The Pope has written an encyclical on Artificial Intelligence. DeepSeek thinks it’s a work of science fiction, because it’s the kind of thing you only encounter in SF.
From my discussion with DeepSeek on the Pope’s argument:
“… you're right that the excerpt you shared is surprisingly philosophical in tone rather than explicitly Christological. For a papal encyclical, that's notable.”
I think the Pope could have made a much better argument for the human/AI distinction he’s trying to make if he explicitly talked about the Incarnation and the person of Christ. You have to assume Christianity as an assumption of course, but I think the Pope is allowed to do that. (The argument in the encyclical seems drafted to convince non-Christians).
If your starting premise is, e.g., you’re a Buddhist, you might be more willing to grant non-human actors status as moral agents.
Oh, sections 234 and 235 contain a version of the explicitly Christian argument I was expecting to see. I might have made it more central to the argument.
Has something about battery operated consumer electronics changed? I swear years ago NimH rechargeable were marketed as easy replacements for disposable alkalines. They were able to be used even in stuff as demanding as pro electronic photography flashes.
Meanwhile, the last few years I feel like the majority of stuff like toy RC cars and their ilk I try don’t work with NimH but work fine with regular old alkalines. What gives?
There was this famous TED talk about the paradox of choice which is very counter-intuitive, choice should be good. Now as someone on the spectrum I am immune to this paradox, I don't care how many kinds of ice cream exist, I always have dark chocolate. So I want many kinds to be on offer, as it increases the chance of dark chocolate to be offered. Is this immunity why spectrumy people are often libertarian? Like you do not find it dangerous for yourself if the corner stone sells crack cocaine because you already know what is your preferred drug, or none, and not exploring/experimenting/having temptations other than your already existing preference?
I guess it depends on whether you perceive the choices as equivalent, or you care a lot about choosing the best one.
I wouldn't care much about the flavor of ice cream, so I can easily choose on a whim.
But recently I was trying to buy a washing machine, and there are dozens of choices with no simple way to compare some parameters I care about. I ended up downloading their manuals and checking which ones can wash at least 5 kg of laundry at 40 degrees in at most 1 hour... lots of work. And I was anxious that I might miss a better option. I made a decision finally, but it was a day unpleasantly spent.
I'm with you for the most part, but occasionally the paradox of choice still shows up for me even as an autistic person. For example, I really like pasta. I have all sorts of opinions about which shape is the best, etc., but at the end of the day I like a lot of different shapes. If I go to an Italian restaurant and there's penne, tortellini, manicotti, etc. on the menu, I have to actually think for a while and decide which one I want. For most other types of restaurant there's only one thing on the menu I like and I always get that (it doesn't help that I'm also vegetarian and the vast majority of offerings at most restaurants have meat -- often you can ask for it without meat, but that requires more conversation with a stranger...). Anyway, my point is, lots of things have subcategories, and one of those things might be something you already like / are interested in.
How about a non-profit pronatalist dating app? The idea is that if not many women and not many men want children, the least that can be done is that make it easy for them to find each other. It must be non-profit because the financial incentives of for profit apps are not aligned with people getting married and deleting the app. It would be financed by donations, and people getting married from the app would be honor-bound to donate $500.
Does it have to be explicitly pronatalist? Being anti-natalist doesn't necessarily make one uninterested in dating. Even if you secretly have a pronatalist agenda creating the app, it's probably better not to enforce it or even mention it. People can change their minds over time, and having a dating app that's open to all opinions might be the catalyst for that change, who knows? The people I know who are explicitly anti-natalist usually choose that position for pessimistic or misanthropic reasons, but dating can bring a lonely person happiness that they may not have previously known was possible. I've never witnessed this occur, but perhaps it could turn a single anti-natalist into a married pronatalist given enough time. Just my thoughts, backed up by very weak anecdotal data.
I think Tove K and her husband Anders over at the woodfromeden substack is working on one. I think they will run afoul of the same problems that beset the 3-4 "let's just recreate classic Okcupid" teams out there.
To wit, your chief problem as a dating app is attracting enough dating age women to the platform. The "recreate classic Okc" teams struggled because zennial women don't want to read a bunch and write a bunch of stuff, and they're competing in a saturated landscape.
They faced:
A) monetization problems, because now you're competing against the fully adversarial Match Group (which owns essentially all dating apps except the nigh-bankrupt Bumble) and their established footprint, marketing, and revenue models that will always outcompete a less adversarial option, and
B) the type of person whom, "old Okcupid" appeals to - ie filling out a bunch of questions and writing and reading lengthy profiles instead of swiping - is such a tiny slice of humanity overall that you simply can't get the network effects to have a viable dating app, because recruiting enough people in an ongoing way is the hard problem of dating apps. Previously, in the golden Natufian age of old Okcupid it could work because that's all there was - swipe apps didn't exist, so enough people would actually answer the questions and write / read profiles. But now swipe apps exist, and they're strongly preferred over reading / writing by enough people you just can't get a large enough nucleus of people and ongoing flow to sustain such a dating app now, especially for Zennial women.
Now back to the pronatalist dating site idea. It's being worked on too, and is sure to fail.
Tove is literally proposing creating a dating site for boring guys who are pronatalist. Women ALREADY hate both boring guys and pronatalist guys in aggregate, they will have literally zero reason to come to the site. And Zennial women in particular, which are the prime thing you need to attract enough paying male users to become a viable app.
And they'll be in the exact same environment, where the fully adversarial Match Group exists and makes $1B a year, and can outspend you and out-monetize you on every aspect.
But you know, I wish them luck, and for them to squeeze out a success even so - it's just really unlikely.
Does anyone happen to know who wrote the non-book-review of "The Lyric" - that bit of Time As A Symptom by Joanna Newsom? If so, I just wanted to say thank you. I found your review quite touching, and listened to the song from it, and ever since then I've been going back and back to it and that album. Thanks for the great taste.
Working on a 17-dimension personality measurement instrument (synthesizes 39 peer-reviewed psychological frameworks).
Had a methodology question this audience might find interesting.
When a source framework gets retired from the literature mid-project (for instance, the March 2026 consensus paper declaring Polyvagal Theory untenable, signed by 39 leading experts), what's the field-standard procedure for re-attributing items and documenting the change?
My read is the field doesn't really have one, and MMPI-2-RF is the closest precedent for "we revised the instrument, here's what changed and why," but I haven't found anything where an active commercial instrument publishes its full audit trail in real time.
The closest analog I can find is open-source software changelogs.
Curious if anyone here has come across personality / psychometric instruments that publish their own reception ledgers, or whether this is a genuinely empty space.
I’m a fan of quirky character driven films, think Paris Texas, Little Miss Sunshine, Repo Man, Wonder Boys, David Byrnes’ True Stories, just about any Coen Brothers film…
Any recommendations?
Edit: A lot of Robert Altman films work here too, 3 Women, Short Cuts… are great
And that wonderful film he made in Ireland about the woman who seemed to be going mad the name of witches escapes me at the moment. The long goodbye as well.
We watched Double Indemnity tonight. Took a bit of effort to get the My Three Sons theme to quit playing in my head but it didn’t take long to see that it was the inspiration for Body Heat.
They could make the sexual attraction much more explicit by the early 80s.
Yeah, I had to go through the My Three Sons adjustment myself. It took a few minutes. Edward G. Robinson is the standout in that show for me. That little in his stomach. I did love that.
When it comes to quirky character-driven films, I think all of Preston Sturges' films are kind of wonderful in that sense. Particularly "The Palm Beach Story" and a couple of the others I mentioned elsewhere.
Quite a few of my recommendations are based on how interested you might be in film history or old movies, so if that's not part of what you're looking for, I apologise. All of my recommendations captured the spirit of your request, though.
Checking availability. People I worked with would tease me because it seemed I saw as many films as Roger Ebert. There are a couple art house theaters in Mpls and they were just down the block from our first apartment there.
- Punk Samurai Slash Down (as you might be able to guess this one has some action stuff too - but it's definitely also quirky and has some real characters.)
Thanks. With foreign language films i always prefer subtitles. Dubbed movies stray too far from the original dialogue to get the lip syncing correct. I finally watched “Y mama tambien” a couple weeks ago. It was a lot better than the premise suggested.
Wonder Boys has a great soundtrack. Have you read the book or any other Michael Chabon's works? Speaking of Chabon, he wrote part of the best Spider-Man movie, and some of the bad Picard episodes.
But to answer your question:
Wes Anderson films: particularly the Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but really any of them. He has a unique style, but his most recent films are kinda becoming a little too into it? I don't know how quite to articulate it.
Christopher Guest films: Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind. They are mockumentaries with many overlapping actors. Speaking of mockumentaries, check out the Documentary Now series by Seth Meyers, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. It satirizes popular documentaries. Watching the original documentaries does help to better appreicate them, but it's not required for enjoyment.
Scorsese's After Hours has some oddballs in it and takes place over the period of one night. It's quite different from his mafia films.
Sideways with Paul Giamatti. He's also in American Splendor about the comic writer Harvey Pekar. Harvey's also in the film. It's pretty good; it gets a bit meta at times. You'll need to tolerate not great people as protagonists in these films.
If you don't mind teenage protagonists (somewhat less quirky) then Clueless (90's retelling of Emma) and 10 Things I Hate About You (90's Taming of the Shrew) are both quite entertaining and light. Maybe Ghost World, though I don't like that one as much as the first two.
EDIT: You might also be interested in some of Tim Burton's earlier films: Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood.
A lot of agreement from me on these. Yes I’ve read WBs and i think this is one time where the movie is a bit more fun than the book. And yes the soundtrack is a favorite of mine. I have the CD cached somewhere and I need to dig it up cause my steaming service doesn’t carry the entire album
I watch After Hours every couple years. It never gets old for me.
I like Wes Anderson quite a bit too but i think my fave of his is Moonrise Kingdom.
I need to check out American Splendor. Somehow haven’t caught it yet.
I enjoyed Ed Wood but haven’t yet seen Edward Scissorhands. I’ll give it a whirl.
Thanks for the recommendations.
Edit: Speaking of Chabon we need someone to The Amazing Adventures of K and K. For Jack Kirby’s sake if for no other reason. Plus Yiddish Policemen’s Union would be right up the Coen Bros alley.
Struggling to think of other movies I know of in the genre, but The Fisher King is probably in it. Probably the most grounded of Terry Gilliam's movies.
Well this is a documentary, I really liked "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" made in 2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Tammy_Faye_(2000_film) They made a movie later which I've never watched and have no opinion about. I would like to watch the documentary again.
It is but Minnesota kids knew they were poking fun at International Falls — or the nation’s icebox as weathermen occasionally called it. Some day I might relate the story of my arrest and brief detention just across to the Canadian side by customs authorities. I was on my way to a Canadian lake after about an hour. No Canadian demerits were issued for merely possessing Zig Zags.
Not yet. I liked Walter Matthau in Charlie Varrick and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nicky though.
The last film Natalie Wood was in before she died under mysterious circumstances, Brainwave, was a weird one. Sci fi thing where a device that records human qualia in their entirety is developed. You can play the recording and experience everything that someone else had.
The test pilot who tied it first recorded his climax with a hooker or maybe just a good sport and put the happy ending on a loop. They found him in a coma and when he recovered he retired immediately and just wanted to play golf by himself and probably wasn’t even keeping score. Kinda reenforces a half baked hypothesis of mine regarding what drives male ambition to gain status and wealth.
I was around at the time but it flew under my radar. The juxtaposition with RuPaul as narrator suggests it’s a hit piece but the Wikipedia page doesn’t describe it much.
Kryptogal says it keeps happening that the person with the $900K bonus gives $50 bonus to the secretary, the person with the $30K bonus gives $5K and not because the secretary is worse, they are shared. Does wealth cause a drop in empathy and how much does that explain about our world?
I did my econ capstone on the income elasticity of charitable giving.
It turns out if you include people who don’t donate anything, the average poor person, middle class person, and rich person donates the same percent of their income.
If you don’t include people who don’t donate anything, poor people and rich people donate the same percent of their income, but middle class people donate a smaller percentage.
I think this can partially be explained by the fact that people with different levels of money value money differently.
It wouldn't shock me to learn that someone with way more money would have a lower personal valuation of money, leading them to see it as a less meaningful gift.
This can be part of it, yes. Fellow Hungarians sometimes ask on Reddit how to practice English, and I reply, astonished, "But you are already on Reddit, that's just how I did it. Read, watch vids, then start commenting.". The point is, I tend to think learning things is easy. And conversely I basically never teach people. It just annoys me. Why don't you just go and learn stuff? It annoys me when I send software documentation to coworkers and they ask me to train them. Like can you read? So basically because I find learning easy, I tend to not be altruistic with it.
I think it becomes more simple when you reverse the question: does empathy cause a drop in wealth? Well, the more you donate to fix the world, the less you have left for yourself.
Now of course different people have different earning capabilities, so it is possible for a high-earning person to donate a lot and still keep a lot. But within the same earning category, the person who donates more will ultimately have less left.
Also, some people donate strategically, expecting something in return. They may donate money to a university that will name a lecture hall after them. That's different from feeding the plebs.
Of course there are those who say to get rich you gotta be ruthless. What I see is that rich people are behaving decently 99.99% of the time, because they get ahead by, for example, getting and retaining really good employees, satisfying customers etc. Now I accept that to truly succeed, one has to deliver some backstabs, but that is truly rarely necessary. And can backfire.
I think if Kamala Harris would have won the primary instead of backstabbing Biden, she would be President, what happened is that some voters did not like that and did not vote. I have seen a lot of angry liberals on YT during that time, like "Shouldn't the Democratic Party be actually democratic?" and so on.
I also distinctly remember the times, like around 2000, that Linux development was fueled by disgust felt over Bill Gates' sleazy business tactics. I was there, although just as a user/tester, but we loved to shit talk about him a lot and it was motivating. And look, they lost the server and the phone, keeping only the desktop, which counts as a marginal victory at least. We also managed to force Microsoft to be more ethical. Like .doc files were back then purposefully obscure to sabotage what is now LibreOffice, and look at it now, you can rename a .docx to .zip, unzip it, and you get a bunch of really clear XML files. Win.
A lot of wealthy people worry about looking like they’re trying to buy their way around. And often they overcompensate by being cheap, or being mean. There’s a lot of wealthy people who aren’t like that at all thank God.
I recently heard Robert Sapolsky talk about this (I think it was here: https://youtu.be/IOoK7t7P78E?si=qsIPrCXgLf0oiEZv); he described research suggesting that something like this is indeed a pattern, though I don't remember him saying it was due to "drop in empathy" exactly. I remember him talking about cortisol levels instead, but maybe he did talk about empathy and I missed it.
I think the pattern he described, and I might be misremembering it slightly, was more like "the behaviors that cumulatively make you wealthy also align with beating up on lower-status people" so wealthier people do relatively fewer nice things for the less-wealthy.
This was surprising to me; I'd always assumed wealthy people do more charity and tipping and stuff than they are generally presumed to, if for no other reason than as a way to game the tax system or something.
One summer when I was a student (ie, pre-internet) I took a 'job' going door to door soliciting money for PIRG, the Public Interest Research Group. I'd knock, explain I was raising money for a charity which worked to help consumers and promote product safety. It was obvious on the first day that the more dilapidated the house and car and yard, the more stressed out the woman who answered the door, the more likely I'd get a donation. The calm and well-dressed occupant of the well-maintained house with a lovely yard would politely explain why they didn't give to charities except at tax time. Experienced people on the job told me this was standard, and if we weren't getting paid for each door we knocked on, it would make msot sense to just focus on the worst looking properties. I quit on the third day - I was just taking money from poor people to help the better off people who actually bought most of the consumer products.
My parents, who were fairly wealthy, and smart, would not donate, because they do not see any proof that it is not a scam. Quite honestly it is possible that poor people tend to be less smart and not think about that possibility. But I must say it was in a fairly low-trust Post-Commie country with a lot of scams.
Did you have any serious proof on you that it was not a scam? Like something hard to forge? IDK holographic government stamp or suchlike. How high-trust you would estimate that place and time?
Those who are number types here should plot income vs. donation and income vs. falling victim to scams, to see if they correlate.
Last year it was midnight end-of-day Pacific Time:
>2: Remember, the due date for the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is TODAY, May 12. I will keep accepting entries until the end of the day, Pacific time, then start working on getting things organized so you can vote for finalists.
Generally, things that appear in nature, so people invented words for them more than thousand years ago, so the gender reflects some ancient intuition. I wonder if there will be some kind of "logic" (e.g. long shape = masculine, soft and spherical = feminine) or it's just complete noise.
Good ideas, supposedly in Spanish the masculine words tend to be angular and heavy while feminine ones are round and light, so it might hold across languages too.
In French, cat is male, while in German it's female. In German, dog is male, cow is female, elephant is male, and giraffe is female. Pear is female, apple is male, pineapple is female. Everything ending in "-nuss", like peanut, walnut, coconut, is female, regardless of size or shape. Even Kopfnuss.
I don't think this rule holds up, at least not in German.
Agreed. In Italian, fruits are usually the feminine form of the (masculine) name of the tree that produced them. One egg is masculine but two eggs are feminine. A table is masculine when you're working on it but feminine when you're dining on it, and so on. The gender of each name appears to be arbitrary and almost entirely driven by etymology (e.g., the reason for the egg situation is that the word "egg" used to be neuter in Latin, but Romance languages lost the neuter gender and redistributed nouns among the other two categories; but some neuter nouns happened to have a masculine-like singular and a feminine-like plural).
I'm bored of doing webdev, and it seems the market for this is no longer very favorable anyway.
Claude is telling me about transitioning to being a Research Software Engineer, since I'm interested in being involved in science on some level. It also mentioned computational biology and bioinformatics, which sound interesting.
Can anyone comment into breaking into those roles? I'm willing to go for a Master's if needed (I have a BS in comp sci).
I used to work as a software engineer for a research institute. I was bored a lot of the time because I'm not that good at figuring out how to spend my time when I don't have an explicit task, but in retrospect I really wish I hadn't quit that job (why I did is a story for another time perhaps). I miss being able to talk to smart research scientists everyday and learn random things about random fields. I didn't have a master's degree but most of the other people there did, so that was a bit intimidating.
As I recall, the job was posted on indeed, but I had to apply on an external site. The application was really long and I had to include references and a cover letter. They interviewed me over zoom (this was at the tail end of covid); there were a lot of people on the call who asked me various questions, some CS related, some not. I answered what I could and for the rest said I didn't know. A couple weeks later I got a call that they were offering me the job at a pay rate of $55000/year.
I thought that was quite low but I had been applying for months without success so I thought it was at least worth attempting to negotiate. So I went to an orientation type meeting and successfully talked my way up to 60000. I took it because there were also crazy benefits like 24 vacation days, 13 sick days, and 2 personal days. It was at this orientation meeting that I found out much of what I would be doing was defense contracts (somehow I didn't take the hint from the US citizenship no dual citizenship requirement).
Anyway, the job was in person but with management approval you could occasionally work from home using a vpn, and a few people had more permanent wfh arrangements due to having children or illnesses.
I was never satisfied with the pay, but there were realistically only two paths to getting better pay, and neither one seemed appealing. The first was to get a master's and PhD remotely while on the job, thereby reducing take home pay while doing that (they had a rule that anyone with a PhD gets six figures). The second was applying for other jobs and getting a higher offer to shove in management's face. Turns out when you have a job it's much harder to devote time to applying elsewhere.
If you want to go in the direction of webdev for science, one idea that comes to mind is to design GUIs for (1) instrumentation control or (2) data viewing.
Here is a tiny, quick example I made for data simulation/viewing of time-domain optical pulse shaping:
A master's program could be a great opportunity to link up with a research group that interests you. You could probably go far with a computer science MS program at a place with potential collaborators in other departments.
If you're at a big tech company, you've got two fairly straightforward paths for switching to a different sub-field of software engineering. One is just to apply for internal positions, since it's generally appreciated at such companies that most software engineering skills are transferrable between sub-fields, and "I'm looking for different challenges" tends to be looked at favorably as a motivation for moving positions especially if you have a good story about the details. The other is to apply for software jobs at places that aren't software companies as such but need the kind of software engineer you want to be; having a prestigious tech company or two on your resume tends to be a big plus for that type of job, and you can sincerely present yourself as having programming skills useful to them, the ability to ramp up on other programming skills they need (e.g. you might not have done backend or infrastructure work yourself, but you've worked with people who have and know what the problems are and what sorts of approaches can solve them), and a genuine interest in the work they're doing.
If you're hyperspecialized in web dev and don't think you could handle making the jump directly, I would suggest first taking some steps towards becoming more of a generalist. It's hard to give specific advice here without knowing more about your background, but if there's stuff in your current role where you could volunteer to take on tasks outside your comfort zone like business logic and internal tools (e.g. fixing bugs or picking up features that matter to your team's goals but aren't normally in your job description and aren't getting done in a timely manner otherwise), then do so and stretch your capabilities until you are able to pivot into another role either at the same company or a different one.
I work at a medium size midwestern agency. It's just 5 devs on the dev team. I don't have any big names on my resume, I've never been ambitious. I've been doing full stack web dev (so front end, back end, database) to be precise, and even though that's mostly what I've been up to, it's not all my experience, and I don't consider myself tied to it at all. In my career, I've been expected to solve any problem that gets thrown my way, there's essentially no siloing. I'm confident in my ability to learn anything STEM, except possibly physics and pure math.
Hmm, yes, maybe I could apply directly to places I find interesting, unless you have any other suggestions.
I am an ERP dev and looked at leetcode, and the easiest task, finding the first non-unique character in a string took me some serious headache and nearly 30 minutes to solve. And my solution is not elegant. Do "mainstream" developers really do such things? What we do is like mapping data tables to xml files in a straightforward way, no wonder even free Gemini does it generally flawlessly. So I focus more on the consulting side of things now.
I think everyone sucks the first time they try competitive programming. I've known some very smart guys in college who excelled at math competitions and even they struggled with pretty simple algorithmic problems initially.
> Do "mainstream" developers really do such things?
In my 30 years of software development, never.
The most sophisticated thing I coded for money, were some recursive algorithms, and even that happened only once per decade. (A recursive parser of expressions. A recursive algorithm to clone a graph of objects. And the first place goes to a recursive function that transformed an XML schema into recursive encoder, decoder, and validator.) But opportunities like that felt like Christmas. Over 90% of coding is just copying something from place A to place B, and figuring out how to configure stuff. Width, but almost no depth.
Yeah, that stuff is very silly I think. I've been doing this for 13 years, I don't know that I've ever needed to do anything algorithmic, since typically that stuff doesn't come up or it's handled in the standard library of whatever language you're using. The main skill you develop is how to build a giant codebase without it turning into a pile of unmaintainable spaghetti.
It's worth a try. If they've got multiple positions in different specialties, probably apply for whichever one is closest to your current experience in skillset since that's where you're most likely to make it through the early hiring filters. Once you're hired, you'll probably have opportunities to pivot.
Having full stack experience will definitely help, since back end and database experience are going to be more transferrable than if you were a front-end specialist.
I was recently listening to an attractive person describe a situation where they'd misinterpreted someone else's behavior to be about them (a variant on the classic "are they mad at me?" scenario), and it made me think of a fun evo-psych hypothesis.
In short, attractive people should be more self-centered, because it minimizes prediction error. Consider – let's say a person has some value 𝕤 which expresses how likely they are to interpret a situation as being about them. Higher, and they're more self-centered, lower, and they're more other-focused. Then, there must be some value 𝕤ₚ which minimizes error, ie reflects the true distribution of whether situations really are about them.
My assertion then is that the value 𝕤ₚ is positively correlated with attractiveness, because attractiveness makes other people more likely to pay attention to / be thinking about the attractive person, and therefore, having a higher 𝕤 is a prediction-error minimizing strategy for attractive people. And thus we should not be surprised to find more attractive people more self-centered.
Where is the evo part? You are just assuming that being correct here will give you an evolutionary advantage. Why would that be so?
alternative considerations:
- it could be more important to be well adjusted to your tribe's social norms and not seeming like an asshole, rather than being correct
- at least in some situations, the cost of being wrong is larger in one direction. E.g. if you see two of your enemies talking to each other, it might be more important to take action (fleeing, rallying allies) than to correctly predict whether they are conspiring against you, since the cost of doing nothing and being wrong is extreme
It seems plausible to me that either of these would completely overwhelm any selection in favor of being more correct.
See my comment to Nadav below - having an accurate mental model of other people's interest in oneself is very clearly adaptive, and to my understanding was a primary driver for the evolution of our large brains in the first place.
It would work for important people, or people with lots of money, not just attractive people, though I understand there’s some correlation there already. Could also work for troublemakers (e.g. school bully overhearing two teachers talk).
You’d have to work out how low prediction error relates to increased reproduction to make it “evo” psych. If someone is attractive, does correctly predicting that they are getting attention result in additional mating opportunities beyond the direct effects of being attractive in the first place? Doesn’t this contradict the “girl next door” thing, where an attractive woman is considered even more attractive if she doesn’t act like she knows she is attractive?
Having an accurate mental model of the world is so obviously adaptive that it's hard for me to even understand how to respond to this, but I'll try. Imagine some human in the ancestral environment - they're not sure if some other human would be receptive to their advances. Should they invest energy in pursuit? That's the kind of question that having an accurate model of whether other people are interested in you helps solve. Being right about whether that person would be receptive lets them invest their energy (time, social capital, literal calories, etc) in better opportunities.
I also think it's usually a mistake to try to apply modern archetypes (like the girl next door you mention) to a process that would have largely played out in the ancestral environment.
I do mostly agree with your earlier comment, and think this could probably be generalized to high social status of all kinds.
Not obvious. You need a mental model such that when combined with your motivational system it drives you to do the "right" thing (in terms of fitness). It needs to have some degree of accuracy, sure, but more accurate does not necessarily mean more adaptive in every situation. Sometimes being overly optimistic is good, as it leads you to try many times until success. Sometimes being overly pessimistic is good, as it leads you to avoid unnecessary risk.
> Sometimes being overly pessimistic is good, as it leads you to avoid unnecessary risk.
Wouldn't the level of pessimism required to avoid unnecessary risks be the *right* level of pessimism? Being *overly* pessimistic would lead to avoidance even of necessary risks, or to misjudgement of negligible risks.
> Wouldn't the level of pessimism required to avoid unnecessary risks be the *right* level of pessimism?
Yes. The right level of pessimism in terms of your behavior. Which can be overly pessimistic in terms of your world model, e.g. interpreting 20% risk as "this will definitely happen". So we are talking about "overly pessimistic/optimistic" in epistemological terms (making it "not obvious" that a more accurate world model is adaptive).
"Having an accurate mental model of the world is so obviously adaptive"
Not obvious. We have all sorts of inaccuracies in our mental models of the world, adaptive ones even! That's why optical illusions and biases exist, for example.
Also well-known scenarios, such as: you get home from work and realize your fly was unzipped all day. You feel like everyone you encountered that day saw, cared, and judged you for having your fly unzipped, when realistically, probably nobody noticed, and the few people who did probably didn't give it a moment's thought. How did you evolve that erroneous thought pattern? Probably it was somehow adaptive in the ancestral environment.
It's also that staying attractive is a fairly self-centered activity. Makeup is the most obvious example, but quite a lot of the process involves some level of "look at me".
Shrimp welfare, EA: it is ultimately the altruism part of that trips me up. It never made sense to me to have some entirely non-selfish moral system, I could always imagine morality only as committing to rules, if everybody did, would likely benefit me. So committing to helping poor people can benefit me, because if me doing so serves as an example to others, in case I would be poor, there would be an increased chance of someone helping me. Trivers' reciprocal altruism. This truly breaks down at shrimp and at people from countries who would likely not ever be in the position of helping me. Quite likely it only works as something like strong local communities, which was sort of the historic norm of how much altruistic people wanted to be. And does not scale beyond that.
I am really at a loss at imaging why would anyone would do something that is basically a guaranteed net loss for oneself, with no hope of reciprocation ever. Like you are not even religious and you want to be a saint?
But I am pretty sure I am missing something. Reciprocal altruism is just overly convenient in the sense of somehow at the same time maximizing self-interest while still sort of looking like being a decent enough person? Such local optima are somehow suspicious. Either maximized self-interest lies at utter transactionality which feels like being a kind of a callous person, or the duties of a decent enough person go beyond the help-the-community level.
On a deeper level, as someone around here mentioned, how does philosophy supply motivation. Like you have perfectly logical arguments that I am a fish, now I am going to go live in the sea?
1. EA aspires to be rational about altruism. It does not argue the altruism part itself. It assumes it. And it is correct to assume most people have altruistic impulses and appealing to these impulses often works. I've been part of the animal welfare wing of EA (as rank and file) for a while and, let me tell you, most people already care about all kinds of animals. If I told you I kick my cat for fun, you'd think I'm a psychopath. That is true even though my cat can't do shit for you. Most people are altruistic in the making a better world sense, in addition to the pragmatic, reciprocal altruism sense.
2. Misfortune could befall you. Something that is bad *in a strange way* could happen to you. A society that is kind to the fargroup is more likely to be kind to you (let's assume the limiting factor is not resources, but noticing/empathy). Should we build a society that is expansive in it's kindness? Remember to apply some sort of veil of ignorance.
A society that is maximally altruistic is going to be less generous to you, mathematically. Sure, we benefit when people are not completely selfish but we here is a line.
A. No, not mathematically. Depending on your chance of being turned into the equivalent of a shrimp, it might actually be more generous in expectation (in literal resources). Although this is an edge case.
B. More importantly, your welfare might benefit from resources in a non-linear way. A tiny bit of resources/consideration to your shrimp-like self might dramatically improve your subjectively perceived welfare. So might actually benefit in expectation.
Sure, there is a limit, but people arguing "reciprocal altruism" typically make overly confident statements about where that limit is. I'm just pointing out that it is not obvious.
A "shrimp-like position" might involve suffering in a way that is hard for many people to empathize with and leaves the sufferer in a position of not being able to reciprocate.
A real world example might be chronic pain/fatigue conditions like ME that are dramatically under-researched considering how much they impact people's quality of life. There are probably a lot more types of "under the radar" suffering like that.
Even if I was in such a state, caring about shrimp isn’t going to somehow make people lessen my suffering. Is your thought process that the more utilitarian people are, the more they will ease suffering in general, therefore you should be more utilitarian? Because that’s not how any of this works.
> Like you are not even religious and you want to be a saint?
Who said they're not religious? As far as I'm concerned, there's no real distinction between secular morality and religion. They're both just baseless social dogma. This is just secular liberal morality that taken to the extreme, a consequence of the absence of a strong central authority resulting in ideological drift. At least they're less of an immediate danger compared to the religious extremists...
If they didn't gain 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 from it, they would not do it. At the very least, it's feeding their ego, their own perceived sense of moral "goodness" that is based on nothing but their own fears and desires of how they're seen by others. Whether those others are real or imagined is irrelevant.
Yes, the people who do things to feed their own perceived sense of moral goodness instead of personal material gain is what we call good people and they are worthy of respect.
In contrast, the people who always choose the action that gives them the most material gain and don't care about perceived sense of goodness and how others see them are what we call bad people and are worthy of disrespect.
I see animal rights as an aesthetic issue rather than a moral one. It's unpleasant to think about people being unreasonably cruel to animals, so I'd rather it didn't happen.
Sometimes it feels nice to be nice, even if nobody pays you for it. People can get inherent satisfaction from behaving in alignment with their own morals, which in many cases can completely offset any practical costs they may incur from that moral behavior. Maybe your morals don't currently include being nice to shrimp. Maybe some kind of argument could change the way you feel about that, or maybe not.
On the Musk lawsuit, I'm having a hard time squaring the outcome with the prediction markets. 500k+ of volume on Polymarket[0] had Elon losing at only even odds until March, 2:1 until May 15th, and 3:1 before the verdict dropped.
It seems to have been widely reported from the start[1] and throughout[2] that the statute of limitations was a key thing Musk's team had to prove. It also seems overabundantly clear that Musk knew about OpenAI's moves to convert to a for-profit, which were publicly reported on top of being highly personally relevant. Why did bettors think this case had legs?
Considering the possibility that the lawsuit was brought mostly out of spite, it strikes me as somewhat plausible that Musk threw money at Polymarket just to make Altman sweat
I despise the man, can't tell whether we're quite on the same page there, anyway I think you're right about this. He's a rare breed and the way he wins is a bit novel, the deck is irrelevant, he's attending to a different game entirely, like literally sometimes, getting his SBF on, it's a compulsion. But I don't believe he really sees a game board, more a surfer always riding a peculiar wave, no regard for what caused it to appear, but he WAS born to ride these ones.
Perhaps what they did miss, and I know bupkis about this case, just read the highlights from Zvi, going 100% on vibes: Altman might actually be one of the few who can out Elon Elon, like do what he does but on purpose, and at will. I do not know if I like this one or what in the end they might share in common, he makes me very uneasy.
There's at least one more person who fits the mold you lay out (I'll give you one guess). They have exploited the unclose-able gap between written word and the "norm" of the law. If a rule doesn't have an immediate, catastrophic penalty attached to it, it doesn't exist for them.
Nate Silver I think just wrote about it, pointing out that they play "hardball" with the law and ignore our normative guardrails. God help us when the filibuster gets fully fully broken, we're aaaalmost there!
Yes and he's the best proof I have that Elon probably hasn't done anything like mastering 4d chess cause he's even.. less cognizant, proof that you don't need.. certain brain modules to win in this.. greatest country of all time which I happen to live in. Yay everything!
So imagine a future not long from now, where virtual hologram meetings are commonplace. In fact if you're meeting remotely you're required to be there in full-body projection, because we all know how people fidget, distract themselves, read other stuff, and generally don't show up. On the flip side, the embodied people at the meeting are required to maintain a sort of etiquette: never occupy the same space as a virtual participant. it's rude. A person might say about this: "Don't ____ me!"
What's a good slang word for this? (It's for a book I'm writing).
There is a common explanation to alien abduction phenomenon that abductees were influenced by depictions of aliens and abductions in pop culture, while experiencing a nightmare or something like sleep paralysis. This also lines up with recent discussion of sun miracles: Christians will see Virgin Mary in the Sun, Buddhists will see Buddha, ufologists will see aliens, etc. Seems reasonable, your brain will hallucinate what you believe in or at least have some knowledge of. However, there's a subset of alien abductions that are not easily explained by this: 7 foot tall telepathic alien mantises.
On subreddit r/MantisEncounters you'll see dozens of reports of seeing mantis-like creatures. Many of them are of 'I tried to contact mantises on LSD and it worked' type, which are not interesting to me, but there also are a lot of independent discoveries, both with drugs and in real life. Most reports share common features of mantis race: 7 feet in height, dressed in purple robes, and telling people that humanity is going to screw up the planet yet "Earth will be saved". If they appear together with stereotypical gray aliens or little green men, they seem to be in charge of them, standing in the background and only delivering the message to abductee in the end of abduction, while grays do 'manual' job like experiments on your body. Sometime reporters see a regular mantis (insect) *after* the encounter. Many reports depict mantises as immaterial or at least telepathic, but a few of them just describe seeing a giant mantis around.
So, what to make out of this? Is there some pop culture reference that is the source of these reports? Why mantis? It is an animal that you don't often contact with, and is not dangerous or useful to humans. With reptilians, you can say that it's some deep fear of snakes routed in subconsciousness showing up. But mantis? And why purple robes? Very specific but consistent detail. Greys are the stereotypical aliens, reptilians are also well-known, 'Nordics' are just basically humans, however mantises are only familiar to UFO fans.
Of course, one can just say that all of the reports are fake. I think many of psychedelics trips are self-induced, but a lot of sightings are genuine (i.e. a person really had this experience) and independent (not result of some influence). I don't find abduction stories convincing, and would dismiss mantis encounters as hallucinations or sleep paralysis too, if not the lack of mantis depictions in popular culture and common yet specific elements like purple cloaks. But if we have to explain this in line with psychosocial theory, I'd say it's easy to come up with an insectoid (just mix a human and an insect), and mantises are the most humanoid out of all insects. Most mythical humanoid creatures boil down to 'human + something else' or 'humans with a quirk' anyway.
Haven't looked at the details, but cultural patterns often start as a random fluke and then get amplified. One person dreams or hallucinates a mantis, talks of it, others hear, and so on. Out of hundreds of such memetic chains that go nowhere, maybe one somewhat catches on, without necessarily reaching the success of "reptilians".
https://spaceghost.fandom.com/wiki/Zorak is a mantis alien from a popular cartoon series dating to the 1960s, which was then revived for a different type audience in the 90s. In fact, that audience (Cartoon Network's Adult Swim) has a pretty high overlap with the kind of people who'd be on that subreddit.
There was this citation from one of Scotts post, something among the lines that the Left hates AI so much that they want to believe every bad thing about it at the same time. Strangely, I fail to find it now.
I just want to say when I was experimenting with lifestyle interventions about mental health, the usual recommendations like exercise, eating vegs or putting down the phone did not work - I was mostly reading ebooks on my phone anyway - but spending outside did. Seriously just sitting on a park bench and reading an ebook had a noticeable effect.
I find it truly strange, that convicted felons get hour of outside time per law, and since the Mandela Rules it cannot even be taken away as punishment or for reasons of being overly dangerous, it is considered such a basic right, and some of these rules date back to the mid-19th century, yet we somehow treat ourselves worse than that.
And yeah after having made the experiment, I strangely proceeded to generally not do it... I live in a super safe place, and yet inside feels safer...
I wonder about this: spending a lot of time on the English language Internet, one is basically living in virtual America, and not being familiar with the physical one, one might lose some context.
One context I wonder about is this: Christianity is so powerful in physical America, that it takes a fair amount of radicalism to challenge it. So American women are either Christian trads or feminists, not much in between, as anything other than trad-marriage is coded as feminist, because one cannot simply "shrug" at trad expectations. One either challenges it head-on or accepts it. So this is why we hear the American Right complaining about feminism having broken the trad lifestyle.
Which just does not code in other developed nations, where not caring much about religion was already a thing in like 1968, before anyone really heard much about feminism. So women having a series of boyfriends or doing hookups was not explicitly feminist. The trad lifestyle largely died out of entropy, not head-on challenges.
Conversely, in most other developed nations it is possible to be a very normie, very oldschool lifestyle "hobbit" without ever setting foot in church. Czechia is really a prime example of this, hardly anyone goes to church, yet the culture has a bit of a conservative-conventional vibe, because people are just sort of cautious and practical.
So the big battle between Christians and radicals is just not happening. People either evaporate out of church while still mostly living like their grandparents, or drifting into a non-trad lifestyle without considering it any sort of radical.
>So American women are either Christian trads or feminists, not much in between, as anything other than trad-marriage is coded as feminist.
"Coded as feminist" by whom, exactly? Certainly not me. In order to make this true, you have to use either an unreasonably broad definition of "Christian Trad" or an unreasonably broad definition of "feminist", and in either case you are not facilitating useful communication.
Yes, there are people on one lunatic fringe who will define any woman who gets married as a "Christian Trad", and people on another lunatic fringe who will define any woman who *doesn't* get married as a "feminist". These people are the lunatic fringe; they can and should be ignored in most contexts (like this one). Just like the lunatic fringe that defines anyone to the right of Karl Marx as a "fascist" and the lunatic fringe that defines anyone to the left of Benito Mussolini as a "communist"; it does not follow that all Americans are either Fascists or Communists.
>One context I wonder about is this: Christianity is so powerful in physical America, that it takes a fair amount of radicalism to challenge it.
This is a characteristic the United States in the Year of the Lord 2026 which remains baffling to nearly all Europeans. A significant majority of the population of all European countries at the present time are nominally Christian, but they are also in the main rather superficially Christian - i.e., whilst the label is usually accepted as a matter of course, it carries with it a minimum of theological and doctrinal baggage. The attachment is usually to the deep rooted rituals and customs of social Christianity, with the result that many people who are effectively agnostic or atheist will still express a preference for church weddings and the baptism of their children.
This is true of most members of the Catholic and the principal non-evangelical Protestant churches, as well as to many members of the more rigid and intolerant Greek Orthodox church, few of whom are likely to be much swayed in their political allegiances by religion. The exceptions are, of course, Ireland and the Balkans, both of which have undergone significant historical trauma linked to religious identity; Ireland going back to the island's colonisation by England under the Tudors, and the Balkan states whose 18th and 19th century independence struggles were defined by religious difference.
That the world's (still?) most powerful state remained in thrall to religious fundamentalism had been for many decades a source of mild amusement to Europeans, but the schadenfreude is no longer as entertaining as it was before Trump and Vance appeared on the scene.
I think your comment also exposes the reality that people today use the word "feminist" to mean a range of different things, which can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. I would use it as a name for the general view that women should have basically the same rights and privileges as men... which I guess has been a radical idea at different times & places but is currently pretty normative in the west.
You can share the general view that women should have basically the same rights and privileges as men... and still get banned on a feminist subreddit.
Another possible definition of feminism is: the set of opinions that will get you upvoted in a mainstream feminist subreddit. It may be difficult to define it explicitly, but any specific hypothesis can be verified experimentally... it will only cost you one account.
I think this describes America thirty years ago, and maybe red-state America today, but not blue-state America (including where most of the people a European would meet on the Internet are). At least in blue state America, Christianity is no longer hegemonic and it works the same way you describe it working in Europe.
Is Substack nothing more than yet another online echo chamber, despite presenting itself as superficially more sophisticated than the rest? Has that always been the case, or has it declined precipitously in the last twelve months?
I started posting on Substack about a year and a half ago, mostly on geopolitical issues and primarily on the rise of authoritarianism in the USA and the war in Palestine, hoping to generate some useful debate. Unfortunately (though probably not surprisingly), all I generated were some approving nods and a handful of heated attacks, some borderline psychotic, but never anything approaching a serious argument, pro, con or neutral. For example, I had expected at least some informed discussion over the issue of whether, seen in the light of existing international law, Israel's continuing action in Gaza could be considered genocidal, but that never seemed to happen.
Substack remains an invaluable access point for input from a number of excellent writers and commentators such as Heather Cox Richardson (and yes, that statement places me accurately enough on the political spectrum), but otherwise seems increasingly taken over by self-publicists, narcissists and the odd rabid nut case - as a forum for debate, it seems to me to have failed. Is this an unfairly jaundiced judgement?
I read your statement about Heather Cox Richardson, and that it places you on the political spectrum. I never heard of her, and wanted to know how fast can I clock it.
I opened her most recent article, in the second paragraph she talk about Trump and his cronies, and it was obvious.
So 1 paragraph to alignment. Then I began to wonder, how fast can you clock different writers?
There are indeed an almost infinite number of discrete echo chambers within Substack as a whole - left, right, upside-down and every possible variation between them. It would probably be more useful to say that an echo chamber dynamic inevitably functions within Substack (as it does in every other online forum) by segregating posters within what will quickly develop into their own 'safe' or congenial area of discourse (a.k.a. echo chamber). Of course they are free to wander outside it, but the results are likely fo be unilluminating, discombobulating, or both!
> segregating posters within what will quickly develop into their own 'safe' or congenial area of discourse
This is the general "problem of discovery," and it happens anywhere there's a lot of content, which is most places online.
Anytime there's millions of potential pieces of content to read/watch, the platform itself always needs to help its audience do discovery, lest they dive into an infinite pool of content and be shocked, dismayed, or simply overwhelmed with choice.
So what do they do?
They group you. They see what you read and click on, who reads and clicks on you, and they put you in the group of "people who read and click on stuff like this."
From the outside, it looks like a filter bubble. But from the platform's point of view, they're showing you the stuff you're most likely to click on, read, and engage with, and that keeps you coming back.
If you want to truly step outside of your bubble, you need to manually do it, by deliberately searching for and clicking on and reading things you wouldn't normally engage with.
-They group you. They see what you read and click on, who reads and clicks on you, and they put you in the group of "people who read and click on stuff like this."-
I'm not sure how true this is because hatewatching is a real thing. Lots of algorithms seem to generate lots of traffic and attention not by only showing you things you like but by showing you things you love or hate. The weird thing about Substacks is that "hate reading" doesn't really appear to be a thing whereas I think that was Twitter's entire business model.
People love debate, people love watching people get owned, people love fighting and drama. In WWE terms, the only thing better than Hulk Hogan and the Macho Man teaming up to defeat the Ultimate Warrior is Hulk Hogan betraying the Macho Man and then they fight. Drama sells.
I find it odd that this doesn't replicate on Substack, that everyone just retreats to their own corner.
PS.
John Carter sent me on a dive into...social media strategy land. Really like these two pieces on modern social media strategy:
Yeah, great point. I think the Substack equivalent is probably gender discourse. It's everywhere, there's two sides, and a good chunk of the readers and commenters on both sides are from the "other side," and are in high dudgeon about it.
It's also one of the easiest ways to get a ton of reads or likes.
> This is the general "problem of discovery," and it happens anywhere there's a lot of content, which is most places online.
Understood, and that is certainly an elegant way of putting it. But is not the ineluctable conclusion that the certain aspects of the internet, and specifically internet forums, are actually one of the worst imaginable places to conduct research?
Note that I don't disparage the internet as a source of factual information (to be treated with reasonable suspicion and cross-checked, as should be the case with any source of information), but I seriously doubt the value of internet forums (including this one) for anything other than the rare opportunity of defending your ideas and prejudices against hopefully rational and informed interlocutors.
> but I seriously doubt the value of internet forums (including this one) for anything other than the rare opportunity of defending your ideas and prejudices against hopefully rational and informed interlocutors.
Here I'll point to another general principle of online platforms - the law of 90/9/1. 90% of people consume - they read, or they watch, and that's it.
9% of people comment or actively engage with content on the platform. 1% actually post or create new content entirely.
By those lights, I think even the "defending your ideas" use case you're pointing to is by far the minority - you're in the 9% or 1% if you're doing that, either commenting or creating.
The vast majority use case is something like "edutainment." Simply consuming ideas, for entertainment or education or both.
Slightly contra Bugmaster below then, I'll argue that you CAN actually change minds and educate - it's just not going to happen in the 9% that you're commenting and going back and forth with. The two of you have come from different priors and backgrounds and values, and never the twain shall meet.
But what you ARE doing is putting out arguments and ideas being consumed by ~10x the amount of people commenting, and the odds are then on your side. Some of that much larger population probably had backgrounds and values similar enough to your own that they might be persuaded or convinced by your arguments.
So when we create, or comment, online, we should keep that broader audience in mind. Yes, we're directly interacting with specific commenters, but your arguments are actually most likely to resonate or change minds with other people out there reading than the one you're directly corresponding with.
Every online forum is an echo chamber. Substack is no different. If you want intellectual variety, you need to participate in several echo chambers with opposite views.
Don't settle for opposite views about specific issues, that's a very shallow kind of difference. Dive into frankly divergent views about what *matters*, and you'll be seeing a bit of the world.
My experience is that all you get from participating in several rival echo chambers is a headache; variety, yes, but not debate. Echo chamber 'A' which supports viewpoint Alpha will encourage praise of Alpha and attack or ignore praise of Beta; echo chamber 'B' will do the opposite, but never the twain shall meet.
Oh, yes, of course; but you yourself might be able to find some nuggets of truth in the middle. You're not going to convince anyone of anything, of course.
Hard disagree. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The finding-truth-in-the-middle heuristic only works when all sides actually are trying to get to truth; it fails when the algorithm is “I just automatically take the opposite side to whatever I hear”. Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism adds exactly as much value as a rock with the words “you are wrong” written on it.
