.
2. I capitalize TABOO (or my autocorrect does now) because it's the operative word I'm trying to mainstream as it helps label the issue and also implies the action that must be taken to keep these behaviors from becoming socially acceptable.
3. Some people may be fine to live as social pariahs. There were pockets of America where white supremacists lived in a sort of circular economy. If these hateful bigots want to do the same, that's fine. But I think that via a "moral guilt by association," they can be cut off from most of polite society, and at least from there they can't cause nearly as much harm to the rest of us.
4. I think this blends a number of different foundations, including Rule utilitarianism, Duty-based deontology, and Epistemic hygiene. Ultimately, I think this aligns to institutional stability and objective accountability.
Prior to October 7th, almost nobody could go out and explicitly say "kill all the [blanks]" or celebrate an assassination or terrorist attack and keep their job. The taboos eroded slowly over decades, and then boiled over after 10/7. We must revert to 10/6/2023, and then slowly start to retreat further back to undo the "reverse racism" that DEI "oppressor vs oppressed" frameworks created permission structures for.
It's still taboo to explicitly say "kill all the [blanks]", and nobody but the egelordiest of edgelords does that in public. But it has always been popular to point at people who are perhaps unfairly or over-harshly criticizing the blanks and say "what they *really* mean is to kill all the [blanks], they're violating the taboo, we must all shun them!". Which in turn begets "When they say to shun them, they *really* mean to kill all the [anti-blanks]..."
The point is that when the edgelords do it in public and don't get ostracized for it, the taboo erodes and that hate normalizes.
A few months ago there was a chant "we support Hamas here". There was media outrage. Nobody actually got punished. This week it happened again. It didn't make the news. It'll be fully tolerated before we know it.
You're extending my argument beyond the limiting principles I've set. You can argue that the those limits won't be abided by, or that the violations are so rare that they're not meaningful. But you should also acknowledge what happens if this type of hate is not made TABOO and socially punished. If we see the trendline continue where more people not just think that political violence and terrorism are acceptable, but openly express that view, we'll see that view normalize, and the violence and terror will follow. Or do you disagree?
Alright, let's go to point 4, which I think is the heart of it. There's a technical issue here and a practical one.
(4) It is possible to uphold taboos in a principled way that does not violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
Technical: Just because something is possible does not mean it is probable or that we should do it. It might be possible to uphold these taboos with succumbing to cancel culture/wokism or legal penalties but it's also possible to bet it all on, like, black 32 on the roulette wheel and get a 35x return. Possible merely tells us the odds are somewhere between 0.001% and 99.999%. Those imply very different actions.
Practically: What went wrong with wokism and, if we reestablish the stronger form of many of these taboos, how would we prevent wokism/PC culture/cancel culture's reoccurrence? Allan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind" almost 40 years ago decrying proto-wokeness and he was a homosexual Harvard professor. It's not as if there were no responsible, credible, and respectable criticisms of this failure mode. Instead, there's 40 years of discourse decrying it, critiquing it, and all but begging for it to be reversed. It did not.
I understand and agree that the social taboos and discourse we experienced in the 90s and 2000s is significantly better than what we experience now. I suspect, however, that I was far more bothered and disturbed by the social and discourse taboos than we had in the 2010's. I perceive current social and discourse taboo norms to be dramatically better than they were in the 2010s. I concur that it would be better to return to the norms of the 90s and it would be best to develop better norms than existed in the 90s. What changes or mechanisms do you propose that would prevent us from backsliding into wokism again? What guarantees are there that this will work. If the guarantees are that we can resolve this by reasonable discussion and discourse, there is a voluminous literature on that exact corrective mechanism failing.
Or, on very simple terms, for someone who flipped from Obama to Trump in significant part due to this, what guarantees are there that the Dems/Left have actually changed? The fact that it's possible is insufficient.
Were you expecting Trump and his supporters to restore free speech, or enact their own cancellations in the opposite direction? Which do you think happened?
I wanted Trump to restore free speech, I think he broadly did that from 2016-2024, there was a "vibe shift" over his first term and....somewhat of the Biden term, it's a mixed bag. Now they're pretty clearly just beating down the other side.
And, like, speech is one thing, but pretty clearly something happened in terms of the stakes people care about, which is "who's losing their job." In the 2010s, lots of right-wingers lost their jobs, especially guys in left-wing spaces, Brendan Eich being the continual poster child. Starting about 12 months ago though, a lot of USAID employees, federal employees, scientists, medical guys, just a whole bunch of left-coded industries got hit for pretty clearly ideological reasons. Meanwhile, while I'm sure certain industries, like tech, are hardly right-wing friendly, they're a lot better than they were 5-10 years ago.
We can debate the edge cases but I think there's pretty clearly been a shift in who's getting fired. And, while I'd much rather my political outgroup get fired than my political ingroup, a lot of my friends are in my political outgroup and I would prefer if no one got fired for their political views. I think that would be good. So I try to keep my eyes open for genuine shoots of moderation and an opportunity to get to the good place where no one gets fired for political beliefs. Unfortunately, both online and in private, I get the feeling the majority of people calling for moderation would not consider Trump and his group not, um, within the bounds of proper society.
Do you think nobody should get fired for their "political beliefs"? If somebody got fired for celebrating/endorsing political violence, is this bad or necessary? I'd argue it's the latter (in the cases that are clear cut).
If it's not performed while they're on the job, they should not face punishment through their job. Otherwise, in demanding they only say work-appropriate things while off the clock, you're demanding they work for free.
I think it's possible to uphold taboos, although I'm not sure Refutree hits upon the magic formula for it. (It might, but I can't tell; I can't visit the site because it's blocked by the provider here due to being a "newly registered domain".)
To answer an intermediate question: we indeed might want to. The main reason I see is spam. Imagine wanting to have a serious discussion where you crowdsource ideas that help you make some important and timely but topic-spanning decision, but when you submit the CFP, someone keeps bringing up some "taboo subject" and insists everyone consider it before moving on to the decision, on pain of censorship accusation. Your options at this point are bleak; you can cut that person's mic and look like a censorweasel; preface with a list of "what will not be discussed" and look like a censorweasel who's also prepared; you can ignore it and look like a pocket-censorweasel; or you can address that issue either at object level or discuss why it is or isn't relevant, and miss the deadline for your timely decision.
You can try to prioritize taboos away, but that sometimes doesn't work either. Most people might think, say, the Shah's legitimacy or Carter's handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis is relevant to the current Iran war, relative to military spending, oil prices, Trump's war aims, or the role of Israel, which would justify spending more time on the latter, but is there an objective metric for prioritizing? What if something that happened during the hostage crisis really did provide a key for resolving the matter? Can you show that the War doesn't hinge on some "damn fool thing in Syria" so definitively that you can justify automatically shutting down anyone who brings up Syria?
You might get around this by democratizing the discussion process and having everyone vote on what's worth discussing, but what if the topic is what led to some disaster in space development, the vast majority appear to want to discuss NASA's reputation as a good-faith development agency, but the minority is some scientist at the end of the table who wants to point out a fault with the O-rings?
One common method for deciding which project society puts its material resources to, is to let individuals within that society own those resources, and let them choose any project they want, no matter how crackpot that project is; the only catch is that if they're the only one who picks it, they're the only source of resources.
When it comes to debate, the scarce resource I notice is the participants' attention. My question would be whether Refutree employs that approach.
"When it comes to debate, the scarce resource I notice is the participants' attention. My question would be whether Refutree employs that approach."
Not sure what you mean here but Refutree appears to demand substantially more attention, not less. Here's essentially what I saw:
P1. Since the Civil Rights Movement, 'overt hateful bigotry' has been TABOO aka socially unacceptable in the US (and much of the West).
P2. Taboos only remain taboo if they are enforced.
P3. In the US, where there cannot be legal consequences for speech, the only way to uphold taboo speech ("lawful but awful") is via social consequences.
P4. It is possible to uphold taboos in a principled way that does not violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
P5. The KKK was marginalized and defeated by making their hateful ideology taboo and very costly (socially, economically, etc.). Not only were they fired from their jobs, nobody was able to publicly associate with them or they'd face their own ostracism ("moral guilt by association").
P6. The 4 Principles to Restore and Uphold our Universal Moral Taboos are: 1. The Red Line: Limit actionable taboos to overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence. 2. The Consensus Test: Distinguish between subjective offense (which is partisan and open to individual interpretation) and a Shared Moral Violation (which reflects a broad, trans-tribal consensus and warrants consequence). 3. The Private Mechanism: Enforce standards through civil society (employers, associations), never government coercion. 4. The Open Door: The goal of consequence must be correction, not permanent destruction; always offer a path to redemption.
Basically, if we break one big argument up into six-ish subarguments and then further break those down, eventually we will resolve them and we'll have a definitive winning argument that everyone agrees with.
If I had to guess on the failure mode, I would expect people to just bail when the debate is not going in their preferred direction or just going somewhere useful. Barring some enforcement mechanism, like a strong boss or a shared financial stake, demanding high time/attention investment into a system with no guaranteed return is...meh. Plus, I feel like I've seen this thing 5 times already. Your mileage may vary.
I wasn't asking whether Refutree demanded more attention than some alternative debate site, but rather whether it directly addressed the question of how much of one's attention should be allocated to various debate arguments. So:
P1: "Overt hateful bigotry" implies one can safely allocate zero attention to OHB arguments. But I notice that's likely to shift all debates to "is this argument OHB?".
P2: Taboo status depending on enforcement is insightful, but in my context, not really - some taboos are de facto enforced because people run out of free time before getting to this or that argument. In other words: lack of attention.
P3-P4: As social consequences go, lack of attention is pretty effective. But Refutree seems more concerned with the "fish" whose attention is roped in by cranks. I agree there's no 1A problem with telling people "hey, this guy over here is a crank", but IMO that's not the actual problem; the actual problem is _convincing_ people of that. It's possible if Refutree has a bias-free way of showing it, but that's a huge ask.
P5: The KKK, despite being a fringe view now, still has adherents. We can claim they're at lizardman levels, but whatever - their members aren't likely to look at whatever Refutree has and think, oh, well then, that's settled, now I can be more productive at something else. There's a reason for that, and I suspect Refutree isn't addressing it.
P6: In fact, I get the sense here that Refutree is shooting for some centralized Crank-O-Meter, and if so, I think that's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. They might be trying to distinguish subjective and objective crankery, but either they'll find out everything's subjective, or I'm going to suspect something's wrong with their methodology.
As you say, some people may put tribe over idea, and peace out when the Refutree FAQ puts pressure on them. I think Refutree, like any debate solution, will need to acknowledge the tribe factor and work with it. Fight it, and you'll just lose.
Also, I don't think tribes are that absolutist. They just look that way to people who don't understand the underlying drive behind any given tribe's identity. (I think a lot of people don't understand their _own_ tribe drive, sometimes.)
Who gets to declare what are these supposedly universal taboos? And who decides when someone has had a sincere struggle session?
I claim that there is no one and no body that can do this without instantly becoming corrupted by the power to declare things they disagree with as taboo.
No, free speech absolutism is the only path that doesn't inevitably lead to tyranny.
We do need to be clear what we mean by free speech absolutism. Literal absolutism leads to death of discourse: people who enjoy being in a cesspit alter the environment to their liking, and everyone who can't tolerate the result is forced out. Even Scott moderates.
My take:
* don't unilaterally impose global restrictions on speech
* do allow communities and platforms to self-police as they see fit
* do allow people to form new communities and platforms, and move between them, as they see fit
Mastodon is the closest current thing to this ideal. Everyone can have their own soapbox. I'm not required to listen to or spread your speech in my platform, but I can't stop you making your own and saying what you like there; and the reverse is also true.
I'd like to see the costs of getting AS registration come down. Single digit thousands of dollars is certainly not beyond the means of someone who /really/ wants to say something very very taboo, but it's not exactly accessible to the everyman.
It seems like a lot of the social value of free speech comes down to not letting anyone forbid the discussion of ideas or beliefs or (outside a pretty narrow window) claims of fact. When unpopular ideas are suppressed, this can create society-wide blind spots that do a lot of harm.
Hate speech laws seem like they are often used in Europe to shut down the expression of ideas, and of course all kinds of "terms of service liberalism" during the 2015-2022 period was targeted at shutting down the expression of ideas like "a transwoman is just a dude in a dress" or "covid was made in a Chinese lab" or whatever else. The point was explicitly to prevent the expression of offensive or harmful ideas and claims of fact, and very often mere truth was not believed to be a defense. (Consider how discussions of the black/white IQ gap were/are handled in mainstream outlets.)
> not letting anyone forbid the discussion of ideas or beliefs
...society-wide. Your argument supports not letting anyone forbid the discussion of ideas or beliefs society-wide. Or, as I put it, "don't unilaterally impose global restrictions on speech".
The "global" is super important because entirely too often I see "free speech" used as a stick to beat up /individuals/ with in order to try to force them to carry /in their space/ ideas or beliefs they do not want to carry.
This is entirely separate to the conversation of whether we really literally mean never criminalise any speech at all; e.g. do we have a problem with "conspiracy to commit" style crimes? CSAM? "Incitement to X" for any X? Leaking classified material to foreign agents and other forms of treason-by-speech? If we permit criminalisation of any of these, we can no longer just say "free speech" to the ones we want decriminalised - it's now a matter of different groups accepting boundaries exist but wanting them in different places, and they will have to actually do the work of haggling - what are the benefits of allowing that kind of speech, and what are the costs?
You've given some things you presumably find compelling, but what are the least personally compelling things you nevertheless feel obliged to defend? That's where any interesting shifts are going to happen.
Also, internet moderation discussions always seem to run aground on the distinction between:
a. I don't want to see this crap.
b. I don't want anyone to see this crap.
(a) is not just defensible, it's necessary to have a functioning world. The academic conference on evolutionary biology can throw out the guys who want to talk about young-Earth creationism, and the bible study group can throw out the guys who want to mock people for talking to their invisible sky friend.
It is super common to see people swap between these, though. I don't want to see white supremacist views[1] discussed, therefore Substack should ban white supremacist writers. I don't want to see hateful discussion of my religion, therefore criticisms of my religion should be banned.
And this has both the intent and the effect of shutting down some ideas.
[1] In practice, any acceptable-to-ban group always gets expanded as far as possible, so soon enough, the "white supremacists" you're trying to ban will be Ben Shapiro or Razib Khan, just as an earlier generation accused anyone to the left of the median Democrat of being a communist to shut them down.
The fight I most often see is currently neither of these; it’s “I made a place for people to talk, but I don’t want to be made to have this crap there”, vs “I want your visitors to hear my ideas, and by stopping that you are censoring me”.
Yeah, I mean globally. My point is that the big potential loss we get from suppressing speech globally is that current consensus can't be argued against even when it's wrong or incomplete, that important or valuable new ideas can't be discussed, that facts or ideas that offend powerful people can be suppressed. That's why the coordinated campaigns to shut down media sites or publications seem really bad to me, as do the campaigns to try to shut down some lines of inquiry in science or academia. This is basically just blinding ourselves. I think this is a useful place to start--when someone is proposing that some ideas or facts or beliefs be shut down, we ought to start out extremely skeptical, since that's attacking exactly the core thing we need from free speech. And this isn't just about law, though I think we should care the most about speech restrictions that involve someone going to jail for saying the wrong thing. If all the internet companies agreed that nobody is allowed to say anything bad about Trump online, that seems like it would be really bad, even though it might not touch on the first amendment at all. Or, to use a recent case, Amazon ceasing to sell _Camp of the Saints_ seems pretty bad to me, but nobody thinks there's a legal requirement for anyone to sell books they don't like. It still doesn't seem great that the giant online bookstore is trying to decide what I can and can't read.
I agree that "free speech" doesn't specify everything we care about wrt speech restrictions, and in fact there's a whole bunch of case law and legal reasoning and such built up around getting the details right. (Nor is this unique to speech. Consider the differences between a basic view of "don't steal other peoples' stuff" and all the intricacies of how the law deals with property (what bundle of rights goes with the land, how is inheritance handled, what happens when there's a dispute about ownership, etc.) I think looking at whether the goal or effect of some legal restriction on speech is to suppress ideas or beliefs or broad factual claims[1] is a good way to work out whether it may be reasonable.
I think if someone wants to claim the holocaust never happened, or HIV was created by the US government, they should not face any legal consequences for that and their speech should not be suppressed. I never want to hear their nonsense, but I think giving someone the power to suppress even this obvious nonsense is inevitably giving them power that will be used to suppress offensive/weird ideas that aren't nonsense, and will make us all dumber thereby.
[1] Slander and libel involve factual claims, so this needs to be a little narrower, but I want to make sure nobody is able to suppress factual claims like "human CO2 emissions are/aren't altering the climate" or "blacks do/don't commit crimes at a much higher rate than whites in the US."
I think we still have a fundamental point of disagreement: my preferred recourse for companies deciding not to carry some content is not to force them to carry it, but to reduce the cost and complexity of creating competing alternatives. Hence my comment about AS costs, since starting your own ISP is the nuclear option here.
Suppose you're trying to make some important community-wide decision, and have chosen to use Mastodon to find any information relevant to that decision.
How do you find which Mastodon servers might have relevant information?
What's the chance you'll miss something critical if you sort those servers by participant count and only consult the top N?
Suppose you make a choice, and then it turns out to be the wrong choice (by the community's standards), evidenced by information on some server that didn't make your top-N list. How defensible is this choice?
Is "sort by participant count" the best metric in this case? Of the other plausible metrics (sort by highest participant status; median participant status; median participant education level; comment count; average comment length; number of technical citations; average subscriber wealth), what's their tradeoffs?
How have I ended up in charge of making this community-wide decision?
Certainly I can't make policy decisions for other people's servers. That is the entire point: their servers, their rules. I guess if someone delegates managing their server to me but shuts me out of any space where conversation about how they want it managed takes place and also won't come to where I am and tell me what they want directly, then... I'm not sure what they expect to happen, exactly? If I get elected for some even wider Mastodon thing - and it's unclear what any such thing would be, since the purpose of a decentralised system is to avoid being subject to a centralised authority - I'd say it's on the people who elected me to come to where I am and say what they want to happen if they have opinions on the matter that they think I will otherwise miss.
Turns out this is how community politics works offline as well. We've just participated in a consultation about a new railway junction nearby. The people in charge of making the decisions advertised that the consultation was happening, in places where they were permitted to do that; it was then on us to participate, if we had opinions on the matter and wanted them taken into account. A lot of local government decisions are made this way, and as far as I am aware this is not and never has been controversial. If you can't be bothered to say your piece when asked, that's on you.
So if it's offline politics we're talking about and I'm this kind of official in your scenario and it's this kind of decision I'm making, and I've "chosen Mastodon" as the consultation venue, I'd advertise my Mastodon server in all the same places consultations get advertised today, and the consultation would happen like it always does.
The last time people were directly consulted about a non-local community decision in these parts was Brexit, and we all know how that went.
To be honest, I do not believe anyone involved in any central decision has ever looked at what I otherwise post on social media to help them decide, or ever will; nor do I expect this.
"How have I ended up in charge of making this community-wide decision?"
If it's not you, it's someone else. :-) I'm presenting this as a hypothetical. Central example: you're in charge of policy, maybe for your local Elk lodge chapter, maybe for the State Department, maybe for the UN. Presumably you want to make an informed decision, and you're trying to learn from past mistakes, so you're trying to be open to all arguments, but at the same time, you have limited time, and there _do_ exist trolls. So I'm asking how one ought to navigate this.
Obviously Mastodon is a tool of value here. I'm asking questions that explore its limits. For example, I'm aware server owners set the rules for the servers they own. But if Server P explores position P on issue S and Server Q explores Q, and you're deciding some policy for S, how much time do you spend on P and Q? How do you tell if P is a crank position? Or Q? Or both?
Popularity might not be the right yardstick. As the saying goes, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If you set policy in favor of whoever's 51% that year, then you might end up just eating 10% of yourself every year. If it's just the wealthiest 10%, for example, then after a generation you're liable to wonder why you're so poor, while the 51% pony up the next target to label "exploiters".
OTOH, if the stakes are relatively low, such as what to do with a railway junction, it looks like it'll work. But then I'd say the solution is to only make low-stakes decisions, and avoid high-stakes issues unless the natural solution is much more obvious. Mastodon might help, but it might not tell you anything any other media outlet could. I honestly don't know.
Still not understanding this hypothetical where in any of these situations the functionary spends a nonzero amount of time looking anywhere other than the organisation’s own servers that they themselves manage and run, and invites interested parties to discuss the issues there.
I’m trying to think of any existing real-world scenario that works the way you seem to describe, with the investigator going around different communities to listen in on the conversations happening there, and the only thing I’m coming up with is police / secret service infiltrations and similar intelligence scenarios where agents have the full time job of getting themselves into various groups, and their higher-ups then create summaries and reports of what is happening there; the people affected, meanwhile, likely would not want the agent there if they knew what was happening.
Could you perhaps give a real example of the sort of democratic investigation you describe and how it works today in the pre-universal-Mastodon world?
Is there even one country with absolute free speech? Free speech that includes insults, death threats, criticism of The Man, dissemination of any and all media? I find that hard to believe.
To the best of my knowledge, there is not. I predict that bell_of_a_tower will rebut me in one of these ways (if they reply at all), sorted from most to least likely:
1. All countries are currently on the path to tyranny, they're just not quite there yet (but soon will be, if they don't adopt free speech absolutism).
2. One or a few countries (probably the US) does have free speech absolutism, and all other countries have already descended into tyranny.
3. All countries have already descended into tyranny, where the term "tyranny" has a definition which is functionally equivalent to "lack of free speech absolutism".
The linked comment essentially says GrimMoar is a sockpuppet for other accounts, one of which was banned for similar content. So it was a sort of lifetime achievement ban.
I'm a dummy that was looking for someone else bringing up that two of the linked comments didn't show me the ban-worthy material, and for some reason I ctrl-F'd for "link" instead of "comment" and so I want to express my appreciation that you used the words "linked comment" instead of just "comment." Glad someone met me at the "link" Schelling Point.
Could also be "Characters, Hook, Arc, Idea, Resolution". Probably not that important, as long as it's the same letters as the word "chair" (not the acronym), an allusion to a plot device in the book.
The Iliad: The middle part is pretty good,, but the setup is a bit forced and the resolution relies on the bad guys falling for the oldest trick in the book.
Book of Genesis: Prose is pretty but a bit dense. Lots of plot holes. Narrative jumps around a lot. Too many begats.
Titus Andronicus: Ugh, I have to sit through over two hours of this when I just want to see the recipe.
Not sure there is anything wrong with the end of The Iliad. It finishes before the end of the war; the Trojan Horse legend gets a brief reference in The Odyssey but that's it for Homer.
I fudged it for the joke. In the original, the story of the Trojan Horse was split between the Little Iliad and The Sack of Troy, two of the lesser works from the Epic Cycle for which the full original text is lost but we know most of the content from other works that quote or discuss them. Modern translations and adaptation sometimes attach it to the end of the Iliad or the beginning of the Odyssey. It's also in the Aeneid, as that's a Roman fanfic of the Epic Cycle; Aeneas tells the story of the Horse and the Sack from the Trojan perspective in flashbacks in Book 2.
Similarly, the Judgement of Paris and the story of the early-to-middle phases of the war (stuff like Odysseus pretending to be mad to try to get out of having to join the war) come from another lesser work in the cycle, the Cypria, but are often attached to one or both stories in modern editions.
Based on your critic of Genesis, you may try the sequel Numbers. It has less plot holes, stays focused for longer time on one point, and the begats are replaced by lists of other things.
Reform UK leader Zia Yusuf, whose ancestors fought at the Battle of Hastings, announced a new policy to put migrant detention centers in areas that vote for the Green Party:
The migrants, he claims, will not be able to leave these detention centres. One wonders, then, what the issue is. Why not reward Reform voters with jobs? But it’s the NIMBY degrowth YooKay, where building anything is considered a punishment for nearby people, who will then turn around and complain about poverty and lack of jobs.
On the subject of dysfunctional political cultures, WSJ has a map of data center bans in the US:
The greatest concentration is in the Detroit metro area. An area that treated the rest of us to decades of complaining about how “they” sent all the jobs to China.
"An area that treated the rest of us to decades of complaining about how “they” sent all the jobs to China."
A rather uncharitable take. Deliberate policy choices by "they" (national policymakers) substantially and predictably contributed to the offshoring of skilled jobs and manufacturing capacity. See NAFTA and the line of maquiladoras that popped up just across the Mexican border after it was signed, for example.
Global economic shifts and competition played a role, of course. But the UAW guy who thinks Clinton pretended to be pro-labor and then stabbed blue collar workers in the back isn't entirely wrong.
I've worked 30 years in several different fields in several different parts of the country, and I'm convinced the vast majority of Americans want unrestricted free trade for the things they consume while also having strong protectionist policies for the particular field he/she works in. Auto workers hate NAFTA, tech workers hate H1B, etc.
>The migrants, he claims, will not be able to leave these detention centres. One wonders, then, what the issue is. Why not reward Reform voters with jobs? But it’s the NIMBY degrowth YooKay, where building anything is considered a punishment for nearby people, who will then turn around and complain about poverty and lack of jobs.
Come on now, it's obviously not the "building" that's supposed to be the punishment.
Being in close proximity to dangerous criminals, even if they're locked up, is intimidating for most people, for reasons that have nothing to do with "spiritual adjacency".
The Greens know that a lot of migrants are dangerous, BTW, which is why they're currently freaking out over the prospect of having detention centres put in their own communities. Of course, they're perfectly fine with letting those same dangerous migrants wander around poor areas.
It's not intimidating to red-state Americans. This not only results in economic opportunity and jobs, the prisoners are counted as residents of the area, inflating its economic power.
Good for them, I guess? Not really sure what this has to do with British Greens, who seem at least somewhat intimidated, judging by their reaction to the proposal.
I think there is an assumption that areas with migrant detention centers will become migrant-hevay outside of them, e.g. because of families of detainees or detainees that were released without deportation or on bail.
The Detroit thing is interesting, is it mostly nimbyism or competing uses for energy? (Also why do they need so many bans, is it a big data center hub or just a nimbyism hub?)
Paywalled article, but I have connections to the area and have mostly been hearing uproar about proposals near Ann Arbor. The A2 area has a critical mass of politically active progressives/environmentalists/hippies, plus relatively affordable undeveloped land on the outskirts.
At least one of the proposed data centers has some kind of DOE national security tie-in, which further enrages the anti-Trump crowd.
Parts of the Detroit metro style themselves as "automation alley", because of all the autonomous vehicle research happening in the area, so maybe the AI companies thought it would be a favorable regulatory environment?
I looked up what Jim said and he's right - is *is* favourable in that there's a lot of tax credits for anyone willing to bring business to the Detroit area, which made some hyperscalers start some datacenters there, which led to pushback (afaict, some of it unreasonable scare tactics and some of it more reasonable takes that these are long term tax credits for temporary jobs, once the construction is done) which led to local zoning fights.
I would suspect that datacenter bans appear only after datacenter construction proposals appear. So, the 'why Detroit?' question is probably explained by the plethora of abandoned industrial sites with tax abatement incentives for new tenants, favorable zoning, and with electrical infrastructure already in place.
The placebo effect. So what is it and why don't we study it and try to make it even more effective? The only papers along this line that I can find are by people into alternative medicine.
So it seems pretty obvious that the placebo effect is real. And it works in all sorts of different ways that we don't really understand. And my question is how does it work? I'm reading several books, but I'm still in the first parts where the author is still providing more examples of it working. Which is useful data, but I want some mechanism.
So tentative ideas.
1.) It's something to do with the unconscious mind. Great what the F is that. We don't understand the conscious mind. Did the unconscious mind come before / after or at the same time as the conscious mind? And doesn't unconscious mind sound something like a non sequitur. To me at least mind implies conscious mind. So I'm someone who thinks in images. Conscious mind has no image for me. It seems far away from neurons firing in the brain. So some blob. And then unconscious mind is even more unknown, some bigger blob? Does one enclose the other, two separate blobs but intersecting?
To try and understand the placebo effect, we should try to understand the unconscious mind.
My mother in law was a clinical psychologist for many years. She used aromatherapy as part of her practice, knowing it was only a placebo but figuring she was just as happy with a placebo helping her patients as she would be with a real drug helping her patiens.
So it seems pretty obvious that the placebo effect is real. And it works in all sorts of different ways that we don't really understand. And my question is how does it work? I'm reading several books, but I'm still in the first parts where the author is still providing more examples of it working. Which is useful data, but I want some mechanism.
So tentative ideas.
1.) It's something to do with the unconscious mind. Great what the F is that. We don't understand the conscious mind. Did the unconscious mind come before / after or at the same time as the conscious mind? And doesn't unconscious mind sound something like a non sequitur. To me at least mind implies conscious mind. So I'm someone who thinks in images. Conscious mind has no image for me. It seems far away from neurons firing in the brain. So some blob. And then unconscious mind is even more unknown, some bigger blob? Does one enclose the other, two separate blobs but intersecting?
To try and understand the placebo effect, we should try to understand the unconscious mind.
One mechanism regarding Placebo that I read about is that the body is apparently prone to producing more endogenous opioids. These can create a positive feedback loop. If that is true, than "placebo" turns out to be *actual* medicine.
I vaguely remember a podcast (I think Econtalk?) where the guest theorized that the placebo effect was more powerful the more you trusted medical science, and that this probably made it a bigger thing in clinical trials (where the volunteers tend to be very positive toward cutting-edge medicine and which tend to happen in big, impressive medical centers) than in normal use, where the miracle drug is given as an injection by a tired-looking PA in a run-down office, with some kid screaming about not wanting a shot in the background.
Wow, yeah sure. That's a long article, I skimmed a bunch. I found nothing about mechanism except the usual mind over body... Well how the heck does that work? But lots of conformation that it does work.
The thing is, we have been funding the hell out of science and especially medicine for decades now, so most things that sound important to a layman have probably got a literature, unless there's some reason (technical or ethical or political) why it can't really be studied.
Thanks I think I read that before. Still the 'cause' of the placebo effect is left unexplored. Maybe our brain/ mind/ unconscious is better at healing than we think. What about the power of pray and faith healing?
The problem with creating meaning is that it's subjective. The meaning of an intervention can be quite different from patient to patient. Meaning is important though. With stress-related or psychosomatic illnesses meaning can be the difference maker. It's possible to be so stressed from your stress-related illness that it makes recovery basically impossible. (Part) of the solution then lies in shifting the meaning of such an illness.
Shifting meaning is not an exact science. We try do this in psychology, but even there the best methods might not outperform each other much (see e.g. Bruce Wampold) and outcomes are not guaranteed at all (Wampold puts the number needed to treat for therapy at 3). We know the relationship between patient and therapist is important and we also know of some things that can help in forming that relationship, but that's not the same as substantively knowing what causes a shift in meaning.
However, even though meaning is personal, we seem more able to predictably shift meaning. For example in the chronic pain literature, treatments like pain reprocessing therapy (e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482298/) focus on shifting the meaning that patient's pain has to them, and so far results seem quite promising, suggesting that there might be ways to shift meanings in patients which work at a higher rate than "just" the therapeutic alliance/standard treatments in psychology can.
Thanks for the long reply. I'll check out the Moerman book. (At least a sample on my kindle.) The second article is great. Though it's not really clear what 'pain reprocessing therapy' is. Whatever it appears to work well.
So my very naive thought is that the placebo effect probably has many causes. I wish we would look into more of them. Oh and the short answer of why this isn't studied more is that there may be no profit in it. There is no new pill to sell someone.
Because most of the Placebo effect is on paper or during the doctor's visit, not actual material improvement in the patient's condition long-term.
There are some things that can be materially helped by changing the patient's attention and interpretation, but those treatments have different names already, many of them 'psychology.'
One positive effect of placebo is when there's not much useful to be done for some problem medically. A homeopathic cold remedy won't cure your cold, but maybe will convince you you're doing something and thus keep you from zonking yourself out on antihistamines so you fall asleep driving home, or going to a doctor for your cold and coming home with the flu.
I do a weekly project with Claude in which I ask him question about some classical pieces and since changing from 4.6 to 4.7 he's been proactive to a fault. A simple question generates long paragraphs of context and tangents. Not exactly wrong things, but just above and beyond what I asked
Reading Suttree and I had to verify this one:
“St Peter patron of fishmongers. St Fiacre that of piles.”
Per Claude
“St. Fiacre, a 7th-century Irish monk, was particularly renowned for curing hemorrhoids , making him the patron saint of piles.”
Yep. McCarthy had done his homework.
I pasted some data with no labels into a fresh Claude chat and asked it to do a linear regression, and it somehow inferred that the data was my weight. I guess it's another demonstration of AI "truesight". And yes, I have memory disabled and everything.
It's a combination of having seen many patterns, and guessing with overconfidence.
A few weeks ago I tried to reverse-engineer an application using Claude. There was a check whether some byte was between capital 'A' and 'Z', and Claude said: "This is checking whether the argument is a valid disk letter." I was impressed, like how can it predict so much detail based on so little information... but later it turned out that the argument was *not* a disk letter, merely a capital ASCII character used for an unrelated purpose.
My guess is that Claude knows that when an old application is testing whether something is a character between 'A' and 'Z', there is maybe 80% chance that it will be used as a disk, so it speaks like it knows for sure. And when it happens to be right, you are deeply impressed, like "how could it have known this for sure?", but it didn't.
Claude is hit and miss on this sort of thing. Occasionally it will pick up on something like non explicit ironic humor and even respond with something genuinely funny.
The thing is it will never experience the human pleasure of relaxed spontaneous laughter. No qualia, no consciousness, in my inexpert opinion.
Hello from the land of back surgery and opioids. Opioid thought: consciousness is the surface tension on something. But what?
> consciousness is the surface tension on something. But what?
Really fun idea. Surface tension is the amount of energy per surface area.
In that sense, I'll say consciousness is the surface tension on the manifold of self-simulation of future states.
You exist at a point in time, and from here, you branch into an infinite array of potential future selves / states. Steering your "self" in better ways through that high dimensional state is literally the point and purpose of consciousness.
This schema makes sense - because it's about simulation, you'll see natural divisions in the overall simulation ability (driven by different simulation hardware) of different people and organisms. Why do smart, high C people generally do better in life? They're better able to simulate, create a plan, and stick to it, to reach those better places on the manifold of potential future states.
