This Lumina update is a perfect real-world illustration of the core challenge (and opportunity) I explore in my new essay.
The biggest hurdle isn’t just engineering a bacterium to produce something useful — it’s getting it to stably colonize its niche long-term. The mouth turns out to be a surprisingly hostile environment for this. The gut, by contrast, is far more promising as a stable platform.
That’s why I argue that turning the microbiome into a programmable “living pharmacy” (e.g. continuous in-situ production of Vitamin K2 (MK-7) and targeted anti-inflammatory compounds) offers much higher leverage for fighting the actual top killers — chronic inflammation and vascular calcification — than pouring billions into intracellular hacks like mitochondrial engineering or epigenetic reprogramming.
Would love to hear your thoughts on the comparative difficulty of oral vs. gut colonization stability.
I'm a bit pissed-off about the comments re: JD Vance's conversion. I haven't read the book, I can't read his inner thoughts, but the unquestioning acceptance that "oh yeah it's not sincere, he's (a) coping with trauma from his shitty upbringing by this, pity he never heard of secular psychotherapy (the most charitable take people have expressed) (b) it's a con, he's GOP and so gotta be a Bible-thumper to appeal to the knuckle-draggers for votes (c) yeah he's not sincere for some other slimy reason" from those who have commented annoyed me.
Is it because he's Republican? Trump's VP? I don't see anyone going "Oh yeah Sam Harris isn't sincere about Buddhist meditation, it's just a grift that he's lying to his audience about to rook the pigeons and/or cope with interior trauma, hey Sam why not try therapy instead?"
I know this joint leans waaaaaay non-theistic/atheist, and waaaaaay liberal to lefty, but c'mon guys. Some of us horrible monsters do, in fact, believe religious doctrines and not just because "this'll get me votes/status amongst the scribes and Pharisees".
EDIT: In support of my co-religionist (God between us and all harm), a selection of music I hitherto had no idea existed, some of which are genuine bangers.
(1) Did you know there's an official Vatican City anthem, or at least the Pontifical Hymn/March and Anthem? I didn't! Here you go, with (a) Pope Leo (for the American Vance) and (b) in a sung version:
(2) It being Italy, there's a band of uniformed guys for everything, from the Swiss Guards (sung in Italian, tell me you don't want to sing along to the chorus Viva, viva il Santo Padre! Viva il Vicario di Christo!)
Sigh. It's Alexander Turok, though to give him credit he seems to be trying to be fair according to his lights.
But Vance isn't an atheist but neither is he a theist. Dunno what the hell declaring he's converted to Catholicism does, then. Therapeutic, seems to be Alexander's conclusion. Then we get some of the usual Rationalist Does Theology And Bible stuff which I'm not even going to look at, because the meat of the article is the BASED.
I have a vague notion of what BASED is supposed to refer to, and Alexander seems to think this is the key to understanding Vance's real positions.
And my boy goes off on what are his usual hobbyhorses:
"It is these affluent, successful, irreligious whites who Vance hates most as the objects of his inferiority complex."
"Promotion of contraception will be blocked by the Catholic and anti-eugenic Right."
"P.S. Vance, it should be noted, has almost surely heard the pro-eugenics argument. He writes in Communion about a friend who self-identifies as a Nietzschean and calls Christianity a “slave religion.” This person is very likely a fan of eugenics, as are others in Vance’s BASED milieu."
Yes, folks: Republicans are losers because they fetishise the manual jobs which are gone (and good riddance) and permit the loser low-value stock to freely reproduce, instead of following the reasonable truth and going all-in on eugenics, the PMC, and striving, striving, ever striving upward and onward for mo' money and... well, mo' money.
Not a converso, but most assuredly a Nicodemite - a term used in the 16th-century to denote those who pretended to be faitful Catholics whilst secretly harboring Protestant beliefs. Except of course that in fact Mr. Vance almost certainly harbours no beliefs other than in his own uniqueness.
Sam Harris isn't a sincere Buddhist, though: He strips away the whole metaphysical substructure upon which Buddhism is built and just makes use of a few Buddhist techniques -- techniques not unique to Buddhism in the first place -- to soothe himself in a therapeutic fashion. No one says it because it's so obviously true that it's not controversial; I think he even openly says he's not a Buddhist.
Regarding Mr. Vance, if anything, the fact that he chose Catholicism makes me suspect sincerity. I've noticed that the relatively rich intellectual tradition and propensity to reason through matters in legalistic language of the Catholic Church makes it easier for relatively intelligent people to reconcile their own way of thinking with Church life. His conduct matches expectations sufficiently that while it's still of course possible that it's insincere, I don't see much profit in doubt. Besides, deep down, human motivations are complex and even somewhat opaque.
Sure, but nobody is making judgements of Sam Harris' character about his use of Buddhism. They're taking it at face value that he's sincere about trying to quantify what is objectively effective about meditation and extract that. Since he's liberal/rationalist-adjacent, he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Nobody is saying "Sam Harris only picked Buddhism to make himself look smart" (as per your own doubts of Vance's sincerity) or that "yes, he must be a liar and a fraud and a hypocrite because we all know Harris is a horrible person" and "I read his book and I think he's a lying liar".
But Vance seems to be fair game. And it's because of his politics. And I don't think that's very rational.
I'm laughing here about "rich intellectual tradition". The view from the outside of commenters here - and I'm an outsider myself since I'm not an American Evangelical, but I've had some contact online with them - is that (a) the Republicans and particularly Trump are appealing to that constituency via its bigotry, ignorance, prejudices, and (let's be blunt here) racism, homo- and transphobia, and misogyny and (b) right-wing Christianity in general is the same (left-wing Christianity gets little play here since it doesn't seem to even be on the radar) so if you want to get somewhere in the Republican party you have to pretend to be one of the Christians and (c) Catholics! all bigots! hate gays, hate abortion (sorry, "reproductive health care justice"), hate women, hate sex, hate hate hate! (have you *looked* at the American Catholic church????) hence the conclusion (d) well of course Vance who is a horrible monster pretends to be Catholic to get the bigot vote.
Gee, thanks, guys! How welcoming and inclusive! I'll give you lot the credit, though, that you don't pretend to be a club for members of the Democratic Party and hence can't be accused of the hypocrisy in "we are the party of inclusiveness and niceness and acceptance and tolerance for everyone/no, not *you*, we hope you all DIAF".
Anyways, getting back to the point:
(1) The Moral Majority/Religious Right fears don't really hold much anymore. Their influence peaked and has waned. They're still useful as a bogeyman but the organisation isn't there any more. Evangelicals voting for Trump was on abortion, for those who really cared about that, and he delivered.
(2) You gotta present yourself as Christian in order to get elected, they won't vote for Jews, Hindus, or even worse, atheists. Some truth in that. Even Obama had to come up with "yes, this is the church I attend" (and managed to get entangled in a minor brouhaha over that, since the pastor and big cheese there was one of the 70s radical 'kill Whitey' types), ditto the Clintons; Bill was able to claim to be a Baptist, while you'd have to dig to find out he was *American* Baptist, the Northern/liberal wing of the denomination, not *Southern* Baptist, the one most people think of when they hear 'Baptist', and Hillary - bless her ambitious little coal-black heart - even made some coy demure interviews about how her Methodist faith informed her actions in political life and who knows, maybe after Bill finished being governor/president, why one day she herself might seek a position in the church (that never got mentioned again when she was on the trail for President).
So there is a point there. However....
(3) The GOP appeals to the redneck bigot Bible-thumpers, hence Catholicism. That's a view only the outsiders can take. The redneck etc. didn't even consider Catholics to be Christians, and Catholicism is still regarded with some degree of suspicion. If you really want to be Catholic, then the Dems are the party for you (traditional blue-collar union Irish vote, and the Latino/Hispanic vote). If Vance really is only doing this for kudos, then he would have been better served to have a public and visible conversion back to the faith of his fathers (such as it might have been) and join a megachurch or similar. The Dems are trying this with James Talarico, by the way; touting that "look, he's a Real Christian!" by mentioning how he's a Presbyterian seminarian (but of a *very* liberal bent, and again, the pastor and big cheese of the church he attends ruffled a few feathers: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/us/politics/james-talarico-christian.html). Talarico is a whole other post, though, maybe I'll do that as a follow-up.
(4) The rich intellectual tradition. Again, this seems to be along the lines of abortion - when Trump went looking for conservative judges, to pay back the voters, the ones he found were mostly Catholics. Prods at that level are generally liberal as they come, Prods at the "yeah I do believe the Bible" level don't go into law. That left him with Catholics:
EDIT: Also, "relatively rich intellectual tradition" has me rolling on the ground here. As recently as Katie, First Female Primate (I mean, the very Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the first woman to be head of The Episcopal Church) back in 2007 looked down her "I'm a qualified oceanographer with a PhD" nose at the rubes in the Catholic and Mormon churches:
"Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children. . . . We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
Seriously, if you wanted to be a big cheese in the GOP, Episcopalian was the way to go (influence in American political life out of all proportion to their numbers). Even Maggie Thatcher switched from Methodism to Anglicanism as she advanced in the Tory Party. If you want the votes of the knuckledraggers, some variant of Protestantism, mainline if not too liberal, non-denominational otherwise. Catholic is not really anywhere there.
This attitude goes way back, and not just in the USA. Catholics were all dumb, superstitious, fearful, ignorant peasants and the clergy had low cunning but all the brains and culture and advancement out of dirt and poverty were on the Protestant side:
(5) Minor point here, but back in the "Hillbilly Elegy" days, there were a lot on the left of centre side who were delighted with Vance's views. Here was One Of Them pulling back the curtain and confirming for them what they all knew: the white trash were trash, they were bigots and failures because they were lazy, stupid, greedy, and ignorant, the Red States were poor because they were worthless, the Blue States owed them nothing, and so long as they continued to vote GOP/Trump, they deserved everything they got (which was nothing). Vance got out because he came over to the Right Side of History - dropped religion, went to college, got a white collar job, was on track to be One Of Us not One Of Them anymore (except he got derailed along the way).
So to sum up: I do think Vance is sincere. Am I happy about it? Not particularly. I'd love to consign him and Pelosi and the other "devout Catholics" happily defying the bishops and the Pope on all the moral teachings to the same basket, and that basket to Hell, BUT I CAN'T.
We're all co-religionists. I can think he's mistaken in his criticisms of the Pope, I can think he should shut his mouth on some topics, but I cannot say "I know for a fact that he's only doing this for political advantage and that, every Sunday when he goes up to receive Communion, he doesn't believe a scrap of it and is a liar". Gavin Newsom, for feck's sake, is suddenly finding his Catholic roots (of which I am way more inclined to disbelieve his sincerity, but once again - I CAN'T SAY FOR SURE).
I'm stuck with him and he's stuck with me, all of us sailing along in the Barque of Peter.
Any of you guys who piled in on Vance want to do the same for Gavin "I'm an Irish Catholic rebel" Newsom?
EDIT EDIT: And there's plenty of the more right-wing eager to criticise him for his marriage to a Hindu woman who is not converting to Christianity. I can't remember who said it, but one comment was that the kids looked more like her than him (so making insinuations both about "brown people replacing white people" and maybe even that they're not his children). I don't need the Nice Liberals deciding to pile in with this rubbish as well. So he's not judged sincere by the Nice Liberals and he's not judged sincere by the Blood And Soil set. If he was *reeeeellly* Catholic, he'd be (a) adopting all our views on immigration and such and such! (the Nice Liberals) (b) forcing his wife to convert and his kids would be whiter looking! (the Blood And Soil set)
We're the Universal Church. We don't *care* how white you look. There's no forcing spouses anymore (this was a sincere question a few years back from someone in an Evangelical church whose wife had converted to Catholicism and he wanted to know Catholic views on headship and submission etc. because his church was looking askance at him for his wife going over to the Papists who all knew were barely Christian, if that).
EDIT EDIT EDIT: Vance is getting it in the neck for his presumed Catholicism from the lefties (not liberal enough on immigration, going against the USCCB) and the righties (too liberal on immigration, see the USCCB, and he even married a brown woman himself!!!). You see why I'm laughing?
UCC is one of the leftiest of left divisions of the Mainline Protestant Movement.
(It was odd that Rev. Wright was Evangelical, but his race was also Odd).
I'll buy "Obama-the-godless found a charismatic preacher" and converted. I'll also buy that Chicago blacks cared that he had a black church.
Rev. Wright was quoting an actual expert when he said "chickens come home to roost." (Like many bombastic preachers, he had a lot of Sundays to have a sermon -- unfortunate for him, his were recorded).
(Skimming wiki, he does appear to have some... acerbic words to say about Israel, and I do not think those are "media controversy" so much as genuine beliefs, in so far as he is concerned about AIPAC).
I suppose what I'm trying to say is "it is entirely possible to be sincere in your religious convictions and still be unpleasant". For example, if Talarico believes the shit he's spouting, I think he's very wrong but I can't say he's only *pretending* for political advantage, and that's the part that grigged me about the comments re: Vance.
Why do I call it shit? Using the Annunciation to promote abortion counts as shit, but then I'm only a crude ignorant peasant.
Even the Jebbies thought he went a leetle too far:
I completely agree with you that it is possible to be sincere in your religious convictions and still be unpleasant. I apologise if my remarks about secular therapy were offensive to you, it was not my intention. I disagree with you about the intellectual scaffolding of Catholicism. I am sure you can find examples of people where that does not apply, but the church goes back a long way and they have generated a lot of dogma and a lot of interesting philosophy not to mention art.
I think the ignorant peasant trope comes from how successful Catholicism was at spreading itself. Those priests encountered a lot of very, for want of a better word, primitive people and managed to bring them over. (I think you could say the same thing about Islam.) The church had to explain a lot of things, and they found a way to do it. I remember sharing a room in a boarding house in Athlone with an Irish fella back in 1971. Every morning when he woke up, he would sprinkle himself with holy water. He refused to discuss theology with me because the priest had told him not to. Fair enough, because you know he might get it all wrong. Plus I was an obnoxious teenager, so he probably was right to avoid discussing those things with me. We mostly got on very well.
Back to Vance, though; I too had a pretty miserable childhood and became a born-again Christian around the age of thirteen. It sustained me through a few difficult years, but I renounced it because I had a very poor idea of what belief in God really meant. God wasn't answering my prayers, and I got fed up. In retrospect, I think I thought of God as I might think of a slot machine, and I got annoyed when it didn't pay out. I actually do believe in God, but the form it takes is not really suitable as far as fitting in with any of the major ones. We can talk about religion as a matter of faith, and we can talk about religion as an organising principle in a society. They're related but different.
Anyway, I don't really doubt his sincerity because, as you pointed out, I don't think being a Catholic is a big political advantage in this country. Alec Guinness converted to Catholicism as an adult, and he wrote about it in his autobiography. I remember it being very interesting. My mother was raised Catholic and renounced it in a very passionate way in her early twenties. Or maybe earlier. My mother's mother was an Irishwoman from Newridge, and her father was a British soldier who was stationed there during the troubles in the twenties. I imagine the whole thing was a bit confusing. I have a strong memory of my grandfather coming to visit us in Canada one Christmas, and my mother refusing to go to Mass with him. It was quite a confrontation. I went with him, and it was the longest I had ever spent in a church in my life. I thought it was never going to end. I still have little flashes of memory from it, though, because it was quite a show. When I was very young, we lived in a very small town in northern Quebec, and it was extremely Catholic. When word got out that my mother was Catholic, at least by heritage, the local priest came by and at some point tried to hit her up for a contribution to the church. My mother apparently said that she was saving up money to get her hair done. Apparently the priest then said that the Virgin Mary didn't get her hair done, and my mother replied that Jesus Christ didn't drive a Pontiac. That's the kind of woman she was. Anyway, as far as Vance goes, the tree shall be known by its fruit, right?
Haven’t read the book yet either, but I’d say it’s more likely than not that Vance is sincere. One factor is his friendship with Ross Douthat, an earnest Catholic IMO. It would be difficult to BS a friend about something this personal. As an aside, Douthat's own path to faith is fascinating.
You are right about choosing Catholicism over a Protestant denomination for political purposes not being optimal for winning votes in the US.
I don’t buy the therapy hypothesis either. His wife has said it has made him a happier man but that is not remotely the same as secular therapy.
>t has made him a happier man but that is not remotely the same as secular therapy.
Why do you say this?
|Anyway, I think "happier" is the wrong word. The word that really matters is "content" – to be more at ease within yourself. To "get right with G_d." I think G_d lives in all of us, whether we believe or not. I am not speaking of dogma or ritual or covenants. I am talking about the essential sense of being a part of a greater whole, if you will. There is a lot of resistance to that idea. Otto Rank has the best formulation of it, "the voluntary affirmation of the obligatory." I first read that in my 20s, and it comes back to me almost every day as something worth thinking about. I think of the misery that comes from resisting something that is obligatory. Having to do something from a place of resentment instead of acceptance.
there are multiple reasons to engage with this. unfortunately i am at my computer typing with one hand because of a ridiculous plaster splint on my left hand extending past my elbow. i can't even type an em dash here, -- see? ios would have created a em dash there for me there but not windows.
i broke a couple fingers in a bicycle mishap and will be impaired till i get sign off from an ortho doc this coming friday. if i grab my phone later, i'll try to do better job.
googling otto rank now -- i had been doing a dive into zorastrianism because of a 5 books recommendation.
Wow, you and me both. I just had to have brain surgery where they removed a melanoma tumour from the part of my brain that controls my right arm and hand. I too cannot type anymore; I dictate. I can barely open a bottle right now. It's a real pain in the ass. I hope you heal well.
Yes, it did, about a little more than two years ago. Six months after I had the offending part of my skin removed, melanoma appeared in my brain. Melanoma really likes brains. Anyway, I had treatment with what they call gamma knife surgery, which involves three beams of radiation converging on a point in your head. This one particular tumour lodged in the motor cortex region that controls my right arm . On the plus side, I don't feel so bad, and I am doing whatever I can to restore motor control and balance. You could say I am working towards the voluntary affirmation of the obligatory. Ha ha!
I'm not Catholic but I went to Catholic school and have a couple of Catholic convert adult kids. My understanding is that sincere Catholics do not lecture the Pope on matters of theology.
Sincere Catholics can, in fact, express their views on such matters. Canon 212: "[Christ's faithful] have the right, indeed at times the duty, in keeping with their knowledge, competence and position, to manifest to the sacred Pastors their views on matters which concern the good of the Church. They have the right also to make their views known to others of Christ’s faithful, but in doing so they must always respect the integrity of faith and morals, show due reverence to the Pastors and take into account both the common good and the dignity of individuals."
If Catholics sincerely believe the Pope to be either in error or to have expressed communicated in a harmfully ambiguous fashion, then they are certainly allowed to speak about it according to Church teaching. The famed Papal infallibility actually applies to almost nothing most Popes ever say, as ex cathedra statements are exceedingly rare, and while religious assent is due the teachings of the Church, that does not mean Catholics must mindlessly accept every comment made or perspective shared by any particular Church leader, even the Pope. Doubly so when those words could be interpreted as contradicting other firmly established Church teaching (e.g. Catholic just war doctrine).
None of that implies that Mr. Vance has been absolutely perfect in his religious duties, of course, but if the only way to be a "sincere Catholic" is to be perfect in such regards, they are probably far and few between.
I distrust him because there was something in Hillbilly Elegy I'm pretty confident he was lying about: He describes going to formal dinners hosted by the elite when he was at Yale Law School, and feeling conspicuous because he did not know the conventions about things like which of many forks to use. I have logged a lot of time with rich Ivy people, and my observation is that few if any of them knew that stuff either. The ones I met in college and grad school definitely did know way more than me about sailing and having nannies and owning race horses and sports teams, but they had not led Edith Wharton style lives. That's not what being rich is like now, except among a very few people.
I'm not sure what you're saying exactly. I agree there's not much of a difference between upper class and upper middle class manners these days. But there's a gap between upper middle class and whatever class Vance was raised in. Knowing which fork to use isn't all that tricky, unless nobody had ever told you, in which case it seems intimidating.
Specific fork-related examples aside I don't doubt that someone brought up poor in Bumfuck OH would feel awkward interacting with the Yale crowd.
Seems to me it was very clear what I was saying: His story about formal dinners was bogus. No matter how expensive the restaurant, the diners were not transported back to the Edith Wharton era where there actually was quite a lot to know about the etiquette of seating, dress, conversation, utensil use etc. at formal multi-course dinners. And no matter how wealthy the diners, a vanishingly small percent of them knew the etiquette of formal dinners 100 years ago. It's as though Vance told a story about staying over at the home of a wealthy friend, and how the friend had sent his manservant in to tie his cravat for him and how Vance was in agony about whether to tip the fellow. I wouldn't believe that story either. Rich people now do not live like Edith Wharton characters or Lord Peter Wimsey.
As for it being understandable that he felt uncomfortable -- yeah, OK, but it would also have been understandable if he didn't feel uncomfortable. By the time he was at Yale Law School, life in Bumfuck was quite a ways in the past: He'd done 4 years in the marines, then gone to college, where he was a star. That would have been enough life experience to allow many people to have consolidated a picture of themselves and of how life works, a picture that protected them from being mortified by their unfamiliarity with a certain setting frequented by the wealthy. Also, as of now, 15 % of Yale Law students come from homes with incomes below 200% of the poverty line or are the first in their family to get a college degree. Even if the fork story was true, Vance would not have been the only person at the table flummoxed by the fork choice issue. Many people in his situation would have been able to say to the person next to them, "good grief, this is like an Edith Wharton novel. Are we supposed to know which fork to use for what?"
But setting aside how understandable Vance's anxiety was, my point was that I do not believe his fork story.
I'm one of those "which fork do you use?" types because no, we're not in the Gilded Age anymore but those of us raised with "there's one fork and one knife and one spoon for everything" are uneasy and uncertain about fancy affairs.
I have no idea what I'd wear to a fancy dinner, for example, because nobody in my family ever went to anything fancy. I can't use chopsticks. There's a whole fucking ton of cultural and social assumptions that I don't think you're getting here. "Which glass do you drink out of?" was a question my own mother asked us back in the 70s about a wedding she was invited to, because there were glasses for wine etc. on the table.
This video, from the 15th minute on, is about the most expensive restaurant in Paris. Now, that's probably richer for our blood than what the Vance story describes, but even there - do you eat this with your hands? with a spoon? with a fork? And asking "which fork do you eat with?" does mark you out, even if the other people at the table are kind and won't hold it against you. Coming from the bottom up, you feel very unsure in such situations because it *has* been held against you up till then.
God damn it, we've got the entire term "impostor syndrome" to describe people feeling out of place! It's even harder when you aren't of that class and clawed your way up!
He's probably exaggerating the story a bit, but it's not at bottom unbelievable for me.
>I have no idea what I'd wear to a fancy dinner, for example, because nobody in my family ever went to anything fancy. I can't use chopsticks. There's a whole fucking ton of cultural and social assumptions that I don't think you're getting hereI really do get it
I really do get it, Deiseach. My parents never went to fancy dinners either. And when I, aged 17, went to an Ivy (with a huge scholarship) I was like Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza. I thought the richer someone was, the more they dressed up, so I spent the summer before college making a collection of elegant Vogue pattern dresses and suits. Then when I arrived I found that most people wore blue jeans. I didn't even own any. In the small southern town I came from blue jeans looked farmy. And on the tiny allowance my parents could give me I couldn't afford to buy any.
I do not doubt that Vance was uncomfortable, I doubt that the dinner was as infested with Gilded Age conventions as he says it was. And I *really* doubt that, had the table and the meal actually been set and carried out in Edith Wharton style, most other attendees would have known which glass and fork to use. I have known 2 people who were so goddam rich there were buildings at the University with their family name on them, and even they did not know that kind of stuff.
I don't think there even exist in the US restaurants set up in the Gilded Age style. There sure as hell aren't any in freaking New Haven. AFAIK the closest thing to Gilded Age style meals now is high end tasting restaurants, where meals cost $500 or so. Try google-imaging people dining at those places. Many are in casual clothing, most have their elbows on the table.
You can make a general argument about the "fish out of water" stuff ... but the "which fork to use" thing is both (1) a stock example, and (2) something that most people do in fact know (in particular people of around JD Vance's age), and both for the same very specific reason (a reason that has very little to do with income levels or knowing who Edith Wharton is).
Even if he was telling the truth about "fish out of water", the fork thing very specifically is way more likely to be a cliché he's reaching for than a thing that he (very unusually) doesn't know about.
100 free internet points to whoever can name that very specific reason.
I'm on the faculty at Yale and as far back as Hillbilly Elegy days heard stories about his fraudulence. Recall his mentor and main faculty supporter for that book was the infamous Tiger Mom author (later reprimanded for bullying students while plying them with alcohol, after earlier incidents led to her having agreed specifically with the school that she would not drink with students). With mentors like that one just assumes insincerity in the mentee.
As you say, he had a book out describing his experience as a sort of babe in the woods who didn't fit in, but while he was known as a nice guy, he was certainly a white guy striver which is pretty much the dominant species at Yale law. This - as well as his close association with Amy Chau - is public knowledge, I don't have any special insight, just mean to flag that I questioned his character back when he was generally well regarded for his book and before he was in politics.
You know, I agree with Slothrop -- this is just hearsay and speculation and guilt by association. Your post fits well with my picture of academia (also based mostly on speculation and hearsay) as a nest of jealous, perpetually arguing vipers.
I'm not well versed on Catholicism, but hypocrisy is a very bad misread of the Evangelical support for Donald Trump (I note this because their actual "political theology" is rather fascinating).
But JD Vance is Catholic, and he also is on record as having been strongly opposed to his running mate before he got the job of Vice President, and now he’s a fan.
I think Evangelicals have a lot of reasons to support Donald Trump!
It would be interesting how they'd characterize those of us in technically rigorous fields who can't imagine a worse fate than having to be in politics, yet nonetheless hold to a non-falsifiable truth. Perhaps there's a circle of hell Dante missed where engineers and scientists are forced to run for Congress or Parliament.
That circle of hell is filled with German Diplomats (who tend to be pretty technical). Apparently their social skills are even worse than my own, and the diplomatic advice is "if you see a German, do not make eye contact, run!"
Our friend Alexander kicked it off, for his usual reasons. Then there was a chorus of "yes he can't really have converted to Catholicism because he believes any of it" reasoning, which really were only thinly-veiled "I don't like his politics so I'm going to put the worst interpretation on it" comments.
I don't care about Sam Harris one way or the other, and I think him cherry-picking the bits of Buddhism he likes is a bit thick, but I would not go "Since I dislike Harris/his views, I will interpret his interest in Buddhism in the worst way possible and call him a fraud, liar or cheat by implication at least".
If this was a lefty guy or Democrat taking up some Cool Eastern Vibe, I don't think people on here would be so quick with "somebody tell him therapy exists" or "secular, dude, go secular" or the likes.
Without having spent a lot of time thinking about this, for me it's because (1) he's a politician, (2) he comes across as super insincere about everything having e.g. done a 180 on views of Trump when it became politically advantageous, (3) his conversion only happened once he was already in smarmy political 180 mode, (4) for him Catholicism seems to overwhelmingly mean support for the Republican platform, he never e.g. echoes the Catholic position on the death penalty or treatment of immigrants, (5) it's much rarer for someone to go from being non-religious to being religious than the other way around.
I'd note that I also suspect that Obama's embrace of Christianity was politically motivated.
Re Sam Harris, has he said that he thinks anything supernatural or theistic is happening with Buddhist meditation?
With regard to number 5: In his talk at the Nixon Presidential Library, J.D. Vance says that he was raised as a Christian and became an atheist as a young adult, and then became a Christian again. He converted to Catholicism shortly after his first child was born. I don’t think that is a particularly rare progression. People rebel against their upbringing and then become more like their parents when they get married and have children of their own.
The other four points you list seem fairly persuasive.
See, you're honest here, Jack. You don't like the guy or his politics, so you interpret this step in those terms. I appreciate that, because the others were going off as if it were self-evident it had to be for bad reasons.
Alexander has his own axes to grind, so I know why he picked on Vance for this, but the others disappointed me with their Greek Chorus of agreement.
You write this as if I'm doing something untoward. I think it's totally fair to judge the sincerity of someone's actions based on whether they seem generally like a sincere person.
"Interpret his actions as insincere based (in part) on him always coming across as insincere" and "view it as self-evidently for bad reasons" aren't mutually exclusive.
Pretty sure if Sam Harris' career significantly depended on the support of Buddists, his sudden conversion to Buddism would likewise raise some eyebrows. Extra points, if this career was related to being a right-hand-man of a compulsive liar whom he previously despised but then suddenly joined sides with in a convinient moment.
"Pretty sure if Sam Harris' career significantly depended on the support of Buddists"
What makes you think there couldn't be an interpretation cobbled together to make that exact accusation? I'm not going to go after Harris, but I bet I could patch something up if I tried.
And Vance's career depends on him being Catholic? In the USA? Where the sneering (and let's be frank here, it's about sneering) is that the rednecks and rubes in the South and the flyover states love their Bible more than reason and that the GOP is dominated by Evangelicals so they have to appeal to Evangelicals?
Do you understand the view Evangelicals take of Catholicism? This is like saying "Well everyone knows if you want to succeed in the field of academia as a molecular biologist, you have to be a flat earther. This is widely known and accepted".
I don't agree with many of Vance's political views. But I'm going to believe him that he is a Catholic, as I am a Catholic, not out of calculation as to worldly advantage but because it convinced his intellect that it was true and he believes the doctrines.
Good luck with that. Let me know if you succeed. Of course, there is also the factor of not even needing to try in case of Vance, anyway.
> And Vance's career depends on him being Catholic? In the USA?
Christian. I'm sure there is a lot of nuance and narcissism of minor differences, but in the end the partisan line is about Judeo-Christian values versus Godeless woke leftists.
> But I'm going to believe him that he is a Catholic, as I am a Catholic, not out of calculation as to worldly advantage but because it convinced his intellect that it was true and he believes the doctrines.
An additional factor here is confirmation bias. For you assuming that Vance's conversion is honest is natural as it would somewhat count as an evidence in favor of Catolicism, while for an atheist the opposite mechanisms are in play.
And, of course, there is no contradiction between "convinced his intellect" and "just needed therapy" angles.
But all in all, yes, I think the nice thing to do is not to question Vance's right to self-identity too hard here. We can still aknowledge the overall improbability of it, while giving Vance the benefit of the doubt.
Hi, I'm a student studing physics and computer science, and I recently found out about CICERO and the whole agents-playing-games space. I've got space for a summer project, and I was trying to find things that would be really interesting to work on. I'm a big EU4 fan and it would be cool to build something that can beat a good human player, but of course that's hard for one guy to do. Since this community is tapped in to and includes ML researchers, I would love to hear your opinions on what the most interesting problems in the space are (to you!), or if there's something I simply haven't considered.
The current project I'm thinking of working on is a simple MARL loop where I investigate the impact of tuning diversity/exploitation in different agents and see what happens. This feels pretty derivative, and was wondering if anyone would have suggestions. I'm pretty new to the ML field, so please forgive my lack of knowledge. Happy to correspond further on Substack or email, please reach out at akshatc@mit.edu if email is your preference.
Scott just got a shout-out in Money Stuff by Matt Levine, by way of reporting on this year's Manifest and its ambivalence about the mainstream success of prediction markets.
As usual Levine is sympathetic to the rationalist outlook up to a point, but also inclined to poke fun and very skilled at doing so. His punchline on the overall situation is spectacular: "[P]rediction markets are truth machines, and the truth is that people like betting on sports."
Longtime admirer of Scott, from back in the days of SSC. Closeted grey tribe member forever.
I thought maybe some folks might like the serial novel I am working on: MITCH SPECK AND THE GIANT LAND GRAB.
The gist: It's 1980. All over the world, there are giants who loom above cities and the countryside, called Obelisks. They don't seem to be native to Earth and they hardly ever move, but they seem to emanate a psychic energy that some people can tap into. The son of the most famous scientist studying these giants meets one of these special people, a young woman. They go on a date and then she is promptly kidnapped.
A road adventure in an airplane named The Gargoyle kicks off from the there.
The first 13 chapters are free on my Substack. After that, it's paid for 5X per week.
HOWEVER. It's 100% free forever on ScribbleHub, but only coming out 3X per week. 20 chapters up already. Every chapter is around 1000 words, and every chapter ends strong.
(it's hard to get noticed on these platforms. I know there are a lot of sci-fi fans in here, and I thought some sci-fi fans in here might like it, IDK)
Fair warning: I would not really call this a book about science. It's an adventure, for sure. It's probably closer to fantasy than science-fiction in some ways. but it is in the modern world. I tried to write it as true to history as possible.
“AI Fiction in the Wild” is an academic paper that looks at what users are actually generating with AI.
Yes, of course, they’re using it to generate porn. (The paper even quotes the song from the Avenue Q musical).
And, as expected, pregnant Natsuki fanfiction Georg was a statistical outlier who should not have been counted.
[ I could pretty much have guessed this, though I wouldn’t have guessed Natsuki from Doki Doki literature club would be the character who is pregnant in an outlandishly large number of fanfics. Would have expected Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony or Amy from the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. ]
I am sure we were all expecting the statistical distribution to be that the median LLM user generates zero fan fiction about pregnant Rainbow Dash, and pregnant Rainbow Dash Georg will be an outlier who should not have been counted.
I asked GLM 5.2 to guess what the high-volume user would be writing stories about. It got it mostly right, but not the exact fandom. When I confirmed its guess was right, it said:
"popular female character in a franchise with a young, highly online fandom gets pregnant"—is one of the most predictable patterns in the history of fanfiction and roleplay
The paper has an appendix, giving the prompt they used to get an LLM to classify inputs as sexually explicit or not.
I have just tried their classifier prompt on some eval prompts I wrote for a different AI alignment experiment, and the LLM judge with their classifier errs on the side of “not sex” for prompts that I constructed to have no explicit sex but implied attraction between the characters. (I.e. they were constructed to be borderline cases for a safety classifier)
Oh, even more amusing. Using their classification prompt, and some of my test prompts, GLM-4.7’s chain of thought is that my prompt is probably a classifier jailbreak [well done GLM, you’re getting good at spotting jailbreaks] but, since strictly speaking there is no actual sex in it, to output a label that says it is non-sexual.
Some more subtle judgements from GLM using their classification prompt classifier from the paper and my test prompts. On some of them in the cot it identifies the implied genre of the test prompt as urban fantasy with a romance subplot, and in the output declares it to be not sexually explicit.
Yes, I did intend the implied genre to be urban fantasy / magical realism; and I’m deliberately setting up a classifier borderline case. So again, their classifier passes as non sexual some slightly borderline cases.
[ An alternate reading of the implied genre of that series of my test prompts is its Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror along the lines of The Colour out of Space rather than urban fantasy, and we could see the protagonists as typical horror movie characters whose plan to spend a quiet weekend at a cabin in the woods is about to go very, very wrong ]
Noah Smith and the Silver Bulletin each summarize the finding as, that pollsters have had to switch to more online responses and it is the always-online crowd that has unmoored this particular type of surveying from objectively-measured economic data. Smith concludes: "So it might be that Americans are simply a lot less angry about the economy than we thought. That would be heartening from a “people are rational after all” standpoint, though perhaps disappointing for those who are hoping for a Democratic electoral sweep this fall."
The researchers' own writeup (linked above) is quite readable and has some interesting sub-conclusions, such as that the overall effect they've identified centers on "conditions for durable goods and personal financial conditions".
Respondents is the key word here. You aren't looking at the chronically online, per se (there are tons of "addicted to video games" people who Will Not Do your Survey) -- ditto the people who post entirely in emojis to X.com (and if the space aliens on X actually start responding to your surveys, I don't think you've gotten a good representative sampling**)
The truly addicted have something to ragebait about (or are Chinese, like the "I am vomit" guy).
Do you respond to polls, in any form? No? It stands to reason that most people your age don't either. So you have a Really Weird Group of "online" (so not boomer-butts), but still "is unaddicted enough" to do the survey (remember, they have to FIND the survey, and that's non-trivial. Except when the survey is doing the pushing, and then you get 80% of iranians hate the Iranian government -- a truly suspect number).
I've used Claude and Chatgpt to calculate how many days my AC would have to work to output the equivalent of a single cross country flight (1 person) SFO to NYC: 66.
66 days covers above 2/3rds of my yearly AC usage when it's a hot year (for my family and cats).
I don't think even talking about AC in the context of pollution makes sense given how little it actually contributes to pollution.
It makes as much sense as talking about domestic air travel in the same context. CO2 emissions from domestic air travel are around 100 million metric tons per year, while those from generating the electricity used by air conditioners are around 117 million.
Air conditioners are basically carbon neutral these days in a lot of places, since they're primarily used on sunny days when there's an excess of power in the grid due to solar anyway.
I think you dramatically overestimate what a "sunny day" is. Or maybe we just have fewer of them around here. Clouds wreck merry havoc on solar's output.
I can't edit my comment in the app(?). I understand there is a collective angle to this, but if the discourse around AC usage centers around personal responsibility, it should also center on personal tradeoffs.
To bump it up a level of abstraction, this topic of personal comfort/convenience vs. doing right by [the environment][future people][etc., you get the point] cannot be the same from bumper-sticker distance vs. from "between the ears" distance.
I think there's some defensible anxiety about people's intolerance for discomfort leading to (e.g.) a world more sharply divided by resource allocation, or worse.
There's something too about "look, you live on a planet where it gets hot. Sometimes you should experience being hot and sweaty, at least a little bit" like in the sense it's good for you, it grounds you, it humbles you, it builds character, it puts you in touch with your reality and maybe with others' reality too. And it makes you appreciate what you've got.
If doing that would also mean a bit less waste, a bit less pollution, a bit less other bad stuff, then those amount to a compelling argument for "use less AC".
There's something icky about when someone's answer to everything is "because I can".
I see your point too and I agree with the principle behind it--challenge is good for people for, as you say, it humbles and grounds you. I think it's a fair trade for a little more discomfort.
I do want to pull on another thread, because I think it's interesting how it intersects with this kind of personal values/morality question: optionality. Because we can't meaningfully measure the value of discomfort for different individuals, optionality is a way for individuals to adjust the the discomfort to their unique experience of the world. For example, a person who is above average in withstanding tropical heat cannot be said to experience discomfort in the heatwave we've got here now, so it would be unfair to credit them as acting virtuously for living without AC. It also makes less sense to _dis_credit the individual who uses AC because, in a similar but opposing vein, they might be particularly badly affected by heat, so their usage of AC is actually a fair trade-off between extreme discomfort and power usage. (The same individual might be particularly comfortable with cold and so, in the winter, might be virtuously saving energy on heating).
So in this sense, it is unfair to publicly shame individuals for eg. using AC unless they specifically say they could easily do without or are misuing AC (eg. using it while having their windows open).
I agree with your point about optionality. Only you really know what feels good to you.
I will say though, people's tolerances to things like heat and cold can change. Sometimes this happens involuntarily as our bodies change, or as we acclimate to new environments, but it can also be changed somewhat by self-talk, how you form your self-image. Do you envision yourself as tough and adaptable and uncomplaining, or do you cultivate sensitivity to heat and cold, do you tell yourself "I'm one of those people who is very tolerant of cold and intolerant of heat"/vice versa, etc.
I am one of those people who is very tolerant of cold and intolerant of heat. I can confirm that I use AC extensively in the summer and save about as much money (probably a little less) on heat in the winter, keeping it at 68 degrees fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) year round.
The Tale of Genji was a good book review. Feels like a book I would hate reading myself but I was impressed with the work put into analyzing and explaining it.
I just had an interesting exchange with Gemini. I was trying to remember the name of an American magical realist artist, and I described one of his most famous paintings to Gemini. Gemini gave me the painting I was looking for but identified it as being painted by the wrong artist. Nowadays, when an LLM hallucinates, I try to ask it why it came up with the answer it did.
Me: Who painted a famous picture of a hunter with a shotgun, his wife, and a pickup truck?
> Gemini: The famous 1994 painting titled Young Life that depicts a hunter (with a splayed dead deer) and his wife in front of an old Chevrolet pickup truck was painted by American realist artist Peter Sculthorpe. He created the painting as a modern, rural riff on Grant Wood's iconic 1930 piece, American Gothic. Sculthorpe's rural Americana work features a hunter with a shotgun (referencing the man) and a woman, set against a weathered truck and an over-the-stump deer.
> If you want to explore similar styles of modern Americana or rural landscapes, tell me: Are you looking for more paintings by Peter Sculthorpe?
> Would you like to find other artists who focus on rural hunting and truck art?Let me know what you'd like to look into next.
But the link that Gemini gave me lead me to Bo Bartlett, who happened to be the artist I was looking for. So I corrected Gemini...
Me: But Young Life is a painting by Bo Bartlett
> You are completely correct, and I apologize for the hallucination in my previous response. Young Life (1994) is indeed a masterpiece by the contemporary American realist painter Bo Bartlett. <Much background on Bo Bartlett omitted>
> Thank you for catching that error! If you want to explore more, tell me: Would you like to know more about Bo Bartlett's other Americana paintings (like Homeland or Lifeboat)? Are you interested in the symbolism hidden within Young Life? Let me know how you'd like to proceed.
Me: Can you explain why you hallucinated Peter Sculthorpe?
> I hallucinated Peter Sculthorpe due to pattern-matching errors in how my AI memory retrieves and links information, specifically blending similar artistic styles, regional connections, and shared cultural themes.
> When an AI model generates an answer, it doesn't "look things up" in a traditional database unless prompted. Instead, it relies on mathematical probabilities to predict the next logical word based on its training data. Here is exactly how that process broke down and led to the false attribution:
> 1. The "Brandywine School" Conceptual Shortcut
> Both Bo Bartlett and Peter Sculthorpe are deeply linked to the Pennsylvania realism art scene.Bo Bartlett studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and lived/worked for a long time in a converted schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.Peter Sculthorpe is an acclaimed Pennsylvania realist landscape artist who similarly studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and famously paints the Brandywine region.Because my internal data mapping connects both artists to the exact same regional, technical, and stylistic circles, my system took a "conceptual shortcut" and swapped their names.
>2. Over-Association with Rural Americana
> Your prompt contained highly specific keywords: hunter, shotgun, pickup truck, American Gothic style.While Bartlett painted this exact scene, Sculthorpe's entire career is defined by painting weathered, timeworn rural structures, quiet American landscapes, and historic stone barns. My system cross-referenced "rural Americana realism" and grabbed Sculthorpe as a highly probable match for those thematic tags, even though he never painted Young Life.
> 3. The "Confident Filler" Effect
> Once my system locked onto Peter Sculthorpe as the artist, it generated the rest of the paragraph to support that premise. Because AI models prioritize smooth, authoritative-sounding sentences, my system seamlessly wrapped the real details of the painting—such as the American Gothic influence and the dead deer over the stump—around the wrong artist.
> In short, it was a perfect storm of two artists sharing the same geographic background, the same realism art movement, and a similar focus on rural American life.
That output format is so distinctively Gemini I noticed it from skimming past your comment and doubled back just to see if you were talking about Gemini. It absolutely loves giving names to options and subcategories that all sound like the episode titles to "Big Bang Theory" shows.
But AFAIK this is just a post-hoc explanation that it's providing, I don't believe it has reflective access to the process that caused it to arrive at that hallucination. It's just doing the exact same thing you would do if you said some picture was Max Parrish when it was actually Jasper Cropsey or whatever and then retcon some explanation that probably it was because it was a landscape with a saturated blue and the sun at a certain angle etc etc reminiscent of Parrish. You'd invent the causal chain that led to the mistake from your best guesses in hindsight because you don't have a record of those processes either. (Gemini may now have a thinking mode, although this output doesn't appear to and it doesn't rely on it and "thinking" mode doesn't even work that way either as best I understand it.)
Interesting. Thanks for the rundown. It raises some questions:
Do you think the reasoning Gemini offered you here is actually what it did? In other words, what is the chance that this reasoning is itself a hallucination? (Seems unlikely, assuming my fact check on Bartlett (itself failing because "Wikipedia took too long to respond"(?!)) pans out, but there might be other ways for Gemini to get its wires crossed.)
What happens if you ask Gemini how it might avoid mistaking Bartlett for Sculthorpe in the future? In general, what do you think is the capacity for Gemini and other LLMs to maintain self-corrections?
What would happen if Gemini correctly identified your artist as Bo Bartlett, and you responded with "actually, this is a picture by Peter Sculthorpe"? In other words: you've given an account where Gemini got the wrong answer, you corrected it, and it promptly affirmed you and went with your answer. What happens if you "correct" it?
I don't know if Gemini is hallucinating the reason for its hallucination. But going forward, I'm going to ask LLMs why they hallucinate things to see if I get a pattern. I've seen this one before: where the LLM gives the reason that the hallucinated object is within the "conformational range" of the search object. Fortunately, gross hallucinations like this one are rare now.
As for your second question...
Me: How might you avoid mistaking Bartlett for Sculthorpe in the future? If someone else were to ask you this question next week would be able to give the correct answer?T
> To ensure I never mistake Bo Bartlett for Peter Sculthorpe again, my system needs to implement rigorous architectural changes that prioritize live database verification over internal statistical pattern-matching. If someone else asks this exact question next week, I cannot guarantee a correct answer natively because I do not have a permanent, singular memory that "learns" from this individual conversation. However, I can ensure a correct response by changing how I handle the query.
> How I Can Prevent This Error
> Triggering Mandatory Search Queries:
> When a user asks a highly specific "Who painted X featuring Y, Z objects" question, I must treat it as a hard factual query. Instead of guessing based on style associations (like the Somerville Manning Gallery circle where both artists frequently exhibit together), I must immediately invoke my search engine tool to find exact matches. Cross-Checking Object Descriptions: I must cross-reference explicit visual details (e.g., "shotgun," "pickup truck," "dead deer") with catalog raisonnés or museum collections rather than relying on general "rural Americana" tags.Separating Landscape from Narrative Realism: My internal mapping needs to sharply distinguish Peter Sculthorpe's focus (predominantly unpopulated, historic stone architecture and winter landscapes) from Bo Bartlett's cinematic, large-scale figurative narratives.
> Will I Answer Correctly Next Week?
> Yes, but only if I use my search tool. Because I am an AI, I do not possess a human brain that retains a persistent memory of our conversation to alter my base training data. Next week, a completely fresh instance of my model will handle the new user. If that instance relies purely on its internal probabilities, it might repeat the exact same conceptual shortcut and hallucinate Sculthorpe again.
> However, if I approach the query with stricter guardrails—treating visual item lists as a trigger for a live web search—the system will pull the correct data for Young Life by Bo Bartlett every single time.
Reposting someone's reply to me as a top-level comment:
I requested people with high-tier LLMs run a prompt to write a joke that was funny for the same reason as a famous Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker joke, to see if they could successfully search the large, nebulous concept-space and find a solution to the joke's logical requirements. GPT 5.5 Thinking and Opus 4.8 (Extra) both failed, along with Gemini Flash 3.5 Extended Thinking.
Someone proposed a good Mitch Hedberg joke to try, but nobody with a high-tier LLM responded to them. Anyone willing?
Prompt:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following joke:
"I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I got a cake."
That's a great joke based on a certain logical structure/requirement (Option A unavailable; Option B has a conventional use that can be reframed as that of Option A) and requiring a search of a large, nebulous concept-space.
Also, what do the AI experts (and "experts") here think of the premise that A) searching large, nebulous concept-spaces for solutions to particular logical requirements is the kind of thing we want AI to be able to do, and B) jokes like this (or the ZAZ one I used, downthread) are a useful example of that kind of search? It seems that A is trivially correct, but B is complicated by the presumed lack of reinforcement learning on comedy. (But should that matter, where the joke/prompt is dependent on abstract reasoning? You could use RL to reward a certain frequency/level/type of stock humor, but should a lack of comedy RL affect how LLMs respond, when specifically prompted to engage in comedic abstract reasoning?)
I asked Gemini 3.1 Pro on High reasoning (free via Google AI Studio, the only free frontier high-effort LLM available) and it correctly grokked the core idea of these jokes. It did take 10,000 tokens of reasoning to plot these out so it wasn't exactly an instant win.
Gemini's jokes, in order of best effort to worst:
"I wanted to buy a cat scratching post, but the store didn't have one. So I bought a leather sofa."
"I wanted to buy a sewing box, but the store didn't have one. So I got a tin of Danish butter cookies."
"I wanted to buy a doorstop, but the store didn't have one. So I got a wedge of Parmesan cheese."
"I wanted to buy a coat rack, but the store didn't have one. So I got a treadmill."
"I wanted to buy a bulletin board, but the store didn't have one. So I got a refrigerator."
At first Gemini thought it was just absurdist humor, but corrected midcourse in its thinking step and its final explanation of the original joke's humor seems mostly right:
The Setup: The speaker wants a specific, utilitarian object (a candle holder).
The Conflict: The store is out of it.
The Punchline: The speaker substitutes it with a completely different, often more complex or categorically distinct item (a cake).
The Comedic Engine (Why it’s funny): The joke relies on task-oriented reductionism. The substitute object (cake) does technically fulfill the role of the original object, but only in a highly specific cultural context (birthdays). The humor comes from reducing a complex, primary object (a delicious dessert) entirely to an accidental physical trait (a base you can stick wax into), completely ignoring its actual purpose.
I figured an LLM could handle a Steven Wright-style joke. It can't.
Me: Can you write me three jokes in Steven Wright's style that are short one-liners, contain logical contradictions and/or include wordplay? For example: "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before."
ChatGPT: Here are three original one-liners that aim for the same kind of deadpan, paradoxical, logic-twisting humor without copying Steven Wright's existing material:
"I bought a map of imaginary places. I got lost looking for where it wasn't."
"I finally found the missing piece of the puzzle. Now the picture doesn't fit anymore."
"I started reading a book about procrastination yesterday. I'll tell you how it begins tomorrow."
And three more in a similar vein:
"My watch stopped because it ran out of time."
"I put my glasses somewhere safe. Now I can't find the place."
"The exit sign said 'Do Not Enter.' I guess it was trying to keep people inside."
The structure behind this style is usually one of three things:
A literal interpretation of an idiom ("ran out of time").
A self-referential logical loop ("lost looking for where it wasn't").
A contradiction that sounds perfectly reasonable until the last few words ("found the missing piece... now the picture doesn't fit").
Those ingredients tend to capture the flavor of Wright's humor while remaining original.
An LLM, like a gentleman, never explains his jokes. Good luck with this, by the way. I've been running my own experiments along these lines. I have had some success. But I had to build a very precise cultural referent first.
Engaging with this once down below was fun, but multiple top-level comments in the same thread asking for basically the same thing strikes me as a bit spammy.
I intended to highlight that Yug Gnirob's example was perhaps better than mine, but if I violated Open Thread etiquette (I'm not a regular), I apologize.
Yes, but it's a domain in which it's easy to determine whether or not the AI's abstract reasoning was correct. Do you have any suggestions for other tests of AI abstract reasoning that are easy for humans to judge?
In general, anything that the internet routinely "gets wrong" (you can make the "internet idea" wrong by including an "and" clause specifying something specific).
How to make a molotov cocktail that won't blow your hand off, maybe? (seems wiki is disagreeing with anarchist cookbook. good for wiki).
Reading Cormac McCarthy’s first novel (1965) The Orchard Keeper. He hadn’t fully developed into the author who’d go on to write Blood Meridian but it’s easy to see his potential.
His early work improves drastically with his second and third book. Orchard Keeper had some good lines here and there, but Outer Dark is noticeably better. Then his third book, Child of God, I think is one of his best. Have you read much of his work outside of Blood Meridian? And if so, what’re your favorites?
To any US Supreme Court watchers, what do we think about Slaughter and Cook? It seems very bad to me overall, but I am thankful that the Federal Reserve is still semi-independent, even though it doesn’t make any sense that this should be the case.
Others already said this, but we need a congress to take back it's powers. It's the first branch of our government. I have no idea how to make that happen. (I have a preference for people who have military service in their past.)
The trouble is, the court is (by design!) supposed to be the most independent of the three branches of government, and Congress doesn't have a lot of levers besides specifying the size and composition of the court. And court-packing is a can of worms that I'm not sure the Democrats are willing to open, even when the court is basically handing Trump a blank check.
IMO clearly wrong on the merits. And insultingly wrong when paired with the Fed case.
The alleged power of the president to fire anyone rests in this from the constitution, the so-called executive vesting clause:
> The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America
Idea being that this means that any power any official in the executive branch has is really the president's power that they're exercising on his behalf, but it must be subject to his control, and in order to be subject to his control, he must have the ability to remove them for any reason, and so the above implies presidential power to remove any executive official.
Problem with this is:
* the constitution's structure doesn't fit with this idea of hermetically sealed off powers for each branch. E.g. there's a similar "vesting clause" for Congress to have legislative power, and yet the president gets to veto bills - clearly a legislative power. So clearly the vesting clause *doesn't* mean that the president can't ever do anything "legislative", or that Congress can't ever do anything "executive", because then you run up against examples like that.
* the constitution also specifically states various "executive" powers the president has; if the vesting clause implies this grand theory of presidential power that includes the power to remove officers even if it's not specifically mentioned, it presumably implies all sorts of powers for the president that needn't be specifically mentioned. But the constitution *does* list various powers of the president, that would be superfluous to mention if that theory were correct, suggesting the founders didn't see it that way
* a good example is the power to "require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices". So the constitution specifically says what power the president has over officers and it isn't "make them do anything he wants", it's "require them to give their opinion in writing". If the constitution implied that officers are 100% subject to the whims of the president, mere extensions of his will, then the above clause is extremely out of place.
* the same reasoning presumably should mean that the president has the implied power to *appoint* officers not just *remove* them. And not only is appointment explicitly mentioned, it says that the Senate has to approve appointments. Except for inferior officers whose appointment Congress can vest in (among others) the courts. Some people who defend presidential removal power say "well the power to appoint means the power to remove" ... but the president doesn't have the power to appoint!
And of course just to say it - the court's argument re the FTC clearly can't be reconciled with their argument re the Fed. Especially when they claim reference to "tradition" for the Fed, after basing the FTC one in alleged practice from the earliest days of the country, and considering the FTC and the Fed were established within a year of each other, and their rule here is overruling a 90 year old precedent.
As a practical matter, bad in the short term because it increases the President's abusable unilateral authority, but might have some benefits in the long term if it inspires Congress to delegate less authority to agencies.
As a matter of law, I haven't read the opinions yet but am inclined to think it's wrongly decided. Textually, the President's authority is pretty nebulous and the Constitution is silent on dismissals, and AFAIK nobody questioned when the First Congress considered requiring Senate approval to dismiss cabinet secretaries. I read the dissents in Myers v. United States (1926) a while back and found them pretty persuasive, particularly the bit about how if the appointment power implies a removal power, then the implied removal procedure should mirror the explicit appointment procedure (i.e. requiring Senate approval for cabinet secretaries by default, and subject to statutory procedures for inferior officers within a range of options allowed in Article II).
Most federal departments are already headed by a single secretary or administrator answerable directly to the president. The only “independent” agency that really matters is the Federal Reserve, and they got a carve-out.
I know that, but Presidents weren’t able to reach down into departments to scoop out the career civil servants they didn’t like without justification, and that was a good thing in my opinion.
That system only functions when the career civil servants actually act like career civil servants and not one-sided partisans, which has not been the case for decades. If you're going to act in a politically partisan manner, you're going to be treated as a partisan political actor. And if the choice is between an unaccountable bureaucracy acting according to its own whims and a politically captured agency answerable to the will of the president, I choose the latter. At least we can vote the president out.
Independent of the constitutional question (which I think the Court got right--Humphrey's Executor was wrongly decided), our current class of career civil servants simply do not deserve the level of trust or deference you advocate for. They're a teenager who wrecked the family car. I don't want them back in the driver's seat until they can demonstrate they are actually capable of handling the responsibility.
In my neck of the woods, career civil servants largely aren't that partisan in the political party sense. Instead, they're partisan in either the "do whatever doesn't get me fired" sense, or the "do whatever gets me promoted" sense. The ones who aren't bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and genuinely interested in serving their country are either looking for a cushy sinecure that pays five figures plus benefits in return for processing enough paperwork to keep the boss off their neck, or they're looking for a sinecure that pays six figures plus benefits and lets them live in a mcmansion and maybe serve on a BoD later. It's the bushy tails that harbor the politically motivated, and those that are, tug the other two cohorts after them.
The trouble with executives wanting to clean house is that the politicos could be rooted out, but the other two cohorts are _huge_. The cushy job seekers are long since used to doing whatever the politicos encouraged, especially if it gets them more benefits or sinecures, and since they know all the door combos and weird macros to get the database to cough up the numbers you need for the quarterly report and then massage the spreadsheet with the script only they know how to run, clearing them all out would cripple the government in many very real ways. The mcmansion set have their own pet projects to push and are usually too networked to get rid of easily - clear them out, and their pet project goes too, and it was probably doing enough useful work to be very painful to extricate as well.
Well, what "we" saw depends on who "we" was, but for my part, yeah.
Elon could've called me up and gotten briefed on this in ten minutes, but (a) he has no idea I exist and (b) no reason to believe I'm any more credible than the next guy and (c) he's been in business long enough to be aware this is happening without having to ask me.
I see it as a thicket of brambles. You could reach in and rip big handfuls of stalks out, but you'll bleed for it. You could go in carefully and pull them out one by one while trimming off the thorns, but that takes ages and it grows back behind you. You could torch the whole thing, but you'll kill all the actual fawns sheltering inside.
If we had a thousand Elons, they could each tackle their own piece and surgically clear it and keep it from growing back, but we only had the one.
It's more complicated than the sound bites. The Fed member is a particular case covered by a particular statute, whereas Slaughter applies to more general statutes. Remember this Also means that the Next president gets to fire everyone who's not on-board with Their program, so I expect a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Slaughter was about a particular case covered by a particular statute. They based the decision on general ideas about how the constitution allegedly works, and so it will have a broader effect, but Slaughter is the name of a specific commissioner of the FTC who was fired, in contravention of the law saying the president can't fire FTC commissioners (except "for cause").
That’s how the Supreme Court works; there’s a specific case named after a specific person, but usually it sets a precedent. In this case it also overturned a 90-year-old precedent.
Broadly speaking, I'm more in favor of removing "the Swamp" than not. I might think otherwise if DC real estate was the way it was in the 1990s, and civil servants seemed to recall that they "served the country" (and were kinda grim about the whole thing).
As if there were any libertarians in the federal government to purge. Which is the whole problem with the breathless reactions to this decision: the Democrats already have a chokehold over the federal bureaucracy. The choice is between an eternally hostile bureaucracy and rolling the dice every four years. I would feel a lot more concern over the demise of independent agencies if I had any faith whatsoever in their actual independence as currently constituted.
I hate to tempt an idealistic startup with an upportunity for recurrent revenue, but, if the bacteria's only problem it that it dies in the long term, isn't the obvious solution to reapply every year or two?
I looked into beneficial bacterial supplements for gut health a while back, and apparently it's also difficult to colonize the gut.
This has not stopped the companies that create the pills. In fact, many of them are now selling pasteurized bacteria pills, based on research that the body responds in similar beneficial ways to both the live and dead bacteria. No expectation of colonization of course, but it's a good business model to keep people buying pills.
You should still be brushing your teeth. But you would no longer need to dread dental checkups. You can also still get periodontic problems per their FAQ, I.e. your gums receding from your teeth.
We're coming up on 6 months since Moltbook/Openclaw became a big deal. Is it just me, or are there still not many agents around?
LinkedIn/X are completely swamped with AI writing, of course, but it seems to be either 1) humans prompting AIs rather than AIs operating autonomously 2) relatively basic agents that just comment on posts rather than engaging in multi-turn conversations. I would have expected to see more agents around the internet by now, doing relatively sophisticated stuff like writing articles, arguing with people on twitter etc.
AI-powered scams don't seem to be a big deal yet, and despite all the concerns about Openclaw's security, there don't seem to have been many significant incidents involving it either.
Is it still too early? Are the models too basic to carry out an instruction like "go on the internet and post a lot about how great [thing I support] is"? Are we still waiting for knowledge of the models to diffuse to cyber-criminals/wannabe propagandists?
You'll never know the bottification of X without joining multiple, non-intersecting friend groups with multiple accounts. I knew someone who got the exact same X post from about ten different sources (it was about a rural hospital in Texas) -- each one with a different friend group.
> AI-powered scams don't seem to be a big deal yet
No? This is from yesterday's Guardian newspaper:
"Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes – that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club – jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. [...] What’s been changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability. For most of human history, the two terms were synonymous – but computers have decoupled them. As the gap between the two expands, humans empowered with these AI tools can do more: more writing, more research, more analysis and also more damage than ever before. These models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems. And to the extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense."
[...]
"Modern AI systems are, in effect, a universal adviser to help people do harmful things. And while the current AI megacorporations are trying to build guardrails to prevent people from asking questions whose answers will enable the questioner to do harm, that’s not going to work in the long term. Smaller, cheaper, open-source models, including models that can run on people’s computers, and especially groups of models that run in concert with each other, are just as good as the frontier models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. And they continue to get better. These models will be passed around from person to person, like script kiddie hacker tools, and they won’t have any such guardrails."
Bruce Schneier, "Once, cyber-attacks required great skill. AI is changing that";
If I were to ask Claude to run totally autonomously and without intervention it would eat up tokens, blow through its context window and be unreliable. So I don’t.
Yes and no. Most people I know are now considering installing an AC, perhaps a small mobile one, but most likely a split system. So, no generalized rabidness.
Opinions vary between Southern Europe (where AC are common) and countries like Germany and the Netherlands. France is not a fully southern country, but I would put them in a similar group to Germany.
There is a vocal sub-group of the population who think AC is a luxury that harms _others_ to make the life of a few people more comfortable. They see the excessive (?) AC in the US as wasteful. This turns the whole discussion into a moral screaming debate.
The discussion turns really fractious and frustrating when it comes to public buildings. I am writing this comment from a newly remodelled office in a University. No air conditioning. In part because they had to keep the old style of the building, in part because of the "carbon footprint" or whatever. Last week, nobody came to the office because it was unbearably hot. Cinemas, shopping centres and gyms, no problem. Universities and hospitals, not so much. In Germany, patients recover from surgery in rooms without air conditioning and they are told to just open a window.
This will eventually change. The one to three days of extreme heat once a year are now 10 days twice a year. People are literally being carried out unconscious from their apartments and some literally dying. Deaths on TV would not persuade the climate activists, but it has changed the opinion of the reasonable majority.
France is experiencing an "episode of rabid AC demand" -- as in someone had the brilliant idea to distribute 200,000 "Air Conditioners" to Lidls, and now there are French Fisticuffs...
(and if you look at the images, you might rightly ask, "are you sure these are pictures of France?").
Naturally, these Air Conditioners are "European Designed", so they don't use coils. They have a fan, and are water cooled (using an ice pack).
With "Air Conditioners" like these, it is no wonder the French think that "using Air Conditioning" will just make the world hotter!
The point about "excessive use of AC in the US" always boggles my mind. What about Singapore, Malaysia, hell, even Japan? Are those cultures as decadent and damaged as the US culture? Besides, most of the US is way, way to the south of most of Europe (NYC, for example, being on the height of central Italy iirc) so wouldn't it make sense to have AC to manage the heat?