Contrarianism spurs one to question the status quo, to be skeptical of received wisdom (what many here lately have been calling "vibes-based reasoning"), to seek better answers, and perhaps most importantly, to feel at ease when following through on this questioning and skepticism. Because raising a doubt is relatively easy but persisting after you receive abuse for it is hard.
Contrarianism makes you less susceptible to echo chambers and fads, not to mention various more entrenched isms. It is a good character trait in a scientist or engineer as much as in an artist.
Contrarianism can't be the end either of course, it can't be the only thing going on in your head, but things go better when it's in the mix. So I think it is virtuous.
I have heard a few prestigious scientists and writers (e.g. Carlos Frenk, Adam Grant) say some version of this so I know it's not just my own crackpot idea.
Echo chambers are bad because when you get no external input, you will arrive at ridiculous cultural equilibria that would never arise in the real world. Substack is better than most because it confers higher status to real people with real jobs, feeding the conversation with world-relevant input.
Doesn't mean most users aren't insane, just that they can tempered.
It’s a common Internet claim that mattress stores often are fronts for money laundering or other nefarious activities, as there are many of them and they rarely if ever seem busy. Chances are you’ve seen such claims yourself. Having had relatives who were in the business, I can say that mattress stores can and do thrive despite there being so danged many of them.
Mattress stores have among the lowest set-up and operating costs of any retailers. In most cases a mattress store is just a large room filled with display models, without much in the line of expensive shelving and fixtures found at most retailers. It often can operate with just one or two employees on duty, who may very well be commissioned. Minimal staffing works as shoppers tend to make their choices based on the feel of the display mattresses without much input from the employees. Finally, as mattress stores fulfill orders by direct shipment from offsite warehouses the stores don’t need to keep any inventory on hand other than the displays.
Most customer visits to mattress stores are purposeful, in other words it’s uncommon for the customers who are out for other reasons to decide on the spur of the moment to stop into the mattress store they just saw. This means that mattress stores generally don’t need to be in high-traffic, high-visibility locations, but can be in more out-of-the-way and cheaper spots. Finally, in what’s likely the most important reason of all, the retailer markup on mattresses is higher than almost all other consumer products with the possibility exception of jewelry.
So yes, a mattress stores can be quite a moneymaker even with much competition and infrequent sales transactions. And without being a front.
I had not heard that about mattress stores. Mattresses are one of those products you absolutely must try in person, and unlike say shoes, its cost prohibitive to ship and return in volume. So its remaining vulnerability is figuring out which mattress you want in store then buying online. I had read that mattresses are intentionally mislabelled to prevent this (and that might have something to do with the bizzare tags saying its a felony to remove??). Once the need for physical retail is established, the mark up will be whatever is necessary to make the numbers work.
Some brands you can buy online and then return if you don't like it. I did it once. In the end I didn't like the mattress, returned it without an issue, and went to a store to buy one.
As used mattresses can’t be resold, at least not for anything approaching original price, the extremely high retailer markups make these returns possible. A mattress seller can afford to take the occasional loss on a return,
I saw a video about this once. It claimed, plausibly in my opinion, that mattress stores make most of their money by sort of playing the long game in a real-estate strategy:
1. They get in as tenants when the rent is cheap (often when a new strip mall or other multi-outlet retail development goes up, the mattress store is one of the first occupants).
2. They make just enough money selling mattresses to cover their costs (which, as noted, are low).
3. Then, when the development around them starts to get lots of traffic and the landlord wants to charge more, the mattress stores, who don't pull a lot of traffic, say "give us $$ and we'll leave".
Then they go set up and do the same thing at the next new commercial development.
Interesting. I always underestimate how much foot traffic a business gets, because I don't get to see all the customers. I often find myself wondering how many of them stay afloat.
One possible bit of caution, which I didn’t mention above, is that customers now can buy inexpensive mattresses in a box at retailers like Walmart and Lowe’s. These might take away some of the business from mattress stores at the lower end of the market. As my relatives are no longer in the industry I don’t know much more.
Internet people will claim any business or transaction that they don't understand is "money laundering", while of course not understanding money laundering either.
The real question is why someone hasn't managed to disrupt this model yet. Sell three mattresses (soft/medium/hard), set up small shops in high-traffic areas where people can try them out, price them at 20% markup instead of 100% markup (and make it clear in marketing that you're doing it by showing everyone the actual wholesale price of that $2000 Sealy), and sell primarily online.
I guess this forum is only interested in g-increasing nootropics, but I wanna know what do you all think about HGH-supplementation for height size of healthy children. From the most concise paper I found https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(96)01038-0/abstract, seems like it'll give effect size (Gemini-calculated) of 0.38, which sounds quite huge for height size treatment. Also the side effects seem pretty minimal especially when we're only targeting children.
Most refutations I found seems to say that it has side effects for minimal benefit, but it just sounds just like resistances I heard about nootropics. Of course I may have confirmation biased myself along the way so feel free to tear this apart.
I'm considering this for my boys, for whom the advantages are large enough to offset the very minor downsides (in my own opinion).
I think for girls, additional height can actually be a downside in terms of happiness, dating and marriage outcomes, and so on.
My daughter, naturally, has turned out to be 99.9%+ percentile in height anyways so far - she's probably going to be as tall as (or taller than) her six foot grandma.
To my mind, the arguments for boys are:
1. Known significant effect sizes in earnings, dating, and social status generally
2. In terms of safety, "an excellent safety profile of rhGH has been demonstrated in large Phase IV registries comprising > 600,000 patient-years of rhGH exposure and long-term safety cohorts of adults treated with GH as children."
So would I take a tiny bit higher chance of a slipped capital femoral epiphysis and a tiny bump in the chance of slightly impaired glucose handling for a free 4cm+ in my boys?
Most definitely, and I would have gladly chosen that for myself (and I'm doing well, height wise).
If your kids have a 6' grandma (+3 SD for average US woman height, IIRC) , then I wonder why you'd need to give your boys anything. I'm assuming the men in the family are also well-fed and tall, so they should have the nature and nurture to make them taller than average. Are you concerned they will "only" be 6'2"? Will you not be satisfied unless your offspring make Wemby seem like a dwarf?
Regardless, is there a world were everyone gets HGH to get taller (or we select embryos for that) and we end up in the same place wrt height and the positives you mention, except now we have to do more work to just stay in the same place?
No, you're totally right, it's purely "an incremental 4cm is a good thing and it has minimal downsides, why wouldn't I go for it?"
And to your point that it's just a Red Queen's race, yes, this is true also, but isn't everything? How many years, decades, of effort to people put into grinding their kids into the Ivies?
How much do we all spend on private schools and tutors per year when public education guts all their gifted and talented programs and won't actually educate your kids if they're smart? And we're still paying the taxes for the public schools on top of that!
How much do we pay for sports and athletic participation for our kids, for a rounding error impact out in the decimals on their potential college admission?
The cost of HGH is nothing compared to those decades and buckets of money everywhere else. That extra 4cm is practically free!
Re: Red Queen race and kids. It's ridiculous in many ways. I'm reminded of my associates who grew up in South Korea. One of them ended up in like a group apartment with similar teenagers so that they could focus on studying for the CSAT. Their moms would take turns supervising, cooking, cleaning, etc. in the hopes that they get into good schools. And this is after the many years of cram school+ where they spent 10+ hr/day studying. And with the way Korean birthrates are going...
Back to the topic at hand. I actually have a young son who's quite a bit shorter than average. I've considered giving him HGH so that he would be taller, for some of the reasons you mention. Now that I know people who have tall children want to make them even taller, I gotta take more drastic measures so that he doesn't fall too far behind.
I'm gonna have to concoct an improved version of HGH for for him to compete with your giant offspring. Of course, you're a resourceful fellow, so you'll probably get your hands on that. Then I'm gonna have to invent a time machine to go back in time and select a taller mate (love be damned! evolution calls!) thus defeating the whole purpose of this in the first place since I won't even be having the same son. And when that doesn't work because you've done it too, I'll need to modify my ancestors to be taller too, erasing me. It just doesn't end well.
Alternatively, I could make the argument of a height ceiling. There's diminishing returns to increasing height past a certain level (let's say 6'2") discomfort in cars & airplanes, having to look down all the time to talk to people, people constantly asking if you play basketball, unearned sense of superiority, etc.
> Are you expecting full news coverage on each of them?
Of course not. That's why we're wondering why this specific incident isn't getting coverage. If it's just minority on minority crime, nobody would give a damn, but a hate crime can push an agenda.
Very plausible. But unless it's substantially made up of lies, we're still talking about people going to a house of worship and shooting at people. Hard to imagine plausible unreported facts that paint that as anything other than horrific
An electrical engineer and a neuroscientist ask the question: "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?" Spoiler alert: their answer is 'no.' And they write: "This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems..."
If I understand correctly, the claim is not that a neuroscientist can understand the way the CPU is built, given lectures, but that current neuroscience methods to understand the brain, fail to understand a (relatively old and simple) microprocessor.
I would say this give a pretty bad sign on neuroscientific methods to understand the brain as a complex system, if even a much simpler system can't be understood.
... though now I wonder - has modern neuroscience advanced much in the decade since? Like, we've gotten good GPUs since then, surely that's done something for some -omics somewhere.
As someone who studies a bit of both, I am not sure how useful one is to the other. The brain is a massively complex machine which computes using a very exotic system compared to a CPU. I have not found it helpful to use computer hardware analogies in the brain, only DSA like binary trees.
It's an interesting theory. But even if the brain's mojo is due to quantum effects within/between neurons, that still doesn't explain why I see red as red while observing myself seeing red as red, and why I ask why I see red as red. ;-)
Maybe if the dept of war gets its way and then a subSAGI nukes someone. Generally speaking rushing killer robots might be a good way to galvanize the public before its too late.
I can only offer scattered (and half-baked) thoughts on this. I can imagine a world where there's large scale AI-pushback, enough to really slow things down or maybe even reverse.
-AI causes significant unemployment (> 20 % or maybe certain politically connected sectors being largely affected) and governments react by passing laws to ensure humans in the loop for employment reasons. An NYT article has a high-level overview here of a recent Chinese court case: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/china-ai-unemployment.html . It doesn't help general AI-sentiment that there are companies actively crediting AI for layoffs or encouraging businesses to hire fewer humans.
-AI drones/"killbots" become more ubiquitously used, maybe autonomous swarms in terror attacks.
That depends greatly on the speed of AI capability improvements. Unfortunately, in 2027 the first new datacenters that can train models with 100T parameters will become operational. That is on the order of a human brain's synapse count. At that point, there is a good chance of very radical capability improvements (from our human POV).
A human and an ape are very similar genetically, yet we perceive the ape to have so little intelligence that we don't even afford it any rights. Our concept of "intelligence" is formed from observing the variation among humans, but because humans have basically the same hardware, we will perceive a system with just slightly better hardware to be much, much more intelligent.
When it invents nanotech using math we can't even comprehend even when it is slowly explained to us, we will wonder how it could have become so smart so quickly? But objectively, it's just a little bit smarter than us. We just don't perceive it that way.
In this case, there won't be a Butlerian jihad, because we die quickly.
If this does not come to pass and AI development continues "slowly" and white collar workers are gradually displaced, then yes, a large anti-AI political backlash is inevitable and our only chance of not dying later when ASI is born.
What we should keep an eye on is whether robotics becomes advanced enough so that the ruling class is able to police the lower classes without actual humans. If they replace police with robots, there's little chance the backlash will achieve much. Political power has always been based on the threat of violence.
> That is on the order of a human brain's synapse count. At that point, there is a good chance of very radical capability improvements (from our human POV)
Firstly, comparing the parameter counts to synapse counts assumes that electronic substrates behave the same way as biological substrates. Given that we still don't have a falsifiable neuroscientific theory of how the human brain works to create consciousness (or even intelligence), I'd say it's wishful thinking to assume that 100T parameters will necessarily improve AI model performance. I fall into the Marcus/LeCun camp; I doubt our current AI models will translate into robust world models. We've seen studies showing that a longer chain of thought can hurt performance, and that logical reasoning collapses at high complexity. I doubt that just scaling transformers will produce AGI.
Personally, I've been using LLMs for about three years now, and they're still feeding me bullshit (err, hallucinations). The only trouble is that the bullshit is getting less obvious (for instance, instead of references with wrong authors or wrong titles, it's now can give me summaries that don't reflect the authors' conclusions).
And what about those goblins? Geez, that was weird.
> yet we perceive the ape to have so little intelligence that we don't even afford it any rights.
Let's not confuse political rights with intelligence. Various ethological studies have shown that wild chimpanzees and orangutans possess problem-solving capabilities comparable to those of humans in spatial, mechanical, and "extractive" domains (extractive meaning figuring out a puzzle to get food). What humans have that the rest of the great apes don't is language, which allows us to communicate to others how we solved a puzzle. :-)
> our only chance of not dying later when ASI is born.
I have yet to see a realistic scenario where ASI would be able to cause an extinction event for humans. Even if it could cause one, it would likely need humans to maintain its infrastructure.
> Political power has always been based on the threat of violence.
Ummm. Maybe. But there's a point where violence becomes unproductive for the ruling class, and the threat of violence not longers motivates people to actively participate in the regime.
On the first point, you are completely right. We don't know how many neural network parameters are equivalent to a biological neuron, so the 100T number is at most a very rough target. It was on my mind for its poetic significance, but it was a mistake to include in my comment as it does not provide evidence to the hypothesis that a big jump in capabilities is near. (I do think that, but for other reasons that can't really be transmitted using text.)
> I'd say it's wishful thinking to assume that 100T parameters will necessarily improve AI model performance.
Scaling always helped performance so far and did so predictably (in some metric), (search scaling laws for more), so there is very little chance it will stop exactly now. We can't be sure how much it will improve it, but I would bet at 1:1000 odds that it will.
> I doubt that just scaling transformers will produce AGI.
I'm pretty sure it will, but don't forget that AI labs don't need to "just" scale, they can and will use any method they find that improves performance.
> What humans have that the rest of the great apes don't is language, which allows us to communicate to others how we solved a puzzle. :-)
What we have compared to them is not just language. If a chimpanzee is raised exactly like a human, it still won't be able to understand language. We have a brain that's capable of learning language. This capability is a gigantic advantage, even though our brains are barely different.
> I have yet to see a realistic scenario where ASI would be able to cause an extinction event for humans. Even if it could cause one, it would likely need humans to maintain its infrastructure.
> Maybe. But there's a point where violence becomes unproductive for the ruling class, and the threat of violence not longers motivates people to actively participate in the regime.
And what will they do? Most people need to eat, they have to participate in the system to get money they can exchange for food. In a future where the ruling class don't need the lower classes for anything, because AI is able to do everything be it manual or intellectual work, the best the lower classes can hope for is that they will be fed, but they will have no power or influence on humanity anymore.
I don't think so. It's illegal to torture animals, but that does not necessarily mean they have rights. Legal systems don't handle an animal as a full person, they just forbid humans from performing some specific actions on them. It's illegal to litter, but that does not mean we grant rights to our environment.
Anyways, this issue is very tangential to my comment, surely you don't disagree that we view animals as much less intelligent than us.
I would need a reason to think the backlash against AI causing social harms would be any stronger than the backlash against social media or cell phones causing social harms - real and newsworthy, but ultimately a failure.
Wouldnt the reason be that the social harms are much greater and therefore a stronger more united backlash results. The trigger would likely be large harm inflicted at a time humans are still in enough control to do something. Thats not the same as a warning bell, itd be actual harm. The fact that a theoretical super AI would not show its hand too early does not prevent lesser AIs erring. So this one still seems plausible
A recent US opinion poll indicates that 71% of respondents were more afraid of living next to an AI data center than of living next to a nuclear power plant. And a UK poll found that 57% believe AI will eliminate far more jobs than it creates (and people expressed extreme concern about this outcome). Finally, some anarchists (reputedly) used incendiary devices to attack the construction site of Equinix's massive AI campus in Meudon, France. I suspect we'll see an escalation of attacks on data centers in the coming years—especially as radical environmentalist and political groups decide to take direct action. Just sayin...
The canon Butlerian Jihad took place AFTER mankind was interstellar and the AIs were already in effective control of quite a lot. The interstellar part seems unlikely.
But could we have a somewhat violent reaction against AI and/or autonomous robots? Something that resolves to acceptance of "Thou shalt not create a machine in the image of the human mind"? Sure. That is still possible. My P(DOOM) < 99%
I was tempted to reply "Different Butler". But I never actually finished reading Erewhon, and did even worse on the Dune saga, so I gave up and asked Google:
AI Overview:
The "Butlerian Jihad" in the Dune universe is a direct, deliberate homage to Samuel Butler’s 1872 satirical novel Erewhon. Butler’s book—specifically the sections known as "The Book of the Machines"—outlines the exact philosophical foundation for the galaxy-wide rebellion against artificial intelligence in Dune.
Trying to think of artificial real world places that evoke similar feelings to a simple walk through nature. Places that are calm and quiet and have that that sense of wonder.
This feels like the taste essays: do you mean a place that will generically evoke those feelings in (almost) all people?
If you are open to idiosyncratic examples, I have felt that in some libraries and on visits to Manhattan. The latter is obviously not calm and quiet, but with the right attitude can provoke a sense of wonder.
Mass MoCA is a museum in Western Massachusetts that has sometimes evoked that feeling in me. Giant spaces with giant installations. Always something cool going on there.
It's never quite the same, but I live on the east side of Providence, and I get similar feelings walking through the city early in the morning or late at night when there's no traffic. Doubly true after the few true snow events we've had since I moved here, although that feels like cheating because it's basically a blanket of Nature over everything.
The walkable layout and old architecture goes a long way towards evoking peace.
There are places constructed by humans that evoke some similar feelings as a walk through actual wilderness, but none that I can think of evoke all the same feelings, to the same degree, and those that come the closest are basically manmade nature, such as parks.
Is comparing a translation of one work to a translation of a different work fair?
The second piece seems to use more stale imagery than the first ("tip of my tongue", "get the words out", "get up the nerve", "hot blood surging"; compared to just "ears drumming" and "drip with sweat"), but then maybe being pale as a blade of grass is a cliche in Ancient Greek, and also, I bet all of this has more to do with the translation than the original work.
> Is comparing a translation of one work to a translation of a different work fair?
That depends what you're comparing. You might have noticed the repeated syllables in the Chinese song. In the original Mandarin, those syllables all rhyme. This matters to the quality of the poetry, and it would be unfair to compare that aspect of it in translation.
But what I'm remarking on is more to do with the meaning of the verse, and I see no problem comparing meaning in translation.
Issues can crop up. I picked Mary Barnard's translation because of the explicit reference to a beating heart. Sappho does make an explicit reference to her heart; translations commonly treat that as a metaphor. She seems to say literally that it "trembles"; I have no idea whether that's idiomatic Sapphic Greek for a heartbeat or whether it means something else.
Sappho says she turns paler than grass, or a meadow. You might notice that in English this is complete nonsense, since grass is green. Mary Barnard "fixes" that problem by translating "grass" as "dry grass", which I find unwarranted enough that I left it out.
But these are more issues of not knowing how to translate something than issues of the translation failing to capture the meaning.
> get up the nerve
It didn't make my extract, but this is also present in Sappho 31. The verse following the preserved portion of the poem begins "but all can/must be dared ...". Is it just the wording that you don't like?
Would you prefer a more literal translation of the Chinese? "The words have reached the side of my mouth"?
> But what I'm remarking on is more to do with the meaning of the verse, and I see no problem comparing meaning in translation.
Yeah, that's a good question. How important are meaning and execution when it comes to taste?
My first impression is that good execution is necessary for something to be tasteful, while the meaning (and themes etc.) make a difference on the margins but aren't strictly required, but I can think of counterexamples.
It's a novel of a sort, or rather a collection of many short glimpses forming a future history of humankind and its descendants.
Each chapter covers a timespan ten times longer than the previous: first the next century, then the next millennium, then the next ten thousand years, and so on, into millions and billions of years from now, as our world changes beyond recognition. Interplanetary states rise and collapse, the descendant of humanity split into non-sapient species on Earth and merge with other lifeforms among the stars. It's not quite a conventional novel in that it doesn't really have characters or a plot: humankind, maybe, defined very broadly, or time itself.
The first fourth of the book is actually set in the past, starting from the formation of Earth and drawing toward the present (exponentially slowing down as the latter part of the story exponentially accelerates). I think this will help the reader make sense of the timescales used in the future part.
The intention of the experiment is to smoothly transition between a human brain (which you probably believe has qualia) and a GLUT, using Chalmers Dancing Qualia (which you might have accepted as a valid technique) You start with the 86 billion PLUTS, then combine them one at a time, or any order you want, into 46 billion PLUT2's, then 23 billion PLUT4's...
While I admit I did say a perfect replica using a lookup table, which would include chemistry, I was only thinking in terms of electrical signals that result in other neurons firing, motor responses, etc. no lookup table could exactly mimic exact physics of the situation (gravity, etc) anyway. If every neuron has significant internal state storage that impacts the behavior (which I wasn't aware of) this would complicate it, conceptually at least.
Though I suspect you can still do a Chalmers style dance here that would get you to the GLUT, I haven't thought it through from necessary state storage yet. Can't you just give each PLUT a little storage, then when you combine PLUTS, you combine the storage too?
Classified threads have been discontinued. You are free to advertise in Open Threads, within reason. Explaining in a few lines why the thing might be interesting is expected.
I do remember that Scott made the rule rule about self-promotion a few months ago because I commented on it, but can't find the post right now, so it's possible I misremember the classifieds thing. The last classified thread was Jan 26, so the announcement would have been after that, probably in an OT.
My guess is that the actual illusion is just the sun appearing to be in front of the clouds (which can happen under certain conditions, you can google pictures of it).
When seeing this illusion, you have a moment of perceiving the sun just normal in the sky (far), suddenly changing too perceiving it as in front of the clouds (near). I think that either your brain fills in a sense of motion when you notice this to account for the perceived change in distance, or else people fill that motion in narratively when describing/remembering their experience.
(basically, there's a known illusion that makes it switch from 'far' to 'near', changing position without movement doesn't make sense on priors, so the brain fills in the movement either in your perceptions or on retelling)
Well, I think that's a way more complicated question, and gets into the full complexity of context and setting that Scott talks about.
Basically, 'it looked like that moved' is a simple perceptual primitive that you can realistically offer simple one-sentence explanations for. 'I thought the world was ending' is a much more complex idea, and not easily answered through speculation like this.
My hot take for the week is that all moral systems are just rule utilitarianism wearing different hats.
Rule utilitarianism: Please obey this set of moral heuristics which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
Deontology: Please obey this set of moral heuristics (which I have conveniently labelled as "duties") which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
Virtue ethics: Please obey this set of moral heuristics (which I have conveniently labelled as "virtues") which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
Basic utilitarianism: Forget the heuristics, just do whatever will lead to optimal outcomes! But of course in practice we need to use heuristics...
I don't think deontology makes any claim about "these rules, if universally obeyed, will lead to optimal outcomes". I think many deontologists actually base their rules on something much more abstract like "these rules, if universally obeyed, will mean the essential dignity of the human spirit is properly respected."
My beef with basic utilitarianism is that we should not be allowed to be a law to ourselves, we should not think like absolute kings. Our basic instincts should be those of law-abiding citizens. In all but the most exceptional cases, we should not violate laws. Generally speaking only violate a law that directly violates natural law, that is, the life, limb, property stuff.
If rule utilitarians think the very first rule is generally this, then it makes sense. But of course virtue ethicists can also say the very first virtue is obeying the law, unless it is a special case.
1. Not to solve all of philosophy in one sentence, but heuristics are sometimes needed when cold calculation fails because you don't always have perfect information and you don't always have linear comparability which utilitarianism requires.
2. The only difference between them besides that, is what is considered optimal outcome. Utilitarians want to minimise suffering, ie: relying on calculation to do the heavy lifting. Deontologists want to maximise rule following to prevent social systems from collapsing, ie: relying on systems to do the heavy lifting. Virtue Ethicists want every person to the the best version of themselves, ie: relying on individuals to do the heavy lifting. Because we cannot possibly say which outcome is objectively the best due to the massive uncertainty involved in the long run of the universe, a little bit of each is probably the strongest philosophy.
These systems have different notions of what you actually look at to determine an "optimal outcome".
Roughly speaking:
* utilitarians look at groups
* deontologists look at actions,
* virtue ethicists like to look at the person taking the action
None of these actually say, for example, "action X is bad / good". Instead, they're different ways you would answer the question "why is action X bad / good?"
A utilitarian would answer the question by demonstrating the net impact X would have on the group.
A deontologist would answer by demonstrating that X violates the decision rule (ex: don't use rational agents as means to an end)
A virtue ethicist would answer by analyzing how committing action X would (overall, holistically) help or hurt the person taking it.
These are just systems of reason giving. In order to actually apply them, you still need a specific notion of "Utility", "Decision Rule", or "Virtue".
Two utilitarians with different ways of assigning utility would disagree about action X (in a way more complicated than one just being wrong), as would two virtue ethicists with different notions of virtue.
Deontologists don't look at actions to decide the optimal outcome. They ignore the outcome and look at the action you in particular are doing.
For example, a deontologist wouldn't say "Murder is bad, and by executing murderers I'm preventing murder, therefore I should execute them." It's "Murder is bad, so I personally won't do it, no matter how much or how little murder happens as a consequence".
Likewise, a virtue ethicist looks only at the person taking the action, and not the virtue existing as an outcome.
You're right. I was trying to avoid a semantic argument. In a manner of speaking, the "outcome" is whether you do the thing or not.
You can take a deontological situation (ex: should I lie to the Gestapo asking about my friend's location) and say there are two outcomes (lie vs don't lie). The "optimal outcome" is whichever one doesn't cause a violation of the decision rule.
Similarly, a virtue ethicist can say an "optimal outcome" is whichever action helps me reach my Eudaimonia. If I'm trying to decide whether to act hedonistically or exercise self control, the "optimal outcome" is probably practicing restraint
If they have no penalties, more people will do the crime, which causes more harm. If they have heavy penalties, there's less harm from the crime, but more indirect harm towards the criminals and also in the form of taxing people to pay for the punishment. So the rule of light penalties for intentional but not-particularly-serious crimes leads to better outcomes.
Or I guess if you're assuming *everyone* follows the rule, there's no point in punishing people at all. After all, you're assuming nobody would be committing crimes. Is that what you mean?
No. I mean that under the assumption that the heuristics are universally obeyed, there is no reason for the penalties to be light. They should be heavy.
The statement wasn't "please obey this set of moral heuristics which, if universally obeyed by non-criminals, will lead to optimal outcomes".
If people are universally obeying the rules, why would we have a rule about making laws? Either the law is already a rule, in which case everyone is already obeying it, or it's not a rule, in which case it must be a bad law. And if there is a rule to break a law, people would break it no matter the punishment, right?
From a pure utilitarian standpoint, I think it's useful to have rules of thumb based on what would happen if a significant portion of people obeyed it. It makes it easier to think about the secondary consequences. But assuming literally everyone is following it is silly. By that logic, it's good to drive on the left or the right, but bad to drive on the east or the west. And everyone would follow whatever standard they personally think is best instead of following the one that exists.
No because the point of utilitarianism is it maximizes some good and virtue ethics is not doing that. One of the virtues is moderation. It’s an ethics for humans, not machines.
The idea that virtue ethics is just following heuristics is pretty weaksauce. Full strength virtue ethics means you MAKE things good through the FORCE of your virtue.
A deontologist or virtue ethicist who is trying to optimize for good outcomes would reproduce something a lot like rule utilitarianism, yes.
However, caring about good outcomes is intrinsic to utilitarianism, but is not a requirement of the other systems.
A deontologist is perfectly free to say 'Follow these rules because I have carefully considered the matter and found these rules to be Just and Fair. If they lead to bad outcomes, well, that's a shame, but it's no excuse for violating Justice and Fairness.'
A virtue ethicist is perfectly free to say 'These are the virtues a Good Man should posses, and what transpires in the world as a result is of no moral concern to a Good Man, for he has already fulfilled all possible moral obligations by being Virtuous.'
In practice, this is why Consequentialism actually matters. It can be hard to imagine societies where horrifically torturing people of different faiths is honestly considered morally good because God said to, or where endless cycles of murder and carnage result from people expressing Proper Manly Virtues. But these types of societies were the reality for most of human history, and Consequentialism is an actually meaningful and transformative insight if your society isn't already run on it.
Consequentialism doesn't solve this, since the question then becomes: "good results for whom?"
For much of human history the answer was "for me and my kin". So torturing enemies and making suffer is fine if they give me stuff in return, since I care more about me (and my kin) having stuff then outsiders suffering.
But my point is that I don't think anyone believes that their moral system leads to suboptimal outcomes. Nobody ever says "Do X, even though not-X would ultimately be better".
I guess that depends on what you mean by "outcome." Technically, all behavior leads to an outcome, because by definition all behavior acts upon the world. One can even say that all behavior is attempting to achieve a goal, a desired outcome. But that's trivial--Utilitariansim isn't just trying to impact the world or achieve short term goals on an individual basis--it's attempting to maximize mass satisfaction. That's what makes it unique. There are many moral systems that do not prioritize that.
Right, but only by their own personal utility function.
A Virtue Ethicist can watch the world burn and say 'my utility function says the most important thing is that men express the Manly virtues properly, all of these men are doing so, therefore this is the best possible world'.
And they're correct *by their own utility function*, but not by the *average utility function of everyone in the world*, since that would include all the people getting stabbed and set on fire in service of their virtues.
The difference for utilitarianism is that it cares about everyone.
Should utilitarian gamers who want their gaming ability to positively contribute to global wellbeing prioritize playing Player vs Environment over Player vs Player games when playing multiplayer games? While no matter the type of gaming, there is probably some baseline level of enjoyment everyone playing experiences no matter how well they do, but still it would seem that with PvP games a marginal increase in your gaming ability would not lead to a marginal increase in wellbeing. Putting aside the baseline enjoyment already mentioned, PvP games are otherwise zero-sum. One team wins, and the other team loses. If you win even harder, the other team loses even harder. So the increase in your delight in winning more brought about by your better playing is equally balanced by the other team's increased sting of defeat in losing more. In PvE games, on the other hand, a marginal increase in your gaming ability actually results in a marginal increase in utility. Your team kills the NPCs more, wins more, and everyone feels better when your gaming is better. There is no conscious team of losers having countervailing emotions, there is only upside in better playing. All this being said, if someone is confident in their gaming ability and wants good to come of it, should we conclude that PvE games should be their priority?
If you factor in roleplaying, then people can get enjoyment from both heroic victories and tragic defeats, as long as everybody gets a chance to emote properly.
Having played many MMOs, I can assure you enjoyment is not zero-sum. The joy of being part of a large group effort made games like EVE Online and Foxhole a wonderful experience even when losing.
If your charity work has to be gaming-related, simply playing the game has the least beneficial impact. If that's the only impact you're looking at, it's negligible and potentially net negative.
The main problem with your question is that it has no consideration for opportunity costs, which can be substantial. If you play a typical game of League of Legends, that's 10 people bound to the game for ~30 minutes each, or 5 person-hours total. In order to come out ahead, those 5 hours have to make up for 5 hours not spent on the most effective charity, or at least your 30 minute chunk if you assume that the other 9 would not work in charity if they weren't gaming.
Furthermore, even in multiplayer gaming you can't focus on winning and losing alone. It's entirely possible for both teams to get net benefit in PvP (one side winning, the other gaining experience), or for the human team in PvE to feel bad (flaming marginally worse players).
There are ways to substantially improve the overall well-being of society through gaming, but they all come down to your social skills. Your gaming skills have marginal utility in that they attract a certain type of gamer to you, as an advertisment effect, but gaming alone won't make the world a meaningfully better place. You have to convert those social interactions more explicitely.
One example is streaming. A charity gamer should play whatever they personally enjoy most and which has some market demand, whether that demand is from the gaming skills or the social skills (entertainment). They should stream it, monetize the stream, then donate excess income to charity. That would be far more effective than any game itself.
Another example is community building outside of any specific game. For example, make a webcomic and start a charity off it (Penny Arcade), or become a modder/gamedev/writer/whatever and direct some of the attention towards actual charity.
It seems to me that there's always going to be something you can do with your time that's more utilitarian than playing video games. In fact, pretty much anything. Go clean up a beach or something.
There is a lot of game design that goes into making losing fun, or at least minimally non-fun. For instance, in Overwatch, control point maps are typically designed so that the last point is much harder to take than the others, increasing the chance of a dramatic last stand and making the victory or defeat more satisfying than a one-sided stomp.
This assumes the utility of winning is the negative utility of losing, which I don't think is true.
Given that as others have said some of the utility of competition is in its closeness, presumably increasing the pool of players allows for better matchmaking around a given skill level.
First, you seem to be ignoring matchmaking. In most modern PVP games, as your skill goes up, you get paired against better opponents, and both you and they enjoy the heightened level of play. If you didn't play and improve your skill in those PVP games, the other high-level players wouldn't have a good opponent, and their enjoyment would be diminished.
Second, I don't think you can model losses a strictly worse than wins from an enjoyment perspective. Generally speaking, anyone who wins every game they play of something will grow board and quit very fast. Losses are motivation to improve and play again, and they give you novel experiences and opportunities to learn. They make later victories sweeter.
This is analogous to the question of 'would you rather wirehead your reward centers and vegetate in a pod, or live a normal life that is carefully calibrated to give you the correct levels of challenge, reward, novelty, and meaning to make you feel proud and accomplished and vital and satisfied?'
The Fun Sequence on Lesswrong dives deeply into this topic, it's worth checking out.
...are you talking about as a player, or as a creator?
As a creator, you should focus on making whatever you want to see more of, and making sure the mechanics are fun. A PvP game with great jumping will be more fun than a PvE game with bad jumping.
As a player, you should play whatever you enjoy and focus on real-life PvE events like road repair or something, because videogames are supposed to be the thing you do when you need to recuperate and turning rest into work means you're not resting anymore.
Personally, I think the biggest contribution you can do is 1) play PvP and 2) don't be a dick. When I've played competitively, I've cared very little about how much I win or lose (with a robust enough matchmaking, it all trends towards 50% anyway), but cared a lot when the person I was matched up against was toxic, which was pretty common.
(I played the most of Rocket League, which only let you send pre-canned messages, and people still managed to use those to be toxic - every single shot you miss: "Nice Shot! Nice Shot! Thanks! Wow!" - it's even worse with free text or voice chat, I imagine)
There's still some of this dynamic in PvE - people can still get nasty if you lose a PvE game and they think its your fault, but I find it's less common, PvE doesn't have to have a functional 50% win rate, and PvE I always have the option of just side-stepping the issue, going and finding friends and playing with them. (Whereas it's hard to find a friend who perfectly matches your skill-level for PvP games)
A point to consider: I've heard lots of stories of rude, anti-social behavior in PvP games making a less pleasant play experience for a large portion of the community[1]. I expect that a game choosing an appropriate PvP game and making a point to be kind, friendly, helpful and socialable to their fellow players will likely have a far, far bigger impact through that than they will ever have through their gaming ability alone. I've done very little online PvP gaming, but I've participated in plenty of other competitive activities, such as Magic the Gathering, board games and a few sorts of sports. The culture and attitude of a space will make a huge difference in how enjoyable a competitive game is. Magic is a standout example: I've played at shops full of generally friendly, helpful, laid-back people and shops full of entitled sore losers, and the difference in enjoyability is night and day. The people who helped set and maintain the culture of the former spaces were contributing far more utility than the highest-skilled players in the latter spaces.
All of this can apply to PvE games to some degree, as most will have online communities built up around discussing and analyzing the game and there's space to make positive contributions there. But they don't force interaction the way PvP game do, so I expect the latter see far stronger impact from good community norms and attitudes.
[1] Obviously this is only possible in some PvP games: others limit player-to-player interaction to avoid this.
Neither a utilitarian nor a gamer, but in my rec-league hockey experience, competitive games are not "zero sum" in this way. The phrase "a weekend where you lose is still way better than a weekend with no hockey" is a common refrain.
Competing + winning is fun, but competing is also fun simply as a baseline, even if you lose. And even within a loss there are good plays and moments to celebrate. And beers after. Always the beers after.
Mapping from sports to videogames, I'd say people who enjoy competing should compete, and people who enjoy PVE should do PVE. PVP people want to win, sure, but more than that they tend to want to *compete*, and a world where they can't do that will be less happy overall than one where PVPers can PVP other PVPers to their PVPing hearts' content.
I agree for IRL sports at least. Yeah it is more fun to win. But playing the game, the comaraderie, the after game pint(s) is the real appeal. Fun is the prime directive.
I think games that have good matchmaking systems encourage PvP games that are close and exciting for both winners and losers, leading to more utility for both sides relative to PvE.
I do think that the addiction of grinding out PvP games in lieu of other things you could be doing with your life can be a loss of utility. I rarely game these days, and generally only break that for a story-based game that is clearly bounded.
I've become more interested in the state of the non-profit AI safety space recently, because it seems like to become more important in the near future (Anthropic's latest RSP heavily relies on external review, concern about safety in general seems to be rising again post-Opus 4.5) and because I think Ant's IPO might unlock an enormous wave of funding towards the space.
I'm increasingly wondering whether there might be too many organisations working on safety. According to this https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7YDyziQxkWxbGmF3u/ai-safety-field-growth-analysis-2025 the number of orgs is growing exponentially and pretty much matching the number of FTEs in the field. I just read the other day that the chief scientist at UK AISI is moving back to Berkeley to start another non-profit.
It seems like there's not much incentive for organisations to merge, but at this point the marginal donation would be best being just given to Redwood/METR/Apollo etc.
Unfortunately I can see a world where the Ant IPO leads to even more orgs being set up rather than scaling the existing groups.
Apologies, I actually meant to come back and add specifics to my original post but didn't get around to it yesterday. To be clear, I think it would be better to have fewer, larger/better-resourced orgs than more smaller orgs. I think for me the main reasons would be:
- The major orgs (METR, Redwood, Epoch) seem quite resource constrained. Obviously the METR time-horizons work seems to be increasingly limited by inability to develop longer tasks, which more funding might help address. Ryan Greenblatt at Redwood has made a couple of posts about areas of AI safety he hopes to see more work on (which implies to me that Redwood can't do that work ATM). Jamie Sevilla from Epoch has also posted recently about their inability to do more evals due to lack of funding. This lack of resources could become extremely important if Anthropic plans to rely on external organisations as part of their RSP and these orgs are called on to carry out very high stakes work under time constraints.
- Larger, richer orgs are likely to be more credible in the eyes of the press and politicians. This could be important in raising awareness of concerning findings (e.g. acceleration of capabilities or evidence of scheming). They could also become more credible in the eyes of governments which could be quite important if the Trump admin does actually pivot towards increasing auditing of models.
- The average person who works for these orgs at the moment seems to be a young person with pre-existing strong concerns about AI (usually from an EA background) and technical skills who often goes through an AI safety fellowship. Apparently, these orgs lack generalists (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k3nq7FxBCsrNFmAYi/ai-safety-s-biggest-talent-gap-isn-t-researchers-it-s-2). I think larger, richer orgs would find it much easier to attract established professionals, especially as AI safety probably becomes more mainstream. It seems like it would be good for older, skilled people like comms professionals to join these orgs, even if they aren't from an AI safety background. I also imagine that there are some people out there who have concerns about safety, but also have families and so just stay at their well-paid FAANG (or frontier lab) jobs. Richer orgs could potentially be better positioned to hire these people.
- Larger, richer orgs are probably more credible in the eyes of the labs, too. If we are going to shift towards a world where frontier models are rolled out in stages due to misuse concerns, it seems like it would be very good and achievable for orgs like METR/Redwood to get early access to use these models alongside cyber/bio orgs. (Maybe this is already happening with Mythos and they just aren't talking about it). I think larger, more professional orgs are better positioned to get this access than smaller groups.
The major drawback of consolidation would be the risk of groupthink, especially if you're someone who thinks empirical safety work is not actually making any real progress on alignment. But I think having credible evals is good for all parties involved in "AI safety" - the METR chart seems to have been an enormous driver of concern about safety over the last year or so, and o3's FrontierMath score did the same before that.
1. After the three-day truce between Russia and Ukraine expired, Russia unleashed a massive drone and ballistic missile attack against Ukraine with over 1500 drones and at least 14 Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles. I'm not sure, but I think this may be the largest unmanned air attack against Ukraine ever. If so, it may also be the largest unmanned air attack in the history of warfare (?). Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. (According to ChatGPT, the peak intensity of V-1s launched against Britain was about 100 per day during the summer of 1944.)
In the past, Ukraine has had a pretty high interception rate for Russia's long-range drones — roughly 90% in 2025 and up to 94% in 2026, but I wouldn't be surprised if their interception capabilities were unable to keep up with this drone wave. Also, the shortage of Patriots makes it difficult for Ukraine to intercept ballistic missiles (Zelenskyy has said it's a priority for Ukraine to develop its own ABM systems, and they're working with Germany to do so. Europeans are also nervous about the shortage of Patriot missiles.) Lots of civilian targets were hit in this drone attack, including a couple of apartment buildings. At least 5 civilians were killed in the attack, and a search and rescue of a partially collapsed apartment building was underway Saturday. The past pattern has been that Russians concentrate their attacks on civilian targets and electrical infrastructure. Of course, UKR probably isn't reporting the military targets that Russia hits. But to me, it looks like Russia is trying to demoralize the civilian population. As with bombing campaigns in previous wars hasn't reduced Ukraine's will to fight. If that's Russia's goal it's wasting its drones on civilians rather than military targets.
2. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, Ukraine responded, and for the first time, they launched their strikes against multiple targets in the Moscow area. According to Russian authorities, 120 Ukrainian drones were intercepted. Ukraine hit the Angstrem semiconductor plant on the outskirts of Moscow, a Moscow Oil Refinery (repeatedly), and a couple of oil pumping stations. Ukraine's drone attack continued during the daylight hours. Moscow residents were posting videos of drones flying overhead, pillars of smoke from the hit targets, and a lot of freaked-out commentary. A couple of Ukrainian drones smacked into apartment buildings. Unlike an Iskander ballistic missile, the explosive payloads in the drones didn't cause the apartment buildings to collapse. Moscow authorities report six people were killed and dozens injured. Last week, the Russian Duma made it a crime of treason to post videos of drone attacks, but Moscow residents either hadn't heard about this new law or they didn't care. Dozens of videos of the attacks were posted on TikTok and Telegram (which also suggests that Russian attempts to block VPNs aren't working as well as the authorities hoped). Until now, Moscow residents lived in a safe psychological bubble, but no longer.
3. Russian authorities downed a Ukrainian long-range drone in Crimea with two smaller FPV drones mounted on its wings. Russian milbloggers discussed this ominous development because it means long-range drones can deliver FPVs far behind Russian lines. Both FPVs were equipped with Starlink transceivers. Since the cat was out of the bag, Ukraine posted a video of this innovative combined drone system and bragged about it.
4. Russian tourists are still vacationing in Crimea, but they were posting (illegal) videos of the beaches that were covered with dragon's teeth (concrete pyramids placed to inhibit sea assaults). One video showed an angry vacationer complaining that the dragon's teeth had taken over the best beach spots. In the background, beachgoers are picking their way over the cables that hold the dragon's teeth in place to take a dip in the Black Sea. (What's the Black Sea's water temperature this time of year?)
5. Also, in the past, Russian milbloggers regularly used the euphemism of the "Laotian" army for the Russian army, and the Ukrainians were called "the rebels". Milbloggers could discuss the failures of the Laotian military against the rebels without being targeted by censors. Nobody seems to bother with that Laotian figleaf anymore. Everyone seems pretty disgusted with Russia's inability to stop Ukrainian drone attacks, and none of them seemed concerned that they're committing treason.
6. Vladimir Putin, in a recent press conference, referred to Zelenskyy as "Gospodin Zelensky" (i.e., "Mr. Zelensky"). This is the first time he's attached an honorific to Zelenkyy's name, and not called him a Nazi and coke addict. Even the Russian media picked up on this.
7. Ukraine's anticorruption authorities arrested Zelenskyy's former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, for a multi-million dollar money-laundering and corruption investigation related to a luxury real estate project near Kyiv (six luxury villas in a small gated community). The case is referred to Ukrainian media as "Mindichgate," after Timur Mindich (another Zelenskyy associate), who allegedly helped siphon and launder illicit funds. Yermak posted bail for ~$3 million. The funds were raised by his friends in a Ukrainian football team (owners and players). Interesting that journalists are still attaching the "-gate" suffix to any scandal, and that it has spread worldwide, over fifty years after Watergate. This may be Richard Nixon's lasting legacy to history <#snarkasm>.
8. And in the Gulf, rumors have it that the Saudis and the UAE are in negotiations to make a separate peace with Iran. Just rumors right now. But the Saudi's are royally pissed with Jared Kushner, who they blame for getting them into this mess. They suspect he was a tool of Netanyahu and that he influenced his dad into striking Iran. Jared currently runs an investment fund with over $6 billion in Saudi and UAE money. We'll see if they withdraw their investments.
And unsuccessfully. I have relatives with a great view of the refinery from their living room, and the drone(s) missed anything flammable.
> Until now, Moscow residents lived in a safe psychological bubble, but no longer.
This is incorrect. That wasn't the first wave of drones Ukraine launched against Moscow and previous attempts in 2025 had approximately the same effect in proportion to the number of drones launched: several impacts on apartment complexes, hits on electronics factories in Zelenograd.
Here we have a video of the refinery getting hit, and a large smoke plume rises after the explosion. But I don't see any videos of any subsequent fires.
Oh, and here's a video of the talk-show propagandist anchor Vladimir Solovyov mocking the sounds of air-raid sirens over Kyiv in 2020. I wonder if he's laughing at the sirens now? Of course, his mistress and their two daughters are safely living in NYC, so he doesn't have to worry about them.
Point number 6 is simply untrue. Putin has always referred to Zelensky as "Mr. Zelensky". It is quite easy to verify: google for "господин зеленский" site:kremlin.ru, this is the website of Putin's administration which keeps videos and actual full transcripts of all his speeches and interviews (of which there are plenty, the guy famously likes to talk). You will find that he has consistently referred to Zelensky as "Mr. Zelensky" all the way since 2019, through 2022. For example http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/77914, an interview on 3.9.2025, at 10:50 mark he says "Что касается возможных встреч с господином Зеленским..." ("Regarding possible meetings with Mr. Zelensky...").
It does seem to be true that Putin visibly dislikes mentioning Zelensky by name at all if possible (this was in fact much more pronounced with Navalny, whom he famously mentioned by name, also as "Mr. Navalny", only after Navalny's death), but nonetheless he is capable of doing that, and when he does, he consistently calls him Mr. Zelensky. Pretty sure Putin also never directly called him, or anyone else for that matter, a Nazi or a coke addict; this is simply not his style, Putin's public image is exceedingly polite, although often dryly sarcastic. If he needs to call Zelensky a Nazi, he has other people (Medvedev, TV propagandists) for that.
This is, again, what you get when relying exclusively on regurgitated Western sources (with a sprinkle of "Russian warbloggers") to interpret this war. Putin's rhetoric hasn't really changed at all (the vague statement that the war is nearing its end is also nothing new), so the real question is why are the Western media suddenly pushing this particular point.