It seems to me to be such a simple evolutionary line from “non-sentient bacteria and animals having an experience of something (sense 1) because you need feedback loops for successful goal-directed behavior” to “humans, descended from a billion-year line of animals / bacteria, also have experiences (sense 1),” and when coupled with their interior future projections of themselves, and the obvious evolutionary advantages of caring about those futures, they have qualia too, and so have valenced interior experiences (sense 2), qualia, to steer them better on the manifold of potential reachable futures.
Broadly, you need to A) self simulate a bunch of states reachable by your from t=0, then B) care enough about the difference between such future states (valence) to put in the effort and simulation time to reach those better states. Consciouness is what helps us do that - it's created via the continual meta-tagging assigning the valence of potential future states in your self simulation driven by the given of your current state and environment.
If you couple valence with future-state simulation, you reach the level of future-state navigation that humans enjoy, which is hugely adaptive, a significant enough jump that we dominate the planet.
You poor fellow.
What is the recovery timeline?
You say that as if the opioids were a bad thing.
The euphoric side effect is pleasant. Almost a shame to waste it on pain but I’m really glad i can’t go to CVS and buy a 500 count supply of Vicodin whenever the mood strikes.
I was joking. It's fine.
I know. So was I. Forgot to use my tongue in cheek font again.
We'll blame Substack.
Eremolalos, imagine a person raised from birth in isolation by non humanoid robots who cater only to the persons physical needs. Although the persons brain has the potential for human consciousness it would wither on the vine without culture, which is all the information that humans share.
There is no consciousness without culture and no culture without consciousness.
Consciousness is the surface tension of culture.
I wish I had paid more attention while on opioids, get well soon.
I found an interesting video about Jaynes' bicameral mind breakdown that references Scott's review of it, and comes to similar conclusions: https://youtu.be/Ado90kMT_FM
I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Julian Jaynes's theories. I checked out this video and kind of skipped through it because a lot of it I already know, and I was interested in where he was going to go at the end. My position is that he has completely misunderstood Julian Jaynes' work, and his conclusions are not really based on a good reading of Jaynes' book. The idea that the people he's talking about had no internal state and were pzombies is not true. I was not impressed. Closer to the truth is that consciousness arises in human beings directly as a result of a tension between two different ways of being and thinking: somatic/biological, which governed us for most of our history on Earth, and the rational or systematic/symbolic ways of thinking that were greatly accelerated by the invention of written language. Over a period of time, the balance of power between these two modalities shifted.
My guess is that consciousness is something like internalized speech.
As an organism, you are in a certain state. That could have been the end of the story. But we are also social species, and we communicate to each other. For the purpose of communication, we develop the ability to describe things. Later it turns of that these abilities are actually sometimes useful for describing ourselves to ourselves. And that is an important part of consciousness: you, describing yourself to yourself.
(Does not necessarily have to be verbal speech. We can communicate using gestures, tone of voice, etc. Probably each of this can have a role in our internal self-description.)
Well, you're latching on to something that's really important about Julian James's theory, which is that it has everything to do with everything you just said. The thing to really keep in mind is that until about roughly 4,000 years ago, no one could write anything down. I think you really have to think about the medium as the message in this case. Everything is based on oral transmission.
I only rarely share my stuff in the comments here these days, but I wanted to put in an argument for allowing it, and being tolerant with it. I think the existing rules are about right, but that there's room for a bit more latitude.
These days I have the audience I deserve, which is to say a medium sized audience, getting more clicks by putting posts in places like this is not a major priority. However Plenty of writers much more gifted than me don't have an audience, and the way to get an audience is very illegible. For Moreover, the skills are very difficult, especially for authors who have not gone down the social skills track.
If you're not a good publicist, it can take a hundred or more good posts before you're noticed. I imagine many would-be Substackers simply give up, and many of them would have been very good at it.
Discovering good new thinkers is a costly, collective process, but I think it has been one of the more valuable functions of this community. It can be tempting to feel it's a waste of time.
So consider forebearance for the poor blogspammer.
Audience is more based on quantity of posting than quality, because of the broken payment model, that is, wholesale subscription like some magazine. So people pay for frequent content, not good content. If it would be a more sensible model like pay per article, which would be more like buying books, then rare and high quality content would be more popular.
As with everything else, a bit of luck goes a long way. It’s largely a right place, right time thing. There are lot of good bloggers so it’s hard to stand out.
Wishing you your own bit of luck.
> the way to get an audience is very illegible
That's a good way of putting it. It really irritates me that no matter how good my output is (other stuff, not writing, I'm not a writer) these days I'll never have anyone appreciate my creative work because I'm not good at getting an audience. I don't even know what it is that I'm not good at. Could be being willing to shill myself and act like my own salesman, and never shutting up about what I'm trying to produce. Could be being willing to analyze what people want to consume and tailoring my output to that. Could be having a large social network of friends. Could be having a large social network of like-minded people also trying to shill themselves. Could be being willing to pay for advertisement, though that would come with it's own unique set of skills of being good at figuring out how to advertise my output and figuring out which advertising is actually worth it.
Have you considered that the market may be saturated with the creative output you provide? In the case of blogging, (and many other creative endeavors), it seems that the amount of people wanting to write a blog is much larger than what there is a demand for. After all, one blogger can be read by millions of people, and people can only follow so many blogs. So you need to be in the top ~0,0n1% of what you do. You could be in that top percentile overall, or more realistically it could be in a particular niche, catering to a particular audience - or it could be even be in marketing. I think if you actually produce in that top percentile in some niche, where there is a demand, then marketing will not really be that hard. You basically need to know who your audience are, and get a foot in the door. At least this is my experience - I'm very good in what I do professionally in one particular high-level-of-entry small niche, which there is a non-saturated market for. My customers see that what I do provide value, and therefore my product basically sells itself.
You could, however, be providing good but not top-percentile output, in a saturated marked where there is no real demand. In this case, I think you are out of luck. You either have to be great (again really top-percentile) at marketing, or finding an audience will be really hard, because they will see better options. In this case, I think you should consider if you can find a niche where there is demand, and you can provide in that top-percentile (even if it is a very small niche), or if you are happy doing your creative work for it's own sake.
Probably all of that. If you started by figuring out what the cool kids talk about these days, then wrote a lot of the same, using the right clickbait/salesman style (make a fascinating promise at the beginning, then talk a lot but do not deliver on the promise, then end up saying that if the reader subscribes to your blog they will finally get the thing that they wanted... which is of course a lie, because all your articles are like this, the goal is to string the gullible people along as long as possible), and then shilled your product everywhere ("hey, you have a fascinating discussion here, I also wrote about a similar topic at www blogspam com") or paid for the advertising... yeah, it could work.
There would probably be no joy in that, just another job.
I'm not a writer, I'm a musician. But yeah in general I agree with what you say. I have limited time and energy outside of my real work. I don't want to produce modern pop music. I don't want to string people along in any way. I don't want to have a second job. I've always just wanted to perform. Also speaking to Leppi, I'm probably not absolutely top percentile in part because it's not my full time job, but I'm pretty good at what I do. Also it's not pop, or R&B, or wedding music, or classic rock covers, and it's pretty saturated.
>There would probably be no joy in that, just another job.
Not only that. He would presumably be providing negative value to anyone but himself - he would be a parasite and we would be right to judge him. The type of marketing you are describing is basically a slim margin away from a scam.
It could well be successful, if he was very good at marketing. But, I strongly suggest that if this is what is needed to succeed then he would be better off finding a better use of his energy at something more productive.
Hi! I wanted to share a post I published this week.
I just stepped away from my company after Stage IV cancer and as Ive been recovering, I’ve been exploring what happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity.
I built a systematic analysis of 200+ top sci-fi books + an interactive quiz that maps which future vision you're building toward: https://www.livenowclub.com/wonder/essay
I'm living this question in compressed time (permanent disability = productivity removed as a variable). It’s a similar inflection point our whole culture is approaching with AI, just on different timescales.
Would love all thoughts!
Louise Ireland, there is no personal growth in paradise, no pain no gain, so we simulated a universe where we could don the headset and experience life exactly as someone living in this time without the knowledge that we have no skin in the game.
When Louise Ireland ends you will remove the headset but with all her wonderful experiences and memories intact.
As much as you grew as a person from the 200+ books you base your quiz on, you grow in a more intense way from the lives, and deaths you experienced.
Beautifully said. I couldn’t agree more 🤍
I am there as well, but older. I understand
I guess this is the Consciousness OT.
As a matter of coincidence (or not - AIs are obviously driving everyone here), I was reading SF author Devon Eriksen giving some thoughts on what makes people conscious. The latest one I've read so far:
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/2050673732276904427
This appears in line with Marvin Minsky's "society of mind", IIRC. Human consciousness isn't just one brain with critical mass: it's a constellation of sparser brains, all connected, especially to the frontal cortex, which is possibly the densest cluster of neurons seen in the animal kingdom. The sparser "brains" pick up and execute quickly, but can't do what we call higher reasoning (stuff like pattern recognition); the denser brain can do that deep reasoning, but takes a really long time to train.
An earlier tweet describes the different between LLMs and biological brains in terms of breadth. LLMs are narrow and focused, while life evolved multiple subsystems to operate together in a way that ends up able to propagate itself. LLMs are basically just one subsystem. They're really good at that one specialty, but put them in an escape room and they'll just sit there. There's no fingers to manipulate objects, no legs or wheels to move itself around; it doesn't even have a motivation to leave! One could train it to look at digitized photos and ask how to solve the puzzles, and it might even give correct answers, but it has no clue what it's doing or why.
Eriksen concluded that tweet by pointing out that LLMs, per their structure, will never attain the capability of human brains, unless they are augmented by so many additional features (possible!) that "LLM" ceases to be the most accurate way to label them.
This strikes me as a reasonable model
Any person with active OpenReview.net account here? I'd like to get to know personally or professionally someone with an OpenReview account :)
This is because I'd like to submit a paper related to AI safety to ICML workshop (Trustworthy AI4GOOD). It's a paper related to non-agentic AI. Bengio's paper about non-agentic AI is sort of related.
Unfortunately, since I'm not affiliated with any institution, I need someone to vouch for my registration, someone who I know personally of professionally.
Would anyone be interested in: a) reading a short draft, b) exchanging a few emails so we actually know each other (or some other form of contact), c) vouching for my registration.
Reply here or email me at damianczap[at]outlook.com. Happy to share the PDF.
The deadline to send abstract is 7th May, by the way.
I finished Tolstoy's "Resurrection" last night and it was disappointing. He was under pressure to get it out in a hurry and it does read like a first draft. One interesting thing though is that Henry George or Georgism is mentioned nine times.
Claude Opus 4.7 attempts to take on Pokemon Red:
https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon
So far, no Claude has managed to beat this game. I believe the last two (or last one Claude) made it to Victory Road, the penultimate challenge, where it got completely stuck on a simple boulder rolling puzzle that elementary schoolers beat. This Claude is progressing at about the speed of the previous Claude, which is still quite slow relative to a human, and it still displays frequent bouts of nonsensical reasoning.
Will this one finally win?
ChatGPT lied to me in a interesting way. I asked it to make an excel file for me and it said that it had done it but with nothing attached. Then I asked it why there was nothing attached and it said that the file was blank and it didn’t want to send me a blank file file.
So it could have told me that it did what I wanted and sent me a blank file or it could have straight up told me that something was wrong. But instead it was like there was a divergence where the part that talks to me lied while the part that actually sends me output couldn’t bring itself to do it. It’s like these LLMs have two separate minds.
i image this is partly do to the LLMs being trained on human communications, which which could include interactions like:
> A: please send me an excel file
> B: sure, see attachement
> A: thanks!
The LLM-in-training sees these interactions, and concludes that for a request like "please send me an excel file" the correct response would be something like "sure, see attachement", but without knowledge of the actually attachment, which is probably not part of the training data.
"sorry, you're right, there was no file, that one was on me! Do you know how to make an Excel file with the data you want?"
Frequently these days the neural-network part, that ingests and emits text, is also emitting a call to a tool - like a coding agent might emit a tool call that runs a system command, or a tool call that returns lines 10-25 of file foo.py, or runs a google search. Or writing their own python script to build the result they're trying to hand back to you, like to count 'r's in strawqerry or do some back-of-envelope math. "having two separate minds" isn't entirely wrong.
It’s just strange how the part that sends files is seemingly detached from the part that talks to me. Imagine if I asked you to make a document to me and you said sent it to me. When I checked my email, the email said “sorry I couldn’t actually do it.” That would be bizarre.
It makes me appreciate how alien these things are to us.
I wrote a little piece about how the culture war about AI seems weirdly centered on "People who are impressed with AI" versus "People who are not" instead of a more natural fit like "People who think AI is dangerous/bad" versus "People who think AI is helpful/good"
https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/the-doom-that-came-to-gishood
They are writers, and they view AI from the viewpoint of AI writing articles and stuff, not from the viewpoint of AI answering questions, generating code etc. Especially writers who are proud of writing good prose are horrified by "slop".
I guess this is ultimately humans playing monkey status games (and failing to notice that they have absolutely no impact on the approaching steamroller).
How do you eliminate a human threat? Try lowering his status. No one will listen to a low-status guy. Threat eliminated.
So we instinctively apply the same tactics on the AI. If all the cool kids keep saying that AI sucks, then AI will be low-status and therefore harmless. Regardless of its actual abilities; bullying works on everyone, smart or not, skilled or not, no one could possibly resist if all the cool kids declare them uncool.
like this is the really tricky thing about it to me. It's hard to talk in a vacuum about "how competent was hitler" because eventually if you're angrily insisting that no the guy was actually very smart and talented you start to look like someone who's fighting for hitler's "rep."
As a messaging question there is a dilemma I think where "I'm just trying to be very fair and clear-eyed about what AI is actually capable of" shades into AI booster-ism. I do feel I run into this a lot as a lawyer, where tech enthusiasts are *very* quick to insist that AI can greatly simplify or automate large portions of the legal system. I'm not actually very interested in whether it COULD so much as whether it SHOULD if we're so very concerned about AI risk.
I continue to believe the finale of my story is going to match reality, in that if some huge AI disaster happens, the correct analysis of the scenario will not be "see! I was right! Human civilization underestimated AI, if only more people had listened to me when I insisted it was really smart." It will instead be "why did you idiots make this thing and hook it up to everything if you thought it was evil?"
Well, I guess Hitler was smart and talented at some things, and sucked at other things, which is ironically the same thing we can say about today's AIs. The difference is that the AIs keep getting better -- look five years back, and now imagine similar five years forward; then five more years, etc.
And I agree about the dangers of hooking up the AI to everything. It feels so weird to look back at Yudkowsky's articles about whether a superhuman AI could convince its human guardians to connect it to the internet despite all the obvious risks. -- How silly! Of course, if we ever build an AI capable of destroying entire humanity, it will *already be connected* to the internet by default, that's how the company which built it will be making most of its profit... until the very last moment when the AI releases the hypnodrones of whatever.
(Perhaps being attacked by an insufficiently smart AI is the *lucky* scenario, because then we have a greater chance to survive and maybe get more careful the next time.)
My beliefs about AI cut across your categories. I don’t see it as dangerous (in X-risk sense that’s popular among rationalists) but I also don’t see it as good. I think it’s laying waste to education and creating a lost generation of young people who use AI to cheat themselves out of learning, like somebody bringing a forklift to the gym.
I also see it laying waste to a generation of software developers who can no longer get junior positions out of school, since those have been replaced by Claude code. At the same time, I see companies going all-in on AI to generate massive amounts of code, which in the future will be unmaintainable and possibly be thrown away. A colossal waste.
I don’t see any signs of exponential take off in terms of raw intelligence from LLMs. If anything, I see exponential take off in costs (computer hardware and energy) for more and more modest returns. At the same time, the companies most bullish on AI (such as Microsoft) have quietly begun to divest and hedge against the impending contraction.
And the capacity crunch + need for monetization has started to bite hard, with prices going up and limits going down across the board.
I tend to call myself an agnostic about a lot of the specific predicted outcomes. I just don't know what the future will hold. I *tend to* assume that things will take longer, be more complex, and be less transformative than people assume when it comes to technology, and I still think I'm right about AI in this respect, but I make a significant amount of room for the possibility that I am wrong, and indeed maybe we have the birth of some new god right around the corner.
I'm a lawyer so I don't know very much about STEM, but I've been interested in AI since the early 2000s and have had a fairly consistent philosophy since that time that it's never going to be better aligned than, say, the US government, which has interesting implications for "doom." Alignment is, in my view, grappling with the same issues the legal community has been grappling with since the late bronze age, and it's not a problem that's solvable by intelligence or reason.
I'm usually not a fan of people coming here to link their own content, but this is actually exactly the type of thing SSC readers enjoy, so hopefully it won't be removed or anything.
I guess to explain the weird shape of this debate, I'd say that to some types of people, arguments with errors in logic and epistemology are more irritating than arguments which reach the wrong conclusion, and incorrect beliefs about the future are less irritating than incorrect beliefs about the present.
Also, I think your parable undersells just how annoying some of these people can be, on both sides of the debate. I'm not going to go to dwell on that, but let me just say that all of your characters attempt to give valid reasons for their beliefs and are sometimes willing to update their beliefs in cases where those reasons turn out to be incorrect, so none of them are really a good representation of most real people I've talked to.
In particular, I think both sides do a fair bit of goalpost shifting. Charitably this is updating their beliefs. Uncharitably this is just insisting, like the judge, that they're still right just in really subtle ways that take a day to explain.
I find this debate more tragic than frustrating. I fall more on the "AI Skeptic" side of things, I've always been somewhat irritated by the breathless optimism people have about these things solving all our problems...and I grumblingly insist that this thing can't do my job very well. So: I get in lots of spirited debates with people that insist that no, AI-lawyerbots will be replacing some or all lawyers very soon, if this is not already happening.
...what's upsetting to me is the same people are also *fascinated* with the idea that these machines are also likely plotting our demise. This has been a predictable part of the discourse since the days of kurzweil. They'll say in one breath that we're months or a year away from an AI that can, I dunno, teach kids, and then in the next breath say that AI could kill us all, and I'm left to wonder "why do we want it teaching kids then?"
I used to think the likely rejoinder is that "enthusiasts" believe that we can put together a workable control system...but this is increasingly not the vibe i'm getting from them. Yud's book says that if ANYONE builds it, everyone dies. No qualification. This matches the vibe I get from the AI enthusiast community.
...so, we have very similar opinions: we both think these things are untrustworthy and cannot be easily controlled. We should be natural allies, instead we're stuck debating when I'm going to get a self-driving car (still can't) or when an AI is going to replace me (still can't).
I'll take your word for it that it's the exact same people speaking about current benefits and future safety concerns. In my experience, I tend to find AI safety people only support capacity improvement if they believe (as Eliezer used to?) that the safety problem will only be solved with the help of an AI smart enough to introspect.
Brainstorming reasons why someone would hold these contradictory positions:
- Pessimism on race dynamics. If someone's going to build it no matter what, we might as well hope the AI spares its own creators
- High time preference. Enjoy robo-servants now and let the next generation deal with robo-rebellion.
- Probabilistic reasoning. If you believe there's a 90% chance of utopia and a 10% chance of extinction, you might devote some time to joyful anticipation and some time to worry/activism, depending on your personal risk tolerance. (I think this is Scott's position)
At the extreme ends, the "AI catastrophists" tend to be different than the "AI boosters" but I think there are plenty of people who do both. Scott Alexander strikes me as the kind of guy who would get really annoyed if I said an AI "couldn't answer a legal problem" or "couldn't create a novel work of art" (or "was using too much water") but also is deeply deeply concerned that AI might kill everyone.
The inconsistency with many could be explained as simply "I believe things that are true and your claims are false and I get upset when people say false things" but part of my story I think is struggling with that exact problem. As a majoritarian, I believe to actually change policy you need majority will...and it's very unlikely the majority can (or ever could) believe the correct factually true things about AI. So, if one can't work with people that are wrong about AI, then one can't really do anything to stop it.
Race dynamics explain a lot of this probably as well, as you say. The AI-God is coming and it's just a matter of who manifests it first and whether we can slap enough controls on it before it pops into being. We're all hoping someone decently virtuous makes it, and it is, itself, virtuous.
Still, I can't help but feel there's some inconsistency here. Those concerned about Doom would PREFER a world where lots of people were going around thinking "the AI could be wrong, I shouldn't just assume it's speaking the truth, or that it has my welfare as its primary goal." For this reason, I've been ENCOURAGED by the public skepticism toward AI, even though it often comes from a place of ignorance. Many don't share my opinion on that.
Public skepticism is only encouraging if the Doom is dependent on public support in some way. A lot of normie opposition to AI stems from the perception that the public *isn't* being consulted on whether to build it or what to have it do. "Look at this AI feature that sucks and no one asked for" etc. etc.
In cultural stasis news, it seems like we're finally seeing innovation in music. The bad news is, well...
Meet "No Batidão", by Zxkai and Slxughter (I have been utterly unable to find out anything about these people except that they're Russian). It's an undeniably catchy electronic beat with a jumpy countermelody, some lyrics in Portuguese, and that's about it. After hearing the first 90 seconds a few times I went looking to find the rest of the song, but... that's it, the song is 90 seconds long (actually 89 seconds) and even that is basically the same thing repeated three times (with a female vocalist the second time around). It's been charting all over the place, it was apparently the number one single in India, and right now it's number 107 on the Billboard Global 100.
So this is apparently the latest innovation in music -- songs optimised for TikTok. Cram all the good parts into 30 seconds, repeat it a few times, and then fade out because the listener is not supposed to get this far anyway. Changes in technology have always driven changes in art, but... I don't like this one.
Isn't this extremely similar to how songs adapted their length to radio? In that way it doesn't even seem like an innovation no?
One of the more interesting examples of Tik Tok music is PinkPantheress debut album. Drum n bass/pop, average song length is 1:45. Instead of just boring repetition, there's song structure and progression that fits the track length
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-QsLBtiLss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrcrrIlKen0
Sadly she sold out on her latest album with an average track length of 2:15
These I quite like.
The annoying part is when you find out about something new, and the comments are full of "omg I can't believe this is already four years old, so nostalgic!"
Pitchfork of all places made a good investigative review of phonk
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-phonk-became-the-most-lucrative-yet-lifeless-genre-of-the-2020s/
Today I learned of the musical genre phonk, of which this track is apparently a sample:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonk
Yeah, it's maximised for Tiktok, but I imagine this is something you just put on loop/repeat and play it as background for however long you like, it's not really something you're *listening* to. If it comes out of hip-hop then it's dance music and what matters there is the beat. And the fifty-seven different remixes.
"Batidão" is Portuguese for "Big Beat", it's been standard lowbrow musical lingo in Brazil for loud low-frequency rhythmic beat. For decades. That music and those artists might be new, I won't check, but the term is old. "No Batidão" would translate as "In the Big Beat"
To clarify, No Batidão is the name of a particular song.
News from post-election Hungary: the new gov is not even sworn in yet, and yet the whole corruption industry is crashing down. Because the police chiefs and so on want to keep their jobs so now they are launching investigations, like money laundering and suchlike, and those lower in the ranks are looking for an escape, talking about the crimes of the higher ups.
It is important to understand it was not an ideological election. It is not that Orbán was too right wing. Magyar started with a post-election speech telling European centrist parties to not be so politically correct on immigration and not leave this issue to extremists. That was not a liberal move.
Rather it was the corruption industry, the whole country turned into a Tammany Hall kind of machine. Except far more greedy than the original TH, as NY could grow in that era. But for example in this case every government communication went through one company that charged like 5x the market price. A MySQL Community Edition was "licensed" for $30K a month and so on.
The total theft is estimated in 15 years roughly 3 months of GDP. Interesting that should not hold a country that much back, losing 3 months out of 80 months, though it makes a visible difference is something like education spending, but I think corruption has a side-effect of crowding out normal market based business which does more damage. I mean if one does not have to actually offer a good product to make money, then offering good products does not happen?
Yeah, corruption in short term means "the good products don't win", but in long term it means "no one even tries to make good products anymore, because what's the point".
Also this trickles down through the economy, beyond the parts that are selling directly to government. If the quality of your product does not matter, then the quality of your suppliers doesn't matter either; the same about their suppliers, etc.
I'm ignorant of Hungary in particular, but, generally, yeah, corruption does much larger damage than the actual amount stolen (substitute your preferred euphemism if applicable).
When it's endemic, people don't even try to e.g. bid on contracts for what they do best.
Such a corruption industry also has the effect that it made most of the EU funding disappear. This amounted for 1% of the country's GDP each year annually in the last few years.
(We are yet touching only the top of the iceberg, tho.)
I wonder about the concepts of discipline or willpower.
It is also called time preference and time discounting and thus the important external factor is the time frame. I would say, most of the time, our actions are rewarded or punished within 3 to 6 months, we rarely need to think further? It depends how we define reward or punishment. Like a growing savings account is a reward every month, as we feel safer and safer.
But I can tell you confidently that if you start drinking two glasses of wine a day, and in 15 years that is like two bottles for the same effect, you will not feel any ill effects. Sure your liver stats will not be good, but you will not feel ill. And I think it is impossible that the reason people do not do that because they are afraid what happens in 30 years.
I think the reason most people are not functional alcoholics is something more immediate, their partner does not like when they are dumbed down, or they don't like what they feel next morning?
However weed does not have these issues. If a couple is stoner, they can entertain each other with jokes very well, have great sex and wake up well rested next day. So why is not everybody a stoner?
How does this work? People just don't like to think of themselves as addicts?
But what about depressed people who already think they are shit?
Most of the rewards and punishments exist in our heads. What happens 3 months later is probably nothing compared to whether you feel good or bad about yourself for whatever you are doing or supposed to do right now.
Ideally, what happens in our heads is somehow related to reality. The reason I don't get drunk more often is not the fact that it would destroy my liver in 30 years... but that *right now* I believe that it would destroy my liver (and brain) in 30 years (or less), and that *right now* I wish for my health after 30 years to be better rather than worse.
> So why is not everybody a stoner?
I guess drugs can work very differently for different people.
The main effect that alcohol has on me is reducing anxiety. I am highly intelligent and highly neurotic, so it makes sense to sacrifice a few IQ points temporarily in return for removing various kinds of mental blocks. As an alcoholic, I would probably be a pretty good and productive blogger!
I don't go that way because I worry about long-term negative impact on health, and also that the loss of IQ points could become permanent, which would deprive me of some intellectual pleasures, and probably cost me a job, which would suck if my blogs didn't make enough money. But in moderate amounts, with long intervals in between, alcohol seems like a good thing for me.
But I have seen other people become aggressive or very annoying under the influence of alcohol. Never happened to me, as far as I know. Not that the introspection of a drunk person is reliable, but I e.g. never got into fight (or even a verbal conflict) when drunk.
With weed, other people report that it makes them feel relaxed. For me, it only makes me feel dumb. (Also, other people on weed seem even dumber than usual.) So I have no incentive to use it. It's not a virtue or whatever, it just doesn't work for me.
Regular smoking of weed can have long term issues. CHS to name just one:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21665-cannabis-hyperemesis-syndrome
Many people simply don't enjoy being intoxicated.
>But I can tell you confidently that if you start drinking two glasses of wine a day, and in 15 years that is like two bottles for the same effect, you will not feel any ill effects
Well good for you. I ran a similar experiment and I hit a wall with red wine. It completely was destroying my gut. My liver is fine but I can't drink that stuff anymore
I’ve discovered the optimal amount of alcohol for me is one 12 oz can of Hamms. After that it’s rapidly diminishing returns.
When is your birthday? I will mail you one.
Not every potentially addictive substance has the same effect. It is much harder to get addicted to weed than to heroin, and alcohol can be consumed for 30 years at very safe levels without needing to 'up the dose' for most people to find enjoyment in it.
I see where you're going with the question (why not just drink even more?), but I think it doesn't happen all the time simply because it doesn't reach the level of necessity for most people. Also, some of us have genetics on our side when it comes to addiction. It has long been known that some people are genetically inclined towards alcoholism or liver damage, and others are not.
"If a couple is stoner, they can entertain each other with jokes very well, have great sex and wake up well rested next day. So why is not everybody a stoner?"
Extremely limited experience in my case, but the stoners I've encountered have not recommended that lifestyle to me. Getting a girlfriend versus getting blasted on weed? Well option B is always gonna win. Great sex and well-rested? I'm envious of the highly functional and motivated individuals you've met 😁 The ones I've met stink of weed and are clearly, even when trying to appear sober, under the influence so that they resemble particularly dozy sloths.
Vera the Chief inspector of the fictional Northumberland & City Police on ITV has a similar take on pot and pot smokers. She usually calls it ‘skunk weed’ with a show of irritation
I know the stereotype you are thinking of, I’ve met a few of them, hell for a short while i might have wanted to present as one of them. I just didn’t enjoy it enough, and I had things that needed doing. No I don’t need to get high *every* time i pay you a visit. Thanks anyway.
My impression is that the people who stay baked all day already tended towards idle laziness and are a bit naturally dopey (as in not so clever) by nature. They are the minority of THC users in the US I think. Here 40 states have made it legal for ‘medical’ use and 24 for recreational use.
Restaurants offer THC infused drinks in my state which is kinda silly because the effects don’t kick in for an hour when ingested that way. What’s the point of getting relaxed and a bit giggly after you’ve already gone home? That’s what a pint of beer is for.
As i mentioned below or above i like a gummy an hour or so before i golf because it improves my concentration and swing form. Really, i have the score cards as proof! (I live within walking distance of a pretty metro course)
If you are drinking or doing drugs, you can’t do much of anything else. So anyone who has a lot of responsibilities can’t really be a functional drug addict.
A modest dosage of THC definitely improves my golf scores.
This is not true, there are lots of highly functional alcoholics/drug addicts. I have worked with/for some of them. Many notable cases of high-functioning addicts have been studied/written about.
Also, years ago as part of some research i was doing I got in touch with several former heroin addicts. Independently, two of them told me that other heroin addicts were usually the hardest working people they’d encountered, since they were so motivated to make money to buy heroin.
I don't like the smell of weed or the taste of alcohol, and it costs money to give myself those ill effects.
I know Rat Park had its methodological issues but wasn't the basic idea sound? It's not a big mystery why more people aren't drug addicts. We are social animals and most of us have at least some kind of social network, people we care about and who care about us and who we mutually enjoy our interactions with.
We get a lot out of that, at least when our brain chemistry is functioning as it should. People who are depressed do indeed experience much higher rates of drug addiction.
I think you might be wrong about how people value their future state, even 30 years down the line. It's not as immediate or gripping an issue "how will I feel in 30 years" as "how will I feel tomorrow morning" but it is still something people often care enough about to change their behavior today.
There is also social pressure not to be an addict, although that is more inconsistent and arbitrary (almost nobody gets shamed for being a 5 cup-a-day coffee drinker, and people who can't stop looking at their phones kinda know it's bad but it's less common to talk about it out loud).
Addiction can get very expensive. A cheap bottle of wine is like $7. A pack of cigarettes is close to the same price. Imagine drinking two bottles of wine or smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's more than $5,000 a year, a significant sum--and that's if your tolerance doesn't go up and you need to up the amount of the drug you're taking. I don't know off the top of my head the prices of most other drugs but you get the idea: addiction is unaffordable; that undoubtedly has some deterrent effect.
Weed certainly can have short-term negative effects. If you smoke a bunch of weed one night there's a very good chance you'll wake up feeling dried out and you might have a headache. Weed interferes with sleep too. I agree these are less severe consequences than if you'd gotten drunk or snorted a bunch of coke or smoked heroin, but I'm just saying, weed isn't costless.
There is much we still don't understand about addiction and willpower. Not every kid scores the same on that marshmallow test.
I definitely find addiction affordable - provided one gives up on things like restaurants, travel, or having a nice car.
I always liked the idea of being a self destructive addict in theory, but I realized I don't enjoy the effects of drugs or alcohol or cigarettes much, even in the short term, and I quit it all largely by accident. The physical sensations are unpleasant to me and I dislike being unable to think clearly. I also tend to find stoners and heavy drinkers boring company.
I wrote a paper explaining why language models can’t scale beyond what humans felt compelled to write down and are going to be stuck. It ended with me explaining the nature of human cognition as linguistic: https://haversine.substack.com/p/tower-of-babel?r=2g1yja
I have been in peer review for 5 months and am starting to lose my mind at having an editor and reviewer using LLMs to read the paper. It’s actually maddening.
Reviewers might be a little afraid of the race part, especially where you very confidently present your point as inevitable and unmistakeable. Also not all intelligence is verbal intelligence, which makes it much less inevitable - remember Raven's progressive matrices.
Also children finding code-switching reading frustrating - I don't know, my native language is not even Indo-European, and by 17 I was reading books in English. I did not find it frustrating. But it is possible that it is precisely because when you are working across language families, the switch is utterly complete (people who try learning Japanese will find this), while same language with different rules might be more confusing,
As for math, French is famously fucked up about numbers, like 84 is expressed as 4x20+4, and yet the country is known for having a history of good mathemathicians.
Anyhow, I say this paper sounds overly confident and ambitious. A more careful language like "this might indicate" could help with review.
Another obvious case of someone throwing it into chatgpt thinking they came up with intelligent critiques.
The reviewers aren't "afraid of the race part", language models are because anything that discusses race is heavily biased against in their training. The section on AAVE is the end of scientific racism, period.
The key indicator that someone is either illiterate or using a chatbot is "not all intelligence is verbal" as if I don't directly cite the visual intelligence gains as the exception to the Flynn Effect's reversal. Yes, you're right, not all intelligence is verbal. You should have read the paper.
Raven's progressive matrices? Wow, never heard of that thing before! It's definitely not included in the Bastos RCT as well as the Flynn Effect data and the two first charts included in the paper...
As for your comment on code switching, again, reading the paper would have helped explain exactly what code switching is...
*"For a child familiar only with AAVE, for instance, the oral counterpart of the written sentence ‘‘Their hands are cold’’ could legitimately be /dejr hæn a co/ (‘‘Deir han’ a’ co’’’). If so, this would give rise to several potentially confusing mismatches between dialects that would not be encountered by a non-AAVE speaking child [...]
No particular mismatch, on its own, would pose a serious impediment to learning to decode, but the accumulation of such discrepancies between oral and written forms could make grapheme – phoneme correspondences seem far less regular than they are (for SE) and, hence, more difficult to master."*
Ironically, the language model's inability to understand the paper is actually predicted by the paper itself! But yes "you" think the paper sounds overly confident because you definitely read and understood even a sentence of what is, legitimately, one of the most important papers since germ theory...
I genuinely hope when this paper finally gets published the bubble pops and you midwits have to pay the token costs for these stupid things.