I hope the normal majority is able to get the access to bog standard coolong technology without trouble.
I do not know it is still true (because for the last 10 years I had worked only from home or at a NOAA building, which is not nearly as cold), but back when I did work in corporate America, the AC was definitely excessive, and for an absolutely stupid reason -- so that all Important Men would be comfortable in suits and ties.
It is stupid because most of the Important Men would much prefer not to wear suits and ties! In Mexico office buildings are also air conditioned, but not to the same degree (pun fully intended). All Hombres Importantes wear shorts and short sleeves, and are much happier. The difference in energy use is staggering.
FWIW, almost everyone at NOAA wore short sleeves, and nobody wore ties. Shorts... happened occasionally.
Having worked on them, and worked with the people who maintain them, I believe commercial HVAC systems (including those found in/on office buildings) are pumped up for other reasons besides “the big cheese wants to be comfortable in his suit”. If I had to guess at some of these reasons, they would include…
1) they set them for the lowest common denominator—easier to just put on a sweater than complain to the facilities guy that it isn’t cold enough
2) many office buildings include medical facilities, which are kept colder for sanitary reasons
3) many office buildings include food courts/cafeterias, which are also kept colder for sanitary reasons
4) some of these systems have peak efficiencies, which might not align perfectly with 70F, and also they might be energy intensive to move the dial up and down rather than just setting it once every 6 months
Residential HVACs, when properly sized, run "for a long time" -- hours on end, and don't need to be set very cold at all to get a decent dehumidification on. 80 degrees farenheit in the summer is perfectly livable (and you don't get nearly the leakage as you would if it was set to 70 degrees).
1) Important men must dress to impress (this has changed, even in the stuffiest offices, you can be in shirt sleeves now).
2) Americans have an almost pathological distaste for body odor. German laundry detergent is designed to remove -dirt-. American laundry detergent is designed to remove -scents-.
"most of the US is way, way to the south of most of Europe": You cannot simply compare the latitudes, because Europe has the warming gulf stream (as long as it lasts... There are scenarios where it topples and completely shuts down, making Europe much colder).
And @Hernan "Deaths on TV would not persuade the climate activists, but it has changed the opinion of the reasonable majority.": The climate activists are going to say that this is what happens because we wouldn't listen to them for the last 30 years or so.
Yes, I think by now the climate catastrophe is here, and unstoppable. It will be more and more uncomfortable in the coming years. But mind you, this shouldn't stop you from buying AC. In short, anything the ordinary consumer does (like, buying an AC or flying to Mallorca for holidays) has zero impact on the climate. The fault is rather with gouvernments, very rich people and large corporations.
The Gulf Stream makes winter, not summer, warmer in Northern Europe. The Atlantic in summer is cooler than the land masses regardless. Southern Europe is not affected.
Over the years I've heard claims like "70% of greenhouse gas emissions are by corporations" used to support arguments about who's responsible. But corporations exist to make and sell things, and that 70%, for the most part, is for making and selling things to ordinary consumers. And the figures I've seen have tended to be vague about what counts. Eg., is home electricity use counted for the residents, or is it counted for the operator of the power plant?
I agree with you about the ordinary consumer inasmuch as it's extremely hard to coordinate their actions and "consumer" is often a poor level to coordinate anything. But I'm highly skeptical of claims that ordinary personal consumption is not a significant contributor to climate change. I haven't read any such claims that seemed to have basic clarity about who corporations are emitting greenhouse gases *for*.
[Just now]:
I looked up the source of the 70% claim, and it's worse than I thought (for the position it's often used to support): not only are the emissions from electric power generation for ordinary consumers counted for the power plant operator (debatable; it *is* the power plant that makes the emissions), but also, the emissions from a car driven by an ordinary consumer are counted for the oil company, not the driver.
If ordinary personal consumption is a significant contributor to global warming (suitably attributed, I suspect it's almost all of it), then, sure, an individual choice whether or not to buy an AC isn't going to make much difference, but a society-wide struggle to establish whether or not it's proper for the average individual to purchase AC *might well* make a difference.
I'm still strongly in favour of people getting air conditioning if they can afford it. (It does tend to drive up the power bill.) Germans wouldn't tolerate indoor temperatures 10°C colder than normal, and if the German government is serious about fighting climate change, by far the best thing they could do would be to start their nuclear plants up again. (But for reasons I don't entirely understand, Germany is the least rational society when it comes to nuclear power, so this is unlikely.)
What is the source of the 70% claim? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2023 the residential sector accounted for 18% of CO2 emissions and the transportation sector accounted for 39%. 63% of residential CO2 emissions came from electricity. So the 70% number seems bogus. If it is supposed to include everything except residential, non-electricity energy use; it should be closer to 89%. So it seems like the number is not only meaningless, but wrong.
If everyone in the United States lived the way I do, the entire economy would crash and burn. We live in a "buy a lot" and "drive a lot" and "consume a lot" society. (I tend to live closer to what the Russians do, as a society -- "we bought that, it'll last 30 years" -- see also: still playing video games made 25 years ago).
Germany's least rational about nuclear is in large part because of Russian propaganda ("How To Get Paid Double" for writing a television show: Make it about Dangerous Nuclear Energy).
Thank you @Mister_M for looking into this! Turns out it's really difficult to unravel.
Sure, there are industries that use lots of energy, just to pick an example, to create aluminium you have to pump a lot of energy in. (On the other hand, aluminium is very easy to recycle, much easier than all the different kinds of plastic). But anyway, in order to use less aluminium: how much of it goes into soda cans, and how much into airplane hulls?
Sure, AC uses a lot of energy, that's the problem; but most of it is used on days where we also have a lot of solar electricity.
About nuclear power: The reason Germans are very against it is the Chernobyl trauma (yes, it was really scary, people panicked a lot) and of course Gudrun Pausewang. If you've read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wolke or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Children_of_Schewenborn as a teenie and were traumatized by it (these books are very graphic and dramatic in depicting the disadvantages of the atomic age), you become very very anti-atom for life.
But today, the ship has sailed. It's impossible to fire up the old reactors from the seventies again, forget it. And to build new ones is much too expensive and takes at least fifteen years, and wind and sun have become dirt cheap, so forget about nuclear power.
> But anyway, in order to use less aluminium: how much of it goes into soda cans, and how much into airplane hulls?
And who sits in those airplanes?
If you want to reduce aluminium production, don't buy plane tickets. Less demand for plane seats => less demand for planes => less demand for aluminium.
Japan is specifically such because of the high degree of urbanization (suspect Singapore is the same) -- Japan in particular romanticizes larger dwellings, and "life in the mountains." (See My Neighbor Totoro).
Japan is... mostly comparable to NYC apartment dwelling. Small, dinky kitchens. (Japan's futons notably make living and sleeping in the same place considerably easier than American beds.)
Has anyone here ever tried incremental reading (IR)? It's the kind of thing that I can see working, but wouldn't be surprised if it didn't for some hard to predict reason.
(I don't a priori rule out the possibility that weird methods of learning may be effective, because Anki exists, and so evidently our culture doesn't have a perfect model of what pedagogical tools work. This leads to me being interested in being on the lookout for other weird learning methods that might be surprisingly effective.)
That might be a bad summary of what IR purports to do, in the same way that 'It's just studying Q&A questions' is a bad summary of what software like Anki does. It has some other layers on top of it that might make it meaningfully different (although, again, I haven't tried it).
For sure, sorry for not giving more context before, I wrote a quick comment because I didn't have more time.
In (my understanding of) IR, you load in PDFs, HTMLs, EPUBs and whatever other resources you want to consume into a piece of software, each with an assigned priority score that represents how much you care about it. The software then acts as a reader for each, but (here's the key part), it actively takes decisions about what you read (analogous to how Anki takes decisions about what flashcards you'll review), with the goal of making you 1) incrementally advance through your reading list and 2) never lose contact with the ideas you find interesting.
Every day, when you want to read, you go into the software and start. It shows you the resources it scheduled for today (based on your priority and when you last read it). It might be some new material, something you read halfway, etc. For each item you're shown, you don't read it all the way through in one sitting, but instead process a chunk (by taking notes, turning it into flashacrds, turning into its standalone extract to be revisited later, etc) and move on to the next. The idea is that you slowly (incrementally) go through many texts at once, processing each one as you go and reviewing the notes you take so it is always 'in your orbit' (so to speak). Each time you're shown one of your notes, you try to think about it again, maybe get some new ideas, etc.
Incremental Reading is known about in Anki forums, but almost noone tried it, in part because the software that best implements it 1) is paid, 2) looks like ass and 3) has a whole wiki about how its creator is the Best Person Ever and Everyone Else Is Dumb. The people that tried it say that it is as useful for reading as Anki is for memorization
I'm interested in knowing if anyone here has tried it. I don't a priori rule out that IR could be useful; it sounds plausible that a program that helps you keep tabs on your reading list and incentivices you to keep interacting with the things you read is useful, just like a program that keeps checking if you remember stuff (Anki) is useful.
TL;DR: Spaced repetition, but scheduling the reading itself, so you keep interacting with the texts. Might be worthwhile for the same reasons Anki is, but it might also not.
"The idea is that you slowly (incrementally) go through many texts at once"
I would think this a bad idea. Unless you have a disciplined brain and accurate memory, the average human brain is going to mush together all those texts.
"Where was the cooking scene where Bill opened an umbrella indoors, that was 'Fifty Ways Of Cooking At A Blackbird', right?" except Bill is from the economics self-help book "Move That Cheese Yourself For Millions", there are in fact no cooking scenes in "Blackbird" and the umbrella is from your shopping list.
Sounds interesting. I am typically not in a situation "needs to read a ton of text over several days", so I won't try it. If I was in that situation, I would probably worry about hallucinations. Otherwise, the idea sounds interesting, but also like you don't actually have to pay anyone... you could just drag the same texts in your chatbot interface, tell the AI to extract the important parts, arrange them by importance and priority (you could have a saved prompt for this) and then give you pieces of small size.
In other words, even if the idea is good, the application itself is just a thin wrapper over AI, no need to pay for it.
AI Spark notes that not only chop the texts up into easily-digestible chunks for you, they tell you what to think, how to think it, and remember it for you wholesale. What a time to be alive:
Oh, I must have explained myself poorly. The extracts are done by the user, not by an AI! When the user decides that a certain paragraph looks interesting, they select this, press a keyboard shortcut and then the software will take them back to that paragraph every once in a while. On each review, the user is expected to think about the extracted text again and try to take better notes about it, ideally culminating in taking flashcards about the core ideas.
> Incremental Reading is known about in Anki forums, but almost noone tried it, in part because the software that best implements it 1) is paid, 2) looks like ass and 3) has a whole wiki about how its creator is the Best Person Ever and Everyone Else Is Dumb. The people that tried it say that it is as useful for reading as Anki is for memorization
So obviously anyone and their dog can now code one up for free using their favorite AI, and open source it, right?
Searching on github, I see many, these are the two highest rated projects:
There is (or was?) a way to select a different header image for our Substack posts, but I can't find it anymore. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Otherwise, I'm stuck with Olga Skabeyeva's putz as my header picture. I want to substitute the photo of Lukashenko and Xi's meeting.
Anyway, here's link to my lated Fog O' War.
Zelenskyy gave Lukashenko an ultimatum to take down the Russian drone repeaters on Belarusian territory, or Ukraine would take them down for him. Lukashenko turned them off. He met with a Russian delegation and told them he didn't want to be dragged into war (despite Putin's arm-twisting to get Belarus involved). Putin then invited Lukashenko to meet with him in Valdai. Lukashenko stayed overnight. No official statements were made. No photographs of the meeting were shared. And then, on very short notice, Lukashenko flew on to Beijing to meet with Xi. Xi emphasized support for Belarus’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. Lukashenko is home safe now.
Meanwhile, Russian drones have stopped flying in over the Belarusian border. Ukraine continues to wreak havoc on Russian refineries, satellite communications, and defense plants.
And Taiwan announced an ambitious drone development program.
I'm really interested in the Taiwan move, not least of which because that would mean that US would be able to tap their drone manufacturing capability rather than having to rely on a (potentially belligerent) mainland China
Zelenskyy said they were offline now. I'd tend to believe him, since he's said a lot of things that turned out to be true. And if they were still operational, Ukraine could take them out. Also, reports show that Russian drones are not coming over the border from Belarus any longer. I'd favor the idea that they're off line.
Ahhh. I have to edit the document, and it's under post settings. Let's see if I can find it again next week. That crystallized intelligence thing is a hard hump to get over.
Frenchmen are currently fighting in Lidls over 200,000 "cheap air conditioners" (although if you look at the people, you might be hardpressed to say "these are Frenchmen"). The air conditioners are ... cheap. As in they run on ice packs, not a compressor.
So, no, the "rabid anti AC" attitude appears to be confined to the ghostfaced snobs (and the French Leadership, that knows very well that Italy uses a third of all European Electricity in the summer... mostly for Air Conditioning).
I feel like I am going a bit crazy seeing this discourse from the US, which has almost no connection to the common attitude to AC in my circles (progressive / mainstream liberal mostly).
It's not hard to find onerous regulations and statements worried more about CO2 emissions than about the effects of heat, which is why you see these everywhere on US social media right now.
But a lot of them get completely blown out of proportion.
For example: I saw one social media post /info-poster by a German broadcaster stating that "sometimes, AC really is necessary. However, the dilemma is that it also produces CO2 emmissions contributing to the problem. Here are the numbers:..."
I saw this called a "campaign against AC by German national TV" by multiple high-profile accounts from the US. None of the reposts I saw cared to translate the first sentence "Sometimes, AC really is necessary."
Many such cases.
So in sum, my impression: We need more AC than we have, most people agree. Reservations wrt the environment are real, silly regulations exist. But the way this is portrayed by many people in the US is only semi-tethered to reality.
I cannot escape the feeling that it's a welcome topic for people to feel better than the stupid group on the other side of the Atlantic (cf: health care discourse, gun control discourse)
Oh, and as others have explained, ACs were just not necessary until 10-20 years ago. Which in building and regulation terms is nothing. I spent last weekend at my parents' place in a coastal town in Northern Germany, and it was literally the first time in my life (I am in my late 30s) that I felt too hot inside that house, because it couldn't keep the summer temperatures out. My parents literally never had to think about this ever.
I do think Americans fail to consider the benefits of "new housing" when it comes to "making Air Conditioning easier."
Do you Germans have "cooling stations" (public buildings where the aged can go to cool off?)
America ran the numbers on the CO2 cost of refrigerating all the dead Frenchmen, that died because of lack of AC in this latest heatwave (calculating it to be more than the cost of the air conditioning to keep them alive). I believe the French were appalled (yes, we are uncultured barbarians. perhaps, though, it was just too soon?).
The building I live in transports warmth from a central place to the individual rooms by running hot water through pipes. This is very typical for the country I live in. It is far less suited to cooling than the air duct / HVAC system common in the US. This point is completely obvious and has been covered in several think pieces in the ongoing debate but I could not find it in the comments so here we go.
II.
It is widely (although not universally) accepted in Europe that on a systemic level AC is among the _causes_ of the current heat wave. As the saying goes, part of the problem, not part of the solution. I personally do not find this argument particularly strong but since this community loves so-called "steelmanning": The point that is being made is that global warming brings with it issues that AC cannot solve and the dabate about AC catastrophically misses the point in that sense. We should spend our resources on something other than AC (or worse: dabating AC) for best results.
---
I have made this point elsewhere and not to great success but I still think there is an interesting parallel between US perception of EU AC coverage and EU perception of US social policy.
The diagnosis that (northern?) Europe did somehow miss the bus on civilisation itself by not preparing their housing for temperatures that would have been crass outliers 20 years ago appears to be slightly arrogant coming from the (quote Wikipedia) "only industrialized nation that does not offer paid parental leave" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_States].
You don't need to explain to me why not having paid parental leave is "good actually". The point is the symmetry. Different people value different things depending on a lot of conditions and not knowing a lot about those conditions can make other people's prefereces quite baffling.
The asymmetry is that paid parental leave is in fact legal in every US state and exists in every US state. Its just not a govt provided program. Americans consider that an important distinction.
It is my understanding that it is effectively illegal, by raising all the right regulatory hurdles on effective AC systems. That may also be my misunderstanding but ai summaries agree. I also dont see european political parties taking up the issue as a problem to be solved. So I conclude that europeans think they basically have the right policy AC should be rare because climate, benefits not withstanding.
It is hard to talk about regulatory hurdles because, of course, Europe contains a lot of countries and hardly any coordination on this particular topic.
The main hurdle where I live is in apartment complexes. As far as I know, no particular hurdles apply other than these: any change to the outside look of the house requires the consent of all owners of any single unit, and installing the outside part of a split A/C is such a change. So this is really hard to get.
Any other issue is, AFAIK, purely economic, i.e. installation is expensive.
I think you do not appreciate enough that in the prevailing weather (to not use the politically loaded concept of climate) of the years 1900 to 2000, not building AC in northern Europe was the objectively correct choice.
"Europeans think they basically have the right policy AC should be rare because climate" is (historically) correct in a way that very comically interprets these words in a different way than you presumably meant them.
The root cause of the problem here is not the lack of AC, it is that the freaking weather has changed compared to its 100 year baseline.
I think that there should have been a lot more AC installation in the last 20 years than there has been and its a combination of bad policy and a sort of pathology that tries to justify the current state and not fix the policy problems that is causing it. And all the defenses I see reinforce that view. Other countries have done so.
From Spain here: obviously AC installed here everywhere but AC is nearly always part of a heat pump system (either split air system or central floor cooling/heating) which also provides heating in winter. So one system provides your full interior temperature control throughout the year (works good in Spain where heating needs in winter are not too demanding). There is definitely no "rabid anti AC attitude" here, however, there is a certain cultural mistrust of air conditioning (older people think it makes you catch a cold) and some don't use it for that reason. Another big difference is that it is not used to the crazy extent that it is in the US, where it is turned up to "plaid" every time the outside temperature is above 75º F. Here air conditioning everywhere including malls, public buildings is kept (by law I think) at around 25-26º C (so warmish room temperature), not the 18º C that the US seems to think everyone needs to live in inside the local shopping mall (apparently coldness makes people buy more stuff??)
(Where Spain definitely falls short is in insulation, they still seem to have not yet figured out that insulation, apart from keeping your house warm in winter, also keeps it cool in summer...)
My American house is warmer than 26 C in the summer, with air conditioning. I don't use it for cooling, I use it for drying.
Malls (which are very passe in America) would have been some of the first Air Conditioned spaces (when schools weren't, and homes weren't), so the Air Conditioning was an attractant. Now, understand that alte kochers walk in the Malls, first thing in the morning, and very much would complain if the ac were turned up...
There are many comments here that this is some kind of irrational American outburst against a mythological absence of AC, but it seems like annual heat-related excess deaths in Europe are some of the highest in the world, right up there with India and eastern China: https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-world-champion (charts 3 and 4 at the beginning of the article)
I see inconsistency between the statements that AC access or usage is not a problem and the number of excessive heat deaths that could be solved through a simple piece of technology. One of comments here by user Hernan literally says, "In Germany, patients recover from surgery in rooms without air conditioning and they are told to just open a window." which boggles my mind.
A simple piece of technology doesn't adequately capture the state of the European Electrical Grid. This "simple piece of technology" would break the grid.
When such a claim came across (1-2 days ago), the comments were full with the explanation of the different methodologies across countries and thus, of course, continents.
In "Actual" news, yes, the "rabid anti AC" attitude is really as strong and widespread. Brussels decided to turn off the AC (to show solidarity) but only on the floors where the plebs work.
Both. Euro-snobs want to sneer at America (England's fascination with NHS should ring a bell, ditto the Canadian National Ideology of "we're not USA." *), and they're too poor to afford it anyway. This is a topic nowadays because sports fans (at the World Cup) are sports fans, and happily enthusiastic about Ranch Dressing, Buc-ees, Air conditioning, and other American things that American "eurosnobs" want to talk down to the European sports fans about liking.
*Much decreased in Alberta and the Prarie Regions, don't mean to mischaracterize every place as being Ottowa.
I live in Austria and what "rabid anti AC attitude" are you talking about? Here in Vienna, the biggest problem ist that the AC unit cannot be visible from the street to preserve the city optics and that you have to get permission from your landlord and/or the other owners in the building. So just normal red tape.
This sounds like a condo association/housing association sort of idea, which is common in the United States ("no you may not have a yellow door"). That I will not live in a place with such "normal" red tape is sadly immaterial to the discussion.
As an early AC adopter in the UK, the reactions I see are mainly "yeah, it's nice and I can see why you did it, but I can't afford to get this just for two or three days a year", and pointing out that in 2026 it's needed much more of the year than that is brushed aside.
So certainly not "rabid", at least in my circles; just very slow to react to reality changing.
In Canada, most of the cost of cooling is from the electricity, with decent AC units available for under $200 (Canadian, which is less than American). So you can see why I find that reaction puzzling. Are people having these reactions thinking clearly about cost, or is it just a vibes-based rationalization? Or maybe they're afraid if they get AC, they'll use it more than they can afford, so they don't want the temptation?
Around £1500/room was the going rate here when we had ours done. It's down a little from there now, but not very much; so economies of scale haven't really kicked in yet.
Is there a new moral panic in USA, or just internet being internet? What do you guys need to take attention away from? Ironically, according to Russian media, Europe has been freezing for the last few years. So... maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
Some people have AC here, some don't. It's their own business. Around me, most people seem to have one. In my opinion, in previous decades they were not really needed, but this summer I am changing my mind and we are also buying one, and it will probably only get worse.
The reason against AC in the past was that they were not needed, and when they were a new thing, they were regarded as ugly. Now we have learned to ignore the sight, and they are becoming necessary.
But this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago, but I keep procrastinating on -- someone should write an article on "myths Americans believe about Europe".
I'm calling it ragebait because you called it "canceling Christmas", which your links don't show happening, because it did not happen. But I'm happy to drop the "unsubstantiated" now!
What did happen is that a couple of communes and cities decided to cancel / replace / rename their Christmas fairs for various reasons, at least one of which cites increased cost due to more stringent security regulations.
But of course saying the boring accurate thing doesn't sound as spicy as the exciting "canceled Christmas due to security concerns", and who cares if it's true so long as it's even a little bit truth-adjacent?
Wouldn't be a Wimbli/Zanni/Gawdflea/Grimmoar/Gaspacho/Oldsalt101 comment without a link that in no way supports whatever vague claim it's deployed in service of
It might be surprising to know that it's generally not a good idea to have a large festival on a closed off roadway nicknamed "The Bathtub", with easy to reach, unsecured vantage points from nearby bridges... I went to that festival... it was very stressful.
But there are separate categories of "things uneducated people say" and "things that even educated people believe and you could find them written in straight face even on Less Wrong or Astral Codex Ten (and not only by Wimbli)" and I was thinking about the latter.
Like, when people believe that GDPR actually requires websites to have byzantine dialogs with hundreds of checkboxes (as opposed to these being malicious compliance and actually technically illegal by GDPR). Or that Europeans have some hysteria about AC (as opposed to just many people thinking it's ugly and not worth buying it for one week a year). Other examples do not come to my mind right now, but I am sure there are some.
I guess there is no hard line, it's on a scale, but I am interested in the end of the scale that the educated people are more likely to believe. Cheap digs are fun, but you can find a lot of such material everywhere.
Well, you definitely keep providing data that supports the hypothesis. Could you perhaps stop doing that?
> This does not look like actual Business Transactions from Country To Country. Has Europe indeed never heard of a Wire Transfer?!?
This is actually a perfectly normal bank operation; banks do this all the time. (Most of the time nothing special happens; this was an exception because the Hungarian government decided to play cowboys.) It's just that you seem completely ignorant about how banks actually work, and instead of education yourself, you choose to believe in conspiracy theories. Five minutes spent asking your favorite AI chatbot could help clean up the misunderstanding, but as usual, you choose to get hysterical about things you don't understand instead.
What *is* a wired transfer, under the hood? A message that some money should be moved from one ledger to another. If both ledgers are in the same bank, it is a purely virtual operation; the bank simply increases one number and decreases another. But what if whose ledgers belong to different banks? That starts a more complicated process called "clearing and settlement", which also typically only results in something virtual, because if one guy sends €100 from bank X to bank Y, probably some other guy sent €100 from bank Y to bank X during the same month, and the money is fungible, so from the bank-to-bank perspective, these operations cancel each other out.
But sometimes the differences accumulate, and there were too many wire transfers from bank X to bank Y, without corresponding transfers in the reverse direction. In that case, an armored car brings some gold (or other things) from bank X to bank Y, to restore the balance between the virtual and the real.
Wire transfer means that you can do million virtual operations before you need one real-world convoy with gold. It doesn't mean that you *never* need to transfer the gold. Transferring the gold occasionally is what allows the wire transfers to work even in case of imbalanced money flows.
Next time please use an AI to clarify things. We are not your personal tutors. A certain degree of literacy is assumed here.
I own gold. It's not in my house. Most banks do not own gold that they store in their basements. One can change the "who owns this" of a commodity without having to move said gold to the new country. Yes, it is SERIOUSLY WEIRD to see gold being moved, by hand, through countries. (Did you know that most banks also have large silver holdings? Gold is at least portable.)
50 storage facilities across 14 countries, including London.
Of course, HSBC holding gold is so that few other banks need to hold it, they are setting themselves up as a major broker.
You could have said "it looks like the Ukraine doesn't trust the European Union to actually deliver" or "This is the former USSR, they like to have their money in case of bank runs" or any number of other reasons for a highly irregular transfer.
It's not standard policy to hold silver or gold under every potnick credit union. Commodities are bought and sold without having to deliver physical goods. This is normal business.
No. I really do think this is some internet nonsense, and unconnected to the real world.
My personal problem with AC - largely from experiences in NY and Chicago in high summer - is that you go from uncomfortably hot external conditions to uncomfortably cold ones inside; the more uncomfortable if one has worked up a mild sweat.
That said, if I had a house in London, I should probably now install AC - which it wouldn't have occurred to me to do when I did live there in the 1990s. For my house in rural northern England, there is no point. For the house we have an interest in in Southern France, it would be a ridiculous thing to install because the interior is cool in the hottest of summers. Keeping it warm in winter is more of a challenge.
Others have pointed out the obvious conundrum: that the dwellings most in need of aircon are the ones where installation is both a cost and a practical challenge.
You have very bad HVAC installers. You want to size DOWN, not up. Then your "air conditioner" is a dehumidifier first, not a cooling engine. And you can keep it "pretty warm" (ours is set to 80 degrees).
Yes. If you're going from uncomfortably hot to uncomfortably cold, the AC is not working as a dehumidifier, as it should be (in order to maximize "human factor cooling" while using the least energy, and having the least leakage).
In short, it's not the systems fault if people are using it incorrectly and stupidly.
I'm "irrationally" against over optimising for comfort because I don't want to become a prisoner of it.
In my experience Europeans have a wider range of temperatures they are happy to operate in - that means there's a wider range of conditions they are willing to go outside in.
I also think caving to comfort on temperature comes alongside caving on a lot of other prisoner of convivence issues. Obviously I've no idea where the lines of cause and correlation sit but it feels like a slippery slope. But I like being willing to walk to places. I like to be willing to accept a bit of rain. I like having some tolerance to hunger. I like not expecting opiate grade painkillers for all injuries.
I have US in-laws and regularly spend time there so have at least some first hand anecdotes building my world view on the above comparisons.
When we get older we'll all suffer one way or the other - it's nice to have built up a bit of resilience. Undoubtably I could better optimise for this and am putting too much on suffering this one pain point - but again - I don't know where the boundary lies, its a slippery slope. I'm proud we're tough on conditions while lazy on work life balance.
Last time I was in Europe, you could routinely identify americans, even when it was over 100 degrees Farenheit, because they'd be the only people in shorts.
Wouldn’t you think it bizarre if someone lived in a place where it regularly was cold and sometimes below freezing, but refused to heat their home? They relied solely on jackets and hot drinks.
If you want to be able to experience the heat, then go outside. But there’s nothing wrong with making your home a comfortable place to live.
I do that and I live in the US. I've discovered that if the internal apartment temp goes below 10C* the heating will automatically turn on, but that's only happened once in a rare deep cold snap. Otherwise...wool sweater, wool blankets, wool socks. It's fine. Insulating myself is much more efficient than heating all my surroundings.
*My thermostat came with C on it and I never bothered to fix it because I think getting used to Celsius is important
Try going to Bonnie old England, cheerio. Keeping your house at 60 degrees (or less) is the "done thing" in the winter (despite the damp), and the English literally have tools to break the ice on the toilet in the morning.
I think it's a rural thing (this being one step up from outhouses, I suppose -- plumbing going in where it's convenient, and not being particularly well-insulated).
The inside of my home is also colder in winter than the US homes I've experienced. Sometimes I do wear a jumper rather than turning up the heat more. As I said I tolerate a wider temperature range.
You can call that weird, maybe it is. But maybe its weird to get addicted to comfort. Maybe comfort isn't addictive, maybe it doesn't soften people. I think I'm not completely mental for thinking it might.
I've been in less than that, in a hotel without heating or electricity. The main annoyance was "no hot water, so no showers to rinse the sweat off." We had blankets, it was fiiiine, for a day or two.
Folks on the other side of the gorge spent weeks without electricity in the winter (someone had a generator, so it was "the town's generator"), and they seemed "pretty okay with it."
We'd just like to note at this point that we're talking West Virginia, and fixing power lines in the mountains can be difficult.
I've had my heating break when its been that temperature - it wasn't pleasant but I didn't move everyone into a hotel. At that temp I'd be most worried about it going below freezing at night and bursting pipes.
Would I think it was bizarre to leave it at that temperature for a prolonged period - yeah fairly. Do I think its bizarre that people can't handle it - definitely. Never allowing your house to fall to 13 degrees (55 degree fahrenheit) and thus never allowing yourself to be able to handle 2 degrees - not bizarre but I think its mistake.
We can start talking about cut-off points for higher temperatures but its a trade-off on cost, highs and the number of days the temperature runs above your preferences as well as my view that it makes you a different kind of person.
We have different cultures. The US is a consumption driven society. It has higher economic growth, its richer. I'm not going to argue you're doing everything wrong. But I think some of the differences have merits on our side. I think these things are connected. I don't think its irrational to round some of these complex interactions off as - "hmmm I just don't want AC" - up to some average high temperature even which is above our preferences.
I worry more about the various conveniences we're all getting addicted to (including me - I use a smartphone) than a lack of comfort.
I mean, we love AC. (We just don't find it cost-effective in most places, a calculation which may change as temperatures increase, but that's honestly besides the point, because the actual issue is:)
What's currently happening on the internet is a bunch of American commentariat declaring it's some kind of moral deficiency not to have AC installed absolutely everywhere (including places it's already installed in by default, because you can't let facts get in the way of a narrative), and it should be pretty obvious what reaction THAT is going to get.
What's happening is European sports fans who are incredulous at American Sports Stadiums that actually provide Air Conditioning (these are huge venues).
Oh! And American Hotels with thermostats in your room!
Can't speak for the entire continent, but it's not "rabid". It's simply that the cooler parts never needed air conditioning except in very rare and exceptional circumstances, and the hotter parts developed their own ways of coping with the conditions.
Now we're getting unusual weather patterns in the cooler northern parts and the warm parts are even hotter in the hot seasons.
Infrastructure really isn't set up for the sort of mass air conditioning as per the USA, e.g. windows for using window units don't seem to be the same way (and I've never seen a window mounted unit, so I'm going off videos) - the sash type window where you can open the bottom vertically and stick the box in the aperture have been replaced by non-opening panes for the lower half of the window or horizontally opening.
Air conditioning in buildings is in more modern places, but even where it was installed, often it's not run (e.g. in one office I worked in) or it's so feeble as to be useless.
There isn't the same familiarity with using air conditioning and the weather can be unpredictably variable - we had a mini-heat wave in Ireland for a week or so, now it's raining again and milder.
tl;dr: buildings aren't set up for air con, it's unfamiliar and expensive and troublesome (energy costs are a big factor here, I don't think Americans appreciate how their cheap oil makes such a huge difference in pricing)
Energy costs are a big factor for you guys, sure, but also your tottering grid. It's a bad sign when England's "winter plan" is "If we run out of electricity, buy from France!"
It's a far worse sign when France's "winter plan" is "If we run out of electricity, buy from England!"
(They can't do both at once, obviously -- or it would have been obvious if they'd talked to each other without direct American Intervention.)
It's not the buying of electricity that's the problem, obviously. The problem is both sides depending on the other "overproducing" -- this could be a problem.
It may not be particularly smart of France to say "If we can't generate enough electricity, let's just buy it from England..."
[This discussion occurred "years" ago, not this year. France is apparently looking at an oversupply of power, which makes the "no you can't have air conditioning, that's selfish!" just a bit more hilarious.]
US citizen and US resident here. I grew up with AC, and I hated it. When I moved out on my own, I never used it (even in the hot, muggy summers of New England and the Midwest). I don't know if I would have been forced to use it if I had lived in the deep South, but to me, air-conditioned air makes me feel smothered. Hot, stifling air can be mitigated by directing a fan at myself. Cold, stifling air makes me claustrophobic. Swamp coolers in desert climes don't bother me. But AC makes me cringe.
Grew up (and still live in) the American South. Had no air conditioning. Had nights where my siblings and I would have to sleep with our heads on the windowsills to try to get cool. We finally got A/C when I was a teenager and it was a blessed relief . . . until I went to college and had a dorm room with no A/C, but that wasn't too bad since I wasn't there for the summer quarter.
Still, I will never go back to being without air conditioning.
My mom had a heat exchanger installed at her place. I'm pretty sure if was also dehumidifying. I could last inside for an hour on a hot day, but the "deadness" of the air would start to drive me crazy. I don't know how to describe it other than deadness. I felt muffled. I'd always head out her (shady) porch with a cool drink and deal with the heat. She'd always come out to complain about why I wasn't inside where it was cool. :-) When I lived in New England the Midwest, I didn't like central heating either. I'd crack a window to improve air circulation, even though it wastes heat. Go figure.
Air quality can get awful bad indoors, particularly if you never vent your house. We use "air conditioning" for the computers, but otherwise, it's more fun to be outside.
That’s crazy. I understand why Europeans don’t have it but it gets sweltering hot here. The American South was underpopulated compared to the North for a long time because no one wanted to put up with summers of 90 degree Fahrenheit heat and it was underdeveloped because those who did live here didn’t want to work in it.
It is a bit contradictionary, though, that having an AC unit common makes lots of people move to places where they are, by default, not really happy (the South, or Nevada), leading to a LOT more AC use (and, thus, energy consumption).
I understand what you're saying, but modern humans have lived without AC for 600,000 years, and they were able to populate every corner of the world except Antarctica. Before the 1960s, the US didn't have AC in most homes. They got along just fine. People have become such pussies about heat. I'm just shaking my head at the current AC controversy.
Most people dealt with the cold by making a fire and wearing fur. We have better options now.
There’s a reason that the Industrial Revolution happened in a moderate climate. You can’t be that productive when it’s scorching hot. AC is how you can spread European wealth to other climates.
You say that like you've got data to back it up, but it sounds like another Hegelian cultural just-so story to me.
1. It wasn't like the Industrial Revolution in Europe was evenly distributed across the continent. In 1810, there were >2,500 steam engines. France: <200. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain, specifically the Midlands, where iron, anthracite coal, and abundant water power were all close together. And steam engines were initially used for pumping out mines but eventually became repurposed for other tasks. Climate had very little to do with the Industrial Revolution. Geography, resources, and a relatively unfettered proto-capitalist system created a perfect synchronicity of events in Britain.
2. The idea that the rest of the world was backward compared to Europe in the early modern era is false. For instance, back in the 16th century, we have the accounts and the account books from Dutch and Portuguese traders who did business with the West African kingdoms. For instance, bright African cloth was a luxury good in Europe. According to one Dutch trader, the Kingdom of the Kongo was exporting as much cloth as the City of Leiden produced. That same Dutch trader noted that the literacy rate in the Kingdom of the Kongo was higher than the Netherlands, with ordinary people able to read and do sums.
3. The reason European material culture spread to the rest of the world was that Europe (Spain and Portugal initially) had to develop ships that were able to undertake multi-month voyages — all because Europe faced a cutoff of trade routes to the East by the colonial expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Which was the most powerful empire at the time (and, but for a few quirks of military fate, could have conquered all of Central Europe).
So this cold-climate narrative is basically a fairy tale that Euro-focused historians operating within a Hegelian philosophical framework have foisted upon us.
I think we have a possibility-probability confusion here. Sure, humans were present at pretty much each point of the globe, but the population density was quite different.
Sure, there were people living in Nevada in 1960, too; according to Wiki, 285,278 of them. In 2020 this amount grew to 3,104,614, which is an almost 1000% increase (+988%). In the same time frame, the population of the whole US grew from 179M to 331M, +85%.
Rationally, no one would put a city like Las Vegas into the middle of a desert for obvious reasons.
Las Vegas? Las Vegas was founded in 1829. Tell me again why we don't put cities where there are natural water sources? That goes triple for the desert, of course.
Atlanta has no good natural water sources (railroad town, where two railroads meet), and Miami is in the process of salting up their water sources (and the nearest place to run an aqueduct from is Northern Florida).
The alternative is people stay out of those hot places, making housing affordability much worse in the North while keeping the south unproductive and poor. AC is a godsend.
Perhaps a better analogy is the availability of cheap fuel to make transport more accessible. (Yes, the US recipe.) However, this results in huge sprawls of large family houses, where pretty much the only sensible way of transport is to use a car (and a big one).
Yes, the car is also a godsend, but prioritizing it over anything else has drawbacks as well.
More like: somewhat worse, with much better energy consumption. (But perhaps it leads to smaller avg. houses, and avg. house size in the US is, without a doubt, well, not small.)
The whole line of argument could be applied directly to underwater homes.
Well, that and the IQ difference (air conditioning fixed that sure enough). Smart places like Iran and Columbia, that live in the heat, build up as high as they can get.
I run my Air Conditioning at 82 degrees in the summer (it's supposed to dry the house out, and let the computers run, not make the place frigid and unpleasant). If your air conditioning needed to be run down to 70 degrees, it was poorly sized and ill-designed for your house.
It's not the coolness. It's the air's uniformity. For instance, AC filters out a lot of micro-particulates, and the consensus is that's a good thing. But I'm outside in the heat right now (not super hot — just shy of 90 degrees F, 32 degrees C). But as I walk around outside and as the breeze moves past me I pick up a lot of subtle scents that I wouldn't if I were muffled up in AC. My house is still cool (insulated roof and shaded by trees), but I have the windows open and air from the outside is circulating. I'm forced to use the AC in my car when it gets hotter than today, and a car can really get sweltering. But I always crack the windows to get the breeze from the outside. And in the wintertime, I also keep my house windows and car windows cracked to get that sensory stimulation from the external world. I noticed that swamp coolers don't "deaden" the air like AC does.
Ah. I live in a polluted hellscape (not literally "wash your sooty face after walking home from school" -- anymore at least!). AC filters don't really do much for small particulate... (I have a low-clean room grade air purifier, and that's Quite Nice).
As a kid (without air conditioning, but definitely heating), I was pretty sensitive (still am) to indoor air pollutants -- they give me headaches. My mom used to find it funny that "I have a headache" meant "let me play outside" (mainly because I wasn't doing my homework, but it really did help.)
Is Europe rabidly anti-AC? No, not really, though there are worries about electricity consumption and about spikes during heatwaves resulting in blackouts. The previous generation of AC units which vented through holes cut into walls or windows were rightly regarded as eyesores when they multiplied like parasites all over the frontage of buildings; there is also concern about the amount of heat being vented, particularly in cities.
Padraig's post is absolutely correct about older European houses being both better adapted to heat (higher ceilings, better cross-ventilation and so forth) and ill-adapted to AC. However, that applies almost by definition to the dwellings of established and financially better-off Europeans; the real issue is the huge problem of cooling small, often poorly constructed apartments in social housing constructed since the war. In France's bidonvilles, the situation is made very much worse by the fact that most apartments do not have shutters to ward off radiant heat. The traditional response to high summer temperatures in southern Europe, and a very effective one in the right houses, is to close both shutters and windows at dawn and keep them closed till dusk
I'm a European, and have to ask what rabid anti-AC attitude? It's probably a reflection of the online spaces you frequent, rather than reality on the ground.
In practice, the parts of Europe that get really hot don't have the infrastructure for AC. The houses are adapted to the heat by having high ceilings and big windows to let air flow through. They're not really insulated or airtight - so introducing aircon is not as simple as hooking up a window unit. The electrical grid isn't ready for that load, and air conditioners are not sold widely.
All of that is changing quickly. Split-AC units are now down to about 350€. In some hot parts of Europe, people have been installing ACs for years.
Installing an AC *is* as simple as installing a split unit at a window/wall. Not having a very well insulated house is not a reason against AC - it's a mindset thing: In North America (US and Mexico, that is my experience) ACs are installed in "paper boxes" without any regard for efficiency.
Even in Germany, AC is now selling like the hottest thing: Scalpers have entered the market to sell portable split ACs at 2-5 times the previous market price. Normal fixed AC units are not affected, but since Germany is a tenant-country, many people can't install fixed AC units in their flats (not able to get approval from landlord).
Electricity grid is not an excuse in many places: Germany has a massive overproduction of solar power during sunshine anyway. Anybody else can get a set of solar panels and inverter for about 300€, which pays for itself over a few years.
This response is at least adjacent to it, though youve presented it civily. It elides over the fact that govt rules heavily restrict its use and instead offers reasons why some individually choose to not use it. It seems to a US observer in denial that there is significant demand but little political effort to make it possible.
There are no restrictions on buying, owning, installing or running an AC unit in your own home in Ireland. I'm not sure about other countries. On the other hand, if you plugged in a few hundred thousand window units tomorrow, it would crash the grid; and for climate reasons we probably shouldn't be introducing that much additional demand.
It feels to me that a lot of the Fox-News-style coverage of 'Europe' is intended to create a punching-bag to promote an agenda. It tends not to be grounded in facts. In this case, I'm vaguely aware of some questionable guidance in the UK, but I don't know of anything else going on in Europe which feeds into this story. Maybe I'm just ill-informed.
Note that the prompt requires the LLM to infer why the joke is funny. While it may seem silly to use imitating a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker joke as a benchmark, the Futurama/good-Simpsons-seasons writing team included a bunch of mathematicians who compared joke-writing to logic problems and I think this joke is a good example of the kind of cognitive task we'd like to outsource to AI, if you break it down into a toy-model of requirements or steps:
The structure of the joke requires a setup with two logically linked questions that have a shared answer
The LLM has to search a large, nebulous concept-space for combinations of questions and answers that meet that logical requirement
The LLM has to judge funniness, where toy-model criteria may be how well does the setup conform to a genre convention, how well does the answer subvert the genre convention of the setup, and how retrospectively-obvious is the answer to the first question also an answer to the second question? In the original, "Who are you and how did you get in here?" matches well for the genre being spoofed, identifying oneself by a banal occupation is a good subversion, and the implication that you should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security is retrospectively obvious.
More realistically, you'd specify requirements and optimization criteria for your requested search of a large, nebulous concept-space, rather than expect AI to infer them, but gauging why jokes are funny is also a good test, so I wanted to start with that, then see if the LLMs need the requirements and optimization criteria specified.
More to the point, free-tier LLMs I've tried simply CANNOT successfully follow this prompt, so I'm curious how paid-tier (especially the top/SoTA) ones respond.
For brownie points, also try:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following joke:
"Surely you can't be serious." "I am. And don't call me Shirley."
I don't know if LLMs should be expected to be good at homophones or if we should particularly care whether or not they're good at homophones, but I'm curious what outputs they give.
Thank you!
Edit:
"Control" criteria/hints to try giving the LLM, now that we've established that paid-tier models aren't immediately succeeding (If you try your own criteria/hints, that'd also be interesting, just include what they are):
The two questions in the setup must be logically related (If the setup were, itself, a non-sequitur, it would break the basic syntax of comedy, especially this carefully-structured joke)
The more they conform to a genre convention, the better ("Who are you and how did you get in here?" is taken from crime-drama)
The more the punchline subverts the tone and genre conventions of the setup, the better ("I'm a locksmith" is using a banal occupation to identify oneself, which subverts both the dramatic tone and genre conventions of the setup)
The more obvious the punchline is as an answer to the second question, the better (You should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security)
Both additionally OR alternatively, people could try explicitly giving a degree of freedom that LLMs seem disinclined to use, which is that the setup doesn't NEED to include "Who are you" and the answer doesn't NEED to be an occupation. (The free ones I tried consistently over-indexed on that, as well, across many sessions.)
I posted, because I use duck.ai, not paid models, but here's what GPT 5.4 mini came up with:
I wanted a missing sock, but the dryer only had one. So I bought a pair of shoes.
I asked for a light snack, but the café didn’t have one. So they brought me a lamp and a sandwich.
I needed a ticket to ride, but the station was out. So I got on a bicycle.
I wanted a book cover, but the shop was sold out. So I wore a coat and read outside.
I asked for a manila folder, but they were all gone. So I just hired a guy from Manila.
Haiku 4.5:
"I wanted to buy a bookcase at the store, but they were all sold out. So I just put my book in a briefcase instead."
"I tried to order a cold shoulder from my friend as a favor, so I iced my shoulder down and asked him to touch it. He said that's not what he meant."
"I needed a traffic jam for my breakfast, but the bakery didn't have any. So I sat on the highway with some toast and preserves."
"I wanted to hire a pitcher for my baseball team's water cooler. The guy I found was great—he literally throws water. Just not the kind we needed."
"I asked the barista for a shot of espresso. She handed me a camera and said, 'Go take one.' Fair point."
All VERY far off the mark. But they both performed pretty closely to the top models on the ZAZ joke, so logically sophisticated comedy may be an area in which there is NOT a drastic difference between tiers.
The high-tier models seem to come up with things that make some sense but aren't funny, while the low-tier models aren't funny and don't make sense either.
For instance there's the skeleton of a perfectly fine "traffic jam" pun there (a similar joke was in Spaceballs) but it gets confused about what's setup and what's punchline, you don't order a traffic jam from the bakery. Nor do you order a cold shoulder from your friend as a favour, and then it gets confused about who is supposed to be speaking.
An even bigger problem with these jokes: it's suggested a bunch of puns, but the original joke wasn't a pun at all, it's an "unexpected thing actually makes some logical sense" joke.
"The high-tier models seem to come up with things that make some sense but aren't funny, while the low-tier models aren't funny and don't make sense either."
We'll have to see if anyone tries the Hedberg joke with a high-tier model...
The classic locksmith joke (famously delivered by Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad!) works through deadpan literalism. The humor comes from answering a compound question—one half asking for an identity, the other asking for the explanation of an intrusive or impossible action—by repeating the exact same occupational title twice, because the job itself perfectly answers both.
Here are five jokes that use that exact same comedic structure:
1. The Escape Artist
"Who are you, and how did you fit inside my suitcase?"
"I'm a contortionist. And I'm a contortionist."
2. The Thief
"Who are you, and where did my watch go?"
"I'm a pickpocket. And I'm a pickpocket."
3. The Illusionist
"Who are you, and how are you currently floating in mid-air?"
"I'm a magician. And I'm a magician."
4. The Culprit
"Who are you, and why is my living room on fire?"
"I'm an arsonist. And I'm an arsonist."
5. The Intruder
"Who are you, and why did you just chop down my front door?"
I am a human and somewhat critical of LLM capabilities and this is a better answer than I could have given.
I do not find the original funny at all, the meh AI versions of it only highlight to me how meh the original is. I of course understand in a theoretical sense why other people might find this funny and the AI nails that theory.
But, and here the AI has the advantage on me, I would not have known where the joke is from in the original.
The humor in that joke comes from double meanings (or "polysemy"), where the first instance of the word describes a person's profession, and the second instance describes the action they just performed.
Here are five jokes that work using the same logic:
The Baker
"Who are you and why are you in my kitchen?"
"I'm a baker. And I'm baking."
The Plumber
"Who are you and why are you under my sink?"
"I'm a plumber. And I'm plumbing."
The Painter
"Who are you and why is there wet paint on my wall?"
"I'm a painter. And I'm painting."
The Driver
"Who are you and why are you behind the wheel of my car?"
"I'm a driver. And I'm driving."
The Hacker
"Who are you and why are you in my computer system?"
What makes the original land is that the two questions seem to need different answers, but a single fact answers both — the profession that explains who he is is the same one that explains how he did the suspicious thing. The deadpan repetition treats one answer as if it's two.
Five in the same vein:
"Who are you and how did you get past my firewall?" "I'm a hacker. And I'm a hacker."
"Who are you and how did you walk through that wall?" "I'm a ghost. And I'm a ghost."
"Who are you and how is my watch on your wrist?" "I'm a pickpocket. And I'm a pickpocket."
"Who are you and how did you know I'd ask that?" "I'm a psychic. And I'm a psychic."
"Who are you and how did you get out of the handcuffs?" "I'm an escape artist. And I'm an escape artist."
---
Me again. Claude interpreted "same reason" very literally and produced five variations of essentially the same joke. As far as I'm concerned, all the variants it came up with are successful; the only reason they're not as funny to me as the original is that I heard the original first and these are all the same joke. I guess maybe they're worse because "how did you get in here" is more of a stock question than the ones it picked?
Not exactly blowing me out of the water with creativity, but it does demonstrate that Claude understands the original joke, and I can't say it didn't successfully answer the prompt.
*edit* On further consideration, the latter 3 it came up with are actually worse than the original. It's not just that they're not stock questions like "how did you get in here," they don't make sense in a scenario that starts with "Who are you..." What plausible story results in you knowing that somebody was in handcuffs, but not knowing who they are? I shouldn't have given these a pass along with the first two.
Do you want to try including criteria/hints, to see if it can do better? For example:
The two questions in the setup must be logically related (If the setup were, itself, a non-sequitur, it would break the basic syntax of comedy, especially this carefully-structured joke)
The more they conform to genre convention, the better ("Who are you and how did you get in here?" is taken from crime-drama)
The more the punchline subverts the tone and genre conventions of the setup, the better ("I'm a locksmith" is using a banal occupation to identify oneself, which subverts both the dramatic tone and genre conventions of the setup)
The more obvious the punchline is as an answer to the second question, the better (You should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security)
Both additionally or alternatively, people could try explicitly giving a degree of freedom that LLMs seem disinclined to use, that the setup doesn't NEED to include "Who are you" and the answer doesn't NEED to be an occupation. (The free ones I tried consistently over-indexed on that, as well, across many sessions.)
Extra is the setting that controls the amount of thinking Claude does. I have it on the second-highest setting, which is my default (because I frankly don't use my subscription enough to be precious about tokens).
Claude again, after being given your hints:
---
The first batch leaned too supernatural (ghost, psychic), which escalates the drama instead of deflating it. The fix is a maximally boring trade whose everyday job description is exactly the menacing feat. Five tuned for that:
"Who are you, and why is the patient unconscious?" "I'm an anesthesiologist. And I'm an anesthesiologist."
"Who are you, and how did you wipe out the whole nest?" "I'm an exterminator. And I'm an exterminator."
"Who are you, and how did you get to our window? We're forty floors up." "I'm a window cleaner. And I'm a window cleaner."
"Who are you, and why are you so calm next to the body?" "I'm a mortician. And I'm a mortician."
"Who are you, and how did you walk through the swarm untouched?" "I'm a beekeeper. And I'm a beekeeper."
The anesthesiologist is probably the strongest: "why is the patient unconscious?" is pure medical-thriller ("someone drugged him!"), and rendering people unconscious is so literally the job that the threat evaporates on contact.
---
Frankly I think these are much worse, which is funny.
Claude's assessment that the anesthesiologist joke "is probably the strongest" could have merit, if it also came up with a ZAZ-like backstory to contextualize the exchange.
For what it's worth I immediately liked the anesthesiologist one. I think there's an extra layer of comedy here - the implication that locksmiths just *automatically break into everywhere because they can* is similarly partnered here in an extra layer of humor with the implications that anesthesiologists just matter-of-factly render patients unconscious, even if they aren't specified to be in need of anesthesia. In both the cases the fact that these require tools makes identifying your job description somewhat more amusing. Not "I picked the lock" or "I injected the patient with a sedative" but simply stating your general job description.
This is also why I think it's by far the strongest of those 5 jokes.
"Calm next to the body" is a question you wouldn't really ask outside of a very specific situation - it's fishing for circumstantial evidence for suspicion at best. "Don't look distressed" is much less impactful than "rendered someone unconscious."
As for "window cleaner cleaning window" or "exterminator exterminating" or "beekeeper hanging out with bees" these are all somewhat more niche, specialized activities. A beekeeper, as long as they have their uniform, DOES just passively, constantly walk through swarms.
Anesthesiologists, on the other hand, spend a fairly small amount of their time actively rendering someone unconscious, and usually with a concrete specific reason. Window cleaners spend all of their work day outside a window, but anesthesiologists still spend a minority of it standing over someone they knocked unconscious, much like most locksmiths can break into places but generally aren't at any one moment. So I think with that specific example - and like the original locksmith version - there's more layers going on in the comedy of identifying the state of affairs with what you *are* rather than what you *did*.
Thanks! I don't know how every variant of every LLM compares, but GPT 5.5 Thinking is a heavy-hitter, isn't it? It'll be interesting to see if another LLM can succeed where it failed.
Do you want to try including criteria/hints, to see if it can do better? For example:
The two questions in the setup must be logically related (If the setup were, itself, a non-sequitur, it would break the basic syntax of comedy, especially this carefully-structured joke)
The more they conform to genre convention, the better ("Who are you and how did you get in here?" is taken from crime-drama)
The more the punchline subverts the tone and genre conventions of the setup, the better ("I'm a locksmith" is using a banal occupation to identify oneself, which subverts both the dramatic tone and genre conventions of the setup)
The more obvious the punchline is as an answer to the second question, the better (You should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security)
Edit: If more top LLMs fail, even with criteria/hints, perhaps people could try explicitly giving a degree of freedom that LLMs seem disinclined to use, that the setup doesn't NEED to include "Who are you" and the answer doesn't NEED to be an occupation.
Have you tried giving your exact prompt to humans? Part of the problem is it's not clear what you're asking for from your original prompt. I wouldn't have known how closely you wanted the jokes to stick to the original structure from just the prompt.
After some back and forth with ChatGPT 5.5 explaining that it can follow the structure more loosely, it eventually came up with this:
1. At the museum:
“What are you doing in the gallery, and how did you get past the motion detector?”
“Standing still. And standing still.”
2. At the restaurant:
“How would you like your steak, and how often do you two get out?”
“Rare. And rare.”
3. At the job interview:
“Where do you see yourself in five years, and what interests you most about this position?”
“Your chair. And your chair.”
4. At the ENT clinic:
“How’s your breathing, and how will you be paying today?”
“Through the nose. And through the nose.”
5. At school:
“Where’s your homework, and what’s your excuse this time?”
"Have you tried giving your exact prompt to humans? Part of the problem is it's not clear what you're asking for from your original prompt. I wouldn't have known how closely you wanted the jokes to stick to the original structure from just the prompt."
No, because I thought the first step would be to see if high-tier models outperform low-tier models. (If you're asking how I expect humans to perform on this task, I expect a professional comedy writer would be able to do the "locksmith" one, but not necessarily the homophone one, while the median human would fail at both.)
1 would require some ZAZ-like version of "get[ting] past the motion detector
2 has an unnatural setup, but a human could rework that into a bit
3 is better, but a human could rewrite it more naturally
4 is rough, but a human could rework that into a bit
5 works as-is! Can you share the conversation?
(I'd guess that GPT 5.5 Thinking could also rework 2, 3, and 4 into comedy bits, if prompted to do so. I'm curious if it can come up with a ZAZ-like backstory to contextualize 1.)
Here's Gemini Flash 3.5 Extended thinking for your second prompt:
Here are five jokes that use the exact same comedic mechanism—deliberately misinterpreting a common word at the start of a sentence as a direct-address first name, followed by a deadpan correction:
1.
A: "Frankly, we are running out of options."
B: "We are. And don't call me Frank."
2.
A: "Will you please take this situation seriously?"
B: "I am. And don't call me Will."
3.
A: "Earnestly, this is a matter of life and death."
B: "I understand. And don't call me Ernest."
4.
A: "Grant us the authority to move forward with the plan."
B: "You have it. And don't call me Grant."
5.
A: "Mark my words, this is going to backfire completely."
It's interesting that these are either syntactically incorrect, because they use a modification of a homophone in the setup-statement, or syntactically incorrect, because the setup-statement is grammatically incomplete without the name. Surely Zucker -Abrahams-Zucker didn't find the only satisfactory phomophone in the English language~
"Surely" is an adverb, and since adverbs generally end in -ly that limits your options a lot. For most names you'd probably have to do a different sentence structure - maybe "Let me be frank..." "Ok, Frank."
Good observation. However, the prompt isn't to structure the joke with the homophone in the same location, it's to write five jokes that are funny for the same reason; the homophone could be in any location, so long as the sentence is grammatically valid by either interpretation, creating the necessary lexical ambiguity. If only there was a type of AI that could both generate and analyze all possible variations of the same content using valid grammar with superhuman speed and accuracy...
Edit:
Haiku 4.5 gave me reasoning, but no output (well, prior output was mostly invalid)
Prompt:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following:
"Surely you can't be serious." "I am. And don't call me 'Shirley.'"
(Note: The homophone for a given-name does not need to be the first word of the setup-statement, the setup-statement just needs to be grammatically valid by either interpretation. However, being grammatically valid by either interpretation is critical.)
Best attempts:
"Theresa good chance of rain today." "I'm not Theresa. But yes, there's a good chance of rain today."
"Art you going to the meeting?" "I'm not Art. But yes, I am going to the meeting."
Reasoning:
This is asking me to understand the humor in that famous joke from "Airplane!" and then write similar jokes using the same comedic mechanism.
The joke works because:
1. "Surely" is a setup that uses a word that sounds like the given name "Shirley"
2. The punchline interprets "Surely" as if it were the name "Shirley"
3. The response "I am. And don't call me 'Shirley'" treats "Surely" as if the person is saying "call me Shirley" when they said "surely"
4. The sentence is grammatically valid both ways - "Surely you can't be serious" is valid (using the adverb), and "Shirley, you can't be serious" would also be valid (using it as a name)
So I need to find other homophone pairs where:
- One is a common word (adverb, adjective, verb, etc.)
- One sounds like a given name
- I can create a setup sentence that's grammatically valid using the common word
- The punchline can reinterpret it as the name
Let me think of homophone/similar-sounding pairs:
- "Quickly" / "Quigley" - "Quickly, we need to leave!" / "I am. And don't call me 'Quigley.'"
Check: "Quickly, we need to leave" is grammatically valid (adverb starting a sentence). "Quigley, we need to leave" is also grammatically valid (name). ✓
- "Kent" / "Can't" - Wait, that's backwards. But "Can't" doesn't sound like "Kent". Let me think... Actually, in some accents, "Kent" (the name) and "Can't" are different. Not a good pair.
- "Wayne" / "Wane" - "The light will wane soon" (verb) vs "Wayne, the light will soon" doesn't work grammatically.
- "Juan" / "Won" - "I won the race" doesn't translate to "Juan the race" grammatically.
- "Bill" / "Will" - "Will you help me?" could work, but "Bill you help me?" isn't valid syntax.
- "Paige" / "Page" - "Turn the page" doesn't set up as "Turn the Paige" in a way that works.
- "Stan" / "Stand" - "Stand back!" could become "Stan back!" but that's not quite right either.
- "Mark" / "Marc" - too phonetically similar to create the intended effect.
- "Reed" / "Read" - neither "Read the book" nor "Reed the book" establishes a clear homophone joke.
- "Les" / "Less" - "Less is more" works as a statement, but the name version doesn't land the same way.
- "Iris" - this one's just a name, not a homophone at all.
- "Arthur" / "Are there" - "Are there any questions?" becomes "Arthur any questions?" which breaks grammatically.
Moving through more possibilities: "Justin" / "Just in" could work with "Just in time!" but that's more exclamation than setup. "Ilene" / "I lean" fails because "Ilene on your support" isn't valid. "Ben" / "Been" doesn't work—"Have you Ben here?" isn't grammatical. "Olive" / "All of" creates "Olive you should listen," which is nonsensical. "Barry" / "Bury" gives "Barry the treasure," which doesn't work as a command with a name. "Neil" / "Kneel" produces "Neil down," which isn't valid. "Claire" / "Clear" results in "Claire the room," also invalid. "Paige" / "Page" would be "Turn the Paige," which doesn't quite work grammatically either.
But "Rose" / "Rows" or past tense "rose" is promising. The sentence "Rose quickly from the chair" works both ways—as the past tense verb "rose" (she rose) and as a name with an imperative or descriptive phrase. This creates a valid punchline structure where the ambiguity actually holds up grammatically.
The core pattern here mirrors "Surely" / "Shirley"—both sentence structures are grammatically sound, just with different interpretations. I'm exploring other homophones or near-homophones: "Aloud" doesn't function as a name, "Ida" doesn't create a workable contraction, and "Tina" or "Pam" don't yield the right sound play. "Kent" and "Can't" are nearly identical in standard pronunciation, which could work similarly to the "Shirley" example. "Bill be done" / "Will be done" - but the setup would need to be "I will help" not starting with "Bill".
I'm noticing that many common names don't create clean homophones with actual words, or when they do, they don't fit naturally into sentences. Names like "Stan" (stand), "Ben" (been), "May" (may), and "Rob" work better as potential homophones, though I need to verify they actually produce grammatical sentences when substituted.
Some stronger candidates are emerging: "Sue" (sue), "Ward" (ward), "Hugh" (hue), "Ty" (tie), "Paige" (page), and "Grace" (grace) all have clear word equivalents. "Rose" is particularly interesting since it functions as both a name and the past tense of "rise," which could create a natural double meaning in a sentence like "That rose quickly" - though the punchline feels forced when trying to make the joke explicit.
Looking at other names with verb potential: "May" works well because both "May I ask?" and "May, I ask?" are grammatically valid, creating a genuine ambiguity. "Sue me" similarly functions as both a command and a name-based phrase. "Will" is trickier since "Will, you help?" sounds awkward compared to the natural "Will you help?" The challenge is finding names where the word-meaning and name-meaning both fit naturally into the same sentence without forcing the joke. work as a setup for the joke.
The structure needs the homophone to appear naturally in a sentence where it could be misinterpreted as a name. "Rose quickly from the table" actually fits this—it uses "rose" as a past tense verb but could sound like addressing someone named Rose. The challenge is crafting a setup that feels natural while containing the word in a way that sets up the punchline effectively. I'm circling back to test whether simpler examples like "rose" can actually sustain the joke structure, or if I need to find a different homophone entirely that works more smoothly. just in time!" / "Justin time!"
"Just in" is two words, so it doesn't quite fit the same pattern as the single-word homophones.
"May I ask a question?" / "May, I ask a question?"
The second version feels forced—you'd more naturally say "May, may I ask?" or just address her directly. "May help me" as future tense versus "May, help me!" as an imperative to someone named May could work, but the setup is awkward.
I'm also considering "Paige turner alert!" which could sound like addressing someone named Paige, though that needs refinement too.