I stand corrected. But the Mr. Zelensky remark was noted by multiple sources. I can't find the clip now, but after that press conference, I think it was Olga Skabeyeva who questioned the "Mr" honorific being used with Zelenskyy after her daughter was frightened by the mean old Mr. Zelensky's drones.
CORRECTION: it was Margarita Simonyan the night before last. She described how, "Drones are flying. It's unpleasant. Scary. My kids are sleeping in the corridor... and also the walk-in wardrobe. Yes indeed, actually. On the 9th of May .my little six-year-old... She, of course, knows about the war and our heroic feats, but she doesn't know the details because she's too little to be told. She pinned the St George's ribbon not only on herself but also on her favorite doll. Just like this. Right on her chest.
'Mom, I know we defeated the fascists in the war. But who are the fascists? Are fascists the ones sending us drones?' I say, 'Yes, darling. They are the fascists. Well done. Absolutely. What a clever girl you are!'" Another person on the panel said "Spot on. Yes, darling!" But I can't find the part where she questions whether the Gospodin honorific be given to Zelenskyy. Maybe I'm confusing the propagandists.
Seeing you write "UKR" just reminds me that one of the most disgusting acts of Imperialism is the United Kingdom somehow pigeonholing Ukraine into being "UA." Having the two letters "en" already stolen wasn't enough for them, they needed MORE!
(Yes, I'm joking.)
"But to me, it looks like Russia is trying to demoralize the civilian population. As with bombing campaigns in previous wars (it) hasn't reduced Ukraine's will to fight."
This reminds me of a comment my (Ukraine born/raised) mother made early into the whole Hormuz debacle. That when the invasion was first coming to Ukraine she assumed Kiev was doomed just for a simple reason along the lines of "there's no way Russia would be stupid enough to do this if it could FAIL." By the time US was hitting Iran she was disabused of such notions. At this point it's very hard to believe that all the big scary strongman "really know what they're doing" on some deep level. And if some of them do, their confidence and posturing fails to be a useful indicator thereof, since all of the incompetents have it in spades.
But I still emotionally get that feeling of "surely nobody would be THAT dumb..." but it's as a futile a refrain in reality as it is towards fiction.
Russian milbloggers, and even propagandists like Solovyov, are constantly complaining about the culture of "Vranyo"—lying to please one's bosses. I wonder how much of an information bubble Putin lives in. Good description here...
He did say recently that the special military operation was coming to an end, but he was vague about it. No timeline, no concrete steps. Could be something, could be nothing.
What specifically do you have doubts about? I primarily use analysts from X, YouTube, and Substack as my sources (but I also source from Haaretz, The Kyiv Independent, The Moscow Times, CNN, and other MSM outlets).
I do use Gemini and ChatGPT to look up facts quickly (such as the peak V-1 attacks on GB were ~100/day). I try to state when rumors are rumors. But that's why I call these posts "Fog of War."
If you think I've gotten any of the facts wrong, please provide your arguments and some links. But beware, I will swamp you with links in return if I think you're being impolite or purposefully bullshitting. Cheers!
I just spent an hour cutting and pasting links into this reply, and then I deleted the post by mistake. Uggghhh. This is why I don't bother anymore. These are just items that caught my attention. I am not a journalist, and posting lots of links is very time-consuming.
Trying again with a reduced number. In the future, I will put a disclaimer at the start of my Fog o' War summaries, saying that links will be provided upon request.
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Does anyone have a good explanation of the US stock market's performance during the Iran War? I'm torn between two different observations.
#1 John Mearsheimer (1) and others predicted massive oil shocks as a result of the Iran War which would lead to recession. This seems largely to have occurred. Oil prices have risen significantly all over the US and everyone I talk to is feeling it at the pump. Seems like it should be a massive oil shock.
#2 Stonks go up. The S&P was $6,858 at the start of the year, ~$6,878 at the start of the Iran war, bottomed out on 3/30 at $6,343, and is currently at $7,383.
I notice that I'm confused. There's a massive risk to global oil markets, that risk materializes, over the next month, the market declines, and then at the end of March the market bounces back $1,000 over 6-7 weeks despite the oil crisis getting worse. On the one hand I'm seeing pretty credible evidence of an oil/energy shock and yet stonks go up. I do not understand this.
(1) As an example of an excellent IR resource, not some rando streamer.
The stock market and the economy are two different things. The economy can be crashing and burning while the stock market (or at least certain sectors of it) goes parabolic. Directionally, this seems to track the "k-shaped recovery" argument.
Possible partial answers/contributing factors:
(1) Money needs to go somewhere; can't just park your cash in treasuries and call it a day. Fund managers can rotate sectors, seek targeted deployment, etc but the net result is stonks go up.
(2) There was a massive pile of private equity powder on the sidelines arising from covid-era printing, and it's commit-or-return time for those funds.
(3) The AI craze is keeping everything else afloat.
I was going to say that it would take a genuine shock event to trigger a sell-off but I'm not sure in light of recent months what that might actually be. The markets have seemingly grown numb. It might end up being some straw that breaks the camel's back. Take bets now, it'll be interesting to unpack in 50 years' time once the ashes have cooled (/snark).
Fair- so your argument would be that continued inflows to US equities are the result of affirmative decisions by active managers in response to inflationary market pressures?
Did you notice? Your link doesn’t answer why non-top 5 AI stocks have grown since April, rather than shrinking. It says oil companies grew during the war, but the ones it lists have been pretty flat since then. Or maybe it’s the smaller AI stocks, collectively - that does seem plausible!
Mearsheimer has predicted 10 of the last 2 US misadventures abroad. Including, somehow, wars the US isn't participating in. I wouldn't take him seriously on most things.
As for US stocks: the US is the only major advanced manufacturing economy that's a net energy exporter. (Norway, Canada, etc too but they're smaller.) If there's a major oil shock the US will be affected least. Not unaffected, just affected least. If your output drops by 10% and your competitors by 50% (to pick a number) you end up relatively ahead and investor money wants to capture that.
More generally, the US is the only major advanced economy that doesn't have major, structural underlying weaknesses. It has one major issue, a spending problem, which all its competitors have too and which is solvable in a way demographic decline or decades of stagnation and overregulation aren't. The US has problems. Everyone else just has more. So in times of instability capital flees to the US as it has for a long time. And the world is getting less stable.
The market is telling you is that investors don't think the oil price shock is going to have a long term effect on profitability. Even if you look at the oil company stocks, they're up YTD. Even if you look at businesses that are obviously very exposed, like mining, they're also up YTD.
Why does the market think this? I imagine they reckon a way will be found to work around the strait closure and other damage, through alternate transport routes or supplies from other sources. This actually seems plausible. Prices are high right now, but high prices bring expensive sources online in larger quantities which then drives prices down.
And overall the economy is less dependent on oil than it once was. There's still a lot of oil in the supply chain for electronics, but its a less important part of the overall cost basis now than it was in the 1970s.
I mean we would expect US oil stocks to be up on the Hormuz news, and to keep going up the longer it goes on.
I thought maybe US equities were up because of investors fleeing from Asian equities, but actually, the Nikkei is up 3.5% since the start of the Hormuz operation. This is much harder to explain, since Asian is super reliant on the Strait of Hormuz for oil specifically.
Oil companies are all globalized. Exxon doesn't necessarily have more exposure to US reserves versus the Middle East than BP does. But the more telling thing to me is that industrial uses that require gasoline as an input - like mining - are all up too.
The only interpretation I can see is that the market thinks this is temporary and manageable.
The US is a net oil exporter since 2020, so rising oil prices are actually good for the US economy as a whole.
This is a big shift from 50+ years of the opposite being true, and it might take another decade for the information to propagate to "common knowledge".
I don't think our oil exports are a large enough portion of our economy for that to actually be good. Oil prices are bid up on the world market, and parts of the US economy that consume rather than produce oil still have to pay those prices.
> Oil prices are bid up on the world market, and parts of the US economy that consume rather than produce oil still have to pay those prices.
Yes, and the parts that produce rather than consume pocket that money. In terms of the general welfare, it is a wash or maybe a slight decline. But prices do go up, and with them, the market.
No, it's not a wash. Higher prices result in deadweight loss, where people decide to consume less. A monopoly which can't engage in price discrimination results in less total utility than a competitive market for that reason.
This is wrong. Oil is an input to almost all economic activity. The marginal increase in export revenue will be dwarfed by the reduction in activity caused by the high prices. Not to mention the distortionary effect of redistributing income from literally everybody who needs oil to domestic oil producers specifically.
I don't know much about the stock market but it could be that the oil shock is being cancelled out by something else. Investors seem pretty optimistic about AI lately, so maybe that's it.
Grimmoar/gawdflea/3 other banned nicks, could you just stay away? The conspiracy theories and hints at hidden information are really annoying enough, but combined with the flood-style of posting and derailing it's dragging the comments down. Please, there is a reason for the previous bans.
If you click on the profile you can report him to Substack directly. Ban evasion counts as Spam, and they're much faster about these things than Scott. NoddaNick only lasted about 24 hours.
Any good advice or sources on nutrition for fertility and/or pregnancy? I've been asked by my partner to read up on it, and I like to read, so here I am. Like most things regarding nutrition, it seems very hard to find out who/what to trust.
I am unsure if I think this is a good idea, or will just give us more things to worry about. By most standards, I would say we are very healthy and our diet is good, so Im thinking things will work out anyway. Any experiences?
I'm not a biologist, nor a zoologist, but I watch pop science videos about extinct critters. And there's one thing that bugs me immensely about phylogeny.
Apparently, if you lived more than 1 million years ago and among your countless descendants are representatives of two different species, then you don't belong to any class, order, or family. Your genus shall not be named, and your place on the tree of life shall forever remain an unmarked fork on the evolutionary path. Fish aren't shown to be descended from archaea, amphibians from fish, mammals from amphibians. The tree always branches off juuuuust before.
Except for birds and dinosaurs. Because birds totally are dinosaurs! Oh, sorry, I meant to say "avian dinosaurs". Yeah, that's how totally birds are dinosaurs. And therefore a sparrow and a triceratops are both dinosaurs, despite branching off from each other some 230 million years ago. Fuck this!
Modern taxonomy considers monophyletic groups or clades the most "natural" type of group of organisms, and thus prefers to use only these to classify organisms. A clade is defined as a group that contains *all* the descendants of a given ancestor (usually hypothetical) and *only* its descendants. Groups that leave out some descendants of that ancestor (called paraphyletic) or are traced to multiple ancestors (called polyphyletic) are not considered, by modern best practice in taxonomy, to be good categories.
This is why today birds are said to be dinosaurs by biologists. Suppose you wish to give a clear cladistic definition of "dinosaur" for the purpose of classification. There are two main ways to formally define a clade: an exclusive one ("the broadest group that contains A but not B") and an inclusive one ("the narrowest group that contains both A and B"). A definition I've seen for Dinosauria, for example, is "the narrowest group that contains both *Allosaurus fragilis* (a Tyrannosaur-like carnivore) and *Triceratops prorsus*". Anybody, academic or no, would consider these two species to be dinosaurs; you could even replace them with *Megalosaurus* and *Iguanodon*, the genera for which that the name Dinosauria was created in the first place in 1842.
However. Living birds are, in fact, closer kin (i.e., their latest common ancestor is more recent) to *Allosaurus* than to *Triceratops*. Any species that is ancestral to both *Allosaurus* and *Triceratops* will, by necessity, also be ancestral to birds. If you try an exclusive definition that cuts out birds, e.g. "the broadest group that contains *Allosaurus fragilis* but not *Turdus merula*", then you will fatally lose *Triceratops*. There is simply no way to construct a clade that includes all species that meet the paleontological criteria for dinosaur without also including birds. (The same is the case for, say, great apes and humans). The time of branching is irrelevant: Isaac Newton and the brain-eating amoeba are still both eukaryotes, even though they separated a couple billion years ago.
So general practice is to define Dinosauria as a clade, and reserve the term "non-avian dinosaur" for the group that excludes birds. (For that matter, there is no clear line where non-avian dinosaurs end and birds begin. The origin of birds involves a very long and gradual gain and loss of traits.)
Now, you could very well defend the value of paraphyletic groups, and I would agree; biologists do talk about "reptiles" and "amphibians" and "fish" all the time, even though those two groups definitely exclude some descendants of their own common ancestor. But then you will not find these groups at all on formal phylogenetic trees (indeed, they're not in the one you linked), because they don't have rigorous definitions. Mammals do, in fact, descend from species most people would call "reptiles", and before that "amphibians", and before that "fish", but cladistic's answer to whether a particular species is a "fish" or an "amphibian" is Mu.
I'll give you Archaea, but the idea that Eukaryotes are a subset of Archaea is more recent than that particular tree; now it's more accepted, and more modern trees do reflect that (e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6942926/figure/F1/). (Besides, Eukaryotes contain a load of both Archaeal and Bacterial genes that makes it awkward to classify them as either, though you could say that their "main" ancestry line is within Archaea. The strictly dichotomous trees of cladistics don't work so well when a massive transfer of DNA occurs, which is rare among complex organisms, but common among prokaryotes.)
Now, paleontologists will also refuse to call *individual* ancient species ancestral to modern ones, unless they are very close in time. The fact is that when you have a diversity of early representatives of a group, there is no way to tell exactly which of them is the ancestor of modern species. For that matter, by numbers it's far more likely than the true ancestor, though it must have existed, was never found. Hence, the forking points on a phylogenetic tree remain unnamed. This is not the case for birds being dinosaurs, because this doesn't assert any descendance from a particular species to another: it simply acknowledges that the group of birds falls inside the group of dinosaurs, in the same way that both fall inside the group of sauropsids and tetrapods and vertebrates.
> it simply acknowledges that the group of birds falls inside the group of dinosaurs
It sounds like what we're missing, then, is words to distinguish between "dinosaurs" as the layman understands them (extinct animals from the Mesozoic) and "dinosaurs" as pedants now seem to want to use it (which includes their Cenozoic descendants known as birds).
I would be inclined to let the laymen have the word "dinosaur" and think up something else for the biological classification.
But the scientific use of "dinosaur" predates the layman one. The word was coined by a zoologist (Richard Owen, 1842, peerless anatomist and asshole extraordinaire) to describe three recently discovered skeletons.
This problem shows up in places other than biology. In its general form, it's something like:
> Both laypeople and scientists use the same word, but with different meanings. There is tension between the scientifically precise definition and the historically prior, widespread one.
I've noticed it in psychology too. Are 'depression', 'anxiety', 'fetish', etc., words that people use erroneously (and should be reserved for their DSM definitions) or words that psychologists have twisted beyond their correct meaning (and should be replaced in professional practice)?
IMO, both directions can be productive depending on the case, and we'd be wrong to categorically reject either one. Sometimes our culture has a term that obscures more than it reveals; sometimes scientists inadvertently stretch a word so far that it would be better to just coin a new concept altogether. (Categories are made for man, not man for the categories, etc etc.) We should analyze what we want a word to do before settling on its meaning.
That said, saying that I was chased by a dinosaur when I was a kid sounds _way cooler_ than lamenting that a chicken attacked me at a farm. So count me as voting for Birds are Dinos.
1. Define "fish" cladistically and broadly, including all species commonly described as "fish". Lungfish & coelacanths are closer relatives to tetrapods (land vertebrates) than to ray-finned bony fish, and ray-finned bony fish are closer relatives to tetrapods than to sharks and rays, and sharks and rays are closer relatives to tetrapods than to lampreys and hagfish, so if your definition includes any two of these groups, then whales and other mammals are indeed also included.
2. Define "fish" cladistically and narrowly, e.g. restricting it to ray-finned bony fish (Actinopterygii), which contains the vast majority of fish species. In this case, lungfish, sharks, and lampreys are excluded along with whales.
3. Give up on "fish" as a taxonomic term altogether, leaving only the vernacular use.
Apparently box jellyfish are more remotely related to jellyfish than sea horses are to horses! I would guess they are equally distant from wasps, so their "new" name of sea wasps is equally misleading, Someone obviously needs to come up with a better name for them than either of these, so can I suggest cubozes?
Thank you for this great answer to my semi-serious comment. There's one point I want to push back on, though:
> Groups that leave out some descendants of that ancestor (called paraphyletic) or are traced to multiple ancestors (called polyphyletic) are not considered, by modern best practice in taxonomy, to be good categories.
What makes a "good category"? Besides neatly fitting into a mathematical tree and subtree model, that is. For example, what features unify a sparrow and Triceratops, that aren't also shared between Triceratops and Lagosuchus (a dinosauromorph but not a dinosaur)? How does the concept of clades help with predicting the biological properties of animals, when the smallest clade that contains both horses and cows also contains orcas?
> For example, what features unify a sparrow and Triceratops, that aren't also shared between Triceratops and Lagosuchus (a dinosauromorph but not a dinosaur)?
Sparrows and Triceratops share a suite of derived skeletal features inherited from the first true dinosaurs, whereas Lagosuchus branched off just before that full suite evolved. Among other things, sparrows and Triceratops share a particular type of acetabulum (an open hip socket), three sacral vertebrae attached to the pelvis, and a particular type of leg articulation. There are a bunch of other anatomical features shared between Aves and Dinosauria, but these are pretty obvious, and even a layperson can identify them after seeing a few examples.
According to ChatGPT, Lagosuchus didn't have the open acetabulum of Dinosauria or Aves, but instead, Lagosuchus had "a proto-perforate acetabulum." Thus, cladistic analysis would say that Lagosuchus branched off just before that full suite Dinosaur/Ave features evolved. Or it might be considered ancestral.
> How does the concept of clades help with predicting the biological properties of animals, when the smallest clade that contains both horses and cows also contains orcas?
I think of clades as an organizational tool, and they don't necessarily predict the biological properties of animals. Convergent evolution may yield similar features. Thus, superficially, Mosasaurs and Orcas look vaguely similar, both having streamlined finned bodies. But if you look at the arrangement of their tail vertebrae, we can see Mosasaurs propelled themselves with a side-to-side tail undulation, while Orcas propel themselves with an up-down tail undulation. And looking at the entirety of their skeletal features can say with certainty that Orcas are related to other mammals, while Mosasaurs are members of the Dinosauria.
Just for curiosity, here is the list of skeletal traits that define Dinosauria, from a 2004 paper:
> Postfrontal absent, deltopectoral crest elongate with apex situated at a point corresponding to more than 38% down the length of the humerus, brevis shelf on ventral surface of post-acetabular part of ilium, acetabulum extensively perforated, tibial distal end transversely expanded with subrectangular end, tibia with caudolateral flange and receiving depression on dorsal aspect of astragalus, astragalar ascending process on cranial face of tibia.
Thanks for the link! Cladistics certainly evolved since my time in grad school!
> There are three kinds of definitions of taxon names: apomorphy-based, stem-based, and node-based. An apomorphy-based definition is founded on one or more derived characters (e.g., “Aves consists of all archosaurs with feathered wings used for powered flight”). Apomorphy-based taxa combine definition and diagnosis. Stem- and node-based definitions include ancestors as the basal member of the clade (fig. 1.1). A stem-based taxon name refers to a clade that includes all the descendants from a particular cladogenetic event. An example of stem-based definition for Ornithischia is “all dinosaurs more closely related to Triceratops than to Tyrannosaurus.” A node-based taxon name is one that is defined by a basal node. For example, a node-based definition for Aves takes the form “Archaeopteryx, Neornithes, their most recent common ancestor, and all descendants.” Because we do not know all of the stem taxa in stem-based taxa, their diagnoses are not possible. Node-based taxa can be diagnosed on the basis of the derived features that have evolved in or immediately prior to the ancestor of the clade (this practice has been applied to stem-based clades as well). A crown clade is a node-based clade defined solely on the basis of extant forms...
> Sparrows and Triceratops share a suite of derived skeletal features inherited from the first true dinosaurs […]
Do sparrows and Triceratops retain _all_ features that differentiate Lagosuchus from Dinosauria? Evolution doesn't always lead to a monotonic accumulation of traits; features can be lost across time. One of the most obvious examples is the Tetrapoda clade, the motivating trait of which are four limbs. Yet some of its descendants lost this trait, and retain only two limbs (like whales or kiwis) or none at all (like snakes).
I've always explained clades to myself by imagining how I'd classify people into groups: I would find it more natural to use families as the fundamental unit instead of trying to fit them into groups of similar looking people. In part because similarity is hard to define, and subjective in a way that relatedness isn't.
If you go with relatedness as your organizing principle, then the family tree is the most natural structure, and clades emerge as a nice object to analyze. After all, if I am part of the group A, and one of my brothers is, then my sister should also be included! A classification that groups only 2 of us together but exclused the third one feels unnatural.
Maybe this explanation helps motivate the idea of clades to someone else.
"How does the concept of clades help with predicting the biological properties of animals, when the smallest clade that contains both horses and cows also contains orcas?"
Not a biologist, but I presume the obvious one-word answer here is "genetics." Our obvious, instinctive classifications of which species are similar and which are *often* reasonably in-line with the underlying genetics, but far from *always*. A sufficiently good understanding of genetics will tell you things that would be almost impossible to discern just by watching with your eyes.
The crux of the matter, as best I understand it, is this: convergent evolution can push two distantly related species towards having multiple similar macro-level traits and thus looking or seeming similar at a glance. But convergent evolution cannot and will not bring those species genomes closer together in an information-theoretic sense. The space of possible genomes is combinatorially large, and once a pair of species has significantly diverged, they have diverged for good. Where the genomes are in that cominatorially-large genome-space determines things like where they can go next: what adaptations are reasonably accessible to the species and what the possibilities for future change and speciation are.
Agreed. It's important to note that large sections of the genome (except for a few ultraminimalist species, such as bacteria that are intracellular parasites) do not code for proteins, and the parts that code for proteins are highly redundant. This means that there's a huge number of possible genotypes that would result, in principle, in the same phenotype. Natural selection does not really distinguish among them.
This is why highly conserved sequences like 18S (part of the protein synthesis machinery) and COI (a central part of mitochondrial metabolism) are used to build molecular phylogenetic trees. Since almost all substantial changes to these genes would be catastrophic, with very rare exceptions, the vast majority of accumulated mutations are completely neutral, absorbed in the slack created by genome redundancy. Since these mutations do not affect fitness at all, patterns of similarity of these mutations cannot have been produced by convergent evolution, and can be attributed to common origin.
This is also why molecular phylogeny is extremely powerful evidence in favor of evolution with common descent: design for similar purposes does not explain these patterns.
"For that matter, by numbers it's far more likely than the true ancestor, though it must have existed, was never found."
This jibes with another way I often think of fossils and the tree of life. Very roughly speaking, there are order of about 10 million fossils sitting in museums and labs across the globe. Speaking even more roughly, there are order of a billion different species. If every fossil we had was a different species, then for every species for which we have a specimen, there are about 100 for which we don't. And we have lots of repeat fossils.
"Very roughly" is doing lots of work above. "Fossil" might be defined as remnants of one lifeform, or one rock that might contain hundreds or thousands of lifeforms (e.g. diatoms). "Species" is roughly defined as a group of lifeforms that can all produce viable offspring, but that definition runs into trouble when travelling in time - how many generations up or down could a lifeform go and still breed? They never do (AFAIK) in nature, so this would be a largely artificial thought experiment. And there's obviously no clear cutoff; any lifeform resembles its parents and even great-grandparents. A little searching around gave me an average duration for a species at one million years, and that's clearly variable depending on the forms in question.
Generally, there's no definitive online answer to "how many fossils are there?" or "how many species have there been?" Even so, any twiddling of the numbers still tends to lead for me to "many, many more species than we have fossils".
Arguably, we might scope this to just charismatic megafauna and megaflora. But search results are even sparser there.
The whole point about evolution is that there's a smooth transition from one lifeform to another. You can dice up the gradient of life into "phyla" and "species", but your categories are going to be fairly arbitrary no matter what you do. Outside of massive divisions such as "this thing can absorb sunlight for energy, and this other one can't", the fine-grained details will always come down to historical precedent, a.k.a. vibes.
If it's all about feelings and subjective opinions, then I'm going to start a grassroots movement to redefine dinosaur as "real 'dinosaurs', you know what I mean, but definitely not birds".
Fine, alright. Cassowaries get a second chance to join the club, but they better re-evolve some teeth real soon now.
IIRC the classic taxonomic system of orders and families has been deprecated for about a decade. It's less that they don't bother naming new families anymore and more that there shouldn't have been any families named in the first place. But I'm no biologist, don't quote me.
The birds are dinosaurs thing is less about saying how cool birds are, and more about highlighting the fact that actual dinosaurs of old were in fact feathered. I also think it predates the deprecation of taxonomic ranks by like 6 months.
Fuzzy proto-feathers were widespread among dinosaurs and even their close kin the pterosaurs, and probably were found in some form in their common ancestors, but many large-bodied groups lost them and reverted to scales only, and true bird-like feathers were only found in the narrower Pennaraptora clade.
The current approach is making sure that every taxonomic group is a clade, as I've defined it above, and abolishing all traditional Linnaean ranks like "phylum", "class", and "order", though they're still used informally. This is not entirely consistent: "families" still have special naming conventions (name ending in -aceae if it's photosynthetic stuff, and in -idae if it isn't; heritage of a very obsolete division between zoology and botany), and you could argue that species are no less arbitrary than classes and phyla, but there's no alternative to *that*.
Crude oil prices are still hovering around $100, which is surprisingly low to me - it's comparable to the spike after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, even though it's a much bigger disruption to the supply of oil. Are people still betting that the strait will clear up relatively soon, or is the market adjusting faster than anticipated to cover the lack of oil from the middle east, or what?
I'm still thinking about taste and the way artists stories matter in a way I feel wasn't adequately addressed. The mind set of an artist is not always fundamental to the arts value but sometimes it is incredibly important to the piece. A novel like My Manservant and Me only hits if you know the author is dying of AIDS. Carrie and Lowell is a great album but listening is enhanced by knowing Sufjan Steven's family history. Henry Dargers art is amazing not for it's content necessarily but for the single minded vision a human can have and keep secret in their heart for decades, and seeing it knowing his life transforms the art.
In the same way, the experience of a Monet is enhanced by knowing the history of artistic movements and the forms the Impressionists were rebelling against. It's not surprising to look at a Monet against another painting and to appreciate them equally or even find the other superior, and then appreciate it more after you know the artist and their history.
Maybe most people appreciating Monets over other paintings don't know the history, in which case it's more of a status game in some sense, but for those who do it's very relevant to the appreciation.
I love Monet--his style is one of very few I tolerate, as I define my favorite artform as "art what looks like the thing it's supposed to be a art of" and impressionism is a sort of magic trick in that regard--but I don't know a thing about the context other than 19th century and French.
There was a huge joke about this very concept a few years ago: the film Boyhood took 12 years to make, which is a long time for a movie not stuck in development hell, but it's still thoroughly mediocre.
Another example would be the music video for Wyclef Jean by Young Thug. The singer never actually showed up for the shoots, so the video is a bunch of B-roll interspersed with title cards in which the editor tells the story of attempting to make the video. This isn't a case where knowing the context makes the thing better, though: the context IS the text. If the editor had simply stitched together the B-roll without adding the humorous story, it wouldn't have been interesting.
I feel the need to nitpick the Henry Darger case because even if his book isn't very good per se, it's still striking how astonishingly long it is, which is mostly a characteristic of the work rather than the author (unless you want to get kind of meta about it).
I agree, but I think there's a difference between a life story truly necessary to produce the work, and a life story that merely makes the work seem more interesting once you know it. If we put too much weight on the latter, then art becomes basically a genre of celebrity trivia and memorabilia. "This is the actual katana that Mishima stabbed himself with after he tried to overthrow the government! Oh and this is the actual novel that Mishima wrote before he stabbed himself with said katana! And this is a tissue he once sneezed on!" At a certain point you have to let the novels stand on their own. In Mishima's case, I think they do for the most part.
Yes, definitely. It has to be interesting/quality art in the first place to have value. No context can elevate garbage to the level of greatness. But when distinguishing which I appreciate more between two pieces of art, it's a relevant consideration.
Airplane is considered hilarious by many people who've never seen the movies being parodied. Kids laugh at Bugs Bunny cartoons without ever having seen It Happened One Night.
The exploding Ford Pinto gag in Top Secret is still funny even without knowing the history of that specific make and model.
Most of the jokes in Kentucky Fried Movie still work too: the feel-o-vision narrator announcing that the next film will be Deep Throat makes sense even without knowing that's the title of an actual film which was making waves at the time; Cleopatra Schwarz works without knowing anything about blaxploitation (I didn't know Cleopatra Jones was an actual movie until afterwards).
There's also a Black Dynamite reference which went over my head, too, but knowing it's a reference doesn't really make the scene more funny in retrospect.
I agree they are different in the ways you describe, but I'm trying to get at the fact that knowledge outside the piece of art itself can change the way it's viewed. This could be knowledge of personal history or art history. Good art should be digestible without knowing the personal history, but it can change the experience.
I feel like the piece on taste was dismissing this. That if you look at two pieces of art in a vacuum and like one better, it seemed to be making the argument that knowledge about the history or creation of the art shouldn't influence your opinion. You should just keep liking the same one, because your "taste" implied it to be the better painting/book/poem/etc. E.g. the part about Chestertons poems.
But the history does matter. It changes my emotional state when absorbing the piece, which is the basis of my taste.
I'm just not sure it's relevant to my larger argument, which I would summarize as:
My taste is my reaction to a piece of art. If someone can tell me something true about the context of that art which changes my reaction for the better, that's a relevant factor in my appreciation. There's no reason to strip away context to get to a "purer" appreciation of the piece itself, which seemed to be Scott's opinion.
Perhaps he meant narrowly to strip away the concept of fame in and of itself affecting your appreciation, which I might agree with, but also maybe not. For instance knowing some piece of art was highly regarded in some ancient culture could increase my appreciation just by imagining the crowds that flocked to see it centuries ago to appreciate it and I don't think that's irrelevant either. The object would be imbued with some sense of historical awe that could draw me to it outside its physical details.
Thank you Mark, I find the computer metaphor very useful and this post creates probably two new tentative edges in my world model. I've been casually trying to steelman Christianity lately, this helps. Cheers
Left-wing influencer Will Stancil claims “let me be clear: put me in charge and I will absolutely, unequivocally, without any hesitation firebomb the ballroom.”
Who exactly is supposed to put him in charge is left unsaid. The problem with left-wing terrorism is nobody wants to make a move without getting approval from the firebombing committee and completing a 500-page environmental impact statement.
“Put me in charge” means “vote for me as President”, and he says it because if he’s in office it *isn’t* terrorism, it’s in the same category as tearing stuff down to build the ballroom in the first place
Are you honestly, seriously, interpreting this as a statement of terroristic intent? As in, you believe that if Will Stancil had access to a couple of people with molotov cocktails and appropriate know-how, he would be directing them to burn the ballroom down?
If so, you are an idiot. The posts he's replying to, and the replies, make it pretty clear that the intended statement is "when the Democrats take power, they should burn the ballroom to the ground rather than allow Trump to have any sort of legacy." This is about as newsworthy as a Trump supporter saying "if I was President, I'd have Kamala Harris shot for treason."
(And every time there's a post about violent rhetoric from Trump or his supporters, it gets shrugged off with a "you are still crying wolf" and a "take him seriously and not literally," so nobody here has the right to complain about a liberal wanting to take out fiery vengeance on a building.)
>Are you honestly, seriously, interpreting this as a statement of terroristic intent?
No, I think he's running his mouth on the internet and isn't going to do anything.
>This is about as newsworthy as a Trump supporter saying "if I was President, I'd have Kamala Harris shot for treason."
That is also a bad and objectionable thing to say. If you spent more time here you'd know I am not a Trump supporter and often spend time bashing the Right.
Wasn't he getting cancelled for not being left enough on economic issues like 6 months ago? I thought Noahpinion said that in a blog post defending him. Very confused how that could square with this.
I'm not on Twitter or Bluesky so I can't keep track of these lefty commentary guys and their drama and their corny one liners anymore.
Ah, poor Will. He's getting it very tough on Bluesky recently so he needs desperately to do something to claw back his leftist street cred. This is just a desperate cry for attention, he's not firebombing anything (except perhaps his reputation).
So he wants to break the rules, but he wants permission first. There's this strange desire among these people to be both one of the good kids and one of the bad kids at the same time. The fact that he's 40 makes it stranger.
If I were in charge I probably would demolish the ballroom, but it would be relatively low priority, and I'd go through all the proper approvals and permits and such.
"The Trump administration has a secret plan, and if you knew about it you'd realize that Trump's current stupid idea is actually genius" has never once been true. Nobody in this administration has the ability to make plans, secret or otherwise.
But that's not what's happening at all. Trump wanted a ballroom, and after the fact tried to get reasons for why this project should not follow established parcs&rec, natural history procedures, or congressional approval.
Suddenly there are natural security reasons for it, and the taxpayers were not going to pay for it at all, but now a billion dollar is going through the defense budget and no you can't review this project because of national security reasons. People can very rightfully criticize that. Hell, they might just destroy the ballroom, and put a smaller, more modest, more in line renewed east wing on it. That should be possible no, cover all that secret with a nice lawn?
People would not be complaining if it wasn't so over the top large, break all the archictural lines in both the white house design and the Washington DC street and line of sight plan. It's a gilded horrific monument to a wanna-be dictator, breaking the rules.
At least one of us here has the level of intellectual ability necessary to assess Erik's claim as "probably true, with minor exceptions of no great importance". And to cite in support of that assessment the fact that an organization of sufficient scope to constitute "antifa" remaining unknown to e.g. journalists and law enforcement ,would violate the General Rule Against Conspiracy Theories. And the observation that, in spite of a number of highly capable and motivated law enforcement agencies being unleashed against "antifa" by the official terrorist-organization declaration, there's been a distinct shortage of e.g. RICO cases against "antifa".
I’ve actually known several people who have taken part in Antifa activities back in the 90s and 00s. It was just a bunch of anarchists who showed up, coordinated informally, and went home. Messing with Operation Rescue, fighting Nazis and Klansmen, etc. If you have information to the contrary (not propaganda from the Trump admin), let’s hear it.
I know you're joking, but terrorists tend to come from the anarchistic direct-action "propaganda of the deed" strain of leftism rather than the bureaucratic vetocracy strain which takes hold in established governments.
I thought of a strange conciousness/pzombie thought experiment involving two previous ones. The first is blockhead, a computer that seems to be concious because it has one GIANT lookup table for IO pairs of human conversation. Note that Blockhead inputs could technically even include vision, audio, etc. while outputs could include motor responses, etc, and be arbitrarily quantized regarding time (1 second of IO, or 1 millisecond, etc) It is often used as a modus tolens against behavioralism, because obviously a lookup table isnt concious! Chalmers Dancing Qualia is another thought experiment where you go through the whole brain, taking neurons and converting them to a silicone equivalent, preserving functionality. As you go, the subject should report if qualia disappeared, but if they did, that would be a loss in functionality! Many accept this as a good argument against substrate dependence.
Well lets take a human brain and a single neuron in it: replace it with a lookup table for inputs and outputs. Now replace an adjacent neuron with another table. Now combine those two tables into one larger table. Keep doing this in any order you see fit, until you have one giant lookup table. We have danced our way from a human brain to Blockhead. Remember, any change in concious experience during the process should have been reportable. Any change in reported qualia would violate the functional requirement. Where on the subdivision dimension did it start/stop becoming conscious?
Edit: Note that we could run this the other way, slowly turn blockhead into a normal brain, or have a normal brain composed of many tiny blockheads, have a blockhead composed of tiny brains, etc. the point is that you can make a continuum of these things, and move along it.
Some people try to get around the Blockhead question by claiming that only the thing that recorded it's IO pairs must have been concious. This dancing process closes that loophole somewhat. My conclusion is that a true Blockhead (a lookup table far, FAR larger than our universe btw) would be as concious as I am, OR there is problem, other than size, preventing a lookup table from ever functionally cloning my brain, like how a non turing complete language would be unable to emulate a turing complete one.
My first thought is that this table probably needs more entries than the largest numbers people have yet conceived. But what if you knew in advance all the input I would receive, and only stored those? Now concievable to store it, right? It might even be small. Or would I lose qualia by not storing possible IO pairs that will never happen before I die?
My second thought is something non-woo re quantum mechanics entangling the brain with its surroundings, which I didn't think a lookup table could correctly replicate (a QM system is not just the sum of its parts) but I'm out of my depth here.
> Chalmers Dancing Qualia is another thought experiment where you go through the whole brain, taking neurons and converting them to a silicone equivalent, preserving functionality.
That's a bad idea, a logically flawed one. Firstly, and not so importantly, neurons do not have any functionality whatsoever except the ones someone assigns to them, like serving as an extravagant meal, or whatever. Secondly, and importantly, only similar things undergo similar processes. A silicone thing might be able to interact per release of the usual chemicals (if stored inside it in the first place) with a neuron next to it, but what would happen in the silicon thing would be very dissimilar to what happens in the neuron. A good copy of a neuron would be another neuron -- one cannot decide beforehand what it has to be doing, that is, which properties it needs to have and change in, for a human to be conscious of anything.
> As you go, the subject should report if qualia disappeared
What does that sentence mean? That one wants the subject to do this or that the subject is able to do this? If the latter, how does one know it's able to do this? If the silicon things are designed in a way to keep the brain keeping the body going as usual, then the horror scenario would be that the subject says everything is fine while the lights are, piece by piece, going out.
It’s an interesting area, but I think your thought experiment reduces to the Sorites paradox. There’s probably no satisfying answer to how many grains of sand make a mound, and I think that in the same way, there’s no satisfying answer to how many neurons make something conscious. If you need to be “a living, human brain” to be conscious, you can probably kill off thousands of neurons and still have a living, human brain. You can probably also add a bunch of noise, similar to the equivalent region of someone else’s brain, and still have a normally-conscious human brain. If you replace all but one neuron with a lookup table, you probably don’t. Trying to draw the line anywhere in that spectrum there feels necessarily arbitrary, like trying to define a mound. I don’t have a great answer for what consciousness is, though.
I think the obvious problem here lies in equating the Giant Lookup Table to the collection of 86 billion Petite Lookup Tables. They are not at all the same. I think you've somewhat outsmarted yourself here, in that in posing this version of the thought experiment, you've inadvertently stripped away most of the features that made the GLUT a compelling challenge to various ideas about consciousness.
In particular:
1. The GLUT maintains no internal state other than the record of past inputs. But each PLUT needs to keep its own record, meaning the overall system has an extremely complicated, multi-dimensional internal state.
2. The GLUT is very deliberately performing no computation other than a lookup. The system of PLUTs is almost certainly capable of performing arbitrary computations, ableit bounded by size and reliability.
3. The GLUT is assumed to do its lookup effectively instantly (though the response can include a delay as appropriate). But each PLUT depends on the timing of signals received from other PLUTs: any received signal must propagate through the system over the course of a finite period of time.
4. The GLUT allows us to abstract away things like implementation details, but the PLUT system is extremely substrate dependent.[1] The "inputs" neurons receive don't just include targeted electrochemical signals from other neurons, they're also receiving nutrients and various sorts of gross molecular signals through the cerebrospinal fluid. They're doing some amount of their own internal chemistry in turn, and releasing some of the products back into their environment. So your "lookup tables" have to be awfully de-abstracted into something that can near-perfectly take the place of a neuron in the brain, including occupying very nearly the same location in space and interacting chemically in all the same ways. To me that sounds less like a "lookup table" and more like a "highly realistic artificial neuron."
5. Creating a GLUT requires compiling and storing an amount of information that is enormously, ludicrously impractical: orders of magnitude more than the entropy of the whole universe. A system of PLUTs cuts out this requirement almost completely. Even if you can implement the PLUTs in a way that almost completely trades away the computations of a neuron for simple storage-and-lookup, the network of PLUTs explicitly not doing that (see point 2), using the PLUT-PLUT interactions to do the vast majority of the work of computing the output. It's hard to say for sure, but I'd guess that a PLUT-system might be implemented with an entirely physically realistic amount of storage. This is especially true if you're allowed to compress over the similarity between PLUTs to reduce the overall storage footprint; but even if each PLUT needs a separate memory representation, it might well be small enough to be realistic.
What it all amounts to is that I have no problem at all allowing that a large system of neuron-mimicing PLUTs might be conscious, while still maintaining that a GLUT probably could not be. I couldn't really offer more than vague guesses at what consciousness actually is, but those vague guesses would certainly involve something about computation and decision-making and the interactions between disparate parts of a complex system, all of which are plainly present in a PLUT system in a way that's not at all true of a GLUT.
[1] I'm not a biologist and especially not a neurologist, so please excuse any errors or inaccuracies in this part; my hope is that the basic gist is right even if some details are wrong.
The intention of the experiment is to smoothly transition between a human brain (which you probably believe has qualia) and a GLUT, using Chalmers Dancing Qualia (which you might have accepted as a valid technique) You start with a normal brain, the convert one neuron at a time till you have the 86 billion PLUT's, then combine them one at a time, or any order you want, into 46 billion PLUT2's, then into 23 billion PLUT4's...
If we are ok with storing past inputs for the GLUT, I don't see why the PLUTS can't do this individually, then just combine those too.
While I admit I did say a perfect replica using a lookup table, which would include chemistry, I was only thinking in terms of electrical signals that result in other neurons firing, motor responses, etc. no lookup table could exactly mimic exact physics of the situation (gravity, etc) anyway. If every neuron has significant internal state storage that impacts the behavior (which I wasn't aware of) this would complicate it, practically at least.
Though I suspect you can still do a Chalmers style dance here that would get you to the GLUT, I haven't thought it through from necessary state storage yet. Can't you just give each PLUT a little storage, then when you combine PLUTS, you combine the storage too?
"You start with a normal brain, the convert one neuron at a time till you have the 86 billion PLUT's, then combine them one at a time, or any order you want, into 46 billion PLUT2's, then into 23 billion PLUT4's..."
My apologies, I missed the "slowly combine them into a GLUT" step. As I laid out in my comment to Taleuntum below, I think combining them is significantly more complicated and hazardous than it might seem at first glance: I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea of a single-neuron PLUT, but wildly uncomfortable with the idea that even two PLUTs could be merged into a single, coherent system. The larger GLUT sort of sidesteps this by handwaving away ALL the intricate internal machinery in a brain. But I suspect that somewhere between "simulate neurons at the most granular level possible" and "ignore all the internal details of a brain and just write down its inputs and outputs at whatever length necessary," there's a step where moving from one level to the next would require you to actually understand how a brain works before you could sensibly define that step.
" If every neuron has significant internal state storage that impacts the behavior (which I wasn't aware of) this would complicate it, practically at least."
Again, not a biologist, but I'm nearly certain that it does. My dim recollection is that the "firing" of a neuron involves the movement of charged ions through special channels across the cell wall, after which the neuron signals to its neighbors by releasing messenger molecules (neurotransmitters) to cross the gap between neurons. Both the balance of ions inside and outside the cell and the amount and types of neurotransmitters available seem like unavoidably stateful pieces of information that will influence how the neuron responds to outside stimulus. And that's not even getting into questions of cell health, available energy (in the form of glucose/ATP) and heaven knows what else. Biology is *complicated.*
My final (and in my opinion least-interesting) note is that even if I became convinced that combining PLUTs could be done trivially, the result of your thought experiment just seems like the same sort of "Consciousness Sorites Paradox," which already existed in other domains. You start at one of of the spectrum: PLUT-brain (probably conscious). You end at the other end of the spectrum: GLUT (probably not conscious). So the process of going from one to the other involves gradual motion from "conscious thing" to "not conscious thing" or vice-versa. But we already knew that must be possible: both growing a brain from a zygote to an adult human and killing/destroying/turning off a brain are extended physical processes that take finite time and have definitely-conscious thing at one end and a definitely-not-conscious thing at the other. In a slightly more abstract sense, so is the process of evolution from brainless single-celled organism to sapient hominid. I think these real instances on the Consciousness Sorites Paradox are fairly thorny issues for philosophers of consciousness to grapple with. But if we accept that they must *have* a solution (even if we don't know it), it's easy enough to posit that the same sort of solution ought to apply to the PLUT-GLUT transition.
Did you miss that you then gradually merge the petite tables into one GLUT? I'm pretty sure OP would agree with you that the billion PLUTs are obviously conscious, the point of the thought experiment seems to me that there is a sequence of entities where the consecutive entities have negligible change and the first is the human which is obviously conscious, then the <number of human neurons>th is the <number of human neurons> of PLUT (that is very likely conscious based on the Chalmer's argument), but then the final <2*number of human neurons - 1>th is the GLUT which most people believe is not conscious. This is the puzzle imo, but I could be wrong ofc.
Having considered it, I think the handwave-y notion of "merging the tables" hides a very striking amount of trouble. Even flattening out two tables into one is much, much more than twice as complicated as keeping those tables separate. To the point where...how do I put this...I'm not actually sure it's a logically coherent thing to talk about.
If each PLUT was an isolated system, then two PLUTs of size A and B would "merely" combine into a super-PLUT of size A*B. But each PLUT is not an isolated system: the output of one PLUT can form the input of another, and nothing stops this process from looping back on itself. I am not at all sure that even a two-neuron system couldn't do arbitrary computations on appropriately entered input signals. And if that's the case, then it's literally impossible to write down a super-PLUT for a two-neuron system, as doing so would run afoul of the halting problem.
Now, if this is true, than actual human brains must have some ability to correct situations where groups of neurons end up in an undesirable feedback loop. But I don't have any idea whence that ability stems or whether it's primarily mediated by individual neurons, groups of neurons, or some other biochemical process in the brain that isn't specifically contained in the neurons. In any case, I don't see any particular reason to assume that the PLUT abstraction is good at capturing it, and especially no reason to assume that it could be captured by arbitrarily small collections of PLUTs replacing arbitrarily small collections of neurons in a larger brain or larger PLUT-based brain imitation.
OP handwaves away precisely what the input to the GLUT consists of, but pinning that down is critical for understanding the system's capabilities here: if it includes at least some GLUT output from one or more previous lookups, I see no reason you couldn't model the interaction, or indeed any other computation you want; whereas if it does not, the resulting system would be unable to respond to things like "what did you just say? I missed that last bit" as a human would.
My assumption was simply that it would have to keep a continuous record of all input: you couldn't isolate it into chunks.
So if your GLUT function is represented by f(x), and immediately on instantiation it receives, in-order, inputs A, B and C, it's outputting f(A), then f(A&B) then f(A&B&C), rather than just f(A), f(B) and f(C). Otherwise it has to have internal structure complicated enough that it's not really a GLUT anymore.
You have it exactly right! Thanks for taking the time to read and understand it. Have been having trouble finding anyone willing to engage with it at all 😞
> "because obviously a lookup table isnt concious!"
It seems unjustified to make conclusions from on "obviousness" based on the "obvious" properties of consciousness (which is an incredibly underdeveloped fuzzy concept). If somebody tries to make an argument from obviousness, they have no recourse if you just disagree. IMO, "obviousness" is a way you filter out kinds of conversations you're uninterested in having.
> "As you go, the subject should report if qualia disappeared, but if they did, that would be a loss in functionality! Many accept this as a good argument against substrate dependence."
This depends on self-report being a good way to determine the presence of qualia. If the human being is being assessed with the question "do you still have qualia?" and the answer "yes" is considered evidence, then you could replace the human being with a literal piece of paper with a single word printed on it.