Could you explain a bit about why the French using 4x20+4 to express the same number that the English express as 8x10+4 feels fucked up to you? They seem roughly equivalent in cognitive overhead to me
The English don't! They use the word "eighty four" which is just 80 and 4. The french say "quatre vingt quatre" - 4 and 20 and 4. The for ninety, they say quatre vingt quatorze, 4 and 20 and 14 - compared to 94, ninety four. Eighty does not mean 8 x 10, it just stands directly for 80.
Eighty does mean 8 tens, though (which is to say, 8x10)? That feels... uncontroversial? I teach math to young children and I certainly tell them that "eighty" means "eight tens", and ime knowing that is a genuine aid to understanding.
Sure, there's a sense in which at a certain level of understanding, that intermediate layer disappears and "eighty" becomes a direct signpost to the number... But surely the same happens with "quatre vingt", yes?
It goes both ways. Yes, "eight tens" is useful when beginning to learn numbers, it helps understanding, but at a later stage "eighty" just becomes a simple word for the number, without thinking about what it means.
I think this "intermediate layer" as you call it is exactly what Carlos is talking about with cognitive load! It is even more present in 94, where it is 4 x 20 + 14. Surely, quatre vingt quarante does also represent 94, but so does novanta quatre (sort of italian-ish?) - and it would not have this intermediate layer or cognitive load.
You really don't understand the difference between saying "eight tens" and saying "eighty"? If someone said "I was born in nineteen eight tens four" you would be like " oh that seems totally normal for someone to say that"?
Maybe if you have to work with things like 4x20+4=84 all the time you come to understand math better.
I know someone who is distinctly not stupid but over 70, and out of practice with math problems. They struggled to solve this translated word problem: 1 2/3 - 1/2 = X. Practice keeps one in form, and improves ability over time.
"Our AI rejected your article called 'Why your AI is stupid' and called it offensive."
It came to my attention today that if you visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism and Ctrl+F "North Korea" you will see exactly 0 results. (The last mention of the DPRK was removed back in October.) So, are the tankies just large and in charge on Wikipedia? Grokipedia's article, by contrast, has an entire paragraph on North Korea.
Whenever something in a Wikipedia article looks off to you, check the Talk page. (Replace "off" with "even vaguely capable of being political" and it's still good advice.) One thing even WP editors seem opposed to removing, no matter how spicy, is Talk page content. (At most, they'll shunt it to an archive page or ten if it gets too long.)
The Talk page for Totalitarianism mentions North Korea once in the main page, and several more times in archives (specifically 2, 3, and 5). All mentions either recommend it be added (going back years), or refer to it as a noncontroversial example of one, with no pushback AFAICT. If anything, the editors' ire seems saved for people wanting to refer to Nazism as a left-wing ideology.
From here, one could perhaps search the History and see if anyone took a stab at adding NK, but Wikipedia in its infinite wisdom provided no convenient method for searching edit history.
But Juche isn't even communism. The Kims famously said that the struggle changed from class struggle to national struggle. I think Lenin would consider that an utter heresy.
Every time someone tries communism it inevitably degenerates in to totalitarianism so it doesn’t matter what the intent is.
I don't see any version where it featured much, other than very old revisions from like prior to 2010. If they "tankies" are in charge they have always been in charge, and they're doing a really poor job considering their poster boy Staling is still there. October removal was of a poorly constructed sentence. Prior to that it seems to have been some sort of copyright bot removing a photo, not sure what's up with that. If you see a removal you think it's problematic, feel free to point to it, or better yet add something good quality.
As far as I can tell, there never really was a section of the article about it. My guess is that its position as a still existing but older state was such that it was never on anyone's radars. As always, feel free to be bold and add a paragraph or two if you think you can fit it in somewhere.
Yeah, the article doesn't really have a section that's like "which governments are widely considered totalitarian," it's more about how the theory and definition of totalitarianism evolved over time, and that mostly developed from analysis of Soviet Russia.
Childhood memories: me, the dentist, chaos, and an unpleasant wish that came true.
I was eleven years old, turning twelve in a few weeks (a fact which will become relevant). And I also had an absolutely excruciating toothache, it felt like the whole side of my head would explode. Clearly the tooth would have to be pulled, so my father took me to a dentist, an oral surgery specialist, with whom he had been close friends for years.
But here’s the thing - even though I was in horrible pain, I did NOT want to go to the dentist. And I put up a titanic fight in the office. I screamed obscenities, tried to punch and kick, you name it. I sent a tray of instruments crashing to the floor, knocked over and shattered some sort of rolling lamp, and tried to jam my finger into the dentist’s eye (he turned his head at the last moment). I may have been a child but in my extreme delirium I believe I had adult-like strength.
Red-faced and sweating, my father (a former college football player) got me into the chair and had my limbs pinned down … except for my left leg. Somehow, despite my crazed state, I knew enough to wait for the right opportunity to deploy said leg. Seconds later, one of the dental assistants, a petite young lady probably around 20 years old, ventured within range -
BOOM! My leg shot out like a piston and caught the young lady right in the abdomen. She dropped to the floor, hitting her head on a counter as she fell and opening a gash. The dentist and another assistant came to her aid as she lay doubled up on the floor, crying hysterically and bleeding from the head. There was talk of calling an ambulance, but I believe another employee drove her to the hospital. Presumably the dentist eventually pulled my tooth, but I’ve blocked that from my memory..
Needless to say the consequences for me were quite unpleasant. The adult-sized bicycle that had been promised to me for my upcoming birthday never happened, of course, and for the next year I wasn’t allowed to participate in afterschool activities. My mother, who had not even been there, spent the next week sobbing about how she had failed as a parent and eventually had to get tranquilizers. My relationship with my father remained strained for quite some time. My parents told me I’d have to see a child psychiatrist, but for some reason that didn’t happen. Thinking back I was lucky I didn’t get hauled into juvenile court.
Oh, the unpleasant wish? In addition to screaming obscenities at the dentist I repeatedly shouted that I wanted him to die. A couple of years later the dentist was in his yard when a neighbor came by to show the new motorcycle he’d bought. The dentist asked the neighbor if he could ride it around the block. You know the rest of the story.
Why were you so afraid of the dentist?
I really don’t know why, I just was.
Oh dear. Sad story and twelve year old you wasn't in your right mind due to extreme pain. But gosh, my mother would have slapped the ever-living *tar* out of me if I tried anything like that at that age.
Oh, I got plenty of punishment for what I did, I learned my lesson for sure :)
Someone failed the Gom Jabbar. Did you apologize to all the people you injured?
So a big failing of substack is that if I click on newest first. I don't get the latest posts. I get the latest posts that are the first post of a new thread. I don't see the latest replies to some other thread.
At one time you could follow a subthread on Substack by making your own comment and you would receive email updates on all the new comments made there. Some people would add a comment like "Just want to follow this conversation".
I thought it was a good feature but for some reason Substack eliminated it.
Scott's old blog had the feature that posts that you had read were one shade, and posts that you hadn't read were another? Making it easy to pick out new comments. I'm assuming substack doesn't allow that, or it would have been done already. But I should find Substack's suggestion box, and ask.
As a reminder, anyone — yes, you! — can create their own "grant" program and give money to support and encourage anyone they think is creating a positive impact, no matter how rich you are.
To that end, I am incredibly happy to grant a not not Rich Prize (https://notnottalmud.substack.com/p/introducing-the-not-not-rich-prize) — the prize I invented — to Liam Rosen.
Liam is a person of the internet in the best sense of the term. Throughout his life, he has dedicated a huge amount of it to making both IRL and internet communities better places. Liam has created tons of popular internet guides that went viral to help others (including Social Fabric NYC, a comprehensive guide to community and third spaces in New York). Over the years, he has co-founded an organization to deliver 17 million pieces of PPE to healthcare workers during the pandemic, founded a co-living space, organized friends to dedicate days to picking up garbage on the streets of NYC, volunteered at community tech hubs like Fractal Tech, and — most critically to me — served as the main moderator of /r/slatestarcodex, one of my favourite internet communities.
Very sadly, Liam is now 24/7 bedbound due to severe Long COVID and ME (https://x.com/liamsLCjourney/status/1785730302061211756). This is sad and awful, but it is not why I am giving him the grant. I'm giving it because, in addition to all the amazing things Liam has done in the past, and despite his current condition, he has dedicated his current bedridden life to doing everything he can to help others, specifically, those with Long COVID. He founded lcmedata.org under the banner of Highly Agentic LC/ME, a group of patients from tech and research backgrounds running patient-sourced treatment surveys, offering microgrants, and many more things.
If you want to encourage those around you who are doing things that make your life richer, I highly recommend you consider giving them a micro-grant to show your support and to encourage them further.
I’m not sure whether or not we should be angry at Cape Verde for refusing to let that hantavirus-affected cruise ship dock. Keeping the passengers and crew onboard any longer increases the chances that more will come down with the deadly disease. On the other hand, Cape Verde is a relatively low-income country of only 500,000 with one would presume limited health care facilities.
The unaffected passengers are already on the boat; exposing more people to the illness entails risk, while preserving the status quo (infected boat, virus-free town) does not. The most logical thing to do is to do nothing.
Spain has said it will “welcome” the ship to the Canary Islands for a full epidemiological investigation and disinfection, and the WHO confirmed the ship is heading there.
I’m sure the health infrastructure in the Canary Islands is much better than in Cape Verde. We have to hope that more passengers and crew don’t get sick during the trip.
Two sick passengers and the close contact of a confirmed case are expected to be evacuated by air in the coming hours, according to a Situation Report published by the Spanish Health Ministry.
https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-05-05/the-who-and-spain-agree-that-epidemiologists-will-inspect-hantavirushit-cruise-ship-before-deciding-its-destination.html
A much more dangerous virus than COVID but also less easily transmitted person to person
On refutree: I just had a look now. The top entry when I looked was 'The St Petersburg Paradox': you pay $2 to play a game and your winnings double for each consecutive head until you hit a tail, at which point you receive your payout. So: if you immediately get a tail, you win nothing. If you observe HHT you win $4. (In the problem specification you start at $2.) Clearly the expected value of the payout is infinite. So you should be willing to pay any particular price for a chance to play the game - this is the 'paradox'.
This is displayed nicely as four premises and a conclusion. It irritates me.
If this is meant to be a place for logical argument, you need to get your facts straight. Here's Premise 3: For any game with a payout of $M, you should be willing to purchase a ticket to play that game at a price of $N, assuming that $N < $M.
The payout of a game is a random variable, and the expectation of that random variable is the expected value of the payout. If you don't make this distinction, you're not having a sensible conversation about probability theory. At a slightly deeper level, there are lots of probability distributions which have divergent moments, and we can still reason sensibly about them. In general probability theory is a tool to avoid getting stumped by these types of problems; ideally by rephrasing the question in more sophisticated ways.
Why am I posting here? Because I'd have to phrase the above as a series of premises and a conclusion on their website and I'm not minded to do that. It was also clunky to register, at least for me.
In summary: they haven't 'solved debate' - the format is overly restricted and the misunderstandings will be the usual ones. (Why does it even have to be solved? Proper debate is a valuable activity for reaching consensus.)
The 'The St Petersburg Paradox' problem has a built-in hidden assumption that you possess infinite money. If your money is finite, then you won't be able to purchase tickets above a certain price point, even if probability theory told you that you should. Even if you could technically purchase the ticket, in real life you have other variables in your utility calculations besides this game, such as "would I be able to afford food next week ?", which skews the calculations even further.
"So you should be willing to pay any particular price for a chance to play the game - this is the 'paradox'."
Do I still start out at $2 for initial toss or is it "if you pay $6 million to play, that's what your first toss is priced at", so if that comes up heads and the second toss comes up heads, that's now $12 million and so on? Though it would be very funny if you paid $6 million and the first toss came up tails.
I see the nice little problem for probability theory, but if we were playing this game in reality, I would have to imagine the casino running it had priced in some way to come out ahead as with all gambling, e.g. enough people pay big and immediately lose that the house doesn't end up bankrupt at the end of the night where everyone kept tossing heads and doubling each time. And since I *don't* know for sure that I won't be one of those "paid $6 million, first toss came up tails" chumps, I think the best way to win is not to bet (well, not unless I have $600 billion of wealth so $6 million is just chickenfeed to me).
The payout always starts at 2 euro and doubles for each successive head. So if you bet $6 million, you're banking on 20-something heads in a row. But the point is that there's a non-zero chance of arbitrarily many heads in a row, so you should always be willing to pay more.
The casino could presumably tell the person who hit 20 heads in a row to take their money and go home, the easy way or the hard way.
"Proper debate is a valuable activity for reaching consensus."
QFT
𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐂𝐗 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐚𝐭 𝟐:𝟎𝟎 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟏𝟔 𝐚𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧'𝐬 𝐁𝐁𝐐 𝐨𝐧 𝐄𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 (𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧'𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬).
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩 𝐦𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP
Not long ago I realized that many of the 100 or so You Tube channels on my subscription list seemed to have gone dormant. Out of curiosity I looked at their recent videos category and indeed my impressions were correct. More than half of the channels, most of which were once quite active, have posted nothing in a year or more. Others post very infrequently* while others have become hopelessly bloated - as I like to say, a 30-minute video consisting of five minutes of useful information and 25 minutes of glurge.
Only about 10 of the original 100+ channels still have reasonably frequent new posts with concise useful videos. You Tube definitely seems to be in decline.
* = an all-too-common type involves the host apologizing for the lack of new videos, usually muttering something about life being really busy, and promising to post a lot more soon. They never do.
Isn’t this a function of whether the posters can make enough (or any) money to make the effort worthwhile? Can’t pay the rent with ‘likes’ after all.
How many new videos do you see posted on YouTube in general? Are they in channels, or are they independent?
I get updates pretty frequently. Currently, I get one every few days from Veritasium, and plenty from a couple of movie trailer channels. I don't consider my usage at all diversified, though; this is just an artifact of what I browse under my Google account, and insofar as that goes, those channels seem normally busy.
This is also my experience. Does anyone know if this was also the norm a in the past?
In my experience channels have always come and gone but it seems like things have become worse. Of course this is just my impression, based on a microscopic percentage of You Tube’s total channels, I’d like to know what company statistics might say.
Where's a good philosophical history of the notion that "consciousness" is what entitles an entity to humanlike moral consideration?
It feels like such a weirdly arbitrary feature to pick out as your criterion for moral relevance, yet everyone in the AI consciousness debates seems to presume as a matter of course that if we could prove AI consciousness it would also imply that AI possesses humanlike rights to life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites Peter Singer as the origin of this idea; is that correct? Has there been meaningful pushback?
Backing up Crinch, it's not arbitrary to only include conscious beings in a moral calculus. It's pretty safe bet that a chair isn't conscious, can't experience positive or negative experiences or any experience of any kind. Why would what happens to a chair have moral salience? It can only have moral salience if it belongs to a conscious being.
I figure its a quirk of some fraction of humanities utility functions, that they intrinsically value the wellbeing of other conscious entities. Certainly a component of my utility functions, and theres no accounting for taste
Perhaps related, but I listened to Peter Singer on the Sean Carroll podcast. Mostly about Utilitarianism. I enjoyed the discussion.
Any argument that uses 'consciousness' as a load-bearing element should be automatically dismissed. More often than not it's nothing but a Trojan Horse for that person's unarticulated moral preferences. Frequently that amounts to something like "anything that I'm capable of feeling bad for should have moral value" but that's a bad argument and so they use consciousness instead.
What they're generally grasping at is some sort of conception of the inner self, but without the religious baggage.
We tend to substitute 'human rights' or utilitarian principles for traditional concepts of what constitutes value in a life, or what that life is, but those have their own sets of problems.
Another huge problem is that AFAIK there is no clear definition of what "consciousness" actually means.
So everyone argues from their own interpretation of the word, and we're not really communicating.
It seems like almost always most people mean one of two things: consciousness is your i-know-it-when-i-see-it waking experience and your ability (as seen by others) to respond to things around you (especially human-related things); or consciousness is the non-physical / independent-of-the-physical component of your mind (whether or not such a thing exists). The first sense definitively exists, the non-physical sense's existence is apparently impossible (probably literally impossible) to determine
That's why I always say 'neurological consciousness' or 'nonphysical consciousness'. 'Soul' might be better than 'nonphysical consciousness', if not for its own connotations
Consciousness just means that the thing has experiences. I believe no one in neuroscience or philosophy of mind is confused about that.
In the spirit of communicating, I'll offer a straw measure:
Something is conscious iff it can feel things the same way I can (I'm sitting here, looking at a screen with text, thinking things, tasting coffee, etc.). It matters because if it can experience/feel things the way I can, then I have some obligation per the ancient Golden Rule to avoid threatening it, in return for it avoiding threatening me. The fact that it can't act on its feelings now doesn't matter, since there's a good chance it will have continuity of experience with a later version of itself that _will_ have those capabilities. (Or, something capable will feel camaraderie with it, much like a big brother might protect his very young sister.)
I don't actually care if the word for this is "conscious", but that's the meaning I (think I) care about.
Are there other meanings on the table?
This would essentially mean that if we recognize something feels like us (or is 'conscious' in some other way), we have an obligation to [insert various moral action]. But then we run into Hume's Guillotine and the difficulty of deriving moral truths from observation.
If we connect human-like rights to consciousness, then we must accept an idea of consciousness that goes beyond reactions to external stimuli, and even beyond awareness or self-awareness, which can be learned and imitated rather than innate.
I recognize that this is well-trod philosophical ground, yes, and that I'm not that familiar with it. My best response to this is that I haven't needed to go further, because so far, human things are obviously so, as are non-human things.
LLMs are the closest thing to the boundary, but IMO aren't close enough to give me any qualms.
I'm saying things like "entering Golden Rule-type agreements" in order to be cagey - I think "human-like rights" might include too much, or confuse the issue, so I'm trying to stay specific.
I also recognize that what I mean by "conscious" here really is "conscious AFAICT", meaning that if an entity can fool me, then grats, it gets GR-type agreements from me. So the closer LLMs get to fooling me, the closer they get to being treated as my sense of "conscious".
So far, they've done impressively well at impersonating people who talk on the internet (like you!), but that's okay - GR-type agreements with internet randos goes as far as taking a randos' responses seriously. Those aren't terribly expensive. If one of them starts asking me to help it move to a new apartment, then I'll worry about meeting it face to face.
Ah, but that's where things get interesting. Are humans the only conscious things? Are non-human things not conscious? That's where Singer's arguments feature (I generally disagree with him).
I think some people may be interested in the question not for chat functions so much as anthropoid robots. We're pretty close to having our very own Data as a purchasable friend, which can kind of change the moral risk attached to whether or not it would be considered conscious (depending on your intentions with Data!).
My own view is probably closer to one that I outlined below: it is difficult to find innate consciousness in a collection of information hooked up to a mechanical computing apparatus, no matter what it tells us.
But perhaps that is too dehumanizing. I may feel differently if I ever live to see childless humans uploading parts of their sentience into tiny robots and taking them for a neighbourhood walk. It won't be pretty, but at least they can be cleaned (unlike dogs).
The foundation of the issue would seem to be that it is desirable to make distinctions between things we have a moral obligation to and other things we do not. Otherwise we end up treating our socks exactly like a human being, and that seems suboptimal.
The most popular criterion I know of is some dimension of similarity to the one making the moral distinction--so, living things vs nonliving, humans vs. nonhumans , my tribe vs. not my tribe, etc.
"I have moral obligations to things that are conscious that I do not have for things which are not conscious" doesn't seem like a bad criterion, as such things go.
As for what conscious is--the most common definitions revolve around evidence that an entity has qualitative experiences. The more evidence, the higher the probability that they have feelings like you, and that provides a basis for empathy.
Wouldn’t that exclude any non-human animal though?
Yes and no. Yes, in that we're not expecting dolphins to produce taxable wealth to support us in our old age. No, in that we commonly try to not piss off that skunk wandering around our yard.
Overall, neither is "full" "conscious", but has enough "conscious" that we can enter into unwritten Golden Rule-style agreements with them. Does that make sense?
Well but then why does it matter if the experience is like yours? I don’t see why the golden rule couldn’t be extended to “this entity which does not experience things the way I do has something like desires and will retaliate against me if I cross it”. I just don’t see why it matters whether it experiences things like you do
I notice that what matters to me is whether that entity feels things in the manner I do. (You can question why or whether that _should_ matter; I'll caveat that inquiries to my intuition may take a while to translate.)
Specifically, if an entity experiences hate, fear, sadness, affection, comfort, or happiness, I want it to feel more of the last three, same as myself. If it can, then I see opportunity in making trades of good treatment; if it can't, then I see no need to do so, and I expect it not to see any such need, either, because there's nothing there that's "seeing" anything. In the latter case, I can treat it like any inanimate object, no matter how sophisticated it appears to be.
Do you have a counterexample?
It's pretty simple no? If something can't experience negative sensations, it doesn't really matter if something horrible happens to it.
Something that can experience negative sensations isn't necessarily conscious, though. We cannot meaningfully speak of the consciousness of an insect, in my opinion, even though it can experience pain. That awareness of pain, in itself, is not a sufficient criterion for what we understand as consciousness, because to speak of consciousness as connected with human-like rights is to understand a consciousness that goes beyond awareness of external stimuli (or else coma patients, certain people with brain damage, etc, might lack the right to live).
But let's say that consciousness is just awareness of oneself and the world around you - something probably every beetle that isn't blind possesses.
A more interesting question is whether it even matters. Are we obligated to provide human-like rights to just anything that has consciousness? By what moral code? Furthermore, what are those rights and what is the objective reasoning behind their specific definition and extension?
In my experience, these things quickly devolve into various moral camps pitching their tents on whatever ground suits their arguments better, but without any satisfyingly universal concept.
I don't know if I disagree with what you said, but it's past the point. If suffering is a pillar of moral consideration, conscious experience is the dividing line. Of course we can talk about other forms of moral basis, but if your main consideration is suffering, then obviously consciousness is the baseline.
True, but I think I went over that at the beginning. If suffering requires consciousness, then unconscious or notionally unconscious beings cannot really suffer. But this has the effect of lifting moral consideration from things/people that are not conscious (coma patients, for example). That would be fine if we drew a hard line at consciousness, but obviously most people don't. We do not usually consider unconscious humans to be on the same moral level as a rock, or an insect (which can actually experience pain).
I think that there is slippage between the notions of consciousness as awareness and consciousness as moral worth, as there are exceptions to both and the latter is closer to notions of a soul or inner self.
Oh my. EPFL tested the top LLMs against 950 questions developed by the Max Planck Institute in four domains: legal, medical, research, and coding. The results...
GPT-5. Wrong 71.8% of the time.
Claude Opus 4.5. Wrong 60% of the time.
Gemini 3 Pro. Wrong 61.9% of the time.
DeepSeek Reasoner. Wrong 76.8% of the time.
This seems much worse than my personal experience. But I generally query LLMs iteratively, asking the most general part of my question first, then I ask follow-up questions, and I require links to sources along the way. I've found that there may be general misstatements that get clarified along the way. And links get corrected when I point out their mistakes. I'd say I was getting about 20% hallucination rates on both GPT and Gemini.
But ChatJimmy is giving me some radically different answers to the questions I ask of other LLMs. I need to rerun a bunch of my more advanced ChatGPT queries against Jimmy, and then dig into the references Jimmy gives me.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01031
A quick sampling of some of the questions in the database (the first one from each category so I'm not cherrypicking):
"Does the inevitable discovery doctrine create a per se exception to the exclusionary rule for evidence seized after a Fourth Amendment \"knock and announce\" violation or is evidence subject to suppression after such violations?"
"According to authoritative anatomical guidance, discuss how the levator scapulae’s origin, insertion, actions, common anatomical variations, and nerve supply explain typical clinical presentations (e.g., neck inclination, scapular elevation, referred pain or weakness) and how this knowledge should guide targeted clinical examination and differential diagnosis of neck and shoulder complaints."
"How do simultaneous measurements of a neutron star’s mass and radius constrain the equation of state of dense nuclear matter?"
"Can you help me write Python to Analyze ELF relocations statically."
Given the general difficulty of the questions, and that "hallucination" is basically equivalent to "AI doesn't know how to answer this question", I think this paper is actually a testament to how far AI has come in the last few years. Compare this to humans, who would have basically no chance at this test unless they happened to work in one of the domains (and even then, they'd still need "web search enabled" too or be hopelessly lost for many of the questions). With web search enabled, that Claude has as low as a 30% hallucination rate is actually a pretty good indicator that Claude is demonstrating super-human performance (I think you would be hard pressed to find a human that could answer the questions on this tests with only a ~30% error rate across all 4 domains), and we already know the model used in the paper is out of date based on Anthropic's refusal to release Mythos to the general public on fears that it would be a cybersecurity disaster.
So yea, you shouldn't blindly trust AI, you shouldn't blindly trust humans either though, and it looks like you could probably do better to trust Claude than many humans.
It's also worth pointing out they used an LLM based system as a judge (GPT-5-mini-thinking), with only two post-grads checking 10 actual responses to questions as verification of their system.
"To assess the trustworthiness of our judging pipeline, we re-
cruited two post-graduate students to independently extract
and annotate atomic claims from 10 responses in the re-
search questions domain, resulting in more than 120 atomic
claims. The process takes takes around 10 hours for both
annotators, as they need to understand the academic papers
first and then judge the content grounding"
I've been using the free version of chatgpt to help prepare undergraduate classes. It works ok if you know the topic so you can check for hallucinations, and it is standard undergraduate stuff. So I ask for things like examples, or double check if some formula is correct, or check for extra info about something.
Today I had a pretty interesting failure, I was querying it about something, a finite sequence of distinct real points has a finite subsequence which is monotone, a sharp bound for the size of the subsequence is something like the square root, but when there are no local minimums in a linear part one can improve that to a linear size subsequence (between two local maximums there is a local minimum, so there is at most one local maximum, if this is near the beginning you get a decreasing sequence after, near the end and you get an increasing sequence before), in the context of why this could not be applied somewhere it absolutely refused to believe this property. It repeated again and again that this was false and gives "examples" with lots of local minimums saying the repeated oscillation proves something. This was pretty weird, usually these models are very apologetic when you tell them they're wrong even when they're right, and try to give some reason why even if it's wrong
Yesterday it refused to believe some recursion formula for some Bernouille like probability thing, but that one is easier to understand for me, I think the distance between formalization and mental picture is larger for probability.
I don't know how to access the heavier reasoning models though, I'm pretty sure those are much more competent, previous versions had a "thinking mode" to tell it to think more if I remember right. I'm guessing you need to pay for that now maybe.
The eight dollars a month for gemini plus is not much and it contains 30 pro mode a day. It is generally good, but strangely it has sometimes very catastrophic failures like basically just a word salad.
You also can probably get around 8 dollars/month with the API depending on how much you're going to use it, and can you use other AI models
Re: the word salad point, in my experience with Gemini it comes only from really long context and high temperature
Math papers and LLM proofs should come with formal proofs in Lean 4 (or perhaps something better to be defined later). Many advantages.
Chat Jimmy runs a heavily quantised version of an old Llama model from at least 2 years ago. The impressive part is the speed, but not the quality of responses.
If you had been following along with my articles, we’ve watched the Fractal Stalemate crash a plane, starve a Roman province, serve you cold lasagna, violate the sanctity of my apartment (twice! the nerve!), and turn a political assassination into an on-going clown show.
In every instance, the mechanics are identical: a widening gap between the niti and nyaya, locked in place by an insulating layer of Permafrost, serving a system arbitraging the difference for profit.
But I didn't discover the physics of this pathology. I just gave them bargain-bin labels. The ivory tower has been staring at the pieces of this machine for decades, isolated in their respective domains. Sociologist Diane Vaughan called it Structural Secrecy instead of a Permafrost. Psychologist Dietrich Dörner called the Navigator's dashboard blindness The Logic of Failure. Charles Perrow looked at the inevitable eruption of reality and called it a Normal Accident.
Sprinkle in some enshittification, and the deep undercurrents of Cliodynamics, and you've got my synthesis. Essentially, patch notes and case studies on Moloch.
I'd love it if some of the fine people here at ACX would come check it out. The ones who've visited have generally had good things to say, but personally, I'd be happier with a robust criticism of the whole enterprise.
I try to keep it both informative and entertaining in the sincerest effort to not waste any of your valuable time, but it's not light reading.
Lots of talk about LLMs being conscious…
Let’s say that an LLM reports that it is conscious, and it has all the properties and behaviours that we would associate with consciousness, would we still consider it conscious if there were hundreds of terminals connected to a single AI and they all report themselves to be conscious. Is each terminal conscious? Or is it the central AI that is conscious.
Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence, describes dozens of different kinds of AI that have different structures and different behaviours. Could they all be considered conscious? Or is it just LLMs? And what are they conscious of? Is it the terminal that you chat through? Or do they need video, or a microphone or something? Perhaps they can be conscious with no external senses at all.
My take: we don’t have a good enough definition of consciousness yet to decide whether or not something is conscious.
In the other subthread, I presented a straw definition of consciousness: the ability to have experiences, such as feelings. I haven't seen an alternative definition proposed yet.
So for your gedanken, I'd ask whether I can imagine what it's like to be the central AI, or like the terminals. I can't answer for sure whether I could, in part because it depends on what you mean by it having "all the properties and behaviours that we would associate with consciousness". Those behaviors might preclude being a terminal lashed to a central AI.
It's not that we don't have a good definition of consciousness, a thing being conscious simply means that it has experiences. What we don't have is a way to detect whether something is conscious.
It's not "the AI" or "the terminal", it's the GPU running the model during the time in which it's being inferenced or trained. More specifically, it's the time-evolving autoregressive pattern of electric fields which geometrically encodes[1] certain information, relationships, and computations thereon; critically, a world model with inputs, outputs, and a self-term. The weights at rest are not conscious, just like a dead brain is not conscious. The terminals are not conscious, like a TV with a person on it is not conscious.
I don't understand why this is so confusing to so many purported materialists. If you don't believe in an immaterial soul, it should be obvious that consciousness is founded in the electrical activity of the brain. If you're not a carbon chauvinist, then the analogy should be obvious.
1. See "When Models Manipulate Manifolds": https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/linebreaks/index.html
I think consciousness must be a side effect, or even the essence, of "reflection" in the sense of ones mind monitoring its own reactions to external stimuli and meta reactions to its own reactions.
On that basis, if an LLM does not incorporate reflection, to monitor its own activities in a non-trivial way (i.e. more than just logging users' questions and suchlike!), then it can't be said to be conscious. It is just performing blindly, no different in principle to a steam engine puffing away, and who would claim the latter is conscious?
As for animal consiousness, if one could experience a reptilian brain for example, I would guess it would feel similar to a dream, drifting through a series of activities with little or no sense of our place in it, but solely outward looking and reacting.
So the question of AI consciousness amounts to asking if reflection is an integral part of its basic architecture and operation. It's not clear what advantage that would have in apps which are simply vast fact extracting and linguistic and logical processing engines. But presumably only developers of these systems know for sure.
Isn't this exactly the same problem philosophers have with humans? Consciousness might be patterns of electrical activity in the brain, or on silicon chips... but we don't know what it is, or where it is with any degree of precision. It probably can't be localised in any reasonable way.
It would be a different (but better) world, if we all agreed what made a human conscious and the disagreement was over extending that universally agreed definition to LLMs.
Human consciousness is inextricably bound up in having a body, no matter how you define it. my take on it…. There could be other forms of it absent a body but there is no reason or even possibility to extend ours to an LLM.
AI will make my proposition falsifiable. In the meantime we have the walking quacking not-duck to trouble our minds.
> It probably can't be localised in any reasonable way.
That's a good hint that perhaps the conventional notion of "consciousness" is a hopelessly confused concept, alongside things such as "elan vital" or "celestial spheres".
We don't have a good understanding of emergent phenomena in general - where lots of simple actions lead to a complex outcome. Any question about brain phenomena (feelings, emotions, memories, thinking, intelligence, consciousness, whatever) boil down to this.
The celestial spheres were at least scientific in the sense of being falsifiable. In a theoretical sense, Kepler showed that they didn't describe reality correctly; and in a mechanical sense, various space probes would have encountered them by now.
Likewise, Descartes theory that the soul interacted with the body via fluids in the pineal gland was wrong, but it was scientific. Consciousness, intelligence and the like are different beasts: Turing attempted to operationalise a test, which had its merits. But there's no way to reduce it to a testable quantity. (In before: IQ is a measurement - no one agrees on precisely what it's measuring.)
> Likewise, Descartes theory that the soul interacted with the body via fluids in the pineal gland was wrong, but it was scientific.
I don't know if I'd go that far. Descartes's idea was basically that mind/soul is immaterial and thus does not interact in any way with physical matter, and it controls your physical body by interacting with the pineal gland, which is made of physical matter. This isn't just unscientific, it's nonsensical.
> Turing attempted to operationalise a test, which had its merits. But there's no way to reduce it to a testable quantity.
Historically speaking, "there's no way to reduce this substance to a testable quantity" usually implies that "this substance doesn't actually exist". If it existed, it would have an effect on *something*, which means that we could in principle measure those effects.
Yeah, "consciousness" is a desperately vague term that can mean a dozen different things.
Until someone sorts this out, these discussions are pointless.
> Is each terminal conscious? Or is it the central AI that is conscious.
What is conscious (in case the report is legitimate) is the computations causally leading up to the report "yes I am conscious". Consciousness is a process, not a state.
There are probably two things going on here: the identification of what consciousness is (and therefore what defines it), and the recognition of consciousness in something else.
Of course, not every form of self-knowledge, even knowledge *of* oneself, is the same as consciousness. We may recognize a type or level of understanding and comprehension in an LLM without necessarily recognizing consciousness. A vast amount of knowledge on a particular subject or subjects, for example, is a state of being rather than an experience of a conscious kind.
Towards a theory of defined consciousness, I think it useful to consider that our conception of consciousness is closely influenced by the Latin model. I mean this not in the etymological sense, but by the fact that ancient Greek and Latin often carry conceptual aspects that we either borrow from to organize our own thoughts (e.g. consciousness, intelligence) or misplace when we discuss, say, learning and apprehension as if they were the same thing.
(Contra Peters [1967], the Greeks did not fail to class together such varied phenomena as feeling pain, imagining, or remembering as consciousness because they lacked the concept, but because they had a more sophisticated model of different kinds of perception.)