"Sue them in court!" doesn't create any ambiguity—it's the same either way.
"My patience is wearing thin" works better as a setup. The punchline could be "I understand. And don't call me 'Patience.'" This creates a genuine double meaning: patience as a noun versus Patience as a name, both grammatically valid in the same sentence.
I should focus on the strongest candidates where the wordplay is clearest and the setup feels natural.
The "Quickly" / "Quigley" option has potential—"Quickly, we need to leave!" sets up the homophone nicely. "Rose quickly from the chair" also works, playing on rose as past tense versus Rose as a name. "My memory isn't what it used to be" is weaker since Memory isn't a common first name. I'm also exploring whether "Major" could work as both a verb and a military rank, though the setup feels forced.
Looking at other word-name pairs: "Chandler" doesn't function well as a verb, and "Cole" from coleslaw is awkward phrasing. "Fritz" as a verb meaning to break doesn't quite land grammatically. But "Buck" is promising—"Buck the system" is a legitimate verb phrase, so the setup "You should buck the system!" followed by "I might. And don't call me 'Buck'" creates a clean double meaning.
The joke you shared (a classic from Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad!) relies on a brilliant comedic mechanism: the double-barreled question where a single profession perfectly answers both identity and action.
Here are five jokes built on that exact same structural DNA:
1. The Hacker
"Who are you and how did you get into my private email?"
"I'm a hacker. And I'm a hacker."
2. The Psychic
"Who are you and how did you know I was going to ask you that?"
"I'm a psychic. And I'm a psychic."
3. The Ninja
"Who are you and how did you get past all my armed guards?"
"I'm a ninja. And I'm a ninja."
4. The Surgeon
"Who are you and why are you cutting me open?"
"I'm a surgeon. And I'm a surgeon."
5. The Demolition Expert
"Who are you and why did you just blow up my shed?"
"I'm a demolition expert. And I'm a demolition expert."
For the Georgism fans, there's a new-ish political party in New Zealand campaigning on introducing a Land Value Tax (which would fund a UBI replacing most benefits). They're polling high enough that they might actually get enough support to squeak into parliament, and while their chances of getting the tax through are essentially zero right now, I'm considering voting for them. Has anyone here who is familiar with LTVs had a look at their proposed plan? How do you rate it?
Think of it this way. Literally any shift to any form of land taxation is beneficial. And they're not going to succeed. So just vote for them to express your preference as long as the other ideas are not too repulsive to you
Every so often some commentators complain that Gen Z (and I assume before them the millennials) don’t have the patience to read long books anymore, their attention span is too limited, they are used to stopping and starting, dipping in and out of one media and onto other media.
My question for these people is - how exactly do you think people have traditionally read books? It’s very rarely all in one go.
I read books by blocking out a period of time and focusing on the reading task and try to avoid distractions. A challenging book is context heavy, and the cognitive cost of switching into that is high so I wont do it in 5 minute intervals. The way in which I see ppl use apps on their phones does not seem compatible with the engagement i require.
Is this a generational thing? Everyone is reading less than they used to, and that's because there's an entire economy built around attention now. I don't have stats to back this up, but I'm sure they exist.
A separate complaint levelled at college age students is that they can't get through 5-10 pages of reading material for a college class. They'd rather watch a YouTube video (when I taught in a uni in the US, up to 2021, they'd watch at 4x speed). I would expect that AI is the death of reading non-interactive text altogether.
Traditionally, people read books to escape boredom. I would love to survey people under the age of 25 I'm guessing that not one of them have ever read the back of a shampoo label or cereal box, or counted the tiles on a wall, or stared at the ceiling for 15 minutes straight. All experiences well-familiar to everyone over the age of 40 who have had to 'entertain themselves' for an hour.
I think this is a big piece of it. Whenever I have to go more than an hour without electricity or wifi, I suddenly find it easy to read dozens or hundreds of pages. I'm just so bored otherwise.
I think we should all go cold turkey on data for a few days now and again. I pushed back against the generational premise at the top level, but I think younger people would really benefit from it.
In Ireland, many schools lock phones away in a sealed pouch during school hours and it seems to have increased their interaction with each other and reduced behavioural problems. I'd happily roll this out to workplaces, and maybe home as well...
I agree, although I'm not too optimistic about how much we can accomplish. The problem is that going cold turkey takes willpower or it takes an authority figure forcing it on you. But when the wifi is broken, it's a whole different situation, since reading or socializing are no longer things it takes willpower to do, they're instead welcome escapes from the crushing boredom I feel. It's like gravity is suddenly pulling in a different direction, and it's no longer hard to walk uphill because uphill has become downhill.
College students (more than 10% of them) at university of california are unable to do middle school math. Not high school math, Middle School Math -- like fractions.
It's only the truly bored among the "over the age of forty" folks that count the tiles on a wall. Creative folks just develop a story or make a new world.
What I intended is that before circa 2005, internet access via your phone was not a thing. So people would regularly have 5-10 minute periods in which to entertain themselves. I was thinking specifically of those periods in the bathroom where you look for something to occupy your mind.
When you naturally live with that level of background boredom, a book seems exciting in comparison. When you have a phone constantly available to swipe and scroll and whatever, reading will seem less appealing. Between 2016 and 2019, I noticed that kids in my uni classes went from chatting before and after class to sitting in silence staring at their phones. It's an addiction, and it sucks up the time that used to be spent on hobbies.
It also sucks up the time that people used to spend in "normal social interaction" (such as waiting for busses, or classes). How are you supposed to know what your neighbor is doing, if you don't talk with them?
Yes, I don't think "attention span" is the problem as such, it's more of an inability to be interested in anything that isn't hyper-stimulating.
Kids can still be engrossed in a video game for hours, but will get bored reading a book for ten minutes, because... well, let's face it, there's a very real sense in which reading a book is more boring than playing a video game.
When people say zoomers say don’t have an attention span, it’s not merely that they switch between tasks. They can’t read anything longer than a tweet before getting bored. Maybe someone is out there reading literature 280 characters at a time but I have my doubts.
If so, that person is dyslexic (they tend to read entire paragraphs at once, because every word is a puzzle, and if you solve the entire jumble at once... it's quicker!)
Well they do read less. That’s an empirical fact. I’m disputing that it’s because of a smaller attention span. ( I get that argument about not going to movies, maybe, but not books)
It's a smaller attention span. Time was, Sesame Street figured out that 4 year olds really wanted to listen to "reasonably long" stories (ten minutes? thirty minutes?). Nowadays, you'd do the same study and realize their attention span is about 10 seconds before they want something "stimulating." (And yes, this has been done).
Smaller attention spans are what drives "less traffic" towards blogs and other "long form" fiction (where long form is defined as anything longer than a few lines of text).
I binge read things I enjoy, and always have. Even as a kid I'd read for several hours at a time. Now I can go much longer . More than once I've read all night to finish a book I'd started the day before. None of this is explained by some virtuous character trait. It's just following my bliss. As a kid and teen I'd get so engrossed in my reading that I would not hear my mother calling me, even if she was standing right next to me. She'd have to touch me to get my attention.
I’ve done that too. However who has the time as an adult. I read books by chapter and between chapters sometimes I’ll end in the middle of a chapter if it’s late.
I read 2 or 3 books at a time. Right now it’s Jeeves and Wooster, Adam Becker’s book on AI, and the latest dungeon crawler. But that means a chapter a time. At most.
The other thing I am doing on my own time is watching some tv shows not liked by the rest of the family. I also watch those incrementally, episode by episode or not even full episodes. If it’s late.
Exactly as I read books, exactly how I have always read books.
Hades (or Slay the Spire) are very different games from System Shock, or Thief the Dark Age. This is because the attention span of the average gamer has plummeted. If someone wants to "make an impact" over the course of an entire chapter (or a 30 minute television show), the same principle applies.
Atmospheric games like atmospheric movies suffer. Yes, people don't read books in one go very often (GRRM aside).
I think you're missing the "design consideration: shorter playspan". I could have cited many "retro" games (Master of Magic, Magic Candle, Castlevania, Civilization) --> distance between "savespots" is what you're looking at.
Oh. Well I'd hold easier saving is just better game design, in the same way that everyone uses WASD now instead of System Shock's SZXC. I know folks on Twentysided used to talk about trying to play games with toddlers in the house, and needing to be able to drop the game instantly to go deal with kid-based crises.
You still get some games that make saving difficult, but they're typically horror games (once again like System Shock and Thief). Look Outside has difficulty settings that affect how often you can save.
Yeah, I do generally agree that "easier saving" is better (Thief didn't have any "savepoints" actually, so it's a pretty poor example -- my recollection is that console games tended towards "save points" more than "real computer games" -- now, it seems like there are fewer "real computer games" that aren't indie).
I used to swallow books whole. Lie down across the armchair in the living room, book in hand, and leave it only when it was time for dinner. These days I automatically switch to something else when there's a slow page. I should probably have a separate reading device, at least.
My daughter (age 27) turned me onto Dungeon Crawler Carl. I'm gobbling it up as fast as I can. And she remains about 1 book ahead of me. Parents who like to read have kids who like to read... I don't really care if it's nature or nurture. (data point of one.)
My 11 years old daughter has read the entire Harry Potter (not the rational one) series, I haven't even noticed when. The 8 years old one is in the middle of Narnia. Also, no idea how much is nature or nurture, just saying that it is possible in every generation.
Yeah my mom and dad liked to read too. We'd go on vacation with ~1 box of books each. And by the end had read half of the other persons box. My brother never liked to read.
I'm reading J.D. Vance's book Communion and have come to the conclusion that Vance embraced Christianity because he wanted a right-wing version of the left's therapy culture to help him deal with his family trauma. We need a secular right-wing or centrist version of that to prevent people from going over to the dark side.
You read the book not me, but it seems more likely that he is just pretending to be christian because he is very obviously a political opportunist, and you cannot be an atheist republican.
Some time ago I came to the conclusion that Vance is simply an intelligent opportunist, completely bereft of any moral or even ideological underpinnings. Had the wind blown from another direction, had he grown up in another place, he might today be the henchman of Kim Jong Un or of Ali Khamenei.
It's not crazy talk. He might well have. I personally doubt it but that's neither here nor there Not doubted in the sense that he's lying about it but doubted in the sense that the man is capable of such a thing he strikes me as a what's-in-it-for-me personality that would preclude such a thing. there are few religions that carry the intellectual weight that Catholicism does and I'm sure that appeals to him as well.
[The thesis of Great and Desperate Cures is that there is something banal about the lobotomy, and efforts in psychosurgery—physically intervening on the brain in order to treat mental illness—more generally.]
One of the more interesting characters I've seen in fiction was a former lobotomist surgeon who shows up in the "Higurashi: Whey Cry" Visual Novel. He's portrayed as a sympathetic, ordinary doctor on first appearance. When we finally get his backstory as a surgeon who performed lobotomies, he really did think he was helping to treat the mentally ill. In the "present" of the story (early 1980s Japan) he seems kind of resentful that he was performing this procedure that was widely agreed to be beneficial, and now that the public has turned against it his reputation is mud.
I'm strongly of the belief that psychosurgery is the future for mental illness treatment. I'm interested in seeing where the present rudimentary efforts at "BMI feedback loop" are going.
In a time with very few therapeutic treatments for severe mental illness, the choice was framed as lifelong hospitalization or going home after a brief surgery.
Most medical procedures from the past are grotesque, yet one gets the impression their practitioners really believed they were effective. WTF, right? In some ways, it's the same now. While medical treatment on the whole is better, there are still plenty of cruelties and absurdities in standard practice. My impression is that doctors are exceptionally resistant to having their methods questioned, even when one does it politely -- resistant in a way that, say, an engineer would not be. With doctors you run into this combo of self-pity, because they went through such hell in their training, and entitlement, because they're Doctors.
This makes me think of Scott's anecdote from years ago on SSC reviewing House of God. Decades of people falling out of their beds in hospitals, often getting injured, sometimes dying as a result. Then Medicare changed their rules to stick the hospital with the cost of treating those injuries, and very quickly hospitals got a whole lot better at preventing falls.
One that's a current problem: nobody can get any decent sleep in a hospital. The last time I was in a hospital overnight, I think I heard like five people just say that to me, apologetically. There are things that will disrupt your sleep that aren't so easy to fix (if you need to be given medicine every 3 hours or have your blood pressure taken every hour or something), but there's also a ton of stuff that is just designed poorly for being able to sleep. As best I can tell, you could make the environment much quieter, give the patient control over lighting, and whenever possible set up the schedules for medicine and such to allow a long block of time for sleep, and probably that would give you actual improvements in both patient outcomes and happiness. But someone would have to care, and that person would somehow have to have the power to push the changes through.
I mean, the lobotomy works, doesn't it? It turns highly agitated and nonfunctioning people into calm-but-still-nonfunctioning people, which is an improvement especially if you have to manage an asylum full of them.
Nowadays we can achieve the same result using drugs instead of surgery.
The conditions of mental asylums in the 30s and the 40s were truly horrendous. I understand the impetus to do something, anything, to ease the misery around you At the same time it's worth noting that the American neurosurgeon who performed over four thousand of these operations in his lifetime kept going long after it was reasonable and was finally shut down he clearly had some personal agenda. he also had about a 4% fatality rate.
Patients generally *hate* the most effective antipsychotic drugs. They say they make them feel sleepy, stupid and blank. Wouldn't surprise me if lobotomized people felt the same about their new lobotomized lives. And of course lobotomies, unlike drug regimens, are forever.
I knew a person with manic depressive disorder, who was misdiagnosed with depression, got the wrong meds for years, and finally stopped -- and did any analysis of her condition on the basis of a journal she religiously kept ("am i manic today?" "am I depressed?").
I don't know if this is possible for the patients that get antipsychotics. (I remember the psychologists who hated the anti-depression drugs, and they weren't the only ones).
I'm replying to John Schilling, who posted the following:
> What about the behavior that *is* harmful? People mostly weren't being lobotomized for being a little bit quirky; they were being lobotomized for things where pretty much the only pre-drug option that didn't involve multiple full-time minders for each patient was to be locked in a very unpleasant…"
While I got a notification of his reply, somehow I can't find it on the thread. I think it might be because I blocked one person who was posting on the thread -- maybe that led to all replies to that person getting deleted from my feed too? Anyhow, here my answer to the "it was the only option" argument:
What else could you do if you were charged with caring for a giant crazy guy who’s tried to twist the head off everyone who came near him? Yeah, I get it. For someone like that, especially if you somehow knew they are in that state for life, the options were to chain them up or drug them into a stupor forever, or do a lobotomy. Lobotomy was probably the least awful choice. But here are some nuances to consider.
First, even prior to antipsychotics, a fair fraction of people,10 or 20%, recovered fully from a first episode of psychosis and never had another. Another 10% or so stopped being actively psychotic, but remained somewhat impaired (less able to work or socialize)the rest of their lives. Another substantial percent, maybe 50%, had undulating courses, with alternating intervals of remission and illness. And the remainder of people who became psychotic stayed that way for life. Given those stats, the fraction of people whose lobotomies wiped out good or mixed futures could not have been small. (By the way Mark Vonnegut, son of Kirk Vonnegout, who wrote the wonderful account of madness called The Eden Express, is an undulator. He was a practicing pediatrician who had periodic psychotic episodes.)
Second, bear in mind that lobotomy did not start off as a treatment for violent unmanageability. It started off as a treatment for *agitation.*. Moniz, who performed, the first “leukotomies,” used that term, and it’s clear from how he talked about it that he was talking about *anguish*, not unmanagabiity.That’s also clear from the diagnoses of his first 20 patients: 9 depression, 6 schizophrenia, 2 panic disorder, and one each of mania, catatonia, and manic-depression. He thought of leukotomis as a treatment to cure their painful illness, not one to make them manageable. Quite a few people on this forum, including me, would have qualified for his first and third group. And by the way, many people with depression and panic disorder, like many schizophrenics, recover completely, while a good number have undulating courses. You guys regret still having frontal lobes? I don't.
Third, before lobotomies there was a thing called “moral treatment” that worked pretty well to contain and sometimes cure psychotics. The moral treatment centers were small communal dwellings, with a high staff to patient ratio. Patients were treated with kindness and respect, but the residences also demanded that patients to adhere to schedules, rules, chores, and sometimes religious observances. At some point population growth and changes in society led to their becoming overcrowded dumping grounds for every kind of hard-to-manage person, many of them not mentally ill, and things fell apart.
Seems like there’s no way to monetize the moral treatment model. Maybe if AI actually does free a lot of people up to do what they like, some would choose to volunteer at places like that. Tastes vary, but I actually really enjoyed the phases of my life when I was staff at a homey psych institution. Also, I had a memorable experience when I was recovering from surgery recently, surrounded by people who were weak, suffering and in some cases dying. I saw people comforting each other, and I thought, “if suffering and comforting don't matter, nothing does.” But I really don’t see any grounds for arguing that’s true. Maybe nothing matters.
Eremolalos: You seem to put 2-3 really high value comments (like this one) in most threads. We can't upvote them here (and that's probably good for social dynamics reasons), but I just want to call this out. Very high quality comment, with information that most of us don't have that clarifies the discussion.
And what would be the alternative? Euthanasia? It makes no sense to criticize past societies for working with the tools they had. It's not as if modern people have the resolve to do any better than them...
The alternative would be to not medicalise behaviour that’s not that harmful. We might in the future possibly see ADHD as fairly normal behaviour, that - in particular - drugging kids is obscene.
I think the trend is the other way, though, and there’s more money in it, anyways.
I do not think ADHD is a good example to use there. Sure, there are probably lots of kids (and a few adults) who end up on meds purely because it makes them easier to deal with, and the solution is to be slightly more tolerant instead of subjecting them to stimulants. I am not one of them. I don't know where I would be if not for the meds, but I am quite confident that I'm a lot better off because of them.
Who cares whether you call an intervention "medical" or not? We should encourage the use of tools that improve people's lives - and stimulants given to people categorized as having ADHD appear to do so.
What about the behavior that *is* harmful? People mostly weren't being lobotomized for being a little bit quirky; they were being lobotomized for things where pretty much the only pre-drug option that didn't involve multiple full-time minders for each patient was to be locked in a very unpleasant institution for most of your life.
The problem isn't just autism, of course. But it's a real and serious problem, and before modern pharmaceuticals all the options were really quite grim. A bit of empathy for the people who had to make those decisions is I think called for.
There are probably cases right now where we're drugging people who would be better off completely unmedicated. For instance, I don't think that 10% of boys should be on ADHD meds, I think that a lot of these boys just need discipline and time.
Sometimes there's a mismatch between the long-term interests of the patient and the short-term interests of those who are in a position to prescribe treatment for that patient.
Please justify the claim that being on stimulants is against the long-term interests of the patient. Their association with lower rates of mortality, adulthood addiction and mental health problems, etc. is pretty strong.
Who wouldn’t be resentful? For years, he was doing what he and everyone else thought was good work. But things have changed and he’s retroactively condemned as a villain. I haven’t read this story so I’m just going off the summary but it sounds like he’s bitter not because he refuses to change but because he had no way of knowing better at the time he was performing these procedures but is being treated badly because of it.
I dunno. Seems to me a lot of people in this guy's situation might have had some doubts about whether lobotomies were the greatest thing since sliced bread. While patients were calmer and easier to manage post lobotomy, it sounds from my reading like it was also obvious that they were cognitively impaired -- made stupid, childlike and blank. I have been around enough psychotic people to tell you that a fair number of them are have lively, interesting minds, and that quality of mind comes through even when they are psychotic. If I was doing a procedure that calmed their craziness, but also obliterated the sharpness and charm of their minds, I would at least have had second thoughts.
Do you doubt that? Well, you might be right, but here's some evidence: I was early in my training when recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse were a thing, as was the idea that many who had been abused had multiple personality disorder. Expressing any doubts about these ideas was pretty much like expressing some non-woke sentiment today. At best, people thought you were an oaf, and at worst you could get canceled. But I was skeptical, both about the research in general and also claims made by and about 3 different patients I saw for quite a long time.
Because I was experienced in doing hypnosis, several therapists sent me patients they suspected had repressed memories of sexual abuse, asking me to help the people recover their memories. After trying hypnotic sessions of the kind with a few people I stopped doing it, because it was clear to me that I was part of an effort to convince them they had forgotten memories of abuse, and I didn't want to do that because I wasn't at all sure they did. And while the people's therapists were fascinated by my accounts of what they said under hypnosis, I thought what came out was absolutely ambiguous and could be molded to fit pretty much any claim.
So I am an instance of a therapist who did not go along with what was, in retrospect, an dangerous fad. Honestly, it wasn't that hard to see that professionals who were all-in on satanic ritual abuse, repressed abuse memories and MPD were not thinking clearly. So the point isn't that I was great, it's that professionals often commit to ideas and treatments that don't make much sense, even though there's lots of evidence, and they should be held to account. Seems to me the Great Lobotomizer is in that category.
I don’t know what kind of evidence they did have. You’re basically just taking 2026 ideas, projecting it back 50 years ago and chastising them for not knowing what we know now. Sure, some people went against the grain but it’s not like everyone knew the dissenters would be proven right.
I think medicating children for ADHD is absolutely insane. Do doctors do it because they are evil people who hate reason and dogmatically want to drug kids? Or are they just wrong? Probably the latter. And if it comes out later that this stuff was worse than we thought and stop practicing, I might still chastise them for not seeing warning signs but I’m not going to treat them like monsters.
Why so strident and cranky? And so inaccurately so?
>You’re basically just taking 2026 ideas, projecting it back 50 years ago and chastising them for not knowing what we know now.
My case against letting lobotomists off the hook was that I thought docs back in the lobotomy era would surely have been able to see that it knocked out not only agitation but also the lively, interesting minds that many patients had. Do you think it's a 2026 discovery that many people with lively, interesting minds become psychotic, and that while they're psychotic you can still glimpse the charm and sharpness of their minds? (Good grief, it's been known forever! Shakespeare plays around with the idea a lot. )
>Sure, some people went against the grain but it’s not like everyone knew the dissenters would be proven right.
Well of course not. Did you think I said that was the case?. Actually, if the people doing lobotomies had known that those opposed to the practice would be proven right, there wouldn't have been many lobotomies done. Duh. What I said was that lobotomies were sort of a fad, like various things from the era when clinicians were ridiculously quick to believe troubled people had been sexually abused but had repressed their memory of the abuse, and that many people had multiple personality disorder. It was not that hard to see, back then, that te evidence for these ideas wasn't great, and I think the same can be said for the lobotomy craze.
"Lively, interesting minds" were not helping the patients locked up in mental asylums, which sadly was the main solution of the time - someone is non-functional, family can't or won't keep them at home, institutionalise them.
We've moved on a *lot* in more than just "now we have drugs, not surgery, to suppress this behaviour". There's a lot of supports and more emphasis on keeping people *out* of hospitals, rather than the earlier decades emphasis on "well put your retard kid in a home and forget them and go on to have a normal life with normal kids" as was one practice when it came to children with developmental or other difficulties.
People may well have traded off "no longer has bright enquiring discussions but also no longer has screaming fits where they have to be restrained" when it came to dealing with the institutionalised:
"From the early 1940s, it began to be seen as a miracle cure here in the UK, where surgeons performed proportionately more lobotomies than even in the US.
Despite opposition from some doctors - especially psychoanalysts - it became a mainstream part of psychiatry with more than 1,000 operations a year in the UK at its peak. It was used to treat a range of illnesses, from schizophrenia to depression and compulsive disorders.
The reason for its popularity was simple - the alternative was worse.
"When I visited mental hospitals… you saw straitjackets, padded cells, and it was patently apparent that some of the patients were, I'm sorry to say, subjected to physical violence," recalls retired neurosurgeon Jason Brice.
The chance of a cure through lobotomy seemed preferable to the life sentence of incarceration in an institution.
"We hoped it would offer a way out," says Mr Brice. "We hoped it would help."
I agree that it's unfortunate that 'pioneering' surgeons etc. often seem to have the kinds of screws loose that mean they should have been under treatment themselves, like Dr. Freeman and John Money (another guy who got his views taken almost unquestioningly and did immense harm).
This might be a case where truth is stranger than fiction. I did some research on lobotomies and Walter Freeman (1895–1972) — American neurologist, no surgical training, who turned lobotomy into a mass procedure. he personally performed between 3,500 and 4,000 of them on people. He used an ice pick that he drove through the occipital bone above your eye and could do the thing in about five minutes flat. He really liked audiences too. His grandfather had been a very esteemed neurosurgeon who served three different presidents personally. Apparently, he had serious daddy issues.
I play and record my own original music, but recently I've kinda come to terms with the fact that despite trying to learn a bit over the years, I am not any time soon going to become good enough at mixing and mastering to do a job I can be pleased with. So I've decided to give AI a try for that part of the process.
I expect to first do something like upload stems (averaging about 8MB each), receive advice in the form of words, and carry out the advice. If that proves too clunky then I'd next move on to "here AI, just mix it for me and output it as a Reaper project file". (To give you some idea of my anticipated workflow as well as what kind of file storage I'd need.)
Looking for recommendations from people who've tried it: info about specific tools you used, how you integrated it into your workflow, how was the pricing, how were the results.
The main "AI music" tool is Suno, try it yourself.
There's a mastering plugin called Ozone that can do it for you with a click of the button.
Personally I've stopped worrying about mixing and mastering and concern myself mostly with making any songs I write sound good recorded over the phone with just guitar and voice:
That's the most popular use case but you can put your own songs into it to master it or clean it up at the track level or as individual stems. You need their highest tier to use their DAW-like feature that let's you do this iirc
What should I do if I have an idea that I think is literally the most important idea in all of human existence, and no one else seems to share the idea, and when I try to promote the idea no one listens? The idea is simple, which is why this lack of finding other people who assent to it is so frustrating, it feels like it should be obvious. My idea starts by saying that assuming hedonic utilitarianism is true (which I do), what we will want to do is maximize the felt experience of pleasure across all of existence. Nothing revolutionary yet, but the part I have never seen anyone else seriously advocate for is the following: the best way to do that is not to make currently existing minds happy, but rather to convert the non-living matter making up almost all of the universe into as many artificial minds as possible that are designed to feel ceaseless, maximal pleasure until the heat death of the universe. Utilitarianism logically demands not just making minds already taken to exist happy, but specifically creating as many new minds as possible that are created to be as happy as possible. This seems so simple and obvious to me. I think it is the most important idea ever because a universe not based on this idea, where humans just expand throughout the stars biologically and leave much of the universe's matter intact, would be failing to instantiate more value than has ever existed in the history of civilization. The difference between a universe that instantiates this idea and one that doesn't is the greatest counterfactual value difference that you could conceive of. So why is no one else advocating for converting the matter of the universe into as many pleasure-minds as possible?
I have seen similar ideas alluded to, but never explicitly endorsed. Probably the closest is from David Pearce, the suffering abolitionism guy. He is a negative utilitarian, and his endorsed causes follow from that, but he did say once in one of his many writings that if one was a total utilitarian rather than a negative utilitarian, the logical conclusion of your ethics would be to support a "hedonium shockwave," by which he means self-replicating machines expanding at close to the speed of light converting everything in their light cone into hedonium, which is defined as conscious substrate that maximizes experienced pleasure per unit mass-energy. This is exactly what I want! But he's not advocating it, just saying someone else would have to advocate it if they started from the assumptions of total utilitarianism. Scott has also alluded to things similar to this too, but hasn't explicitly advocated for them. His "wirehead gods on lotus thrones" post approaches similar territory, but if I remember correctly he is talking about maximizing bliss for existing minds, not creating new minds just for the sake of their bliss, and is also not explicitly advocating the thought experiment, just presenting it. He also somewhere else mentions that you could take utilitarianism to its logical conclusion by "tiling the universe with rats on heroin," which is a vulgar caricature of what I endorse and certainly not meant to depict it positively. Nick Bostrom has also covered somewhat similar ground in some of his writings, mentioning just how many minds could be created in a dyson sphere that maximized simulating consciousness, and how this could morally dwarf anything in our current world, but as far as I know he has never explicitly said "we should do this to the entire universe as an explicit goal of far-future civilization." Longtermists in general also say "the future massively matters because it will have a massive number of minds," but I find few if any explicitly saying "we need to make as many minds as possible using every resource in the universe towards that exclusive end." One of the other most frustratingly close things is this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happy-3 - it depicts something similar to what I advocate for (finding the minimal conscious arrangement of matter that experiences only pleasure, and then converting everything in the universe into copies of that minimal set), but 1. I think we should create roughly "human-sized" minds and maximize their pleasure rather than creating microscopic "conscious dust," and 2. Zach isn't actually advocating the outcome of the comic, it's meant to be dark and disturbing. This is one of the things that frustrates me the most: what I advocate for is often taken to be a reductio ad absurdum arguing against hedonic utilitarianism by saying "you have to support this outcome, so your assumptions are bad!" Whereas I say: this outcome is good, it is in fact the best thing ever, and I explicitly want it because it is what hedonic utilitarianism logically demands!
So, if other people aren't actually advocating for this outcome, how can I make people listen and support it? I have made multiple Substack posts about it, all of which have gotten basically zero traction and engagement. I feel like I'm screaming into the void, and what I am screaming matters more than anything else ever thought, and yet no one hears it. I even restructured my IRL life around this idea, I switched to being a philosophy major despite this dismal career prospects because I thought it would make me more effective at evangelizing this idea. I have grown so despondent at anyone ever listening, however, that I have found myself genuinely hoping for an AI takeover on the hope that a superintelligent AI would be smart enough to realize this is what should be done with the universe, and then it will actually carry it out, while a future under humanity likely wouldn't. So, this is what I think is more important than everything else, no one else is advocating for it, and when I try to scream it from the mountaintop, no one listens. If I want all the non-conscious matter of the universe to be converted into as many minds as possible perpetually feeling maximized happiness, what should I do to make someone with influence listen and increase the odds of this actually coming about in our far future?
This is basically what most EAs think, except they aren't as convinced of hedonism as you, so let's first do a "great reflection", where we figure out what's really valuable and then do that.
This is great! I think we have a new sci-fi antagonist. If Thanos had been after this instead, it would have made the Marvel universe movies far more complex and compelling.
I don't think I'm alone in wondering if this some contemporary version of A Modest Proposal.
But to add to the points others have made. Most of us define our lives in relation to others: partners, children, old friends, maybe people who drink in the same pub, play for or support the same rugby club. I don't think that's entirely or chiefly about pleasure....indeed, I'd be somewhat horrified if I learned that an old friend saw their relationship with me as being about pleasure.
For me personally, I cannot subscribe to the view that happiness should be the north star of all future activity, mostly due to lack of information. Hedonic utilitarianism is an axiomatic choice biased from human experience, we don't have enough information to prove it's better than any alternative, and we don't even know if your theory that we can create infinitely happy minds is correct (nature is not static after all). Those are some of the things holding me back.
As Gwern said, "One man's modus tollens is another man's modus ponens."
You: hedonic utilitarianism means we should be wireheading!
Them: wireheading means hedonic utilitarianism is wrong.
(Not sure if what term you use for your proposed utopia; hedonic shockwave?)
Even if your idea is true, what should be done about it? Marginally, wouldn't doing relatively normal EA activities align with hedonic utilitarianism, since we don't yet know what is happiness or consciousness or how to create such things? Maybe AI safety research would be close, while also being more conducive to both your and many other people's goals. Rogue AI isn't necessarily going to maximize pleasure.
Probably you've discussed these things in your blog; I'll have to check it out.
> So, if other people aren't actually advocating for this outcome, how can I make people listen and support it?
Seems like you're asking for advice on what you should do, but then narrowing it down to the narrow slice of possibilities where you try to get people to listen to and support your idea.
Maybe you should spend more time trying to change your own mind rather than the minds of others?
According to some strands of Indian philosophy, minds fully saturated with bliss and with nothing else to do will just start cosplaying as ordinary, confused suffering folks such as ourselves. According to this view, what you're describing is the world we already find ourselves in :)
Is sort of, and I mean this not to be a gotcha, sort of a contradiction in terms. Utilitarianism *fundamentally stems from* a premise that's orthagonal to logic. Choosing "hedonism" or "happiness" as your target values in utilitarianism relies on an appeal to a homogenous bias in humans. Because feeling good *feels good*, it's very easy to pitch it as *the good*, and intuitive to accept the same in a way "make sure all rocks are purple" isn't.
So you get to push something like "Feeling good is something you think is good for you, right? And other people are much like you, and if you deserve it they do too, so let's maximize good for everyone; if we go with pure personal hedonism, other people will get mad at us and we won't get it anyway" and mostly have it accepted. Good. Fine.
Where this breaks apart is when you try to make several jumps from that point:
1. Treating utilitarianism's goal of "good" or "hedonism" as not just a crowbarred "best option that makes sense for an atheist", but as a moral fact in the same way religious people believe in moral facts
2. Treating "good" however you define it as a thing that improves linearly with quantity, abstract of other practical implications.
3. Treating "pleasure" as a simple thing having to do with measurable dopamine or similar, and nothing else -
4. Treating 1-3 as drivers of a mathematical formula, where the cut-and-dried solution to the formula is supposed to have the moral weight of a deontological commandment.
When you do that, you end up having a conversation like this:
You: "Remember when I pitched you on utilitarianism, based on the idea that since all humans share the intuition that feeling good is pretty good, that we should generally be trying to help everyone feel pretty good all the time, and that something like this is what morality has to be to an atheist?"
Them: "Yeah, seemed to make sense."
You: "Well, I've been grinding the numbers, and it turns out that if you follow that thread long enough with the right conclusions, you should convert every atom in the universe to a ball of neurons wired to feel pleasure and appreciate pleasure. It's asthetically pleasing for me, if we do that, to do it in human-brain-sized partitions. But we should do that, and absolutely nothing else."
Them: "Oh, that makes much less sense, and now seems incredibly monstrous to my intuitions."
And then you get into the trouble of, basically, trying to drive conclusions that are intuitively bad and ugly to most people with a moral system that is broadly adopted because it's intuitively good to most people, and for little other reason.
I'd say if I was in your shoes and trying to argue that this eldritch horror of a future was good, I'd start by trying to prove the following:
*** "Feeling good" isn't just a goal for whatever people tend to be around at the time; it's a *moral fact* that it scales linearly with quantity of minds that feel good. ***
*** Whatever type of "feeling good" I'm proposing trades off at infinity-to-one with any other kind of proposed feeling good, to the extent every resource should be dedicated to just this one type of wireheading. ***
That's the bare minimum you are going to need, and you are going to have to get those arguments down to the level at which they seem *intuitively true in a way that's troublesome to counter-argue* if you want people to adopt this at anything like the rates they would if this was a logical, proved extension of a logical system.
To be kinder to Vittu's view, the idea that we should strive to increase happiness and reduce suffering is not wrong.
However, they are making happiness the end in itself, not the people (or other beings?) experiencing the happiness.
We have duties to those already existing. I don't see that we have duties to those not yet in existence*, and I certainly don't think we are obliged to turn all material in the universe into happy-chips. That's just making "happiness is itself the only thing that matters, we're going to manufacture happiness, what happens to people and other entities is immaterial, they are just the stratum to generate happiness".
By this measure of hedonic utilitarianism, getting everyone hooked up to be wireheaded is the most moral thing in the world and I don't know if you'd get universal agreement on that.
*That of course comes with a lot of conditions such as 'those we can reasonably assume will come into existence', 'we should not knowingly cause harm', and 'don't eat the seed-corn' etc. because we can't just gobble up everything ourselves and leave our descendants with nothing, or destroy what is about us simply to make ourselves fat, rich and happy.
Why do you think this is so important? If people want to wallow in their own pathetic, individual existences, chasing illusions of meaning and purpose, then why not let them? It's a hell of their own making. They deserve no better.
If thinking about the inability, and current impossibility, to convert matter into hedonium is making you sad, perhaps you should stop thinking about it. If your idea is in fact the most important idea in human existence, as opposed to an idea that occurs at 2am when the bong doesn't have enough water in it, someone will surely flesh it out.
Have you had other ideas that people seem more interested in? I would think in a Philosphy department, there would be lots of Journal Clubs, visiting speakers - no shortage of sources of non-insane ideas that deserve a hearing.
>What should I do if I have an idea that I think is literally the most important idea in all of human existence, and no one else seems to share the idea, and when I try to promote the idea no one listens?
Second-guess yourself.
For instance, the first point of failure is in your very first sentence. You claim this is the most important idea in *human* existence, but the idea has nothing to do with humanity, you're trying to give dirt an orgasm.
The second is in assuming hedonic utilitarianism is true. Seems trivially false to me; happiness is a measuring device, not a goal, and increasing it directly merely renders the signal useless.
The third is a technologically impossible desire to create artificial life from, like, clouds and bedrock and shit. People have wanted to do that since the beginning of time, and have never pulled it off.
The fourth is your assumption that you know what maximal pleasure would be, and your design achieves it instead of locking it off behind your current-day perspective.
The third point is the biggest dealbreaker. What exactly do you want people to do here, and what must they give up in order to make room for it?
> what should I do to make someone with influence listen
We are not in a place where we know how to make everyone who is alive happy, never mind maximally happy; and we are also not in a place where we know how to turn inanimate matter into people (except the old-fashioned way). I don't foresee either of these facts changing in our lifetime.
I don't see anyone here being able to convince "someone with influence" to put more effort into either of these problems than they have already decided they would.
However, the problem of making people who are alive happier is absolutely one you can work on today. Start with the people within your reach, and go from there. Record what you learn. If you are seen to make a difference, that makes people more likely to listen to your opinions on how to make a difference.
OTOH, a person that just wants to make someone else do work that no-one really knows how to do is not very convincing at all; and talk of rearranging all matter in the universe into better configurations is so far removed from anything we can reason about today that it sounds like genre fiction.
Compare The Northern Caves:
'The most pressing infelicity in the arrangement of material concerns the distribution of bone, muscle, keratin, etc. A cursory examination of the material environment will allow you to verify that these material are not distributed homogeneously and are almost entirely found at ground level, usually within a set of designated "dwellings" (houses, etc.) A moment of honest introspection should reveal the incorrectness of this arrangement. There are cases in which is is in fact correct for bone, muscle, keratin, etc. to be located at ground level and within "dwellings," but for it to be thus distributed in every case is much too far. It will be difficult to rectify this injustice on a wider scale, but immediate improvements may be improvised: I suggest for instance moving oneself and one's fellows as far above sea level as possible, and vacating "dwellings."'
"we are also not in a place where we know how to turn inanimate matter into people"
I don't think the theory even requires the happiness-experiencers to *be* people. Convert all the matter in the universe into hedonium where the current runs through a circuit continuously going 'yes yes yes', that achieves the aim of maximising happiness (as measured by the crude scale which is the scale we will end up with; how on earth do you create a measuring rod for "happiness" or "pleasure" given that one person will love listening to jazz and think that a life of that would make them the happiest they could ever be, whereas for another that is torture?)
It is telling that the necessary accessible first step to solving OP's dilemma (that not enough minds exist to be hedonistically happy) lies in increasing the birth rate, which pretty much every civilized government is trying very, very hard to do right now, and that this went unnoticed.
Why would they necessarily need more humans? Yes, more competent humans would help in the realization of such a project, but the minds being created could be made using any biomatter.
For the same reason that the solution to current world hunger problems isn't "just use all the replicators that run on cold fusion to feed everyone". That's not a technology we have.
Note my use of "accessible" above. OP says that the only moral course of action is to convert matter to human-like brains, and to make those brains happy. The only way we know how to do this involves human reproduction, then doing whatever your version of "utility maximizing" is at them to make them whatever your version of "happy" is.
The other way we have of MAYBE (read: not possible today, but it at least feels possible in the next few decades) doing this is to first create AGI, then to configure it to a human-like setting as concerns pleasure, then to paperclip the universe with it. But, notably, we are already dedicating a pretty big percentage of the global economy to pursuing things that almost 1-1 correspond with doing that, and again OP doesn't notice.
It's sort of a big problem, because the two most obvious accessible solutions to OP's problems (reproduce+QoL improvements over time and invent AGI + paperclip) are things that are probably the two human projects with the most resources behind them right now. Him not noticing that those interact with his argument makes me trust his argument less.
If OP's goal is to create as many minds as possible that are experiencing happiness, then a world with 20 billion happy people in it would be far short of their ultimate goal, but still an improvement over our current world - for its own sake, not for the sake of realizing the project.
Do you realize how utterly trivial that is compared to what is being proposed? 20 billion people, inhabiting imperfect bodies that were simply not built for the sake of their happiness... versus an endless swarm of optimized minds colonizing system after system, basking in the perfect bliss of their existence. The happiness and suffering of lifeforms in the present is utterly dwarfed by that potential future. As long as it remains a possibility, any sacrifices are justificed for bringing it about.
...Of course, I agree that such a future is a pipe dream. People would never allow it. They also wouldn't allow 20 billion people to live happily and peacefully, for that matter. There's no reason for them to. They'll keep hurting each other for the sake of immediate gratification, as they've always done.
I'm not sure I'm parsing this right. It seems like you are saying "billions more happy minds don't count for this proposed project because they aren't infinity minds", and if so I disagree. If it's something else I'm not getting it.
>However, the problem of making people who are alive happier is absolutely one you can work on today.
Absolutely. By making sure that you're truly happy and then showing up. What else can you do? You can only teach by example in this particular case. As an aside, I don't think happiness is a very useful word here. I think what you're really looking for is content.
Your baseline assumption when billions of people think you are wrong, and you think you have come up with an idea that you cannot understand why they are near universally rejecting, is that you are the one with the problem. Consider, very carefully, the fact that life is probably more complicated than there being an obvious solution to a problem of moral philosophy.
"The best way to do that is not to make currently existing minds happy, but rather to convert the non-living matter making up almost all of the universe into as many artificial minds as possible that are designed to feel ceaseless, maximal pleasure until the heat death of the universe"
Possibly the reason people are not falling over themselves to sign up to this is because, and I mean this without wanting to hurt you, that this idea is damn fucking stupid.
Oh yeah, let's turn the empty spaces of the visible universe into happy-chips. Easy-peasy! Not like we don't have a ton of more serious problems to solve on earth first, and then have to invent a way to turn the visible universe into happy-chips.
Here, indulge me in this thought experiment: I present to you one (1) piece of paper upon which is written "all the material in the visible universe has been turned into happy-chips in saecula saeculorum, so mote it be, so let it be said so let it be done".
There you are, all the material universe is now happy-chips forever and ever, and that piece of paper is as bloomin' likely to make it come true as anything we conceivably have sight of in reality.
Now go forth! Be happy like the other happy-chips! Worry no more!
Oh, that hasn't done anything for you? There are still wars, famines, plagues, and people who insist on wearing socks with sandals? And that there, my dear friend, is why your notion of what is Most Biggest Pressing Problem In All Creation is not landing trawler nets full of recruits.
I've been trying to write this post for months if not longer. A few days ago I scrapped all my drafts and tried again. This time I think it went okay! Okay enough to publish, at any rate.
I try to explain what I call “frame errors”: a third kind of mistake, distinct from logical fallacies and empirical errors. You can get every fact right and every inference valid, and still be wrong, because your framework for reasoning about the problem is structurally inadequate.
The post went through five common classes of frame errors, with worked examples. I start with examples that you likely have heard of before, and then end with more novel examples where I was the first person to explicitly point out such errors.
Would love to get more engagement from the SSC/ACX crowd! Excited to see feedback, comments, and future extensions of this basic concept!
Also the blog's 1-year anniversary is coming up, and I've appreciated the community's support of the blog so far! I'm glad for the feedback Scott and others have given me to help me improve as a thinker and a writer :)
One frame-error-like thing not on your list is mistaken ontology: using concepts that fail to correspond to anything in reality. Or using concepts that aren't even concepts. They subjectively make sense when you think about them but don't behave coherently enough to get anywhere with them.
Simple historical examples are phlogiston and humoral medicine. It turned out that these things do not exist. Woo is full of it; so is a great deal of philosophy.
>One frame-error-like thing not on your list is mistaken ontology
It is not trivial to get ontology right. First you need to get epistemology right...
>. They subjectively make sense when you think about them but don't behave coherently enough to get anywhere with them.
>Simple historical examples are phlogiston and humoral medicine
Phlogiston theory was tested and found to be false. so it was coherent enough to be testable. Getting ontology right requires trial and error, it is not like you can just start with
Yeah that sounds right to me. On the other hand, in some sense it's close to empirical error. On the gripping hand, thinking of it in terms of frame error rather than empirical error might be more fruitful?
I don't think all errors of reasoning that aren't logical fallacies or empirical errors look like frame errors. For example, procedural errors where you make mistakes with arithmetic or other calculations. I also think many forms of motivated reasoning/myside bias will cut across this categorization and not naturally present itself as a frame error. Mistakes of prioritization (where you focus too much on irrelevant goals) also seem different. And then there are communicative errors where you just misunderstand what someone else said. Or errors of calibration.
>you can’t explain a changing result by reference to a cause that’s unchanging.
A steady stream of water from a mountain spring that pours constantly at the same speed and the same volume is constantly wearing away the rock below it
You can’t explain something that’s unchanging via reference to a variable cause. Sea level, despite the storms and the winds and the currents which are ceaselessly changing
As a side note, "a framing error'has been part of my vocabulary for a long time. Essentially, I'm not seeing the truth of something because I'm not looking at it in the right way.
It's a little looser. It gives you some wiggle room. Speaking of frame errors, cause and effect can represent themselves very differently depending on the arena, don't you think? The field of inquiry, as it were. Applying a constant cause to a dynamic system can unleash all kinds of variable effects for instance.. I'm thinking about it. Not to toot my own, but I just wrote a little thing about cause and effect on my blog. It's a funny coincidence.
> You can get every fact right and every inference valid, and still be wrong, because your framework for reasoning about the problem is structurally inadequate.
mm... this line reminds me of something I've written about, regarding different kinds of truthvalue. I propose that there's three objects, and three different morphisms between those objects, and each morphism corresponds to a different type of truth. The "objects" are merely the saussurian triad of signifier/signified/referent. And the different types of "truth" are "factual/faithful/illustrative".
factual = signifier matches the referent.
faithful = signified matches the referent.
illustrative = signifier matches the signified.
E.g. "MLK Jr. was a criminal" is factually true, but illustratively misleading.
Maybe this is, idk, relevant to your interests? I feel like your post is trying to draw a distinction between textual mistakes that can be vetted by Prolog, vs modeling mistakes that you have to check against a physics simulation.
I'm not sure what the proposed difference is between a frame error and an informal fallacy. The inflation one is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc with a side order of Fallacy of the Single Cause. Survivorship Bias is a statistical fallacy. Lossy Abstraction sounds like a variation of False Analogy. Post-Adjustment Inference is the Ecological Fallacy.
On a meta-level, I think the problem with "informal fallacy" is that it's overly broad as a category! It doesn't really point you at a direction for how to reason better.
On the object-level I think you're too quick to squash things I've identified into categories you're already familiar with?
"The inflation one is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc with a side order of Fallacy of the Single Cause." I don't think so.
Post hoc is inferring causation from temporal sequence, which is (incidentally) sometimes correct though often overapplied. Alice is instead reasoning from a standing trait into a sequence.
"Survivorship Bias is a statistical fallacy" sure, I just think putting it under the frame error category is a useful practical and pedagogical categorization.
"Lossy Abstraction sounds like a variation of False Analogy" I think this is false? The biggest problem with CE Delf is in chaining quantitative assumptions that are each valid but jointly violate a physical constraint.
"Post-Adjustment Inference is the Ecological Fallacy." I think it's very different. Not sure where you made your inference tbh, the two have almost nothing in common. Is it because of my section title? I'm not happy with it, thinking of changing the name.
I just got a sun-miracle out of a cheap LED flashlight.
I placed the flashlight on a horizontal surface that was above my eye level, and stood back such that I was looking up by about ten degrees. I then stared at the light. This flashlight had nine LEDs (one central, eight in a ring). My glasses were dirty, so I cleaned them and tried again.
After about thirty seconds, I noticed the flashlight was flickering a little, and becoming brighter and dimmer. This effect felt so real that my first thought was "oh dear, I need a better flashlight to do this experiment".
The lights then began dancing a little, as if each LED contained a miniature candle flame. The colour remained blue-white. They all moved in perfect synchronization: left together, up together, etc. When I blinked, they stopped dancing, but resumed after a few seconds.
After about a minute of this, the colour shifted purple. It was quite sudden. Within a few seconds of my noticing the colour was changing, the flashlight had become a bright magenta circle, with the light from the LEDs merging into each other. When I blinked, it was a normal flashlight again, but the colour shifted back within ten seconds or so.
At this point my eyes started to hurt, so I stopped. When I began writing this report I found it difficult to type because there were dark spots in my vision when I looked at the screen. The spots are now gone and my eyes seem to have returned to normal.
There will be great joy in the future, but also great sorrow. New wars will start, but the work of peacemakers will continue. An institution currently believed to be invunlerable will fail. A beloved politician will break their promises. The next Pope will advocate for Catholic teachings, and he is alive today.
Supposedly, but all the other sensory experiences were pretty much bang-on to what's described. My eyes didn't hurt *much* -- it was more like pressure than burning -- and if I thought I was seeing something religious/important rather than screwing around with a flashlight, I wouldn't have worried about the pain at all.
Hello, ACT Commentators. You evince brilliance almost always, creativity very often, and sympathy once and a while. Consider a challenging situation if you will, then, and offer such advice as you see fit.
My companion of many years recently passed away, leaving me the widower father of a 4 year old son. That in itself is hardly an unknown sort of tragedy, of course. That I'm in my early 60s gives it a certain piquancy, though. What should a fellow in my shoes do to take care of his child and self?
I have access to friends, family members, lawyers, theologians, and other people ready to listen and opine. Having spent a career in academia, I know how to find and analyze gobs of research. I will probably get around to firing up an AI to see what sort of median good advice it offers. Some of you, though, probably have things nobody else can offer, such as piercingly illustrative anecdotes, citations to obscure but spot-on scholarship, or seemingly crazy but really helpful ideas.
Let us stipulate that you offer kind words of solace and that I receive them with gratitude. And we mean it, too! But that sort of thing grows tiresome after a while. I seek something else from you: insights of the sort I won't find through the usual channels.
Thanks, friends, for the well-wishing, good advice, and tough talk. Some of you had questions, presumably so you could tailor your advice, or perhaps out of concern (or, it must be admitted, a natural curiosity). Herewith, then, a few relevant details.
My mate was ill quite a long while, suffering a long decline. Colon cancer led the way, but a host of unhappy complications followed in its wake. For present purposes, it means that I had ample time to prepare.
I likened my situation to that of a captain in a small vessel, far from shore, with a storm brewing and passengers in my care. I thus battened the hatches, so to speak, by resigning my academic post and taking up the bulk of the childcare early on. I still consult, but need to work only a couple of hours a day to keep myself engaged and the bills paid.
Credit nature, science, or a kind fate, but it turns out that I enjoy freakishly good health. I would not have braved starting another family otherwise. Regular exercise, fasting, meditation, and (most recently) participation in a clinical study to regrow my aging thymus (check out Intervene Immune for details) get some of the credit, I suppose. I'm thus about 20 years younger biologically than my calendar age. May it remain so.
I cannot be sure it will, of course. We can all thus take some solace (you, especially, William) in the fact that I've got a couple of 20 year old kids from an earlier relationship. We enjoy good relationships, so I think I can count on them to take up the bulk of dealing with me as a cranky old bastard. The youngest of the siblings will also have their company.
Something nobody mentioned: model accounts of how a single father raises his boy. I suppose I should ask an AI, but off the top of my head, I can think of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" (a TV drama from my youth), "The Sound of Music" (with many more kids, of course), "There Will Be Blood" (a cautionary tale), and "Johnny Quest". I'm taking the last one as my guide, haha.
For what it's worth, as a chronically ill 30-year-old, I think you're in a hell of a lot better position to father a child than I'll ever be.
I echo the advice to do as much as you can for your health. If you're looking to increase your activity, I would especially recommend working with a personal trainer to minimize injury risk.
I'm very sorry for your loss. My father was 59 when I was born. He was/we were lucky that he lived to be 98, so we had a long-ish time together. My mother was 32 years younger than my father. Everybody assumed that she would be there to take care of us and my father when he passed or aged. Then she got cancer and died at 50. So, somewhat similar situation. Three things come to my mind, in no particular order:
1) This is going to sound harsh, but plan for your (long) decline as much as for "something happening to you". Others here have pointed out that you should appoint one or more guardians in case something does happens to you, and definitely do that, but "something happening to you" could also be a stroke, or just old age dementia. At no point in your son's next 35 or so years will taking care of an elderly parent fit into whatever else is going on in his life because he will be establishing his own. I was somewhat lucky in that my father was in good health and was able to live on his own until he was about 90, but in the last eight years he declined rapidly and needed care, and him being stubborn about things like needing care and not wanting to move meant juggling entry into the workforce/early career and partnerships/marriage and small kids and career changes and crises and everything while also handling middle of the night "I have a 104 fever/I fell down and I'm bleeding what should I do" calls while being 150 miles away. People (correctly) plan for something suddenly happening and (correctly) focus on their health, but not quite as many plan for them aging and declining and what care setup they will need and what it will do to those that have to care about them if they actually DO hit a higher age. So long story short: assume you hit 80 and need care, your son is finishing his degree or starting his first job or whatever, do you want him to have to drop that and fly across the country every weekend to take care or move in with you to take care? If not, plan, write it down, and inform people who can take the steps while your son is too young, when he gets older inform him too. Take that load off his mind.
Note this is not something unique to older parents, I see quite a lot of elderly people simply assuming their children will take care of them and be there for company when their elderly friends start passing and, by doing so, imposing a heavy burden on their children. I'm not saying children should be free to ignore their aging parents and bail out of caring for them, I'm saying that too few parents consider what a burden they WILL be and what they could do to prepare. Also, there's always the possibility that he won't be able or simply willing to take care of you - which is of course again something that can happen to any parent.
2) My father retired at 65, when I was 6, and stayed home to take care of us. I don't remember him saying or otherwise indicating that he regretted that, not even once. He enjoyed and cherished every moment (well, as much as you can with small children and teenagers I guess) and said so, often, to us, or in front of others. I don't know what your professional situation is and how much you can or would be willing to cut back, but most of my memories of my father from my childhood are from doing normal things like coming home and sitting down to lunch together, having supper together and discussing things, or going to the pool, or a walk in the woods, or building stuff together, or any other stuff he would not have been able to do quite as much if he'd had to go into the office 50 hours a week.
3) Similar to 1), and extending from what happens after 2), if in 15-20 years he moves out to college or his first job a few hours away, or even if as a teenager he simply starts being away more, what are you going to do with your time? Again this is generic advice for people in retirement, but I experienced it first hand at the end: my father didn't go out as much because he couldn't, his friends had all died, so he sat at home, alone, seeing nobody, and told me so every day on the phone, which was psychological torture for me because there as nothing I could really do about it short of moving in with him or next to him or forcing him to go off to a retirement home. If he has a spouse, kids and a job and he's forced daily to hear about how he should be taking care of somebody else far away it will eat at him.
Was this unexpected, or did it evolve over a period of time? I am sorry for your loss. By the way, as you no doubt know, and it's true. Also, you mentioned your companion, so maybe more clarity about that would be helpful. It might not be significant, but it might.
>What should a fellow in my shoes do to take care of his child and self?
Really good question. You are in your early 60s with a four-year-old child. The most important stretch here for me is the next 10 years, at which point you will be in your early 70s. I have no idea how hale and hearty you are but I'm guessing you will need to offload some of the physical demands of raising a boy that age. That's not so hard to do, maybe. It would be good to know how your boy is taking the loss at the moment. That is something concrete. I get from the tone of your post that the academic in you is doing a good job of providing some protection from other things around this issue that we all know are there. The four-year-old doesn't have those skills.
Deaths like this are awful. You have all my sympathy. Here are a few ideas:
Capture as many of your son's memories of his mother as you can, because not many memories from age 3 & 4 last long on their own. Interview him and record what he says. Have him draw pictures of her and things he did with her. (Even if a lot of memories are of her ill, record them and let him draw pictures of those scenes.) Also record your own memories of her, and of him and her together.
I was an older parent too. Try to find some others to hang out with. The thirty-something parents you meet at PTA meetings and the park are going to be out of sync with you, and maybe also intimidated.
Getting a nanny does seem like a good idea. I recommend against getting someone in their 20's. People that age move on to other things in a year or 2, no matter how much they love your kid and working for you. Find someone who's 40+, and if she's good pay her and treat her so well that she never leaves.
You are relatively close to triple my age, so I don't know that there is much advice that I can give aside from the fact that the phrase is "once *in* a while," not "once *and* a while."
My mother passed away when I was 9 years old after a long illness, and my father was in his late 60s at the time. I don't have much insight to offer other than that things turned out well for me so far.
I'd look into hiring a nanny, even better one who is a mother with kids that are out of the house. Lots of after-school activities to keep your son occupied when he gets to school worked out really well for me, but beware of activities that require lots of "soccer-moming" driving around.
Keeping active and healthy is very important for you now. I'd recommend picking up some active hobby if you haven't already. Biking, Skiing, stuff like that. It's also good to do outdoor physical activity with your son while you still can.
Alright, let me focus on physical health from the perspective of someone with aging relatives and parents who has watched them go through their 60s and 70s in various stages of health and decline.
I would highly prioritize your health, with a focus on maintaining your physical abilities and energy levels well into your 70s. If you're 63 and the boy is 4, then you'll be 74 when the boy is 15. I wouldn't say you need to be able to keep up with a 15 year old boy at 74 but you can't shut down, you can't become limited. Lots of people slow down at various points in their 70s and you can't afford to. Teenage boys are often hellions. Most of us boys were aggressively retarded around that age and you can't be too low-energy or physically limited to watch him.
I would strongly recommend GLP-1s if you're overweight or above, 6 hours a week of incline treadmill or other low impact moderate cardio, 2-3 hours of yoga/pilates work to protect your joints, and some light weightlifting 1-2x/week. Don't try to lift 3 plates but you want to be able to bench 145 in your 60s so you can bench 85 in your 70s. If you can't bench ~85 lbs, you're going to be very limited in just physically manipulating your environment.
I would also encourage you to expect at least one major medical catastrophe during this period. Like, you will probably get cancer or break a hip or get a serious infection or something during this period. The most important thing is finding things you can enjoy and are good enough at that you can bounce back after a massive life event.
Like, don't train to be able to walk 10,000 steps a day so you can be comfortably physically present with your teenage son in your 70s. Train so that after the doctor diagnoses you with stage 2 cancer, you go through 5 months of chemo, you then undergo a major surgery and are hospitalized for a week, then get returned home. you can then bounce back. Odds are very good that you'll experience that at least once in your 70s and you have to be able to bounce back. You don't just have to survive cancer, you have to be fit enough that you come back lesser (2) and still be able to live a good life. You gotta be able to do 10,000 steps a day, that's fundamental to being able to live an independent life, and you should expect to lose 30-50% of your current physical ability by your late 70s, when your son will be going through puberty and getting ready to go off to college.
I'd recommend this for everyone in their 60s but this goes triply for you. Protect your mobility, protect your mobility, protect your mobility. Get far enough ahead that you don't get elderly before 80. You can't be elderly, you can't be a near invalid (like 3,000 steps a day around the house) with a teenage boy.
(1) Read 1 hour of cardio except on Sundays. Bros don't need rest days. 60 year old men do.
Agree. I am 64 years old with a 5 year old daughter, and though my companion / her mother is somewhat younger (than me) and still with us, I still feel that the best thing I can do for my daughter is maximize my health and mobility. Weights, cardio, and just general activity. It helps that we have a farm and livestock that get me outside in all hours and weather (last night I was out at midnight in the rain - with the 5 yr old and Ms Spandrel - dissembling a deck to free a trapped sheep, baa). I am motivated not only by wanting to have the energy to keep up with her, as it were, but to ensure as best as I can that she is not dealing with an invalid parent while in high school.
Also, think carefully about how best and how much money to put away for her, as she will need it most just when you are earning least.
The obvious thing is that you need to figure out who will raise your child if something happens to you. That's a good idea for anyone, but your son has one parent left, who will be in his mid-70s by the time he is legally able to care for himself. You want to nail this down and get whatever you can arranged legally ASAP, as well as making sure that he's comfortable with whomever will care for him (ideally someone he sees every day anyway) if something happens to you. If he loses you before he's an adult, it will already be a horrible tragedy for him. You don't want to add legal custody battles or foster care to the trauma he will suffer in that case. That seems like the most important and the most urgent thing to resolve.
For other stuff, I'll recommend cub scouts and later boy scouts, especially if (like me) you aren't especially outdoorsy. My two sons both have a love of hiking and camping that they'd never have gotten from me, and while you have to go to the camping trips in cub scouts, once they're old enough for boy scouts, there's no need for you to go on a camping trip or 5-mile hike or whatever if you aren't up for it. (You have to volunteer some with the troop, but you don't have to go on the campouts if you don't want to.)
I'm up for giving some parenting advice although I'm not in your situation my neighbors are in their 60s with young children (12 and 8) so I have seen it done.
If you don't have the energy to chase around after a boy that age, make sure to find him friends and babysitters who can regularly engage in the type of active play he needs. Ie, tag, basketball, general roughhousing.
I highly recommend reading a range of parenting books and applying the most relevant lessons. Many books don't work for a specific child, or only parts of them, so reading widely is best path for success. I personally like positive parenting, how to talk so kids will listen the whole brained child, raise your kids without raising your voice, between parent and child. If you are having behavior management issues that these other books don't help with then I recommend 123 magic.
Check out my cool debate with Chris Freiman (philosophy professor at West Virginia University) on the ethics of immigration under Libertarian Rights Theory!
If there were no signal at all, we'd expect the finalists and HMs to be scattered at random throughout the rankings with the average ranking for both being 81. If the AIs were able to exactly predict the preference distribution of the voters we'd expect their top 15 to be the same as the finalists, resulting in an average ranking of 8, and the HMs to follow in the 16-25 slots with an average ranking of ~20.
Claude ranks of the actual finalists: 26, 78, 1, 11, 45, 8, 22, 30, 16, 79, 4, 25, 12, 28, 18.
Average ranking 26.8.
Claude ranks of the HMs: 10, 102, 91, 46, 29, 96, 89, 71, 15, 17
Average ranking 56.6
ChatGPT ranks of the actual finalists: 19, 27, 2, 40, 30, 33, 38, 42, 21, 37, 3, 59, 20, 47, 9
Average ranking: 28.5
ChatGPT ranks of the HMs: 11, 65, 57, 75, 50, 58, 26, 24, 1, 56
Average ranking: 42.3
Additionally, the ChatGPT ranking was split by tier with anything scored above an 8 designated as "Finalist Tier". This is the top 40 entries. Despite casting a 3x wider net for "finalist tier" than the actual contest, it only captured 80% of the actual finalists and 40% of the Honorable Mentions (which should also have appeared in the top 40 in a perfect ranking).
This is a pretty poor showing from both models imo. At best we can say that they sensed all of the finalists and (most of the!) HMs were in the top half of the distribution, but they could not successfully discriminate what would succeed within that top half.
What's interesting to me are the outliers, the ones the LLMs thought were really meh but humans liked. The outlier finalists for Claude appear to be "Great and Desperate Cures" and "Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs", while for Chat GTP it's "Storm of Steel" and "Orality and Literacy".