> "Remember, any change in concious experience during the process should have been reportable."
This specifically doesn't seem intuitive to me. I think this whole thought experiment equates "self-report of conscious experience" with "presence of consciousness", and once you've done that you've pre-defined consciousness in a way that makes the intermediate replacement process irrelevant
Can you elaborate on why your version "closes the loophole [of the standard answer] somewhat"? I don't see it. From a non-illusionist POV (i.e. incorrect), I would understand what happens in the following way:
Answer to original (for context):
A system composed of a big lookup table and a "look up answer to input" algorithm is very simple, fully understood and does not contain any interesting parts like reflexivity that one might assume would be needed for a system to give rise to qualia. Therefore, it's highly likely that it is not conscious.
However, let's see how an example row in the lookup-table was made in detail: input: getting pinched, output: ?. How should we calculate what will be the output? The only way is to do a calculation that is exactly the same as the one the neurons of a hypothetical person who was pinched would do. Now this computation is a much better candidate for the entity that would give rise to qualia!
Answer to your version:
In the same vein, when we are at the point that there are some lookup tables already, but there is still some organic composition between them, a part of the consciousness is in the past at the times when the lookup tables were made* and some part of it is in the present when the output of the lookup tables is used in the still organic compositor. It is a strange type of consciousness for sure, but I still don't see much reason to accept that the final lookup table is conscious, scifi has a lot of examples of weird types of consciousness already (greg egan slowing or stopping the simulation of consciousness, golden oecumene, etc..).
*: One might ask: what about the calculation that went into making the component lookup tables, but whose output is NOT actually used in the present. Is that consciousness? This question is equivalent to the question whether some subset of the brain isolated from the other parts instantiates consciousness or not.
closes the loophole [of the standard answer] somewhat
Since you can run the partially-lookup-table-converted-brain at any point, you need to have an answer for it having some particular qualia at any conversion step. If we accept chalmers Dancing Qualia idea for the simple case of a silicon neurons preserving qualia (one of the premises) we should be be able to follow the same logic/process here. rejecting Chalmers dancing qualia experiment is one valid way to reject the whole idea of course
As for the "only the past/pre computing entity had conciousness" argument, if we start with converting each single neuron to a very simple lookup table first, ideas about pinching don't ever appear in this process. Each neuron in the brain is now just a very small lookup table. (In contrast to the true huge one table blockhead, this is obviously possible and has already been done in some sense with with low quantized (eg 4 bit) neural nets). Each neuron individually has nothing like that. Subsequent combinations of lookup tables to get to bigger ones just have to multiply the IO pairs. For example, We only get "English" output in the in the table very late in the conversion process.
Yes, I need to have an answer for even the partially "lookuptabled" human, but I feel like I did give it explicitly in my comment: part of its qualia is in the past, part of it is in the present. Do you think this is impossible? If so, what is your opinion on the Greg Egan reference? Where and when is the qualia if I simulate a human, but very slowly. Maybe even stop for a while. Is the simulated human not conscious?
Also, it's not clear to me what your second second paragraph is a reply to. By pinching, I meant when a someone squeezes with their fingers someone else's skin causing pain. For the sequence of entitied the pinching input is in the form of the pain signal on the nerves coming from the skinand the annoying friends' face on the nerves clming from the eyes.
Thanks for the Egan reference! Exactly why I came here. I will have to read more of his stuff, as I was not familiar before now.
I guess I assume simulating a human slowly is just going to smear the qualia across time more than they are in a human brain? Obviously their subjective experience will be the outside world moving fast.
What do you mean by qualia in the past? Is that the memory editing in his story? Im having trouble connecting his ideas from Google/Claude with mine.
So the Egan thought experiment shows two things (imo) (for those who believe in qualia at least):
1. As you say, the qualia can be smeared/elongated through time by running the simulatiom slowly.
2. The qualia can also be interrupted in time by stopping the simulation! Clearly, when we don't do any computation for the simulation, no qualia can occur for the inhabitants!
Therefore, the qualia is a 4d pattern in spacetime that can be highly irregular (it doesn't even have to be connected!).
Applying this to the many PLUT -> GLUT transition: a partially lookuptabled x entity, when it sees a rose: a part of the qualia happens at the time it sees the rose (the part that is still organic, because that computation happens at that moment), but another part happens in the past, when its lookuptables were made.
As an example:
Let's say the entity's total experience is computed from x input the following way: (x+1)*(x+2). (X+1) is calculatef by one neuron, (x+2) by the other and the * is calculated by a third.
This is obviously a very simplified model, but good enough to show what I mean.
Now we replace the x+1 neuron with a lookuptable, let's say x is between 1 and 100 so there are 100 elements in the table. 1 -> 2, 2->3, 3->4, ....
Now when it sees a 2, so x=2. Some computation for the total result (12) is done at the time it sees the 2, but some was done when the lookup table was made. If the computation is what gives rise to qualia, the qualia itself is similarly disconnected this exact way.
>OR there is problem, other than size, preventing a lookup table from ever functionally cloning my brain
Can this lookup table be updated?
Because, if not, how could it possibly store new memories? Our neurons rewire themselves, presumably, to allow learning and memory formation. So, if this lookup table is fixed (can't be changed) then it cannot approximate your brain (which slowly changes over time).
If the lookup table *can* be updated, then perhaps it could be conscious? After all, what's the difference between a lookup table that is being updated and the matter in our brains being rewired?
**EDIT:**
To put it more concretely, a fixed lookup table cannot even represent one neuron in your brain, because the connections between that neuron and other neurons change over time.
Example:
Imagine neuron A is connected to neurons B and C.
At first, A gets strong input from B and medium input from C.
So the lookup table might say:
B + C → A fires
But after learning, the brain rewires a bit.
Now A is also connected to neuron D, and the connection from B to A is weaker.
So now A's behavior depends on a different setup:
weak B + C + D → A fires
A fixed lookup table cannot capture that change unless the table itself changes.
It only represents the old wiring pattern.
So it is not modeling a learning neuron; it is modeling a frozen version of that neuron.
I should have addressed this originally, but you can resolve this a few ways. Either the lookup table includes all previous inputs as part of the (Input) thus input X then Y would internally lookup X, then XY, or you could argue memory/learning isn't necessary for conciousness, as per humans with dementia or memory loss. I suppose the XY lookup includes storing state X for future inputs, so calling it a mere lookup table isn't correct. It's a lookup table + tape recorder
I agree that it might be, but now you have to grapple with all the real life systems that could be represented with a lookup table + tape recorder. Are they all concious, or just the ones that claim to be?
Surely it depends on what operation they happen to be performing when you ask?
It's maybe worth remembering that not all humans are conscious all of the time; e.g. some of us occasionally require sleep. Simply possessing hardware capable of consciousness is not, on its own, enough.
The lookup table has no need to be updated. It comes out of the box pre-loaded with the results of any possible update it would ever need. Every possible combination of "new memories" is already latent in the lookup table: as it receives input, certain areas--involving reporting on the "memories" of its past "experiences" become accessible. A much larger region of other areas, corresponding to counterfactual "memories" associated with inputs combinations it didn't receive become near-permanently inaccessible.
(A Giant Lookup Table is an utterly preposterous and enormously counterintuitive object.)
>Every possible combination of "new memories" is already latent in the lookup table.
Okay, well, then the question here is whether God is conscious, right? Because a lookup table that knows every possible memory that could have ever been formed ahead of time is omniscient.
Eh, it "contains" every possible memory that could ever have been formed. But I don't think that it "knows" them in any meaningful sense. By assumption, the Giant Lookup Table can only *access* a particular set of memories when it's fed the correct input: the correct input presumably being the sequence of "experiences" that would create those memories in the first place.
Maybe an more concrete example would clarify things. A real easy test for "omniscient" should be "can it reliably win the lottery in one shot?" A GLUT certainly cannot.
A GLUT includes the "memory" of picking the winning lottery number and thereby winning the lottery. But even if somebody handed you a GLUT and a powerful search engine capable of sifting through its memories, you couldn't use that to win the lottery. Why not? Because it's "future memories" include branches in which it chooses every possible lottery number, with "winning" and "losing" sub-branches for each. There's nothing there to tell you anything about which possibilities are more likely: it takes the overwhelming-force solution of mapping out EVERY possibility. (And I repeat, GLUTs are thoroughly ridiculous objects.)
It's like the trick that politicians do where they have a speech pre-prepared for the case of "winning the election" and a different one pre-prepared for "losing the election." When they pull out and read an appropriate speech, it's not because they prognosticated the result, they just prepared for both results. Preparing a GLUT is like doing this for every possible situation.
I find it relevant that such a lookup table is in principle impossible under conventional physics, since there is no mechanism which could search and extract responses from it as quickly as a human brain functions, nor at the same size or energy usage.
I think this is relevant because the answer to solipsism is and always has been reasoning from analogy.
We can never prove that other humans are conscious, we just know that *we're* conscious and other humans seem like ourselves in every way we can measure, so it makes sense/satisfies Occam's Razor to assume that they are conscious as well.
Asking whether other non-human things are conscious is a similar exercise in reasoning by analogy, but now with more distance and thus more uncertainty.
This animal has a brain that's different from ours in high-level architecture but basically the same in low-level substrate and built by the same evolutionary processes, and it has a set of behaviors which seems analogous to our own behaviors, probably they have *some* conscious experiences that are analogous to ours with some limitations and differences.
This computer has a completely different physical architecture *and* substrate, but its programming works in a way that's *analogous* to how our neurons/brains work and was designed in part to mimic them, and it has these sets of behaviors that are analogous to our own, *maybe* it has *some* form of consciousness but with high uncertainty.
Etc.
Now, back to solipsism.
The cybernetic human that has each neuron replaced with a synthetic duplicate that is functionally identical is still very analogous to a normal human in many ways, and this is relevant to your probabilistic reasoning that it should also be analogous in conscious experiences.
If you *could build* a functionally identical human with a lookup table, that would be relevant to the reasoning here. But the fact that you *can't actually do that* is *actually relevant evidence* that these two things are not analogous, and that you should be much less confident about any analogous conscious experience existing.
I agree that the inability to build it, or the difficulty, MIGHT be relevant (my last few paragraphs address this), but its not obvious how. If we lived in a universe with 1000000 additional orders of magnitude above and below our brains, a limited blockhead should be possible.
so if we're going to say it's evidence, we should at least try to find it as evidence toward some theories and away from others
Also, we definitely could build a partial blockhead (human brain composed of many many individual lookup tables. the less tables, the larger the final one has to be) so saying we can't build it doesn't buy us much. We can probably move quite a ways away from a normal brain and toward blockhead before we tap out on physical constraints.
I really don't think so, but it depends on how you're formulating the hypothetical. Lets come to grip with the actual mechanics of the hypothetical, and what they imply for our conclusions.
The premise here is that you could build something behaviorally identical to a human with a lookup table. To me, that means it has to perfectly mimic a human across its entire lifespan, from birth to death by natural causes. 'A lookup table can contain a script that looks human for 5 minutes under specific conditions, then collapses or loops' is not behaviorally the same as a human, so there's no analogous intuition that we should expect it to be human.
The premise here is that this functionality could be implemented by a simple look-up table. To me, that means a singular table, not relations between many tables; and it means the table is full and complete at birth, not updated over time. Otherwise, the clear dissociation between functional complexity and behavioral specificity is lost, and it's easy to just read consciousness into the functional elements of relations between tables or the process that updates those tables.
Which means, to have the strongest version of this thought experiment work, you need a lookup table that includes not just every possible set of inputs a human might experience over their entire lifetime (which involves modelling all possible futures they might find themselves in, including all possible cultural events and technological advancements and etc), but also the interaction between that and every possible state the person could be in (because you don't react identically to the same inputs every time, you yourself learn and change over time).
I'm pretty sure that's going to be computationally larger than the universe, if you try to write it in full specificity. Or even if it's smaller than that, it's still not something you can fit inside a human skull even with pure computronium; you'd need a galaxy-size computer beaming instructions to a puppet or w/e, at which point it's not physically analogous to a human anymore.
And you can fudge it by rounding off categories of responses and ignoring unlikely scenarios, but that just pushes you further from the 'perfect behavioral copy of a human' premise.
I don't think your idea of 'imagine we can predict the future' saves anything here - at that point, we're not talking about a lookup table anymore, just a linear, determinist script. 'I will look at this determinist system and plot the future course of this sentient being and replace it with a nonsentient being that does the exact same things' is literally just p-zombies again, you've lost the distinctions that make Blockhead a separate thought experiment.
It will definitely be larger than the universe. There is another discussion thread about that.
Losing the distinction was actually my goal. All these thought experiments exist on a continuum. We should be able to move throughout the continuous space of experiments and ask questions about any given theory of consciousness as we go. For instance, blockhead can be changed into the linear deterministic script one part at a time. blockhead is surely still blockhead if I remove one random entry. Or will it become a pzombie the moment I remove an entry that will never be called? How many never to be called entries can I remove? I guess my point is you can drive all the way from human brain to deterministic script in one grand journey (using some existing ideas), which causes problems for most theories.
I became frustrated at people confidently claiming LLMs definitely are or aren't concious, and tried to show that any theory is going to yield seeming absurdities, so we shouldn't be confident at all.
A general property of many of these debates is people's intuitions running into difficulty with the concept of things being composed of other things. There is a presumption that if something is made of something else, that something doesn't /really/ exist - all that /really/ exists is the stuff it's made of.
Software doesn't /really/ exist; when you look, it's just electrons moving about; the meaning of the movements is all in your head. The mind doesn't /really/ exist; when you look, it's just neurons firing; etc etc.
You then have to somehow deal with the cognitive dissonance of really feeling that no, seriously, you do exist, actually, even though you're apparently entirely made of smaller things that aren't themselves very special; and so dualism is summoned up to resolve this - all these things I'm made of aren't /really me/, the /real/ me is some invisible intangible thing that's somewhere else that can't be disappeared from existence by having its component parts be understood or understandable even in principle.
And so we arrive in a place where a thing that's made entirely of parts we could in principle understand, like lookup tables or matrix multiplications or whatever, can't be conscious like me, because if we admit otherwise, I stop existing.
I've yet to come across any reliable way of shifting out of that space once trapped in it; so alas, I fear we are doomed to keep arguing around in endless little circles, like the automata we are.
The problem is that there is no way to empirically test the proposition "a lookup table is conscious". You can argue either way (it is / isn't conscious) all you want, it wouldn't be evidence, it wouldn't be science. We have the same problem with brains.
"what is true is already so. owning up to it doesn't make it worse"
Why identify yourself with something that does not exist if you can easily choose something else (your atoms, your personality, the social roles you fulfill, your experiences' quasi-phenomenal properties, whatever)? This is purely self-induced hardship.
Qualia are defined as the phenomenal properties of experience, but unfortunately, there is no such thing. Introspectable properties of experience are merely quasi-phenomenal ones, i.e. purely physical properties that introspection misrepresents as phenomenal.
Please read at least the first two parts of the first section:
The problem with all those Chinese Room Blockhead p-Zombie thought experiments is that they're totally unfalsifiable. If you ask the Chinese Room/etc. if it's conscious, it will say "yes", because that's what its loopkup table indicates; and in all other respects it acts as though it were conscious, so there's no way for you to tell that it isn't really truly conscious unless you take it apart -- and maybe not even then. This leads to the following possible conclusions:
1). Only biological systems can be conscious, because I have a priori decided this to be axiomatically true.
2). Consciousness is mysterious and ineffable and nonphysical and it's all a grand spiritual mystery.
3). The philosophical concept of "consciousness"/"qualia"/etc. is hopelessly confused, on par with "elan vital" but more so.
Personally, I'm going with option (3), but that's just me.
What's the difference ? The "thought experiment" is unfalsifiable either way. At every step in the "dance", from lookup table to biological brain, you've got an agent that acts in all respects exactly the same as it used to, i.e. the same way as a human would. So what was the point of all that dancing ? How does your thought experiment help you distinguish between cases #1, #2, and #3 ?
The purpose of any thought experiment is to draw a conclusion from the premises, which are considered axiomatic. The conclusion can be accepted, or if rejected, suggests problem with the premises or reasoning steps.
Is Euclid's theorem of infinite primes unfalsifiable? That's kind of not the point.
In this case, I took two things I believed to be true, and I think many in this community would have accepted: Chalmers Dance suggests substrate independence of qualia, and separately, dictionaries are not conscious, and argued you probably can't accept one while rejecting the other. This thought experiment does not help you distinguish between the questions you raised, (which are good questions), nor many other questions it was not designed to help with.
You don't need any of the poorly-defined qualia stuff to lose that intuition.
Notice that the Chinese Room is not JUST a dictionary; it is a system that performs dictionary lookups over and over, forever.
This seems like a tiny trivial distinction, but Turing completeness is stupidly easy to introduce to tiny systems accidentally, never mind deliberately; and, as expected, it turns out that it takes very very little to make dictionary lookup in a loop Turing complete. The esoteric programming languages wiki contains an entire category of string rewriting paradigm Turing tarpits [1], many of which are some variation on "search dictionary for key and replace with value, in a loop"; some are very minimal indeed, e.g. Novice[2] or Thue[3].
Which is to say that if you admit that /any/ computation exists that can produce consciousness, the Chinese room (or something a non-computer-scientist would find indistinguishable from it) can emulate that computation, and therefore you are forced to admit it must also be capable of consciousness.
ETA another intuition pump is the CPU-less computer. A fun party trick, it turns out you don’t need any of the traditional circuitry for explicitly doing anything one could describe as “computation” like an ALU or registers or counters or any of the stuff from vlsi 101. Take a nice big eprom and some wires, hook up some of the data out pins to some of the address pins and the rest to the outside world (your main bus, memory etc), and away you go - populated with a suitable bit pattern, that thing can do arbitrary computation; just, y’know, slowly.
> Many accept this as a good argument against substrate dependence.
I don’t know why people don’t think about the mind being analogous to software here. Something running on a system (or substrate) that depends on the lower system to run but isn’t itself the lower system. In the case of a future AI living in a data centre we could replace all the data centre machines, and keep the AI. If it felt qualia to begin with it it would feel it to end with.
That's the point of the thought experiment, right? The benefit of Chalmers one is that it starts with something you already believe to be concious, you.
(in case you misread, the quoted line agrees with your text)
This is basically the Chinese Room thing again, and I find it kind of annoying (no offense to you in particular). You take some data structure and simultaneously say it "obviously" is or isn't [a thing we can barely define] but then you also extend it to a level of complexity we can't really understand (arbitrary size, all kinds of inputs, the passage of time) so it doesn't even really resemble what we would normally think of as "a lookup table".
With these constraints you could implement a deep learning model as "a lookup table" and therefore approximate any continuous function.
It's been a while since I took a Theory of Computation class, but I'm pretty sure the lookup table you describe is sufficiently complicated to reproduce the behavior of any computer program.
Definitely not. I could have set up a version of Blockhead to only work for 5 seconds of behavior at 0.1 second steps (and perhaps only one branch of conversation/experiences) this system isnt necessarily turing complete if that's what you're saying.
You can arbitrarily limit the time it will work for. Is a human that will only live another 5 seconds due to a bomb going off not conscious during those 5 seconds?
In the abstract, mathematical sense, yes and no. A function in math is just a mapping from inputs to outputs. Any way you choose to define that function is equivalent as long it maps the same inputs to the same outputs.
The trouble with defining sin(x) via lookup table is that traditionally sin(x) is defined over an uncountably infinite set of inputs, so you'd need a lookup table with an uncountably infinite set of entries.
But if you restrict the domain of the sine function to any finite set of values, then yes, a lookup table over those values can be equivalent of any other way of defining sin(x) over that domain.
Perhaps I am too old -- a lookup table is definitely THE solution for sin(x), in most cases at least. :-) (This was pretty common in ASM demos in the early 90s, for example.)
I am more interested now in the distinction between sin(x) and the lookup table. And not "any possible lookup tables", but if you take one specific lookup table, with an arbitrary large, but eventually finite precision -- can you say "this is sin(x)"?
Ah, this is more of a philosophical question. I would say no. sin(x) is defined to infinite precision. A lookup table of finite size can only ever approximate it.
Of course it is a philosophical question -- just like the one before. Which is the resolution of model where we say that approximating the intelligent responses with a finite set of mechanical responses becomes intelligence?
(Birds are quite good examples for giving mechanical responses. In other words, they are (mostly) dumb. :-) I'm not a biologist tho.)
The thing is you can't. The so-called thought experiment is to prevent you from thinking. It's a con. The person using this con will avoid all discussion of _the conversation_ with "the room," because supposedly it is irrelevant.
But it is not irrelevant. If we accept the room cannot be distinguished from a "real person" speaking Chinese, then we can ask it all sorts of things. How do you feel? What did you have for lunch yesterday? Can we meet tomorrow? What is the first question I asked you? Who else have you spoken to and did they tell you a message to relay to me? Let X represent the first question and Y represent the second question and Z represent the third question; what words are common to X and Z but not Y? You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise...
If we accept the room is _perfectly indistinguishable_ from a person, then we could teach the room. It could retain a lifetime of context. And so on. If it can't. then it's not indistinguishable. If it can... then this matters, because a simple lookup table isn't going to work. The person proposing this is on the line for explaining considerably more about how it must work. About how these things are supported. Cards and filing cabinets will not suffice.
At what percentage of inherent disadvantage to your default answer do you switch sides?
I'd press red in the original setting, but if a blue outcome was allowed with just 5% of blue votes, I'd easily choose blue. I can't know for certain but I think my boundary is around 30%
I’d press the blue button, and probably switch somewhere between 60% and 75% blue. I hadn’t heard of this before reading the link above, but having read the setup I correctly guessed that a decent percentage of people would do the same. I would guess that most of my friends and family would do the same, and that no realistic amount of arguing on my part would change most of their minds. So it’s really a question of “am I willing to risk my life to save the lives of most of the people I care about”. And yes, one vote almost never swings an election, but one soldier probably doesn’t swing a war either, and that’s not a good argument to stay out of the military.
I think around 60% blue I might chicken out. By 70% it would feel dangerously optimistic to stay blue. People have a tendency to harden under pressure when they have a decent hope of making a difference (c.f. Ukraine), and I think there’s a decent chance that if this ran in real life, the blue vote would be higher than the two thirds or so in the original poll. But 2:1 seems like a typical margin on culture war referendums/plebiscites, which this feels like in some ways, and it’d be quite risky to expect a higher blue vote than that. By 75%, I think I’d think my odds of surviving if I voted blue would be too low, and I’d preserve myself.
I suspect that it's not monotonic. What if we reduce the number of required blue pressers all the way down to two?
That is, everyone lives if everyone picks red or at least two people press blue, but if only one person presses blue then that person dies.
Would you still press blue in this scenario? I wouldn't. If anyone is going to press blue then it's almost certain that at least two people will press blue, but I'm not going to take the chance of being the one poor sod who chooses blue.
at two people needed I'd very happily press blue, and even at like 10%, but I can admit that part of my motivation is the "heroism" i'd be perceived as having, and that's definitely not the selfless act people are claiming is inherent to the blue-pressers.
There's a trolley running along a set of tracks, with absolutely no one tied to the tracks. There are a bunch of people standing around in the vicinity, who can stand on the tracks if they want to but don't have to if they don't. However, if X% of the people in the area all stand on the tracks, the trolley driver will notice them and stop - but only at the last second, when it's too late to change your mind when you notice lots of people deciding in the second-to-last second that they really didn't want to play a game of chicken with a trolley after all.
Are you saying that with X=30%, you're going to go stand on the trolley tracks and wait right up to the last second and beyond?
It's a silly problem, where most people's answer will depend on how you contextualize the same underlying choice. I'm pretty sure you'd get a significant change in people's claimed decisions if you just swap the colors "red" and "blue" while keeping everything else the same.
And if we're taking the premise seriously, with the whole world being involved, differences in language and culture mean most of the world's eight billion people are going to contextualize the problem differently than you and your friends. And so I'm going to play it safe and not bet my life on my ability to predict how a Chinese housewife or a Pakistani bricklayer's son is going to understand this. Except of course that a lot of them will play it safe because they don't understand how you and I are going to react.
The most important part of your interpretation is: "with absolutely no one tied to the tracks". Blue button pushers interpret the original as "everyone has to tie themselves either to track Red or track Blue" and assume that some people will pick track Blue simply because they are too stupid or inattentive or busy to understand the rules. They consider saving them (from themselves) to be a virtuous act.
Or consider another interpretation that completely reverses yours: N people are trapped under a big concrete slab and are holding it above their heads until help arrives. You are free to lower your arms and leave, but if less than N/2 people remain under the slab, it will become too heavy for those still under it and will crush them. Would you leave or would you stay?
Yes, and there will be people too stupid or careless or clumsy to stay clear of the tracks. We can observe this with e.g. human behavior around actual trolley tracks. But we usually deal with that by yelling at those people to get off the tracks, and helping them if needed, not by rushing on to the tracks in the hope that our combined numbers will stop the trolley.
If you want to save the life of a stupid or inattentive person, tell them to push the red button. There's a good chance that will actually *work*, in a way that telling people to all stand in front of a trolley almost certainly won't.
The trolley version of the problem does have some features that the button version doesn't though, like the fact that you can see how many other people are on the tracks, you can see who is running towards the tracks or getting up from the tracks, and so forth.
I do agree that the contextualisation makes a difference, though.
You can see how many people are answering "blue" or "red" on opinion polls about what button they're going to press, which is the same thing. A person standing on the tracks a minute before the train arrives, is a person who is today talking about how they're for sure going to press the blue pill. How many of them are still going to be standing on the tracks two seconds before impact with the train bearing down on them?
The problem would be meaningfully different if people could precommit by e.g. pressing the button in advance of the deadline (no backsies) and having the result publicly displayed. But that's not the question being asked.
The problem is so reflexive that even just the manner in which it would be presented has a strong influence on what everyone might think about everyone else's thought process, and thus how one 'ought' to answer. The attempts to transform the question by imagining jumping into a woodchipper which disables if 50%+ of people jump in because the question is not merely whether you, the reader, are willing to jump in or push red, but what you think the likelihood is that others will do so. In the abstract I'm a red-pusher with the original framing but if the presentation of the threat to red-pushers were sufficiently menacing it would shape my decision.
Oh, yeah, I've been having this issue and it's pretty infuriating. I also hate the stupid tribalism it's spawned, and this question comes from a need to mend that tribalism. For the moment let's say it's the exact same framing with just the percentage required for a blue win adjusted.
In the lower percentages (say, blue wins with 5%), i'd guess the threat to pushing red is social stigma or shame, in proportion with how low the threshold was.
Probably. The parallels to real world politics are too obvious to ignore.
A world where everybody will be fine as long as they follow their own rational self-interest, but some people want all the sensible rational people to sacrifice their own safety for the good of the people who can't make the simple correct decision? That's not a weird hypothetical, that's everyday life.
I think it's annoying because it's a dumb thought experiment that mimics the structure of real life situations where people are called on to sacrifice for the greater good, so some people respond to this as another example of people sacrificing for the greater good, while others are like "what's your problem, it's just a thought experiment with two buttons".
It's a thought experiment that *very poorly* mimics the structure of real-life situations, and it's annoying mostly because people are using it to pass inappropriate judgement on real people because they gave the "wrong" answer in an online poll or discussion.
In real-life situations, it is *very rare* for people to be called on to do something that has a >10% chance of killing them, in order to save others. In real-life situations that meet that standard, the person being asked to take that risk is usually someone who has signed on to take that extraordinary risk (e,g. a policeman), and if it's not then it's probably someone who by circumstance is the only person or one of the only few people who could meaingfully intervene, so that "meh, if I play it safe other people will take care of it" is off the table. And in real-life situations, it's almost always the case that the person's own sacrifice, possibly in conjunction with a few other people close at hand that they can count on, will suffice to save the day. Are there any real-life circumstances where people are asked to risk their lives on a gesture that will surely get them killed and do no good whatsoever unless bignum complete strangers from foreign cultures all step up to back their play with no precommitment?
I don't think this is bad at all. People were already feeling that hate, anger and contempt, but the button thought experiment allows us to distil down what we were all angry about all along.
It's kinda a high-tech drink that would appeal to techies. They use a multistep process of activated carbon filtration to absorb chlorine and VOCs, then reverse osmosis under high pressure to remove remaining impurities. Then it gets hit with UV to disinfect it. And finally, mineral enhancements are added. It used to be my bottled water of choice, but I discovered I preferred the calcaire taste of Fiji water. ;-)
Yeah, I was sorta joking. But about 25 years ago, I ran for the local water board and lost. At the time, they didn't seem to be testing for traces of chemicals like Cr(VI) (even though the movie Erin Bronkovitch had made it a big deal earlier), and they weren't testing for a host of toxins that the Feds didn't consider dangerous in very low quantities. I made water safety platform, and I came in last. But after researching the issue, I got obsessed with ultra-pure water. And Dasani seemed like the best choice. I also bought some expensive water purifiers to treat my cooking water with. After about a decade or so, I gave up on my pure-water fetish.
But I do like Fiji Water (despite the family that owns it being Central Valley agribusiness water assholes). Coming from a limestone aquifer, Fiji Water is softer on the tongue. And it's probably pretty pure since it comes from an aquifer that hasn't been contaminated with industrial waste seeping into it (yet). But that's not why I drink it.
Yes. Isn't it? It's an important component of the Fijian economy. It employs hundreds of Fijians, and it earns Fiji millions in export revenue. But maybe it's not as crazy as the trans-Pacific laundry service between SF and Hawaii in the 1850s...
Journalists tend to take completely normal human behaviour and turn it into a focal point of the article to convince readers how weird the SF AI scene is. For example: group houses with brand identities, prediction markets on each other, hanging out with prosties, pharmacology for career advancement, polyamorous workplaces. These are all totally normal things like drinking Dasani, but the journalists turn them into "weird" things.
The funniest ones I recall are how Lighthaven is a "walled compound" (you know, as opposed to a normal hotel or event center, which have no walls and are just out in the open), or how the fake grass inside (where there's too little light for real grass to grow at all never mind survive being trampled by all the events) is "AstroTurf".
> Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.
In the Age of AI, four quadrants emerge that tell four very different stories about where people are headed. There's the Augmented Thinker, the Cognitive Outsourcer, The Traditional Thinker, and the Passive Drifter. Which one will you be?
I feel like the options are just 'Red smear after poorly aligned ASI destroyed humanity,' 'Unimaginably comfortable and happy human after well aligned ASI saved humanity', and 'Normal person pretty much like today after the AI bubble burst and was shown to be all hype plus mild productivity saves and mild social corrosion'.
By which I guess I mean, the band of possible futures in which the four quadrants you mention are relevant seems vanishingly small to me. Either the AI hype is real and the future will change so radically that none of that matters for more than a few years, or the AI hype is false and none if that will matter anyways.
There's a possible world of 'The business model of AI is semi-real but it never grows qualitatively more powerful and never causes qualitative changes to society' where those quadrants could matter, it just feels like the future needs to be incredibly fine-tuned to stay within that band for long.
Okay, I'm probably Quadrant 3 but ignore that, I want to fight with you over this:
"Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, said, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
I went "I never read a word by Pericles but I'm damn sure he never said that" and going back to the original source, insofar as I'm directed to an original source, no, indeed he did not:
"It is wrong to say that the people love Athens because she is great. It is the other way around --- Athens is great because the people love her and take part in politics. Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the State as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics; this is a peculiarity of ours; we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
Pericles
Speech to the Athenians in 450 B.C."
So "Politics is interested in you" is a stupid, modern, goldfish attention span, Internet quotes (worst of) boiled-down version of what he did say. It's not "You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you", it's "Athenians believe it to be their civic duty to take an interest in the affairs of the State, and this is what makes Athens great".
You have just demonstrated why I'm never going to use AI to think for me or help me think if I can possibly help it; we already have bad Internet Quotes where historical figures are represented as saying shit they never said (pardon the strong language, I feel deeply about this) and AI-mangled précis of data scraped off the Internet is only going to make it worse.
I agree that's an inapt paraphrasing of that Pericles quote. I always heard that quote phrased "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," and it's always attributed to Lenin or Trotsky, but it turns out neither one of them said it:
At least as much as there is to believe those top 10 lists in the chum box. "Top 10 child actresses to look like crumpled paper bags by age50. (Number 3.14159 will amaze you! It's McNeilly himself!)"
It's a guy saying "MY job is safe, I'm an Augmented Thinker!" while using AI to help him write the piece, seeming not to recognise that AI might produce such in future without the need of a human middleman to generate prompts.
The irony may turn out that the job of the fella sweeping the floors in the university is safer in the AI future than that of "Mark McNeilly is a Professor of the Practice at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and chairs the UNC Provost’s AI Committee. He writes on AI, leadership, and strategy at Mimir’s Well on Substack.
This article was written by me and improved with additional input from AI."
They might be targeted towards people who trust Scott's opinions, but otherwise don't even know enough about the candidates to guess what would be on there.
I don't think that's actually a "reductio". You are just making an assertion. A reductio might be something like "If we care about any brain no matter how different it is from ordinary human brains, then our overwhelming priority would be all the Boltzmann brains generated in an infinitely large universe", only I don't know what the absurd next time would be if altruism was directed toward them. I suppose you could also say "Shrimp lives tend to be short, ending in death as they are eaten by other creatures. Our top priority should thus be ensuring the extinction of shrimp, or replacing them with mutants who can't experience suffering". But maybe there are real people who believe that!
The Pope has written an encyclical on Artificial Intelligence. DeepSeek thinks it’s a work of science fiction, because it’s the kind of thing you only encounter in SF.
From my discussion with DeepSeek on the Pope’s argument:
“… you're right that the excerpt you shared is surprisingly philosophical in tone rather than explicitly Christological. For a papal encyclical, that's notable.”
I think the Pope could have made a much better argument for the human/AI distinction he’s trying to make if he explicitly talked about the Incarnation and the person of Christ. You have to assume Christianity as an assumption of course, but I think the Pope is allowed to do that. (The argument in the encyclical seems drafted to convince non-Christians).
If your starting premise is, e.g., you’re a Buddhist, you might be more willing to grant non-human actors status as moral agents.
Reference: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Oh, sections 234 and 235 contain a version of the explicitly Christian argument I was expecting to see. I might have made it more central to the argument.
Does anyone know why Polymarket is only at 89% for CA wealth tax to appear on the ballot? I thought it was already confirmed that they'd gotten enough signatures? https://polymarket.com/event/billionaire-one-time-wealth-tax-on-california-ballot
Has something about battery operated consumer electronics changed? I swear years ago NimH rechargeable were marketed as easy replacements for disposable alkalines. They were able to be used even in stuff as demanding as pro electronic photography flashes.
Meanwhile, the last few years I feel like the majority of stuff like toy RC cars and their ilk I try don’t work with NimH but work fine with regular old alkalines. What gives?
There was this famous TED talk about the paradox of choice which is very counter-intuitive, choice should be good. Now as someone on the spectrum I am immune to this paradox, I don't care how many kinds of ice cream exist, I always have dark chocolate. So I want many kinds to be on offer, as it increases the chance of dark chocolate to be offered. Is this immunity why spectrumy people are often libertarian? Like you do not find it dangerous for yourself if the corner stone sells crack cocaine because you already know what is your preferred drug, or none, and not exploring/experimenting/having temptations other than your already existing preference?
I guess it depends on whether you perceive the choices as equivalent, or you care a lot about choosing the best one.
I wouldn't care much about the flavor of ice cream, so I can easily choose on a whim.
But recently I was trying to buy a washing machine, and there are dozens of choices with no simple way to compare some parameters I care about. I ended up downloading their manuals and checking which ones can wash at least 5 kg of laundry at 40 degrees in at most 1 hour... lots of work. And I was anxious that I might miss a better option. I made a decision finally, but it was a day unpleasantly spent.
What if there were ten different flavours of dark chocolate ice cream?
Heaven. How would you do it though? Would you have to add raspberries, brandy or something …then it wouldn’t really be pure dark chocolate . A detail.
Dark chocolate, slightly darker chocolate, slightly darker than that, all the way through to ridiculously dark all-cocoa black hole dark.
...Vanta-chocolate?
I'm with you for the most part, but occasionally the paradox of choice still shows up for me even as an autistic person. For example, I really like pasta. I have all sorts of opinions about which shape is the best, etc., but at the end of the day I like a lot of different shapes. If I go to an Italian restaurant and there's penne, tortellini, manicotti, etc. on the menu, I have to actually think for a while and decide which one I want. For most other types of restaurant there's only one thing on the menu I like and I always get that (it doesn't help that I'm also vegetarian and the vast majority of offerings at most restaurants have meat -- often you can ask for it without meat, but that requires more conversation with a stranger...). Anyway, my point is, lots of things have subcategories, and one of those things might be something you already like / are interested in.
How about a non-profit pronatalist dating app? The idea is that if not many women and not many men want children, the least that can be done is that make it easy for them to find each other. It must be non-profit because the financial incentives of for profit apps are not aligned with people getting married and deleting the app. It would be financed by donations, and people getting married from the app would be honor-bound to donate $500.
Does it have to be explicitly pronatalist? Being anti-natalist doesn't necessarily make one uninterested in dating. Even if you secretly have a pronatalist agenda creating the app, it's probably better not to enforce it or even mention it. People can change their minds over time, and having a dating app that's open to all opinions might be the catalyst for that change, who knows? The people I know who are explicitly anti-natalist usually choose that position for pessimistic or misanthropic reasons, but dating can bring a lonely person happiness that they may not have previously known was possible. I've never witnessed this occur, but perhaps it could turn a single anti-natalist into a married pronatalist given enough time. Just my thoughts, backed up by very weak anecdotal data.
> How about a non-profit pronatalist dating app?
I think Tove K and her husband Anders over at the woodfromeden substack is working on one. I think they will run afoul of the same problems that beset the 3-4 "let's just recreate classic Okcupid" teams out there.
To wit, your chief problem as a dating app is attracting enough dating age women to the platform. The "recreate classic Okc" teams struggled because zennial women don't want to read a bunch and write a bunch of stuff, and they're competing in a saturated landscape.
They faced:
A) monetization problems, because now you're competing against the fully adversarial Match Group (which owns essentially all dating apps except the nigh-bankrupt Bumble) and their established footprint, marketing, and revenue models that will always outcompete a less adversarial option, and
B) the type of person whom, "old Okcupid" appeals to - ie filling out a bunch of questions and writing and reading lengthy profiles instead of swiping - is such a tiny slice of humanity overall that you simply can't get the network effects to have a viable dating app, because recruiting enough people in an ongoing way is the hard problem of dating apps. Previously, in the golden Natufian age of old Okcupid it could work because that's all there was - swipe apps didn't exist, so enough people would actually answer the questions and write / read profiles. But now swipe apps exist, and they're strongly preferred over reading / writing by enough people you just can't get a large enough nucleus of people and ongoing flow to sustain such a dating app now, especially for Zennial women.
Now back to the pronatalist dating site idea. It's being worked on too, and is sure to fail.
Tove is literally proposing creating a dating site for boring guys who are pronatalist. Women ALREADY hate both boring guys and pronatalist guys in aggregate, they will have literally zero reason to come to the site. And Zennial women in particular, which are the prime thing you need to attract enough paying male users to become a viable app.
And they'll be in the exact same environment, where the fully adversarial Match Group exists and makes $1B a year, and can outspend you and out-monetize you on every aspect.
But you know, I wish them luck, and for them to squeeze out a success even so - it's just really unlikely.
Does anyone happen to know who wrote the non-book-review of "The Lyric" - that bit of Time As A Symptom by Joanna Newsom? If so, I just wanted to say thank you. I found your review quite touching, and listened to the song from it, and ever since then I've been going back and back to it and that album. Thanks for the great taste.
Working on a 17-dimension personality measurement instrument (synthesizes 39 peer-reviewed psychological frameworks).
Had a methodology question this audience might find interesting.
When a source framework gets retired from the literature mid-project (for instance, the March 2026 consensus paper declaring Polyvagal Theory untenable, signed by 39 leading experts), what's the field-standard procedure for re-attributing items and documenting the change?
My read is the field doesn't really have one, and MMPI-2-RF is the closest precedent for "we revised the instrument, here's what changed and why," but I haven't found anything where an active commercial instrument publishes its full audit trail in real time.
The closest analog I can find is open-source software changelogs.
Curious if anyone here has come across personality / psychometric instruments that publish their own reception ledgers, or whether this is a genuinely empty space.
I’m a fan of quirky character driven films, think Paris Texas, Little Miss Sunshine, Repo Man, Wonder Boys, David Byrnes’ True Stories, just about any Coen Brothers film…
Any recommendations?
Edit: A lot of Robert Altman films work here too, 3 Women, Short Cuts… are great
I really like Altman
McCabe and Mrs. Miller is one of my favourite
And that wonderful film he made in Ireland about the woman who seemed to be going mad the name of witches escapes me at the moment. The long goodbye as well.
McCabe and Mrs Miller is great. Saw it at your recommendation. Thanks again
Scarlet Street
Being There
Morgan: a suitable case for treatment.
Dr. Strangelove (three different quirky characters with one quirky character playing them all) The others are quirky as well, frankly.
Midnight Cowboy.
Double indemnity.
We watched Double Indemnity tonight. Took a bit of effort to get the My Three Sons theme to quit playing in my head but it didn’t take long to see that it was the inspiration for Body Heat.
They could make the sexual attraction much more explicit by the early 80s.
Yeah, I had to go through the My Three Sons adjustment myself. It took a few minutes. Edward G. Robinson is the standout in that show for me. That little in his stomach. I did love that.
When it comes to quirky character-driven films, I think all of Preston Sturges' films are kind of wonderful in that sense. Particularly "The Palm Beach Story" and a couple of the others I mentioned elsewhere.
“Listen Colonel Bat Guano, if that is your real name.” Slim Pickens riding the bomb like a bronco. Yep Dr Strangelove is indeed a classic.
Seem and enjoyed that and Being There and Midnight Cowboy. Mrs Slothrop has her iPad out now to see where the other 3 are streaming.
Quite a few of my recommendations are based on how interested you might be in film history or old movies, so if that's not part of what you're looking for, I apologise. All of my recommendations captured the spirit of your request, though.
No apologies needed. I think your industry experience gives you more insight here. I’m always on the lookout for something I’ve yet to see.
Ninotchka
White heat
Checking availability. People I worked with would tease me because it seemed I saw as many films as Roger Ebert. There are a couple art house theaters in Mpls and they were just down the block from our first apartment there.
Miracle at Morgan’s Creek
Sullivan‘s travels
Freddy got Fingered
Gotta have the director’s cut to fully appreciate this one. The boxed set wth director commentary. (Yes, I’m joking as i assume you were)
It's a quirky character whose quirks drive the plot.
You weren’t putting me on? Okay I’ll look into it.
Some foreign-language recommendations:
- The Man Who Copied
- Survive Style 5+
- Punk Samurai Slash Down (as you might be able to guess this one has some action stuff too - but it's definitely also quirky and has some real characters.)
Thanks. With foreign language films i always prefer subtitles. Dubbed movies stray too far from the original dialogue to get the lip syncing correct. I finally watched “Y mama tambien” a couple weeks ago. It was a lot better than the premise suggested.
The Station Agent
Secondhand Lions
Lars and the Real Girl
Thank you. I haven’t seen any of them. In my queue now
Wonder Boys has a great soundtrack. Have you read the book or any other Michael Chabon's works? Speaking of Chabon, he wrote part of the best Spider-Man movie, and some of the bad Picard episodes.
But to answer your question:
Wes Anderson films: particularly the Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but really any of them. He has a unique style, but his most recent films are kinda becoming a little too into it? I don't know how quite to articulate it.
Christopher Guest films: Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind. They are mockumentaries with many overlapping actors. Speaking of mockumentaries, check out the Documentary Now series by Seth Meyers, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. It satirizes popular documentaries. Watching the original documentaries does help to better appreicate them, but it's not required for enjoyment.
Scorsese's After Hours has some oddballs in it and takes place over the period of one night. It's quite different from his mafia films.
Sideways with Paul Giamatti. He's also in American Splendor about the comic writer Harvey Pekar. Harvey's also in the film. It's pretty good; it gets a bit meta at times. You'll need to tolerate not great people as protagonists in these films.
If you don't mind teenage protagonists (somewhat less quirky) then Clueless (90's retelling of Emma) and 10 Things I Hate About You (90's Taming of the Shrew) are both quite entertaining and light. Maybe Ghost World, though I don't like that one as much as the first two.
EDIT: You might also be interested in some of Tim Burton's earlier films: Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood.
A lot of agreement from me on these. Yes I’ve read WBs and i think this is one time where the movie is a bit more fun than the book. And yes the soundtrack is a favorite of mine. I have the CD cached somewhere and I need to dig it up cause my steaming service doesn’t carry the entire album
I watch After Hours every couple years. It never gets old for me.
I like Wes Anderson quite a bit too but i think my fave of his is Moonrise Kingdom.
I need to check out American Splendor. Somehow haven’t caught it yet.
I enjoyed Ed Wood but haven’t yet seen Edward Scissorhands. I’ll give it a whirl.
Thanks for the recommendations.
Edit: Speaking of Chabon we need someone to The Amazing Adventures of K and K. For Jack Kirby’s sake if for no other reason. Plus Yiddish Policemen’s Union would be right up the Coen Bros alley.
I liked Henry Fool. My memory tells me it's in the same line as Wonder Boys.
Thx. It’s new to me.
Struggling to think of other movies I know of in the genre, but The Fisher King is probably in it. Probably the most grounded of Terry Gilliam's movies.
Yep, Rushmore also came to mind last night as I was dropping off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushmore_(film)
I liked Mumford too but it has a poor Rotten Tomatoes score.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumford_(film)
Well this is a documentary, I really liked "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" made in 2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Tammy_Faye_(2000_film) They made a movie later which I've never watched and have no opinion about. I would like to watch the documentary again.
I’m not sure what to think about a documentary about Tammy Faye narrated by RuPaul. Didn’t know she was born in Frostbite Falls until just now.
Isn’t that where Rocky and Bullwinkle come from?
It is but Minnesota kids knew they were poking fun at International Falls — or the nation’s icebox as weathermen occasionally called it. Some day I might relate the story of my arrest and brief detention just across to the Canadian side by customs authorities. I was on my way to a Canadian lake after about an hour. No Canadian demerits were issued for merely possessing Zig Zags.
That might be a good read.
That might be a good read.
Have you ever seen the great race?
Jack lemmon, Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, and what’s his face who played Columbo Peter Faulk.
It has the greatest pie fight ever filmed
Not yet. I liked Walter Matthau in Charlie Varrick and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nicky though.
The last film Natalie Wood was in before she died under mysterious circumstances, Brainwave, was a weird one. Sci fi thing where a device that records human qualia in their entirety is developed. You can play the recording and experience everything that someone else had.
The test pilot who tied it first recorded his climax with a hooker or maybe just a good sport and put the happy ending on a loop. They found him in a coma and when he recovered he retired immediately and just wanted to play golf by himself and probably wasn’t even keeping score. Kinda reenforces a half baked hypothesis of mine regarding what drives male ambition to gain status and wealth.
I don't know if you are old enough to remember all the scandal. But what I learned is that Tammy is not the person I thought she was.
I was around at the time but it flew under my radar. The juxtaposition with RuPaul as narrator suggests it’s a hit piece but the Wikipedia page doesn’t describe it much.