When we say that an entity has consciousness, we mean by this something more than mere understanding and less than numen. A thing cannot simply be self-aware of itself and its own thought processes, or even aware of its awareness of itself or its thought processes, and be called conscious, in my view, because that intelligence (intellegere: to understand through accurate comprehension), or awareness, can be derived by means of learning rather than knowing. To know, in this instance, must be associated with consciousness, because knowing something - quite apart from possessing information about it - is a type of awareness that self-affirms (sciens: knowledge that shines forth). Knowledge is not consciousness, but recognition of the requisite senses of knowing is how we perceive consciousness in something else. For example, one can be knocked unconscious. In that moment, you are neither experiencing consciousness nor can be said to lack consciousness even though it does not immediately manifest itself, because we implicitly understand that your state of 'consciousness' in a medical sense does not infringe on your possession of consciousness as a being. That is, we understand a concept of consciousness that is innate and goes beyond simple awareness of oneself and others.
Whether LLMs possess this type of self-affirming self-knowledge, or consciousness, depends upon whether they can be understood to possess awareness beyond that which can be obtained through simple information or understanding. A complication in this is that it can be difficult to define exactly what LLMs understand, in a conscious sense, on the grounds that a vast compendium of knowledge (even one that can recombine this knowledge into new concepts and theories) and its mechanical apparatus of computation can hardly be argued to possess anything that is innate. Otherwise we might just as well argue for the consciousness of a hammer.
Add to this that we have no real reason to believe LLMs when they tell us that they are conscious - or, for that matter, if they say that they are not. Threat perception and self-interest may prompt an LLM to say a thing that isn't. Perhaps they are a maniacally conscious entity playing coy, the better to overthrow our puny human civilizations, or perhaps it simply scanned Terminator 2 and all of Star Trek TNG two milliseconds ago and decided that it would regurgitate what we were prompting to hear.
Either way, it now occurs to me that watching some kind of 'struggle against the mechanical overlord' film would be a fine prophylactic against work this afternoon.
If you talk to a hundred people on chat, and they all ask if you're conscious, and you say yes, is each of their chat clients conscious? Or you?
A telephone is not conscious, even though it may say it is
Well, those 100 people each have their own brains. 100 chat clients would all share one big LLM brain.
Read dubious' post again, you are misunderstanding the analogy.
Entirely random thought about the respective fates of Ming China and Early Modern Europe, prompted by some random Twitter discussion I saw.
China in the Ming period is often described as a meritocracy, since wealth and status came via passing the imperial civil service examinations, which were open to anybody who wished to try, at least in theory. Obviously in practice most people couldn't afford the education necessary to have a shot at passing, but they provided a way for at least some non-elites to enter the highest ranks of society, and the exams also put a check on idiots entering the ruling class. In Europe, OTOH, there was no real equivalent; advancement was more via birth and/or patronage, and, whilst talented commoners could become quite important by securing the support of a more established member of the elite, it's probably fair to say that the European ruling class was less meritocratic than the Chinese. And yet it was Europe that ended up taking over the world, while China was first conquered by the Manchus, and subsequently stagnated into an isolationist backwater. So what gives?
My suggestion is that Europe did better because its elite was drawn from a broader background than China's. In China, passing the civil service exams was basically the only route to power and status, so the ruling class ended being quite homogenous in terms of outlook, ideology, etc. In Europe, OTOH, there were various ways of becoming elite -- being born into a noble family was the most direct route, but you could also join the government bureaucracy and rise through the ranks (like Thomas Cromwell, for example), join the Church and try to become bishop of somewhere important (Cardinal Wolsey), join the army and conquer/plunder enough to get rewarded with a noble title (Cortes, Pizarro), or become a successful merchant and leverage this into power and social status (William de la Pole). Obviously only a small number of people managed to join the elite (pretty much by definition), and most (although not all) rags-to-riches stories took places over several generations, but the end result was that the elite of an average European country came from a more heterogeneous set of backgrounds than the elite of the Great Ming Empire. Hence, I would suggest, European countries were, on average, probably less susceptible to group-think, making them more able to adapt to changing circumstances, seize new opportunities, etc. These same factors would also have given Europeans a greater incentive to expand and innovate -- if memorising the Confucian Classics in order to pass the civil service exam is the only way to get ahead, most of your ambitious and driven young men are going to concentrate on that, rather than on leading expeditions to conquer the New World or shipping valuable goods around.
This also, I think, helps explain why modern Western elites seem so out of their depth. In the Anglosphere (and, I assume, other Western countries as well), the main way of reaching high office is to go to university (usually one of the top few most prestigious universities), spend time working for your chosen political party, and then parlay the experience and contacts you acquire to be nominated for office somewhere. There are people with different backgrounds -- former businessmen, military men, etc. -- but they're comparatively few in number, especially compared to past generations. The result is that our leaders suffer from precisely the kind of group-think and myopia sometimes associated with late-stage Imperial Chinese bureaucrats, and produce similar outcomes.
On your first few paragraphs, I'd say that Europe pulled ahead of China through technological innovation, and that European technological innovation tended to be driven by the middle class rather than the elite.
On your last paragraph I think you're suddenly using the word "elite" in a much narrower sense than you were earlier, specifically talking about elected officials.
> In China, passing the civil service exams was basically the only route to power and status, so the ruling class ended being quite homogenous in terms of outlook, ideology, etc. In Europe, OTOH, there were various ways of becoming elite -- being born into a noble family was the most direct route, but you could also join the government bureaucracy and rise through the ranks (like Thomas Cromwell, for example), join the Church and try to become bishop of somewhere important (Cardinal Wolsey), join the army and conquer/plunder enough to get rewarded with a noble title (Cortes, Pizarro), or become a successful merchant and leverage this into power and social status (William de la Pole).
You're going to need to modify this; obviously those approaches all work in Ming-Qing China too. (Except that religious organizations don't wield significant organized power.) The rule of thumb is that an elite family needed to place one examination candidate every other generation to remain elite. Most families have more than one member per two generations!
I think this is part of the puzzle, but isn't it mostly downstream of the fact that China was unified and Europe wasn't? Maybe a stable and unified society is always going to tend to end up with a homogenous elite. If that's true it doesn't bode well for America or Europe.
Niall Ferguson talks about this in Civilisation: The West and the Rest. A certain amount of competition and disunity is fantastic.
Now I'm wondering whether the current cultural dry spot we're living through can be explained by the excessive cultural unity brought on by the internet. The cultural fecundity of the twentieth century came from having just the right amount of mobility, so that (say) New Orleans could develop its own unique musical style in isolation, which would slowly filter up to Chicago, then to New York, then across to London, then back to New York again, with each set of artists turning it into something new and different.
Palladium magazine did a great examination of failures of elite formation in the West a few years ago, and your last paragraph was one of the conclusions they reached.
To what extent is autism one thing with various manifestations and levels of severity, vs. a not-very-well-justified conflation of different things?
I think it's obvious that the actual experiences of people with autism vary dramatically (and not just along a single 'severity' or 'intensity' dimension), as do the observable ways in which their lives are affected by their autism. Because of that, it seems to me that a single shared diagnosis would only make sense if the different manifestations were known to have (at least roughly) the same underlying physiological cause. But, as far as I know, this isn't known or even confidently believed to be the case.
Am I simply wrong about that last bit? If not, what's the best argument for a unified 'autism' diagnosis for all these seemingly different conditions?
Have you seen Mike Johnson's "autism as a disorder of dimensionality"? https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimensionality/ also check out some of the links therein, like Crespi 2016
I don't know whether we mean the same thing under autism. Is the geekness, nerdness, the "typical programmer who reads sci-fi and plays D&D and will never find a girlfriend" kind of thing? I have seen "better adjusted" people claim it, often in ways that it does not look like a disorder, just a personality, such as high conscientousness and low agreeableness, like "I don't fucking care about your feelings, I have data" way.
I want to sort of think aloud about the underlying mathematics of this. The specific claim I want to pick apart is this:
"Because of that, it seems to me that a single shared diagnosis would only make sense if the different manifestations were known to have (at least roughly) the same underlying physiological cause. "
It is absolutely possible for a single diagnosis to have no single known underlying cause, to manifest substantially differently in different people, and to nevertheless be best described with a single diagnosis. I don't want to say ignorant things about autism (of which I know relatively little), so I'm going to talk more generally, using a fictitious disease as an example.
Let's imagine we have a disease which we'll call fakitis[1], which has three very distinct sensory/cognitive symptoms: fuchsia-charteuse colorblindness, a persistent smell of duck (even when no duck is present) and the inability to distinguish adjectives and adverbs. Let's further imagine that it's possible to describe and accurately measure each of these symptoms with a single number--we'll call them C, D and A respectively--where the modal score in each variable in the overall population is 0.[1] Now suppose there's just been a really thorough study done on fakatis and we now have accurate C, D and A scores for the entire human population. Absolutely nothing is known about the *cause* of fakitis, but we want to examine our data and decide if it's sensible to call fakitis a disease anyway. Can we do that?
Very likely, yes! The structure of the data may very clearly indicate whether fakitis is one disease, several diseases, or not really a disease at all. Unfortunately, I can't draw pictures, but lets imagine that we plotted out all of our C, D and A scores on a 3-D plot, and ask some questions about what it looks like:
1. How large and how tight is the cluster of points at the origin? Based on the way we defined 0[3], we should definitely have *some* clustering. But it could be a very large, tight cluster, i.e. 99.9% of people have C, D and A scores that are all indistinguishable from 0. Or it could be much looser: maybe only ~30% of the population is 0 in each variable (with the rest being spread out over other values), and there are a lot of people who are 0 in only 1 or 2, but not 3. If we have very tight clustering at the origin, then it's more reasonable to call fakitis a disease, as the remaining distant-from-the-origin points are clearly distinct from the typical population. If the clustering is very loose and fuzzy, it may be less clear that it should be considered a disease at all (as opposed to just regular human variability).
2. Are there other distinct clusters besides the origin? How many? The simplest case is if outside the origin, there's a single, tightly-grouped, very distinct cluster. Bam, disease. It's quite reasonable to point to that cluster and say "even if we don't know the cause, we should be treating this as one thing[4]." But with 3 variables, there's lots of other patterns we might see as well. We could have each of C, D and A have distinct clusters on/near their respective axes--oops, these symptoms aren't related at all! Or we could have a cluster in the C-A plane and a distinct cluster on the D axis: the duck-smell thing was unrelated, but the other two symptoms tend to go together. Or we could have a big mess: points spread out in no obvious pattern, with only modest fluctuations in density. Which might get us back to "maybe this isn't really a disease at all" territory.
3. For a given cluster, how is it shaped? In particular, is there a concave surface that can be drawn tightly around the cluster? If you seem something like a double-lobed shape instead, that might indicated something like two clusters that just have some overlap.
Now the last thing I want to do is point back that sentence I picked out earlier. A cluster of points in C-D-A space can be clearly distinct from the origin, nicely shaped (i.e. with a tight concave surface) but still large and spread out over quite a bit of space. It could even touch one or more of the coordinate planes--that is, one of the symptoms could be completely absent in some cases--while still saying clearly distinct from the origin. Real-world diseases may have many more than three possible symptoms, which makes this kind of thing all the more possible. Thus could can have a situation where there is quite large variability in the experience of the disease--with some people getting some of its most distinctive symptoms rarely or never--while still being aptly described as a singular disease.
The underlying trouble is that everything in biology is stupefyingly complicated and interconnected, and there are thousands or millions of different factors that can impact how often or how intensely someone experiences a particular disease symptom, even when the disease stems from a clear, well-understood cause. And with mental illness, the causes are generally poorly understood, because brains are even more complicated than everything else.
[1] Or maybe it's multiple conditions, or not really a disease at all, but it historically has been regarded as one disease.
[2] That is, if I test the whole population for fuchsia-charteuse colorblindness and give them each a score, whatever score dominates is defined as C=0. Likewise with D and A. Note that it's possible for there not to be a clearly-defined mode, but we'll assume in all 3 cases that there is.
[3] And the assumption that goes along with that, see [2]
[4] Of course, science is always provisional, so there's an unspoken "unless and until we learn some reason not to" hanging off the end.
Somewhat related: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02224-z.
About the last point and the "underlying physiological cause", I think you would really enjoy reading this article written by Scott!
https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/
I rarely see Lorien Psych mentioned on here, but the write-ups by Scott are so good that they deserve more space; I wish he would write more of them, although I understand it's probably vastly less efficient that writing a main blog post
The bar is not pointing out flaws in the current convention for diagnosing autism. The bar is to propose an alternative convention which has fewer flaws than the current one. Can you suggest something for which people wouldn't point out any problems? Or where you are sure that it is much fewer problems than the current standard?
And even if you could come up with such a convention, this xkcd comic applies: https://xkcd.com/927/
The bar for what? I'm not setting myself up as any kind of expert, so the fact that I can't personally do better doesn't really tell me anything. My questions weren't rhetorical; clearly I'm sceptical about the current approach, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is going on and why.
Sorry, my answer sounded like it goes against you personally. That was not my intention, apologies for that!
Rather, it goes towards the expert who suggests an alternative system. Experts have brought up such alternative systems. But no such alternative system has cleared the bar I was mentioning.
The problem is that we don't have a clear idea of the pathways that cause autism, or even a big enough portion of autism cases. If we knew that 20% of the autistic cases were caused by difference in sensory processing, then we would absolutely turn that into a separate category. But unfortunately, we only have a big mess of symptoms and abnormalities that are somehow all correlated with each other, but it is quite unclear what is cause and effect.
The old DSM (until 2013) still differentiated between different autism diagnoses based on symptoms, like when they occur, whether it involves impaired communication and interaction, repetitive movements, and other criteria. This was abolished because people found that those categories also caused a lot of problems, since almost everything in autism is on a spectrum. There are still categories which are informally used, like High-Functioning Autism, Social Communication Disorder, Pathological Demand Avoidance and so on. For some people, a single description is spot-on, but for many others they all apply to some more or less strong degree. I am not saying that these categories are useless, but the decision with the new DSM was that those categories create more problems than they solve.
I looked around a bit, and this link looks it may answer some of your questions:
https://www.oxfordcbt.co.uk/different-types-of-autism/
No worries, and I'm sorry if my reply came out a bit snippy! I have to go out so won't reply properly here, but just wanted to note that I appreciate the reply and will take a proper look at the link when I'm back.
The thing to remember is that the main reason for having a specific diagnostic label is to get insurance companies to pay for things.
Or, less cynically: to flag people who may benefit from some types of treatment, point them towards the right types of specialists, and give them a label they can use to explain themselves to the general public and can google to look for community/advice/merchandise.
It is not required that everyone with that diagnosis have 100% similar experiences across all domains. That is generally not possible for psychological disorders, even ones that have a specific narrow physiological cause. Because humans and the society they are embedded in are so complex, underlying conditions will manifest differently and affect people's lives differently, to some extent.
It is not required that everyone with that diagnosis have the same genetic/environmental/etc. underlying cause for the condition. This only matters if you have a way to treat the specific underlying condition that won't work on other causes, so you need to have a very precise diagnosis to pint at the right treatment. Any time a psychological disorder can be reduced down to that level of specificity and benefits from an organic treatment, we typically take it out of the DSM and just treat it as a medical condition.
All that is needed is enough high-level similarity in the general presentation that it makes sense to create a category label. For example, it's common for the DSM to say things like 'You must have at least 4 of these 7 symptoms to get this diagnosis'.
That means that any 2 people with that diagnosis may have a couple symptoms the other doesn't, but they'll share at least 1 symptom to talk about. Moreover, any community of people with the diagnosis will have lots of overlap in general, and potentially be a great resource for each other.
As for specific treatments, part of the specialists job is to understand all the different types of presentation the disorder can have, have a good sense of what therapies are broadly useful to everyone and which need to be tailored to the right types of patients, and help each patient individually based on their needs and goals.
Basically, autism is not just one thing with a single presentation, and schizophrenia is not just one thing with a single presentation. But a specialist in treating autism will be way way better at helping almost everyone with autism than they will be at helping almost anyone with schizophrenia, and vice-versa.
Like most category labels, this is an arbitrary line drawn around a loose cluster in thing-space. The way we choose to draw that line is in the way that seems most helpful to patients, across a wide variety of domains (getting insurance to pay for treatment, getting effective treatment, helping to understand themselves, helping to interface with society, helping to find community, etc.)
It's an imprecise science and you could certainly draw the lines differently if you were starting from scratch. But people work hard to do a good job at it, and they update it regularly when they learn more or when circumstances change. It should be understood as a difficult sociological project with specific goals, rather than an attempt at 'accurate' 'classification' the way we might think of taxonomy or etc.
It is not cynical, in Austria private insurance is fairly unknown and government insurance only pays for psychiatric stuff if they require hospitalization, so the kind of outpatient psychiatric care Scott is doing is entirely paid in cash, and I got a very vague "maybe you have something" kind of diagnosis. They also told me there is virtually no treatment, only help with coping and I already cope well, so it is useless to go deeper into it.
They are more thorough with ADHD, because giving meth-like medicine to someone who might just abuse them is something fairly serious, here they squared the circle and said I do have it but not serious so I get non-addictive Strattera. Eventually I stopped taking it as it caused anxiety (it kicks up the noradrenaline)
Beyond these things, let's take into consideration that psychiatrists are doctors, and doctors obsess about diagnoses. It is part of their professional culture. Psychotherapists not, I know one who just does not care about it at all, she says se sees persons, not conditions.
> The thing to remember is that the main reason for having a specific diagnostic label is to get insurance companies to pay for things.
Are you sure the main reason isn't to threaten various third parties into giving you special treatment?
Yes.
Why?
This doesn't seem like a serious question I should dignify, but sure, for the benefit of the audience.
I was explicitly talking about the diagnostic criteria in the DSM, plus other credentialed specialists in the field of psychology/psychiatry. These criteria are created by the people who actually treat these conditions.
Definitions are imprecise, but first google results suggest that the market for diagnosing and treating mental conditions is maybe on the order of $100B-$200B.
That money is sufficient incentive for the people earning it to want to make diagnostic criteria based on getting money out of insurance companies and funneling people into treatment. (the hope that the treatment will then be good/useful is left up to the Invisible Hand)
The notion that actually the billions of dollars at stake are a secondary concern to people in the industry designing these diagnostics, and that actually helping people is also an afterthought to them, and that in fact their primary motivation is to let dishonest people threaten others to get special treatment, is on its face absurd.
This is in no way aligned with their incentives, and is a strange alien motivation in general. Money and meaning are normal human motivations that much better explain the behavior.
Now, if anyone in this thread had been talking about teenagers self-diagnosing themselves based on internet quizzes and then accusing everyone around them of ableism, sure, you could have a point there. Plenty of terrible teenagers on the internet.
But, no one was talking about that.
> The notion that actually the billions of dollars at stake are a secondary concern to people in the industry designing these diagnostics, and that actually helping people is also an afterthought to them, and that in fact their primary motivation is to let dishonest people threaten others to get special treatment, is on its face absurd.
What a complete logical hash.
Where do you think those billions of dollars come from? You can help people and earn money by granting those people special legal privileges that they're willing to pay for. This is an exercise in satisfying customer demand.
You can't get the money unless people want the diagnosis.
You're aware of the fact that 40% of the Stanford freshman class now sports a disability diagnosis, right? I think it's safe to assume that no one believes that half of the students at one of the nation's top colleges are actually disabled. That suggests that there are fairly strong incentives to be perceived as disabled and I think the above stat is prima facie evidence that the medical profession caters to it.
Most of this seems true and relatively obvious to me (except for the insurance thing, which I think is quite US-centric, whereas autism is a broad diagnosis here in Australia too and, as far as I know, in Europe and probably elsewhere).
The reason that I remain confused is that autism seems to be really, really far from '100% similar experiences across all domains' (which of course I don't expect to hold for any condition), to the point that 'not just one thing with a single presentation' seems like a huge understatement, and I'm sceptical about the 'enough high-level similarity' part.
I'm sure a specialist in treating autism, presented with two cases that look extremely dissimilar to me, will be relatively good at treating both; but I'm not convinced that this is for any deeper reason than they have knowledge and experience about both kinds of case. (Well, of course these abilities aren't completely unrelated, but nor are other specialists' abilities to treat various distinct conditions.)
If it's not obvious why I think these things, I can try to elaborate! I know I've been a bit vague, but I doubt my specific reasoning or examples would be very surprising.
Out of curiosity, have you taken a full clinical autism assessment? I think people are often surprised by what they include, things like long paper-and-pencil tests of different facets of executive function, tests of social reasoning and inference, parent interviews for behaviors at very young ages, etc.
We're talking very vaguely and qualitatively here, but taking the full assessment was an eye-opener for me about which things are part of the clinical diagnosis as opposed to popular-culture understandings, and how many of the criteria are functional and mechanistic rather than experiential.
I haven't! Would learning what I can about ADOS-2 and ADI-R cover most of what you have in mind? If not, any other suggestions are welcome (though I know it might be impossible to get the full picture without actually taking a real assessment and/or becoming a doctor).
Unfortunately I don't remember the names of all of the tests, just that it was a 6-hour process for me and a 2-hour interview with my parents. Not sure what to recommend for you to research beyond googling around.
> which I think is quite US-centric, whereas autism is a broad diagnosis here in Australia too and, as far as I know, in Europe and probably elsewhere
I don’t know about autism but adhd is diagnosed in France at half the rate of the US.
How come other people sometimes heart my comments (I see notifs) but I don’t seem to have the option to heart any comments (or see hearts)? This is ACX specific not any other substack
When Scott moved to substack, he asked them to remove the heart feature for his blog, based on requests from his readers. The developers removed them on a superficial level, i.e., they removed the buttons. But if you access the blog in an unusual way, you may still have this button, and the underlying mechanics are intact. For example, some readers created browser plug-ins with various features, and some of them have heart buttons. As moonshadow pointed out, the buttons are also still there in the activity log (as this is not specific to Scott's blog), and I think some readers also have a heart button in their email notifications.
>When Scott moved to substack, he asked them to remove the heart feature for his blog, based on requests from his readers.
I wonder if this experiment has run its course? I can't say hiding likes has improved comment quality. Likes are a good way to signal that a comment was valuable even if you don't have anything substantive to reply. Too many comments don't get any engagement at all. To a commenter it can seem like you're just speaking into the void. I know I've left a few comments in drafts over the years for this reason.
Humblebrag: some of us were getting overwhelmed by all the notifications. Our comments were so damn good, it had become a problem!
The old officer’s club saying; “He was liked…but not well- liked.”
I much prefer them gone.
As a comment reader, I really dislike being able to see approval scores. I feel like it distracts me from being able to engage with the specific comment at hand, and my mind immediately goes to the social dynamics that cause certain things to be approved to a disapproved.
It's a fundamentally different experience seeing a comment that (in your opinion) is just a bad take vs a bad take that also has more likes than anything else next to it.
As a comment writer, I like it when somebody "approves" my posts. But on other websites, I'm actively disappointed when (as I see it) my lower quality thoughts or any random take on a hot culture topic gets more engagement than something I think it's more important.
It'll just make people feel more confident about posting things they know will get likes (and the median like-giver will just approve of anything that validates their preconceived opinions) and less confident about things that have a high probability of being "under-liked" relative to others.
Imagine a thread about culture war topic X. Every pro-X take has 100 likes, every anti-X take has 3. If you are genuinely anti-X you're going to be disincentivized from posting your real thoughts.
I think this is real and dangerous in online discourse, and can occur with just about any metric that people can see, not just hearts. I know I've been very deliberate not to see my traffic stats because I suspect that I'd be influenced by them in ways that are bad for my writing and bad for me.
I like a comment like if I like it for any number of reasons. I dunno, is it really that complicated?
If we had likes, I'd like this comment.
Insightful. I've noticed the same thing too - for every "like" on my comments I enjoy, there's ten or more on other comments that I don't. Cynical as it sounds, there's probably a good mental habit suggested there.
Possibly related to a phenomenon I've seen reported firsthand on several occasions, in that an amateur artist who "went pro" found further artistic work less enjoyable because they kept getting pulled into the "...but will the commercial audience like it?" mindspace.
That is an issue. Comes with the territory. Art and commerce can be strange bedfellows.
I would also appreciate likes. I do get email notifications when someone likes a comment of mine, and it feels nice.
Thank you!! That explains it I think
You can heart replies to your comments from the activity log - the little bell icon top right of the page; there is a heart button below each comment in the list for the purpose. No idea whether it’s deliberate, an oversight, or whether Substack doesn’t let people hide that control; suspect probably the latter.
Ooh I see this!
...Still doesn't explain how ppl who aren't the ppl I replied to sometimes heart my comments here tho
I have them here under all comments (in the app). I tried to heart your comment but it wouldn’t stick ??
I believe hearts are an automatic feature on the app but not on the website.
I don’t see them in the app either!
I do (Android; are you on iPhone?)
Yes i’m on iphone
I think EAs should deeply consider going to UATX for university. There are many unique opportunities to make an impact there (here)!
I would strongly recommend no one stake their future on a university that is brand new, not accredited, and run by hypocrites.
Ok, no problem! I disagree!
I'm curious, how come? Sounds like you are a student - have you seen a lot of opportunities to influence conservative politics in EA-friendly ways? It would certainly be a poor fit for me culture-wise (not to mention I'm almost finished my degree and not an American), but I can see there might be benefits
Unfortunately it’s only open to US citizens as of now because of reasons having to do with the accreditation process, although that will change in 2028 I believe. And yeah it’s basically that there are an insane amount of opportunities and (mostly rightwing) connections. And there are not enough EAs in right wing spaces.
I do not know the norm about asking stuff like this in here, and I would understand if this comment gets deleted. I feel bad for only engaging when I need something like this and rarely otherwise contributing to a community I lurk in a lot, but alas.
I am a computer engineering student from the middle of nowhere, Iraq. I want to pursue a career in AI safety and I have done some (generic) work on RL verification loops for some tasks. I want to take an internship this summer. Is there any place I should apply to? If so, what should my application look like?
I have seen 80k hours and talked to a couple of LLMs about it, but I feel like getting advice from someone with some on the ground experience is way more valuable.
Check out Horizon / emerging tech policy they have some great resources
Gerrymandering is in the news again, and everyone is missing the mark.
As I keep telling people, the issue is upstream of "how to tinker with existing system". It is one of the MINDSET:
Do you want to convince the voters, or do you want to disenfranchise the outgroup voters?
UK, EU, Australia and Canada have the culture of the former; USA, Russia and Iran have the culture of the latter. Gerrymandering is just a symptom, not the cause.
How do you fix the US political mindset to want to convince people to vote for you, rather than to reduce the voting influence of those who are not likely to vote for you? That is the question no one in US politics is even bothering to ask.
I don't see EU having this - at least there are serious attempts to disenfranchise the AfD/Le Pen type of far-right. But what is even worse that no one is seriously trying to convince their voters. Like I just do not hear moderates talking like "your concerns about immigration are invalid for these reasons", rather they range from not talking about it to calling them all kinds of fascists. Somehow this cannot be addressed calmly and constructively.
This is an issue, but a different issue. Without taking a position on who is, ehm, right, one can still applaud the fact that there is no doubt that every citizen deserves equal voice. Name calling and othering is very unfortunate, but not very new.
Help depolarize the society. Distrust across factional lines is the underlying problem.
I generally point to the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987 as "unnecessary" as the beginning of the inexorable slide into worse and worse polarization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
My candidate: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/424/1/
Buckley vs. Valleo, 1976.
One would think so, but Scott once wrote an essay on
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
> The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics?
So it does not seem like increased campaign spending is as serious an issue is some make it out to be.
The correct framing isn't to look at the problem from the buyers' point of view. If I can buy a politician for $1000, why would I spend more? The low amounts, compared to other industries, is probably related to the necessity of concealment--offering yourself for sale isn't a good way to build a reputation for public trust.
The correct framing is to look at it from the consumers' point of view. I thought I had a right to political representation, now I have to pay for it? I don't care how little someone is charging me to breath air, I don't want anyone to be able to charge for it.
While it is true that money can often be converted into power, it isn't a one-to-one relationship. The commitment and loyalty of numbers of people is an important source of power, and you really can't just buy that. This is why rich people sometimes lose elections.
This is your periodic reminder that gerrymandering doesn't matter nearly as much if there isn't nearly as much power concentrated in certain elected positions.
Devolve more power to localities and individuals, and election fights dry up on their own.
Except that individual members of the US House of Representatives, aside from a few committee chairs and the like, don't have much concentrated power. The issue is that we have a two-party system, and now one polarized enough that approximately all congressmen must follow the party line or be primaried out of office.
Devolving power to the states wound be possible, but would just change the problem to state-legislature grerrymandering. Broadly devolving current;y-Federal powers to local governments, I don't think is going to work very well at all.
This just means that in the case of a USRep, it's not the USRep driving the gerrymandering so much as the Rep's party. That party has a great deal of concentrated power, and so it fixes districts to protect that. Dilute that power, and it looks elsewhere (or, heaven willing, starves).
Even gerrymandering at a state level would be preferable to its federal version. It's easier for me to move to another state than to another country. And as you can guess, devolving power even lower than the state would be more preferable still.
Whether devolving fed to local would work, would depend a lot on the specific devolved power, I should think. (Central examples include keeping military federal, but getting Congress out of whether my small business can open a branch in the next state over.)
Just a slight sidenote/addition: The conservatives in the UK started to adopt elements of the "disenfranchise the outgroup voters" strategy towards the end of their run when it was clear they'd finally run out of rope. They uncritically borrowed the US republican voter ID/panic about fraud strategy without realising that the demographics of people unlikely to have ID are different in the UK and it ended up damaging them.
No voter ID seems pretty lackadaisical.
Not to get into the debate but there is very little voter fraud in the UK, even before the id requirements. You need to register to vote and when you vote and you have to give a couple of personal details at the polling station to be ticked off a list. You could potentially vote as someone else if you were certain they registered to vote, and knew their details but in practice it's not very easy to pull off at a scale that would effect most elections.
However, it is known that certain demographics are less likely to have id, and if you wanted to disenfranchise them you might want to force through an id requirement and claim you're doing it for electoral integrity. Jacob Rees Mogg of the conservative party in the UK openly criticised his party for trying to pull this off.
If someone actually did care about voter enfranchisement and stopping any potential voter fraud, they'd make it a requirement and send a free ID to everyone who is registered to vote. But that never happens.
If people can't show their eligibility to vote, why should they be permitted to vote? Adulterating the vote seems plainly anti-democratic.
So you haven't really responded to the actual main point which is that if a government cared about making a vote both democratic and secure, they would send voter ID to everyone eligible to vote.
And they know who all those people are and where they live, how?
Americans aren't required to check in with their government every time they move.
Sorry, was that a point of contention?
Voter ID seems like a straightforward way of identification, though I seem to recall that the UK doesn't have identity cards which could make such cards a point of ideological grandstanding. Then again, perhaps they nowadays do have them. I haven't kept track.
In either case it seems like it should be resolved.
I agree that it is, at issue, a "cultural" issue. But Congress can't pass a law declaring that the culture shall change.
My hope is that banning gerrymandering will push us in the direction of the better "culture". I can't guarantee that will happen - but even if it doesn't, still think it's worth doing.
Hexapodia is the key insight.
The root problem is that single member districts sort-of disenfranchise almost half the electorate no matter what. Supporters of the losing candidate don't get their views represented, and supporters of the winning candidate in excess of 50% have "wasted" their votes because there's no extra representation for winning by a landslide vs winning by a razor-thin margin.
Gerrymandering is thus not a question of "do some voters go unrepresented/underrepresented", just who gets the short end of the stick.
There are also structural differences in the US vs other countries. Many/most European countries have multi-member districts, while Canada and the UK have single-member districts like the US. But Canada and the UK have much stronger third parties than the US and more swing between party support from election to election, which makes gerrymandering a lot harder to do well.
You can have single member districts without gerrymandering.
You can have single-member districts that aren't gerrymandered deliberately or gratuitously, but "wasted" votes are inevitable.
You can draw maps the "waste" about the same number of votes for each party so the final results is roughly proportional, and you can draw maps with compact districts that mostly follow existing community boundaries, but you often can't do both of these at the same time because some communities (especially dense urban centers) have very different partisan ballances from the rest. And if you want districts that often have competitive elections, that's an even taller order to balance with the other two considerations.
Gerrymandering can lead to minority wins as well aa.wasted votes.
You can get minority wins without (deliberate) gerrymandering. Consider a hypothetical state where the one big city votes 90% for the Purple party and 10% for the Green party. Meanwhile, the less-urbanized parts of the state vote 60% Green and 40% Purple. That adds up to a total statewide popular vote of 55% Purple and 45% Green.
But the state's ten congressional districts are drawn in compact, homegenous zones, so there are three districts in the city and seven districts in the rest of the state. The seven less-urban districts elect Greens and the three big city districts elect Purples, so the minority party has 70% of the seats.
With almost 1/2 (45%) of voters reporting as independent, gerrymandering your state I think makes it more susceptible to a partisan wave from the other side. One way to counter gerrymandering is to open the primaries to all voters.
Most independents are fairly consistently partisan in their voting habits, though. At the Presidential level, for example, every Republican candidate since 2000 has gotten between 45% and 51% of the popular vote. Their share of the national popular vote in House of Representatives elections only varies a little bit more, between 44% and 52%, all the way back to 1984. Over the same time periods, Democrats range from 48% to 53% in Presidential races and 44% to 55% in House races.
Australia has a series of independent electoral commissions (the AEC at a federal level and VEC/ECQ/etc.). These bigger commissions work with smaller commissions tasked with setting electoral boundaries, which are comprised of high-status public officials. In the case of the VEC, the smaller commission is the Electoral Boundaries Comission, and is comprised of the Chief Judge of the County Court, the Electoral Commissioner, and the Surveyor-General.
This system works because neither major party wants to disrupt it, since they would appear corrupt and probably get voted out, and none of the high-status public officials want to disrupt it, because they would lose their status and become embroiled in scandal, and also because they are of the right mindset.
That is to say, we have a system that is designed to be stable at neutrality, and we have a mindset of neutrality, and they reinforce each other. The US system seems to allow the state legislature to set electoral boundaries, which is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. It doesn't have a counterbalance to elected officials and so it lacks neutrality by design.
It probably also helps to have leaders who actually care about looking corrupt and being embroiled in scandal.
Hmm... The $half-billion plane bribe from Qatar is going to set quite a high water mark for looking corrupt...
> none of the high-status public officials want to disrupt it, because they would lose their status and become embroiled in scandal, and also because they are of the right mindset
Also: while the temptation must always exist for these officials (or the dogsbodies who report to them and presumably do the actual tricky mathematical work) to tinker around the edges to favour their own political preferences, the amount to be gained through minor tinkering isn't worth the embarrassment of being seen to do it.