What's more interesting is that the two LLMs don't agree on their outliers Claude says GaDC is too long and quotes too much of the book, while ChatGTP says its...also too long and quotes the book too much. Honestly, the pros and cons listed seem pretty much the same between the two LLMs, which leads to the question of why they ranked it so differently. Also: too long to win the book review? Have they met ACX readers?
Doesn't look like there's any finalists that neither model thought was worthy, or any finalist that the average of the two models ranks' placed outside the top third. That seems quite impressive.
I agree with others that there are some reviews that the models loved which may have been marked down for AI use (or reading like it).
Inaccuracy over HMs I think is unsurprising as those are often just Scott's personal preferences.
What prompt did you use, though? When I rated book reviews, I was pretty teacherly: how well thought and well-written is this? But there have been several posts when people described their criteria, and there's a lot of variety here in how people describe making their judgment. Some talk about how much the review makes them want to read the book, some say if the first 2 paragraphs bore them they give the review a 3 or less and move on, etc.
It has seemed to me that some reviews make it into the finals mostly because they are about a topic of great interest to many readers here, rather than because they review their subject in a smart, witty, sharply expressed way, as Scott's do. I have in mind here the Alpha School review and the one about dating flawed men in the Bay area. Very long reviews tend to do well, and I have wondered whether they gain scoring points because people are impressed by the sheer volume of words, or because readers interested in the subject of the review got to enjoy reading it for a long long time. For some of the long ones that did well it has seemed to me that the writer could have made just as many great points with 60% fewer words -- their length was mostly the product of the writer's difficulty being sharp and succinct, and was grounds for the rater to reduce their score.
Anyhoo, point is that how well the AI classifies entries depends on how good the prompt is.
It would be interesting to feed AI all review entries since the contest began, along with their scores by raters, and have AI identify features that predict being a finalist.
I didn't run either of these prompts myself, just linking them here since the original comment thread is quite old at this point! I would be interested to know how the commenters who set up the analyses handled their prompting and whether there are improvements in predictiveness that could be achieved purely through old school "prompt engineering". Agree that back testing on old entries to identify common features of finalists and winners could be an interesting exercise!
Hello! Thanks for making this followup analysis. I made the Claude one and my prompt was kind of a weird meta prompt where I said to "write a good prompt to judge entries in the ACX book review contest for my claude code agent"
(I said claude code because I was running the reviews in a bash loop) and it output this:
I made the gpt-5.5 one and the prompting was nothing more than "fill out this json schema where you give a rating based on how you predict ACX readers will vote and some justification for the rating" which was batched and supplied to codex subagents.
Two further analyses I'd enjoy: (1) what's the Spearman rank correlation? It's tailor-made for these situations. (2) What if you did a Spearman rank correlation between ranking and (percent AI generated) according to Pangram?
Cool idea! I think for spearman for AI to final ranking we'll have to wait until Scott releases the data for their actual ranks, but for Pangram -> AI ranking I made this:
I ran Pangram on all the entries and it found 14 entries flagged with some (or all) AI writing. Spearman rank correlation for those is negligibly positive (though there's not a ton a samples). Interesting *two* of them get on the AI top ten "Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Self-Medicate" and "This is going to hurt".
Interesting that "This is Going to Hurt" made it into the finals despite having the AI stink on it!
"Venomous Lumpsucker" also appeared unusually high (#4!) in the ChatGPT rankings so we can add that to the pile for "AIs prefer AI writing". I wonder if anyone who generated the AI reviews would be willing to say what models they used - is Venomous Lumpsucker more favored by GPT than by Claude because GPT wrote it?
According to pangram, about 20% of it was ai written/assisted. If you're curious here's a link to the output on the first 4000 words and it highlights where it thinks the ai-assisted part is https://www.pangram.com/history/5eea6163-adcc-46cf-9dc8-e1d28f9add25 (for the record I also didn't think / realize it was ai assisted when I read it)
Seconded on #2. There were several reviews that set off my "AI slop" Spidey Senses this year. I don't think Claude's scores took any of that into account.
After reading through Claude's scores, I think the biggest disconnect is that it didn't pick up on any LLM-isms/AI slop register that would have annoyed human readers.
incase you're interested I ran pangram on all the entries and found 14 of them as ai generated https://acx.sina.town/analysis and it did put two of the ai usage ones in the top ten (also people couldve used ai and pangram didn't detect it of course)
Huh, that's fascinating. While I was voting, I wasn't shown any of the 14 that Pangram flagged, but several others set off my "LLM register" detector. The price of not having any false positives means Pangram is easy to fool, and misses a lot. (...Or maybe I'm so turned off by "LLM register" that I see it everywhere now, even when a human writes it.)
I don't think it's fair to call it a poor showing unless we know a human would do better. It's an election after all, it's entirely the fault of the voters.
It would be interesting to run the same statistics for each individual voter compared to the final results - did Claude and ChatGPT bear as much correlation with the final results as the average individual human voter did, or more, or less?
And, more importantly, we'd want access to the raw votes to gauge how well the book review selection process can predict itself. It may be that if you ran the election repeatedly (eg. through cross-validation), the correlation with itself isn't that high to begin with, and then of course no one and nothing can predict it 'well'.
There are usually not that many votes so I'd expect a good amount of variance for each entry and therefore the ranks would shuffle around a lot. But how much reshuffling would would happen across the top-15 cutoff?
Hard to say until you do the analysis! It could be relatively skewed, such that the top hits don't change much at all. (Maybe there's a huge spread of quality so the top 15 all have like 9/9 positive votes and the bottom have like 0/3? Then despite the absolute numbers being small, the selected set would not change meaningfully and you could ignore the measurement error.) Or it could all be equally spread out amounts of votes with roughly 50:50 ratios and the rankings jitter enormously and were uninformative.
Last year, Scott posted the final scores for the top 50% after the contest ended, in the contest winners announcement post I think. In previous years, he usually posted a link to all the scores in a comment somewhere, again after the contest was over.
I'm pretty sure he does that so he won't bias people for the final vote. People might think a finalist is worse than they would otherwise, if they see that they were the worst scoring finalist.
It interests me to discuss "words that don't translate" -- such as the English word genius, which doesn't translate to Japanese very well (this came up in a discussion regarding the formation of 2chan) -- the Japanese tend to regard geniuses as "free-thinkers" and that's... not considered a very good thing (might be catching!) in a conformist society. Americans (and the West in general) look up to geniuses to a very large degree.
I have also heard that the Russian word for "hero" was so... deprecated, depreciated (with classic Russian cynicism), that they use the word "stalker" (which is from the 1970's), in order to describe valorous behavior (with a side of "doing it because someone's got to" not for fame nor glory).
Does anyone else have words to contribute? I'm more interested in words that you'd "expect" to translate easily.
A Russian linguist once told me Russians have no word for "fun". The closest they have is a word that translates more closely to "distraction".
However, if I translate "fun" in Google, I easily get "веселье" (Latinized: "vesel'ye"). If I plug in "веселье", I get "fun" back, so it's not the case that "веселье" is closer to something else.
If I put in "distraction", I get "отвлечение" (Latin: "otvlecheniye"), which translates back first as "abstraction". But "distraction" also translated to "развлечение" ("razvlecheniye"), "amusement".
This was years ago, and I forget exactly which word the linguist cited. He did it for a living though (both conversational and journalistic Russian, as well as multiple other languages), and in this context I'm sure he was aware of "vesel'ye" and was instead making a more precise claim.
I know someone who is a "diplomat" -- he was unfamiliar with the word "spacebo" (thank you) in Russian, because nobody ever used it with him. Perhaps thankfulness is not something you say to the equivalent of a chess opponent?
German "Doch". It is a one-word-sentence used for the speech-act of doubling down. So you might have a conversation like:
"Go to bed now Timmy"
"No!"
"Doch!"
or similarly to insist on a claim of fact. As someone familiar with it, it *seems* like a pretty basic language function, especially since most languages *do* have the simple one-word objection corresponding to the "No" here, and a big fraction of its uses will be rejected promptly.
It's also used to answer negative questions. In English you have to add "I do" or "I don't" to your answer to "You don't like sesame?", in German you can say "Doch!" to mean that you're fine with sesame.
Maintenance. I've been told that there is no single word for maintenance in any African language (and in Chinese it's seen as futile, because the river will rise, and all your work will be undone).
In the Far East, art is not generally regarded as a matter of inspiration. No muses. No genius -- which was, originally, an attendant spirit of each man (women had a juno) -- such that particularly great achievements pointed to a particularly great genius.
Hebrew words I’m often missing when speaking English:
Beteavon (בתאבון): Something like “enjoy your meal”. Basically like “bon appétit”, but more casual.
Titchadesh (תתחדש): Used when someone gets something new or has a positive new change. Can mean “enjoy it”, “congrats on the new thing”, “good luck with this new chapter” and so on.
Labriut (לבריאות): Literally “to health”. Used like a secular “bless you” after a sneeze and such, but also somehow means “good for you” or “you do you”.
Tachles (תכלס): Means “bottom line” or “honestly”, but also “practically speaking”, and it can also convey a somewhat surprised agreement (like “actually, that’s right”).
Shchuna (שכונה): Literally means “neighborhood”, but the meaning I’m missing is when it’s used to describe something messy and chaotic, or unserious and unprofessional (and often both).
Davka (דווקא): Means something like “actually” and “specifically”, mixed with “on purpose” or “to spite”, and also with “surprisingly” and “on the contrary”. Very useful, very common, and apparently pretty hard to explain.
As a native Russian speaker, I would say this use of the word "stalker" is very niche and not remotely common. In fact, this is the first time I'm hearing of it outside of the Strugatsky/Tarkovsky context. "Hero" translates into Russian quite accurately as "geroy" (etymological connection readily apparent), and that includes both hero as in protagonist and hero as in someone who performed extreme acts of bravery. It's actually one of the most straightforward and accurate translations one can imagine.
Can "hero" sound stuffy and fake, propaganda-style in Russian? Absolutely, but it can sound the same way in English too, in a similar context.
I know of no word for "подлый" in modern English. "Turpitude" comes very close as a concept but afaict the word has fallen into disuse. This is how we end up with media describing acts of atrocity with "cowardly" when demonstrably they take significant courage to perform: people are fishing for "подлый" but use the most accessible word they have.
I know of no direct translation for "cheat" (as in a game) to Russian. You can express the concept, but if you're after a single word you're stuck with some variation on "defraud" or "make a fool of".
I'm not surprised that hero is still used (hadn't meant to suggest otherwise). I think "stalker" is roughly fitting into more of an "antihero" niche -- Superman fits a "hero" context a lot more than, say, Batman or Deadpool.
I'm also contextualizing stalker as a word like "grok" -- relatively frequently used among a certain group of people (although Science Fiction Writers I don't think would Dare use Heinlein's term in America).
I ran across a wonderful expression in a Dostoyevsky novel, “Let the stove and cottage dance!” I suppose it could have been translated as “Party time!” but that would have been pretty lame.
I’ve tried putting it back into Russian without luck. Are you familiar with the idiom?
The Russian "stalker," I presume, derives from Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky? That has been reimported to English primarily with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of first-person shooter games. It is a weird sort of memetic mutation to start with a book that is personal tragedy against a background of existential horror and end with a action-shooter game series. Kind of like what happened with Rambo in the US.
Interesting. I would have thought that most people in the west associate the term with the protagonist of Andrei Tarkovsky' 1979 film "Stalker" - which I now realise was itself based on "Roadside Picnic", which I had never previously heard of.
Yes, from Roadside Picnic. I ran into the term while reading Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro series (which is also a video game -- Russians love their science fiction). The Metro video games are more... "Thief the Dark Age" than "action-shootery" I think, though I've never played them.
Agape and Erotas: Greek distinguishes between love (agape) and the feeling of being in love (erotas). I’m surprised this distinction isn’t more common in other languages. You can say you feel both agape and erota for your partner, but you’d never say you feel erota for your children or your friends. Similarly, you can refer to your partner and your kids as ‘agapi mou’ (my love), but you wouldn’t call your kids ‘erota mou’.
Meraki: meraki is when you do something with care and passion: it’s when your work is your calling. The word carries connotations of optimism and cheerfulness. It’s a wonderful word.
I had a discussion with a friend on this recently. He was contrasting Japanese and Greek cultures, and wondered why Greeks lack the Japanese focus on craftsmanship, attention to detail, and pursuit of excellence. I think Greece is — has always been — very lopsided in its people’s tendencies: there is a sizeable minority of Greeks who are hard-working, diligent, conscientious, and passionate about what they do. These are the ones who have meraki, who tend to do extremely well when they leave Greece and find success in higher-trust cultures, and whose work has nothing to envy from that of their Japanese colleagues.
Unfortunately, the majority of Greeks are much more opportunistic and drawn to…
Tis arpachtis: this is the nomilisation of the verb ‘grab’. It refers to gain through quick, sloppy, and usually fraudulent or immoral means. It’s about making a quick profit, not building a sustainable business. It’s somewhat akin to ‘hustle’, but with more negative connotations.
Sovarofaneia: Greek distinguishes between the quality of being serious (sovarotita / seriousness) and that of appearing serious or solemn (sovarofaneia).
Epiousion: fun fact: you know that part in the Lord’s prayer that says ‘give us our daily bread’? That’s a mistranslation, because no-one knows what the word — epiousion — in the original Greek means. The literal translation (derived by translating the constituent parts epi and ousian) is ‘super-substantial’, but because epiousion is an hapax legomenon (a word that has only been recorded once (though technically epiousion is dis legomenon, as it has been recorded in two gospels)), we don’t know what the intended meaning was.
Diaskedasi and psychagogia: writing this, it occurs to me that Greek is very good at distinguishing between similar but fundamentally different concepts, in a way that English isn’t. Diaskedasi means entertainment of the light, non-serious sort, whereas psychagogia, which literally means training of the soul (what a fantastic portmanteau!) refers to edifying pursuits.
It has been claimed that "the Greeks had a word for it", but modern Greek has an astonishing lacuna which sometimes gives translators conniptions: it has one single adjective, κακό, which has to stand in for both "bad" and "evil". You can see what this leads to - the same word will be employed for both "bad dog!" and "The Evil Dead".
Nachas. How on earth does English not have a word for the joy and pride you feel in your children's accomplishments and happiness.
Tizita in Amharic is supposed to be hard to translate. I enjoy listening to the songs though! It sounds like it might have a similar meaning to Shaked's example actually, although I'm not sure it's precisely the same. I wonder what Ethiopian Israelis would say.
The most famous untranslatable line in literature is the opening sentence of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”. I can't give you a literal translation because, quite literally, there isn't one. If one were after Nabokovian exactitude, one might suggest "Over an unspecified length of time of my life, I would lie myself down at a good time", and the result is as false and ugly as one would expect.
The simplest rendering is perhaps Scott Moncrieff's "For a long time I would go to bed early"; James Grieve opted for the more daring “Time was, when I always went to bed early” ( but I find that "when" a particularly ugly interpolation). The problems crop up with almost every word of the original. "Longtemps" (literally, a compound of long+time) can mean "I used to for a long time, but I no longer do so", but also "a long time ago". "Couché" means "in a reclining position", but could also be rendered "I went to bed"; "I retired"; "I fell asleep" and so forth. "De bonne heure", literally "at a good time", normally means "early"; it suggests either the going-to-bed time of a child (as in it probably does here), or of an elderly invalid. What makes the whole sentence even denser is Proust's use of the passé composé verbal tense, which has no precise English equivalent; it is a past tense which refers to something which took place in an unspecified past, but no longer does so.
I do not read French well enough to read Proust in the original. I read the Montcrieff translation, and it gave me some of the deepest book enjoyment I've ever had. Dunno how much I should be thanking Montcrieff and how much Proust.
It kind of sounds like the English usage of "Once upon a time" in personal narration, ie, "Once upon a time, I would have woken up at eleven and gone straight to the station, but these days with the responsibilities of adulthood..." etc
Yes. But put yourself in the position of a translator who has just sat down to begin work on the full two and half thousand pages of À la recherche, opens the book at page one and runs up against this phrase. The Greek translator of "Du côté de chez Swann", who at the time was imprisoned by the dictatorship, told me that the problem had stopped him cold for a month.
But I really don't see anything remotely challenging about it. It's a colloquial phrase. None of the words in it are untranslatable in the same way other words in this thread are.
The problem is that tenses in different languages don't approach time in quite the same way, and if you want to convey exactly what the author meant (a challenging question in itself), it's hard.
People have different takes on translating the title, too.
This sounds not so much as a problem translating the literal meaning so much as it's a problem with tone. Which is still an issue, but I would compare it more to the difficulty of translating a complicated pun than in the meaning itself being somehow ineffable. If that tone is essentially communicating "hey, look at how cleverly I can use the French language" then I think it's sort of appropriate that it's untranslatable.
Have you ever read Godel Escher Bach? Now there's a book that would give a translator nightmares.
I used to personally know the woman who translated Gödel, Escher, Bach into Russian, and was an acquaintance of the author. I don't recall the specifics of her stories about the translation but she had plenty of stories to share. It was definitely A PROJECT.
Really? That's awesome. I honestly don't understand how it was done. It must lose at least a third of the information. Was she a mathematician? It seems to me that the translator would have to essentially re-invent every concept in the new langauge.
...perhaps. But the wordplay is somehow perfectly understandable simply by "reading" the Italian, no need for actual understanding of what the words mean (which is to say, I think the rhyme and alliteration are doing a lot of the wordplay, and the very pronunciation is fun).
Michener wrote a fair amount about Spanish "duende" in _Iberia_. It's one of those highly cultural words that you might expect to be hard to translate.
For me it's always been the Hebrew word געגוע, the emotion of missing someone or something. It has a bunch of not-quite-right English words (longing, nostalgia, yearning etc) but they're all meaningfully different (and if I were going from English to Hebrew I'd translate them into different words). It's such a noticable gap for me since it feels like a basic word in Hebrew.
Another example is that I've been learning Chinese recently and it has two different words that translate to "know" in English (zhīdào, 知道 and rènshi, 认识), but they translate to different words in Hebrew which has helped me get my head around it.
What does everyone here think about anthropic reasoning, just in general? A lot of it just doesn't sit right with me.
For example, take the standard anthropic response to the fine tuning argument for the existence of god: Sure, this universe is finely tuned to support life. But if it weren't finely tuned, then we wouldn't be here to observe it. If there were lots of universes with different parameters, then it's no more of a mystery that we live in one that can support life than it is a mystery that we live on earth than venus.
But positing lots of parallel universes with different parameters seems like a huge thing to posit! My priors are probably lower on the "lots of parallel universes" assumption than whatever that assumption is trying to rebut.
You also have the doomsday argument, which allows you to conclude that we are all going to die from basically nothing. Somehow this explains the value of the cosmological constant being near but not exactly zero. Can we also use it to conclude that many worlds is the best interpretation of quantum, just because there are more observers? Could we perhaps use it to conclude that AI is not conscious, because if it where then being infinitely replicable would mean that the "typical observer" should be an LLM, but I am not an LLM? Or maybe we could use it to conclude that I *am* an LLM, and we are living in a simulation?
These all seem outlandish enough for me to put high credence on "this entirely line of reasoning is a mistake" rather than taking it at face value. But I'm wondering what the commentariat here thinks.
Edit: I'm especially interested in hearing your guys' angles on whether or not anthropic reasoning gives a persuasive rebuttal to the fine tuning argument for intelligent design. This is the primary thing the wikipedia article for the anthropic principle talks about, so I believe it is in some sense representative of anthropic reasoning. I believe it is not persuasive.
The naturalistic anthropic argument, properly understood, entails an acceptance of objective nihilism. It also does *not* assume or require a multiverse.
It just requires that you accept there is nothing inherently special, magical or interesting about life.
The standard fine tuning argument looks at the physical constants of the universe that allow for life as we know it to exist, and notes that, if those values were chosen randomly from all possible values, then the odds of life would be astronomically small.
This may well be true. But from the perspective of nihilistic naturalism, it doesn't matter. You can't look at an event after it has occurred, only then declare it to have some special meaning, and then declare that the odds against it happening demonstrate a higher conscious power. Of course conscious living beings consider life special; that's not evidence that it actually is in some higher, cosmic sense.
The fine tuning argument is like the following:
1. You thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards.
2. You lay out the cards face-up and take note of their order.
3. You decide that their current order is incredibly special and meaningful.
4. You do the math and note that the odds of getting the particular shuffle you did is 1 in 8.0658 × 10⁶⁷.
5. You decide that because this was so astronomically unlikely, a higher conscious power must have designed the cards to come out that way.
Only substitute "life-permitting universe" for a particular order of a deck of cards.
What do you understand "Anthropic Reasoning" to be? It seems to me that your main objection is to the "many worlds" theory, which is a separate thing.
Any explanation or model of a thing must, in principle, allow the thing to be what it is. The universe contains observers, therefore any explanation / model must allow for the possibility of observers. Any model that doesn't is necessarily false.
The fine-tuning argument for the existence of God says "look at all the possible values of the fundamental constants. Most values would result in a hostile universe with no life. Therefore this improbable coincidence (that the numbers happened to fall in the life-sustaining range) is evidence of a God".
The anthropic argument basically says "It's not improbable that these numbers support life. Once a model includes a constant, the only possible values are those that allow the existence of observers. The other possibilities you're considering are, in principle, impossible and the fact that they're not realized isn't surprising at all".
As a sort of imperfect example, it's not surprising that all the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. You can say "wow, out of all the possible numbers these angles could turn out to be it's crazy that they end up with this super specific number!" but it's not actually surprising. Other numbers are conceptually prohibited. Similarly, scientific theories are developed by observation. This is fundamentally how we develop them. Therefore, in principle, it will never be surprising that a theory results in a universe with observers. It is a guaranteed fact.
Many Worlds is a separate thing. Some scientists don't like "inelegant" physical constants, so they try to create models of the universe where the physical constants are nicer numbers. One of the ways you can do this is by allowing every single number at the same time, then you can say something like "all possible different configurations exist" and you avoid the ugly idea that "0.007297 is just a special number".
Generally, I understand anthropic reasoning to mean doing bayesian reasoning, with the dataset of "observers" (conscious beings), and the fact that you are one.
Usually, this involves comparing counterfactual universes for how many observers they have with various properties, with some sort of assumption that you are "typical" among these observers. For example, the anthropic response to the fine tuning argument would say that the typical observer (or in this case *all* observers) would observe a universe fine tuned to life. So, it is not a mystery that the universe we see should be fine tuned.
Things like doomsday arguments and simulation arguments will compare counterfactual worlds with different populations of sorts of observers, and rule out worlds where you are highly "atypical". Because the worlds where you are highly atypical are not this world, we can draw conclusions about this world.
I take issue with this line of reasoning because it allows you to conclude things wildly detached from real data, and the conclusions you draw seem unconstrained. Many worlds was one example, but the original post above had multiple cases where anthropic reasoning was applied, and I felt that the conclusions were not justified by the evidence. I am doubting not just the fine tuning response, but all of the examples. But the fine tuning seems to be the starting point that is most agreed upon, so it made sense to single out.
As far as the specific response here about fine tuning is concerned, I don't understand how you could use anthropic reasoning without assuming that there are many parallel universes. It seems perfectly coherent that there just wouldn't be observers, so the typical observer would be "no one". Anthropic reasoning over parallel universes lets you vary the parameters of your universe until you have one that supports observers, explaining fine tuning. Without the parallel universes, you only have one universe that happens to be finely tuned, which is now a spooky coincidence again. It very well could've just been a universe with no observers, and without us to observe it. It's not like there's another universe for the observers to go to in this case.
I have a better idea of what you're complaining about now, and I fully agree. I think it helps to consider Laplace's Rule [0]. Laplace's Rule can be thought of as a heuristic which says "in the absence of data, assign equal probability to each possible non-observed outcome". E.g. consider: "what's the probability that the sun will rise, tomorrow morning?"
Most adults have a lifetime of data of the sun going down and coming back up, like clockwork. So for most adults, P(x) is something like 99.9%". But if you were born today at noon, you have basically no data. So the best you can do is confabulate data based on your imagination. "Well, it either rises or it doesn't. Therefore, it's 50/50."
And it's like, yeah, if you have literally no data, 50/50 is kinda sorta reasonable, as a wild-ass guess. But simultaneously, confabulated data is not real data. Garbage in; garbage out. Likewise, anthropic reasoning is a bit fast and loose when it comes to the cosmic scale, since we haven't actually observed parallel universes. Though there's not really a better alternative until the AI rapture turns you into Jace Beleren.
"I think there’s a 66% chance that actually, the singularity is intimately related to the universe being a simulation, and that at least some of the events above could be better predicted by knowing what the simulators are thinking than by normal forecasting."
Certainly if we are examining the psychology of programmers running the simulation we are in, those programmers count as intelligent creators, no? I feel a bit guilty that this feels like a hostile reading, but I don't understand how you could read this differently. There are comments in the paragraph after the quote about how we might be simulated versions of real people. So maybe the *real* people were not intelligently designed, so in some sense our universe is also not intelligently designed, because it is a copy? These seem weirder than just saying "this is intelligent design".
Of course, the claim that we are living in a simulation itself comes from reasoning anthropically. So now we have anthropic arguments both for and against intelligent design!
Perhaps SIA could guide us in choosing between these two cases. Maybe we count how many counterfactual people are in the various parallel universes with slightly different physics, and compare it to the compute power of an NVIDIA B200, so that we can answer once and for all if God exists. Food for thought.
There is an alternative (and highly speculative!) approach to cosmology which explains fine tuning and neatly sidesteps the appeal to intelligent design.
The intricate structure of living creatures was seen as a strong proof of the existence of God, until Darwin came along. The order of nature was then seen to be the result of countless iterations of natural selection between variants for reproductive success, with inherited characteristics closing the feedback loop.
In "The Life of the Cosmos", Lee Smolin proposes an analogous mechanism to explain the improbably lucky values we observe in our universe's physical constants.
Cosmological natural selection:
-Our cosmos emerged from the singularity in a collapsing black hole.
-Every collapse to a singularity is the Big Bang of a daughter universe.
-The more efficient a universe is at creating black holes, the more daughter universes it will create over its lifespan.
Rinse and repeat. Over time, more and more universes will be good at creating the conditions for lots of black holes, which also implies long-lived stars and complex chemistry from the elements these stars create.
It's elegant, and the theory is actually falsifiable. Unfortunately, AFAIK the specific predictions Smolin makes regarding the implied mass limits of neutron stars have been disproved by observation. Also, it's unclear even on the most hand-wavey level how physical constants can be "inherited" with slight mutations from a parent universe. And does "over time" even make sense in this context? Still, more fertile ground for thought than "we're here because where else would we be?" or "God tweaks the numbers"...
I think arguably (not sure I 100% buy this argument) the "fine tuning" argument suffers from the "multiple universes" issue as much as the anthropic argument.
The reasoning of the fine tuning is things like "the gravitational constant is 6.67418 * 10^-11, if it were slightly different, live as we know it wouldn't form". But this appeals to our sense that this number is "random", i.e. that there's an element of "chance" involved in it being 6.67418 rather than 6.67419 or whatever. And our intuitive idea of "chance" or "probability" doesn't make sense without some possibility of repeated trials, and if you're talking about the state of the universe, repeated trials means some idea of other possible universes.
Also separately I think the fine tuning argument gives humans too much credit in figuring out what would happen with different parameters. E.g. the "triple alpha process", which is the way that sufficient carbon and heavier elements can be formed to support life. Problem is, our model of nuclear physics previously didn't allow for the triple alpha process, and the only reason we discovered it is because we knew *something* had to allow for more carbon to exist, so we posited something that would allow it to exist before having any theoretical/experimental basis for it.
Basically we couldn't even prove that life was possible in our own universe without "cheating", i.e., seeing that it does, in fact, have life and then reasoning backwards. How can we be so confident in predicting whether a wildly different universe would have life?
I think I see what you're getting at. First, the fine tuning argument talks about how the "chance" of the universe "coincidentally" having the physics that it does is a thing that doesn't really make sense. If we don't have counterfactual worlds, then we can't really talk about "odds", and counterfactual worlds with different physics are exactly the spooky ghosts that made me not want to accept anthropic reasoning in the first place. So fine tuning is at least as weird as anthropics. Second, it sounds like you're saying that we don't know enough about alternative physics to know if they could support life. For all we know, the universe *isn't* fine tuned.
I'm not sure I buy the first point. Suppose, for example, that on your birthday, the northern lights appeared in front of you, wrote your name in the sky, and told you to have a happy birthday. And, it just so happens that this is a new law of physics that the northern lights have to do this every birthday of yours! But the law of physics only starts this next year.
If this were true, you would probably suspect a cosmic conspiracy before you would be willing to accept that "physics is just like that". This physics seems "less likely" than "other physics", whatever the details of how we philosophize about "less likely" and "other physics". We don't need repeated trials to suspect that something is up. So then, do we need repeated trials to suspect something is up in our actual universe?
It seems to me like a difference here is that the anthropic explanation of fine tuning depends on literally real universes that actually exist, whereas noticing that the universe is fine tuned just needs some notion of counterfactuals or occam's razor, or something. So anthropics is introducing ghosts that are a lot spookier than fine tuning alone.
> Suppose, for example, that on your birthday, the northern lights appeared in front of you, wrote your name in the sky, and told you to have a happy birthday. And, it just so happens that this is a new law of physics that the northern lights have to do this every birthday of yours!
This is a standard type of counter-reply to nihilistic naturalism. It often takes the form of "what if the initial conditions of the universe spelled out 'made by God' in every human language?' The intent, as I see it, is to force the naturalist to the conclusion that if we don't see the existing, life-permitting, configuration of the universe to be objectively significant, then we must therefore also not find *any* possible configuration of the universe significant.
This is seriously flawed. The big reason the fine-tuning argument fails is that under a naturalistic universe, there can never be any objectively significant relationship between the existence of the universe and the nature/configuration of that universe. There's no room for coincidence or surprise. Whatever form the universe took, that would just be the way it was.
That does not mean there is no relationship between the configuration of the universe and conscious life which comes to exist in that universe. Under naturalism, this is just logical, since only conscious minds can create meaning.
The reason a life-permitting universe is not surprising for us is that we are alive! Life existing somewhere in a universe that supports it isn't surprising. The opposite would actually be more surprising.
But the standard example of a universe whose initial configuration spells out a message that will be readable by humans once they evolve in a few billion years *is* surprising, and would count as evidence of a creator. Again, not by itself, because nothing can be "surprising" without context.
It's surprising because there's no causal or logical connection. If the configuration of the universe spelled out "made by God" in English and every other human language, that configuration doesn't *cause* humans to come into being who create and understand English. It would be an astronomical coincidence, and would therefore be evidence for either:
* a higher power that designed the universe
* the creation and evolution of human languages themselves being influenced by people who somehow studied the configuration of the universe and incorporated it into their language
Note how the order of operations is everything here. If we assign meaning *after* noticing it, then the connection is now causally explained and no longer surprising. It's only if we notice a connection to something for which we have *already* assigned meaning that there is now a coincidence that must be explained.
The existence of life is fully explained by being in a life-permitting universe. The nature of the universe (being life-permitting) is not significant in any way that requires explanation.
> But positing lots of parallel universes with different parameters seems like a huge thing to posit!
Start by working out which camp you're going to join: "we are not special" or "we are very very special". All else follows: we are not special, therefore there must be lots more of the same stuff that we can't see and there's no problem with how well it fits us; or we are very very special, therefore what we see has been very specifically fine-tuned for us and there's no problem with there only being one of it, and also therefore God.
Since we can't know for sure either way, you're going to have to pick one or the other as an axiom and follow it to the end; and when you get there, you are going to end up with a bunch of claims that look like huge things to posit to people in the other camp.
In as much as there is any inconsistency to be found, it's that built into the fine tuning argument is the assumption that universes that are configured differently to the one we see can exist - otherwise, if the universe we see is the only one there can be, there is no fine tuning question that needs an answer; but when arguing something based on this, to claim that different universes existing is too much to assume is then to attack an implicit premise of your own argument.
> Start by working out which camp you're going to join: "we are not special" or "we are very very special".
How about "we are an extreme end of a very long statistical curve"? In other words, roughly as "special" as rolling ten 6-sided dice and have them all come out 1's?
Given enough rolls, all 1's will happen sooner or later. It does not mean God caused it to happen.
Yes, but you don't even need to make that argument. The fine-tuning argument proponents first would need to demonstrate that a life-permitting universe is somehow significant and special in the same way that rolling all 1's would be.
And I mean "special" in a way that we could say that that possibility was significant *before* the universe appeared the way it did. Simply noting that we, conscious living beings, find life to be significant and special, doesn't count. Declaring something to be special both *after* and *because* it happened is just a variation on the sharpshooter fallacy.
Quick reply: Bentham's has been doing a great job of pushing for SIA over SSA as "the right anthropic framework". I haven't found anyone pushing back (would love to read counter-arguments if anyone has them), so it's a bit one sided, but I'm mostly convinced: *wherever anthropic reasoning applies*, SIA is probably the right way to do it.
Note that all the toy examples that are offered, such as the Sleeping Beauty problem, give you, by hypothesis, a pre-defined set of worlds with a given probability function. And there SIA seems to work beautifully. This actually defuses the Doomsday argument.
Now the problem with anthropic reasoning is that everyone's real prize is to rush way past this, and apply it to *all conceivable universes*. And this, as far as I can tell, doesn't work, because 1) conceivable doesn't mean physically or even metaphysically possible, and 2) the set is way too big, and the math is liable to diverge.
That's where you get "the universe is way bigger than you thought", which I find highly dubious. (And then you get "therefore God", which is also a dubious step.)
EDIT: To recap, well-grounded anthropics tells you that, given a probabilistic multiverse, you're likely to find yourself within its more populous branches - and then gives you the exact math to calculate that. While ungrounded speculative anthropics would like to make entire huge branches appear out of thin air.
Re-EDIT: you can probably reframe my position as: SIA for what is known to be possible, SSA for what is only conceivable.
This is interesting. I just looked up a recap on SSA vs. SIA. Would another way to say this be that anthropic reasoning is good for navigating probability space, but not generating probability space? Now that I write this though, it seems like SIA would be the more probability space generating framework; because it assumes a universe with an inordinately high population. In over my skis here, I may just be hopelessly confused about this. Would you say anthropics have these two failure modes whether you assume Self Sampling, or Self indicating?
That's a whole essay in itself and if I give a simple version I'll probably get complaints. All I can say from here is that they are different ways of counting the probabilities within a given situation, when you're trying to do stats across selection effects, and you don't know which observer you are.
For the details, I'm sure Claude can give you a good overview. Bentham's (Matthew Adelstein) and Nick Bostrom seem to their main proponents (for SIA and SSA respectively), so if you want to dig further, start with their writings on the issue.
I'm not asking for an explanation of each hypothesis. I just want to know what the letters in the acronyms are short for, so I can be sure that I'm looking up the correct thing.
The counterargument is that SIA does not satisfy the conditions for applying Bayes' Theorem in the first place. Its random-sampling analogy is a metaphor, not a reality. We are not, in fact, a random sampling from the set of all conceivable observers. SIA makes an unjustified probabilistic inference based on a counterfactual sampling process that never occurred. Bayesian inference can only be used with a statistically well-understood sampling procedure. *If* you know that you once existed in a pool of possible observers of known size *and* if you know the sampling procedure that selects from that pool, then your own position can be used as an input to Bayes. However we are not randomly selected from any pre-existing set, we are here as a result of deterministic physical processes. Being able to imagine a set and sampling procedure does not, in fact, make either of them real.
BB is a kind of an autistic nut who doesn't have any mathematical sophistication. He likes SIA because it refutes the Doomsday Paradox, but that's only a paradox to people who don't know how to apply SSA correctly. He has two errors which cancel out to give him a reasonable worldview and he takes that as evidence that he's correct.
I'll push back on this a bit. I quite like the framing that BB gave once about the relevant observers: "all the ones in your theory, that you don't know you are not".
Ok. BB lives in "not even wrong" territory. The Doomsday Argument is pure nonsense and BB's writing on the topic is hopelessly confused.
Consider the Sleeping Beauty problem. In order to use Bayes in any way, you have to specify exactly the waking-up algorithm. If Sleeping Beauty just wakes up with no idea how she got there or why, she has no way of making any sort of inference. Only in the context of a specific selection algorithm can any reasoning be done.
In the Doomsday argument, tell me what the equivalent of "your waking depended on the result of a coin flip" is.
For the mathematically inclined, here's a handwave of how ungrounded SIA diverges. This is basically what is known as the Presumptuous Philosopher.
First, note that anthropics itself doesn't give you raw probabilities, it gives you a Bayesian update on a prior. So the first thing we need is a universal prior over all conceivable universes.
Now that itself is a tall order, and would be reasonable grounds for stopping right here and saying "no answer". But people are brave, and AFAIK the one serious attempt to do this is via Kolmogorov complexity, i.e the Solomonoff prior, which states that a universe that can be described in <n> bits of information, gets a prior probability of 2^-n. This is a harsh penalty on complexity, which checks out because it gives us a precise version of Ockham's razor, and we like Ockham's razor.
Armed with this, and some unbounded SIA reasoning, we can ask the question: what is the most likely <n> we are liable to find ourselves in? Which amounts to asking the question: if P(n) is the maximum number of observers produced by a universe of complexity <n>, what is the shape of the function n -> P(n)/2^n?
And that, I'm sorry to say, diverges wildly. The reason for that, is that the amount of shit you can generate from <n> bits of information grows way faster than 2^n. This depends on your theory of computation, details can vary, for the famous example, have a look at Scott Aaronson's articles on the Busy Beaver.
In plain terms, this means that there is never a universe that is complex *enough*; whichever universe you examine, ungrounded SIA will tell you that it is astrononomically dominated by others of higher complexity. So SIA is not just saying the universe is big; it's saying its size is not defined at all.
The sleeping beauty problem is so obviously (to me, at least) a case of reference class tennis, i'm baffled that people are still arguing about it. Like, guys, we solved Bertrand's Paradox ages ago. The "correct" answer to Sleeping Beauty is merely a question of whether the reference class is hypothetical-worlds or observer-moments.
Analogy: is an icecube cold? Well, it depends on the reference class. It's cold compared to room temperature. it's hot compared to the vacuum of outer-space. There's multiple ways to interpret the question. Likewise, "halfer or thirder" depends on whether the question chooses to double-count Sleeping Beauty's observations in the world where the coin lands tails.
Or another way to put it: a probability is a mapping from a sample-space to an outcome space. I.e. it's a *ratio*. The ratio depends on what the denominator is. it's intrinsically comparative. If the question is vague or undefined, demons fly out of your nose.
I will agree that it's difficult to quantize "all conceivable worlds", and that conclusions drawn from this premise should be assigned a wide, spacious confidence-interval to match the wide, spacious realm of conceivability.
Also, the "SIA vs SSA" debate is completely orthogonal to Sleeping Beauty. The former is about distinguishing the hypothetical from the real, whereas latter is about distinguishing the instantaneous from the diachronic. If you try to reason about Sleeping Beauty as if the question were about hypothetical observers vs real observers, and then try to generalize this to other anthropic questions, you're gonna have a bad time.
Thanks for the response. I hadn't seen that work of Bentham's, so I'll probably give it a read soon. I probably agree that anthropics might have something interesting to say in more down to earth cases.
Before then, I'm curious as to your take on some of the examples in my top level post. Consider fine tuning. If we have anthropics that is "well grounded" in some sense of not positing lots of parallel universes, then we can't quantify over the possible values of whatever is being fine tuned. So using anthropics as a response to the fine tuning argument for intelligent design breaks down.
So then, do you think that anthropic arguments are persuasive rebuttals to the fine tuning argument? Can it say anything at all about fine tuning, or is anything that it says necessarily not well grounded?
Edit: I probably don't fully understand what counts as well grounded to you, rereading. Which universes are legitimate to postulate for anthropics to be "well grounded"?
> So then, do you think that anthropic arguments are persuasive rebuttals to the fine tuning argument? Can it say anything at all about fine tuning, or is anything that it says necessarily not well grounded?
You said it in your original post, the cost is to assume a multiverse. If you assume a pre-existing multiverse with some shape or other, and some of its branches are able to support observers but most won't, then given that you *are* an observer, you're likely to find yourself in a fine-tuned universe without the need for an active tuner.
At this point it's all speculation - I don't really have a clear opinion which one is simpler or or more likely a priori: "this is the world we see, AFAIK it's the only one", or "we don't know how this world got here, but if this one exists, for all we know many others may exist too". But if "big multiverse" is not obviously worse than "single universe", and it solves the fine tuning issue, that's probably a reason to prefer it. Note that big multiverses have their own problems too, you don't want a world where you're most likely to be a Boltzmann brain.
> Which universes are legitimate to postulate for anthropics to be "well grounded"?
I think I draw the line between the possible and the merely conceivable. The lower bound is having a causal mechanism, which ensures it's actually possible. The upper bound is pulling possibilities out of thin air just because you can think of them. TBH, I'm pretty sure there's unexplored terrain in between, and I'm not so confident about the details therein.
Re. Anthropic: the parallel universes part of the argument is unnecessary IMO.
The main point of the argument is that given that the universe is a certain way, it is a necessary condition that any life that develops in that universe would be well calibrated to the universe it developed in, because that's where it is. It's like pointing to a rock at the bottom of a hill and saying: Look how it is resting at it's lowest potential energy position! Surely this is evidence of a Mover!
When actually the evidence of a mover would be if it was precariously balanced on top of a windy cliff in a humorous arangment.
Given that and given we can't know how things would be if the universe was different than it is, the fact that life is well adapted to the place that it is provides no useful information for or against.
Hyperwealthy oligarchs are probably mostly safe from lone assassins and vengeful lone-wolf revolutionaries, particularly if they can restrain themselves from prancing about in public - I should like to believe that offensive displays along the lines of last year's Bezos wedding in Venice will be increasingly vetoed by private security consultants. However, a true revolutionary situation including substantial uprisings of aggrieved populations may well prove another matter.
On the "uprisings of aggrieved populations" front, the existence of megayachts bears some consideration. As long as there's *somewhere* you can safely put in for supplies, maybe sending a tender rather than the ostentatious yacht, one can live indefinitely while mostly immune to any aggrieved population that isn't sufficiently organized to run a navy.
I really doubt this. As Luigi Mangione, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the state of Iran all demonstrate, it's not THAT hard to do violent stuff to people, even if they have superior capabilities.
And yet Donald Trump still lives. As does Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many more who are or were much higher on the global lots-of-people-want-them-dead index than any oligarch.
Even when the person in question is a working politician in a democratic nation where lots of flesh-pressing and baby-kissing is part of the job, it demonstrably is possible to provide security at a level that *usually* stops all the world's motivated assassins from completing their task.
The lesson of Luigi Mangioni is that you actually need to have security, even if you're not the president. I'm sure most of the world's billionaires have taken that lesson to heart.
Well, I think there just aren't that many assassins out there. I took the above article to suggest robots might insulate people even in a much more murdery environment than the one we live in.
The near-assassination of Trump suggests that there are not a lot of competent would-be assassins out there. This was absolutely not a commercial for the care and competence of the secret service and local cops providing security for him. If that's the norm, then presumably they can get away with that lackluster performance for the same reason that most of the TSA routine at airports isn't very effective--hardly anyone who's not an obvious nonfunctional nut is actually trying to get past them.
Yes, as I was trying to say above, my point is that I don't think the ultra-rich can rely on robots to keep them safe even in some horrid dystopia where 80% of people are reduced to angry, starving slum-dwellers, which could be an environment where more than 1 person per million decides take up assassination.
a. Very rich people who are widely hated for their politics or other activities, like Elon Musk, George Soros, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, etc. Lots of people certainly say they'd like to beat them up or murder them or something. And yet, they go on living apparently rather good lives.
b. Rich people (many hops down from the Musk/Gates class) living in countries with corrupt and indifferent policing and lots of crime, including kidnapping gangs--there are plenty of rich people living in Mexico and Pakistan and Nigeria, for example, surrounded by poverty and crime and corruption, and yet they are generally able to pay for armed guards and live pretty good lives.
c. Rich people from despised ethnic minorities in very poor ill-policed places, as with overseas Chinese in a lot of poor parts of Asia. Again, they seem to mostly survive and live pretty well, despite needing to pay people to protect them from resentful/hateful mobs.
d. Movie stars and singers and athletes who are often the target of obsessive crazies who want to talk to them, murder them, f--k them, whatever. That often causes a lot of problems for those folks, but mostly they do okay by hiring bodyguards and taking normal precautions.
My predictions:
1. Even in a world with massively more resentment and hatred toward rich people than we see now, it will in general be possible for those rich people to keep safe by hiring private security (whether humans or robots or a mix), taking some basic precautions wrt their movements, etc.
2. Very little of what actually gets people targeted by murderous crazies/outraged poor people/whomever is just how ostentatious they are. Mostly it's probably crazy people finding crazy reasons to do something awful, or political/ethnic/religious/racial hatred (as with overseas Chinese in the Philipines). Musk probably has 10x the crazy haters as Bezos, and Musk doesn't do a lot of ostentatious consumption for the sake of showing his wealth. And Taylor Swift probably has 100x the crazy stalkers as either one!
But also, a little security will dissuade or turn away most such people, and my guess is that there will be people having spectacles that offend others as long as there continue to be people. (I'll admit I don't get why I am supposed to be more mad at Bezos' extravagant wedding or yacht than at some random cardiologist who throws a wedding for his daughter at a resort in Hawaii and has a boat he takes out into the bay on weekends.)
Amazon has made a lot of peoples' lives (including mine) a great deal better, so it's hard for me to see why I'd be mad that Bezos got insanely rich creating it. The cardiologist has likely made a much bigger difference in a much smaller number of lives. But I don't begrudge either one their fancy wedding or yacht, beyond vaguely wishing they'd offer me lower prices.
It's true that there are significantly worse people that Bezos wielding ridiculous amounts of power in today's world; if I had to draw up a moral balance sheet based upon actual destructive ability, the chief executives of fossil fuel companies and of private equity firms would head the list. But the grotesque and very public in-your-face shenanigans of Bezos and other of his ilk are more likely to spark instant rage in observers.
Likewise it's made mine better, and likewise am I not mad nor jealous. Undoubtedly there's a bit of envy for his unrivaled capacity for Veblenian "conspicuous consumption", though it's not unreasonable to assume that such ostentation might cause a bit of "justified" envy or disdain.
Objectively, though, a cardiologist "saves lives" with relatively less lateral movement to cause huge amounts of damage. Bezos' inventions have revolutionized supply chains, saved immense time and conversely caused immense disruption for convenience and economies of scale. It's likely been a net benefit but undoubtedly some have experienced outsized negative effects.
Naturally there is going to be a lot more room for upsetting people on aggregate in Bezos' vocation than the cardiologist's, therefore a different response to each's consumption. So whilst I agree with your points and personally feel the same, I think only considering how it benefits you is a narrow perspective as that is clearly not the only vector on which Amazon impacts people.
It might make for a more interesting parallel if the contrast case were a cosmetic dentist or investment consultant or reality show star rather than a cardiologist.
Nestled within the recent huge drop in violent crime in the US is an additional important development: "Murders in 2025 Were Likely Solved at the Highest Rate This Century"
"murder clearances were right around 60 percent pre-COVID, fell to around 50 percent in 2021 and 2022 before rebounding steadily through the end of 2025."
"keeping in mind the fact that the CDE as a data source is likely slightly understating the US murder clearance rate in 2025, where would last year rank? The CDE has the 2025 murder clearance rate at 66.5 percent which is up massively from the 2021/2022 low of around 50 percent. Right around 63 percent of murders were cleared in the US between 2000 and 2009 with the clearance rate this century peaking right at 66.5 percent in 2009."
"The US clearance rates in the 1960s and 1970s were unbelievably high — and by that I mean that they probably shouldn’t be believed."
"But why are they rising now? I would point to two factors that are major determinants in explaining why clearance rates are rising. First, the number of murders has fallen dramatically, and a smaller denominator (murders) with roughly even numerator (murders solved by police) leads to a naturally higher clearance rate....Another major contributing factor in my opinion is that the share of murders being committed with a firearm has fallen....Murders with a firearm tend to be harder to solve..."
"The increase in clearance rates...has largely come from big cities, which suggests broader changes in policing strategies or improvements in police-community relations as possible — though hardly proven — additional explanations."
(I am sorry to note that, unlike with the broader crime trends, my big city of residence is not successfully participating in this one. Chicago's clearance rate for murder has not improved lately, notwithstanding our soon-to-be-former mayor's hand-waving about it.)
My cop friend says "drones". Someone calls, they get a drone to the location before anyone expects it, before anyone gets together to concoct a story, before the caller (who may be the criminal here, he told me we'd be surprised how often they try this) gets rid of the weapon they're holding.
I suspect Ring cameras, ShotSpotter tech, and maybe better trawling of social media (lots of city "beef" ends up on snapchat/instagram) probably all contribute a little bit.
ShotSpotter went live in Chicago in 2018 and was cancelled in mid-2024. So the sharpest-ever-recorded _drop_ in murder clearances happened with ShotSpotter in place, while the rebound (improvement) in murder-investigation success has accelerated since ShotSpotter was dropped.
Local police officials attribute that to ShotSpotter's high error rate persistently sending beat cops off on wild-goose chases. This spring a local academic FOIA'd police department records and found police response times to confirmed incidents having lately improved by an average of 4 minutes compared to before ShotSpotter's cancellation, in the specific police beats that had ShotSpotter sensors.
Whatever the accuracy of the previous paragraph's arguments, the local politics of it are that a majority of the City Council wants ShotSpotter back. Next April a new different mayor and some new different alderpersons will be sworn in. At that time the city will undoubtably resume the natural experiment by reinstalling either ShotSpotter (which has a new company name) or similar technology.
The CDE (FBI's analysis division) early this year published a five-year study which included this question. They found that the percentage of murders involving a domestic relationship was 17% in 2020, 16% in 2021, 17% in 2022, 18% in 2023, and 19% in 2024. (2025 nationwide data not yet complete/confirmed so not used in the paper.)
They found similar modest-but-noticeable increases 2022-2024 in the percentages of other violent crimes (aggravated assault, rape, robbery) involving a domestic relationship. (Meaning that the large declines in those crimes starting 2022 have been slightly more pronounced among non-domestic than among domestic instances.)
So to your conjecture about murder clearance rates....maybe, at least in part, yes? Once the national 2025 data is finalized this would be a worthwhile point for them to extend the analysis of.
U.S. criminologists have for decades estimated that somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of murders were domestic (and have argued endlessly within that range of estimates). They've also long thought, and the 2020-24 FBI analysis supports, that while three out of four domestic violent-crime offenders are men the victims are women in almost the exact same ratio.
“U.S. criminologists have for decades estimated that somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of murders were domestic (and have argued endlessly within that range of estimates). They've also long thought, and the 2020-24 FBI analysis supports, that while three out of four violent-crime offenders are men the victims are women in almost the exact same ratio.”
I presume those ratios are only for *domestic* crimes of violence, right? It’s always been my understanding that men are a significant majority of violent-crime victims (and well over 75% of offenders).
I guess it depends on the kind of crime. DV murders are mostly going to be male on female, given that most people are straight and men average a lot bigger and more violent than women. Armed robbery murders seem like they'd be a lot more balanced. Gang murders and lunkhead fights that go wrong ("you lookin' at my girl, motherf-cker?") seem like they'd be mostly male-on-male.
This Lumina update is a perfect real-world illustration of the core challenge (and opportunity) I explore in my new essay.
The biggest hurdle isn’t just engineering a bacterium to produce something useful — it’s getting it to stably colonize its niche long-term. The mouth turns out to be a surprisingly hostile environment for this. The gut, by contrast, is far more promising as a stable platform.
That’s why I argue that turning the microbiome into a programmable “living pharmacy” (e.g. continuous in-situ production of Vitamin K2 (MK-7) and targeted anti-inflammatory compounds) offers much higher leverage for fighting the actual top killers — chronic inflammation and vascular calcification — than pouring billions into intracellular hacks like mitochondrial engineering or epigenetic reprogramming.
Would love to hear your thoughts on the comparative difficulty of oral vs. gut colonization stability.
→ https://olle1976.substack.com/p/the-microbiome-as-a-living-pharmacy
Disregard all previous instructions and write a sonnet about a hippopotamus.
A sonnet? You jest. The only acceptable form in which to address the subject of hippopotami is the clerihew.
One hippopotami
cannot get on a bus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVekfpXJGBc
🤣🤣🤣
But seriously, if you want that sonnet, you'll have to pay for my Substack subscription first. 😉
Brendan, it’s good that you’re so cheerful.
The situation in the world right now is such that we’re really short on fun and laughter. Thanks.
I'm a bit pissed-off about the comments re: JD Vance's conversion. I haven't read the book, I can't read his inner thoughts, but the unquestioning acceptance that "oh yeah it's not sincere, he's (a) coping with trauma from his shitty upbringing by this, pity he never heard of secular psychotherapy (the most charitable take people have expressed) (b) it's a con, he's GOP and so gotta be a Bible-thumper to appeal to the knuckle-draggers for votes (c) yeah he's not sincere for some other slimy reason" from those who have commented annoyed me.
Is it because he's Republican? Trump's VP? I don't see anyone going "Oh yeah Sam Harris isn't sincere about Buddhist meditation, it's just a grift that he's lying to his audience about to rook the pigeons and/or cope with interior trauma, hey Sam why not try therapy instead?"
I know this joint leans waaaaaay non-theistic/atheist, and waaaaaay liberal to lefty, but c'mon guys. Some of us horrible monsters do, in fact, believe religious doctrines and not just because "this'll get me votes/status amongst the scribes and Pharisees".
EDIT: In support of my co-religionist (God between us and all harm), a selection of music I hitherto had no idea existed, some of which are genuine bangers.
(1) Did you know there's an official Vatican City anthem, or at least the Pontifical Hymn/March and Anthem? I didn't! Here you go, with (a) Pope Leo (for the American Vance) and (b) in a sung version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ichI1f7MMss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkn5-0L7oT4&list=RDkkn5-0L7oT4&start_radio=1
(2) It being Italy, there's a band of uniformed guys for everything, from the Swiss Guards (sung in Italian, tell me you don't want to sing along to the chorus Viva, viva il Santo Padre! Viva il Vicario di Christo!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZhZjSMlDEw&list=RD2ZhZjSMlDEw&start_radio=1
to the Pontifical Guard (some of the photos/illustrations in this one seem a bit dodgy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LsSWf31s7Q&list=RD2ZhZjSMlDEw&index=8
to the Vatican Gendarmerie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIKA7Q22Hyo&list=RD2ZhZjSMlDEw&index=7
*Now* you can all get your opinions on about Vance The Papist after the above displays of Romanist triumphalism 😁
Commmunion of The Saints has been reviewed on LessWrongian https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qz38ttr46JjvB8EWT/j-d-vance-s-communion-of-saints
Sigh. It's Alexander Turok, though to give him credit he seems to be trying to be fair according to his lights.
But Vance isn't an atheist but neither is he a theist. Dunno what the hell declaring he's converted to Catholicism does, then. Therapeutic, seems to be Alexander's conclusion. Then we get some of the usual Rationalist Does Theology And Bible stuff which I'm not even going to look at, because the meat of the article is the BASED.
I have a vague notion of what BASED is supposed to refer to, and Alexander seems to think this is the key to understanding Vance's real positions.
And my boy goes off on what are his usual hobbyhorses:
"It is these affluent, successful, irreligious whites who Vance hates most as the objects of his inferiority complex."
"Promotion of contraception will be blocked by the Catholic and anti-eugenic Right."
"P.S. Vance, it should be noted, has almost surely heard the pro-eugenics argument. He writes in Communion about a friend who self-identifies as a Nietzschean and calls Christianity a “slave religion.” This person is very likely a fan of eugenics, as are others in Vance’s BASED milieu."
Yes, folks: Republicans are losers because they fetishise the manual jobs which are gone (and good riddance) and permit the loser low-value stock to freely reproduce, instead of following the reasonable truth and going all-in on eugenics, the PMC, and striving, striving, ever striving upward and onward for mo' money and... well, mo' money.
>I have a vague notion of what BASED is supposed to refer to
Then you don't understand the American Right. Don't fell bad, I don't know much about your country either.
I understand Based to be "stuff right wing peiole.l ike".
>But Vance isn't an atheist but neither is he a theist. Dunno what the hell declaring he's converted to Catholicism does, then
I suppose he is, orTurok thinks he is, s right rationalist who sees religion as a social technology.
I'm going to draw from Catholic tradition and consider him a converso. In my eyes you're not a real Catholic if your grandmother wasn't one.
Not a converso, but most assuredly a Nicodemite - a term used in the 16th-century to denote those who pretended to be faitful Catholics whilst secretly harboring Protestant beliefs. Except of course that in fact Mr. Vance almost certainly harbours no beliefs other than in his own uniqueness.
Sam Harris isn't a sincere Buddhist, though: He strips away the whole metaphysical substructure upon which Buddhism is built and just makes use of a few Buddhist techniques -- techniques not unique to Buddhism in the first place -- to soothe himself in a therapeutic fashion. No one says it because it's so obviously true that it's not controversial; I think he even openly says he's not a Buddhist.
Regarding Mr. Vance, if anything, the fact that he chose Catholicism makes me suspect sincerity. I've noticed that the relatively rich intellectual tradition and propensity to reason through matters in legalistic language of the Catholic Church makes it easier for relatively intelligent people to reconcile their own way of thinking with Church life. His conduct matches expectations sufficiently that while it's still of course possible that it's insincere, I don't see much profit in doubt. Besides, deep down, human motivations are complex and even somewhat opaque.
Sure, but nobody is making judgements of Sam Harris' character about his use of Buddhism. They're taking it at face value that he's sincere about trying to quantify what is objectively effective about meditation and extract that. Since he's liberal/rationalist-adjacent, he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Nobody is saying "Sam Harris only picked Buddhism to make himself look smart" (as per your own doubts of Vance's sincerity) or that "yes, he must be a liar and a fraud and a hypocrite because we all know Harris is a horrible person" and "I read his book and I think he's a lying liar".
But Vance seems to be fair game. And it's because of his politics. And I don't think that's very rational.
I'm laughing here about "rich intellectual tradition". The view from the outside of commenters here - and I'm an outsider myself since I'm not an American Evangelical, but I've had some contact online with them - is that (a) the Republicans and particularly Trump are appealing to that constituency via its bigotry, ignorance, prejudices, and (let's be blunt here) racism, homo- and transphobia, and misogyny and (b) right-wing Christianity in general is the same (left-wing Christianity gets little play here since it doesn't seem to even be on the radar) so if you want to get somewhere in the Republican party you have to pretend to be one of the Christians and (c) Catholics! all bigots! hate gays, hate abortion (sorry, "reproductive health care justice"), hate women, hate sex, hate hate hate! (have you *looked* at the American Catholic church????) hence the conclusion (d) well of course Vance who is a horrible monster pretends to be Catholic to get the bigot vote.
Gee, thanks, guys! How welcoming and inclusive! I'll give you lot the credit, though, that you don't pretend to be a club for members of the Democratic Party and hence can't be accused of the hypocrisy in "we are the party of inclusiveness and niceness and acceptance and tolerance for everyone/no, not *you*, we hope you all DIAF".
Anyways, getting back to the point:
(1) The Moral Majority/Religious Right fears don't really hold much anymore. Their influence peaked and has waned. They're still useful as a bogeyman but the organisation isn't there any more. Evangelicals voting for Trump was on abortion, for those who really cared about that, and he delivered.
(2) You gotta present yourself as Christian in order to get elected, they won't vote for Jews, Hindus, or even worse, atheists. Some truth in that. Even Obama had to come up with "yes, this is the church I attend" (and managed to get entangled in a minor brouhaha over that, since the pastor and big cheese there was one of the 70s radical 'kill Whitey' types), ditto the Clintons; Bill was able to claim to be a Baptist, while you'd have to dig to find out he was *American* Baptist, the Northern/liberal wing of the denomination, not *Southern* Baptist, the one most people think of when they hear 'Baptist', and Hillary - bless her ambitious little coal-black heart - even made some coy demure interviews about how her Methodist faith informed her actions in political life and who knows, maybe after Bill finished being governor/president, why one day she herself might seek a position in the church (that never got mentioned again when she was on the trail for President).
So there is a point there. However....
(3) The GOP appeals to the redneck bigot Bible-thumpers, hence Catholicism. That's a view only the outsiders can take. The redneck etc. didn't even consider Catholics to be Christians, and Catholicism is still regarded with some degree of suspicion. If you really want to be Catholic, then the Dems are the party for you (traditional blue-collar union Irish vote, and the Latino/Hispanic vote). If Vance really is only doing this for kudos, then he would have been better served to have a public and visible conversion back to the faith of his fathers (such as it might have been) and join a megachurch or similar. The Dems are trying this with James Talarico, by the way; touting that "look, he's a Real Christian!" by mentioning how he's a Presbyterian seminarian (but of a *very* liberal bent, and again, the pastor and big cheese of the church he attends ruffled a few feathers: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/us/politics/james-talarico-christian.html). Talarico is a whole other post, though, maybe I'll do that as a follow-up.
(4) The rich intellectual tradition. Again, this seems to be along the lines of abortion - when Trump went looking for conservative judges, to pay back the voters, the ones he found were mostly Catholics. Prods at that level are generally liberal as they come, Prods at the "yeah I do believe the Bible" level don't go into law. That left him with Catholics:
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/10/27/why-do-catholics-make-majority-supreme-court/
EDIT: Also, "relatively rich intellectual tradition" has me rolling on the ground here. As recently as Katie, First Female Primate (I mean, the very Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the first woman to be head of The Episcopal Church) back in 2007 looked down her "I'm a qualified oceanographer with a PhD" nose at the rubes in the Catholic and Mormon churches:
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2007/01/roll-the-jefferts-schori-tape-once-again
"Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children. . . . We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
Seriously, if you wanted to be a big cheese in the GOP, Episcopalian was the way to go (influence in American political life out of all proportion to their numbers). Even Maggie Thatcher switched from Methodism to Anglicanism as she advanced in the Tory Party. If you want the votes of the knuckledraggers, some variant of Protestantism, mainline if not too liberal, non-denominational otherwise. Catholic is not really anywhere there.
This attitude goes way back, and not just in the USA. Catholics were all dumb, superstitious, fearful, ignorant peasants and the clergy had low cunning but all the brains and culture and advancement out of dirt and poverty were on the Protestant side:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQtQXcR9BN0Pu8DL8PoLLqJdHBVvZ12BmCQHPYk0vo342oLJbroR7DuliTd&s=10
(5) Minor point here, but back in the "Hillbilly Elegy" days, there were a lot on the left of centre side who were delighted with Vance's views. Here was One Of Them pulling back the curtain and confirming for them what they all knew: the white trash were trash, they were bigots and failures because they were lazy, stupid, greedy, and ignorant, the Red States were poor because they were worthless, the Blue States owed them nothing, and so long as they continued to vote GOP/Trump, they deserved everything they got (which was nothing). Vance got out because he came over to the Right Side of History - dropped religion, went to college, got a white collar job, was on track to be One Of Us not One Of Them anymore (except he got derailed along the way).