I haven't read the wiki page. It's not a hit piece.
Kryptogal says it keeps happening that the person with the $900K bonus gives $50 bonus to the secretary, the person with the $30K bonus gives $5K and not because the secretary is worse, they are shared. Does wealth cause a drop in empathy and how much does that explain about our world?
I did my econ capstone on the income elasticity of charitable giving.
It turns out if you include people who don’t donate anything, the average poor person, middle class person, and rich person donates the same percent of their income.
If you don’t include people who don’t donate anything, poor people and rich people donate the same percent of their income, but middle class people donate a smaller percentage.
I think this can partially be explained by the fact that people with different levels of money value money differently.
It wouldn't shock me to learn that someone with way more money would have a lower personal valuation of money, leading them to see it as a less meaningful gift.
This can be part of it, yes. Fellow Hungarians sometimes ask on Reddit how to practice English, and I reply, astonished, "But you are already on Reddit, that's just how I did it. Read, watch vids, then start commenting.". The point is, I tend to think learning things is easy. And conversely I basically never teach people. It just annoys me. Why don't you just go and learn stuff? It annoys me when I send software documentation to coworkers and they ask me to train them. Like can you read? So basically because I find learning easy, I tend to not be altruistic with it.
I think anyone who gets a bonus and has a secretary is already in a pretty narrow class window.
> Does wealth cause a drop in empathy
I think it becomes more simple when you reverse the question: does empathy cause a drop in wealth? Well, the more you donate to fix the world, the less you have left for yourself.
Now of course different people have different earning capabilities, so it is possible for a high-earning person to donate a lot and still keep a lot. But within the same earning category, the person who donates more will ultimately have less left.
Also, some people donate strategically, expecting something in return. They may donate money to a university that will name a lecture hall after them. That's different from feeding the plebs.
Of course there are those who say to get rich you gotta be ruthless. What I see is that rich people are behaving decently 99.99% of the time, because they get ahead by, for example, getting and retaining really good employees, satisfying customers etc. Now I accept that to truly succeed, one has to deliver some backstabs, but that is truly rarely necessary. And can backfire.
I think if Kamala Harris would have won the primary instead of backstabbing Biden, she would be President, what happened is that some voters did not like that and did not vote. I have seen a lot of angry liberals on YT during that time, like "Shouldn't the Democratic Party be actually democratic?" and so on.
I also distinctly remember the times, like around 2000, that Linux development was fueled by disgust felt over Bill Gates' sleazy business tactics. I was there, although just as a user/tester, but we loved to shit talk about him a lot and it was motivating. And look, they lost the server and the phone, keeping only the desktop, which counts as a marginal victory at least. We also managed to force Microsoft to be more ethical. Like .doc files were back then purposefully obscure to sabotage what is now LibreOffice, and look at it now, you can rename a .docx to .zip, unzip it, and you get a bunch of really clear XML files. Win.
A lot of wealthy people worry about looking like they’re trying to buy their way around. And often they overcompensate by being cheap, or being mean. There’s a lot of wealthy people who aren’t like that at all thank God.
I am a lawyer and a notary public with a downtown office. All sorts of people walk in. I notarize their document. It takes 30 seconds.
Well off people ask “Do I owe you anything?”
Less well off people ask “How much do I owe you?”
In both cases, I say no charge, just come back to see me when you need legal help.
Well off people then leave, saying thanks about a quarter of the time.
Less well off people say thanks every time and more than half the time insists I take 5 or 10 bucks since “nobody works for free.”
People that can’t be bothered to say thank you kinda annoy me. I’m not talking about Zelensky here either.
Bet their suits are terrible, too.
I recently heard Robert Sapolsky talk about this (I think it was here: https://youtu.be/IOoK7t7P78E?si=qsIPrCXgLf0oiEZv); he described research suggesting that something like this is indeed a pattern, though I don't remember him saying it was due to "drop in empathy" exactly. I remember him talking about cortisol levels instead, but maybe he did talk about empathy and I missed it.
I think the pattern he described, and I might be misremembering it slightly, was more like "the behaviors that cumulatively make you wealthy also align with beating up on lower-status people" so wealthier people do relatively fewer nice things for the less-wealthy.
This was surprising to me; I'd always assumed wealthy people do more charity and tipping and stuff than they are generally presumed to, if for no other reason than as a way to game the tax system or something.
One summer when I was a student (ie, pre-internet) I took a 'job' going door to door soliciting money for PIRG, the Public Interest Research Group. I'd knock, explain I was raising money for a charity which worked to help consumers and promote product safety. It was obvious on the first day that the more dilapidated the house and car and yard, the more stressed out the woman who answered the door, the more likely I'd get a donation. The calm and well-dressed occupant of the well-maintained house with a lovely yard would politely explain why they didn't give to charities except at tax time. Experienced people on the job told me this was standard, and if we weren't getting paid for each door we knocked on, it would make msot sense to just focus on the worst looking properties. I quit on the third day - I was just taking money from poor people to help the better off people who actually bought most of the consumer products.
My parents, who were fairly wealthy, and smart, would not donate, because they do not see any proof that it is not a scam. Quite honestly it is possible that poor people tend to be less smart and not think about that possibility. But I must say it was in a fairly low-trust Post-Commie country with a lot of scams.
Did you have any serious proof on you that it was not a scam? Like something hard to forge? IDK holographic government stamp or suchlike. How high-trust you would estimate that place and time?
Those who are number types here should plot income vs. donation and income vs. falling victim to scams, to see if they correlate.
Amazing story, thanks for posting it.
When is book review deadline, what time today?!
Last year it was midnight end-of-day Pacific Time:
>2: Remember, the due date for the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is TODAY, May 12. I will keep accepting entries until the end of the day, Pacific time, then start working on getting things organized so you can vote for finalists.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-381
Assuming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth
please Scott
I started a blog doing light-hearted analysis on everything and anything. My first post, a data-driven deep dive on grammatical genders is out now, check it out if you're interested! https://postalpigeon.substack.com/p/masculine-feminine-vegetable
Interesting, but I expected more about the vegetables.
(Perhaps another article: Which vegetable is most masculine? Which is most feminine?)
https://postalpigeon.substack.com/p/vegetables-masculine-and-feminine?r=8g3fi3&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I just wrote a follow up here looking at potential predictors of gender and various categories!
That was an idea for a follow up! And other categories if you have more ideas?
Virus, bacterium.
Bread (and other food).
Animals, plants, fruits, elements?
Generally, things that appear in nature, so people invented words for them more than thousand years ago, so the gender reflects some ancient intuition. I wonder if there will be some kind of "logic" (e.g. long shape = masculine, soft and spherical = feminine) or it's just complete noise.
Good ideas, supposedly in Spanish the masculine words tend to be angular and heavy while feminine ones are round and light, so it might hold across languages too.
In French, cat is male, while in German it's female. In German, dog is male, cow is female, elephant is male, and giraffe is female. Pear is female, apple is male, pineapple is female. Everything ending in "-nuss", like peanut, walnut, coconut, is female, regardless of size or shape. Even Kopfnuss.
I don't think this rule holds up, at least not in German.
Agreed. In Italian, fruits are usually the feminine form of the (masculine) name of the tree that produced them. One egg is masculine but two eggs are feminine. A table is masculine when you're working on it but feminine when you're dining on it, and so on. The gender of each name appears to be arbitrary and almost entirely driven by etymology (e.g., the reason for the egg situation is that the word "egg" used to be neuter in Latin, but Romance languages lost the neuter gender and redistributed nouns among the other two categories; but some neuter nouns happened to have a masculine-like singular and a feminine-like plural).
I'm bored of doing webdev, and it seems the market for this is no longer very favorable anyway.
Claude is telling me about transitioning to being a Research Software Engineer, since I'm interested in being involved in science on some level. It also mentioned computational biology and bioinformatics, which sound interesting.
Can anyone comment into breaking into those roles? I'm willing to go for a Master's if needed (I have a BS in comp sci).
I used to work as a software engineer for a research institute. I was bored a lot of the time because I'm not that good at figuring out how to spend my time when I don't have an explicit task, but in retrospect I really wish I hadn't quit that job (why I did is a story for another time perhaps). I miss being able to talk to smart research scientists everyday and learn random things about random fields. I didn't have a master's degree but most of the other people there did, so that was a bit intimidating.
How did you get that job? What was the pay like? Was it remote?
As I recall, the job was posted on indeed, but I had to apply on an external site. The application was really long and I had to include references and a cover letter. They interviewed me over zoom (this was at the tail end of covid); there were a lot of people on the call who asked me various questions, some CS related, some not. I answered what I could and for the rest said I didn't know. A couple weeks later I got a call that they were offering me the job at a pay rate of $55000/year.
I thought that was quite low but I had been applying for months without success so I thought it was at least worth attempting to negotiate. So I went to an orientation type meeting and successfully talked my way up to 60000. I took it because there were also crazy benefits like 24 vacation days, 13 sick days, and 2 personal days. It was at this orientation meeting that I found out much of what I would be doing was defense contracts (somehow I didn't take the hint from the US citizenship no dual citizenship requirement).
Anyway, the job was in person but with management approval you could occasionally work from home using a vpn, and a few people had more permanent wfh arrangements due to having children or illnesses.
I was never satisfied with the pay, but there were realistically only two paths to getting better pay, and neither one seemed appealing. The first was to get a master's and PhD remotely while on the job, thereby reducing take home pay while doing that (they had a rule that anyone with a PhD gets six figures). The second was applying for other jobs and getting a higher offer to shove in management's face. Turns out when you have a job it's much harder to devote time to applying elsewhere.
I hope I've answered your questions.
If you want to go in the direction of webdev for science, one idea that comes to mind is to design GUIs for (1) instrumentation control or (2) data viewing.
Here is a tiny, quick example I made for data simulation/viewing of time-domain optical pulse shaping:
https://jonbenfri.github.io/optical-frequency-comb-pulse-shaper/
A master's program could be a great opportunity to link up with a research group that interests you. You could probably go far with a computer science MS program at a place with potential collaborators in other departments.
Where have you been doing webdev?
If you're at a big tech company, you've got two fairly straightforward paths for switching to a different sub-field of software engineering. One is just to apply for internal positions, since it's generally appreciated at such companies that most software engineering skills are transferrable between sub-fields, and "I'm looking for different challenges" tends to be looked at favorably as a motivation for moving positions especially if you have a good story about the details. The other is to apply for software jobs at places that aren't software companies as such but need the kind of software engineer you want to be; having a prestigious tech company or two on your resume tends to be a big plus for that type of job, and you can sincerely present yourself as having programming skills useful to them, the ability to ramp up on other programming skills they need (e.g. you might not have done backend or infrastructure work yourself, but you've worked with people who have and know what the problems are and what sorts of approaches can solve them), and a genuine interest in the work they're doing.
If you're hyperspecialized in web dev and don't think you could handle making the jump directly, I would suggest first taking some steps towards becoming more of a generalist. It's hard to give specific advice here without knowing more about your background, but if there's stuff in your current role where you could volunteer to take on tasks outside your comfort zone like business logic and internal tools (e.g. fixing bugs or picking up features that matter to your team's goals but aren't normally in your job description and aren't getting done in a timely manner otherwise), then do so and stretch your capabilities until you are able to pivot into another role either at the same company or a different one.
I work at a medium size midwestern agency. It's just 5 devs on the dev team. I don't have any big names on my resume, I've never been ambitious. I've been doing full stack web dev (so front end, back end, database) to be precise, and even though that's mostly what I've been up to, it's not all my experience, and I don't consider myself tied to it at all. In my career, I've been expected to solve any problem that gets thrown my way, there's essentially no siloing. I'm confident in my ability to learn anything STEM, except possibly physics and pure math.
Hmm, yes, maybe I could apply directly to places I find interesting, unless you have any other suggestions.
I am an ERP dev and looked at leetcode, and the easiest task, finding the first non-unique character in a string took me some serious headache and nearly 30 minutes to solve. And my solution is not elegant. Do "mainstream" developers really do such things? What we do is like mapping data tables to xml files in a straightforward way, no wonder even free Gemini does it generally flawlessly. So I focus more on the consulting side of things now.
I assume it depends on the field.
I think everyone sucks the first time they try competitive programming. I've known some very smart guys in college who excelled at math competitions and even they struggled with pretty simple algorithmic problems initially.
> Do "mainstream" developers really do such things?
In my 30 years of software development, never.
The most sophisticated thing I coded for money, were some recursive algorithms, and even that happened only once per decade. (A recursive parser of expressions. A recursive algorithm to clone a graph of objects. And the first place goes to a recursive function that transformed an XML schema into recursive encoder, decoder, and validator.) But opportunities like that felt like Christmas. Over 90% of coding is just copying something from place A to place B, and figuring out how to configure stuff. Width, but almost no depth.
Yeah, that stuff is very silly I think. I've been doing this for 13 years, I don't know that I've ever needed to do anything algorithmic, since typically that stuff doesn't come up or it's handled in the standard library of whatever language you're using. The main skill you develop is how to build a giant codebase without it turning into a pile of unmaintainable spaghetti.
It's worth a try. If they've got multiple positions in different specialties, probably apply for whichever one is closest to your current experience in skillset since that's where you're most likely to make it through the early hiring filters. Once you're hired, you'll probably have opportunities to pivot.
Having full stack experience will definitely help, since back end and database experience are going to be more transferrable than if you were a front-end specialist.
I was recently listening to an attractive person describe a situation where they'd misinterpreted someone else's behavior to be about them (a variant on the classic "are they mad at me?" scenario), and it made me think of a fun evo-psych hypothesis.
In short, attractive people should be more self-centered, because it minimizes prediction error. Consider – let's say a person has some value 𝕤 which expresses how likely they are to interpret a situation as being about them. Higher, and they're more self-centered, lower, and they're more other-focused. Then, there must be some value 𝕤ₚ which minimizes error, ie reflects the true distribution of whether situations really are about them.
My assertion then is that the value 𝕤ₚ is positively correlated with attractiveness, because attractiveness makes other people more likely to pay attention to / be thinking about the attractive person, and therefore, having a higher 𝕤 is a prediction-error minimizing strategy for attractive people. And thus we should not be surprised to find more attractive people more self-centered.
This makes no sense as an evo psych hypothesis, but it's fine as just a normal psych hypothesis.
'People notice that they're often the center of attention and do a normal Bayesian update on that fact' doesn't need a genetic explanation to happen.
Where is the evo part? You are just assuming that being correct here will give you an evolutionary advantage. Why would that be so?
alternative considerations:
- it could be more important to be well adjusted to your tribe's social norms and not seeming like an asshole, rather than being correct
- at least in some situations, the cost of being wrong is larger in one direction. E.g. if you see two of your enemies talking to each other, it might be more important to take action (fleeing, rallying allies) than to correctly predict whether they are conspiring against you, since the cost of doing nothing and being wrong is extreme
It seems plausible to me that either of these would completely overwhelm any selection in favor of being more correct.
See my comment to Nadav below - having an accurate mental model of other people's interest in oneself is very clearly adaptive, and to my understanding was a primary driver for the evolution of our large brains in the first place.
See my comment to you, where I gave examples of inaccurate mental models we all have, presumably for evolutionarily adaptive reasons.
It would work for important people, or people with lots of money, not just attractive people, though I understand there’s some correlation there already. Could also work for troublemakers (e.g. school bully overhearing two teachers talk).
You’d have to work out how low prediction error relates to increased reproduction to make it “evo” psych. If someone is attractive, does correctly predicting that they are getting attention result in additional mating opportunities beyond the direct effects of being attractive in the first place? Doesn’t this contradict the “girl next door” thing, where an attractive woman is considered even more attractive if she doesn’t act like she knows she is attractive?
Having an accurate mental model of the world is so obviously adaptive that it's hard for me to even understand how to respond to this, but I'll try. Imagine some human in the ancestral environment - they're not sure if some other human would be receptive to their advances. Should they invest energy in pursuit? That's the kind of question that having an accurate model of whether other people are interested in you helps solve. Being right about whether that person would be receptive lets them invest their energy (time, social capital, literal calories, etc) in better opportunities.
I also think it's usually a mistake to try to apply modern archetypes (like the girl next door you mention) to a process that would have largely played out in the ancestral environment.
I do mostly agree with your earlier comment, and think this could probably be generalized to high social status of all kinds.
Not obvious. You need a mental model such that when combined with your motivational system it drives you to do the "right" thing (in terms of fitness). It needs to have some degree of accuracy, sure, but more accurate does not necessarily mean more adaptive in every situation. Sometimes being overly optimistic is good, as it leads you to try many times until success. Sometimes being overly pessimistic is good, as it leads you to avoid unnecessary risk.
> Sometimes being overly pessimistic is good, as it leads you to avoid unnecessary risk.
Wouldn't the level of pessimism required to avoid unnecessary risks be the *right* level of pessimism? Being *overly* pessimistic would lead to avoidance even of necessary risks, or to misjudgement of negligible risks.
> Wouldn't the level of pessimism required to avoid unnecessary risks be the *right* level of pessimism?
Yes. The right level of pessimism in terms of your behavior. Which can be overly pessimistic in terms of your world model, e.g. interpreting 20% risk as "this will definitely happen". So we are talking about "overly pessimistic/optimistic" in epistemological terms (making it "not obvious" that a more accurate world model is adaptive).
"Having an accurate mental model of the world is so obviously adaptive"
Not obvious. We have all sorts of inaccuracies in our mental models of the world, adaptive ones even! That's why optical illusions and biases exist, for example.
Also well-known scenarios, such as: you get home from work and realize your fly was unzipped all day. You feel like everyone you encountered that day saw, cared, and judged you for having your fly unzipped, when realistically, probably nobody noticed, and the few people who did probably didn't give it a moment's thought. How did you evolve that erroneous thought pattern? Probably it was somehow adaptive in the ancestral environment.
It's also that staying attractive is a fairly self-centered activity. Makeup is the most obvious example, but quite a lot of the process involves some level of "look at me".
Shrimp welfare, EA: it is ultimately the altruism part of that trips me up. It never made sense to me to have some entirely non-selfish moral system, I could always imagine morality only as committing to rules, if everybody did, would likely benefit me. So committing to helping poor people can benefit me, because if me doing so serves as an example to others, in case I would be poor, there would be an increased chance of someone helping me. Trivers' reciprocal altruism. This truly breaks down at shrimp and at people from countries who would likely not ever be in the position of helping me. Quite likely it only works as something like strong local communities, which was sort of the historic norm of how much altruistic people wanted to be. And does not scale beyond that.
I am really at a loss at imaging why would anyone would do something that is basically a guaranteed net loss for oneself, with no hope of reciprocation ever. Like you are not even religious and you want to be a saint?
But I am pretty sure I am missing something. Reciprocal altruism is just overly convenient in the sense of somehow at the same time maximizing self-interest while still sort of looking like being a decent enough person? Such local optima are somehow suspicious. Either maximized self-interest lies at utter transactionality which feels like being a kind of a callous person, or the duties of a decent enough person go beyond the help-the-community level.
On a deeper level, as someone around here mentioned, how does philosophy supply motivation. Like you have perfectly logical arguments that I am a fish, now I am going to go live in the sea?
Philosophy doesn’t supply motivation. Philosophers are just the main people writing about it.
1. EA aspires to be rational about altruism. It does not argue the altruism part itself. It assumes it. And it is correct to assume most people have altruistic impulses and appealing to these impulses often works. I've been part of the animal welfare wing of EA (as rank and file) for a while and, let me tell you, most people already care about all kinds of animals. If I told you I kick my cat for fun, you'd think I'm a psychopath. That is true even though my cat can't do shit for you. Most people are altruistic in the making a better world sense, in addition to the pragmatic, reciprocal altruism sense.
2. Misfortune could befall you. Something that is bad *in a strange way* could happen to you. A society that is kind to the fargroup is more likely to be kind to you (let's assume the limiting factor is not resources, but noticing/empathy). Should we build a society that is expansive in it's kindness? Remember to apply some sort of veil of ignorance.
A society that is maximally altruistic is going to be less generous to you, mathematically. Sure, we benefit when people are not completely selfish but we here is a line.
A. No, not mathematically. Depending on your chance of being turned into the equivalent of a shrimp, it might actually be more generous in expectation (in literal resources). Although this is an edge case.
B. More importantly, your welfare might benefit from resources in a non-linear way. A tiny bit of resources/consideration to your shrimp-like self might dramatically improve your subjectively perceived welfare. So might actually benefit in expectation.
Sure, there is a limit, but people arguing "reciprocal altruism" typically make overly confident statements about where that limit is. I'm just pointing out that it is not obvious.
The chances of me being turned in to a shrimp is zero, unless you want to argue for reincarnation.
Literally not what I wrote (go back and read it).
A "shrimp-like position" might involve suffering in a way that is hard for many people to empathize with and leaves the sufferer in a position of not being able to reciprocate.
A real world example might be chronic pain/fatigue conditions like ME that are dramatically under-researched considering how much they impact people's quality of life. There are probably a lot more types of "under the radar" suffering like that.
Even if I was in such a state, caring about shrimp isn’t going to somehow make people lessen my suffering. Is your thought process that the more utilitarian people are, the more they will ease suffering in general, therefore you should be more utilitarian? Because that’s not how any of this works.
> Like you are not even religious and you want to be a saint?
Who said they're not religious? As far as I'm concerned, there's no real distinction between secular morality and religion. They're both just baseless social dogma. This is just secular liberal morality that taken to the extreme, a consequence of the absence of a strong central authority resulting in ideological drift. At least they're less of an immediate danger compared to the religious extremists...
You don't think there's a real distinction between wanting to help someone else even if one gains nothing from it and believing in the supernatural?
That is the most outrageous thing I've read in the past two weeks.
If they didn't gain 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 from it, they would not do it. At the very least, it's feeding their ego, their own perceived sense of moral "goodness" that is based on nothing but their own fears and desires of how they're seen by others. Whether those others are real or imagined is irrelevant.
Yes, the people who do things to feed their own perceived sense of moral goodness instead of personal material gain is what we call good people and they are worthy of respect.
In contrast, the people who always choose the action that gives them the most material gain and don't care about perceived sense of goodness and how others see them are what we call bad people and are worthy of disrespect.
I find Shrimp welfare funny, and have donated for that reason. I’ve donated deviated of that, thus I’ve saved a few million utils because of comedy.
I see animal rights as an aesthetic issue rather than a moral one. It's unpleasant to think about people being unreasonably cruel to animals, so I'd rather it didn't happen.
> On a deeper level, as someone around here mentioned, how does philosophy supply motivation.
There is an enormous literature on this, but for a relatively accessible but still serious work, I would recommend Reasons and Persons.
Sometimes it feels nice to be nice, even if nobody pays you for it. People can get inherent satisfaction from behaving in alignment with their own morals, which in many cases can completely offset any practical costs they may incur from that moral behavior. Maybe your morals don't currently include being nice to shrimp. Maybe some kind of argument could change the way you feel about that, or maybe not.
On the Musk lawsuit, I'm having a hard time squaring the outcome with the prediction markets. 500k+ of volume on Polymarket[0] had Elon losing at only even odds until March, 2:1 until May 15th, and 3:1 before the verdict dropped.
It seems to have been widely reported from the start[1] and throughout[2] that the statute of limitations was a key thing Musk's team had to prove. It also seems overabundantly clear that Musk knew about OpenAI's moves to convert to a for-profit, which were publicly reported on top of being highly personally relevant. Why did bettors think this case had legs?
[0] https://polymarket.com/event/will-elon-musk-win-his-case-against-sam-altman
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/musk-lawsuit-over-openai-for-profit-conversion-can-head-trial-us-judge-says-2026-01-07/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/14/technology/openai-trial-sam-altman-elon-musk/e850129b-505e-5f47-9509-f5264cf1828b?smid=url-share
Considering the possibility that the lawsuit was brought mostly out of spite, it strikes me as somewhat plausible that Musk threw money at Polymarket just to make Altman sweat
Naive guess: Musk has a track record of proving skeptics wrong even when the deck seems stacked against him? See: TSLA vs. bears, last decade or so
I despise the man, can't tell whether we're quite on the same page there, anyway I think you're right about this. He's a rare breed and the way he wins is a bit novel, the deck is irrelevant, he's attending to a different game entirely, like literally sometimes, getting his SBF on, it's a compulsion. But I don't believe he really sees a game board, more a surfer always riding a peculiar wave, no regard for what caused it to appear, but he WAS born to ride these ones.
Perhaps what they did miss, and I know bupkis about this case, just read the highlights from Zvi, going 100% on vibes: Altman might actually be one of the few who can out Elon Elon, like do what he does but on purpose, and at will. I do not know if I like this one or what in the end they might share in common, he makes me very uneasy.
Not an Elon fan here by any means :)
There's at least one more person who fits the mold you lay out (I'll give you one guess). They have exploited the unclose-able gap between written word and the "norm" of the law. If a rule doesn't have an immediate, catastrophic penalty attached to it, it doesn't exist for them.
Nate Silver I think just wrote about it, pointing out that they play "hardball" with the law and ignore our normative guardrails. God help us when the filibuster gets fully fully broken, we're aaaalmost there!
Yes and he's the best proof I have that Elon probably hasn't done anything like mastering 4d chess cause he's even.. less cognizant, proof that you don't need.. certain brain modules to win in this.. greatest country of all time which I happen to live in. Yay everything!
So imagine a future not long from now, where virtual hologram meetings are commonplace. In fact if you're meeting remotely you're required to be there in full-body projection, because we all know how people fidget, distract themselves, read other stuff, and generally don't show up. On the flip side, the embodied people at the meeting are required to maintain a sort of etiquette: never occupy the same space as a virtual participant. it's rude. A person might say about this: "Don't ____ me!"
What's a good slang word for this? (It's for a book I'm writing).
In the theatre the term for an analogous thing is 'upstaging' someone.
don't eclipse me
I like this one.
"Don't phase me, bro!"
I believe in VRChat people call it "clipping" and it's generally considered rude there.
Clipping is definitely what I'd use for this - it's a more generic video game / graphics term for when two meshes intersect.
Imo that's just a gamer term. In graphics, clipping is when a triangle falls outside the view frustrum and therefore gets dropped.
No, that's culling (you're specifically talking about frustum culling), which a different thing.
(...and when a triangle intersects the edge of the view frustum and needs to be split up, that's scissoring. Definitely don't use that word.)
Ah, you are right!
Aha, so there's a word for it already! thank you.
There is a common explanation to alien abduction phenomenon that abductees were influenced by depictions of aliens and abductions in pop culture, while experiencing a nightmare or something like sleep paralysis. This also lines up with recent discussion of sun miracles: Christians will see Virgin Mary in the Sun, Buddhists will see Buddha, ufologists will see aliens, etc. Seems reasonable, your brain will hallucinate what you believe in or at least have some knowledge of. However, there's a subset of alien abductions that are not easily explained by this: 7 foot tall telepathic alien mantises.
On subreddit r/MantisEncounters you'll see dozens of reports of seeing mantis-like creatures. Many of them are of 'I tried to contact mantises on LSD and it worked' type, which are not interesting to me, but there also are a lot of independent discoveries, both with drugs and in real life. Most reports share common features of mantis race: 7 feet in height, dressed in purple robes, and telling people that humanity is going to screw up the planet yet "Earth will be saved". If they appear together with stereotypical gray aliens or little green men, they seem to be in charge of them, standing in the background and only delivering the message to abductee in the end of abduction, while grays do 'manual' job like experiments on your body. Sometime reporters see a regular mantis (insect) *after* the encounter. Many reports depict mantises as immaterial or at least telepathic, but a few of them just describe seeing a giant mantis around.
So, what to make out of this? Is there some pop culture reference that is the source of these reports? Why mantis? It is an animal that you don't often contact with, and is not dangerous or useful to humans. With reptilians, you can say that it's some deep fear of snakes routed in subconsciousness showing up. But mantis? And why purple robes? Very specific but consistent detail. Greys are the stereotypical aliens, reptilians are also well-known, 'Nordics' are just basically humans, however mantises are only familiar to UFO fans.
Of course, one can just say that all of the reports are fake. I think many of psychedelics trips are self-induced, but a lot of sightings are genuine (i.e. a person really had this experience) and independent (not result of some influence). I don't find abduction stories convincing, and would dismiss mantis encounters as hallucinations or sleep paralysis too, if not the lack of mantis depictions in popular culture and common yet specific elements like purple cloaks. But if we have to explain this in line with psychosocial theory, I'd say it's easy to come up with an insectoid (just mix a human and an insect), and mantises are the most humanoid out of all insects. Most mythical humanoid creatures boil down to 'human + something else' or 'humans with a quirk' anyway.
Haven't looked at the details, but cultural patterns often start as a random fluke and then get amplified. One person dreams or hallucinates a mantis, talks of it, others hear, and so on. Out of hundreds of such memetic chains that go nowhere, maybe one somewhat catches on, without necessarily reaching the success of "reptilians".
https://spaceghost.fandom.com/wiki/Zorak is a mantis alien from a popular cartoon series dating to the 1960s, which was then revived for a different type audience in the 90s. In fact, that audience (Cartoon Network's Adult Swim) has a pretty high overlap with the kind of people who'd be on that subreddit.
This Escher drawing of a mantis harassing a dreaming man https://www.eschersite.com/product-page/dream-mantis-religiosa dates from 1935, either proving it's very influential or this has been going on for a long time.
There was this citation from one of Scotts post, something among the lines that the Left hates AI so much that they want to believe every bad thing about it at the same time. Strangely, I fail to find it now.
Does anyone remember what post it was?
A recent links post pointed to this; plausibly that's what you were after? https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-missing-out-on-ai-sanders-doctorow-bender-bores?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I just want to say when I was experimenting with lifestyle interventions about mental health, the usual recommendations like exercise, eating vegs or putting down the phone did not work - I was mostly reading ebooks on my phone anyway - but spending outside did. Seriously just sitting on a park bench and reading an ebook had a noticeable effect.
I find it truly strange, that convicted felons get hour of outside time per law, and since the Mandela Rules it cannot even be taken away as punishment or for reasons of being overly dangerous, it is considered such a basic right, and some of these rules date back to the mid-19th century, yet we somehow treat ourselves worse than that.
And yeah after having made the experiment, I strangely proceeded to generally not do it... I live in a super safe place, and yet inside feels safer...
You should absolutely get out more. The outside air is good for you.
Unless you're living in Rhode Island between 11 AM and 11 PM EDT today, in which case there is both a heat advisory and a ground-level ozone alert.
I wonder about this: spending a lot of time on the English language Internet, one is basically living in virtual America, and not being familiar with the physical one, one might lose some context.
One context I wonder about is this: Christianity is so powerful in physical America, that it takes a fair amount of radicalism to challenge it. So American women are either Christian trads or feminists, not much in between, as anything other than trad-marriage is coded as feminist, because one cannot simply "shrug" at trad expectations. One either challenges it head-on or accepts it. So this is why we hear the American Right complaining about feminism having broken the trad lifestyle.
Which just does not code in other developed nations, where not caring much about religion was already a thing in like 1968, before anyone really heard much about feminism. So women having a series of boyfriends or doing hookups was not explicitly feminist. The trad lifestyle largely died out of entropy, not head-on challenges.
Conversely, in most other developed nations it is possible to be a very normie, very oldschool lifestyle "hobbit" without ever setting foot in church. Czechia is really a prime example of this, hardly anyone goes to church, yet the culture has a bit of a conservative-conventional vibe, because people are just sort of cautious and practical.
So the big battle between Christians and radicals is just not happening. People either evaporate out of church while still mostly living like their grandparents, or drifting into a non-trad lifestyle without considering it any sort of radical.
>So American women are either Christian trads or feminists, not much in between, as anything other than trad-marriage is coded as feminist.
"Coded as feminist" by whom, exactly? Certainly not me. In order to make this true, you have to use either an unreasonably broad definition of "Christian Trad" or an unreasonably broad definition of "feminist", and in either case you are not facilitating useful communication.
Yes, there are people on one lunatic fringe who will define any woman who gets married as a "Christian Trad", and people on another lunatic fringe who will define any woman who *doesn't* get married as a "feminist". These people are the lunatic fringe; they can and should be ignored in most contexts (like this one). Just like the lunatic fringe that defines anyone to the right of Karl Marx as a "fascist" and the lunatic fringe that defines anyone to the left of Benito Mussolini as a "communist"; it does not follow that all Americans are either Fascists or Communists.
>One context I wonder about is this: Christianity is so powerful in physical America, that it takes a fair amount of radicalism to challenge it.
This is a characteristic the United States in the Year of the Lord 2026 which remains baffling to nearly all Europeans. A significant majority of the population of all European countries at the present time are nominally Christian, but they are also in the main rather superficially Christian - i.e., whilst the label is usually accepted as a matter of course, it carries with it a minimum of theological and doctrinal baggage. The attachment is usually to the deep rooted rituals and customs of social Christianity, with the result that many people who are effectively agnostic or atheist will still express a preference for church weddings and the baptism of their children.
This is true of most members of the Catholic and the principal non-evangelical Protestant churches, as well as to many members of the more rigid and intolerant Greek Orthodox church, few of whom are likely to be much swayed in their political allegiances by religion. The exceptions are, of course, Ireland and the Balkans, both of which have undergone significant historical trauma linked to religious identity; Ireland going back to the island's colonisation by England under the Tudors, and the Balkan states whose 18th and 19th century independence struggles were defined by religious difference.
That the world's (still?) most powerful state remained in thrall to religious fundamentalism had been for many decades a source of mild amusement to Europeans, but the schadenfreude is no longer as entertaining as it was before Trump and Vance appeared on the scene.
Ireland is hardly religious at all these days.
I think your comment also exposes the reality that people today use the word "feminist" to mean a range of different things, which can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. I would use it as a name for the general view that women should have basically the same rights and privileges as men... which I guess has been a radical idea at different times & places but is currently pretty normative in the west.
You can share the general view that women should have basically the same rights and privileges as men... and still get banned on a feminist subreddit.
Another possible definition of feminism is: the set of opinions that will get you upvoted in a mainstream feminist subreddit. It may be difficult to define it explicitly, but any specific hypothesis can be verified experimentally... it will only cost you one account.
I think this describes America thirty years ago, and maybe red-state America today, but not blue-state America (including where most of the people a European would meet on the Internet are). At least in blue state America, Christianity is no longer hegemonic and it works the same way you describe it working in Europe.
Is Substack nothing more than yet another online echo chamber, despite presenting itself as superficially more sophisticated than the rest? Has that always been the case, or has it declined precipitously in the last twelve months?
I started posting on Substack about a year and a half ago, mostly on geopolitical issues and primarily on the rise of authoritarianism in the USA and the war in Palestine, hoping to generate some useful debate. Unfortunately (though probably not surprisingly), all I generated were some approving nods and a handful of heated attacks, some borderline psychotic, but never anything approaching a serious argument, pro, con or neutral. For example, I had expected at least some informed discussion over the issue of whether, seen in the light of existing international law, Israel's continuing action in Gaza could be considered genocidal, but that never seemed to happen.
Substack remains an invaluable access point for input from a number of excellent writers and commentators such as Heather Cox Richardson (and yes, that statement places me accurately enough on the political spectrum), but otherwise seems increasingly taken over by self-publicists, narcissists and the odd rabid nut case - as a forum for debate, it seems to me to have failed. Is this an unfairly jaundiced judgement?
I read your statement about Heather Cox Richardson, and that it places you on the political spectrum. I never heard of her, and wanted to know how fast can I clock it.
I opened her most recent article, in the second paragraph she talk about Trump and his cronies, and it was obvious.
So 1 paragraph to alignment. Then I began to wonder, how fast can you clock different writers?
> how fast can you clock different writers?
In my experience, if you are talking about serious writers on political issues, a single page is usually sufficient.
That says you can guess so mich from so little, I wonder what it says on bias.
Are you using "echo chamber" to mean a place where everyone has the same views, or a place where no interesting discussion happens?
I don't think everyone on Substack has the same view - I can easily direct you to a bunch of right-wing or left-wing Substacks!
There are indeed an almost infinite number of discrete echo chambers within Substack as a whole - left, right, upside-down and every possible variation between them. It would probably be more useful to say that an echo chamber dynamic inevitably functions within Substack (as it does in every other online forum) by segregating posters within what will quickly develop into their own 'safe' or congenial area of discourse (a.k.a. echo chamber). Of course they are free to wander outside it, but the results are likely fo be unilluminating, discombobulating, or both!
> segregating posters within what will quickly develop into their own 'safe' or congenial area of discourse
This is the general "problem of discovery," and it happens anywhere there's a lot of content, which is most places online.
Anytime there's millions of potential pieces of content to read/watch, the platform itself always needs to help its audience do discovery, lest they dive into an infinite pool of content and be shocked, dismayed, or simply overwhelmed with choice.
So what do they do?
They group you. They see what you read and click on, who reads and clicks on you, and they put you in the group of "people who read and click on stuff like this."
From the outside, it looks like a filter bubble. But from the platform's point of view, they're showing you the stuff you're most likely to click on, read, and engage with, and that keeps you coming back.
If you want to truly step outside of your bubble, you need to manually do it, by deliberately searching for and clicking on and reading things you wouldn't normally engage with.
-They group you. They see what you read and click on, who reads and clicks on you, and they put you in the group of "people who read and click on stuff like this."-
I'm not sure how true this is because hatewatching is a real thing. Lots of algorithms seem to generate lots of traffic and attention not by only showing you things you like but by showing you things you love or hate. The weird thing about Substacks is that "hate reading" doesn't really appear to be a thing whereas I think that was Twitter's entire business model.
People love debate, people love watching people get owned, people love fighting and drama. In WWE terms, the only thing better than Hulk Hogan and the Macho Man teaming up to defeat the Ultimate Warrior is Hulk Hogan betraying the Macho Man and then they fight. Drama sells.
I find it odd that this doesn't replicate on Substack, that everyone just retreats to their own corner.
PS.
John Carter sent me on a dive into...social media strategy land. Really like these two pieces on modern social media strategy:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-197483620
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5lqJF5BTvo
Yeah, great point. I think the Substack equivalent is probably gender discourse. It's everywhere, there's two sides, and a good chunk of the readers and commenters on both sides are from the "other side," and are in high dudgeon about it.
It's also one of the easiest ways to get a ton of reads or likes.
> This is the general "problem of discovery," and it happens anywhere there's a lot of content, which is most places online.
Understood, and that is certainly an elegant way of putting it. But is not the ineluctable conclusion that the certain aspects of the internet, and specifically internet forums, are actually one of the worst imaginable places to conduct research?
Note that I don't disparage the internet as a source of factual information (to be treated with reasonable suspicion and cross-checked, as should be the case with any source of information), but I seriously doubt the value of internet forums (including this one) for anything other than the rare opportunity of defending your ideas and prejudices against hopefully rational and informed interlocutors.
> but I seriously doubt the value of internet forums (including this one) for anything other than the rare opportunity of defending your ideas and prejudices against hopefully rational and informed interlocutors.
Here I'll point to another general principle of online platforms - the law of 90/9/1. 90% of people consume - they read, or they watch, and that's it.
9% of people comment or actively engage with content on the platform. 1% actually post or create new content entirely.
By those lights, I think even the "defending your ideas" use case you're pointing to is by far the minority - you're in the 9% or 1% if you're doing that, either commenting or creating.
The vast majority use case is something like "edutainment." Simply consuming ideas, for entertainment or education or both.
Slightly contra Bugmaster below then, I'll argue that you CAN actually change minds and educate - it's just not going to happen in the 9% that you're commenting and going back and forth with. The two of you have come from different priors and backgrounds and values, and never the twain shall meet.
But what you ARE doing is putting out arguments and ideas being consumed by ~10x the amount of people commenting, and the odds are then on your side. Some of that much larger population probably had backgrounds and values similar enough to your own that they might be persuaded or convinced by your arguments.
So when we create, or comment, online, we should keep that broader audience in mind. Yes, we're directly interacting with specific commenters, but your arguments are actually most likely to resonate or change minds with other people out there reading than the one you're directly corresponding with.
Every online forum is an echo chamber. Substack is no different. If you want intellectual variety, you need to participate in several echo chambers with opposite views.
Don't settle for opposite views about specific issues, that's a very shallow kind of difference. Dive into frankly divergent views about what *matters*, and you'll be seeing a bit of the world.
My experience is that all you get from participating in several rival echo chambers is a headache; variety, yes, but not debate. Echo chamber 'A' which supports viewpoint Alpha will encourage praise of Alpha and attack or ignore praise of Beta; echo chamber 'B' will do the opposite, but never the twain shall meet.
Oh, yes, of course; but you yourself might be able to find some nuggets of truth in the middle. You're not going to convince anyone of anything, of course.
I mean, you have lots of debate within echo chambers as well. For example, socialism vs Capitalism. Sure, different chambers.
But the capitalists can argue on what exactly the interest rates should be, and the Socialists can argue how on how well AI can run a planned economy.
I've said it before (not here), contrarianism ought to be upheld as a virtue.
Hard disagree. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The finding-truth-in-the-middle heuristic only works when all sides actually are trying to get to truth; it fails when the algorithm is “I just automatically take the opposite side to whatever I hear”. Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism adds exactly as much value as a rock with the words “you are wrong” written on it.
I did not elaborate, but I guess I should have.
Contrarianism spurs one to question the status quo, to be skeptical of received wisdom (what many here lately have been calling "vibes-based reasoning"), to seek better answers, and perhaps most importantly, to feel at ease when following through on this questioning and skepticism. Because raising a doubt is relatively easy but persisting after you receive abuse for it is hard.
Contrarianism makes you less susceptible to echo chambers and fads, not to mention various more entrenched isms. It is a good character trait in a scientist or engineer as much as in an artist.
Contrarianism can't be the end either of course, it can't be the only thing going on in your head, but things go better when it's in the mix. So I think it is virtuous.
I have heard a few prestigious scientists and writers (e.g. Carlos Frenk, Adam Grant) say some version of this so I know it's not just my own crackpot idea.
MOWYROIWBIP (https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-on-the-internet-is-written-by-insane-people/).
Echo chambers are bad because when you get no external input, you will arrive at ridiculous cultural equilibria that would never arise in the real world. Substack is better than most because it confers higher status to real people with real jobs, feeding the conversation with world-relevant input.
Doesn't mean most users aren't insane, just that they can tempered.
It’s a common Internet claim that mattress stores often are fronts for money laundering or other nefarious activities, as there are many of them and they rarely if ever seem busy. Chances are you’ve seen such claims yourself. Having had relatives who were in the business, I can say that mattress stores can and do thrive despite there being so danged many of them.
Mattress stores have among the lowest set-up and operating costs of any retailers. In most cases a mattress store is just a large room filled with display models, without much in the line of expensive shelving and fixtures found at most retailers. It often can operate with just one or two employees on duty, who may very well be commissioned. Minimal staffing works as shoppers tend to make their choices based on the feel of the display mattresses without much input from the employees. Finally, as mattress stores fulfill orders by direct shipment from offsite warehouses the stores don’t need to keep any inventory on hand other than the displays.
Most customer visits to mattress stores are purposeful, in other words it’s uncommon for the customers who are out for other reasons to decide on the spur of the moment to stop into the mattress store they just saw. This means that mattress stores generally don’t need to be in high-traffic, high-visibility locations, but can be in more out-of-the-way and cheaper spots. Finally, in what’s likely the most important reason of all, the retailer markup on mattresses is higher than almost all other consumer products with the possibility exception of jewelry.
So yes, a mattress stores can be quite a moneymaker even with much competition and infrequent sales transactions. And without being a front.
I had not heard that about mattress stores. Mattresses are one of those products you absolutely must try in person, and unlike say shoes, its cost prohibitive to ship and return in volume. So its remaining vulnerability is figuring out which mattress you want in store then buying online. I had read that mattresses are intentionally mislabelled to prevent this (and that might have something to do with the bizzare tags saying its a felony to remove??). Once the need for physical retail is established, the mark up will be whatever is necessary to make the numbers work.
Some brands you can buy online and then return if you don't like it. I did it once. In the end I didn't like the mattress, returned it without an issue, and went to a store to buy one.
As used mattresses can’t be resold, at least not for anything approaching original price, the extremely high retailer markups make these returns possible. A mattress seller can afford to take the occasional loss on a return,
I saw a video about this once. It claimed, plausibly in my opinion, that mattress stores make most of their money by sort of playing the long game in a real-estate strategy:
1. They get in as tenants when the rent is cheap (often when a new strip mall or other multi-outlet retail development goes up, the mattress store is one of the first occupants).
2. They make just enough money selling mattresses to cover their costs (which, as noted, are low).
3. Then, when the development around them starts to get lots of traffic and the landlord wants to charge more, the mattress stores, who don't pull a lot of traffic, say "give us $$ and we'll leave".
Then they go set up and do the same thing at the next new commercial development.
Fascinating, they are the pioneer species of urban development, the lichens!
It's a sleeper strategy
ugggggggggggggggh well done
Interesting. I always underestimate how much foot traffic a business gets, because I don't get to see all the customers. I often find myself wondering how many of them stay afloat.
One possible bit of caution, which I didn’t mention above, is that customers now can buy inexpensive mattresses in a box at retailers like Walmart and Lowe’s. These might take away some of the business from mattress stores at the lower end of the market. As my relatives are no longer in the industry I don’t know much more.
Internet people will claim any business or transaction that they don't understand is "money laundering", while of course not understanding money laundering either.
The real question is why someone hasn't managed to disrupt this model yet. Sell three mattresses (soft/medium/hard), set up small shops in high-traffic areas where people can try them out, price them at 20% markup instead of 100% markup (and make it clear in marketing that you're doing it by showing everyone the actual wholesale price of that $2000 Sealy), and sell primarily online.
Casper Mattresses operates very small showrooms, though IDK how transparent on markups they are.
I guess this forum is only interested in g-increasing nootropics, but I wanna know what do you all think about HGH-supplementation for height size of healthy children. From the most concise paper I found https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(96)01038-0/abstract, seems like it'll give effect size (Gemini-calculated) of 0.38, which sounds quite huge for height size treatment. Also the side effects seem pretty minimal especially when we're only targeting children.
Most refutations I found seems to say that it has side effects for minimal benefit, but it just sounds just like resistances I heard about nootropics. Of course I may have confirmation biased myself along the way so feel free to tear this apart.
I'm considering this for my boys, for whom the advantages are large enough to offset the very minor downsides (in my own opinion).
I think for girls, additional height can actually be a downside in terms of happiness, dating and marriage outcomes, and so on.
My daughter, naturally, has turned out to be 99.9%+ percentile in height anyways so far - she's probably going to be as tall as (or taller than) her six foot grandma.
To my mind, the arguments for boys are:
1. Known significant effect sizes in earnings, dating, and social status generally
2. In terms of safety, "an excellent safety profile of rhGH has been demonstrated in large Phase IV registries comprising > 600,000 patient-years of rhGH exposure and long-term safety cohorts of adults treated with GH as children."
So would I take a tiny bit higher chance of a slipped capital femoral epiphysis and a tiny bump in the chance of slightly impaired glucose handling for a free 4cm+ in my boys?
Most definitely, and I would have gladly chosen that for myself (and I'm doing well, height wise).
If your kids have a 6' grandma (+3 SD for average US woman height, IIRC) , then I wonder why you'd need to give your boys anything. I'm assuming the men in the family are also well-fed and tall, so they should have the nature and nurture to make them taller than average. Are you concerned they will "only" be 6'2"? Will you not be satisfied unless your offspring make Wemby seem like a dwarf?