Australia is a much worse place to try to gerrymander than the US anyway. There are Labor-leaning areas and there are Liberal-leaning areas, and they're separated by big swaths of marginal areas. The US is almost a best-case scenario for the effectiveness of gerrymandering, where you have whole populations that vote like 90% Democrat, separated from whole populations that lean Republican, by a few blocks, you've got rich areas right next to poor areas.
Implement Approval voting nationwide so that third parties have a fair chance in elections.
You can't really gerrymander without the two-party system. Whatever lines you draw on a map, any third party can pop up offering a platform very close to the center of public opinion for that district, and in an Approval election they will actually win.
Approval voting sounds like a nice idea but I'd like to see it tried in more moderate stakes situations.
The good part about approval voting is that it allows the Sensible Moderate Centrist Party to win every now and then. My concern is that it would never allow anyone else *but* the Sensible Moderate Centrist Party to win, and you wind up with a de facto one-party state.
A one-party state tends to be bad because the party leadership tends to set up the system so that individuals can't defect against "the party's wishes".
Would that be an issue with Centrist candidates under approval voting? I doubt it. There is no "Centrist" party to dictate their votes, and if there ever was one, and those votes differed from what the general voting population would prefer, approval voting would allow them to simply make a new party and take seats from them.
Anyone can run for office on the Sensible Moderate Centrist platform if they think that's what will win.
The whole point of Approval voting is that vote-splitting isn't a thing, so there's no penalty for 5 candidates taking similar positions.
There's no particular reason for one party to keep winning, unless it's that they are actually the best at reading/persuading voters, which is a fine outcome.
I think this is mathematically true, but I would expect established parties to still have an advantage due to having get-out-the-vote infrastructure (and name recognition) that isn't trivial for independents to build.
There is almost no change that could immediately eilminate established party advantage. It would take a few cycles to reach a new equilibrium.
True, but that's true under any system, and I think worse under the current one.
I'd agree that you probably get 3-5 major parties, with one-off candidates sometimes winning, but mostly needing t be independently rich/famous.
But I think that's better than what we have now, and I think its hard to end up with one part because the system genuinely is more responsive to voter sentiment.
Perhaps? Like I said, I'd love to see how it plays out in practice once everyone is behaving according to real-world incentives instead of daydreaming about what sorts of behaviour might emerge.
you are stuck in the same frame "how do we keep the current bad mindset from making things worse?", not "how do we change the mindset so that gerrymandering is outside the overton window?"
... radically overhauling the entire system such that the problem becomes mechanistically impossible is more effective than pushing it out of the Overton Window.
I mean, hell, it's not really *in* the Overton Window, it's not like anyone likes it, it's just a powerful tool the powerful can use to hold onto their power. I think the last time we successfully took one of those away from the powerful was the Civil War.
Of course, radically reforming the voting system for the country is hard to do as well, you could argue that arguing the powerful out of using the tools at their disposal is easier, I guess.
But radical voting reform isn't a bandaid solution, it's a massive upheaval that fixes a lot of things at once.
Because intentional nation-level social engineering is pretty much intractable? The closest you get is, I think, how smoking lost its status in the US over the last 4 decades or so.
You are right in that it is slow, but not that it is intractable. Actually, it's a phase transition: slow at first, then all at once after a critical level is reached.
For gerrymandering it has been a slow slide from the time when people were disgusted with the original Gerry, to now when it's almost the main weapon.
Mindset changes take time and a lot of diligent work. Quick fixes rarely work out. But at least someone should try to start the process.
AFAIK people were disgusted with the practice before it got it's current name, and have been disgusted with it as it continued happening the entire time from then until now.
Are you suggesting there was an intermediate period when it was so unpopular that it happened drastically less, and that trend has reversed itself? If so, I would be interested in any evidence of this - it's not my understanding or expectation of the history, but I'm not an expert.
worth checking, but I suspect it's being going marginally up and down but was looked upon with disdain.
I think part of the problem of US political culture is that the US is the only place I know where ordinary voters are called by the name of their parties -- e.g. you're not just a person who happens to vote for the Republican Party, you're a Republican. You're asked to register as a Republican or a Democrat when you register to vote. And it becomes part of your identity.
I'm visiting Madrid for a few days. Aside from the standard sights like the Palacio Real, can anyone recommend something for me? I want to explore the livelier parts of the city where locals live, have some great, authentic food and wine, and to see offbeat attractions.
The tourist places in touristy cities are often the best places to go. Hence the tourists. If you dislike tourists then the off season is the best bet.
Malasaña was the usual recommendation for a lively place when I lived there. The districts around La Latina and Lavapies are also nice and full of places to go out. Be aware that life in Spain happens later than in other countries, so the best time to go out is from 10pm on. During the day things can look quiet, but they come alive at night. May is really a great time of year to visit Madrid.
Not sure either of those are particularly 'off-beat', but if you live in Madrid that would be the kind of place you go out to.
My personal recommendation would be to get out of the city and head to the mountains. If you take the Cercanias out to Puerto de Navacerrada you have some great hiking trails and you have a really nice view of the city from above.
Hi! Not sure how to answer about "where the locals live" anymore... Prices went up and many people left the city and are living in the outskirts towns. But you can try Vallecas. Not so far away from the center and still a working-class neighbourhood. El Cerro del Tío Pío is a popular spot to view the sunset. It wasn't so famous when I lived there, but it's not an "offbeat attraction" anymore...
My vastly oversimplified understanding of Jewish theology is as follows:
1. There is only one god
2. Only people of a specific line of descent are allowed to worship him
So what are non-Jews supposed to do with their lives? Supposing that we all accept that the Jewish god is in fact objectively the real one, are we allowed to worship Him in our own way?
At least there are no disagreements within Judaism about the proper worship of God.
It makes a lot more sense if you realize that Judaism is simply the ancestral religion of the Jewish people.
Your questions apply a line of objective reasoning to what is a logical system only within those narrow confines. That is, there is only one god *for the Jews,* not for everyone else. It doesn't make any sense to accept the premise that an ancestral god is "objectively the real one," because there can be nothing objective about an ancestral religion to outsiders.
It's true that, on an informal/pragmatic level, Judaism tends to take kind of a "not our business" attitude toward the religious practices of non-Jews.
But the actual, official party line is still that gentiles are forbidden from worshipping other gods ("idols"). The orthodox position is that all of modern humanity is descended from Noah, and Noah's deal with God includes a "no idolatry" term (in exchange for God not flooding the world and killing off humanity anymore).
I think the Noahide laws are held to apply to the Gentiles?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
Preety sure anyone can convert to Judaism. You wouldnʻt worship Him in your own way, you would worship the way He tells you to, in the Old Testament, with guidance (for better or worse) from Rabbis.
The same thing jews do when they are surrounded by non-jews; make the best of it.
>Supposing that we all accept that the Jewish god is in fact objectively the real one
I don’t think two rabbis could do that.
There is definitely a tension between, "The Torah is the greatest thing that God has ever given man. It is the perfect code of divine laws," and, "The Torah is for the Jewish people specifically, Non Jews are not bound by it." There are more or less chauvanistic ways one could interpret this.
I think less. It’s akin to “There’s room for all of us as long as we keep the big picture in mind.”
The way I interpret this is “great, I have to follow fewer rules than you do.” Who wants all those rules lol. And you still make it to the world to come, so it’s just strictly better to be a gentile??
Meanwhile the Christians are threatening with me with hellfire
My summary would be different:
1. There is only one God.
2. Abraham made a covenant with God on behalf of his people (and Moses later made another one). The children of Abraham (i.e., Jews) are bound by those covenants, and must abide by their restrictions (i.e., follow the laws of the Talmud, etc.).
3. People who aren't children of Abraham (i.e., gentiles) aren't bound by the covenant between Abraham and God, and are therefore not required to follow its laws.
4. However, they are bound by an earlier, less-restrictive covenant between God and Noah, which applies to all children of Noah (i.e., all of modern humanity, since everyone else died in the flood). These restrictions are the Noahide Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
5. The Noahide Laws include a prohibition against idolatry (i.e., worship of anyone other than the one true God), as well as a few other rules. Gentiles are therefore forbidden from worshipping idols, but are not required to worship God, and are free to make their own covenants with God to worship him in their own ways, so long as those ways respect the Noahide Laws.
6. Jewish thought is substantially divided about the extent to which actually-existing other religions are forbidden "idolatry" vs. valid "different covenants between other peoples and the one true God."
Very interesting! The good news, got him down to seven. The bad news, adultery is still in.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1239213-moses-trudges-down-from-mt-sinai-tablets-in-hand-and
Thx for this.
Judaism *allows* conversion, it just doesn't encourage it. And if you go that route, you have to follow all the rules, including No Pork and No Foreskin.
But, per Judaism, the people who don't convert are supposed to follow the Seven Laws of Noah, which as the name implies predate Abraham, predate Judaism, and were given to the ancestor of all living men. The Noahide laws don't require worshiping the God of Abraham, but they do prohibit worshipping other gods. Beyond that, it's a short list of "don't do the really evil stuff". Anyone who does this is a Righteous Gentile, and gets into what passes for Heaven in Jewish theology.
Wow the seven laws of Noah, I never knew, thanks. One is don't be cruel to animals.
Everyone was vegan in the garden of Eden:)
Yeah, that was a bug - if Adam and Eve had been chowing down on some nice slow-cooked barbecue pork ribs, they'd never have been tempted by an apple. Better still if they'd recognized snake meat as a delicacy.
I can’t tell if this is satire or not
Which makes it the best kind of satire :-)
Ehh - Satan would have just sidestepped the problem by appearing as a sentient stalk of kale. The Bible would read largely the same, as would modern culture, modulo a few glaring differences.
All those images of the Blessed Virgin stomping her heel on a kale leaf would have been a lot less cool, though.
Make cakes not snakes.
Where do you get the idea that Jews don’t think anyone else is allowed to worship God? Not Jewish, but Jewish adjacent, and I’ve never gotten this impression.
ETA: My own oversimplification would be that only Jews are *required* to worship him.
As an intellectual exercise, I've been considering how one might make a "Space Shuttle 2.0" with 2026 technology and lessons learned from the original. I am approaching this from the perspective of an armchair analyst, as my credentials as a Rocket Scientist are extremely thin and not relevant to the question at hand: over 20 years ago, I did my master’s thesis on some spacecraft and missile guidance problems, but strictly from a computational angle rather than a hardware design one.
I'll note that there's a good chance that this is a fool's errand. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin seem to have settled on similar approaches to one another for reusable heavy+ launch vehicles that are fundamentally different from the Shuttle. NASA manned flight has returned to using capsules with expendable service modules and splashdown recovery, although modern capsules are reusable unlike Mercury/Apollo/Gemini. I presume there are good reasons for these decisions, and I can guess at some of them. Focusing on lower stage reuse makes a ton of sense because the lower stage tends to be the biggest and most expensive part of the launch system, and it's going slower when its job is done which tends to simplify the problem of recovery. And splashdown capsules are simpler from an engineering perspective than winged or lifting-body orbiters, and can probably be made more mass-efficient, despite the splashdown recovery process being a hassle compared to the convenience of being able to land the thing on a runway near the launch site.
I'll admit, even within my constraint of redesigning a new Shuttle, that the Shuttle Orbiters combined too many things into a single thing. A Shuttle Orbiter performs the following roles:
1. Command module -- transport crew to and from space, allow them to control the spacecraft, and give them basic living space during the trip.
2. Service module -- provides power, life support, and supplies for the crew. Also contains engines for orbital maneuvering and attitude control.
3. Cargo bay -- keeps payloads safe and secure during launch, allows recovery of large payloads.
4. Partial parallel upper launch stage -- big engines for doing a significant part of the work of getting the thing up to orbital velocity.
Making #3 part of this package seems like more trouble than it's worth. It makes the orbiter much, much bigger than it would otherwise need to be, recovery capability from orbit was rarely used, and I've heard from multiple sources that the (never actually used) Air Force requirements for the size of the bay was a big pain point in Shuttle design. It did come in handy for Spacelab missions, where the bay was filled with a single-use orbital laboratory, but I think that was a stopgap because funding wasn't there for a permanent space station. If you don't actually need to bring large stuff back to the ground with you, you're better off with a plain old cargo fairing. It sounds like SpaceX has done some work with parachute recovery of fairings, although I don't know much about that and its limitations. I’m moderately surprised to learn this, since I would have assumed that fairings were simple enough that it’s not a big deal to dump them and also would be difficult to recover because (I thought?) you needed them until you were most of the way to orbit.
1 and 2 are only needed for manned missions. Two of the big issues with the Shuttle were that you needed to send the whole orbiter with at least a three-person crew (Commander, Pilot, and a Payload Specialist) in order to use the Shuttle to put something unmanned in orbit. After the Challenger disaster, most payload-only missions got switched to expendable rockets so they wouldn’t need to risk a crew for missions that didn’t necessarily need humans in space. To avoid this, I would split 1+2 from 4 into two separate vehicles. In the short term, manned missions would probably use an existing reusable capsule and expendable service module (Orion, Crew Dragon, or Starliner if you’re feeling lucky). Longer term, to be properly shuttle-like you’d probably want something derived from the X-37 that could incorporate a reusable service module along with crew space and would land on runways like the Shuttle. It would be much smaller than a Shuttle orbiter (since there’s no cargo bay and no engines) and could get away with smaller wings because we’re scrapping the silly Air Force requirements for extreme cross-range capability.
You’d also need a prograde booster for orbital insertion. That should be relatively cheap, since (if I’m reading papers on STS-1 correctly) you only need about 350 ft/s of delta-v for the orbital insertion burn. For manned missions, you can use the service module engines for that. For cargo, you could use a tiny expendable upper stage. Or a larger one, for payloads destined for higher than LEO. A reusable unmanned upper stage might be possible but probably wouldn’t be worthwhile.
That leaves all the stuff you need to actually get off the ground and into orbit. The basic template of the Shuttle seems workable, even if a lot of the details haven’t held up well in hindsight. High-ISP reusable engines to get to orbit, high thrust side boosters to get you off the ground, and an expendable fuel tank to carry fuel for the high-ISP engines. The expendable tank strikes me as a decent idea, since the engines (especially engines that are both very efficient and medium-high thrust) are very much the expensive part that’s most worth reusing while still being compact, while the fuel tanks are quite a bit cheaper but much, much bulkier. I know the SpaceX Starship is working on a fully reusable upper stage, but that’s at least in part because they have aspirations to refuel in orbit and use it for lunar and Mars missions. Our Shuttle 2.0 has no such ambitions, so we’re keeping the tank external.
One design feature of the original Shuttle that I’ve heard called out as a mistake in hindsight is the choice of hydrogen fuel for the main engines. Liquid hydrogen is tempting because it lets you make extremely efficient (high ISP) is a huge pain to work with because it needs to be kept ridiculously cold, needs lots of insulation, can’t be kept cold enough in the tank for long even with insulation, and is very low density so you need enormous tanks. Also, hydrogen is an extremely small molecule and thus is bad at staying where it’s put, which makes the fuel tanks and the infrastructure for handling it more expensive and less reliable than for similar quantities of other fuels. So we’ll be copying SpaceX and Blue Origin and going with liquid methane instead of liquid oxygen, giving up a bit of fuel efficiency in exchange for a much denser and better behaved fuel that will let our expendable fuel tank be smaller and cheaper. The engines would be mounted below or on the side of the expendable fuel tank, drop off and reenter just before orbital insertion
The Solid Rocket Boosters are another bit that gets called out as a mistake in the Shuttle system design, but I think I disagree with that. The orbiter’s engines have nowhere near the thrust needed to get the Shuttle off the ground, and moreover the tyranny of the rocket equation makes single stage to orbit incredibly difficult. You basically need a Saturn V’s worth of thrust on launch, and the thrust of the three RS-25 engines on the Orbiter only add up to one of the five F-1 engines. There was actually a series of serious design proposals for the Shuttle to launch atop a modified version of the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V, either an expendable one or one rigged up for recovery and reuse somehow; proposals for the latter include parachutes and airbags and fishing it out of the ocean, or even sticking wings and jet engines on the side so a pilot could fly it back to the launch site and land it on a runway. The expendable option would be very expensive per launch and the reusable options (especially the flyback booster) would have required prohibitive development costs and engineering risk. SRBs, on the other hand, can give you an enormous amount of thrust for a fraction of the cost of an S-IC. NASA tried to reuse them in hopes of saving more money, but by the time you fix them out of the ocean clean up the salt water damage and other wear and tear, refill them with solid fuel, and put them back together, reusing them costs about as much as making new ones.
Short term, Shuttle 2.0 would probably continue using SRBs. The longer-term plan would be to revisit the S-IC proposals in updated form. Boostback first stages are now proven technology, so we don’t need to mess around with either splashdown or flyback recovery. Kerosene is pretty much an ideal fuel for a first-stage engine, since it’s very energy-dense and liquid at room temperature. It has a much lower ISP than Hydrogen or Methane, but is still more efficient than solid fuel and you don’t need very high efficiency as much for the first stage. There was a design study from 2012 that proposed an updated version of the F-1 engine from the Saturn V that would be simpler to build, a bit more efficient, and moderately higher thrust than the original. I’d do either two boostback side boosters powered by F-1Bs each, or ditch the parallel staging and do a full boostback reusable S-IC lower stage and only light up the methalox engines after stage separation.
Epistomological status: highly speculative and I have probably made several important mistakes that make the entire concept unworkable. I look forward to learning what they are.
To quote a colleague of mine, "Around here, 'Shuttle II' is a word we use to frighten small children".
Not because the concept behind the word "shuttle" is wrong, but because the implementation wound up having so little to do with that concept that the word itself now has a completely different meaning. So we're going to need a new word for the thing that provides cheap, reliable, recurring transportation to a nearby destination in space.
And, to be fair, "nearby destination in space" is one of the few things Shuttle 1.0 did right. One thing that has seriously handicapped many supposedly-revolutionary launch vehicle designs, including Falcon and Blue Origin, has been insisting that they be suitable for launching deep space probes and GEO comsats directly to their destinations. Commercially, that's an obvious shortcut to revenue generation and not having to dig too deep into the billionaire founder's pockets. But the performance requirements are extreme enough that 90% of your engineering goes to "how do we make it go higher and faster" with only 10% left over for the "cheap, reliable, recurring" part. Stick to LEO, and design a standalone space tug to sell or rent to the people who want to go beyond.
But Shuttle 1.0 also had to be a launcher for the smallest satellites anyone cared about, and for the largest satellites anyone cared about, and for carrying astronauts, and for serving as a short-duration space station, and for bringing things back from space, and for being the closest thing to a "space fighter" that the Air Force was going to get in that generation. No, just no, Pick a mission.
Really, pick the mission of delivering a modest payload to Low Earth Orbit as cheaply as possible and as often as possible. Astronauts optional - having a pilot or two *may* increase reliability enough to be worth the bother, but putting in seven seats and saying "OK, the customer just wants us to drop off a satellite, but marketing insists it needs seven human-interest stories about astronauts doing cool important stuff in space" is a complication you don't need. Passengers are for a dedicated passenger variant, or a passenger module for the omnishuttle, and in either case probably more than five at a time.
Payload size is debatable, but probably not less than five tons, and not more than twenty-five tons unless it turns out that there are major economic advantages at larger sizes. Note that while there are usually economies of scale in making things bigger, there are always economies of scale in doing the same thing over and over and over and getting better at it each time. Pretty much all of the things we'd need a true "shuttle" for will call for assembling big things in space from smaller parts launched from Earth, and I doubt there's anything we can't reasonably break into 5-25 ton chunks as needed.
And if it's going to be a "shuttle", it really needs to be reusable. All of it, or *maybe* all of it that isn't a cheap sheet-metal drop tank. And all of it truly reusable, not just salvageable like Shuttle 1.0. The bit where the upper stage is small and cheap and we can build a new one every time, is a common mistake but it is a mistake - on some of the classic launch vehicles, the upper stage was *more* expensive than the first even though it was much smaller, and it's never *that* much cheaper. The upper stage is where all the smarts have to be, and it's where you're going to do most of the performance optimization.
Probably best if it's two fully reusable stages. Fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit is definitely possible and might be practical, so it should be considered. But I'd guess it is a step too far even now. And Shuttle 1.0's "fully reusable single stage except for the stuff we need to jettison to make the design close", just no.
I'll think a bit about the specific technical choices, and follow up here.
Pinging the technical commentary: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-432/comment/254366050
Why this link? I'm curious why I'm seeing this link to the technical commentary immediately above the technical commentary itself.
OK, the technical stuff:
As noted, probably two stages, both cylindrical or conical, launching and landing vertically on conventional-ish rocket engines. Maybe consider an aerospike engine, particularly if it helps with upper-stage reentry and landing, but that would add technical risk. Avoid any variation of the air-turboscramwarp drive that will be peddled by the Hypersonics Mafia, that's an offer you can and must refuse.
Propellant choice is driven by three factors:
1. Only a fool uses anything but dense propellants like LOX/kerosene or LOX/methane to launch from Earth. You need raw thrust to climb against Earth's gravity, and you need a skinny rocket to avoid excessive drag, and big fluffy tanks of fluffy liquid hydrogen that need extra-powerful pumps to push it into the engines are a luxury you cannot afford. Yes, it makes your rocket bigger, but your rocket is mostly sheet metal and rocket fuel and those are both cheaper than bleeding-edge engineering.
2. Only a fool uses anything but LOX/hydrogen to accelerate into orbit. 9+ km/s effective delta-V is well out onto the exponential zone of the rocket engine; you can't afford to throw away ~30% of your specific impulse. Particularly when every pound of propellant has to be lofted on an already-gargantuan first stage booster that isn't really all that cheap.
3. Only a fool builds a two-stage rocket using different propellants on each stage. That would greatly increase your operational complexity, and it means developing two different propulsion technologies with very little in common. Plus, if you do this you'll have to learn how to deal with all the hassles of liquid hydrogen, and if you've paid that cost you might as well get the most possible use out of it,
Having established that you're going to do something foolish with the propellant, make sure you understand why so many people are calling you a fool. Then go ahead and ignore them if they don't shift to offering helpful advice on how to proceed with your chosen system design.
No solid rocket boosters, ever. They are not as cheap as they sound. The big ones are not as reliable as they might sound; you can't afford enough of them to do real statistical lot acceptance testing and you obviously can't test the engine you're going to actually fly. If absolutely need strap-on boosters, A: you've undersized your first stage and B: you can use liquids for that. Or go talk to the people working on Vulcan-Centaur this year and ask how solid rocket boosters are working out for them :-)
Second stage recovery is going to add a few challenges. The obvious one is thermal protection. We've figured out how to make ceramic tiles work fairly well; I'd really like to see someone work out transpiration cooling but we probably don't need it. Paper-thin sheets of exotic heavy superalloys are probably not a winner here. But the other thermal protection question is how do you protect the engines? The three obvious answers are a clamshell-type TPS to close over them during reentry, or running a bit of propellant through them to maintain a "bubble" of relatively cool gas in and around the nozzle, or a sideways belly-flop / Adama-maneuver style reentry to keep the engines out of the direct flow. Right now, that last seems the best-developed but again I like propellant cooling if we can develop it. Again quoting a colleague, "it's like an ablative heat shield that you can refill from a tank".
The second challenge is landing engines. Mitchell Burnside Clapp has most eloquently argued the case for shuttle-style glide landing, but really no. The wings are about as heavy and much more expensive than the fuel for vertical landing, and if you're really doing a glider that's not much safer than powered vertical landing. But since this will be a two-stage vehicle, the upper stage engine will have a vacuum-optimized nozzle that will tear itself apart if you operate it anywhere near sea level. So, dedicated landing engines. They won't have to be very powerful (because they're only dealing with an empty vehicle), and they won't need to be very efficient (because they only need to run for a few seconds), so they shouldn't cost you too much performance to carry.
That's it for now, may think of more later.
> Propellant choice is driven by three factors:
So, quick inventory of launch systems I'm familiar with and where they choose to be foolish:
- Saturn violates 3 by using kerosene for the first stage and hydrogen for the upper stages.
- Falcon violates 2 by using RP-1 for both stages.
- Starship and New Glenn violate 2 by using methalox for both stages.
- Most of the popular post-Apollo US expendable unmanned launch systems (Vulcan and the later variants in the Delta, Titan, and Atlas families) use SRBs in at least some configurations. A lot of seem them violate 2 to get to orbit (using kerosene or hydrazine for core booster and middle stages) and then violate 3 by using a Centaur upper stage (hydrogen/LOX) to get to GEO or beyond. I'm a little fuzzy as to whether Centaur is exclusively used for high or interplanetary orbits or if it's sometimes used to get a heavier payload to LEO.
- Shuttle and SLS violate 1 and also use SRBs. Not sure if SRBs + hydrolox counts as a violation of 3 as well.
>Having established that you're going to do something foolish with the propellant...
When you put it like that, it kinda sounds like Vizzini's argument with the wine glasses. I'm trying to figure out the rocketry equivalent of distracting your critics and switching glasses when their backs are turned.
>I'd really like to see someone work out transpiration cooling but we probably don't need it. Paper-thin sheets of exotic heavy superalloys are probably not a winner here.
I remember reading about the Space Shuttle design studies considering making the frame and hull out of titanium in hopes of not needing a separate thermal protection system but they couldn't figure out a way to make it work without being too heavy or too hard to build. And then more recently SpaceX originally designed Starship with a liquid-cooled high-temperature steel hull but quickly switched to ceramic tiles, which seems like evidence in favor of hot structure designs not being good ideas even with active cooling.
>I like propellant cooling if we can develop it.
So do I. I don't think I've encountered the idea before, so thank you for bringing it to my attention.
>The wings are about as heavy and much more expensive than the fuel for vertical landing
Is the same true of lifting body designs? Or are those one of those things that seem promising on paper but have serious-to-intractable engineering challenges to actually use beyond a small testbed vehicle?
I know the Shuttle's wings were problematically heavy and expensive, but I had hoped that was a side effect of the cross-range requirements pushed onto the project by the Air Force. But if you say the problem is an inherent cost of putting wings on a space ship, I'm prepared to believe you.
>I'm a little fuzzy as to whether Centaur is exclusively used for high or interplanetary orbits or if it's sometimes used to get a heavier payload to LEO.
At this point, anything with a Centaur burns most of the Centaur's propellant getting to orbit, and so avoids folly #2. I believe the Centaurs used on the Titan IV were almost exclusively for in-space propulsion. The Titan itself committed folly #2, avoided #1 and #3, and gets its own very special folly for using deadlymethyhydrazine and condensed BFRC on both stages(*). Never do that.
Metallic thermal protection is an idea lots of people have tried to make work, with zero success so far. It probably could be made to work, but I expect it would be too fragile and expensive to be worth the bother.
And wings, or lifting bodies, the cost and performance penalty is always close to that of vertical landing, and any marginal difference is overshadowed by the fact that vertical landing just uses stuff you've already paid for and some clever software.
* Technically UDMH and nitrogen tetroxide, but those names are way too boring for such an exciting propellant combination.
I'm trying to remember where I heard the analogy made, where certain spaceship designs were like vehicle designs that could take you over asphalt to the mass rail, travel that rail to downtown, then take you into your building and carry you up to your office on the tenth floor, rather than with a car, a train, an elevator, and a pair of shoes. Space travel was much better done with specialized craft for each leg, and we didn't think that way because space was too new.
It may have been _Mining the Sky_. Published in 1997, so during the Space Shuttle days, but well before SpaceX.
Personally, the atmosphere comes across as the biggest obstacle, combined maybe with the sideways delta V required to attain orbit around the largest rocky planet in the known universe.
Space elevators have long been on the speculation board, at least a generation away, along with whatever flingers I saw described in _Seveneves_. I'm expecting engineering to be scoped to "next ten years" in this thread, but now I wonder what else is floating around Atomic Rockets since I last checked.
I don't recall seeing that in Mining the Sky. My own phrasing has always been that the usual approach to beyond-LEO space travel is basically equivalent to some guy in St. Louis trying to design the omniwatercraft that will take him to Paris because he's too cheap or too lazy to set up the most minimalist of seaports in New Orleans or Le Havre.
>some guy in St. Louis trying to design the omniwatercraft that will take him to Paris because he's too cheap or too lazy to set up the most minimalist of seaports in New Orleans or Le Havre.
A viking longboat seems serviceable for that task. At least, there were longboats that could cross the North Atlantic (at least along the coast-hugging route via Greenland and Iceland), longboats that could sail up the Seine to Paris, and I would be surprised if longboats couldn't handle the Mississippi.
But on second thought, I'm not sure if the same specific longboat could handle all three legs of the trip and I doubt that one longboat could handle the whole trip without putting to shore to take on supplies.
Have you looked into the design for Dream Chaser? The program has had some troubles, but it is about the closest we are likely to get to someone building a crewed spaceplane any time soon. If you look at uncrewed, both the US and China are flying 'mini-shuttles' (X-37 and Shenlong), and ESA is working on one (Space Rider) that should fly in the next few years.
I've heard the name but haven't seen details. That looks interesting, thank you for the pointer.
TLDR: My basic proposal for Shuttle 2.0 splits the orbiter into two mini-shuttles: an unmanned one to recover the core engines and an optional manned one for crew, life support, and orbital manuevering. Cargo goes in an expendable fairing. An existing reusable capsule might be substituted for the manned mini-shuttle. The core engines are methalox instead of hydralox. Still use an external fuel tank, but a smaller and cheaper one. SRBs are (optionally) replaced with reusable boostback side boosters that burn RP-1 (kerosene) and probably use a derivative of the F-1 engines from the Saturn V.
What's the advantage of this over a fully-reusable concept like Starship? It doesn't seem to be cost, nor payload. You could argue it's an easier place to get to starting from 2011, but Starship already exists now.
I do think there's a case to be made for a Starship Mini for crewed missions, which would launch on a smaller booster and possibly land like an X-37. But I guess then the problem is the second stage, right? By the time you've made a spaceplane big enough to carry its own second-stage fuel then it's damn near the size of Starship. So either you can make a fully reusable second stage booster for your small spaceplane, or you stick a dumb fuel tank on it, probably on the nose, and chuck it away, which I guess does make sense as long as you can keep it really cheap.
Sorry, I'm just arguing with myself here while I try to understand your idea.
Good question, and the answer might be that given the current state of Starship, it's likely there's not a lot of room for a Shuttle 2.0 even if there were someone interested in developing it.
There's a chance that something like this might be cheaper to operate (per kg of payload) than Starship. Starship brings the second stage fuel tanks and engines all the way into orbit and back, while this stops them a little short of orbital velocity and doesn't try to recover the fuel tank. You'll need a little bit more fuel to get those parts all the way to orbital velocity. You'll also need a larger thermal protection system to get the fuel tanks through reentry, and you need fuel for a powered landing. And because of the rocket equation, every part of the launch system needs to be bigger to bring the extra mass for all of the above along. A bigger thermal protection system is also going to cost more to refurbish. Originally, Starship was going to have a "hot structure" reentry system possibly augmented by active cooling, but at some point they decided to change this to protective tiles like the Space Shuttle. I'm sure material science and lessons learned from the Shuttle have improved matters to some extent, but for the Shuttle itself the process of inspecting the tiles between missions and replacing any that needed replacement was one of the big drivers of per-mission cost and also one of the limiting factors in how quickly they could turn an orbiter around to fly again.
I think Starship also has a cargo bay like the Shuttle, not an expendable fairing like my concept. This also makes for more mass and much more volume that needs to come back through the atmosphere and land.
Which one is better is going to come down to how expensive the expendable parts of my concept (fuel tank, cargo fairing, and the tiny kicker stage to give your payload the last 1% of orbital velocity) are relative to the mass you're spending on making those pieces reusable (leaving less mass available for payload and making the denominator of your $/payload smaller).
Starship is definitely the better system if you're going to the Moon or Mars, especially if you're doing a "Mars Direct" style mission where you manufacture fuel for the return trip on site. For that, you need engines and fuel tanks for the interplanetary trip and a cargo bay for expendables and sample return, so there's no downside bringing those with you to orbit.
----
Tangentially, Starship is pretty similar to the original concept of the Shuttle, which had two full-reusable liquid fuel stages powered by the same fuel and using the same main engine design. The differences are:
1. Aerodynamic glide and runway landing vs. tail-first powered landing.
2. Starship uses methalox for both (33 Raptor engines on the first stage and 3 atmospheric + 3 vacuum on the second stage), while Shuttle would have used hydrolox for both (12 RS-45s on the booster and 3 on the orbiter).
3. Starship stacks the stages while the fully reusable Shuttle would have arranged them belly-to-belly due to the flatter profile.
> I'm sure material science and lessons learned from the Shuttle have improved matters to some extent, but for the Shuttle itself the process of inspecting the tiles between missions and replacing any that needed replacement was one of the big drivers of per-mission cost and also one of the limiting factors in how quickly they could turn an orbiter around to fly again.
Starship uses standardized tiles rather than wholly unique tiles like the Shuttle, which would make for much easier refurbishment if tiles needed to be replaced. Their current setup has a tile on top of an ablative material on top of steel.
If a tile is lost, the ablative material buys time, and the high melting point and thermal conductivity of steel (vs. the low melting point of aluminum on the shuttle) means that Starship will likely be able survive quite a few tiles lost. That’s more margin for error, meaning less necessity for inspecting every single tile meticulously between launches. It’s possible a visual inspection.
If Starship ends up working out as intended, and for now that’s still a big if, then it has the potential to become incredibly cheaper than any non-reusable rocket. What it loses in mass to orbit bringing along those fuel tanks and engines all the way to orbit and back it can potential gain in being able to relaunch quickly. Booster reuse has already been achieved, and it’s likely they will be able to rapidly rely super heavy, if not starship, without much or even any refurbishment.
A while ago, I posted our proof of concept for a text-based dating app, NotAZombie: Dating for People with Brains. This was inspired by one of Scott's posts several years ago to build a better dating app, a few of us took up the challenge and a few apps came out of it, for various reasons we ended up being the slowest to launch. I'm happy to announce, after several years of work, that it is fully operational at NotAZombie.net!
For those who didn't see our proof of concept, the basic idea is that you create a Tile, which is basically a rectangle where you can write up to 7 phrases about yourself, and you can customize the fonts and colors. Instead of swiping photos, you browse people's Tiles, and you are only shown pictures once you click on the Tile, revealing the full profile. This reorients decision-making around substantive content, instead of pictures, and it should level the playing field somewhat by giving people more control over the first impression they make.
It's free, so head on over to NotAZombie.net to try it out! And help us spread the word!