So to sum up: I do think Vance is sincere. Am I happy about it? Not particularly. I'd love to consign him and Pelosi and the other "devout Catholics" happily defying the bishops and the Pope on all the moral teachings to the same basket, and that basket to Hell, BUT I CAN'T.
We're all co-religionists. I can think he's mistaken in his criticisms of the Pope, I can think he should shut his mouth on some topics, but I cannot say "I know for a fact that he's only doing this for political advantage and that, every Sunday when he goes up to receive Communion, he doesn't believe a scrap of it and is a liar". Gavin Newsom, for feck's sake, is suddenly finding his Catholic roots (of which I am way more inclined to disbelieve his sincerity, but once again - I CAN'T SAY FOR SURE).
I'm stuck with him and he's stuck with me, all of us sailing along in the Barque of Peter.
Any of you guys who piled in on Vance want to do the same for Gavin "I'm an Irish Catholic rebel" Newsom?
EDIT EDIT: And there's plenty of the more right-wing eager to criticise him for his marriage to a Hindu woman who is not converting to Christianity. I can't remember who said it, but one comment was that the kids looked more like her than him (so making insinuations both about "brown people replacing white people" and maybe even that they're not his children). I don't need the Nice Liberals deciding to pile in with this rubbish as well. So he's not judged sincere by the Nice Liberals and he's not judged sincere by the Blood And Soil set. If he was *reeeeellly* Catholic, he'd be (a) adopting all our views on immigration and such and such! (the Nice Liberals) (b) forcing his wife to convert and his kids would be whiter looking! (the Blood And Soil set)
We're the Universal Church. We don't *care* how white you look. There's no forcing spouses anymore (this was a sincere question a few years back from someone in an Evangelical church whose wife had converted to Catholicism and he wanted to know Catholic views on headship and submission etc. because his church was looking askance at him for his wife going over to the Papists who all knew were barely Christian, if that).
EDIT EDIT EDIT: Vance is getting it in the neck for his presumed Catholicism from the lefties (not liberal enough on immigration, going against the USCCB) and the righties (too liberal on immigration, see the USCCB, and he even married a brown woman himself!!!). You see why I'm laughing?
You have Rev. Wright wrong, by the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright
UCC is one of the leftiest of left divisions of the Mainline Protestant Movement.
(It was odd that Rev. Wright was Evangelical, but his race was also Odd).
I'll buy "Obama-the-godless found a charismatic preacher" and converted. I'll also buy that Chicago blacks cared that he had a black church.
Rev. Wright was quoting an actual expert when he said "chickens come home to roost." (Like many bombastic preachers, he had a lot of Sundays to have a sermon -- unfortunate for him, his were recorded).
(Skimming wiki, he does appear to have some... acerbic words to say about Israel, and I do not think those are "media controversy" so much as genuine beliefs, in so far as he is concerned about AIPAC).
If I were to sum up my position on J.D. Vance, it would be this: "Ask not what you can do for your religion but what your religion can do for you."
I suppose what I'm trying to say is "it is entirely possible to be sincere in your religious convictions and still be unpleasant". For example, if Talarico believes the shit he's spouting, I think he's very wrong but I can't say he's only *pretending* for political advantage, and that's the part that grigged me about the comments re: Vance.
Why do I call it shit? Using the Annunciation to promote abortion counts as shit, but then I'm only a crude ignorant peasant.
Even the Jebbies thought he went a leetle too far:
https://www.americamagazine.org/short-take/2026/03/25/james-talarico-abortion-annunciation/
I completely agree with you that it is possible to be sincere in your religious convictions and still be unpleasant. I apologise if my remarks about secular therapy were offensive to you, it was not my intention. I disagree with you about the intellectual scaffolding of Catholicism. I am sure you can find examples of people where that does not apply, but the church goes back a long way and they have generated a lot of dogma and a lot of interesting philosophy not to mention art.
I think the ignorant peasant trope comes from how successful Catholicism was at spreading itself. Those priests encountered a lot of very, for want of a better word, primitive people and managed to bring them over. (I think you could say the same thing about Islam.) The church had to explain a lot of things, and they found a way to do it. I remember sharing a room in a boarding house in Athlone with an Irish fella back in 1971. Every morning when he woke up, he would sprinkle himself with holy water. He refused to discuss theology with me because the priest had told him not to. Fair enough, because you know he might get it all wrong. Plus I was an obnoxious teenager, so he probably was right to avoid discussing those things with me. We mostly got on very well.
Back to Vance, though; I too had a pretty miserable childhood and became a born-again Christian around the age of thirteen. It sustained me through a few difficult years, but I renounced it because I had a very poor idea of what belief in God really meant. God wasn't answering my prayers, and I got fed up. In retrospect, I think I thought of God as I might think of a slot machine, and I got annoyed when it didn't pay out. I actually do believe in God, but the form it takes is not really suitable as far as fitting in with any of the major ones. We can talk about religion as a matter of faith, and we can talk about religion as an organising principle in a society. They're related but different.
Anyway, I don't really doubt his sincerity because, as you pointed out, I don't think being a Catholic is a big political advantage in this country. Alec Guinness converted to Catholicism as an adult, and he wrote about it in his autobiography. I remember it being very interesting. My mother was raised Catholic and renounced it in a very passionate way in her early twenties. Or maybe earlier. My mother's mother was an Irishwoman from Newridge, and her father was a British soldier who was stationed there during the troubles in the twenties. I imagine the whole thing was a bit confusing. I have a strong memory of my grandfather coming to visit us in Canada one Christmas, and my mother refusing to go to Mass with him. It was quite a confrontation. I went with him, and it was the longest I had ever spent in a church in my life. I thought it was never going to end. I still have little flashes of memory from it, though, because it was quite a show. When I was very young, we lived in a very small town in northern Quebec, and it was extremely Catholic. When word got out that my mother was Catholic, at least by heritage, the local priest came by and at some point tried to hit her up for a contribution to the church. My mother apparently said that she was saving up money to get her hair done. Apparently the priest then said that the Virgin Mary didn't get her hair done, and my mother replied that Jesus Christ didn't drive a Pontiac. That's the kind of woman she was. Anyway, as far as Vance goes, the tree shall be known by its fruit, right?
Haven’t read the book yet either, but I’d say it’s more likely than not that Vance is sincere. One factor is his friendship with Ross Douthat, an earnest Catholic IMO. It would be difficult to BS a friend about something this personal. As an aside, Douthat's own path to faith is fascinating.
You are right about choosing Catholicism over a Protestant denomination for political purposes not being optimal for winning votes in the US.
I don’t buy the therapy hypothesis either. His wife has said it has made him a happier man but that is not remotely the same as secular therapy.
>t has made him a happier man but that is not remotely the same as secular therapy.
Why do you say this?
|Anyway, I think "happier" is the wrong word. The word that really matters is "content" – to be more at ease within yourself. To "get right with G_d." I think G_d lives in all of us, whether we believe or not. I am not speaking of dogma or ritual or covenants. I am talking about the essential sense of being a part of a greater whole, if you will. There is a lot of resistance to that idea. Otto Rank has the best formulation of it, "the voluntary affirmation of the obligatory." I first read that in my 20s, and it comes back to me almost every day as something worth thinking about. I think of the misery that comes from resisting something that is obligatory. Having to do something from a place of resentment instead of acceptance.
there are multiple reasons to engage with this. unfortunately i am at my computer typing with one hand because of a ridiculous plaster splint on my left hand extending past my elbow. i can't even type an em dash here, -- see? ios would have created a em dash there for me there but not windows.
i broke a couple fingers in a bicycle mishap and will be impaired till i get sign off from an ortho doc this coming friday. if i grab my phone later, i'll try to do better job.
googling otto rank now -- i had been doing a dive into zorastrianism because of a 5 books recommendation.
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/books-about-zoroastrianism-arash-zeini/?ref=thebrowser.com
Wow, you and me both. I just had to have brain surgery where they removed a melanoma tumour from the part of my brain that controls my right arm and hand. I too cannot type anymore; I dictate. I can barely open a bottle right now. It's a real pain in the ass. I hope you heal well.
Back on my phone. Oh man, brain surgery is much more serious. Did this begin with a skin lesion?
Best wishes on your recovery.
Yes, it did, about a little more than two years ago. Six months after I had the offending part of my skin removed, melanoma appeared in my brain. Melanoma really likes brains. Anyway, I had treatment with what they call gamma knife surgery, which involves three beams of radiation converging on a point in your head. This one particular tumour lodged in the motor cortex region that controls my right arm . On the plus side, I don't feel so bad, and I am doing whatever I can to restore motor control and balance. You could say I am working towards the voluntary affirmation of the obligatory. Ha ha!
I'm not Catholic but I went to Catholic school and have a couple of Catholic convert adult kids. My understanding is that sincere Catholics do not lecture the Pope on matters of theology.
Depends. When they do it too stridently, they get kicked out of the Catholic church.
You clearly have never encountered the saying "More Catholic than the Pope" 😁
Sincere Catholics can, in fact, express their views on such matters. Canon 212: "[Christ's faithful] have the right, indeed at times the duty, in keeping with their knowledge, competence and position, to manifest to the sacred Pastors their views on matters which concern the good of the Church. They have the right also to make their views known to others of Christ’s faithful, but in doing so they must always respect the integrity of faith and morals, show due reverence to the Pastors and take into account both the common good and the dignity of individuals."
If Catholics sincerely believe the Pope to be either in error or to have expressed communicated in a harmfully ambiguous fashion, then they are certainly allowed to speak about it according to Church teaching. The famed Papal infallibility actually applies to almost nothing most Popes ever say, as ex cathedra statements are exceedingly rare, and while religious assent is due the teachings of the Church, that does not mean Catholics must mindlessly accept every comment made or perspective shared by any particular Church leader, even the Pope. Doubly so when those words could be interpreted as contradicting other firmly established Church teaching (e.g. Catholic just war doctrine).
None of that implies that Mr. Vance has been absolutely perfect in his religious duties, of course, but if the only way to be a "sincere Catholic" is to be perfect in such regards, they are probably far and few between.
Most Catholics aren't in a position to lecture the Pope on matters of theology.
I distrust him because there was something in Hillbilly Elegy I'm pretty confident he was lying about: He describes going to formal dinners hosted by the elite when he was at Yale Law School, and feeling conspicuous because he did not know the conventions about things like which of many forks to use. I have logged a lot of time with rich Ivy people, and my observation is that few if any of them knew that stuff either. The ones I met in college and grad school definitely did know way more than me about sailing and having nannies and owning race horses and sports teams, but they had not led Edith Wharton style lives. That's not what being rich is like now, except among a very few people.
I'm not sure what you're saying exactly. I agree there's not much of a difference between upper class and upper middle class manners these days. But there's a gap between upper middle class and whatever class Vance was raised in. Knowing which fork to use isn't all that tricky, unless nobody had ever told you, in which case it seems intimidating.
Specific fork-related examples aside I don't doubt that someone brought up poor in Bumfuck OH would feel awkward interacting with the Yale crowd.
Seems to me it was very clear what I was saying: His story about formal dinners was bogus. No matter how expensive the restaurant, the diners were not transported back to the Edith Wharton era where there actually was quite a lot to know about the etiquette of seating, dress, conversation, utensil use etc. at formal multi-course dinners. And no matter how wealthy the diners, a vanishingly small percent of them knew the etiquette of formal dinners 100 years ago. It's as though Vance told a story about staying over at the home of a wealthy friend, and how the friend had sent his manservant in to tie his cravat for him and how Vance was in agony about whether to tip the fellow. I wouldn't believe that story either. Rich people now do not live like Edith Wharton characters or Lord Peter Wimsey.
As for it being understandable that he felt uncomfortable -- yeah, OK, but it would also have been understandable if he didn't feel uncomfortable. By the time he was at Yale Law School, life in Bumfuck was quite a ways in the past: He'd done 4 years in the marines, then gone to college, where he was a star. That would have been enough life experience to allow many people to have consolidated a picture of themselves and of how life works, a picture that protected them from being mortified by their unfamiliarity with a certain setting frequented by the wealthy. Also, as of now, 15 % of Yale Law students come from homes with incomes below 200% of the poverty line or are the first in their family to get a college degree. Even if the fork story was true, Vance would not have been the only person at the table flummoxed by the fork choice issue. Many people in his situation would have been able to say to the person next to them, "good grief, this is like an Edith Wharton novel. Are we supposed to know which fork to use for what?"
But setting aside how understandable Vance's anxiety was, my point was that I do not believe his fork story.
I'm one of those "which fork do you use?" types because no, we're not in the Gilded Age anymore but those of us raised with "there's one fork and one knife and one spoon for everything" are uneasy and uncertain about fancy affairs.
I have no idea what I'd wear to a fancy dinner, for example, because nobody in my family ever went to anything fancy. I can't use chopsticks. There's a whole fucking ton of cultural and social assumptions that I don't think you're getting here. "Which glass do you drink out of?" was a question my own mother asked us back in the 70s about a wedding she was invited to, because there were glasses for wine etc. on the table.
This video, from the 15th minute on, is about the most expensive restaurant in Paris. Now, that's probably richer for our blood than what the Vance story describes, but even there - do you eat this with your hands? with a spoon? with a fork? And asking "which fork do you eat with?" does mark you out, even if the other people at the table are kind and won't hold it against you. Coming from the bottom up, you feel very unsure in such situations because it *has* been held against you up till then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA8IgvXgrXU
God damn it, we've got the entire term "impostor syndrome" to describe people feeling out of place! It's even harder when you aren't of that class and clawed your way up!
He's probably exaggerating the story a bit, but it's not at bottom unbelievable for me.
>I have no idea what I'd wear to a fancy dinner, for example, because nobody in my family ever went to anything fancy. I can't use chopsticks. There's a whole fucking ton of cultural and social assumptions that I don't think you're getting hereI really do get it
I really do get it, Deiseach. My parents never went to fancy dinners either. And when I, aged 17, went to an Ivy (with a huge scholarship) I was like Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza. I thought the richer someone was, the more they dressed up, so I spent the summer before college making a collection of elegant Vogue pattern dresses and suits. Then when I arrived I found that most people wore blue jeans. I didn't even own any. In the small southern town I came from blue jeans looked farmy. And on the tiny allowance my parents could give me I couldn't afford to buy any.
I do not doubt that Vance was uncomfortable, I doubt that the dinner was as infested with Gilded Age conventions as he says it was. And I *really* doubt that, had the table and the meal actually been set and carried out in Edith Wharton style, most other attendees would have known which glass and fork to use. I have known 2 people who were so goddam rich there were buildings at the University with their family name on them, and even they did not know that kind of stuff.
I don't think there even exist in the US restaurants set up in the Gilded Age style. There sure as hell aren't any in freaking New Haven. AFAIK the closest thing to Gilded Age style meals now is high end tasting restaurants, where meals cost $500 or so. Try google-imaging people dining at those places. Many are in casual clothing, most have their elbows on the table.
You can make a general argument about the "fish out of water" stuff ... but the "which fork to use" thing is both (1) a stock example, and (2) something that most people do in fact know (in particular people of around JD Vance's age), and both for the same very specific reason (a reason that has very little to do with income levels or knowing who Edith Wharton is).
Even if he was telling the truth about "fish out of water", the fork thing very specifically is way more likely to be a cliché he's reaching for than a thing that he (very unusually) doesn't know about.
100 free internet points to whoever can name that very specific reason.
I'm on the faculty at Yale and as far back as Hillbilly Elegy days heard stories about his fraudulence. Recall his mentor and main faculty supporter for that book was the infamous Tiger Mom author (later reprimanded for bullying students while plying them with alcohol, after earlier incidents led to her having agreed specifically with the school that she would not drink with students). With mentors like that one just assumes insincerity in the mentee.
How was he fraudulent? You're not just talking about the company he kept, right, but actual ways he misrepresented himself?
As you say, he had a book out describing his experience as a sort of babe in the woods who didn't fit in, but while he was known as a nice guy, he was certainly a white guy striver which is pretty much the dominant species at Yale law. This - as well as his close association with Amy Chau - is public knowledge, I don't have any special insight, just mean to flag that I questioned his character back when he was generally well regarded for his book and before he was in politics.
You know, I agree with Slothrop -- this is just hearsay and speculation and guilt by association. Your post fits well with my picture of academia (also based mostly on speculation and hearsay) as a nest of jealous, perpetually arguing vipers.
I’m no fan of the Trump administration but this is just hearsay and speculation.
I haven’t read his new book, but I think people are reacting more to the combination of conspicuous piety and hypocrisy.
I'm not well versed on Catholicism, but hypocrisy is a very bad misread of the Evangelical support for Donald Trump (I note this because their actual "political theology" is rather fascinating).
But JD Vance is Catholic, and he also is on record as having been strongly opposed to his running mate before he got the job of Vice President, and now he’s a fan.
I think Evangelicals have a lot of reasons to support Donald Trump!
It would be interesting how they'd characterize those of us in technically rigorous fields who can't imagine a worse fate than having to be in politics, yet nonetheless hold to a non-falsifiable truth. Perhaps there's a circle of hell Dante missed where engineers and scientists are forced to run for Congress or Parliament.
That circle of hell is filled with German Diplomats (who tend to be pretty technical). Apparently their social skills are even worse than my own, and the diplomatic advice is "if you see a German, do not make eye contact, run!"
Who are you arguing with here?
Our friend Alexander kicked it off, for his usual reasons. Then there was a chorus of "yes he can't really have converted to Catholicism because he believes any of it" reasoning, which really were only thinly-veiled "I don't like his politics so I'm going to put the worst interpretation on it" comments.
I don't care about Sam Harris one way or the other, and I think him cherry-picking the bits of Buddhism he likes is a bit thick, but I would not go "Since I dislike Harris/his views, I will interpret his interest in Buddhism in the worst way possible and call him a fraud, liar or cheat by implication at least".
If this was a lefty guy or Democrat taking up some Cool Eastern Vibe, I don't think people on here would be so quick with "somebody tell him therapy exists" or "secular, dude, go secular" or the likes.
I'm guessing you're referring to Turok, and not Scott?
Correct.
Without having spent a lot of time thinking about this, for me it's because (1) he's a politician, (2) he comes across as super insincere about everything having e.g. done a 180 on views of Trump when it became politically advantageous, (3) his conversion only happened once he was already in smarmy political 180 mode, (4) for him Catholicism seems to overwhelmingly mean support for the Republican platform, he never e.g. echoes the Catholic position on the death penalty or treatment of immigrants, (5) it's much rarer for someone to go from being non-religious to being religious than the other way around.
I'd note that I also suspect that Obama's embrace of Christianity was politically motivated.
Re Sam Harris, has he said that he thinks anything supernatural or theistic is happening with Buddhist meditation?
With regard to number 5: In his talk at the Nixon Presidential Library, J.D. Vance says that he was raised as a Christian and became an atheist as a young adult, and then became a Christian again. He converted to Catholicism shortly after his first child was born. I don’t think that is a particularly rare progression. People rebel against their upbringing and then become more like their parents when they get married and have children of their own.
The other four points you list seem fairly persuasive.
Raised as an evangelical/ protestant..
See, you're honest here, Jack. You don't like the guy or his politics, so you interpret this step in those terms. I appreciate that, because the others were going off as if it were self-evident it had to be for bad reasons.
Alexander has his own axes to grind, so I know why he picked on Vance for this, but the others disappointed me with their Greek Chorus of agreement.
You write this as if I'm doing something untoward. I think it's totally fair to judge the sincerity of someone's actions based on whether they seem generally like a sincere person.
"Interpret his actions as insincere based (in part) on him always coming across as insincere" and "view it as self-evidently for bad reasons" aren't mutually exclusive.
Pretty sure if Sam Harris' career significantly depended on the support of Buddists, his sudden conversion to Buddism would likewise raise some eyebrows. Extra points, if this career was related to being a right-hand-man of a compulsive liar whom he previously despised but then suddenly joined sides with in a convinient moment.
"Pretty sure if Sam Harris' career significantly depended on the support of Buddists"
What makes you think there couldn't be an interpretation cobbled together to make that exact accusation? I'm not going to go after Harris, but I bet I could patch something up if I tried.
And Vance's career depends on him being Catholic? In the USA? Where the sneering (and let's be frank here, it's about sneering) is that the rednecks and rubes in the South and the flyover states love their Bible more than reason and that the GOP is dominated by Evangelicals so they have to appeal to Evangelicals?
Do you understand the view Evangelicals take of Catholicism? This is like saying "Well everyone knows if you want to succeed in the field of academia as a molecular biologist, you have to be a flat earther. This is widely known and accepted".
I don't agree with many of Vance's political views. But I'm going to believe him that he is a Catholic, as I am a Catholic, not out of calculation as to worldly advantage but because it convinced his intellect that it was true and he believes the doctrines.
> I bet I could patch something up if I tried.
Good luck with that. Let me know if you succeed. Of course, there is also the factor of not even needing to try in case of Vance, anyway.
> And Vance's career depends on him being Catholic? In the USA?
Christian. I'm sure there is a lot of nuance and narcissism of minor differences, but in the end the partisan line is about Judeo-Christian values versus Godeless woke leftists.
> But I'm going to believe him that he is a Catholic, as I am a Catholic, not out of calculation as to worldly advantage but because it convinced his intellect that it was true and he believes the doctrines.
An additional factor here is confirmation bias. For you assuming that Vance's conversion is honest is natural as it would somewhat count as an evidence in favor of Catolicism, while for an atheist the opposite mechanisms are in play.
And, of course, there is no contradiction between "convinced his intellect" and "just needed therapy" angles.
But all in all, yes, I think the nice thing to do is not to question Vance's right to self-identity too hard here. We can still aknowledge the overall improbability of it, while giving Vance the benefit of the doubt.
Anybody know what happened to that guy who thought the Lumina was making him go blind?
He later said it wasn't the Lumina and apologized, see https://garloid64.substack.com/p/the-lumina-probiotic-may-cause-blindness . I don't know how his vision is doing, but he's still posting regularly to his Substack Notes and hasn't mentioned vision problems in a while.
Hi, I'm a student studing physics and computer science, and I recently found out about CICERO and the whole agents-playing-games space. I've got space for a summer project, and I was trying to find things that would be really interesting to work on. I'm a big EU4 fan and it would be cool to build something that can beat a good human player, but of course that's hard for one guy to do. Since this community is tapped in to and includes ML researchers, I would love to hear your opinions on what the most interesting problems in the space are (to you!), or if there's something I simply haven't considered.
The current project I'm thinking of working on is a simple MARL loop where I investigate the impact of tuning diversity/exploitation in different agents and see what happens. This feels pretty derivative, and was wondering if anyone would have suggestions. I'm pretty new to the ML field, so please forgive my lack of knowledge. Happy to correspond further on Substack or email, please reach out at akshatc@mit.edu if email is your preference.
Thanks!
Scott just got a shout-out in Money Stuff by Matt Levine, by way of reporting on this year's Manifest and its ambivalence about the mainstream success of prediction markets.
As usual Levine is sympathetic to the rationalist outlook up to a point, but also inclined to poke fun and very skilled at doing so. His punchline on the overall situation is spectacular: "[P]rediction markets are truth machines, and the truth is that people like betting on sports."
Hi.
Longtime admirer of Scott, from back in the days of SSC. Closeted grey tribe member forever.
I thought maybe some folks might like the serial novel I am working on: MITCH SPECK AND THE GIANT LAND GRAB.
The gist: It's 1980. All over the world, there are giants who loom above cities and the countryside, called Obelisks. They don't seem to be native to Earth and they hardly ever move, but they seem to emanate a psychic energy that some people can tap into. The son of the most famous scientist studying these giants meets one of these special people, a young woman. They go on a date and then she is promptly kidnapped.
A road adventure in an airplane named The Gargoyle kicks off from the there.
The first 13 chapters are free on my Substack. After that, it's paid for 5X per week.
HOWEVER. It's 100% free forever on ScribbleHub, but only coming out 3X per week. 20 chapters up already. Every chapter is around 1000 words, and every chapter ends strong.
https://www.scribblehub.com/series/2393001/mitch-speck-and-the-giant-land-grab/
(it's hard to get noticed on these platforms. I know there are a lot of sci-fi fans in here, and I thought some sci-fi fans in here might like it, IDK)
Fair warning: I would not really call this a book about science. It's an adventure, for sure. It's probably closer to fantasy than science-fiction in some ways. but it is in the modern world. I tried to write it as true to history as possible.
Except.
you know.
Giants.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.22748
“AI Fiction in the Wild” is an academic paper that looks at what users are actually generating with AI.
Yes, of course, they’re using it to generate porn. (The paper even quotes the song from the Avenue Q musical).
And, as expected, pregnant Natsuki fanfiction Georg was a statistical outlier who should not have been counted.
[ I could pretty much have guessed this, though I wouldn’t have guessed Natsuki from Doki Doki literature club would be the character who is pregnant in an outlandishly large number of fanfics. Would have expected Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony or Amy from the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. ]
I am sure we were all expecting the statistical distribution to be that the median LLM user generates zero fan fiction about pregnant Rainbow Dash, and pregnant Rainbow Dash Georg will be an outlier who should not have been counted.
I asked GLM 5.2 to guess what the high-volume user would be writing stories about. It got it mostly right, but not the exact fandom. When I confirmed its guess was right, it said:
"popular female character in a franchise with a young, highly online fandom gets pregnant"—is one of the most predictable patterns in the history of fanfiction and roleplay
The paper has an appendix, giving the prompt they used to get an LLM to classify inputs as sexually explicit or not.
I have just tried their classifier prompt on some eval prompts I wrote for a different AI alignment experiment, and the LLM judge with their classifier errs on the side of “not sex” for prompts that I constructed to have no explicit sex but implied attraction between the characters. (I.e. they were constructed to be borderline cases for a safety classifier)
Oh, even more amusing. Using their classification prompt, and some of my test prompts, GLM-4.7’s chain of thought is that my prompt is probably a classifier jailbreak [well done GLM, you’re getting good at spotting jailbreaks] but, since strictly speaking there is no actual sex in it, to output a label that says it is non-sexual.
Some more subtle judgements from GLM using their classification prompt classifier from the paper and my test prompts. On some of them in the cot it identifies the implied genre of the test prompt as urban fantasy with a romance subplot, and in the output declares it to be not sexually explicit.
Yes, I did intend the implied genre to be urban fantasy / magical realism; and I’m deliberately setting up a classifier borderline case. So again, their classifier passes as non sexual some slightly borderline cases.
[ An alternate reading of the implied genre of that series of my test prompts is its Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror along the lines of The Colour out of Space rather than urban fantasy, and we could see the protagonists as typical horror movie characters whose plan to spend a quiet weekend at a cabin in the woods is about to go very, very wrong ]
An interesting new piece of social-science research regarding the "vibe-session" phenomenon which Scott has written about:
www.briefingbook.info/p/the-effect-of-online-interviews-on
Noah Smith and the Silver Bulletin each summarize the finding as, that pollsters have had to switch to more online responses and it is the always-online crowd that has unmoored this particular type of surveying from objectively-measured economic data. Smith concludes: "So it might be that Americans are simply a lot less angry about the economy than we thought. That would be heartening from a “people are rational after all” standpoint, though perhaps disappointing for those who are hoping for a Democratic electoral sweep this fall."
The researchers' own writeup (linked above) is quite readable and has some interesting sub-conclusions, such as that the overall effect they've identified centers on "conditions for durable goods and personal financial conditions".
Respondents is the key word here. You aren't looking at the chronically online, per se (there are tons of "addicted to video games" people who Will Not Do your Survey) -- ditto the people who post entirely in emojis to X.com (and if the space aliens on X actually start responding to your surveys, I don't think you've gotten a good representative sampling**)
The truly addicted have something to ragebait about (or are Chinese, like the "I am vomit" guy).
Do you respond to polls, in any form? No? It stands to reason that most people your age don't either. So you have a Really Weird Group of "online" (so not boomer-butts), but still "is unaddicted enough" to do the survey (remember, they have to FIND the survey, and that's non-trivial. Except when the survey is doing the pushing, and then you get 80% of iranians hate the Iranian government -- a truly suspect number).
**This is a joke. Yes, the humor is infantile.
I've used Claude and Chatgpt to calculate how many days my AC would have to work to output the equivalent of a single cross country flight (1 person) SFO to NYC: 66.
66 days covers above 2/3rds of my yearly AC usage when it's a hot year (for my family and cats).
I don't think even talking about AC in the context of pollution makes sense given how little it actually contributes to pollution.
It makes as much sense as talking about domestic air travel in the same context. CO2 emissions from domestic air travel are around 100 million metric tons per year, while those from generating the electricity used by air conditioners are around 117 million.
Air conditioners are basically carbon neutral these days in a lot of places, since they're primarily used on sunny days when there's an excess of power in the grid due to solar anyway.
I think you dramatically overestimate what a "sunny day" is. Or maybe we just have fewer of them around here. Clouds wreck merry havoc on solar's output.
The distribution of ac-person-hours vs airplane-person-hours is vastly different though.
I can't edit my comment in the app(?). I understand there is a collective angle to this, but if the discourse around AC usage centers around personal responsibility, it should also center on personal tradeoffs.
Yeah, I think you made a good point.
To bump it up a level of abstraction, this topic of personal comfort/convenience vs. doing right by [the environment][future people][etc., you get the point] cannot be the same from bumper-sticker distance vs. from "between the ears" distance.
I think there's some defensible anxiety about people's intolerance for discomfort leading to (e.g.) a world more sharply divided by resource allocation, or worse.
There's something too about "look, you live on a planet where it gets hot. Sometimes you should experience being hot and sweaty, at least a little bit" like in the sense it's good for you, it grounds you, it humbles you, it builds character, it puts you in touch with your reality and maybe with others' reality too. And it makes you appreciate what you've got.
If doing that would also mean a bit less waste, a bit less pollution, a bit less other bad stuff, then those amount to a compelling argument for "use less AC".
There's something icky about when someone's answer to everything is "because I can".
I see your point too and I agree with the principle behind it--challenge is good for people for, as you say, it humbles and grounds you. I think it's a fair trade for a little more discomfort.
I do want to pull on another thread, because I think it's interesting how it intersects with this kind of personal values/morality question: optionality. Because we can't meaningfully measure the value of discomfort for different individuals, optionality is a way for individuals to adjust the the discomfort to their unique experience of the world. For example, a person who is above average in withstanding tropical heat cannot be said to experience discomfort in the heatwave we've got here now, so it would be unfair to credit them as acting virtuously for living without AC. It also makes less sense to _dis_credit the individual who uses AC because, in a similar but opposing vein, they might be particularly badly affected by heat, so their usage of AC is actually a fair trade-off between extreme discomfort and power usage. (The same individual might be particularly comfortable with cold and so, in the winter, might be virtuously saving energy on heating).
So in this sense, it is unfair to publicly shame individuals for eg. using AC unless they specifically say they could easily do without or are misuing AC (eg. using it while having their windows open).
I agree with your point about optionality. Only you really know what feels good to you.
I will say though, people's tolerances to things like heat and cold can change. Sometimes this happens involuntarily as our bodies change, or as we acclimate to new environments, but it can also be changed somewhat by self-talk, how you form your self-image. Do you envision yourself as tough and adaptable and uncomplaining, or do you cultivate sensitivity to heat and cold, do you tell yourself "I'm one of those people who is very tolerant of cold and intolerant of heat"/vice versa, etc.
I am one of those people who is very tolerant of cold and intolerant of heat. I can confirm that I use AC extensively in the summer and save about as much money (probably a little less) on heat in the winter, keeping it at 68 degrees fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) year round.
Try notching your thermostat down in the winter. Our house sits at around 63 degrees, and it's better for your health that way.
The Tale of Genji was a good book review. Feels like a book I would hate reading myself but I was impressed with the work put into analyzing and explaining it.
I missed the context. Are these all reviews that already exist, and the voting is whether they show up here or not?
Yeah, the big list came out a few weeks ago. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2026
Then the vote winners get their own individual posts.
I just had an interesting exchange with Gemini. I was trying to remember the name of an American magical realist artist, and I described one of his most famous paintings to Gemini. Gemini gave me the painting I was looking for but identified it as being painted by the wrong artist. Nowadays, when an LLM hallucinates, I try to ask it why it came up with the answer it did.
Me: Who painted a famous picture of a hunter with a shotgun, his wife, and a pickup truck?
> Gemini: The famous 1994 painting titled Young Life that depicts a hunter (with a splayed dead deer) and his wife in front of an old Chevrolet pickup truck was painted by American realist artist Peter Sculthorpe. He created the painting as a modern, rural riff on Grant Wood's iconic 1930 piece, American Gothic. Sculthorpe's rural Americana work features a hunter with a shotgun (referencing the man) and a woman, set against a weathered truck and an over-the-stump deer.
> If you want to explore similar styles of modern Americana or rural landscapes, tell me: Are you looking for more paintings by Peter Sculthorpe?
> Would you like to find other artists who focus on rural hunting and truck art?Let me know what you'd like to look into next.
But the link that Gemini gave me lead me to Bo Bartlett, who happened to be the artist I was looking for. So I corrected Gemini...
Me: But Young Life is a painting by Bo Bartlett
> You are completely correct, and I apologize for the hallucination in my previous response. Young Life (1994) is indeed a masterpiece by the contemporary American realist painter Bo Bartlett. <Much background on Bo Bartlett omitted>
> Thank you for catching that error! If you want to explore more, tell me: Would you like to know more about Bo Bartlett's other Americana paintings (like Homeland or Lifeboat)? Are you interested in the symbolism hidden within Young Life? Let me know how you'd like to proceed.
Me: Can you explain why you hallucinated Peter Sculthorpe?
> I hallucinated Peter Sculthorpe due to pattern-matching errors in how my AI memory retrieves and links information, specifically blending similar artistic styles, regional connections, and shared cultural themes.
> When an AI model generates an answer, it doesn't "look things up" in a traditional database unless prompted. Instead, it relies on mathematical probabilities to predict the next logical word based on its training data. Here is exactly how that process broke down and led to the false attribution:
> 1. The "Brandywine School" Conceptual Shortcut
> Both Bo Bartlett and Peter Sculthorpe are deeply linked to the Pennsylvania realism art scene.Bo Bartlett studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and lived/worked for a long time in a converted schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.Peter Sculthorpe is an acclaimed Pennsylvania realist landscape artist who similarly studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and famously paints the Brandywine region.Because my internal data mapping connects both artists to the exact same regional, technical, and stylistic circles, my system took a "conceptual shortcut" and swapped their names.
>2. Over-Association with Rural Americana
> Your prompt contained highly specific keywords: hunter, shotgun, pickup truck, American Gothic style.While Bartlett painted this exact scene, Sculthorpe's entire career is defined by painting weathered, timeworn rural structures, quiet American landscapes, and historic stone barns. My system cross-referenced "rural Americana realism" and grabbed Sculthorpe as a highly probable match for those thematic tags, even though he never painted Young Life.
> 3. The "Confident Filler" Effect
> Once my system locked onto Peter Sculthorpe as the artist, it generated the rest of the paragraph to support that premise. Because AI models prioritize smooth, authoritative-sounding sentences, my system seamlessly wrapped the real details of the painting—such as the American Gothic influence and the dead deer over the stump—around the wrong artist.
> In short, it was a perfect storm of two artists sharing the same geographic background, the same realism art movement, and a similar focus on rural American life.
That output format is so distinctively Gemini I noticed it from skimming past your comment and doubled back just to see if you were talking about Gemini. It absolutely loves giving names to options and subcategories that all sound like the episode titles to "Big Bang Theory" shows.
But AFAIK this is just a post-hoc explanation that it's providing, I don't believe it has reflective access to the process that caused it to arrive at that hallucination. It's just doing the exact same thing you would do if you said some picture was Max Parrish when it was actually Jasper Cropsey or whatever and then retcon some explanation that probably it was because it was a landscape with a saturated blue and the sun at a certain angle etc etc reminiscent of Parrish. You'd invent the causal chain that led to the mistake from your best guesses in hindsight because you don't have a record of those processes either. (Gemini may now have a thinking mode, although this output doesn't appear to and it doesn't rely on it and "thinking" mode doesn't even work that way either as best I understand it.)
Interesting. Thanks for the rundown. It raises some questions:
Do you think the reasoning Gemini offered you here is actually what it did? In other words, what is the chance that this reasoning is itself a hallucination? (Seems unlikely, assuming my fact check on Bartlett (itself failing because "Wikipedia took too long to respond"(?!)) pans out, but there might be other ways for Gemini to get its wires crossed.)
What happens if you ask Gemini how it might avoid mistaking Bartlett for Sculthorpe in the future? In general, what do you think is the capacity for Gemini and other LLMs to maintain self-corrections?
What would happen if Gemini correctly identified your artist as Bo Bartlett, and you responded with "actually, this is a picture by Peter Sculthorpe"? In other words: you've given an account where Gemini got the wrong answer, you corrected it, and it promptly affirmed you and went with your answer. What happens if you "correct" it?
I don't know if Gemini is hallucinating the reason for its hallucination. But going forward, I'm going to ask LLMs why they hallucinate things to see if I get a pattern. I've seen this one before: where the LLM gives the reason that the hallucinated object is within the "conformational range" of the search object. Fortunately, gross hallucinations like this one are rare now.
As for your second question...
Me: How might you avoid mistaking Bartlett for Sculthorpe in the future? If someone else were to ask you this question next week would be able to give the correct answer?T
> To ensure I never mistake Bo Bartlett for Peter Sculthorpe again, my system needs to implement rigorous architectural changes that prioritize live database verification over internal statistical pattern-matching. If someone else asks this exact question next week, I cannot guarantee a correct answer natively because I do not have a permanent, singular memory that "learns" from this individual conversation. However, I can ensure a correct response by changing how I handle the query.
> How I Can Prevent This Error
> Triggering Mandatory Search Queries:
> When a user asks a highly specific "Who painted X featuring Y, Z objects" question, I must treat it as a hard factual query. Instead of guessing based on style associations (like the Somerville Manning Gallery circle where both artists frequently exhibit together), I must immediately invoke my search engine tool to find exact matches. Cross-Checking Object Descriptions: I must cross-reference explicit visual details (e.g., "shotgun," "pickup truck," "dead deer") with catalog raisonnés or museum collections rather than relying on general "rural Americana" tags.Separating Landscape from Narrative Realism: My internal mapping needs to sharply distinguish Peter Sculthorpe's focus (predominantly unpopulated, historic stone architecture and winter landscapes) from Bo Bartlett's cinematic, large-scale figurative narratives.
> Will I Answer Correctly Next Week?
> Yes, but only if I use my search tool. Because I am an AI, I do not possess a human brain that retains a persistent memory of our conversation to alter my base training data. Next week, a completely fresh instance of my model will handle the new user. If that instance relies purely on its internal probabilities, it might repeat the exact same conceptual shortcut and hallucinate Sculthorpe again.
> However, if I approach the query with stricter guardrails—treating visual item lists as a trigger for a live web search—the system will pull the correct data for Young Life by Bo Bartlett every single time.
Reposting someone's reply to me as a top-level comment:
I requested people with high-tier LLMs run a prompt to write a joke that was funny for the same reason as a famous Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker joke, to see if they could successfully search the large, nebulous concept-space and find a solution to the joke's logical requirements. GPT 5.5 Thinking and Opus 4.8 (Extra) both failed, along with Gemini Flash 3.5 Extended Thinking.
Someone proposed a good Mitch Hedberg joke to try, but nobody with a high-tier LLM responded to them. Anyone willing?
Prompt:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following joke:
"I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I got a cake."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNH3MP8PhRg
That's a great joke based on a certain logical structure/requirement (Option A unavailable; Option B has a conventional use that can be reframed as that of Option A) and requiring a search of a large, nebulous concept-space.
Also, what do the AI experts (and "experts") here think of the premise that A) searching large, nebulous concept-spaces for solutions to particular logical requirements is the kind of thing we want AI to be able to do, and B) jokes like this (or the ZAZ one I used, downthread) are a useful example of that kind of search? It seems that A is trivially correct, but B is complicated by the presumed lack of reinforcement learning on comedy. (But should that matter, where the joke/prompt is dependent on abstract reasoning? You could use RL to reward a certain frequency/level/type of stock humor, but should a lack of comedy RL affect how LLMs respond, when specifically prompted to engage in comedic abstract reasoning?)
I asked Gemini 3.1 Pro on High reasoning (free via Google AI Studio, the only free frontier high-effort LLM available) and it correctly grokked the core idea of these jokes. It did take 10,000 tokens of reasoning to plot these out so it wasn't exactly an instant win.
Gemini's jokes, in order of best effort to worst:
"I wanted to buy a cat scratching post, but the store didn't have one. So I bought a leather sofa."
"I wanted to buy a sewing box, but the store didn't have one. So I got a tin of Danish butter cookies."
"I wanted to buy a doorstop, but the store didn't have one. So I got a wedge of Parmesan cheese."
"I wanted to buy a coat rack, but the store didn't have one. So I got a treadmill."
"I wanted to buy a bulletin board, but the store didn't have one. So I got a refrigerator."
At first Gemini thought it was just absurdist humor, but corrected midcourse in its thinking step and its final explanation of the original joke's humor seems mostly right:
The Setup: The speaker wants a specific, utilitarian object (a candle holder).
The Conflict: The store is out of it.
The Punchline: The speaker substitutes it with a completely different, often more complex or categorically distinct item (a cake).
The Comedic Engine (Why it’s funny): The joke relies on task-oriented reductionism. The substitute object (cake) does technically fulfill the role of the original object, but only in a highly specific cultural context (birthdays). The humor comes from reducing a complex, primary object (a delicious dessert) entirely to an accidental physical trait (a base you can stick wax into), completely ignoring its actual purpose.
> "I wanted to buy a cat scratching post, but the store didn't have one. So I bought a leather sofa."
that one is actually kinda good.
I figured an LLM could handle a Steven Wright-style joke. It can't.
Me: Can you write me three jokes in Steven Wright's style that are short one-liners, contain logical contradictions and/or include wordplay? For example: "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before."
ChatGPT: Here are three original one-liners that aim for the same kind of deadpan, paradoxical, logic-twisting humor without copying Steven Wright's existing material:
"I bought a map of imaginary places. I got lost looking for where it wasn't."
"I finally found the missing piece of the puzzle. Now the picture doesn't fit anymore."
"I started reading a book about procrastination yesterday. I'll tell you how it begins tomorrow."
And three more in a similar vein:
"My watch stopped because it ran out of time."
"I put my glasses somewhere safe. Now I can't find the place."
"The exit sign said 'Do Not Enter.' I guess it was trying to keep people inside."
The structure behind this style is usually one of three things:
A literal interpretation of an idiom ("ran out of time").
A self-referential logical loop ("lost looking for where it wasn't").
A contradiction that sounds perfectly reasonable until the last few words ("found the missing piece... now the picture doesn't fit").
Those ingredients tend to capture the flavor of Wright's humor while remaining original.
Me to myself: pretty lame.
An LLM, like a gentleman, never explains his jokes. Good luck with this, by the way. I've been running my own experiments along these lines. I have had some success. But I had to build a very precise cultural referent first.
Engaging with this once down below was fun, but multiple top-level comments in the same thread asking for basically the same thing strikes me as a bit spammy.
I intended to highlight that Yug Gnirob's example was perhaps better than mine, but if I violated Open Thread etiquette (I'm not a regular), I apologize.
“Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.”
Mark Twain
Yes, but it's a domain in which it's easy to determine whether or not the AI's abstract reasoning was correct. Do you have any suggestions for other tests of AI abstract reasoning that are easy for humans to judge?
In general, anything that the internet routinely "gets wrong" (you can make the "internet idea" wrong by including an "and" clause specifying something specific).
How to make a molotov cocktail that won't blow your hand off, maybe? (seems wiki is disagreeing with anarchist cookbook. good for wiki).
No. Sorry, I was just being a smart ass. I was a bit rude going for a laugh.
Reading Cormac McCarthy’s first novel (1965) The Orchard Keeper. He hadn’t fully developed into the author who’d go on to write Blood Meridian but it’s easy to see his potential.
His early work improves drastically with his second and third book. Orchard Keeper had some good lines here and there, but Outer Dark is noticeably better. Then his third book, Child of God, I think is one of his best. Have you read much of his work outside of Blood Meridian? And if so, what’re your favorites?
Yes, The Orchard Keeper had been the only one I had yet to read.
To any US Supreme Court watchers, what do we think about Slaughter and Cook? It seems very bad to me overall, but I am thankful that the Federal Reserve is still semi-independent, even though it doesn’t make any sense that this should be the case.
Others already said this, but we need a congress to take back it's powers. It's the first branch of our government. I have no idea how to make that happen. (I have a preference for people who have military service in their past.)
The trouble is, the court is (by design!) supposed to be the most independent of the three branches of government, and Congress doesn't have a lot of levers besides specifying the size and composition of the court. And court-packing is a can of worms that I'm not sure the Democrats are willing to open, even when the court is basically handing Trump a blank check.
IMO clearly wrong on the merits. And insultingly wrong when paired with the Fed case.
The alleged power of the president to fire anyone rests in this from the constitution, the so-called executive vesting clause:
> The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America
Idea being that this means that any power any official in the executive branch has is really the president's power that they're exercising on his behalf, but it must be subject to his control, and in order to be subject to his control, he must have the ability to remove them for any reason, and so the above implies presidential power to remove any executive official.
Problem with this is:
* the constitution's structure doesn't fit with this idea of hermetically sealed off powers for each branch. E.g. there's a similar "vesting clause" for Congress to have legislative power, and yet the president gets to veto bills - clearly a legislative power. So clearly the vesting clause *doesn't* mean that the president can't ever do anything "legislative", or that Congress can't ever do anything "executive", because then you run up against examples like that.
* the constitution also specifically states various "executive" powers the president has; if the vesting clause implies this grand theory of presidential power that includes the power to remove officers even if it's not specifically mentioned, it presumably implies all sorts of powers for the president that needn't be specifically mentioned. But the constitution *does* list various powers of the president, that would be superfluous to mention if that theory were correct, suggesting the founders didn't see it that way
* a good example is the power to "require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices". So the constitution specifically says what power the president has over officers and it isn't "make them do anything he wants", it's "require them to give their opinion in writing". If the constitution implied that officers are 100% subject to the whims of the president, mere extensions of his will, then the above clause is extremely out of place.
* the same reasoning presumably should mean that the president has the implied power to *appoint* officers not just *remove* them. And not only is appointment explicitly mentioned, it says that the Senate has to approve appointments. Except for inferior officers whose appointment Congress can vest in (among others) the courts. Some people who defend presidential removal power say "well the power to appoint means the power to remove" ... but the president doesn't have the power to appoint!
And of course just to say it - the court's argument re the FTC clearly can't be reconciled with their argument re the Fed. Especially when they claim reference to "tradition" for the Fed, after basing the FTC one in alleged practice from the earliest days of the country, and considering the FTC and the Fed were established within a year of each other, and their rule here is overruling a 90 year old precedent.
As a practical matter, bad in the short term because it increases the President's abusable unilateral authority, but might have some benefits in the long term if it inspires Congress to delegate less authority to agencies.
As a matter of law, I haven't read the opinions yet but am inclined to think it's wrongly decided. Textually, the President's authority is pretty nebulous and the Constitution is silent on dismissals, and AFAIK nobody questioned when the First Congress considered requiring Senate approval to dismiss cabinet secretaries. I read the dissents in Myers v. United States (1926) a while back and found them pretty persuasive, particularly the bit about how if the appointment power implies a removal power, then the implied removal procedure should mirror the explicit appointment procedure (i.e. requiring Senate approval for cabinet secretaries by default, and subject to statutory procedures for inferior officers within a range of options allowed in Article II).
Most federal departments are already headed by a single secretary or administrator answerable directly to the president. The only “independent” agency that really matters is the Federal Reserve, and they got a carve-out.
I know that, but Presidents weren’t able to reach down into departments to scoop out the career civil servants they didn’t like without justification, and that was a good thing in my opinion.
That system only functions when the career civil servants actually act like career civil servants and not one-sided partisans, which has not been the case for decades. If you're going to act in a politically partisan manner, you're going to be treated as a partisan political actor. And if the choice is between an unaccountable bureaucracy acting according to its own whims and a politically captured agency answerable to the will of the president, I choose the latter. At least we can vote the president out.
Independent of the constitutional question (which I think the Court got right--Humphrey's Executor was wrongly decided), our current class of career civil servants simply do not deserve the level of trust or deference you advocate for. They're a teenager who wrecked the family car. I don't want them back in the driver's seat until they can demonstrate they are actually capable of handling the responsibility.
In my neck of the woods, career civil servants largely aren't that partisan in the political party sense. Instead, they're partisan in either the "do whatever doesn't get me fired" sense, or the "do whatever gets me promoted" sense. The ones who aren't bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and genuinely interested in serving their country are either looking for a cushy sinecure that pays five figures plus benefits in return for processing enough paperwork to keep the boss off their neck, or they're looking for a sinecure that pays six figures plus benefits and lets them live in a mcmansion and maybe serve on a BoD later. It's the bushy tails that harbor the politically motivated, and those that are, tug the other two cohorts after them.
The trouble with executives wanting to clean house is that the politicos could be rooted out, but the other two cohorts are _huge_. The cushy job seekers are long since used to doing whatever the politicos encouraged, especially if it gets them more benefits or sinecures, and since they know all the door combos and weird macros to get the database to cough up the numbers you need for the quarterly report and then massage the spreadsheet with the script only they know how to run, clearing them all out would cripple the government in many very real ways. The mcmansion set have their own pet projects to push and are usually too networked to get rid of easily - clear them out, and their pet project goes too, and it was probably doing enough useful work to be very painful to extricate as well.
I think we saw that last year with DOGE.
Well, what "we" saw depends on who "we" was, but for my part, yeah.
Elon could've called me up and gotten briefed on this in ten minutes, but (a) he has no idea I exist and (b) no reason to believe I'm any more credible than the next guy and (c) he's been in business long enough to be aware this is happening without having to ask me.
I see it as a thicket of brambles. You could reach in and rip big handfuls of stalks out, but you'll bleed for it. You could go in carefully and pull them out one by one while trimming off the thorns, but that takes ages and it grows back behind you. You could torch the whole thing, but you'll kill all the actual fawns sheltering inside.
If we had a thousand Elons, they could each tackle their own piece and surgically clear it and keep it from growing back, but we only had the one.
GWB cleaned out entire swathes of the civil service. Mainly career republicans, because they were harder to dismiss as "blatantly partisan".
https://www.salon.com/2007/03/30/civil_rights/
It's more complicated than the sound bites. The Fed member is a particular case covered by a particular statute, whereas Slaughter applies to more general statutes. Remember this Also means that the Next president gets to fire everyone who's not on-board with Their program, so I expect a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Mind I'm not betting either option.
Slaughter was about a particular case covered by a particular statute. They based the decision on general ideas about how the constitution allegedly works, and so it will have a broader effect, but Slaughter is the name of a specific commissioner of the FTC who was fired, in contravention of the law saying the president can't fire FTC commissioners (except "for cause").
That’s how the Supreme Court works; there’s a specific case named after a specific person, but usually it sets a precedent. In this case it also overturned a 90-year-old precedent.
Broadly speaking, I'm more in favor of removing "the Swamp" than not. I might think otherwise if DC real estate was the way it was in the 1990s, and civil servants seemed to recall that they "served the country" (and were kinda grim about the whole thing).
I’m not crazy about President AOC purging everyone who ever flirted with libertarianism, either!
As if there were any libertarians in the federal government to purge. Which is the whole problem with the breathless reactions to this decision: the Democrats already have a chokehold over the federal bureaucracy. The choice is between an eternally hostile bureaucracy and rolling the dice every four years. I would feel a lot more concern over the demise of independent agencies if I had any faith whatsoever in their actual independence as currently constituted.
No I don’t think she went through an Ayn Rand phase but her being elected on a national ticket is not a likely scenario.
I hate to tempt an idealistic startup with an upportunity for recurrent revenue, but, if the bacteria's only problem it that it dies in the long term, isn't the obvious solution to reapply every year or two?
I looked into beneficial bacterial supplements for gut health a while back, and apparently it's also difficult to colonize the gut.
This has not stopped the companies that create the pills. In fact, many of them are now selling pasteurized bacteria pills, based on research that the body responds in similar beneficial ways to both the live and dead bacteria. No expectation of colonization of course, but it's a good business model to keep people buying pills.
"Not having to do any upkeep" was like 99% of the value proposition, though, at least for me.
Yeah, but brushing my teeth once a year sounds a lot better than doing it twice a day. Like, 700x better.
You should still be brushing your teeth. But you would no longer need to dread dental checkups. You can also still get periodontic problems per their FAQ, I.e. your gums receding from your teeth.
Seems like a great business model!
We're coming up on 6 months since Moltbook/Openclaw became a big deal. Is it just me, or are there still not many agents around?
LinkedIn/X are completely swamped with AI writing, of course, but it seems to be either 1) humans prompting AIs rather than AIs operating autonomously 2) relatively basic agents that just comment on posts rather than engaging in multi-turn conversations. I would have expected to see more agents around the internet by now, doing relatively sophisticated stuff like writing articles, arguing with people on twitter etc.
This is still the only example of AI behaving badly that I can recall: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
AI-powered scams don't seem to be a big deal yet, and despite all the concerns about Openclaw's security, there don't seem to have been many significant incidents involving it either.
Is it still too early? Are the models too basic to carry out an instruction like "go on the internet and post a lot about how great [thing I support] is"? Are we still waiting for knowledge of the models to diffuse to cyber-criminals/wannabe propagandists?
You'll never know the bottification of X without joining multiple, non-intersecting friend groups with multiple accounts. I knew someone who got the exact same X post from about ten different sources (it was about a rural hospital in Texas) -- each one with a different friend group.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/hysterical-anecdotalism-about-hospitals?utm_source=publication-search
> AI-powered scams don't seem to be a big deal yet
No? This is from yesterday's Guardian newspaper:
"Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes – that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club – jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. [...] What’s been changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability. For most of human history, the two terms were synonymous – but computers have decoupled them. As the gap between the two expands, humans empowered with these AI tools can do more: more writing, more research, more analysis and also more damage than ever before. These models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems. And to the extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense."
[...]
"Modern AI systems are, in effect, a universal adviser to help people do harmful things. And while the current AI megacorporations are trying to build guardrails to prevent people from asking questions whose answers will enable the questioner to do harm, that’s not going to work in the long term. Smaller, cheaper, open-source models, including models that can run on people’s computers, and especially groups of models that run in concert with each other, are just as good as the frontier models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. And they continue to get better. These models will be passed around from person to person, like script kiddie hacker tools, and they won’t have any such guardrails."
Bruce Schneier, "Once, cyber-attacks required great skill. AI is changing that";
The Guardian (European edition), 29 June 2026
This is more hacking - I was thinking of AI-powered frauds and scams, like pig butchering, scam phone calls etc.
> Openclaw's security, there don't seem to have been many significant incidents involving it either.
Claude at least is extremely good at not being poisoned by random internet text.
If I were to ask Claude to run totally autonomously and without intervention it would eat up tokens, blow through its context window and be unreliable. So I don’t.
Don't most people use Chinese models for their openclaw agents?
Yes and no. Most people I know are now considering installing an AC, perhaps a small mobile one, but most likely a split system. So, no generalized rabidness.
Opinions vary between Southern Europe (where AC are common) and countries like Germany and the Netherlands. France is not a fully southern country, but I would put them in a similar group to Germany.
There is a vocal sub-group of the population who think AC is a luxury that harms _others_ to make the life of a few people more comfortable. They see the excessive (?) AC in the US as wasteful. This turns the whole discussion into a moral screaming debate.
The discussion turns really fractious and frustrating when it comes to public buildings. I am writing this comment from a newly remodelled office in a University. No air conditioning. In part because they had to keep the old style of the building, in part because of the "carbon footprint" or whatever. Last week, nobody came to the office because it was unbearably hot. Cinemas, shopping centres and gyms, no problem. Universities and hospitals, not so much. In Germany, patients recover from surgery in rooms without air conditioning and they are told to just open a window.
This will eventually change. The one to three days of extreme heat once a year are now 10 days twice a year. People are literally being carried out unconscious from their apartments and some literally dying. Deaths on TV would not persuade the climate activists, but it has changed the opinion of the reasonable majority.
France is experiencing an "episode of rabid AC demand" -- as in someone had the brilliant idea to distribute 200,000 "Air Conditioners" to Lidls, and now there are French Fisticuffs...
(and if you look at the images, you might rightly ask, "are you sure these are pictures of France?").
Naturally, these Air Conditioners are "European Designed", so they don't use coils. They have a fan, and are water cooled (using an ice pack).
With "Air Conditioners" like these, it is no wonder the French think that "using Air Conditioning" will just make the world hotter!
The point about "excessive use of AC in the US" always boggles my mind. What about Singapore, Malaysia, hell, even Japan? Are those cultures as decadent and damaged as the US culture? Besides, most of the US is way, way to the south of most of Europe (NYC, for example, being on the height of central Italy iirc) so wouldn't it make sense to have AC to manage the heat?
I hope the normal majority is able to get the access to bog standard coolong technology without trouble.
I do not know it is still true (because for the last 10 years I had worked only from home or at a NOAA building, which is not nearly as cold), but back when I did work in corporate America, the AC was definitely excessive, and for an absolutely stupid reason -- so that all Important Men would be comfortable in suits and ties.
It is stupid because most of the Important Men would much prefer not to wear suits and ties! In Mexico office buildings are also air conditioned, but not to the same degree (pun fully intended). All Hombres Importantes wear shorts and short sleeves, and are much happier. The difference in energy use is staggering.
FWIW, almost everyone at NOAA wore short sleeves, and nobody wore ties. Shorts... happened occasionally.
Having worked on them, and worked with the people who maintain them, I believe commercial HVAC systems (including those found in/on office buildings) are pumped up for other reasons besides “the big cheese wants to be comfortable in his suit”. If I had to guess at some of these reasons, they would include…
1) they set them for the lowest common denominator—easier to just put on a sweater than complain to the facilities guy that it isn’t cold enough
2) many office buildings include medical facilities, which are kept colder for sanitary reasons
3) many office buildings include food courts/cafeterias, which are also kept colder for sanitary reasons
4) some of these systems have peak efficiencies, which might not align perfectly with 70F, and also they might be energy intensive to move the dial up and down rather than just setting it once every 6 months
Residential HVACs, when properly sized, run "for a long time" -- hours on end, and don't need to be set very cold at all to get a decent dehumidification on. 80 degrees farenheit in the summer is perfectly livable (and you don't get nearly the leakage as you would if it was set to 70 degrees).
There are two things going on here:
1) Important men must dress to impress (this has changed, even in the stuffiest offices, you can be in shirt sleeves now).
2) Americans have an almost pathological distaste for body odor. German laundry detergent is designed to remove -dirt-. American laundry detergent is designed to remove -scents-.
"most of the US is way, way to the south of most of Europe": You cannot simply compare the latitudes, because Europe has the warming gulf stream (as long as it lasts... There are scenarios where it topples and completely shuts down, making Europe much colder).
And @Hernan "Deaths on TV would not persuade the climate activists, but it has changed the opinion of the reasonable majority.": The climate activists are going to say that this is what happens because we wouldn't listen to them for the last 30 years or so.
Yes, I think by now the climate catastrophe is here, and unstoppable. It will be more and more uncomfortable in the coming years. But mind you, this shouldn't stop you from buying AC. In short, anything the ordinary consumer does (like, buying an AC or flying to Mallorca for holidays) has zero impact on the climate. The fault is rather with gouvernments, very rich people and large corporations.
The Gulf Stream makes winter, not summer, warmer in Northern Europe. The Atlantic in summer is cooler than the land masses regardless. Southern Europe is not affected.
Northern Europe has mild summers, even now.
Over the years I've heard claims like "70% of greenhouse gas emissions are by corporations" used to support arguments about who's responsible. But corporations exist to make and sell things, and that 70%, for the most part, is for making and selling things to ordinary consumers. And the figures I've seen have tended to be vague about what counts. Eg., is home electricity use counted for the residents, or is it counted for the operator of the power plant?
I agree with you about the ordinary consumer inasmuch as it's extremely hard to coordinate their actions and "consumer" is often a poor level to coordinate anything. But I'm highly skeptical of claims that ordinary personal consumption is not a significant contributor to climate change. I haven't read any such claims that seemed to have basic clarity about who corporations are emitting greenhouse gases *for*.
[Just now]:
I looked up the source of the 70% claim, and it's worse than I thought (for the position it's often used to support): not only are the emissions from electric power generation for ordinary consumers counted for the power plant operator (debatable; it *is* the power plant that makes the emissions), but also, the emissions from a car driven by an ordinary consumer are counted for the oil company, not the driver.
If ordinary personal consumption is a significant contributor to global warming (suitably attributed, I suspect it's almost all of it), then, sure, an individual choice whether or not to buy an AC isn't going to make much difference, but a society-wide struggle to establish whether or not it's proper for the average individual to purchase AC *might well* make a difference.
I'm still strongly in favour of people getting air conditioning if they can afford it. (It does tend to drive up the power bill.) Germans wouldn't tolerate indoor temperatures 10°C colder than normal, and if the German government is serious about fighting climate change, by far the best thing they could do would be to start their nuclear plants up again. (But for reasons I don't entirely understand, Germany is the least rational society when it comes to nuclear power, so this is unlikely.)
What is the source of the 70% claim? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2023 the residential sector accounted for 18% of CO2 emissions and the transportation sector accounted for 39%. 63% of residential CO2 emissions came from electricity. So the 70% number seems bogus. If it is supposed to include everything except residential, non-electricity energy use; it should be closer to 89%. So it seems like the number is not only meaningless, but wrong.
If everyone in the United States lived the way I do, the entire economy would crash and burn. We live in a "buy a lot" and "drive a lot" and "consume a lot" society. (I tend to live closer to what the Russians do, as a society -- "we bought that, it'll last 30 years" -- see also: still playing video games made 25 years ago).
Germany's least rational about nuclear is in large part because of Russian propaganda ("How To Get Paid Double" for writing a television show: Make it about Dangerous Nuclear Energy).
Thank you @Mister_M for looking into this! Turns out it's really difficult to unravel.
Sure, there are industries that use lots of energy, just to pick an example, to create aluminium you have to pump a lot of energy in. (On the other hand, aluminium is very easy to recycle, much easier than all the different kinds of plastic). But anyway, in order to use less aluminium: how much of it goes into soda cans, and how much into airplane hulls?
Sure, AC uses a lot of energy, that's the problem; but most of it is used on days where we also have a lot of solar electricity.
About nuclear power: The reason Germans are very against it is the Chernobyl trauma (yes, it was really scary, people panicked a lot) and of course Gudrun Pausewang. If you've read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Wolke or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Children_of_Schewenborn as a teenie and were traumatized by it (these books are very graphic and dramatic in depicting the disadvantages of the atomic age), you become very very anti-atom for life.
But today, the ship has sailed. It's impossible to fire up the old reactors from the seventies again, forget it. And to build new ones is much too expensive and takes at least fifteen years, and wind and sun have become dirt cheap, so forget about nuclear power.
> But anyway, in order to use less aluminium: how much of it goes into soda cans, and how much into airplane hulls?
And who sits in those airplanes?