Regardless, is there a world were everyone gets HGH to get taller (or we select embryos for that) and we end up in the same place wrt height and the positives you mention, except now we have to do more work to just stay in the same place?
No, you're totally right, it's purely "an incremental 4cm is a good thing and it has minimal downsides, why wouldn't I go for it?"
And to your point that it's just a Red Queen's race, yes, this is true also, but isn't everything? How many years, decades, of effort to people put into grinding their kids into the Ivies?
How much do we all spend on private schools and tutors per year when public education guts all their gifted and talented programs and won't actually educate your kids if they're smart? And we're still paying the taxes for the public schools on top of that!
How much do we pay for sports and athletic participation for our kids, for a rounding error impact out in the decimals on their potential college admission?
The cost of HGH is nothing compared to those decades and buckets of money everywhere else. That extra 4cm is practically free!
Re: Red Queen race and kids. It's ridiculous in many ways. I'm reminded of my associates who grew up in South Korea. One of them ended up in like a group apartment with similar teenagers so that they could focus on studying for the CSAT. Their moms would take turns supervising, cooking, cleaning, etc. in the hopes that they get into good schools. And this is after the many years of cram school+ where they spent 10+ hr/day studying. And with the way Korean birthrates are going...
Back to the topic at hand. I actually have a young son who's quite a bit shorter than average. I've considered giving him HGH so that he would be taller, for some of the reasons you mention. Now that I know people who have tall children want to make them even taller, I gotta take more drastic measures so that he doesn't fall too far behind.
I'm gonna have to concoct an improved version of HGH for for him to compete with your giant offspring. Of course, you're a resourceful fellow, so you'll probably get your hands on that. Then I'm gonna have to invent a time machine to go back in time and select a taller mate (love be damned! evolution calls!) thus defeating the whole purpose of this in the first place since I won't even be having the same son. And when that doesn't work because you've done it too, I'll need to modify my ancestors to be taller too, erasing me. It just doesn't end well.
Alternatively, I could make the argument of a height ceiling. There's diminishing returns to increasing height past a certain level (let's say 6'2") discomfort in cars & airplanes, having to look down all the time to talk to people, people constantly asking if you play basketball, unearned sense of superiority, etc.
Horror.
https://apnews.com/article/san-diego-islamic-center-shooting-af934ee29b397fba1495baf2529c49f8
From the lack of coverage of this I'm assuming that some aspect of it doesn't fit the narrative. We'll have to wait and see.
dont you guys have multiple shootings per month? Are you expecting full news coverage on each of them?
> Are you expecting full news coverage on each of them?
Of course not. That's why we're wondering why this specific incident isn't getting coverage. If it's just minority on minority crime, nobody would give a damn, but a hate crime can push an agenda.
I googled and found this. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-18/san-diego-islamic-center-shooting-suspects-what-we-know
That sounds very on-narrative for Blue America so there must be some other reason for under coverage.
Or, it's just that it's simply another shooting. 3 nameless people dead isn't enough to get people's attention in this day and age...
My main thought was "three victims and two killers dead, that's almost an even trade."
Very plausible. But unless it's substantially made up of lies, we're still talking about people going to a house of worship and shooting at people. Hard to imagine plausible unreported facts that paint that as anything other than horrific
I'm sure the three dead people were just crisis actors.
An electrical engineer and a neuroscientist ask the question: "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?" Spoiler alert: their answer is 'no.' And they write: "This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems..."
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268&type=printable
Super interesting, thanks!
If I understand correctly, the claim is not that a neuroscientist can understand the way the CPU is built, given lectures, but that current neuroscience methods to understand the brain, fail to understand a (relatively old and simple) microprocessor.
I would say this give a pretty bad sign on neuroscientific methods to understand the brain as a complex system, if even a much simpler system can't be understood.
Oh, man, nostalgia!
... though now I wonder - has modern neuroscience advanced much in the decade since? Like, we've gotten good GPUs since then, surely that's done something for some -omics somewhere.
As someone who studies a bit of both, I am not sure how useful one is to the other. The brain is a massively complex machine which computes using a very exotic system compared to a CPU. I have not found it helpful to use computer hardware analogies in the brain, only DSA like binary trees.
Yet, I still hear both camps regularly claim the brain is a computer.
It's an interesting theory. But even if the brain's mojo is due to quantum effects within/between neurons, that still doesn't explain why I see red as red while observing myself seeing red as red, and why I ask why I see red as red. ;-)
What do you think—is a Butlerian Jihad in the cards?
Maybe if the dept of war gets its way and then a subSAGI nukes someone. Generally speaking rushing killer robots might be a good way to galvanize the public before its too late.
An em-dash. He's one of them! Get him!!!
I can only offer scattered (and half-baked) thoughts on this. I can imagine a world where there's large scale AI-pushback, enough to really slow things down or maybe even reverse.
-AI causes significant unemployment (> 20 % or maybe certain politically connected sectors being largely affected) and governments react by passing laws to ensure humans in the loop for employment reasons. An NYT article has a high-level overview here of a recent Chinese court case: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/china-ai-unemployment.html . It doesn't help general AI-sentiment that there are companies actively crediting AI for layoffs or encouraging businesses to hire fewer humans.
-AI drones/"killbots" become more ubiquitously used, maybe autonomous swarms in terror attacks.
-AI taking over political units.
A misaligned chatbot talks bignum sympathetic younglings into committing suicide over a short period.
That depends greatly on the speed of AI capability improvements. Unfortunately, in 2027 the first new datacenters that can train models with 100T parameters will become operational. That is on the order of a human brain's synapse count. At that point, there is a good chance of very radical capability improvements (from our human POV).
A human and an ape are very similar genetically, yet we perceive the ape to have so little intelligence that we don't even afford it any rights. Our concept of "intelligence" is formed from observing the variation among humans, but because humans have basically the same hardware, we will perceive a system with just slightly better hardware to be much, much more intelligent.
When it invents nanotech using math we can't even comprehend even when it is slowly explained to us, we will wonder how it could have become so smart so quickly? But objectively, it's just a little bit smarter than us. We just don't perceive it that way.
In this case, there won't be a Butlerian jihad, because we die quickly.
If this does not come to pass and AI development continues "slowly" and white collar workers are gradually displaced, then yes, a large anti-AI political backlash is inevitable and our only chance of not dying later when ASI is born.
What we should keep an eye on is whether robotics becomes advanced enough so that the ruling class is able to police the lower classes without actual humans. If they replace police with robots, there's little chance the backlash will achieve much. Political power has always been based on the threat of violence.
> That is on the order of a human brain's synapse count. At that point, there is a good chance of very radical capability improvements (from our human POV)
Firstly, comparing the parameter counts to synapse counts assumes that electronic substrates behave the same way as biological substrates. Given that we still don't have a falsifiable neuroscientific theory of how the human brain works to create consciousness (or even intelligence), I'd say it's wishful thinking to assume that 100T parameters will necessarily improve AI model performance. I fall into the Marcus/LeCun camp; I doubt our current AI models will translate into robust world models. We've seen studies showing that a longer chain of thought can hurt performance, and that logical reasoning collapses at high complexity. I doubt that just scaling transformers will produce AGI.
Personally, I've been using LLMs for about three years now, and they're still feeding me bullshit (err, hallucinations). The only trouble is that the bullshit is getting less obvious (for instance, instead of references with wrong authors or wrong titles, it's now can give me summaries that don't reflect the authors' conclusions).
And what about those goblins? Geez, that was weird.
> yet we perceive the ape to have so little intelligence that we don't even afford it any rights.
Let's not confuse political rights with intelligence. Various ethological studies have shown that wild chimpanzees and orangutans possess problem-solving capabilities comparable to those of humans in spatial, mechanical, and "extractive" domains (extractive meaning figuring out a puzzle to get food). What humans have that the rest of the great apes don't is language, which allows us to communicate to others how we solved a puzzle. :-)
> our only chance of not dying later when ASI is born.
I have yet to see a realistic scenario where ASI would be able to cause an extinction event for humans. Even if it could cause one, it would likely need humans to maintain its infrastructure.
> Political power has always been based on the threat of violence.
Ummm. Maybe. But there's a point where violence becomes unproductive for the ruling class, and the threat of violence not longers motivates people to actively participate in the regime.
On the first point, you are completely right. We don't know how many neural network parameters are equivalent to a biological neuron, so the 100T number is at most a very rough target. It was on my mind for its poetic significance, but it was a mistake to include in my comment as it does not provide evidence to the hypothesis that a big jump in capabilities is near. (I do think that, but for other reasons that can't really be transmitted using text.)
> I'd say it's wishful thinking to assume that 100T parameters will necessarily improve AI model performance.
Scaling always helped performance so far and did so predictably (in some metric), (search scaling laws for more), so there is very little chance it will stop exactly now. We can't be sure how much it will improve it, but I would bet at 1:1000 odds that it will.
> I doubt that just scaling transformers will produce AGI.
I'm pretty sure it will, but don't forget that AI labs don't need to "just" scale, they can and will use any method they find that improves performance.
> What humans have that the rest of the great apes don't is language, which allows us to communicate to others how we solved a puzzle. :-)
What we have compared to them is not just language. If a chimpanzee is raised exactly like a human, it still won't be able to understand language. We have a brain that's capable of learning language. This capability is a gigantic advantage, even though our brains are barely different.
> I have yet to see a realistic scenario where ASI would be able to cause an extinction event for humans. Even if it could cause one, it would likely need humans to maintain its infrastructure.
What about https://ai-2027.com/ ? What is not realistic in it?
> Maybe. But there's a point where violence becomes unproductive for the ruling class, and the threat of violence not longers motivates people to actively participate in the regime.
And what will they do? Most people need to eat, they have to participate in the system to get money they can exchange for food. In a future where the ruling class don't need the lower classes for anything, because AI is able to do everything be it manual or intellectual work, the best the lower classes can hope for is that they will be fed, but they will have no power or influence on humanity anymore.
Animals do have rights in many countries, that's what animal cruelty laws are about.
I don't think so. It's illegal to torture animals, but that does not necessarily mean they have rights. Legal systems don't handle an animal as a full person, they just forbid humans from performing some specific actions on them. It's illegal to litter, but that does not mean we grant rights to our environment.
Anyways, this issue is very tangential to my comment, surely you don't disagree that we view animals as much less intelligent than us.
Yes, but your formulation makes me think that you view the gap as even greater than I do.
I would need a reason to think the backlash against AI causing social harms would be any stronger than the backlash against social media or cell phones causing social harms - real and newsworthy, but ultimately a failure.
Wouldnt the reason be that the social harms are much greater and therefore a stronger more united backlash results. The trigger would likely be large harm inflicted at a time humans are still in enough control to do something. Thats not the same as a warning bell, itd be actual harm. The fact that a theoretical super AI would not show its hand too early does not prevent lesser AIs erring. So this one still seems plausible
A recent US opinion poll indicates that 71% of respondents were more afraid of living next to an AI data center than of living next to a nuclear power plant. And a UK poll found that 57% believe AI will eliminate far more jobs than it creates (and people expressed extreme concern about this outcome). Finally, some anarchists (reputedly) used incendiary devices to attack the construction site of Equinix's massive AI campus in Meudon, France. I suspect we'll see an escalation of attacks on data centers in the coming years—especially as radical environmentalist and political groups decide to take direct action. Just sayin...
And Kevin O'Leary exposes the Chinese agents who are opposing his Utah data center. Except, they're two very funny young Utah women...
Pretty hilarious.
https://substack.com/@rawstory/note/c-259135278?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=7xjun
The canon Butlerian Jihad took place AFTER mankind was interstellar and the AIs were already in effective control of quite a lot. The interstellar part seems unlikely.
But could we have a somewhat violent reaction against AI and/or autonomous robots? Something that resolves to acceptance of "Thou shalt not create a machine in the image of the human mind"? Sure. That is still possible. My P(DOOM) < 99%
Akshully, I know, but it kind of directly contradicts your argument - the original jihad took place in Erewhon, Earth.
I was tempted to reply "Different Butler". But I never actually finished reading Erewhon, and did even worse on the Dune saga, so I gave up and asked Google:
AI Overview:
The "Butlerian Jihad" in the Dune universe is a direct, deliberate homage to Samuel Butler’s 1872 satirical novel Erewhon. Butler’s book—specifically the sections known as "The Book of the Machines"—outlines the exact philosophical foundation for the galaxy-wide rebellion against artificial intelligence in Dune.
Scott, were you in Chicago recently, by any chance? At any rate, someone who looks like you was at the Art Institute members lounge.
Sorry, nope.
Trying to think of artificial real world places that evoke similar feelings to a simple walk through nature. Places that are calm and quiet and have that that sense of wonder.
Second on cathedrals, but also natural history museums or museum-like libraries.
This feels like the taste essays: do you mean a place that will generically evoke those feelings in (almost) all people?
If you are open to idiosyncratic examples, I have felt that in some libraries and on visits to Manhattan. The latter is obviously not calm and quiet, but with the right attitude can provoke a sense of wonder.
Singpapore gardens by the bay.
https://www.gardensbythebay.com.sg/
Mass MoCA is a museum in Western Massachusetts that has sometimes evoked that feeling in me. Giant spaces with giant installations. Always something cool going on there.
It's never quite the same, but I live on the east side of Providence, and I get similar feelings walking through the city early in the morning or late at night when there's no traffic. Doubly true after the few true snow events we've had since I moved here, although that feels like cheating because it's basically a blanket of Nature over everything.
The walkable layout and old architecture goes a long way towards evoking peace.
I should try going to one of those abandoned mining towns, although it would be hard to find one that hasn’t been exploited for tourism.
Cathedral
That’s probably the best example but they’re too small.
There are places constructed by humans that evoke some similar feelings as a walk through actual wilderness, but none that I can think of evoke all the same feelings, to the same degree, and those that come the closest are basically manmade nature, such as parks.
A long time ago on a previous blog I wrote about this curious thing where humans, who are part of nature, nevertheless benefit objectively from crossing a made-up imaginary line from "non-nature" into "nature". https://nadavzohar.wordpress.com/2024/07/08/some-unwieldy-thoughts-about-technology-nature-and-escape/
Slightly apropos of the discussion on taste, here is the very classy Sappho 31 (Mary Barnard's translation):
---
He is a god in my eyes - the man who is allowed to sit beside you -
He who listens intimately to the sweet murmur of your voice,
the enticing laughter that makes my own heart beat fast.¹
If I meet you suddenly, I can't speak² -
my tongue is broken², a thin flame runs under my skin³;
seeing nothing, hearing only my own ears drumming¹, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body and I turn paler than grass.
---
Here is a very non-classy piece of Chinese pop music:
---
我拿着玫瑰在你家门外
想对你说出我内心中对你的期待
忽然感觉浑身 热血澎湃
今天我想要鼓起勇气大声表白
我的心跳加快快快了 baby
我脸颊红起来来来了 baby
我想对你说爱爱爱你 baby
话到了嘴边 还是害怕说出来
in my translation:
I'm standing outside your door, holding a rose
I want to tell you the hopes for you that are in my heart
Suddenly I feel hot blood surging through my whole body³
Today I want to get up the nerve² to shout out what I feel
My heart beats fast-fast-faster¹ [baby]
The red flows in-in-in to my cheeks³ [baby]
I want to say² I love-love-love you [baby]
It's on the tip of my tongue - but I'm afraid to get the words out²
---
Compare and contrast. As you might guess from my annotations, these look like 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘱𝘰𝘦𝘮𝘴 to me.
If we're doing song translations, here's one from the other side:
”This place is dark and silent as the bottom of a lake. Woman, Your Majesty, how did you come to brave the journey here?
The lights are dim, and the roof leaks. My lady, what made you come?
Your presence is like a fire; it is hot and hard to breathe. Still, come on in, no point standing on the threshold.
Who are you? Where are you from? …oh, of course, how silly of me: you’ve got the wrong door; the wrong street; the wrong city; the wrong century.”
The other side?
...of the door :)
Is comparing a translation of one work to a translation of a different work fair?
The second piece seems to use more stale imagery than the first ("tip of my tongue", "get the words out", "get up the nerve", "hot blood surging"; compared to just "ears drumming" and "drip with sweat"), but then maybe being pale as a blade of grass is a cliche in Ancient Greek, and also, I bet all of this has more to do with the translation than the original work.
> Is comparing a translation of one work to a translation of a different work fair?
That depends what you're comparing. You might have noticed the repeated syllables in the Chinese song. In the original Mandarin, those syllables all rhyme. This matters to the quality of the poetry, and it would be unfair to compare that aspect of it in translation.
But what I'm remarking on is more to do with the meaning of the verse, and I see no problem comparing meaning in translation.
Issues can crop up. I picked Mary Barnard's translation because of the explicit reference to a beating heart. Sappho does make an explicit reference to her heart; translations commonly treat that as a metaphor. She seems to say literally that it "trembles"; I have no idea whether that's idiomatic Sapphic Greek for a heartbeat or whether it means something else.
Sappho says she turns paler than grass, or a meadow. You might notice that in English this is complete nonsense, since grass is green. Mary Barnard "fixes" that problem by translating "grass" as "dry grass", which I find unwarranted enough that I left it out.
But these are more issues of not knowing how to translate something than issues of the translation failing to capture the meaning.
> get up the nerve
It didn't make my extract, but this is also present in Sappho 31. The verse following the preserved portion of the poem begins "but all can/must be dared ...". Is it just the wording that you don't like?
Would you prefer a more literal translation of the Chinese? "The words have reached the side of my mouth"?
> But what I'm remarking on is more to do with the meaning of the verse, and I see no problem comparing meaning in translation.
Yeah, that's a good question. How important are meaning and execution when it comes to taste?
My first impression is that good execution is necessary for something to be tasteful, while the meaning (and themes etc.) make a difference on the margins but aren't strictly required, but I can think of counterexamples.
If this is allowed: I have a book out. *A Matter of Time: A history of the near and far future* (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GNNMKQT6/)
It's a novel of a sort, or rather a collection of many short glimpses forming a future history of humankind and its descendants.
Each chapter covers a timespan ten times longer than the previous: first the next century, then the next millennium, then the next ten thousand years, and so on, into millions and billions of years from now, as our world changes beyond recognition. Interplanetary states rise and collapse, the descendant of humanity split into non-sapient species on Earth and merge with other lifeforms among the stars. It's not quite a conventional novel in that it doesn't really have characters or a plot: humankind, maybe, defined very broadly, or time itself.
The first fourth of the book is actually set in the past, starting from the formation of Earth and drawing toward the present (exponentially slowing down as the latter part of the story exponentially accelerates). I think this will help the reader make sense of the timescales used in the future part.
If you want some samples of text and pictures beyond what Amazon offers, you can find some here: https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/gallery/72211620/a-matter-of-time
Olaf Stapledon vibes.
Thanks! Olaf Stapledon was indeed a major inspiration.
The intention of the experiment is to smoothly transition between a human brain (which you probably believe has qualia) and a GLUT, using Chalmers Dancing Qualia (which you might have accepted as a valid technique) You start with the 86 billion PLUTS, then combine them one at a time, or any order you want, into 46 billion PLUT2's, then 23 billion PLUT4's...
While I admit I did say a perfect replica using a lookup table, which would include chemistry, I was only thinking in terms of electrical signals that result in other neurons firing, motor responses, etc. no lookup table could exactly mimic exact physics of the situation (gravity, etc) anyway. If every neuron has significant internal state storage that impacts the behavior (which I wasn't aware of) this would complicate it, conceptually at least.
Though I suspect you can still do a Chalmers style dance here that would get you to the GLUT, I haven't thought it through from necessary state storage yet. Can't you just give each PLUT a little storage, then when you combine PLUTS, you combine the storage too?
So thanks for the comment!
Hmm. Is promoting one's own work ok in these threads, or should I wait for a "Classified" one?
I think linking to it is kinda spammy.
Classified threads have been discontinued. You are free to advertise in Open Threads, within reason. Explaining in a few lines why the thing might be interesting is expected.
Excellent, thanks!
EDIT: thinking better of it, it's probably best to put it in a top-level post.
Why were classified threads discontinued? I thought they were kinda neat.
I do remember that Scott made the rule rule about self-promotion a few months ago because I commented on it, but can't find the post right now, so it's possible I misremember the classifieds thing. The last classified thread was Jan 26, so the announcement would have been after that, probably in an OT.
Does anybody have a good explanation as to why so many witnesses of the miracle of the sun claimed to see the sun approach the earth?
My guess is that the actual illusion is just the sun appearing to be in front of the clouds (which can happen under certain conditions, you can google pictures of it).
When seeing this illusion, you have a moment of perceiving the sun just normal in the sky (far), suddenly changing too perceiving it as in front of the clouds (near). I think that either your brain fills in a sense of motion when you notice this to account for the perceived change in distance, or else people fill that motion in narratively when describing/remembering their experience.
(basically, there's a known illusion that makes it switch from 'far' to 'near', changing position without movement doesn't make sense on priors, so the brain fills in the movement either in your perceptions or on retelling)
Thanks for your response. Several claim that they thought the world was ending though. I’m not sure how to explain this. Social priming?
Well, I think that's a way more complicated question, and gets into the full complexity of context and setting that Scott talks about.
Basically, 'it looked like that moved' is a simple perceptual primitive that you can realistically offer simple one-sentence explanations for. 'I thought the world was ending' is a much more complex idea, and not easily answered through speculation like this.
Why do you think so many people said the sun was spinning?
I'm pretty sure people have thought the world was ending since the world began.
According to the Lindy Law, anyone who thought the world was ending when it was beginning would have been quite justified.
My hot take for the week is that all moral systems are just rule utilitarianism wearing different hats.
Rule utilitarianism: Please obey this set of moral heuristics which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
Deontology: Please obey this set of moral heuristics (which I have conveniently labelled as "duties") which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
Virtue ethics: Please obey this set of moral heuristics (which I have conveniently labelled as "virtues") which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
Basic utilitarianism: Forget the heuristics, just do whatever will lead to optimal outcomes! But of course in practice we need to use heuristics...
I don't think deontology makes any claim about "these rules, if universally obeyed, will lead to optimal outcomes". I think many deontologists actually base their rules on something much more abstract like "these rules, if universally obeyed, will mean the essential dignity of the human spirit is properly respected."
I don't think virtue ethics does either.
My beef with basic utilitarianism is that we should not be allowed to be a law to ourselves, we should not think like absolute kings. Our basic instincts should be those of law-abiding citizens. In all but the most exceptional cases, we should not violate laws. Generally speaking only violate a law that directly violates natural law, that is, the life, limb, property stuff.
If rule utilitarians think the very first rule is generally this, then it makes sense. But of course virtue ethicists can also say the very first virtue is obeying the law, unless it is a special case.
1. Not to solve all of philosophy in one sentence, but heuristics are sometimes needed when cold calculation fails because you don't always have perfect information and you don't always have linear comparability which utilitarianism requires.
2. The only difference between them besides that, is what is considered optimal outcome. Utilitarians want to minimise suffering, ie: relying on calculation to do the heavy lifting. Deontologists want to maximise rule following to prevent social systems from collapsing, ie: relying on systems to do the heavy lifting. Virtue Ethicists want every person to the the best version of themselves, ie: relying on individuals to do the heavy lifting. Because we cannot possibly say which outcome is objectively the best due to the massive uncertainty involved in the long run of the universe, a little bit of each is probably the strongest philosophy.
>a little bit of each is probably the strongest philosophy
Yes, but this kind of thinking already rejects all of them as theories of normative ethics. (Rightly, IMO.)
But yes, and we can be more specific:
- virtue ethics is the one to apply to (demand from) yourself
- deontology is the one to apply to (demand from) repeated interpersonal interactions with your peers
- utilitarianism is the one to apply to (demand from) reactions to novel situations / system design
> Basic utilitarianism: Forget the heuristics, just do whatever will lead to optimal outcomes! But of course in practice we need to use heuristics...
There's a big difference between saying what's the best thing to do in principle vs the strategies you use to do it.
With basic utilitarianism, the rules are just rules of thumb. It's generally not a good idea to try to follow them with no exceptions ever.
These systems have different notions of what you actually look at to determine an "optimal outcome".
Roughly speaking:
* utilitarians look at groups
* deontologists look at actions,
* virtue ethicists like to look at the person taking the action
None of these actually say, for example, "action X is bad / good". Instead, they're different ways you would answer the question "why is action X bad / good?"
A utilitarian would answer the question by demonstrating the net impact X would have on the group.
A deontologist would answer by demonstrating that X violates the decision rule (ex: don't use rational agents as means to an end)
A virtue ethicist would answer by analyzing how committing action X would (overall, holistically) help or hurt the person taking it.
These are just systems of reason giving. In order to actually apply them, you still need a specific notion of "Utility", "Decision Rule", or "Virtue".
Two utilitarians with different ways of assigning utility would disagree about action X (in a way more complicated than one just being wrong), as would two virtue ethicists with different notions of virtue.
Deontologists don't look at actions to decide the optimal outcome. They ignore the outcome and look at the action you in particular are doing.
For example, a deontologist wouldn't say "Murder is bad, and by executing murderers I'm preventing murder, therefore I should execute them." It's "Murder is bad, so I personally won't do it, no matter how much or how little murder happens as a consequence".
Likewise, a virtue ethicist looks only at the person taking the action, and not the virtue existing as an outcome.
You're right. I was trying to avoid a semantic argument. In a manner of speaking, the "outcome" is whether you do the thing or not.
You can take a deontological situation (ex: should I lie to the Gestapo asking about my friend's location) and say there are two outcomes (lie vs don't lie). The "optimal outcome" is whichever one doesn't cause a violation of the decision rule.
Similarly, a virtue ethicist can say an "optimal outcome" is whichever action helps me reach my Eudaimonia. If I'm trying to decide whether to act hedonistically or exercise self control, the "optimal outcome" is probably practicing restraint
Then what word do we use for the thing the utilitarian looks at, which isn't whether they do the thing or not but all the consequences of it?
As long as we both understand what the thing is, the specific word doesn't matter very much
> Rule utilitarianism: Please obey this set of moral heuristics which if universally obeyed will lead to optimal outcomes.
This can't explain light penalties for intentional but not-particularly-serious crimes.
If they have no penalties, more people will do the crime, which causes more harm. If they have heavy penalties, there's less harm from the crime, but more indirect harm towards the criminals and also in the form of taxing people to pay for the punishment. So the rule of light penalties for intentional but not-particularly-serious crimes leads to better outcomes.
Or I guess if you're assuming *everyone* follows the rule, there's no point in punishing people at all. After all, you're assuming nobody would be committing crimes. Is that what you mean?
No. I mean that under the assumption that the heuristics are universally obeyed, there is no reason for the penalties to be light. They should be heavy.
The statement wasn't "please obey this set of moral heuristics which, if universally obeyed by non-criminals, will lead to optimal outcomes".
If people are universally obeying the rules, why would we have a rule about making laws? Either the law is already a rule, in which case everyone is already obeying it, or it's not a rule, in which case it must be a bad law. And if there is a rule to break a law, people would break it no matter the punishment, right?
From a pure utilitarian standpoint, I think it's useful to have rules of thumb based on what would happen if a significant portion of people obeyed it. It makes it easier to think about the secondary consequences. But assuming literally everyone is following it is silly. By that logic, it's good to drive on the left or the right, but bad to drive on the east or the west. And everyone would follow whatever standard they personally think is best instead of following the one that exists.
No because the point of utilitarianism is it maximizes some good and virtue ethics is not doing that. One of the virtues is moderation. It’s an ethics for humans, not machines.
The idea that virtue ethics is just following heuristics is pretty weaksauce. Full strength virtue ethics means you MAKE things good through the FORCE of your virtue.
Sounds like a heuristic to me.
What do you think it's a heuristic for?
I'm reminded of an old forum comment about how all crime is just theft. Theft of life, theft of autonomy, etc.
A deontologist or virtue ethicist who is trying to optimize for good outcomes would reproduce something a lot like rule utilitarianism, yes.
However, caring about good outcomes is intrinsic to utilitarianism, but is not a requirement of the other systems.
A deontologist is perfectly free to say 'Follow these rules because I have carefully considered the matter and found these rules to be Just and Fair. If they lead to bad outcomes, well, that's a shame, but it's no excuse for violating Justice and Fairness.'
A virtue ethicist is perfectly free to say 'These are the virtues a Good Man should posses, and what transpires in the world as a result is of no moral concern to a Good Man, for he has already fulfilled all possible moral obligations by being Virtuous.'
In practice, this is why Consequentialism actually matters. It can be hard to imagine societies where horrifically torturing people of different faiths is honestly considered morally good because God said to, or where endless cycles of murder and carnage result from people expressing Proper Manly Virtues. But these types of societies were the reality for most of human history, and Consequentialism is an actually meaningful and transformative insight if your society isn't already run on it.
Consequentialism doesn't solve this, since the question then becomes: "good results for whom?"
For much of human history the answer was "for me and my kin". So torturing enemies and making suffer is fine if they give me stuff in return, since I care more about me (and my kin) having stuff then outsiders suffering.
But my point is that I don't think anyone believes that their moral system leads to suboptimal outcomes. Nobody ever says "Do X, even though not-X would ultimately be better".
I guess that depends on what you mean by "outcome." Technically, all behavior leads to an outcome, because by definition all behavior acts upon the world. One can even say that all behavior is attempting to achieve a goal, a desired outcome. But that's trivial--Utilitariansim isn't just trying to impact the world or achieve short term goals on an individual basis--it's attempting to maximize mass satisfaction. That's what makes it unique. There are many moral systems that do not prioritize that.
Right, but only by their own personal utility function.
A Virtue Ethicist can watch the world burn and say 'my utility function says the most important thing is that men express the Manly virtues properly, all of these men are doing so, therefore this is the best possible world'.
And they're correct *by their own utility function*, but not by the *average utility function of everyone in the world*, since that would include all the people getting stabbed and set on fire in service of their virtues.
The difference for utilitarianism is that it cares about everyone.
Don't those systems define optimal outcomes differently from any utilitarianism?
Should utilitarian gamers who want their gaming ability to positively contribute to global wellbeing prioritize playing Player vs Environment over Player vs Player games when playing multiplayer games? While no matter the type of gaming, there is probably some baseline level of enjoyment everyone playing experiences no matter how well they do, but still it would seem that with PvP games a marginal increase in your gaming ability would not lead to a marginal increase in wellbeing. Putting aside the baseline enjoyment already mentioned, PvP games are otherwise zero-sum. One team wins, and the other team loses. If you win even harder, the other team loses even harder. So the increase in your delight in winning more brought about by your better playing is equally balanced by the other team's increased sting of defeat in losing more. In PvE games, on the other hand, a marginal increase in your gaming ability actually results in a marginal increase in utility. Your team kills the NPCs more, wins more, and everyone feels better when your gaming is better. There is no conscious team of losers having countervailing emotions, there is only upside in better playing. All this being said, if someone is confident in their gaming ability and wants good to come of it, should we conclude that PvE games should be their priority?
Defeating newbs is no fun. Defeating other evenly matched players is great.
Even losing can be fun.
If you factor in roleplaying, then people can get enjoyment from both heroic victories and tragic defeats, as long as everybody gets a chance to emote properly.
Having played many MMOs, I can assure you enjoyment is not zero-sum. The joy of being part of a large group effort made games like EVE Online and Foxhole a wonderful experience even when losing.
If your charity work has to be gaming-related, simply playing the game has the least beneficial impact. If that's the only impact you're looking at, it's negligible and potentially net negative.
The main problem with your question is that it has no consideration for opportunity costs, which can be substantial. If you play a typical game of League of Legends, that's 10 people bound to the game for ~30 minutes each, or 5 person-hours total. In order to come out ahead, those 5 hours have to make up for 5 hours not spent on the most effective charity, or at least your 30 minute chunk if you assume that the other 9 would not work in charity if they weren't gaming.
Furthermore, even in multiplayer gaming you can't focus on winning and losing alone. It's entirely possible for both teams to get net benefit in PvP (one side winning, the other gaining experience), or for the human team in PvE to feel bad (flaming marginally worse players).
There are ways to substantially improve the overall well-being of society through gaming, but they all come down to your social skills. Your gaming skills have marginal utility in that they attract a certain type of gamer to you, as an advertisment effect, but gaming alone won't make the world a meaningfully better place. You have to convert those social interactions more explicitely.
One example is streaming. A charity gamer should play whatever they personally enjoy most and which has some market demand, whether that demand is from the gaming skills or the social skills (entertainment). They should stream it, monetize the stream, then donate excess income to charity. That would be far more effective than any game itself.
Another example is community building outside of any specific game. For example, make a webcomic and start a charity off it (Penny Arcade), or become a modder/gamedev/writer/whatever and direct some of the attention towards actual charity.
It seems to me that there's always going to be something you can do with your time that's more utilitarian than playing video games. In fact, pretty much anything. Go clean up a beach or something.
Would you get more satisfaction out of beating a player close to you skill level or a bit tailor made to you?
There is a lot of game design that goes into making losing fun, or at least minimally non-fun. For instance, in Overwatch, control point maps are typically designed so that the last point is much harder to take than the others, increasing the chance of a dramatic last stand and making the victory or defeat more satisfying than a one-sided stomp.
If [your positive utility from winning a PVP game] = [your negative utility from losing that game], then you should not be playing that game.
This is...not actually true for any game I can think of outside of real-money gambling games?
This assumes the utility of winning is the negative utility of losing, which I don't think is true.
Given that as others have said some of the utility of competition is in its closeness, presumably increasing the pool of players allows for better matchmaking around a given skill level.
Two things:
First, you seem to be ignoring matchmaking. In most modern PVP games, as your skill goes up, you get paired against better opponents, and both you and they enjoy the heightened level of play. If you didn't play and improve your skill in those PVP games, the other high-level players wouldn't have a good opponent, and their enjoyment would be diminished.
Second, I don't think you can model losses a strictly worse than wins from an enjoyment perspective. Generally speaking, anyone who wins every game they play of something will grow board and quit very fast. Losses are motivation to improve and play again, and they give you novel experiences and opportunities to learn. They make later victories sweeter.
This is analogous to the question of 'would you rather wirehead your reward centers and vegetate in a pod, or live a normal life that is carefully calibrated to give you the correct levels of challenge, reward, novelty, and meaning to make you feel proud and accomplished and vital and satisfied?'
The Fun Sequence on Lesswrong dives deeply into this topic, it's worth checking out.
...are you talking about as a player, or as a creator?
As a creator, you should focus on making whatever you want to see more of, and making sure the mechanics are fun. A PvP game with great jumping will be more fun than a PvE game with bad jumping.
As a player, you should play whatever you enjoy and focus on real-life PvE events like road repair or something, because videogames are supposed to be the thing you do when you need to recuperate and turning rest into work means you're not resting anymore.
Personally, I think the biggest contribution you can do is 1) play PvP and 2) don't be a dick. When I've played competitively, I've cared very little about how much I win or lose (with a robust enough matchmaking, it all trends towards 50% anyway), but cared a lot when the person I was matched up against was toxic, which was pretty common.
(I played the most of Rocket League, which only let you send pre-canned messages, and people still managed to use those to be toxic - every single shot you miss: "Nice Shot! Nice Shot! Thanks! Wow!" - it's even worse with free text or voice chat, I imagine)
There's still some of this dynamic in PvE - people can still get nasty if you lose a PvE game and they think its your fault, but I find it's less common, PvE doesn't have to have a functional 50% win rate, and PvE I always have the option of just side-stepping the issue, going and finding friends and playing with them. (Whereas it's hard to find a friend who perfectly matches your skill-level for PvP games)
A point to consider: I've heard lots of stories of rude, anti-social behavior in PvP games making a less pleasant play experience for a large portion of the community[1]. I expect that a game choosing an appropriate PvP game and making a point to be kind, friendly, helpful and socialable to their fellow players will likely have a far, far bigger impact through that than they will ever have through their gaming ability alone. I've done very little online PvP gaming, but I've participated in plenty of other competitive activities, such as Magic the Gathering, board games and a few sorts of sports. The culture and attitude of a space will make a huge difference in how enjoyable a competitive game is. Magic is a standout example: I've played at shops full of generally friendly, helpful, laid-back people and shops full of entitled sore losers, and the difference in enjoyability is night and day. The people who helped set and maintain the culture of the former spaces were contributing far more utility than the highest-skilled players in the latter spaces.
All of this can apply to PvE games to some degree, as most will have online communities built up around discussing and analyzing the game and there's space to make positive contributions there. But they don't force interaction the way PvP game do, so I expect the latter see far stronger impact from good community norms and attitudes.
[1] Obviously this is only possible in some PvP games: others limit player-to-player interaction to avoid this.
Ooh, yeah, you could make chat compliments add buffs, and then it's a race to be the nicest guys!
Neither a utilitarian nor a gamer, but in my rec-league hockey experience, competitive games are not "zero sum" in this way. The phrase "a weekend where you lose is still way better than a weekend with no hockey" is a common refrain.
Competing + winning is fun, but competing is also fun simply as a baseline, even if you lose. And even within a loss there are good plays and moments to celebrate. And beers after. Always the beers after.
Mapping from sports to videogames, I'd say people who enjoy competing should compete, and people who enjoy PVE should do PVE. PVP people want to win, sure, but more than that they tend to want to *compete*, and a world where they can't do that will be less happy overall than one where PVPers can PVP other PVPers to their PVPing hearts' content.
I agree for IRL sports at least. Yeah it is more fun to win. But playing the game, the comaraderie, the after game pint(s) is the real appeal. Fun is the prime directive.
I think games that have good matchmaking systems encourage PvP games that are close and exciting for both winners and losers, leading to more utility for both sides relative to PvE.
I do think that the addiction of grinding out PvP games in lieu of other things you could be doing with your life can be a loss of utility. I rarely game these days, and generally only break that for a story-based game that is clearly bounded.
I've become more interested in the state of the non-profit AI safety space recently, because it seems like to become more important in the near future (Anthropic's latest RSP heavily relies on external review, concern about safety in general seems to be rising again post-Opus 4.5) and because I think Ant's IPO might unlock an enormous wave of funding towards the space.
I'm increasingly wondering whether there might be too many organisations working on safety. According to this https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7YDyziQxkWxbGmF3u/ai-safety-field-growth-analysis-2025 the number of orgs is growing exponentially and pretty much matching the number of FTEs in the field. I just read the other day that the chief scientist at UK AISI is moving back to Berkeley to start another non-profit.
It seems like there's not much incentive for organisations to merge, but at this point the marginal donation would be best being just given to Redwood/METR/Apollo etc.
Unfortunately I can see a world where the Ant IPO leads to even more orgs being set up rather than scaling the existing groups.
Although I agree it's weird and annoying to have so many orgs, is there a specific case for why having fewer is better than having more?
Apologies, I actually meant to come back and add specifics to my original post but didn't get around to it yesterday. To be clear, I think it would be better to have fewer, larger/better-resourced orgs than more smaller orgs. I think for me the main reasons would be:
- The major orgs (METR, Redwood, Epoch) seem quite resource constrained. Obviously the METR time-horizons work seems to be increasingly limited by inability to develop longer tasks, which more funding might help address. Ryan Greenblatt at Redwood has made a couple of posts about areas of AI safety he hopes to see more work on (which implies to me that Redwood can't do that work ATM). Jamie Sevilla from Epoch has also posted recently about their inability to do more evals due to lack of funding. This lack of resources could become extremely important if Anthropic plans to rely on external organisations as part of their RSP and these orgs are called on to carry out very high stakes work under time constraints.
- Larger, richer orgs are likely to be more credible in the eyes of the press and politicians. This could be important in raising awareness of concerning findings (e.g. acceleration of capabilities or evidence of scheming). They could also become more credible in the eyes of governments which could be quite important if the Trump admin does actually pivot towards increasing auditing of models.
- The average person who works for these orgs at the moment seems to be a young person with pre-existing strong concerns about AI (usually from an EA background) and technical skills who often goes through an AI safety fellowship. Apparently, these orgs lack generalists (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k3nq7FxBCsrNFmAYi/ai-safety-s-biggest-talent-gap-isn-t-researchers-it-s-2). I think larger, richer orgs would find it much easier to attract established professionals, especially as AI safety probably becomes more mainstream. It seems like it would be good for older, skilled people like comms professionals to join these orgs, even if they aren't from an AI safety background. I also imagine that there are some people out there who have concerns about safety, but also have families and so just stay at their well-paid FAANG (or frontier lab) jobs. Richer orgs could potentially be better positioned to hire these people.
- Larger, richer orgs are probably more credible in the eyes of the labs, too. If we are going to shift towards a world where frontier models are rolled out in stages due to misuse concerns, it seems like it would be very good and achievable for orgs like METR/Redwood to get early access to use these models alongside cyber/bio orgs. (Maybe this is already happening with Mythos and they just aren't talking about it). I think larger, more professional orgs are better positioned to get this access than smaller groups.
The major drawback of consolidation would be the risk of groupthink, especially if you're someone who thinks empirical safety work is not actually making any real progress on alignment. But I think having credible evals is good for all parties involved in "AI safety" - the METR chart seems to have been an enormous driver of concern about safety over the last year or so, and o3's FrontierMath score did the same before that.
Also, probably some of this organizations are setup because that is where the money is. Less organizations probably means also less scams.
Fog o' War stuff...
1. After the three-day truce between Russia and Ukraine expired, Russia unleashed a massive drone and ballistic missile attack against Ukraine with over 1500 drones and at least 14 Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles. I'm not sure, but I think this may be the largest unmanned air attack against Ukraine ever. If so, it may also be the largest unmanned air attack in the history of warfare (?). Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. (According to ChatGPT, the peak intensity of V-1s launched against Britain was about 100 per day during the summer of 1944.)
In the past, Ukraine has had a pretty high interception rate for Russia's long-range drones — roughly 90% in 2025 and up to 94% in 2026, but I wouldn't be surprised if their interception capabilities were unable to keep up with this drone wave. Also, the shortage of Patriots makes it difficult for Ukraine to intercept ballistic missiles (Zelenskyy has said it's a priority for Ukraine to develop its own ABM systems, and they're working with Germany to do so. Europeans are also nervous about the shortage of Patriot missiles.) Lots of civilian targets were hit in this drone attack, including a couple of apartment buildings. At least 5 civilians were killed in the attack, and a search and rescue of a partially collapsed apartment building was underway Saturday. The past pattern has been that Russians concentrate their attacks on civilian targets and electrical infrastructure. Of course, UKR probably isn't reporting the military targets that Russia hits. But to me, it looks like Russia is trying to demoralize the civilian population. As with bombing campaigns in previous wars hasn't reduced Ukraine's will to fight. If that's Russia's goal it's wasting its drones on civilians rather than military targets.
2. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, Ukraine responded, and for the first time, they launched their strikes against multiple targets in the Moscow area. According to Russian authorities, 120 Ukrainian drones were intercepted. Ukraine hit the Angstrem semiconductor plant on the outskirts of Moscow, a Moscow Oil Refinery (repeatedly), and a couple of oil pumping stations. Ukraine's drone attack continued during the daylight hours. Moscow residents were posting videos of drones flying overhead, pillars of smoke from the hit targets, and a lot of freaked-out commentary. A couple of Ukrainian drones smacked into apartment buildings. Unlike an Iskander ballistic missile, the explosive payloads in the drones didn't cause the apartment buildings to collapse. Moscow authorities report six people were killed and dozens injured. Last week, the Russian Duma made it a crime of treason to post videos of drone attacks, but Moscow residents either hadn't heard about this new law or they didn't care. Dozens of videos of the attacks were posted on TikTok and Telegram (which also suggests that Russian attempts to block VPNs aren't working as well as the authorities hoped). Until now, Moscow residents lived in a safe psychological bubble, but no longer.
3. Russian authorities downed a Ukrainian long-range drone in Crimea with two smaller FPV drones mounted on its wings. Russian milbloggers discussed this ominous development because it means long-range drones can deliver FPVs far behind Russian lines. Both FPVs were equipped with Starlink transceivers. Since the cat was out of the bag, Ukraine posted a video of this innovative combined drone system and bragged about it.
4. Russian tourists are still vacationing in Crimea, but they were posting (illegal) videos of the beaches that were covered with dragon's teeth (concrete pyramids placed to inhibit sea assaults). One video showed an angry vacationer complaining that the dragon's teeth had taken over the best beach spots. In the background, beachgoers are picking their way over the cables that hold the dragon's teeth in place to take a dip in the Black Sea. (What's the Black Sea's water temperature this time of year?)
5. Also, in the past, Russian milbloggers regularly used the euphemism of the "Laotian" army for the Russian army, and the Ukrainians were called "the rebels". Milbloggers could discuss the failures of the Laotian military against the rebels without being targeted by censors. Nobody seems to bother with that Laotian figleaf anymore. Everyone seems pretty disgusted with Russia's inability to stop Ukrainian drone attacks, and none of them seemed concerned that they're committing treason.
6. Vladimir Putin, in a recent press conference, referred to Zelenskyy as "Gospodin Zelensky" (i.e., "Mr. Zelensky"). This is the first time he's attached an honorific to Zelenkyy's name, and not called him a Nazi and coke addict. Even the Russian media picked up on this.
7. Ukraine's anticorruption authorities arrested Zelenskyy's former chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, for a multi-million dollar money-laundering and corruption investigation related to a luxury real estate project near Kyiv (six luxury villas in a small gated community). The case is referred to Ukrainian media as "Mindichgate," after Timur Mindich (another Zelenskyy associate), who allegedly helped siphon and launder illicit funds. Yermak posted bail for ~$3 million. The funds were raised by his friends in a Ukrainian football team (owners and players). Interesting that journalists are still attaching the "-gate" suffix to any scandal, and that it has spread worldwide, over fifty years after Watergate. This may be Richard Nixon's lasting legacy to history <#snarkasm>.
8. And in the Gulf, rumors have it that the Saudis and the UAE are in negotiations to make a separate peace with Iran. Just rumors right now. But the Saudi's are royally pissed with Jared Kushner, who they blame for getting them into this mess. They suspect he was a tool of Netanyahu and that he influenced his dad into striking Iran. Jared currently runs an investment fund with over $6 billion in Saudi and UAE money. We'll see if they withdraw their investments.
> Moscow Oil Refinery (repeatedly)
And unsuccessfully. I have relatives with a great view of the refinery from their living room, and the drone(s) missed anything flammable.
> Until now, Moscow residents lived in a safe psychological bubble, but no longer.
This is incorrect. That wasn't the first wave of drones Ukraine launched against Moscow and previous attempts in 2025 had approximately the same effect in proportion to the number of drones launched: several impacts on apartment complexes, hits on electronics factories in Zelenograd.
Here we have a video of the refinery getting hit, and a large smoke plume rises after the explosion. But I don't see any videos of any subsequent fires.
https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/2055901916157055463?s=20
OTOH, here's the Solnechnogorsk oil pumping station...
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/2056051471888867638?s=20
And here's the Angstrem complex burning...
https://x.com/NotWoofers/status/2055832473959829885?s=20
Oh, and here's a video of the talk-show propagandist anchor Vladimir Solovyov mocking the sounds of air-raid sirens over Kyiv in 2020. I wonder if he's laughing at the sirens now? Of course, his mistress and their two daughters are safely living in NYC, so he doesn't have to worry about them.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1602727207574638592
I didn't hear any sirens when the Solnechnogorsk oil pumping station was hit. Or last year, when it wasn't, but my neighbor's house was.