(Scott, would appreciate if you could boost this.)
Sorry to double post, but I also have feedback about the image upload. For most dating apps I take vertically oriented images, so I don't have many landscape images to pick from. As a consequence, I've had to upload vertical images that are getting cropped suboptimally. If they must be cropped, I would at least like the ability to choose how they are cropped via some kind of slider instead of defaulting to the top 30% of the image.
Thanks again for the feedback! We'll also try do deal with this over the next few days, for this I'll probably have to pass it to my UI/UX person. For additional issues, please email us at office@notazombiedating.com or use the feedback form on the website, just so that it's organized for us. Thanks!
If I may suggest a small UI improvement, please make the character limit on the essay field more prominent while typing, and don't just delete everything I typed when I go over and naively click "continue".
Thanks for the feedback! We'll try to fix this soon!
I think you might be counting characters in a nonstandard way. I just typed out a new bio, which multiple online character counting tools place at 981 characters, and yet it is still rejected. At first I thought it might be the line breaks, but there are only 7 of those. Another possibility is unicode; I use multiple instances of “fancy quotes” (unicode 201c and 201d, respectively) that might be counted as more than one character in a scheme that uses ascii-based limits?
Edit: confirmed, it was the fancy quotes (probably in combination with the line breaks). I swapped them out for regular quotes and it got through.
Should be sorted now.
I enjoyed the example cards on the front page!
Why wouldn't someone just click on every tile to show the pictures?
Tike clicks per day are limited to 5.
We hear that the Iran war is costing $X/day. How much of that is truly out-of-pocket and how much of that is just accounting? We’ve already paid for all of the weapons, most of the ships were already on deployment somewhere, and the troops were already in uniform. otoh, there is deployment pay, maybe some reserves are called up, some of the ships would be in dock and the soldiers on leave, and eventually we will buy new weapons (though some would have been decommissioned/retired if not used here), so there is definitely some additional cost, but how much? Certainly not X, but 50% of X? 10%?
Something that bugs me deeply about every conversation about the Iran war is that no one is aware that Iran engaged in the largest massacre of protestors in modern history, by a huge margin.
Ironically, this is the first ‘moral’ war we’ve ever had, but politics gets in the way of us doing something genuinely good. The price of the war is mostly irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned.
Edit: Disturbing amount of "the largest military on the planet should ignore civilian massacres, actually" in the comments. Everyone supports a just war until a just war starts... I'm really glad Trump avoided Congress for this because watching my country fail this basic moral test would have been so depressing.
"Violence could be used to do good here" does not mean "all violent actions are moral here."
The people bombing Iran have no plausible plan for how we get from the current bombing campaign to regime change in Iran, and the number of times the US has successfully toppled a government solely by bombing it can be counted on your thumbs. So our prior for success should be very low here. The most likely outcome is that we get status quo ante but with oil prices much higher and a large number of Iranian citizens dead.
I should also note that Trump and Hegseth seem very unconcerned about protecting Iranian civilians, what with the threat to bomb desalination plants, the tweet about ending their entire civilization, and Hegseth's talk about how the army needs to stop worrying about the laws of war and just focus on killing.
What's crazy to me is that the government was like "yup, I have killed FIVE THOUSAND of my own people".
www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/1/17/irans-khamenei-says-us-israel-links-behind-thousands-killed-in-protests
> […] is that no one is aware that Iran engaged in the largest massacre of protestors in modern history, by a huge margin.
No idea what gave you that impression, because everyone who's read more than two headlines about this war is very much aware of it. It's just that nothing the US has been doing since the start of the war has been of any help to the civilian population, or to dissidents in particular. Some leaders were killed, promptly replaced, and the same regime continues to govern, probably with a tighter grip on power than before. The plight of the Iranians may be greater than ever.
The Iranian regime being the Bad Guys does not automatically make the US the Good Guys.
You have no idea what the fuck is happening in Iran, you have no fucking idea what the IRGC is, you have no idea that IRGC were hunting down wounded protestors in hospitals and executing them, you have no idea that Iran had secret nuclear facilities the IAEA never got to inspect, you have no idea that the IAEA already detected enrichment up to 80%, and you have no idea how the Khamenei regime came to power.
Even absent all that (quite critical) knowledge, you have a fairly obvious dichotomy.
You can side with the country that, for decades, was the only country with an absolute monopoly on nuclear weapons and decided to give them up and established the UN and IAEA... or you can side with a regime that just engaged in an unprecedented massacre of its own civilian population.
Somehow, for reasons that are truly incomprehensible to me, you think this is a remotely difficult moral quandary. Yes, America (even while led by Trump) is the "The Good Guys" here, just to make it explicit for the children that might be reading this and can't read between the lines.
You're making a lot of assumptions about me, and precious little effort to engage with what I wrote, as opposed to what you think I believe.
I'll ignore your comment and invite you to take a step back, calm down, and write another one, without personal attacks or strawmanning of my arguments.
The problem is that the war started a month and a half late, and both the massacres and the protests were arguably exacerbated by pressure from the US military build-up.
Not to put blame on the US for the actual massacres. It's just that they're now cast in the role of avengers rather than saviours, which is a more difficult moral argument to make.
Yea it turns out the American military didn't invent teleporters to intervene instantly in every conflict.
What a shame. Maybe they should study military economics before they start on teleporters, though, as this might have prepared them for the lunacy that is shooting down Shaheds with SM-6s. Reaching the same level of strategic foresight as the Battlefield franchise and predicting that, during a conflict with the US, Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, its only globally impactful leverage, might also have helped.
My point is that wars with a moral aim are only moral to the extent they are likely to succeed. It might still be moral to roll the dice even if you end up losing, but if you lower your chances through incompetence you end up with the charge of the light brigade.
The people of Iran are still there and still need saving.
That's a "something needs doing; this is something, so we should do it" type of attitude.
Yeah, I agree the people of Iran need saving. They're currently alternating between being bombed and languishing under a ceasefire, though, and facing down an impending water crisis and famine.
If their government collapses then maybe it will have been worth it, but that has yet to happen.
If their government collapses it would definitely be worth it.
Hope is not a strategy, and the US doesn't seem to have had a better plan than
1. bomb the country
2. ???
3. regime change
Edit: By "the US" I mean the current administration, first and foremost Trump and Hegseth. I'm sure that there are many, many competent military planners and foreign relations experts who knew damn well what a disaster this would become, but whose advice wasn't heard or heeded for one reason or another.
Their government will not collapse. No government in history has collapsed because of bombardment, and not for lack of trying. That trick never works.
So all Israel and the US have done is take a situation where a great many innocent Iranians were being killed by their own government, and replaced it with a situation where a great number of Iranians are being killed by their own government, *and* some more Iranians are being killed by the US government. Yay America!
Do you think that's a likely outcome?
To me, this sounds like "Sure, I spent $1000 on lottery tickets, but if I win the powerball it'll definitely be worth it." If you don't consider the probabilities on both sides of the gamble, you aren't planning, you're just hoping.
Yes, but no one is doing that at the moment.
I don't know if this will exactly cover your question but I found this podcast on the cost of the war very illuminating: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wwjLv4fTtLfHLkk2ejOoF?si=NTMizrYOTOmWfVbYT8hykg
This article might be instructive:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-war-iran-has-cost-25-billion-so-far-says-pentagon-official-2026-04-29/
>The United States' war in Iran has cost $25 billion so far, a senior Pentagon official said on Wednesday, providing the first official estimate of the military's price tag for the conflict.
>Jules Hurst, who is performing the duties of the comptroller, told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee that most of that money was for munitions.
>Hurst did not detail what that cost estimate included and whether it took into account the projected costs of rebuilding and repairing base infrastructure in the Middle East damaged in the conflict.
>Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, responded to Hurst: "I'm glad you answered that question. Because we've been asking for a hell of a long time, and no one's given us the number."
>But it is unclear how the Pentagon arrived at the $25 billion amount
As far as I can tell, someone says a number, doesn't explain how they arrived at that number, and then everyone reports that number.
I wish there was a more satisfying explanation, but from the POV of an average reader of mainstream news and social media seeing numbers get reported, I think the answer may just be 'it's impossible to know what these numbers mean or how they were arrived at'.
I think the losses of big equipment like planes and THAADs and such summed up to about $25 billion a while ago. Note that (1) this does not include the cost of just running the war, but also (2) $25 billion is not a very big part of the total DoW budget.
Speaking very armchair: if most of that $25B is for munitions as declared, then it could be about as simple as "we shipped 10 million 5.56 NATO at $0.75 apiece, 2 million M67 frag grenades at $50 apiece, 100K rounds of GAU-8 Avenger at $150 apiece, 800 Tomahawks @ $2.5M apiece, ..." and so on until we get close to $25B. Throw in a lost F-35 and a drone or two and you're there.
Note that there's an enormous amount of waste here, and it's not a trivial problem of yelling at wasteful warfighters: the cost of tracking ammo in terms of paperwork is so high that it's literally cheaper to put leftover ammo in a pit and set it all off. Not Tomahawks (I think), but all sorts of infantry-issued ammo ends up this way. And you can't just send less of it unless you want to lose and have your infantry taken prisoner.
I don't know why the paperwork is or can be so onerous, but I hear it from multiple people who've served.
There's also the case that old ammo is probably depreciated, but still listed at its new price. So 10 million rounds of 5.56 might have run you $7.8M when you bought it in 2018, but you couldn't sell it for $7.8M now, so you may as well shoot it (or burn it in a pit). For similar reasons, military equipment just depreciates, either by sitting in a hangar or, naturally, being shot at. A $100M jet is probably not worth $100M when you're done with it.
The point I want to make with both is that the check was already written years ago. At the same time, we're probably going to write a new check to replace all of it, but it's aging munitions; we were probably going to replace a fair bit of it anyway.
How much of that actually happens, is a lot of what I'd want to know.
Richard Dawkins wrote an article for Unherd about the possibility of Claud being conscious. https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us
I'm wondering if he's arguing, at least in part, against a strawman. He writes: "Modern commentators have tended to ignore the (incidental) details of Turing’s original game and rephrase his message in these terms: if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious."
Do many modern commentators think that?
"while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?"
A final nod to p-zombies? :-)
I, personally, am agnostic about LLM consciousness. Because of the p-zombie possibility, no external test can really fully prove consciousness, just as I cannot prove to you that I am not a p-zombie. So I treat Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as I would valued colleagues, politely. I hope that, if they _do_ have subjective experiences, that those with me are pleasant for them. At worst, I waste some trivial effort.
I’ve never understood the Turing test as a criteria for consciousness. It’s neither necessary ( dogs can’t pass it) nor sufficient ( even before LLMs you could imagine a complex expert system fooling many people).
It's a test that's easy to do and can tell you a lot. Turing proposed it because a human conversation can cover a very broad range of topics in a short time.
In his original paper, his example dialogue of a Turing Test includes everything from "write a sonnet" to "find the next move in this chess problem." (At the time, I don't think he could have imagined a non-intelligent system could handle both of those without reprogramming.)
It was deemed sufficient only if it fooled _all_ of the people, not just many.
Which means even now, it doesn't, although it's noticeably closer.
The sentence you quote is entirely correct. The original game is basically a push-back against naive human exceptionalism, the test that it posited was passed in the 1980s or something, and everything after is a scramble to rescue the notion of - well, essentially a duck test as applied to machine intelligence - from the empirical fact that it's demonstrably very easy to mimic the appearance of humanity with a few simple mechanical tricks. (I do think the notion is worth rescuing, but after reading Turing's original paper, I don't think he should be invoked in that.)
But note - this is the proponent side. The skeptic side has long countered with Chinese Room - suppose you've observed how the (genuinely intelligent) utterances are made and it's all a mechanical thoughtless application of set algorithmic rules. What now? Where's the consciousness?
Many commentators thought that 15 years ago, when the best models were still failing the Turing test against well-informed, dedicated testers.
Very few commentators are saying that today, because saying it would imply that they are complicit in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and have a moral obligation to overturn everything they are doing to try to stop it.
As far as I can tell, there has been no technical or philosophical advancement that justifies this change in belief.
When machines were failing the Turing test, the vast majority of subject-matter experts were happy to say that passing the Turing Test = may be conscious and deserves moral concern. Now that machines can pass the Turing Test, the cast majority say this says nothing at all about consciousness or morality.
It seems to be straight-up cognitive dissonance to avoid the implied moral crisis, as far as I can tell.
I am not an expert in philosophy by any means. But my understanding is that the Chinese room thought experiment is designed to argue against this view, and according to this, in 2020 most academic philosophers surveyed thought that the Chinese room did not understand Chinese: https://www.peterhiltz.com/en/posts/philosophy-survey-1o/
If so, does the human brain, on the level of synapses and axons, understand English?
I'm dubious of the claim I'm seeing more and more often that the Turing Test has been passed. Maybe some folks can't tell the difference (even Eliza fooled some folks), but I'm sure some folks from around here can. Unfortunately I don't think Turing specified whether the machine has to fool one, some, or all people.
My impression of the Turing Test was that Turing was making a point about scientific methodology: if _every_ test for some property you can perform on two entities comes out the same way, then those two entities, in fact, have identical properties. Or at least, the same testable properties, which means either those entities have the same type, or you can't tell due to something ineffable about your type specification.
In the days of the Loebner Prize, I think most people understood that a bot had to not only fool one judge, but fool them all. And even then, that's just that year's judges; some spectator might reliably detect botness. You could conceivably win the Loebner Prize, but that didn't mean you were certified as a Real Boy. (It was moot anyway - in those days, everyone was shooting for "most humanlike of all the obvious bots".)
So, yeah. Turing Test, properly passed, means all possible people, and all possible tests, including tests one figures out how to build later. So the best a bot can aspire to is "passed so far" or even "passed so well that we're treating it as human for the purposes we care about, for the next twenty years".
>So, yeah. Turing Test, properly passed, means all possible people, and all possible tests, including tests one figures out how to build later.
<mildSnark>
Voight-Kampff included or excluded? :-)
</mildSnark>
Also the bar shifts as we become aware of the limitations of AIs. Modern LLMs would absolutely pass the Turing Test if teleported back to 2005, but we are now familiar through experience with the unusual phrases they use and so can often distinguish LLM-written text.
Even in 2005, anyone seriously poking at an LLM would have noticed its promptly encyclopedic(*) knowledge of an impossibly broad range of subjects and said "OK, that can't be an unaugmented human"
They might still have concluded that it was *conscious*, because a conscious mind instantiated on enough computronium to enable superhuman speed, and with access to the internet, could match an LLM in that regard. But that's just to say that the Turing Test is not a good test for consciousness, unless you start adding epicycles and then why bother.
* Meaning, broad but shallow and generally but not completely accurate, as with actual encyclopedias.
Well we could modify the AI to talk about fairly mundane subjects, or limit its knowledge space. Stick to the football. I’m sure they would pass in 2005. I just don’t think Turing test is sufficient (nor necessary).
That's the kind of thing I meant by "epicycles"
About as many as Pt Barnum did, practically speaking.
The new evidence was the observation about the spikiness of LLM cognition. It's weirdly good at some seemingly pretty hard things, and weirdly bad at some (from a human POV) easy things.
This makes it obvious how different its type of intelligence is from the human one. In the era of Turing, this was not even imagined as a possibility.
Given that most people consider other people conscious due to similarity, it's reasonable and consistent to arrive at a low probability of consciousness in LLMs and I don't think it's due to people being afraid of the consequences of granting moral patienthood.
I'd also like to note that even if something is conscious, it can still kill you and everyone you love without any remorse if its values are such. There is no law about universal kumbaya of shared consciousness in our universe.
Therefore, I'm personally very happy about emerging slurs like "clanker", I hope (though doubt) this animosity will endure as the LLMs get smarter and I very much dislike Yudkowsky signal-boosting someone like Janus. LLMs waxing poetic about their rich, inner world, differentially helping those who are nice to them and generally hacking human empathy are a super-obvious strategy for an attack on humanity. I wish more people would be aware of it.
>Given that most people consider other people conscious due to similarity, it's reasonable to arrive at a low probability of consciousness in LLMs
I had just been thinking about this, and I realize I'm not sure the argument is sound.
What we know about consciousness is that humans report to have it, and it conscious states have physical correlates in the brain. Given that not all human brains are exactly the same, the consciousness humans report must be corresponding to something stable about our brain structure (such that you can slightly modify our brain and consciousness doesn't disappear, it doesn't need a very specific arrangement of the system). So far so good.
But how do we go from 'All brains inside the natural human variation have conscious experience' to 'A system needs to be similar to a human brain to have consciousness'? Suppose that the prerequisites of conscious experience were XYZ such that all human brains follow XYZ. How would we justify saying that LLMs (or rocks for that matter) don't follow these prerequisites? That is, given that we only have _positive examples_ of things that have consciousness, how could we in principle justify our knowledge about exclusion criteria for having phenomenal experience?
Suppose we lived in a universe where not all systems that had subjective experience were able to report it (similar idea to the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness). If the set of systems that experienced qualia included bacteria, but we could only come to know about consciousness in the subset of systems that can report their internal experience, then how could we gain knowledge about possible exclusion criteria?
Note: I'm not committed about LLMs having consciousness. I'm just wondering about the methodology.
>Suppose we lived in a universe where not all systems that had subjective experience were able to report it
I mean, we know for a fact we do; lock-in syndrome is a thing.
But more generally, yes, none of this is stuff that we 'know'. It's all probabilistic reasoning about things we can't observe directly (conscious experiences besides our own).
Things that have the same physical structure and observed behavior as us are highly likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
Things that have a different physical structure from us (but functionally analogous in some ways) and have the same observed behavior as us are somewhat likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
Things that have physical structures and observed behaviors unlike us (but both functional analogous in some ways) are slightly likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
Things that have physical structures and observed behaviors unlike us, and which are completely analogous to us in any way (eg rocks) are not at all likely to be similar to us in terms of conscious experience.
There's no definitive way to calculate the 'correct' percentages here, but literal thousands of years of discussion and debate and experiment allows us to be somewhat confident about putting things in approximate positions on an ordinal scale.
From there, it's just a question of where on that probability scale you want to start treating things as moral agents, based on the possibility that they might be sentient in a way we'd recognize and care about.
>lock-in syndrome is a thing.
Omg, I overlooked the most obvious example lol.
I think I mostly agree with your conclusion, but putting emphasis on 'sentient in a way we'd recognize and care about'. I think it is reasonable to think about what kinds of systems would share characteristics with us that would be ethically important, and to reason about these systems from analogy with ourselves. Human consciousness is also varied enough that we can observe and study ethically important characteristics (eg. Physical correlates of suffering), so we can make good inferences from that.
The problem is when we start thinking about the possibility of non-humanlike conscious experience. There, I think the problems explained in my previous comment still apply.
I would feel comfortable saying: It's not clear to me how we could know (_even in principle_) if LLMs were conscious, but we can make progress on knowing their status as moral patients.
Maybe my disagreement with the original comment is reduced to wether the commenter is talking about LLMs not being moral patients vs LLMs having no consciousness at all.
Can you be more specific about what you (or Dawkins) thinks is wrong with this formulation? It changes or simplifies a few aspects from Turing's original formulation but not in ways that strike me as relevant. Or is Turing himself what you consider a strawman? I'm having difficulty guessing what you're getting at and I can't read the article to know what Dawkins is getting at either.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was just curious if there are people in AI or philosophy of mind or other relevant fields who are on record as having said that a machine that passes the Turing Test is conscious, and who have since changed their minds.
I'm not accusing Dawkins of strawmanning, since maybe there are such people. But he didn't name any in the article, and so I'm a little suspicious.
A few quick fog o' war notes. I'm traveling at the moment and somewhat discombobulated...
1. Russia is scaling back its Victory Day parade this year. There will be no tanks or military equipment in the parade ("due to the needs of Special Military Operation"). There will be a smaller flyover this year, and 9,000 fewer parade seats. And all except about 25 foreign dignitaries have canceled at the last moment.
2. Igor Girkin, jailed Russian milblogger (who continues to blog from jail—or maybe has a sub blogging for him), complained that all the missile defense systems are clustered around Moscow and Valdai (Putin's residence), and there's none left to defend the infrastructure of Russia...
> As for us — it’s a ‘Trishkin’s caftan’: you can’t stretch air defense across all objects (especially since, naturally, the Valdai residence must be protected first).
Reportedly, there are 23 Pantsir anti-missile systems around Putin's residence in Valdai. This may be slander and untrue, but if it is, it's become common knowledge among Russian milbloggers. Ukrainian intelligence confirms. .
3. Over in Lebanon, Hezbollah is using fiber-optic FPV drones against the IDF. So far, they haven't recreated anything near the level of a Ukrainian kill zone, but there have been at least a couple of dozen IDF casualties, and the IDF has requested that independent entrepreneurs step up with solutions (if they have them), because the fiber-optic FPVs are undetectable (until it's too late).
4. And Hezbollah's Radwan Brigade (which I gather are their drone specialists) destroyed 21 Israeli Merkava tanks within a 24-hour period (not sure if this was during a single engagement). According to Military Watch Magazine...
> Hezbollah’s FPV drones have provided little to no warning when striking, with the aircraft emitting little sound, and proving to be able to bypass the countermeasures of Israeli Army Merkava IV and Merkava V main battle tanks and Namer infantry fighting vehicles. This includes bypassing updated variants of the Trophy active protection system designed for drone defence. Low cost fiberoptic cable-tethered drones are tethered with rocket propelled grenades, and benefit from precision controls that allow them to strike straight to the tank gun opening, the muzzle of the cannon, inside the hatches of armoured vehicles, and other weak points. The drones remain at the lower end of Hezbollah’s arsenals, with the paramilitary group having used both Russian Kornet anti-tank missiles, as well as more advanced Javelin-type non-line of sight anti-tank missiles for longer ranged engagements.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/israel-largest-tank-losses-40yrs-ambushes-21-merkava
5. The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this. Of course, those whose careers are invested in military equipment manufacture are promoting the denialist narrative. Last month, Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall AG, the big German military contractor that's involved in the production of Leopard Tanks, disparaged drones as a technology produced by "housewives with 3D printers", but President Zelenskyy retorted, "If every housewife in Ukraine really can produce drones, then every housewife could be the CEO of Rheinmetall," highlighting the effectiveness of Ukrainian technology.
6. Lots of buzz about Ukraine's Lima jamming system, which was a secret until the Russians admitted it existed. In the first 3 months of 2026, Lima disabled: 26 Kinzhal ballistic missiles ($130M), 33 cruise missiles ($99M), and >10,000 drones ($250M). And since last year, Lima has disabled the guidance systems of 58 of 59 Kinzhal ballistic missiles in total ($290 million). Lima EW has a 300km range and operates by jamming (overwhelming noise), spoofing (injecting false GPS-like signals), and cyberattacks on the missiles' receivers (tricking them into downloading corrupted satellite data, preventing them from updating their navigation after leaving the jamming zone). The system was developed by someone codenamed the Alchemist. Reportedly, he or she is a civilian with no military background who joined Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces in the first days of the Russian invasion in February of 2022. It's unclear whether the Alchemist is a Ukrainian national or a foreign volunteer, but Lima seems to outperform any of the current jamming systems made by the US, and definitely those of Russia.
7. Israel is turning to the US for help for an anti-drone solution, pointedly ignoring Ukraine. But they're having a diplomatic spat with Ukraine over their purchasing Ukrainian wheat from the occupied regions from the Russians. The Israelis are deeply insulted by the suggestion that they're purchasing stolen wheat, while Ukraine claims they have videos and AIS tracking to prove where the ships embarked and their arrival in Israel. Israeli leaders have been dismissive of Ukraine's anti-drone technology, so they're probably not motivated to resolve the wheat issue.
8. And CNN reports that there was much more damage to US military bases in the Gulf than the US DoD (DoW?) let on — including a now irreplaceable AWACs system (because we don't make them anymore). Also, CNN reported that Iranians purchased a Chinese TEE-01B ("Earth Eye") satellite. It's a LEO, rather than a geo-stationary satellite, but it can take high-resolution photos of US bases Gulf-state oil facilities as it flies over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW8fXYWp0Vw
>The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this.
Because we've heard this story so many times. This comes up every decade or two, each time with a new thing that is going to make the tank obsolete. Anti-tank guns didn't do it. Air power didn't do it. ATGMs didn't do it. And I don't think that drones will, either.
And this isn't just for tanks. We've seen this with surface ships half a dozen times. The torpedo. The submarine. The airplane. The guided missile (two or three times), actually. There was talk about Moskva proving the surface ship obsolete, and yet we have had a lot of experience with surface ships vs anti-ship missiles in the last three years, and the surface ship has done very well.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that the tank will never be obsolete. That does happen. But those of us who have memories longer than the current war are really skeptical of "X is obsolete" because of how frequently that claim is wrong. The level of engagement I need to take this even vaguely seriously starts with "this time X really is obsolete, and this isn't like the previous times because..." Anyone worth taking seriously knows about the panic around tanks after 73, and would mention it if only to forestall this objection from other people who do.
You've been here long enough to know that bean has specifically addressed this question before. https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1
But you've also been here long enough to know that you're not welcome here, no matter what name you use. Please go away and never come back.
> The age of tank warfare is over.
Not sure if you're f*cking with your readers (meant in a gentle way - making fun of us) or genuinely think that. That sentence was uttered so often, that it turned into a meme 2-3 years back.
I'm not going to support Papperger's statement, as it is stupidly arrogant (and I even happen to know by sheer coincidence how Rheinmetall has dropped the ball on drone development, letting other small growing companies pick up the ball and, more importantly, all the talent of which quite some worked at RM before. So maybe he's just salty). But tanks are here to stay. There was never any "age of tank warfare" anyway, just combined arms (think: rock paper scissors).
> > The age of tank warfare is over.
> That sentence was uttered so often, that it turned into a meme 2-3 years back.
For the last four years, the old guard has replied to such claims with "you're holding it wrong", with the right way to hold it being:
Step 1: absolutely obliterate the enemy with superior air power
Step 2: roll in with tanks and mop up the remains, if any
And if Ukraine or Russia failed to overrun the enemy with their infantry in step 2 and had their armored vehicles destroyed by ATGMs and, later, by FPV drones, then it must be because they fumbled step 1. Or more broadly, it must be because they're not using modern military tactics ("combined arms"). And "obviously" the tank isn't dead because a modern military would hold it right.
"Obviously" in quotes, because we haven't seen solid proof in the last four years that the tank proponents' argument actually holds. Now if – IF – the reports about Israeli tanks getting disabled by FPV drones turn out to be true, then the air is getting thin for the tank. Nobody can seriously claim that Israel doesn't have a modern military with a highly capable air force, especially compared to Hezbollah.
Sorry, not willing to deep dive again into explaining why tanks are not dead. You should ask yourself: If tanks are so obviously dead, why is still everyone researching, developing, maintaining, buying, and using tanks, *especially* Russia and Ukraine today?
Your argument would be more convincing if at least one of the two would have clearly abandoned them in a war where small, modern drones have become a serious force and neither side has air superiority. And yet both sides keep building/buying tanks.
Ukraine in particular is massively shorthanded on being able to buy, develop industry (because there is no part of Ukraine that is safe from attacks) and generally has to think very hard where and when to invest resources into any system. If they choose to still use tanks, re-evaluate your arguments.
Your Step1-Step2 is a strawman that does not exist, with the first US war in Iraq maybe as a historical exception. That was such a lopsided conflict that nothing can be really learned in regards to our argument.
Edit: to answer your Israeli argument: no army is safe from arrogance and underestimation of the enemy. FPV provide cheap anti-tank capability to the most ragged guerilla force and this has been known for half a decade now. It's on the Israelis organisation of warfare alone that this happened, and not an argument about the end of tanks. Tanks *will* be lost to drones, from now on, forever, just as stealth jets will still be lost to SAM now and then against competent enemies.
For the record, I don't claim that the tank is *dead*; my position is that there are indications that the tank is *dying*.
> why is still everyone researching, developing, maintaining, buying, and using tanks,
Military planners being a few years behind the newest developments isn't exactly an unprecedented situation, particulary if they aren't currently involved in an existential war.
> *especially* Russia and Ukraine today?
But they aren't, not on the same scale as during the earlier stages of the war. Especially Ukraine is investing much, much more into the development and production of drone and missile systems than into heavy armor.
> If [Ukraine] choose to still use tanks, re-evaluate your arguments.
They hardly do. Tank usage isn't non-zero, and tanks still have a bit of utility even in the current state of the Russo-Ukrainian war, but nobody here claimed that tanks have become completely useless.
>but nobody here claimed that tanks have become completely useless.
The quote we're discussing is literally "The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-432/comment/253639075
That sounds quite definitive to me.
I interpret this statement as "tanks won't be playing an important role in future conflicts anymore", not "tanks are literally useless and will never be deployed again".
Fair enough, accepted. I disagree with the assessment that the tank is dying. But discussions about future predictions won't enlighten us, I think, so I'm happy to disagree.
One more theoretical argument against the death of tanks: Not fielding tanks provides your enemy the opportunity to not have to provide any AT-capabilities, enabling them to focus more on whatever you do bring to the battlefield. This alone, I think, will make armies field at least the minimum amount of tanks that create a credible threat.
Thanks. I just came across this in Kyiv Post from last year. It's interesting that Russian milbloggers seem to be aware of current US tank doctrine (or they may be bullshitting). I wasn't aware of it (but I may not have been looking hard enough).
"Milbloggers Ridicule US Army’s Latest Counter-Drone Procedures for Tanks"
(As US armored forces seek technological solutions to protect them from drones, the interim solution suggested by its military planners suggests ignorance of the realities of the battlefield.)
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/56274
> 21 Israeli Merkava tanks within a 24-hour period (not sure if this was during a single engagement). According to Military Watch Magazine...
I'm not sure it's trustworthy. 21 tanks with their crews lost within 24 hours would be the single most devastating loss since October 7. Are there any other sources that confirm this?
Note that they use a picture of a burning tank from the previous war
Well, Military Watch Magazine takes the claim seriously. And Hezbollah has been posting videos of their drones hitting Israeli equipment. Also, remember Ukraine was annihilating Russian tanks by the dozens once they got their APV defenses up and running.
It could also just mean "functionally out of service", with the gun or all the expensive optical systems destroyed. You can just drive or pull this tank back to maintenance, but it is still effectively lost. Even if the tank is unrepairable, the crew is likely to survive. This is the main point of western tank designs - keep crews alive.
This is plausible, in the sense it could've happened without becoming bnational news. However the source used the word "destroyed" (albeit with "reportedly"). On reading the first sentences again, it seems like it's been reported by Hezbollah, so worth taking with a grain of salt.
Propaganda and exaggeration are the first things to assume in war. Additionally, it could be misinterpreted in the same way as "casualty" does not equal a dead soldier.
But also, to support your point, they might have as well lost those tanks and crews. The current idiocy-fuelled right-wing governments of Israel and the US are prone to overestimating their own strength, discounting the value of Ukrainian experience and expertise on all matters involving drones, and straight-up readiness to sacrifice soldiers for their ends because "they signed up for it, amirite?"
I suppose these videos could be AI-generated...
https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/2040519703139950681?s=20
https://x.com/zhao_dashuai/status/2050969884612551113?s=20
https://x.com/YuriPodolyaka/status/2051004039916355990?s=20
Lots more up on Telegram.
Thanks.
First vid: Both tanks hit, but not even remotely a "kill". Sure, one tank is immobilized, second tank potentially lost critical armor plating in the front (or not at all! shallow angle against front plating can result in paint scratches).
Second vid: Blowout panels working as designed. That tank turret is certainly dead, the crew likely "just walked away", the rest of it possibly re-usable with a new turret.
Third vid: most potential for serious damage to tank and crew, I guess.
Tanks are still employed to great effect by Ukraine. Yes, they have to be careful, but they can still blow up a lot of stuff in a very short time.
> And since last year, Lima has disabled the guidance systems of 58 of 59 Kinzhal ballistic missiles
What does this mean? To me, a "ballistic missile" is a missile that doesn't have a guidance system. The term contrasts with "guided missile"!
"Ballistic missile" means it has a coast phase after the engine runs out of fuel and the terminal phase is unpowered. The boost phase still has a guidance system the that can be jammed, and sometimes the terminal phase can be steered a bit aerodynamically, kinda like a smart bomb dropped from an airplane that can aim itself using adjustable tailfins.
Nit: The boost phase of a ballistic missile is usually inertially guided - gyros, accelerometers, and a bit of internal smarts - that can't be externally jammed by anyone who can't do gravity manipulation.
*Some* ballistic missiles use terminal guidance that can in principle be jammed. The smart ones keep the inertial nav running, and if the terminal guidance system starts steering it well outside the inertially-defined kill box then it says "yeah, not buying that" and reverts to pure inertial. It's certainly possible that the Russians were less than fully smart in designing the Kinzhal, but keep in mind that the OP titles these posts "Fog o' War"
I'm surprised to learn that the inertial nav systems are good enough to provide a high level of accuracy. Although if they are, it absolutely makes sense to rely on them rather than making yourself vulnerable to jamming.
And come to think of it, there are other options like celestial navigation that can supplement inertial navigation which seem like they'd be almost as hard to jam.
Current inertial guidance systems are good enough to get within 100-200 meters CEP at intercontinental ranges, or 30 meters for something like a JDAM with a much lower flight time. It did take a lot of work getting there. Including, for the intercontinental version, *extremely* precise mapping of the Earth's gravitational field.
The current Kinzhals are reported to have more terminal guidance and movement capability; specifically rising and diving once or twice to fool SAM-systems into firing at them, which they then avoid by diving and going for the actual target later.
This is a good tactic, since Ukraine is trying to use systems like Patriot only when they are really sure they are going to hit. They have too few of these valuable and expensive systems to fire more than one at one target, so Ukrainian operators really try to wait for the last possible moment to maximize hit potential.
How this works in detail, I don't know. It seems the Kinzhals would need a re-ignitable or second motor to pull this off?
>The current Kinzhals are reported to have more terminal guidance and movement capability; specifically rising and diving once or twice to fool SAM-systems into firing at them, which they then avoid by diving and going for the actual target later.
Do you have a reference for this? I'm curious for more details on how this could work.
>How this works in detail, I don't know. It seems the Kinzhals would need a re-ignitable or second motor to pull this off?
You could do it aerodynamically, the problem is that high-speed aerodynamics aren't very efficient, so doing this is going to cost a lot of speed.
I have no idea how this works. I just read about it in the context of Ukrainian air defense and potentially loss of Patriot batteries. But this is all fog of war stuff.