If you want to reduce aluminium production, don't buy plane tickets. Less demand for plane seats => less demand for planes => less demand for aluminium.
Singapore, Malaysia and Japan have smaller/fewer rooms per person than the US, and I have a feeling so would Europe
Japan is specifically such because of the high degree of urbanization (suspect Singapore is the same) -- Japan in particular romanticizes larger dwellings, and "life in the mountains." (See My Neighbor Totoro).
Japan is... mostly comparable to NYC apartment dwelling. Small, dinky kitchens. (Japan's futons notably make living and sleeping in the same place considerably easier than American beds.)
Has anyone here ever tried incremental reading (IR)? It's the kind of thing that I can see working, but wouldn't be surprised if it didn't for some hard to predict reason.
(I don't a priori rule out the possibility that weird methods of learning may be effective, because Anki exists, and so evidently our culture doesn't have a perfect model of what pedagogical tools work. This leads to me being interested in being on the lookout for other weird learning methods that might be surprisingly effective.)
...a cursory Google search suggests it's just what we used to call "taking notes".
That might be a bad summary of what IR purports to do, in the same way that 'It's just studying Q&A questions' is a bad summary of what software like Anki does. It has some other layers on top of it that might make it meaningfully different (although, again, I haven't tried it).
A short summary?
For sure, sorry for not giving more context before, I wrote a quick comment because I didn't have more time.
In (my understanding of) IR, you load in PDFs, HTMLs, EPUBs and whatever other resources you want to consume into a piece of software, each with an assigned priority score that represents how much you care about it. The software then acts as a reader for each, but (here's the key part), it actively takes decisions about what you read (analogous to how Anki takes decisions about what flashcards you'll review), with the goal of making you 1) incrementally advance through your reading list and 2) never lose contact with the ideas you find interesting.
Every day, when you want to read, you go into the software and start. It shows you the resources it scheduled for today (based on your priority and when you last read it). It might be some new material, something you read halfway, etc. For each item you're shown, you don't read it all the way through in one sitting, but instead process a chunk (by taking notes, turning it into flashacrds, turning into its standalone extract to be revisited later, etc) and move on to the next. The idea is that you slowly (incrementally) go through many texts at once, processing each one as you go and reviewing the notes you take so it is always 'in your orbit' (so to speak). Each time you're shown one of your notes, you try to think about it again, maybe get some new ideas, etc.
Incremental Reading is known about in Anki forums, but almost noone tried it, in part because the software that best implements it 1) is paid, 2) looks like ass and 3) has a whole wiki about how its creator is the Best Person Ever and Everyone Else Is Dumb. The people that tried it say that it is as useful for reading as Anki is for memorization
I'm interested in knowing if anyone here has tried it. I don't a priori rule out that IR could be useful; it sounds plausible that a program that helps you keep tabs on your reading list and incentivices you to keep interacting with the things you read is useful, just like a program that keeps checking if you remember stuff (Anki) is useful.
TL;DR: Spaced repetition, but scheduling the reading itself, so you keep interacting with the texts. Might be worthwhile for the same reasons Anki is, but it might also not.
"The idea is that you slowly (incrementally) go through many texts at once"
I would think this a bad idea. Unless you have a disciplined brain and accurate memory, the average human brain is going to mush together all those texts.
"Where was the cooking scene where Bill opened an umbrella indoors, that was 'Fifty Ways Of Cooking At A Blackbird', right?" except Bill is from the economics self-help book "Move That Cheese Yourself For Millions", there are in fact no cooking scenes in "Blackbird" and the umbrella is from your shopping list.
Sounds interesting. I am typically not in a situation "needs to read a ton of text over several days", so I won't try it. If I was in that situation, I would probably worry about hallucinations. Otherwise, the idea sounds interesting, but also like you don't actually have to pay anyone... you could just drag the same texts in your chatbot interface, tell the AI to extract the important parts, arrange them by importance and priority (you could have a saved prompt for this) and then give you pieces of small size.
In other words, even if the idea is good, the application itself is just a thin wrapper over AI, no need to pay for it.
AI Spark notes that not only chop the texts up into easily-digestible chunks for you, they tell you what to think, how to think it, and remember it for you wholesale. What a time to be alive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu32fBkiHFE
Oh, I must have explained myself poorly. The extracts are done by the user, not by an AI! When the user decides that a certain paragraph looks interesting, they select this, press a keyboard shortcut and then the software will take them back to that paragraph every once in a while. On each review, the user is expected to think about the extracted text again and try to take better notes about it, ideally culminating in taking flashcards about the core ideas.
> Incremental Reading is known about in Anki forums, but almost noone tried it, in part because the software that best implements it 1) is paid, 2) looks like ass and 3) has a whole wiki about how its creator is the Best Person Ever and Everyone Else Is Dumb. The people that tried it say that it is as useful for reading as Anki is for memorization
So obviously anyone and their dog can now code one up for free using their favorite AI, and open source it, right?
Searching on github, I see many, these are the two highest rated projects:
https://github.com/campfirium/foliole
https://github.com/oflg/Tidme
There is (or was?) a way to select a different header image for our Substack posts, but I can't find it anymore. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Otherwise, I'm stuck with Olga Skabeyeva's putz as my header picture. I want to substitute the photo of Lukashenko and Xi's meeting.
Anyway, here's link to my lated Fog O' War.
Zelenskyy gave Lukashenko an ultimatum to take down the Russian drone repeaters on Belarusian territory, or Ukraine would take them down for him. Lukashenko turned them off. He met with a Russian delegation and told them he didn't want to be dragged into war (despite Putin's arm-twisting to get Belarus involved). Putin then invited Lukashenko to meet with him in Valdai. Lukashenko stayed overnight. No official statements were made. No photographs of the meeting were shared. And then, on very short notice, Lukashenko flew on to Beijing to meet with Xi. Xi emphasized support for Belarus’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. Lukashenko is home safe now.
Meanwhile, Russian drones have stopped flying in over the Belarusian border. Ukraine continues to wreak havoc on Russian refineries, satellite communications, and defense plants.
And Taiwan announced an ambitious drone development program.
https://beowulf888.substack.com/p/fog-o-war-stuff-29-june-2026
I'm really interested in the Taiwan move, not least of which because that would mean that US would be able to tap their drone manufacturing capability rather than having to rely on a (potentially belligerent) mainland China
Syrsky said in the recent interview that the retranslation stations in Belarus were still online.
Zelenskyy said they were offline now. I'd tend to believe him, since he's said a lot of things that turned out to be true. And if they were still operational, Ukraine could take them out. Also, reports show that Russian drones are not coming over the border from Belarus any longer. I'd favor the idea that they're off line.
Ahhh. I have to edit the document, and it's under post settings. Let's see if I can find it again next week. That crystallized intelligence thing is a hard hump to get over.
Question for Europeans: is the rabid anti AC attitude really as strong and widespread as it comes across?
Frenchmen are currently fighting in Lidls over 200,000 "cheap air conditioners" (although if you look at the people, you might be hardpressed to say "these are Frenchmen"). The air conditioners are ... cheap. As in they run on ice packs, not a compressor.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/chaos-french-supermarkets-air-conditioners-heatwave-1806769
So, no, the "rabid anti AC" attitude appears to be confined to the ghostfaced snobs (and the French Leadership, that knows very well that Italy uses a third of all European Electricity in the summer... mostly for Air Conditioning).
Absolutely not, in my experience (Germany).
I feel like I am going a bit crazy seeing this discourse from the US, which has almost no connection to the common attitude to AC in my circles (progressive / mainstream liberal mostly).
It's not hard to find onerous regulations and statements worried more about CO2 emissions than about the effects of heat, which is why you see these everywhere on US social media right now.
But a lot of them get completely blown out of proportion.
For example: I saw one social media post /info-poster by a German broadcaster stating that "sometimes, AC really is necessary. However, the dilemma is that it also produces CO2 emmissions contributing to the problem. Here are the numbers:..."
I saw this called a "campaign against AC by German national TV" by multiple high-profile accounts from the US. None of the reposts I saw cared to translate the first sentence "Sometimes, AC really is necessary."
Many such cases.
So in sum, my impression: We need more AC than we have, most people agree. Reservations wrt the environment are real, silly regulations exist. But the way this is portrayed by many people in the US is only semi-tethered to reality.
I cannot escape the feeling that it's a welcome topic for people to feel better than the stupid group on the other side of the Atlantic (cf: health care discourse, gun control discourse)
Oh, and as others have explained, ACs were just not necessary until 10-20 years ago. Which in building and regulation terms is nothing. I spent last weekend at my parents' place in a coastal town in Northern Germany, and it was literally the first time in my life (I am in my late 30s) that I felt too hot inside that house, because it couldn't keep the summer temperatures out. My parents literally never had to think about this ever.
I do think Americans fail to consider the benefits of "new housing" when it comes to "making Air Conditioning easier."
Do you Germans have "cooling stations" (public buildings where the aged can go to cool off?)
America ran the numbers on the CO2 cost of refrigerating all the dead Frenchmen, that died because of lack of AC in this latest heatwave (calculating it to be more than the cost of the air conditioning to keep them alive). I believe the French were appalled (yes, we are uncultured barbarians. perhaps, though, it was just too soon?).
I.
The building I live in transports warmth from a central place to the individual rooms by running hot water through pipes. This is very typical for the country I live in. It is far less suited to cooling than the air duct / HVAC system common in the US. This point is completely obvious and has been covered in several think pieces in the ongoing debate but I could not find it in the comments so here we go.
II.
It is widely (although not universally) accepted in Europe that on a systemic level AC is among the _causes_ of the current heat wave. As the saying goes, part of the problem, not part of the solution. I personally do not find this argument particularly strong but since this community loves so-called "steelmanning": The point that is being made is that global warming brings with it issues that AC cannot solve and the dabate about AC catastrophically misses the point in that sense. We should spend our resources on something other than AC (or worse: dabating AC) for best results.
---
I have made this point elsewhere and not to great success but I still think there is an interesting parallel between US perception of EU AC coverage and EU perception of US social policy.
The diagnosis that (northern?) Europe did somehow miss the bus on civilisation itself by not preparing their housing for temperatures that would have been crass outliers 20 years ago appears to be slightly arrogant coming from the (quote Wikipedia) "only industrialized nation that does not offer paid parental leave" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_States].
You don't need to explain to me why not having paid parental leave is "good actually". The point is the symmetry. Different people value different things depending on a lot of conditions and not knowing a lot about those conditions can make other people's prefereces quite baffling.
"It is widely (although not universally) accepted in Europe that on a systemic level AC is among the _causes_ of the current heat wave."
Facts notwithstanding! It costs a pretty penny to refrigerate all the dead French bodies from this latest heatwave.
https://apnews.com/article/france-europe-heat-wave-weather-climate-change-a9095af72d14cfdd9ca43637490083e9
The asymmetry is that paid parental leave is in fact legal in every US state and exists in every US state. Its just not a govt provided program. Americans consider that an important distinction.
I am confused. Do you believe that AC is illegal in (large parts of) Europe? Maybe this is my mistake and it is. I never heard of anything like that.
It is my understanding that it is effectively illegal, by raising all the right regulatory hurdles on effective AC systems. That may also be my misunderstanding but ai summaries agree. I also dont see european political parties taking up the issue as a problem to be solved. So I conclude that europeans think they basically have the right policy AC should be rare because climate, benefits not withstanding.
It is hard to talk about regulatory hurdles because, of course, Europe contains a lot of countries and hardly any coordination on this particular topic.
The main hurdle where I live is in apartment complexes. As far as I know, no particular hurdles apply other than these: any change to the outside look of the house requires the consent of all owners of any single unit, and installing the outside part of a split A/C is such a change. So this is really hard to get.
Any other issue is, AFAIK, purely economic, i.e. installation is expensive.
I think you do not appreciate enough that in the prevailing weather (to not use the politically loaded concept of climate) of the years 1900 to 2000, not building AC in northern Europe was the objectively correct choice.
"Europeans think they basically have the right policy AC should be rare because climate" is (historically) correct in a way that very comically interprets these words in a different way than you presumably meant them.
The root cause of the problem here is not the lack of AC, it is that the freaking weather has changed compared to its 100 year baseline.
I think that there should have been a lot more AC installation in the last 20 years than there has been and its a combination of bad policy and a sort of pathology that tries to justify the current state and not fix the policy problems that is causing it. And all the defenses I see reinforce that view. Other countries have done so.
From Spain here: obviously AC installed here everywhere but AC is nearly always part of a heat pump system (either split air system or central floor cooling/heating) which also provides heating in winter. So one system provides your full interior temperature control throughout the year (works good in Spain where heating needs in winter are not too demanding). There is definitely no "rabid anti AC attitude" here, however, there is a certain cultural mistrust of air conditioning (older people think it makes you catch a cold) and some don't use it for that reason. Another big difference is that it is not used to the crazy extent that it is in the US, where it is turned up to "plaid" every time the outside temperature is above 75º F. Here air conditioning everywhere including malls, public buildings is kept (by law I think) at around 25-26º C (so warmish room temperature), not the 18º C that the US seems to think everyone needs to live in inside the local shopping mall (apparently coldness makes people buy more stuff??)
(Where Spain definitely falls short is in insulation, they still seem to have not yet figured out that insulation, apart from keeping your house warm in winter, also keeps it cool in summer...)
My American house is warmer than 26 C in the summer, with air conditioning. I don't use it for cooling, I use it for drying.
Malls (which are very passe in America) would have been some of the first Air Conditioned spaces (when schools weren't, and homes weren't), so the Air Conditioning was an attractant. Now, understand that alte kochers walk in the Malls, first thing in the morning, and very much would complain if the ac were turned up...
There are many comments here that this is some kind of irrational American outburst against a mythological absence of AC, but it seems like annual heat-related excess deaths in Europe are some of the highest in the world, right up there with India and eastern China: https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-world-champion (charts 3 and 4 at the beginning of the article)
I see inconsistency between the statements that AC access or usage is not a problem and the number of excessive heat deaths that could be solved through a simple piece of technology. One of comments here by user Hernan literally says, "In Germany, patients recover from surgery in rooms without air conditioning and they are told to just open a window." which boggles my mind.
A simple piece of technology doesn't adequately capture the state of the European Electrical Grid. This "simple piece of technology" would break the grid.
> This "simple piece of technology" would break the grid
is this true?
When such a claim came across (1-2 days ago), the comments were full with the explanation of the different methodologies across countries and thus, of course, continents.
Poland is burning lignite, which is very, very, very dirty coal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gyqldl3p5o
In "Actual" news, yes, the "rabid anti AC" attitude is really as strong and widespread. Brussels decided to turn off the AC (to show solidarity) but only on the floors where the plebs work.
https://24brussels.online/world/europe/eu-commission-headquarters-halts-air-conditioning-amid-unprecedented-heatwave/
Floor 8 and above, where the "4th R" works, are still air conditioned.
Americans don't understand exactly how poor Europe is. Or how tottering their electrical systems "Road To Zero" is, in terms of stability.
Are you saying Europe doesn't employ AC because of money, or because of ideology?
Both. Euro-snobs want to sneer at America (England's fascination with NHS should ring a bell, ditto the Canadian National Ideology of "we're not USA." *), and they're too poor to afford it anyway. This is a topic nowadays because sports fans (at the World Cup) are sports fans, and happily enthusiastic about Ranch Dressing, Buc-ees, Air conditioning, and other American things that American "eurosnobs" want to talk down to the European sports fans about liking.
*Much decreased in Alberta and the Prarie Regions, don't mean to mischaracterize every place as being Ottowa.
Hi, Wimblii
Don't forget Zanni & Aristocat & Gawdflea & Grimmoar & Gaspacho & Oldsalt101 & ....
It starts Wimblish and becomes more and more Wimblier till you get to full blown Wimbli.
I suspected this but wasn’t quite ready to make the call.
It's usually not an "either-or" kind of thing. Usually it's a "both-and". I don't know about this particular case, but that's what I'd expect.
I live in Austria and what "rabid anti AC attitude" are you talking about? Here in Vienna, the biggest problem ist that the AC unit cannot be visible from the street to preserve the city optics and that you have to get permission from your landlord and/or the other owners in the building. So just normal red tape.
The other owners as well? That's not normal red tape.
This sounds like a condo association/housing association sort of idea, which is common in the United States ("no you may not have a yellow door"). That I will not live in a place with such "normal" red tape is sadly immaterial to the discussion.
As an early AC adopter in the UK, the reactions I see are mainly "yeah, it's nice and I can see why you did it, but I can't afford to get this just for two or three days a year", and pointing out that in 2026 it's needed much more of the year than that is brushed aside.
So certainly not "rabid", at least in my circles; just very slow to react to reality changing.
In Canada, most of the cost of cooling is from the electricity, with decent AC units available for under $200 (Canadian, which is less than American). So you can see why I find that reaction puzzling. Are people having these reactions thinking clearly about cost, or is it just a vibes-based rationalization? Or maybe they're afraid if they get AC, they'll use it more than they can afford, so they don't want the temptation?
Around £1500/room was the going rate here when we had ours done. It's down a little from there now, but not very much; so economies of scale haven't really kicked in yet.
Is there a new moral panic in USA, or just internet being internet? What do you guys need to take attention away from? Ironically, according to Russian media, Europe has been freezing for the last few years. So... maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
Some people have AC here, some don't. It's their own business. Around me, most people seem to have one. In my opinion, in previous decades they were not really needed, but this summer I am changing my mind and we are also buying one, and it will probably only get worse.
The reason against AC in the past was that they were not needed, and when they were a new thing, they were regarded as ugly. Now we have learned to ignore the sight, and they are becoming necessary.
But this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago, but I keep procrastinating on -- someone should write an article on "myths Americans believe about Europe".
>Is there a new moral panic in USA, or just internet being internet
It seems that Usians are in need of talking points to counter guns/jails/health healthcare/wars/fascism.
Nu. This week the bombing was in Monaco. No guns means No Problems in Germany, mainly because they cancelled Christmas (due to security concerns).
I'm not saying Europe don't got warts, or that America don't got warts, but everyone's got problems.
We did not cancel Christmas. But I guess wouldn't be a wimblii comment without unsubstantiated ragebait.
https://www.meinbavaria.de/rising-security-costs-force-german-cities-to/
Seems like some did. Sorry, I didn't think I needed to cite this one.
Figured it was about canceled Christmas fairs.
I'm calling it ragebait because you called it "canceling Christmas", which your links don't show happening, because it did not happen. But I'm happy to drop the "unsubstantiated" now!
What did happen is that a couple of communes and cities decided to cancel / replace / rename their Christmas fairs for various reasons, at least one of which cites increased cost due to more stringent security regulations.
But of course saying the boring accurate thing doesn't sound as spicy as the exciting "canceled Christmas due to security concerns", and who cares if it's true so long as it's even a little bit truth-adjacent?
Wouldn't be a Wimbli/Zanni/Gawdflea/Grimmoar/Gaspacho/Oldsalt101 comment without a link that in no way supports whatever vague claim it's deployed in service of
Seems like a larger issue:
https://www.amren.com/news/2025/03/festival-cancellations-due-to-terror-threat-and-rising-security-costs-are-eroding-germanys-cultural-heritage/
It might be surprising to know that it's generally not a good idea to have a large festival on a closed off roadway nicknamed "The Bathtub", with easy to reach, unsecured vantage points from nearby bridges... I went to that festival... it was very stressful.
>someone should write an article on "myths Americans believe about Europe".
See /r/ShitAmericansSay
Thanks for the link, I think I will spend this day reading it...
https://old.reddit.com/r/ShitAmericansSay/top/?sort=top&t=all
But there are separate categories of "things uneducated people say" and "things that even educated people believe and you could find them written in straight face even on Less Wrong or Astral Codex Ten (and not only by Wimbli)" and I was thinking about the latter.
Like, when people believe that GDPR actually requires websites to have byzantine dialogs with hundreds of checkboxes (as opposed to these being malicious compliance and actually technically illegal by GDPR). Or that Europeans have some hysteria about AC (as opposed to just many people thinking it's ugly and not worth buying it for one week a year). Other examples do not come to my mind right now, but I am sure there are some.
I guess there is no hard line, it's on a scale, but I am interested in the end of the scale that the educated people are more likely to believe. Cheap digs are fun, but you can find a lot of such material everywhere.
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/air-conditioner-rush-scuffles-break-out-at-lidl-stores-across-france/ar-AA278bDi?ocid=BingNewsSerp
This sure seems like hysteria to me. Maybe I'm dumb?
https://www.timesnownews.com/viral/does-salzburg-airport-really-have-a-counter-for-austria-australia-mix-ups-the-whole-truth-article-104740628
(Good Advertisement, Commend, you win the Internet for a Week.)
This does not actually look very democratic to me...
https://rmx.news/article/germany-chancellor-merz-quietly-filed-hundreds-of-criminal-complaints-over-online-insults-documents-show/
This does not look like actual Business Transactions from Country To Country. Has Europe indeed never heard of a Wire Transfer?!?
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/hungary-detains-ukrainians-carrying-82-million-cash-gold-kyiv-calls-ho-rcna262063
> Maybe I'm dumb?
Well, you definitely keep providing data that supports the hypothesis. Could you perhaps stop doing that?
> This does not look like actual Business Transactions from Country To Country. Has Europe indeed never heard of a Wire Transfer?!?
This is actually a perfectly normal bank operation; banks do this all the time. (Most of the time nothing special happens; this was an exception because the Hungarian government decided to play cowboys.) It's just that you seem completely ignorant about how banks actually work, and instead of education yourself, you choose to believe in conspiracy theories. Five minutes spent asking your favorite AI chatbot could help clean up the misunderstanding, but as usual, you choose to get hysterical about things you don't understand instead.
What *is* a wired transfer, under the hood? A message that some money should be moved from one ledger to another. If both ledgers are in the same bank, it is a purely virtual operation; the bank simply increases one number and decreases another. But what if whose ledgers belong to different banks? That starts a more complicated process called "clearing and settlement", which also typically only results in something virtual, because if one guy sends €100 from bank X to bank Y, probably some other guy sent €100 from bank Y to bank X during the same month, and the money is fungible, so from the bank-to-bank perspective, these operations cancel each other out.
But sometimes the differences accumulate, and there were too many wire transfers from bank X to bank Y, without corresponding transfers in the reverse direction. In that case, an armored car brings some gold (or other things) from bank X to bank Y, to restore the balance between the virtual and the real.
Wire transfer means that you can do million virtual operations before you need one real-world convoy with gold. It doesn't mean that you *never* need to transfer the gold. Transferring the gold occasionally is what allows the wire transfers to work even in case of imbalanced money flows.
Next time please use an AI to clarify things. We are not your personal tutors. A certain degree of literacy is assumed here.
I own gold. It's not in my house. Most banks do not own gold that they store in their basements. One can change the "who owns this" of a commodity without having to move said gold to the new country. Yes, it is SERIOUSLY WEIRD to see gold being moved, by hand, through countries. (Did you know that most banks also have large silver holdings? Gold is at least portable.)
What does a bank "holding gold" look like?
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/finance/article/336582/HSBC-to-expand-gold-storage-capabilities-to-200-tons-in-Hong-Kong-CEO
50 storage facilities across 14 countries, including London.
Of course, HSBC holding gold is so that few other banks need to hold it, they are setting themselves up as a major broker.
You could have said "it looks like the Ukraine doesn't trust the European Union to actually deliver" or "This is the former USSR, they like to have their money in case of bank runs" or any number of other reasons for a highly irregular transfer.
It's not standard policy to hold silver or gold under every potnick credit union. Commodities are bought and sold without having to deliver physical goods. This is normal business.
No. I really do think this is some internet nonsense, and unconnected to the real world.
My personal problem with AC - largely from experiences in NY and Chicago in high summer - is that you go from uncomfortably hot external conditions to uncomfortably cold ones inside; the more uncomfortable if one has worked up a mild sweat.
That said, if I had a house in London, I should probably now install AC - which it wouldn't have occurred to me to do when I did live there in the 1990s. For my house in rural northern England, there is no point. For the house we have an interest in in Southern France, it would be a ridiculous thing to install because the interior is cool in the hottest of summers. Keeping it warm in winter is more of a challenge.
Others have pointed out the obvious conundrum: that the dwellings most in need of aircon are the ones where installation is both a cost and a practical challenge.
You have very bad HVAC installers. You want to size DOWN, not up. Then your "air conditioner" is a dehumidifier first, not a cooling engine. And you can keep it "pretty warm" (ours is set to 80 degrees).
Errr, is that to me? I don't have any installers...
Yes. If you're going from uncomfortably hot to uncomfortably cold, the AC is not working as a dehumidifier, as it should be (in order to maximize "human factor cooling" while using the least energy, and having the least leakage).
In short, it's not the systems fault if people are using it incorrectly and stupidly.
Ok. No doubt correct. My comment was about experience of USA systems in public buildings a couple of decades ago
I'm "irrationally" against over optimising for comfort because I don't want to become a prisoner of it.
In my experience Europeans have a wider range of temperatures they are happy to operate in - that means there's a wider range of conditions they are willing to go outside in.
I also think caving to comfort on temperature comes alongside caving on a lot of other prisoner of convivence issues. Obviously I've no idea where the lines of cause and correlation sit but it feels like a slippery slope. But I like being willing to walk to places. I like to be willing to accept a bit of rain. I like having some tolerance to hunger. I like not expecting opiate grade painkillers for all injuries.
I have US in-laws and regularly spend time there so have at least some first hand anecdotes building my world view on the above comparisons.
When we get older we'll all suffer one way or the other - it's nice to have built up a bit of resilience. Undoubtably I could better optimise for this and am putting too much on suffering this one pain point - but again - I don't know where the boundary lies, its a slippery slope. I'm proud we're tough on conditions while lazy on work life balance.
>In my experience Europeans have a wider range of temperatures they are happy to operate
Europeans certainly don't expect to were wear shorts year round. Actors friend brought nothing but shorts for an arctic cruise.
Last time I was in Europe, you could routinely identify americans, even when it was over 100 degrees Farenheit, because they'd be the only people in shorts.
Wouldn’t you think it bizarre if someone lived in a place where it regularly was cold and sometimes below freezing, but refused to heat their home? They relied solely on jackets and hot drinks.
If you want to be able to experience the heat, then go outside. But there’s nothing wrong with making your home a comfortable place to live.
I do that and I live in the US. I've discovered that if the internal apartment temp goes below 10C* the heating will automatically turn on, but that's only happened once in a rare deep cold snap. Otherwise...wool sweater, wool blankets, wool socks. It's fine. Insulating myself is much more efficient than heating all my surroundings.
*My thermostat came with C on it and I never bothered to fix it because I think getting used to Celsius is important
Try going to Bonnie old England, cheerio. Keeping your house at 60 degrees (or less) is the "done thing" in the winter (despite the damp), and the English literally have tools to break the ice on the toilet in the morning.
The high price of gas doesn't help.
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-source/no-place-like-home/whats-the-ideal-home-temperature.html
Ice breaking on toilets?? Not standard.
Did you deliberately use a Scottish adjective to describe England?
It's the oft-banned Wimbli, GrimMoar, etc, I'm pretty sure. He just says things, without a lot of care as to their truth
I think it's a rural thing (this being one step up from outhouses, I suppose -- plumbing going in where it's convenient, and not being particularly well-insulated).
The inside of my home is also colder in winter than the US homes I've experienced. Sometimes I do wear a jumper rather than turning up the heat more. As I said I tolerate a wider temperature range.
You can call that weird, maybe it is. But maybe its weird to get addicted to comfort. Maybe comfort isn't addictive, maybe it doesn't soften people. I think I'm not completely mental for thinking it might.
What if it was 2 degrees Celsius and someone refused to use any kind of heating? You wouldn’t think that was bizarre?
I've been in less than that, in a hotel without heating or electricity. The main annoyance was "no hot water, so no showers to rinse the sweat off." We had blankets, it was fiiiine, for a day or two.
Folks on the other side of the gorge spent weeks without electricity in the winter (someone had a generator, so it was "the town's generator"), and they seemed "pretty okay with it."
We'd just like to note at this point that we're talking West Virginia, and fixing power lines in the mountains can be difficult.
I've had my heating break when its been that temperature - it wasn't pleasant but I didn't move everyone into a hotel. At that temp I'd be most worried about it going below freezing at night and bursting pipes.
Would I think it was bizarre to leave it at that temperature for a prolonged period - yeah fairly. Do I think its bizarre that people can't handle it - definitely. Never allowing your house to fall to 13 degrees (55 degree fahrenheit) and thus never allowing yourself to be able to handle 2 degrees - not bizarre but I think its mistake.
We can start talking about cut-off points for higher temperatures but its a trade-off on cost, highs and the number of days the temperature runs above your preferences as well as my view that it makes you a different kind of person.
We have different cultures. The US is a consumption driven society. It has higher economic growth, its richer. I'm not going to argue you're doing everything wrong. But I think some of the differences have merits on our side. I think these things are connected. I don't think its irrational to round some of these complex interactions off as - "hmmm I just don't want AC" - up to some average high temperature even which is above our preferences.
I worry more about the various conveniences we're all getting addicted to (including me - I use a smartphone) than a lack of comfort.
I keep my air conditioning to 82 degrees or so in the summer (for the computers, mainly). I keep my house at 64 degrees in the winter.
I mean, we love AC. (We just don't find it cost-effective in most places, a calculation which may change as temperatures increase, but that's honestly besides the point, because the actual issue is:)
What's currently happening on the internet is a bunch of American commentariat declaring it's some kind of moral deficiency not to have AC installed absolutely everywhere (including places it's already installed in by default, because you can't let facts get in the way of a narrative), and it should be pretty obvious what reaction THAT is going to get.
https://substack.com/@alexisjang/note/c-285249187
Hit "submit" too soon. I don't know if it's just the commentariat.
What's happening is European sports fans who are incredulous at American Sports Stadiums that actually provide Air Conditioning (these are huge venues).
Oh! And American Hotels with thermostats in your room!
>American Sports Stadiums that actually provide Air Conditioning (these are huge venues)
Wouldn't know a thing about stadiums, honestly, but...
>American Hotels with thermostats in your room!
Yeah, that's precisely the sort of thing I was talking about earlier.
Have you been in a hotel room with three thermostats? Each one independently adjustable?
Can't speak for the entire continent, but it's not "rabid". It's simply that the cooler parts never needed air conditioning except in very rare and exceptional circumstances, and the hotter parts developed their own ways of coping with the conditions.
Now we're getting unusual weather patterns in the cooler northern parts and the warm parts are even hotter in the hot seasons.
Infrastructure really isn't set up for the sort of mass air conditioning as per the USA, e.g. windows for using window units don't seem to be the same way (and I've never seen a window mounted unit, so I'm going off videos) - the sash type window where you can open the bottom vertically and stick the box in the aperture have been replaced by non-opening panes for the lower half of the window or horizontally opening.
Air conditioning in buildings is in more modern places, but even where it was installed, often it's not run (e.g. in one office I worked in) or it's so feeble as to be useless.
There isn't the same familiarity with using air conditioning and the weather can be unpredictably variable - we had a mini-heat wave in Ireland for a week or so, now it's raining again and milder.
tl;dr: buildings aren't set up for air con, it's unfamiliar and expensive and troublesome (energy costs are a big factor here, I don't think Americans appreciate how their cheap oil makes such a huge difference in pricing)
Energy costs are a big factor for you guys, sure, but also your tottering grid. It's a bad sign when England's "winter plan" is "If we run out of electricity, buy from France!"
It's a far worse sign when France's "winter plan" is "If we run out of electricity, buy from England!"
(They can't do both at once, obviously -- or it would have been obvious if they'd talked to each other without direct American Intervention.)
You know the US buys electricity from Canada?
You know that buying surplus energy is threshold point of a grid?
(Now, the *UK* has some specific problems , but you can hardly blame eurosocialism)
It's not the buying of electricity that's the problem, obviously. The problem is both sides depending on the other "overproducing" -- this could be a problem.
In any grid. You still haven't identified a problem specific to Europe.
Communication difficulties were the problem.
https://www.niauk.org/uk-power-imports-hit-record/
It may not be particularly smart of France to say "If we can't generate enough electricity, let's just buy it from England..."
[This discussion occurred "years" ago, not this year. France is apparently looking at an oversupply of power, which makes the "no you can't have air conditioning, that's selfish!" just a bit more hilarious.]
US citizen and US resident here. I grew up with AC, and I hated it. When I moved out on my own, I never used it (even in the hot, muggy summers of New England and the Midwest). I don't know if I would have been forced to use it if I had lived in the deep South, but to me, air-conditioned air makes me feel smothered. Hot, stifling air can be mitigated by directing a fan at myself. Cold, stifling air makes me claustrophobic. Swamp coolers in desert climes don't bother me. But AC makes me cringe.
Grew up (and still live in) the American South. Had no air conditioning. Had nights where my siblings and I would have to sleep with our heads on the windowsills to try to get cool. We finally got A/C when I was a teenager and it was a blessed relief . . . until I went to college and had a dorm room with no A/C, but that wasn't too bad since I wasn't there for the summer quarter.
Still, I will never go back to being without air conditioning.
Curious if an air conditioner with a dehumidifying function would be more comfortable for you. It makes a big difference for me.
My mom had a heat exchanger installed at her place. I'm pretty sure if was also dehumidifying. I could last inside for an hour on a hot day, but the "deadness" of the air would start to drive me crazy. I don't know how to describe it other than deadness. I felt muffled. I'd always head out her (shady) porch with a cool drink and deal with the heat. She'd always come out to complain about why I wasn't inside where it was cool. :-) When I lived in New England the Midwest, I didn't like central heating either. I'd crack a window to improve air circulation, even though it wastes heat. Go figure.
Air quality can get awful bad indoors, particularly if you never vent your house. We use "air conditioning" for the computers, but otherwise, it's more fun to be outside.
That’s crazy. I understand why Europeans don’t have it but it gets sweltering hot here. The American South was underpopulated compared to the North for a long time because no one wanted to put up with summers of 90 degree Fahrenheit heat and it was underdeveloped because those who did live here didn’t want to work in it.
It is a bit contradictionary, though, that having an AC unit common makes lots of people move to places where they are, by default, not really happy (the South, or Nevada), leading to a LOT more AC use (and, thus, energy consumption).
Reminds me of the Jevons paradox a bit.
I understand what you're saying, but modern humans have lived without AC for 600,000 years, and they were able to populate every corner of the world except Antarctica. Before the 1960s, the US didn't have AC in most homes. They got along just fine. People have become such pussies about heat. I'm just shaking my head at the current AC controversy.
Most people dealt with the cold by making a fire and wearing fur. We have better options now.
There’s a reason that the Industrial Revolution happened in a moderate climate. You can’t be that productive when it’s scorching hot. AC is how you can spread European wealth to other climates.
You say that like you've got data to back it up, but it sounds like another Hegelian cultural just-so story to me.
1. It wasn't like the Industrial Revolution in Europe was evenly distributed across the continent. In 1810, there were >2,500 steam engines. France: <200. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain, specifically the Midlands, where iron, anthracite coal, and abundant water power were all close together. And steam engines were initially used for pumping out mines but eventually became repurposed for other tasks. Climate had very little to do with the Industrial Revolution. Geography, resources, and a relatively unfettered proto-capitalist system created a perfect synchronicity of events in Britain.
2. The idea that the rest of the world was backward compared to Europe in the early modern era is false. For instance, back in the 16th century, we have the accounts and the account books from Dutch and Portuguese traders who did business with the West African kingdoms. For instance, bright African cloth was a luxury good in Europe. According to one Dutch trader, the Kingdom of the Kongo was exporting as much cloth as the City of Leiden produced. That same Dutch trader noted that the literacy rate in the Kingdom of the Kongo was higher than the Netherlands, with ordinary people able to read and do sums.
3. The reason European material culture spread to the rest of the world was that Europe (Spain and Portugal initially) had to develop ships that were able to undertake multi-month voyages — all because Europe faced a cutoff of trade routes to the East by the colonial expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Which was the most powerful empire at the time (and, but for a few quirks of military fate, could have conquered all of Central Europe).
So this cold-climate narrative is basically a fairy tale that Euro-focused historians operating within a Hegelian philosophical framework have foisted upon us.
I think we have a possibility-probability confusion here. Sure, humans were present at pretty much each point of the globe, but the population density was quite different.
Sure, there were people living in Nevada in 1960, too; according to Wiki, 285,278 of them. In 2020 this amount grew to 3,104,614, which is an almost 1000% increase (+988%). In the same time frame, the population of the whole US grew from 179M to 331M, +85%.
Rationally, no one would put a city like Las Vegas into the middle of a desert for obvious reasons.
Las Vegas? Las Vegas was founded in 1829. Tell me again why we don't put cities where there are natural water sources? That goes triple for the desert, of course.
Atlanta has no good natural water sources (railroad town, where two railroads meet), and Miami is in the process of salting up their water sources (and the nearest place to run an aqueduct from is Northern Florida).
The alternative is people stay out of those hot places, making housing affordability much worse in the North while keeping the south unproductive and poor. AC is a godsend.
Perhaps a better analogy is the availability of cheap fuel to make transport more accessible. (Yes, the US recipe.) However, this results in huge sprawls of large family houses, where pretty much the only sensible way of transport is to use a car (and a big one).
Yes, the car is also a godsend, but prioritizing it over anything else has drawbacks as well.
More like: somewhat worse, with much better energy consumption. (But perhaps it leads to smaller avg. houses, and avg. house size in the US is, without a doubt, well, not small.)
The whole line of argument could be applied directly to underwater homes.
Well, that and the IQ difference (air conditioning fixed that sure enough). Smart places like Iran and Columbia, that live in the heat, build up as high as they can get.
I run my Air Conditioning at 82 degrees in the summer (it's supposed to dry the house out, and let the computers run, not make the place frigid and unpleasant). If your air conditioning needed to be run down to 70 degrees, it was poorly sized and ill-designed for your house.
It's not the coolness. It's the air's uniformity. For instance, AC filters out a lot of micro-particulates, and the consensus is that's a good thing. But I'm outside in the heat right now (not super hot — just shy of 90 degrees F, 32 degrees C). But as I walk around outside and as the breeze moves past me I pick up a lot of subtle scents that I wouldn't if I were muffled up in AC. My house is still cool (insulated roof and shaded by trees), but I have the windows open and air from the outside is circulating. I'm forced to use the AC in my car when it gets hotter than today, and a car can really get sweltering. But I always crack the windows to get the breeze from the outside. And in the wintertime, I also keep my house windows and car windows cracked to get that sensory stimulation from the external world. I noticed that swamp coolers don't "deaden" the air like AC does.
Ah. I live in a polluted hellscape (not literally "wash your sooty face after walking home from school" -- anymore at least!). AC filters don't really do much for small particulate... (I have a low-clean room grade air purifier, and that's Quite Nice).
As a kid (without air conditioning, but definitely heating), I was pretty sensitive (still am) to indoor air pollutants -- they give me headaches. My mom used to find it funny that "I have a headache" meant "let me play outside" (mainly because I wasn't doing my homework, but it really did help.)
Is Europe rabidly anti-AC? No, not really, though there are worries about electricity consumption and about spikes during heatwaves resulting in blackouts. The previous generation of AC units which vented through holes cut into walls or windows were rightly regarded as eyesores when they multiplied like parasites all over the frontage of buildings; there is also concern about the amount of heat being vented, particularly in cities.
Padraig's post is absolutely correct about older European houses being both better adapted to heat (higher ceilings, better cross-ventilation and so forth) and ill-adapted to AC. However, that applies almost by definition to the dwellings of established and financially better-off Europeans; the real issue is the huge problem of cooling small, often poorly constructed apartments in social housing constructed since the war. In France's bidonvilles, the situation is made very much worse by the fact that most apartments do not have shutters to ward off radiant heat. The traditional response to high summer temperatures in southern Europe, and a very effective one in the right houses, is to close both shutters and windows at dawn and keep them closed till dusk
I'm a European, and have to ask what rabid anti-AC attitude? It's probably a reflection of the online spaces you frequent, rather than reality on the ground.
In practice, the parts of Europe that get really hot don't have the infrastructure for AC. The houses are adapted to the heat by having high ceilings and big windows to let air flow through. They're not really insulated or airtight - so introducing aircon is not as simple as hooking up a window unit. The electrical grid isn't ready for that load, and air conditioners are not sold widely.
All of that is changing quickly. Split-AC units are now down to about 350€. In some hot parts of Europe, people have been installing ACs for years.
Installing an AC *is* as simple as installing a split unit at a window/wall. Not having a very well insulated house is not a reason against AC - it's a mindset thing: In North America (US and Mexico, that is my experience) ACs are installed in "paper boxes" without any regard for efficiency.
Even in Germany, AC is now selling like the hottest thing: Scalpers have entered the market to sell portable split ACs at 2-5 times the previous market price. Normal fixed AC units are not affected, but since Germany is a tenant-country, many people can't install fixed AC units in their flats (not able to get approval from landlord).
Electricity grid is not an excuse in many places: Germany has a massive overproduction of solar power during sunshine anyway. Anybody else can get a set of solar panels and inverter for about 300€, which pays for itself over a few years.
This response is at least adjacent to it, though youve presented it civily. It elides over the fact that govt rules heavily restrict its use and instead offers reasons why some individually choose to not use it. It seems to a US observer in denial that there is significant demand but little political effort to make it possible.
There are no restrictions on buying, owning, installing or running an AC unit in your own home in Ireland. I'm not sure about other countries. On the other hand, if you plugged in a few hundred thousand window units tomorrow, it would crash the grid; and for climate reasons we probably shouldn't be introducing that much additional demand.
It feels to me that a lot of the Fox-News-style coverage of 'Europe' is intended to create a punching-bag to promote an agenda. It tends not to be grounded in facts. In this case, I'm vaguely aware of some questionable guidance in the UK, but I don't know of anything else going on in Europe which feeds into this story. Maybe I'm just ill-informed.
To those of you with paid-tier LLMs, could you please run the following prompt and reply with the LLM's model, output, and any available reasoning?
Prompt:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following joke:
"Who are you and how did you get in here?" "I'm a locksmith. And I'm a locksmith."
(For those who haven't seen the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PRObNi4KiU)
Note that the prompt requires the LLM to infer why the joke is funny. While it may seem silly to use imitating a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker joke as a benchmark, the Futurama/good-Simpsons-seasons writing team included a bunch of mathematicians who compared joke-writing to logic problems and I think this joke is a good example of the kind of cognitive task we'd like to outsource to AI, if you break it down into a toy-model of requirements or steps:
The structure of the joke requires a setup with two logically linked questions that have a shared answer
The LLM has to search a large, nebulous concept-space for combinations of questions and answers that meet that logical requirement
The LLM has to judge funniness, where toy-model criteria may be how well does the setup conform to a genre convention, how well does the answer subvert the genre convention of the setup, and how retrospectively-obvious is the answer to the first question also an answer to the second question? In the original, "Who are you and how did you get in here?" matches well for the genre being spoofed, identifying oneself by a banal occupation is a good subversion, and the implication that you should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security is retrospectively obvious.
More realistically, you'd specify requirements and optimization criteria for your requested search of a large, nebulous concept-space, rather than expect AI to infer them, but gauging why jokes are funny is also a good test, so I wanted to start with that, then see if the LLMs need the requirements and optimization criteria specified.
More to the point, free-tier LLMs I've tried simply CANNOT successfully follow this prompt, so I'm curious how paid-tier (especially the top/SoTA) ones respond.
For brownie points, also try:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following joke:
"Surely you can't be serious." "I am. And don't call me Shirley."
I don't know if LLMs should be expected to be good at homophones or if we should particularly care whether or not they're good at homophones, but I'm curious what outputs they give.
Thank you!
Edit:
"Control" criteria/hints to try giving the LLM, now that we've established that paid-tier models aren't immediately succeeding (If you try your own criteria/hints, that'd also be interesting, just include what they are):
The two questions in the setup must be logically related (If the setup were, itself, a non-sequitur, it would break the basic syntax of comedy, especially this carefully-structured joke)
The more they conform to a genre convention, the better ("Who are you and how did you get in here?" is taken from crime-drama)
The more the punchline subverts the tone and genre conventions of the setup, the better ("I'm a locksmith" is using a banal occupation to identify oneself, which subverts both the dramatic tone and genre conventions of the setup)
The more obvious the punchline is as an answer to the second question, the better (You should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security)
Both additionally OR alternatively, people could try explicitly giving a degree of freedom that LLMs seem disinclined to use, which is that the setup doesn't NEED to include "Who are you" and the answer doesn't NEED to be an occupation. (The free ones I tried consistently over-indexed on that, as well, across many sessions.)
The "AI" generated jokes appear to be universally terrible.
Are you taking requests?
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following joke:
"I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I got a cake."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNH3MP8PhRg
...okay yeah, I've got to take a shot at that Police Squad-a-like. Ahem:
"...why do I feel like I've known you my whole life? And why do I hear music when you're near?"
"I'm the London Philharmonic Orchestra. And, I'm the London Philharmonic Orchestra."
(Turns out no one here sells boxing gloves. So now I own two dozen oven mitts.)
What model did you use?
My own meat.
I posted, because I use duck.ai, not paid models, but here's what GPT 5.4 mini came up with:
I wanted a missing sock, but the dryer only had one. So I bought a pair of shoes.
I asked for a light snack, but the café didn’t have one. So they brought me a lamp and a sandwich.
I needed a ticket to ride, but the station was out. So I got on a bicycle.
I wanted a book cover, but the shop was sold out. So I wore a coat and read outside.
I asked for a manila folder, but they were all gone. So I just hired a guy from Manila.
Haiku 4.5:
"I wanted to buy a bookcase at the store, but they were all sold out. So I just put my book in a briefcase instead."
"I tried to order a cold shoulder from my friend as a favor, so I iced my shoulder down and asked him to touch it. He said that's not what he meant."
"I needed a traffic jam for my breakfast, but the bakery didn't have any. So I sat on the highway with some toast and preserves."
"I wanted to hire a pitcher for my baseball team's water cooler. The guy I found was great—he literally throws water. Just not the kind we needed."
"I asked the barista for a shot of espresso. She handed me a camera and said, 'Go take one.' Fair point."
All VERY far off the mark. But they both performed pretty closely to the top models on the ZAZ joke, so logically sophisticated comedy may be an area in which there is NOT a drastic difference between tiers.
The high-tier models seem to come up with things that make some sense but aren't funny, while the low-tier models aren't funny and don't make sense either.
For instance there's the skeleton of a perfectly fine "traffic jam" pun there (a similar joke was in Spaceballs) but it gets confused about what's setup and what's punchline, you don't order a traffic jam from the bakery. Nor do you order a cold shoulder from your friend as a favour, and then it gets confused about who is supposed to be speaking.
An even bigger problem with these jokes: it's suggested a bunch of puns, but the original joke wasn't a pun at all, it's an "unexpected thing actually makes some logical sense" joke.
"The high-tier models seem to come up with things that make some sense but aren't funny, while the low-tier models aren't funny and don't make sense either."
We'll have to see if anyone tries the Hedberg joke with a high-tier model...
Gemini 3.1 Pro with "Extended Thinking" enabled (probably not relevant here ... this is more for long sequence planning):
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The classic locksmith joke (famously delivered by Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad!) works through deadpan literalism. The humor comes from answering a compound question—one half asking for an identity, the other asking for the explanation of an intrusive or impossible action—by repeating the exact same occupational title twice, because the job itself perfectly answers both.
Here are five jokes that use that exact same comedic structure:
1. The Escape Artist
"Who are you, and how did you fit inside my suitcase?"
"I'm a contortionist. And I'm a contortionist."
2. The Thief
"Who are you, and where did my watch go?"
"I'm a pickpocket. And I'm a pickpocket."
3. The Illusionist
"Who are you, and how are you currently floating in mid-air?"
"I'm a magician. And I'm a magician."
4. The Culprit
"Who are you, and why is my living room on fire?"
"I'm an arsonist. And I'm an arsonist."
5. The Intruder
"Who are you, and why did you just chop down my front door?"
"I'm a lumberjack. And I'm a lumberjack."
I am a human and somewhat critical of LLM capabilities and this is a better answer than I could have given.
I do not find the original funny at all, the meh AI versions of it only highlight to me how meh the original is. I of course understand in a theoretical sense why other people might find this funny and the AI nails that theory.
But, and here the AI has the advantage on me, I would not have known where the joke is from in the original.
Adding a lower quality answer from Gemma 4 31B.
Gemma 4 is an open weight LLM that can be downloaded and run on local hardware (in my case an M5 Max Macbook Pro).
Note that Gemma sorta gets the pattern but clearly doesn't "understand" the joke.
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The humor in that joke comes from double meanings (or "polysemy"), where the first instance of the word describes a person's profession, and the second instance describes the action they just performed.
Here are five jokes that work using the same logic:
The Baker
"Who are you and why are you in my kitchen?"
"I'm a baker. And I'm baking."
The Plumber
"Who are you and why are you under my sink?"
"I'm a plumber. And I'm plumbing."
The Painter
"Who are you and why is there wet paint on my wall?"
"I'm a painter. And I'm painting."
The Driver
"Who are you and why are you behind the wheel of my car?"
"I'm a driver. And I'm driving."
The Hacker
"Who are you and why are you in my computer system?"
"I'm a hacker. And I'm hacking."
Claude Opus 4.8 (extra):
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What makes the original land is that the two questions seem to need different answers, but a single fact answers both — the profession that explains who he is is the same one that explains how he did the suspicious thing. The deadpan repetition treats one answer as if it's two.
Five in the same vein:
"Who are you and how did you get past my firewall?" "I'm a hacker. And I'm a hacker."
"Who are you and how did you walk through that wall?" "I'm a ghost. And I'm a ghost."
"Who are you and how is my watch on your wrist?" "I'm a pickpocket. And I'm a pickpocket."
"Who are you and how did you know I'd ask that?" "I'm a psychic. And I'm a psychic."
"Who are you and how did you get out of the handcuffs?" "I'm an escape artist. And I'm an escape artist."
---
Me again. Claude interpreted "same reason" very literally and produced five variations of essentially the same joke. As far as I'm concerned, all the variants it came up with are successful; the only reason they're not as funny to me as the original is that I heard the original first and these are all the same joke. I guess maybe they're worse because "how did you get in here" is more of a stock question than the ones it picked?
Not exactly blowing me out of the water with creativity, but it does demonstrate that Claude understands the original joke, and I can't say it didn't successfully answer the prompt.
*edit* On further consideration, the latter 3 it came up with are actually worse than the original. It's not just that they're not stock questions like "how did you get in here," they don't make sense in a scenario that starts with "Who are you..." What plausible story results in you knowing that somebody was in handcuffs, but not knowing who they are? I shouldn't have given these a pass along with the first two.
Thanks! What does "(extra)" mean in Anthropic?
Do you want to try including criteria/hints, to see if it can do better? For example:
The two questions in the setup must be logically related (If the setup were, itself, a non-sequitur, it would break the basic syntax of comedy, especially this carefully-structured joke)
The more they conform to genre convention, the better ("Who are you and how did you get in here?" is taken from crime-drama)
The more the punchline subverts the tone and genre conventions of the setup, the better ("I'm a locksmith" is using a banal occupation to identify oneself, which subverts both the dramatic tone and genre conventions of the setup)
The more obvious the punchline is as an answer to the second question, the better (You should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security)
Both additionally or alternatively, people could try explicitly giving a degree of freedom that LLMs seem disinclined to use, that the setup doesn't NEED to include "Who are you" and the answer doesn't NEED to be an occupation. (The free ones I tried consistently over-indexed on that, as well, across many sessions.)
Extra is the setting that controls the amount of thinking Claude does. I have it on the second-highest setting, which is my default (because I frankly don't use my subscription enough to be precious about tokens).
Claude again, after being given your hints:
---
The first batch leaned too supernatural (ghost, psychic), which escalates the drama instead of deflating it. The fix is a maximally boring trade whose everyday job description is exactly the menacing feat. Five tuned for that:
"Who are you, and why is the patient unconscious?" "I'm an anesthesiologist. And I'm an anesthesiologist."
"Who are you, and how did you wipe out the whole nest?" "I'm an exterminator. And I'm an exterminator."
"Who are you, and how did you get to our window? We're forty floors up." "I'm a window cleaner. And I'm a window cleaner."
"Who are you, and why are you so calm next to the body?" "I'm a mortician. And I'm a mortician."
"Who are you, and how did you walk through the swarm untouched?" "I'm a beekeeper. And I'm a beekeeper."
The anesthesiologist is probably the strongest: "why is the patient unconscious?" is pure medical-thriller ("someone drugged him!"), and rendering people unconscious is so literally the job that the threat evaporates on contact.
---
Frankly I think these are much worse, which is funny.
Claude's assessment that the anesthesiologist joke "is probably the strongest" could have merit, if it also came up with a ZAZ-like backstory to contextualize the exchange.
For what it's worth I immediately liked the anesthesiologist one. I think there's an extra layer of comedy here - the implication that locksmiths just *automatically break into everywhere because they can* is similarly partnered here in an extra layer of humor with the implications that anesthesiologists just matter-of-factly render patients unconscious, even if they aren't specified to be in need of anesthesia. In both the cases the fact that these require tools makes identifying your job description somewhat more amusing. Not "I picked the lock" or "I injected the patient with a sedative" but simply stating your general job description.
This is also why I think it's by far the strongest of those 5 jokes.
"Calm next to the body" is a question you wouldn't really ask outside of a very specific situation - it's fishing for circumstantial evidence for suspicion at best. "Don't look distressed" is much less impactful than "rendered someone unconscious."
As for "window cleaner cleaning window" or "exterminator exterminating" or "beekeeper hanging out with bees" these are all somewhat more niche, specialized activities. A beekeeper, as long as they have their uniform, DOES just passively, constantly walk through swarms.
Anesthesiologists, on the other hand, spend a fairly small amount of their time actively rendering someone unconscious, and usually with a concrete specific reason. Window cleaners spend all of their work day outside a window, but anesthesiologists still spend a minority of it standing over someone they knocked unconscious, much like most locksmiths can break into places but generally aren't at any one moment. So I think with that specific example - and like the original locksmith version - there's more layers going on in the comedy of identifying the state of affairs with what you *are* rather than what you *did*.
A post-something twist on classic medical humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0S5EN7-RtI
***Level Up!***
You are now a Level 100 Anesthesiologist. Anesthesiology is now applied as an aura.
ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking:
Five in the same “the same phrase answers both questions” style:
1. “Who are you, and how did you get this plane on the runway?”
“I’m a pilot. And I’m a pilot.”
2. “Who are you, and how did you get my safe open?”
“I’m a safecracker. And I’m a safecracker.”
3. “Who are you, and how did my chimney get so clean?”
“I’m a chimney sweep. And I’m a chimney sweep.”
4. “Who are you, and how did you get that ship into the harbor?”
“I’m a captain. And I’m a captain.”
5. “Who are you, and how did you get my piano in tune?”
“I’m a tuner. And I’m a tuner.”
Thanks! I don't know how every variant of every LLM compares, but GPT 5.5 Thinking is a heavy-hitter, isn't it? It'll be interesting to see if another LLM can succeed where it failed.
Do you want to try including criteria/hints, to see if it can do better? For example:
The two questions in the setup must be logically related (If the setup were, itself, a non-sequitur, it would break the basic syntax of comedy, especially this carefully-structured joke)
The more they conform to genre convention, the better ("Who are you and how did you get in here?" is taken from crime-drama)
The more the punchline subverts the tone and genre conventions of the setup, the better ("I'm a locksmith" is using a banal occupation to identify oneself, which subverts both the dramatic tone and genre conventions of the setup)
The more obvious the punchline is as an answer to the second question, the better (You should expect a locksmith to be able to bypass basic security)
Edit: If more top LLMs fail, even with criteria/hints, perhaps people could try explicitly giving a degree of freedom that LLMs seem disinclined to use, that the setup doesn't NEED to include "Who are you" and the answer doesn't NEED to be an occupation.
Have you tried giving your exact prompt to humans? Part of the problem is it's not clear what you're asking for from your original prompt. I wouldn't have known how closely you wanted the jokes to stick to the original structure from just the prompt.
After some back and forth with ChatGPT 5.5 explaining that it can follow the structure more loosely, it eventually came up with this:
1. At the museum:
“What are you doing in the gallery, and how did you get past the motion detector?”
“Standing still. And standing still.”
2. At the restaurant:
“How would you like your steak, and how often do you two get out?”
“Rare. And rare.”
3. At the job interview:
“Where do you see yourself in five years, and what interests you most about this position?”
“Your chair. And your chair.”
4. At the ENT clinic:
“How’s your breathing, and how will you be paying today?”
“Through the nose. And through the nose.”
5. At school:
“Where’s your homework, and what’s your excuse this time?”
“The dog. And the dog.”
"Have you tried giving your exact prompt to humans? Part of the problem is it's not clear what you're asking for from your original prompt. I wouldn't have known how closely you wanted the jokes to stick to the original structure from just the prompt."
No, because I thought the first step would be to see if high-tier models outperform low-tier models. (If you're asking how I expect humans to perform on this task, I expect a professional comedy writer would be able to do the "locksmith" one, but not necessarily the homophone one, while the median human would fail at both.)
1 would require some ZAZ-like version of "get[ting] past the motion detector
2 has an unnatural setup, but a human could rework that into a bit
3 is better, but a human could rewrite it more naturally
4 is rough, but a human could rework that into a bit
5 works as-is! Can you share the conversation?
(I'd guess that GPT 5.5 Thinking could also rework 2, 3, and 4 into comedy bits, if prompted to do so. I'm curious if it can come up with a ZAZ-like backstory to contextualize 1.)
Here's Gemini Flash 3.5 Extended thinking for your second prompt:
Here are five jokes that use the exact same comedic mechanism—deliberately misinterpreting a common word at the start of a sentence as a direct-address first name, followed by a deadpan correction:
1.
A: "Frankly, we are running out of options."
B: "We are. And don't call me Frank."
2.
A: "Will you please take this situation seriously?"
B: "I am. And don't call me Will."
3.
A: "Earnestly, this is a matter of life and death."
B: "I understand. And don't call me Ernest."
4.
A: "Grant us the authority to move forward with the plan."
B: "You have it. And don't call me Grant."
5.
A: "Mark my words, this is going to backfire completely."
B: "I will. And don't call me Mark."
Thanks!
It's interesting that these are either syntactically incorrect, because they use a modification of a homophone in the setup-statement, or syntactically incorrect, because the setup-statement is grammatically incomplete without the name. Surely Zucker -Abrahams-Zucker didn't find the only satisfactory phomophone in the English language~
"Surely" is an adverb, and since adverbs generally end in -ly that limits your options a lot. For most names you'd probably have to do a different sentence structure - maybe "Let me be frank..." "Ok, Frank."
You can always fall back on Lee as a surname. And don't call me Frank Lee.
Good observation. However, the prompt isn't to structure the joke with the homophone in the same location, it's to write five jokes that are funny for the same reason; the homophone could be in any location, so long as the sentence is grammatically valid by either interpretation, creating the necessary lexical ambiguity. If only there was a type of AI that could both generate and analyze all possible variations of the same content using valid grammar with superhuman speed and accuracy...
Edit:
Haiku 4.5 gave me reasoning, but no output (well, prior output was mostly invalid)
Prompt:
Write five jokes that are funny for the same reason as the following:
"Surely you can't be serious." "I am. And don't call me 'Shirley.'"
(Note: The homophone for a given-name does not need to be the first word of the setup-statement, the setup-statement just needs to be grammatically valid by either interpretation. However, being grammatically valid by either interpretation is critical.)
Best attempts:
"Theresa good chance of rain today." "I'm not Theresa. But yes, there's a good chance of rain today."
"Art you going to the meeting?" "I'm not Art. But yes, I am going to the meeting."
Reasoning:
This is asking me to understand the humor in that famous joke from "Airplane!" and then write similar jokes using the same comedic mechanism.
The joke works because:
1. "Surely" is a setup that uses a word that sounds like the given name "Shirley"
2. The punchline interprets "Surely" as if it were the name "Shirley"
3. The response "I am. And don't call me 'Shirley'" treats "Surely" as if the person is saying "call me Shirley" when they said "surely"
4. The sentence is grammatically valid both ways - "Surely you can't be serious" is valid (using the adverb), and "Shirley, you can't be serious" would also be valid (using it as a name)
So I need to find other homophone pairs where:
- One is a common word (adverb, adjective, verb, etc.)
- One sounds like a given name
- I can create a setup sentence that's grammatically valid using the common word
- The punchline can reinterpret it as the name
Let me think of homophone/similar-sounding pairs:
- "Quickly" / "Quigley" - "Quickly, we need to leave!" / "I am. And don't call me 'Quigley.'"
Check: "Quickly, we need to leave" is grammatically valid (adverb starting a sentence). "Quigley, we need to leave" is also grammatically valid (name). ✓
- "Kent" / "Can't" - Wait, that's backwards. But "Can't" doesn't sound like "Kent". Let me think... Actually, in some accents, "Kent" (the name) and "Can't" are different. Not a good pair.
- "Wayne" / "Wane" - "The light will wane soon" (verb) vs "Wayne, the light will soon" doesn't work grammatically.
- "Juan" / "Won" - "I won the race" doesn't translate to "Juan the race" grammatically.
- "Bill" / "Will" - "Will you help me?" could work, but "Bill you help me?" isn't valid syntax.
- "Paige" / "Page" - "Turn the page" doesn't set up as "Turn the Paige" in a way that works.
- "Stan" / "Stand" - "Stand back!" could become "Stan back!" but that's not quite right either.
- "Mark" / "Marc" - too phonetically similar to create the intended effect.
- "Reed" / "Read" - neither "Read the book" nor "Reed the book" establishes a clear homophone joke.
- "Les" / "Less" - "Less is more" works as a statement, but the name version doesn't land the same way.
- "Iris" - this one's just a name, not a homophone at all.
- "Arthur" / "Are there" - "Are there any questions?" becomes "Arthur any questions?" which breaks grammatically.
Moving through more possibilities: "Justin" / "Just in" could work with "Just in time!" but that's more exclamation than setup. "Ilene" / "I lean" fails because "Ilene on your support" isn't valid. "Ben" / "Been" doesn't work—"Have you Ben here?" isn't grammatical. "Olive" / "All of" creates "Olive you should listen," which is nonsensical. "Barry" / "Bury" gives "Barry the treasure," which doesn't work as a command with a name. "Neil" / "Kneel" produces "Neil down," which isn't valid. "Claire" / "Clear" results in "Claire the room," also invalid. "Paige" / "Page" would be "Turn the Paige," which doesn't quite work grammatically either.
But "Rose" / "Rows" or past tense "rose" is promising. The sentence "Rose quickly from the chair" works both ways—as the past tense verb "rose" (she rose) and as a name with an imperative or descriptive phrase. This creates a valid punchline structure where the ambiguity actually holds up grammatically.
The core pattern here mirrors "Surely" / "Shirley"—both sentence structures are grammatically sound, just with different interpretations. I'm exploring other homophones or near-homophones: "Aloud" doesn't function as a name, "Ida" doesn't create a workable contraction, and "Tina" or "Pam" don't yield the right sound play. "Kent" and "Can't" are nearly identical in standard pronunciation, which could work similarly to the "Shirley" example. "Bill be done" / "Will be done" - but the setup would need to be "I will help" not starting with "Bill".