Point number 6 is simply untrue. Putin has always referred to Zelensky as "Mr. Zelensky". It is quite easy to verify: google for "господин зеленский" site:kremlin.ru, this is the website of Putin's administration which keeps videos and actual full transcripts of all his speeches and interviews (of which there are plenty, the guy famously likes to talk). You will find that he has consistently referred to Zelensky as "Mr. Zelensky" all the way since 2019, through 2022. For example http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/77914, an interview on 3.9.2025, at 10:50 mark he says "Что касается возможных встреч с господином Зеленским..." ("Regarding possible meetings with Mr. Zelensky...").
It does seem to be true that Putin visibly dislikes mentioning Zelensky by name at all if possible (this was in fact much more pronounced with Navalny, whom he famously mentioned by name, also as "Mr. Navalny", only after Navalny's death), but nonetheless he is capable of doing that, and when he does, he consistently calls him Mr. Zelensky. Pretty sure Putin also never directly called him, or anyone else for that matter, a Nazi or a coke addict; this is simply not his style, Putin's public image is exceedingly polite, although often dryly sarcastic. If he needs to call Zelensky a Nazi, he has other people (Medvedev, TV propagandists) for that.
This is, again, what you get when relying exclusively on regurgitated Western sources (with a sprinkle of "Russian warbloggers") to interpret this war. Putin's rhetoric hasn't really changed at all (the vague statement that the war is nearing its end is also nothing new), so the real question is why are the Western media suddenly pushing this particular point.
I stand corrected. But the Mr. Zelensky remark was noted by multiple sources. I can't find the clip now, but after that press conference, I think it was Olga Skabeyeva who questioned the "Mr" honorific being used with Zelenskyy after her daughter was frightened by the mean old Mr. Zelensky's drones.
CORRECTION: it was Margarita Simonyan the night before last. She described how, "Drones are flying. It's unpleasant. Scary. My kids are sleeping in the corridor... and also the walk-in wardrobe. Yes indeed, actually. On the 9th of May .my little six-year-old... She, of course, knows about the war and our heroic feats, but she doesn't know the details because she's too little to be told. She pinned the St George's ribbon not only on herself but also on her favorite doll. Just like this. Right on her chest.
'Mom, I know we defeated the fascists in the war. But who are the fascists? Are fascists the ones sending us drones?' I say, 'Yes, darling. They are the fascists. Well done. Absolutely. What a clever girl you are!'" Another person on the panel said "Spot on. Yes, darling!" But I can't find the part where she questions whether the Gospodin honorific be given to Zelenskyy. Maybe I'm confusing the propagandists.
https://x.com/anders_aslund/status/2056506507655586136?s=20
Seeing you write "UKR" just reminds me that one of the most disgusting acts of Imperialism is the United Kingdom somehow pigeonholing Ukraine into being "UA." Having the two letters "en" already stolen wasn't enough for them, they needed MORE!
(Yes, I'm joking.)
"But to me, it looks like Russia is trying to demoralize the civilian population. As with bombing campaigns in previous wars (it) hasn't reduced Ukraine's will to fight."
This reminds me of a comment my (Ukraine born/raised) mother made early into the whole Hormuz debacle. That when the invasion was first coming to Ukraine she assumed Kiev was doomed just for a simple reason along the lines of "there's no way Russia would be stupid enough to do this if it could FAIL." By the time US was hitting Iran she was disabused of such notions. At this point it's very hard to believe that all the big scary strongman "really know what they're doing" on some deep level. And if some of them do, their confidence and posturing fails to be a useful indicator thereof, since all of the incompetents have it in spades.
But I still emotionally get that feeling of "surely nobody would be THAT dumb..." but it's as a futile a refrain in reality as it is towards fiction.
> At this point it's very hard to believe that all the big scary strongman "really know what they're doing" on some deep level.
They probably believe that they do not need to really know what they are doing *because* they are strong enough to win regardless.
(Sometimes they find out they were wrong.)
Russian milbloggers, and even propagandists like Solovyov, are constantly complaining about the culture of "Vranyo"—lying to please one's bosses. I wonder how much of an information bubble Putin lives in. Good description here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz59GWeTIik
I recall Putin was reported as talking about an end or resolution to the special military opposition..without mentioning the V word..on Victory day.
Not a Russian speaker, etc.
He did say recently that the special military operation was coming to an end, but he was vague about it. No timeline, no concrete steps. Could be something, could be nothing.
Is all this sourced from ChatGPT, or has it been substantiated?
What specifically do you have doubts about? I primarily use analysts from X, YouTube, and Substack as my sources (but I also source from Haaretz, The Kyiv Independent, The Moscow Times, CNN, and other MSM outlets).
I do use Gemini and ChatGPT to look up facts quickly (such as the peak V-1 attacks on GB were ~100/day). I try to state when rumors are rumors. But that's why I call these posts "Fog of War."
If you think I've gotten any of the facts wrong, please provide your arguments and some links. But beware, I will swamp you with links in return if I think you're being impolite or purposefully bullshitting. Cheers!
Why not include the links in the original comments so we can verify without having to be confrontational?
I just spent an hour cutting and pasting links into this reply, and then I deleted the post by mistake. Uggghhh. This is why I don't bother anymore. These are just items that caught my attention. I am not a journalist, and posting lots of links is very time-consuming.
Trying again with a reduced number. In the future, I will put a disclaimer at the start of my Fog o' War summaries, saying that links will be provided upon request.
Item 1:
https://x.com/KaterynaLis/status/2054914459387203593?s=20
Item 2:
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/2056091011726688373?s=20
https://x.com/albafella1/status/2055930213398094104?s=20
Item 3:
https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/2055717330940743949?s=20
Item 4:
https://x.com/JayinKyiv/status/2055579188803826109?s=20
Item 5:
https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/why_russian_milbloggers_mention_laotian_air_defense_each_time_they_suspect_friendly_fire_opinion-11146.html
Item 6:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/putin-addresses-zelensky-as-mister-for-the-first-time-morgan-stanley-says-it-means-a-vibe-shift-in-peace-negotiations-47c14f56
Item 7:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/zelenskys-ex-chief-staff-released-074732470.html
Item 8:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCOuxXDmHIE
https://x.com/brane_mija64426/status/2056120364917268735?s=20
Hey I just wanna say I appreciate your comments on the ACX posts!
Also worth noting that this year's parade in Moscow had exactly one motorized vehicle: an armored limo. Apparently they're even out of T-34s.
Actually, it gets better, because the armored limo is a convertible, which is almost literally like a screen door on a submarine.
https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/2053025386087518689
Just want to say thanks for these weely updates.
6 — I don’t think I’ve seen ‘royally pissed” used in a literal sense before.
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Does anyone have a good explanation of the US stock market's performance during the Iran War? I'm torn between two different observations.
#1 John Mearsheimer (1) and others predicted massive oil shocks as a result of the Iran War which would lead to recession. This seems largely to have occurred. Oil prices have risen significantly all over the US and everyone I talk to is feeling it at the pump. Seems like it should be a massive oil shock.
#2 Stonks go up. The S&P was $6,858 at the start of the year, ~$6,878 at the start of the Iran war, bottomed out on 3/30 at $6,343, and is currently at $7,383.
I notice that I'm confused. There's a massive risk to global oil markets, that risk materializes, over the next month, the market declines, and then at the end of March the market bounces back $1,000 over 6-7 weeks despite the oil crisis getting worse. On the one hand I'm seeing pretty credible evidence of an oil/energy shock and yet stonks go up. I do not understand this.
(1) As an example of an excellent IR resource, not some rando streamer.
Most companies are not doing well. But a handful of large tech companies are doing extremely well and contributing all of the index performance.
The stock market and the economy are two different things. The economy can be crashing and burning while the stock market (or at least certain sectors of it) goes parabolic. Directionally, this seems to track the "k-shaped recovery" argument.
Possible partial answers/contributing factors:
(1) Money needs to go somewhere; can't just park your cash in treasuries and call it a day. Fund managers can rotate sectors, seek targeted deployment, etc but the net result is stonks go up.
(2) There was a massive pile of private equity powder on the sidelines arising from covid-era printing, and it's commit-or-return time for those funds.
(3) The AI craze is keeping everything else afloat.
I was going to say that it would take a genuine shock event to trigger a sell-off but I'm not sure in light of recent months what that might actually be. The markets have seemingly grown numb. It might end up being some straw that breaks the camel's back. Take bets now, it'll be interesting to unpack in 50 years' time once the ashes have cooled (/snark).
That's the first time I've ever heard the word stonks. So by the 24 hour rule I fully expect to hear it again elsewhere by the end of today!
Fair- so your argument would be that continued inflows to US equities are the result of affirmative decisions by active managers in response to inflationary market pressures?
Did you notice? Your link doesn’t answer why non-top 5 AI stocks have grown since April, rather than shrinking. It says oil companies grew during the war, but the ones it lists have been pretty flat since then. Or maybe it’s the smaller AI stocks, collectively - that does seem plausible!
My base case for the stock market's performance during the Iran War would be to see the stock market's performance in other wars.
Mearsheimer has predicted 10 of the last 2 US misadventures abroad. Including, somehow, wars the US isn't participating in. I wouldn't take him seriously on most things.
As for US stocks: the US is the only major advanced manufacturing economy that's a net energy exporter. (Norway, Canada, etc too but they're smaller.) If there's a major oil shock the US will be affected least. Not unaffected, just affected least. If your output drops by 10% and your competitors by 50% (to pick a number) you end up relatively ahead and investor money wants to capture that.
More generally, the US is the only major advanced economy that doesn't have major, structural underlying weaknesses. It has one major issue, a spending problem, which all its competitors have too and which is solvable in a way demographic decline or decades of stagnation and overregulation aren't. The US has problems. Everyone else just has more. So in times of instability capital flees to the US as it has for a long time. And the world is getting less stable.
The market is telling you is that investors don't think the oil price shock is going to have a long term effect on profitability. Even if you look at the oil company stocks, they're up YTD. Even if you look at businesses that are obviously very exposed, like mining, they're also up YTD.
Why does the market think this? I imagine they reckon a way will be found to work around the strait closure and other damage, through alternate transport routes or supplies from other sources. This actually seems plausible. Prices are high right now, but high prices bring expensive sources online in larger quantities which then drives prices down.
And overall the economy is less dependent on oil than it once was. There's still a lot of oil in the supply chain for electronics, but its a less important part of the overall cost basis now than it was in the 1970s.
I mean we would expect US oil stocks to be up on the Hormuz news, and to keep going up the longer it goes on.
I thought maybe US equities were up because of investors fleeing from Asian equities, but actually, the Nikkei is up 3.5% since the start of the Hormuz operation. This is much harder to explain, since Asian is super reliant on the Strait of Hormuz for oil specifically.
Oil companies are all globalized. Exxon doesn't necessarily have more exposure to US reserves versus the Middle East than BP does. But the more telling thing to me is that industrial uses that require gasoline as an input - like mining - are all up too.
The only interpretation I can see is that the market thinks this is temporary and manageable.
The US is a net oil exporter since 2020, so rising oil prices are actually good for the US economy as a whole.
This is a big shift from 50+ years of the opposite being true, and it might take another decade for the information to propagate to "common knowledge".
I don't think our oil exports are a large enough portion of our economy for that to actually be good. Oil prices are bid up on the world market, and parts of the US economy that consume rather than produce oil still have to pay those prices.
> Oil prices are bid up on the world market, and parts of the US economy that consume rather than produce oil still have to pay those prices.
Yes, and the parts that produce rather than consume pocket that money. In terms of the general welfare, it is a wash or maybe a slight decline. But prices do go up, and with them, the market.
No, it's not a wash. Higher prices result in deadweight loss, where people decide to consume less. A monopoly which can't engage in price discrimination results in less total utility than a competitive market for that reason.
OK. Not a wash. A clear loss of aggregate welfare. But my main point is that the market indices do not track aggregate welfare.
True, market indices aren't designed to do that. Consumer surplus normally goes unmeasured, while externalities are also unpriced.
This is wrong. Oil is an input to almost all economic activity. The marginal increase in export revenue will be dwarfed by the reduction in activity caused by the high prices. Not to mention the distortionary effect of redistributing income from literally everybody who needs oil to domestic oil producers specifically.
I don't understand this branch of Economics enough to argue for or against this.
I'm sure there are also several different ways to measure "good for the US economy as a whole".
I was confused too. Claude said it was a result of earnings coming in higher than projected for many companies. I didn't independently verify.
Trump seems to be looking for an offramp, even though he has few good options.
Oil shocks don't have a major impact on the earnings power of companies whose good fortunes have been the engine of the S&P 500 since 2023.
I don't know much about the stock market but it could be that the oil shock is being cancelled out by something else. Investors seem pretty optimistic about AI lately, so maybe that's it.
Active government ", interferencr", such a QE, buy ups, price control s, etc, are usually very visible. What do you think the rest of us are missing?
Please stop replying and leave this blog, Gawdflea/Wimbli/Zanni/Grimmoar. The same all over again, and banned for a reason.
Yeah, new email addresses are free.
Grimmoar/gawdflea/3 other banned nicks, could you just stay away? The conspiracy theories and hints at hidden information are really annoying enough, but combined with the flood-style of posting and derailing it's dragging the comments down. Please, there is a reason for the previous bans.
If you click on the profile you can report him to Substack directly. Ban evasion counts as Spam, and they're much faster about these things than Scott. NoddaNick only lasted about 24 hours.
Wimbli—>Aristocat—>Zanni—>Gawdflea—>GrimMoar
Let’s play Where’s Wimbli.
Any good advice or sources on nutrition for fertility and/or pregnancy? I've been asked by my partner to read up on it, and I like to read, so here I am. Like most things regarding nutrition, it seems very hard to find out who/what to trust.
I am unsure if I think this is a good idea, or will just give us more things to worry about. By most standards, I would say we are very healthy and our diet is good, so Im thinking things will work out anyway. Any experiences?
Scott had a post about this a few years back: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much
I don't know what might have changed since then.
That post itself contains a recommendation for Emily Oster's "Expecting Better," as a good evidence-based guide to which parts of general pregnancy wisdom are real and which are BS; it looks like there's a 2025 update to that: https://www.amazon.com/Expecting-Better-Conventional-Pregnancy-Wrong/dp/0143125702
Nice, exactly the sort of recommendations I had in mind. Thanks alot, I will look into it!
I'm not a biologist, nor a zoologist, but I watch pop science videos about extinct critters. And there's one thing that bugs me immensely about phylogeny.
Everyone seems deathly afraid of actually labeling any group of species X as the ancestor of another group of species Y. Don't believe me? Search for "phylogenetic tree of life", and you'll mostly find depictions like this one: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252743392/figure/fig5/AS:365282104233990@1464101448858/The-phylogenetic-tree-of-life.png
Apparently, if you lived more than 1 million years ago and among your countless descendants are representatives of two different species, then you don't belong to any class, order, or family. Your genus shall not be named, and your place on the tree of life shall forever remain an unmarked fork on the evolutionary path. Fish aren't shown to be descended from archaea, amphibians from fish, mammals from amphibians. The tree always branches off juuuuust before.
Except for birds and dinosaurs. Because birds totally are dinosaurs! Oh, sorry, I meant to say "avian dinosaurs". Yeah, that's how totally birds are dinosaurs. And therefore a sparrow and a triceratops are both dinosaurs, despite branching off from each other some 230 million years ago. Fuck this!
Modern taxonomy considers monophyletic groups or clades the most "natural" type of group of organisms, and thus prefers to use only these to classify organisms. A clade is defined as a group that contains *all* the descendants of a given ancestor (usually hypothetical) and *only* its descendants. Groups that leave out some descendants of that ancestor (called paraphyletic) or are traced to multiple ancestors (called polyphyletic) are not considered, by modern best practice in taxonomy, to be good categories.
(I made a graphical summary of relevant terms here: https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/Terms-in-phylogenetics-919396935)
This is why today birds are said to be dinosaurs by biologists. Suppose you wish to give a clear cladistic definition of "dinosaur" for the purpose of classification. There are two main ways to formally define a clade: an exclusive one ("the broadest group that contains A but not B") and an inclusive one ("the narrowest group that contains both A and B"). A definition I've seen for Dinosauria, for example, is "the narrowest group that contains both *Allosaurus fragilis* (a Tyrannosaur-like carnivore) and *Triceratops prorsus*". Anybody, academic or no, would consider these two species to be dinosaurs; you could even replace them with *Megalosaurus* and *Iguanodon*, the genera for which that the name Dinosauria was created in the first place in 1842.
However. Living birds are, in fact, closer kin (i.e., their latest common ancestor is more recent) to *Allosaurus* than to *Triceratops*. Any species that is ancestral to both *Allosaurus* and *Triceratops* will, by necessity, also be ancestral to birds. If you try an exclusive definition that cuts out birds, e.g. "the broadest group that contains *Allosaurus fragilis* but not *Turdus merula*", then you will fatally lose *Triceratops*. There is simply no way to construct a clade that includes all species that meet the paleontological criteria for dinosaur without also including birds. (The same is the case for, say, great apes and humans). The time of branching is irrelevant: Isaac Newton and the brain-eating amoeba are still both eukaryotes, even though they separated a couple billion years ago.
So general practice is to define Dinosauria as a clade, and reserve the term "non-avian dinosaur" for the group that excludes birds. (For that matter, there is no clear line where non-avian dinosaurs end and birds begin. The origin of birds involves a very long and gradual gain and loss of traits.)
Now, you could very well defend the value of paraphyletic groups, and I would agree; biologists do talk about "reptiles" and "amphibians" and "fish" all the time, even though those two groups definitely exclude some descendants of their own common ancestor. But then you will not find these groups at all on formal phylogenetic trees (indeed, they're not in the one you linked), because they don't have rigorous definitions. Mammals do, in fact, descend from species most people would call "reptiles", and before that "amphibians", and before that "fish", but cladistic's answer to whether a particular species is a "fish" or an "amphibian" is Mu.
I'll give you Archaea, but the idea that Eukaryotes are a subset of Archaea is more recent than that particular tree; now it's more accepted, and more modern trees do reflect that (e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6942926/figure/F1/). (Besides, Eukaryotes contain a load of both Archaeal and Bacterial genes that makes it awkward to classify them as either, though you could say that their "main" ancestry line is within Archaea. The strictly dichotomous trees of cladistics don't work so well when a massive transfer of DNA occurs, which is rare among complex organisms, but common among prokaryotes.)
Now, paleontologists will also refuse to call *individual* ancient species ancestral to modern ones, unless they are very close in time. The fact is that when you have a diversity of early representatives of a group, there is no way to tell exactly which of them is the ancestor of modern species. For that matter, by numbers it's far more likely than the true ancestor, though it must have existed, was never found. Hence, the forking points on a phylogenetic tree remain unnamed. This is not the case for birds being dinosaurs, because this doesn't assert any descendance from a particular species to another: it simply acknowledges that the group of birds falls inside the group of dinosaurs, in the same way that both fall inside the group of sauropsids and tetrapods and vertebrates.
Excellent summary! Thanks!
> it simply acknowledges that the group of birds falls inside the group of dinosaurs
It sounds like what we're missing, then, is words to distinguish between "dinosaurs" as the layman understands them (extinct animals from the Mesozoic) and "dinosaurs" as pedants now seem to want to use it (which includes their Cenozoic descendants known as birds).
I would be inclined to let the laymen have the word "dinosaur" and think up something else for the biological classification.
But the scientific use of "dinosaur" predates the layman one. The word was coined by a zoologist (Richard Owen, 1842, peerless anatomist and asshole extraordinaire) to describe three recently discovered skeletons.
This problem shows up in places other than biology. In its general form, it's something like:
> Both laypeople and scientists use the same word, but with different meanings. There is tension between the scientifically precise definition and the historically prior, widespread one.
I've noticed it in psychology too. Are 'depression', 'anxiety', 'fetish', etc., words that people use erroneously (and should be reserved for their DSM definitions) or words that psychologists have twisted beyond their correct meaning (and should be replaced in professional practice)?
IMO, both directions can be productive depending on the case, and we'd be wrong to categorically reject either one. Sometimes our culture has a term that obscures more than it reveals; sometimes scientists inadvertently stretch a word so far that it would be better to just coin a new concept altogether. (Categories are made for man, not man for the categories, etc etc.) We should analyze what we want a word to do before settling on its meaning.
That said, saying that I was chased by a dinosaur when I was a kid sounds _way cooler_ than lamenting that a chicken attacked me at a farm. So count me as voting for Birds are Dinos.
"However. Living birds are, in fact, closer kin (i.e., their latest common ancestor is more recent) to *Allosaurus* than to *Triceratops*."
And lungfish are more closely to all land vertebrates than they are to sharks.
This leads to the amusing conclusion that, by a modern monophyletic reckoning, whales are, in fact, fish (as are all tetrapods).
There are three possible responses to this:
1. Define "fish" cladistically and broadly, including all species commonly described as "fish". Lungfish & coelacanths are closer relatives to tetrapods (land vertebrates) than to ray-finned bony fish, and ray-finned bony fish are closer relatives to tetrapods than to sharks and rays, and sharks and rays are closer relatives to tetrapods than to lampreys and hagfish, so if your definition includes any two of these groups, then whales and other mammals are indeed also included.
2. Define "fish" cladistically and narrowly, e.g. restricting it to ray-finned bony fish (Actinopterygii), which contains the vast majority of fish species. In this case, lungfish, sharks, and lampreys are excluded along with whales.
3. Give up on "fish" as a taxonomic term altogether, leaving only the vernacular use.
Apparently box jellyfish are more remotely related to jellyfish than sea horses are to horses! I would guess they are equally distant from wasps, so their "new" name of sea wasps is equally misleading, Someone obviously needs to come up with a better name for them than either of these, so can I suggest cubozes?
Very true!
Thank you for this great answer to my semi-serious comment. There's one point I want to push back on, though:
> Groups that leave out some descendants of that ancestor (called paraphyletic) or are traced to multiple ancestors (called polyphyletic) are not considered, by modern best practice in taxonomy, to be good categories.
What makes a "good category"? Besides neatly fitting into a mathematical tree and subtree model, that is. For example, what features unify a sparrow and Triceratops, that aren't also shared between Triceratops and Lagosuchus (a dinosauromorph but not a dinosaur)? How does the concept of clades help with predicting the biological properties of animals, when the smallest clade that contains both horses and cows also contains orcas?
> For example, what features unify a sparrow and Triceratops, that aren't also shared between Triceratops and Lagosuchus (a dinosauromorph but not a dinosaur)?
Sparrows and Triceratops share a suite of derived skeletal features inherited from the first true dinosaurs, whereas Lagosuchus branched off just before that full suite evolved. Among other things, sparrows and Triceratops share a particular type of acetabulum (an open hip socket), three sacral vertebrae attached to the pelvis, and a particular type of leg articulation. There are a bunch of other anatomical features shared between Aves and Dinosauria, but these are pretty obvious, and even a layperson can identify them after seeing a few examples.
According to ChatGPT, Lagosuchus didn't have the open acetabulum of Dinosauria or Aves, but instead, Lagosuchus had "a proto-perforate acetabulum." Thus, cladistic analysis would say that Lagosuchus branched off just before that full suite Dinosaur/Ave features evolved. Or it might be considered ancestral.
> How does the concept of clades help with predicting the biological properties of animals, when the smallest clade that contains both horses and cows also contains orcas?
I think of clades as an organizational tool, and they don't necessarily predict the biological properties of animals. Convergent evolution may yield similar features. Thus, superficially, Mosasaurs and Orcas look vaguely similar, both having streamlined finned bodies. But if you look at the arrangement of their tail vertebrae, we can see Mosasaurs propelled themselves with a side-to-side tail undulation, while Orcas propel themselves with an up-down tail undulation. And looking at the entirety of their skeletal features can say with certainty that Orcas are related to other mammals, while Mosasaurs are members of the Dinosauria.
Does this answer your question?
Just for curiosity, here is the list of skeletal traits that define Dinosauria, from a 2004 paper:
> Postfrontal absent, deltopectoral crest elongate with apex situated at a point corresponding to more than 38% down the length of the humerus, brevis shelf on ventral surface of post-acetabular part of ilium, acetabulum extensively perforated, tibial distal end transversely expanded with subrectangular end, tibia with caudolateral flange and receiving depression on dorsal aspect of astragalus, astragalar ascending process on cranial face of tibia.
-- https://bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristol.ac.uk/dist/5/537/files/2019/07/2004Dinosauria.pdf (p. 19)
Thanks for the link! Cladistics certainly evolved since my time in grad school!
> There are three kinds of definitions of taxon names: apomorphy-based, stem-based, and node-based. An apomorphy-based definition is founded on one or more derived characters (e.g., “Aves consists of all archosaurs with feathered wings used for powered flight”). Apomorphy-based taxa combine definition and diagnosis. Stem- and node-based definitions include ancestors as the basal member of the clade (fig. 1.1). A stem-based taxon name refers to a clade that includes all the descendants from a particular cladogenetic event. An example of stem-based definition for Ornithischia is “all dinosaurs more closely related to Triceratops than to Tyrannosaurus.” A node-based taxon name is one that is defined by a basal node. For example, a node-based definition for Aves takes the form “Archaeopteryx, Neornithes, their most recent common ancestor, and all descendants.” Because we do not know all of the stem taxa in stem-based taxa, their diagnoses are not possible. Node-based taxa can be diagnosed on the basis of the derived features that have evolved in or immediately prior to the ancestor of the clade (this practice has been applied to stem-based clades as well). A crown clade is a node-based clade defined solely on the basis of extant forms...
> Sparrows and Triceratops share a suite of derived skeletal features inherited from the first true dinosaurs […]
Do sparrows and Triceratops retain _all_ features that differentiate Lagosuchus from Dinosauria? Evolution doesn't always lead to a monotonic accumulation of traits; features can be lost across time. One of the most obvious examples is the Tetrapoda clade, the motivating trait of which are four limbs. Yet some of its descendants lost this trait, and retain only two limbs (like whales or kiwis) or none at all (like snakes).
Yes, my understanding is they do. Definitely in the hip and leg bone structures.
I've always explained clades to myself by imagining how I'd classify people into groups: I would find it more natural to use families as the fundamental unit instead of trying to fit them into groups of similar looking people. In part because similarity is hard to define, and subjective in a way that relatedness isn't.
If you go with relatedness as your organizing principle, then the family tree is the most natural structure, and clades emerge as a nice object to analyze. After all, if I am part of the group A, and one of my brothers is, then my sister should also be included! A classification that groups only 2 of us together but exclused the third one feels unnatural.
Maybe this explanation helps motivate the idea of clades to someone else.
"How does the concept of clades help with predicting the biological properties of animals, when the smallest clade that contains both horses and cows also contains orcas?"
Not a biologist, but I presume the obvious one-word answer here is "genetics." Our obvious, instinctive classifications of which species are similar and which are *often* reasonably in-line with the underlying genetics, but far from *always*. A sufficiently good understanding of genetics will tell you things that would be almost impossible to discern just by watching with your eyes.
The crux of the matter, as best I understand it, is this: convergent evolution can push two distantly related species towards having multiple similar macro-level traits and thus looking or seeming similar at a glance. But convergent evolution cannot and will not bring those species genomes closer together in an information-theoretic sense. The space of possible genomes is combinatorially large, and once a pair of species has significantly diverged, they have diverged for good. Where the genomes are in that cominatorially-large genome-space determines things like where they can go next: what adaptations are reasonably accessible to the species and what the possibilities for future change and speciation are.
Agreed. It's important to note that large sections of the genome (except for a few ultraminimalist species, such as bacteria that are intracellular parasites) do not code for proteins, and the parts that code for proteins are highly redundant. This means that there's a huge number of possible genotypes that would result, in principle, in the same phenotype. Natural selection does not really distinguish among them.
This is why highly conserved sequences like 18S (part of the protein synthesis machinery) and COI (a central part of mitochondrial metabolism) are used to build molecular phylogenetic trees. Since almost all substantial changes to these genes would be catastrophic, with very rare exceptions, the vast majority of accumulated mutations are completely neutral, absorbed in the slack created by genome redundancy. Since these mutations do not affect fitness at all, patterns of similarity of these mutations cannot have been produced by convergent evolution, and can be attributed to common origin.
This is also why molecular phylogeny is extremely powerful evidence in favor of evolution with common descent: design for similar purposes does not explain these patterns.
"For that matter, by numbers it's far more likely than the true ancestor, though it must have existed, was never found."
This jibes with another way I often think of fossils and the tree of life. Very roughly speaking, there are order of about 10 million fossils sitting in museums and labs across the globe. Speaking even more roughly, there are order of a billion different species. If every fossil we had was a different species, then for every species for which we have a specimen, there are about 100 for which we don't. And we have lots of repeat fossils.
"Very roughly" is doing lots of work above. "Fossil" might be defined as remnants of one lifeform, or one rock that might contain hundreds or thousands of lifeforms (e.g. diatoms). "Species" is roughly defined as a group of lifeforms that can all produce viable offspring, but that definition runs into trouble when travelling in time - how many generations up or down could a lifeform go and still breed? They never do (AFAIK) in nature, so this would be a largely artificial thought experiment. And there's obviously no clear cutoff; any lifeform resembles its parents and even great-grandparents. A little searching around gave me an average duration for a species at one million years, and that's clearly variable depending on the forms in question.
Generally, there's no definitive online answer to "how many fossils are there?" or "how many species have there been?" Even so, any twiddling of the numbers still tends to lead for me to "many, many more species than we have fossils".
Arguably, we might scope this to just charismatic megafauna and megaflora. But search results are even sparser there.
Fantastic answer, thank you!
The whole point about evolution is that there's a smooth transition from one lifeform to another. You can dice up the gradient of life into "phyla" and "species", but your categories are going to be fairly arbitrary no matter what you do. Outside of massive divisions such as "this thing can absorb sunlight for energy, and this other one can't", the fine-grained details will always come down to historical precedent, a.k.a. vibes.
If it's all about feelings and subjective opinions, then I'm going to start a grassroots movement to redefine dinosaur as "real 'dinosaurs', you know what I mean, but definitely not birds".
Fine, alright. Cassowaries get a second chance to join the club, but they better re-evolve some teeth real soon now.
You'd better let ostriches into the club as well. Those things are terrifying.
> massive divisions such as "this thing can absorb sunlight for energy, and this other one can't"
Unfortunately, even that division is blurry and holey. Evolution despises clarity.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
IIRC the classic taxonomic system of orders and families has been deprecated for about a decade. It's less that they don't bother naming new families anymore and more that there shouldn't have been any families named in the first place. But I'm no biologist, don't quote me.
The birds are dinosaurs thing is less about saying how cool birds are, and more about highlighting the fact that actual dinosaurs of old were in fact feathered. I also think it predates the deprecation of taxonomic ranks by like 6 months.
> highlighting the fact that actual dinosaurs of old were in fact feathered
#notalldinosaurs
True.
Fuzzy proto-feathers were widespread among dinosaurs and even their close kin the pterosaurs, and probably were found in some form in their common ancestors, but many large-bodied groups lost them and reverted to scales only, and true bird-like feathers were only found in the narrower Pennaraptora clade.
See https://64.media.tumblr.com/f4c66ce1a3ec4f926434e843895ae82e/2c1c9ee4c986706b-f6/s1280x1920/0aabc71a31851b7206618c604045b9b78d575f1c.png , extracted from this 2026 paper which is not open https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02960-9
Did they replace it with a better system, and if so, what is it?
The current approach is making sure that every taxonomic group is a clade, as I've defined it above, and abolishing all traditional Linnaean ranks like "phylum", "class", and "order", though they're still used informally. This is not entirely consistent: "families" still have special naming conventions (name ending in -aceae if it's photosynthetic stuff, and in -idae if it isn't; heritage of a very obsolete division between zoology and botany), and you could argue that species are no less arbitrary than classes and phyla, but there's no alternative to *that*.
I've stop watching war coverage. But I check the oil price, and that gives me a hint. It's getting worse in the 'oil prices' opinion.
Crude oil prices are still hovering around $100, which is surprisingly low to me - it's comparable to the spike after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, even though it's a much bigger disruption to the supply of oil. Are people still betting that the strait will clear up relatively soon, or is the market adjusting faster than anticipated to cover the lack of oil from the middle east, or what?
I'm still thinking about taste and the way artists stories matter in a way I feel wasn't adequately addressed. The mind set of an artist is not always fundamental to the arts value but sometimes it is incredibly important to the piece. A novel like My Manservant and Me only hits if you know the author is dying of AIDS. Carrie and Lowell is a great album but listening is enhanced by knowing Sufjan Steven's family history. Henry Dargers art is amazing not for it's content necessarily but for the single minded vision a human can have and keep secret in their heart for decades, and seeing it knowing his life transforms the art.
In the same way, the experience of a Monet is enhanced by knowing the history of artistic movements and the forms the Impressionists were rebelling against. It's not surprising to look at a Monet against another painting and to appreciate them equally or even find the other superior, and then appreciate it more after you know the artist and their history.
Maybe most people appreciating Monets over other paintings don't know the history, in which case it's more of a status game in some sense, but for those who do it's very relevant to the appreciation.
I love Monet--his style is one of very few I tolerate, as I define my favorite artform as "art what looks like the thing it's supposed to be a art of" and impressionism is a sort of magic trick in that regard--but I don't know a thing about the context other than 19th century and French.
There was a huge joke about this very concept a few years ago: the film Boyhood took 12 years to make, which is a long time for a movie not stuck in development hell, but it's still thoroughly mediocre.
Another example would be the music video for Wyclef Jean by Young Thug. The singer never actually showed up for the shoots, so the video is a bunch of B-roll interspersed with title cards in which the editor tells the story of attempting to make the video. This isn't a case where knowing the context makes the thing better, though: the context IS the text. If the editor had simply stitched together the B-roll without adding the humorous story, it wouldn't have been interesting.
I feel the need to nitpick the Henry Darger case because even if his book isn't very good per se, it's still striking how astonishingly long it is, which is mostly a characteristic of the work rather than the author (unless you want to get kind of meta about it).
True. Nobody would care if it was a 200 page book
I agree, but I think there's a difference between a life story truly necessary to produce the work, and a life story that merely makes the work seem more interesting once you know it. If we put too much weight on the latter, then art becomes basically a genre of celebrity trivia and memorabilia. "This is the actual katana that Mishima stabbed himself with after he tried to overthrow the government! Oh and this is the actual novel that Mishima wrote before he stabbed himself with said katana! And this is a tissue he once sneezed on!" At a certain point you have to let the novels stand on their own. In Mishima's case, I think they do for the most part.
Yes, definitely. It has to be interesting/quality art in the first place to have value. No context can elevate garbage to the level of greatness. But when distinguishing which I appreciate more between two pieces of art, it's a relevant consideration.
Airplane is considered hilarious by many people who've never seen the movies being parodied. Kids laugh at Bugs Bunny cartoons without ever having seen It Happened One Night.
Airplane! mostly isn't really a parody, it's a bunch of puns and sight gags hanging off the skeleton of a serious movie.
It's a different type of movie altogether.
The exploding Ford Pinto gag in Top Secret is still funny even without knowing the history of that specific make and model.
Most of the jokes in Kentucky Fried Movie still work too: the feel-o-vision narrator announcing that the next film will be Deep Throat makes sense even without knowing that's the title of an actual film which was making waves at the time; Cleopatra Schwarz works without knowing anything about blaxploitation (I didn't know Cleopatra Jones was an actual movie until afterwards).
There's also a Black Dynamite reference which went over my head, too, but knowing it's a reference doesn't really make the scene more funny in retrospect.
I agree they are different in the ways you describe, but I'm trying to get at the fact that knowledge outside the piece of art itself can change the way it's viewed. This could be knowledge of personal history or art history. Good art should be digestible without knowing the personal history, but it can change the experience.
I feel like the piece on taste was dismissing this. That if you look at two pieces of art in a vacuum and like one better, it seemed to be making the argument that knowledge about the history or creation of the art shouldn't influence your opinion. You should just keep liking the same one, because your "taste" implied it to be the better painting/book/poem/etc. E.g. the part about Chestertons poems.
But the history does matter. It changes my emotional state when absorbing the piece, which is the basis of my taste.
I still feel that you do not distinguish "history of the author" and "history in general" (or, perhaps better put, simply "context") enough.
I'm just not sure it's relevant to my larger argument, which I would summarize as:
My taste is my reaction to a piece of art. If someone can tell me something true about the context of that art which changes my reaction for the better, that's a relevant factor in my appreciation. There's no reason to strip away context to get to a "purer" appreciation of the piece itself, which seemed to be Scott's opinion.
Perhaps he meant narrowly to strip away the concept of fame in and of itself affecting your appreciation, which I might agree with, but also maybe not. For instance knowing some piece of art was highly regarded in some ancient culture could increase my appreciation just by imagining the crowds that flocked to see it centuries ago to appreciate it and I don't think that's irrelevant either. The object would be imbued with some sense of historical awe that could draw me to it outside its physical details.
Believing there's a God who loves you solves a concurrency problem.
Just wrote this, would love thoughts or feedback. This is especially relevant to people interested in predictive processing models.
https://apxhard.substack.com/p/monotheism-solves-a-concurrency-problem
Thank you Mark, I find the computer metaphor very useful and this post creates probably two new tentative edges in my world model. I've been casually trying to steelman Christianity lately, this helps. Cheers
Thank you!
Left-wing influencer Will Stancil claims “let me be clear: put me in charge and I will absolutely, unequivocally, without any hesitation firebomb the ballroom.”
https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3mlhdwy3vas2q
Who exactly is supposed to put him in charge is left unsaid. The problem with left-wing terrorism is nobody wants to make a move without getting approval from the firebombing committee and completing a 500-page environmental impact statement.
“Put me in charge” means “vote for me as President”, and he says it because if he’s in office it *isn’t* terrorism, it’s in the same category as tearing stuff down to build the ballroom in the first place
Is there any reason whatsoever to give a moment's serious consideration to the views of anyone presenting themselves as an influencer?
"Left-wing terrorism"?
Are you honestly, seriously, interpreting this as a statement of terroristic intent? As in, you believe that if Will Stancil had access to a couple of people with molotov cocktails and appropriate know-how, he would be directing them to burn the ballroom down?
If so, you are an idiot. The posts he's replying to, and the replies, make it pretty clear that the intended statement is "when the Democrats take power, they should burn the ballroom to the ground rather than allow Trump to have any sort of legacy." This is about as newsworthy as a Trump supporter saying "if I was President, I'd have Kamala Harris shot for treason."
(And every time there's a post about violent rhetoric from Trump or his supporters, it gets shrugged off with a "you are still crying wolf" and a "take him seriously and not literally," so nobody here has the right to complain about a liberal wanting to take out fiery vengeance on a building.)
>Are you honestly, seriously, interpreting this as a statement of terroristic intent?
No, I think he's running his mouth on the internet and isn't going to do anything.
>This is about as newsworthy as a Trump supporter saying "if I was President, I'd have Kamala Harris shot for treason."
That is also a bad and objectionable thing to say. If you spent more time here you'd know I am not a Trump supporter and often spend time bashing the Right.
Wasn't he getting cancelled for not being left enough on economic issues like 6 months ago? I thought Noahpinion said that in a blog post defending him. Very confused how that could square with this.
I'm not on Twitter or Bluesky so I can't keep track of these lefty commentary guys and their drama and their corny one liners anymore.
Counterpoint: Be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness.
>https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
Left-Wing Group Too Disorganized For FBI Agents To Infiltrate
https://theonion.com/left-wing-group-too-disorganized-for-fbi-agents-to-infi-1848923025/
Hah, yet another entry in the growing list of Onion Headlines that Struggle to be More Extreme and Ridiculous than Real Life.
Satire becomes more difficult every day.
Ah, poor Will. He's getting it very tough on Bluesky recently so he needs desperately to do something to claw back his leftist street cred. This is just a desperate cry for attention, he's not firebombing anything (except perhaps his reputation).
So he wants to break the rules, but he wants permission first. There's this strange desire among these people to be both one of the good kids and one of the bad kids at the same time. The fact that he's 40 makes it stranger.
If I were in charge I probably would demolish the ballroom, but it would be relatively low priority, and I'd go through all the proper approvals and permits and such.
"The Trump administration has a secret plan, and if you knew about it you'd realize that Trump's current stupid idea is actually genius" has never once been true. Nobody in this administration has the ability to make plans, secret or otherwise.
The plan is to make his critics talk about something normal voters don't care about unlike inflation or abortion where he's actually vulnerable.
But that's not what's happening at all. Trump wanted a ballroom, and after the fact tried to get reasons for why this project should not follow established parcs&rec, natural history procedures, or congressional approval.
Suddenly there are natural security reasons for it, and the taxpayers were not going to pay for it at all, but now a billion dollar is going through the defense budget and no you can't review this project because of national security reasons. People can very rightfully criticize that. Hell, they might just destroy the ballroom, and put a smaller, more modest, more in line renewed east wing on it. That should be possible no, cover all that secret with a nice lawn?
People would not be complaining if it wasn't so over the top large, break all the archictural lines in both the white house design and the Washington DC street and line of sight plan. It's a gilded horrific monument to a wanna-be dictator, breaking the rules.
You can’t get kicked out of antifa because antifa isn’t an organization.
Do you genuinely think anyone here is dumb enough to be fooled by that old saw?
At least one of us here has the level of intellectual ability necessary to assess Erik's claim as "probably true, with minor exceptions of no great importance". And to cite in support of that assessment the fact that an organization of sufficient scope to constitute "antifa" remaining unknown to e.g. journalists and law enforcement ,would violate the General Rule Against Conspiracy Theories. And the observation that, in spite of a number of highly capable and motivated law enforcement agencies being unleashed against "antifa" by the official terrorist-organization declaration, there's been a distinct shortage of e.g. RICO cases against "antifa".
I’ve actually known several people who have taken part in Antifa activities back in the 90s and 00s. It was just a bunch of anarchists who showed up, coordinated informally, and went home. Messing with Operation Rescue, fighting Nazis and Klansmen, etc. If you have information to the contrary (not propaganda from the Trump admin), let’s hear it.
>If you have information to the contrary
What would you accept as evidence?
I've heard most of these people are mentally ill. True or not true?
Go away.
I don't think he was ever really part of antifa. He's a Twitter-turned-Bluesky progressive.
I know you're joking, but terrorists tend to come from the anarchistic direct-action "propaganda of the deed" strain of leftism rather than the bureaucratic vetocracy strain which takes hold in established governments.
I thought of a strange conciousness/pzombie thought experiment involving two previous ones. The first is blockhead, a computer that seems to be concious because it has one GIANT lookup table for IO pairs of human conversation. Note that Blockhead inputs could technically even include vision, audio, etc. while outputs could include motor responses, etc, and be arbitrarily quantized regarding time (1 second of IO, or 1 millisecond, etc) It is often used as a modus tolens against behavioralism, because obviously a lookup table isnt concious! Chalmers Dancing Qualia is another thought experiment where you go through the whole brain, taking neurons and converting them to a silicone equivalent, preserving functionality. As you go, the subject should report if qualia disappeared, but if they did, that would be a loss in functionality! Many accept this as a good argument against substrate dependence.
Well lets take a human brain and a single neuron in it: replace it with a lookup table for inputs and outputs. Now replace an adjacent neuron with another table. Now combine those two tables into one larger table. Keep doing this in any order you see fit, until you have one giant lookup table. We have danced our way from a human brain to Blockhead. Remember, any change in concious experience during the process should have been reportable. Any change in reported qualia would violate the functional requirement. Where on the subdivision dimension did it start/stop becoming conscious?
Edit: Note that we could run this the other way, slowly turn blockhead into a normal brain, or have a normal brain composed of many tiny blockheads, have a blockhead composed of tiny brains, etc. the point is that you can make a continuum of these things, and move along it.
Some people try to get around the Blockhead question by claiming that only the thing that recorded it's IO pairs must have been concious. This dancing process closes that loophole somewhat. My conclusion is that a true Blockhead (a lookup table far, FAR larger than our universe btw) would be as concious as I am, OR there is problem, other than size, preventing a lookup table from ever functionally cloning my brain, like how a non turing complete language would be unable to emulate a turing complete one.
My first thought is that this table probably needs more entries than the largest numbers people have yet conceived. But what if you knew in advance all the input I would receive, and only stored those? Now concievable to store it, right? It might even be small. Or would I lose qualia by not storing possible IO pairs that will never happen before I die?
My second thought is something non-woo re quantum mechanics entangling the brain with its surroundings, which I didn't think a lookup table could correctly replicate (a QM system is not just the sum of its parts) but I'm out of my depth here.
> Chalmers Dancing Qualia is another thought experiment where you go through the whole brain, taking neurons and converting them to a silicone equivalent, preserving functionality.
That's a bad idea, a logically flawed one. Firstly, and not so importantly, neurons do not have any functionality whatsoever except the ones someone assigns to them, like serving as an extravagant meal, or whatever. Secondly, and importantly, only similar things undergo similar processes. A silicone thing might be able to interact per release of the usual chemicals (if stored inside it in the first place) with a neuron next to it, but what would happen in the silicon thing would be very dissimilar to what happens in the neuron. A good copy of a neuron would be another neuron -- one cannot decide beforehand what it has to be doing, that is, which properties it needs to have and change in, for a human to be conscious of anything.
> As you go, the subject should report if qualia disappeared
What does that sentence mean? That one wants the subject to do this or that the subject is able to do this? If the latter, how does one know it's able to do this? If the silicon things are designed in a way to keep the brain keeping the body going as usual, then the horror scenario would be that the subject says everything is fine while the lights are, piece by piece, going out.
It’s an interesting area, but I think your thought experiment reduces to the Sorites paradox. There’s probably no satisfying answer to how many grains of sand make a mound, and I think that in the same way, there’s no satisfying answer to how many neurons make something conscious. If you need to be “a living, human brain” to be conscious, you can probably kill off thousands of neurons and still have a living, human brain. You can probably also add a bunch of noise, similar to the equivalent region of someone else’s brain, and still have a normally-conscious human brain. If you replace all but one neuron with a lookup table, you probably don’t. Trying to draw the line anywhere in that spectrum there feels necessarily arbitrary, like trying to define a mound. I don’t have a great answer for what consciousness is, though.
That's a great point! I was intentionally aiming for that sort of thing, but pointing out sorites paradox explicitly is useful.
I think the obvious problem here lies in equating the Giant Lookup Table to the collection of 86 billion Petite Lookup Tables. They are not at all the same. I think you've somewhat outsmarted yourself here, in that in posing this version of the thought experiment, you've inadvertently stripped away most of the features that made the GLUT a compelling challenge to various ideas about consciousness.
In particular:
1. The GLUT maintains no internal state other than the record of past inputs. But each PLUT needs to keep its own record, meaning the overall system has an extremely complicated, multi-dimensional internal state.
2. The GLUT is very deliberately performing no computation other than a lookup. The system of PLUTs is almost certainly capable of performing arbitrary computations, ableit bounded by size and reliability.
3. The GLUT is assumed to do its lookup effectively instantly (though the response can include a delay as appropriate). But each PLUT depends on the timing of signals received from other PLUTs: any received signal must propagate through the system over the course of a finite period of time.