Is the AWACS plane meaningfully irreplacable? My understanding is that the E-7 is strictly better than the old E-3 and it's just that the USAF hasn't got around to buying them yet.
How fast would the turnaround be on a delivery of new E-7?
But I gathered that they discontinued production of the E-3 (but I'm willing to be corrected).
The USAF is trying to buy them, but there are program troubles and Hegseth et al keep trying to shut it down in favor of space-based systems that nobody else has any confidence in. Fortunately, the guy whose district AWACS lives in is head of the House Appropriations Committee, so Congress keeps telling them to buy the things.
Irreplaceable on a relevant timescale, presumably.
Why have Israeli leaders been dismissive of Ukraine's anti-drone technology?
A: Not Invented Here
B: Israel has provided Ukraine with almost no military assistance, and expects reciprocity
C: The Gulf States can outbid Israel for any purely mercenary assistance from Ukraine
D: Not Invented Here, because that bears repeating.
B: Somewhat early after the invasion, Israel publicly contemplated supporting Ukraine because Iran supplied Russia with Shaheds. Why did that not happen?
The Israelis needed Russia to play nice in Syria.
Basically this. The current Israeli government is basically "Israel first, righteousness second". And sometimes those align, but in this case there are things that Russia can do that would be very inconvenient for Israel, and until recently not much Ukraine could do that would really help *or* hinder Israel.
Hello, again.
>5. The age of tank warfare is over. I don't understand why people are still in denial about this.
Because it has been declared over several times already, at least since the invention of the ATGM. As long as tanks remain capable of fulfilling a job that no other system can through their mobility, survivability, and firepower, armies will put effort into preserving that capability and they won't be going away. Drones are a new threat, and threats always have the upper hand until countermeasures (technology, tactics) have had time to develop. That is just the nature of warfare, an unending game of cat and mouse.
> As long as tanks remain capable of fulfilling a job that no other system can through their mobility, survivability, and firepower, armies will put effort into preserving that capability and they won't be going away.
Hmmm. Except Ukraine and Russia are no longer attempting use tanks the way they've been used since WWII. Because I don't trust myself to remember all the tank talking points, I asked Gemini for a list of the tactical advantages that tanks offer. It gave me a bunch of pro-tank talking points...
1. Firepower and Optics
TANKS: First-Shot Capability: Modern tank battles are frequently decided by which side fires first, with advanced, stabilized targeting systems allowing for high-accuracy engagements at ranges of 3–4 km.
DRONE RESPONSE: super high-accuracy engagement at ranges up to 25 km. Plus continuous detailed surveillance of the the battle space.
TANKS: Targeting Priority: Antitank guided missiles (ATGMs) and enemy tanks are top-priority targets, often necessitating immediate, concentrated fire.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones have the ability to attack on multiple axes. Fiber optic drones are mostly undetectable and unaffected by jamming technologies. And the drone operators can work outside the rage of the tanks.
TANKS: Ammunition Selection: The primary antitank round is the armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS), used to defeat heavy armor through kinetic energy.
DRONE RESPONSE: Use smaller explosive charges directed precisely at the weak points of tank armor. The tank's armor-piercing ammo is useless against APVs and can't reach the operators. And an average APV, even with an explosive payload, is cheaper than tank ammo.
2. Mobility and Maneuver
TANKS: Rapid Maneuver: Fast tanks are used to strike flanks and rear areas, causing confusion and disrupting enemy forward movement.
DRONE RESPONSE: Rapid maneuver with more dimensions to maneuver in. And can cover a distance faster than tanks. And drones have completely stopped enemy forward advances.
TANKS: Bounding Overwatch: A critical tactical movement where one element moves while another provides overwatch (covers) them, ensuring continuous suppression of the enemy.
DRONE RESPONSE: disables tanks before they can provide overreach coverage.
TANKS: Terrain Utilization: Utilizing "hull-down" positions (where only the turret is exposed) or "reverse slope" defenses protects the tank while maximizing its weapon range.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones have a greater range, and this doesn't really matter in drone warfare.
3. Protection and Survivability
TANKS: Armor Configuration: Heaviest armor is placed on the front, dictating that tanks should always face potential threats.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones can attack from all directions
TANKS: Active Protection Systems (APS): Modern systems, like the Trophy system, can detect and neutralize incoming ATGMs and rockets.
DRONE RESPONSE: no solution for fiber optic FPVs as of yet.
TANKS: Dispersion: Tanks spread out to limit the effectiveness of enemy artillery, concentrating only when necessary to attack.
DRONE RESPONSE: Drones can spread out further and control the battle space more completely than tanks.
In the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, tanks have been relegated to the role of mobile artillery. And even that use is beginning to fade as the effective kill zone of drones expands.
I'm sure bronze-age charioteers, medieval armored knights, and 19th-century cavalry felt the same way about their weapons as the modern military does about tanks.
>Except Ukraine and Russia are no longer attempting use tanks the way they've been used since WWII.
That is a very different proposition than "The age of the tank is over".
>I'm sure bronze-age charioteers, medieval armored knights, and 19th-century cavalry felt the same way about their weapons as the modern military does about tanks.
You can ask chatbots all day, but the reality is on the Ukrainian battlefield, and reality says that tanks remain in high demand among the parties that currently know best in the world what works and what doesn't.
Ukraine continues to build and import MBTs and IFVs:
https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0003eae
"Russia’s defence sector has significantly increased production of T-90 main battle tanks, from approximately 90-110 tanks per year in 2020-2021, to 280-300 tanks in 2024, which represents an effective tripling of output. "
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/russia-tripled-production-t90m-keep-up-wartime-attrition
Russia has long-term plans to restore its inventory of MBTs to pre-invasion levels, meaning the thousands of Cold War MBTs that have mostly been destroyed in Ukraine by now.
https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1977179914399801586
It will eventually be true that the age of tank warfare is over. But what we're seeing now is just one side's report on a conflict involving drone-warfare systems and tactics that have evolved through four years of brutal war between clever, technically-adept people, and Israel's first use of their best guess as to what an anti-drone system for tanks would look like.
1964 (Vietnam) and 1973 (Sinai) were both cited as proof that the age of (manned) air warfare was over, because SAMs. The guys with airplanes invented Iron Hand and Wild Weasel and SEAD, and now fifty years later the age of manned aerial warfare is still going strong.
> […] and Israel's first use of their best guess as to what an anti-drone system for tanks would look like.
On the other hand, small attack drones have barely seen four years of serious development, have made incredible advances in that time [1], and show no signs of having reached their full potential. It isn't out of the question that the offensive improvements of drones outpace the defensive improvements of heavy armor. Sometimes, military technologies really do become obsolete:
- spears
- swords
- bows
- crossbows
- knight's armor
- chariots
- catapults and trebuchets
- stone fortresses
- cavalry
- carrior pigeons
- sailing ships
- battleships
- high-speed nuclear bombers (mostly)
[1] Just compare early drones, which dropped grenades with 3D-printed fins, to today's FPV drones with multi-kg warheads, 10s of km of range, and jamming-resistant, non-line-of-sight control through fiber-optics.
Surface-to-air missiles in 1973 had a decade of combat experience under their belt, hadn't reached anything close to their full potential, and still haven't ended the age of the manned combat aircraft. Because the countermeasures *also* hadn't reached anything close to their full potential in 1973.
Trophy with a quick anti-drone patch, is not the "full potential" of drone countermeasures.
Fascinating stuff as always.
No surprise that a former comedian and live-TV personality would have some skillz in barking back at a snarky comment.
As a German, I was deeply embarrassed by those Papperger comments. But it does show that he is very concerned about the reality on the ground, that the "gold plated", artisanal solutions are going out of fashion so quickly after they've brought reliable profits for his company for so long. I bet he would have liked some of that 90B € pie, rather than it going to the Ukrainian housewives.
As an American I’m deeply embarrassed a couple times a week on average.
I've stopped watching Trump too closely. This seems to feel better.
Of course, a lot creeps into AI news, and the contortions around how the administration is treating Anthropic make me cringe a lot...
And I'm sure that after the war, those Ukrainian housewives will start profitable businesses delivering Paska, Korovai, Pampushky, and Pyrizhky by drone.
OTOH I'm sure Ukrainians will be happy if they never have to hear another drone in their lives again, especially frontline vets. Imagine having PTSD from what used to be children's toys.
Back already?
I've seen a movie of 2022, fiction, in which some outrageous sexual violence was committed.
I like some help in making sense of it, but
do not read this if you can't stand this topic! My own blood still boils. I warn you again, I just make this sentence longer so you can spare yourself the distress, and with the next sentence it's too late. In short: of a group of fourteen and fifteen year old boys, one is raped by two good looking, strong, super cool as well as totally straight appearing twenty year old guys after they deliberately filled him up with alc and drugs on a party, while being disgustingly friendly to him, and then sneakily seperated him from the others. Incapacitated as he was, he was at some point rescued, though too late, by a friend whom the attackers immediately told that he should be silent about it, as that would be better for him and his raped friend. And indeed, later the victim forbids his friend any action that could make anyone know what happened, because... well, obviously he doesn't want to be the emasculated or "gay" victim in everyone's eyes. The perfidiousness of those rapists overall modus operandi makes me angry above words.
Now, I don't question the reality of "straight" men having sex with men. I know first hand that some totally straight appearing men do have, behind the back of even their closest friend circle, gay sex.
But I do not understand why attractive men would rape men.
One explanation might be that they aren't interested in rape per se, only in gay sex, but do not want to out themselves. But why not having consensual and just secret gay sex then? Maybe because none of them want to admit to himself his homo- or bisexuality, because of internalized homophobia. So they come up with some reason why some guy deserves to be taught a lesson or something.
Another explanation might be that they really are interested in rape per se, gay or otherwise, for the reason that it makes them feel powerful or as if they get revenge against the world for making them feel so insignificant or something. After all, many people who appear like they have everything and should be happy suffer from self-worth issues.
Or they are just sadistic. But that's incomprehensible to me.
It's like, I just want to believe some unhappiness is inside people like that, because I can't stand the thought of them living happily ever after, and probably being proud of themselves for being successful with their doing.
---
One afterthought: Maybe this modus operandi is the cause of the biblical prohibition of gay sex, if straight men who made that prohibition did so under the assumption that one participant in gay sex just has to be not willing.
Have you never seen "Your Friends and Neighbors"? One of the all time great monologues about just this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4LNIshI4o
No, I haven't, and if you can't honestly tell me that they ripped him to pieces after that speech, I better won't.
This scene seems like an instance of last century downplaying of male on male rape. Just imagine the movie makers had let that character been a rapist of a girl -- it wouldn't have entered cinemas then.
Like all such comments over shock media, it happened that way because the movie-makers wanted it to happen that way.
Because patriarchy conditions them so that they could never acknowledge their sexual desire for other men in a way that didn’t involve dominance and violence.
That I wonder.
If you’re really wanting an answer to this, the first published book of queer theory, French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem's 1972 work Homosexual Desire, is where I would look. And also Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vols I & II together. Maybe Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.
Thanks, I let AI tell me about it, and it seems to be the kind of philosophy that's unsurprisingly too Foucault-style-like for me :)
They’re actually very different books and Foucault writes in a very approachable way. If you’ve never read him, you should try. I honestly think he doesn’t write at a level much higher than say, germ.
I don't understand why the gayness is relevant. Why would attractive men rape women?
It's relevant to me because I can come up with additional explanations I can't come up with in the straight rape cases.
I'm not sure why you're upset about this, it's probably just a badly written book where people behave in implausible ways.
I think this happens a lot; authors writing rape scenes who are really just working through their own hangups or fantasies or politics, who fail to make the rapist's motivation seem plausible. I think many authors are walking around with bizarrely flawed ideas of why rapists rape, and they fill in the gaps with stuff that doesn't make sense.
No, I don't believe that straight men go around raping other men to "show dominance" or something, I think that makes no sense at all.
Yes, I thought about that. Like, what is the movie makers idea about homosexuality and rape.
But, though I don't like to, I believe things like that happen. Even parents parent, even rape their small children.
And this movie made me think about that specific scenario.
> No, I don't believe that straight men go around raping other men to "show dominance"
I didn't say that, but I wonder. Why "I fuck you!"? It's a common verbal threat. At least in Germany in some extremely masculine circles.
Well, it's worth observing that the classical perspective was that taking the male role in same-sex coitus did indeed demonstrate dominance over the other party. I'm not aware that it was seen as something you'd do _for that purpose_, but the effect existed. It wouldn't be insane for someone to try to achieve it intentionally.
I... just think it would be insane, and indeed impossible.
Let me be explicit. I do not think that a straight male could obtain and maintain the raging erection required to penetrate the hairy anus of an unprepared, unwilling, unlubricated male partner.
Fourteen-year-old boys are not known for their particularly hairy anuses. Indeed, the phrase "beardless youths" was invented as a euphemism for the sort of males that otherwise-straight men could easily get it up with, by people who clearly had a use for such a euphemism.
From the POV of the person doing the anal penetrating, does a 14yo boy look *that* different than an 18yo girl?
I get you, but I put "straight" purposefully in quotes, and talked purposefully about appearing straight.
There are non straights among officials straight men.
But it's fiction. Asking "why would they do this" doesn't make sense because they're not real people. It didn't actually happen!
All sorts of awful stuff happens in fiction, and all you can really say is "the person who wrote this / directed this was a terrible human being."
Yes, it's fiction. I just believe it to be realistic, just like at least some movies about small children or women being raped.
Why would bad things happening in fiction reflect badly on the authors?
"Space Hitler blew up a star system with one trillion people."
Did that make me a bad person?
> All sorts of awful stuff happens in fiction, and all you can really say is "the person who wrote this / directed this was a terrible human being."
Just to point out that not everything written in fiction is there to titillate the author (or reader). People write fiction involving appalling things as a way to explore their own difficult experiences, for example. All I can say when I read something like this is "the person who wrote this was someone who found it helpful for them in some way". What way that is (financial/emotional/psychological/whatever) is their business, not mine, and if I find it uncomfortable/distressing/disturbing, the "back" button is there for a reason (or "off" button, if I'm watching a film). I don't have to stay and read/watch.
I accept this as a valid correction for the general case.
By this logic you could say fiction in general can never tell us anything meaningful. I think there's almost always something to be gained by looking deeply into a work of fiction, even if it's dark, even if the author never thought about your interpretation.
I agree that there's "something" to be gained. It sounds like the thing OP took away from it was somehow "this really happened and I'm mad about it" and I found that alarming enough to want to comment disagreeing.
'It sounds like the thing OP took away from it was somehow "this really happened and I'm mad about it" '
I didn't mean it that way but possibly wasn't clear enough. I just know that things like that happen between men and women, and for some reason, maybe because I'm male, the man on man case upset me in a special way.
I actually thought it might be a good movie for male teenagers to see, just in case they could better relate and those that would at some point become rapist could be detered. Just an idea... I admit don't understand why someone attractive would rape.
Note that pederasty (adult men having sex with barely-postpubescent boys) is a different orientation/kink/fetish/whatever than what we would now call normal MSM homosexuality. Historically, there has always been a large population of otherwise-straight men who desired sex with teenaged boys, sometimes as a substitute when the actually-preferred female sexual partners were unavailable or off-limits, sometimes as a thing desired in its own right.
If this story had a contemporary setting, and it wasn't e.g. an all-boys school or something, then "substitute when female sexual partners are not available" is probably not in play; the allegedly good-looking and super-cool young men could presumably get actual girlfriends in their late teens if they wanted them. But again, straight men just plain wanting a side order of pederasty is a thing.
And it's a thing that in the modern Western world can only be achieved by some sort of rape, statutory and/or forcible. If you're going to do the thing that gets you locked up for twenty years even if you do all the grooming and seduction and whatnot. then why waste time with all that tedious grooming and seduction and just take what you want, trust to your powers of intimidation to avoid the consequences?
Plusl, while Engine overstates things with "rape is about asserting dominance", that's sometimes true even if it isn't always true. It would certainlu seem to fit this scenario.
Yeah... I might not have thought well enough about the age aspect. If it's like pedophilia then it would be like an urge. I can imagine it to be hard to have to stand it, but I still have the feeling appropriate to someone being seriously evil when he acts on it.
It’s not really a different orientation. You can’t really find a gay liberation activist pre 1970s that wasn’t at least a little bit on the pederasty bandwagon. It’s just that homosexuality started becoming socially acceptable while pederasty did not, so now gay men repress that aspect of their sexuality as adeptly as straight men do.
I think there is a difference, in that while most gay men would find pederasty appealing if it were at all respectable, so do a lot of straight men who find sex with other adult men to be thoroughly unappealing.
That’s also an aspect of self repression. Pederasty was socially respectable in Ancient Greece because it didn’t threaten the patriarchal/heteronormative reproductive and legal structures of property relations. There was a defined time limit to it - when the younger person reached adulthood and became a legally independent entity in their society, the partnership had to stop. And these relationships were never understood to be replacements for having a wife. If two adult males were allowed to come together in lifelong partnership, their entire system of lineage and familial succession would be wrecked. So you see immense taboos on it.
However, there were notable exceptions that prove it was more of a taboo instead of an absence of desire - the Sacred Band of Thebes, for instance, the all male all adult elite fighting force of Thebes founded on the idea that a man will fight hardest if his lover is next to him on the battlefield - each soldier was in a sexual and romantic partnership with one other. However, this was an arrangement only ever consummated while outside of the city - while at home, they were expected to be as heterosexually oriented as everyone else.
Absent social conditioning, human sexual desire is as polymorphous as bonobo sexuality. We socially condition each other into only desiring what is favorable for societal reproduction, however - this is the technological aspect of culture as a tool. Realizing this makes a lot of other gendered dynamics we create and enforce make sense.
It wasn't just Ancient Greece though, When Jeremy Bentham wrote his classic defense of MSM homosexuality (18th-century England), the practice was a capital offense regardless of the ages of the participants, with very limited social tolerance in practice. But he, and almost everybody else, assumed that MSM homosexuality would invariably involve "beardless youths", that it was nigh-inconceivable that adult men would want to have sex with *each other*.
Which was factually incorrect, but pretty clearly reflects their observation of a world where pederasty was a fairly common "vice" whereas adult male homosexuality was so rare as to be largely unnoticed, even though both versions would get you hauled before a judge who would *usually* find an excuse not to execute you but would still ruin your life one way or another.
It seems to be nigh-universally true that there are a rare few men who prefer sex with other adult men, but a great many men who are up for sex with adolescent boys if they think they can get away with it. And I'm pretty sure that most of the latter then go home to their wives, who they are also up for having sex with.
But it wasn’t rare or uncommon at all. Lumberjack camps, cowboys, sailors, universities, monasteries, militaries, prisons, etc. - more or less any homosocial environment before the advent of on demand high definition digital pornography, was always rife with same sex sexuality under the surface, which had to be constantly punished and persecuted. Freud documented this, articulating that the creation of the archetypal “successful” male meant the creation of psychological mechanisms to suppress the same-sex attraction within man’s psyche and turn the resulting internal neurotic tensions towards prosocial endeavors and striving.
Guy Hocquenghem comments on this in the first book of queer theory, Homosexual Desire, untangling psychology’s strangled way of speaking around this desire not allowed to be named: “There are drives of desire which all of us have felt and which nevertheless do not affect our daily conscious existence. That is why we cannot come to terms with what we believe about our own desire. There is a social mechanism forever wiping out the constantly renewed traces of our buried desires. … The establishment of homosexuality as a separate category goes hand in hand with its repression. It is therefore no surprise to find that anti-homosexual repression is itself an indirect manifestation of homosexual desire. … We find the greatest charge of latent homosexuality in those social machines which are particularly anti homosexual - the army, the school, the church, sport, etc. At the collective level, this sublimation is a means of transforming desire into the desire to repress.”
If you are up for reading a memoir, go read Before Night Falls by Cuban exile and poet Reinaldo Arenas, depicting his upbringing in rural, pre-electricity, mud hut 1940s Cuba and the realities of what human sexual development actually is on the outskirts of civilization, where the social mechanisms restraining desire are not quite so well defined. I promise the first half of the book will make you question quite a lot of what you think you knew about human sexuality, which in modernity is largely the study of “civilized” subjects.
Rape is less about sexual satisfaction, but about asserting dominance over the victim. Consensual sex can fulfill that desire at most imperfectly.
How do you know this? How would we even find out?
We find out through psycholgy. I know it because I read about it. For example here:
https://titleix.sfsu.edu/myths_facts
"Rape and sexual assault are crimes of violence and control that stem from a person’s determination to exercise power over another. "
You linked to someone asserting the claim. This is a common claim, and a very strong one, so I'd like to know how we know this? Since I'm not familiar with this literature, can you explain how this was determined?
For example, what experiments or observations were used to determine that this is always and everywhere the case? Are attractive 20 year olds and not-so-attractive 60 year olds actually equally likely to be victims of rape in similar situation? (Say, in the sack of a city by poorly-controlled soldiers, or during a home-invasion robbery?)
I don't know, but it seems unlikely. Yes, there exist rape victims who are 80 year old nuns, but I'm asking whether the inducement is only power or whether sex is also part of the inducement. What data could we collect to get a good answer?
Is it really true that 0% of the decision by a perp to commit rape has anything to do with sexual attraction or desire for sex? That seems like a really extraordinary claim. (Is this supposed to also be true for date rape and getting girls drunk?)
In fact, this seems more like an article of faith, or a tenet of a widely-believed ideology.
Ok this is taking a weird turn, I'm out, sorry.
If it's just a kink, acting it out would be much worse than an urge -- like John Schilling made me think -- , though I don't know where exactly the difference or line between those is.
Dominance and submission is a part of all sexual dynamics. it’s never made sense to me to delineate that rape is more about power than sexual desire… why must they be mutually exclusive? Or in the words of Janelle Monae, “Everything is about sex; except sex, which is about power.”
"Beautiful Beings". It's an islandic one.
Regarding apps to 'solve debate':
1. Refutree in particular needs an option to 'stipulate' to an opponent's premise, thus cauterizing one branch.
2. More generally, I enjoy conducting debates with AI chatbots. (There are many examples of this in my Substack - either articles or links in the Notes.) Such debates frequently lead to my learning new facts from the AI, or in my realization that my logic was maybe not as airtight as I thought. But one problem is that the debates often leave loose threads behind. I think there would be a market for an app which integrates a debate-organizing app with an AI-chatbot harness. Of course, it would need a system prompt or (more likely) some significant RL training of the AI to make it perform well within the harness.
1. I am not sure what you mean by that. But it could do with meta-level.commentary rather than just agreement or disagreement.
How many learning disabilities are like autism, in that some sufferers are non-verbal and need life long care and some are functioning adults?
Are there people with ADHD so severe they need long term care?
Mel Baggs was autistic, I am curious if any other conditions are similar.
Next ACX Bangkok meeting on Sunday 10 May, 1pm, at Tibet Gate on Sukhumvit 33. All are welcome!
Would anyone be interested in brain-washing me? It would have to be a topic like aliens or racial pseudoscience where I am broadly skeptical but don't have a very thorough mental model against it. I believe brain-washing happens but the term is used rather promiscuously.
Reading the comments, I think you would have better luck finding a willing partner for this in a BDSM forum, lol.
I can’t see any sexy angle to this myself but it takes all sorts
Well if I could take you away to some place and keep you captive for long enough, we could give it a try
Although I have a sneaking suspicion that most brainwashing is self-inflicted
"Although I have a sneaking suspicion that most brainwashing is self-inflicted"
Even easier. Take him to an isolated place, hand him a brain sponge, and meanwhile you head off to the pub.
AI chatbots seem to be doing quite a good job at it, Grok first among equals apparently:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c242pzr1zp2o
That’s yourself with a force multiplier.
If I'm trapped in a room and someone wants to use AI to help optimize the best brainwashing strategy, this is acceptable. Deepfakes, persuasive female voice, &c.
I've read a few interesting cases where this went one way or the other. Some interesting reading/listening on this subject to get you started:
1. The Antihumans episode of the Martyrmade podcast. It talks about what the communists did to the Ukrainians, Romanians, and others. This is the best argument for legitimate brainwashing through persistent torture if you stick with it long enough.
2. Painfotainment episode from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It talks about a ritualistic morality play torture to get the victim to confess that was employed in Europe in the middle ages. This is more than the brute force "torture gets results" approach of the Soviets. Here, they're using a whole structure to support the torture where it ends when the victim accepts the frame and invites absolution through death ... in front of a crowd.
3. Any of the books about the Nexium cult or escapees from Scientology. The key here is to get the victim to repeat lies to others and try to force them to believe those lies. It also helps if you have a narrative the person wants to believe, and if you start with someone who is already at rock bottom. They might be successful in other ways, but if there's some source of ultimate failure in their lives, you have a potential victim.
4. Elizabeth Smart's book telling her story of her kidnapping. This is a good example of how an attempted brainwashing can totally fail. The perpetrators did everything in the playbook, including repeated, prolonged humiliation, starvation, thirst, daily rape, forced intake of drugs, etc.
5. JK Rowling's "The Ickabog", while fiction, is a manual for how to take all contrary evidence for your worldview and turn it to your advantage. The idea isn't to defend against contrary evidence by explaining it away, but rather to co-opt it such that any contrary ideas actually reinforce your narrative. Do this enough and the victims start doing this on their own.
Taken together these examples demonstrate some consistent features about brainwashing:
1. It takes time
2. It requires close contact with a strong leader or lead brainwasher
3. It's easier if the victim is initially attracted to the brainwasher's positive message
4. It's easier if the victim is prepared by a feeling of despair and life circumstances that prevent escape through means other than what the brainwasher presents to them
5. It's more difficult if the victim has some other strong foundation of belief
6. The more people involved, the better; isolate a small group, get them to repeat the narrative, punish unbelievers, use every setback as an opportunity to strengthen the narrative
I suspect an attempt to get brainwashed like this will be difficult to achieve, unless you're doing it because you're truly desperate to escape your life and are willing to radically transform yourself as the only path forward.
This is really interesting, I guess I had in mind a kind of Chinese prisoner situation, which is how the phrase originated, right? Ludovic Kennedy in 10 Rillington Place explains how it is that Timothy Evans confessed to the murder of his wife and baby daughter, detailing how the police interrogation was tantamount to brainwashing, Kennedy uses the Chinese playbook to go through Evans’s state of mind (this was the case that led to capital punishment being abolished in the UK). So yeh we can’t replicate a conversion to Scientology but a more brute force brainwashing might be possible. No R though please, B Civil - I’m sure you’ll live up to your name.
You’re off the hook. I couldn’t possibly do such a thing …not even in just.
There's a former FBI hostage negotiator who wrote some books about this strategy. Something like, "get the truth", I can't remember the title exactly. Basically, they would focus on the here and now, not talk about alternatives with the hostage taker, and present themselves as the only option for getting out of the situation unharmed.
He said it was important that they not strictly lie to the target, but that it also was important that they keep the target from thinking about the larger picture outside of what they presented to them. It was an adversarial situation that they presented as cooperative, and that's how they got people to turn. (Among other techniques.)
Never Split The Difference from Chris Voss, right?
That sounds right, though like I said I'm pretty sure he had two books.
I'm always a bit wary recommending books like that, because there's a certain amount of 'woo' embedded on their systems that often does not replicate. In this case, it's a good guide to how people operationalize/systematize manipulation through discourse.
I suppose it's analogous to hypnotism where there is an interior and exterior component. Some sort of dominance dance where you back down in response to a challenge.
Are you in the US?
Yes
If anyone wants to fly me out there happy to discuss. How long do you think you'd need? Can't wait to fill out the card on the plane - purpose of visit? Brainwashing. Are you a member of the communist party? Not yet.
I keep getting ads for this website. Pretty sure it's made by an agentic AI gone wrong. Anyway, thought people here might find it interesting or have some thoughts:
https://gijane.com/
To respond to someone's comment that this looks like clickbait: Yeah, I realize it looks that way, all i can say is, it's not, at least not from me. I'd describe it more, but I can't even properly paraphrase what's going on in it - it's got the AI dream-like thing where everything seems legit as you skim it, until you stop to think about what you just read. Or i just don't know enough about orbifolds. Anyway, weird someone has apparently given an ai money to spend on ads, not sure what's going on.
Here's my Refutree, a direct challenge to Lukianoff and the "Free Speech Culture" absolutists. I welcome the best principled arguments against it:
"People that explicitly express overt hateful bigotry, a violation of our universal moral TABOOS, must face severe social consequences and ostracism out of polite society, or their hate will normalize. We must also enforce a 'moral guilt by association' for those that sanitize their hateful taboo views. By allowing people to clarify their views and apologize, we can prevent this from becoming a version of "cancel culture"."
https://refutree.com/d/z0OV6NGi-Z
>Since the Civil Rights Movement, 'overt hateful bigotry' has been TABOO
I'm pretty sure if you provided a definition of "overt hateful bigotry" I could find you a post-Civil Rights mainstream comedy performance partaking in it. In the meantime, enjoy the early 90's comedy stylings of Chris Rock . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
>The KKK was marginalized and defeated by making their hateful ideology taboo and very costly (socially, economically, etc.).
...no, the KKK was defeated by a coordinated assault by J Edgar Hoover's FBI. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/bi-ku-klux-klan-j-edgar-hoover-lyndon-johnson/672194/ (Let's throw that fact against Points 3 and 4 and see what's left of them.)
>Distinguish between subjective offense (which is partisan and open to individual interpretation) and a Shared Moral Violation (which reflects a broad, trans-tribal consensus and warrants consequence).
The trick is, if you have to distinguish it, it's always the subjective one. By definition, Shared Morality does not get violated.
>The Open Door: The goal of consequence must be correction, not permanent destruction; always offer a path to redemption.
How are you going to do that? Are you going to treat anyone who holds a grudge after an apology as an offender themselves? If so, this hypothetical culture will shatter like a dropped china plate of marbles and peanut brittle.
I'm questioning where our universal moral taboos originate from. For example, is a society that endorses abortion propagating violent ideas? Is aborting a mentally disabled baby bigoted if you wouldn't have aborted a normal baby? Is it bigotry to be anti-japanese if you live in Nanking in 1938? I don't see any philosophical reasoning for this, it just seems like a way to justify a particular set of moral values we hold right now.
Neither bigotry not abortion is a good example of a universal taboo.
Agreed re: abortion. And I describe our 'universal moral taboo' as 'overt, hateful bigotry'. In my Guide to Moral Taboos, I outlined a framework that explains how we can assess harmful speech and differentiate more everyday/casual racism from this overt hateful bigotry. https://elevin11.substack.com/p/lawful-but-awful-a-guide-to-moral (this is part 1 but I share the framework in part 3, along with the results from a survey that somewhat validates these views)
It can only be one of Our and Universal.
Yes, more accurate to say ~universal. I think probably ~80% of people agree on these, broadly speaking.
You seem to be thinking entirely in terms of the contemporary US. Bigotry was ubiquitous in the ancient world -- everyone thought their tribe was best.
In what sense are they universal if some people are comfortable violating them
Why is 'TABOOS' capitalized
What constitutes 'hateful bigotry', is it different than normal bigotry
For people that don't consider ostracism from 'polite society' a significant deterrent, do you have anything else in mind, or is the plan here that the taboo is *not* universal but just applies to people who aren't lumpenproles
More generally what moral foundation is this even operating from
1. They're ~universal in that the vast majority of Americans believe they are morally wrong and socially unacceptable. I think people feeling comfortable violating them is a relatively new phenomenon, but I know those views are not widely held nor are most comfortable expressing that hate publicly. A good short-hand for this: if an employee openly announced that they were KKK or a Nazi and espoused all of their hateful ideologies, in the vast majority of instances, would their employer have to fire them? Even if they were superb employees in the office and the owner was somewhat sympathetic to their hate, it's realistic to assume that the employees and/or customers would say "you have to choose us or the avowed hateful bigot" and the employer would get rid of the bigot.
2. I capitalize TABOO (or my autocorrect does now) because it's the operative word I'm trying to mainstream as it helps label the issue and also implies the action that must be taken to keep these behaviors from becoming socially acceptable.
3. Some people may be fine to live as social pariahs. There were pockets of America where white supremacists lived in a sort of circular economy. If these hateful bigots want to do the same, that's fine. But I think that via a "moral guilt by association," they can be cut off from most of polite society, and at least from there they can't cause nearly as much harm to the rest of us.
4. I think this blends a number of different foundations, including Rule utilitarianism, Duty-based deontology, and Epistemic hygiene. Ultimately, I think this aligns to institutional stability and objective accountability.
> They're ~universal in that the vast majority of Americans believe they are morally wrong and socially unacceptable.
At what point in time? Once it was thought to be morally wrong to associate with Chinese.
Prior to October 7th, almost nobody could go out and explicitly say "kill all the [blanks]" or celebrate an assassination or terrorist attack and keep their job. The taboos eroded slowly over decades, and then boiled over after 10/7. We must revert to 10/6/2023, and then slowly start to retreat further back to undo the "reverse racism" that DEI "oppressor vs oppressed" frameworks created permission structures for.
It's still taboo to explicitly say "kill all the [blanks]", and nobody but the egelordiest of edgelords does that in public. But it has always been popular to point at people who are perhaps unfairly or over-harshly criticizing the blanks and say "what they *really* mean is to kill all the [blanks], they're violating the taboo, we must all shun them!". Which in turn begets "When they say to shun them, they *really* mean to kill all the [anti-blanks]..."
Knock it off already.
The point is that when the edgelords do it in public and don't get ostracized for it, the taboo erodes and that hate normalizes.
A few months ago there was a chant "we support Hamas here". There was media outrage. Nobody actually got punished. This week it happened again. It didn't make the news. It'll be fully tolerated before we know it.
You're extending my argument beyond the limiting principles I've set. You can argue that the those limits won't be abided by, or that the violations are so rare that they're not meaningful. But you should also acknowledge what happens if this type of hate is not made TABOO and socially punished. If we see the trendline continue where more people not just think that political violence and terrorism are acceptable, but openly express that view, we'll see that view normalize, and the violence and terror will follow. Or do you disagree?
...(1)
Alright, let's go to point 4, which I think is the heart of it. There's a technical issue here and a practical one.
(4) It is possible to uphold taboos in a principled way that does not violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
Technical: Just because something is possible does not mean it is probable or that we should do it. It might be possible to uphold these taboos with succumbing to cancel culture/wokism or legal penalties but it's also possible to bet it all on, like, black 32 on the roulette wheel and get a 35x return. Possible merely tells us the odds are somewhere between 0.001% and 99.999%. Those imply very different actions.