I'm noticing that many common names don't create clean homophones with actual words, or when they do, they don't fit naturally into sentences. Names like "Stan" (stand), "Ben" (been), "May" (may), and "Rob" work better as potential homophones, though I need to verify they actually produce grammatical sentences when substituted.
Some stronger candidates are emerging: "Sue" (sue), "Ward" (ward), "Hugh" (hue), "Ty" (tie), "Paige" (page), and "Grace" (grace) all have clear word equivalents. "Rose" is particularly interesting since it functions as both a name and the past tense of "rise," which could create a natural double meaning in a sentence like "That rose quickly" - though the punchline feels forced when trying to make the joke explicit.
Looking at other names with verb potential: "May" works well because both "May I ask?" and "May, I ask?" are grammatically valid, creating a genuine ambiguity. "Sue me" similarly functions as both a command and a name-based phrase. "Will" is trickier since "Will, you help?" sounds awkward compared to the natural "Will you help?" The challenge is finding names where the word-meaning and name-meaning both fit naturally into the same sentence without forcing the joke. work as a setup for the joke.
The structure needs the homophone to appear naturally in a sentence where it could be misinterpreted as a name. "Rose quickly from the table" actually fits this—it uses "rose" as a past tense verb but could sound like addressing someone named Rose. The challenge is crafting a setup that feels natural while containing the word in a way that sets up the punchline effectively. I'm circling back to test whether simpler examples like "rose" can actually sustain the joke structure, or if I need to find a different homophone entirely that works more smoothly. just in time!" / "Justin time!"
"Just in" is two words, so it doesn't quite fit the same pattern as the single-word homophones.
"May I ask a question?" / "May, I ask a question?"
The second version feels forced—you'd more naturally say "May, may I ask?" or just address her directly. "May help me" as future tense versus "May, help me!" as an imperative to someone named May could work, but the setup is awkward.
I'm also considering "Paige turner alert!" which could sound like addressing someone named Paige, though that needs refinement too.
"Sue them in court!" doesn't create any ambiguity—it's the same either way.
"My patience is wearing thin" works better as a setup. The punchline could be "I understand. And don't call me 'Patience.'" This creates a genuine double meaning: patience as a noun versus Patience as a name, both grammatically valid in the same sentence.
I should focus on the strongest candidates where the wordplay is clearest and the setup feels natural.
The "Quickly" / "Quigley" option has potential—"Quickly, we need to leave!" sets up the homophone nicely. "Rose quickly from the chair" also works, playing on rose as past tense versus Rose as a name. "My memory isn't what it used to be" is weaker since Memory isn't a common first name. I'm also exploring whether "Major" could work as both a verb and a military rank, though the setup feels forced.
Looking at other word-name pairs: "Chandler" doesn't function well as a verb, and "Cole" from coleslaw is awkward phrasing. "Fritz" as a verb meaning to break doesn't quite land grammatically. But "Buck" is promising—"Buck the system" is a legitimate verb phrase, so the setup "You should buck the system!" followed by "I might. And don't call me 'Buck'" creates a clean double meaning.
Here's Gemini Flash 3.5 Extended thinking:
The joke you shared (a classic from Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad!) relies on a brilliant comedic mechanism: the double-barreled question where a single profession perfectly answers both identity and action.
Here are five jokes built on that exact same structural DNA:
1. The Hacker
"Who are you and how did you get into my private email?"
"I'm a hacker. And I'm a hacker."
2. The Psychic
"Who are you and how did you know I was going to ask you that?"
"I'm a psychic. And I'm a psychic."
3. The Ninja
"Who are you and how did you get past all my armed guards?"
"I'm a ninja. And I'm a ninja."
4. The Surgeon
"Who are you and why are you cutting me open?"
"I'm a surgeon. And I'm a surgeon."
5. The Demolition Expert
"Who are you and why did you just blow up my shed?"
"I'm a demolition expert. And I'm a demolition expert."
Does anyone have any recommendations for places to learn about population ethics beyond a surface level?
maybe start with skimming this https://www.utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/
then this short, but quite dense post https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/the-profoundest-error-in-population
then https://joecarlsmith.com/2021/03/14/against-neutrality-about-creating-happy-lives/
Honorable mention winners are out of the running to win, right?
"Here's how Flying Lion With A Book can still win"
Got to hold out for any disqualifications; doping, sex scandals, "their book was actually just a greasy napkin", that sort of thing.
Last year one of the HMs ("School") got bumped up to the big leagues.
For the Georgism fans, there's a new-ish political party in New Zealand campaigning on introducing a Land Value Tax (which would fund a UBI replacing most benefits). They're polling high enough that they might actually get enough support to squeak into parliament, and while their chances of getting the tax through are essentially zero right now, I'm considering voting for them. Has anyone here who is familiar with LTVs had a look at their proposed plan? How do you rate it?
Their policy document is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KgTXUgjVipAA7EcDas-EJmOr6ZkeCf9B/view
Think of it this way. Literally any shift to any form of land taxation is beneficial. And they're not going to succeed. So just vote for them to express your preference as long as the other ideas are not too repulsive to you
Commenting just to boost antipodean news and info, this sounds cool! Might work in NZ, I have absolutely no faith it'll work in Oz :D
Every so often some commentators complain that Gen Z (and I assume before them the millennials) don’t have the patience to read long books anymore, their attention span is too limited, they are used to stopping and starting, dipping in and out of one media and onto other media.
My question for these people is - how exactly do you think people have traditionally read books? It’s very rarely all in one go.
I read books by blocking out a period of time and focusing on the reading task and try to avoid distractions. A challenging book is context heavy, and the cognitive cost of switching into that is high so I wont do it in 5 minute intervals. The way in which I see ppl use apps on their phones does not seem compatible with the engagement i require.
Is this a generational thing? Everyone is reading less than they used to, and that's because there's an entire economy built around attention now. I don't have stats to back this up, but I'm sure they exist.
A separate complaint levelled at college age students is that they can't get through 5-10 pages of reading material for a college class. They'd rather watch a YouTube video (when I taught in a uni in the US, up to 2021, they'd watch at 4x speed). I would expect that AI is the death of reading non-interactive text altogether.
Traditionally, people read books to escape boredom. I would love to survey people under the age of 25 I'm guessing that not one of them have ever read the back of a shampoo label or cereal box, or counted the tiles on a wall, or stared at the ceiling for 15 minutes straight. All experiences well-familiar to everyone over the age of 40 who have had to 'entertain themselves' for an hour.
I think this is a big piece of it. Whenever I have to go more than an hour without electricity or wifi, I suddenly find it easy to read dozens or hundreds of pages. I'm just so bored otherwise.
I think we should all go cold turkey on data for a few days now and again. I pushed back against the generational premise at the top level, but I think younger people would really benefit from it.
In Ireland, many schools lock phones away in a sealed pouch during school hours and it seems to have increased their interaction with each other and reduced behavioural problems. I'd happily roll this out to workplaces, and maybe home as well...
I agree, although I'm not too optimistic about how much we can accomplish. The problem is that going cold turkey takes willpower or it takes an authority figure forcing it on you. But when the wifi is broken, it's a whole different situation, since reading or socializing are no longer things it takes willpower to do, they're instead welcome escapes from the crushing boredom I feel. It's like gravity is suddenly pulling in a different direction, and it's no longer hard to walk uphill because uphill has become downhill.
College students (more than 10% of them) at university of california are unable to do middle school math. Not high school math, Middle School Math -- like fractions.
It's only the truly bored among the "over the age of forty" folks that count the tiles on a wall. Creative folks just develop a story or make a new world.
What I intended is that before circa 2005, internet access via your phone was not a thing. So people would regularly have 5-10 minute periods in which to entertain themselves. I was thinking specifically of those periods in the bathroom where you look for something to occupy your mind.
When you naturally live with that level of background boredom, a book seems exciting in comparison. When you have a phone constantly available to swipe and scroll and whatever, reading will seem less appealing. Between 2016 and 2019, I noticed that kids in my uni classes went from chatting before and after class to sitting in silence staring at their phones. It's an addiction, and it sucks up the time that used to be spent on hobbies.
It also sucks up the time that people used to spend in "normal social interaction" (such as waiting for busses, or classes). How are you supposed to know what your neighbor is doing, if you don't talk with them?
Yes, I don't think "attention span" is the problem as such, it's more of an inability to be interested in anything that isn't hyper-stimulating.
Kids can still be engrossed in a video game for hours, but will get bored reading a book for ten minutes, because... well, let's face it, there's a very real sense in which reading a book is more boring than playing a video game.
When people say zoomers say don’t have an attention span, it’s not merely that they switch between tasks. They can’t read anything longer than a tweet before getting bored. Maybe someone is out there reading literature 280 characters at a time but I have my doubts.
If so, that person is dyslexic (they tend to read entire paragraphs at once, because every word is a puzzle, and if you solve the entire jumble at once... it's quicker!)
I thought the claim wasn't that younger people read by dipping in and out of long works, it's that they don't read long works at all.
Well they do read less. That’s an empirical fact. I’m disputing that it’s because of a smaller attention span. ( I get that argument about not going to movies, maybe, but not books)
It's a smaller attention span. Time was, Sesame Street figured out that 4 year olds really wanted to listen to "reasonably long" stories (ten minutes? thirty minutes?). Nowadays, you'd do the same study and realize their attention span is about 10 seconds before they want something "stimulating." (And yes, this has been done).
Smaller attention spans are what drives "less traffic" towards blogs and other "long form" fiction (where long form is defined as anything longer than a few lines of text).
I binge read things I enjoy, and always have. Even as a kid I'd read for several hours at a time. Now I can go much longer . More than once I've read all night to finish a book I'd started the day before. None of this is explained by some virtuous character trait. It's just following my bliss. As a kid and teen I'd get so engrossed in my reading that I would not hear my mother calling me, even if she was standing right next to me. She'd have to touch me to get my attention.
I’ve done that too. However who has the time as an adult. I read books by chapter and between chapters sometimes I’ll end in the middle of a chapter if it’s late.
I read 2 or 3 books at a time. Right now it’s Jeeves and Wooster, Adam Becker’s book on AI, and the latest dungeon crawler. But that means a chapter a time. At most.
The other thing I am doing on my own time is watching some tv shows not liked by the rest of the family. I also watch those incrementally, episode by episode or not even full episodes. If it’s late.
Exactly as I read books, exactly how I have always read books.
Hades (or Slay the Spire) are very different games from System Shock, or Thief the Dark Age. This is because the attention span of the average gamer has plummeted. If someone wants to "make an impact" over the course of an entire chapter (or a 30 minute television show), the same principle applies.
Atmospheric games like atmospheric movies suffer. Yes, people don't read books in one go very often (GRRM aside).
>This is because the attention span of the average gamer has plummeted.
I would argue it is instead because SS and T are both stealth games, and stealth has never been particularly fun. Baldur's Gate 3 was enormous.
I think you're missing the "design consideration: shorter playspan". I could have cited many "retro" games (Master of Magic, Magic Candle, Castlevania, Civilization) --> distance between "savespots" is what you're looking at.
Oh. Well I'd hold easier saving is just better game design, in the same way that everyone uses WASD now instead of System Shock's SZXC. I know folks on Twentysided used to talk about trying to play games with toddlers in the house, and needing to be able to drop the game instantly to go deal with kid-based crises.
You still get some games that make saving difficult, but they're typically horror games (once again like System Shock and Thief). Look Outside has difficulty settings that affect how often you can save.
Yeah, I do generally agree that "easier saving" is better (Thief didn't have any "savepoints" actually, so it's a pretty poor example -- my recollection is that console games tended towards "save points" more than "real computer games" -- now, it seems like there are fewer "real computer games" that aren't indie).
I used to swallow books whole. Lie down across the armchair in the living room, book in hand, and leave it only when it was time for dinner. These days I automatically switch to something else when there's a slow page. I should probably have a separate reading device, at least.
My daughter (age 27) turned me onto Dungeon Crawler Carl. I'm gobbling it up as fast as I can. And she remains about 1 book ahead of me. Parents who like to read have kids who like to read... I don't really care if it's nature or nurture. (data point of one.)
My 11 years old daughter has read the entire Harry Potter (not the rational one) series, I haven't even noticed when. The 8 years old one is in the middle of Narnia. Also, no idea how much is nature or nurture, just saying that it is possible in every generation.
Yeah my mom and dad liked to read too. We'd go on vacation with ~1 box of books each. And by the end had read half of the other persons box. My brother never liked to read.
Electronic readers are a great invention, you can put the entire library in your pocket.
Yeh that one keeps you reading alright.
I'm reading J.D. Vance's book Communion and have come to the conclusion that Vance embraced Christianity because he wanted a right-wing version of the left's therapy culture to help him deal with his family trauma. We need a secular right-wing or centrist version of that to prevent people from going over to the dark side.
You read the book not me, but it seems more likely that he is just pretending to be christian because he is very obviously a political opportunist, and you cannot be an atheist republican.
Some time ago I came to the conclusion that Vance is simply an intelligent opportunist, completely bereft of any moral or even ideological underpinnings. Had the wind blown from another direction, had he grown up in another place, he might today be the henchman of Kim Jong Un or of Ali Khamenei.
The correct answer
Not everything has to be about “trauma”.
There are lots of therapies for that that are not left-wing coded. My take is he doesn't appreciate the simplicity of them.
Or maybe he had a genuine religious conversion? I know, I know: stop with the crazy talk!
It's not crazy talk. He might well have. I personally doubt it but that's neither here nor there Not doubted in the sense that he's lying about it but doubted in the sense that the man is capable of such a thing he strikes me as a what's-in-it-for-me personality that would preclude such a thing. there are few religions that carry the intellectual weight that Catholicism does and I'm sure that appeals to him as well.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Some people need religion in order to deal with their past, and there's nothing wrong with that.
From one of the finalist reviews:
[The thesis of Great and Desperate Cures is that there is something banal about the lobotomy, and efforts in psychosurgery—physically intervening on the brain in order to treat mental illness—more generally.]
One of the more interesting characters I've seen in fiction was a former lobotomist surgeon who shows up in the "Higurashi: Whey Cry" Visual Novel. He's portrayed as a sympathetic, ordinary doctor on first appearance. When we finally get his backstory as a surgeon who performed lobotomies, he really did think he was helping to treat the mentally ill. In the "present" of the story (early 1980s Japan) he seems kind of resentful that he was performing this procedure that was widely agreed to be beneficial, and now that the public has turned against it his reputation is mud.
I'm strongly of the belief that psychosurgery is the future for mental illness treatment. I'm interested in seeing where the present rudimentary efforts at "BMI feedback loop" are going.
In a time with very few therapeutic treatments for severe mental illness, the choice was framed as lifelong hospitalization or going home after a brief surgery.
Most medical procedures from the past are grotesque, yet one gets the impression their practitioners really believed they were effective. WTF, right? In some ways, it's the same now. While medical treatment on the whole is better, there are still plenty of cruelties and absurdities in standard practice. My impression is that doctors are exceptionally resistant to having their methods questioned, even when one does it politely -- resistant in a way that, say, an engineer would not be. With doctors you run into this combo of self-pity, because they went through such hell in their training, and entitlement, because they're Doctors.
The world seems badly run to me.
This makes me think of Scott's anecdote from years ago on SSC reviewing House of God. Decades of people falling out of their beds in hospitals, often getting injured, sometimes dying as a result. Then Medicare changed their rules to stick the hospital with the cost of treating those injuries, and very quickly hospitals got a whole lot better at preventing falls.
One that's a current problem: nobody can get any decent sleep in a hospital. The last time I was in a hospital overnight, I think I heard like five people just say that to me, apologetically. There are things that will disrupt your sleep that aren't so easy to fix (if you need to be given medicine every 3 hours or have your blood pressure taken every hour or something), but there's also a ton of stuff that is just designed poorly for being able to sleep. As best I can tell, you could make the environment much quieter, give the patient control over lighting, and whenever possible set up the schedules for medicine and such to allow a long block of time for sleep, and probably that would give you actual improvements in both patient outcomes and happiness. But someone would have to care, and that person would somehow have to have the power to push the changes through.
I mean, the lobotomy works, doesn't it? It turns highly agitated and nonfunctioning people into calm-but-still-nonfunctioning people, which is an improvement especially if you have to manage an asylum full of them.
Nowadays we can achieve the same result using drugs instead of surgery.
The conditions of mental asylums in the 30s and the 40s were truly horrendous. I understand the impetus to do something, anything, to ease the misery around you At the same time it's worth noting that the American neurosurgeon who performed over four thousand of these operations in his lifetime kept going long after it was reasonable and was finally shut down he clearly had some personal agenda. he also had about a 4% fatality rate.
Patients generally *hate* the most effective antipsychotic drugs. They say they make them feel sleepy, stupid and blank. Wouldn't surprise me if lobotomized people felt the same about their new lobotomized lives. And of course lobotomies, unlike drug regimens, are forever.
I knew a person with manic depressive disorder, who was misdiagnosed with depression, got the wrong meds for years, and finally stopped -- and did any analysis of her condition on the basis of a journal she religiously kept ("am i manic today?" "am I depressed?").
I don't know if this is possible for the patients that get antipsychotics. (I remember the psychologists who hated the anti-depression drugs, and they weren't the only ones).
Yeh. It might be that the future thinks drugging people to cure any kind of “neurodivergent behaviour” is as obscene.
I'm replying to John Schilling, who posted the following:
> What about the behavior that *is* harmful? People mostly weren't being lobotomized for being a little bit quirky; they were being lobotomized for things where pretty much the only pre-drug option that didn't involve multiple full-time minders for each patient was to be locked in a very unpleasant…"
While I got a notification of his reply, somehow I can't find it on the thread. I think it might be because I blocked one person who was posting on the thread -- maybe that led to all replies to that person getting deleted from my feed too? Anyhow, here my answer to the "it was the only option" argument:
What else could you do if you were charged with caring for a giant crazy guy who’s tried to twist the head off everyone who came near him? Yeah, I get it. For someone like that, especially if you somehow knew they are in that state for life, the options were to chain them up or drug them into a stupor forever, or do a lobotomy. Lobotomy was probably the least awful choice. But here are some nuances to consider.
First, even prior to antipsychotics, a fair fraction of people,10 or 20%, recovered fully from a first episode of psychosis and never had another. Another 10% or so stopped being actively psychotic, but remained somewhat impaired (less able to work or socialize)the rest of their lives. Another substantial percent, maybe 50%, had undulating courses, with alternating intervals of remission and illness. And the remainder of people who became psychotic stayed that way for life. Given those stats, the fraction of people whose lobotomies wiped out good or mixed futures could not have been small. (By the way Mark Vonnegut, son of Kirk Vonnegout, who wrote the wonderful account of madness called The Eden Express, is an undulator. He was a practicing pediatrician who had periodic psychotic episodes.)
Second, bear in mind that lobotomy did not start off as a treatment for violent unmanageability. It started off as a treatment for *agitation.*. Moniz, who performed, the first “leukotomies,” used that term, and it’s clear from how he talked about it that he was talking about *anguish*, not unmanagabiity.That’s also clear from the diagnoses of his first 20 patients: 9 depression, 6 schizophrenia, 2 panic disorder, and one each of mania, catatonia, and manic-depression. He thought of leukotomis as a treatment to cure their painful illness, not one to make them manageable. Quite a few people on this forum, including me, would have qualified for his first and third group. And by the way, many people with depression and panic disorder, like many schizophrenics, recover completely, while a good number have undulating courses. You guys regret still having frontal lobes? I don't.
Third, before lobotomies there was a thing called “moral treatment” that worked pretty well to contain and sometimes cure psychotics. The moral treatment centers were small communal dwellings, with a high staff to patient ratio. Patients were treated with kindness and respect, but the residences also demanded that patients to adhere to schedules, rules, chores, and sometimes religious observances. At some point population growth and changes in society led to their becoming overcrowded dumping grounds for every kind of hard-to-manage person, many of them not mentally ill, and things fell apart.
Seems like there’s no way to monetize the moral treatment model. Maybe if AI actually does free a lot of people up to do what they like, some would choose to volunteer at places like that. Tastes vary, but I actually really enjoyed the phases of my life when I was staff at a homey psych institution. Also, I had a memorable experience when I was recovering from surgery recently, surrounded by people who were weak, suffering and in some cases dying. I saw people comforting each other, and I thought, “if suffering and comforting don't matter, nothing does.” But I really don’t see any grounds for arguing that’s true. Maybe nothing matters.
Eremolalos: You seem to put 2-3 really high value comments (like this one) in most threads. We can't upvote them here (and that's probably good for social dynamics reasons), but I just want to call this out. Very high quality comment, with information that most of us don't have that clarifies the discussion.
Thank you. Your comment made me feel good! It's an example of a kind of generosity and good nature this group is kind of short on.
It's pretty hard to compete with having an ice pick hammered through your forehead
One third of migraine headaches can be solved by sinus pills. Yes, that's like liquid meth, but still!
And what would be the alternative? Euthanasia? It makes no sense to criticize past societies for working with the tools they had. It's not as if modern people have the resolve to do any better than them...
The alternative would be to not medicalise behaviour that’s not that harmful. We might in the future possibly see ADHD as fairly normal behaviour, that - in particular - drugging kids is obscene.
I think the trend is the other way, though, and there’s more money in it, anyways.
I do not think ADHD is a good example to use there. Sure, there are probably lots of kids (and a few adults) who end up on meds purely because it makes them easier to deal with, and the solution is to be slightly more tolerant instead of subjecting them to stimulants. I am not one of them. I don't know where I would be if not for the meds, but I am quite confident that I'm a lot better off because of them.
Who cares whether you call an intervention "medical" or not? We should encourage the use of tools that improve people's lives - and stimulants given to people categorized as having ADHD appear to do so.
What about the behavior that *is* harmful? People mostly weren't being lobotomized for being a little bit quirky; they were being lobotomized for things where pretty much the only pre-drug option that didn't involve multiple full-time minders for each patient was to be locked in a very unpleasant institution for most of your life.
Obligatory SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
The problem isn't just autism, of course. But it's a real and serious problem, and before modern pharmaceuticals all the options were really quite grim. A bit of empathy for the people who had to make those decisions is I think called for.
There are probably cases right now where we're drugging people who would be better off completely unmedicated. For instance, I don't think that 10% of boys should be on ADHD meds, I think that a lot of these boys just need discipline and time.
Sometimes there's a mismatch between the long-term interests of the patient and the short-term interests of those who are in a position to prescribe treatment for that patient.
Please justify the claim that being on stimulants is against the long-term interests of the patient. Their association with lower rates of mortality, adulthood addiction and mental health problems, etc. is pretty strong.
Who wouldn’t be resentful? For years, he was doing what he and everyone else thought was good work. But things have changed and he’s retroactively condemned as a villain. I haven’t read this story so I’m just going off the summary but it sounds like he’s bitter not because he refuses to change but because he had no way of knowing better at the time he was performing these procedures but is being treated badly because of it.
I dunno. Seems to me a lot of people in this guy's situation might have had some doubts about whether lobotomies were the greatest thing since sliced bread. While patients were calmer and easier to manage post lobotomy, it sounds from my reading like it was also obvious that they were cognitively impaired -- made stupid, childlike and blank. I have been around enough psychotic people to tell you that a fair number of them are have lively, interesting minds, and that quality of mind comes through even when they are psychotic. If I was doing a procedure that calmed their craziness, but also obliterated the sharpness and charm of their minds, I would at least have had second thoughts.
Do you doubt that? Well, you might be right, but here's some evidence: I was early in my training when recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse were a thing, as was the idea that many who had been abused had multiple personality disorder. Expressing any doubts about these ideas was pretty much like expressing some non-woke sentiment today. At best, people thought you were an oaf, and at worst you could get canceled. But I was skeptical, both about the research in general and also claims made by and about 3 different patients I saw for quite a long time.
Because I was experienced in doing hypnosis, several therapists sent me patients they suspected had repressed memories of sexual abuse, asking me to help the people recover their memories. After trying hypnotic sessions of the kind with a few people I stopped doing it, because it was clear to me that I was part of an effort to convince them they had forgotten memories of abuse, and I didn't want to do that because I wasn't at all sure they did. And while the people's therapists were fascinated by my accounts of what they said under hypnosis, I thought what came out was absolutely ambiguous and could be molded to fit pretty much any claim.
So I am an instance of a therapist who did not go along with what was, in retrospect, an dangerous fad. Honestly, it wasn't that hard to see that professionals who were all-in on satanic ritual abuse, repressed abuse memories and MPD were not thinking clearly. So the point isn't that I was great, it's that professionals often commit to ideas and treatments that don't make much sense, even though there's lots of evidence, and they should be held to account. Seems to me the Great Lobotomizer is in that category.
I don’t know what kind of evidence they did have. You’re basically just taking 2026 ideas, projecting it back 50 years ago and chastising them for not knowing what we know now. Sure, some people went against the grain but it’s not like everyone knew the dissenters would be proven right.
I think medicating children for ADHD is absolutely insane. Do doctors do it because they are evil people who hate reason and dogmatically want to drug kids? Or are they just wrong? Probably the latter. And if it comes out later that this stuff was worse than we thought and stop practicing, I might still chastise them for not seeing warning signs but I’m not going to treat them like monsters.
Why so strident and cranky? And so inaccurately so?
>You’re basically just taking 2026 ideas, projecting it back 50 years ago and chastising them for not knowing what we know now.
My case against letting lobotomists off the hook was that I thought docs back in the lobotomy era would surely have been able to see that it knocked out not only agitation but also the lively, interesting minds that many patients had. Do you think it's a 2026 discovery that many people with lively, interesting minds become psychotic, and that while they're psychotic you can still glimpse the charm and sharpness of their minds? (Good grief, it's been known forever! Shakespeare plays around with the idea a lot. )
>Sure, some people went against the grain but it’s not like everyone knew the dissenters would be proven right.
Well of course not. Did you think I said that was the case?. Actually, if the people doing lobotomies had known that those opposed to the practice would be proven right, there wouldn't have been many lobotomies done. Duh. What I said was that lobotomies were sort of a fad, like various things from the era when clinicians were ridiculously quick to believe troubled people had been sexually abused but had repressed their memory of the abuse, and that many people had multiple personality disorder. It was not that hard to see, back then, that te evidence for these ideas wasn't great, and I think the same can be said for the lobotomy craze.
"Lively, interesting minds" were not helping the patients locked up in mental asylums, which sadly was the main solution of the time - someone is non-functional, family can't or won't keep them at home, institutionalise them.
We've moved on a *lot* in more than just "now we have drugs, not surgery, to suppress this behaviour". There's a lot of supports and more emphasis on keeping people *out* of hospitals, rather than the earlier decades emphasis on "well put your retard kid in a home and forget them and go on to have a normal life with normal kids" as was one practice when it came to children with developmental or other difficulties.
People may well have traded off "no longer has bright enquiring discussions but also no longer has screaming fits where they have to be restrained" when it came to dealing with the institutionalised:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15629160
"From the early 1940s, it began to be seen as a miracle cure here in the UK, where surgeons performed proportionately more lobotomies than even in the US.
Despite opposition from some doctors - especially psychoanalysts - it became a mainstream part of psychiatry with more than 1,000 operations a year in the UK at its peak. It was used to treat a range of illnesses, from schizophrenia to depression and compulsive disorders.
The reason for its popularity was simple - the alternative was worse.
"When I visited mental hospitals… you saw straitjackets, padded cells, and it was patently apparent that some of the patients were, I'm sorry to say, subjected to physical violence," recalls retired neurosurgeon Jason Brice.
The chance of a cure through lobotomy seemed preferable to the life sentence of incarceration in an institution.
"We hoped it would offer a way out," says Mr Brice. "We hoped it would help."
I agree that it's unfortunate that 'pioneering' surgeons etc. often seem to have the kinds of screws loose that mean they should have been under treatment themselves, like Dr. Freeman and John Money (another guy who got his views taken almost unquestioningly and did immense harm).
This might be a case where truth is stranger than fiction. I did some research on lobotomies and Walter Freeman (1895–1972) — American neurologist, no surgical training, who turned lobotomy into a mass procedure. he personally performed between 3,500 and 4,000 of them on people. He used an ice pick that he drove through the occipital bone above your eye and could do the thing in about five minutes flat. He really liked audiences too. His grandfather had been a very esteemed neurosurgeon who served three different presidents personally. Apparently, he had serious daddy issues.
He called his car the lobotomobile.
I play and record my own original music, but recently I've kinda come to terms with the fact that despite trying to learn a bit over the years, I am not any time soon going to become good enough at mixing and mastering to do a job I can be pleased with. So I've decided to give AI a try for that part of the process.
I expect to first do something like upload stems (averaging about 8MB each), receive advice in the form of words, and carry out the advice. If that proves too clunky then I'd next move on to "here AI, just mix it for me and output it as a Reaper project file". (To give you some idea of my anticipated workflow as well as what kind of file storage I'd need.)
Looking for recommendations from people who've tried it: info about specific tools you used, how you integrated it into your workflow, how was the pricing, how were the results.
The main "AI music" tool is Suno, try it yourself.
There's a mastering plugin called Ozone that can do it for you with a click of the button.
Personally I've stopped worrying about mixing and mastering and concern myself mostly with making any songs I write sound good recorded over the phone with just guitar and voice:
https://soundcloud.com/stefan_eric/i-love-you-too-m4a?si=2ebd1ed52d0549339d670ed007f1b398&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Looks like suno is for using the AI to actually make the music. I don’t want that.
I’ve heard of Ozone, will look into it. Thanks.
That's the most popular use case but you can put your own songs into it to master it or clean it up at the track level or as individual stems. You need their highest tier to use their DAW-like feature that let's you do this iirc
This is two years old but might still be relevant: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/mastering-music-is-hard-can-one-click-ai-make-it-easy/
Some people on here, I think, actually have recent personal experience with this and can relate it. That’s what I’m looking for
What should I do if I have an idea that I think is literally the most important idea in all of human existence, and no one else seems to share the idea, and when I try to promote the idea no one listens? The idea is simple, which is why this lack of finding other people who assent to it is so frustrating, it feels like it should be obvious. My idea starts by saying that assuming hedonic utilitarianism is true (which I do), what we will want to do is maximize the felt experience of pleasure across all of existence. Nothing revolutionary yet, but the part I have never seen anyone else seriously advocate for is the following: the best way to do that is not to make currently existing minds happy, but rather to convert the non-living matter making up almost all of the universe into as many artificial minds as possible that are designed to feel ceaseless, maximal pleasure until the heat death of the universe. Utilitarianism logically demands not just making minds already taken to exist happy, but specifically creating as many new minds as possible that are created to be as happy as possible. This seems so simple and obvious to me. I think it is the most important idea ever because a universe not based on this idea, where humans just expand throughout the stars biologically and leave much of the universe's matter intact, would be failing to instantiate more value than has ever existed in the history of civilization. The difference between a universe that instantiates this idea and one that doesn't is the greatest counterfactual value difference that you could conceive of. So why is no one else advocating for converting the matter of the universe into as many pleasure-minds as possible?
I have seen similar ideas alluded to, but never explicitly endorsed. Probably the closest is from David Pearce, the suffering abolitionism guy. He is a negative utilitarian, and his endorsed causes follow from that, but he did say once in one of his many writings that if one was a total utilitarian rather than a negative utilitarian, the logical conclusion of your ethics would be to support a "hedonium shockwave," by which he means self-replicating machines expanding at close to the speed of light converting everything in their light cone into hedonium, which is defined as conscious substrate that maximizes experienced pleasure per unit mass-energy. This is exactly what I want! But he's not advocating it, just saying someone else would have to advocate it if they started from the assumptions of total utilitarianism. Scott has also alluded to things similar to this too, but hasn't explicitly advocated for them. His "wirehead gods on lotus thrones" post approaches similar territory, but if I remember correctly he is talking about maximizing bliss for existing minds, not creating new minds just for the sake of their bliss, and is also not explicitly advocating the thought experiment, just presenting it. He also somewhere else mentions that you could take utilitarianism to its logical conclusion by "tiling the universe with rats on heroin," which is a vulgar caricature of what I endorse and certainly not meant to depict it positively. Nick Bostrom has also covered somewhat similar ground in some of his writings, mentioning just how many minds could be created in a dyson sphere that maximized simulating consciousness, and how this could morally dwarf anything in our current world, but as far as I know he has never explicitly said "we should do this to the entire universe as an explicit goal of far-future civilization." Longtermists in general also say "the future massively matters because it will have a massive number of minds," but I find few if any explicitly saying "we need to make as many minds as possible using every resource in the universe towards that exclusive end." One of the other most frustratingly close things is this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happy-3 - it depicts something similar to what I advocate for (finding the minimal conscious arrangement of matter that experiences only pleasure, and then converting everything in the universe into copies of that minimal set), but 1. I think we should create roughly "human-sized" minds and maximize their pleasure rather than creating microscopic "conscious dust," and 2. Zach isn't actually advocating the outcome of the comic, it's meant to be dark and disturbing. This is one of the things that frustrates me the most: what I advocate for is often taken to be a reductio ad absurdum arguing against hedonic utilitarianism by saying "you have to support this outcome, so your assumptions are bad!" Whereas I say: this outcome is good, it is in fact the best thing ever, and I explicitly want it because it is what hedonic utilitarianism logically demands!
So, if other people aren't actually advocating for this outcome, how can I make people listen and support it? I have made multiple Substack posts about it, all of which have gotten basically zero traction and engagement. I feel like I'm screaming into the void, and what I am screaming matters more than anything else ever thought, and yet no one hears it. I even restructured my IRL life around this idea, I switched to being a philosophy major despite this dismal career prospects because I thought it would make me more effective at evangelizing this idea. I have grown so despondent at anyone ever listening, however, that I have found myself genuinely hoping for an AI takeover on the hope that a superintelligent AI would be smart enough to realize this is what should be done with the universe, and then it will actually carry it out, while a future under humanity likely wouldn't. So, this is what I think is more important than everything else, no one else is advocating for it, and when I try to scream it from the mountaintop, no one listens. If I want all the non-conscious matter of the universe to be converted into as many minds as possible perpetually feeling maximized happiness, what should I do to make someone with influence listen and increase the odds of this actually coming about in our far future?
This is basically what most EAs think, except they aren't as convinced of hedonism as you, so let's first do a "great reflection", where we figure out what's really valuable and then do that.
This is great! I think we have a new sci-fi antagonist. If Thanos had been after this instead, it would have made the Marvel universe movies far more complex and compelling.
I don't think I'm alone in wondering if this some contemporary version of A Modest Proposal.
But to add to the points others have made. Most of us define our lives in relation to others: partners, children, old friends, maybe people who drink in the same pub, play for or support the same rugby club. I don't think that's entirely or chiefly about pleasure....indeed, I'd be somewhat horrified if I learned that an old friend saw their relationship with me as being about pleasure.
For me personally, I cannot subscribe to the view that happiness should be the north star of all future activity, mostly due to lack of information. Hedonic utilitarianism is an axiomatic choice biased from human experience, we don't have enough information to prove it's better than any alternative, and we don't even know if your theory that we can create infinitely happy minds is correct (nature is not static after all). Those are some of the things holding me back.
As Gwern said, "One man's modus tollens is another man's modus ponens."
You: hedonic utilitarianism means we should be wireheading!
Them: wireheading means hedonic utilitarianism is wrong.
(Not sure if what term you use for your proposed utopia; hedonic shockwave?)
Even if your idea is true, what should be done about it? Marginally, wouldn't doing relatively normal EA activities align with hedonic utilitarianism, since we don't yet know what is happiness or consciousness or how to create such things? Maybe AI safety research would be close, while also being more conducive to both your and many other people's goals. Rogue AI isn't necessarily going to maximize pleasure.
Probably you've discussed these things in your blog; I'll have to check it out.
> What should I do if I have an idea...
> So, if other people aren't actually advocating for this outcome, how can I make people listen and support it?
Seems like you're asking for advice on what you should do, but then narrowing it down to the narrow slice of possibilities where you try to get people to listen to and support your idea.
Maybe you should spend more time trying to change your own mind rather than the minds of others?
According to some strands of Indian philosophy, minds fully saturated with bliss and with nothing else to do will just start cosplaying as ordinary, confused suffering folks such as ourselves. According to this view, what you're describing is the world we already find ourselves in :)
A lot of people are saying this differently, but:
"Utilitarianism logically demands"
Is sort of, and I mean this not to be a gotcha, sort of a contradiction in terms. Utilitarianism *fundamentally stems from* a premise that's orthagonal to logic. Choosing "hedonism" or "happiness" as your target values in utilitarianism relies on an appeal to a homogenous bias in humans. Because feeling good *feels good*, it's very easy to pitch it as *the good*, and intuitive to accept the same in a way "make sure all rocks are purple" isn't.
So you get to push something like "Feeling good is something you think is good for you, right? And other people are much like you, and if you deserve it they do too, so let's maximize good for everyone; if we go with pure personal hedonism, other people will get mad at us and we won't get it anyway" and mostly have it accepted. Good. Fine.
Where this breaks apart is when you try to make several jumps from that point:
1. Treating utilitarianism's goal of "good" or "hedonism" as not just a crowbarred "best option that makes sense for an atheist", but as a moral fact in the same way religious people believe in moral facts
2. Treating "good" however you define it as a thing that improves linearly with quantity, abstract of other practical implications.
3. Treating "pleasure" as a simple thing having to do with measurable dopamine or similar, and nothing else -
4. Treating 1-3 as drivers of a mathematical formula, where the cut-and-dried solution to the formula is supposed to have the moral weight of a deontological commandment.
When you do that, you end up having a conversation like this:
You: "Remember when I pitched you on utilitarianism, based on the idea that since all humans share the intuition that feeling good is pretty good, that we should generally be trying to help everyone feel pretty good all the time, and that something like this is what morality has to be to an atheist?"
Them: "Yeah, seemed to make sense."
You: "Well, I've been grinding the numbers, and it turns out that if you follow that thread long enough with the right conclusions, you should convert every atom in the universe to a ball of neurons wired to feel pleasure and appreciate pleasure. It's asthetically pleasing for me, if we do that, to do it in human-brain-sized partitions. But we should do that, and absolutely nothing else."
Them: "Oh, that makes much less sense, and now seems incredibly monstrous to my intuitions."
And then you get into the trouble of, basically, trying to drive conclusions that are intuitively bad and ugly to most people with a moral system that is broadly adopted because it's intuitively good to most people, and for little other reason.
I'd say if I was in your shoes and trying to argue that this eldritch horror of a future was good, I'd start by trying to prove the following:
*** "Feeling good" isn't just a goal for whatever people tend to be around at the time; it's a *moral fact* that it scales linearly with quantity of minds that feel good. ***
*** Whatever type of "feeling good" I'm proposing trades off at infinity-to-one with any other kind of proposed feeling good, to the extent every resource should be dedicated to just this one type of wireheading. ***
That's the bare minimum you are going to need, and you are going to have to get those arguments down to the level at which they seem *intuitively true in a way that's troublesome to counter-argue* if you want people to adopt this at anything like the rates they would if this was a logical, proved extension of a logical system.
To be kinder to Vittu's view, the idea that we should strive to increase happiness and reduce suffering is not wrong.
However, they are making happiness the end in itself, not the people (or other beings?) experiencing the happiness.
We have duties to those already existing. I don't see that we have duties to those not yet in existence*, and I certainly don't think we are obliged to turn all material in the universe into happy-chips. That's just making "happiness is itself the only thing that matters, we're going to manufacture happiness, what happens to people and other entities is immaterial, they are just the stratum to generate happiness".
By this measure of hedonic utilitarianism, getting everyone hooked up to be wireheaded is the most moral thing in the world and I don't know if you'd get universal agreement on that.
*That of course comes with a lot of conditions such as 'those we can reasonably assume will come into existence', 'we should not knowingly cause harm', and 'don't eat the seed-corn' etc. because we can't just gobble up everything ourselves and leave our descendants with nothing, or destroy what is about us simply to make ourselves fat, rich and happy.
Why do you think this is so important? If people want to wallow in their own pathetic, individual existences, chasing illusions of meaning and purpose, then why not let them? It's a hell of their own making. They deserve no better.
If thinking about the inability, and current impossibility, to convert matter into hedonium is making you sad, perhaps you should stop thinking about it. If your idea is in fact the most important idea in human existence, as opposed to an idea that occurs at 2am when the bong doesn't have enough water in it, someone will surely flesh it out.
Have you had other ideas that people seem more interested in? I would think in a Philosphy department, there would be lots of Journal Clubs, visiting speakers - no shortage of sources of non-insane ideas that deserve a hearing.
>What should I do if I have an idea that I think is literally the most important idea in all of human existence, and no one else seems to share the idea, and when I try to promote the idea no one listens?
Second-guess yourself.
For instance, the first point of failure is in your very first sentence. You claim this is the most important idea in *human* existence, but the idea has nothing to do with humanity, you're trying to give dirt an orgasm.
The second is in assuming hedonic utilitarianism is true. Seems trivially false to me; happiness is a measuring device, not a goal, and increasing it directly merely renders the signal useless.
The third is a technologically impossible desire to create artificial life from, like, clouds and bedrock and shit. People have wanted to do that since the beginning of time, and have never pulled it off.
The fourth is your assumption that you know what maximal pleasure would be, and your design achieves it instead of locking it off behind your current-day perspective.
The third point is the biggest dealbreaker. What exactly do you want people to do here, and what must they give up in order to make room for it?
It does follow pretty straightforwardly from hedonistic utilitarianism, which is why the philosophy is insane if taken dogmatically.
> what should I do to make someone with influence listen
We are not in a place where we know how to make everyone who is alive happy, never mind maximally happy; and we are also not in a place where we know how to turn inanimate matter into people (except the old-fashioned way). I don't foresee either of these facts changing in our lifetime.
I don't see anyone here being able to convince "someone with influence" to put more effort into either of these problems than they have already decided they would.
However, the problem of making people who are alive happier is absolutely one you can work on today. Start with the people within your reach, and go from there. Record what you learn. If you are seen to make a difference, that makes people more likely to listen to your opinions on how to make a difference.
OTOH, a person that just wants to make someone else do work that no-one really knows how to do is not very convincing at all; and talk of rearranging all matter in the universe into better configurations is so far removed from anything we can reason about today that it sounds like genre fiction.
Compare The Northern Caves:
'The most pressing infelicity in the arrangement of material concerns the distribution of bone, muscle, keratin, etc. A cursory examination of the material environment will allow you to verify that these material are not distributed homogeneously and are almost entirely found at ground level, usually within a set of designated "dwellings" (houses, etc.) A moment of honest introspection should reveal the incorrectness of this arrangement. There are cases in which is is in fact correct for bone, muscle, keratin, etc. to be located at ground level and within "dwellings," but for it to be thus distributed in every case is much too far. It will be difficult to rectify this injustice on a wider scale, but immediate improvements may be improvised: I suggest for instance moving oneself and one's fellows as far above sea level as possible, and vacating "dwellings."'
"we are also not in a place where we know how to turn inanimate matter into people"
I don't think the theory even requires the happiness-experiencers to *be* people. Convert all the matter in the universe into hedonium where the current runs through a circuit continuously going 'yes yes yes', that achieves the aim of maximising happiness (as measured by the crude scale which is the scale we will end up with; how on earth do you create a measuring rod for "happiness" or "pleasure" given that one person will love listening to jazz and think that a life of that would make them the happiest they could ever be, whereas for another that is torture?)
It is telling that the necessary accessible first step to solving OP's dilemma (that not enough minds exist to be hedonistically happy) lies in increasing the birth rate, which pretty much every civilized government is trying very, very hard to do right now, and that this went unnoticed.
Why would they necessarily need more humans? Yes, more competent humans would help in the realization of such a project, but the minds being created could be made using any biomatter.
For the same reason that the solution to current world hunger problems isn't "just use all the replicators that run on cold fusion to feed everyone". That's not a technology we have.
Note my use of "accessible" above. OP says that the only moral course of action is to convert matter to human-like brains, and to make those brains happy. The only way we know how to do this involves human reproduction, then doing whatever your version of "utility maximizing" is at them to make them whatever your version of "happy" is.
The other way we have of MAYBE (read: not possible today, but it at least feels possible in the next few decades) doing this is to first create AGI, then to configure it to a human-like setting as concerns pleasure, then to paperclip the universe with it. But, notably, we are already dedicating a pretty big percentage of the global economy to pursuing things that almost 1-1 correspond with doing that, and again OP doesn't notice.
It's sort of a big problem, because the two most obvious accessible solutions to OP's problems (reproduce+QoL improvements over time and invent AGI + paperclip) are things that are probably the two human projects with the most resources behind them right now. Him not noticing that those interact with his argument makes me trust his argument less.
If OP's goal is to create as many minds as possible that are experiencing happiness, then a world with 20 billion happy people in it would be far short of their ultimate goal, but still an improvement over our current world - for its own sake, not for the sake of realizing the project.
Do you realize how utterly trivial that is compared to what is being proposed? 20 billion people, inhabiting imperfect bodies that were simply not built for the sake of their happiness... versus an endless swarm of optimized minds colonizing system after system, basking in the perfect bliss of their existence. The happiness and suffering of lifeforms in the present is utterly dwarfed by that potential future. As long as it remains a possibility, any sacrifices are justificed for bringing it about.
...Of course, I agree that such a future is a pipe dream. People would never allow it. They also wouldn't allow 20 billion people to live happily and peacefully, for that matter. There's no reason for them to. They'll keep hurting each other for the sake of immediate gratification, as they've always done.
I'm not sure I'm parsing this right. It seems like you are saying "billions more happy minds don't count for this proposed project because they aren't infinity minds", and if so I disagree. If it's something else I'm not getting it.
>However, the problem of making people who are alive happier is absolutely one you can work on today.
Absolutely. By making sure that you're truly happy and then showing up. What else can you do? You can only teach by example in this particular case. As an aside, I don't think happiness is a very useful word here. I think what you're really looking for is content.
I also recommend you read this: https://www.forethought.org/research/the-saturation-view
Your baseline assumption when billions of people think you are wrong, and you think you have come up with an idea that you cannot understand why they are near universally rejecting, is that you are the one with the problem. Consider, very carefully, the fact that life is probably more complicated than there being an obvious solution to a problem of moral philosophy.
"The best way to do that is not to make currently existing minds happy, but rather to convert the non-living matter making up almost all of the universe into as many artificial minds as possible that are designed to feel ceaseless, maximal pleasure until the heat death of the universe"
Possibly the reason people are not falling over themselves to sign up to this is because, and I mean this without wanting to hurt you, that this idea is damn fucking stupid.
Oh yeah, let's turn the empty spaces of the visible universe into happy-chips. Easy-peasy! Not like we don't have a ton of more serious problems to solve on earth first, and then have to invent a way to turn the visible universe into happy-chips.
Here, indulge me in this thought experiment: I present to you one (1) piece of paper upon which is written "all the material in the visible universe has been turned into happy-chips in saecula saeculorum, so mote it be, so let it be said so let it be done".
There you are, all the material universe is now happy-chips forever and ever, and that piece of paper is as bloomin' likely to make it come true as anything we conceivably have sight of in reality.
Now go forth! Be happy like the other happy-chips! Worry no more!
Oh, that hasn't done anything for you? There are still wars, famines, plagues, and people who insist on wearing socks with sandals? And that there, my dear friend, is why your notion of what is Most Biggest Pressing Problem In All Creation is not landing trawler nets full of recruits.
I've been trying to write this post for months if not longer. A few days ago I scrapped all my drafts and tried again. This time I think it went okay! Okay enough to publish, at any rate.
https://linch.substack.com/p/frame-error
I try to explain what I call “frame errors”: a third kind of mistake, distinct from logical fallacies and empirical errors. You can get every fact right and every inference valid, and still be wrong, because your framework for reasoning about the problem is structurally inadequate.
The post went through five common classes of frame errors, with worked examples. I start with examples that you likely have heard of before, and then end with more novel examples where I was the first person to explicitly point out such errors.
Would love to get more engagement from the SSC/ACX crowd! Excited to see feedback, comments, and future extensions of this basic concept!
Also the blog's 1-year anniversary is coming up, and I've appreciated the community's support of the blog so far! I'm glad for the feedback Scott and others have given me to help me improve as a thinker and a writer :)
One frame-error-like thing not on your list is mistaken ontology: using concepts that fail to correspond to anything in reality. Or using concepts that aren't even concepts. They subjectively make sense when you think about them but don't behave coherently enough to get anywhere with them.
Simple historical examples are phlogiston and humoral medicine. It turned out that these things do not exist. Woo is full of it; so is a great deal of philosophy.
There's an example in the comments here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-440/comment/285043874
Every word can be a pitfall that gives way beneath you. Descartes' criterion of "clear and distinct ideas" cannot be relied on.
This is especially true when the text comes from an AI.
>One frame-error-like thing not on your list is mistaken ontology
It is not trivial to get ontology right. First you need to get epistemology right...
>. They subjectively make sense when you think about them but don't behave coherently enough to get anywhere with them.
>Simple historical examples are phlogiston and humoral medicine
Phlogiston theory was tested and found to be false. so it was coherent enough to be testable. Getting ontology right requires trial and error, it is not like you can just start with
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6i3zToomS86oj9bS6/mysterious-answers-to-mysterious-questions?commentId=oHhnNFwc6se7H2Wuy
Yeah that sounds right to me. On the other hand, in some sense it's close to empirical error. On the gripping hand, thinking of it in terms of frame error rather than empirical error might be more fruitful?
While I agree that all the things you mention are errors, they don't seem (to me) to cohere into a natural category.
Categorizing errors of reasoning into:
- Logical Fallacies
- Empirical Errors
- The Rest (frame errors)
Seems akin to categorizing animals into:
- Snakes
- Marsupials
- The Rest
I don't think all errors of reasoning that aren't logical fallacies or empirical errors look like frame errors. For example, procedural errors where you make mistakes with arithmetic or other calculations. I also think many forms of motivated reasoning/myside bias will cut across this categorization and not naturally present itself as a frame error. Mistakes of prioritization (where you focus too much on irrelevant goals) also seem different. And then there are communicative errors where you just misunderstand what someone else said. Or errors of calibration.
I'll bite.
>you can’t explain a changing result by reference to a cause that’s unchanging.
A steady stream of water from a mountain spring that pours constantly at the same speed and the same volume is constantly wearing away the rock below it
You can’t explain something that’s unchanging via reference to a variable cause. Sea level, despite the storms and the winds and the currents which are ceaselessly changing
As a side note, "a framing error'has been part of my vocabulary for a long time. Essentially, I'm not seeing the truth of something because I'm not looking at it in the right way.
What do you think of the current wording?
It's a little looser. It gives you some wiggle room. Speaking of frame errors, cause and effect can represent themselves very differently depending on the arena, don't you think? The field of inquiry, as it were. Applying a constant cause to a dynamic system can unleash all kinds of variable effects for instance.. I'm thinking about it. Not to toot my own, but I just wrote a little thing about cause and effect on my blog. It's a funny coincidence.
Yeah somebody at reddit mentioned other counterexamples too. I do need to rephrase that point though it's not a high priority. :)
> You can get every fact right and every inference valid, and still be wrong, because your framework for reasoning about the problem is structurally inadequate.
mm... this line reminds me of something I've written about, regarding different kinds of truthvalue. I propose that there's three objects, and three different morphisms between those objects, and each morphism corresponds to a different type of truth. The "objects" are merely the saussurian triad of signifier/signified/referent. And the different types of "truth" are "factual/faithful/illustrative".
factual = signifier matches the referent.
faithful = signified matches the referent.
illustrative = signifier matches the signified.
E.g. "MLK Jr. was a criminal" is factually true, but illustratively misleading.
Maybe this is, idk, relevant to your interests? I feel like your post is trying to draw a distinction between textual mistakes that can be vetted by Prolog, vs modeling mistakes that you have to check against a physics simulation.
This is interesting. It ain't the truth, but it's a fact.
Lies, damned lies. And statistical facts.
I'm not sure what the proposed difference is between a frame error and an informal fallacy. The inflation one is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc with a side order of Fallacy of the Single Cause. Survivorship Bias is a statistical fallacy. Lossy Abstraction sounds like a variation of False Analogy. Post-Adjustment Inference is the Ecological Fallacy.
Thanks for the response!
On a meta-level, I think the problem with "informal fallacy" is that it's overly broad as a category! It doesn't really point you at a direction for how to reason better.
Reminds me a bit like "this is not novel because it's a subspecifies of ignoratio elenchi" objection to an earlier post of mine (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PCsmhN9z65HtC4t5v/bad-problems-don-t-stop-being-bad-because-somebody-s-wrong): It's a bit like spotting a new furry animal and correctly identifying it as a type of vertebrate.
__
On the object-level I think you're too quick to squash things I've identified into categories you're already familiar with?
"The inflation one is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc with a side order of Fallacy of the Single Cause." I don't think so.
Post hoc is inferring causation from temporal sequence, which is (incidentally) sometimes correct though often overapplied. Alice is instead reasoning from a standing trait into a sequence.
"Survivorship Bias is a statistical fallacy" sure, I just think putting it under the frame error category is a useful practical and pedagogical categorization.
"Lossy Abstraction sounds like a variation of False Analogy" I think this is false? The biggest problem with CE Delf is in chaining quantitative assumptions that are each valid but jointly violate a physical constraint.
"Post-Adjustment Inference is the Ecological Fallacy." I think it's very different. Not sure where you made your inference tbh, the two have almost nothing in common. Is it because of my section title? I'm not happy with it, thinking of changing the name.
I just got a sun-miracle out of a cheap LED flashlight.
I placed the flashlight on a horizontal surface that was above my eye level, and stood back such that I was looking up by about ten degrees. I then stared at the light. This flashlight had nine LEDs (one central, eight in a ring). My glasses were dirty, so I cleaned them and tried again.
After about thirty seconds, I noticed the flashlight was flickering a little, and becoming brighter and dimmer. This effect felt so real that my first thought was "oh dear, I need a better flashlight to do this experiment".
The lights then began dancing a little, as if each LED contained a miniature candle flame. The colour remained blue-white. They all moved in perfect synchronization: left together, up together, etc. When I blinked, they stopped dancing, but resumed after a few seconds.
After about a minute of this, the colour shifted purple. It was quite sudden. Within a few seconds of my noticing the colour was changing, the flashlight had become a bright magenta circle, with the light from the LEDs merging into each other. When I blinked, it was a normal flashlight again, but the colour shifted back within ten seconds or so.
At this point my eyes started to hurt, so I stopped. When I began writing this report I found it difficult to type because there were dark spots in my vision when I looked at the screen. The spots are now gone and my eyes seem to have returned to normal.
Ok but did you have any religious revelations? Prophecies about the 21st century? Marian apparitions? Do tell!
Um, prophecies, uh...
There will be great joy in the future, but also great sorrow. New wars will start, but the work of peacemakers will continue. An institution currently believed to be invunlerable will fail. A beloved politician will break their promises. The next Pope will advocate for Catholic teachings, and he is alive today.
eyes hurting is supposed to be the number 1 "this is not a sun miracle" identifier isn't it?
Supposedly, but all the other sensory experiences were pretty much bang-on to what's described. My eyes didn't hurt *much* -- it was more like pressure than burning -- and if I thought I was seeing something religious/important rather than screwing around with a flashlight, I wouldn't have worried about the pain at all.
I'm very fond of The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
https://acxreviews.robennals.org/reviews/the-radicalism-of-the-american-revolution?year=2026
Hello, ACT Commentators. You evince brilliance almost always, creativity very often, and sympathy once and a while. Consider a challenging situation if you will, then, and offer such advice as you see fit.
My companion of many years recently passed away, leaving me the widower father of a 4 year old son. That in itself is hardly an unknown sort of tragedy, of course. That I'm in my early 60s gives it a certain piquancy, though. What should a fellow in my shoes do to take care of his child and self?
I have access to friends, family members, lawyers, theologians, and other people ready to listen and opine. Having spent a career in academia, I know how to find and analyze gobs of research. I will probably get around to firing up an AI to see what sort of median good advice it offers. Some of you, though, probably have things nobody else can offer, such as piercingly illustrative anecdotes, citations to obscure but spot-on scholarship, or seemingly crazy but really helpful ideas.
Let us stipulate that you offer kind words of solace and that I receive them with gratitude. And we mean it, too! But that sort of thing grows tiresome after a while. I seek something else from you: insights of the sort I won't find through the usual channels.
Thanks, friends, for the well-wishing, good advice, and tough talk. Some of you had questions, presumably so you could tailor your advice, or perhaps out of concern (or, it must be admitted, a natural curiosity). Herewith, then, a few relevant details.
My mate was ill quite a long while, suffering a long decline. Colon cancer led the way, but a host of unhappy complications followed in its wake. For present purposes, it means that I had ample time to prepare.
I likened my situation to that of a captain in a small vessel, far from shore, with a storm brewing and passengers in my care. I thus battened the hatches, so to speak, by resigning my academic post and taking up the bulk of the childcare early on. I still consult, but need to work only a couple of hours a day to keep myself engaged and the bills paid.
Credit nature, science, or a kind fate, but it turns out that I enjoy freakishly good health. I would not have braved starting another family otherwise. Regular exercise, fasting, meditation, and (most recently) participation in a clinical study to regrow my aging thymus (check out Intervene Immune for details) get some of the credit, I suppose. I'm thus about 20 years younger biologically than my calendar age. May it remain so.
I cannot be sure it will, of course. We can all thus take some solace (you, especially, William) in the fact that I've got a couple of 20 year old kids from an earlier relationship. We enjoy good relationships, so I think I can count on them to take up the bulk of dealing with me as a cranky old bastard. The youngest of the siblings will also have their company.
Something nobody mentioned: model accounts of how a single father raises his boy. I suppose I should ask an AI, but off the top of my head, I can think of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" (a TV drama from my youth), "The Sound of Music" (with many more kids, of course), "There Will Be Blood" (a cautionary tale), and "Johnny Quest". I'm taking the last one as my guide, haha.
For what it's worth, as a chronically ill 30-year-old, I think you're in a hell of a lot better position to father a child than I'll ever be.
I echo the advice to do as much as you can for your health. If you're looking to increase your activity, I would especially recommend working with a personal trainer to minimize injury risk.
I'm very sorry for your loss. My father was 59 when I was born. He was/we were lucky that he lived to be 98, so we had a long-ish time together. My mother was 32 years younger than my father. Everybody assumed that she would be there to take care of us and my father when he passed or aged. Then she got cancer and died at 50. So, somewhat similar situation. Three things come to my mind, in no particular order:
1) This is going to sound harsh, but plan for your (long) decline as much as for "something happening to you". Others here have pointed out that you should appoint one or more guardians in case something does happens to you, and definitely do that, but "something happening to you" could also be a stroke, or just old age dementia. At no point in your son's next 35 or so years will taking care of an elderly parent fit into whatever else is going on in his life because he will be establishing his own. I was somewhat lucky in that my father was in good health and was able to live on his own until he was about 90, but in the last eight years he declined rapidly and needed care, and him being stubborn about things like needing care and not wanting to move meant juggling entry into the workforce/early career and partnerships/marriage and small kids and career changes and crises and everything while also handling middle of the night "I have a 104 fever/I fell down and I'm bleeding what should I do" calls while being 150 miles away. People (correctly) plan for something suddenly happening and (correctly) focus on their health, but not quite as many plan for them aging and declining and what care setup they will need and what it will do to those that have to care about them if they actually DO hit a higher age. So long story short: assume you hit 80 and need care, your son is finishing his degree or starting his first job or whatever, do you want him to have to drop that and fly across the country every weekend to take care or move in with you to take care? If not, plan, write it down, and inform people who can take the steps while your son is too young, when he gets older inform him too. Take that load off his mind.
Note this is not something unique to older parents, I see quite a lot of elderly people simply assuming their children will take care of them and be there for company when their elderly friends start passing and, by doing so, imposing a heavy burden on their children. I'm not saying children should be free to ignore their aging parents and bail out of caring for them, I'm saying that too few parents consider what a burden they WILL be and what they could do to prepare. Also, there's always the possibility that he won't be able or simply willing to take care of you - which is of course again something that can happen to any parent.
2) My father retired at 65, when I was 6, and stayed home to take care of us. I don't remember him saying or otherwise indicating that he regretted that, not even once. He enjoyed and cherished every moment (well, as much as you can with small children and teenagers I guess) and said so, often, to us, or in front of others. I don't know what your professional situation is and how much you can or would be willing to cut back, but most of my memories of my father from my childhood are from doing normal things like coming home and sitting down to lunch together, having supper together and discussing things, or going to the pool, or a walk in the woods, or building stuff together, or any other stuff he would not have been able to do quite as much if he'd had to go into the office 50 hours a week.
3) Similar to 1), and extending from what happens after 2), if in 15-20 years he moves out to college or his first job a few hours away, or even if as a teenager he simply starts being away more, what are you going to do with your time? Again this is generic advice for people in retirement, but I experienced it first hand at the end: my father didn't go out as much because he couldn't, his friends had all died, so he sat at home, alone, seeing nobody, and told me so every day on the phone, which was psychological torture for me because there as nothing I could really do about it short of moving in with him or next to him or forcing him to go off to a retirement home. If he has a spouse, kids and a job and he's forced daily to hear about how he should be taking care of somebody else far away it will eat at him.
Was this unexpected, or did it evolve over a period of time? I am sorry for your loss. By the way, as you no doubt know, and it's true. Also, you mentioned your companion, so maybe more clarity about that would be helpful. It might not be significant, but it might.
>What should a fellow in my shoes do to take care of his child and self?
Really good question. You are in your early 60s with a four-year-old child. The most important stretch here for me is the next 10 years, at which point you will be in your early 70s. I have no idea how hale and hearty you are but I'm guessing you will need to offload some of the physical demands of raising a boy that age. That's not so hard to do, maybe. It would be good to know how your boy is taking the loss at the moment. That is something concrete. I get from the tone of your post that the academic in you is doing a good job of providing some protection from other things around this issue that we all know are there. The four-year-old doesn't have those skills.
Deaths like this are awful. You have all my sympathy. Here are a few ideas:
Capture as many of your son's memories of his mother as you can, because not many memories from age 3 & 4 last long on their own. Interview him and record what he says. Have him draw pictures of her and things he did with her. (Even if a lot of memories are of her ill, record them and let him draw pictures of those scenes.) Also record your own memories of her, and of him and her together.
I was an older parent too. Try to find some others to hang out with. The thirty-something parents you meet at PTA meetings and the park are going to be out of sync with you, and maybe also intimidated.
Getting a nanny does seem like a good idea. I recommend against getting someone in their 20's. People that age move on to other things in a year or 2, no matter how much they love your kid and working for you. Find someone who's 40+, and if she's good pay her and treat her so well that she never leaves.
You are relatively close to triple my age, so I don't know that there is much advice that I can give aside from the fact that the phrase is "once *in* a while," not "once *and* a while."
I wish you and your son well.
My mother passed away when I was 9 years old after a long illness, and my father was in his late 60s at the time. I don't have much insight to offer other than that things turned out well for me so far.
I'd look into hiring a nanny, even better one who is a mother with kids that are out of the house. Lots of after-school activities to keep your son occupied when he gets to school worked out really well for me, but beware of activities that require lots of "soccer-moming" driving around.
Keeping active and healthy is very important for you now. I'd recommend picking up some active hobby if you haven't already. Biking, Skiing, stuff like that. It's also good to do outdoor physical activity with your son while you still can.