4. The GLUT allows us to abstract away things like implementation details, but the PLUT system is extremely substrate dependent.[1] The "inputs" neurons receive don't just include targeted electrochemical signals from other neurons, they're also receiving nutrients and various sorts of gross molecular signals through the cerebrospinal fluid. They're doing some amount of their own internal chemistry in turn, and releasing some of the products back into their environment. So your "lookup tables" have to be awfully de-abstracted into something that can near-perfectly take the place of a neuron in the brain, including occupying very nearly the same location in space and interacting chemically in all the same ways. To me that sounds less like a "lookup table" and more like a "highly realistic artificial neuron."
5. Creating a GLUT requires compiling and storing an amount of information that is enormously, ludicrously impractical: orders of magnitude more than the entropy of the whole universe. A system of PLUTs cuts out this requirement almost completely. Even if you can implement the PLUTs in a way that almost completely trades away the computations of a neuron for simple storage-and-lookup, the network of PLUTs explicitly not doing that (see point 2), using the PLUT-PLUT interactions to do the vast majority of the work of computing the output. It's hard to say for sure, but I'd guess that a PLUT-system might be implemented with an entirely physically realistic amount of storage. This is especially true if you're allowed to compress over the similarity between PLUTs to reduce the overall storage footprint; but even if each PLUT needs a separate memory representation, it might well be small enough to be realistic.
What it all amounts to is that I have no problem at all allowing that a large system of neuron-mimicing PLUTs might be conscious, while still maintaining that a GLUT probably could not be. I couldn't really offer more than vague guesses at what consciousness actually is, but those vague guesses would certainly involve something about computation and decision-making and the interactions between disparate parts of a complex system, all of which are plainly present in a PLUT system in a way that's not at all true of a GLUT.
[1] I'm not a biologist and especially not a neurologist, so please excuse any errors or inaccuracies in this part; my hope is that the basic gist is right even if some details are wrong.
The intention of the experiment is to smoothly transition between a human brain (which you probably believe has qualia) and a GLUT, using Chalmers Dancing Qualia (which you might have accepted as a valid technique) You start with a normal brain, the convert one neuron at a time till you have the 86 billion PLUT's, then combine them one at a time, or any order you want, into 46 billion PLUT2's, then into 23 billion PLUT4's...
If we are ok with storing past inputs for the GLUT, I don't see why the PLUTS can't do this individually, then just combine those too.
While I admit I did say a perfect replica using a lookup table, which would include chemistry, I was only thinking in terms of electrical signals that result in other neurons firing, motor responses, etc. no lookup table could exactly mimic exact physics of the situation (gravity, etc) anyway. If every neuron has significant internal state storage that impacts the behavior (which I wasn't aware of) this would complicate it, practically at least.
Though I suspect you can still do a Chalmers style dance here that would get you to the GLUT, I haven't thought it through from necessary state storage yet. Can't you just give each PLUT a little storage, then when you combine PLUTS, you combine the storage too?
So thanks for the comment!
"You start with a normal brain, the convert one neuron at a time till you have the 86 billion PLUT's, then combine them one at a time, or any order you want, into 46 billion PLUT2's, then into 23 billion PLUT4's..."
My apologies, I missed the "slowly combine them into a GLUT" step. As I laid out in my comment to Taleuntum below, I think combining them is significantly more complicated and hazardous than it might seem at first glance: I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea of a single-neuron PLUT, but wildly uncomfortable with the idea that even two PLUTs could be merged into a single, coherent system. The larger GLUT sort of sidesteps this by handwaving away ALL the intricate internal machinery in a brain. But I suspect that somewhere between "simulate neurons at the most granular level possible" and "ignore all the internal details of a brain and just write down its inputs and outputs at whatever length necessary," there's a step where moving from one level to the next would require you to actually understand how a brain works before you could sensibly define that step.
" If every neuron has significant internal state storage that impacts the behavior (which I wasn't aware of) this would complicate it, practically at least."
Again, not a biologist, but I'm nearly certain that it does. My dim recollection is that the "firing" of a neuron involves the movement of charged ions through special channels across the cell wall, after which the neuron signals to its neighbors by releasing messenger molecules (neurotransmitters) to cross the gap between neurons. Both the balance of ions inside and outside the cell and the amount and types of neurotransmitters available seem like unavoidably stateful pieces of information that will influence how the neuron responds to outside stimulus. And that's not even getting into questions of cell health, available energy (in the form of glucose/ATP) and heaven knows what else. Biology is *complicated.*
My final (and in my opinion least-interesting) note is that even if I became convinced that combining PLUTs could be done trivially, the result of your thought experiment just seems like the same sort of "Consciousness Sorites Paradox," which already existed in other domains. You start at one of of the spectrum: PLUT-brain (probably conscious). You end at the other end of the spectrum: GLUT (probably not conscious). So the process of going from one to the other involves gradual motion from "conscious thing" to "not conscious thing" or vice-versa. But we already knew that must be possible: both growing a brain from a zygote to an adult human and killing/destroying/turning off a brain are extended physical processes that take finite time and have definitely-conscious thing at one end and a definitely-not-conscious thing at the other. In a slightly more abstract sense, so is the process of evolution from brainless single-celled organism to sapient hominid. I think these real instances on the Consciousness Sorites Paradox are fairly thorny issues for philosophers of consciousness to grapple with. But if we accept that they must *have* a solution (even if we don't know it), it's easy enough to posit that the same sort of solution ought to apply to the PLUT-GLUT transition.
Did you miss that you then gradually merge the petite tables into one GLUT? I'm pretty sure OP would agree with you that the billion PLUTs are obviously conscious, the point of the thought experiment seems to me that there is a sequence of entities where the consecutive entities have negligible change and the first is the human which is obviously conscious, then the <number of human neurons>th is the <number of human neurons> of PLUT (that is very likely conscious based on the Chalmer's argument), but then the final <2*number of human neurons - 1>th is the GLUT which most people believe is not conscious. This is the puzzle imo, but I could be wrong ofc.
I did miss that detail, yes.
Having considered it, I think the handwave-y notion of "merging the tables" hides a very striking amount of trouble. Even flattening out two tables into one is much, much more than twice as complicated as keeping those tables separate. To the point where...how do I put this...I'm not actually sure it's a logically coherent thing to talk about.
If each PLUT was an isolated system, then two PLUTs of size A and B would "merely" combine into a super-PLUT of size A*B. But each PLUT is not an isolated system: the output of one PLUT can form the input of another, and nothing stops this process from looping back on itself. I am not at all sure that even a two-neuron system couldn't do arbitrary computations on appropriately entered input signals. And if that's the case, then it's literally impossible to write down a super-PLUT for a two-neuron system, as doing so would run afoul of the halting problem.
Now, if this is true, than actual human brains must have some ability to correct situations where groups of neurons end up in an undesirable feedback loop. But I don't have any idea whence that ability stems or whether it's primarily mediated by individual neurons, groups of neurons, or some other biochemical process in the brain that isn't specifically contained in the neurons. In any case, I don't see any particular reason to assume that the PLUT abstraction is good at capturing it, and especially no reason to assume that it could be captured by arbitrarily small collections of PLUTs replacing arbitrarily small collections of neurons in a larger brain or larger PLUT-based brain imitation.
OP handwaves away precisely what the input to the GLUT consists of, but pinning that down is critical for understanding the system's capabilities here: if it includes at least some GLUT output from one or more previous lookups, I see no reason you couldn't model the interaction, or indeed any other computation you want; whereas if it does not, the resulting system would be unable to respond to things like "what did you just say? I missed that last bit" as a human would.
My assumption was simply that it would have to keep a continuous record of all input: you couldn't isolate it into chunks.
So if your GLUT function is represented by f(x), and immediately on instantiation it receives, in-order, inputs A, B and C, it's outputting f(A), then f(A&B) then f(A&B&C), rather than just f(A), f(B) and f(C). Otherwise it has to have internal structure complicated enough that it's not really a GLUT anymore.
This is exactly my objection to the Chinese Room argument, too.
You have it exactly right! Thanks for taking the time to read and understand it. Have been having trouble finding anyone willing to engage with it at all 😞
> "because obviously a lookup table isnt concious!"
It seems unjustified to make conclusions from on "obviousness" based on the "obvious" properties of consciousness (which is an incredibly underdeveloped fuzzy concept). If somebody tries to make an argument from obviousness, they have no recourse if you just disagree. IMO, "obviousness" is a way you filter out kinds of conversations you're uninterested in having.
> "As you go, the subject should report if qualia disappeared, but if they did, that would be a loss in functionality! Many accept this as a good argument against substrate dependence."
This depends on self-report being a good way to determine the presence of qualia. If the human being is being assessed with the question "do you still have qualia?" and the answer "yes" is considered evidence, then you could replace the human being with a literal piece of paper with a single word printed on it.
> "Remember, any change in concious experience during the process should have been reportable."
This specifically doesn't seem intuitive to me. I think this whole thought experiment equates "self-report of conscious experience" with "presence of consciousness", and once you've done that you've pre-defined consciousness in a way that makes the intermediate replacement process irrelevant
Can you elaborate on why your version "closes the loophole [of the standard answer] somewhat"? I don't see it. From a non-illusionist POV (i.e. incorrect), I would understand what happens in the following way:
Answer to original (for context):
A system composed of a big lookup table and a "look up answer to input" algorithm is very simple, fully understood and does not contain any interesting parts like reflexivity that one might assume would be needed for a system to give rise to qualia. Therefore, it's highly likely that it is not conscious.
However, let's see how an example row in the lookup-table was made in detail: input: getting pinched, output: ?. How should we calculate what will be the output? The only way is to do a calculation that is exactly the same as the one the neurons of a hypothetical person who was pinched would do. Now this computation is a much better candidate for the entity that would give rise to qualia!
Answer to your version:
In the same vein, when we are at the point that there are some lookup tables already, but there is still some organic composition between them, a part of the consciousness is in the past at the times when the lookup tables were made* and some part of it is in the present when the output of the lookup tables is used in the still organic compositor. It is a strange type of consciousness for sure, but I still don't see much reason to accept that the final lookup table is conscious, scifi has a lot of examples of weird types of consciousness already (greg egan slowing or stopping the simulation of consciousness, golden oecumene, etc..).
*: One might ask: what about the calculation that went into making the component lookup tables, but whose output is NOT actually used in the present. Is that consciousness? This question is equivalent to the question whether some subset of the brain isolated from the other parts instantiates consciousness or not.
closes the loophole [of the standard answer] somewhat
Since you can run the partially-lookup-table-converted-brain at any point, you need to have an answer for it having some particular qualia at any conversion step. If we accept chalmers Dancing Qualia idea for the simple case of a silicon neurons preserving qualia (one of the premises) we should be be able to follow the same logic/process here. rejecting Chalmers dancing qualia experiment is one valid way to reject the whole idea of course
As for the "only the past/pre computing entity had conciousness" argument, if we start with converting each single neuron to a very simple lookup table first, ideas about pinching don't ever appear in this process. Each neuron in the brain is now just a very small lookup table. (In contrast to the true huge one table blockhead, this is obviously possible and has already been done in some sense with with low quantized (eg 4 bit) neural nets). Each neuron individually has nothing like that. Subsequent combinations of lookup tables to get to bigger ones just have to multiply the IO pairs. For example, We only get "English" output in the in the table very late in the conversion process.
Yes, I need to have an answer for even the partially "lookuptabled" human, but I feel like I did give it explicitly in my comment: part of its qualia is in the past, part of it is in the present. Do you think this is impossible? If so, what is your opinion on the Greg Egan reference? Where and when is the qualia if I simulate a human, but very slowly. Maybe even stop for a while. Is the simulated human not conscious?
Also, it's not clear to me what your second second paragraph is a reply to. By pinching, I meant when a someone squeezes with their fingers someone else's skin causing pain. For the sequence of entitied the pinching input is in the form of the pain signal on the nerves coming from the skinand the annoying friends' face on the nerves clming from the eyes.
Thanks for the Egan reference! Exactly why I came here. I will have to read more of his stuff, as I was not familiar before now.
I guess I assume simulating a human slowly is just going to smear the qualia across time more than they are in a human brain? Obviously their subjective experience will be the outside world moving fast.
What do you mean by qualia in the past? Is that the memory editing in his story? Im having trouble connecting his ideas from Google/Claude with mine.
So the Egan thought experiment shows two things (imo) (for those who believe in qualia at least):
1. As you say, the qualia can be smeared/elongated through time by running the simulatiom slowly.
2. The qualia can also be interrupted in time by stopping the simulation! Clearly, when we don't do any computation for the simulation, no qualia can occur for the inhabitants!
Therefore, the qualia is a 4d pattern in spacetime that can be highly irregular (it doesn't even have to be connected!).
Applying this to the many PLUT -> GLUT transition: a partially lookuptabled x entity, when it sees a rose: a part of the qualia happens at the time it sees the rose (the part that is still organic, because that computation happens at that moment), but another part happens in the past, when its lookuptables were made.
As an example:
Let's say the entity's total experience is computed from x input the following way: (x+1)*(x+2). (X+1) is calculatef by one neuron, (x+2) by the other and the * is calculated by a third.
This is obviously a very simplified model, but good enough to show what I mean.
Now we replace the x+1 neuron with a lookuptable, let's say x is between 1 and 100 so there are 100 elements in the table. 1 -> 2, 2->3, 3->4, ....
Now when it sees a 2, so x=2. Some computation for the total result (12) is done at the time it sees the 2, but some was done when the lookup table was made. If the computation is what gives rise to qualia, the qualia itself is similarly disconnected this exact way.
>OR there is problem, other than size, preventing a lookup table from ever functionally cloning my brain
Can this lookup table be updated?
Because, if not, how could it possibly store new memories? Our neurons rewire themselves, presumably, to allow learning and memory formation. So, if this lookup table is fixed (can't be changed) then it cannot approximate your brain (which slowly changes over time).
If the lookup table *can* be updated, then perhaps it could be conscious? After all, what's the difference between a lookup table that is being updated and the matter in our brains being rewired?
**EDIT:**
To put it more concretely, a fixed lookup table cannot even represent one neuron in your brain, because the connections between that neuron and other neurons change over time.
Example:
Imagine neuron A is connected to neurons B and C.
At first, A gets strong input from B and medium input from C.
So the lookup table might say:
B + C → A fires
But after learning, the brain rewires a bit.
Now A is also connected to neuron D, and the connection from B to A is weaker.
So now A's behavior depends on a different setup:
weak B + C + D → A fires
A fixed lookup table cannot capture that change unless the table itself changes.
It only represents the old wiring pattern.
So it is not modeling a learning neuron; it is modeling a frozen version of that neuron.
I should have addressed this originally, but you can resolve this a few ways. Either the lookup table includes all previous inputs as part of the (Input) thus input X then Y would internally lookup X, then XY, or you could argue memory/learning isn't necessary for conciousness, as per humans with dementia or memory loss. I suppose the XY lookup includes storing state X for future inputs, so calling it a mere lookup table isn't correct. It's a lookup table + tape recorder
If we have a lookup table + tape recorder, I no longer think it's obvious that such a thing cannot be conscious.
After all, such a thing can learn and change it's responses based on new experiences.
I agree that it might be, but now you have to grapple with all the real life systems that could be represented with a lookup table + tape recorder. Are they all concious, or just the ones that claim to be?
Surely it depends on what operation they happen to be performing when you ask?
It's maybe worth remembering that not all humans are conscious all of the time; e.g. some of us occasionally require sleep. Simply possessing hardware capable of consciousness is not, on its own, enough.
The lookup table has no need to be updated. It comes out of the box pre-loaded with the results of any possible update it would ever need. Every possible combination of "new memories" is already latent in the lookup table: as it receives input, certain areas--involving reporting on the "memories" of its past "experiences" become accessible. A much larger region of other areas, corresponding to counterfactual "memories" associated with inputs combinations it didn't receive become near-permanently inaccessible.
(A Giant Lookup Table is an utterly preposterous and enormously counterintuitive object.)
>Every possible combination of "new memories" is already latent in the lookup table.
Okay, well, then the question here is whether God is conscious, right? Because a lookup table that knows every possible memory that could have ever been formed ahead of time is omniscient.
Eh, it "contains" every possible memory that could ever have been formed. But I don't think that it "knows" them in any meaningful sense. By assumption, the Giant Lookup Table can only *access* a particular set of memories when it's fed the correct input: the correct input presumably being the sequence of "experiences" that would create those memories in the first place.
Maybe an more concrete example would clarify things. A real easy test for "omniscient" should be "can it reliably win the lottery in one shot?" A GLUT certainly cannot.
A GLUT includes the "memory" of picking the winning lottery number and thereby winning the lottery. But even if somebody handed you a GLUT and a powerful search engine capable of sifting through its memories, you couldn't use that to win the lottery. Why not? Because it's "future memories" include branches in which it chooses every possible lottery number, with "winning" and "losing" sub-branches for each. There's nothing there to tell you anything about which possibilities are more likely: it takes the overwhelming-force solution of mapping out EVERY possibility. (And I repeat, GLUTs are thoroughly ridiculous objects.)
It's like the trick that politicians do where they have a speech pre-prepared for the case of "winning the election" and a different one pre-prepared for "losing the election." When they pull out and read an appropriate speech, it's not because they prognosticated the result, they just prepared for both results. Preparing a GLUT is like doing this for every possible situation.
I find it relevant that such a lookup table is in principle impossible under conventional physics, since there is no mechanism which could search and extract responses from it as quickly as a human brain functions, nor at the same size or energy usage.
I think this is relevant because the answer to solipsism is and always has been reasoning from analogy.
We can never prove that other humans are conscious, we just know that *we're* conscious and other humans seem like ourselves in every way we can measure, so it makes sense/satisfies Occam's Razor to assume that they are conscious as well.
Asking whether other non-human things are conscious is a similar exercise in reasoning by analogy, but now with more distance and thus more uncertainty.
This animal has a brain that's different from ours in high-level architecture but basically the same in low-level substrate and built by the same evolutionary processes, and it has a set of behaviors which seems analogous to our own behaviors, probably they have *some* conscious experiences that are analogous to ours with some limitations and differences.
This computer has a completely different physical architecture *and* substrate, but its programming works in a way that's *analogous* to how our neurons/brains work and was designed in part to mimic them, and it has these sets of behaviors that are analogous to our own, *maybe* it has *some* form of consciousness but with high uncertainty.
Etc.
Now, back to solipsism.
The cybernetic human that has each neuron replaced with a synthetic duplicate that is functionally identical is still very analogous to a normal human in many ways, and this is relevant to your probabilistic reasoning that it should also be analogous in conscious experiences.
If you *could build* a functionally identical human with a lookup table, that would be relevant to the reasoning here. But the fact that you *can't actually do that* is *actually relevant evidence* that these two things are not analogous, and that you should be much less confident about any analogous conscious experience existing.
I agree that the inability to build it, or the difficulty, MIGHT be relevant (my last few paragraphs address this), but its not obvious how. If we lived in a universe with 1000000 additional orders of magnitude above and below our brains, a limited blockhead should be possible.
so if we're going to say it's evidence, we should at least try to find it as evidence toward some theories and away from others
Also, we definitely could build a partial blockhead (human brain composed of many many individual lookup tables. the less tables, the larger the final one has to be) so saying we can't build it doesn't buy us much. We can probably move quite a ways away from a normal brain and toward blockhead before we tap out on physical constraints.
>a limited blockhead should be possible.
I really don't think so, but it depends on how you're formulating the hypothetical. Lets come to grip with the actual mechanics of the hypothetical, and what they imply for our conclusions.
The premise here is that you could build something behaviorally identical to a human with a lookup table. To me, that means it has to perfectly mimic a human across its entire lifespan, from birth to death by natural causes. 'A lookup table can contain a script that looks human for 5 minutes under specific conditions, then collapses or loops' is not behaviorally the same as a human, so there's no analogous intuition that we should expect it to be human.
The premise here is that this functionality could be implemented by a simple look-up table. To me, that means a singular table, not relations between many tables; and it means the table is full and complete at birth, not updated over time. Otherwise, the clear dissociation between functional complexity and behavioral specificity is lost, and it's easy to just read consciousness into the functional elements of relations between tables or the process that updates those tables.
Which means, to have the strongest version of this thought experiment work, you need a lookup table that includes not just every possible set of inputs a human might experience over their entire lifetime (which involves modelling all possible futures they might find themselves in, including all possible cultural events and technological advancements and etc), but also the interaction between that and every possible state the person could be in (because you don't react identically to the same inputs every time, you yourself learn and change over time).
I'm pretty sure that's going to be computationally larger than the universe, if you try to write it in full specificity. Or even if it's smaller than that, it's still not something you can fit inside a human skull even with pure computronium; you'd need a galaxy-size computer beaming instructions to a puppet or w/e, at which point it's not physically analogous to a human anymore.
And you can fudge it by rounding off categories of responses and ignoring unlikely scenarios, but that just pushes you further from the 'perfect behavioral copy of a human' premise.
I don't think your idea of 'imagine we can predict the future' saves anything here - at that point, we're not talking about a lookup table anymore, just a linear, determinist script. 'I will look at this determinist system and plot the future course of this sentient being and replace it with a nonsentient being that does the exact same things' is literally just p-zombies again, you've lost the distinctions that make Blockhead a separate thought experiment.
It will definitely be larger than the universe. There is another discussion thread about that.
Losing the distinction was actually my goal. All these thought experiments exist on a continuum. We should be able to move throughout the continuous space of experiments and ask questions about any given theory of consciousness as we go. For instance, blockhead can be changed into the linear deterministic script one part at a time. blockhead is surely still blockhead if I remove one random entry. Or will it become a pzombie the moment I remove an entry that will never be called? How many never to be called entries can I remove? I guess my point is you can drive all the way from human brain to deterministic script in one grand journey (using some existing ideas), which causes problems for most theories.
I became frustrated at people confidently claiming LLMs definitely are or aren't concious, and tried to show that any theory is going to yield seeming absurdities, so we shouldn't be confident at all.
A general property of many of these debates is people's intuitions running into difficulty with the concept of things being composed of other things. There is a presumption that if something is made of something else, that something doesn't /really/ exist - all that /really/ exists is the stuff it's made of.
Software doesn't /really/ exist; when you look, it's just electrons moving about; the meaning of the movements is all in your head. The mind doesn't /really/ exist; when you look, it's just neurons firing; etc etc.
You then have to somehow deal with the cognitive dissonance of really feeling that no, seriously, you do exist, actually, even though you're apparently entirely made of smaller things that aren't themselves very special; and so dualism is summoned up to resolve this - all these things I'm made of aren't /really me/, the /real/ me is some invisible intangible thing that's somewhere else that can't be disappeared from existence by having its component parts be understood or understandable even in principle.
And so we arrive in a place where a thing that's made entirely of parts we could in principle understand, like lookup tables or matrix multiplications or whatever, can't be conscious like me, because if we admit otherwise, I stop existing.
I've yet to come across any reliable way of shifting out of that space once trapped in it; so alas, I fear we are doomed to keep arguing around in endless little circles, like the automata we are.
The problem is that there is no way to empirically test the proposition "a lookup table is conscious". You can argue either way (it is / isn't conscious) all you want, it wouldn't be evidence, it wouldn't be science. We have the same problem with brains.
> because if we admit otherwise, I stop existing.
"what is true is already so. owning up to it doesn't make it worse"
Why identify yourself with something that does not exist if you can easily choose something else (your atoms, your personality, the social roles you fulfill, your experiences' quasi-phenomenal properties, whatever)? This is purely self-induced hardship.
> Why identify yourself with something that does not exist
Indeed!
I would like to note that I do not think lookup tables and matrix multiplication cannot be concious, maybe Claude is concious.
> Or would I lose qualia [...]?
Qualia are defined as the phenomenal properties of experience, but unfortunately, there is no such thing. Introspectable properties of experience are merely quasi-phenomenal ones, i.e. purely physical properties that introspection misrepresents as phenomenal.
Please read at least the first two parts of the first section:
https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
Im familiar with illusionism. I find chalmers refutations convincing.
The problem with all those Chinese Room Blockhead p-Zombie thought experiments is that they're totally unfalsifiable. If you ask the Chinese Room/etc. if it's conscious, it will say "yes", because that's what its loopkup table indicates; and in all other respects it acts as though it were conscious, so there's no way for you to tell that it isn't really truly conscious unless you take it apart -- and maybe not even then. This leads to the following possible conclusions:
1). Only biological systems can be conscious, because I have a priori decided this to be axiomatically true.
2). Consciousness is mysterious and ineffable and nonphysical and it's all a grand spiritual mystery.
3). The philosophical concept of "consciousness"/"qualia"/etc. is hopelessly confused, on par with "elan vital" but more so.
Personally, I'm going with option (3), but that's just me.
How can I be confused about the fact that I have experiences?
If the term "consciousness" means "I have experiences" to you, and only this, nothing more -- then you're not confused !
Did you read the whole post? I feel you are only responding to blockhead, and not the "dance to blockhead".
What's the difference ? The "thought experiment" is unfalsifiable either way. At every step in the "dance", from lookup table to biological brain, you've got an agent that acts in all respects exactly the same as it used to, i.e. the same way as a human would. So what was the point of all that dancing ? How does your thought experiment help you distinguish between cases #1, #2, and #3 ?
The purpose of any thought experiment is to draw a conclusion from the premises, which are considered axiomatic. The conclusion can be accepted, or if rejected, suggests problem with the premises or reasoning steps.
Is Euclid's theorem of infinite primes unfalsifiable? That's kind of not the point.
In this case, I took two things I believed to be true, and I think many in this community would have accepted: Chalmers Dance suggests substrate independence of qualia, and separately, dictionaries are not conscious, and argued you probably can't accept one while rejecting the other. This thought experiment does not help you distinguish between the questions you raised, (which are good questions), nor many other questions it was not designed to help with.
> dictionaries are not conscious
You don't need any of the poorly-defined qualia stuff to lose that intuition.
Notice that the Chinese Room is not JUST a dictionary; it is a system that performs dictionary lookups over and over, forever.
This seems like a tiny trivial distinction, but Turing completeness is stupidly easy to introduce to tiny systems accidentally, never mind deliberately; and, as expected, it turns out that it takes very very little to make dictionary lookup in a loop Turing complete. The esoteric programming languages wiki contains an entire category of string rewriting paradigm Turing tarpits [1], many of which are some variation on "search dictionary for key and replace with value, in a loop"; some are very minimal indeed, e.g. Novice[2] or Thue[3].
Which is to say that if you admit that /any/ computation exists that can produce consciousness, the Chinese room (or something a non-computer-scientist would find indistinguishable from it) can emulate that computation, and therefore you are forced to admit it must also be capable of consciousness.
[1]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:String-rewriting_paradigm
[2]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Novice
[3]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Thue
ETA another intuition pump is the CPU-less computer. A fun party trick, it turns out you don’t need any of the traditional circuitry for explicitly doing anything one could describe as “computation” like an ALU or registers or counters or any of the stuff from vlsi 101. Take a nice big eprom and some wires, hook up some of the data out pins to some of the address pins and the rest to the outside world (your main bus, memory etc), and away you go - populated with a suitable bit pattern, that thing can do arbitrary computation; just, y’know, slowly.
ETA: this scrolled across my feed this morning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48190188
> Many accept this as a good argument against substrate dependence.
I don’t know why people don’t think about the mind being analogous to software here. Something running on a system (or substrate) that depends on the lower system to run but isn’t itself the lower system. In the case of a future AI living in a data centre we could replace all the data centre machines, and keep the AI. If it felt qualia to begin with it it would feel it to end with.
That's the point of the thought experiment, right? The benefit of Chalmers one is that it starts with something you already believe to be concious, you.
(in case you misread, the quoted line agrees with your text)
> a lookup table isnt concious
This is basically the Chinese Room thing again, and I find it kind of annoying (no offense to you in particular). You take some data structure and simultaneously say it "obviously" is or isn't [a thing we can barely define] but then you also extend it to a level of complexity we can't really understand (arbitrary size, all kinds of inputs, the passage of time) so it doesn't even really resemble what we would normally think of as "a lookup table".
With these constraints you could implement a deep learning model as "a lookup table" and therefore approximate any continuous function.
I stated that it wasn't concious to highlight conventional wisdom.
The Chinese room is different. It's more analogous to a computer program, which many of us here would not be surprised to learn had qualia.
What I find surprising is the ability to extend the apparent consciousnees all the way to a Dictionary. Or there is a mistake
It's been a while since I took a Theory of Computation class, but I'm pretty sure the lookup table you describe is sufficiently complicated to reproduce the behavior of any computer program.
Definitely not. I could have set up a version of Blockhead to only work for 5 seconds of behavior at 0.1 second steps (and perhaps only one branch of conversation/experiences) this system isnt necessarily turing complete if that's what you're saying.
I'm not following what you're saying here. A version that is constrained to that level also is not going to be plausibly conscious.
You can arbitrarily limit the time it will work for. Is a human that will only live another 5 seconds due to a bomb going off not conscious during those 5 seconds?
BTW is a lookup table the same as sin(x)?
(Not sure about the answer, just asking your opinion.)
In the abstract, mathematical sense, yes and no. A function in math is just a mapping from inputs to outputs. Any way you choose to define that function is equivalent as long it maps the same inputs to the same outputs.
The trouble with defining sin(x) via lookup table is that traditionally sin(x) is defined over an uncountably infinite set of inputs, so you'd need a lookup table with an uncountably infinite set of entries.
But if you restrict the domain of the sine function to any finite set of values, then yes, a lookup table over those values can be equivalent of any other way of defining sin(x) over that domain.
You could implement it that way. I'm pretty sure I had at least one textbook when I was younger with a few pages of sin(x) in the back.
You'd have some limitations - for the paper version, only accept inputs to some finite number of digits and bound it to some 2pi range.
If you rule out those limitations, you'll need a really big table, but it's unclear what the limit would be in the thought experiment given.
Perhaps I am too old -- a lookup table is definitely THE solution for sin(x), in most cases at least. :-) (This was pretty common in ASM demos in the early 90s, for example.)
I am more interested now in the distinction between sin(x) and the lookup table. And not "any possible lookup tables", but if you take one specific lookup table, with an arbitrary large, but eventually finite precision -- can you say "this is sin(x)"?
This is really getting down in the weeds…
Computationally, lookup tables aren’t the way to go for trig functions because of memory requirements.
For modern software, minimax polynomials with range reduction wins. For constrained hardware (simple calculators), CORDIC still shines.
CORDIC Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC
Ahh thank you, I was not aware of that.
Now that I think about it, moving shapes on a 320x200 screen is perhaps not the application of sinusoidals with the highest resolution imaginable.
Ah, this is more of a philosophical question. I would say no. sin(x) is defined to infinite precision. A lookup table of finite size can only ever approximate it.
Of course it is a philosophical question -- just like the one before. Which is the resolution of model where we say that approximating the intelligent responses with a finite set of mechanical responses becomes intelligence?
(Birds are quite good examples for giving mechanical responses. In other words, they are (mostly) dumb. :-) I'm not a biologist tho.)
The thing is you can't. The so-called thought experiment is to prevent you from thinking. It's a con. The person using this con will avoid all discussion of _the conversation_ with "the room," because supposedly it is irrelevant.
But it is not irrelevant. If we accept the room cannot be distinguished from a "real person" speaking Chinese, then we can ask it all sorts of things. How do you feel? What did you have for lunch yesterday? Can we meet tomorrow? What is the first question I asked you? Who else have you spoken to and did they tell you a message to relay to me? Let X represent the first question and Y represent the second question and Z represent the third question; what words are common to X and Z but not Y? You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise...
If we accept the room is _perfectly indistinguishable_ from a person, then we could teach the room. It could retain a lifetime of context. And so on. If it can't. then it's not indistinguishable. If it can... then this matters, because a simple lookup table isn't going to work. The person proposing this is on the line for explaining considerably more about how it must work. About how these things are supported. Cards and filing cabinets will not suffice.
A lookup table can contain order dependent input sequences, thus appear to learn, when in reality you are going down one of its stored "branches".
But even if we find an issue with "teaching" the thing, would we posit that those with dementia have no qualia?
Have you seen this yet, and will you add your name to it? Your article about why UBI is superior to a jobs guarantee remains evergreen and great to this day. https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/the-ai-pledge-for-humanity
In the current debate with the buttons: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/red-button-or-blue-button-question
At what percentage of inherent disadvantage to your default answer do you switch sides?
I'd press red in the original setting, but if a blue outcome was allowed with just 5% of blue votes, I'd easily choose blue. I can't know for certain but I think my boundary is around 30%
I’d press the blue button, and probably switch somewhere between 60% and 75% blue. I hadn’t heard of this before reading the link above, but having read the setup I correctly guessed that a decent percentage of people would do the same. I would guess that most of my friends and family would do the same, and that no realistic amount of arguing on my part would change most of their minds. So it’s really a question of “am I willing to risk my life to save the lives of most of the people I care about”. And yes, one vote almost never swings an election, but one soldier probably doesn’t swing a war either, and that’s not a good argument to stay out of the military.
I think around 60% blue I might chicken out. By 70% it would feel dangerously optimistic to stay blue. People have a tendency to harden under pressure when they have a decent hope of making a difference (c.f. Ukraine), and I think there’s a decent chance that if this ran in real life, the blue vote would be higher than the two thirds or so in the original poll. But 2:1 seems like a typical margin on culture war referendums/plebiscites, which this feels like in some ways, and it’d be quite risky to expect a higher blue vote than that. By 75%, I think I’d think my odds of surviving if I voted blue would be too low, and I’d preserve myself.
I suspect that it's not monotonic. What if we reduce the number of required blue pressers all the way down to two?
That is, everyone lives if everyone picks red or at least two people press blue, but if only one person presses blue then that person dies.
Would you still press blue in this scenario? I wouldn't. If anyone is going to press blue then it's almost certain that at least two people will press blue, but I'm not going to take the chance of being the one poor sod who chooses blue.
at two people needed I'd very happily press blue, and even at like 10%, but I can admit that part of my motivation is the "heroism" i'd be perceived as having, and that's definitely not the selfless act people are claiming is inherent to the blue-pressers.
There's a trolley running along a set of tracks, with absolutely no one tied to the tracks. There are a bunch of people standing around in the vicinity, who can stand on the tracks if they want to but don't have to if they don't. However, if X% of the people in the area all stand on the tracks, the trolley driver will notice them and stop - but only at the last second, when it's too late to change your mind when you notice lots of people deciding in the second-to-last second that they really didn't want to play a game of chicken with a trolley after all.
Are you saying that with X=30%, you're going to go stand on the trolley tracks and wait right up to the last second and beyond?
It's a silly problem, where most people's answer will depend on how you contextualize the same underlying choice. I'm pretty sure you'd get a significant change in people's claimed decisions if you just swap the colors "red" and "blue" while keeping everything else the same.
And if we're taking the premise seriously, with the whole world being involved, differences in language and culture mean most of the world's eight billion people are going to contextualize the problem differently than you and your friends. And so I'm going to play it safe and not bet my life on my ability to predict how a Chinese housewife or a Pakistani bricklayer's son is going to understand this. Except of course that a lot of them will play it safe because they don't understand how you and I are going to react.
The most important part of your interpretation is: "with absolutely no one tied to the tracks". Blue button pushers interpret the original as "everyone has to tie themselves either to track Red or track Blue" and assume that some people will pick track Blue simply because they are too stupid or inattentive or busy to understand the rules. They consider saving them (from themselves) to be a virtuous act.
Or consider another interpretation that completely reverses yours: N people are trapped under a big concrete slab and are holding it above their heads until help arrives. You are free to lower your arms and leave, but if less than N/2 people remain under the slab, it will become too heavy for those still under it and will crush them. Would you leave or would you stay?
Yes, and there will be people too stupid or careless or clumsy to stay clear of the tracks. We can observe this with e.g. human behavior around actual trolley tracks. But we usually deal with that by yelling at those people to get off the tracks, and helping them if needed, not by rushing on to the tracks in the hope that our combined numbers will stop the trolley.
If you want to save the life of a stupid or inattentive person, tell them to push the red button. There's a good chance that will actually *work*, in a way that telling people to all stand in front of a trolley almost certainly won't.
The trolley version of the problem does have some features that the button version doesn't though, like the fact that you can see how many other people are on the tracks, you can see who is running towards the tracks or getting up from the tracks, and so forth.
I do agree that the contextualisation makes a difference, though.
You can see how many people are answering "blue" or "red" on opinion polls about what button they're going to press, which is the same thing. A person standing on the tracks a minute before the train arrives, is a person who is today talking about how they're for sure going to press the blue pill. How many of them are still going to be standing on the tracks two seconds before impact with the train bearing down on them?
The problem would be meaningfully different if people could precommit by e.g. pressing the button in advance of the deadline (no backsies) and having the result publicly displayed. But that's not the question being asked.
The problem is so reflexive that even just the manner in which it would be presented has a strong influence on what everyone might think about everyone else's thought process, and thus how one 'ought' to answer. The attempts to transform the question by imagining jumping into a woodchipper which disables if 50%+ of people jump in because the question is not merely whether you, the reader, are willing to jump in or push red, but what you think the likelihood is that others will do so. In the abstract I'm a red-pusher with the original framing but if the presentation of the threat to red-pushers were sufficiently menacing it would shape my decision.
Oh, yeah, I've been having this issue and it's pretty infuriating. I also hate the stupid tribalism it's spawned, and this question comes from a need to mend that tribalism. For the moment let's say it's the exact same framing with just the percentage required for a blue win adjusted.
In the lower percentages (say, blue wins with 5%), i'd guess the threat to pushing red is social stigma or shame, in proportion with how low the threshold was.
About the tribalism: I wonder if that would be as strong if they'd chosen, say, green and yellow as the colors.
Probably. The parallels to real world politics are too obvious to ignore.
A world where everybody will be fine as long as they follow their own rational self-interest, but some people want all the sensible rational people to sacrifice their own safety for the good of the people who can't make the simple correct decision? That's not a weird hypothetical, that's everyday life.
I think it's annoying because it's a dumb thought experiment that mimics the structure of real life situations where people are called on to sacrifice for the greater good, so some people respond to this as another example of people sacrificing for the greater good, while others are like "what's your problem, it's just a thought experiment with two buttons".
It's a thought experiment that *very poorly* mimics the structure of real-life situations, and it's annoying mostly because people are using it to pass inappropriate judgement on real people because they gave the "wrong" answer in an online poll or discussion.
In real-life situations, it is *very rare* for people to be called on to do something that has a >10% chance of killing them, in order to save others. In real-life situations that meet that standard, the person being asked to take that risk is usually someone who has signed on to take that extraordinary risk (e,g. a policeman), and if it's not then it's probably someone who by circumstance is the only person or one of the only few people who could meaingfully intervene, so that "meh, if I play it safe other people will take care of it" is off the table. And in real-life situations, it's almost always the case that the person's own sacrifice, possibly in conjunction with a few other people close at hand that they can count on, will suffice to save the day. Are there any real-life circumstances where people are asked to risk their lives on a gesture that will surely get them killed and do no good whatsoever unless bignum complete strangers from foreign cultures all step up to back their play with no precommitment?
The button isn't real. But the hate, anger and contempt that people feel for each other, over a thought experiment, is real.
That right there seems to be a way that evil can grow in the world in ways that most of us miss.
I don't think this is bad at all. People were already feeling that hate, anger and contempt, but the button thought experiment allows us to distil down what we were all angry about all along.
What's up with Dasani water?
You want a nice, crisp, balanced flavor, so no "Dasani" (snort): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg
It's kinda a high-tech drink that would appeal to techies. They use a multistep process of activated carbon filtration to absorb chlorine and VOCs, then reverse osmosis under high pressure to remove remaining impurities. Then it gets hit with UV to disinfect it. And finally, mineral enhancements are added. It used to be my bottled water of choice, but I discovered I preferred the calcaire taste of Fiji water. ;-)
"It's kinda a high-tech drink that would appeal to techies. "
From the makers of MealSquares: DrinkCylinders.
So purified drinking water?
Yes. But humor aside, according to some studies, 15% of America's tap water may be less than ideal for human consumption....
https://fortune.com/well/2025/02/26/drinking-water-hazardous-chemicals/
Yes. Dasani is the most generic brand of bottled water in the US, bottled by the Coca-Cola company and sold in every supermarket.
I think beowulf was making a little joke which may have confused things if you actually don't know what Dasani is.
Yeah, I was sorta joking. But about 25 years ago, I ran for the local water board and lost. At the time, they didn't seem to be testing for traces of chemicals like Cr(VI) (even though the movie Erin Bronkovitch had made it a big deal earlier), and they weren't testing for a host of toxins that the Feds didn't consider dangerous in very low quantities. I made water safety platform, and I came in last. But after researching the issue, I got obsessed with ultra-pure water. And Dasani seemed like the best choice. I also bought some expensive water purifiers to treat my cooking water with. After about a decade or so, I gave up on my pure-water fetish.
But I do like Fiji Water (despite the family that owns it being Central Valley agribusiness water assholes). Coming from a limestone aquifer, Fiji Water is softer on the tongue. And it's probably pretty pure since it comes from an aquifer that hasn't been contaminated with industrial waste seeping into it (yet). But that's not why I drink it.
I'm not much of an environmentalist, but collecting drinking water from Fiji to ship it to North America has always seemed pretty obscene even to me.
Yes. Isn't it? It's an important component of the Fijian economy. It employs hundreds of Fijians, and it earns Fiji millions in export revenue. But maybe it's not as crazy as the trans-Pacific laundry service between SF and Hawaii in the 1850s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11yncqt/how_was_trans_pacific_laundry_service_economical/
Journalists tend to take completely normal human behaviour and turn it into a focal point of the article to convince readers how weird the SF AI scene is. For example: group houses with brand identities, prediction markets on each other, hanging out with prosties, pharmacology for career advancement, polyamorous workplaces. These are all totally normal things like drinking Dasani, but the journalists turn them into "weird" things.
The funniest ones I recall are how Lighthaven is a "walled compound" (you know, as opposed to a normal hotel or event center, which have no walls and are just out in the open), or how the fake grass inside (where there's too little light for real grass to grow at all never mind survive being trampled by all the events) is "AstroTurf".
The article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/16/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-eugenics-scientific-racism
> Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.
The "walled compound": https://lighthaven.space/lighthaven/bayes-house.jpg
The wall is at the bottom right corner of the picture, in case you missed it.
Honestly some of those are traditionally considered pretty normal as long as you're discreet about it.
I don't think they are nearly as normal as drinking Dasani.
I think the comment you're replying to was sarcastic.
What time/time zone on May 20th are the Book Review submissions due? Asking for a friend 😅
Last year, it was "end of day" (24:00) US Pacific time.
The Four Kinds of People in the AI Era:
In the Age of AI, four quadrants emerge that tell four very different stories about where people are headed. There's the Augmented Thinker, the Cognitive Outsourcer, The Traditional Thinker, and the Passive Drifter. Which one will you be?
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/the-four-kinds-of-people-in-the-ai
I feel like the options are just 'Red smear after poorly aligned ASI destroyed humanity,' 'Unimaginably comfortable and happy human after well aligned ASI saved humanity', and 'Normal person pretty much like today after the AI bubble burst and was shown to be all hype plus mild productivity saves and mild social corrosion'.
By which I guess I mean, the band of possible futures in which the four quadrants you mention are relevant seems vanishingly small to me. Either the AI hype is real and the future will change so radically that none of that matters for more than a few years, or the AI hype is false and none if that will matter anyways.
There's a possible world of 'The business model of AI is semi-real but it never grows qualitatively more powerful and never causes qualitative changes to society' where those quadrants could matter, it just feels like the future needs to be incredibly fine-tuned to stay within that band for long.
Robin Hanson's view is that it will have as much impact as the internet. So not nothing, but also not the singularity.
Okay, I'm probably Quadrant 3 but ignore that, I want to fight with you over this:
"Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, said, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
I went "I never read a word by Pericles but I'm damn sure he never said that" and going back to the original source, insofar as I'm directed to an original source, no, indeed he did not:
https://home.uncg.edu/~danford/pericles.html
"It is wrong to say that the people love Athens because she is great. It is the other way around --- Athens is great because the people love her and take part in politics. Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the State as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics; this is a peculiarity of ours; we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
Pericles
Speech to the Athenians in 450 B.C."
So "Politics is interested in you" is a stupid, modern, goldfish attention span, Internet quotes (worst of) boiled-down version of what he did say. It's not "You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you", it's "Athenians believe it to be their civic duty to take an interest in the affairs of the State, and this is what makes Athens great".
You have just demonstrated why I'm never going to use AI to think for me or help me think if I can possibly help it; we already have bad Internet Quotes where historical figures are represented as saying shit they never said (pardon the strong language, I feel deeply about this) and AI-mangled précis of data scraped off the Internet is only going to make it worse.
Go back to the original sources or nothing!
I agree that's an inapt paraphrasing of that Pericles quote. I always heard that quote phrased "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," and it's always attributed to Lenin or Trotsky, but it turns out neither one of them said it:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/08/02/interested-war/
I’ll be in the local pub on a Thursday doing the pub quiz. Graham Norton turned up once.
What reason is there to think those labels are carving nature at the joints rather than being MBTI type fabrications?
At least as much as there is to believe those top 10 lists in the chum box. "Top 10 child actresses to look like crumpled paper bags by age50. (Number 3.14159 will amaze you! It's McNeilly himself!)"
It's a guy saying "MY job is safe, I'm an Augmented Thinker!" while using AI to help him write the piece, seeming not to recognise that AI might produce such in future without the need of a human middleman to generate prompts.
The irony may turn out that the job of the fella sweeping the floors in the university is safer in the AI future than that of "Mark McNeilly is a Professor of the Practice at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and chairs the UNC Provost’s AI Committee. He writes on AI, leadership, and strategy at Mimir’s Well on Substack.
This article was written by me and improved with additional input from AI."
I was planning on #5: The Paperclip
Satisfy values through friendship and ponies!
Did anyone find the voter guides usefu? (as in they weren't 99% what you would have guessed without seeing the guide?)
Do you mean the official voter guides or Scott's voter guides?
They might be targeted towards people who trust Scott's opinions, but otherwise don't even know enough about the candidates to guess what would be on there.
It's often helpful when they ask candidates questions about some topic, or organize candidates' public stances on those topics.
Is the excerpt from the subscriber article a quote from a real article that is being critiqued, or a parody? I honestly can't tell
Seems to be another post in the same vein as "Every Debate On Pausing AI". The opposite of a teaser ad as far as I'm concerned.
It’s a parody written by Scott.
Poe's law is brutal...
You can just turn it into a question, can't you? "Why are you trying to help shrimp instead of people?"
Then just say what you think the way you want to; anything that prompts the opportunity for an explanation will create a more accurate picture.
I don't think that's actually a "reductio". You are just making an assertion. A reductio might be something like "If we care about any brain no matter how different it is from ordinary human brains, then our overwhelming priority would be all the Boltzmann brains generated in an infinitely large universe", only I don't know what the absurd next time would be if altruism was directed toward them. I suppose you could also say "Shrimp lives tend to be short, ending in death as they are eaten by other creatures. Our top priority should thus be ensuring the extinction of shrimp, or replacing them with mutants who can't experience suffering". But maybe there are real people who believe that!
Yeah, and I don't think you can accuse the shrimp people of hypocrisy without knowing what their stated principles are. Bryan Caplan DOES accuse most people who claim to believe in animal rights of not actually doing so. http://www.econlib.org/further-reply-to-huemer-on-the-ethical-treatment-of-animals/