Practically: What went wrong with wokism and, if we reestablish the stronger form of many of these taboos, how would we prevent wokism/PC culture/cancel culture's reoccurrence? Allan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind" almost 40 years ago decrying proto-wokeness and he was a homosexual Harvard professor. It's not as if there were no responsible, credible, and respectable criticisms of this failure mode. Instead, there's 40 years of discourse decrying it, critiquing it, and all but begging for it to be reversed. It did not.
I understand and agree that the social taboos and discourse we experienced in the 90s and 2000s is significantly better than what we experience now. I suspect, however, that I was far more bothered and disturbed by the social and discourse taboos than we had in the 2010's. I perceive current social and discourse taboo norms to be dramatically better than they were in the 2010s. I concur that it would be better to return to the norms of the 90s and it would be best to develop better norms than existed in the 90s. What changes or mechanisms do you propose that would prevent us from backsliding into wokism again? What guarantees are there that this will work. If the guarantees are that we can resolve this by reasonable discussion and discourse, there is a voluminous literature on that exact corrective mechanism failing.
Or, on very simple terms, for someone who flipped from Obama to Trump in significant part due to this, what guarantees are there that the Dems/Left have actually changed? The fact that it's possible is insufficient.
(1) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will
Were you expecting Trump and his supporters to restore free speech, or enact their own cancellations in the opposite direction? Which do you think happened?
I wanted Trump to restore free speech, I think he broadly did that from 2016-2024, there was a "vibe shift" over his first term and....somewhat of the Biden term, it's a mixed bag. Now they're pretty clearly just beating down the other side.
And, like, speech is one thing, but pretty clearly something happened in terms of the stakes people care about, which is "who's losing their job." In the 2010s, lots of right-wingers lost their jobs, especially guys in left-wing spaces, Brendan Eich being the continual poster child. Starting about 12 months ago though, a lot of USAID employees, federal employees, scientists, medical guys, just a whole bunch of left-coded industries got hit for pretty clearly ideological reasons. Meanwhile, while I'm sure certain industries, like tech, are hardly right-wing friendly, they're a lot better than they were 5-10 years ago.
We can debate the edge cases but I think there's pretty clearly been a shift in who's getting fired. And, while I'd much rather my political outgroup get fired than my political ingroup, a lot of my friends are in my political outgroup and I would prefer if no one got fired for their political views. I think that would be good. So I try to keep my eyes open for genuine shoots of moderation and an opportunity to get to the good place where no one gets fired for political beliefs. Unfortunately, both online and in private, I get the feeling the majority of people calling for moderation would not consider Trump and his group not, um, within the bounds of proper society.
Do you think nobody should get fired for their "political beliefs"? If somebody got fired for celebrating/endorsing political violence, is this bad or necessary? I'd argue it's the latter (in the cases that are clear cut).
If it's not performed while they're on the job, they should not face punishment through their job. Otherwise, in demanding they only say work-appropriate things while off the clock, you're demanding they work for free.
I think it's possible to uphold taboos, although I'm not sure Refutree hits upon the magic formula for it. (It might, but I can't tell; I can't visit the site because it's blocked by the provider here due to being a "newly registered domain".)
To answer an intermediate question: we indeed might want to. The main reason I see is spam. Imagine wanting to have a serious discussion where you crowdsource ideas that help you make some important and timely but topic-spanning decision, but when you submit the CFP, someone keeps bringing up some "taboo subject" and insists everyone consider it before moving on to the decision, on pain of censorship accusation. Your options at this point are bleak; you can cut that person's mic and look like a censorweasel; preface with a list of "what will not be discussed" and look like a censorweasel who's also prepared; you can ignore it and look like a pocket-censorweasel; or you can address that issue either at object level or discuss why it is or isn't relevant, and miss the deadline for your timely decision.
You can try to prioritize taboos away, but that sometimes doesn't work either. Most people might think, say, the Shah's legitimacy or Carter's handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis is relevant to the current Iran war, relative to military spending, oil prices, Trump's war aims, or the role of Israel, which would justify spending more time on the latter, but is there an objective metric for prioritizing? What if something that happened during the hostage crisis really did provide a key for resolving the matter? Can you show that the War doesn't hinge on some "damn fool thing in Syria" so definitively that you can justify automatically shutting down anyone who brings up Syria?
You might get around this by democratizing the discussion process and having everyone vote on what's worth discussing, but what if the topic is what led to some disaster in space development, the vast majority appear to want to discuss NASA's reputation as a good-faith development agency, but the minority is some scientist at the end of the table who wants to point out a fault with the O-rings?
One common method for deciding which project society puts its material resources to, is to let individuals within that society own those resources, and let them choose any project they want, no matter how crackpot that project is; the only catch is that if they're the only one who picks it, they're the only source of resources.
When it comes to debate, the scarce resource I notice is the participants' attention. My question would be whether Refutree employs that approach.
"When it comes to debate, the scarce resource I notice is the participants' attention. My question would be whether Refutree employs that approach."
Not sure what you mean here but Refutree appears to demand substantially more attention, not less. Here's essentially what I saw:
P1. Since the Civil Rights Movement, 'overt hateful bigotry' has been TABOO aka socially unacceptable in the US (and much of the West).
P2. Taboos only remain taboo if they are enforced.
P3. In the US, where there cannot be legal consequences for speech, the only way to uphold taboo speech ("lawful but awful") is via social consequences.
P4. It is possible to uphold taboos in a principled way that does not violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
P5. The KKK was marginalized and defeated by making their hateful ideology taboo and very costly (socially, economically, etc.). Not only were they fired from their jobs, nobody was able to publicly associate with them or they'd face their own ostracism ("moral guilt by association").
P6. The 4 Principles to Restore and Uphold our Universal Moral Taboos are: 1. The Red Line: Limit actionable taboos to overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence. 2. The Consensus Test: Distinguish between subjective offense (which is partisan and open to individual interpretation) and a Shared Moral Violation (which reflects a broad, trans-tribal consensus and warrants consequence). 3. The Private Mechanism: Enforce standards through civil society (employers, associations), never government coercion. 4. The Open Door: The goal of consequence must be correction, not permanent destruction; always offer a path to redemption.
Basically, if we break one big argument up into six-ish subarguments and then further break those down, eventually we will resolve them and we'll have a definitive winning argument that everyone agrees with.
If I had to guess on the failure mode, I would expect people to just bail when the debate is not going in their preferred direction or just going somewhere useful. Barring some enforcement mechanism, like a strong boss or a shared financial stake, demanding high time/attention investment into a system with no guaranteed return is...meh. Plus, I feel like I've seen this thing 5 times already. Your mileage may vary.
I wasn't asking whether Refutree demanded more attention than some alternative debate site, but rather whether it directly addressed the question of how much of one's attention should be allocated to various debate arguments. So:
P1: "Overt hateful bigotry" implies one can safely allocate zero attention to OHB arguments. But I notice that's likely to shift all debates to "is this argument OHB?".
P2: Taboo status depending on enforcement is insightful, but in my context, not really - some taboos are de facto enforced because people run out of free time before getting to this or that argument. In other words: lack of attention.
P3-P4: As social consequences go, lack of attention is pretty effective. But Refutree seems more concerned with the "fish" whose attention is roped in by cranks. I agree there's no 1A problem with telling people "hey, this guy over here is a crank", but IMO that's not the actual problem; the actual problem is _convincing_ people of that. It's possible if Refutree has a bias-free way of showing it, but that's a huge ask.
P5: The KKK, despite being a fringe view now, still has adherents. We can claim they're at lizardman levels, but whatever - their members aren't likely to look at whatever Refutree has and think, oh, well then, that's settled, now I can be more productive at something else. There's a reason for that, and I suspect Refutree isn't addressing it.
P6: In fact, I get the sense here that Refutree is shooting for some centralized Crank-O-Meter, and if so, I think that's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. They might be trying to distinguish subjective and objective crankery, but either they'll find out everything's subjective, or I'm going to suspect something's wrong with their methodology.
As you say, some people may put tribe over idea, and peace out when the Refutree FAQ puts pressure on them. I think Refutree, like any debate solution, will need to acknowledge the tribe factor and work with it. Fight it, and you'll just lose.
Also, I don't think tribes are that absolutist. They just look that way to people who don't understand the underlying drive behind any given tribe's identity. (I think a lot of people don't understand their _own_ tribe drive, sometimes.)
Who gets to declare what are these supposedly universal taboos? And who decides when someone has had a sincere struggle session?
I claim that there is no one and no body that can do this without instantly becoming corrupted by the power to declare things they disagree with as taboo.
No, free speech absolutism is the only path that doesn't inevitably lead to tyranny.
What do you mean by free speech absolutism? Kiddie porn is permitted? Slander? I can give a speech at 3 am outside your window with a bullion?
Or just that anyone can express any opinion they want?
We do need to be clear what we mean by free speech absolutism. Literal absolutism leads to death of discourse: people who enjoy being in a cesspit alter the environment to their liking, and everyone who can't tolerate the result is forced out. Even Scott moderates.
My take:
* don't unilaterally impose global restrictions on speech
* do allow communities and platforms to self-police as they see fit
* do allow people to form new communities and platforms, and move between them, as they see fit
Mastodon is the closest current thing to this ideal. Everyone can have their own soapbox. I'm not required to listen to or spread your speech in my platform, but I can't stop you making your own and saying what you like there; and the reverse is also true.
I'd like to see the costs of getting AS registration come down. Single digit thousands of dollars is certainly not beyond the means of someone who /really/ wants to say something very very taboo, but it's not exactly accessible to the everyman.
It seems like a lot of the social value of free speech comes down to not letting anyone forbid the discussion of ideas or beliefs or (outside a pretty narrow window) claims of fact. When unpopular ideas are suppressed, this can create society-wide blind spots that do a lot of harm.
Hate speech laws seem like they are often used in Europe to shut down the expression of ideas, and of course all kinds of "terms of service liberalism" during the 2015-2022 period was targeted at shutting down the expression of ideas like "a transwoman is just a dude in a dress" or "covid was made in a Chinese lab" or whatever else. The point was explicitly to prevent the expression of offensive or harmful ideas and claims of fact, and very often mere truth was not believed to be a defense. (Consider how discussions of the black/white IQ gap were/are handled in mainstream outlets.)
> not letting anyone forbid the discussion of ideas or beliefs
...society-wide. Your argument supports not letting anyone forbid the discussion of ideas or beliefs society-wide. Or, as I put it, "don't unilaterally impose global restrictions on speech".
The "global" is super important because entirely too often I see "free speech" used as a stick to beat up /individuals/ with in order to try to force them to carry /in their space/ ideas or beliefs they do not want to carry.
This is entirely separate to the conversation of whether we really literally mean never criminalise any speech at all; e.g. do we have a problem with "conspiracy to commit" style crimes? CSAM? "Incitement to X" for any X? Leaking classified material to foreign agents and other forms of treason-by-speech? If we permit criminalisation of any of these, we can no longer just say "free speech" to the ones we want decriminalised - it's now a matter of different groups accepting boundaries exist but wanting them in different places, and they will have to actually do the work of haggling - what are the benefits of allowing that kind of speech, and what are the costs?
You've given some things you presumably find compelling, but what are the least personally compelling things you nevertheless feel obliged to defend? That's where any interesting shifts are going to happen.
Also, internet moderation discussions always seem to run aground on the distinction between:
a. I don't want to see this crap.
b. I don't want anyone to see this crap.
(a) is not just defensible, it's necessary to have a functioning world. The academic conference on evolutionary biology can throw out the guys who want to talk about young-Earth creationism, and the bible study group can throw out the guys who want to mock people for talking to their invisible sky friend.
It is super common to see people swap between these, though. I don't want to see white supremacist views[1] discussed, therefore Substack should ban white supremacist writers. I don't want to see hateful discussion of my religion, therefore criticisms of my religion should be banned.
And this has both the intent and the effect of shutting down some ideas.
[1] In practice, any acceptable-to-ban group always gets expanded as far as possible, so soon enough, the "white supremacists" you're trying to ban will be Ben Shapiro or Razib Khan, just as an earlier generation accused anyone to the left of the median Democrat of being a communist to shut them down.
The fight I most often see is currently neither of these; it’s “I made a place for people to talk, but I don’t want to be made to have this crap there”, vs “I want your visitors to hear my ideas, and by stopping that you are censoring me”.
Yeah, I mean globally. My point is that the big potential loss we get from suppressing speech globally is that current consensus can't be argued against even when it's wrong or incomplete, that important or valuable new ideas can't be discussed, that facts or ideas that offend powerful people can be suppressed. That's why the coordinated campaigns to shut down media sites or publications seem really bad to me, as do the campaigns to try to shut down some lines of inquiry in science or academia. This is basically just blinding ourselves. I think this is a useful place to start--when someone is proposing that some ideas or facts or beliefs be shut down, we ought to start out extremely skeptical, since that's attacking exactly the core thing we need from free speech. And this isn't just about law, though I think we should care the most about speech restrictions that involve someone going to jail for saying the wrong thing. If all the internet companies agreed that nobody is allowed to say anything bad about Trump online, that seems like it would be really bad, even though it might not touch on the first amendment at all. Or, to use a recent case, Amazon ceasing to sell _Camp of the Saints_ seems pretty bad to me, but nobody thinks there's a legal requirement for anyone to sell books they don't like. It still doesn't seem great that the giant online bookstore is trying to decide what I can and can't read.
I agree that "free speech" doesn't specify everything we care about wrt speech restrictions, and in fact there's a whole bunch of case law and legal reasoning and such built up around getting the details right. (Nor is this unique to speech. Consider the differences between a basic view of "don't steal other peoples' stuff" and all the intricacies of how the law deals with property (what bundle of rights goes with the land, how is inheritance handled, what happens when there's a dispute about ownership, etc.) I think looking at whether the goal or effect of some legal restriction on speech is to suppress ideas or beliefs or broad factual claims[1] is a good way to work out whether it may be reasonable.
I think if someone wants to claim the holocaust never happened, or HIV was created by the US government, they should not face any legal consequences for that and their speech should not be suppressed. I never want to hear their nonsense, but I think giving someone the power to suppress even this obvious nonsense is inevitably giving them power that will be used to suppress offensive/weird ideas that aren't nonsense, and will make us all dumber thereby.
[1] Slander and libel involve factual claims, so this needs to be a little narrower, but I want to make sure nobody is able to suppress factual claims like "human CO2 emissions are/aren't altering the climate" or "blacks do/don't commit crimes at a much higher rate than whites in the US."
I think we still have a fundamental point of disagreement: my preferred recourse for companies deciding not to carry some content is not to force them to carry it, but to reduce the cost and complexity of creating competing alternatives. Hence my comment about AS costs, since starting your own ISP is the nuclear option here.
Suppose you're trying to make some important community-wide decision, and have chosen to use Mastodon to find any information relevant to that decision.
How do you find which Mastodon servers might have relevant information?
What's the chance you'll miss something critical if you sort those servers by participant count and only consult the top N?
Suppose you make a choice, and then it turns out to be the wrong choice (by the community's standards), evidenced by information on some server that didn't make your top-N list. How defensible is this choice?
Is "sort by participant count" the best metric in this case? Of the other plausible metrics (sort by highest participant status; median participant status; median participant education level; comment count; average comment length; number of technical citations; average subscriber wealth), what's their tradeoffs?
How have I ended up in charge of making this community-wide decision?
Certainly I can't make policy decisions for other people's servers. That is the entire point: their servers, their rules. I guess if someone delegates managing their server to me but shuts me out of any space where conversation about how they want it managed takes place and also won't come to where I am and tell me what they want directly, then... I'm not sure what they expect to happen, exactly? If I get elected for some even wider Mastodon thing - and it's unclear what any such thing would be, since the purpose of a decentralised system is to avoid being subject to a centralised authority - I'd say it's on the people who elected me to come to where I am and say what they want to happen if they have opinions on the matter that they think I will otherwise miss.
Turns out this is how community politics works offline as well. We've just participated in a consultation about a new railway junction nearby. The people in charge of making the decisions advertised that the consultation was happening, in places where they were permitted to do that; it was then on us to participate, if we had opinions on the matter and wanted them taken into account. A lot of local government decisions are made this way, and as far as I am aware this is not and never has been controversial. If you can't be bothered to say your piece when asked, that's on you.
So if it's offline politics we're talking about and I'm this kind of official in your scenario and it's this kind of decision I'm making, and I've "chosen Mastodon" as the consultation venue, I'd advertise my Mastodon server in all the same places consultations get advertised today, and the consultation would happen like it always does.
The last time people were directly consulted about a non-local community decision in these parts was Brexit, and we all know how that went.
To be honest, I do not believe anyone involved in any central decision has ever looked at what I otherwise post on social media to help them decide, or ever will; nor do I expect this.
"How have I ended up in charge of making this community-wide decision?"
If it's not you, it's someone else. :-) I'm presenting this as a hypothetical. Central example: you're in charge of policy, maybe for your local Elk lodge chapter, maybe for the State Department, maybe for the UN. Presumably you want to make an informed decision, and you're trying to learn from past mistakes, so you're trying to be open to all arguments, but at the same time, you have limited time, and there _do_ exist trolls. So I'm asking how one ought to navigate this.
Obviously Mastodon is a tool of value here. I'm asking questions that explore its limits. For example, I'm aware server owners set the rules for the servers they own. But if Server P explores position P on issue S and Server Q explores Q, and you're deciding some policy for S, how much time do you spend on P and Q? How do you tell if P is a crank position? Or Q? Or both?
Popularity might not be the right yardstick. As the saying goes, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If you set policy in favor of whoever's 51% that year, then you might end up just eating 10% of yourself every year. If it's just the wealthiest 10%, for example, then after a generation you're liable to wonder why you're so poor, while the 51% pony up the next target to label "exploiters".
OTOH, if the stakes are relatively low, such as what to do with a railway junction, it looks like it'll work. But then I'd say the solution is to only make low-stakes decisions, and avoid high-stakes issues unless the natural solution is much more obvious. Mastodon might help, but it might not tell you anything any other media outlet could. I honestly don't know.
Still not understanding this hypothetical where in any of these situations the functionary spends a nonzero amount of time looking anywhere other than the organisation’s own servers that they themselves manage and run, and invites interested parties to discuss the issues there.
I’m trying to think of any existing real-world scenario that works the way you seem to describe, with the investigator going around different communities to listen in on the conversations happening there, and the only thing I’m coming up with is police / secret service infiltrations and similar intelligence scenarios where agents have the full time job of getting themselves into various groups, and their higher-ups then create summaries and reports of what is happening there; the people affected, meanwhile, likely would not want the agent there if they knew what was happening.
Could you perhaps give a real example of the sort of democratic investigation you describe and how it works today in the pre-universal-Mastodon world?
> No, free speech absolutism is the only path that doesn't inevitably lead to tyranny.
The empiric evidence contradicts your claim: There are many countries where free speech isn't absolute, and which didn't descend into tyranny.
You don't understand, tyranny is when not absolutely free speech! q.e.d
Edit: Okay I feel less clever now, having read on and seeing you made the same point some two days prior. Oh well!
Is there even one country with absolute free speech? Free speech that includes insults, death threats, criticism of The Man, dissemination of any and all media? I find that hard to believe.
To the best of my knowledge, there is not. I predict that bell_of_a_tower will rebut me in one of these ways (if they reply at all), sorted from most to least likely:
1. All countries are currently on the path to tyranny, they're just not quite there yet (but soon will be, if they don't adopt free speech absolutism).
2. One or a few countries (probably the US) does have free speech absolutism, and all other countries have already descended into tyranny.
3. All countries have already descended into tyranny, where the term "tyranny" has a definition which is functionally equivalent to "lack of free speech absolutism".
For rubberneckers: the URL to the comment that got Nicholas Lopez banned points to the Andy G. comment by mistake. The Lopez comment is here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/being-john-rawls/comment/230467302
Were you able to discover the GrimMoar comment that elicited a ban? I searched my best for it but could not find it
The linked comment essentially says GrimMoar is a sockpuppet for other accounts, one of which was banned for similar content. So it was a sort of lifetime achievement ban.
I'm a dummy that was looking for someone else bringing up that two of the linked comments didn't show me the ban-worthy material, and for some reason I ctrl-F'd for "link" instead of "comment" and so I want to express my appreciation that you used the words "linked comment" instead of just "comment." Glad someone met me at the "link" Schelling Point.
Ah man, I thought I wasn't seeing those links because I'd blocked one user and the other had blocked me.
...I thought I was special.
You're special to me! You're, like, the outright opposite of a boring guy.
Spoken like a true, uh, robad.
Ah, they're Gawdflea/aristocrat. I had my suspicion...
Somehow GrimMoar is the only one that ever came to my attention.
Oh, that explains why GrimMoar was trying to continue an argument that started in the OT in my DMs.
Rejected submissions to the book review contest.
Moby Dick: A+. Has the same problem as Homestuck where it makes you talk about reading it. Friends visibly annoyed.
Consider Phlebas: A- on its own, but in context redundant, just read Moby Dick
Faust: Ungraded, DNF
Inferno: Did not open before returning due to being bored by Faust.
Use of Weapons: CHAIR
I have never heard Moby Dick compared to Homestuck and now I might have to read it.
Is this what "CHAIR" means:
Conquest, Hierarchy, Authority, Insight, Relationship
I'm pretty sure it is referring to a literal chair which a major plot point in the book.
Could also be "Characters, Hook, Arc, Idea, Resolution". Probably not that important, as long as it's the same letters as the word "chair" (not the acronym), an allusion to a plot device in the book.
Ah. It has been way too long since I read it and didn't remember that plot element.
Carpentry Horror And Interleaved Recall 👍
Chair and hat
The Iliad: The middle part is pretty good,, but the setup is a bit forced and the resolution relies on the bad guys falling for the oldest trick in the book.
Book of Genesis: Prose is pretty but a bit dense. Lots of plot holes. Narrative jumps around a lot. Too many begats.
Titus Andronicus: Ugh, I have to sit through over two hours of this when I just want to see the recipe.
Not sure there is anything wrong with the end of The Iliad. It finishes before the end of the war; the Trojan Horse legend gets a brief reference in The Odyssey but that's it for Homer.
I fudged it for the joke. In the original, the story of the Trojan Horse was split between the Little Iliad and The Sack of Troy, two of the lesser works from the Epic Cycle for which the full original text is lost but we know most of the content from other works that quote or discuss them. Modern translations and adaptation sometimes attach it to the end of the Iliad or the beginning of the Odyssey. It's also in the Aeneid, as that's a Roman fanfic of the Epic Cycle; Aeneas tells the story of the Horse and the Sack from the Trojan perspective in flashbacks in Book 2.
Similarly, the Judgement of Paris and the story of the early-to-middle phases of the war (stuff like Odysseus pretending to be mad to try to get out of having to join the war) come from another lesser work in the cycle, the Cypria, but are often attached to one or both stories in modern editions.
Hector fell for the oldest trick in the book; getting outfought and stabbed.
I thought being murdered out of jealousy because your offerings were more pleasing was the oldest trick in the book?
*Yawn* The reboot where they used a trojan rabbit was better.
Launching it into the air even made for a good leitmotif for a later climax.
LOL at the third one...
Based on your critic of Genesis, you may try the sequel Numbers. It has less plot holes, stays focused for longer time on one point, and the begats are replaced by lists of other things.
Book of Numbers: too many words
You're going to hate the Gospel of John, then.
Reform UK leader Zia Yusuf, whose ancestors fought at the Battle of Hastings, announced a new policy to put migrant detention centers in areas that vote for the Green Party:
https://x.com/ZiaYusufUK/status/2051033457464127976
The migrants, he claims, will not be able to leave these detention centres. One wonders, then, what the issue is. Why not reward Reform voters with jobs? But it’s the NIMBY degrowth YooKay, where building anything is considered a punishment for nearby people, who will then turn around and complain about poverty and lack of jobs.
On the subject of dysfunctional political cultures, WSJ has a map of data center bans in the US:
https://dan1yd6v4krxnx.archive.ph/yXW98/f4f2c37915b4d4b3ebd948cca4af030d14d184de.jpg
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/these-cities-and-states-are-taking-aim-at-data-centers-3b98adf1
The greatest concentration is in the Detroit metro area. An area that treated the rest of us to decades of complaining about how “they” sent all the jobs to China.
"An area that treated the rest of us to decades of complaining about how “they” sent all the jobs to China."
A rather uncharitable take. Deliberate policy choices by "they" (national policymakers) substantially and predictably contributed to the offshoring of skilled jobs and manufacturing capacity. See NAFTA and the line of maquiladoras that popped up just across the Mexican border after it was signed, for example.
Global economic shifts and competition played a role, of course. But the UAW guy who thinks Clinton pretended to be pro-labor and then stabbed blue collar workers in the back isn't entirely wrong.
It's an entitlement mentality to think the entire rest of America is required to buy their goods instead of cheaper Mexican ones.
I've worked 30 years in several different fields in several different parts of the country, and I'm convinced the vast majority of Americans want unrestricted free trade for the things they consume while also having strong protectionist policies for the particular field he/she works in. Auto workers hate NAFTA, tech workers hate H1B, etc.
I would be shocked if it was just Americans
"There should be modest barriers to trade to encourage local consumption", is a policy choice that I don't think fits the definition of "entitlement".
>The migrants, he claims, will not be able to leave these detention centres. One wonders, then, what the issue is. Why not reward Reform voters with jobs? But it’s the NIMBY degrowth YooKay, where building anything is considered a punishment for nearby people, who will then turn around and complain about poverty and lack of jobs.
Come on now, it's obviously not the "building" that's supposed to be the punishment.
Then what is it? Some kind of spiritual adajacency to the migrants?
Being in close proximity to dangerous criminals, even if they're locked up, is intimidating for most people, for reasons that have nothing to do with "spiritual adjacency".
The Greens know that a lot of migrants are dangerous, BTW, which is why they're currently freaking out over the prospect of having detention centres put in their own communities. Of course, they're perfectly fine with letting those same dangerous migrants wander around poor areas.
It's not intimidating to red-state Americans. This not only results in economic opportunity and jobs, the prisoners are counted as residents of the area, inflating its economic power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Prison-based_gerrymandering
>It's not intimidating to red-state Americans.
Good for them, I guess? Not really sure what this has to do with British Greens, who seem at least somewhat intimidated, judging by their reaction to the proposal.
I think there is an assumption that areas with migrant detention centers will become migrant-hevay outside of them, e.g. because of families of detainees or detainees that were released without deportation or on bail.
Rightists have no actual ideology except being against what the Left is for theory confirmed again.
The Detroit thing is interesting, is it mostly nimbyism or competing uses for energy? (Also why do they need so many bans, is it a big data center hub or just a nimbyism hub?)
Paywalled article, but I have connections to the area and have mostly been hearing uproar about proposals near Ann Arbor. The A2 area has a critical mass of politically active progressives/environmentalists/hippies, plus relatively affordable undeveloped land on the outskirts.
At least one of the proposed data centers has some kind of DOE national security tie-in, which further enrages the anti-Trump crowd.
Parts of the Detroit metro style themselves as "automation alley", because of all the autonomous vehicle research happening in the area, so maybe the AI companies thought it would be a favorable regulatory environment?
I looked up what Jim said and he's right - is *is* favourable in that there's a lot of tax credits for anyone willing to bring business to the Detroit area, which made some hyperscalers start some datacenters there, which led to pushback (afaict, some of it unreasonable scare tactics and some of it more reasonable takes that these are long term tax credits for temporary jobs, once the construction is done) which led to local zoning fights.
I would suspect that datacenter bans appear only after datacenter construction proposals appear. So, the 'why Detroit?' question is probably explained by the plethora of abandoned industrial sites with tax abatement incentives for new tenants, favorable zoning, and with electrical infrastructure already in place.
The placebo effect. So what is it and why don't we study it and try to make it even more effective? The only papers along this line that I can find are by people into alternative medicine.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6707261/
"The myth of the Placebo response" Wayne B. Jonas
There is this from the Cleveland Clinic https://health.clevelandclinic.org/placebo-effect
Edit: So I want to copy a response I made below.
So it seems pretty obvious that the placebo effect is real. And it works in all sorts of different ways that we don't really understand. And my question is how does it work? I'm reading several books, but I'm still in the first parts where the author is still providing more examples of it working. Which is useful data, but I want some mechanism.
So tentative ideas.
1.) It's something to do with the unconscious mind. Great what the F is that. We don't understand the conscious mind. Did the unconscious mind come before / after or at the same time as the conscious mind? And doesn't unconscious mind sound something like a non sequitur. To me at least mind implies conscious mind. So I'm someone who thinks in images. Conscious mind has no image for me. It seems far away from neurons firing in the brain. So some blob. And then unconscious mind is even more unknown, some bigger blob? Does one enclose the other, two separate blobs but intersecting?
To try and understand the placebo effect, we should try to understand the unconscious mind.
Defining consciousness is a joke that a bunch of philosophers played on us a long time ago and we still haven’t gotten it.
My mother in law was a clinical psychologist for many years. She used aromatherapy as part of her practice, knowing it was only a placebo but figuring she was just as happy with a placebo helping her patients as she would be with a real drug helping her patiens.
So it seems pretty obvious that the placebo effect is real. And it works in all sorts of different ways that we don't really understand. And my question is how does it work? I'm reading several books, but I'm still in the first parts where the author is still providing more examples of it working. Which is useful data, but I want some mechanism.
So tentative ideas.
1.) It's something to do with the unconscious mind. Great what the F is that. We don't understand the conscious mind. Did the unconscious mind come before / after or at the same time as the conscious mind? And doesn't unconscious mind sound something like a non sequitur. To me at least mind implies conscious mind. So I'm someone who thinks in images. Conscious mind has no image for me. It seems far away from neurons firing in the brain. So some blob. And then unconscious mind is even more unknown, some bigger blob? Does one enclose the other, two separate blobs but intersecting?
To try and understand the placebo effect, we should try to understand the unconscious mind.
One mechanism regarding Placebo that I read about is that the body is apparently prone to producing more endogenous opioids. These can create a positive feedback loop. If that is true, than "placebo" turns out to be *actual* medicine.
I vaguely remember a podcast (I think Econtalk?) where the guest theorized that the placebo effect was more powerful the more you trusted medical science, and that this probably made it a bigger thing in clinical trials (where the volunteers tend to be very positive toward cutting-edge medicine and which tend to happen in big, impressive medical centers) than in normal use, where the miracle drug is given as an injection by a tired-looking PA in a run-down office, with some kid screaming about not wanting a shot in the background.
Placebo surgery
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/09/magazine/the-placebo-prescription.html?unlocked_article_code=1.f1A.oKYl.ZVP3-2nZm3ww&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Wow, yeah sure. That's a long article, I skimmed a bunch. I found nothing about mechanism except the usual mind over body... Well how the heck does that work? But lots of conformation that it does work.
> why don't we study it
What makes you think it's not being studied?
The placebo effect is probably one of the most studied things, concepts(?), ever
You could start here https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=placebo+effect and spend the next 30 years reading nothing but studies about the placebo effect
If you've got a specific link or book or article I'd read it. I guess I assumed it's not being studied because I never hear about it. My bad perhaps.
There's probably even a study in there where they tell you it's not a real study and you deceive yourself into not feeling informed.
The thing is, we have been funding the hell out of science and especially medicine for decades now, so most things that sound important to a layman have probably got a literature, unless there's some reason (technical or ethical or political) why it can't really be studied.
Partially covered by old Scott:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Thanks I think I read that before. Still the 'cause' of the placebo effect is left unexplored. Maybe our brain/ mind/ unconscious is better at healing than we think. What about the power of pray and faith healing?
The term placebo is a bit of misnomer. I agree with Moerman (https://www.cambridge.org/gn/universitypress/subjects/anthropology/social-and-cultural-anthropology/meaning-medicine-and-placebo-effect) that it's more useful to talk about "meaning effects".
The problem with creating meaning is that it's subjective. The meaning of an intervention can be quite different from patient to patient. Meaning is important though. With stress-related or psychosomatic illnesses meaning can be the difference maker. It's possible to be so stressed from your stress-related illness that it makes recovery basically impossible. (Part) of the solution then lies in shifting the meaning of such an illness.
Shifting meaning is not an exact science. We try do this in psychology, but even there the best methods might not outperform each other much (see e.g. Bruce Wampold) and outcomes are not guaranteed at all (Wampold puts the number needed to treat for therapy at 3). We know the relationship between patient and therapist is important and we also know of some things that can help in forming that relationship, but that's not the same as substantively knowing what causes a shift in meaning.
However, even though meaning is personal, we seem more able to predictably shift meaning. For example in the chronic pain literature, treatments like pain reprocessing therapy (e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482298/) focus on shifting the meaning that patient's pain has to them, and so far results seem quite promising, suggesting that there might be ways to shift meanings in patients which work at a higher rate than "just" the therapeutic alliance/standard treatments in psychology can.
Thanks for the long reply. I'll check out the Moerman book. (At least a sample on my kindle.) The second article is great. Though it's not really clear what 'pain reprocessing therapy' is. Whatever it appears to work well.
So my very naive thought is that the placebo effect probably has many causes. I wish we would look into more of them. Oh and the short answer of why this isn't studied more is that there may be no profit in it. There is no new pill to sell someone.
> Oh and the short answer of why this isn't studied more is that there may be no profit in it.
"Supplements" is literally a billion dollar industry
Here's another interesting tidbit on the placebo effect: you can block part of it with naloxone, which is an opioid antagonist
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0304395983902038, and a more modern source: https://journals.lww.com/pain/abstract/2023/05000/open_label_nondeceptive_placebo_analgesia_is.7.aspx
This suggests that part of the placebo effect is an endogenous opioid.
So it might not only have many causes, but also multiple mechanisms.
Greg Cochran's view is that it's just regression to the mean. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/
So now we have to test the placebo against *actually* doing nothing, which seems pretty meta
Because most of the Placebo effect is on paper or during the doctor's visit, not actual material improvement in the patient's condition long-term.
There are some things that can be materially helped by changing the patient's attention and interpretation, but those treatments have different names already, many of them 'psychology.'
One positive effect of placebo is when there's not much useful to be done for some problem medically. A homeopathic cold remedy won't cure your cold, but maybe will convince you you're doing something and thus keep you from zonking yourself out on antihistamines so you fall asleep driving home, or going to a doctor for your cold and coming home with the flu.
Anyone find Opus 4.7 very very verbose?
I do a weekly project with Claude in which I ask him question about some classical pieces and since changing from 4.6 to 4.7 he's been proactive to a fault. A simple question generates long paragraphs of context and tangents. Not exactly wrong things, but just above and beyond what I asked
Yes, I have noticed this as well