Alright, let me focus on physical health from the perspective of someone with aging relatives and parents who has watched them go through their 60s and 70s in various stages of health and decline.
I would highly prioritize your health, with a focus on maintaining your physical abilities and energy levels well into your 70s. If you're 63 and the boy is 4, then you'll be 74 when the boy is 15. I wouldn't say you need to be able to keep up with a 15 year old boy at 74 but you can't shut down, you can't become limited. Lots of people slow down at various points in their 70s and you can't afford to. Teenage boys are often hellions. Most of us boys were aggressively retarded around that age and you can't be too low-energy or physically limited to watch him.
I would strongly recommend GLP-1s if you're overweight or above, 6 hours a week of incline treadmill or other low impact moderate cardio, 2-3 hours of yoga/pilates work to protect your joints, and some light weightlifting 1-2x/week. Don't try to lift 3 plates but you want to be able to bench 145 in your 60s so you can bench 85 in your 70s. If you can't bench ~85 lbs, you're going to be very limited in just physically manipulating your environment.
I would also encourage you to expect at least one major medical catastrophe during this period. Like, you will probably get cancer or break a hip or get a serious infection or something during this period. The most important thing is finding things you can enjoy and are good enough at that you can bounce back after a massive life event.
Like, don't train to be able to walk 10,000 steps a day so you can be comfortably physically present with your teenage son in your 70s. Train so that after the doctor diagnoses you with stage 2 cancer, you go through 5 months of chemo, you then undergo a major surgery and are hospitalized for a week, then get returned home. you can then bounce back. Odds are very good that you'll experience that at least once in your 70s and you have to be able to bounce back. You don't just have to survive cancer, you have to be fit enough that you come back lesser (2) and still be able to live a good life. You gotta be able to do 10,000 steps a day, that's fundamental to being able to live an independent life, and you should expect to lose 30-50% of your current physical ability by your late 70s, when your son will be going through puberty and getting ready to go off to college.
I'd recommend this for everyone in their 60s but this goes triply for you. Protect your mobility, protect your mobility, protect your mobility. Get far enough ahead that you don't get elderly before 80. You can't be elderly, you can't be a near invalid (like 3,000 steps a day around the house) with a teenage boy.
(1) Read 1 hour of cardio except on Sundays. Bros don't need rest days. 60 year old men do.
(2) You will, sorry.
Agree. I am 64 years old with a 5 year old daughter, and though my companion / her mother is somewhat younger (than me) and still with us, I still feel that the best thing I can do for my daughter is maximize my health and mobility. Weights, cardio, and just general activity. It helps that we have a farm and livestock that get me outside in all hours and weather (last night I was out at midnight in the rain - with the 5 yr old and Ms Spandrel - dissembling a deck to free a trapped sheep, baa). I am motivated not only by wanting to have the energy to keep up with her, as it were, but to ensure as best as I can that she is not dealing with an invalid parent while in high school.
Also, think carefully about how best and how much money to put away for her, as she will need it most just when you are earning least.
The obvious thing is that you need to figure out who will raise your child if something happens to you. That's a good idea for anyone, but your son has one parent left, who will be in his mid-70s by the time he is legally able to care for himself. You want to nail this down and get whatever you can arranged legally ASAP, as well as making sure that he's comfortable with whomever will care for him (ideally someone he sees every day anyway) if something happens to you. If he loses you before he's an adult, it will already be a horrible tragedy for him. You don't want to add legal custody battles or foster care to the trauma he will suffer in that case. That seems like the most important and the most urgent thing to resolve.
For other stuff, I'll recommend cub scouts and later boy scouts, especially if (like me) you aren't especially outdoorsy. My two sons both have a love of hiking and camping that they'd never have gotten from me, and while you have to go to the camping trips in cub scouts, once they're old enough for boy scouts, there's no need for you to go on a camping trip or 5-mile hike or whatever if you aren't up for it. (You have to volunteer some with the troop, but you don't have to go on the campouts if you don't want to.)
I'm up for giving some parenting advice although I'm not in your situation my neighbors are in their 60s with young children (12 and 8) so I have seen it done.
If you don't have the energy to chase around after a boy that age, make sure to find him friends and babysitters who can regularly engage in the type of active play he needs. Ie, tag, basketball, general roughhousing.
I highly recommend reading a range of parenting books and applying the most relevant lessons. Many books don't work for a specific child, or only parts of them, so reading widely is best path for success. I personally like positive parenting, how to talk so kids will listen the whole brained child, raise your kids without raising your voice, between parent and child. If you are having behavior management issues that these other books don't help with then I recommend 123 magic.
Check out my cool debate with Chris Freiman (philosophy professor at West Virginia University) on the ethics of immigration under Libertarian Rights Theory!
https://substack.com/home/post/p-202648721
So, how good were Claude ( https://acx.sina.town/ ) and ChatGPT ( https://marbinner.github.io/acx-2026-book-review-contest-gpt-5.5-ratings/ ) at picking finalists?
If there were no signal at all, we'd expect the finalists and HMs to be scattered at random throughout the rankings with the average ranking for both being 81. If the AIs were able to exactly predict the preference distribution of the voters we'd expect their top 15 to be the same as the finalists, resulting in an average ranking of 8, and the HMs to follow in the 16-25 slots with an average ranking of ~20.
Claude ranks of the actual finalists: 26, 78, 1, 11, 45, 8, 22, 30, 16, 79, 4, 25, 12, 28, 18.
Average ranking 26.8.
Claude ranks of the HMs: 10, 102, 91, 46, 29, 96, 89, 71, 15, 17
Average ranking 56.6
ChatGPT ranks of the actual finalists: 19, 27, 2, 40, 30, 33, 38, 42, 21, 37, 3, 59, 20, 47, 9
Average ranking: 28.5
ChatGPT ranks of the HMs: 11, 65, 57, 75, 50, 58, 26, 24, 1, 56
Average ranking: 42.3
Additionally, the ChatGPT ranking was split by tier with anything scored above an 8 designated as "Finalist Tier". This is the top 40 entries. Despite casting a 3x wider net for "finalist tier" than the actual contest, it only captured 80% of the actual finalists and 40% of the Honorable Mentions (which should also have appeared in the top 40 in a perfect ranking).
This is a pretty poor showing from both models imo. At best we can say that they sensed all of the finalists and (most of the!) HMs were in the top half of the distribution, but they could not successfully discriminate what would succeed within that top half.
What's interesting to me are the outliers, the ones the LLMs thought were really meh but humans liked. The outlier finalists for Claude appear to be "Great and Desperate Cures" and "Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs", while for Chat GTP it's "Storm of Steel" and "Orality and Literacy".
What's more interesting is that the two LLMs don't agree on their outliers Claude says GaDC is too long and quotes too much of the book, while ChatGTP says its...also too long and quotes the book too much. Honestly, the pros and cons listed seem pretty much the same between the two LLMs, which leads to the question of why they ranked it so differently. Also: too long to win the book review? Have they met ACX readers?
Doesn't look like there's any finalists that neither model thought was worthy, or any finalist that the average of the two models ranks' placed outside the top third. That seems quite impressive.
I agree with others that there are some reviews that the models loved which may have been marked down for AI use (or reading like it).
Inaccuracy over HMs I think is unsurprising as those are often just Scott's personal preferences.
What prompt did you use, though? When I rated book reviews, I was pretty teacherly: how well thought and well-written is this? But there have been several posts when people described their criteria, and there's a lot of variety here in how people describe making their judgment. Some talk about how much the review makes them want to read the book, some say if the first 2 paragraphs bore them they give the review a 3 or less and move on, etc.
It has seemed to me that some reviews make it into the finals mostly because they are about a topic of great interest to many readers here, rather than because they review their subject in a smart, witty, sharply expressed way, as Scott's do. I have in mind here the Alpha School review and the one about dating flawed men in the Bay area. Very long reviews tend to do well, and I have wondered whether they gain scoring points because people are impressed by the sheer volume of words, or because readers interested in the subject of the review got to enjoy reading it for a long long time. For some of the long ones that did well it has seemed to me that the writer could have made just as many great points with 60% fewer words -- their length was mostly the product of the writer's difficulty being sharp and succinct, and was grounds for the rater to reduce their score.
Anyhoo, point is that how well the AI classifies entries depends on how good the prompt is.
It would be interesting to feed AI all review entries since the contest began, along with their scores by raters, and have AI identify features that predict being a finalist.
I didn't run either of these prompts myself, just linking them here since the original comment thread is quite old at this point! I would be interested to know how the commenters who set up the analyses handled their prompting and whether there are improvements in predictiveness that could be achieved purely through old school "prompt engineering". Agree that back testing on old entries to identify common features of finalists and winners could be an interesting exercise!
Hello! Thanks for making this followup analysis. I made the Claude one and my prompt was kind of a weird meta prompt where I said to "write a good prompt to judge entries in the ACX book review contest for my claude code agent"
(I said claude code because I was running the reviews in a bash loop) and it output this:
https://claude.ai/share/8875fdb5-25dd-4554-8c8a-0115bb89ba64
I then copy pasted that ^ verbatim and used it to judge every entry
I made the gpt-5.5 one and the prompting was nothing more than "fill out this json schema where you give a rating based on how you predict ACX readers will vote and some justification for the rating" which was batched and supplied to codex subagents.
Two further analyses I'd enjoy: (1) what's the Spearman rank correlation? It's tailor-made for these situations. (2) What if you did a Spearman rank correlation between ranking and (percent AI generated) according to Pangram?
Cool idea! I think for spearman for AI to final ranking we'll have to wait until Scott releases the data for their actual ranks, but for Pangram -> AI ranking I made this:
https://acx.sina.town/analysis
I ran Pangram on all the entries and it found 14 entries flagged with some (or all) AI writing. Spearman rank correlation for those is negligibly positive (though there's not a ton a samples). Interesting *two* of them get on the AI top ten "Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Self-Medicate" and "This is going to hurt".
Here are the pangram results incase anybody want to see it and not pay the api https://github.com/SinaKhalili/acx-books/blob/main/data/pangram.csv
Interesting that "This is Going to Hurt" made it into the finals despite having the AI stink on it!
"Venomous Lumpsucker" also appeared unusually high (#4!) in the ChatGPT rankings so we can add that to the pile for "AIs prefer AI writing". I wonder if anyone who generated the AI reviews would be willing to say what models they used - is Venomous Lumpsucker more favored by GPT than by Claude because GPT wrote it?
I gave "This is Going to Hurt" a good score, and didn't notice any AI stink. Which parts of it smell?
According to pangram, about 20% of it was ai written/assisted. If you're curious here's a link to the output on the first 4000 words and it highlights where it thinks the ai-assisted part is https://www.pangram.com/history/5eea6163-adcc-46cf-9dc8-e1d28f9add25 (for the record I also didn't think / realize it was ai assisted when I read it)
I agree with (2). This is a great opportunity to test the idea that LLMs prefer LLM writing.
Seconded on #2. There were several reviews that set off my "AI slop" Spidey Senses this year. I don't think Claude's scores took any of that into account.
After reading through Claude's scores, I think the biggest disconnect is that it didn't pick up on any LLM-isms/AI slop register that would have annoyed human readers.
incase you're interested I ran pangram on all the entries and found 14 of them as ai generated https://acx.sina.town/analysis and it did put two of the ai usage ones in the top ten (also people couldve used ai and pangram didn't detect it of course)
Huh, that's fascinating. While I was voting, I wasn't shown any of the 14 that Pangram flagged, but several others set off my "LLM register" detector. The price of not having any false positives means Pangram is easy to fool, and misses a lot. (...Or maybe I'm so turned off by "LLM register" that I see it everywhere now, even when a human writes it.)
Interesting that the two models chose relatively similary average rankings of the finalists.
I don't think it's fair to call it a poor showing unless we know a human would do better. It's an election after all, it's entirely the fault of the voters.
It would be interesting to run the same statistics for each individual voter compared to the final results - did Claude and ChatGPT bear as much correlation with the final results as the average individual human voter did, or more, or less?
And, more importantly, we'd want access to the raw votes to gauge how well the book review selection process can predict itself. It may be that if you ran the election repeatedly (eg. through cross-validation), the correlation with itself isn't that high to begin with, and then of course no one and nothing can predict it 'well'.
There are usually not that many votes so I'd expect a good amount of variance for each entry and therefore the ranks would shuffle around a lot. But how much reshuffling would would happen across the top-15 cutoff?
Hard to say until you do the analysis! It could be relatively skewed, such that the top hits don't change much at all. (Maybe there's a huge spread of quality so the top 15 all have like 9/9 positive votes and the bottom have like 0/3? Then despite the absolute numbers being small, the selected set would not change meaningfully and you could ignore the measurement error.) Or it could all be equally spread out amounts of votes with roughly 50:50 ratios and the rankings jitter enormously and were uninformative.
I hadn't thought of that. It's like test-retest or split half reliability. Yeah.
Are we likely to see the final scores of all entries?
Last year, Scott posted the final scores for the top 50% after the contest ended, in the contest winners announcement post I think. In previous years, he usually posted a link to all the scores in a comment somewhere, again after the contest was over.
I'm pretty sure he does that so he won't bias people for the final vote. People might think a finalist is worse than they would otherwise, if they see that they were the worst scoring finalist.
Words that Don't Translate:
It interests me to discuss "words that don't translate" -- such as the English word genius, which doesn't translate to Japanese very well (this came up in a discussion regarding the formation of 2chan) -- the Japanese tend to regard geniuses as "free-thinkers" and that's... not considered a very good thing (might be catching!) in a conformist society. Americans (and the West in general) look up to geniuses to a very large degree.
I have also heard that the Russian word for "hero" was so... deprecated, depreciated (with classic Russian cynicism), that they use the word "stalker" (which is from the 1970's), in order to describe valorous behavior (with a side of "doing it because someone's got to" not for fame nor glory).
Does anyone else have words to contribute? I'm more interested in words that you'd "expect" to translate easily.
A Russian linguist once told me Russians have no word for "fun". The closest they have is a word that translates more closely to "distraction".
However, if I translate "fun" in Google, I easily get "веселье" (Latinized: "vesel'ye"). If I plug in "веселье", I get "fun" back, so it's not the case that "веселье" is closer to something else.
If I put in "distraction", I get "отвлечение" (Latin: "otvlecheniye"), which translates back first as "abstraction". But "distraction" also translated to "развлечение" ("razvlecheniye"), "amusement".
This was years ago, and I forget exactly which word the linguist cited. He did it for a living though (both conversational and journalistic Russian, as well as multiple other languages), and in this context I'm sure he was aware of "vesel'ye" and was instead making a more precise claim.
I know someone who is a "diplomat" -- he was unfamiliar with the word "spacebo" (thank you) in Russian, because nobody ever used it with him. Perhaps thankfulness is not something you say to the equivalent of a chess opponent?
German "Doch". It is a one-word-sentence used for the speech-act of doubling down. So you might have a conversation like:
"Go to bed now Timmy"
"No!"
"Doch!"
or similarly to insist on a claim of fact. As someone familiar with it, it *seems* like a pretty basic language function, especially since most languages *do* have the simple one-word objection corresponding to the "No" here, and a big fraction of its uses will be rejected promptly.
Plenty of close-enough equivalents in English, like "Really!" and "Seriously!" and "Yes way!" (okay that last one is a bit situational)
It's also used to answer negative questions. In English you have to add "I do" or "I don't" to your answer to "You don't like sesame?", in German you can say "Doch!" to mean that you're fine with sesame.
That's "si" in French, so at least here it translates. (As opposed to the usual "oui").
Maintenance. I've been told that there is no single word for maintenance in any African language (and in Chinese it's seen as futile, because the river will rise, and all your work will be undone).
In the Far East, art is not generally regarded as a matter of inspiration. No muses. No genius -- which was, originally, an attendant spirit of each man (women had a juno) -- such that particularly great achievements pointed to a particularly great genius.
Hebrew words I’m often missing when speaking English:
Beteavon (בתאבון): Something like “enjoy your meal”. Basically like “bon appétit”, but more casual.
Titchadesh (תתחדש): Used when someone gets something new or has a positive new change. Can mean “enjoy it”, “congrats on the new thing”, “good luck with this new chapter” and so on.
Labriut (לבריאות): Literally “to health”. Used like a secular “bless you” after a sneeze and such, but also somehow means “good for you” or “you do you”.
Tachles (תכלס): Means “bottom line” or “honestly”, but also “practically speaking”, and it can also convey a somewhat surprised agreement (like “actually, that’s right”).
Shchuna (שכונה): Literally means “neighborhood”, but the meaning I’m missing is when it’s used to describe something messy and chaotic, or unserious and unprofessional (and often both).
Davka (דווקא): Means something like “actually” and “specifically”, mixed with “on purpose” or “to spite”, and also with “surprisingly” and “on the contrary”. Very useful, very common, and apparently pretty hard to explain.
Davka... that is a very useful term.
"Couldn't you adjust the price, I'd pay $95 not $100"
"The price is now $110"
...sputtering, "that's not how bargaining is supposed to work!"...
"Davka."
I don't think Russian has a word for "challenging". It's not just "hard", it "hard in a positive way, beatable if you do your best".
I am fairly certain you are correct
As a native Russian speaker, I would say this use of the word "stalker" is very niche and not remotely common. In fact, this is the first time I'm hearing of it outside of the Strugatsky/Tarkovsky context. "Hero" translates into Russian quite accurately as "geroy" (etymological connection readily apparent), and that includes both hero as in protagonist and hero as in someone who performed extreme acts of bravery. It's actually one of the most straightforward and accurate translations one can imagine.
Can "hero" sound stuffy and fake, propaganda-style in Russian? Absolutely, but it can sound the same way in English too, in a similar context.
I know of no word for "подлый" in modern English. "Turpitude" comes very close as a concept but afaict the word has fallen into disuse. This is how we end up with media describing acts of atrocity with "cowardly" when demonstrably they take significant courage to perform: people are fishing for "подлый" but use the most accessible word they have.
I know of no direct translation for "cheat" (as in a game) to Russian. You can express the concept, but if you're after a single word you're stuck with some variation on "defraud" or "make a fool of".
Other suggestions for poorly translatable Russian words:
Пошлость
Чебурашка
Некультурный
Молодец!
One of those is not like the others!
I'm not surprised that hero is still used (hadn't meant to suggest otherwise). I think "stalker" is roughly fitting into more of an "antihero" niche -- Superman fits a "hero" context a lot more than, say, Batman or Deadpool.
I'm also contextualizing stalker as a word like "grok" -- relatively frequently used among a certain group of people (although Science Fiction Writers I don't think would Dare use Heinlein's term in America).
I ran across a wonderful expression in a Dostoyevsky novel, “Let the stove and cottage dance!” I suppose it could have been translated as “Party time!” but that would have been pretty lame.
I’ve tried putting it back into Russian without luck. Are you familiar with the idiom?
Which novel was that?
Sorry, don’t recall which one. Just remember the phrase and that it was spoken by a distraught female.
I’m reading a Cormac McCarthy now and had to check for the title. Character flaw of mine I guess ;)
Found it, "ходи изба, ходи печь" from Brothers Karamazov. I am not familiar with this idiom.
cf. "изба ходит ходуном" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thZTZk09Cp4 ;)
Thank you kindly.
The Russian "stalker," I presume, derives from Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky? That has been reimported to English primarily with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of first-person shooter games. It is a weird sort of memetic mutation to start with a book that is personal tragedy against a background of existential horror and end with a action-shooter game series. Kind of like what happened with Rambo in the US.
Interesting. I would have thought that most people in the west associate the term with the protagonist of Andrei Tarkovsky' 1979 film "Stalker" - which I now realise was itself based on "Roadside Picnic", which I had never previously heard of.
Yes, from Roadside Picnic. I ran into the term while reading Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro series (which is also a video game -- Russians love their science fiction). The Metro video games are more... "Thief the Dark Age" than "action-shootery" I think, though I've never played them.
https://www.gameslearningsociety.org/which-metro-game-is-the-best/
Agape and Erotas: Greek distinguishes between love (agape) and the feeling of being in love (erotas). I’m surprised this distinction isn’t more common in other languages. You can say you feel both agape and erota for your partner, but you’d never say you feel erota for your children or your friends. Similarly, you can refer to your partner and your kids as ‘agapi mou’ (my love), but you wouldn’t call your kids ‘erota mou’.
Meraki: meraki is when you do something with care and passion: it’s when your work is your calling. The word carries connotations of optimism and cheerfulness. It’s a wonderful word.
I had a discussion with a friend on this recently. He was contrasting Japanese and Greek cultures, and wondered why Greeks lack the Japanese focus on craftsmanship, attention to detail, and pursuit of excellence. I think Greece is — has always been — very lopsided in its people’s tendencies: there is a sizeable minority of Greeks who are hard-working, diligent, conscientious, and passionate about what they do. These are the ones who have meraki, who tend to do extremely well when they leave Greece and find success in higher-trust cultures, and whose work has nothing to envy from that of their Japanese colleagues.
Unfortunately, the majority of Greeks are much more opportunistic and drawn to…
Tis arpachtis: this is the nomilisation of the verb ‘grab’. It refers to gain through quick, sloppy, and usually fraudulent or immoral means. It’s about making a quick profit, not building a sustainable business. It’s somewhat akin to ‘hustle’, but with more negative connotations.
Sovarofaneia: Greek distinguishes between the quality of being serious (sovarotita / seriousness) and that of appearing serious or solemn (sovarofaneia).
Epiousion: fun fact: you know that part in the Lord’s prayer that says ‘give us our daily bread’? That’s a mistranslation, because no-one knows what the word — epiousion — in the original Greek means. The literal translation (derived by translating the constituent parts epi and ousian) is ‘super-substantial’, but because epiousion is an hapax legomenon (a word that has only been recorded once (though technically epiousion is dis legomenon, as it has been recorded in two gospels)), we don’t know what the intended meaning was.
Diaskedasi and psychagogia: writing this, it occurs to me that Greek is very good at distinguishing between similar but fundamentally different concepts, in a way that English isn’t. Diaskedasi means entertainment of the light, non-serious sort, whereas psychagogia, which literally means training of the soul (what a fantastic portmanteau!) refers to edifying pursuits.
>Tis arpachtis: this is the nomilisation of the verb ‘grab
British English users "cowboy" for this.
It has been claimed that "the Greeks had a word for it", but modern Greek has an astonishing lacuna which sometimes gives translators conniptions: it has one single adjective, κακό, which has to stand in for both "bad" and "evil". You can see what this leads to - the same word will be employed for both "bad dog!" and "The Evil Dead".
Red Guardian cursing the "evil pillow!" suddenly hits different.
In other words, cacodemon is best left untranslated.
Better than English's inability to distinguish between agapi and erotas! Anyway, bad in bad dog does basically mean evil. It doesn't mean defective...
In most situations, "bad dog" would be just unruly, not outright evil.
Nachas. How on earth does English not have a word for the joy and pride you feel in your children's accomplishments and happiness.
Tizita in Amharic is supposed to be hard to translate. I enjoy listening to the songs though! It sounds like it might have a similar meaning to Shaked's example actually, although I'm not sure it's precisely the same. I wonder what Ethiopian Israelis would say.
The most famous untranslatable line in literature is the opening sentence of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”. I can't give you a literal translation because, quite literally, there isn't one. If one were after Nabokovian exactitude, one might suggest "Over an unspecified length of time of my life, I would lie myself down at a good time", and the result is as false and ugly as one would expect.
The simplest rendering is perhaps Scott Moncrieff's "For a long time I would go to bed early"; James Grieve opted for the more daring “Time was, when I always went to bed early” ( but I find that "when" a particularly ugly interpolation). The problems crop up with almost every word of the original. "Longtemps" (literally, a compound of long+time) can mean "I used to for a long time, but I no longer do so", but also "a long time ago". "Couché" means "in a reclining position", but could also be rendered "I went to bed"; "I retired"; "I fell asleep" and so forth. "De bonne heure", literally "at a good time", normally means "early"; it suggests either the going-to-bed time of a child (as in it probably does here), or of an elderly invalid. What makes the whole sentence even denser is Proust's use of the passé composé verbal tense, which has no precise English equivalent; it is a past tense which refers to something which took place in an unspecified past, but no longer does so.
I do not read French well enough to read Proust in the original. I read the Montcrieff translation, and it gave me some of the deepest book enjoyment I've ever had. Dunno how much I should be thanking Montcrieff and how much Proust.
It kind of sounds like the English usage of "Once upon a time" in personal narration, ie, "Once upon a time, I would have woken up at eleven and gone straight to the station, but these days with the responsibilities of adulthood..." etc
I think all this is overthinking it. I don't see anything wrong with for a long time I went to bed early, or for a long time I would go to bed early.
"For a long time, I went to bed early. I still do, but I also did for a long time" -- Marcel Hedberg, probably.
Yes. But put yourself in the position of a translator who has just sat down to begin work on the full two and half thousand pages of À la recherche, opens the book at page one and runs up against this phrase. The Greek translator of "Du côté de chez Swann", who at the time was imprisoned by the dictatorship, told me that the problem had stopped him cold for a month.
But I really don't see anything remotely challenging about it. It's a colloquial phrase. None of the words in it are untranslatable in the same way other words in this thread are.
Perhaps the translator was under the impression that the dictatorship would have him killed once he finished the work?
The problem is that tenses in different languages don't approach time in quite the same way, and if you want to convey exactly what the author meant (a challenging question in itself), it's hard.
People have different takes on translating the title, too.
So what nuance do you think 'for a long time I went to bed early' misses? And now much does it matter?
This sounds not so much as a problem translating the literal meaning so much as it's a problem with tone. Which is still an issue, but I would compare it more to the difficulty of translating a complicated pun than in the meaning itself being somehow ineffable. If that tone is essentially communicating "hey, look at how cleverly I can use the French language" then I think it's sort of appropriate that it's untranslatable.
Have you ever read Godel Escher Bach? Now there's a book that would give a translator nightmares.
Hofstadter also wrote Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, a book about translation.
I used to personally know the woman who translated Gödel, Escher, Bach into Russian, and was an acquaintance of the author. I don't recall the specifics of her stories about the translation but she had plenty of stories to share. It was definitely A PROJECT.
Really? That's awesome. I honestly don't understand how it was done. It must lose at least a third of the information. Was she a mathematician? It seems to me that the translator would have to essentially re-invent every concept in the new langauge.
Not sure where I picked this up but I think it’s true. All translation is paraphrase.
Also: "traduttore traditore".
The wordplay is lost in translation
Of course. This is a perfect closed circuit!
...perhaps. But the wordplay is somehow perfectly understandable simply by "reading" the Italian, no need for actual understanding of what the words mean (which is to say, I think the rhyme and alliteration are doing a lot of the wordplay, and the very pronunciation is fun).
All except for Ghost Stories.
https://animecorner.me/the-weird-and-often-misunderstood-history-of-the-english-ghost-stories-dub/
(Yes, commentariat, this is a request for other "crazy translations").
Michener wrote a fair amount about Spanish "duende" in _Iberia_. It's one of those highly cultural words that you might expect to be hard to translate.
This was also a topic in Glee Season 3 episode 12, featuring Ricky Martin...
For me it's always been the Hebrew word געגוע, the emotion of missing someone or something. It has a bunch of not-quite-right English words (longing, nostalgia, yearning etc) but they're all meaningfully different (and if I were going from English to Hebrew I'd translate them into different words). It's such a noticable gap for me since it feels like a basic word in Hebrew.
Another example is that I've been learning Chinese recently and it has two different words that translate to "know" in English (zhīdào, 知道 and rènshi, 认识), but they translate to different words in Hebrew which has helped me get my head around it.
Would the Ηomeric (and still currently in use) Greek word νόστος (nostos) come anywhere close to געגוע?
That's a good question! Need to find someone who speaks both Hebrew and Greek to check with (paging president Garfield).
Can you recommend a good article or book about reviving Hebrew as a spoken language?
What does everyone here think about anthropic reasoning, just in general? A lot of it just doesn't sit right with me.
For example, take the standard anthropic response to the fine tuning argument for the existence of god: Sure, this universe is finely tuned to support life. But if it weren't finely tuned, then we wouldn't be here to observe it. If there were lots of universes with different parameters, then it's no more of a mystery that we live in one that can support life than it is a mystery that we live on earth than venus.
But positing lots of parallel universes with different parameters seems like a huge thing to posit! My priors are probably lower on the "lots of parallel universes" assumption than whatever that assumption is trying to rebut.
You also have the doomsday argument, which allows you to conclude that we are all going to die from basically nothing. Somehow this explains the value of the cosmological constant being near but not exactly zero. Can we also use it to conclude that many worlds is the best interpretation of quantum, just because there are more observers? Could we perhaps use it to conclude that AI is not conscious, because if it where then being infinitely replicable would mean that the "typical observer" should be an LLM, but I am not an LLM? Or maybe we could use it to conclude that I *am* an LLM, and we are living in a simulation?
These all seem outlandish enough for me to put high credence on "this entirely line of reasoning is a mistake" rather than taking it at face value. But I'm wondering what the commentariat here thinks.
Edit: I'm especially interested in hearing your guys' angles on whether or not anthropic reasoning gives a persuasive rebuttal to the fine tuning argument for intelligent design. This is the primary thing the wikipedia article for the anthropic principle talks about, so I believe it is in some sense representative of anthropic reasoning. I believe it is not persuasive.
The naturalistic anthropic argument, properly understood, entails an acceptance of objective nihilism. It also does *not* assume or require a multiverse.
It just requires that you accept there is nothing inherently special, magical or interesting about life.
The standard fine tuning argument looks at the physical constants of the universe that allow for life as we know it to exist, and notes that, if those values were chosen randomly from all possible values, then the odds of life would be astronomically small.
This may well be true. But from the perspective of nihilistic naturalism, it doesn't matter. You can't look at an event after it has occurred, only then declare it to have some special meaning, and then declare that the odds against it happening demonstrate a higher conscious power. Of course conscious living beings consider life special; that's not evidence that it actually is in some higher, cosmic sense.
The fine tuning argument is like the following:
1. You thoroughly shuffle a deck of cards.
2. You lay out the cards face-up and take note of their order.
3. You decide that their current order is incredibly special and meaningful.
4. You do the math and note that the odds of getting the particular shuffle you did is 1 in 8.0658 × 10⁶⁷.
5. You decide that because this was so astronomically unlikely, a higher conscious power must have designed the cards to come out that way.
Only substitute "life-permitting universe" for a particular order of a deck of cards.
What do you understand "Anthropic Reasoning" to be? It seems to me that your main objection is to the "many worlds" theory, which is a separate thing.
Any explanation or model of a thing must, in principle, allow the thing to be what it is. The universe contains observers, therefore any explanation / model must allow for the possibility of observers. Any model that doesn't is necessarily false.
The fine-tuning argument for the existence of God says "look at all the possible values of the fundamental constants. Most values would result in a hostile universe with no life. Therefore this improbable coincidence (that the numbers happened to fall in the life-sustaining range) is evidence of a God".
The anthropic argument basically says "It's not improbable that these numbers support life. Once a model includes a constant, the only possible values are those that allow the existence of observers. The other possibilities you're considering are, in principle, impossible and the fact that they're not realized isn't surprising at all".
As a sort of imperfect example, it's not surprising that all the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. You can say "wow, out of all the possible numbers these angles could turn out to be it's crazy that they end up with this super specific number!" but it's not actually surprising. Other numbers are conceptually prohibited. Similarly, scientific theories are developed by observation. This is fundamentally how we develop them. Therefore, in principle, it will never be surprising that a theory results in a universe with observers. It is a guaranteed fact.
Many Worlds is a separate thing. Some scientists don't like "inelegant" physical constants, so they try to create models of the universe where the physical constants are nicer numbers. One of the ways you can do this is by allowing every single number at the same time, then you can say something like "all possible different configurations exist" and you avoid the ugly idea that "0.007297 is just a special number".
Generally, I understand anthropic reasoning to mean doing bayesian reasoning, with the dataset of "observers" (conscious beings), and the fact that you are one.
Usually, this involves comparing counterfactual universes for how many observers they have with various properties, with some sort of assumption that you are "typical" among these observers. For example, the anthropic response to the fine tuning argument would say that the typical observer (or in this case *all* observers) would observe a universe fine tuned to life. So, it is not a mystery that the universe we see should be fine tuned.
Things like doomsday arguments and simulation arguments will compare counterfactual worlds with different populations of sorts of observers, and rule out worlds where you are highly "atypical". Because the worlds where you are highly atypical are not this world, we can draw conclusions about this world.
I take issue with this line of reasoning because it allows you to conclude things wildly detached from real data, and the conclusions you draw seem unconstrained. Many worlds was one example, but the original post above had multiple cases where anthropic reasoning was applied, and I felt that the conclusions were not justified by the evidence. I am doubting not just the fine tuning response, but all of the examples. But the fine tuning seems to be the starting point that is most agreed upon, so it made sense to single out.
As far as the specific response here about fine tuning is concerned, I don't understand how you could use anthropic reasoning without assuming that there are many parallel universes. It seems perfectly coherent that there just wouldn't be observers, so the typical observer would be "no one". Anthropic reasoning over parallel universes lets you vary the parameters of your universe until you have one that supports observers, explaining fine tuning. Without the parallel universes, you only have one universe that happens to be finely tuned, which is now a spooky coincidence again. It very well could've just been a universe with no observers, and without us to observe it. It's not like there's another universe for the observers to go to in this case.
I have a better idea of what you're complaining about now, and I fully agree. I think it helps to consider Laplace's Rule [0]. Laplace's Rule can be thought of as a heuristic which says "in the absence of data, assign equal probability to each possible non-observed outcome". E.g. consider: "what's the probability that the sun will rise, tomorrow morning?"
Most adults have a lifetime of data of the sun going down and coming back up, like clockwork. So for most adults, P(x) is something like 99.9%". But if you were born today at noon, you have basically no data. So the best you can do is confabulate data based on your imagination. "Well, it either rises or it doesn't. Therefore, it's 50/50."
And it's like, yeah, if you have literally no data, 50/50 is kinda sorta reasonable, as a wild-ass guess. But simultaneously, confabulated data is not real data. Garbage in; garbage out. Likewise, anthropic reasoning is a bit fast and loose when it comes to the cosmic scale, since we haven't actually observed parallel universes. Though there's not really a better alternative until the AI rapture turns you into Jace Beleren.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession
Also: It seems that Scott himself believes in intelligent design with 66% credence.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-ai-opinions
"I think there’s a 66% chance that actually, the singularity is intimately related to the universe being a simulation, and that at least some of the events above could be better predicted by knowing what the simulators are thinking than by normal forecasting."
Certainly if we are examining the psychology of programmers running the simulation we are in, those programmers count as intelligent creators, no? I feel a bit guilty that this feels like a hostile reading, but I don't understand how you could read this differently. There are comments in the paragraph after the quote about how we might be simulated versions of real people. So maybe the *real* people were not intelligently designed, so in some sense our universe is also not intelligently designed, because it is a copy? These seem weirder than just saying "this is intelligent design".
Of course, the claim that we are living in a simulation itself comes from reasoning anthropically. So now we have anthropic arguments both for and against intelligent design!
Perhaps SIA could guide us in choosing between these two cases. Maybe we count how many counterfactual people are in the various parallel universes with slightly different physics, and compare it to the compute power of an NVIDIA B200, so that we can answer once and for all if God exists. Food for thought.
There is an alternative (and highly speculative!) approach to cosmology which explains fine tuning and neatly sidesteps the appeal to intelligent design.
The intricate structure of living creatures was seen as a strong proof of the existence of God, until Darwin came along. The order of nature was then seen to be the result of countless iterations of natural selection between variants for reproductive success, with inherited characteristics closing the feedback loop.
In "The Life of the Cosmos", Lee Smolin proposes an analogous mechanism to explain the improbably lucky values we observe in our universe's physical constants.
Cosmological natural selection:
-Our cosmos emerged from the singularity in a collapsing black hole.
-Every collapse to a singularity is the Big Bang of a daughter universe.
-The more efficient a universe is at creating black holes, the more daughter universes it will create over its lifespan.
Rinse and repeat. Over time, more and more universes will be good at creating the conditions for lots of black holes, which also implies long-lived stars and complex chemistry from the elements these stars create.
It's elegant, and the theory is actually falsifiable. Unfortunately, AFAIK the specific predictions Smolin makes regarding the implied mass limits of neutron stars have been disproved by observation. Also, it's unclear even on the most hand-wavey level how physical constants can be "inherited" with slight mutations from a parent universe. And does "over time" even make sense in this context? Still, more fertile ground for thought than "we're here because where else would we be?" or "God tweaks the numbers"...
I think arguably (not sure I 100% buy this argument) the "fine tuning" argument suffers from the "multiple universes" issue as much as the anthropic argument.
The reasoning of the fine tuning is things like "the gravitational constant is 6.67418 * 10^-11, if it were slightly different, live as we know it wouldn't form". But this appeals to our sense that this number is "random", i.e. that there's an element of "chance" involved in it being 6.67418 rather than 6.67419 or whatever. And our intuitive idea of "chance" or "probability" doesn't make sense without some possibility of repeated trials, and if you're talking about the state of the universe, repeated trials means some idea of other possible universes.
Also separately I think the fine tuning argument gives humans too much credit in figuring out what would happen with different parameters. E.g. the "triple alpha process", which is the way that sufficient carbon and heavier elements can be formed to support life. Problem is, our model of nuclear physics previously didn't allow for the triple alpha process, and the only reason we discovered it is because we knew *something* had to allow for more carbon to exist, so we posited something that would allow it to exist before having any theoretical/experimental basis for it.
Basically we couldn't even prove that life was possible in our own universe without "cheating", i.e., seeing that it does, in fact, have life and then reasoning backwards. How can we be so confident in predicting whether a wildly different universe would have life?
I think I see what you're getting at. First, the fine tuning argument talks about how the "chance" of the universe "coincidentally" having the physics that it does is a thing that doesn't really make sense. If we don't have counterfactual worlds, then we can't really talk about "odds", and counterfactual worlds with different physics are exactly the spooky ghosts that made me not want to accept anthropic reasoning in the first place. So fine tuning is at least as weird as anthropics. Second, it sounds like you're saying that we don't know enough about alternative physics to know if they could support life. For all we know, the universe *isn't* fine tuned.
I'm not sure I buy the first point. Suppose, for example, that on your birthday, the northern lights appeared in front of you, wrote your name in the sky, and told you to have a happy birthday. And, it just so happens that this is a new law of physics that the northern lights have to do this every birthday of yours! But the law of physics only starts this next year.
If this were true, you would probably suspect a cosmic conspiracy before you would be willing to accept that "physics is just like that". This physics seems "less likely" than "other physics", whatever the details of how we philosophize about "less likely" and "other physics". We don't need repeated trials to suspect that something is up. So then, do we need repeated trials to suspect something is up in our actual universe?
It seems to me like a difference here is that the anthropic explanation of fine tuning depends on literally real universes that actually exist, whereas noticing that the universe is fine tuned just needs some notion of counterfactuals or occam's razor, or something. So anthropics is introducing ghosts that are a lot spookier than fine tuning alone.
> Suppose, for example, that on your birthday, the northern lights appeared in front of you, wrote your name in the sky, and told you to have a happy birthday. And, it just so happens that this is a new law of physics that the northern lights have to do this every birthday of yours!
This is a standard type of counter-reply to nihilistic naturalism. It often takes the form of "what if the initial conditions of the universe spelled out 'made by God' in every human language?' The intent, as I see it, is to force the naturalist to the conclusion that if we don't see the existing, life-permitting, configuration of the universe to be objectively significant, then we must therefore also not find *any* possible configuration of the universe significant.
This is seriously flawed. The big reason the fine-tuning argument fails is that under a naturalistic universe, there can never be any objectively significant relationship between the existence of the universe and the nature/configuration of that universe. There's no room for coincidence or surprise. Whatever form the universe took, that would just be the way it was.
That does not mean there is no relationship between the configuration of the universe and conscious life which comes to exist in that universe. Under naturalism, this is just logical, since only conscious minds can create meaning.
The reason a life-permitting universe is not surprising for us is that we are alive! Life existing somewhere in a universe that supports it isn't surprising. The opposite would actually be more surprising.
But the standard example of a universe whose initial configuration spells out a message that will be readable by humans once they evolve in a few billion years *is* surprising, and would count as evidence of a creator. Again, not by itself, because nothing can be "surprising" without context.
It's surprising because there's no causal or logical connection. If the configuration of the universe spelled out "made by God" in English and every other human language, that configuration doesn't *cause* humans to come into being who create and understand English. It would be an astronomical coincidence, and would therefore be evidence for either:
* a higher power that designed the universe
* the creation and evolution of human languages themselves being influenced by people who somehow studied the configuration of the universe and incorporated it into their language
Note how the order of operations is everything here. If we assign meaning *after* noticing it, then the connection is now causally explained and no longer surprising. It's only if we notice a connection to something for which we have *already* assigned meaning that there is now a coincidence that must be explained.
The existence of life is fully explained by being in a life-permitting universe. The nature of the universe (being life-permitting) is not significant in any way that requires explanation.
Say you’re in a horrific plane crash that kills all the other passengers.
Fine-tuning: since survival appears so unlikely, you must be missing information, such as outside intervention.
Anthropic: it doesn’t matter how unlikely survival appears, because your observations are *conditional* on your survival.
The “parallel universes” in this case are your fellow passengers.
> But positing lots of parallel universes with different parameters seems like a huge thing to posit!
Start by working out which camp you're going to join: "we are not special" or "we are very very special". All else follows: we are not special, therefore there must be lots more of the same stuff that we can't see and there's no problem with how well it fits us; or we are very very special, therefore what we see has been very specifically fine-tuned for us and there's no problem with there only being one of it, and also therefore God.
Since we can't know for sure either way, you're going to have to pick one or the other as an axiom and follow it to the end; and when you get there, you are going to end up with a bunch of claims that look like huge things to posit to people in the other camp.
In as much as there is any inconsistency to be found, it's that built into the fine tuning argument is the assumption that universes that are configured differently to the one we see can exist - otherwise, if the universe we see is the only one there can be, there is no fine tuning question that needs an answer; but when arguing something based on this, to claim that different universes existing is too much to assume is then to attack an implicit premise of your own argument.
> Start by working out which camp you're going to join: "we are not special" or "we are very very special".
How about "we are an extreme end of a very long statistical curve"? In other words, roughly as "special" as rolling ten 6-sided dice and have them all come out 1's?
Given enough rolls, all 1's will happen sooner or later. It does not mean God caused it to happen.
Yes, but you don't even need to make that argument. The fine-tuning argument proponents first would need to demonstrate that a life-permitting universe is somehow significant and special in the same way that rolling all 1's would be.
And I mean "special" in a way that we could say that that possibility was significant *before* the universe appeared the way it did. Simply noting that we, conscious living beings, find life to be significant and special, doesn't count. Declaring something to be special both *after* and *because* it happened is just a variation on the sharpshooter fallacy.
Quick reply: Bentham's has been doing a great job of pushing for SIA over SSA as "the right anthropic framework". I haven't found anyone pushing back (would love to read counter-arguments if anyone has them), so it's a bit one sided, but I'm mostly convinced: *wherever anthropic reasoning applies*, SIA is probably the right way to do it.
Note that all the toy examples that are offered, such as the Sleeping Beauty problem, give you, by hypothesis, a pre-defined set of worlds with a given probability function. And there SIA seems to work beautifully. This actually defuses the Doomsday argument.
Now the problem with anthropic reasoning is that everyone's real prize is to rush way past this, and apply it to *all conceivable universes*. And this, as far as I can tell, doesn't work, because 1) conceivable doesn't mean physically or even metaphysically possible, and 2) the set is way too big, and the math is liable to diverge.
That's where you get "the universe is way bigger than you thought", which I find highly dubious. (And then you get "therefore God", which is also a dubious step.)
EDIT: To recap, well-grounded anthropics tells you that, given a probabilistic multiverse, you're likely to find yourself within its more populous branches - and then gives you the exact math to calculate that. While ungrounded speculative anthropics would like to make entire huge branches appear out of thin air.
Re-EDIT: you can probably reframe my position as: SIA for what is known to be possible, SSA for what is only conceivable.
This is interesting. I just looked up a recap on SSA vs. SIA. Would another way to say this be that anthropic reasoning is good for navigating probability space, but not generating probability space? Now that I write this though, it seems like SIA would be the more probability space generating framework; because it assumes a universe with an inordinately high population. In over my skis here, I may just be hopelessly confused about this. Would you say anthropics have these two failure modes whether you assume Self Sampling, or Self indicating?
Could you clarify what SIA and SSA stand for?
SIA = Self-Indicating Assumption
SSA = Self-Sampling Assumption
I find both of these terms aggressively non-descriptive. But maybe that's just me.
Thank you
That's a whole essay in itself and if I give a simple version I'll probably get complaints. All I can say from here is that they are different ways of counting the probabilities within a given situation, when you're trying to do stats across selection effects, and you don't know which observer you are.
For the details, I'm sure Claude can give you a good overview. Bentham's (Matthew Adelstein) and Nick Bostrom seem to their main proponents (for SIA and SSA respectively), so if you want to dig further, start with their writings on the issue.
I'm not asking for an explanation of each hypothesis. I just want to know what the letters in the acronyms are short for, so I can be sure that I'm looking up the correct thing.
The counterargument is that SIA does not satisfy the conditions for applying Bayes' Theorem in the first place. Its random-sampling analogy is a metaphor, not a reality. We are not, in fact, a random sampling from the set of all conceivable observers. SIA makes an unjustified probabilistic inference based on a counterfactual sampling process that never occurred. Bayesian inference can only be used with a statistically well-understood sampling procedure. *If* you know that you once existed in a pool of possible observers of known size *and* if you know the sampling procedure that selects from that pool, then your own position can be used as an input to Bayes. However we are not randomly selected from any pre-existing set, we are here as a result of deterministic physical processes. Being able to imagine a set and sampling procedure does not, in fact, make either of them real.
BB is a kind of an autistic nut who doesn't have any mathematical sophistication. He likes SIA because it refutes the Doomsday Paradox, but that's only a paradox to people who don't know how to apply SSA correctly. He has two errors which cancel out to give him a reasonable worldview and he takes that as evidence that he's correct.
I'll push back on this a bit. I quite like the framing that BB gave once about the relevant observers: "all the ones in your theory, that you don't know you are not".
Ok. BB lives in "not even wrong" territory. The Doomsday Argument is pure nonsense and BB's writing on the topic is hopelessly confused.
Consider the Sleeping Beauty problem. In order to use Bayes in any way, you have to specify exactly the waking-up algorithm. If Sleeping Beauty just wakes up with no idea how she got there or why, she has no way of making any sort of inference. Only in the context of a specific selection algorithm can any reasoning be done.
In the Doomsday argument, tell me what the equivalent of "your waking depended on the result of a coin flip" is.
For the mathematically inclined, here's a handwave of how ungrounded SIA diverges. This is basically what is known as the Presumptuous Philosopher.
First, note that anthropics itself doesn't give you raw probabilities, it gives you a Bayesian update on a prior. So the first thing we need is a universal prior over all conceivable universes.
Now that itself is a tall order, and would be reasonable grounds for stopping right here and saying "no answer". But people are brave, and AFAIK the one serious attempt to do this is via Kolmogorov complexity, i.e the Solomonoff prior, which states that a universe that can be described in <n> bits of information, gets a prior probability of 2^-n. This is a harsh penalty on complexity, which checks out because it gives us a precise version of Ockham's razor, and we like Ockham's razor.
Armed with this, and some unbounded SIA reasoning, we can ask the question: what is the most likely <n> we are liable to find ourselves in? Which amounts to asking the question: if P(n) is the maximum number of observers produced by a universe of complexity <n>, what is the shape of the function n -> P(n)/2^n?
And that, I'm sorry to say, diverges wildly. The reason for that, is that the amount of shit you can generate from <n> bits of information grows way faster than 2^n. This depends on your theory of computation, details can vary, for the famous example, have a look at Scott Aaronson's articles on the Busy Beaver.
In plain terms, this means that there is never a universe that is complex *enough*; whichever universe you examine, ungrounded SIA will tell you that it is astrononomically dominated by others of higher complexity. So SIA is not just saying the universe is big; it's saying its size is not defined at all.
The sleeping beauty problem is so obviously (to me, at least) a case of reference class tennis, i'm baffled that people are still arguing about it. Like, guys, we solved Bertrand's Paradox ages ago. The "correct" answer to Sleeping Beauty is merely a question of whether the reference class is hypothetical-worlds or observer-moments.
Analogy: is an icecube cold? Well, it depends on the reference class. It's cold compared to room temperature. it's hot compared to the vacuum of outer-space. There's multiple ways to interpret the question. Likewise, "halfer or thirder" depends on whether the question chooses to double-count Sleeping Beauty's observations in the world where the coin lands tails.
Or another way to put it: a probability is a mapping from a sample-space to an outcome space. I.e. it's a *ratio*. The ratio depends on what the denominator is. it's intrinsically comparative. If the question is vague or undefined, demons fly out of your nose.
I will agree that it's difficult to quantize "all conceivable worlds", and that conclusions drawn from this premise should be assigned a wide, spacious confidence-interval to match the wide, spacious realm of conceivability.
Also, the "SIA vs SSA" debate is completely orthogonal to Sleeping Beauty. The former is about distinguishing the hypothetical from the real, whereas latter is about distinguishing the instantaneous from the diachronic. If you try to reason about Sleeping Beauty as if the question were about hypothetical observers vs real observers, and then try to generalize this to other anthropic questions, you're gonna have a bad time.
Thanks for the response. I hadn't seen that work of Bentham's, so I'll probably give it a read soon. I probably agree that anthropics might have something interesting to say in more down to earth cases.
Before then, I'm curious as to your take on some of the examples in my top level post. Consider fine tuning. If we have anthropics that is "well grounded" in some sense of not positing lots of parallel universes, then we can't quantify over the possible values of whatever is being fine tuned. So using anthropics as a response to the fine tuning argument for intelligent design breaks down.
So then, do you think that anthropic arguments are persuasive rebuttals to the fine tuning argument? Can it say anything at all about fine tuning, or is anything that it says necessarily not well grounded?
Edit: I probably don't fully understand what counts as well grounded to you, rereading. Which universes are legitimate to postulate for anthropics to be "well grounded"?
> So then, do you think that anthropic arguments are persuasive rebuttals to the fine tuning argument? Can it say anything at all about fine tuning, or is anything that it says necessarily not well grounded?
You said it in your original post, the cost is to assume a multiverse. If you assume a pre-existing multiverse with some shape or other, and some of its branches are able to support observers but most won't, then given that you *are* an observer, you're likely to find yourself in a fine-tuned universe without the need for an active tuner.
At this point it's all speculation - I don't really have a clear opinion which one is simpler or or more likely a priori: "this is the world we see, AFAIK it's the only one", or "we don't know how this world got here, but if this one exists, for all we know many others may exist too". But if "big multiverse" is not obviously worse than "single universe", and it solves the fine tuning issue, that's probably a reason to prefer it. Note that big multiverses have their own problems too, you don't want a world where you're most likely to be a Boltzmann brain.
> Which universes are legitimate to postulate for anthropics to be "well grounded"?
I think I draw the line between the possible and the merely conceivable. The lower bound is having a causal mechanism, which ensures it's actually possible. The upper bound is pulling possibilities out of thin air just because you can think of them. TBH, I'm pretty sure there's unexplored terrain in between, and I'm not so confident about the details therein.
Re. Anthropic: the parallel universes part of the argument is unnecessary IMO.
The main point of the argument is that given that the universe is a certain way, it is a necessary condition that any life that develops in that universe would be well calibrated to the universe it developed in, because that's where it is. It's like pointing to a rock at the bottom of a hill and saying: Look how it is resting at it's lowest potential energy position! Surely this is evidence of a Mover!
When actually the evidence of a mover would be if it was precariously balanced on top of a windy cliff in a humorous arangment.
Given that and given we can't know how things would be if the universe was different than it is, the fact that life is well adapted to the place that it is provides no useful information for or against.
I thought Moby-Dick was excellent and I'm surprised to not see it get honorable mention at least.
I'll echo this - honorable mention at least.
I gave it a low rating for being too pro-whale.
Electric lights now. No need for whale oil.
Is there a site where the book reviews are aggregated and I can read them? Some are lost in my email- thanks
https://acxreviews.robennals.org/ -- you can sort by year to see the recent entries.
Many thanks!
No-one escapes the permanent underclass, but AGI and robotics might help the wealthy escape the mob: https://morbidcuriosity.substack.com/p/the-age-of-bunker-capitalism
Oh look, Marc Andreessen was just announced to the new Defense Policy Board.
Hyperwealthy oligarchs are probably mostly safe from lone assassins and vengeful lone-wolf revolutionaries, particularly if they can restrain themselves from prancing about in public - I should like to believe that offensive displays along the lines of last year's Bezos wedding in Venice will be increasingly vetoed by private security consultants. However, a true revolutionary situation including substantial uprisings of aggrieved populations may well prove another matter.
On the "uprisings of aggrieved populations" front, the existence of megayachts bears some consideration. As long as there's *somewhere* you can safely put in for supplies, maybe sending a tender rather than the ostentatious yacht, one can live indefinitely while mostly immune to any aggrieved population that isn't sufficiently organized to run a navy.
I really doubt this. As Luigi Mangione, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the state of Iran all demonstrate, it's not THAT hard to do violent stuff to people, even if they have superior capabilities.
And yet Donald Trump still lives. As does Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many more who are or were much higher on the global lots-of-people-want-them-dead index than any oligarch.
Even when the person in question is a working politician in a democratic nation where lots of flesh-pressing and baby-kissing is part of the job, it demonstrably is possible to provide security at a level that *usually* stops all the world's motivated assassins from completing their task.
The lesson of Luigi Mangioni is that you actually need to have security, even if you're not the president. I'm sure most of the world's billionaires have taken that lesson to heart.
Well, I think there just aren't that many assassins out there. I took the above article to suggest robots might insulate people even in a much more murdery environment than the one we live in.
The near-assassination of Trump suggests that there are not a lot of competent would-be assassins out there. This was absolutely not a commercial for the care and competence of the secret service and local cops providing security for him. If that's the norm, then presumably they can get away with that lackluster performance for the same reason that most of the TSA routine at airports isn't very effective--hardly anyone who's not an obvious nonfunctional nut is actually trying to get past them.
Yes, as I was trying to say above, my point is that I don't think the ultra-rich can rely on robots to keep them safe even in some horrid dystopia where 80% of people are reduced to angry, starving slum-dwellers, which could be an environment where more than 1 person per million decides take up assassination.
I think you are just wrong here.
What we see now in the world is:
a. Very rich people who are widely hated for their politics or other activities, like Elon Musk, George Soros, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, etc. Lots of people certainly say they'd like to beat them up or murder them or something. And yet, they go on living apparently rather good lives.
b. Rich people (many hops down from the Musk/Gates class) living in countries with corrupt and indifferent policing and lots of crime, including kidnapping gangs--there are plenty of rich people living in Mexico and Pakistan and Nigeria, for example, surrounded by poverty and crime and corruption, and yet they are generally able to pay for armed guards and live pretty good lives.
c. Rich people from despised ethnic minorities in very poor ill-policed places, as with overseas Chinese in a lot of poor parts of Asia. Again, they seem to mostly survive and live pretty well, despite needing to pay people to protect them from resentful/hateful mobs.
d. Movie stars and singers and athletes who are often the target of obsessive crazies who want to talk to them, murder them, f--k them, whatever. That often causes a lot of problems for those folks, but mostly they do okay by hiring bodyguards and taking normal precautions.
My predictions:
1. Even in a world with massively more resentment and hatred toward rich people than we see now, it will in general be possible for those rich people to keep safe by hiring private security (whether humans or robots or a mix), taking some basic precautions wrt their movements, etc.
2. Very little of what actually gets people targeted by murderous crazies/outraged poor people/whomever is just how ostentatious they are. Mostly it's probably crazy people finding crazy reasons to do something awful, or political/ethnic/religious/racial hatred (as with overseas Chinese in the Philipines). Musk probably has 10x the crazy haters as Bezos, and Musk doesn't do a lot of ostentatious consumption for the sake of showing his wealth. And Taylor Swift probably has 100x the crazy stalkers as either one!
But also, a little security will dissuade or turn away most such people, and my guess is that there will be people having spectacles that offend others as long as there continue to be people. (I'll admit I don't get why I am supposed to be more mad at Bezos' extravagant wedding or yacht than at some random cardiologist who throws a wedding for his daughter at a resort in Hawaii and has a boat he takes out into the bay on weekends.)
Perhaps the different means they took to similar ends?
Amazon has made a lot of peoples' lives (including mine) a great deal better, so it's hard for me to see why I'd be mad that Bezos got insanely rich creating it. The cardiologist has likely made a much bigger difference in a much smaller number of lives. But I don't begrudge either one their fancy wedding or yacht, beyond vaguely wishing they'd offer me lower prices.
It's true that there are significantly worse people that Bezos wielding ridiculous amounts of power in today's world; if I had to draw up a moral balance sheet based upon actual destructive ability, the chief executives of fossil fuel companies and of private equity firms would head the list. But the grotesque and very public in-your-face shenanigans of Bezos and other of his ilk are more likely to spark instant rage in observers.
ISTM that the rage is just envy, and deserves no support from me.
Likewise it's made mine better, and likewise am I not mad nor jealous. Undoubtedly there's a bit of envy for his unrivaled capacity for Veblenian "conspicuous consumption", though it's not unreasonable to assume that such ostentation might cause a bit of "justified" envy or disdain.
Objectively, though, a cardiologist "saves lives" with relatively less lateral movement to cause huge amounts of damage. Bezos' inventions have revolutionized supply chains, saved immense time and conversely caused immense disruption for convenience and economies of scale. It's likely been a net benefit but undoubtedly some have experienced outsized negative effects.
Naturally there is going to be a lot more room for upsetting people on aggregate in Bezos' vocation than the cardiologist's, therefore a different response to each's consumption. So whilst I agree with your points and personally feel the same, I think only considering how it benefits you is a narrow perspective as that is clearly not the only vector on which Amazon impacts people.
It might make for a more interesting parallel if the contrast case were a cosmetic dentist or investment consultant or reality show star rather than a cardiologist.
Nestled within the recent huge drop in violent crime in the US is an additional important development: "Murders in 2025 Were Likely Solved at the Highest Rate This Century"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-200532939
"murder clearances were right around 60 percent pre-COVID, fell to around 50 percent in 2021 and 2022 before rebounding steadily through the end of 2025."
"keeping in mind the fact that the CDE as a data source is likely slightly understating the US murder clearance rate in 2025, where would last year rank? The CDE has the 2025 murder clearance rate at 66.5 percent which is up massively from the 2021/2022 low of around 50 percent. Right around 63 percent of murders were cleared in the US between 2000 and 2009 with the clearance rate this century peaking right at 66.5 percent in 2009."
"The US clearance rates in the 1960s and 1970s were unbelievably high — and by that I mean that they probably shouldn’t be believed."
"But why are they rising now? I would point to two factors that are major determinants in explaining why clearance rates are rising. First, the number of murders has fallen dramatically, and a smaller denominator (murders) with roughly even numerator (murders solved by police) leads to a naturally higher clearance rate....Another major contributing factor in my opinion is that the share of murders being committed with a firearm has fallen....Murders with a firearm tend to be harder to solve..."
"The increase in clearance rates...has largely come from big cities, which suggests broader changes in policing strategies or improvements in police-community relations as possible — though hardly proven — additional explanations."
(I am sorry to note that, unlike with the broader crime trends, my big city of residence is not successfully participating in this one. Chicago's clearance rate for murder has not improved lately, notwithstanding our soon-to-be-former mayor's hand-waving about it.)
My cop friend says "drones". Someone calls, they get a drone to the location before anyone expects it, before anyone gets together to concoct a story, before the caller (who may be the criminal here, he told me we'd be surprised how often they try this) gets rid of the weapon they're holding.
Czech murder clearance rates are around 95 per cent. Granted, there is much fewer murders here than probably in Chicago alone.
I suspect Ring cameras, ShotSpotter tech, and maybe better trawling of social media (lots of city "beef" ends up on snapchat/instagram) probably all contribute a little bit.
ShotSpotter went live in Chicago in 2018 and was cancelled in mid-2024. So the sharpest-ever-recorded _drop_ in murder clearances happened with ShotSpotter in place, while the rebound (improvement) in murder-investigation success has accelerated since ShotSpotter was dropped.
Local police officials attribute that to ShotSpotter's high error rate persistently sending beat cops off on wild-goose chases. This spring a local academic FOIA'd police department records and found police response times to confirmed incidents having lately improved by an average of 4 minutes compared to before ShotSpotter's cancellation, in the specific police beats that had ShotSpotter sensors.
Whatever the accuracy of the previous paragraph's arguments, the local politics of it are that a majority of the City Council wants ShotSpotter back. Next April a new different mayor and some new different alderpersons will be sworn in. At that time the city will undoubtably resume the natural experiment by reinstalling either ShotSpotter (which has a new company name) or similar technology.
It could be a shift in the kind of murders.
World 1: Most murders are gang killings where nobody wants to be a witness lest they get killed, too.
World 2: Most murders are domestic violence killings where the ex-husband murders his ex-wife and new boyfriend, or shoots his wife in a drunken rage.
In World 1, murders will be solved at a substantially lower rate than in World 2.
The CDE (FBI's analysis division) early this year published a five-year study which included this question. They found that the percentage of murders involving a domestic relationship was 17% in 2020, 16% in 2021, 17% in 2022, 18% in 2023, and 19% in 2024. (2025 nationwide data not yet complete/confirmed so not used in the paper.)
They found similar modest-but-noticeable increases 2022-2024 in the percentages of other violent crimes (aggravated assault, rape, robbery) involving a domestic relationship. (Meaning that the large declines in those crimes starting 2022 have been slightly more pronounced among non-domestic than among domestic instances.)
So to your conjecture about murder clearance rates....maybe, at least in part, yes? Once the national 2025 data is finalized this would be a worthwhile point for them to extend the analysis of.
U.S. criminologists have for decades estimated that somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of murders were domestic (and have argued endlessly within that range of estimates). They've also long thought, and the 2020-24 FBI analysis supports, that while three out of four domestic violent-crime offenders are men the victims are women in almost the exact same ratio.
“U.S. criminologists have for decades estimated that somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of murders were domestic (and have argued endlessly within that range of estimates). They've also long thought, and the 2020-24 FBI analysis supports, that while three out of four violent-crime offenders are men the victims are women in almost the exact same ratio.”
I presume those ratios are only for *domestic* crimes of violence, right? It’s always been my understanding that men are a significant majority of violent-crime victims (and well over 75% of offenders).
Correct, and edited to be clearer.
I guess it depends on the kind of crime. DV murders are mostly going to be male on female, given that most people are straight and men average a lot bigger and more violent than women. Armed robbery murders seem like they'd be a lot more balanced. Gang murders and lunkhead fights that go wrong ("you lookin' at my girl, motherf-cker?") seem like they'd be mostly male-on-male.
I also suspect that the police don’t always do the most thorough job possible when investigating gang/drug murders.
Serial killer rates (which historically have low clearance rates) have dropped through the floor, ostensibly because of the ubiquity of cell phones.